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No Harm to Anyone

by Keeley Young

I

 

In the wintertime, I am forced to hike for an hour and a half to the next town over approximately three times a month. There, I sit in a cramped diner drinking overpriced coffee while my ex-husband tells me unimportant stories about his work before handing me an envelope. I repeatedly tell him he should give me the envelope before we order, but he gives me a side-eye glance, knowing it just means I can make some excuse once the waitress disappears towards the kitchen. Then, I would be free of him for another three or so weeks. The idea alone of this frequently makes my ex-husband depressed.

​

In the booth, trying to make myself comfortable against squeaky plastic, I keep my head down and focus on the surface of the coffee. Dark, but far from black—a mud pit for little piggies to squelch in. When I was in the third grade, my class went on a school field trip to a sort of petting-zoo farm. In the corner, a sow and two piglets were almost submerged in their puddles of mud, the colour of this coffee from the snout down.

            My ex-husband makes a soft sound, like an intruding oink, and I glance up at him in case I’ve done something to offend him. Other than be distant, of course. He smiles, although I worry these are the forced smiles. The ones I am supposed to feel some concern for. Makeshift rung smiles, a ladder made out of bedposts and fractures of the laundry door and old man’s canes. My ex-husband asks if I wanted anything to eat, like a warm stack of pancakes oiled in maple syrup, or what the menu describes as the Postman’s Regular, but I offer back, ‘I’m not hungry’.

            I haven’t eaten since I left the house, but I don’t remind him I don’t always take the best care of myself. I remind him I need this envelope. He nods, potentially sighs, although at this point in the conversation a couple saunters past us noisily discussing what Freddie needs for an upcoming camping trip with the Boy Scouts. Hiking boots for a young kid…gloves, and a warmer sleeping bag. A torch with enough batteries to replicate the sun.

            My ex-husband, Rickie, and I were married for under a year. Ten and a half months. We’d known each other for four years and he made me the happiest little queer man in this suburban nothing town the day he proposed when we were out hiking together. Nights in bed had been spent reminding him I hated when things became too complicated, too fanciful and overdrawn. People with more energy and more demand had engagement parties and pre-wedding festivities but I wanted to focus on the love we had between us. Somewhat of a gag, now, with us living separate and me wishing I’d have said no instead.

            Rickie swallows a mouthful of his coffee and reminds me if I’d have ordered something to eat, he would have paid for it. The waitress had scribbled down his order—the Postman’s Regular, which she innocently described to be the local postman of 1993’s actual typical order every single day of the year except Sundays and Christmas. Rickie listened to her intently as if he were waiting to flirt with her, but no matter what we finished these breakfasts with him sidling up to me, asking me to give him a second chance.

            Those ten months with Rickie could not be described as the worst months of anyone’s life. He was passionate, shoving me against the wall when we’d start making out after getting only slightly tipsy at the local bar. Here in town it is The Goose Leg, an aptly-named place where you might step in shit if you don’t look down. Rickie would cook for me, ignore the dishes for me, and bring home a packet of glazed donuts when he was texting me and I told him I was feeling in the dumps.

            But then the envelopes started in the wintertime.

                Rickie kicks my foot underneath the table. ‘What’s going on in there?’ I know he wants to lean forward and tap my forehead, something he would do while we were together, but he restricts himself.

            Rickie watches me. I go to say, ‘Nothing,’ and he immediately shakes his head the moment my lips form the letter n. I shake him off, the expected routine. It must drive him insane, to be boiled down to tradition and expectation and the delivery of a white envelope and the dismissal of the waitress.

            ‘I’m doing alright, I swear,’ I cough out, and Rickie gives me a cursory glance as if I am a child who has disobeyed him in this exact way countless times over. ‘The hike is exhausting.’ There was a time, after the divorce, when we discussed alternating, or, quite frankly, for Rickie to drive in his car from one town to another. But there was an unsettled frown on his face at the suggestion and I chose not to stamp on his heart another time by repeating that. In the wintertime, I brave the cold, get some fresh air in the woods, and shake some dew off my coat when I step into the diner where my ex-husband is about to dig into The Postman’s Regular—one too many eggs, in my opinion.

            ‘The hike is exhausting,’ he repeats, without a hint of sarcasm or satire. Following this is a heavy sigh and the clink of a plate against the tabletop as the waitress cautiously sets down his breakfast. Three eggs, fried in the pan, but only two slices of toast and one half of a tomato. Stringy bacon. Complimentary sachets of ketchup. Specifically sachets. I wonder for a moment the historical accuracy of the dish, but consider that maybe a little theatre is enough to entertain the patrons. Rickie is holding his knife and fork like an advertisement. Don’t let me try you, let me try the eggs.

            While Rickie carves out a sliver of the toast, a sliver of one of the eggs, I carefully avoid knocking his foot as I reposition myself in the booth seat. My ass is sore, maybe from some sense of residual discomfort from this diner. Consider for a moment, I think, us sharing the wealth of responsibility equal to the wealth of these envelopes. White, untampered with envelopes I never unseal, only deliver. When Rickie came to me with this, I was hesitant. Is this a drug thing? Rickie, fucking be honest with me here—are you delivering goods and services for the mafia or something now, I don’t get it. He gave me the sort of expression I knew from him meant this needed to be honest, this needed to be something good. No puppy dog eyes, big and overexposed, and no corner of the mouth drooping down.

            We split up and I hoped the envelopes would stop.

​

            Rickie taps the table with the end of his knife and flashes his teeth.

            ‘It’s good, what the postman would’ve ordered,’ he says, skewering the halved tomato with his fork. He threatens to shove the half down his throat without a bite, making a piggish show to the tiny handful of people also in the diner this wintery morning. I usually leave the house at eight o’clock when I need to come collect the envelope from my ex-husband. Everyone is off to their day jobs by the time I wander into town, out of breath, hopefully frost-bitten despite the layers. Rickie lingers outside of the diner with a pom-pommed beanie in his hands, wringing it more often than not. He kisses me on the cheek, and I sigh, thinking, this whole trek for an envelope and an alluring but potentially regrettable kiss.

            Rickie offers me a streak of bacon and I do strangely feel somewhat hungry. Not by any means starved, despite the weather, but I accept and chew down on the grease, the oil, the pig meat. Thinking again about the sow and her piglets off in the corner, attempting their best camouflage.

            ‘I was thinking,’ he says, smiling. ‘We should catch a movie together again sometime.’ In the five years, I suppose, of knowing one another, Rickie and I frequently went to the cinema together. At first, we saw whatever blockbuster was on show—broadly-hyped spectacles draped in millions of bucks, with stars and moons and the cosmos plugged into the projector. But, eventually, he wore me down into showing an interest in the indie films we’d drive out of the way to go see. Sometimes we would take an entire day off work just to drive a couple hours to see a movie and eat steaming-hot meat pies in the car and makeout as the credits rolled. On the car ride home, Rickie would suggest all of these fun-branded detours we could take to delay pulling into the driveway and settling back into what being at home looked like. Doing chores, washing underwear, thinking about every single unknown. The envelopes.

            Rickie waits for my response, and I stare at the remnants of bacon on his plate, suddenly starved for it. Give me that bacon, I think. ‘Maybe.’ Rickie stares at me. I cannot commit to anything, not while I think about walking back in the cold with the envelope in the jacket pocket, snugger than I am. Not while I hold onto the regret of our relationship ending, not while I think about eating his bacon without remorse, not while I go back and forth in my head over whether it is even entirely the correct decision to be sitting here with him, knocking knees, still delivering envelopes.

            I am not allowed to know what is inside the envelopes.

            Rickie has almost finished his plate of food. The diner is somewhat busier—not for any particular reason, but because a small cluster of women have trudged into the establishment wearing thin coats and talking at a polite volume about what a gorgeous morning it is we’re having. They take seats furthest from the door and start equally-polite conversations with some of the other patrons. These conversations I can no longer hear, and I attempt to pull my focus back to my ex-husband. He looks at me with peaceful contempt. I bother him. I refuse to fall dreamily back in love with him.

            He offers me the last strip of bacon and I greedily accept, giving one last salute to the sow mother. The other children on that field trip paid little attention to the mother once she shielded away her piglets, but I was less interested in trotting off to see the clucking chickens. The sow looked on the verge of passing out in the mud. Bloated, somewhat. I remember wanting to lie down beside her as if she were my own mother. In the third grade, I couldn’t have hated my parents already, yet a squeaky oink came out of my mouth when one of the teachers called out my name to round us children up for a lunchtime snack over on the benches by the alpacas. Oink, oink.

            Rickie pays the bill and thanks the plain waitress.

            If I complied, if I went and saw one of his blockbuster movies and let him place a hand on my waist again, he would smile at me like that.

            But I keep on hesitating.

​

​

Outside, in the whisk, Rickie shuffles around in his inner coat pocket for the white envelope. As long as it is delivered to a post box in my town before 6pm, no harm will come to either of us—this is the decree, as if the both of us are working indeed for the mafia, who potentially have some family member of either of ours held hostage in an abandoned cupcake factory. We are punctual, always. After the separation, I moved specifically to that neighbouring town when I realised there was no outrunning obligations. The envelope was not getting posted. Someone more important was collecting it.

            He slaps it into my hand and moves as if to walk in the opposite direction without another word, and I think, I’m the worst kind of asshole to my ex-husband. But Rickie doesn’t want an apology from me, or for any grovelling, or another argument about how our relationship has divulged into whatever this is based on this shared responsibility between us.

            ‘Rickie, wait,’ I say, and he pretends as if he wasn’t moving from his spot to begin with. I consider all these options, true multitudes: walk me home, give me a lift, have dinner with me, take me to some indie arthouse flick in a cinema a three hours’ drive away, be with me, force me to be present. I hesitate. In him, I do still see the man I was once in love with. My once-husband, once-lover, someone I spilled all of life’s secrets to in the hopes he would seal them in the crack in the wall with plaster and the anti- of mixed emotions. I did not say: wait with me, Rickie.

            I could have stared at him forever, an eternal symbol of the hyperbole of lost love, losing love. The dying out of his hope, the rotting carcass of mine. ‘See you in however many days then.’ This I said sharply, before averting my gaze and getting distracted by a drying-up puddle in the middle of the road.

 

In the summertime, or perhaps the spring, this laborious hike, oftentimes on the side of the road without a path, is somewhat more pleasant and enjoyable. During the winter, frostbite creeps in and your fingers go numb unless you wear thick gloves or keep them shoved into your pockets. Walking this alone, walking this out of duty, is meandering and heightened with only tiny morsels in my stomach. I want more of the bacon, seeing swirling images of it in my head. Sometimes it squeaks, oinks, with a poorly-formed snout at one end of the streak. I should have eaten more, but Rickie often pushes to pay for anything I order, and the weight of me owing more to him settles with a stench upon my shoulders. Argue less, be happier more. Qualms can rot. These, ides of a marriage sewn into the very lining of your suit jacket when you settle on what to wear for your wedding day. I remember ours.

            How monumental and over the moon I was.

            We got married in a rotunda in the backyard of an old friend of Rickie’s. Furthest thing we could find to a church or a chapel. The rotunda was not overly large, and could only fit the happy couple, the officiant, who was advised to avoid anything problematically-religious or contentious to our love, and a groomsman on either side of us. Guests stood down from the stairs, circling the rotunda, clasping their hands together, shedding the occasional tear. So I am told. In the past, someone would have thrown the rice.

            We were so in love then, so helpless and naïve. Every marriage is constructed with some semblance of naivety. Folks stumbling together into a union where they promise absolutes, promise to not make decisions without consulting the other. Promise not to aim spanners. Promise not to throw.

            I don’t want to be delivering the envelopes anymore, and I remind Rickie of this, in great repetition, every chance I see him. The envelope, tucked in the jacket pocket, weighs me down to one side. Physically, it is light, seemingly void of contents. Not a large stack of money, someone’s inheritance doled out in these haphazard instalments. Although, it could be the business of gift card fraud—contained between paper, the gift card might be unnoticeably thin.

            Sometimes it is apt to contemplate what the mystery could be if it were not an envelope, but a parcel, the famed confusion of a box without label or warning. Body parts, sums of money, a porcelain vase hiding baggies of crack cocaine. Videotapes or DVDs of snuff pornography or ransom clips or a cult ritual in which a half-naked man wearing an enlarged head of a goat slits his own wrist and sings out to the Great Beyond, wondering why on earth he commits to this and not to his own marriage.

            I keep walking, unable to stop thinking over Rickie.

            Hands in pockets. Trudging through the walk. Tired, cold, horny.

 

​

The drop location is on my left on the other side of the road. Traffic is minimal now, closer to midday, normal people bustling with work and other priorities. Me, on one of my days off work, somehow sweating from the exhaustion of a heart not stopping for a breath. The envelope getting fingered every so often. Check for it to be there, check for the confusion and the excitement to be present. There is no fear or terror with a white slip. Open the lid of the post-box. Slide it down.

            Is this nervousness?

            I cross the street, checking both ways once, twice, maybe three times. A black car the colour of soot approaches from my right, but stands no chance of colliding with me in the short time it takes to jaywalk. I have the envelope now in my left hand, fearful I could damage the paper if my grip becomes any more aggressive. What if some wind blew in from nowhere and lifted it away? Unlikely.

            Unlikely with me around.

            The post-box is an awful maroon colour and looks faintly like a trashcan, almost unlabelled. Siding which once would have indicated it belonged to the Postal Service has been stripped by the sunshine, or otherwise by the kids in town who prefer to graffiti unintelligible words like Bouf or Skian down the side. Invariably, it returns to ugly, morose maroon.

            Standing there, clasping the envelope, I try to remember what Rickie says about receiving it. He is vague, purposefully so—I’m trying to protect us, Alden, he said once, during a particularly heated discussion where I accused him of signing us up for a lackadaisical pyramid scheme. It isn’t a conversation over breakfast in a diner, talking to another ex of his, perhaps he has a secret ex-husband I have no knowledge of. I couldn’t care. Assumptions, I make them about every step of the process. When Rickie and I were married, these were the assumptions: things we said to one another meant something, as did the metal encasing part of the finger, the rings. Rickie would not hurt me, betray me, violate me. Set me adrift without a sail, a compass, a small pail of something to eat, and a vessel for water. A flint and steel, or I could make do with the wedding band, smelted down somewhat, somehow. When Rickie and I divorced—and I still do feel too young to say I am divorced—these were the assumptions: I just take the damn thing and deposit it into the post-box.

            It should not be so complicated to deposit it into the ugly maroon post-box.

            My fingers refuse to let go of the envelope.

            I remind myself as long as the envelope is delivered to this ugly maroon post box before 6pm, I have done whatever constitutes a duty. There is power, I wonder, in holding the envelope to my breast and going about the day with a secret of my own.

            Rickie never kept secrets. He would tell me his periodically, when some part of our conversation sparked a realisation in him—the mention of doing the laundry might remind him of the time he hid the baby, his youngest sibling, inside the washing machine when they were all little and playing around and his mother was in the kitchen on the telephone to Misty down the street. Misty, he explained, almost exclaimed, was prone to sleeping with her direct opposite neighbour’s husband when she was whining about forking out more of her ‘hard-earned cash’ at the dentist. She was lax on brushing her teeth, apparently, and the reverse-of-a-habit propelled itself onto her children. Misty insisted, then, on all of the punishment and none of the routine. Pleasure from the man, true.

            The baby didn’t go for a tumble in the sheets in the washing machine, but Rickie remembers the pushed-up face against the glass wheel. His mother didn’t find out, or else she would’ve killed dead the secret. This mystery, tiny and petite, the size of an infant. Potent, potentially. If it could have spun.

            Rickie whispered his secrets—fucked a boy once when I was in high school in the music room, him using all his might to cling onto the sheet music stand; got caught pantsless by housekeeping in a hotel; we have to start delivering envelopes.

            I slipped the envelope back into the inside jacket pocket and took a tentative step away from the post-box, imagining someone to be observing this segment of the street fervently over the course of this very day. Not quite waiting—Rickie swore on the life of his youngest sibling, the baby all grown up, that their punctuality was restrained to six o’clock. Perhaps the collector got off work at five and drove abiding by the speed limits to get here. Perhaps a past experiment of this crazed errand proved no person without the threat of death hanging over them was going to like a time penalty too severe.

            With the envelope, still, I walked away, breathing out anxious energy. What if someone tackled me down, what if someone sniped my head, what if Rickie pinged my cell and wondered why I was acting strangely, whether it meant I was second-thinking everything. I calmed myself, by heading to the bar, at midday.

 

​

The bar’s a well-established spot for daytime alcoholics who are bitterly forced to be at home in the evenings to smile at their wives and say goodnight to their children. I’ve never been here during daylight—Rickie and I would sometimes do the trivia nights here, or otherwise have a drink and be observed by the older men who might not have appreciated the shoulder-touching, the noticeable flirting.

             Golf is the sport of the day; soup is not offered. A pencil-thin white man is teeing up an unmissable shot from the green, with all the tension and pressure of open-heart surgery. Camera-cut briefly to a small audience wearing breathable fabrics and pastels. The golfer a delicate ballerina, but the celebration is cut short, obliterated. I realise I am standing awkwardly by the door, watching the television. The bar is half-empty, predominately dotted by men, but there is one woman in the back corner, clutching to her glass despite it resting on the table in front of her. She’s unknown to me—could be a tourist, a trucker, most likely someone passing through or stopping for shelter. A stranger in the mist. Cold, too, likely.

            Jamie bartends during the day—this is the first time I’ve seen him on the job, although we talk frequently enough, him passing along the war stories of working there, me commenting something ambiguous about Rickie when he asks. The two of them were once inseparable friends. While Rickie and I were married, they would go out, stay out late, bring home souvenirs—Rickie would bring his passion, wasting away without me; Jamie would bring a bottle of alcohol in a paper bag and a hickey on his neck. He’d pass out on the sofa, shirtless, and in the morning I’d feign an attempt to move him by dragging his arms. Jamie would act like I was trying to tear the limbs from their sockets, yelping in faux-agony, and he’d chuckle the moment I let go. Our version of routine.

            Those nights ended when Rickie and I started the tennis matches, the golf tournaments, around these envelopes. I feel mine pressed against my torso. Little secret, little lie, little hidden totem.

            The time is 12:13pm and someone is noisily enjoying golf inside The Goose’s Leg.

            Jamie nods at me as I slip out of the jacket and sit down on a barstool, the wordless greeting of men.

            ‘Alden without Rickie,’ he says, albeit his tone is lacking in disrespect. I want to clobber him over the head for mentioning it, regardless, but this was and is always his sensibility around things. The same Jamie, painted differently in this light, illuminated by a trickle of sunshine from the outside world and the expected lighting of an alcoholic’s establishment. ‘You don’t come here during the day, and that’s just my observation, mate, don’t shoot the messenger on it.’ Jamie pauses, but he isn’t afraid of the tiptoeing he must be doing to have this conversation. ‘He fucked up again?’

            I shrug the question off. ‘He wants us to go see a movie together.’ Jamie is the sort of straight man who only watches whatever makes a tonne of money at the box office—he won’t sit for two and a half hours unless there’s a lot of excitement, thrill, men acting heroically, women looking gorgeous in practically anything. Rickie and Jamie never saw anything together. They would have grumbled at the other’s suggestion, but caved for their friendship. Jamie would have left the cinema confused, unsure of what he witnessed, feeling a tad psychologised. Rickie would have thought Jamie should be fucking me.

            And that was his sense of humour.

            Rickie would stumble back into the house with his souvenir-lust and mope, jokingly, how something Jamie said reminded him of me. The one at home. He was never attracted to his closest friend, not then, but I always wondered whether he had secretly hoped to convince Jamie into slipping under the sheets with the two of us. Perhaps that was loneliness.

            An attempt to excite, an attempt to delay.

            ‘I usually cut all my exes off,’ Jamie says, leaning on the bar top.

            He smirks, as if he had not suggested I cruelly exile my ex-husband from my life. We have no children together, no shared property or wealth, no yapping dog. Just the remnants of a love. Just the envelopes. Jamie knows nothing of the envelopes, or at least I hope he doesn’t. I could imagine the two of them instead having morning coffee and parting ways with the trouble of a delivery.

            Jamie would just drive.

            I can no longer afford a car.

            Rickie promises me more of an allowance if I keep delivering the envelopes, as if I am one of his children instead of his ex-husband. As if I would accept any money from him regardless.

            He says this like he runs a bank, the Bank of Rickie Sebourn, where a simple loan could be handed out, signed for, accepted, and I would feel more comfortable about our situation, about mine. I would have accepted money from Rickie when we were married—and I did, small little sums I could arrange within my head, knowing I would pay him back x amount or rearrange it, purchase him something he was frugal upon. He acts as if the envelopes benefit us.

            He craves having me in his arms again, craves it without falling to his knees to beg.

            Jamie pours me a shot of vodka and tells me to tip my head back.

            With a smile, a wink, he watches me down the vodka and feign that sense of refresh. The alcohol isn’t laced with citrus-lemon, or frosty-chilling. It doesn’t cut to the mind and soothe the filming-in-progress imagination. But Jamie looks eagerly glad, gratefully impressed in the potency of his so-called wares. I tap the glass for another. Two will do.

            I scan the other patrons of the bar—the woman-trucker in the back retrieves a cap out of nowhere and moves to leave, the heel of her boots thudding down against the hardwood of the floor. There are several older men, mid-forties-fifties, in clusters or sitting comfortably alone. Two men around my own age sit together in a booth, splitting a packet of pretzels. They aren’t interested in a golf tournament, or the world surrounding them. Unlike me, who is nosy.

            I tell myself to stop gazing around, stop staring, but for a brief moment I make eye-contact with one of the men in the booth, and instinctively, I smile at him. Nothing overtly flirtatious. A smile, rare as they can come sometimes. Jamie ahems and I swallow down the second shot. Any adrenaline comes from the envelope, not the alcohol—this much power, this much excitement and thrill from an unexplainable fold of paper would confuse the hell out of any ordinary man. Our eyes drift. I want him to notice me, to give me more attention, more than a passing glance. Look at me.

            I’ll look at you.

            ‘Not my business,’ Jamie interjects, polishing a glass as if he wants to pretend he’s more of a show pony than he is. ‘But why do you still keep in touch with him? You two are still in love, that’s it? This divorce was a mistake, that’s what some of the blokes in here say. I shouldn’t have done it, shouldn’t have gone off with some other woman who doesn’t want to live a free life with me, she wants children, and quickly, because like everyone she’s ageing out of the time where she can confess she’s prim, prime, right for him.’ Jamie says this without aggression, without the tongue of a straight white man scorned. But regardless, he looks moody and brooding. Passionate. Friendship needs a doppelganger spark.

            My intention waning from the boys in the booth, I give Jamie a sympathetic smile and attempt to reassure him on a few things. Rickie and I are not clinging to our relationship, desperate to reverse its fate. I think he just wants my love back.

            ‘It’s not your business,’ I respond first, with a laugh I hope sounds earnest and not brewed out of a cauldron. He grins, and I remember how severely avoidant of an argument he can be. Everything is a conversation, a friendly comedic roast, for Jamie of the bar. ‘But I could never abandon him, even with me having to put a password lock on the wedding photographs because if I look at them I want to…I don’t know what I want to do when I see them anymore. Not kiss him, or repeat the moment.’ I want to say: being married to Rickie was never a mistake, but there is a small hand, like a child’s, clutching onto the corner of my shirt, tugging me backwards. Reminding me: you’re in a bar in the middle of the day, cut the emotional chatter and go do something about your freedom. My freedom. The anti-gravity of feeling. One of the men in the booth, the one I was eyeing, excuses himself to the bathroom and I wait a few beats. Jamie is leaning his stomach against the bar-top.

            ‘Excuse me,’ I say, clicking back the bar-stool so I can wiggle out of my seat.

​

​

In the restroom, there is an immediate odour of urine. I should be distracted, turned-off, but this is a common scent for The Goose’s Leg. Stiff urine. Not unlike some of the drinks.

            The man from the booth is at the urinal, his jeans down underneath his buttocks. Grey underwear. He has a noticeable ass, and for a split second I see Rickie in my head slapping mine. Holding it like a hand. The way men hold an ass in public, something grotesquely possessive about the way they will want to show their love and affection. But with Rickie it was never possessive, never attaching-and-running, stealing. Childhood sweetheart hand-hold. Grabbing my ass, only dirty and seductive in private, when he wanted to bend me over and thrust into me. I try to, even for a moment, imagine Rickie as the type of elderly man to seize control over someone’s rear end, place the centre of focus on one cheek or another. This is distraction.

            Beside him at the urinal trough, I unzip my own pants and take out my cock. It flops around disobeying, until a stream of piss splatters against the steel. Masculine, brutish men, do they grunt and nod when they pee in unison? I wouldn’t know. The stranger beside me hardly acknowledges me except for the brief moment our eyes lock. Strange coincidence, getting drawn to each other at the exact moment. Curiosity making a killing.

            He’s around my age, as mentioned, with light hair the colour of straw. His clothing is dark and moody, but he could be dressed in black to attract the heat. I used to hate walking outside in the summer in anything black, fearing the reaper from a drop of sunlight burrowing into my skin through the colour of the clothes I wore. Black, bringer of body heat and sweaty skin and a trickle down the back of your leg. I make sure I’m not pissing on my leg, and we break eye-contact.

            I think about pushing him against the tiled wall of the restroom and pashing him. There would have been no idea of push-back, no fear, in wanting to fool around again with my lover-boy of an ex-husband, but this is the excitement, the thrill, the thing I want to tide me over while the envelope sits unguarded in the jacket slumped over the rise of the bar stool’s back. I want to make love to him, but nastier, without so much as a compliment. Rickie only liked when I bottomed for him.

            The man from the booth flicks his cock, droplets of his piss splattering without sound on the metal of the urinal. He begins to zip up his jeans but I stop him, a rush of confidence, as I grab his dick and start stroking it. He’s taken aback for a moment, but relaxes into it, clearly finding pleasure. In some bar restroom during the brighter hours of the day he likely didn’t expect to be jerked off by a complete stranger. He groans out, nodding his head in tune to some non-existent beat, maybe something playing in his head. It only serves to make me hornier—I play it like rhythm and feel his cock stiffen in my hand. Ordinarily, with Rickie, I would have seen his penis standing to attention and wanted him to fuck me no matter the time of day. The passion and the pleasure felt the best around midday, especially if both of us were supposed to be at our jobs, slaving away. The naughty escapism of fucking when you should’ve been getting fucked over, it made me orgasm loud enough for the neighbours to type out, print, and deliver into the mailbox a note asking us to be more respectful.

            He reaches with a free hand to begin stroking mine, and the tangle of our arms is somehow satisfying. Skin brushing against skin, the friction of arm hair. I begin not merely jerking him off but brushing up against his arm too, like when you drag a blown-up balloon against the top of someone else’s head. Staticky. I pull down my pants. The man from the booth fidgets with his jeans with his other hand and they tumble down to the floor, too, exposing his tanned legs. He’s not from around here, I think, and having hardly heard a word from his lips I give him a thick American accent and make him mispronounce the word cum.

            We don’t even kiss, not once. He exposes his ass, his furry round cheeks, and I pray to a god I do not believe in that he at least anticipated maybe getting fucked today to douche even a little. But what is a little mess. A little disorder. My dick is throbbing in my hand and he’s moaning soft enough to not be heard. Field mouse moans. The tip of my cock presses against his hole. We’re using bathroom hand soap for lube. It’ll do, I think, overwhelmed not by the pressures of logic or this-or-that but the want and lust to be inside this man. To overwhelm him, only sexually, consensually. He is nodding like a patient, studied game show contestant. I slowly begin to fuck him, remembering the way Rickie would fuck me. Not aggressive, never aggressive. Trained, because he wasn’t virginal when we first started dating, he’d been in other relationships, had sex when he was a teenager because he had the confidence for it. Looked right for it too. Beautiful eyes. I didn’t know him until he was in his twenties.

            The man from the booth is leaning on his forearms against the tiles, but he doesn’t care about whether the tiles are sticky or what he can smell coming from one of the toilets. He moans out the further in I insert my dick, pushing his ass back, making it known he is overqualified for this. Sex in The Goose’s Leg. Overqualified, but he craves it—Rickie doesn’t know how to take dick, but he said if someone else did, they would love mine. Long, but lean, hardly curved. A telephone pole. Pushing up inside this stranger’s ass.

            Back and forth. The dynamic of a man and his bottom. Not his butt. I still don’t know the name of the man from the booth, the man I am having sex with in a bathroom, seemingly unafraid someone could walk in and be outright disgusted. The nerves fight against the adrenaline. My hands rock against his ass. Intense pleasure, and I feel myself edging towards ejaculating inside of him. We moan in harmony. Jamie might overhear, but frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.

            I cum.

            Sticky white stains the opening of his butthole and I wipe the remnants of my seed on his butt cheeks—he’s excited more than anything, grinning at me, still stroking his own erect penis. This state of euphoria has yet to escape him, because he’s yet to cum, or because he’s jammed with more energy and passion than I am. The beauty of being horny has flicked off like a light and I clean off my dick and pull up my pants and glance over at him thinking about what you learn when you just do something.

            He shimmies back into his jeans, squashing his cock against the underwear and the denim, and bears his name. ‘Hunter.’ We don’t exchange phone numbers, although I don’t particularly want to. What would we have in common with one another? Goodbye Hunter, I think, as he shoves open the restroom door and the scene resets. Luckily no one spurted onto the tiles.

I should have fucked him with the envelope pressed against my stomach. The jacket would have been too bulky, too stuffy, but I would have felt the thrill of having and knowing of something that which gave me more power, more freedom. Jamie is hovering at the bar, idling, bored out of his mind, and he winks as I wander back to my stool, back to my jacket.

            ‘You gave him a stiffy,’ he says, nodding down to the shot glass.

            I laugh, either at him or myself. ‘I don’t need more alcohol.’

            Slipping my arms into the sleeves of the jacket, we hold eye contact—he certainly knows I just fucked some stranger in the bathroom, but he doesn’t seem to mind or care. It’s something he would do. Be sleazy with someone he’s attracted to, make a slight fool of himself, go home alone. Jamie would hurl an insult at me for calling him weak, slovenly, but neither of us is in any healthy, stable relationship. I am a gay divorcee.

            Outside, in the wind, I duck down the side of the building, tear the envelope out of the jacket pocket, and stare at it. White, unmarked, noticeable in a post box. No stamp, no little handwritten address to someone’s grandma. A temptation. I want it. I want it. I fucking want to tear into it and know why I have thrown away a marriage for envelopes.

            Without caution, I tear down the lip. Brutal, sharp, chaotic.

II

 

When you get married, your loved ones collect an assortment of gifts in a semi-circle and pity your commitment to a life with the man you so desperately want to spend the rest of it with. Rickie and I have a small semi-circle—with our families largely out of the picture, we consider close friends and old coworkers our loved ones. When we got married, these close friends, old coworkers, lovers and spouses, waited in their patient line with a gift-wrapped present in their arms. I once worked as a receptionist for a child psychologist, when Rickie and I briefly lived in the city, but I formed a fast friendship with Rachel. She loved children, despite being single and childless herself—we gave her shit for not settling down with one of the men she deemed merely a disappointment, merely a replica of the thing she craved the most.

            Rachel gifted us a pastel green toaster.

            It sits, unopened, on the top of the refrigerator. Collecting dust.

            Rickie says, ‘Open it already,’ and I feel the pang of guilt about potentially skiving off our old reliable for something brand-new, something perfectly Magazine and Pinterest and Television. Rickie looks at me with a raised eyebrow like I just talked a string of nonsense, like I had pumped a sausage with Bullshit and Insecurity and Queerness. This last one he intones like what the word once meant—odd, weird, strange, the insanity of being different. He knows I get a little tender thinking of an action of mine as Queer-Odd.

            ‘Our toaster is falling apart,’ he says, feigning with his hand the action of a toaster popping down and then never popping back up again. His limp hand hangs at the height of his bellybutton. ‘It only plays up for me, I know, but damn, we got a free toaster the colour of toothpaste and I want to use it.’ It’s almost whiny, but Rickie restrains himself, always. Maybe an ex-partner of his would have called him a whining child, but when we fell in love, things could not have been further from bratty behaviour. His nagging has always been irresistible.

            The old toaster goes to the trash heap. We sit in Rickie’s car waiting for the line to crawl forward—it is a Saturday, and as much as the dump was a while’s drive out of town, everyone seemed to have something to contribute to it. Sometimes people would wander around, after parking, lugging their wares like a marketplace. I’ve got this old microwave, still works, we can do a trade. People liked sharing their histories, too. How the microwave was once at knee height, and his wife kneed the door closed with a force powerful enough to frighten him while he perched on the toilet seat. He’d truly thought someone had steered their Suzuki into the front of the house, which made no sense to her, his wife, because the screen of shrubbery would have been like the house’s airbags. He laughed, then, telling this story to a small crowd of largely-uninterested folks who wanted him to reverse out and drive the fuck away.

            When Rickie lifts the old toaster out of the boot, a woman with white-grey hair nears him with a faded pastel-pink kettle in her arms, swaddled like a baby. ‘Out with the old,’ she says, smiling at the pair of us. She sets the kettle down in the trash heap, an assortment of forgotten appliances. Creaking refrigerators, gaping mouths wailing out. Grease-kissed ovens. Toasters that jam into place.

            ‘Won’t Rachel be glad we’re finally using the toaster we asked for?’

            In the car, the guilt tears a hole in my stomach.

 

 

When Rickie and I got married, there were car horns blaring down the street during the reception, and we thought it ominous that anyone outside of our intimate circle would pay any attention to us. Traffic jam noises, without the warning of a messy, unkempt crash up ahead. One of the guests, someone’s father, went out into the rain to get a sense of things, as he called it—the man came back inside with hair pasted to his forehead and his suit all wet and said, ‘Some kid is painting a mural out on the street in protest,’ and before we could ask in protest of what, the honking stopped. Dead quiet, everyone turned in their reception seats to look at the drenched father of one of our close friends.

            Why’d we invite the father? I can’t quite remember, although we married only a month ago. You would think every detail retained in my brain, but these didn’t. I am unsure why I chose the underwear for the day I did, unsure why I referenced the obscure things I referenced in my vows, instead of sticking largely to the known as Rickie did. Unsure why I invited Gemma’s father.

            The kid was a nineteen-year-old activist protesting an inhumane abattoir, splattering red paint on the road, tracing out shapes and figures with an oversized paint brush that appeared to be more of a mop than anything. Impatient, disgruntled drivers tooted their horns until the teenager was hoisted off the road, as if by oversized crook, a performer gone wrong. But their wheels were stained red and dragged the paint around the neighbourhood. Their wheels screeched of the squealing pigs and the sow mother, sitting there in the corner, hidden in the mud. It could be blood. That would be the message of the activist. It could, it very well could be blood.

            You don’t let an act of protest disturb your wedding day. Rickie and I, in our private chamber—a dressing room that was actually a bedroom—whispered of how we could have joined in, how we could have left our own reception and splattered the rented suits in faux blood. But neither of us had the courage for it. Neither of us understood why it happened in that part of the neighbourhood, as if we were housewives from the 1950s contemplating something equally absurd, like a Black family moving in, or a Latin family moving in, or…in our own truth, Rickie and I understood and didn’t. We rebelled and didn’t. Being queer and visibly in love was part of the rebellion, but I signed petitions online, Rickie watched documentaries about parts of the world he couldn’t afford to visit, and we both blended into our background.

            Neither of us had the money to do much of anything.

​​

​

Rickie and I are on the couch rewatching a movie neither of us has seen in at least a few years. Something from the early 2000s, pasted with those nauseating fashions and a soundtrack to make you drool. He’s visibly distracted—Rickie is on his phone, scrolling through his Twitter feed, half-heartedly looking at pictures of naked men, liking the ones he likes, and bookmarking them for later, presumably for when he’s masturbating. I don’t say anything—it doesn’t offend me. We have a healthy relationship with our own needs, our own love for pornography. I mind my business when I step out of the shower and hear Rickie stroking his cock in the bedroom. I sneak out into the kitchen and eat a doublecoat Tim-Tam.

            The ruggedly-handsome lead is on screen, inches away from kissing the female lead. Rickie isn’t too fazed about early 2000s romcoms being dominated by straight couples—he doesn’t really like romcoms, not as something he watches separately. On one of our early dates we went to see what you could almost dub a romcomtasy and he spent most of the film whispering in my ear and distracting me. He wasn’t flirting—Rickie practiced cinema etiquette enough to avoid being the couple who wants to fuck in the back row. He was critiquing the cinematography, the acting of the lead actress, the lighting on a particular day on set, the director’s obsession with bringing this or that out of the performances. It made me horny for him regardless.

            ‘Rick,’ I say, poking him in the shoulder playfully. He hates being called Rick, like I am addressing an older, grumpier man who might just have a young, spritely woman on his arm.

            Rickie glances over at me with a concerned look on his face—he isn’t bitter at the nickname, surprisingly, but he knows it spells some sort of serious conversation. I am not about to compliment the chiseled jaw of the male lead; I am not about to wax poetic about how romantic the pairing of one particular song from 2004 is with the two central characters leaning into one another.

            ‘I want to quit my job,’ I say, pairing the wrong nickname with something genuine.

            Rickie stares at me with a blank, uncertain expression. More than concerned, he is startled—talking about hating my job is frequent enough, but he’s successful most days at walking me away from the ledge and remembering the important value of making an income. You grow up, you get a job—you support yourself. Until you want some other, more exciting way of supporting yourself.

            Rickie smoothens out his face and says to me, ‘Then you should.’ No arguing, no contemplating. No discussion over whether tossing out the familiar, the used, would be like severing one of my limbs. The rotted, fungal limb. Then you should. Echoes in my head. Rickie returns to watching the movie as if the conversation came to its natural, comfortable conclusion—I will do what I want. I want him to say something else. I attempt to will it, moving around ideas in my mind, attempting to awaken a part of myself that is space-age, or ghostly, afterlifian, but nothing. I’ve found myself equally stunned, equally confused.

            ‘When should I?’ I sputter out, suddenly concerned. A man and a woman are kissing on screen and I am suddenly wearing the weight of what I’ve said aloud alone. Rickie is looking ahead, quite literally, and figuratively too, without my knowing.

            He sighs. Maybe turning his head will start to exhaust him. ‘I’m sorry, that was the wrong thing to say to try to get you back into the conversation.’ I worry my voice sounds either whiny or robotic.

            Rickie turns his head, lifts the remote control in his hand, and pauses the TV. He turns back again, and I am certain I can see the aches and pains in his neck. The twist, the turn, the unscrewing of his spine. The last time we spoke about my job, about me quitting and fleeing with the wind, Rickie and I had an argument of sorts. He didn’t scream—he never screams at me, unless I startle him aggressively. Pull some accidental prank while he’s on the toilet. Rickie didn’t scream, and neither did I. We were hushed, hesitant, but frustrated with one another—he believed I was being overdramatic about my reasons for wanting to quit, and that I would change my mind in a week because I was known to have these little issues that could be resolved with a night’s rest and half a packet of Panadol spread across the week and a silent scream. I believed I could have the world if I took a month’s leave and bothered only myself at home. I told Rickie I thought about leaping onto my desk like a mountain lion and clawing out the eyes of one of my coworker’s. He knew who I meant.

            I am of half a mind to want him to say something like, I will support us. Something boldly masculine, ripped out from the forgotten time of a husband being the breadwinner only. It doesn’t matter that we exist in a homonormative marriage. Sometimes Rickie likes to act like he’s the one wearing the pants, the manlier of the two of us. He replaces tires, etc, and it bores me to think of either of us in certain lights, stuck in certain patterns, but fuck if I did not want Rickie in this very moment to confess that he thought it completely reasonable for him to be the only one of us making money for a time until I found another source of income. Be it working in the post office, or serving hot pancakes for breakfast, or selling my body. Something.

            Do I want different shackles?

            Rickie smiles at me. ‘How many times are we going to have the same conversation and continue feeling iffy about it?’ He doesn’t look completely convinced of himself, but neither am I. ‘We’re always looking for something, right? You know how many movies we’ve watched where the main character quits their job and has some revelation, some change in perspective, that helps them pursue something better, healthier?’

            It feels indulgent, like he is reading off a script, but I lean into it and hold my breath. Only for a moment. Just to experience whatever he’s talking about—taking a chance, maybe, or at least giving the word chance a once-over instead of ignoring it all the time.

            I love Rickie with all my heart. The night before our wedding, I sat down at a kitchen island counter and wrote him a letter, separate to any vows, separate to anything I knew we would be going through the very next day. I sat with a piece of paper I tore from an old notebook I never used and a four-colour pen—I chose black, to represent sanity—and I wrote Rickie a message. We never write anything down to each other. With our mobile phones, all the different social media apps we use to communicate with one another, because you can be having four different conversations at once, Rickie and I never leave anything unsaid. Maybe I am munted in the head, for loving him when I know he could gouge my heart out with any utensil from the kitchen—a spatula, a cheese grater, a cake temperature tester. I wanted honesty in my own handwriting.

            But I had the paper, the handwritten note, in my hands and I couldn’t bear the idea of ever letting him read it. It was a morose feeling—I meant every word of it, the lyricism something any actual writer would tear apart for being simplistic and generic, but it was not for them. It was for the man who would be my husband in, say, less than twenty-four hours. The idea of him reading what I had wrote sent electric pulses into my abdomen.

            Rickie would shudder, not weep.

            This I knew, this I felt sit underneath my toes, a saturated sock from a march through rising floodwaters. A march from here, to there, to underneath the greatest tree, where instead of folding the note for Rickie, I dampened it underneath the leaves, hunched over with my hands in the murky water.

            In reality, I stood at the kitchen sink, letting the tap gush out.

            Why didn’t I tear it to pieces, shove it into the depths of the trashcan?

            I love this man.

            I could have showed this in words.

            The soppy paper clung to the skin of my hands.

            I love this man.

            I don’t get it.

 

​

In the morning, I handed in a resignation letter, all typed on white, crisp paper and sealed inside an envelope. I felt somewhat impressive, somewhat important, to be carrying around an envelope with a major change sealed up inside of it. When I handed it to Kate, I think she understood wordlessly. Certain moments, they are natural to how we move through the world. A resignation looks like one thing. A goodbye looks like one thing. Walking down the street with a newfound air of confidence looks like one thing.

            The weather is pleasant. It’s a Tuesday afternoon, I am walking home from work, wondering what Rickie and I will eat for dinner, or watch on tv before bed. There’s a sense of peace, but not white-flag surrender, not wave or rush of victory either. Peace like a river. Coursing through my veins.

            I have the path home from work down to the centimetre, which is unfortunate now that I am hanging up the hat and being unemployed for a while. This is an adjustment—being on the outside, looking in. Window-shopping. For an income. Rickie this morning tapped then kissed my forehead and promised me we would be alright spending-wise. The gifts from the wedding were still unwrapped, or un-plugged-in, and we could live for a while comfortably on his salary so long as we didn’t eat out too often or make any unnecessary purchases, like a new hot tub. Neither of us wanted a new hot tub, and we chuckled at the thought of the two of us wringing our hands, eyes darting around in disarray, sitting in the hot tub with bubbles on our nipples.

            I thought about making a detour, but my mind is everywhere but in my feet. If I venture off the path, take a stroll in the park or stop at the bakery for a vanilla slice, my feet will be disoriented, misaligned. I think about collapsing on the couch, home alone until Rickie comes home with the steel-capped boots, the stink of the outside world on his clothes. He unbuttons, unzips, unwinds, tearing himself down to just his underwear, staring over at me with a grin. His butt bounces as he wanders into the bathroom to take a shower. I love this man. I think about tomorrow, going to work with the noose dangling around my throat like a tie, the suitcase half-packed. The image of a businessman going on vacation with his fingers crossed behind his back.

            I’m not coming back.

            There’s a sore thumb of a house in this neighbourhood that reminds me of the concept of new money. It’s a renovation, done in white paint and pearls and tight at the hips. A house corseted. The local myth, legend, is that someone swept into town for an auction, loved the good bones, the lovely bones, and made their obsession with the colour of dust and ash. Constructed a ghastly greenhouse in the lawn. Tinted glass, you assume to obstruct the coming-and-going of an underpaid gardener, groundskeeper, in dirtied overalls with replaced buttons. The neighbours, I am sure, consult their diminishing bank accounts, wanting to install towering fences, plant mammoth pine trees, something of that kind. No one does anything. We grumble, we move on.

            As I approach the house, banking my disapproval, I picture what Rickie and I would do with a property like that. Repaint it, or reverse time before even a consultation. No greenhouse, or more wholesomely, a vegetable patch sprouting capsicums, growing zucchinis and carrots and the odd turnip. Rickie would complain, why do we grow turnips if neither of us knows what to do with them in the kitchen? I would shrug, I would laugh, plucking a dirt-brushed turnip into a wicker basket. Living a fantasy constructed from years of watching whatever was on television in my grandparents’ sitting room, in waiting rooms, in the dentist’s office. I grew this from just a sprout.

            Rickie and I are renting a two-bedroom house with a garage and half a backyard.

            I could re-route myself—I have thought about it every afternoon leaving work. Find another path home, avoiding the eye-sore, but this straight line in the direction of the house is more efficient than anything else would be. Or so I believe, so I assume.

            The front door of the white elephant hangs open, letting in the wind.

            The image of a house invasion, except nothing inside is dishevelled or knocked down. The door is not pinned back, a sort of carelessness unexpected for anyone with new money. There could be something worth taking from the hallway coat rack. The hallway cabinet. The hallway shoe cupboard.

            Although, perhaps people with money have an absurdity of a name for a shoe cupboard, a concept which feels pedestrian, feels ripped out of a catalogue for a Kmart or a Target.

            I could gleam a few things from how they lived their lives—tidy, no-nonsense people with a reverence for order, not chaos. There weren’t noticeable scuff marks on the walls. Childless. Or the type to scold their children relentlessly, scold them to abandon chaos, find their joy in the structured. Childless, or a neat chore wheel on the refrigerator. Each doting little cretin lines up of a Saturday morning, waiting to be handed a slip—your chore for the succeeding hour is vacuum the upstairs living quarters. Skip the bathroom.

            Behind the eyes, I saw an alternate life for us. I would have less discomfort; he would have more. Rickie watched indies about how brutalistic having money could be, made by impoverished auteurs who couldn’t afford to rent out McMansions in the hills. They told their stories through inference, through how the ordinary was quashed by the so-called extraordinary. Rickie would say, I don’t need all the money in the world, I just need less debt. I would nod, burying my lust.

            Graciously, there is no one on the street to nudge into me. I am standing still on the footpath, staring inside the white elephant. I want that house, I think, not for how it looks now, but for how it once looked and how it could look with me cemented into its floorboards.

            Rickie standing in the way, keeping me safe.

            The brand-new, mint-condition toaster on the kitchen counter, its pastel green sheen belonging seven degrees from the pasta arm. I have always wanted a pasta arm.

            I’d get shot at if I stand here long enough, staring inside someone else’s perfect house. Perfect life, fake greenhouse, dirtied gardener, manicured bank account.

            In the end, it is all dirty when you have money, this wealth of freedom.

            Painting everything white on a whim.

            I think about wanting without knowing how to take.

            And then, when the slam of a door shakes me out of the daydream, I notice something. Sitting just inside, to the left-hand side of the agape door, is a white, three-legged stand with a speckled vase upon it. The vase is empty of flowers, real or fake—it is the work-of-art, the statement piece, the fashionable intrigue. Its base colour reminds me of a palomino horse, dotted then with greys and blacks and off-whites. The vase is hardly fashionable amidst the bleak exterior of the house.

            I think about taking the vase.

            The mere illusion of a pile of money sitting on a stand in the entrance hall of a house larger than your own, more well-established than your own. Prettier, handsomer, whiter. No one is around. Unless an overwhelming security system looms, eager to ensnare the foolish, the vase is unguarded. Unprotected, perhaps unloved, sitting at the front of the house with a gentle wind catching against it. One shove and the vase would stumble to the ground and shatter into a billion pieces. A billion worthless pieces. The vase couldn’t be worth a billion dollars, but it could be worth something.

            I want the vase.

            I think again about taking the vase.

            No job, no dream for life, a vase.

            The weight of wanting more is tied around my neck like in the story of the women, the girls, who cannot untie the petite, beautiful sash from around their throat, or else their perfect porcelain heads will roll. Roll right off. The weight of wanting more—that is an earnestness I cannot avoid, jobless, in a marriage I cannot sustain with promises alone, with loving the man alone, with bought gifts from a registry. The weight of wanting a vase—and expecting to be able to carry it.

            No one seems to be around, although my view of the house is limited. There could be someone down the hall and around the bend, humming to themselves in the kitchen. Their hair loosely tied atop their head, a frock gown-like, slippers for inside the house. Not actively participating in any kitchen duty—performatively pacing in the space, an improv of natural suburban life. No one seems to be around, but as I cross onto the path leading toward the white painted staircase, I listen to my heart. Yelping. Contending with another emotion like passion. Wanting.

            I half-expect the gaping door to swing on its hinges as I approach, a motion-sensor on the porch, a security guard perched on a stool someplace inside the white elephant, catching me out. But there is a stillness, a quiet lull in the front yard, which hardly constitutes for a yard. Petite garden bed. Concrete, pavement, stone wall to keep the fairies in. Or out. Everything is precise.

            No creaking on the staircase, four short steps up from the pavers to the porch. This close to the vase, I can appreciate its intricacy in more detail. The palomino colour, golden-brown, like butterscotch pudding. I remember pudding like that from when I was younger, the smell of the warm butterscotch underneath the thicket of custard. Salivating over a vase. I cross the threshold. My movements are slow, unhurried. A burglar taking stock.

            The vase is surprisingly not too heavy. No easy-to-hold handles, so I straddle it in my arms somewhat nurturingly, like swaddling a babe. It takes a moment of adjustment, standing there in the hallway, attempting to be as silent as a worm or a snake or a butterfly or an octopus or something of that kind. One incorrect adjustment and the vase could tumble shatteringly to the floor.

            In my head, I keep thinking, and now, and now, and now. The entire walk down, off the porch, across the manicured front “lawn”, back onto the public, somewhat uneven pavement. Carrying this vase, nestling it against my breast. I keep thinking, this is the moment a man half-undressed from his business attire will accost me for attempting to smuggle out one of his possessions. Perhaps something his mother bought him!
           But I breathe a sigh of relief the moment I hit the pavement and walk in the direction of my own home, carrying the vase, disappearing soon enough from view. I breathe, and I continue to breathe, adjusting myself to a steady rhythm like that of cruise control. No acceleration, no slamming on the brake. Keep walking, keep going. Carry the weight.

            Out of view of the white elephant, I set the vase down on the concrete to give my arms a brief break. There isn’t too much left of the walk home, but already I am feeling the awkwardness of carrying it. Without handles, having to clutch it tightly to my chest, I long for a little red wagon to set it into, a wagon much like Matilda’s, in which she carted her library books home in. That was no theft, but she was treated with indignity, treated like a disturbed outsider, merely for wanting something different. A different outlook on life, burying her head in a book.

            Rickie and I watched Matilda together in the weeks leading up to our wedding. A childhood favourite, we sobered to how uncomfortably harsh of a family-friendly movie it could be. Loveable icon Danny DeVito is cruel, snide, humiliating as Matilda’s father, and you want to wound her family for how snottily they discard her. A reverse of the scene where an unknown on the television snatches out at the falling money, trying to be richer, trying to be impressive on a game show.

            You think about the real-life truths, though, too—that the little girl playing Matilda, Mara Wilson, was taken in by DeVito and Rhea Perlman while her own mother was in hospital. On-screen and off, two realities separated by a script. Those mumblings about life being controlled, constricted, inception after inception of different screenplays, no true world in which people simply exist of their own free will. Rickie can go hours talking on these topics, but keeps himself mum at work, at social gatherings where he only knows one or two people. He talks instead of things he expects them to want to hear about—now is the wedding, now is future plans and sitting down with a slice of toast from the brand-new pastel green toaster.

            Now is being the breadwinner.

            What does that even mean, to win bread?

            Honey-stuck money to your breast.

            I gather up the caramel-coloured vase and begin again, making fleeting eye-contact with a man walking his dog across the street. A beautiful black labrador, wagging its tail.

            No one has come chasing after me, brandishing a weapon of any kind—in my head I imagine everything from a handgun to a butcher’s cleaver to a firepoker. Nothing. It makes the weight of the vase less punishing. I turn into our street, careful not to connect with the raised crack in the pavement and send myself—and the vase—tumbling forward, even for a moment. A nudge would be enough. Enough to shatter everything into a billion pieces.

            With the vase down on the grass, I dig around for the house keys and unlock the front door. It’s quiet inside—I expected Rickie to be home already, given my detour, but perhaps he’s gone to grab himself something from the supermarket, or stopped for a beer at The Goose’s Leg with Jamie. The vase finds a short-term home as the centrepiece of the dining room table, gaudily attention-seeking in a room lacking artwork, lacking antiques and anything of inspiration. We hardly eat in the dining room.

            I collapse into an armchair and wait for Rickie.

‘Don’t look on the table,’ I call out when Rickie sings my name into the quiet house. He kicks off the steel-capped boots and saunters into the living room, beginning to undress himself almost immediately. Sweat has dried on the cloth underneath his armpits. Rickie glances first to me, with a sly smile, then through the archway into the dining room. The vase stares back, hideously out of place, out of sync.

            He guffaws.

            ‘Where’d you pick up that thing?’ He points at it, childishly, noting my expression. There’s an expression reserved for when I regret a purchase. Sometimes it comes months later, when I try on a shirt again and realise the colour or fit or style is completely wrong, and I laugh at myself in the mirror, drooped down, weighed down. Rickie studies the vase, an art critic for an exhibit opening night. Look at its form, at its grace. He runs a hand down the curvature of the vase.

            ‘Don’t worry, I’m selling it.’

            ‘Returning it?’ He says, cocking his head at me.

            ‘Selling.’ I start to think of an excuse for what could have happened to the receipt—caught in the wind, gone with the wind, I threw it out in a trash can on the street, which street, I don’t remember which store in our little town sold such a gaudy statement piece, maybe its vintage, maybe I rescued it from a thrift store and inherently saw more value than the old women did. When did I have time to go to the thrift store, I wonder, observing Rickie’s hesitant scrutiny.

            He rests a palm atop the lip of the vase. You really ought to fill this vase with flowers, sunflowers, perhaps, or something white, lilies, perhaps. Flush-white tulips, bulbous in winter. Ghostly roses. Rickie squints. ‘Did they tell you to pack up your things and leave, then?’ The squint isn’t uncomfortable, isn’t brought upon by malice or discontent—he’s playful, assuming I left work early and had time to wander down to the store to browse for lamps I would no longer be able to afford with my own money while I was unemployed.

            ‘I didn’t buy it,’ I say, with conviction. Rickie stares back at me, then swivels his head towards the vase. A double-take.

            ‘No one is leaving something like that on the street.’ Rickie struggles out of his shirt, as if the confusion has made him hotter, sweatier. It is cast aside onto the carpet. As expected, I am so attracted to this man right in this moment, but I steady myself for what will inevitably come when I let him know I did in fact cross the threshold of someone’s McMansion and I swipe the vase from them.

            ‘They’re not,’ I say, scooting out of the armchair, moving off towards the dining room. ‘I, uh, you know the hideously white, odiously white, house we both cannot stand over on Laurel. Their front door was wide open, like an invitation to an open home. Missing the greeter, carpeted with their smiling face and their perfect attitude, maybe their collection of pamphlets. Anyway, I couldn’t help myself, seeing them waste away their privacy, their security. Someone else would have stumbled inside the house, rooted around for a set of car keys, click-clicked the convertible in the driveway and zoomed off down the street, never to be seen again.’ I pause, sensing Rickie’s reaction. ‘I just took a vase, Rick.’

            ‘You’re stealing shit now?’

            ‘Stealing a vase, one vase.’

            Rickie doesn’t seem to quite believe me.

            ‘I,’ he begins, sighing, staring at the palomino elephant in the room. ‘I know, without you working, without the weekly paycheck from your job, we’re going to be tighter on money. The strain can’t already be getting to you though—it’s only been a few hours since you must’ve handed in your resignation, Alden.’ He ran a hand over the smoothed surface of the vase. ‘Please don’t let the stress flood to your head already. We’ll figure things out.’

            ‘The door was agape,’ I say, as if defending myself.

            ‘I don’t care if there was a sign hanging from the roof that said We Can Afford to Replace Everything. How did you see an open door and think, this won’t sit on my conscience if I steal?’

            I admit I may have lacked some judgement in my actions.

            Rickie stands by the vase, an equal participant in our argument.

            ‘There’s no point trying to go back and replace it,’ I say, hesitating, waiting for my husband to tell me that will be the exact thing I do. Hope, and pray, that the door remains flung open, awaiting another house inspection. I would hopelessly set down the vase again. Someone would catch me and wonder, why did he come back with it? This grown, adult man. Stupid, take the expensive beauty and flee with it. Run away. Never explain where it came from.

            Rickie stares at me.

            ‘What are we doing with stolen goods then?’ Suddenly his anger is certain, uncomfortable. I do my best to not rile Rickie up, but I feel myself inhale more than just oxygen. Parts of myself tuck inside my body. ‘You want to, what, put it on Marketplace? Sell it online and expect whoever lives in that hideous as fuck white house won’t go searching for it, thinking that would be exactly where it ends up? And then when they track it back to us, hiring whatever IT person they need to figure out where the IP address came from, I don’t know computers, then what? We just tink-tink our fingers together like this,’ and he gestures with both his hands, like two finger guns meeting tip-to-tip. ‘We say, I’m fucking sorry, bro, for stealing your vase when you left the front door wide open and the front hallway unattended like that. You were asking for it.’

            I see Rickie reach for the vase, frustration overtaking him. I think, so what if he, out of anger, out of rage and malice, takes up the golden-caramel vase and hurls it against the wall? So what. What now, as he said. Did I take it thinking pawn shops still really exist in the world, eager to take a fancy-looking vase off my hands for a price we both think is reasonable?

            I don’t know what I wanted.

            What I want.

            Jobless, but not vaseless.

​

            When Rickie and I got married, like queer couples are now apt to do, we actually thought about what our future together looked like. The stereotypical—will there be the white picket fence, will there be the suburban home with its amenities, will there be the minivan for the invisible kids? Rickie and I never talked about wanting children—you either do or you don’t. Squeamishly, we pictured ourselves in the marriage bed snuggled up under the covers, only to be intruded upon three seconds later by squirming bodies and sticky fingers and dirty feet. Crying, and piss-stained diapers. Papa and Papa.

            Comically, like assigning ourselves goals, wishlists, five-year-plans, we wrote down our wants. Or, I suppose, I did, and I wondered if Rickie ever took me seriously for suggesting it. Here was another slip of paper I chewed up and spat out, sending it into the garbage can. Nothing I wrote seemed like something I wanted to share with the class. My husband could have my words, my I-do’s, my I-love-you’s. Those words are so uncomplicated, I do. You are signing what is constructed to be a legal contract, this marriage between husband and husband. All you must do is say I do and sign.

            Sign the petition. Stop the inhumane treatment of the squealing piggy.

            I could make a marriage sound like a hellscape, but I love Rickie. I would never want to see myself outside of his arms, outside of arms’ reach of him. Even when he sees my flaws and realises I make bad decisions. ‘I can’t undo what I did, I know, please, don’t make me want to tear my hair out even more than I already do.’ I set a hand upon the lip of the vase, sniffle once, twice.

            ‘What are you going to do with this?’

            ‘I should’ve thought about that,’ I mutter, taking the vase into my arms once more like a swaddled babe. I could kiss it, whisper it a lullaby goodbye. Are you ready to be a billion and one pieces, my palomino?

​

            I hurl the vase at the dining room wall, silently, noiselessly. The shatter is extraordinary.

III

 

There was a period of time when I was visiting the doctor’s office on a semi-regular basis. Nothing was extremely wrong with me—it wasn’t cancer, or something of that ilk. The doctor I had been seeing for a few months was concerned about my weight—I was losing weight too frequently, in his opinion. He saw me thinning too much, despite an exercise routine he would have called lacklustre. I was moving but sluggishly, he imposed—you should be going for early morning jogs before work, and stop begging for lifts from your friends when you need to run an errand. My doctor, frankly, was a narcissistic asshole who was prescribing me with the wrong diagnosis. I wasn’t losing weight any more than I should be, and his visual assumption that I was turning into skin-and-bones was only because he had a peculiar dislike for twiggy arms on a man. My doctor, as it turns out, had a habit of thirsting after his patients, and he was disappointed I was a certain way whenever I came back to see him.

            But because I frequented the doctor’s office for that period of time, I saw one of the receptionists often. He worked similar shifts, I booked similar appointments—he was always there of a Wednesday morning, which I frequented, because it was the easiest day, seemingly, to request time off work. No one took a particular notice on Hump Day. My boss took the suggestion quite literally.

            [He liked to fornicate in the supply closet.]

            The receptionist’s name is Jude. It began as niceties, a friendly welcome, a stumble through the rigmarole of checking in for an appointment. I would repeat my address to him frequently, but never my phone number, a stalkerish reverse of what you would expect if you found someone attractive. And I did, I always found Jude attractive, from the first few moments of interacting with him in the waiting room. He wore glasses and pushed them up the bridge of his nose whenever he first began speaking to me. His dark-brown hair was short and always neat, almost glued down to his scalp. We exchanged very little while I was merely a patient for one of the doctors in the practice.

            But then I bumped into him at the movie theatre, the two of us each carrying an overflowing popcorn box. I had never seen him out of the uniform he wore at work—now he was comfortable, casual, his hair less styled, his manner less assertive. He was those three c’s of cool, calm, and collected, asking me zero questions about why I was frequently in those waiting rooms, blocking out the gardening shows playing on low volume. We were seeing the same film, a superhero flick starring predominately men in tight clothing flying around on greenscreens. Seating wasn’t pre-determined at this particular theatre, but regardless we sat apart, nervously avoidant of making the situation awkward by even suggesting we watch a movie together. He was largely a stranger, an acquaintance whose name I’d read off a nametag. Jude. Short for? I’d start to make that a joke: Judith. He would playfully slap my arm, and that was perhaps the most physical contact we ever had.

            I am two years, three months into seeing Rickie. Jude knows I am serious about Rickie—this relationship is the first serious relationship I have had in a while that has lasted past the one-year anniversary. Perhaps I have our anniversary plugged too harshly into my memory, like wedging a lightning rod into the brain—on the fifth of April I woke up alone in bed wondering why I hadn’t micromanaged our plans so he would be in bed beside me. Happy anniversary, kiss on the mouth…instead, I groggily wiped the sleep out of my eyes and texted him a good morning and rejected myself for wanting to be sappy. I had wanted: ‘happy two-year anniversary, babe, thank you for being in my life and for loving me through thick and thin,’ or some washy-bullshit like that. Wedding vows, early, unflinchingly so, pasty-white-making.

            I changed doctors, but made things awkward by remaining at the same practice. I expected any interactions with Dr Harper to be fleeting—if we made eye-contact, would he still think me frighteningly weightless, or would his disbelief in me not being the patient whose name he just called override it all? Instead, would he merely think me delusional for giving up on his advice?

            You’ll be back.

            Jude, at reception, greeted me with a look of surprise—I hardly imagined he remembered who I had been seeing, although perhaps there was workplace gossip and everyone knew Dr Harper had an unquenchable desire to misdiagnose. Jude said something about that movie we saw together, but not together—I strangely wanted to admit it would have been nicer not sitting alone in the second row from the back, pushing the popcorn into the back of my mouth with my tongue.

            But, I thought, if Rickie wouldn’t have been working, I would have gone with him.

            I started seeing the doctor less frequently—there was truthfully nothing wrong with me, or my weight, and this new doctor, Dr Jaekel, seems less concerned about wasting my money than Dr Harper did. It was nice, unshackled from getting to the practice, sitting in the waiting room, numbing myself with the noise of a baby’s wail at getting stabbed with a needle, or the irregular cough of an old woman in her seventies. I was stepping on the scale less. Hoping I was gaining weight, not losing it. Dr Harper had fudged the numbers in my brain, and I am still wading through the wrong thoughts. You’re too skinny, too petite, don’t you feel yourself wasting away?

            I think Dr Harper was a chubby-chaser.

​

​

Wandering through the park one cold, bitter morning, shivering against my coat, I hear someone call out my name. ‘Alden!’ He shouts out, and I swivel in place, at first confused and staring around at a handful of faces I don’t recognise, and then I see him waving over at me. Jude is carrying a takeaway cup of coffee, similarly rugged up for the winter. Dressed in black.

            ‘You should be drinking something warm,’ he says, offering out his coffee without a moment’s thought. I hesitate, I think, because of the part inside of me that is terrified of cooties—like I am a five-year-old child again. No time for sickness. No time for germs. But I shake free of it when he nudges the takeaway cup forward further, giving me even more permission. My lips are frost-bitten at this point, or that is how it feels. I take a sip of the coffee, pretend to be completely warm all over already. Lick my lips.

            ‘What are you up to?’

            He takes the coffee from my cold hands.

            I tell Jude I am on a morning walk to get out of the house, stretch my legs. I don’t need to tell him I am outrunning a series of conversations with my mother that have me contemplating cutting her out of my life completely. I don’t need to tell him I am lonely.

            ‘A walk sounds lovely,’ he says, taking a sip of the coffee. ‘I don’t have to work myself,’ he says, as we stand awkwardly in the middle of the footpath. An elderly Asian woman steps around us, thrusting a thermos in swing with her steps. ‘It’s nice weather, despite the chill,’ he says, gesturing silently for the two of us to step out of the way and amble towards an unoccupied park bench.

            Sitting side by side, I think this is the first moment Jude and I haven’t felt some strange weight hanging in the air between us. That he is either on the clock, or that it is strange, odd, to be seeing him off the clock. I cannot reach into the recesses of his mind, but I wonder if he acknowledges this too. Jude is asking me about my morning, and I obscure the details—I talk about walking out the front door, immediately met by the cold front. I talk about leaves crunching underneath my feet, the patch of mud I skidded to avoid stepping in, the clouds which hovered overhead and met to form what looked like a gnome-as-jockey, riding his unicorn horse across the finish line. Jude laughs.

            ‘Gnome, and not just a short man? What was he wearing?’

            ‘Short men don’t ride unicorns, Jude,’ I say, and he laughs again, and I wonder if the sentence is actually funny, or if I’m amusing because I’m playfully mocking him.

            The winter chill settles around us—there’s hardly a wind. Jude doesn’t ask a single question about my health, and I like to imagine he doesn’t remember how frequently I was once a patient. Instead, he asks me about my relationship with Rickie, which surprises me. Maybe I thought he would look at a couple in love and think their business was entirely their own, that he doesn’t need the details of how things began, and whether we go on romantic dinner dates or stay in and watch something on the couch. When Harry Met Sally? Is there a queer version of that? Jude listened to the stories as I told them, how Rickie and I first met on a dating app, both in the mindset that one more uninspired date would lead to us deleting the apps forever.

            ‘You must be grateful you held off then,’ he said, taking another sip of his coffee. ‘I mean, there’s a universe where you both logged out an hour before matching, or one of you did and the other stared back at the zero-response chat waiting for destiny to intervene. Or you started to talk to one another, but a feeling behind the eyelids interfered and nevertheless you still logged out, still went without meeting him for the first time.’ It’s charmingly romantic when Jude talks about it. But sitting in the what-if only ever ached, only ever tormented a soul. In that other universe, I am not who I am in this very moment, two years and three months into a relationship with a man who has earned my trust, and whose trust I have earned back.

            Jude smiles, finishing off the last droplets of the coffee he can pour into his mouth.

            ‘I don’t like thinking that way,’ I say, cutting the conversation into potentially tension-heavy territory. But Jude isn’t uncomfortable—he doesn’t flinch by me slicing through his discussion of alternatives, or other worlds. ‘And you shouldn’t,’ he replies, setting the takeaway cup down on the wood of the bench beside him. ‘Why live another life at the same time as this one? Act, if you want to act, or write, if you want to write, but don’t dream too painfully, so long as you can help it.’

            Jude shifts his phone around in the pocket of his pants, a snap-reaction to make himself more comfortable, I imagine, before he begins anew. ‘In university, I read over a manuscript for a friend. They were doing some writing as a hobby, because it was clear to me they never thought writing would get them anywhere fiscally. It would have left holes in the bank account.’ He briefly lifts eye-contact to stare out across the park to a handful of students, dressed in their uniforms, gathering at a bus stop. Trying, hopelessly, to shield themselves from the cold. ‘The manuscript, it was an unfinished novel. My friend, Leslie, was writing about the psychology of dreams, through her fiction. A character, that could only ever amount to anything in their dreams—they had these successes when they slept, but it wasn’t become a millionaire success, it was attend a successful interview and get approved for a bank loan. I would become depressed every time the character woke from their slumber, because that dream reality was a mirage for a person who went to the same job, and hated themselves for it, and still lived with their parents because it was more productive, and fiscally affordable, than braving a world that only rewarded whoever was taking those sweeter successes.’ Jude sighs. He goes to take a sip of the coffee, but quickly remembers he finished it off, and sighs again, staring at the lid.

            ‘Other people got to live lives worth celebrating, remembering, but the main character was endlessly worried of dying a failure, and oftentimes struggled to fall asleep. They would have night sweats, wake up throughout the night constantly shaken out of the dream state, or just not sleep at all. The health benefits were slim to none…life was moving at such a delay for the character they found themselves sleepwalking out into the middle of the road perhaps once or twice a week. Waiting for oncoming traffic, at, say, three AM in the morning.’

            Jude shakes his head, semi-violently, as if to steer himself back on track. ‘Why did I bring this up again?’ I look at him with big eyes and a silly grin on myself. I don’t know, and part of me doesn’t care, I’m swept up in listening to him meander through story.

            ‘Oh.’ He says, pausing, his eyebrows raising on his forehead. ‘Don’t try to live another life concurrently, yes. When you start to think the other existence is better than this one, you get too attached to what isn’t even actually there. The character, they—it was a nonbinary character, too, which is really refreshing for fiction—they got swept up in the dream of the dream. Being successful there, making headway there.’ Jude adjusts on the wooden park bench. ‘It’s all too much, too much of a muchness. In your mind, there are pressures of one thing, but you should let yourself exist outside of the mind.’

            Jude eases back, a signal he’s finished talking and wants to sit in the moment with those thoughts. To be present, to bear witness to whatever is in front of you, not in your dreamscape. These are ideals of indie cinema, too. To be a dreamer but not without reality. If a character is becoming too swept up by the what-could-be’s, they are humbled and continue on, nose to the ground like a bloodhound. All cinema loves a hero. I think about the superhero movie Jude and I saw separately, but close enough together, pulled together, strung together by the closeness of seats.

            There are heroes on the screen, dodging gunfire, dodging fireballs and laser beams. I try to imagine how Jude’s face must have been drawn, for I could only see the back of his head, his dark hair, in the illuminated pitch of the movie theatre. Would the same moments have inspired in us awe, would the same moments have pushed our butts forward on the seat, anticipating, eagerly so.

            ‘I don’t know if she writes much anymore,’ Jude continues, half-grasping at the phone in his pocket. I think, my silence has bored him enough to reach out to an old friend, but he does not move any further, his hand stapled to the outside of the pocket.

            ‘Whenever I think I’m getting pulled into having a new hobby, I think about that. If, in a week, or a month more realistically, I’ll stop having the time for whatever it is and anyone who knew I was interested in it will think another fad has gone to rot.’

            Jude glances at me with an earnestness I have never seen from him.

            This is, I suppose, the first time we have really spoken like this.

            ‘She was a talented writer,’ he utters. ‘Could string together sentences beautifully, better than I ever could in high school English. I thought, where was she when I needed someone to read through old essays before submitting them?’ He pauses, rubbing his hands together for warmth. ‘Oh well then.’

            ‘You’re trying to tell me to not quit my little hobbies?’

            ‘I can’t tell you to do anything, Alden.’

            You can tell me to kiss you, I would have thought, if I was not in a stable relationship. The thought now does not cross my mind, and there is nothing I want desperately from Jude than to continue talking to him. I think, instead, actually, about how strange it will be now when I am the patient and he is the receptionist and all I have to say to him is my name, the appointment time, my address, my date of birth, and whether the phone number they have on file remains correct. Yes, yes.

            I am here to see Dr Jaekel, yes.

            Jude suddenly pivots the conversation: ‘It’s the middle of winter, so it’s freezing cold in the mornings, I understand that, but what do you say about going for a mountain climb with me on the weekend?’ At first, he waits for my response, but hardly: ‘There’s a trail I like about an hour’s drive from here, but I haven’t been in months, because of work.’

            The worse thing about a couple is when they try to make every plan, every decision, involve one another in it. Every brunch, every thrift store search, every hike. Every purchase—do you think I should buy this? I had to scrape it out of my brain whether I needed Rickie’s approval over plans like these, despite our relationship being two-years in the vegetable crisper in the fridge.

            I tell Jude I would love to.

            I hope for a picturesque lookout point overlooking a wide valley of native bushland.

            I hope for my breath when we conclude the hike. For it to remain in my throat, in my lungs, keeping me steady on the ground, not keeling over onto the dusty temporary carpark.

            We chat for a time, and then Jude confesses he must run and we say a brief goodbye, parting ways in the park. I’m suddenly craving something to eat, so I duck into the patches of sunlight, making my way over to the nearest supermarket, where I find a premade salad sandwich, a bottle of chocolate-flavoured milk, and a Snickers. I scarf these down on a different park bench. My appetite is ravenous. I could eat another Snickers. I want something more enriching than the packaged sandwich.

            While walking home, I think about a café I once visited while on vacation. I was alone, wandering the streets after hopping off a bus, and found the place like a sanctuary. There wasn’t much money in my bank account then—I’d checked that morning, after ordering a coffee and sighing at the cost of it. Inner-city coffee is expensive. Everything is expensive when you’re on vacation. Yet you care less, sigh whimsically more, throw yourself into the wind with the caution. With the rain, when it storms for three days and you consider part of the holiday, part of the exciting trip, a stumble.

            The café faced out onto the road, a one-storey brown building alone on the corner beside two empty lots. I’d thought, will they sprout a string of storefronts here, an L-shape, or an angular bow, but there were no For Sale signs on the vacant lots. They seemed more like ungoverned parking lots, one housing a faded-grey camper tethered to the air. To the wind. The café, however lonely on the outside, felt accustomed to the lifestyle on the in. Warm hearth. Earth tones. Hanging plants that could tickle the top of your head if they could only so much as swing themselves like trapeze artists.

            Table for one, and I sit down off towards the corner, thinking about myself as single. This was before Rickie. I met him a few months later, and on one of our early dates, in getting to know one another, in telling anecdotes about a life lived like that, in solitude, almost, I told him about this café. How stepping off the bus I almost collided with a puddle—the rain, for once, had lulled, but it would just be for that one day, where I ceremoniously took myself to the middle of small-town-on-the-mountains to take in the beauty. Then, I was hungry, peeking at the menu on the bus.

            Peeking at the menu again, on the laminated pages.

            Those moments of being overcome by your options.

            I could go for a table in the corner of a café, alone or with someone else—Rickie, or Jude, or friends like Kara, like Sam. Taking our turn to order, nodding and smiling in agreeance—that does sound delicious, so my eyes will take a snapshot of it and digest the pixels. Drinks will come round on a circular tray, set down on the wooden table, making condensation rings. I could go for a table, for a meal at some out-of-the-way café. You’re still not you when you’re still hungry.

I kick off my shoes at the door, straightening them with their snouts against the skirting board. I’m not always this neat and tidy, this pedantic. Sometimes a shoe will go skittering across the floor and I’ll know Rickie is over unannounced, shoving shoes out of the way nonchalantly. Hysterically, almost. We only tease, we only joke.

            Rickie is still working—he won’t be finished until 5pm, and I am already labouring over how far a deadline that is. When he decided to take the new contract and started working Saturdays, I worried we would only see less and less of each other. It makes me earnestly think about moving in together, although Kara would scold me for trying to rush things—two years is too early to be making your entire life about another person. But sometimes I find myself only seeing him on Sundays, or not at all if he goes to attend something I wasn’t invited to, or sees family, or our schedules refuse to align. Friday nights I can see him, if I am lucky.

            I busy myself by sitting in front of the television rewatching a sitcom from the 90s. Their apartments, with their false fourth wall. One of the actors is attractive, although only back then—now he is mature, and greyed-out in the hair, in the face. His features have withered. But then, back in that height of his career, he only makes me horny. Through the fabric of my pants I start to rub my cock. I have to stop every time a joke makes me laugh. It feels wrong to be laughing and making my penis get harder at the exact same time.

            Through the fabric of my pants, my erect cock throbs. I think maybe I will cum right into my underwear, staining it, leaving a wet spot for the washing machine. If Rickie were here, would he be turned on enough by it to immediately want to have sex with me? It doesn’t take a thunderstorm.

            Suddenly they are laughing and I am not stopping. I pull the cock from out of my pants, out of my underwear, and feel it taut against the fabric. The cupping of the balls. My cum will squirt everywhere, dirtying these clothes, but no more do I care about a stain down there than I do a stain anywhere. Stain me. Make me filthy, who cares. I think about the scalding hot shower I will have after I spurt like a horny volcano, steam tangled in the hairs on my chest. When, after having sex, once or twice, Rickie and I showered together and laughed and laughed at how frustrating it was to detangle ourselves from the gelatinous form semen takes when you boil it alive on your skin.

            The repetitious thrust back and forth, back and forth, an animal pouncing out from inside of me as my vision of the actors on screen, entering the apartment in their slimming coats, talking to one another, their overexaggerated laughter somehow less nauseating than the audience laugh track cued up in the background. Like the song, like the lyrics sung by the lady in black, I am on the edge of glory—and then I stop. I let my hand dangle. I let my stiff cock stand solitary to attention, a soldier no one told to return home. The pants are cutting at circulation somewhat, which aroused me more, but now I tug them off entirely and sit on the couch half-naked. The more exciting half of my body.

            A frozen tableau.

            Alden, pantsless, shirt unstained. HAHAHAHA. Someone on the television has just said something incredibly amusing. Jerry Seinfeld just made one of his jokes.

 

​

Rickie rings immediately when he gets home from work—this is what he parrots, I rung immediately as soon as I walked in the door, see I’m kicking off my shoes, see I’m walking into the kitchen to get myself something to drink. I think he’s going for something hard, like a glass of whiskey, but he swerves and pours himself some orange juice, propping the phone up on the kitchen bench while he pours.

            ‘How are you?’ He says, taking the phone back up and aiming the camera’s view back at his lovely, but sweaty, face.

            By this point I’ve showered and dressed in what you could hardly call pyjamas: a shirt I got from the first week of university, for free, and a pair of old underwear. ‘I’m cold, really,’ I say, wondering why I stuck with the skimpy underwear. Maybe, subconsciously, I hoped Rickie would be coming over tonight to rub his boner against my ass while we snuggled in bed.

            Tough luck.

            He begins a story about his day—one of his coworkers had to deal with a puddle of urine in the bathroom. She went in with a mop and a look of perseverance but came out wondering why she did this measly job for such an ordinary pay packet. Cleaning up piss, dealing with shit. I ask who they suspected dropped their trousers and pissed everywhere. Rickie sighs. ‘We shouldn’t let children use the bathroom,’ he utters, then quickly shakes his head realising what he said. ‘Our bathroom! Our bathroom!’ We both cackle, and I think about the Seinfeld episode where Jerry, Elaine, Kramer, and George cannot track down their car in the parking garage. For some reason.

            Maybe I imagine Elaine’s goldfish is swimming in piss instead.

            Or there is no goldfish at all, and she squirms about carrying around a baggie of urine.

            Rickie is getting tired—he needs to go take a shower, but maybe we’ll text more once he’s lying in bed shirtless with a glass of milk on the bedside table. All I can think about is his story about piss.

​

​

            These are our conversations some nights:

            R: How are you? How was your day?

            A: I’m okay/cold/tired/moody/horny. My day was okay/cold/tiring/justification for the moodiness/justification for the horniness/oh it was fucking shit.

            Then he gives me no chance to ask him how he is. Instead, he will launch unceremoniously into something that happened during his day.

            R: Someone pissed on the floor/one of my coworkers was being nasty and cruel/I spilled coffee on my pants/my boss was ornery—except Rickie would never say ornery—and I tiptoed around him all day/there was an accident on the highway.

            A: Oh no that’s terrible.

            Then I wonder why he is not here.

​

​

I know other relationships are murkier, are coarser.

            When Rickie hangs up the phone, after we say I love you back and forth, I sit alone on the edge of the bed uncertain about what to do. An internal clock has been nudged back an hour. The phone call was shorter than standing in line to check-in your luggage at the airport. Sometimes that itself is instant. Like making a coffee from the machine. Press a handful of buttons, stand and wait.

            I know more about Lisa’s day than I do his.

 

‘The thing is,’ I started again, stepping over a puddle. ‘The amount of love I have for him doesn’t buckle underneath whatever is stressing us out. I’m not endlessly pissed at him for being too tired to stay on the phone, because I can empathise with him and get over it, but fuck if I don’t feel like I’m less important than his job or his showerhead.’

            Jude is ahead of me, leaving footprints in the dirt. Somewhere between the carpark and the summit. I dressed for the expected weather, but my arms are already warm and itching to be free of the sleeves. The baseball cap is scratching up against my hair, against my scalp.

            ‘Have you spoken to him about this?’

            When do I have the time to, I think, sighing, or else huffing, already.

            All we ever fucking do is sigh.

            ‘I try to mention that we need to spend more time together, but I start to worry too that I will come across as the needy boyfriend, the gay stereotype. Always wants attention, always wants to fuck, has no personality outside of being in love with a man and in love with sex.’ I have to keep this addiction to sighing under control. ‘When we do see each other, everything is correct. Straightened out. But in order to even dream of a future, Rickie…I don’t know, you don’t want to be hearing about this.’

            Jude glances over his shoulder. ‘What am I for if not to listen?’

            ‘Do you think if we moved in together this would all right itself?’

            The path widens ever so slightly, enough for Jude and me to walk almost side by side. Perfect for the conversation to continue—he slows his pace to match mine, and underneath a canopy of trees, his skin almost seems a tinge green. Fairy boy, flickering in the light. Hidden wings.

            ‘He’d have no choice but to see you in person all the time,’ Jude offers, ducking out of the way of an overhanging plant, fernlike, hunter green. ‘But he could still find his opportunities of peace if he needed them. I’m not saying he wants nothing to do with you, and I’m not saying you want everything to do with him, but being in any relationship has complications.’

            ‘I want him to be there for me when I lose my patience with my mother.’

            I start to tell Jude about the latest in a series of arguments, or silences, with my mother. A woman who has never quite understood who I am, who I am meant to be, or who I want to be. Most of our disagreements are minor, tiny pebbles clinking against the barnacles on a boat. In this specific image of mine, I see the words my mother uses as stones she finds alongside the shoreline, aiming them directly for me. I have this boat, somewhere between a dingy and the Titanic. Clink. Clink. Another pebble collides with the barnacles, which don’t erode but protect, a hardened shell where the surface of the water and below meet the cream-coloured complexion of the boat.

            My mother is unsure about Rickie—I make snide jokes that she would prefer I be in love with a woman, but she casts this aside, narrowing her eyes at me. I’m not homophobic, Alden, jesus. Someone somewhere would quote don’t say the lord’s name in vain but between my mother and I, we remove off the capital letter and keep the curse. Flinging it back and forth at one another.

            My mother is unsure about Rickie, and thinks I dote too much—I shouldn’t want to be with someone who doesn’t know how to make the planets align all by himself. This she said after the first time they met—like any ordinary old parent she asked Rickie what he wanted from his future, whether he had career ambitions and dreams of living in the suburbs with children. Rickie was stoic, unsure, and said he didn’t know what his life would bring him. ‘Career goals, I don’t think I know how to just want one thing,’ he said, setting down the cutlery so as to not fling the knife at himself if suddenly he got enraged by her questioning. ‘Kids? Uh. I’m still so young, and not likely to impregnate someone.’ We’d only been dating for a couple of weeks, perhaps a month, and never even talked about the big f-word. Future. Why would I go about fucking up something good?

            You know, when I dated this boy named Tim, I told him something hysterical, it would have cued the laugh track—in our future, we’ve got two boys. I don’t know where it came from. I was high—not on drugs, but on feeling wanted—and I thought I needed to tell him I could predict the future like a seer, instead of living in the moment.

            My mother thinks Rickie and I might be trading places—I’m losing sight of the big picture, the future, while Rickie spends more and more time dreaming of it. His future, what she doesn’t see, is the life of a corporate slave working six days a week to make enough money to afford the house, the nice car, the brand-new appliances from his paycheck. This to her is a dream I once had, but now I lose.

            Jude, beside me, until the path thins and he steps in front, leader of our functional unit, takes a deep breath and his footfalls become heavier. ‘You’ve told her these aren’t lives she gets to live?’

            ‘I used to get so frustrated, I used to snap like I wanted my words to injure,’ I say, for once not looking down at my feet, or at Jude’s back, but out down the sloping woods. Nothing but the natural world to collect you if you stumbled. ‘When do I start to snap at Rickie then?’

            Quickly, I play through a scenario in my head, orchestrated a little by the words of my mother.

            Two years into a relationship and now you have become complacent.

            Where did all the bitterness come from…

            If I talk to him, our relationship will be better.

            Jude tells me we shouldn’t be far from the lookout.  

​

​

It’s a gorgeous view. Another moment spent without him, and more guilt, but I need to remind myself to be more present and ignore those feelings that dissuade me. Jude is beside me, and I know how wrong it would be to reach down for his hand, even just to squeeze it for a millisecond of a millisecond. Stupid, to imagine this as any sort of accomplishment, when months ago the doctor said I had no meat left on the bones. Sucked dry by some intestinal fatty pig.

​

            ‘I want to live in that house down there.’ I point to the middle of the valley, a house so isolated the trees almost distance themselves from it. A brown roof the colour of soiled pants. ‘But then I think about how miserable I would be living alone like that. And trapping Rickie, too.’

            Do I need to mention him in every second sentence?

            The version of who I was before I started loving Rickie is a distant memory, because after two years and three months, every dead skin cell has fallen off my body and been replaced. The same can be said for the version of myself who had great, grand ambitions for himself, and the version of myself who still needed a mother to be a complete person. All I want to be is a person who loves Rickie, but there is everything in between.

            Jude and I take a selfie with the colossal view in the background. This I will post on Instagram with a caption, something like gonna build a mountain from a little hill because the grid demands a somewhat cheesy post that reeks of sarcasm and doesn’t allude to anything. I cannot entertain anything with Jude that isn’t platonic. Not to punish Rickie, if I think he deserves punishment, and not to punish myself. Always, always, want to punish myself. Punch myself. Tear myself into strips and fry myself in oil in a frying pan on medium heat. Oink, oink, little piggy.

            Somewhere out there, there’s, I don’t know, two people who are in love without feeling the weight of it. Maybe they’re two men, I hope so, and they don’t feel like it’s impossible to want each other’s happiness without sacrificing their own.

            I think I am expected to gouge my own eyes out for thinking I should be able to find happiness without sacrifice, but I’m young, in the longest relationship of my little life, and instead of knowing what to do, I am climbing mountains with a receptionist from the doctor’s practice I go to to be told there was simply never anything wrong with me to begin with. I lost a little weight, from the sadness.

Rickie and I met through a dating app, so the story does not begin with a meet-cute. Neither of us dropped our books in the school hallway, or accidentally knocked all the oranges off the fruit stand at the supermarket. This is how queer people meet—through text messages, wanting to find love, which will mean sex, whatever, but when you can masturbate while watching Seinfeld you understand the core of your priorities.

​

            I love this man.

​

            Yet one day I will be getting married to him and will write the words of our story, of our love, why I part the fucking sea for him, and I will so quickly disintegrate it because he cannot see how dependent on our love I have become. I am becoming.

​

            Rickie cannot ever know there are thoughts in my brain that would make Juliet pierce herself with the dagger even hastier. Nor can Jude, nor can anyone on earth. It is dark and twisted to be in love—you think of yourself on the brink, on the edge of some special, tragic glory. People kill for love; they mutilate each other for it.

            One day we might be divorced or separated, and I will know then that Rickie has seen the inside of my brain and he does not like it there. Or, we will both realise the dead cells have flaked off our bodies and we are no longer the same two people.

Halfway down the mountain, I tap Jude on the back and he halts in front of me, swivelling his head. Now, I think, kiss him. After hours of complaining and roiling around in the mud of a relationship that is hardly troubled. Do whatever you want and kiss a man because you don’t think you will feel guilty about it. Go on, do it. Kiss him.

​

            I could, but I don’t. But now I have a captive audience and there must have been something else on my mind, so I look at Jude with an expression he would see a thousand times. False confidence.

            ‘Do you think we can go to McDonalds after this?’

            Laugh track, laugh track, laugh goddammit.

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©2024 by Keeley Young.

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