Nothing like sadness or anger set in right away when M sat me down one afternoon last February and told me he was moving out of our apartment. The conversation we had after felt relaxed and almost warm—it seemed perfectly normal when he paused after twenty minutes or so and remarked on the way the light was falling on the house across the street, making its chimney look tinselled with silver. I found myself agreeing when he said that some part of him had always known that our relationship was temporary—that, despite his love for me, he’d sensed from the beginning that what we had to give each other was meaningful but finite. We’d never had the sort of intensity that was destined to grow and so he felt, after two years of each other, that we’d both taken what had been offered us and reached a predetermined ending.
I spent the rest of February drinking coffee on my sofa with my computer on my lap, trying to finish three editing jobs that I disliked and couldn’t focus on. I felt a little more miserable every day. The long walks I normally took to clear my head and get some exercise got increasingly shorter, and I turned down every friend who suggested a movie or a drink. Eventually, I wasn’t leaving the apartment except to buy groceries at the meagrely stocked convenience store at the foot of my street or red wine at the liquor store.
During these emptied hours, consumed with missing M, I wondered why I hadn’t protested the breakup. Sometimes, I could convince myself that I’d agreed with him: I’d known all along that we were incompatible in a long-term, happy-ending sort of way and had done my best to repress this knowledge throughout the ups and downs of our two years. But the more persuasive part of me knew that it hadn’t been repression at all—I’d seen all the red flags and sensed our deep-seated unsuitability and had knowingly and earnestly risen against them. I’d defied what had seemed to be the most inevitable conclusion; I’d pictured us as a beautiful exception.
*
I wasn’t feeling much better about anything when I started to think about texting R. The idea didn’t occur to me so much as remind me of its presence, as though the possibility of texting him had been standing in the corner of my living room all this time, all these years, and—out of exhaustion, frustration, curiosity, or defeat—I’d finally turned my head to look at it directly. It might have been that there was so little doubt I would eventually text him that keeping my eye off this corner was more a matter of procrastination than anything else, so that when I actually found myself typing What are you doing? into my phone, I felt little of the guilt I might have felt at falling back into our pattern and more just plain relief.
We agreed to meet the following evening at the bar near his apartment where he often went for dinner. I worked hard at looking pretty without making it seem as though I had, blow-drying my hair, putting on a bit of makeup and finding a flattering T-shirt that could’ve been picked up off the bedroom floor. I’d been to this bar with R many times before—it was dimly lit and under-heated, with battered wood furniture and a strange saltwater fish tank mounted into its back wall, but R liked it for the home-cooked style meal they served every evening, which cost ten dollars and meant he rarely had to cook himself. I saw him as soon as I stepped inside, sitting at a table along the wall with his long smooth arms stretched out in front of him, a paperback upright in one hand. When he saw me, he placed his book down and leaned back in his chair. We stared at each other without saying anything, then we both started to laugh.
I asked, “How are you?”
“Oh, I’m just the same as ever.”
R was very attached to the motif that his life did not change or evolve the way that other people’s lives did, and he’d answered with the mock wistfulness he typically used whenever someone asked him how he was. His appearance corroborated the routine—tall and boyishly slim, he had a creaseless face that would age all at once when he turned sixty.
“What’s the book?” I pointed at the one on the table.
“It’s trash.”
“Trashy?”
“No. Trash. I knew the author in grad school. He’s terrible.”
“A terrible writer?”
“That, too. But the writing might be less offensive than the indirect access to his personality.”
I smiled. “I’m happy to see you.”
R smiled back at me. “Me too, Stamps.”
R called me Stamps after a character on a Finnish detective series that we’d binge-watched together a few years ago, a time we were both stuck in jobs that depressed us and must have believed that staying up until two or three in the morning watching Netflix, thereby ensuring we were exhausted and unfocused at work the next morning, was a small gesture of professional resistance. Stamps was a junior policeman who sucked up to his supervisors and spilled coffee on other people’s desks, but the camera would reveal him tucked away in the corner of a crime scene, crying quietly and tenderly whenever somebody was killed. His soft, servile face spoke to me deeply for reasons I couldn’t find words for, as did his tendency to make a mess of things, a flaw I might not have presented outwardly, but that seemed to literalize what was clumsy and childlike in my heart. So it felt as though R understood the bottom of me when, after a few episodes, he was inspired to call me this man’s name.
I went to the bar and ordered a beer. When I came back to the table, I started to tell him everything I’d wanted to tell him for so long: how the crooked tree outside the Lebanese church on Queen Street had started to lean so much that, out of prudence or superstition, I now crossed the street to avoid it; how the barista at our local café, a woman whom we were certain despised us, had suddenly started to smile at me and make breezy small talk about the weather; how I’d accosted a stranger on the subway who was wearing a jacket identical to the beloved one I’d lost at a restaurant the year before; how my four-year-old niece had started to use the expression “What the what?” when she was confused or overwhelmed. R listened carefully, fascinated by each of these developments, interrupting me occasionally with a clarifying question about context or what happened next. When I was finished, he shared his own backlog of thoughts and experiences. I listened eagerly and attentively, curious about every detail, all the while growing increasingly conscious of how happy I was to be sitting with him, of how much I was enjoying myself, of how good and right and fated our reunion felt. And my awareness of these feelings amounted to a minor distraction as he spoke, which can probably account for why I wasn’t able to control myself and blurted out, “M and I broke up.”
I watched R make the face I could’ve predicted he’d make—and clearly a face that some part of me longed to see. It seemed insufficient to describe this face as I-told-you-so because it was lazier but also more triumphant.
“He moved out about a month ago,” I continued. “I haven’t been all that great.”
R sat back in his seat with a sigh.
“Are you dating anyone these days?” I asked. “Chloe?”
“No, I’m not dating Chloe.”
“That’s too bad,” I said, and some large part of me meant it, because I liked Chloe—or I liked the idea of her with R. She was a modern dancer with soulful grey eyes and graceful androgynous clothes. I might have been jealous of their relationship if R hadn’t once struggled to explain to me why they couldn’t talk about interesting things. He called it a personality clash, but I knew this masked a more annihilating verdict.
“How’s your writing?” I asked.
“Is that what you wanted to talk about?”
“Not exclusively.”
“Why did you text?”
“Aren’t you having a nice time?”
“That’s an unrelated question.”
“I wanted to see you.”
“Why?”
“Because I miss you and I worry about you.”
He forced a laugh. “I think you need to think harder about what that means.”
“I know what it means.”
“I don’t think you do. I think the context of that sentence assumes certain self-serving priorities.”
“Huh?”
“You need to think harder about why you worry about me before getting me involved.”
He was worked up in a familiar way, his face red and thickened by muscle. It was a mood of his that I’d always found a bit embarrassing to witness—he looked like a teenager who couldn’t rein himself in. I faced the window to avoid him and observed the gloomy fact of our reflected selves, framed by polygons of light from the street outside.
“Okay,” I said finally. “I’ll give it some thought.”
*
Long before I met M, I met R. It was at the launch for my first novel—a book I felt insecure about—which my publisher hosted at a bar in the city’s west end. As I stood in front of the small crowd, and thanked those who needed to be thanked, my attention was drawn to R’s face, which seemed better lit than the faces around him. Right away, I had the sense that something would happen between us, though this wasn’t on account of anything he did. In fact, when I tried to catch his eye, he returned my gaze with a fogginess that made it unclear whether he was even really looking at me.
Shortly after that, I read his book. It was written in the first-person but it addressed a “you”— an ex-girlfriend whom the narrator can’t forget. Whatever the narrator said or did or thought was conditioned by his longing for “you,” which meant that he lived his life as an avatar of that longing. I knew I was meant to be impressed by the ideas in the book, but I loved it for a simpler reason: The way it made longing seem like a noble activity. I got R’s email from a friend of a friend and asked if he wanted to have dinner with me.
Our first date took place at a Spanish restaurant that served a single house wine and inexpensive tapas. R was standing outside the restaurant when I arrived. He greeted me with a sagging hug and a warm, unfocussed smile. He’d put his name on the waiting list for a patio table and we joked about butting in front of the couple before us, who were immersed in some kind of app or game on the woman’s phone.
“I liked your book,” R said as soon as we’d sat down at our table. “The sense of dread—how that was a direct function of her psychology—I thought that was really well done.”
R looked at me directly after saying this. It was the first time we’d really made eye contact and it gave me the urge to be honest with him.
“I actually sort of have mixed feelings about it. There are parts I like, but I feel…ambivalent on the whole.”
“You shouldn’t.”
“That’s nice of you to say.”
“I’m not trying to be nice.”
“Oh?”
“I’ve been trying to be my true self lately.”
“I feel very underprepared.”
“I probably should have sent a text or something. Anyway, I thought your book was really good.”
The day’s heat hovered moodily around us as we talked. I hardly noticed the sky deepening into marine blues, or the patio thinning out until we were the only table left. Despite how much we drank, I didn’t feel particularly tipsy when the waitress came over and did last call. Standing on the sidewalk out front, R pulled me close to him and asked in a tone that sounded just a little ironic if I wanted to come over.
He lived farther north than most people in our circle did, in a neighbourhood full of old Italian bars and hair salons. Our Uber stopped in front of a small dark building with a long, paved path up to its front door. His apartment was on the second floor—it opened onto a tiny kitchen and then a virtually unfurnished room, with a tattered loveseat adrift in its centre and books piled all over the floor. Some of these paperbacks rose in towers nearly to the ceiling, while others formed little half-sized clusters by their sides. There were no drapes on the windows and nothing hanging on the walls. It looked as though he’d just moved in, though I suspected that he hadn’t.
“Where do you write?” I asked.
He nodded toward the bedroom, which existed on the other side of a doorframe without a door. Then he took a whiskey bottle down from the top of the fridge and poured us both a glass. We drank quickly and proceeded to take off our clothes.
I woke up in his bed at some point in the night, thinking that the street outside seemed very bright. From where I lay, the light looked peaceful and deliberate, as though shining down from something divine. I left the bedroom and sat with my legs tucked up on his loveseat. I felt very calm sitting there by myself, surrounded by his lack of stuff. It was an emptiness that seemed purposeful just then, like a form of concentration. Other than the books, his only real possession seemed to be the laptop charging on the floor. I wondered whether he’d resolved, at some point in his life, to disencumber himself of material distractions or whether he’d never bothered with them in the first place. I put my head down on the loveseat’s cushion, feeling relaxed and ready to fall asleep.
*
In those early days, we went for walks in the cemetery near his apartment. We kept returning to a conversation about mood—we agreed that mood was a good metric for assessing how much we’d been affected by a work of art. R said that when he thought of a book after reading it, what he could recall, more than anything, was whether it had changed his mood. But he worried that he couldn’t remember whether his mood had changed in some very serious way in real life. He worried that he’d been in a bad mood for so long that he’d forgotten whether the mood was different from who he was, or different from who he thought he was, or maybe just different from who he used to be. I told him that the worry indicated that he had some distance from the mood, some autonomy over it, but this didn’t seem to comfort him.
We went to see a play about a poet who becomes so poor that she takes her two self-published books of poems to the bank and asks if she can use them as collateral for a loan. When the bank teller laughs at her and sends her away, she goes to a pawn shop. The pawn shop owner doesn’t balk when she places the slim books on his counter. He picks up the first one and considers the cover carefully. He reads one poem, then another, then a third. He offers the poet two-hundred dollars.
When the houselights came up, R remained very still. The music from the curtain call was playing softly. I was going to ask where he wanted to go for a drink, but his stillness gave me pause. I hadn’t thought the play was very good but, sitting there so deliberatively after the fact, I became aware that my mood had changed. I realized that a familiar feeling had taken hold of me, a feeling that I associated with my own writing. If I had to name this feeling I might call it sadness, but the sort of sadness that I found desirable, even necessary. I probably depended on this sadness to write in the first place at all. I could feel this sadness very clearly as I sat there beside R, who seemed caught up in feelings of his own. My sadness seemed more meaningful than it ever had, but also, with him next to me, more oppressive.
Soon after, I said to R, “I care about you, but I don’t think this is going to work as a relationship.”
He nodded. “I don’t want you to think of a relationship as the only option for us.”
“I won’t think that.”
“Let’s cover other options.”
“Like hypothetically?” I asked.
“We don’t have to make any decisions tonight.”
*
In the days after reconnecting with R, I did my best to reflect honestly on why I’d texted him. It didn’t take very long for me to admit to myself that he’d been right, if he’d been accusing me of what I felt accused of. M’s departure had left me idle and lonely. While I’d never really stopped thinking about R, the loss of M had made those thoughts more immediate, and I’d let myself follow through on that thinking without considering R’s feelings or point of view.
But as I started to punish myself with certain names—needy, selfish, manipulative—I wondered whether I was being an objective judge or taking the whole story into account. I’d never wanted my friendship with R to be set on pause in the first place. It was he who had stopped returning my texts on account of M’s presence in my life. And it was hardly the first time that we’d cycled in and out of speaking and not speaking. He was happy with our friendship so long as there was no one serious in my life and no one promising in his own. He’d stopped speaking to me several years ago when he started dating a very beautiful woman who, according to LinkedIn, worked in brand design and storytelling. I let him walk away from me without putting up a fight and, with the exception of one weepy phone call after a story of mine was rejected from a mediocre magazine, I gave him the time and space he had tacitly requested.
When he texted a few months after that phone call suggesting we meet for drinks that very night, I accepted without hesitation. Sitting across from him at an intimate wine bar, sharing a bottle of Syrah neither of us could really afford, I repressed the urge to ask what had happened with the beautiful brand designer, knowing it might set him off. Instead, we talked about everything else we’d missed in each other’s lives. Gratitude had never been a feeling I was comfortable with, always striking me as faintly mawkish or religious, but I knew it was a large part of what I felt that evening. And this thankfulness seemed capable of simplifying, even purifying, all the things that were messy and unconventional between us. What did the complications of our friendship amount to when they could engender such uncomplicated happiness? Why did we need to fuss over the occasional bout of jealousy or resentment when we were rewarded with feeling so accurately understood?
When I thought of the time I spent with R over the course of our friendship, or whatever you might call it, I thought of the quality of our conversations. We enjoyed talking about the world together because there was no need for preamble; we could take our common perspective for granted and dig in our heels at exactly the same spot. Our discussions were thorough without the threat of argument. And maybe it was this context of consensus that allowed them to feel as though they truly ran their course, lending them the sense of reaching an ending, in a way that little in my life did. Elsewhere, there was just repetition, the same sort of things happening over and over again. In fact, sometimes I could only distinguish small developments in my life by comparing myself to R, whose life was truly unmarked by conventional signs of progress. He hadn’t published anything since his novel came out a decade ago. He’d lived in the same apartment and worked in the same health-food store for twelve years, spending his small income on ephemeral things: rent, alcohol, his monthly phone bill, and going to new restaurants with younger women. When we met, the women were all of five or six years younger than him. Now, they were more like fifteen. I’d teased him about this a few times, but stopped when it became clear how much it bothered him. What had once signified his sexual prowess, was now just evidence that his life was stalled, and that he was falling increasingly out of sync with his peers, who had partners, children, mortgages, and advancing careers. But maybe worse was that dating women from a different generation put him in a strange, political tension with women his own age, who felt both superior and insulted, and proceeded to write him off as a curiosity they could neither like nor respect.
*
R agreed to go for a walk with me a few days later in the cemetery near his apartment. It was his day off from the health-food store, but he asked if we could meet early, when the grounds would be free of people and cars. He was by the entrance gate when I arrived, standing under a row of iron spikes that looked bluish in the morning light. He appeared to be full of energy, and held a takeaway coffee in each hand, one of which he passed to me.
“You’re right,” I said as we started to walk up the path towards the first cluster of crooked tombstones, sipping our coffees. “I worry about you for complicated reasons that have a lot to do with my own uncertainties.”
He seemed uninterested in my apology. “I want you to read something.”
“Now?”
He gestured toward a bench a few yards off. Once we’d sat down, he gave me something to read off his phone. It was written in the first person and seemed halfway between an essay and a work of fiction. It described a narrator visiting an exhibition at an art gallery and trying to account for how it felt to observe the art. At some point, the narrator decides to leave the gallery and walk home, despite a distance of many miles. Using the map function on his phone, he watches himself make progress through the indicated streets. He begins to feel an affinity for the icon that represents his position, as though the little red circle on his screen actually bears a resemblance to who he is.
“It’s beautiful,” I said, still holding his phone. “I love it.”
“You think it’s good?”
“I do.”
“Really good?”
Like most R’s writing, it felt incredibly smart. He had a way of measuring perceptions against each other that created striking equations out of words. But I suspected it wasn’t as good as R hoped it was. Once, a few years earlier, when we were having a conversation about the nature of intelligence, R had confided in me that he thought he was a literary genius. The comment came the same week that he’d been asked to interview a controversial French novelist for an online publication. The publication’s editor sent back the draft of the interview, complaining that he couldn’t understand the introduction, which should have been an entirely straightforward thing to write. I started to wonder whether R thought his genius began exactly where everyone else thought his writing stopped making sense.
“You should keep working on it,” I said.
“You think it needs work?”
“Well, it needs… elaboration? You need to figure out what it means.”
He stared at me blankly, then snatched back his phone. I needed to say something that would diffuse the situation.
“I have to do laundry today.”
R didn’t have a washing machine in his building either, and we’d frequently commiserated on this shared misfortune, finding ourselves well into adulthood and consigned to leave our apartments to wash our clothes. He dealt with this inconvenience by using a laundry pick-up and delivery service, whereas I didn’t like the idea of a stranger washing the few nice things I had, and so dragged a collapsible wagon stuffed with dirty clothes to my local laundromat every two or three weeks, a chore that was especially tedious in the snow.
“What are you up to later?” I asked.
“I have some plans.”
“Plans? Like a date?”
“I have lunch plans.”
“Who are you having lunch with?”
“You don’t know her.” He drained what remained of his coffee. “She isn’t someone you would know.”
“How are we supposed to be friends if you’re so cagey about this stuff?”
“Don’t oversimplify,” he said angrily. “It’s not important.”
*
When I got to the laundromat later that morning, all the machines were in use. I sat down on one of the folding chairs and scrolled through my phone, looking up every so often at the only other person in the laundromat, a young woman pulling clothes out of a hamper. She was wearing an oversized cropped sweater and, when she leaned away from me, I could see the white T-shirt she had tucked into her sweatpants underneath. With a shiver, it brought to mind something R had told me ages ago, when he’d decided he was finally going to pay someone else to wash his clothes. He said he’d miss seeing girls in their sexiest underwear on laundry day. I asked what he meant by seeing, and he’d insisted that, as women he didn’t know heaved their bundles of clothes in and out of the machines, he’d frequently seen lace and satin peeking out from the waistbands of their pants. Apparently, it was a well-known fact that women wore their sexiest underwear on laundry day, when they were inevitably down to their last few pairs. When I said this was an affront to my understanding of reality—laundromats weren’t crawling with women in gorgeous underclothes, there was no way he’d regularly seen so many thong straps par hazard—he conceded that maybe it was the idea that he was attached to. He loved imagining, as he completed this most banal of tasks, that the women around him were wearing their loveliest, scantiest stuff.
I’d known instantly that I would never forgive him for this. Nothing about this fantasy seemed sexy or refined, and I didn’t doubt for a second that he knew that. He’d said it to remind me of our uneven status in the world. He was rubbing my face in the fact that he was a man and I was a woman, and as my purchase on sexual power diminished a little every year, his remained steady and uncompromised. I could never escape this basic biological fact, even when doing something as insipid as my laundry. Maybe the worst part of this casual cruelness was that I had no rebuttal, no conceivable way of making him feel as demeaned and resentful as he’d made me feel. At that moment, I actually wished him ill. I wanted him to have the kind of life that lonely, eccentric, half-employed men who preyed on twenty-five-year-olds were given.
The young woman turned around just then. She seemed to recognize me and, as she lifted a hand to wave, I realized it was Chloe. She stopped folding the shirt in her hand and remained awkwardly still for a moment, before coming towards me and saying hello.
“I didn’t know you lived around here,” she said.
“I didn’t know you did.”
“Oh, I don’t.” She unclasped the clip that was holding half her hair up—hair so thick and stiff it took a moment to react, hovering like a cloud of steel wool before falling slowly to her shoulders. “My company is renting a new rehearsal space around the corner.”
She had a very direct stare, a natural elegance. We’d only met a handful of times before, and I was always struck by the accidental quality of her beauty, which felt thrown into relief by her mass of hair and formless clothes. I suddenly felt the urge to ask her about R, to learn something of her experience of him. But when I opened my mouth to speak, she was already saying something.
“I was just going to ask if you’d seen … I don’t know if you guys are in touch, but he…”
I smiled. “I saw him this morning, actually.”
“Oh.” She looked both pleased and a bit uneasy. “How’s he doing?”
“He’s the same as always.”
“He’s ok?
She’d been oblivious to my wryness, or simply uninterested in it. I told her he was fine.
“There haven’t been any more… incidents?”
“Incidents of what?”
“Anything. Has there been anything since he was in the hospital?”
I wondered if I’d misunderstood her. I made a face that conveyed as much.
She said, “I guess you guys weren’t talking then.”
“When was he in the hospital?”
She looked around the room. “Do you have time to talk?”
We sat down on the bench by the front window, which was flooded with white sun. She pulled her leg up onto the wood so that her sneaker rested high on her opposite thigh and told me it had begun a couple of years ago, right when they started seeing each other again. “He started to text me a lot in the middle of the night. At first, it was just to share ideas for things he wanted to write, but then it got weirder. Stuff about feeling suffocated and frightened.” She paused. “It stopped for a little while and I thought maybe he was over it. But then one night he called and asked me to meet him at the hospital because he was checking himself in.”
As Chloe told me that this behaviour became cyclical, with R spending a week or so in hospital, leaving, and then checking himself back in, I became unable to look at her directly. Outside, ice on the sidewalk was mottled by shallow ruts of snow. I found myself picturing R’s face under the kind of distress she described. The image came with disconcerting ease, as though some part of my mind had already imagined it.
“I don’t know how things got better,” Chloe said. “Maybe it was his new psychiatrist, but I noticed a month had gone by, then two, and there were no middle of the night texts anymore. He told me that he was feeling less terrible and wanted to fix things in his life.” She turned away from me abruptly and stretched out both her legs so that they made a long, powerful line parallel to the floor. It took me a second to realize that this stiffening served a purpose. “I don’t really know what happened after that, because I broke up with him. If that sounds heartless, I don’t know. Maybe it was.”
“It doesn’t sound heartless,” I said.
“I didn’t know how to help any more. But I still worry about him.” She rested her face in her hands for a moment. “You think he’s ok now?”
“Yeah.”
“He isn’t behaving weirdly?”
I shook my head and found, again, that I couldn’t meet her gaze. We sat with our backs to the sun for a while.
*
I walked home a couple of hours later with my wagon of clean towels and clothes. The sun had been out for some time and I did my best to avoid the slush on the sidewalk. When I got to the steps of my building, my phone buzzed with a message. It was an email from M. I tried to click on it, but when my gloved finger failed to open the app, I just dropped the phone back into my pocket.
Instead of unpacking my laundry, I sat down at my kitchen table and looked out the window. A wispy cloud, low in the sky, was fading into the surrounding light. The street seemed quieter than usual, with no people walking by and few cars. Things seemed quieter in my apartment, too, as though an indeterminate white noise had been turned off. Insulated by all this quiet, I found myself picturing Chloe woken by R’s phone call in the middle of the night, throwing a coat over her pajamas and running out to meet him at the hospital. I imagined them sitting together in the waiting room, R haggard with anxiety, Chloe looking at him with her lovely grey eyes. I wondered whether she’d slept in his room once he’d been admitted, curling up on the chair beside his bed, her head on her folded coat.
I got up then and poured myself a glass of red wine, suddenly exhausted by the prospect of having to go about the rest of my day. I carried my wine to the sofa and turned on the TV. Out of habit or a lack of inspiration, I clicked on the Finnish detective series that R and I used to watch together. I selected the first episode of season one. After the opening sequence played, which featured the chief investigator running down a street, a corridor, a back alley, a tunnel, and an airport runway, there was darkness and flashing lights, followed by the materialization of an underground garage. Policemen were in the process of using yellow tape to cordon off a section of it, where metal wreckage and detritus were strewn across the concrete. Distressed people blurred into the foreground as we zoomed in on a woman sitting in the back of an ambulance with a blanket over her shoulders. When the woman lifted her head, we caught a glimpse of her face and knew instantly that something terrible had happened to her.
Then our focus was pulled towards a man standing in front of a parked car, some distance from the commotion. He was about thirty, balding, but not unattractive, with a strong protruding brow bone that gave him a certain intensity. He wore a long winter coat and held a cardboard tray of coffees in his hand, which he extended out with a stiff arm, as though offering it to someone who wasn’t there.
As this man, Stamps, watched what was happening around him, his eyes grew glassy, he wiped his nose with a tissue. He tried to rest the tray on the roof of the car in front of him, but misjudged the distance and spilled the coffees all over himself. A frazzled colleague appeared and asked if he could help her with some note taking, but seeing what a mess he was and how apparently paralyzed he was by it, she told him to forget it and walked away.
Martha Schabas is the author of two novels: My Face in the Light and Various Positions. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in numerous publications. She was The Globe and Mail’s dance critic from 2014-2020, where she also wrote about theatre and books. Martha lives in Toronto with her husband and three kids.
Jason Bentsman is a writer and fine art photographer. Works have appeared or are forthcoming in Litro Magazine UK, Mercurius, the Offing, Tiny Molecules, The American Bystander, The Amsterdam Quarterly, The Ilanot Review, The Weekly Humorist, LensCulture Online, F-STOP Magazine, and other art and literary publications worldwide. His poetic environmental book The Orgastic Future has been called “A 21st-century HOWL” (A. Shoumatoff, New Yorker & Vanity Fair).