Written by Georgina Beaty
Artwork Hot dawg by Jodie Langford AKA Bode Burnout
Nat was biking back from the library when she heard someone yell, Get a bike light, asshole! She turned around, ready to defend, and there was Shannon, wind-whipped cheeks, biking up beside her. At the red light, Shannon said, I’m going to this art opening at Another Bar, come.
Where?
Another Bar.
Nat thought she must be missing the joke. The light turned green and they biked on, Shannon in front. Low-riding cars pumping Drake slid past them and lit up their shins.
I can’t. I’ve got an essay due, Nat yelled.
It’s Friday night.
They were both aggressively denying reality and asserting that it was spring. Nat with a jean jacket, Shannon with pale pink coveralls, black patent shoes. Shannon could pull off “cute,” whereas Nat would be dismissed as someone’s little sister if she dared to wear gold-threaded ankle socks.
Here!
The sign read, Another Bar. Nat’s bare hands stung when she pulled the metal breaks. She locked up her bike, pushing aside balloons attached to a sandwich board—“Max Friend’s Exhibition.”
He sounds like a children’s entertainer.
Shannon grabbed Nat’s hand and pulled her in. Nat had said to herself that she wouldn’t drink until the term was done but she hadn’t been out in a month, and anyway, having the thought seemed like enough—she wouldn’t drink until the term was done and she would pop in for just one beer.
+
The virus curls at the base of the spine, like a snake under the fridge. Many people have snakes under their fridges, they just don’t know it. Lucky. Once you do know, it’s impossible to un-know.
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‘Beer’ was the only word on the chalk-board above the bar. Nat was relieved not to have options. The bartender cum border guard asked to see her ID and Nat had it in hand. They looked at her, their bowl haircut, their nails painted toxic green, and said, You’re shitting me. It was just because she was small, five foot two, with an upturned nose and a bra-size that hadn’t changed since grade six—a fluke of biology that had led to the past decade of work as an actor, playing a perpetual precocious twelve-year-old. She was thirty-three. The bartender poured her a beer, as if doing her a favor. Though not a reason to switch careers (being mistaken for a teenager with some regularity), it was partly why she’d returned to school, looking for a job where the way she physically presented in the world wasn’t her sole currency.
The bar was about the size of a small flower shop—maybe it used to be a flower shop. She looked around at Max Friend’s art which seemed to consist of pillows. Pillows on plinths, pillows attached to the wall. Touch me, said signs beside or beneath the pillows, and people were doing so. Nat arced around the art, as if it might force participation on her, and made her way over to Shannon and a few other friends. The women had curled their hair with straightening irons or had blunt DIY cuts, glasses like their moms wore in the 80’s, whether they needed them or not. Their jumpsuits (Nat was wearing one too, olive green) had zippers that glinted in the light. The golden seams reminded her of the chrysalides of monarch butterflies from when she was a kid—little green packets of transformation attached to fork tines by a strand. One summer she’d been impatient and had opened a chrysalis too early. An ooze of half-digested biology slopped out, not a half-formed anything.
No way! one of the women in the group was saying to another, No way!
Nat shouldn’t have come to the bar, should have just kept her transition private until it was complete, until she had finished school and could say, I am a new thing, with some degree of conviction.
The bar was filling up, gusts of cold air sliced through as people came in from outside, and their little knot tightened so they could make themselves heard. One of the women—Nat had acted in a show with her once—asked what Nat was up to and because Nat didn’t want to get into “urban resiliency in the case of extreme weather events” right at that moment, she held up her beer and said, Drinking.
They laughed. The group moved on to updates on lovers, political upheaval, authentic versus manufactured desire. Nat felt the gravitational pull towards these friends who were doing what she used to think she’d always do, and really, she still acted, still belonged to this informal team of the permanently auditioning. She scanned the room for an exit. As good as they made it look, it made her sweat to be surrounded by them when she was trying to do something different.
One of the women was talking about Tblisi where she’d recently shot a film. She showed a picture of walnuts strung together on a black thread and dipped into a pomegranate casing, a food meant to sustain soldiers who had to walk long distances, that was now sold in long, red, bulbous loops in markets in Georgia.
I know it looks like anal beads but it’s sooo delicious. She talked about the one scene she had with George Clooney, who, in spite of his extraordinary fame, was the sweetest guy, totally genuine, the real deal.
Nat went to get another beer.
+
To prevent an outbreak, the medical literature advises: avoid stress, menstruation, heightened emotions and late afternoon sunshine. The world is revealed. Werewolves, witches, vampires…they all just have herpes. Or snakes under their fridges.
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Nat was standing by the snack table scraping orange Cheezie powder off her fingers with her teeth when she saw Evan, her last long term boyfriend. He and a woman were standing in front of the pillows mounted on the wall, so it looked like they were sleeping standing up. Nat felt a dull, low sense of replaceability. The woman on the pillow next to Evan—her hair was slightly longer than Nat’s, she was a little bit taller, probably kinder, but otherwise, the similarity between Nat and her was uncanny.
Nat looked away, to other art, to a nearby pillow, and reached out to touch it. It was cold and hard, not soft. She retracted as though she had bitten into something that looked sweet only to taste salt. A guy standing nearby saw her pull back. He was very tall, Diane-Arbus tall—like the one where the giant goes to visit his parents at Christmas and has to bend to fit in the room. She knocked on the pillow and there was a hollow, deep tone. She said, It’s a cheap trick.
The artist she would soon know as Max Friend said, You’re not the first to tell me that.
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A snake is also known as a “herp,” those who study snakes, “herpetologists,” from the Greek for “creeping.” It’s an etymological cluster-fuck. Snakes do not “creep,” they stalk, strike, wind like a river in a membrane, in a never-ending “s” across the floor. The effect of a herp strike (where its tongue flicks, lesions erupt), that vesicular disruption could be called creeping, but really, the nomenclature is all wrong.
The Greek word for snake is “fidi” and how much better to live with a Fidi than Herp. Herp is a creepy friend of a friend who needs a place to crash for the night and then never leaves. Herp stays in his room so long you forget he’s there, until, one morning, you go downstairs and there’s Herp passed out in the kitchen in a scaly pile, coiled and asleep in his own bile.
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You have to come over, said Shannon. It’s an emergency.
Shannon was waiting out in front of her apartment building when Nat arrived, a loaf of sourdough bread in her hands.
Jeff has made a loaf, at least one loaf a day, since we moved in together. Should I be worried?
About yourself or him?
Nat and Shannon took the elevator up to Shannon’s unit. There was a bowl covered in a tea towel on every surface in the kitchen. It smelled yeasty and sweet, and made Nat want to lie down and go to sleep.
Shannon yelled, I can’t end a relationship because he’s taken up baking. Psychologize me!
I’m studying ecology, not psychology. Nat peeked in at the different stages of leavening. Resilience and sustainability plans—
Yeah, perfect, give me that.
For cities to adapt to floods, not coming up with ways to deal with the, like, touching domesticity of your soon-to-be-husband.
Nat looked at the post-its, Jeff’s notes to himself (“Rising,” “halved sugar,” “potato flour,” “6 p.m.”) stuck to each bowl.
Shannon slumped to the floor in the corner between two cabinets.
He starts kneading these fleshy blobs while talking about our plans and I just want to throw up, or smash teacups. Go buy teacups, so that I can smash them.
Does he expect you to do something in return?
What? Like cook dinner or give him blowjobs or something? No. I mean, I do, or, no, I never cook dinner, but, see, that’s what I mean! He’s great. What’s wrong with me?
It didn’t need an answer. Shannon was wearing a thick golden necklace that twisted around and snaked up and away from her neck, casually rejecting gravity.
They smoked a joint on the small balcony. It was warm enough to stand shivering outside. The loaf of bread came with them—crystals of salt, flecks of rosemary. Shannon dangled it from one end. It was the size of a baby and Nat felt the urge to rescue it. Shannon put it down on the edge of the railing.
Nat did ask Shannon about the “pillow artist”—Max—and Shannon said, Oh yeah, he’s polyamorous, which Nat took to mean that a) he had inoculated himself against intimacy and b) his dance card was full, which was just as well. She hadn’t had sex in the past six months, since ending things with Evan, and accident was starting to give way to intent. Why not just keep it up, finish the degree, and then either think about it—sex, love—or not. The wind picked up and a window cleaning platform on the apartment building opposite swayed on its ropes.
Shannon punted the bread off the second floor balcony. I love him so much.
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The snake begins to shed. It leaves dried out semi-translucent replicas of itself behind—a sign. Before a snake strike, there a contraction, a tingling sensation—you can feel it if attuned. Something like desire.
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Even when Nat and Max did begin some manner of dating, as of course they did, she held onto the belief that she was monk-ishly celibate, devoted only to work, even as he finger-fucked her on the table. He was, his words, ‘fluid-bonded’ with his other partner, ______, who was not his primary partner, because he didn’t believe in hierarchy, but was the one with whom he spent five days of the week, who had met his child and so on. Anyway, Nat and Max held off having, his words, p & v sex, and then were good about condoms when they did.
Max liked to talk about systems and how monogamy served capitalism. There was something more biologically natural about having multiple intimacies, emotional and physical. She found it hard enough to make two days a week for one person, let alone have another partnership, but she didn’t particularly care about the label or the theory, and was curious about him, attracted to him. While he talked about being ethically non-monogamous, Nat told Shannon, the only person she had told about Max, that they had “a pin-hole relationship.” They each had little openings into each other’s lives that accumulated into constellations that were quite beautiful. A WhatsApp message he recorded of his five year old daughter singing over and over in an a-tonal way, “Dear dear what is the matter dear, dear dear what is the matter dear.” A picture of a new sculpture he was working on, trying to get wood to look like water. He sent a video of fragments of ice slushing up at the shore of the beach like a million broken windshields. ______ must have been there, but out of frame.
Nat did tell Max that discrete space felt preferable, she wouldn’t have liked to be ______ in that moment, so those videos went on his Instagram story instead, and his curation of their pin-hole relationship changed slightly.
Max was very curious about Nat’s feelings. How did it make her feel when they met up after he had been away for the weekend at a wedding with ______? Or when he came straight to meet her from a date with ______? At a certain point it started to feel like he was asking Nat how she felt about his aunt’s crochet hobby or the fact that he played in a rec hockey league on Wednesday nights—he was asking about something that didn’t seem to be in relationship to her. She wasn’t responding in the way that she expected, which was what? Jealousy? No. She didn’t feel that. You carry so well, he said, as a compliment, after telling her about adding a new lover into his mix. And she liked being someone who could carry.
She liked his idiosyncratic turns of phrase, liked the “time on deck,” found the way he always had a theory to match the manner in which he wanted to behave amusing, and he was considerate, curious, always on time. She liked that he was wrong-sized for the world, his crow’s feet from smiling, the line sketched tattoos, and that he gave her space, which gave her room to want him.
She did sometimes have the feeling (when he’d say, unfortunately they couldn’t meet up Saturday, or that he was busy on her birthday) of pressing into a bruise, a bruise that she didn’t know existed, from a fall she didn’t remember. But pressing into it brought an attendant burst of adrenaline, which felt almost good. She was interested in what would happen next and was glad there wasn’t a fixed narrative about how the relationship would develop. They could figure it out as they went.
It seemed to make him feel better to say, Your work is your other partner.
No. My work is my work.
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If the snake does comes out, you can’t stuff it back in. Snakes do not “stuff.” There’s nothing to do but wait, observe the complex shades of your own unease, note the trail it leaves as it slithers around everything you thought of as yours, as though you are in its home and not the other way around. It will go back eventually, on its own terms, in its own time.
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Max and Nat made a roast chicken dinner together and his phone kept buzzing so he took the call from ______ in the other room. It turned out that ______ had just gotten into a minor fender bender and was, understandably, rattled. Go, Nat said.
It’s my night with you. How will you feel?
Go, of course.
When they next saw each other to go to an event, an interview with someone who had written a book called How Minds Change, she did say to him, You never need anything from me.
She wanted him to need her for dumb things, like picking up vegetables for dinner. Maybe a relationship was just this counter-balance of needs. They sat in the auditorium on plastic chairs, the room filling up, waiting for the event to start.
And I can’t ask you for anything.
Then buck, he said. Ask. He squeezed her leg. I’m here. Try me.
I am trying.
He shook his head and smiled at her. You’re such a tough guy.
He could call Nat anytime, he could show up for a spontaneous lunch, but she couldn’t do the same. Then again, she was relieved there were other people to attend to his voracious need for intimacy.
Nat was reading about community-designed adaptations to desertification. In Arizona, they came up with the idea of small, dense pods of climate-controlled habitation. On her study breaks, she updated Max, unleashing long monologues into Whatsapp that he could listen to on his own time—then a day later the pings of his side of the conversation would pile up. She would wait to listen to his messages and mete them out to herself as an intermittent reward throughout the day. This long, snaking, out-of-time Whatsapp dialogue about ideas—she couldn’t describe what it all amounted to, but it was sustaining.
Nat was trying to figure out how to make a community’s climate resilience plan actionable. She suspected a community would not act in accordance with its theoretical values (preservation, inclusion etc.) unless they first felt safe. One couldn’t divorce urban ecology from feeling. People needed to make adaptive decisions from a place of calm, but how could they do that when the actual disaster was only increasing?
She and Max went for long walks in real time. She talked about how Toronto could build another layer of city, a whole level up, designed for pedestrian life and easier access to nature—though more and more it seemed like the second level might be a necessity rather than a utopic design solution. The ground level was very prone to flooding.
Max sent Nat ambient music to help her study but all of it sounded like there was some sort of emergency, a fire alarm in the background. She liked not liking things from him. Then he sent a playlist of songs she loved and she hated that she loved it, and played it on repeat. The press-in-bruise feeling.
Lying in bed, he acknowledged, There are limits, of course there are limits. But you have limits too.
From the bed she could see the little pile of empties from their date that night, ready to go out to recycling, evidence gone. ______’s jacket was hanging with his clothes—black with Mondrian accents, it was considered, mature. Nat thought she’d probably like ______.
In the morning, Nat helped pull off his sheets for laundry. There were blood stains from other women’s menstruation on the mattress.
You don’t have to do that, he said.
I don’t mind. And she didn’t. She was curious about it. So much laundry to be ethically non-monogamous.
Somehow they had been seeing each other six months.
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HERO GIRL—Sixteen. Hard punk-exterior but genuine, AUTHENTIC at heart. DO NOT submit your client if they have food restrictions. Required to eat sausage McMuffin at casting.
Nat was still going for auditions, even though she’d said she wasn’t going to act anymore. If she were authentic enough to book a national commercial, it would pay for her tuition in a day of work. Biking to casting, she thought a bug had landed in her eye. That was the first hint.
When she got to casting, in the overcrowded bathroom with a sign that said, “Actors, this is not your personal dressing room!” she leaned close to the mirror while the others put in fake nose rings (hard-punk exterior), let their loose powder fall in the sink, and she saw a snot-like gob of white floating on the green iris of her eye. She used a tissue to get it out, pretending to wipe at her eyeliner, then pulled on a black toque to cover up the wrinkles on her forehead—sixteen.
In the waiting room, she saw Mark, a roommate she had slept with years earlier, who was going out for the role of “Dad.” They did the hey-how-are-you-what-a coincidence thing, and he said, God, we’ll probably get called in together. Awkward. They were the same age. When their names were called at the same time, he nodded at Nat. Here we go.
They stood on the tape on the carpet and slated. Natalie Renaud. Mark Walker. They showed the camera the back of their hands and then the front, which is when Nat noticed that the lines in her hands were cracking open, like tiny paper cuts.
There were five men and one woman sitting behind a table, the camera was in one corner and beside it a white flip chart with the dialogue written on it. The spot was called “Unconditional.”
DAD asleep in bed, the phone rings.
CUT TO: Dad’s car pulls up in front of a raging party. HERO GIRL gets in.
CLOSE on McDonalds 24 HOUR SIGN.
Car goes through the drive-thru.
CUT TO: Dad and Hero Girl sit in the car eating sausage McMuffins as the sun comes up.
V.O.: McDonalds. We’re there for you. No matter what.
When the camera began to roll, Nat mimed opening a car door and sat on a plastic chair next to Mark. He put a hand on her shoulder and improvised a line, You okay, kid?
Unbidden, she remembered his cock in her ass and that, as he came, he’d said, I’m going to fill you with milk, which she’d never heard before or since. Whatever passed across her face must have looked authentic enough, because she booked it, baby.
While all the other actors were in the bathroom spitting up the bite of food, Nat finished her cold sausage McMuffin on the way out and authentically enjoyed it.
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It was the morning of the McDonald’s shoot and Nat’s eyes were glued shut. She tried to stay calm. She spit on her fingers and rolled her eyelashes between them, softening the gunk enough to unseal her eyes. Outside it was dark, then a drop of light, and the world emerged in black and white; it had always been there. It had snowed—the diamonds of the chain link fence were piled in, slip marks on the road where bike tires had tried to get traction. Nat pressed a warm cloth over her eyes and clicked on a YouTube guided meditation while making coffee. The woman had a Texan accent and instructed her to imagine she was lying in the grass.
You are relaxed. You are safe. You are held. You hear a plane. A plane comes into your field of vision, in that bright blue sky, and that plane is dragging a banner behind it, just dragging, a long white banner that says “EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE OKAY.”
Nat snapped the computer closed.
On set at 7 a.m., the make-up artist took one look at Nat and said, You have pink eye. The assistant director came in, then the D.O.P., both looking closely, not at her, but her eye.
The director didn’t come in, she just heard him from outside the trailer door saying, Call that other one I liked.
As she took the bus back into the city, Max called her in real-time, as so rarely happened. ______’s fourteen-year-old cat needed to be put down, it was riddled with tumors and ______ was understandably distraught, but it was his day to pick up his daughter from school. Is there any way you could pick up Ruthie and bring her to gymnastics? I’m sorry to ask.
I have pink eye, she said.
Shit. A pause. I just tried all the babysitters but none of them can do it.
Wouldn’t it be…weird, for her?
You could introduce yourself as my friend, she’s used to meeting my friends. How would that make you feel?
It’s just the pink eye.
I mean, don’t stick your finger in her eyes? It would just be an hour. I promise.
Press-in-bruise. Okay.
Hey, how did the sell-out gig go? You’re already done?
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There was an actual snake under the actual fridge when Nat was growing up on the farm. It was probably still there. She and her sister would sometimes shine a flashlight under to take a look. It was a milk snake, scarlet with yellow bands, a silent member of the family. Their dad had asked them to please stop announcing its presence to everyone who visited. People didn’t need to know. She and her sister would watch, breath held, as the neighbor walked closer and closer to the bottom of the fridge, oblivious. They would have to run outside to scream and jump up and down from the pressure of holding it all in.
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An inner organ pain had begun low in her body by the time she arrived home. At 1 p.m., she thought maybe it was a UTI and swallowed a bottle of cranberry pills, but when she peed it still felt like she was sitting on a branding iron. Not to mention her eyes, which she was trying not to rub so they would not appear to be what they were: infected. She would pick up Ruthie and then figure it out. She sanitized her hands while waiting for the school bell to ring.
All the parents waiting seemed to be her age. Nat handed her ID to the kindergarten teacher to confirm that Ruthie could be released to her care. There was no questioning which was Max’s child. Ruthie was so tall that she looked about nine, but when she took Nat’s hand to cross the street it was clear she was still very little.
You’re a babysitter?
Yeah.
It seemed like the simplest answer.
Gymnastics was held in the basement of Crossways mall. The sign out front, orange 70s font on a brown background, read: “For all your Modern Lifestyle needs.” After dropping Ruthie off, Nat wandered, considering the modern lifestyle comprised of: sweet and sour chicken; the dollar store; key cutting; Flip it! children’s gymnastics classes, where Ruthie was currently in a class; and a public sexual health clinic. Nat had ninety minutes to kill.
She took a number from the red dispenser, as if waiting to be served at the deli, and in twenty minutes she was sitting opposite a nurse who took her sexual history and told her, without irony, that if there were any news “Joy” would call and leave a message. They would just screen for everything while Nat was there. The nurse was talking about the HIV test. How will you respond if it turns out you are positive?
I have no idea.
But would you…?
Nat looked at him.
I wouldn’t have a party.
The nurse seemed impatient, pen hovering over a check-box.
I just need you to say that you wouldn’t…
Kill myself? No. I mean, not because of that.
The nurse didn’t laugh.
They sat on the cement steps outside the mall and Nat held out a bag of gummy bears to Ruthie who said, No, thank you, very politely, and absentmindedly fingered the translucent bandage at Nat’s inner arm, the little ball of cotton batting over the vein, as if it were her own body rather than Nat’s. Ruthie was probably still little enough to register events at random intensities. Nat could probably disappear after this point and Ruthie would never remember this day.
HEY! Across the street, a woman with bleached, permed hair, spandex pants, a leopard print jacket and a fanny pack yelled after a massive seagull as it ripped the last bite of a burger from her hands. She ran after it wearing her slipper boots, which were worn away at the edges so her cant was side to side. The seagull released the burger, and, against all odds, it landed in the woman’s hands. She looked around but no one registered the miracle as they rushed into Dundas West station. She didn’t expect to get what she wanted, and now that she had, she wasn’t sure what to do with it.
She shouldn’t eat that, Ruthie tested the statement.
Nat nodded. The woman raised the burger up to her mouth, as if asking the same question and coming to the same conclusion. Then she threw it onto the sidewalk.
Should we go meet your dad?
Just a few more minutes.
It almost made it seem like they’d been having fun.
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When Joy called and confirmed the diagnosis, Nat had already found the blisters on her inner labia. She broke the unspoken rules and called Max in real time instead of leaving a Whatsapp message. He didn’t pick up so she texted. Herpes.
And he wrote back. Are you sure it’s from me?
Her phone rang and he said, I can’t really talk right now. His voice as cool as his stupid metal pillows. I’m watching a movie with ______.
I haven’t been with anyone else. I thought I should let you know.
His hand over the receiver, muffled conversation. I can take the time. How are you?
There was no way he would come over. She couldn’t get help from him, and so she didn’t want it. She hung up and was left contorting around mirrors, as though she might feel better if she understood this swampland, the new habitat she was carrying around with her.
Eventually she tried to keep studying—she read about a community who decided the best strategy for sustainability in the face of rising sea-levels was to leave, abandon their city—but the fever warped all the sentences and each one became a fish, different lengths of fish, all of them pale, swimming sideways, one-finned, and some even turned fully belly up.
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There’s slight recoil when someone hears the word, like you smell of B.O. It’s a minor predicament, really, so minor that it elicits scorn more than sympathy—you must have left the door open and let it in; you’ve been raised poorly and this is just another mark of your reckless decision making and small “s” slutdom. Truly liberated women get something vicious like gonorrhea. But gonorrhea can be annihilated with a shot in the ass while the herp is yours for keeps.
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Can you come over? It was just a fluke that Shannon happened to call. I’m going to Ghana for work and I have to ingest cholera, like the doctor gave me a packet of cholera powder. It looks like orange Kool-Aid. I just need you here to make sure it doesn’t kill me.
Nat was glad to be needed, to have the distraction. She’d been lying at home experiencing, and somewhat fascinated by, the global, not localized, effects of the virus—her muscles aching, a metallic aluminum taste to her saliva.
She sat on a kitchen chair and watched Shannon mix the live powder into water. After Shannon drank it, while they waited to see what, if anything, would happen, Shannon made brownies and Nat said it aloud for the first time. I have herpes.
Shannon said two things. 1) I don’t think this is the end of sex for you and 2) I hope he got you a fucking present.
He didn’t get her a fucking present. Nat cancelled the next lunch date. He was hurt and wanted to talk to her about her feelings. She didn’t want to see him while her guts felt, not like a knife was cutting through them, but that there was a knife at the centre of her stomach, and everything was knotted around it, a complex root system. Every once in a while, the nerves would catch at the edge and rip. Max, out with Ruthie, sent Nat a Whatsapp picture of a kite flying through the air.
Nat went for a drink with her former partner, Evan. He brought her maple syrup from his family’s farm, where he had been with his new girlfriend. Nat said the girlfriend’s name as often as possible to show how okay she was. She did mention she was having a small medical problem.
Are you okay now?
Not yet.
Do you want to tell me anything about it?
No. That’s okay.
He clearly thought she had a small case of cancer and she believed his belief. She produced one tear; it was real, mature and reserved, the sort of tear that would correspond to the removal of a pea-sized lump in the breast, or a small patch of melanoma. She accepted his deep concern as an approximation of love.
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There’s a momentary hitch when the pharmacist asks what the prescription is for, and when he suggests, Shingles?, you are granted a way out with dignity, Yes.
But then, outbreak two, the shame wears off. You walk into the drug store and when they say, What’s it for? you get on the intercom at the twenty-four-hour Shoppers and rhapsodize like a street prophet. The problem of aging is not disintegration but accumulation—barnacles on the whales, ferns on nurse trees, the nest of snakes under your fridge. It’s symbiosis, it’s not personal. You are just the condition for their own hero’s journey; their only life is through you, and they will do what they can to survive.
You go to the bar and scrawl it on the bathroom stall yourself, and leave your own phone number beside it. It isn’t vindictive lovers spray painting the signs; it is the people themselves, getting it out. NAT HAS HERPES.
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A week later she was lying in bed with Max and said, I’m not curious about this anymore.
He spooned her, the warmth of his body against hers. I don’t get to know the future, how come you do?
From the bed, she could see into his kitchen, could almost see something, white bands, under the fridge.
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HERO GIRL—seventeen, fashionable but not stuck up, friendly.
Three girls walk down the street gossiping. They carry shopping bags.
HERO GIRL: Have you heard?
GIRL 2: Get. in. to. it. Tell me everything.
Hero Girl points at the sign for DUNKIN’S NEW ICED MAPLE FRAPPUCCINO.
CUT TO: CASHIER hands over three icy frappuccinos.
CUT TO: The three girls sit in the park drinking their frapps.
V.O.: Spread the news! $1 for a limited time only.
The casting director frowned and shook her head when she saw Nat walk in. Nat, honey, why did they call you in? You’re way too old for this. She looked down at the script. I’ll tell you what. Let’s have you read for the cashier.
Nat booked it. She can’t help it. She’s just so good at being a something she doesn’t want to be.
Georgina Beaty’s fiction has been published in The Walrus, New England Review, The Fiddlehead, The Puritan, and Plenitude. Her collection of short stories, The Party is Here, is forthcoming from Freehand Books. She holds an MFA from UBC and is a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. She lives in Tkaronto/Toronto.
Jodie Langford AKA Bode Burnout is a cartoonist, artist, and writer living in Melbourne, Australia.