by James Phelan

“I mean, fuck me, it wasn’t my face, but I sort of liked the way her nose was before. Appealed to the philosemite in me, you know? Kind of crooked and Jewy. Cute. And, how to put it…significant, somehow. A real signifier. Made you think of history and Israel and all that. The shtetl and Saul Bellow, ‘beautiful tradition.’ You know. A nose to spring boners in the yeshivas. Plus, all due respect and everything, you had to think it would make her easier to lay. Probably did, I don’t know, back then she was always with that guy, Jonathan? Jonathan. Not a threat, of course, he was gay as the hills, but still. That’s not just me saying so, mind you, mere ahem conjecture. I mean, I never saw him bugger anybody or
anything, but when you talked to him he really played it up. Told dick jokes you’d have to be a gay guy to get away with. Or a bigot, I guess, but somebody would’ve called him on it, it’s the English department for chrissake, equity über alles, so that’s out. Anyway, he was always there, you could never get her alone.”

You’re at a bar with your Irish Lit TA. He liked your paper, he knows your sister, of course you’d let him stand you a beer after the exam. The girl he’s talking about, one Sarah Rick, is an old friend of your sister’s, a familiar face from years of birthday parties and staying over for dinner. Picturing her now, you find she’s fixed in your mind at age sixteen,
her age when the thought of her captured your erotic imagination, just as you started to have one, for a few formative weeks. You were, what, eleven? Your TA, please just call him Dan, pours half of half his third pint into the glass from your fourth one and turns to look for the barmaid. Is she, Sarah, still a familiar face? That’s to say, does she still have
one? You haven’t seen her since the surgery. Though can you really be sure? You wouldn’t have seen her unless you met by chance. She was always friendly but you were never friends, not really, and your sister moved away for grad school last September.

James Phelan is from Montreal. He is a graduate of the Liberal Arts College at Concordia University and a Master’s student in English at the University of British Columbia.