Archive for: Fiction

Camilla Holland
Two Tickets for the Resurrection

Her fingers sift through layers of tissue paper to free each crystal droplet, jewel and pendant. Frilled edges of glass scatter prisms of light across the room, bright reflections bounce off the multi-faceted, glinting diamonds. Even in the weak winter sunshine rainbow shapes waltz on her living room walls.
      Her brother Paul is travelling by train to visit. A trip to the portrait gallery and then some music will appeal to him, especially Mahler’s Second Symphony. A concert in the grandeur of the century-old, sandstone-built Usher Hall will evoke memories and nostalgia. She bought a pair of upper tier tickets in a frisson of extravagance when she was passing the box office a few weeks ago. An orchestra plus the massed vocal ranks of a choir, with a sprinkle of international soloists, will certainly indulge the senses and conjure up escapades of the nineteen-seventies teenagers Paul and Joyce.
      Joyce fondles the cold pieces of coruscating glass and hums the symphony’s slow movement to herself. Once mounted on the black iron frame the baubles will speak of dark matter, swirling galaxies and twinkling stars. They were both fascinated with the cosmos and had watched and dissected the television footage of Aldrin and Armstrong as they walked on the surface of the moon in 1969.
      Paul’s birthday is February the fourteenth, a romantic date that no-one would forget. She remembers Paul taking her to London on the train, a three-hour journey, when she was sixteen and he was celebrating his eighteenth birthday. He’d got tickets for the film ‘Gone with the Wind’ and she wept, it was so enjoyable.

*

Paul’s only daughter teaches in California. She doesn’t write to Joyce, not even a birthday card, but Joyce always sends one to California.
      Joyce and her husband had no children, but she feels the faint pang of two disappointing miscarriages. Now she is a widow and she has just celebrated her first Christmas alone.

*

Joyce prays that her big brother Paul approves of her impetuous Gothic chandelier. When she saw it in the antique shop she imagined it suspended from the elaborately-corniced ceiling in the living room of her nineteenth-century Edinburgh apartment.
      One Christmas Day she recalls that Paul ridiculed her traditional Christmas dinner of turkey and kilted sausages with Brussels sprouts and roast potatoes. In a meandering telephone conversation he had extolled the virtues of the nut roast and hummus they were cooking hundreds of miles away in Devon, iconoclast that he was. And perhaps still is.
      Joyce doesn’t want the chandelier to spoil his visit. But wait a minute.
      It’s my apartment, she thinks, the beds are comfortable, the view is pretty good for a European city—Edinburgh Castle tracing the skyline in a ribbon of gold at night, and her company will be spirited and sisterly. The Usher Hall concert will be a triumph. Excitement is building in her chest. Their shared love of Mahler, his Resurrection Symphony indeed, will reignite their sibling intimacy on his birthday.
      They were raised as Roman Catholics so the Gothic symbolism of her chandelier will be familiar. He served as an altar boy while Joyce, in the congregation, inhaled the incense, recited from her missal, and knelt for the Credo.
      The hard glass components tinkle and clank against one another as she sorts them according to size and follows the plan of where each will hang on the skeletal black structure. On the dining table she marshals the jewels into neat rows of soldiers, a kaleidoscope of brilliance impatient to be slotted into the dazzling overhead array.
      Joyce places a chair below the ceiling-mounted chandelier and steps up to attach the glimmering treasures one by one. She polishes with a lint cloth each crystal before she slips the thin wire into its assigned slot on the iron frame. The chandelier hangs right above the table where they will drink a champagne toast on Paul’s arrival. Prismatic beams will mosaic across their faces. Joyce smiles, anticipating Paul’s smile.
      Optimism swells and her fingers dance as she drops scintillating shards one by one into place.
      It’s nine years since her brother visited. He came for their mother’s funeral.
      Not a visit. No, it couldn’t be called that. He stayed less than twenty-four hours.
      Joyce has made eight trips to see him in the past fifteen years. She’s just counted them in her head.
      But he’s never come to visit her.
      Her stomach churns. She slots a rhomboid diamond into place. It glitters.
      His interest in his only sister is an illusion.
      Not one phone call.
      Fifteen years of rejection.
      How stupid I am.
      The chandelier sparkles through the tears as they seep from her eyes, refracting the radiant ranks.
      Dusk has fallen as she finishes her masterpiece. She steps down from the chair. It is ready. In the darkness she gropes her way to the light switch by the door.
      The moment has come. She breathes deeply and the switch illuminates the chandelier.
      She gasps. Her hand rushes to her mouth.
      A blaze of mottled colours fleck the white walls. She walks to the table, reaches up and nudges one droplet – it tinkles against its neighbour, sending a wave of rainbows dancing around the white walls. Iridescence flickers on the pinkness of her hands, flashes on the black window glass and reflects back.
      Her spirit lifts in the presence of such Gothic glory. Surely she is wrong? The parents who raised them were intelligent, compassionate and inculcated a sense of love, family and justice into both of their children.
      A bottle of good champagne chills in the fridge. Slices of French Brie and a pile of nutty oatcakes sit on her favourite silver tray. When she has collected Paul from the train station they will chink glasses, tuck into the little feast and reminisce.
      She selects two crystal glasses from the sideboard and places them on the silver tray. Joyce invokes her blessed mother’s soul to join them as they commune in her chapel of light.
      The phone rings.
      Her sister-in-law. ‘Paul’s gone down with the flu.’
      ‘Oh.’
      ‘He won’t be coming to visit.’ AQ

Gracjan Kraszewski
Footprints is a work of genius!

I nod, nod, nod, nod. My interior self, ‘Bob’, is just about off the knob relative to the plod and trod concerning all things metaphysics, mimesis, and sub-atomic machinations of the most muscular, deft diplomatic stripe.
      The doctor keeps scribbling. He does not look up once, not even when taking a break for a breath between the furious pen pressing.
      Footprints is a work of genius! I think, and hear myself internally say, in preamble to an immediately forthcoming discourse, if he allows it, concerning this very same topic. The guy put women’s shoes and boots on his hands and feet, dipped them into many buckets of various colors, and just plodded (ah, right, that’s why that word) around his studio until he was done and was ready to display it and ready to have someone bid six, maybe seven, figures plus sincere praise and pedantic sycophantism gratis.
       ‘Okay, but, doc, but, bro, dude but listen, okay? Okay if I speak on one more thing before we finish out here? Right. Good. Post modern art, bruh. I’m talking at the time like called mid-century, you see from all the French students in the streets ’68 plus Dubcek east of us plus MLK far to the west, that time, like ’68, like late ’60s where we just flushed about like a waterfall swirled in the historiographical revolutions toppling top-down analytics into bottom-up, bottoms up celebratory drinking parties for the common man, soon the common ‘person’ because this and that always eats its own, like look what then happened about all types of identities and identifiers decades later, right?, this time, ’68, where we say mid-century and we know 20th, where we say fin de siècle and we know 19th, so this time to my timeframe being framed as we speak, here, frames like those things that maybe even they can’t make all this shit look even passably painting-like, a frame of mind, nothing, it’s nothing because nothing itself means jack shit, we’re past the void here, post-nihilist, because when you can’t explain if the painting is upside down, or right-side up, or left, or right, or what color is that color there on the canvas, or that it is, what is, and really is that anything?; or, okay, but that’s not part ‘of it,’ okay…so this time, doc, feel me when I try and keep it on point and just to the facts. Modern art, five things of import: One, the first thing, is that you have be good at playing the ape game, the imitation game, and, because it’s fundamentally about subversion and inversion, literally in the latter inverting like 180 degrees ideas of good, beauty, form, transcendence, truth, meaning, logos, unto, like, bad, ugliness, scattershot shitstormtroopering, imminence, falsehood, absurdity, and, bro doc bro doc doc, cod, cape cod, doc, cape cod league bro, bruh-doc, dawg, and especially, most especially chaos. So that’s number one: Art used to mean something and that thing, those things, were both objective and objectively good so if we want to be effectively subversive—and that’s the whole fucking fuckcluck pointed point; to fight against, and ultimately destroy, try to destroy at least, die trying, die hard, die hard 2, die…you, you get it, to try and destroy all that is solid, sensible, sane and sacred—we need to effectively develop new ‘schools of art’ that say things we all know are shit are actually good and they’re the ‘new thing’, the new avant-garde whateverthefuckever who cares so long as people are effectively fooled by this ape-imitation to say, in effect, the old ways are out, the new way is here. Okay, so then #2 is to start backing up the trucks full of cashlootdimenickelstacksstcakedcoinage and just straight filthy, dirty, expletive-ridden suscio as fuck facil dinero and start dumping it all over this ‘new art’. It’s just insider trading in Oligarch finishing school. If all these art collectors get together and agree to buy endless piles of this shit pseudo-art then—because people worship money, am I telling you something new?—the prices go up, the buzz goes up, general interest climbs and peaks and keeps buzzing all the way unto what they’re really after: legitimacy. If all these rich people are paying like $20m a painting it must be good, right? I mean, to me it looks like shit but, but that guy just paid $20m so, well it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve been wrong; silly me. Legitimacy. Legitimacy. Bruh-doc, Doctor Brother, legitimacy is what we absolutely need, so these they do say, kay? But to really seal the deal the money just won’t do. We need three and four. #3: get these pieces into the museums. How silly does silly me commoner feel when, already rebuked form his absolutely correct first impression that the urine-stained (by the artists’ own sample! The visionary character is found in an impregnable dedication to authenticity) detached toilet seat was, indeed, as valueless as it appeared/appears/will continue to appear to be, he sees said seat hanging in prime real estate within MOMA? And then, #4, something for the true holdouts, the hardest to get common sense critics for whom money and (all) integrity-(and honesty)-for-sale museums won’t bring across the divide, the chasm, that separates art from not-art. #4: Get some academic(s)—if you have to ask does this academic, forcement, forcement as in see: by necessity, have to have a PhD from Harvard or Yale and an undergrad degree from Brown or Berkeley and a current endowed chair at Dartmouth or Princeton? you’re really f***** beyond hopeless, brother; here, for this type of work, even Northwestern need not apply—to write impossibly dense, wordy, inscrutable articles, really as impossible to comprehend as the artwork they’re writing about in the first place, the subject matter (now that, finally, is art), and have it published in the most reputable, most scientifically screened and hyperbonk peer reviewed journals with one message: THIS IS ART AND IT IS GOOD AND YOU MUST LIKE IT AND APPROVE OR ELSE YOU’RE WRONG OR, WORSE OF ALL, A COUNTRY BUMPKIN-LIKE FOURTH RATE FAUX-INTELLECTUAL LIGHTWEIGHT MUCH TOO LIGHT IN THE HEAD TO UNDERSTAND, TO ‘GET’, REAL ART. And there you have it, my doc. I cannot, will not, but, again can not, I do not posses the requisite hairsplitting skills to stop the disco-dancing of all those angels on the pinhead to better, I mean more precisely, cannot any better explain this whole con game to you than that, than I just did, kid; ah, okay, but chu-wanna rid, me, wanna put a lid, on my arguments? Not so fast. A review? One: Perfect imitation game making what was once good bad, and what was once bad, ugly, abhorrent the new ‘good’; two: money to prove legitimacy; three: museums to prove legitimacy; four: a treasure trove of the best and brightest academics and critics proving legitimacy in legitimacy is thy name legitimate journals that only a fool would doubt are in fact legitimate. Five is just one: Step five is the con completed successfully; confirmed; the Z back to A completed loop, 5, Z, that’s all of us, the sheep publicly fleeced for their pleasure certainly not ours, we wearing the itchy wool sweaters of shit ass fake art without the slightest complaint, no, not even a peep, not even a murmur of discontent, rather, an approving and docile smile of passive submission.’ AQ

Judy Upton
Urban Foxes

Life’s hard on the streets of Brighton. It’s the constant uncertainty of getting enough to eat, and finding somewhere to sleep that’s both safe and reasonably dry and warm. I worry about Esme. She’s alone, she’s pregnant and she’s a fox.
      I once heard a celebrity pet owner say the thing she loves about animals is that they don’t judge you. It’s not like that actually. At least it’s not with foxes. They’re actually judging you all of the time. Every moment you’re in range of one of their senses, they’re making tiny assessments. Like why are you offering food? Is it poisoned? Is it a trap? When those golden eyes lock on to yours they look for the slightest signs of aggression, hostility or deceit. Foxes live in a world of deceit, but then don’t we all?
      It was all so different when I first met Esme. It was early last autumn, the start of my ecology degree. I went on a freshers’ pub crawl, wearing the same beer-company sponsored t-shirt as everyone else. And like everyone else I drank too much and ended up skinny dipping at 4 a.m. I’m not a person who likes to stand out from the crowd, so I did my best to blend in.
      Esme has never felt the need to conform. She does exactly as she pleases. She doesn’t skulk or keep close to the walls and hedges. She’s bold and swaggering; sass personified. Her fur shines like burnished copper, her brush is full and ermine tipped. She’s the vixen queen and she knows it.
      I tried to make friends with the other two girls I was flat-sharing with. I probably tried too hard. I thought I was lucky to get that room. The third girl in their group had decided to take a year out from her course, so there was a vacancy. Only then she changed her mind and returned, wanting her room back. She and her flatmates wanted me gone and stupidly I hadn’t insisted on any kind of contract. It meant I had to find somewhere else to live in the middle of term when there weren’t many vacancies and the few there were, were out of my price range.
      I did find somewhere. I do have a roof over my head, even if the circumstances aren’t ideal. I suppose in that sense I’m better off than Esme. My beautiful Esme. The first time I saw her, I was walking home, slightly worse for wear, and she was a little way ahead of me. She must’ve heard my footsteps behind, as she turned and looked. Her gorgeous eyes met mine. She stood transfixed, just staring at me, as I looked back at her. And I felt something I can’t put it into words. This beautiful wild animal, with her tawny fur, sharply pricked ears and confident poise—it was love. From my side anyway.
      I saw her again the next night. This time she was dragging the remains of a KFC box under a hedge. When I peered through the branches, I discovered a big, overgrown garden, a sort of mini wilderness. The house was a large detached one and it looked like it hadn’t been lived in for some time.
      I can tell Esme by sight from any other fox. But I also know nearly all the foxes in this neighbourhood by sight now. They’re all subtly different—in colouring, face shape, and one has a nicked ear and another has a long scar on its chest. With Esme, the black smudges at the side of her nose reach almost up to her eyes, as if she is wearing mascara that has run in the rain.
      I often spend hours crouched in the street, or in a shop doorway watching Esme. Some nights I stay out until dawn. It’s awkward now there’s the lockdown, but I’m as stealthy as a fox. I clamber through the hedge into the wild garden and there’s no one to notice me. That way I don’t see Tim, he’s the owner of the flat I’m staying in. He works at a DIY store and they’re open again now, thankfully.
      When I first met Esme she would sometimes stand or sit with her head pointing at the sky, and screech. At first I thought something was wrong, that she might be in pain or some kind of anguish, but it’s actually a mating call. Fox sex is brutal – the male bites the back of the female’s neck and his penis is barbed and sticks inside her. She screams at every painful thrust. I’ve seen many foxes mating, though not Esme, I don’t think I could stomach it. Not with the way things are in my life.
      Male or dog foxes tend to stay with their partner while the cubs are young, bringing them food. It’s a relationship built on raising young together. I’ve named Esme’s mate George. Sometimes she can be short tempered and nippy with him, but often, after a long night apart foraging in different locations, they greet each other excitably like dogs.
      My parents live in Australia and I couldn’t afford to go there at the start of lockdown. I didn’t like to ask them to send me the airfare as I know their business is struggling at the moment. Now of course it’s too late anyway until normal flights resume. I’m stuck in this situation, even if it is one of my own making. And I can’t tell anyone about it, but Esme.
      When I answered Tim’s advertisement, I knew what I was doing, and it seemed like no big deal. It meant the room was rent-free and he wasn’t repulsive or anything like that. In fact he seemed quite normal, and I suppose he is really. He said he’d only want sex a couple of times a week, and I thought that was fair enough, I could handle that. I’d had a few loveless encounters before, who hasn’t? I didn’t fancy him, but as I say he didn’t really turn me off or anything. But I hadn’t really thought about how it would make me feel. I hadn’t thought about that at all.
      Tim isn’t rough, he doesn’t rape me, but it’s meaningless, it’s mechanical. I’m just an object to satisfy him. He has a girlfriend who’s teaching in India at the moment, and our arrangement is, he says, just a convenient way of getting what he needs in the meantime, without it being a relationship. But living like this is killing me. It’s creeping into my soul and eating it away day by day. It’s not I feel ashamed, used, dirty or worthless. It’s more that I feel as if I am no longer whole.
      Now though I’m turning into a shadow. I’m learning invisibility. I’ve managed to avoid Tim seeing me at all for two weeks. I’ve been staying out all night with my fox. Perhaps I’m gaining some of Esme’s spirit. I’m becoming a wild creature. I trust no one. I show no one my vulnerabilities. If any human comes near I shrink back, muscles tightening, ready to fight or flee. Like Esme when under threat, my hackles rise. I bare my teeth.

****

Esme has had her cubs! There are four of them. Her den is under the decking in the overgrown garden. I think it must’ve been their first time popping up above ground. They’ve big blue eyes at this age and they’re into everything. One chased a grasshopper, another tried and failed to eat a worm; the living spaghetti curling around her muzzle.
      Tim is having an illegal party tonight. He’s invited friends around despite the risk of Covid 19. He wants to introduce me to some of them. Actually what he wants to do is share me with them. He’s even offered me money. I said ‘yeah alright’ in a little meek voice, like the cunning ghost I’ve become. I took his stinking money. I nodded and forced a smile when he told me to ‘dress up for once, not those grungy jeans.’ The fridge was full of food ready for the bash: pizzas, burgers, sausages. He’d ordered it all in earlier. While he was in his bedroom getting ready, silent as Esme, I emptied it all into two big bags. My belongings were already stashed in a suitcase in the front garden. All I needed to do was slip out of the door.
      Foxes cache their food to make it last. Esme will have enough to feed her cubs through their most vulnerable weeks. Me, I’ve been caching cash, and with the extra money Tim has given me in advance of tonight’s activities, I reckon I’ve enough to live on for a while. The first things I’ve bought are a sleeping bag, and a chisel to loosen the basement window of the empty house. I can live here. It’s far enough away from Esme to respect her family’s privacy, but near enough to keep each other company. She knows I mean her no harm. She knows I’ll provide for her whenever I can. Together, living on our wits, and what we can scrounge, I know we’ll both survive, wild and free.
AQ

Greg S. Johnson
Caprice

The man, not yet as white-haired as most would remember him, put a hand through his unruly mop of frizzled hair and scanned the surface of Lac Léman. He could not detect a single ripple of movement all the way across to the French side; it was a mirror of the flawless blue sky. The late August sun, creeping over the tree line, warmed his cheeks. He closed his eyes.
      He sat near the end of a long stone jetty covered in gull dung, its mid-point crook skeletal and akimbo. With little effort he could still remember the first day he set foot in Geneva. Those pinching, patent leather shoes he wore and how each step down the cobblestone streets made him wince and hop as if on the coals of a firewalker. Holding the hand of his father—who must have been younger than he was now, but who seemed ageless and towering and invincible at the time—they made their way through Old Town to find a bakery. His father, looking down at him through his pince-nez, scolded him for jumping about like a monkey.
      A woman of about sixty approached and stood in front of him blocking the sun: ‘Loafing about again, I see.’
      ‘Bonjour, Professor,’ he said, opening his eyes and squinting to get a better look at her. ‘That’s all the French you’ll get from me. The whole of France shudders when I try to say even a few words. How long has it been, liebe?’
      Marie shrugged. ‘A year, perhaps more?’ She nodded toward the wooden sloop tied to the stone jetty. ‘This is yours, Professor?’
      She helped him to his feet. Her features were as stony as he remembered them: high forehead, blunt nose, lapis blue eyes that pierced falsehood like a needle through skin.
      ‘A pocket cruiser as these boating types say.’
      ‘Splendide! And the wood, what is it?’
      ‘Mahogany,’ Albert beamed.
      ‘It seems to me you are now one of these boating types yourself.’
      ‘They say there is an eternal arc to sailing, unfortunately I fear I’m a parabolic projectile launched into this strange, new world.’
      ‘And modest, non?’ she said.       ‘Alors…where do you want this?’ She pointed to a large, finely embroidered carpetbag at her feet.
      Tugging on the stern line, he brought the sloop close enough to step into; he took her carpetbag, then nearly dropped it in the water it was so heavy.
      ‘You’re building a house later?’ he asked with a wry smile.
      After stowing her bag below deck, he let his gaze fall across the lake well to the south. Toward Geneva he saw a few ripples across the still surface. He looked up at the black vane atop the mast, which gave a slight twist.
      ‘There is not much wind just now, but it’s building, bit by bit. I think we can sail toward Chateau d’Yvoire on the French side.’
      ‘I’m in your hands, Capitaine.’
      ‘And I yours,’ he said, taking her hands and pulling her toward him into the cockpit. He rubbed his thumbs over her fingers and noticed how rough they were. ‘You are smart to wear dungarees. Do you know much about this type of rigging? They call it Bermuda.’
      ‘Less than nothing, I’m afraid.’
      Marie eased herself onto one of the two parallel cockpit benches that stretched from the cabin to the stern.
      Out on the bow he grabbed a line and brought it back to the cockpit. She watched him move smartly around the mast and straighten the rigging there.
      ‘Your enthusiasm…it’s almost contagious,’ she said.
      He raised the main sail with steady hand-over-hand tugs of the halyard. Once secured, he repositioned himself at the helm and with some luck was able to catch enough of a south-southwest breeze to move them free of the jetty.
      ‘Have a go at the helm?’ he asked with a wink.
      ‘Would you like me to crash us into anything particular?’ Marie said, tilting a shoulder back to look at him. Often her face had the countenance of a statue so that when she smiled it was like sunshine peaking from under a dark cloud.
      Albert laughed. “Here, come, let me show you.”
      She slid into the helmsman’s seat, and he guided her hand onto the tiller. Her hands were large for a woman’s, but her knuckles were delicate as the nested heads of baby birds. Mottled with coppery spots and sores, they were the hands of an elderly woman.
      Albert was surprised at how the wind had jotted up since they left the jetty. With a nod to Marie, he raised the foresail and watched it ripple, cobra-like up the forestay. The stiff breeze grabbed the white sailcloth of the main and foresail with such force that he had to ease the main sheet a bit to keep from heeling too far over. The wind was building almost to ten knots, which gave him plenty of lift, and he moved out on a reach that put them on a gliding line toward the distant beach at Hermance.
      Albert leaned his back out over the water, hand once again on the tiller. He breathed in deeply, the uneven wind slapping his face then backing off, pushing then retreating. He looked around at the worn green hills and ashen cliffs that unfolded into this drowning pool of long retreated glaciers. How similar it must have looked to those early nomadic tribes, centuries ago, with their embers alight on the shores. Long before there was a Geneva. Long before those same tribes were forced to bow to Caesar.
      ‘Hungry?’ Marie asked.
      ‘I had nothing this morning. Sometimes eating is such…mühe.’
      ‘Come visit me in Paris. I’ll feed you chocolat and croissant, beef, and shellfish. You’ll shed your ambivalence.’
      Off the bow to port he saw the foresail going slack. Wiggling the tiller back and forth, he tried to bladder it, will the wind into it. He looked up to see that the main sail, too, hung like a wet sheet on a line. The bow turned slowly to starboard, into what had been the wind. They were now facing due south.
      ‘Take the helm again, bitte,’ he said, and crept out toward the bow. The drop in the wind made the boat unstable, and he had to steady himself against the side of the cabin as he went. Gaining the bow, he grabbed the jib and luffed it a few times. They had moved too close to shore, and they were trapped in a windless calm, blocked by the mountains he had been admiring.
      ‘We seem to have stopped, haven’t we?’ she said.
      Leaning out, he grabbed hold of the foresail and gave it a few shakes. Albert tried to lure a pocket of wind into it. His right foot slid out from beneath him, and he clutched the forestay just in time to keep from tumbling in.
      ‘Are you all right?’ Marie called.
      Albert struggled to get his breathing under control as he stared down into the black water. He cursed his stupidity for never learning to swim.
      ‘Here, come and eat,’ she said, hauling her violet and crimson carpetbag out from below deck. ‘It’ll do you some good.’
      From the bag she removed several pears, a few apples, some Brie, and a baguette. With an adept touch she sliced the bread and spread the cheese across several pieces.
      He ate all that was offered.
      ‘I suppose we can always use the auxiliary,’ she said, taking a bite of sweet pear. The juice dripped onto her fingers and she fluttered them over the water.
      Smoothing his bushy moustache from the center outward, he scanned the southeast shore, the lush, green hills past Chens-sur-Léman. His eyebrows coiled.
      ‘We can start the auxiliary, non?’ she asked, curious.
      ‘Perhaps not.’
      ‘Pourquoi?’
      ‘No fuel.’
      ‘Did you forget?’
      ‘No, I didn’t forget. To hell with them!’ Albert’s face turned red. ‘They are noisy… abominations! They destroy the beauty of all of this,’ he gestured with his arms to the surrounding water. ‘The peace and the solitude and the…the quiet.’
      Marie sat like a statue for a few moments and then couldn’t control it any longer. She put a sudden hand over her mouth and failed to stifle a laugh.
      ‘Funny, yes!?’
      Albert looked like a child staring into the abyss of a fractured toy.
      ‘Non…non, Je…’ she said, sitting up straighter. ‘Oh, my dear, Je suis désolé. I didn’t mean to insult you.’
      He shook his head and took a deep breath of fresh summer air. ‘It’s fine. Nichts. Nichts.’
      ‘Here, give me.’ She folded both her hands around one of his.
      With his other hand he traced one of the large, damaged circles on her hand. ‘What’s happened here?’ he asked.
      ‘Nichts.’ She dropped his hand and looked away. Somewhere deep within, she knew it was the pitchblende, the metallic rock of radium and polonium that she had worked with for so many years.
      Some swimmers bravely danced into the water at the beach in the distance and then came dancing right back out again.
      ‘Tell me, ’ he insisted.
      ‘Nothing I need to worry about. No one cares about these…ugly things.’ She turned back toward him showing her palms. Her heavy-lidded yet startling blue eyes caught him cold. ‘Certainly not you.’
      Her gnarled hands trembled.
      ‘Did I do something? Say something?’
      ‘You won’t recall,’ Marie said. She rummaged through her bag, and in a few seconds pulled free a green bottle of wine. ‘When I told my friend Jacques about my sail with you today, he recommended this Beaujolais from a nearby vineyard.’
      He looked at her in profile. Marie’s hair was a kinetic knot bunched up on the top of her head. It shielded the massive bluff of her determined forehead.
      ‘I don’t care for wine,’ he said.
      Marie continued as if his voice was a stray puff of wind. She put the bottle between her legs and worked at freeing the cork with a pocketknife. ‘Do you remember that hike we took in the Alps some years back, me with the girls and you with your son?’
      He shrugged. ‘Of course. We hiked for hours. It was a beautiful day.’
      ‘I thought so, too. But then I overheard something from a friend who was at one of your cocktail parties.’
      He closed his eyes, sniffed for a breeze. ‘Marie, it was so long ago.’
      ‘Alors, you do remember. Tell me.’
      Albert’s brown eyes sprang open, alive and furious. ‘What difference does it make!?’
      ‘You said, ‘She’s very intelligent, but has the soul of a herring.’
      ‘I did not!’ He stood up but nearly fell over backward. He grabbed the boom to steady himself.
      ‘What did you say then?’ Her lips were pursed, seething.
      ‘I couldn’t have said that.’ Albert pondered the deck of the cockpit where one of the slats was cracked. It would need to be replaced before winter came.
      ‘It makes no difference to you,’ Marie said. ‘Because you don’t have to care. How easily the conqueror embraces ambivalence.’
      ‘I’m afraid my wives have often bullied me for my temperamental tongue. It was some time ago. I’m sure I thought I was being funny at the time. You’ve always impressed me with your strength of character and your…tenacity.’
      ‘Alors…flatterie? Non?’
      ‘It’s so long past, Marie.’
      ‘Wars have been fought for less.’
      As they drifted closer to the French shore, the calls of the gulls became more distinct and defiant. The jangle of the halyards and the tiny slaps of water against the sides of the wooden sloop made the silence even more galling.
      ‘I don’t suppose you have any glassware?’ she said, nodding to the suddenly open bottle of Beaujolais between her legs.
      They both laughed.
      ‘Let me look,’ he said.
      ‘Don’t bother.’ Marie tilted the bottle back and took a healthy swig. She wiped a red bit of wine away with the back of her hand. ‘Mmmm. Demi sec. Try some.’ She held out the bottle, but he stared at it, unmoving.
      On the morning of that hike, along the trail, her daughter was continually tripping over her hiking boots, and the laces were knotted like cobwebs. Marie pulled a knife from her satchel then used it to rip through the knot and re-string her daughter’s boots. There was no head patting, no ‘there, there, child’; she was matter-of-fact, quick to the point and resolute. After all these years, that was the most prominent memory of their hike. He shook his head as if to wipe it away.
      ‘It won’t bite you, mon ami,’ Marie said, finally.
      Albert took the bottle and looked at the label, then gulped a quick shot.
      They passed the bottle back and forth and listened to the rhythmic slapping of the water below and the halyards in the mast above. The air warmed as the sun reached its apex.
      Marie finished the last of the Beaujolais and set the bottle on the deck of the cockpit. She rubbed her hands together.
      ‘Oh, Albert, we’re as stuck in ourselves as we are in this boat,’ she said.
      He moved closer and attempted to settle an arm around her.
      She tilted away.
      ‘I don’t understand you,’ he said.
      ‘What is it about men that makes them unforgiveable when they won’t see the most basic thing there is? The most…oh, sacrebleu! Forget it. Just…’ She shook her head, closed her eyes.
      Albert stared up at the top of the mast; a feeble breeze fluttered the vane there. He looked again at the sole of the cockpit. He gazed across the flat water of the lake. Without looking at her, he reached for her hands. They were clammy and cold. He massaged them. Staring across the sun-dappled water, back toward the jetty they somehow needed to reach, he stumbled over a few words. A pained expression told him he was still far off, and then, as with a breeze that can build out of the clear blue, rippling the water as it takes on momentum, he regained his balance, braced himself, swallowed hard on his pride and offered her the apology so long deferred.       AQ