Category: Blog

One

My sister is the first one to call me a faggot, so maybe she’s a soothsayer. So maybe she knows, after all. I write down in my diary that I know she reads that I’m not gay (just in case). I pray about it to God, who my father says doesn’t make mistakes. Every night, She comes to me, crawling across the shag carpet my sister begged our parents to buy. She wears hoop earrings and a smile as broad as a highway. She knows everything and She wants to kiss me anyways. I wake up, dry-mouthed, a hand on my chest, feeling like my heart is full of carbonation. “Feeling yourself up?” my sister says, and I roll my eyes. We jostle for position in front of the bathroom mirror, and my father jokingly asks if I have a crush. He scrubs his hand over my shoulder gently, the way he does with my boy cousins when they score a goal during soccer or whatever it is they do out on the field. He doesn’t touch my sister like this, doesn’t hug her as tight ever since she started wearing two bras to bed. He doesn’t even look her in the eye when she’s standing next to him. My mom says he’s just like that, that he doesn’t mean anything by it. “He just doesn’t want his babies to grow up.” My sister says that’s bullshit. My sister says a lot of things are bullshit, ever since our dad told us that he better not catch her walking around outside without a t-shirt over her tank tops, no matter how hot it is. He tells us he doesn’t want anyone to think we’re fast.

In my dream, God peels an orange for the both of us and says she thinks my sister is right. “About everything?” I ask her, thinking of how my sister had, two days ago, caught me balling up socks and putting them in the crotch of my underwear. She didn’t even blink, just closed the door and whispered “Okay, faggot,” sotto voce in response to everything I said to her for two days straight. God sighs, passes me my half of the orange and says, “Maybe just this one time.”

Two

My sister is better at being a girl than I am. I know this is true, even though God once told me that there a million and one different ways to be a girl. We aren’t allowed to wear makeup, but she bought some at CVS and keeps it hidden under my mattress. The lipstick she saved up for doesn’t look right–it’s too bright, and looks pasty on her mouth. It’s not red (not even my sister would go that far) but instead a violent bubblegum. She wears it every chance she gets, up until Bobby From Bio says she looks like a golliwog. When we look up golliwogs in the library, my sister’s mouth pleats and the lipstick cracks–it comes off easily enough, though. Hand cream works fine as a makeup remover, even when we have to use the rough paper towels to get all of it off. I hand her my chapstick and tell her Bobby From Bio is so stupid, he probably didn’t even really know what it means. I tell her she doesn’t need the lipstick anyways, doesn’t need the mascara or the eyeliner or what fucking ever. “You think I don’t know that?” I don’t know if she does but we go in on a different lipstick on our walk back home. Half of my allowance goes towards one the color of Hennessey, and since our parents aren’t home yet, my sister holds me by the chin and puts it on for me. “See? So pretty!” I don’t think that’s true either but I like that she says it. Like when she thinks I might be a good girl, too.

Three

My sister and I still have to go everywhere together, even though she turned fifteen three months ago. She told our parents she shouldn’t have to take me to her friend’s house, of all places. “Amaka doesn’t even know her!” But if I don’t go then she doesn’t go either, so I stay at the park a block away while my sister and Jayna flat iron each other’s hair and watch TV. Sometimes I read, or I think about how I’d react if either of them asked me to stay. How I’d shrug it off, then graciously accept after the third request. “Mixed signals, much?” God asks me the first night I bring this fantasy up to Her, and snorts when I turn and exit the dream. I do that, sometimes, when we disagree. God doesn’t ever leave first, just files Her nails and watches me go.

Jayna lives on top of a hill, and standing on the back pegs while my sister bikes down it is a nightmare. Every single time we speed down, I bite out a prayer to God, even though it’s not night yet–I love you/I’m sorry/I love you. There’s never a time that we don’t make it, but I think God is maybe still annoyed because right when we get home, my father is mowing the lawn out front. He stops and waves to both of us: his arm is still caught in a long arc when he sees my sister, forehead shiny with sweat, heaving herself off the bike. I don’t catch on for a second, and then the sight of her makes my stomach clench: my sister in an old tank top, the baggy shirt that she had worn out the door probably left in Jayna’s room. One of the straps is fraying, almost about to snap.

“Get your ass in the house.” When he gets like this, I don’t want to know him at all. I want to throw out every good memory. I want to comb all of his love out of my hair. My sister slinks past me, chin up, mouth so firm that I know it wants to tremble. I bite out another prayer to God–Please/Let me know what to do/Please–and God maybe picks up her nail file, maybe peels another orange. Maybe just stands and watches us both shake.

On the hottest day of the year, a child dropped from the 10-meter diving board and landed funny on the water, knocked himself unconscious. The security came and closed the gate, and hundreds of other bathers and I became trapped in our grass area, separated from the pool. I jostled for a spot where I could peek over the hedge at the commotion, a foreign figure among the families. A large, older woman stood next to me, eating cold wurst out of a jar. Her burning folds of flesh reminded me of a painting (Rubens), her trashy outfit a film (John Waters).

Without even looking down, she squeezed senf out of a tube neatly onto her sausage, not taking her eyes from the diving board, from the silhouettes up there, pacing nervously to the edge of the diving board and back. Looking down at the boy’s body. As two men lifted him out of the water, his body moved in a way that was maybe not lifeless, but certainly very wrong. He had been floating face down in the deep end, so they pulled him out that way, in an attempt to be gentle and not move the body too much. First a swimmer guided the body softly towards the edge of the pool, where the two men were waiting. Each man gripped the boy by a skinny ankle and a skinny crooked-back elbow, and when they lifted him in the air, the boy’s belly button bent slightly towards the ground in an unsettling u shape, until they laid him softly down, his cheek on the hot concrete.

The image of the a child gone limp and deadweight, face into the ground, was something I had only seen on television screens before, during the European refugee crisis a few years earlier. To me I was seeing that boy on the beach again, the toddler, fully clothed, face obscured by the sand, but obviously dead.

It was an image shown to us over and over and it meant only one thing. Shame. Shame on all of you for letting this happen. It was part of the reason we were so lenient, we took so many of them in. Thirty thousand in my small country alone, where we are not used to accommodating such sudden waves.

This image was a tool used by the liberal media to great success, and watching the boy now I could see why, it made me sick with panic. The wrongness of his body made our collective stomachs drop, pinched our hearts painfully, formed fist-sized lumps in our throat. Us behind the hedge, looking on. His tiny arms slumping over his scrawny brown chest. Water slicked forwards over his shiny black hair, pasting it over his eyes, his hair a wet curtain obscuring him from identification. Was this the boy who had pushed in front of me in the line? The men who had fished him out of the water brushed the hair back from his face gently, so he could breathe, and see, should he open his eyes. They were civilians, not lifeguards, I noticed.

‘He didn’t fall’ the Wurst Woman said to me. ‘He was pushed.’ She spoke with a certainty she had plucked out of thin air, and I marvelled at her stupidity for a moment. Imagine that, to be simple enough to accuse a bunch of figures at the top of a diving board of attempting to harm, even murder, a child. With such nonchalance, based on the way the other people looked, and all the while not pausing your one woman jar to mouth snack assembly line.

I had long ago resigned myself to not speaking in these situations. This was something for the locals to figure out, and I was something less than that. It was my first time at the pool, the idea to visit had come out of a need to take action. A need to apply balm to a burn nobody would acknowledge. For days I had been watching people walking around in full length trousers, sweating into their closed-in shoes and socks. Lots of homeless people still wore jackets. A rising sense of panic took over me, as the days passed and the temperatures continued to rise. Do you people not feel what I feel? How can you all just keep going, through all this? But it was not my place to speak.

Berlin was a city ill-equipped for the heat. And this was the cheapest swimming pool in a poor, immigrant, neighbourhood in the middle of one the worst heat waves this city has seen. It was so crowded here. So crowded all over this city. At some point the people and the heat needed to stop coming.

I grimaced politely at the woman, to show I had understood, but to distance myself from the off remark I was sure she was going to make any minute.

She produced a newspaper and flicked the front page with her thumb and forefinger, as if this was undeniable proof of the point she was about to make.

‘Gang violence. They bring it with them everywhere’.

There it was. Gauche.

We chose our words more carefully in Oslo.

This pool was known for gangs, it was true, and the commotion on the other side of the fence did indicate foul play. Something was deeply wrong. The large rectangular pool area was full of young men, boys, teenagers and some in their twenties, all shirtless, perfectly muscular, pacing, shoulder to shoulder, frowning against the sun. The filled-to-the-brim rectangular space was moving in dark agitated circles like a Van Gogh night sky.

Through this crowd broke a stream of guards, marked by their white button up polo shirts which stretched the word ‘Security’ impossibly wide over their huge backs. Their arms were swollen like my feet in this temperature: veins throbbed in their wrists as they rubbed their shaved heads in concern. They had the same haircuts as the boys, the same sharp fades, the same neatly groomed facial hair, the same diamanté in that one ear.

I was relieved to see a harmony between some of the guards and the boys, who gave out hand gestures, shoulder squeezes and slaps on the backs, quick little smiles of greeting. They looked like football coaches welcoming players off the field. Players of a game that was quickly getting away from them.

Despite looking like opposing forces, the shirts and the no-shirts, the two groups had a sameness. The guards were just grown up versions of the boys. This gave me some hope the tension would simmer down, that everyone would go back to their seats and the boy would be properly seen to. Where were the lifeguards? Why did a pool need a security team like this?

Well I knew the reason why, really. The Wurst Woman was clutching it to her soft pillowy bosom, folded in two. The newspaper article that was in the Bild that morning: Das sind Berlins gefährlichste Schlimm-Bäder. These are Berlin’s Most Dangerous Swimming Pools. Except the schwimm in Schwimmbad, the German word for swimming pool, had been replaced by schlimm, meaning bad. I didn’t understand what puns and the result of misguided social policies had to do with each other.

If she had bothered to read the statistics provided in the article properly, which I’m sure she hadn’t, she would have come to the same conclusion that I had, that the main thing one has to fear at this pool is pickpocketing. Petty thieves. Protecting yourself against these sorts of people was easy, you simply needed a waterproof bag to keep your belongings. I had mine zipped around my waist and I would take it into the water with me, when I eventually was allowed to go in. It squeaked against my sweaty waist securely. Only the weak and unprepared could be taken advantage of by them.

A woman named Olga had been interviewed for the article. I imagined her as the Wurst Woman dressed in a alternate colour combination, with brunette starchy hair instead of peroxide blonde. Perhaps leopard print sunglasses instead of hot pink. She said the crime was evidence of the power shift that had occured in this neighbourhood, that this was a sign of what happens when Islam reaches a critical mass, enough to topple the ‘ever diminishing’ German. Unsurprisingly, Olga had a detailed list of complaints. Specifically, the lawns and fields around the water were now dirty, when they used to be clean. People pissed in the pool, and mothers dropped used diapers in the water. They swore, they threw things, whatever they could do to intimidate, harass, and maintain control. Olga was scared to go to the bathroom alone.

I didn’t see it. I looked around me, and saw spotless green lawns, beautiful tall trees, clear water. Yes, white people were in the minority here, compared to Arabs, but that didn’t scare me. Yes, people didn’t know how to queue here, they jostled and pushed in. You just had to know how to stick your elbows out. Yes, I was perceived as an outsider within these concrete walls, but I knew society at large was just across the other side of those hot bricks, and my real world status could be beckoned over should I require it.

What scared me was the lack of control, the lack of infrastructure. An unconscious child and no lifeguards. All that clear water, and nobody allowed in. Aggravated and sweaty crowds pushing up against paper thin boundaries. One security guard’s fist held fast on the latch of the gate, holding us all back.

I read the Bild over my coffee at the Turkish Bakery on my corner some mornings. The coffee was cheap here, and I am nothing if not economically fiscal. I preferred the broadsheet naturally, but didn’t yet have the language skills to follow. Bild on the other hand was aimed at someone with the German comprehension skills and intelligence of a child. I fell into the former category, which at times in Berlin, when people insisted on speaking in German, placed me unwillingly into the latter category also.

The statistics were as follows for the previous year at this pool: Diebstahl 21, Sachbeschädigung 3, Sexualdelikte 1, Drogen 2, Körperverletzung 5.

I had understood all these categories – theft, property damage, sexual offences, drugs – except the last. Körperverletzung. I looked it up in my online dictionary and it was translated as mayhem. I knew that must be wrong, but it felt so right to me. Five counts of mayhem. Heat waves always brought mayhem with them.

And all these people, the Wurst Women and the trapped men, they were always brewing it too.

A voice rose above the concerned murmurs of us behind the hedge, speaking in such rapid fire German I couldn’t follow the subtleties, only that he was telling someone off. I turned around to see a German teenager, in only swimming shorts and severe dark-rimmed spectacles. In his passion for whatever he was yelling about he was waving his novel around in his hand as he punctuated his sentences, his thumb still holding the page he had been reading. Before all this commotion. Already I was inclined to side with him. He was pale, endearingly chubby, and he jiggled as he yelled. I didn’t know exactly what he was saying but I knew that somebody needed to say something. I internally cheered him on.

As he was yelling, those behind the hedge who understood, turned to the object of his admonishments. The Wurst Woman, who was holding her hands over the hedge and up towards the sky as if to God. But between her pink fingers and long acrylic nails she pinched her phone, videoing in landscape mode, and I saw shrunk down and replicated on her screen the men gated off in the pool area, swirling. And as they paced, through a gap in the bodies, occasionally the unconscious boy could be glimpsed on her screen, and the concerned faces of the men who had found themselves trying to help him.

But seriously, where were the lifeguards?

‘That’s a child’ the teenager was yelling at the Wurst Woman. ‘That’s a child!’ And then what I imagined to be ‘Have some respect and put your phone away.’ He stared angrily at her, who reluctantly lowered her phone, and then the rest of the group stared at her as if she could be blamed for all of this, although to me it was clear she was too stupid to even be a player in the game.

‘This isn’t your entertainment’ the teenager was saying. But to my surprise he was addressing the whole group now. He moved to stand at the front of the group, right at the hedge, with his back to the water, and turned his gaze on us now. He crossed his arms and stared at us angrily, angry at us for staring, which we continued to do, now at him and at the boy. He stared on and so did we, right back, in silence.

I wasn’t so sure I sided with this boy after all. This boy who penned me in with the Wurst Woman.

Something about the weather had me territorial. I looked at the water longingly, I was fenced off from it and I hadn’t been allowed to go in yet. First, it was too crowded, they had let too many people in. There were simply too many people here and not enough space in the pool to go around. And then it was closed off by the guards, and somehow I ended up on the wrong side of the fence. I don’t think it’s fair that I ended up over here, sweating into my linen shirt and waterproof fanny pack, with no way to cool myself down, while all those fit boys got to be by the water. They were so young, and so athletic, olive-skinned, they looked at home in the heat. I was middle-aged, fair and crisping, I could feel my scalp burning under the sun. I needed water desperately. I was dizzy with exhaustion.

Was there anything I could do, to get them to let me through? Could I get to the other side without the other’s behind the hedge noticing, and starting a panicked chain reaction, a mass of us trying to storm the pool at once? Out of everyone here, it was certainly not me who was going to be the one to unleash chaos on the scene. I stood and despaired, fanning myself silently.

Suddenly I felt a weak flutter under my heel and then felt as if I’d stood on a shard of glass. A hot sting fired up around my heel and I cried out in pain, unable to stop myself from making a noise now, and everyone behind the hedge turned to look at me. A deep angry, confused sound came out of me, and I felt it vibrate in my chest as it left my body.

I looked down to see I had stood on a wasp. In anger I stomped on it again, harder this time, to completely crush and destroy this tiny bug that had dared to sting me. That was a mistake, I realised quickly. It stung me several more times, and giving in to the pain, I keeled backwards onto the ground, clutching my ankle and crying out, continuing to swear in Norwegian. All the figures behind the hedge turned to look down at me now, and laying there on the ground looking back up at them, suddenly I felt like a child again. A child who had hurt myself and needed help. The teenager left his post where he was staring angrily at us from, to peer around everyone’s legs to see who was making this noise, who was cursing like a sailor in a mixture of Norwegian and pain.

Now I had spoken they knew I wasn’t one of them, I saw it all over their faces. I had given up the power of staying silent.

‘What’s happened?’ a woman asked.

She could see me struggling for the vocabulary.

‘You have a wasp sting?’ she said, providing it.

‘Yes! I have a wasp sting!’ I screamed, mimicking her. I have a fucking wasp sting.  Wasn’t that much obvious?

Everyone stood staring at me for a while, not moving.

‘I need ice! I need cool water! Somebody fetch me something!’ I yelled, switching to English.

Was anybody going to fucking help me? How long could all these people gape at me slack jawed and watch me writhe around in pain. I thought of my shared experience with the boy, for the child lying helplessly on the ground surrounded by adults that don’t know how to help him, or just don’t want to enough.

A mother started searching through her bag, and came to me with an epipen in her outstretched hand.

‘Allergic?’ she asked in German.

I responded in kind. ‘No. Not allergic!’ and then in English ‘I don’t need an epipen! Something for the pain! The pain!’ I screamed at her. And then in Norwegian, ‘You stupid moronic bitch.’ She continued to rifle through her bag, looking desperately for something else that would help.

‘Coming through’ yelled another woman’s voice. The crowd parted, and I could see the Wurst Woman coming towards me through the gate. She was dragging a blue-shirted lifeguard by the wrist. She was really going at a trot, the dear little porky pie. God bless my unlikely saviour.

‘She doesn’t need a lifeguard’ the teengager with the glasses said.

‘They don’t need three over there,’the Wurst Woman yelled back.

The crowd threw up their hands, made noises of frustration, and turned back the other way to watch the boy. The man knelt down next to me and opened up his box. It was metal and heavy, like a tackle box, with collapsible shelves that folded out to resemble the bleachers by the pool.

He placed my ankle on his knee, and I laid back in the grass, panting, and strange noises continue to come out of me.

He selected an ointment from one of the metal shelves, and began to rub it into the sting with his fingers. The pain began to dissipate slightly and I looked at his face gratefully. He was handsome, in his 20s, with a dark, typically Arab, complexion. What I noticed the most were his two tear tattoos, one on either cheek. This made him seem dangerous to me, which was all the more thrilling as he tenderly worked on my foot. There were two German four letter words across his knuckles, I watched the letters dance as he tended to my heel, but didn’t quite grasp the meaning of his touch.

Nobody was looking, I wanted the lifeguard to lay down on the grass with me and hug me and soothe me, to produce an ice block and run it down my neck. But I also wanted him to make me feel safe, wrap his tattooed arms around me in a way the other men here would understand, I was safe. I was with him. I was protected. By the man with the teardrop tattoos on his cheeks.

But I was simply too hot to pull him down onto the grass with me. I needed to get in that pool. I was done with being gracious. It was time to pull rank.

I struggled to my feet and hopped to the gate. I yelled across the hedge.

‘Hey!’

Nobody noticed me.

‘Yo!’ I don’t know what possessed me to use that word. ‘Excuse me sirs. I said HEY!’

Finally the security team turned, regarded me, but made no move to move towards me. Their black-sneakered feet stayed planted on the concrete, facing the water.

I wrapped my fists around the painted green bars of the gate, and rattled the metal vigorously back and forwards against the latch. This made a horrible clanging sound. The young boys by the pool were looking at me now, brows furrowed. I was a sight, but not a threat.

‘I demand that you open this gate immediately. You need to let me in. I need to get in that water or I might die’.

Now everybody’s eyes were on me, a blonde woman yelling in English. Nobody on the security team understood me, or at least they weren’t willing to engage me. I switched tactics.

‘Wasp sting! Maybe allergy! Maybe death!’ I yelled in my child’s German. I gestured wildly to my foot. ‘I need water!’

Some of the security were softening now, motioning to let me through.

‘She is not allergic’ said the teenager in the severe glasses. ‘She just said no to an epipen. And you don’t treat an allergic reaction with water,’ I guessed he was saying. Even this fucking little twerp was getting in my way now.

I closed my eyes and imagined myself like a man reaching an oasis in the desert, stripping off and dropping to my knees at the water’s edge in an exhausted heap. I imagined plunging into the cool water, finally done with this upheaval of order, floating to the top, soothed and at peace, as I always strived to be, in my rightful place. And then I opened my eyes to see the boys watch me be denied – watched me contentedly. I had no power here. They were pacing slowly, prowling even, around the concrete area by the pool, watching me like I was an injured animal, a neutered threat. Everything was moving in slow motion now, something inside of me had melted, given way, and I was no longer dizzy but completely dissolving. Soon no-one would look at me at all. In front of me brown bare shoulders and chests criss crossed each other, shaved heads moved up and down in uneven gaits that came together looking something like a herd in unrest.

They looked at me with such disregard, as if I was of such little importance. As if this was not my world anymore.

All of a sudden there was an elated noise from the crowd. On the edge of the pool, the child had regained consciousness, he was speaking. But then confusion followed, nobody understood what he was saying. They couldn’t communicate with him.

‘What is your name?’ First they tried Arabic, because of the way he looked.Then Turkish, German, English. No response.

‘Where are your parents?’ No response.

‘Were you pushed?!’ this was the Wurst Woman again, who had trotted back to be by the boy. ‘Point to the boys who pushed you!’

The boy kept murmuring under his breath, coughing, rubbing his eyes. I listened carefully, like a dog, to make sure I heard what I thought I heard. He said it again, clear as day.

‘Jeg forstår ikke.’

Norwegian.

‘Hva skjedde? Hvor er søsteren min?’

I froze, not knowing what to do.

There was more confusion as they kept trying to speak to him in a language he didn’t speak. I stood with my hands on the bars of the gate still, my face sandwiched between the bars, my eyes flitting between the boy, the water, the guards.

‘Where are your parents? What’s your name?’ they were asking.

‘Jeg forstår ikke. Jeg vil ha mamma.’ He wanted his mother, of course.

I saw what to do.

‘Vi finner din mor!’ I yelled. We’ll find her, little one.

He spoke back to me, and the crowd looked at me once more. I was gaining currency quickly.

‘She isn’t here. I came with my sister and her boyfriend. She was supposed to be watching me jump. She told me to climb up and she she would be watching.’ Sorry kid, clearly sis was having a great time with her boyfriend somewhere.

‘Okay, we’ll find your sister then.’ I motioned to the guards. ‘Let me through,’ and all the men who were now in charge, apparently, nodded, and finally the green gate swung open for me, and I crossed the threshold.

I had to escape this mayhem. Get as far away from it as possible.

I broke into an excited canter towards the action, but the pain shot further up my leg until I couldn’t bare it. I picked up the lifeguard’s metal box, and fingered the closed latch nervously. I wrapped my arms around it and hugged it to my chest. Now I broke into a full stride towards the boy, then took off from my good heel, leaping, and launching myself directly over him and into the water.

I hugged the heavy box into my bosom, letting it pull me down as far as I could go. I sank all the way to the bottom and opened my eyes, looking left and right down the 50 metre line. There was a strange quietness down there, all alone and silent. I felt my insignificance in the way I was used to feeling it, when I was alone in the woods, hunting.

Reluctantly I started to let my breath out slowly, bubbles skimmed my cheeks and floated all the way up to the surface. I was going to stay underwater until I couldn’t breathe anymore. Until I sent myself unconscious and they had to fish me out.

It’s not like we could even adopt a cat, but there we were at the animal shelter anyway. We were young and broke and didn’t want to admit that we were on the verge of breaking up, so when Shelli suggested it, I didn’t say no. What else were we going to do? Too many days till payday to go to the movies, too hot to go for a hike, and the mall was just depressing when you couldn’t buy anything. But looking at animals was free and heartwarming, according to Shelli. Part of me wondered if she was planning how she’d replace me once she did finally move out.

She grew up in a veritable zoo: Her mother kept tropical birds and headed up the local tropical bird society. There were four cats over the course of her childhood, three dogs, a passel of guinea pigs they bred for pet stores, and, at one point, a herd of emu. College was the first time she didn’t have a pet, and we were supposed to get one when we found a place together, but the only apartments we could afford: No pets. We got her a turtle from a kiosk at the mall instead and she named him Yertle, but I suppose it wasn’t the same. Me, I’ve never had pets.

So she said, “Let’s go to the shelter,” and I said, “Sure,” and the next thing you know we were standing in a room of dog kennels and the air stunk of saliva. Everything was gray: gray painted cinder blocks, gray linoleum, gray cages. I wondered if it was done that way to make you feel bad for how dreary these dogs’ lives had become.

We walked from cage to cage, like trick or treaters, but instead of getting candy, each time we were greeted with an upturned snout and a tail that wagged back and forth, back and forth. Each time, Shelli squatted down and spoke to the dogs in a falsetto saved for children and animals. I stood back and watched, until Shelli gave me a side eye and said, “Why are you being so weird?” So I started offering them treats in exchange for licks that left my hands uncomfortably sticky.

“I wish I could take them all home with me!” she said after we finished the rounds, and I said, “Maybe you could volunteer?” and she huffed, “With what time?” Which was true. She’d started working full time as a pilates instructor for a local gym, but still took shifts decorating cakes at Giant Eagle on the weekends.

If you tried to look at the situation logically, things had gotten much better: I’d finally started meds that slowed my mind down to a manageable speed but kept me from tanking emotionally, landed an office job so I could pay my half of the bills so we didn’t rack up even more credit card debt. We never really fought anymore, but we also never had sex, never whiled away the evenings talking about the universe or going on some frantic adventure. With my illness went the passion, the backbone of our relationship.

We progressed to the cats, which at least didn’t smell as bad, but they also didn’t seem to care as much that we were there. The set up was perplexing, a tower of cages six feet tall in the middle of a room, and all the walls filled with cages, too, as though they needed to up their cat-per-square-foot ratio. Cat Tokyo. Here, Shelli gave a meaningful sigh, the kind I’d gotten used to hearing.

One looked exactly like you’d imagine an old man would look like in cat form: dull cream with a bulbous nose and bits of crust in the corners of his eyes. He stood up and stretched when we passed his cage, slowly meandered to the front and rubbed his side against the bars. “Well, hello, sir,” she cooed as she stuck her finger in to scratch the top of his head, and he pushed forward into it. I copied her, and read his bio: Wesley Crusher. “I’m very friendly and just want a nice lap to sleep on. I have early stage kidney failure, and need someone who is able to take care of a kitty with special needs.” For a moment, I could imagine us taking him home with us, coming together as we nursed him through his illness, helping him live longer than he was ever expected to last. But when I glanced at Shelli, I could see her eyes were already drifting away. She moved to the next cage, a tabby named Nancy who remained curled in an antisocial ball, glaring at us.

When I lagged behind, she glanced back said, “He’s so weird looking, it’s kind of cute, isn’t it?” She walked over and leaned against me for a moment, watching him as he squatted back on his haunches and began cleaning his tail. I could smell the tea tree oil from her shampoo. I placed one hand against the small of her back.

“Wouldn’t it be great if we could adopt him?”

She shook her head and stepped away, and whatever had briefly existed between us disappeared again. “Do you know how much medicine for a sick cat costs?”

And I felt a flinch of resentment that she didn’t wouldn’t even imagine a life with Wesley, a cat that needed us. Sometimes I wondered who she’d become. We met our sophomore year, when she was organizing canvassers for a vote to make our town a sanctuary city. I’d never really thought about refugees, but she was cute and admired her ability to knock on doors of complete strangers and convince them to care. Her ability to empathize. Her ability to want the unwantable. Now she had become someone who no longer loved the hardest luck cases. But the only explanation was that I had made her that way. This was the bed I had to lie in.

So we moved on. We came to Penelope, tiny, black, and fluffy, just like Pepe Le Pew’s love interest. “Ohhhh…” Shelli moaned, then unlatched the cage door. The little girl butted her head up against Shelli’s hand and immediately started emitting a low purr. Penelope let Shelli pick her up, and when my girlfriend dipped her head down to look at her, she rubbed one cheek against Shelli’s chin. When Shelli finally looked up at me again, her eyes shone and I could see the longing. I could feel it, too, this deep ache pressing against my breastbone, the sadness that comes with wanting something you know you don’t get to keep.

“I don’t think it would hurt to ask about adopting,” I said.

“You know we can’t have pets,” Shelli said to Penelope, scritching her under the chin. Then suddenly she stopped. Squeezed the cat tighter. Swallowed hard and breathed in so her nostrils flared. After a moment, she added, “I think I’m ready to go home.”

“I swear I’ve seen those assholes on the second floor with kitty litter.”

She looked at me and then back at Penelope.

“Worst case scenario, they say no.”

She pressed her nose and mouth against the nape of the cat’s neck. The cat kept purring. Finally, after a long moment, she pulled her face away and nodded. She gently placed Penelope back in the cage, to which Penelope gave a sharp cry of protest. “We’ll be back in a few minutes,” Shelli murmured. Penelope meowed again.

The middle-aged woman working the desk looked kind of butch, crew cut and studs all up one ear. I thought that might mean she’d be on our side. And she did smile when she handed us the paperwork, asking, “Who you girls interested in?”

“Penelope,” Shelli answered.

“Oh, she’s a real love.”

We both nodded. The paperwork was easy enough: Name, Address, Occupation, How many hours will the pet be alone? And so on. Then: Do you rent or own your home? Please provide proof of home ownership, a copy of your lease, or landlord’s contact information.

My fingers felt twitchy, but I wrote in “Montlack Realty.” Maybe some of their properties allowed pets. I handed the form back to the woman, wondering if she noticed it shivering. She scanned it over, nodding. “Mind if I call your landlord now?”

“Oh. Sure,” I replied. “But I don’t have their phone number.”

“I can find it online.” And my heart sank because I knew we were hitting a dead end.

This entire time, Shelli stared at her hands, fiddling with her rings. And all I could think was that I wanted to make her happy at least one more time before this all fell to pieces.

As the adoption lady dialed the phone, I realized I could have given her one of our friends’ numbers. Or it would have happened this way: I would say I didn’t have the number, the woman that she could look it up, and Shelli, always one step ahead, would say, Oh, you know, I have it saved on mine, and immediately know which person would play along with the charade.

“Hi, I’m calling from the Cuyahoga Animal Shelter… Yes, a couple of your tenants have come in looking to adopt a cat, and I just wanted to confirm that it’s okay with the terms of their rental agreement… 36 Rosemary Avenue, Apartment 34.”

I slipped one hand around Shelli’s and squeezed, and she let her hand lie still there under mine while we waited for the verdict. I thought of all the small things I could have done along the way to make things better for her: Those job applications I lied about filling out because I didn’t want to consider what it meant if even Wal-Mart turned me down. All those times she came home from work and found me still on the couch replaying Skyrim and asked, You didn’t even try to take out the trash? Those three appointments she made for me at the community health center before I actually went. The fact that she believed it wasn’t just some fault of my character.

“All right. Thank you very much. Have a nice day.” The woman’s tone shifted slightly, from a genuine warmth to the crispness of a person who has spent thousands of hours on the phone talking to people about matters she has no emotional investment in. I gave Shelli a hopeful smile, but she just closed her eyes and gave a small shake of her head. She pulled her hand out from under mine.

The woman turned back and in the same voice said, “I’m sorry, girls. They told me they don’t allow pets.”

I watched the muscles of Shelli’s jaw clench and unclench. “Of course,” she muttered. Then, louder, “Thank you anyway.”

“Of course.” Then the woman shifted her gaze to the next set of applicants, a wholesome nuclear family that probably had a stick figure rendition of themselves in their SUV’s rear windshield and, more importantly, owned their own home.

“Let’s go,” Shelli said, in a dull monotone that made me wish once more I’d just been able to do something differently, or that the verbiage on our lease was just bullshit like not hanging things on the walls and that the management company would just say, sure, what the heck, have a cat. I could see us filling out the rest of the adoption paperwork, handing over the fee and carrying our new pet out in one of those carrying cases, everybody smiling at us like we were the happiest sight in the world.

“Let’s go back to say goodbye,” I suggested.

Shelli opened her mouth to protest, but then just shrugged.

 Penelope greeted us with a sound halfway between a chirp and a meow, and Shelli’s eyes welled up, which made me have to blink back tears. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Wesley meandering to the front of his cage, too, but I turned my head. Out of sight.

When Shelli opened the door to the cage to give Penelope one last scratch between the ears, it came to me. No one could see us.

I unzipped my hoodie halfway down, picked the cat up by her middle.

“What–” Shelli started, and I dropped the cat into the pouch I’d created, zipped my sweatshirt up around her while keeping one hand under her rump. Her little paws scrabbled at my chest, so I held her closer to me with the other hand.

“Walk,” I said.

“Are you insane?” she whispered, but she stationed herself right in front of me so she could block the wriggling mass on my chest, and we progressed out that way down the hallway, past a volunteer introducing a couple to a leashed poodle, past the kennels of dogs and a room labeled “Small and Furry,” past the alley of visitation rooms.

Near the shelter’s entrance, just when we were almost home-free, the cat gave a long, low yowl. The front desk lady turned to look right at us, yelled, “HEY!”

Shelli glanced at me, and I hoped to see one of her old conspiratorial grins. But instead, her eyes were wet, her skin mottled pink. When I tried to give her a reassuring smile, she snapped her gaze forward.

If circumstances had been different, if our love had just dwindled away, if I had not felt so much like I had caused the rift that pulled us apart, maybe I wouldn’t have felt like I needed to keep gripping so tightly. In another version of our lives, I would have flirted with the marketing girl at work, started a casual emotional affair that I felt no guilt for because Shelli and I had simply grown apart. But that wasn’t what happened.

The woman yelled, “What’s that under your shirt?” I could feel myself starting to cry now, too, realizing. But I had to keep walking, towards the exit. No turning back.

There was no moving it. If it budged some, the thing would budge itself back. Men who lifted weights had come to the house with the intention of demonstrating their strength, and had left with strained back muscles and pulled hamstrings. She had thought she was done with it, this table made from some long-ago tree, its thick bulk docked in the heart of the dining room.

She had grown up with the table, sitting alongside its massive heft at every dinner, and now her parents were dead and they had left it for her. As a child, she had never considered that, for a family of three, the table was excessively large. Looking at it now, she saw that it could probably accommodate at least eight people, something it had never actually done, at least not during her years. The slab of wood used for its surface made no room for an additional leaf — it was a singular behemoth, ready for the work of elbows and cutlery. The thing had retained a gauzy sheen of varnish, dull at its perimeter and growing clearer toward the table’s center. It had been difficult to reach across, both arms out, for a serving tray or pitcher of water.

It was a good table for pillow forts. She remembered emptying the sofa of all its cushions and pulling out blankets from the closet in order to construct a hotel — the same hotel every time — with cells for rooms and each room inhabited by a stuffed rabbit or bear. There weren’t many friends to see the hotel. There had been Darcy Kjelgaard, but she was new to the neighborhood, and her parents had invited Darcy over because they too had a daughter and it was the polite thing to do. Darcy was tall for her age and had a bloody nose after bumping it on the table’s apron. A throw pillow, the ivory macramé one, had received Darcy’s blood before she’d pinched her nostrils shut.

The house was hers now too. It smelled of old paper, and she pulled back the dining room curtains and opened a window. Light made all the difference. It adjusted a person’s mood, but the mood of a hospital was impossible to adjust. There was light in a hospital but it was artificial light. Some rooms had windows that looked out on a parking lot or another building, and these windows did allow for natural light, but when a person is dying, natural light feels like a reminder of the world you’re leaving. Light extinguishes itself for a dying person, and then the space a family takes up in the world shrinks, and the world goes on.

Nothing about the table seemed to have shrunk. If anything, it seemed resistant to time and how it broke a body down. To her, the table possessed a separate version of time. It was its own cosmos, as when, during holidays, miniature white lights strung in the room reflected off its surface as stars in a vague galaxy. Once she had brought a step ladder in from the garage and climbed to its top, her hair brushing the ceiling, in order to take in the whole of it — the bottomless well of the wood’s burnished grain and how its contours opposed any attempt at memorizing their shape. What are you looking at? her father had said. I don’t know, she’d replied, and her father, in his annoying and forgivable way, had stated, You can’t look at an ‘I don’t know.’