“Yes, I remember those.”

  “Well, he’d always say: ‘This place ain’t big enough for the both of us.’”

  “So, what about it?”

  “Well, son, this place ain’t big enough for the both of us. So, see you later.”

  Gary woke with a jolt. Michele, asleep beside her husband’s hospital bed in a large, grey, reclining chair, heard him utter “Uh!” and opened her eyes.

  “You’re back,” she whispered, smiling.

  “I just saw my Dad. He was in an orchard with me and the trees were all in bloom. It was beautiful, but he and I—we never made our peace. I could have said something, but I didn’t know what to say.”

  Michele was silent for a moment as she stroked Gary’s forehead. “Just lie back and rest. The doctor says you’ll need rehab but if you work at it and get some walking in when you’re ready, you’ll be strong again. As I said this morning, spring is just around the corner. We’ll walk together.”

  Gary closed his eyes. He wanted to see the orchard, but for the moment it was too far away, and he would have to wait, perhaps for years, to taste the apples he knew were out there waiting for him and to stand among the boughs and breathe the perfume of the trees. Even with the tubes in his nostrils he was certain the smell of spring had followed him back from the orchard over the crest.

  Consuelo

  A MAN IN the bus station stood staring into the black screen of his dead cell phone as he shouted her name as if he had been wounded and was suffering from a great pain. He shouted it as if he was falling to his knees in the rain and begging forgiveness or pleading for a second chance.

  But what caught my attention was a kid whom I couldn’t see who was near the banquette behind me and who kept pacing up and down, talking in a noticeable New York-Queens accent about how there weren’t any girls in this town and he was coming back to New York because he’d left all his gaming equipment in his old room and he didn’t want the person on the other end of the conversation to pitch it out if he didn’t return.

  And as I looked around the bus station where mothers usually waited late at night with their sleeping children on the seats beside them, or college girls stared at their laptops and chewed gum while listening to their playlists through umbilical ear buds, or old women in head scarves sat nervously on the edge of their seats, clutching at their black shoulder bags because the sound of revving bus engines reminded them of being deported at gun-point when they were children, I looked up and all the women were gone.

  I waited ten, fifteen minutes or more because my bus wouldn’t be leaving for another hour in the middle of the night, and not a single woman appeared. There were only men, some of them old, some of them young, sitting, staring straight ahead, and empty-eyed as if they had all been struck dumb in disbelief. They didn’t speak amongst themselves. I couldn’t speak to them. I had nothing to say. And the kid from New York who kept asking someone on the other end of the cell phone call if they were there, repeated “Hello? Hello?” and slapped the phone in the palm of his hand several times as if it wasn’t working. And the man with the dead cell phone and blackened screen who had called out for Consuelo, leaned against a pillar and wept over what, he told me, he couldn’t remember about the light he had known in her eyes.

  Looking Good

  DAVE IS WHAT’S known as an early barber. He opens early and closes early. He had just warmed up the lather machine and was setting his scissors and cut-throats out on the clean terry-towel when the first customer arrived. He did not look up. “I’m just getting ready for you,” he said.

  “People are rarely ready for me,” the stranger in black said. “I have come.”

  Dave still did not look up. He glanced in the mirror at the backwards clock—something barbers hang on their walls to measure their moments so they don’t chat too long to a friend, or tell too many jokes, or go on about local events and who has been doing what and it was just ten past five. Ten past five in the morning is the hour when people slip silently from this world, some in their sleep going peaceably, some struggling and fighting to the last ounce of their strength, and some just as they are easing their feet out of bed and setting them on the floor.

  The stranger came over and sat down in the chair. Dave lifted the black hood from the customer’s head and exposed the bone of a bald skull. He laughed and shook his head. “Haven’t left me much to work with.” Dave glanced out the front window to the street and the first light was just breaking along the avenue. Then he saw the face of Death in the mirror, though not the actual face. He saw the reflection of Death and himself standing over the skull-headed figure.

  “I am here for you. I am Death, the Grim Reaper.”

  “You don’t say. Seeing as how you are here, you could probably use a haircut?” Dave said, smiling at the smile he saw in the mirror. “Even Death can’t go around looking shaggy.” The customer’s expression did not change. “How about I make a deal with you. If I can give you a haircut, and you pay for it, you can go away and come back in a few weeks when you’ve got something and if I can give you a haircut each time then we’ll keep things square, you and me. If you don’t have anything for me to cut, then I’ll be your guest.”

  “Sounds fair,” Death said.

  Dave began to snip at imaginary hairs when he noticed that, stuck in the joint of his shears, a long grey hair protruded from the screw. He’d missed it the day before when he was cleaning up. He’d been in a hurry. When he closed, he always had somewhere to go to with so little time to get there. Even today, when he closed at noon, he had promised to take his wife shopping.

  Dave tapped the scissors on the back of the chair, but as he brought them down he pulled the strand from the joint and proceeded to snip. “Well, what do you know? You do have something.”

  Death sat up straight in the chair, surprised. He held up the lone hair and placed it in Death’s hand. “There you go. See? You did need a haircut. You might be Death or the Grim Reaper, but you still got some life in you, at least enough for a haircut!”

  The barber set his scissors on the towel, picked up a bottle of green liquid, and poured a handful of pine-scented eau de cologne in the palm of his hand. He rubbed it over Death’s bald pate, and then picked up the mirror to show the dark figure the beauty of his barber arts. “All done. That’ll be twelve fifty.”

  Death stood, fumbled with his long, dirty cloak, reached into his pocket and drew out a ten and a five.

  “Keep the change,” Death said to the barber. “I’ll be back when I need another.”

  “Any time,” Dave said. “Always a pleasure. I’m here and open early.”

  THE MIDDLE

  The Muse

  BOBBY SHOVED PHIL in the microwave. They’d been best buddies since they were young.

  In those days, Phil hardly said a word and Bobby was a lonely boy who people claimed was “troubled.” Yet no matter what passed between them, Phil trusted Bobby implicitly. He would stare at Bobby with his wide eyes. Sometimes Phil would even blink. Sometimes Phil would smile because whatever Bobby did moved Phil in ways that made Phil feel alive. In many ways, Phil was Bobby’s muse, and Bobby was often astounded at what came out when Phil spoke and made Bobby think that a spirit animated every joint of his best pal.

  They had gone to school together until Bobby was teased, then beaten up, then cast out of friendships by the other kids because he insisted that wherever he went Phil had to go. Phil, he insisted, was helpless, and a few of the kinder kids felt empathy for Bobby’s pal, with his limp body that Bobby pushed around the school in a small, wheeled chair.

  Some of the girls Bobby asked out on dates during his sophomore and senior years at high school found Phil’s company amusing at first, but if Bobby began to get close to any of them Phil always had to throw in his two cents worth and ruin things. One girl asked why Bobby just didn’t dump his friend. After all, Phil was starting to wear thin on the less patient girls who laughed at Phil’s jokes, at first, then didn’t.

  When Bobby graduated from university and proposed to his sweetheart, it was Phil who told her that she could do far better than Bobby if she looked harder and wasn’t so willing to settle for less. Despite what Phil said, however, Doris accepted Bobby’s earnest proposal and spoke sharply to Phil. It was, after all, none of Phil’s goddamned business. Bobby apologized and told Doris that Phil was more or less a brother to him, that despite the physical limitations and awkwardness, Phil was really a good soul at heart, someone who just wanted to love and be loved in ways Bobby would know and Phil could not. One night when Bobby and Doris were making love, they stopped, lay in the dark, and were certain they could hear Phil weeping.

  As Bobby’s marriage began to deteriorate, Phil became more of a problem. Whenever the three of them went out for dinner or a drink, Phil insisted that he practice his enunciation, and was certain he would someday master the words “bottle of beer” despite all the warnings that no amount of practice would ever overcome the impossibility of pronouncing that simple phrase. The beers, not just in bottles or cans, but jugs of draught served in increasingly larger mugs, would accumulate on their table. Even when Doris waved the waitresses off, Bobby had to down them all because he felt sorry for his pal, and the problem was not really Phil’s but Bobby’s. Doris would slide a glass in front of Phil, but Phil always begged off because of his delicate condition. “It goes right through me,” he would explain. One day, Doris had enough. She packed her belongings and drove away.

  “You still have me to talk to,” Phil said, offering to console Bobby. “C’mon, Bobby. Be my muse. You inspire me and fill me with life.”

  But Bobby began to think Phil was the root of all evil in his life—the reason Bobby couldn’t hold a job, the master of deception behind his broken relationships, the voice that simply wouldn’t shut up even in the moment of silent remembrance at Bobby’s father’s funeral. Phil had to go, and Phil knew it. For several days he sat in his place at the kitchen table and just stared at Bobby, distrustful yet hopeful that the good old days, the days when Bobby’s friends who loved Phil’s jokes would gather around them to hear Phil sing and to watch him spin his head three hundred and sixty degrees.

  Bobby knew that putting Phil in the microwave was going to be a messy business. After all, he told himself without moving his lips so Phil would not hear or even read his thoughts, the oven would overheat, spark, and explode, perhaps burn down the horrible basement apartment to which Bobby had resigned his life with Phil. Microwaving Phil would be his salvation.

  “Talk to me, Bobby,” Phil pleaded as his dearest companion shoved his limp left arm into the door after it caught during Bobby’s first attempt to close it. “Please, Bobby. I can change. I can try to hold my peace. Remember when I begged you never to put me back in the box? You tossed that away. That was a fresh start. We can do another fresh start. Can’t we?”

  But Bobby said nothing. He wondered how long it would take, whether Phil would suffer, or if the process would burn the apartment down. He felt he could never say anything again, perhaps for as long as he lived. And when the light came on and the turntable spun, Phil’s head fell to one side, so as he rode the glass merry-go-round, his wide eyes looked out at Bobby as if asking if there was anything more to say.

  Alabaster

  THROUGH THE GREEN and clear lake as you submerged, I could not tell the difference between your outline and an island. Your skin reminded me of alabaster. White, translucent. Your beauty spoke to me in the light passing through you and reflected by you.

  There are only so many ways I can protect you.

  There was such delight in your eyes when you found that carved, Mexican parrot at a barn sale up the Sixth Concession. The farmer must have been sitting there forever among the round bundles of greying hay, trying to sell it. I know how proud you were of it for the brief time it was yours, the same look you had in your eyes for the few hours we had our son. I failed to hold both tightly.

  When I brought it out to show the neighbour you were talking to, and it slipped from my hands and shattered on the rock, I thought the world had broken.

  Everything that should have wings is heavier than air. The instant the bird’s short flight began, I knew it could not fly, and the hope went out of your eyes.

  Now, as you swim, I know your eyes are open under water, looking for something that you once had and no longer see, and I cannot tell the difference between the lake and your tears.

  The Tiptoe Effect

  WE WELCOMED A bundle of joy into our lives and the thanks we got was that it grew teeth and bit us. It would bite us if we woke it up by not tiptoeing. We had to tiptoe around it at first, so it wouldn’t wake. Waking it was bad. At first, it didn’t have any teeth, but when we sat it in its vibrating chair, sometimes in the middle of the dining room table and sometimes in the corner of our bedroom, it would grunt and demand we pay attention to it. It made all sorts of demands, not by speaking or saying anything, but simply by being there and thinking its way into our brains until all we could think about was the bundle of joy.

  The teeth it grew were sharp. If we thought it was asleep, we’d pry open its lips and see if it had grown more teeth, and it would snap its jaws shut on us. Shit, those were sharp teeth! They could chew clean through to the bone with one chomp. And it was getting more teeth. It would hold us hostage by crying and making impossible demands. Day and night, it kept up its insistence. We’d been warned, but we had no idea it would be like this. Then it began to grow.

  It was still a bundle of joy, and it didn’t stop being a bundle of joy, but as it became larger and larger, without any appreciable signs of changing into anything remotely human it started grabbing at things and breaking them. That’s when we knew we had a problem on our hands.

  By this time, the bundle of joy had grown so heavy we had trouble moving it from room to room, so we got a dolly, and pushed it with all our strength, and propped it in a corner of the living room. We didn’t have many rooms, and the bundle of joy insisted on having its own space.

  It made terrible smells, awful, noxious exhaustions that came from its mouth and other parts, and if we tried to help it out by cleaning it, it would bite us more, snapping its jaws shut on any part of us that came close enough to attack. And if we weren’t careful, the bundle of joy would throw up on us or crap on us. Its crap could hurtle across a room if we weren’t careful. We had to be very careful.

  And it kept on reading our minds. If we even thought of something we wanted to do the bundle of joy would insist no and make us do something it wanted to do, most of which was stuff we had never imagined ourselves doing, stupid stuff, stuff that made us look like idiots if we did it in public. And we did.

  It asked us to go out in the middle of the night if it had the craving for mushy food, especially mushy cod. All its food had to be mushy. And awful tasting. Once we tried tasting it. We tasted a spoonful of mushy cod. It was awful, and the bundle of joy caught sight of us making gagging faces at the taste of the mushy cod, and started screaming, telling us, telepathically and demonstratively that we had to lay off its mushy cod or else. It was frightening—not just the bundle of joy or its veiled threats but the mushy cod.

  When we couldn’t move it anymore, when it was way too heavy to lift or shove or even reason with, it started wrecking the furniture. It would grab hold of a table and start chewing on the legs. It would roll over to a chair and gnaw on the rungs. It had to put every bloody thing we owned in its mouth. Everything the bundle of joy touched was gooey with slobber or mushy cod.

  We thought we had it cornered in a part of the living room we rarely used, a part where our old stereo used to stand but that the bundle of joy had broken by pushing the buttons the wrong way, so all the old cassettes played at high speed and sounded like mice. The bundle of joy loved that. Good, we thought. We will play it the sound of singing mice to keep it happy so it won’t bite us or spew on us and demand more mushy cod but that was short-lived.

  One morning, when the house was quiet for the first time in ages, we fell asleep. We fell into a deep sleep, a sleep almost like death where we couldn’t hear anything going on around us, and when we opened our eyes we were startled out of our wits. The bundle of joy was leaving.

  It told us it wanted its own life, that it had learned to walk, and talk, and disagree not only with us but with the world, just like we used to disagree with the world when it got to us. It told us it loved us, sort of, and we had to admit that we had grown to love it too, not in the way someone loves an oppressive leader or a country with a restrictive regime but in an odd way we hadn’t considered. We told it we loved it too, perhaps more than we cared to admit.

  The door closed and our bundle of joy was gone. We weren’t sure whether we had been saved or if a hole opened in our lives. We sat and drank our coffee on the living room couch and stared at the space where we had cornered the bundle of joy, and wondered how it all could have passed so quickly that we couldn’t see what enormity the bundle of joy had been and how it had grown into something else when we thought we weren’t watching and even when it was changing right before our eyes.

  The Warm-Up

  PEG TOLD HIM it was just the beginning.

  There was enough snow outside to make a glacier think twice about sticking its nose beyond the doorstep. Peg knew her husband wasn’t going anywhere. He’d have to walk three kilometers along the back trail to the flag stop. That kind of committed energy just wasn’t in him.

  She wanted to leave. She deserved to leave. Tom had been an ass all day, and she couldn’t stand it anymore.