Writing Spaces

“You can say no.”

Could she? Susan’s finger flicked over the edge of the lawyer’s square conference table, wishing it were round. Straight edges unsettled her: dangerous cliffs, appearing from nowhere, causing her elbow to knock pencils, notepads, cups of coffee to the floor. Causing her brain to fill with images of herself sailing over, into an endless fall. With roundness, with a circle, she could look ahead and always know where she would end up. Back where she started.

“It’s not enforceable,” the lawyer continued. “You’d still get the money, even if you refused the dog and the rabbit.”

Susan sagged. She didn’t want burdens. She didn’t want the yoke of caring for another being. She didn’t want reminders of her childhood cat, Mittens, and the hollow feeling that was born in her chest the night he’d disappeared. But Uncle Jeremy had loved his pets, just as he’d loved her, and perhaps she owed him at least that, to care for his gassy one-eyed Brindle pug and his three-legged English lop. Chopped lop. Susan sighed.

“You need to let people in, Susan,” Uncle Jeremy had often said. But he was wrong. Susan had slammed her heart closed when she was 20 after her parents, irrepressibly hearty outdoor enthusiasts, died in a freak storm while whitewater canoeing the Nahanni. She’d barely opened it five years later for Wally, and banged it shut again when they broke up. Now, as she was about to turn 36, Uncle J went, his own tricky heart fooling them both one last time. Susan was not opening the door to hers again, especially not for two broken, orphaned creatures.

She wasn’t like the heroines of the tiny romances she wrote and stored in the cloud. Those bumbling-yet-plucky young women—undiscovered authors who accidentally solved a crime or fortuitously saved a life, and were pulled from obscurity to win a prestigious literary prize—finally opened their eyes and their hearts to a true love who’d been there all along. Someone doting. Steadfast. Enduring. 

Before Uncle J’s death, Susan had unwillingly felt a zip of interest toward the new across-the-hall neighbour. Steve in 17A. But their one impromptu coffee—Susan in her almost-new grey capris feeling well-dressed for a change when they bumped into each other at the place downstairs—well, that coffee had been—disastrous. It was for the best. Happily-ever-afters were fiction. In real life, only grief and solitude endured.

“We’ll transfer the money to your bank,” the lawyer said now. “And you can think about the animals. They’re at the Humane Society until you decide.”

Could Susan take the money without the pug and the lop? She’d feel like a traitor to Uncle Jeremy. If she simply refused the money? Her freelance editing business was fine, it’s fine, but $100,000 would definitely keep kibble on the table. For all of them. Susan’s jaw and her resolve both wobbled. She knew these animals. They trusted her. And surely, they also missed Uncle J. She pictured them behind bars at the pound, each sunken into the far corner of a metal cage. Confused. Sad. 

She didn’t have to love them. She only had to house them. I’m a 35-year-old self-employed recluse with two special-needs animals and a relationship phobia. Put that on the dating sites. Swipe left.

“Yes.” She straightened. “I can do it. I’ll take them.”

The worst part was walking them. Uncle J’s Old Ottawa South yard had been large, treed, fenced. Susan had a downtown high-rise, across Elgin Street from a public park. The one animal carrier she’d found at Uncle J’s place was huge, big enough for dog and rabbit, but far too heavy for Susan. On their first sortie from her apartment, she got it only halfway down the hallway, pug and lop rebounding inside. She dragged the heavy carrier and its ricochetting passengers back to 17B, clipped the animals to their leashes, and hoisted one under each arm. 

She secured each leash around a palm and gripped the animals’ warm bodies, with Brewster, the pug, on the left so he could see whoever was coming, with his singular eye. She squeezed Hamish to her right, holding his three paws snug. Back at the elevator, hands full, struggling with her charges’ shifting mass, Susan did the only thing she could think of. She pushed the call button with her chin.

Steve from 17A came out in time to see her mouth against the metal plate. Steve with his brilliant smile. His flash of white teeth. Friendly Steve. Super-hot Steve. Failed-coffee Steve. He was some kind of athlete, she wasn’t sure what, they hadn’t got that far at coffee before her elbow had knocked his drink over the table’s square corner and sent her own following. She’d insisted on paying, then realized her credit card and phone were in her ancient cargo shorts, crumpled on her bedroom floor. Yet still, whenever they rode the elevator together, Steve smiled at her, a gym bag always over his shoulder, great skin, and a fresh-washed smell every time he came home. Susan took care to stand far away so she didn’t end up sticking her nose between his shapely pecs, inhaling his freshness. Inhaling the warmth of another human body.

Spotting her now, Steve raised his brows. Susan groaned and pulled away from the button, wiping her damp chin on her shoulder. Mentally, she consoled herself. Okay. Good. This is good. Steve seeing me slobbering on the button. That means no hope. Got it, brain? No Steve. No Mr. Hotness. No Mr. Flash. No entanglements.

“Hi, Susan.” She did like his voice. “Need a hand?”

“No, I’m good, Flash. Um. Steve. Just…” She hefted the two animals, a kind of apology or a what-can-you-do. He wiped the brass plate with his sleeve and pushed the button again. The elevator came, and he held his arm gallantly against the door while she bungled in. He followed. The door closed. The car descended.

With a loud toot, Brewster passed wind. The smell was thick. Steve’s eyebrows lifted anew, and his nose wrinkled. Susan cringed. “Bad dog,” she whispered.

At the lobby Steve held the elevator again, and Susan wrangled herself and the squirming animals into the revolving front door and out to the sidewalk. She stopped too close to the exit and Steve gently bumped her as he stepped out behind. “Well, okay, then,” he said, easing her aside with his hands on her arms. “I’ll see you, Susan.” Susan nodded. 

At the crosswalk, as they waited for the light, the rabbit struggled. “Hamish! Stop! I’ll drop you!” A little girl holding her mother’s hand smiled at Hamish as Susan clutched him tighter to her waist. Susan clutched, the rabbit kicked, and she felt his claws through her mother’s faded blue Mountain Equipment Co-op shirt, a piece of clothing Susan wore during most of the hours she spent sitting at her desk, along with those decrepit cargo shorts. Hamish’s claws were leaving welts on her flesh and, she was certain, rips in the shirt. She made a face of anguish at the girl, who hid her head in her own mother’s leg. The light changed and Susan ran, reaching the park on the other side. Hamish leaped for the grass. His wrapped leash cut her palm and she stumbled, dropping Brewster, who yelped. And let one rip. “We’ve got to change your food, Brew,” Susan moaned.

She lengthened the leashes and they dashed, the three of them, clumsy sideways gaits, across the spread of lawn. They slowed and lingered along the edges of the carefully kept flower beds, and finally sat, worn out and panting slightly, under a spreading willow.

“With a hundred thou, we can invest in a couple of cloth carriers,” Susan said. Hamish bounced and his long ears flopped. Brewster lay his head on his paw and looked at her with his eye. “Come on, then.” They took the long way home to stop at the Pet Valu, where the staff cuddled the animals while Susan paid and cut the tags off the two cloth-sided, hard-bottomed bags. Hard Bottomed Steve, she thought. Why did everything come back to Steve?

The rest of the month, three times a day, Susan walked the animals, resenting the disruption to her work schedule and to her long, quiet hours of writing. But she was grudgingly grateful that she saw the sky more often, felt the sun on her face, and found her waist-pinching cargo shorts hanging looser. She began looking forward to evening TV in a little circle of warmth, Hamish on her chest and Brewster at her hip, the three of them propped by sofa cushions and sharing bites from her plate.

Some nights, on the edge of sleep, when Susan’s mind opened to all the things she couldn’t admit in daylight, she suspected that she wasn’t empty at all. She was full of need, full of yearning, full of love that had no place to land. She was filled with an ache beyond what she could channel into work. Into cleaning her apartment. Into writing.

Her stories changed slightly: her heroines were less bumbling, more self-respecting. They didn’t have true loves, but lovers. Unsettled, Susan wondered what was wrong with her, and revised these tales until they were what she was used to seeing on the page. Familiar. Safe. Susan was not looking to fall off the edge of her fiction into any kind of emotional whitewater.

She also wondered why she saw so much of Steve. His door across the hall eased open as she came and went. Whenever Susan thought she and her animals had made a clean getaway into the elevator, Steve would dart from his unit and step on beside her. “Hi, Susan.” He would twist his lips in a tiny grin, wipe the button, and take one of the carriers from her hand.

But then came her 36^th birthday, and the chicken soup. She’d been on the sofa for three days, in and out of fever, managing, barely, to keep the animals fed and scoop their poop from the emergency litter boxes she kept in the bathroom. She had an overdue contract, a fever of 101, and a headache the size of the city. She woke to an insistent knocking on the door. Loud, aggravating knocking. Nobody knew it was her birthday. There was no reason to get up. The knocking came again. “Ugh. Hamish, can you get that? Brewster?” Hamish looked at her from under a floppy ear. Brew passed wind.

When the fourth long rapping came, Susan pushed the wet, plastered hair from her sweaty forehead, dragged off the quilt, and lumbered in her stained, oversized Redblacks jersey and sagging socks to the peephole.

Oh no.

“What, Steve?” she croaked through the door.

“Susan, are you sick?”

“Yes.”

“Can you open the door? I haven’t seen you since Monday. I made chicken soup.” He hefted a Rubbermaid bowl toward the peephole.

Susan leaned her hot forehead on the cool door. Just absolutely no way. “No, Steve, sorry. This really isn’t a good time.”

“Susan. Come on. You need a friend. When you’re sick, I mean. I’m your friend, Susan. Come on.”

“I don’t want friends, Steve,” she said through the door, and shuffled back to the sofa without waiting to see if he stayed or left. Under the quilt, lop and pug curled to her again, Susan’s heart took a sudden topple over a cliff’s edge and straight into loneliness. She plunged into a river of sorrow, meeting her own sodden, drowning heart. “Mom,” she whimpered, for the first time in 15 years. “Mommy.” She sobbed herself into an exhausted sleep.

She woke the next day with her fever gone, replaced by shame. She hadn’t needed to be so harsh with Steve. Perhaps…No. Same as the spilled coffee, same as when she’d slobbered on the elevator button, it was better for him not to have illusions about her. She saw, now, that she was swimming in need. Her resulting one-sided infatuation would end up embarrassing both of them, and the further she stayed from him, the better. So, she made avoiding him an uncompromising mission.

It was considerable work, dodging someone who lived across the hall and had an uncanny sense of her movements. Susan gave it her all, and got reluctant satisfaction from counting her streak of elevator rides without Steve. Until the Friday she realized there had been no movement from his door for two days.

Three days.

Four.

By the sixth day, hands sweaty, she was pacing outside his apartment, lecturing herself. “He’s a kind, decent person. He might need help. Knock on the door, Susan. Just knock.”

She knocked. No one answered. She knocked again, waited, perspiration trickling under her arms and on her forehead, and finally turned, relieved, and a little hollow, to her own door. As she opened it, Hamish and Brewster tumbled into the hallway. She grabbed for them.

“Susan?” The voice behind her was weak. Steve swayed, leaning on the doorjamb, a crutch under his arm. Susan’s eyes fell to his left leg and the enormous brace around his knee.

“Oh,” she said. “Steve.” Distracted, she lost her grip on Brewster, who barrelled into Steve’s apartment. Hamish lopped after him.

“Strained ACL,” said Steve. “Knee. Balance beam. Bad dismount. I won’t need surgery, that’s the good thing, but I’m benched. With Worlds coming up.” He gave her a small grin. “I could use a friend.”

From the hall, Susan watched Hamish and Brewster sniffing the corners of Steve’s apartment. A memory of her parents appeared—on her ninth birthday, a month after Mittens went missing—holding a new, gleaming, green bike between them, insisting they would help her get past her fear and learn to ride. It took weeks, but Susan mastered the bike. Her thoughts went to Wally, who had pushed her hard to go freelance when she complained over and over about the ridiculous management and low pay at her editing firm. After she broke up with him, she ended up doing exactly what he’d suggested, and now she couldn’t fully piece together why she’d left him. She watched Brewster and Hamish settling themselves at Steve’s feet. An odd feeling crept through her chest. Full. Solid. Warm.

Brewster ripped one. 

“Whew,” said Steve.

Susan—Susan laughed. Her heart hadn’t listened to her cautions and rules. It had been pouring out love right under her nose. “Uncle Jeremy,” she said, “you’ve put me in the soup.”

“Pardon?” said Steve.

“I thought I would make us some soup. Chicken soup, Steve.” Susan planted her hand on his chest until he hopped aside, then marched herself through his doorway and to his kitchen.

~~

The Menagerie was long-listed in the Lanark Lit Writing Competition, Dec. 2024