Eve Morton

Tag: life

  • 31 for 31: The Architects by Eve Morton

    This is a story so clearly about my workplace.

    I teach at one of the leading Engineering schools in the world: the University of Waterloo. As a sessional, this often means I’m teaching those engineers English for a credit and I often get hostile audiences, ones who don’t really care about English Lit. That’s fine. But one of my favourite stories to tell them is about the structure of campus itself, and how at one point, there was an entire building built to keep people apart from one another, just like they, too, want to be kept apart from English Lit.

    (Hagey Hall, one of the Arts buildings on campus, was built in a strange shape so that protests could not form; it was built after Kent State and this was seen as a positive feature. My old PhD supervisor is the source for this lore, since he was there during the actual construction process).

    I’ve told this story about Hagey Hall so many times that it was inevitable that during my mat leave, when I wouldn’t have to walk its spooky halls, I would write a short story about a similar university that has similar problems with the shape (and capacity) of certain rooms.

    So follow along with this weird and twisty tale.

    The Architects

    By Eve Morton

    The first time I witnessed a room disappear on campus, I was a proctor for an exam.

    When you’re in graduate school, you’ll take whatever work you can get. All students are desperate and I was no exception. When all the qualification you need to be a proctor is the necessary gender in order to escort students to the bathroom during the exam, hover outside to make sure they don’t cheat, and then take them back to the room, it’s an easy gig. Even when it is at seven in the morning, on the first day of winter, and in a part of the school I’d never seen before. Most of the other proctor spots needed men, since they had women profs. This was the only class, for a man named Tom North, who required a woman. 

    I snapped up the opportunity as soon as I could. I received a confirmation from the admin staff, and waited the week until the exam was set. I’d never met Tom North before, but since he was a staple of the old guard on campus, I’d seen his framed face on the wall of the school’s teacher’s lounge. He was a Big Deal back in the day, but he’d since become a dinosaur. In the age of social media and Rate My Professor, he would have barely received tenure. Then again, they don’t do tenure anymore.

    I took the bus on the designated morning while it was still dark. Frost dotted the campus lawns as I walked deeper and deeper into the hulking buildings as they shifted and changed from one generation of architecture to the next. When the campus first opened, there had only been the brick buildings, the yellow-painted welcome center at the front of the campus, and the expansive library. The brick buildings had now become the designated Arts area, where my office was in a basement. The welcome center stayed roughly the same, save for a few updates to plumbing, and the library was now in the center, rather than the far edge, of the campus itself. The rest of the campus had been added on in the last fifty years, thanks to the school’s graduates and reputation becoming more prominent for Math, Sciences, and Engineering. As I walked, the buildings seemed to evolve alongside me. They became sleeker and taller, filled with windows and elongated forms, until it felt as if I had wandered too far from the 1950s brutalism that marked my office into a sci-fi landscape. 

    I was amazed. I’d never needed to go beyond the library before. Even when I was on the top floor of that building, and could see the outstretched campus, I never looked too closely at the architecture. Only the foliage, and the Canadian geese that stayed here all winter long. 

    Though I was acting as a proctor for an Arts class–Milton and his Contemporaries, according to the course calendar–exam season demanded bigger rooms, and so, better buildings were used. I had thought I would be ushered into the gym, but the room I needed to go to was in a building called M2. It was for Maths and Sciences. I located it on the edge of the campus, almost a twenty minute walk from where my own office was, and I arrived with barely ten minutes to spare. I hurried through the glass doors, warming instantly, and walked past large fossils and rock specimens from the local mines encased in class. I wanted to stay and linger, examine what seemed to be a hidden museum inside a university campus, but I was more concerned about making a good impression on Tom North. 

    I located the stairs and headed to the second floor where the exam was. I stepped out and realized it was the third floor. I doubled back into the stairwell, but there was no other door than the one I’d stepped into. Only two twists of the stairs. 

    The second floor was gone. Or at least, I had no access to it in the stairwell. 

    I found the elevator on the ground level. I now only had five minutes until the exam began. In the elevator, I punched the #2 key easily. I stepped out a second later into an area of campus that looked like any other. There were tile floors that scuffed my shoes, thick wooden doors leading into various rooms, and a large foyer.

    An empty foyer. 

    Even though it had been a long time since I’d written an exam myself, there were always early birds outside, hastily cramming until the last minute. Or late stragglers who wandered in from a bus, dazed and disoriented. 

    But there was no one here. Not even footprints or boot tracks from the limited snow outside. There was no evidence at all that anyone but me had been in the building all morning. 

    I walked down one of the two corridors that split off from the foyer. I compared the number of the room I’d been given for the exam against the doors around me. I walked in a semi-circle and came out the other side of the large foyer. 

    There was nothing. No room, and the only way there could have been a room with that number, would have been if the exam could take place here. In the foyer. From the way the stairs and the halls curved, it was the only way to make sense of anything. 

    “Hello?” I called out, thinking of nothing else to do. 

    No answer. 

    I started to panic then, believing this to be my error and my error alone. My phone had no signal in the thick walls, so I stepped out of the building–it probably wasn’t the right one anyway–and called the front desk in the English Department.

    “Hello?” a woman named Margaret answered. “How can I help you?”

    I explained to Margaret the situation. “I’m a proctor for Tom North, but I think I’m lost. I can’t find the room.” I gave her the number. I heard her click the keyboard on the other side. When she was silent a long time, I babbled about receiving a confirmation for the job, and that though I’d never met Professor North before, I didn’t want to leave him with a bad impression. “If I’m late, it’s one thing. But I don’t want to make it so his students suffer, either.”

    More clicks. Soft breathing from the other side. “This is odd. Says the exam was supposed to be in the Arts department.” She listed a number close to my office. 

    “What? I was never told. I’ll head right over.”

    “Then he cancelled it,” Margaret added, her voice thin. “I’m so sorry. I guess no one got around to telling you. It’s the end of the year, and–“

    “Oh. Oh.” I let out a breath. It was a mistake. No one’s fault. When Margaret assured me that I’d still be paid for my time, all three hours the exam was supposed to go on, I really had nothing to be mad about. 

    “Again, we’re sorry,” Margaret said. “Enjoy your day–and your holidays!”

    I spent the rest of the morning in the strange building, looking at the fossils and the rock specimens I’d never seen before. But soon would see, nearly every day, in time.

    *

    The second time a room disappeared on campus, I nearly missed it because it wasn’t a room at all. It was a hallway that suddenly disappeared, and nearly left me stranded in my office during a winter storm. 

    A year had passed since the incident with Tom North. I moved on from the preliminary stages of my PhD, passed the classes and the comprehensive exams, and was now in my writing mode. Tom North had retired shortly after the proctor mix-up, and I’d heard through the mailroom gossip circle that he’d died. Not uncommon for professors of his generation. It was one of the main issues–spoken about in hushed, polite tones, of course–that people in the department reminded me of when I selected Maurice Callahan as my own supervisor. He was of Tom North’s generation, had started the PhD department when he first began teaching at the university, and was already in his mid-seventies. He’d had no health problems so far, but that seemed to be a strike against him. It would only be a matter of time. 

    I liked Maury, though, as he wanted to be called. He was funny. He laughed at my jokes. And there was a certain allure to the fact that he was almost as old as the school itself. He’d watched the campus unfold into the strange monolith that it was now. 

    “It had a completely different reputation ten, twenty years ago,” he told me during one of our monthly supervisory meetings. “It was an Arts school, through and through. You know the sculpture that’s just outside Hubert Hall?”

    I nodded. The sculpture was off a flat man, as if he’d been steamrolled, throwing a ball in the air. 

    “It’s not a ball. It’s a shot-put. It was supposed to be a symbol for the sports team–the flames–and a symbol for Prometheus stealing fire.”

    “Supposed to?”

    “Yes, well, I think he sort of loses his context now. The art may stay, but meanings change. And well, it feels like we’re strictly in the punishment stage of Prometheus’s life, getting our livers plucked out.”

    I laughed. I could see–and sympathize with–his disdain for the lack of funding the Arts was now receiving. “That’s hindsight for you, I guess.”

    “That’s the thing,” Maury said. “Prometheus means foresight. We should have seen this coming before, not after, our funding was gutted. Hindsight was Prometheus’s brother, Epimetheus.”

    “I don’t know that story,” I said, cheeks blushing. I made a note to look it up, but Maury told it to me anyway.

    “He was the twin of Prometheus, and together they were tasked with giving animals traits. But since Epimetheus lacks foresight like Prometheus, he didn’t give anything to man. He was a fool, in short, which then led his brother to steal fire and stand trial for that crime. Personally, I think we undervalue Epimetheus. He can be the fool, sure, but he’s also the kind one. There is no ulterior motive here. He’s pure materialism, which is to say, thought comes afterwards. He makes something. Then he tells us about it.” Maury laughed. “I think a lot of PhD students can benefit from that attitude. Not you, of course.” He gave me a sly smile. “But I see many students tell me what they’re going to write, and then never do it. Just write the damn thing, you know? Then you can steal fire somewhere else. Now, let’s get back to your project.”

    It was only three days after that conversation when I became stuck in my office. The hallway that I’d taken to get there had simply disappeared. There were two main stairwells to gain entry to the basement of the building: one was the main entrance, flanked by glass doors and school colors, and then there was the back exit that was barely noticeable, especially in winter, when snow was piled close to the doorway. It was known as the “smoker’s exit” since those piles of snow often turned gray in no time with cigarette butts and ash. 

    I liked using the smoker’s doorway. It made coming and going to my office feel clandestine, and since students always seemed to recognize me on campus and want to discuss their grades, being covert was necessary. I’d taken that exit as an entrance like I always did, walked by the bathrooms and the information area, and then settled into my office, next to many other PhD offices. An hour, maybe two, had passed. When I was ready to leave, I wanted to use the bathroom.

    But they were gone. The entire information center and its waiting room was gone. There was only a blank wall, nothing hanging on it, where it had once been. 

    “I don’t…” I didn’t finish my sentence because I heard it echo. I placed a hand against the wall that I swore had never been there. It was solid. I pressed my ear against it. I swore I could hear something–murmuring, chattering–but it could have been my own heartbeat. I tried to follow the wall, to see if it would lead me somewhere else, but it was truly a dead end. Just a wall where there had once been a way out. 

    I turned the other direction, in search of the elevator. That was the only other way I knew of getting to the front exit. My heart did not stop pounding in my chest until I stepped out on the first floor, saw the blazing sunlight through the glass doors, and touched them. They were real. They let me leave. 

    I was too spooked to go around back, where the smokers left their cigarettes, to check if that door was still there. By the time I did, a week and a half later, nothing had changed. 

    The hallway was back where it had been. There was a smoker’s exit again. 

    But a clear sign had now been posted in red, angry letters NO SMOKING WITHIN 9M OF THE BUILDING. The janitorial staff, and a handful of grad students, were now in obeisance of that law, and stood nine meters back. I wanted to go over and join them, take up smoking simply to ask if they had been there last week, and if so, did they get trapped outside, unable to get back in? When had the hallway come back? What the hell had happened?

    But I didn’t say a thing to them. 

    I saw Maurice instead. 

    *

    “Now that’s interesting,” he said, after I’d spilled the incident about the hallway and the previous one a year ago with Tom North’s nonexistent exam room. “You should write a story about that.”

    “I don’t want to,” I said. Maurice often worked under the premise that nearly everyone obtaining an English Literature PhD wanted to be a writer in some way. He did when he was young, though, and some of the other grad students also harbored literary ambitions–but I just wanted to understand things. Including the strange campus. “I just want to know that I can trust the campus maps, and trust where I think I’m going.”

    “You can trust the maps,” Maurice said. “Especially the online ones. They update more frequently.”

    “So you’re telling me that the online map would have reflected that sudden change in my office? Even if it was only for an hour or a week?”

    “I don’t know. I don’t use it myself.”

    “How do you get around?” I asked him. He’d told me on several occasions that he walked everywhere, including to and from the campus since his house was merely a block away. It kept him young, he joked. But maybe it also kept him with working knowledge of a place that I was starting to realize I could never fully pin down or figure out. 

    “On foot,” he answered obviously.

    “But how do you remember where to go?”

    “I’ve been here a long time, remember. I was here when the Dean gave the order to build most of the newer parts of campus. I was even on some committees when they were electing to reshape some of this building, too.”

    “They’ve renovated Hubert Hall?” I looked around the thick brick walls of his office, so much like mine in the basement. The architecture itself was so dense cell phones never worked. Even some of the computers that had been installed didn’t get wifi and had to rely on Ethernet cables. “Hard to tell.”

    “I know, but they did. And it was a serious endeavor and expense, hence the committee. It was in the 1960s,” he began, getting somewhat of a dreamy quality to his voice. “I won’t bore you with too many details, because I could write a book about this myself.”

    “Maybe you should.”

    “Maybe. But I think it’s been done. Either way, this meeting was about the foyer. They didn’t want a large one for students to congregate inside. In effect, they wanted to avoid protesting. There was a lot of uproar about Kent State, with good reason, and so when I say that the staff didn’t want protestors, don’t think they were regressive. They merely wanted to save student lives. So they decided to not have a large foyer, and extend what they needed to do through many hallways instead.”

    “Really? Like where my office is?”

    “Yes. That’s why I thought it was interesting that a hallway disappeared. Almost like the school is fighting back, protesting itself.”

    I didn’t want to believe him, yet I could feel it in my bones that he was right. “What about the other building?” I asked a moment later. “The one where Tom North’s exam should have happened, but didn’t? M2, Mathematics. That’s a newer building, right?”

    “It is. But North–oh, he hated that area.”

    “Hard not to,” I said then quickly added, “given the history between arts and sciences and funding. But it was really pretty. There were fossils there. It was nice.”

    “Yes, I’ve seen those myself. The architect is a bit better than this brutalism. At least phones work.” 

    “Sometimes,” I added. “Not that morning with me.”

    “Huh.” He shrugged, and then ran his hand over his beard. “From what I recall, though, the architect who designed those buildings was related to the first one who did Hubert Hall, version 1.0.”

    “Including the hallways?”

    “I think so. They were brothers?” Maury shook his head. “No, couldn’t have been with the generational difference, especially in styles. Must have been father and son, or something like that. I think I remember the surnames being similar. Potter or Pohle or something like that. So yeah, father and son.” When he noticed me take a note, he added with a wry smile, “be sure to double-check my information, of course. I’m not exactly as much of a library as I used to be.”

    I told him I would. Then I remembered the library. “What about that?”

    “What about the library? It’s been here as long as I can remember.”

    “Right. Who built it? Was it the father or the son?”

    “That I don’t know, but I would assume the father. It hasn’t been renovated, though, aside from the tech updates. So maybe it’s the only place on campus that will stay still.”

    “Maybe.” I wrote down ‘Library’ and underlined it several times. Then, as easily and as quickly as we spoke about the campus, we moved onto my PhD research. My dissertation was almost complete, and when it was, my time at this school would be coming to an end. 

    *

    The third time the campus changed shape for me, I was prepared. 

    I was teaching a class in the Environmental Sciences building. It was closer to the center of campus, having been one of the first buildings in the expansion of the early 1990s. Everyone on campus back then had welcomed the addition. It was the early days of environmental awareness at a popular cultural level; the legwork in critical Sciences had already been done by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in the 1960s, and so, having a building on an already liberal and progressive campus devoted to the green movement was easy to understand and push through budgetary approval. 

    It was also easy to make the building stunning. Filled with high glass windows and large, spacious foyers, there was clearly no fear of protestors here. Entirely one side of the foyer walls was covered in a make-shirt trellis, complete with waterfall that allowed whatever greenery on the trellis to bloom and grow and thrive. The staircase into the upper levels was open and allowed for complete viewing of the green wall. I loved looking at it up close–but those stairs gave me vertigo. I often took the elevators to my class on the third floor, or I took the back stairwell when there was a line-up for the elevator. 

    I was halfway through the spring semester when I noticed the contours of the building change. I took the stairwell to the third floor, but the doorway out read the second. I continued walking and added another flight, but came out at the fourth floor. 

    The third floor had disappeared. 

    I walked down to the building’s ground level and started again. The elevators took me to the third floor, but when I walked out, it was still the second. That was where all the offices, rather than classrooms, were so it was easy to recognize. I doubled back once again and stood in the foyer. Some of my students had already started to arrive, and seeing me, went over to say hello. 

    “Are you all right?” a girl named Deidre asked me. “You look a little pale, if you don’t mind me saying.”

    I considered lying for a moment, saying I was sick, and cancelling the class. How could I get to the class if the floor didn’t seem to exist? But when I saw Shawn, another student of mine, take the free-floating stairs next to the green wall, and make it to the third floor without doubling back, I realized there was only one way to the room. 

    “I’m fine,” I told Deidre. “But will you walk with me? I don’t quite like heights.”

    Deidre was one of those eager to please students, so she took me up on my offer without protest. I made a mental note to give her 100 for participation for the next six weeks, until this class was done, since I knew I’d be relying on her far more. We found the room together, as easy as pie, except that the nagging feeling of the floor disappearing again bothered me. 

    We were in the middle of Marilyn Robinson’s Gilead this week, a text about an absent father writing to his son who will not remember him, and it felt as if the campus was mocking me in some way. Or aligning in the best way possible. From one of the large glass windows in the room, as I read off the passage I wanted my students to analyze, I saw the library’s ornate edifice and tall, imposing structure. 

    The library, where nothing seemed to change. The library, where from its top-most floor, all of the campus could be visible. 

    I quickly finished my class, with ten minutes to spare, and dismissed them. Deidre stayed behind. “Do you need help getting down the stairs?”

    “No thank you,” I told her. “Going down is always easier than going up.”

    She nodded, and gave a silent promise to be there the next week. I knew it would not be a problem, though. The campus was going to right itself, even if I had to be the mediator between father and son. 

    *

    My visits to the library, at first, were uneventful. I went to the top floor, studied the landscape, but still came back with all I’d seen before: a lot of nice greenery, a campus split in two, and those ever-present geese. I wandered through the stacks, trying to find all I could about the architects who built the campus, but only came up with names, the thinnest of biographies, and blueprints. Frederick and Philip Pohle. Father and son, much like Maury had said, and with different design schools influencing their work. 

    When Frederick had died, Philip took over his business, but left many clients unhappy with his attempts to become the Canadian Frank Lloyd Wright. He didn’t have enough ambition to take on that kind of legacy, however, or the proper work ethic, so most of his designs remained on paper. The only places that came to fruition were ones he inherited from his father: the campus extension, a renovated downtown building that I had never liked, and a hospital a town over that had since been torn down. Philip had no children of his own, and so the family business died with him. 

    I made photocopies of all the blueprints I could find, giving special attention to the campus extensions. I figured I could take those, at the very least, to Maury who might be able to help me piece the mystery together–but I soon realized the maps fit over one another. Not as a mere expansion of the campus, but as another layer over top. I took the photocopies out of the tray and made sure that what I’d seen in a glimpse could truly fit. Once I found the library on the blueprints, and used it as the centering anchor it was, the campuses aligned. It was perfect. They weren’t added on in a spatial way, but stacked up in geological time. 

    “Like those fossils,” I said aloud. The library was so quiet my voice, though a whisper, seemed to be a roar. Everyone in the study carrels had on headphones, so no one noticed. But I tip-toed around like a mouse, suddenly afraid that the secret was out. 

    After asking a librarian for tracing paper, I went into a study area and laid out the maps on top of one another. I traced around them, wondering if I could see the way in which floors and hallways had disappeared on me. I could make the maps work in some instances, but not in others. 

    Baffled, I logged into some of the online accounts for the school’s student body and found a message board. A handful of people described the campus as the most difficult to navigate they’d ever come across. The room I needed seemed to disappear, one person wrote, peaking my attention. It sounds crazy, but that’s what happened. I didn’t find it until a week later.

    I started to link together online reports with my own experiences. Soon enough, when I flipped over the blueprint I’d traced, so it was now a mirror image on top of the older campus, the coordinates began to make sense. Father and son had designed the exact same building, but always in opposition. 

    So how to make them stop feuding, even after death? I wondered about this for a long time. It was only as the semester wore on, and Maury began to get more persistent about my dissertation, that I remembered his words of foresight and hindsight. 

    Don’t be like Prometheus, he wrote to me in an email. You don’t want to be repeating this year over and over, even if it seems like fun. You gotta move on and finish that degree.

    But what about hindsight? I asked him in return. What if I realize now that I like the campus, and want to stay?

    He didn’t answer me for a couple days. In the interim, I’d found the sole place of unbalance in my maps of the father and son campus. While the Arts campus had its own figure of Prometheus with a shot-put/fireball, the Science side of campus did not have such a figure. Only a blank area, where someone had put a trash can and where squirrels and geese congregated. 

    We can talk about alternative plans at your next meeting, Maury wrote back. It’s usually better to teach at a different school. Shows depth. But if you really want to stay, we can figure out a way to make it work.

    I will be teaching at a different school, I thought. I’d been stuck on the father’s side of campus until that proctor exam. Frederick Pohle may have wanted me to, like the olden ways of graduate school, leave and set about on my own–but his son Philip had other plans. He was a bit more dynamic and interesting, if only on paper. He just needed more ambition and work ethic, something I knew I had in droves. If he only had his own monument to hindsight, maybe his father could be proud. 

    Then, after that, maybe the fighting could stop.

    *

    When I met with Maury a week later, I told him of my progress. He didn’t seem that surprised that my dissertation, once about the genre known as the campus novel and the subsequent works of Don DeLillo, had now become about the father and son feud that seemed to stretch on for generations in the ever-shifting landscape. 

    “I told you,” he said after I’d explained it all, including the pitch to get another statue to keep the men happy, “you should be a writer.”

    “Fine. Yes, sure, this is what I’ll write my dissertation about, and it will help me get a job here. On Philip’s campus, though. It’ll be different that way.”

    Maury didn’t say anything for a long time. He picked up the maps I’d given him, and the notes, including my sketch for the matching statue of Epimetheus on the other side. He was a flattened monument like the previous one on the other side, only he held a hammer in his hand rather than a shot-put/flame. 

    “I wanted the hammer to symbolize materialism,” I told Maury in the silence. “The fact that thought here comes after form, after the hammer blow. And I–“

    “It’ll take a lot of funding to get this to go through,” he said, cutting me off. It was not mean, only a fact. 

    “That’s fine. I can help. I don’t know how to fund beyond a bake sale, though.”

    Maury smiled. “You gotta learn grant writing soon. It’ll be a great part of your service record. And if you can pull off this statue, especially as a Canadian historical site, while also writing your dissertation, well, then, you’ll be a shoe-in as a prof here.”

    “Really?”

    “Yes. Don’t expect tenure, though,” he added quickly. “No one gets that anymore.”

    I didn’t want tenure. I just wanted to teach in that building with the fossils. I wanted to see a statue of a flattened man, holding a hammer like Epimetheus, and melding the work of father and son into one.

    *

    A year, then two, went by. My dissertation passed with few revisions and I turned it into a book about the father and son team. I applied for a job teaching Writing and Communication to the Science and Math students, and was accepted after three rounds of interviews. Not with tenure, of course, but with a three-year contract. 

    My office is now in the M2 building, and overlooks the statue of Epimetheus on the campus. 

    Though sometimes, when I walk the same stairs that lead to the second floor, it disappears, I now know how to get it back. I call out for father and son to behave, to develop some hindsight. 

    Then I take the elevator. 

    It all sorts itself out in the end. 

    When the campus is truly temperamental, and foresight or hindsight get us nowhere, then I cancel the class I need to teach entirely. I tell them to go to the library instead, because that’s where I’ll be. I make sure I am on the top floor, looking down on both time and space, and generations of a family history at once. I look out at all that I’ve inherited, all that I can claim as my own, with the right map to understand where to go next.

    When a student shows up, which sometimes happens and sometimes not, I show them the statues of Prometheus and Epimetheus, and they learn, for at least an hour, how to stay in one place. 

    END

  • 31 for 31: We Will Survive

    From urban legend to legends on stage, the tone shift from Magda Mayfly to We Will Survive is–to me–a wonderful form of whiplash.

    And the premise for We Will Survive was even better. It was also one of those few instances when I write a story specifically for an anthology, and it gets in!! First try!!

    “We Will Survive” was written for the Vinyl Cuts Anthology by Scary Dairy Press. Make a scary story but also have a tie in to some form of class rock music in some way. Oh, but don’t reproduce lyrics!

    Challenge accepted.

    Throw in some drag queens lip syncing their way to Gloria Gaynor and rescuing kids from a gay conversation camp and you pretty much have the whole story. It was a BLAST to write while my first kiddo was napping and I was experiencing a reprieve from the morning sickness of my second.

    I truly hope you enjoy it (and survive) too!

    We Will Survive

    By Eve Morton

    “How long has it been?” said Jan.

    I glanced at my watch, then at the clock on the idling car’s dashboard. I wanted the times to be different, but they weren’t. “At least a half hour.”

    “Shit. We’re screwed. We’re—” 

    I put a hand on Jan’s shoulder, but Jan brushed me away, so I turned down the radio instead. As much as I wanted to keep listening to the sultry stylings of Gloria Gaynor, the song only reminded me of what Jan already knew and what I had refused to acknowledge for the past thirty-five minutes. We really were fucked. 

    Only three days before, we’d all been getting ready to perform our latest number in the Haven Bar, a place for queers, freaks, and all those in between. Jan was in the Miss Terri get-up, transforming Jan’s current buzz cut into something more dazzling with a blond wig and a dress that cascaded down slim and ever so delicate shoulders. Markus, or Miss Mary Quite Contrary, had been in her fur number, the one with the thick collar and long sleeves to disguise the big footballer’s shoulders. Though Markus had not played the game in years, he often acted as the bouncer for Haven, so he had to cover up the muscles when he played his alter ego of Miss Mary. She was a stunning woman whenever she took the stage; a strong soprano with a show person’s charm. Last year, when she’d sung “Happy Birthday” to Haven’s owner, she’d done the Marilyn Monroe version. Just stunning, just wonderful. 

    I felt a tear slide down my cheek now, just thinking about it. Markus had left to get us gas when we’d run out on the side of the road in Arkansas, and it was now clear he was not coming back.

    “Why are we doing this?” Jan asked me, running a delicate hand through his short hair. “I mean, we hardly know this kid. We could just turn around right now. Go back.”

    “And do what?” I asked. “File a missing person’s report for Markus, which will just be ignored because he’s a big guy, or a faggy queen, and no one cares about us? Not to mention the other kid.”

    Jan looked down at his lap in shame. He’d looked the same when he’d called his father last Easter to wish him a happy holiday and a happy birthday, and his father pretended to not know who he was. I have no son, the stereotypical answer from all homophobic dads. Jan had been upset, but put on a stunning, cathartic performance of Miss Terri that night, as if to channel his father’s pronouncement. He was not his son anymore. Damn right, Miss Terri was a vixen queen who helped the less fortunate.

    I reminded Jan of that day now. “Your dad left you. My family left me. And we know Markus never really had a family to begin with. This kid—”

    “Barry,” he corrected me, and I knew he hadn’t forgotten his heart.

    “Right. Barry. He’s just like us. He’s come to watch us every single Saturday night for the past six months. Then he up and disappears. We know what’s happened to him. It’s what almost happened to all of us, what would have happened to us had there been such a thing as conversion therapy when we were his age.”

    “But there wasn’t. We just ended up homeless.”

    “And fabulous.” I tried to grin, but it was hard. The Arkansas woods around us, and the fact that Markus was still missing, got under my skin. The feeling seemed to have a life of its own. The moment we truly crossed into the Deep South, passed the freshness of Georgia’s peach stands and into the swamps of Louisiana, I felt as if we were surrounded by ghosts. Civil War soldiers; slaves; and of course the missing men and women who lay stranded like us, trying to channel Blanche Dubois and depend on the kindness of strangers, only to be taken off the earth.

    I shook my head and tried to focus. Panicking was going to get us nowhere fast. “We have to keep going.” 

    “But how?” Jan’s eyes were deep blue and utterly desperate. “Markus was bigger than both of us. And if he’s gone—”

    “Then we need to rely on what we’ve always been good at.” I looked into the backseat, where our bags had been tossed. Once we realized Barry was gone, and that his parents had sent him to one of those horrible rehabilitation camps that ran ads in the back of religious magazines, we had set off on our mission. There had been almost no discussion, just utter understanding between the three of us that we had to do this for the inner, abandoned child inside all of us. So we threw all of our clothing in a bag, plus some cash we had lying around and a map of the South that we found in the Haven’s lost and found. 

    It’ll be a fun road trip, Markus had said. If nothing else.

    Oh, we’d been so naive. Three days ago, all that worried us was whether we’d be able to break a kid who was not related to us out of a camp his parents had probably paid good money for. We had some half-baked notion of walking in, claiming to be his cousins and that there was a family emergency he needed to attend to. Since Barry often worshipped us from afar at the bar and asked us for advice between sets—advice that mostly amounted to finding the right shoes in a man’s size ten, not how to escape zealot family members—we were hoping that he’d recognize us out of makeup. If he didn’t, we were planning on humming a few songs to prime his memory pump. And then he’d go with us, and we’d introduce him to being a newly independent queer kid, and everything would be hunky-dory.

    Everything was not going hunky-dory. And without our strongest member, I had no idea what to do next. 

    Except to get dressed.

    “I think we need a disguise,” I said, and then shook my head. “No, no. I think we need to become who we really are. That’s the only way we can fight this place. That’s why Markus is missing—this would have never happened to Miss Mary. The land swallows you whole. You may as well be in a good skirt while it happens.”

    Jan looked at me as if I was crazy. Then as if I was a genius. He opened the passenger side door and, after a careful look around the woods where we were stuck, began looking through our travelling wardrobe in the backseat. “What are you waiting for, Miss Robin?”

    Power pulsed through me at my stage name. Oh, I missed her. The badass girl who could leap over tall buildings, a better Dick Grayson than the real Robin. And now we’re crime fighters, too. We looked through our clothing at the back, found the best outfits, and began to get dressed. 

    The entire time, I swore the woods were watching us. Be it ghosts or hicks or even Markus, lingering on the sidelines and waiting for us to emerge as our true selves, I could feel eyes on me. 

    And I thought, we may as well give them a final show.

    *

    Once we were dressed up, it was easier to find gas. We still had to walk from our broken-down car back towards the gas station we’d spotted off the interstate but when we did it together it was less scary. We were also dressed in a toned-down version of our typical garb. We weren’t performers right now; we were just women out for a walk because our car had broken down. 

    No one at the gas station looked too closely at either one of us. We were lucky, in a way. Jan’s hands were small and delicate, and though his voice was deeper, I’d sung for years in a choir and had better control over my cadence in the everyday waking world; we could mix between the genders, an array of masculine and feminine, and no one would look too closely. I asked softly for gas, holding a scarf over my Adam’s apple, and then asked the kid behind the counter if he remembered a big burly man coming through here and asking for gas an hour earlier.

    “That queer?” he said. He twisted his pockmarked face in disgust. “Yeah, I sold him gas.”

    “He’s a little funny, but that’s just because he’s from New York,” I said, and hoped that the explanation made sense. The kid just shrugged, reiterated that he’d sold him gas, but nothing else. 

    “So, he left here?” I asked.

    “Yes’m.”

    The rest of the conversation was like talking to a brick wall, and I felt as if we were already risking so much. We walked back to the car, arm in arm, as the sun was setting. 

    “It’s supposed to be summer,” Miss Terri, Jan’s alter ego, complained. “What happened to the sun staying out all night and beach parties and fun things?”

    “We’ll get them, my love,” I told her, gripping her arm hard. “We just have to survive.”

    When Miss Terri began to hum the beginning bars of Miss Gloria Gaynor’s hit, I thought it was the best idea we’d had so far. We hummed together, repeating the chorus like a call that would get us through this night. Because once there was gas in the car, and no other sign of Markus, we had to keep going forward. 

    Our plan pretending to be Barry’s cousins had now also changed. Our clothing made us feel powerful, and since we’d managed to get out of the Arkansas woods with them once, we didn’t want to take any further chances. 

    “We have to go in as women,” I said, once we were only a few miles from the camp. We’d been passing billboards as we turned deeper in Arkansas, each one proclaiming a line from the Bible about damnation and salvation or broadcasting an alert about another missing kid with a black and white photo. None of them were Barry, but so many looked the same: wispy hair, a genuine smile, and a fae presence that left me with a faint stirring of recognition. Oh, these boys. These were my boys and they were in trouble. 

    Miss Terri had been quiet, but when I met her gaze, she nodded. She reached down into her purse and grabbed more makeup and started to put it on using the car’s mirrors for guidance.

    “What are you doing?” I asked.

    “We’re going in as ladies of the night,” she said as if it was obvious. “We’re someone’s dates now. Someone in the camp, or someone working at the camp. Doesn’t matter. But they’ve called for us, so we gotta get in somehow.”

    I debated the merits of this. Either they’d see through the thin disguises we had on now, call us the faggots and queers and sinners we were to them, or they’d see us tarted up like Jezebels and try to get us. Or maybe we’d dazzle them. Maybe there would be just enough ambiguity that we could slip in while the confusion was still fresh, and pluck Barry to go home with us.

    Along with any other boy who wanted to come along. 

    “You think there are lesbians there, too?” I asked.

    “Of course. These people make no distinction. Probably make ’em play house together, too. Like some sick Norman Bates nonsense.”

    We both shuddered. I hated Psycho. Just gave dressing up a bad rap. As Jan continued to put on more makeup, fully becoming the elegant Miss Terri in the flesh, I continued to drive. The road changed from paved to dirt. She was done with her eyes by then, so the shaking didn’t rattle her around too much. But the lights that I had once relied on for the road, and the lingering sun, were now almost completely blotted out. The trees surrounding the dirt road became thicker and thicker. I slowed down on impulse, feeling as if I was going into a jungle.

    And that feeling of being watched came back. Ghosts or goblins or hicks, but definitely not the eager eyes of the audience I was used to. “Miss Terri,” I whispered. “I need to put on makeup.”

    She handed me her purse, her makeup, without caring. She could feel the eyes, the strange gazes from the woods, too. 

    “Maybe we should—”

    “We’re not turning back,” I said.

    “No. But I think that’s the camp. And we can’t drive up like this. We need to keep our car as a getaway vehicle.” She gestured into the distance. I was convinced she was crazy, that her vision was going, but the orb that I thought had been the moon rising on the horizon wasn’t that at all. There was no moon in the sky that night, I would later look up. Just blackness, just stars—and this single lamp outside the camp. 

    We pulled the car into thick brush between two trees. I finished a quick slather of my makeup, hands shaking as I did, and then we walked towards the light. We held hands, arms and elbows interlocking with each step forward. Each crunch of the dirt and rocks under our feet made us jump. Each snap of the trees in the woods filled my stomach with dread. I wanted to go back. Desperately so. But each time I remembered that look on Barry’s young face when we performed, longing and despair mixed into one, and I crept forward. I wished someone had done this for me. I wished someone had done this for all the missing boys I’d seen on those billboards as we came in.

    “Hello?” called a man’s voice from our left.

    We turned to see a shadowy figure wearing thick army coveralls and a camouflage jacket. He was clean-cut, and something gold glimmered around his neck. A cross, maybe. He was part of the camp.

    “Can I help you ladies?” he asked. 

    “Yes. We’re a present for one of your guests.” Miss Terri smiled and leaned close to him. She was acting brilliantly; only I saw that her hands shook as she made up our cover story. “Is Bobby inside?”

    “Yes, ma’am.” The man seemed baffled by our presence, but he was also polite. And when asked a direct question by a lady, or someone who seemed like a lady, you answered. “I didn’t know it was his birthday.”

    “It’s a bit early, yes. But we’ve been called in as special entertainment.”

    The man looked from Miss Terri to me, and then back again. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

    “No?” 

    “No.” He reached for something in the side of his pants, and in that split second, Miss Terri jumped on him. She wrestled his hand away from whatever was in his holster, and then used her much more massive body weight to pin him to the ground. When he struggled, she reached behind herself, grabbed a high heel, and gouged it deep into his stomach. He cried out in pain and released his hand from his pocket. 

    “It’s a fucking walkie-talkie!” Miss Terri threw the device away with her free hand and huffed. He struggled underneath her as she tried to feel him up and down for weapons. There were none. “What do I do now?”

    I grabbed the walkie-talkie instead of answering. I pressed the button to listen and heard murmurs of conversations, then I let it go and addressed the man we had pinned. “How many of you are touring the base?”

    “What?”

    “How many of you?” I got close to his face. “You have this walkie-talkie to talk to someone. So, how many someones?”

    He struggled under Terri. He spat at us. Miss Terri held his head against a rock, threatening him in muffled gasped, until he finally mumbled, “Three.”

    “Three?” Miss Terri repeated, but he was silent. She threatened him with the rock again, but he said nothing else. 

    So she knocked him out. 

    “Okay,” she said, looking to me. “Don’t worry, he’s not dead. But let’s take care of these brutes before we go inside.”

    We did the smart thing and stuck together, walking clockwise around the perimeter until we stumbled on two more men just like the one we’d found earlier. Miss Terri distracted the closest man, while I approached the other one from behind. On a silent count of three, we knocked them out, but didn’t kill either one, because we did not want to be murderers. It was tough work, though, and both of our knees were bloody and parts of our dresses were torn by the end of it. 

    “We have three now.” Miss Terri gestured with her head, her hair only slightly out of place, towards the front gate of the camp. We could see three main cabins now, and the one with the light on was the largest. “Let’s subdue whoever’s there, then move on to free all the troops. I sort of like the idea of the woods being filled with free gays and lesbians.”

    I chuckled, feeling the adrenaline pumping through me. But I also looked over my shoulder. I still felt like we were being watched. The men we’d knocked out, we’d also tied up with zip ties  we’d found on their persons, but there was something else. Something more.

    “Hey, wait,” I said to Miss Terri, hurrying to catch up as she took the lead. “Did that guy mean three including him, or three—”

    I didn’t get a chance to finish my question. Only paces in front of me, Miss Terri stepped into the light of the main cabin, and a different shadowy figure ran out of the dark and tackled her from the waist and into a thatch of trees. I froze and saw nothing, only heard grunts and screams of a struggle. My bladder seized with fear as I heard the piteous cries of someone losing a fight.

    I backed away from the cabin’s light and ran towards the woods. I was all fear, all animal instincts. I ran and ran, twigs and branches scraping against my dress and my face. My heels broke off, nearly tripping me, so I was running in flats and then in bare feet. I was almost shirtless, shoeless, and bleeding from both knees and one cheek by the time I reached our car. I got behind the wheel, only to realize that Miss Terri had the keys. Her dress was the only one with pockets. And it had seemed like a good idea at the time for her to carry them, like this whole thing seemed like a good idea only three days ago.

    “Oh no, no, no.” I sobbed onto the wheel, shuddering and shaking with fear. I kicked the floor, the dashboard, and then the radio. Something blinked in the car’s engine, and for a brief second, the car came to life. A snippet of the Gloria Gaynor song came on the air. It left just as quickly, and no matter how many times I kicked the car again, it did not return. Only her voice in my head lingered, the memories I had of performing it with my two other darling ladies.

    Markus was gone. Jan was gone. 

    It was only me now.

    And I was determined to survive. 

    *

    I dressed all in black, the outfit I usually wore to weddings and funerals. And baptisms, had I ever been invited. I thought of it as my “birth and death” dress, the little black number that all girls needed whether they were bio-girls or something else. I’d packed it on a whim, as if this new adventure would have ended in Barry’s eventual christening into a new life. I shimmied my way into it under the starlight of the Arkansas woods. I trembled as I slipped on new shoes, sneakers that did not go with the dress, but would help me as I went back into the woods and took back the only thing I could: Barry. 

    And hopefully some dignity, too.

    When I returned to the camp, I made sure to take a different pathway. I walked through the woods with careful footfalls and over fallen logs; I waited and listened and hunted like my father tried to teach me when I was younger. I was almost grateful for my violent, alcoholic father in that moment, though hunting anything still left me feeling weak. But the one thing he had given me before he kicked me out was the patience to wait for whatever you wanted, be it doe or buck or to save the queer kid from a life of horrible repression.

    I soon saw the men with walkie-talkies. Four of them. Damn. Each one we’d tied was now untied. I verified their numbers at least six times before I followed them with the grace that I still had from years of performing.

    “What should we do with the prisoners?” one of them said. 

    “Didn’t one get away?” another spoke up.

    “Damn. We’ll need to canvass the woods.”

    “With who? We need to watch the freak we still have. How are we supposed to find the other?”

    “That girly man is gone. Scared.”

    “Right. But the other one, the big one that got away. How do we get that back?”

    “Hmm. Maybe if we use the campers?”

    The four of them looked at one another and let out a laugh. “Of course,” one of them said. “Make them do the dirty work. I’ll wake them.”

    I waited on the edge of the forest, not moving from my position, as the four guards scattered into the base camp again. Lights flicked on in each one of the cabins that had once been shrouded in darkness. A whistle sounded, followed by a bell. And then masses and masses of boys and girls, none no more than seventeen years old and some seeming as young as twelve or thirteen, spilled out of the cabins. They all gathered in pajamas—drab and grey—in front of the base camp. The four men—boys, really, they had been so young–in army jackets with walkie-talkies took a secondary position while a man, tall and bone-thin, stepped out of the main cabin to address all of them. He wore a preacher’s outfit, sleek and dark and accented with a golden crucifix. When he spoke, he swayed from side to side as if this was a congregation.

    “Ladies and gentlemen, we have intruders on the base,” he proclaimed with high theatrics and in a Southern drawl. “We have caught some of the miscreants, but I am afraid their power of sin is no match for us. We need your help to scatter the evil that has laid waste to this camp and tried to turn it into a den of iniquity. You know your missions here.”

    The crowd tittered. Everyone seemed too tired and yet utterly afraid to move. The preacher man leaned towards the crowd, cupping a hand by his ear. “What do you say?”

    “We are here to live clear and righteous,” the crowd said in a dull, flat voice. “We will fight for the light of the Lord.”

    “Very good. Now go!”

    The four boys walked through the crowd and gave them large sticks to use as weapons. At first I thought they were merely walking sticks, or the type of poles you’d give teams in Capture the Flag, but one teenager slammed it into the ground. It stuck up out of the dirt like a bitter knife. 

    “I’m not using this,” the boy said. “I won’t kill anyone.”

    Barry. I knew that voice. That was Barry. I wanted to run to him, put my arms around him, but my joy was cut from me by a powerful slap. One of the guards had hit him, and then lectured him on the use of force. “You will protect the camp. You will protect your right to live a just life. Say it now.”

    “I will protect the right to live a just life,” Barry said, though the words were clouded by tears. 

    I wanted to vomit and cry along with him. But I forced myself to slink closer to the tree I was watching from, trying to blend into the night. The rest of the cabin’s inhabitants scattered into the woods. The movement sounded like a harsh echo, a wave of violence and sighs from the mouths of babes who did not want to do this, but only wanted, like we all wanted, to survive. 

    Barry moved slowly with his weapon. He was half-hearted in all his actions until the guard disappeared into the base camp with the preacher. They truly were letting the young ones do their dirty work. Maybe they were calling in reinforcements or doing something sinister behind closed doors—but it was here, as the main antagonist ostensibly went to bed, that I thought I had a chance.

    I tiptoed to Barry. He was skimming close to the edge of the forest, looking more at the flora and fauna around him than truly in search of intruders. I had to be careful to not scare him, so instead of calling his name, I hummed. 

    He froze, holding his back rigid, utterly afraid. When he recognized the song with a shoulder sway, I braved to say his name. “Barry.”

    He turned towards the sound but made no other movement. I emerged from the forest and hoped I didn’t look too beat up. He needed to recognize me for this to work. He needed—

    Barry ran into my arms, tossing his stick on the ground as he did. I embraced him easily, and when I thought of all I had lost to get here, I held him even tighter. “Come on,” I said, though my voice trembled. “We do not have a lot of time to waste.”

    Before we ran deeper and deeper into the woods, he grabbed his stick. Good boy, I thought. Thank you for that. I had no idea how we were going to escape beyond the woods. All I knew was that we had to run. Whenever we couldn’t run anymore, we were going to have to fight. As I repeated the words to “I Will Survive” in my head, I used it like a chant to spur myself forward. Like these small soldiers and the young men who trained them probably used Bible verses to convince themselves that what they were doing was right and just and true.

    Only, I was right. I may not survive this, I thought as we reached the edge of the woods and the world became darker all around me, but I know we are right. I regretted nothing of this strange errand. Except maybe that I definitely tore my dress.

    “What do we do?” said Barry as we burst out of the woods. He was out of breath, like me, and I had stopped us where the car was parked. 

    But the car wasn’t there. 

    “No, no, no,” I moaned. Damn. We were so close. We were … I got on my knees, my wounds stinging as I did, because there were tire tracks. The car had been here. I wasn’t lost. 

    “I don’t understand.” Barry stabbed his stick in the dirt, frustrated. “What do we do?”

    I wanted to scream at him that I was out of fucking ideas. This was it. I had nothing else, other than to embrace our death with dignity. And as I saw bright headlights come towards us, I knew that was the next step. 

    I was ready, world, to be taken into the arms of whoever was on the other side. Maybe I’d see Marilyn and Judy and the other queens I’d loved. I remained on the dirt road, my arms open in supplication.

    “Oh Mary,” I cried. “I’m ready to come home.”

    The car stopped in front of me. And Markus stuck his head out of the driver’s side window. “I’m not Mary right now, but it would definitely please me if you got in this car right fucking now.”

    I gasped, touching the headlights in front of me as if they truly were a heavenly vision. The car was back. The car was running. Miss Terri was in the passenger seat—looking a little worse for wear, as did Markus—but they were there. My Miss Mary and my Miss Terri, back in my life. Alive!

    A door slammed. Barry had already gotten in the backseat while I was still on my knees. Oh, that was ironic. I rose quickly and got into the other side. We’d left the stick behind, an abandoned flag for an unconquered land, but it didn’t matter. Not even as swarms and swarms of other kids came out of the woods with their sticks, along with the preacher and his minions, and surrounded the car with a violent aggressive swarm. We had gas. We had a vehicle.

    And we had Miss Gloria Gaynor on the stereo. 

    “You ready?” Markus asked, though he was already driving. “Better put on your seatbelts. We’re gonna need to go fast and rough.”

    “My middle name. All of them,” I said just as Markus floored it. I hit my head on the back window, seeing stars, but I didn’t care. Hours later, with the camp behind us, we would figure out what to do next, where to go next, and who to perform as next since our drag names were now discoverable. We’d bandage ourselves and sleep the restful sleep of the free. 

    Until then, though, I was going to enjoy the music.

    END

  • 31 for 31: The Institute by Eve Morton

    Happy Monday!

    What’s a better way to celebrate the start of the week than a horror story about institutions and the way we can sometimes eat each other alive to get out of the four walls we spend the bulk of our time inside?

    That’s what “The Institute” is more or less about; instead of dreading a 9-5, our narrator dreads the eating disorder program she’s forced to spend her life inside as she purportedly gets better. Whereas most places that claim to heal are inspiring–or at the very least, boring–this narrator is forced to reckon with a callous system, neglectful counsellors, and a horrible ritual that will allow her to be free–but only if she can swallow it.

    I wrote this story back in 2015 and had it published in 2016. It was a tough time for me personally. The television show Hannibal, oddly enough, was my main comfort show around then. A lot of my academic writing was about it–and I suppose, this short story is yet another Hannibal-inspired tale. It’s also inspired by my own experiences in a similar program, though of course, I got out without the horrifying ritual.

    (Or did I?)

    If you hate hospitals, or are easily upset by discussions around eating disorders, I would recommend skipping this one. Tomorrow, I assure you, there will be a different kind of story with a new and spooky monster. I can’t wait!

    The Institute

    By Eve Morton

    They called us shadow women. Trinket girls. When we checked into the hospital, the nurses whispered about us and our small bodies. Only a thin layer of skin separated us from our bones. As we stepped on the scales, we were weighed in double-digits. The staff wanted to know our secret formula, our magical cure for fat. But then the doctors diagnosed us all with anorexia nervosa and the nurses stopped asking questions. They stopped speaking to us all together. 

    From the hospital, we were sent to the institute – a large treatment facility just outside of a busy highway. We were to spend our days here, eating all our meals on campus, so we could return to normal life – and normal weight – all over again. We would have therapy. We would get better. Our parents dropped us off on the institute’s doorsteps after our electrolytes were balanced and our family GPs had written our condition down on prescription paper. 

    “Your daughter is sick. I can’t help. These people can.” 

    “Anorexia Nervosa is a tricky illness. It affects the body, but also the mind. It has the highest mortality rate out of any mental illness.”

    “Anorexia nervosa is a permanent condition. You only cope. You cannot hope for a cure. These people will help your daughter to cope.”

    The doctors talked about us like we were not inside the room, like we really were the shadow women the nurses saw. Everyone had had about enough of us, anyway. We were too visible to forget about, but not present enough to treat inside our homes anymore. So the institute welcomed us inside.

    I was the last to arrive. 

    “Good afternoon,” a tall, blonde woman greeted me. She shook the hands of my parents first, before she looked down at me. Her eyes x-rayed my body, sensing all the bones under my clothing. She sighed, sadly, and then turned back to my parents. “We will take good care of her.”

    My parents drove away without worry, as the woman, named Rhonda, and I walked around. 

    “I’m one of your counsellors. You will be given the best treatment here. Lots of therapy, lots of group discussions. You’re one of many, here. You won’t be alone.”

    She said the last part more like a threat than a comfort. 

    “What will you do?”

    “Me?” Rhonda smiled. “I help you eat.”

    “How do you do that?”

    “Don’t get too far ahead. You need to rest here.”

    We walked through the sterile doorway of the institute. Black writing on all the doors marked rooms for therapy, rooms for examination, and rooms for eating. I felt as if I was walking into a fairy tale. The oak doors looked vaguely like gingerbread.

    “The first case of anorexia nervosa was a girl who wanted to be a saint,” Rhonda began. “She starved herself because she thought it would take her closer to God.”

    Rhonda opened the door at the end of the hall. We walked into a small kitchen with a long, rectangular table in the centre. The girls sat on the sides of the table, all of their eyes down. A different counsellor, one with red hair, sat at the head. Her name was Kellie.  

    “You’ve got to eat,” Kellie stated. She looked directly at me as she spoke. “The doctor told the first anorexic girl that she could honour God by eating. God is all around, even in our food.” 

    “We do not need divine light,” Rhonda stated. She moved towards the curtains over the windows, and closed them tightly. “Any more than anyone else. Please. Sit now.”

    I sat next to a small girl with sharp bones protruding from her wrists. There were eleven of us at the table. We were missing our last apostle, our Judas. With the counsellors watching us, there were almost thirteen people in the room. 

    “You need your humanity back,” Kellie said. “Humans are hungry. They will always need to eat. Show us you are human. Thinking about the Divine is okay, but human – that is what you all are.”

    “And what exactly are we to eat?” another girl, a patient with sallow hips, snapped. 

    The two counsellors looked at one another. They smiled.

    “You will see,” Rhonda said. 

    “Just give it time,” Kellie echoed.

    The next day, the first man went missing. 

    ***

    In psychiatry, many doctors believe that patients are forced to repeat their traumas, until they find what they are and face them. This is why confession is important. You must confess your indiscretions so you stop repeating them. Binging and purging was one of the many symptoms of an eating disorder. But, if you purged your anxieties, your family history, and your nightmares, then you weren’t sick anymore. You were ahead of the curve, ready to get better and face your fears. 

    As the days went on in the institute, the meals we all shared became our new traumas. They were our new rituals that we were all forced to repeat. 

    Meal times were half an hour. All food must be consumed during those times. Then, for half an hour after the meal, no one was allowed to leave the table. Even when we were lucky enough to go to the bathroom, someone would remain on the other side of the door, listening in to make sure the only thing we purged was our psychic revelations.

    Our group therapy sessions were an hour long, with a break in between for snacks. 

    Three girls in group therapy claimed abuse when they were younger. Two were real, I thought. Another was a false memory produced from the ether, so the counsellors would stop asking questions. 

    Melanie, the first girl-victim, was abused by a man with dark hair. On Tuesday, during lunch, a man with dark hair was presented on the table. His thighs were cut, his skin peeled back to the bone, so the flank could be cooked inside the small kitchen in the institute. He was made into a victim, into a piece of meat. 

    Kellie set up the timer for the meal. “Three minutes, everyone. Then we can begin.”

    As soon as the buzzer went, Melanie picked up her knife and fork. She ate the man so she was not a victim anymore.

    The rest of us had our standard meals, issued by the institute’s dietician. Applesauce and egg sandwiches. Normal, bland food. Only Melanie, with her sandwich full of human meat, got to indulge in order to heal.

    “How did you choose him?” I asked. “If we’re not God, then how are you playing his game?”

    “He got too close to school children,” Rhonda stated. “He was bad news from the start.”

    I nodded, considering this. Melanie grabbed another piece of bread, adding mustard to it, before she ate more of him. Her dark eyes turned blue. The colour came back to her skin. She was getting better – and we all despised her for it. 

    “In some parts of the world, some people believe that when you eat your enemy, you gain their strength,” Kellie said. “You are getting his strength, Melanie. You are becoming something different than before. No longer a shadow or a trinket. But real.” 

    She nodded and smiled. The clock ticked on, another three minutes to go before the meal was over. Melanie ate in a sudden fury, cleaning her entire plate as the buzzer rang. 

    We were no longer Gods, I thought between the sounds. But monsters. 

    ***

    There was a rose garden around the institute. I was always dropped off too early for therapy, so I followed foot trails made by other people, who often dragged their IVs behind them and left marks in the dirt. This morning, I followed a trail to the back of the garden, near the woods. 

    In between two pine trees, I saw a man with dark skin. His eyes were black and his legs were large, like the back haunches of a wolf. I stepped closer. We were too close to a highway for it to be a real wolf. The skin was too dark and the bones were too prominent. He looked like a dishevelled man with oil over his body, as if he had been tarred and feathered. As if he had been shamed. 

    “Hello?” I asked.

    He extended one of his long fingers, pointing towards a hill. Fresh dirt lined the area. I walked closer to him, only to watch as he disappeared in sunlight. The creature was a shadow too. 

    I began digging where he had pointed me to. I got down on my knees, feeling the dirt against my skin. I found a finger bone first. Then, I found a jawline with teeth, rearranged and out of order. I kept digging, knowing that I would be late for therapy. 

    Was this skeleton of the man? I asked myself. Was he an old patient, one who had refused treatment, until his body had folded in on itself and starved to death? I didn’t know, but I grabbed the clavicle from the dirt. 

    “I will be back,” I told the bones. “I promise.” 

    Inside the institute’s examining room, I kept the bone under my arm, as if he were a part of me. When Kellie came into the room to weigh me, I asked, “Have you ever had men at the institute?”

    “Anorexia nervosa primarily affects women. Young women.”

    “But there are outliers, right?”

    She narrowed her eyes at me. “You need to be weighed today. Don’t worry about the past patients.”

    “Has anyone ever failed? What happens then?”

    “Anorexia has the highest mortality rate for any mental illness. I suggest you not test its limits.”

    “But—” 

    “Take off your clothing,” Kellie demanded. “Put on the gown. Get on the scale. You should know the drill by now. We need to see how much you’ve improved. No weighing yourself down.”

    “Okay, okay.” 

    Kellie came closer to me, her green eyes inflamed. “You are to wear nothing. You know what happens if you lie, right?”

    I nodded. Even as she left me alone, I still held the bone close, under the stiff gown they gave me. When she came back in, I tipped the scales.

    “What are you doing? What are you hiding?”

    Kellie found the bone right away. She held it up to the light and then began to search through my stuff. I was pulled into a new room like a child, cornered like a dog, and treated like a criminal.

    “I told you not to lie to me,” Kellie said. “Why didn’t you listen to us?”

    “Is this where you want your life to go?” Rhonda asked. “Why are you preventing your own therapy? Do you want to die?”

    “Or maybe you just like being thin. You like your bones, don’t you? You think you look good? You’re signing your own death certificate with this type of behaviour.”

    “This condition is permanent. But it does not have to be deadly. We are only trying to help.”

    “What else was I supposed to do in the mornings?” I asked, snapping out of the interrogation. “I’m bored. I wanted to be alone, so I went for a walk. And then I found him – I found his bone. I was walking because I wanted to leave, but I knew I would never get very far.” 

    Rhonda and Kellie exchanged looks. They questioned me more, but I refused to tell them where the rest of his body was. They called my parents instead. 

    “Her behaviour must stop. This excessive exercise, the secrecy… She will never get better at this rate.”

    I stood in the corner of the room as they talked. They acted as if I was the one who killed him. As if I was the one who put the bones in the ground, instead of discovering them. I had uncovered atrocities, and they could only focus on the steps I had taken, the exercise I was trying to sneak in.

    “It’s part of her condition. She must walk and walk and walk, as if she’ll run away from problems.”

    “But I carried the bones back,” I argued. “I told you what I found. I kept them safe, under my arms.”

    No one heard.

    “What is wrong?” Kellie asked me after she hung up the phone. “What are you keeping hidden? What are you running away from?”

    I held my breath. I had no memories to bring forth, no confession hidden under my skin. Not like Melanie or the other girl-victims. Not like anyone else here. 

    “I have nothing to confess,” I said. “I have done nothing wrong.” 

    Kellie only shook her head. She wrote something down in my file and then slid it away. 

    “We can talk about this later,” she said. “For now, there is more work to do.”

    As Kellie led me out of the room, I saw Rhonda devour the bone from the corner of my eye. When I looked back, she only smiled. 

    ***

    Every Thursday, we had something called “food desense.” Short for food desensitization. We would gather around and pick a forbidden food to eat. Not apples, not usually. According to the counsellors, we were all afraid of cake and soda and unhealthy things. So, to counter to most doctors’ orders, we were set out on a mission to gather junk food. 

    On an April afternoon, we were sent out beyond the institute’s walls. We held hands like wandering children, with Kellie at the front and Rhonda at the back. There was traffic all around us and a concrete bridge to the left – no escape possible. We couldn’t run even if we wanted to. 

    There were only eight of us now. After Melanie, two more girls had eaten their final meal to pass the test. Gained the weight to hide their bones. They were called cured and sent on their way home.  

    “Here we are,” Kellie stated. We stopped in front of a McDonald’s in a mall. Some girls groaned, but most had learned to be quiet about their food preferences this far along. We were only allowed two “dislikes” for the institute’s menu. Most people had used their “dislikes” for chocolate or milk; butter and gravy; sometimes brussel sprouts and green beans. Valentina, a small girl with dark hair, had used her two dislikes for chicken and beef. She was the only person in the McDonald’s without a burger. She ate ice cream and fries, as the rest of us were given Big Macs and told to stay together.

    We sat at another long table, stretched out, facing the jungle gym. We all ate sad beef and greasy fries and called it therapy for the eating disordered. 

    “Be normal,” Rhonda said. “This is how normal people eat. Not all the time, but every so often.”

    “Shouldn’t we be worried about death?” one girl, Ashley, asked.

    “The cows are fine. Don’t worry about them,” Kellie said. “All life must come from death. If you want, you can thank the cows for their sacrifice. You deserve to live too.”

    “No, I mean the workers. The corporations,” Ashley said. She was a hippy. She had gone too vegan, eating nothing but salads before she came into the hospital walls. It was a simple mistake, really. Most of the girls that sat at the table were nothing but simple mistakes, spelled out with poor food choices and too few calories. 

    Rhonda and Kellie shrugged. “One life leads into another. Don’t worry. Just eat.” 

    “Even sacrificial cows should be worshipped,” Valentina said, sipping her milkshake. “When you sacrifice an animal, it must be well. You cannot use one that’s sick, or else it’s a bad omen. It becomes the conscience of the tribe or the group it represents. This is one of the reasons I can’t eat meat. I just can’t.”

    “Why?” I asked. 

    She looked at me, almost begging. “Because my conscience won’t let me.”

    “Girls,” Kellie said. She narrowed her eyes at us. Rhonda tapped her fingers, beating a tattoo like the time from the institute. “You only have an intrinsic responsibility for your own life. No one else’s. And we are almost out of time.”

    We ate the rest of our meal in silence. We walked back into the mall and towards the elevator that would take us outside again. A woman with blonde hair approached us, staring intently, as she shook her head.

    “The stairs are right there, you know.”

    “We know,” Kellie said. “Thanks.”

    “Why don’t you use them?” she asked.

    Kellie stared daggers at the woman. I knew that stare. It was the same one I had been given in the examination room, the same one that felt like x-rays. I looked away. 

    “I told you: we don’t need the stairs. We need the elevator.”

    “But you all look fine,” the woman argued.  

    “You don’t know these girls,” Rhonda said. “You don’t know their stories.”

    The woman sneered at us like we were leapers, as if we had grown a skin with disease over our shadows. 

    “It’s good to be healthy so easily,” Kellie said, staring at the woman. “Appreciate it while you can.”

    I felt the hair on my neck stand up. I closed my eyes, not wanting to see what I knew was coming from inside Kellie’s threat. The woman muttered under her breath. Her flip-flops smacked against the tile floor as she walked down the stairs, just as our elevator came. 

    “Let that be a lesson to you, girls,” Kellie said when we were inside. “Never let anyone tell you you’re not sick. You all are. And you must follow us in order to be well.”

    On our way outside, we formed a line. The woman who had called us out before moved ahead of us on the sidewalk, her eyes on us. Disgust evident. As she stepped out onto the road, she was struck by a car. 

    We kept walking. No one said a word.

    That night, Valentina ate the woman’s brains, finally breaking her vow of not touching meat. 

    And the next day, she was allowed to go.

    ***

    I had dreams of food often. Real food – not what they gave us wheeled in on carts day in and day out. Not the fast food places or overly sweet cakes they gave to us. Not even the men that they put on the table as therapy. I wanted food, like the kind I ate before I got here. The kind my parents gave me for lunch every day. But the institute kept us starving near the end, knowing that it would cause desperation. No matter how much I said I wanted to eat, they would put it off. 

    “A calorie is a calorie is a calorie,” Kellie said with a wide grin. “If you can’t eat what we tell you to eat, then how can we expect you to survive in the real world?”

    Because I want to eat that food, I thought. I remained silent. She sat down next to me, placing a heavy hand on my shoulder. 

    “Eat the meal. Then you can go. We will know you’re loyal, then.”

    “Loyal to what?”

    “Your recovery. Yourself.”

    I sighed. I thought I was loyal. I thought that was what turning up every day meant and ignoring the bodies and bones on the front stops. I wanted to get out so badly. I tried to be a model patient. But the rules they gave me made no logical sense. When I followed them, they changed. The only way I could leave was eat, but there were too many forbidden foods, too many meals repeated until they were traumas. Everything became divided. The food always had two sides, two stories. In order to get past all the trauma, all the things that had turned me into their patient with anorexia nervosa, I had to break the final taboo.

    Alive and dead. Flesh and bone. Life and death. Monster and God. Even if I was still human.

    “Anorexia nervosa is a permanent condition,” Kellie reminded me. “But not if you eat where you came from. Not if you eat someone healthy.”

    “You are what you eat,” Rhonda said. She strummed her fingertips again. 

    The rest of the girls – there were only four now – stared at me from the table, their faces sunken in. They waited for my response, to see if they could get free too. We all needed one another, but not for comfort – for sustenance. We all needed to eat. We all needed to survive.

    “Let me survive,” I said, turning to Kellie. “I want to eat. Please.”

    “We need to confer with others. We need to see what the doctors would say.” 

    “Why don’t you trust me? I’ll eat.”

    “You got yourself this way,” Kellie said. “You’ll get yourself right back if we are not careful. We have already worked so hard, we don’t want it all falling apart.”

    “I am not a bridge or a building,” I said. “I don’t require an architect.”

    “You are damaged.”

    “I am not a car, either,” I demanded. “I am a person. And I want to eat.” 

    Rhonda and Kellie looked at one another. They looked back at the fridge. 

    “Okay,” Rhonda said. “You’re next.” 

    ***

    On Tuesday, the table was set. They brought out the body from the back cellar. The man was older, one of the oldest bodies yet. His skin was pale and his hair was grey. I heard the scratching of the counsellors’ pens as they wrote their field notes, judging my response like all the others. 

    “She has come so far.”

    “She has gained twenty pounds since treatment began.”

    “She can go home soon. Almost. She is so close.”

    I looked away from the man’s eyes and his navy tattoos. I tried not to think about his backstory as I cracked open his ribcage. The noise was so sickening and yet so full of pleasure, like cracking knuckles. The counsellors smiled at me, proud of my accomplishment. The four girls looked at me with wide eyes, horrified and hungry, as I slipped my hands under the man’s skin. 

    I took out his heart. This was my designated piece to eat. The heart was one of the largest muscles, yet still a delicate organ meat. It looked too small, too light – and like it was still beating. I placed down on my plate as Kellie passed me a napkin.

    “Go on,” she encouraged. “Eat up.”

    I stared. I took another breath, fear gripping me. 

    “Are you okay? Do you need the tube?”

    I blinked. The tube – no, I thought, shaking my head. Too many other girls had had the gastro-intestinal tube shoved down their throat like an amoral organ, where their liquid meals were fed into them before they were forced to swallow. I closed my eyes. 

    In my mind, I saw a creature from the woods. I saw the skinny body leftover from the program, a patient who had refused to become a monster and had died instead and was now buried like a bad omen. I saw the boy that had been tarred and feathered and forgotten about. He hovered over me like my conscience, reminding me not to become a monster. 

    “Are you going to eat?” Rhonda asked. “Or are you wasting our time?”

    I looked up. The buzzer clicked on, the seconds passing by. 

    The black creature from the woods shook his head. He said no. But he was the thing to fear, wasn’t he? He was a totem of my death and permanent destruction if I didn’t do what I was told, right? I saw the boy covered as a shadow, a former self lost inside bones and under dirt. I turned away from the creature and looked down at my plate.

    I raised my knife and fork in my hand – and then ate the heart of the stranger. I thanked the man I didn’t know for giving me life again, closing my eyes in a silent prayer. I tasted iron and rot, my nose filled with the smell of blood.

    When I was done, I looked up at Kellie and Rhonda with blood around my mouth. I wanted to move onto them next, to tear them apart limb from limb. They were the ones who had made me into a monster, who had taken the very thing I thought made me who I was. But my stomach heaved. 

    Now, for the first time in a long time, I was full.

    “Wonderful,” Kellie said, placing a hand on my shoulder. “You’ve done a great job.”

    “Yes,” Rhonda agreed. She rose from her chair. The girls’ eyes followed her as she moved around the table and placed another hand on me. “I think you’re ready to go.”

    I was silent. I worried my voice would never come back again, and if it did, I would speak in a language that was not my own. 

    When the bell rang on the buzzer, Rhonda and Kellie allowed me to rise. I gathered my coat and clothing that I had worn when I came into the institute. They gave me my discharge papers and called my parents. Finally, they took me out through the institute’s door, crossing over a small pond and bridge by the front parking lot where my parents would soon come. 

    “It’s okay,” Kellie said. “You don’t need to say goodbye.”

    When they left me there, I turned around, back towards the glass. No one was there watching me. They had truly let me go. 

    I walked towards the rose garden and found the bones of the body I had left behind. He was incomplete now, because they had taken the bone I carried with me. All of my bones were gone, too, now hidden by layers and layers of flesh. 

    It was okay, I figured. I didn’t need to see them anymore to know that they were there. 

    When I looked up, I saw the black creature. He moved towards me slowly, his eyes dark and judgemental. I had eaten the thing I promised I would not.

    But I had done it to survive.

    “I’m sorry,” I whispered. 

    The creature merely stared at me, like my own former shadow. I raised my hand, hoping he would touch it. He lifted his dark fingers, twisted like tree branches, just as a car pulled up. I blinked as a horn honked. Then he was gone.

    “Hey, Emma,” my parents greeted. Their car engine idled. “How are you feeling?”

    “Okay, I guess.” 

    “Would you like to go home?”

    “Yes,” I said. I raised my eyes. “I would.”

    “Who were you talking to before?” my mom asked once I was inside. I looked out at the woods, from the backseat of the car, and saw the creature wave me a goodbye.

    “No one,” I said. “Just a friend.”