Belinda McKeon - Tender

But now he was not chasing her. Now he was not lonely for want of word from her.

Spending the evening in the darkroom, darling. Love to the others. See you tomorrow, maybe?

Love to the others?

* * *

But be good.

Be so, so good.

* * *

In the backyard of Baggot Street, a feral cat close to giving birth. Dragging herself around. The noise of her. Trying, as they watched from the steps, to burrow into a tangle of ivy.

“She’s trying to get away from the pain of it,” Cillian said. “She doesn’t understand it’s inside of her.”

Catherine stared at him. Could that be true? Could that possibly, possibly, be true?

* * *

The kittens, a few days later: tiny gray clouds of mewling, already with the pus on their eyes.

“Get, get,” Lorraine said, scattering them with the snap of a tea towel. Her face, tense with guilt when she came back into the house. “There’s no point,” she said to Catherine, though Catherine had not said a word.

* * *

Yellow will be your color to watch for in the week ahead.

Do not run from the things it comes to you most naturally to fear.

A letter from a friend may bring you to see old situations in a radical new way.

* * *

She missed him. She missed him so much that the city did not feel like the same city anymore. It felt like the trace of a city, into which she had blindly wandered. Without him beside her, what were these streets?

* * *

Darkroom again this evening, I’m afraid — Lisa has been asking to see some possible photos for the show. You free for lunch on Saturday, maybe? Maybe get some food and bring it to the Green?

Lunch was for people you had tossed down to the Sometime pile. Everyone knew that.

* * *

Dear Cosmic Cit

GREETINGS from L’Arse End d’Italia!! I am very, very sunburned and very, very tired of running after these monsters, and I am at all times within moments of snapping several very small necks and spending the rest of my life in an Italian jail, but apart from that, life is good here. The young men are very forward and many of them ridiculously pretty, and that is quite enough to be going on with for now.

Speaking of pretty, any promising correspondence from Young Emmet? Any flirtatious little missives from Chicago? I must say, I am still teeming with impressedness (should be a word) re: your decisive march on the Stag’s that last evening, even if it was a bit of a flop. But never mind. We will live to fight another day. Or you will. And he will. And there will be no fighting, just snogging. And I will be waving pom-poms from the sidelines.

Which brings me to JAMES! Not pom-poms, but snoggage, namely, with Nordie Liam. Has there been any? Has there been plenty? Please send updates asap! I have had one very coy, very no-news-here postcard from James, but the front of the postcard did show a whole lot of boys running naked around a beach — which, let’s face it, seems like a rather good sign, does it not? I hope that the matter is progressing nicely. They are v.v. cute together, and I am not even saying I Told You So. But. I did. So write and tell me everything, because James is stubbornly refusing to.

Do I have any news for you? Not really. Life here is very hot and very worky. I am up with my charges from before seven in the morning, because the little buggers refuse to sleep any longer, and after that it is a long day of feeding and changing and cleaning and trips to the swimming pool and trips to the gelateria and brushing off Papa’s unwanted advances, which, of course, just has the effect of making Papa all the more determined.

Anyway. Speaking of jobs, you are probably currently in your nightly communication with the stars and the planets to replenish your astounding astrological wisdoms for tomorrow, so I will not keep you any longer with dreary tales of other people’s children and pathetic wonderings about other people’s sex lives. Write me a PROPER LETTER, please, Cits. No postcards. I want one of those big fat envelopes you used to send to James. I need something to read other than crappy Italian bedtime stories. TELL ME WHAT YOU HAVE BEEN UP TO.

ZOE

* * *

She missed Zoe, she realized. She had not expected that to be the case.

She missed everyone. Even Emmet, who she did not think would be sending her any emails from Chicago, flirtatious or otherwise. Missing him surprised her. Everything surprised her.

And yet nothing did.

Because what had she been up to?

Sleep, as long as it lasted. Which was not — which was never — long enough.

And then the waking. And with it the thinking, Maybe this time it will be different. Maybe this time it will not be so bad.

But then the other waking. Then the second waking, the real one. Because how it worked, she had discovered, was this: body woke first, but body was innocent, body contained within itself space for some kind of oblivion. Mind; when mind kicked in, mind put a stop to that gallop. Mind; mind got to. Cranked it up. Piled it on; piled it down. Not just thoughts; they did not feel like just thoughts. They were whole life forms, living in the crevices; they were real things, happiest in the mornings, when they could pulse and they could roam. They were of her, but so much more than that, they were about her, and they were things — she felt sure of this — that she would not necessarily have come up with, herself, about herself, left to her own, small devices—

So much energy they had, the thoughts. Seemingly boundless, endless energy; she almost had to admire it in them.

* * *

And to have tried to drag Emmet down into this shit: unforgivable.

* * *

The skin on her arms, those mornings: so alive with the desire to be cut.

Tingling with the want of it. With the love of it.

But skin was dead, though, wasn’t it?

Skin was the part of you that was already the leftovers of the past.

Or most obviously the leftovers, maybe; most visibly. Maybe that was what it was.

* * *

Do not push yourself past your limits.

Do not test yourself more than you can need or bear to be tested.

Do not take for granted those things you have been lucky to have—

In work, they were delighted with her. They raised her pay another ten pence a script.

* * *

A dream. More than once, the same dream. A bed pushed into the corner of a room. Boxes piled high around it, so that its warmth became a hiding place, and within that hiding place was the still deeper, still warmer cocoon of his arms. She curled into him; she smelled his smell. She dozed, blissful; woke to the sound of his voice saying, Catherine, you’re—

Never the end of the sentence. Never what it was that he thought she was, what it was that he believed of her. She tried playing it over to herself during her waking hours: sitting on the bus, staring at the cursor, drinking the powdered coffee the factory machine made—

But it never finished itself. And Catherine could not finish it either.

What conversations they had now seemed only rubble.

Sitting, barely remembering how to talk to each other, over a half-touched picnic on the Green.

The look in his eye: as though she was the one who had gone from him.

As though there was so much he had to tell her; had, now, to share with her—

But no.

* * *

How are things?

How was your week?

How are your fake fucking horoscopes that are just as useless and empty as you?

How are our friends who are so relieved that I escaped you?

(The last two would have been honest, at least.)

* * *

Small talk as insult.

* * *

How are you?