Leo Paul Marcel - Flash Fiction

The Thirteenth Step

2026-08-01T00:00:00+00:00

The smoking section is a democracy of damage. Everyone out here has counted days, lost count, and started over.

You're on day 847. She's on day one, and she's holding the cigarette the way people hold a cigarette when their hands need somewhere to be.

"First meeting." It comes out flat, daring you to say the thing.

You say it anyway. "It gets easier."

"Does it?"

It does, mostly. What you don't say is that it gets easier the way a limp gets easier. You stop noticing you're doing it.

Meeting someone out here skips a lot of ground. She doesn't have to explain the gap in the résumé, or why she doesn't drive, or the brother who won't pick up. You've read that page. Different book, same page.

She takes a pull off yours. "I quit drinking, not living."

Inside they're on step four, the fearless moral inventory. Out here you're taking your own: the chipped polish, the coat that's too thin for October, the way she checks the door every ninety seconds without turning her head.

"I taught philosophy," she says. "Turns out I was stronger on the applied side."

The meeting lets out. People come past and nod at the two of you, that nod. She stays. You stay. The light over the parking lot comes on with a click and neither of you moves.

"Same time next week?"

She isn't talking about the meeting, and you are both aware that she isn't talking about the meeting.

She flicks the filter into the gutter and goes up Rachel toward Saint-Denis, and you stand there doing arithmetic. Eight hundred and forty-seven. And one. And how many days it takes before this stops being a bad idea.

The Smoking Section Outside AA

2026-08-01T00:00:00+00:00

Outside the church on L'Assomption there's a strip of asphalt between the door and the fence where the smokers stand, close enough in to hear the urn going.

You're new. You hold the coffee with both hands and you stand in the light that comes out of the vestibule, and you keep looking at the door like it might shut.

"First meeting?"

"Troisième." Third. Your lighter takes four tries.

We don't get into why. You say you quit on a Sunday because Sundays were already ruined. I say I quit on a Tuesday, which is worse, because Tuesdays were fine.

Inside, somebody starts the Serenity Prayer. Every cigarette on the asphalt goes down at once, six of them, a small synchronized ending nobody planned.

You put a hand on my shoulder on the way in. Not that. Just a hand.

"On y va?"

"On y va."

Every Tuesday after that, ten minutes. We never trade names. I don't know what you do, whether you have kids, whether the shaking stopped. I know you take it black and always leave half an inch in the cup, and I have never once asked why.

Somebody sweeps the asphalt Wednesday mornings. By the next Tuesday it's full again.

The Coffee Shop on Notre-Dame

2026-08-01T00:00:00+00:00

The place on Notre-Dame has six tables and a grinder loud enough to end a conversation. I take the one by the window because the radiator is under it.

A couple sits at the table across. They're arguing, I think, though it takes me a while to be sure — they're doing it quietly, in two languages, switching often enough that I can't tell who's losing.

He makes his case in French. She answers in English. Then mid-sentence she goes to French and he goes to English, and it's like watching two people change sides of the net without stopping the rally.

Nobody here announces the switch. There's no pause, no sorry, en français. You just go, and the other one goes with you, and afterward neither of you could say which half was said in what.

She wins. I know because he gets up for the sugar he doesn't take.

The grinder starts. When it stops they're holding hands across the table and still not agreeing.

My coffee has gone cold in the good way, where it tastes like the beans instead of the heat. Outside, the 36 goes by mostly empty, throwing slush up onto the curb.

Last Call at the Dep

2026-08-01T00:00:00+00:00

It's 10:45. The dep stops selling beer at eleven, which is the only deadline I've made all year.
We reach for the same six of Boréale. The blonde, because we're both pretending to have taste.
"You take it."
"On split?"
So we walk to the park with the bag between us, passing it back and forth so the handles don't cut. You tell me about the ex who moved to Toronto. I say Toronto the way you'd read a diagnosis and you laugh, which is the whole trick.
The park has one working streetlight and it flickers. The swings are the old kind, rubber straps on chains, and the chains are cold enough to hurt through gloves.
You push off. For a second you're up over the light, a shape against the rest of the city, and then you come down and the chain squeaks and you go up again.
"In another life," you say, going higher, "we meet in daylight. Proper dates and everything."
"In another life we're different people."
"Yeah."
Six beers, six hours. The sun comes up over the east end and turns everything the colour of a bad photograph. We don't trade numbers. You take the empties, because your building has a bin.

Saint-Viateur at Two

2026-08-01T00:00:00+00:00

The line goes past the door and down the block, because it always does, because it's two in the morning and this is what the city does to heal from the nightlife.
Wood smoke first. You catch it four doors up, before you've made the corner, and it will be in the wool of your coat for a week afterward, surfacing at odd moments, in elevators, in other people's kitchens.
Inside it's thirty degrees warmer than the street and the air has weight to it — flour hanging in the light over the bench, the sweet scorch of the honey water where the dough goes before the oven, and under all of it the resin smell of maple burning down to coals at the far end of the room.
Three years ago she pulled one out of the bag before we were even out the door, too hot to hold, passing it hand to hand, and said this is how you know you're alive. She was twenty-four. It was a bagel. She meant it.
I still come. Sesame, dozen, cash only.
The bakers work the peel like men who are bored, which they are, and who have been doing this since before the neighbourhood was worth anything. One of them lands sixteen off the plank in a single motion, a long sweep from the shoulder, and doesn't watch where they go.
The woman ahead of me orders in French and gets French, no negotiation, none of the usual dance. I order in English and get English. Everybody gets fed.
Outside, the bag is warm against my chest through the coat and the cold comes up off Saint-Viateur to meet it.
They'll be stale by tomorrow. They were never going to keep.
I eat two on the walk home.

La Belle Province, 11 p.m.

2026-08-01T00:00:00+00:00

The stool is cold and stays cold. There's a griddle behind the counter that hasn't been off since 1987 and a fridge that cycles every four minutes.
Two steamés, no fries. The onions come out of a plastic squeeze bottle you have to shake.
The girl at the register is new. She rings me twice and voids one and apologizes in French, and I say c'est correct, which is the only phrase I've ever gotten right on the first try.
The man at the window table is halfway through a poutine for two. He isn't waiting for anyone. He eats it in an order — cheese off the top first, then works the fries out from under, and by the end it's gravy and he tips the tray to get at it.
A couple in the corner booth are speaking French too low to follow. Her elbows are on the table. His hands are under it. They've been at whatever this is for a while. Nobody's crying and nobody's leaving.
The hot-dog is exactly what it is. The bun is steamed past the point of structure. There is no version of this that's good and I have been eating them since I was nineteen.
The man finishes and leaves the tray on the table. Cold comes in when the door swings. The couple stays.
I get a cream soda for the walk. The pink kind. It's terrible.

The Last Cigarette

2026-08-01T00:00:00+00:00

The best part of a conversation is the eight seconds between the match and the first exhale. Everything gets decided in there.
It's minus fifteen. We're under the awning of a dep that stopped selling to us an hour ago, standing on the salt.
"Il a pris le chien," you say. Then, quieter, in English: "He took the dog."
The streetlight above us buzzes. A cruiser rolls past at walking speed, the one in the passenger seat looking at us the way they look at people standing still in the cold.
I offer you my last one. You say no. Then you take it. That's how I know you're from here.
We don't talk after that. Just pass it back and forth until it's gone and our fingers won't bend.
You raised that dog from a puppy. It was yours before it was ever his.
Smoke goes straight up. No wind.

The Used Bookstore

2026-08-01T00:00:00+00:00

You have to turn sideways to let anyone past, and there's a cat asleep on the Russians.
I come here to not buy things. The owner knows and doesn't care. He reads behind the register with his glasses pushed up on his head and can go an hour without looking up.
Poetry is in the back, past travel, under a bulb that's been out since spring. A woman is standing in it with her phone light on, working the shelf at eye level, tipping each spine out an inch and pushing it back.
She's been at it long enough that she isn't browsing. She's after one book. I know the posture.
In travel there's a guy with a Michelin guide to Italy, 2009 edition. He's not going to Italy. Wedding ring, work jacket, Tuesday afternoon.
I pick up a paperback with a broken spine and water damage along the bottom corner. Someone wrote a name inside the cover in pencil and then erased it badly, so you can still read it if you tilt the page.
She finds it. I hear the sound — the small satisfied noise — and then she's past me toward the register.
She pays in coins. He counts them into the drawer without looking at them, and the bell over the door goes, and the cat sleeps through all of it.

Sainte-Catherine and Guy

2026-08-01T00:00:00+00:00

The bus is late. We're at Sainte-Cath and Guy with the wind coming off the concourse, which is its own weather system, and it smells like bus exhaust and the rain that hasn't started.
He has his hands in his pockets and he's looking at a point past the light at Guy. He's been looking at it four minutes.
I could say something about the bus. That's the available move — everyone knows it, everyone's allowed it. Complaining about the 165 is a public utility.
I don't.
He shifts his weight right to left. Adjusts the strap on his bag. Takes the phone out and puts it back without unlocking it.
The thing is I have an apparatus for this. I spend my days inside other people's arguments, taking them apart, finding the seam. I cannot produce one sentence at a bus stop.
Headlights come around the corner. He gets on ahead of me and takes a seat and I take one four rows back and neither of us looks up.
He gets off at Atwater. He doesn't nod.
I ride two stops past mine.

Twenty-Three Minutes

2026-08-01T00:00:00+00:00

The bus is twenty minutes late. The sign says three, and has said three for twenty minutes.
You stamp your feet. I blow into my hands, which does nothing and never has.
"In French we say j'ai froid. I have cold."
"We say you are cold."
"So you become it."
"Apparently."
You laugh and it comes out visible.
We get into whether waiting counts as doing something. You say yes. I say the bus doesn't care either way. You have a whole position on this, worked out well in advance, which makes me think you take this bus a lot.
A taxi goes by with the light on. Either of us could have put a hand up. Neither of us does, and then it's gone, and we don't mention it.
Twenty-three minutes. The bus comes in with its wipers going and the destination sign wrong.
We get on. You sit near the front, I go back, because that's what you do, and by Papineau you're on your phone and I'm at the window and it's over.
You get off at Mont-Royal without looking back down the aisle. The doors close. The cold comes in and goes out again.

Walk-In on Papineau

2026-08-01T00:00:00+00:00

The clinic on Papineau takes fifty a day and then stops. If you're not in line by seven you're coming back tomorrow.
You're filling out the form in French. I'm four seats down with a Châtelaine from March of last year. Between us a man coughs in a way that has a shape to it, a whole progression, like he's done this before and knows how long it takes.
You ask to borrow my pen.
I watch you get to état civil and check célibataire, then stop, then scratch it out and write c'est compliqué in the margin.
"They should have that one."
"Facebook has it," you say.
Three hours. We do the CBC cuts, the poutine question, whether it's worse to wait here or at the ER. You have opinions about the ER. You've been to the ER.
Your chest hurts and you don't know if it's your chest. My head spins and it might be my ear. The man between us nods at whatever either of us says.
They call you first.
You stop at the door. "If we're both still sick next week—"
"We'll be here."
The magazine has a recipe for a cake I'm never going to make. I read the whole thing twice.

The Dep at Three

2026-08-01T00:00:00+00:00

The light in here finds every pore. There is no flattering hour at a dépanneur; there is only the hour.
The man behind the counter has worked this shift six years and has watched the whole rotation come through — the post-party crowd at two, loud and generous and buying more than they want; the pre-dawn crowd at four, who are quieter and buy less; and in between them the ones who come in for a single tall can and count it out in change on the rubber mat, unhurried, because there is nowhere after this.
This is where the transactions actually happen. A shared box of Tylenol. Two coffees, one with two sugars. A scratch ticket and a loonie, two heads bent together over it at the counter under the cigarette rack, and the only question of the night that means anything: who paid?
I'm in yesterday's suit. You're in last night's dress with a coat over it that isn't yours, and you're holding the collar shut with one hand the way people do when the coat is not theirs.
We meet at the fridge, between the orange juice and the four-dollar white, in the cold that comes off the glass.
Neither of us says anything. There is nothing to say that the fridge isn't already saying.
You take the wine. I take the juice. He rings us up separately without being asked.

Stalled Between Berri and Beaudry

2026-08-01T00:00:00+00:00

The train stops in the tunnel and the lights drop to the emergency setting, which is orange and makes everyone look ill.
Across from me a man in a navy peacoat is reading La Nausée. His lips move a little. He's about a third in and the spine isn't cracked, so he isn't showing off, he's just started.
The intercom crackles. Désolé pour le retard. Then, after a pause long enough to be a different person: We apologize for the delay.
Nine minutes. In nine minutes you learn what a car full of people does with itself. Two phones come out and go back in when there's no signal. A woman near the door starts eating something out of her bag with enormous discretion. Nobody speaks.
His scarf is coming apart at one end and he's put a knot in it to stop the unravelling. It hasn't worked.
The train lurches. Everyone standing goes one way and comes back. His shoulder hits mine and he says excuse without looking up.
Beaudry. He gets off. The peacoat goes up the stairs and that's it.
I stay on past my stop and read the map, which I've read a thousand times and could draw from memory. Green and orange, crossing twice, never anywhere useful.

Merci, Bonne Nuit

2026-08-01T00:00:00+00:00

Three in the morning and the cooler hums a note I could sing back.
I take the chocolate milk from the back where it's coldest. He rings it through before I'm at the counter. Merci, bonne nuit. Bonne nuit.
Three years of that. I don't know his name. He doesn't know mine. He knows I come in after one, that I take the second-to-last bottle, that I pay with the same twenty until it breaks and then with the change from the twenty.
Last week he put a Caramilk in the bag. Didn't ring it, didn't mention it, didn't look at me.
The next night I left a copy of Volkswagen Blues on the counter. Paperback, cover gone soft, my name not in it. He put it under the register without a word and I don't know if he's read it.
We have never had a conversation. We've been doing this since the year I moved here.
Tonight it's snowing the small dry kind that doesn't stick. He has the radio on low, a call-in show, somebody furious about parking.
Merci. Bonne nuit.

De L'Église, 2 a.m.

2026-08-01T00:00:00+00:00

You're buying cigarettes you told two people you'd quit. I'm buying milk I already have.
The clerk watches us both and says nothing. He has the face of a man who stopped ranking the crises that come through this door a long time ago.
You count out change in French and apologize in English. I read the front of the Journal like it's news to me.
"Rough night?"
"Rough life." Then you laugh, to turn it into a joke, and neither of us is convinced.
We end up on the step, passing the pack back and forth. You tell me the apartment sounds wrong now. Not empty — wrong. The fridge is louder. You can hear the neighbours' TV, which you never could before, and you can't work out whether that's the apartment or you.
I tell you I walk at night. That's the whole thing. I walk, and it feels like getting somewhere.
A drunk comes up De L'Église doing Leloup, every note wrong, fully committed. We clap. He bows and keeps going.
"Same time tomorrow?"
"Probably."
I bought milk four nights that week. I poured most of it out.

The Bar With No Name

2026-08-01T00:00:00+00:00

It doesn't have a name. It has a neon sign that says BAR and one of the letters is on its way out.
Inside it's beer and floor cleaner and whatever's been in the vents since the smoking ban. Four people at the counter, all alone, all here on purpose.
I'm doing the thing with the water rings, joining them up, when she takes the stool beside me. Not the one with a gap. The one beside me.
"You look like you're waiting for someone who isn't coming."
"That's a hell of an opener."
"It's a Tuesday."
She buys the second round because I bought a first round I don't remember buying. Her laugh arrives late, a half-second after the thing that caused it, like it had to travel.
The bartender wipes the counter in circles and doesn't get any of it clean.
We don't exchange much that's true. She says she teaches. I say I used to. Neither of us follows up, which is its own kind of agreement.
By last call her hand is on my knee and the sign is throwing pink across her collarbone and the R has gone out entirely, so it says BA.
We stay until they put the chairs up.

Tim Hortons at Dusk

2026-08-01T00:00:00+00:00

The Tim Hortons is quiet at this hour. The fluorescents hum, the coffee machines hiss. The air smells of new coffee, sugar glaze, and the wet wool of coats hung over chair backs.
The clerk is new. Her hands are still learning the machines. Paper cups whisper against each other as she separates them, and steam rises past her face, briefly clouding her glasses. She asks what I want in broken French. I answer in accented English.
The man beside me holds a 7 Jours, his fingers yellow with bad habits. The pages crackle whenever he shifts his grip. He smells of cigarettes and winter air, though it hasn't snowed yet. Coffee, magazine, no words, then out the door; the same routine at this hour every evening for a week. I know because I've been here for all of them.
A couple sits at the table by the window. Headlights smear across the glass, red and white sliding over their faces. They lean in, hands almost touching. Between them a doughnut nobody has touched, the icing dulling under the lights.
In French, je t'aime is a promise. In English, I love you is something you say to coworkers on the phone.
The clerk hands me my cup. Too hot, and the sleeve doesn't help. I thank her in French and she answers in English, and for a second we share the small embarrassment of getting it right in the wrong language.
The man leaves. His chair scrapes against the tile, louder than it should be, and cold comes in behind him, stirring the napkins in their metal holder. The couple stays. Their hands still aren't touching.
I sit where he sat. The coffee is bitter at first, then I remember to like it.
Rain begins to stipple the window, softening the city beyond it.

Who Juliennes Carrots at Midnight

2026-08-01T00:00:00+00:00

Bleach, and something under the bleach. Everyone who has spent a night here knows the second smell and nobody can name it.
I'm here because my chest feels like there's weight on it. Probably nothing. Definitely something. That's the whole condition.
She's across the aisle with a dish towel around her left hand, gone through in one spot, the dark circle widening at a rate of about an hour.
"Cooking accident," she says, catching me looking. "I was julienning carrots. At midnight. Who juliennes carrots at midnight."
"Someone who isn't sleeping."
"Right."
Boeuf bourguignon, she says. The Montreal version, maple instead of sugar, which she admits is not a version, it's just what she had in the cupboard.
Triage calls B47. Then A23. Then C91. There is no logic to it that anyone in this room has managed to work out, and everyone in this room has tried.
I tell her the chest thing started in a faculty meeting about posthumanism. She laughs hard enough that the towel slips and she has to redo the whole wrap.
Dawn comes up in the window over the vending machines. That flat grey that isn't light yet.
Her number comes. She stands, gets her coat over the bad arm, and says: "Emergency rooms are good for one thing. They tell you what an emergency is."
Mine was nothing. Muscular. They told me to stretch.
I still cook at bad hours. I own a mandoline now. I use the guard.

Compare Scars

2026-08-01T00:00:00+00:00

Eleven on a Tuesday and the waiting room is at about forty percent, which for Saint-Mary's is empty.
You're holding your wrist at an angle wrists don't go. I have a Wildwood t-shirt wrapped around my hand and it's coming through.
"What happened?"
"Kitchen accident." What happened is I put my hand through the hallway drywall after reading her letter, and drywall is not soft, and there was a stud.
"Bike crash," you say, and your eyes do something.
There's one magazine left worth having and we split it, hip to hip, reading a profile of a chef neither of us has heard of. You do the facts in English and the opinions in French. I follow. It's easier to be cruel about someone in a language you're borrowing.
Triage calls numbers. Not names — numbers, like a deli counter.
They get to you first. Before you go you write your number on the back of my good hand with a pen you took off the triage desk.
"Pour comparer les cicatrices."
I never call. You didn't think I would. You wrote it on the hand, not on paper.
Four hours later they closed it up and told me to keep it dry. It came off in the sink at home. I let it.

Griffintown, Before the Condos

2026-08-01T00:00:00+00:00

She said she wanted to see the real one, not the Old Port, so I took her to the brick pile off Ottawa Street that was a brewery and then a warehouse and then nothing at all for nineteen years.
You get in at the corner where somebody cut the fence and somebody else bent it back badly.
Inside, sound does something you aren't ready for. It gets bigger and further away at the same time, so that a voice arrives with an amount of room attached to it, and when she asked how old the building was it came back off the concrete like the question of a stranger standing much further off than she was.
"My grandfather worked here," I said, which isn't true. Somebody's did.
Pigeons in the roof, and the constant small noise of them shifting. Glass on the floor in a layer, ground fine by twenty years of people walking on it, so that it crunches like gravel rather than glass, and after a minute you stop hearing it.
She read the walls with her fingers, actually touching them, which I wouldn't have done. Someone had put JE T'AIME in silver over an older tag that said FUCK GENTRIFICATION, and the damp was taking both of them at the same rate.
We went up. The stairs are steel and they're fine; they'll be the last thing to go.
From the roof you can see the Farine Five Roses sign, and the bridge, and, turning, about two hundred cranes standing over the south-west in various stages of doing this to everything else.
She kissed me up there and the sound of it went down into the building and came back multiplied, which is a thing I did not know a kiss could do.
"I don't usually do this."
Everyone says that up there.
They took it down in March. Two towers now, sold out before the hole was dug. I've stopped going down that street, which is easy, because there's no reason to.

Level P3

2026-08-01T00:00:00+00:00

P3 is where you park if you're staying past six, because the rate changes and nobody who works in the building is still here.
The air is cool and damp and smells like exhaust and something sweeter underneath it, which I've decided is old oil and would rather not investigate.
I say her name and the ramp gives it back three times, each one shorter than the last.
She comes out from behind the column by the elevators. The emergency lights are on the sodium setting so everything is the colour of a bad photograph, and she has her keys already in her hand.
Her footsteps are the clearest sound in the building. Heel, then the rest of the foot. Twelve of them.
"I tried to text."
The garage: text, tex, texxx.
We both hear it. She almost laughs.
That's the conversation, more or less. Whatever I came down here to say, the room said it back to me at a lower volume until it wasn't worth saying.
Her car chirps two rows over. Mine's on P2. We say goodbye standing four feet apart and it comes off the ceiling twice, like someone else agreeing.

Au Revoir

2026-08-01T00:00:00+00:00

Au revoir has the return built into it. Until we see each other again. It's a promise you make without noticing you've made it, and you go on making it for years — at doors, on sidewalks, into phones — until one day you make it and it isn't true, and the grammar has committed you anyway.
Goodbye is a contraction of God be with you, which nobody remembers and nobody means. What's left is the sound. Two syllables, the second one falling, and nothing after it.
I learned the difference on Rue Drolet, standing in the hall after the door had shut, working out which of the two had just happened to me.
We built the thing in one language and took it apart in the other, and the tools didn't fit. Tu es l'erreur que je continue de répéter is a good sentence — it has a spine, and it lands on répéter, on the repetition itself, which is the accusation. You are the mistake I keep making is a bad one. It goes soft in the middle and comes to rest on making, which is nothing, which is a word you could use about a sandwich.
Gainsbourg: je t'aime, moi non plus. In English, I love you, me neither. It isn't even wrong. It's just stupid.
You're quieter in English, she said.
You're crueller in French, I said.
Both true. One language for the store and one for the other thing, and no way to get a sentence intact from one to the other.
She's still in the neighbourhood. We use the same dep. I go at eleven now, which is later than I used to, for reasons I have never had to say out loud to anyone.

Cooking Wine

2026-08-01T00:00:00+00:00

Six-thirty at the Provigo, and everyone in here is buying for one and pretending otherwise. You can tell by the baskets. Nobody with a family carries a basket.
You're at the tomatoes doing the thing where you pick one up and put it back somewhere else.
"The good ones are gone."
"Story of my life."
You turn around, surprised anyone answered. I'm surprised too.
After that we're in the same aisles at the same time and neither of us mentions it. Bread. Then dairy. Then you double back for something and I don't.
At the wine wall you're holding a Malbec.
"For cooking."
"Sure."
I put one in my basket too, which is not subtle, and I know it isn't.
The express line is nine deep because two registers are down. Your basket: four frozen dinners, coffee, the Malbec. Mine: oranges I'll let go soft, bread, the Malbec.
The cashier asks if we're together and we both say no at the same time, too fast. She doesn't care. She's seventeen and it's a keystroke.
It's raining outside. We stand under the overhang with the bags at our feet, not leaving.
"You want to cook something," you say. "Since we both have the wine for it."
Neither of us cooks. We open the bottle at your place at eight and don't eat until midnight, standing up, out of the pan.

Four in the Morning

2026-08-01T00:00:00+00:00

I walk when I can't sleep, which is most nights, and I've worn a route into the city without deciding to.
Café on Bernard where she said she was going. It's a bank vestibule now.
Apartment on Laurier where he stopped answering. Second floor, left. His name is still on the buzzer, which either means something or means the landlord is lazy.
The bench in the park where we agreed to try again, both of us knowing.
At four the streets belong to the shift workers, the other insomniacs, and the cats, who own the alleys outright and will tell you so. Everybody nods. Nobody stops.
There's a bench on Marie-Anne where I sat with someone whose name I've lost. I remember she spoke French when things were good and English when they weren't, and that the last night she spoke only English, and that I noticed at the time and said nothing.
By the time I'm home the sun is coming over the mountain and everything is the colour of a peach.
It's five and a half kilometres. My key is warm from my hand.

How to Disappear Completely at IGA

2026-08-01T00:00:00+00:00

Eight o'clock is when the store empties out and everyone left is buying dinner for tonight.
You're in the cereal aisle comparing unit prices, which nobody does unless they've had a bad month. Your cart: almond milk, one sweet potato, and a bottle of wine with a screwtop and an animal on the label.
We make eye contact by the frozen peas. You smile the way people smile when they've caught themselves being seen.
"You come here often?"
"Only when I want to feel like a person."
You laugh. Then the laugh turns into a cough. Then the cough turns into something else, and you stand there in front of the freezer case with your hand over your mouth, and I look at the peas.
It takes about twenty seconds. I count them.
At the register you wave me ahead. Our hands touch when I put the divider down — the rubber end of it, my knuckle, your finger.
Neither of us asks for anything.
Your car's in the lot. Mine isn't; I walk. I'm halfway up Beaubien before I realize I bought the same wine.

The Bench by the Pond

2026-08-01T00:00:00+00:00

There's a bench at Lafontaine with a view of the pond and the ducks that have given up migrating.
Today it's a woman in a trench coat with a German magazine folded the wrong way, a coffee, and a phone face-down on the slats that buzzes about every ninety seconds.
I know the arrangement. Reading material, coffee, body angled out. It looks like solitude and it is the exact opposite.
"Sprechen Sie Deutsch?" My accent kills it.
She looks up. "Only when I'm homesick."
Berlin winters, then Montreal winters, then the winter in her marriage, which took four minutes to get to. Her husband thinks she's at yoga. The mat is in the car.
The phone buzzes twice more. She doesn't turn it over.
At ten past she stands up, says something in German I don't catch, and goes toward Rachel.
She leaves the scarf. I don't go after her. I sit there another twenty minutes with it beside me and then I hang it over the back of the bench where she'd see it.
I check the next Tuesday. It's gone. That's all it proves.

The Sock

2026-08-01T00:00:00+00:00

Rain on the window, machines going, and a plastic chair with a crack in it that pinches if you sit wrong.
The woman two machines down folds sheets like she was taught. Corner to corner, shake, corner to corner. She can do a fitted sheet, which almost nobody can, and she doesn't look at her hands while she does it.
My load has been done a while. I'm not moving.
She holds up a sock — grey, ribbed, not hers — and raises her eyebrows at me.
It isn't mine either. I shake my head.
She looks at it. Then she puts it in the lint trap of the machine between us. Standing up, where you'd see it.
I don't know what that is. It isn't nothing.
She's gone by the time my dryer stops. I take my things out and fold them badly, the way I do, and on the way past I take the sock.
It's in my drawer. It's been there two years. It doesn't match anything.

Viau, 3 a.m.

2026-08-01T00:00:00+00:00

Two of us, and every machine free except two. The one you're using makes a noise on the spin like it's coming apart, and it does that every time, and nobody has ever fixed it.
You're folding men's shirts. I can tell by the collars — two thumbs, twice, before the fold.
You ask me in French if I have change for a twenty. I tell you in English that I don't, and that the machine took my last five, and we both look at the change machine, which has a sign on it in marker.
The shirts are his. He left three weeks ago. His laundry keeps turning up — in the hamper, behind the door, under the bed — like the apartment is producing it.
I'm washing sheets nobody else has been in since March.
We trade the hard parts in whichever language is further away. Yours goes to French. Mine goes to English.
The dryer buzzes and you pull out a wool sweater that's come out the size of a child's.
"Calice."
You hold it up. You don't put it in the bag. You put it in the garbage by the door, and then you sit back down and start on the next load.
We fold in silence for an hour. On the way out you hold the door with your hip.
It's getting light on Viau. Not light. The idea of it.

Saint-Zotique, Eleven p.m.

2026-08-01T00:00:00+00:00

Grey socks, eight pairs, every one of them gone loose at the top so they slide down inside your boots. I keep washing them. I am not going to buy socks.
Across the room a woman is reading The Stranger in English with a highlighter, which is a thing people stop doing after school and she hasn't.
I read it in French at seventeen and remember two sentences.
She catches me looking and does the small closed-mouth smile that means yes, we are both at a laundromat at eleven at night.
I move down two chairs. Not next to her. Two chairs down, which is a proposal.
She's highlighting something in the middle, in the part where nothing happens.
"Do you think love is absurd?"
She asks it exactly like that, out of nowhere, cap still off the highlighter.
"Probably. It's the only absurd thing worth paying for."
She laughs. It's a good laugh, low, and it goes under the sound of the dryers instead of over it.
Her machine finishes first. She loads the bag, caps the highlighter, waves over her shoulder on the way out.
I put another forty minutes on the dryer for clothes that are already dry.

Lionel-Groulx

2026-08-01T00:00:00+00:00

One in the morning and there are nine of us in the car.
The woman across from me is crying without any of the equipment — no sound, no shaking, just water going down and her not doing anything about it. There's a paperback open on her knee and she isn't reading it.
I could ask. There's a version of me that asks.
At Charlevoix she wipes her face with the flat of her hand, once, both sides, and puts the book in her bag.
Lionel-Groulx. She's out before the chime finishes.
There's a bookmark on the seat where she was. Card stock, handwritten, in blue:
La douleur est une île. On y naît seul, on y vit seul, on y meurt seul.
The handwriting is careful. Somebody made that for somebody.
I rode to Angrignon with it in my coat pocket. At Angrignon they turn the lights all the way up and make everyone get off, and then you wait on the platform and get back on the same train going the other way.

In the Tub, Fully Clothed

2026-08-01T00:00:00+00:00

Every house party in Centre-Sud sounds the same after midnight. Someone playing guitar badly. Someone crying in the kitchen. Someone falling in love on the fire escape who will not be at breakfast.
I go to the bathroom because it's the only room with a lock.
You're already in it, sitting in the empty tub with your shoes on, going through the contents of the medicine cabinet, which you've lined up along the ledge.
"Le métro est fermé," you say, not looking up.
"I know."
I get in the other end. It's a small tub. We're at right angles.
Through the door: laughter, an argument, glass.
"In French we say faire la fête. To make the party."
"In English we have one."
"That's worse."
You hand me a bottle. We read the side effects out loud, taking turns. Drowsiness. Dizziness. Difficulty distinguishing between dreams and reality.
"That's just being awake," you say.
Somebody knocks. We don't answer. They knock again, then give up and use the one downstairs, which we both knew was there the whole time.
We're in there long enough that my foot goes dead. You put everything back in the cabinet in the order you found it, which I notice.
We come out separately. You leave. I stay till six and help stack the cans.

The Mortality Conference

2026-08-01T00:00:00+00:00

Three hundred actuaries at the Fairmont for four days, and the mood in the room during the session on cause-of-death coding was genuinely festive.
She presented on urban longevity. Living within four hundred metres of green space is worth 2.3 years, which sounds like a lot until you hear what a highway costs you.
I sat in the back running numbers on whether the ring was a ring or a countermeasure. Conference creeps are a known hazard and the literature suggests the ring works.
At the urn she went for the decaf.
"Regular after forty is asking for standard deviation."
We're bad at risk, people who do risk. We know how things fail. We have tables.
At lunch she sat down without asking. "Your paper on suicide rates in post-industrial cities. That was almost writing."
Montreal spikes in February and bottoms out in June. Everyone assumes it's the cold. It isn't the cold, it's the length of the thing.
The conference wine tasted like a settlement.
"We're professional pessimists," she said. "We calculate how it ends. It's the job description."
That night in the bar she took the ring off and put it on the napkin. "Divorced. Officially, statistically, irreversibly."
Two people who price catastrophe for a living, doing this anyway, at a hotel bar at one in the morning after a session on pension solvency.
Friday closed with the hundred-year projections. We sat at the back. Her hand found mine in the dark somewhere around slide forty, which was a fan chart, and the fan was very wide at the far end, the way they always are.

The Bench at Laurier

2026-08-01T00:00:00+00:00

The slats are warm through my jeans. It's the first day this year that's been warm enough to notice, and the whole park knows it.
A woman goes by with a small dog that stops every four steps and has to be waited for. She waits. She has the patience of someone who did the math on this walk a long time ago and accepted the number.
A guy is sitting against the big elm with his eyes shut and headphones on, doing the head thing. Every so often his hand moves on his knee, which means there are drums in it.
The swings are all taken. A kid is going high enough that the chain goes slack at the top and then snaps — that sound, the one that makes every parent in the park look up.
Her mother is looking up. Her mother has been looking up for ten minutes and hasn't smiled once.
The woman with the dog comes back the other way. She nods at me. I nod back.
A man sits down on the far end of my bench, which is his right; it's a bench. We share it without acknowledging each other. Then I go, and he spreads out.

The Machine on Stanley

2026-08-01T00:00:00+00:00

The machine on level 3 of the Stanley garage takes cards and does not always give them back. There's a phone on the wall for this. The phone rings somewhere nobody is.
She's been at it a while when I come off the stairs. She has a pen in the slot.
"This is Kafkaesque."
"Kafka would've loved these. Bad light, no exit, and you pay to leave."
She turns around and decides I'm not a problem.
My car is one level up. I have no reason to be here except that I heard swearing and it was in two languages, alternating, which takes commitment.
We get the card out with my key and a lot of angle. It comes free and skids under the machine and we both go down on the concrete after it and she gets it.
"Cassandre."
She says the name like someone used to spelling it.
She pays. The gate is a two-minute walk from the machine, which is a decision somebody made.
At the elevator we run out. She says thanks. I say no problem. She goes down, I go up.
The stub is still in the coat. I find it in November when it's cold enough for the coat, and by then I can't remember what building it was for.

The Almost

2026-08-01T00:00:00+00:00

We're standing by your car on P2 and you're doing Tremblay, the whole waitress bit, flat vowels and everything.
"Une p'tite frite, une p'tite frite… deux toasts beurrées, deux toasts beurrées."
I laugh too loud and it comes back off the ramp.
Then it goes quiet the way it does. Neither of us is talking and neither of us is leaving, and my keys have been in my hand for four minutes.
You lean in.
Your phone goes. Not a text — a call, the whole ringtone, three bars of something.
You step back. You say the word "meeting." You get in the car.
The tail lights go up the ramp and the exhaust hangs there under the low ceiling because it has nowhere to go.
I stand by my car on P3 for a while. There's a sign on the wall that says LEVEL 3 / NIVEAU 3, and a smaller one under it that says REMEMBER YOUR LEVEL.

Rain, Vancouver

2026-08-01T00:00:00+00:00

Eleven months of the year this city is being rained on and about six weeks of that is the good kind.
Tonight is the good kind. Fine, straight down, no wind, warm enough that nobody has a hood up.
The street is doing the thing where wet asphalt takes the neon and doubles it, so the block is twice as lit as it should be, half of it upside down.
Under the awning at the café on the corner there's a couple who have just come out of an argument, or a party, or both. She's laughing with her whole head back. He's holding both coffees and can't do anything about his face.
I go past close enough to hear what it's about, and it's about a movie.
My umbrella is broken at the third rib so the whole thing sits crooked and rain runs off the low side onto my shoulder. I've had it that way two winters.
At Venables the streetlight is out and for most of a block there's nothing but the wet and the sound of it.
Then it's the Drive again, and the pho place, and the guy who's always outside the pho place.

The 24 on Sherbrooke

2026-08-01T00:00:00+00:00

The 24 does Sherbrooke end to end, and if you get on at the right time you can have a double seat to yourself most of the way east.
I've got one. She's got the one across, and she's got Le Mythe de Sisyphe open on her lap in the Folio edition with the cracked yellow spine.
She isn't reading it. She's holding the edge of the page between finger and thumb and moving her thumb.
The bus takes the curve at Papineau and everyone leans and comes back.
Outside it's the run of dépanneurs and phone repair and a church that's a climbing gym now. The windows fog at the bottom and stay clear at the top, so the city comes through as a band across the middle.
She looks up. We look at each other for about a second and a half, which is over the limit.
We both go back to the window.
At Frontenac she gets off. She leaves the book on the seat and I think she's forgotten it, and she hasn't, she's six feet up the sidewalk and doesn't turn.
I don't take it. Somebody at Pie-IX does — a guy in work boots who picks it up, looks at the cover, and puts it inside his jacket like it was his the whole time.

The Second Shovel

2026-08-01T00:00:00+00:00

Forty centimetres overnight, and the plow came at four and put half of it back across the bottom of my driveway in a wall with the consistency of a countertop.
I'm most of the way down one side when the guy from two doors down comes out with a second shovel. Four years we've lived here and said nothing.
"They only plow in summer," he says.
We work from opposite ends. He's better at it — he goes in at an angle and takes less each time, and he's still ahead of me at the halfway point.
His gloves are gone through at the fingertips. My mitts are men's and they aren't mine and they still smell faintly like the guy they belonged to, in the wool.
It takes fifty minutes.
After, in my kitchen, which I have not cleaned, he drinks bad coffee and tells me he plays trumpet, or played, that the gigs went in 2020 and came back at half and then stopped coming back. He does session work when there's session work.
I tell him I cry at the lobster tank at the IGA. I don't know why I tell him this.
He says he's never once looked at the lobster tank.
He puts the mug in the sink, which is a thing you have to have been raised to do.
It's still coming down. By morning there's a new inch on everything and you can't tell anyone was out here.

Coming Down With Boxes

2026-08-01T00:00:00+00:00

The outside staircases are a bad idea the city committed to and now can't get out of. In February they're a spiral of ice with a railing that comes off in your hand.
I'm going up with four bags of groceries in each hand because I refuse to make two trips. You're coming down with a box.
We do the dance. You go left, I go left. You laugh. We try again.
"Moving out?"
"Moving out."
The box has books in both languages, a Bodum, and a rice cooker with the cord wound around it in a way that means somebody taught you to wind cords.
You set it on the landing to let me past. The step is only wide enough for one of us to be right.
I don't ask. There's a version of the question that isn't nosy and I don't have it.
Three trips later the truck is still at the curb with the back open, half full. By four it's gone.
The bags cut into my fingers and I could see the lines on my palms for an hour afterward.
Somebody moved into 3B in June. He plays bass. He's fine.

Emergency Exit

2026-08-01T00:00:00+00:00

The stairwell smells like mould and cold metal and somebody's fabric softener from the fourth floor.
I'm on the landing between three and four when I hear you crying above me. Not the quiet kind. The kind that has to stop to breathe.
I should keep going. I sit down.
Through the concrete I can feel it a little, or think I can. You're wearing red Converse. They're the only thing in the stairwell that has a color.
We don't talk about it that night. We don't talk about it any night.
Second night you bring gummy bears. Third night I bring Caramilks. Fourth night neither of us brings anything. Eventually we split a sleeve of soda crackers you had in your bag.
"You ever think about sleeping here?"
"Only in theory."
The super finds us on day seven. Fire hazard, he says, which is technically correct.
You leave a business card on the step. I write my number on a wrapper and put it under the card.
Neither of us calls. I see you at the recycling once, in October, and we both do the nod.

Ten a.m., Wednesday

2026-08-01T00:00:00+00:00

I'm drinking Côtes du Rhône out of a coffee mug because the glasses are all in the sink and have been since Sunday.
From the desk I can see the tourists at the garden wall photographing the arranged rocks. There's one arrangement they all photograph. The other ones seem sad.
The phone pings. It's my former department chair, third time this week. I always let it go to voicemail. She'll talk for a while about opportunities and the future in the French they teach you in Laval, every consonant paid for.
I pour more wine.
I write: Loneliness is not the absence of others but the presence of ourselves, undiluted. I read it back. I delete it.
I write: Je bois donc je suis. Delete.
I write: it's Wednesday.
Outside a couple is arguing in Mandarin by the pond. I don't have a word of it and I know exactly where they are in it. There's a pitch that only happens near the end.
The wine is warm now. The mug says WORLD'S OKAYEST DAD and isn't mine.
I close the laptop before noon and the day gets on with itself without any help from me.