The bar is less interesting than she imagined it would be. Plain walls, adorned with only a few neon signs and mirrors, generic swag from breweries. No military stuff like her mother talked about. The only interesting feature is a sackcloth dummy standing heavily in the corner, its appearance brutalized as though knives have been used on it with alarming frequency.

She goes to sit at the stool closest to the register and kitchen, but Olsen motions her to the one adjacent. He looks perturbed but disappears before she can ask and reappears with a meal that smells like curried heaven. He makes her a Manhattan. Hard liquor isn’t her thing—booze in general isn’t her thing—but it’s remarkable how well its vermouth and whiskey pair with the curry.

None of my ex’s had a dog. I can’t watch
television alone. I am sloppy
with the weekend

For our second attempt at pepperpot, my husband and I purchased a roast, hoping it would tenderize well in the Instant Pot.

As we had done the first time, we bought a loaf of challah bread to soak up the sauce. We dutifully acquired more Scotch bonnet peppers and cinnamon sticks.

How my heart fell when I unscrewed the lid and realized we didn’t have enough cassareep to coat a second batch of pepperpot. As my husband sautéed the beef over the stove, I pinched an eighth-inch teaspoon between my fingers to scrape as much of the dregs of the cassareep as I could into a measuring cup. By the time my knuckles were sticky with syrup and I could salvage no more, I had collected less than half a cup.

It’s not every day a sock puppet visits a maternity ward.

Minoo and I fly down the hall, the anticipated squeak of hospital vinyl absent from under our feet. We are weightless, shoes barely touching the ground. A reflection of Minoo’s form glides beneath us. Wraith-like, we are darkly mirrored in the freshly-waxed floor. 

And Minoo—she stares ahead, unseeing. Not seeing me, I mean. As conspicuous as I am to everyone else, my existence is as natural to her as the weight of her tongue in her mouth, or the air filling the lungs in her chest. She doesn’t see the nurse who jumps out of our way either, flattening her body to the wall, blue eyes large with shock.

Love felled her like a tree
a robin’s egg in a windstorm
a pretty blue thing
a gift of spring.

The move itself was frigid. Men in boots tracking snow and salt through two houses. Half of our plants died in cold moving trucks. My big orange tabby shat in his cat carrier riding next to me in the car from Hamilton to Paris. An omen? Those first weeks in Paris, I saw omens everywhere. Worst was what I found in the attic. Kneeling and feeling for drafts by a small window, I saw bones lying on the floor next to me. They comprised a full skeleton. It was as though the skeleton had been picked clean and preserved for a science class. Not a bone missing or chipped. No rotting flesh or feathers attached. A bird? Squirrel? Baby raccoon? An offering to dark gods left by previous owners? I couldn’t tell.

I am standing in the middle of the street, crying. “I hate this coffee. Why does everything taste so weird? Why is surówka served with everything?” To this day I don’t get what’s to love about a type of coleslaw. Why did we come here? What was I thinking? My poor husband stands helpless, watching my meltdown. He later tells me he was concerned by my extreme reaction, and worried that I was going to unravel. He felt bad, he said. He had no idea how to help me. We haven’t found our support system. For now it is just the two of us trying to navigate our daily existence.