Excerpt from Mooncalves // Victoria Hetherington

This is an excerpt from Mooncalves by Victoria Hetherington, out April 15 from Now or Never Publishing. This excerpt is presented in partnership with moore hype

I was drinking milk straight from the carton one night, little sips, with the fridge door propped open against my stomach, keeping me cold. I wore only panties and a T-shirt. The fridge light illuminated a few floor tiles around my feet and the legs of a nearby chair, but nothing else really, so when the door banged open and Erica shrieked with laughter, I couldn’t see anything except that she wasn’t alone, two bodies silhouetted briefly as they fumbled together in the cold light of the hallway. I’ve been this tall since age twelve, no kidding,” the guy slurred, and Erica clicked her tongue.That’s so interesting! I can’t imagine being so tall, so young.”People stopped messing with me after that. And then I hit six-five around, like, first year undergrad,” he continued. Erica turned on the living room lamp, and took his coat. Wow. You could have killed it at basketball,” she said. She tossed the coat over the couch, then leaned into him and kissed him. He wobbled a little, then grabbed her face in one hand, and gathered her ponytail in the other, bunching it into a fist. His hair was grey.I did, actually,” he says. “Kill it at basketball. Didn’t I tell you?” She yanked him down by his tie, and kissed him again. They were very drunk, but they knew I was there—I could tell by how they weren’t looking at me. She must’ve warned him I’d be home. Drinking milk, drinking tea, taking laxatives. Hurting myself to grow thin and then thinner, testing the remnants of youthful elasticity which once kept me firm as a flower stalk. I had turned thirty-six the week before, too old for this shit, but the hunger to attain girlishness never escapes you, no matter how far girlishness itself slips from you, a brief window of possibility for a select few, a ring of sun-kissed fawns, constantly replenishing.Arnaud, this is my roommate Shelagh,” Erica said, gently freeing her hair from his fist. He glanced over at me, then looked me up and down. I’d sweated through the neck of the T-shirt, and my nipples were inexplicably hard. I plunked the milk container on the counter, and then went to my room.He was awful,” I told her the next morning, after he’d grabbed his sports jacket from the chair, tucked a cigarette behind his ear, and left. He paid me,” she said. For—for dinner?”No.” She shredded a piece of omelette. “He’s so old he couldn’t even believe my naked body, you know? And too drunk to want me more than once. Really we mostly talked, and then he slept. So peaceful—it was like he came over just to talk and sleep. He kept cupping my boobs really gentle, like they were something alive, and then letting them fall.”You know he’s probably married, right?”Oh yeah. He has a grown-up kid and like a wife. He golfs with friends, but he talks like he’s just been released from solitary confinement. I like this, Shelagh. I’m not going to steal anymore.”Jesus,” I said.Do you want in?” she asked. “It’d be safer with a partner. Plus then, house calls.”I said yes right away, because then I’d be her partner, inexplicably bound together through danger and secrecy, sifting our bodies through the grey mesh of male hunger criss-crossing Toronto. Because then I’d get to see that body, cup those breasts and worship them too. Because I was in love.Loving Erica was such a costly imperative that losing everything else—my home, my boyfriend, my relative freedom—had happened and was OK, because I was buttressed by her focus and elevated by our intimacy, which fluttered around my rib cage whenever I was alone.The following Saturday, she called me into her bedroom: another man in a suit was sitting cross-legged on the bed, one socked foot jiggling. He was loosening his tie, and looked me over. “Want a drink?” Erica asked us both, and darted out of the room.Come sit,” the man said uncertainly, patting the bed. He was bald, and when I sat beside him, I saw a pale, pale layer of fuzz coated his skull, gathering thickest above his ears. The insides of his ears were the hairiest part of him. He had very pale blue eyes, and barely looked at me. He was sixty-five at least, but at thirty-six, I was too old for him.Erica returned with three sweating cans of cider, one of which I’d noticed earlier, half-empty, warming on the sunny kitchen windowsill. The man accepted that particular cider, and allowed her to unbutton his shirt, then brush her mouth against his white, wiry loops of chest hair. His shrunken chest was very tan. He kissed her hungrily, his neck under his jowl crinkling like tissue paper, his dull pink tongue snaking into her mouth. He pulled her onto his lap, then grabbed my knee. I froze, and he pulled back from her a little, looking into her eyes.I’ve just gotta ask you whether, um,” he said, wiping his mouth, “your friend is here for fun, or? Because I’m just paying for you.”We’re a package deal,” she chirped, and I felt so nauseous I had to stand up. She’s just kidding,” I said. “I’m going to bed.”Even his subtle, very nice cologne couldn’t mask the old-man smell, and his skin bunched loose around his gold rings, so they looked wedged on his fingers. He looked near death. I could imagine his grey, filed-down tooth nubs under the white crowns that clicked when he spoke. But he didn’t want to fuck me because he thought I was too old. I was full of rage and so was he, the rage reserved for those who’ve had loved ones snatched by death, and those staring down death themselves. He looked at me, and saw himself burnt up in a vase, buried in the winter ground.Erica, I have a fucking job,” I said early the next morning, as she prepared omelettes and hummus toast for her and I. “You know? I don’t need this crap.”Oh god, I’m so sorry,” she said, sucking egg off her palm. “I think he was really sick. He couldn’t even get it up, you know? But listen: this is freedom. Right? You come home from that office every night just deflated. You spend all your daylight there, no windows, and they pay you peanuts. This way … we could sleep until the afternoon, if we wanted. Watch movies, paint our nails, make our own hours.”I wanted to become visible again, and accompany Erica through this big city packed with ugly romance—a romance born of the sheer fact that so many others were witnessing and sharing our experience. The next day I came home after work, and called out for Erica. “Are you home?”She called me into her bedroom, which was even more disastrous than usual. I sat cross-legged on the very edge of her plush, satiny bed, and opened my laptop on my lap, ignoring the sex smell dissipating from the air. One of her pillows was folded in half, and visibly wet. We sat together late into the night, waiting by her phone, and though my elastic youth was nearly gone hers remained, that terrifying power that, at the dawn of every generation, seems certain to tear us all down.An hour later, I was standing by the fridge sipping milk again, and she yelled out to me: “Shelagh! Got a pen?” She came to her doorway and gave me an address, a room number, and a name: Paul Smith.I don’t think Smith is his last name,” I said, and she laughed. I doubt Paul is his first name! He says he’s a scientist, though. Astrophysics, so that’s nice.”That’s nice,” I agreed. He wants you for 7 p.m. You call me on the hour, every hour. You don’t do that, I call the cops to the place. All right?” Is that a hotel, this place?” I asked.

*

It was in fact a motel, squat and brown and swallowed up in concrete, right out near Downsview Airport, where everything is kilometres away from everything else. Paul was waiting for me in Room 9, playing solitaire with battered cards. He was one of countless unattractive men you see hunched between filing cabinets, driving trucks, restoring carpets, fixing vacuum cleaners. The kind of men the world seems packed full of, who lie dead for weeks before the smell reaches their neighbours. But then again, maybe he wasn’t so bad-looking—I never can tell with men. At least he had his clothes on.He stood up, walked over, and grasped both my elbows gently; I could tell from his face that he’d never hurt a woman in his life. He didn’t know how to proceed, and I realized with a rush like ice water that shit, neither did I. “Do you mind if we eat?” I asked. That is a great idea,” he said, in a more gregarious voice than I was expecting. He had, I think, a Russian accent. “My treat, of course. I want to celebrate.”Celebrate what?” I said, a little resentfully.There will be a solar flare tonight,” he said. “Chances are, it’ll miss the earth completely. Not a big deal to most earthlings, I’m afraid.” I didn’t know what a solar flare was—or what’d happen if one didn’t miss the earth—but I sure as hell wasn’t asking. “How do you know that?” I asked.Satellites,” he said, vaguely. What a shitty celebration, I thought. Who’d pick a beat-down motel, and a bony escort over thirty-five? Maybe he’d stayed here before, perhaps attending a conference, eating spongy sandwiches from a tray and falling asleep in rough sheets, his head full of stars. Maybe this motel, my company, and a meal was just great, compared to whatever else he’d seen.The motel restaurant was in fact a pub, and exactly what I liked. It was dark, but full of colour once my eyes adjusted: a flickering neon sign behind the bar, the pilling green felt of a pool table. The place was nearly empty, and the bartender waved us in with a thin, hairy arm. My heart leapt with joy, sudden and strange. I didn’t know how free I was, back then; you only learn that later, when real age piles on like rocks. Tell me more about the satellites,” I said. We’ve got a satellite that detects these kinds of storms a few days before it hits,” he said, taking a tiny sip of his beer. “The satellite is a million miles away from Earth, if you can imagine this.”How long did it take the satellite to get there?”Eleven years.”Just to get there?”How long do you think it’d take you to drive a million miles? Or run?”A lot less if there’s nothing in my way. There aren’t even oceans out there.”All of it is an ocean, yeah? And we are dust.”He must think like this always, which exhausted me to contemplate. So I started talking about tactile, simple things: how does his meat pie taste; does my hand feel clammy; look at that woman’s bag over there, it’s embroidered “GWENDOLYN” in shaky yarn letters—somebody loves her. I think if I ran all my life, I’d get far,” I said, quite drunk. “Mars. Or the one with the rings—Saturn? Because … ”Because?”Because I have faith in myself.” I thought of Erica, and smiled a sloppy smile. If you ran all your life? Hm.” He sipped his coffee and I realized I liked his lips: they were large, chapped and soft-looking. “Assuming sixty years of running ten hours a day, let’s say 1,533,000 kilometres. You could reach the Voyager satellite.”But no coming home.”Well if return journeys really matter to you, let’s see … you could run to the moon, and come back to Earth. Then change your mind and run back to the moon, and then make it nearly home again.”I imagined myself floating dead in space, my sneakers on and strands of my ponytail drifting in and out of my opened mouth, having stopped just short of Earth’s bright atmosphere. “Why would I do that?” I asked.He smiled at me. “Why indeed?” I drained my glass, feeling suddenly as spooked by the inches of space between us both as the vast distance from the moon to Earth. Back in the room, we fucked. He cooed appreciatively over my thinness, grasping my thighs with his soft hands, pantomiming resistance on my part, so he might overpower it. His penis was smallish and had an odd shape, and I shocked myself with how wet I was—wet enough to make a rhythmic sucking noise as he fucked me, slick long strands of wetness gluing his thighs to mine, my thighs to each other, my ass cheeks to the mattress. Aaah, aahh, ahhh, he went, no longer translating from Russian to English before he spoke, and I pressed my face into his shoulder and shuddered. Call me Pavel, he whispered, so I gasped his real name into the overripe flesh of his shoulder. It died on my tongue–why was I embarrassed?–and so I tried again. Pavel, Pavel.Candy, he groaned into my hair, expelling heat and wet into my ear, tightening his grip on my thigh, my neck. I remembered that ‘Candy’ was the name Erica and I both gave. Coming from him, it felt like my real name, perhaps—but not only—because he believed it was. At one point he pulled out and rolled his balls back and forth in three shaking fingers, and I throbbed in his brief absence, squeezing in on myself.Afterwards we lay in our wet patches and he praised me, saying I hadn’t once checked my phone, that I was so present. Saying that he was a busy guy, and lonely too (if I could believe it) and so when he wanted companionship, he wanted the whole person. He smiled at me by pressing his lips together hard, and rubbed sweat from his short, spiked hair. I thanked him, though really I’m on the internet all day, and even then I felt pings of desire for my phone, nestled safe and alluring in my purse.It breaks your brain,” he said, miming typing on a computer. “It looks like a real world, behind that screen, but it is a deception. Mimic only.”A fiery red light burst through the room. I screamed and dug my nails into his arm, and confess I pissed a little, soaking the mattress. Something banged in the hallway, and somebody else shrieked. He yanked himself free. “It’s happening. The flare!” Paul yelled. He jumped out of bed, and hopped up and down on the balls of his feet. He yanked open the blinds, exposing a mass of people dashing through the parking lot to their cars. His naked chest, arms and stomach shone bright red.Later I’d learn that the Rocky Mountains had flared so bright all nearby forests glowed like day, and miners woke to prepare their breakfasts. I’d learn that aurorae scrolled through the sky, bright red over Toronto, green-white over Shanghai. I’d be able to visualize the electronic grid flicking out across North America—which lay in shadow—bathing office buildings and animals and people and highways in soft, shifting light. Erica, wherever she was, disentangling her body from a man’s and rushing to a window, looking up in wonder.

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