Pile of Bones

by Bailey Cunningham

  She blinked. “Are you asking me out?”

  “I’m asking you to share carrot sticks with me on a balcony.”

  “That—actually sounds pretty good.”

  “Okay. You grab the quiches and the roughage. I’ll get the protein.” He began parceling meatballs into a napkin. “On second thought—get the Nanaimo bar first. They go fast.”

  “I’m on it.”

  A few minutes later, they were ducking through the window of the TA office, which led to a concrete patio. Cigarette butts and spiderwebs decorated the corners. Andrew divided the food equally, and they ate in companionable silence.

  “So—you do Restoration stuff.”

  Shelby wiped her mouth with the napkin. The mini quiche was sitting like a rock in her stomach, but at least the hunger pangs were gone. “Basically. I’m studying Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle.”

  “Wasn’t she crazy?”

  “Crazy like a seventeenth-century fox.”

  He laughed. “I liked The Convent of Pleasure. Especially the part where the women keep trying different sauces, and each one is better than the last.”

  “Yeah. It was a rock-and-roll convent.” Shelby smiled. “She said that her plays were her children. Her paper bodies, she called them. And when she committed them to the flames, it was like burning her own flesh and blood.”

  “So—crazy.”

  “Any woman who wrote during that time was considered crazy.”

  “What drew you to her work?”

  “She wrote these letters to an imaginary friend. They’re so lively, and bitchy, and they feel—I don’t know”—she stared at a spiderweb—“like they were written to me, or something. When she complains about annoying children, and bad makeup, and ignorant people who make her feel small—I understand where she’s coming from. Plus, we both love boiled chicken and suffer from panic attacks.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “What are you studying?”

  “These two Anglo-Saxon poems. Wulf and Eadwacer and The Wife’s Lament.”

  “That’s intense. Old English makes my mouth hurt.”

  “Sometimes I speak it in my sleep.” He smiled. “So many fricatives.”

  “Who are you working with?”

  “Natasha Black.”

  “She scares me. She’s always wearing a pantsuit.”

  “I just pretend that she’s Bea Arthur.”

  “That might actually work.”

  “It does. What about you?”

  “I’m cross-appointed. Trish Marsden in Gender Studies, and Victor Laclos in English. I feel like they’re always having brunch to complain about me.”

  “I doubt they think about us at all.”

  Andrew was looking at her strangely. “Where did you go?”

  Shelby blinked. She realized that she was standing in the middle of Scarth Street Mall, holding her coffee. A few feet away from her, a guy was doing some sort of act with a crystal ball, letting it dance across his fingers. A boom box positioned behind him played “Orinoco Flow.” She studied the crystal’s progress for a second, then returned her gaze to Andrew. He was frowning slightly, as if she were a questionable footnote.

  “Sorry. I was just remembering that time we shared meatballs on the patio. We had to use a letter opener to cut the Nanaimo bar.”

  “It was either that or go back for a knife, and that room was way too full of critical energy. I didn’t want to get sucked into a conversation about being post-human.”

  She sipped her coffee. “When you asked me to dinner, I thought for a second that you might be into me.”

  “You were extremely interesting.”

  “Nobody knew anything about you.”

  “That’s because nobody asked.”

  They walked down to Broad Street to pick up Carl. Their conversation drifted, like a slightly intoxicated person wandering through a department store. After a while, Andrew began saying “Right” to everything, then simply nodding, which made her realize that he’d checked out. He was studying bright, misspelled signs, vague promises stenciled on windows, or anything else that caught his attention. He had a loose tether, but Shelby had grown accustomed to it. As they continued in silence, she thought about how odd their group was—their company, if you could call it that. Andrew was an introvert who studied poems that didn’t rhyme, sawtoothed alliteration and white space that had slept on vellum for a thousand years. Carl was a material historian with the self confidence of a male pageant contestant, twirling his baton in any direction.

  Who am I? A slightly damaged girl who likes to read old letters? A girl in serious debt, with a shelf full of Broadview editions but only three usable plates?

  Why be a grad student? It was such a boring question, but they all asked it, every day—while drinking (why), while smoking (why), while fucking (why), while sleeping (zzz), the question followed them around on little cat feet. Why am I doing this? Andrew probably knew, and his answer had notations. Carl might not have known, but he went through the motions beautifully. In the end, he’d fall into something. He’d become a cute archivist or pilot some kind of project that involved ground-penetrating radar. He’d find a lost Byzantine button hoard and land a front-page feature in National Geographic, looking happily smudged in his sweat-stained vest and cargo pants.

  Her research wasn’t about to appear in the pages of Restoration Culture. Nobody gave a shit about how closely she was reading the letters of Margaret Cavendish. Academia was about finding something obscure, something lost at sea or misfiled in the British Library. In Restoration circles, the work of Cavendish had become feminist-mainstream. Unless she could unearth a lost play, a libretto, or a lock of Margaret’s hair, chances were slim that she’d be able to parlay her research into a job. The seventeenth century was still the misfit kid, the period that scholars politely avoided on their way to the Victorian era. Not sexy enough to be Early Modern, not functional enough to be Medieval, it hung out behind the bleachers, watching girls while comparing expansion packs.

  Maybe her mother had been right. She should have studied something that applied to her, something immediate and political. But Shelby couldn’t help it. She loved reading about syphilis and dancing masters. Just the thought of Early English Books Online gave her a thrill, as if she were a country wife visiting the big city for the first time. Why couldn’t she hang out with the vizards and the wise orange-girls? Why hadn’t she received an urgent letter? Unopened collection notices from SaskTel were not the same thing.

  Her mother had it all figured out. She had an office inside a translucent crystal cliff, with built-in bookshelves and art on the walls. She wrote action plans, returned calls, and attended meetings for something called “executive of council,” which Shelby thought must be some kind of admiral in vermilion robes. When her mother used the word community, she wasn’t referring to a sitcom or a gaming website.

  “How big is a silenus?”

  The question jolted her. “What’s with you and parking lately?”

  “Nobody’s listening. How big are they—on average?”

  She didn’t want to think about silenoi. “I don’t know. The size of a sasquatch, I guess. Taller than the average human, and about three times as strong.”

  “You’re the only one of us who’s actually seen one up close. You must still remember a few physical characteristics.”

  “I wasn’t exactly paying attention to its height.” For a moment, she could see the rain on the battlements and smell the creature’s dank hair. “Why do you need to know?”

  “I was just curious.”

  “Andrew. I think we’re past cryptic.”

  “Okay. Just—humor me for a second.”

  “Our friendship is based on mutual humor.”

  “You know what I mean.” He wasn’t looking at her. That was a bad sign. It meant that his brain was working furiously. “A silenus could easily”—she felt him hesitate over the word kill—“incapacitate a human. They hunt with weapo
ns, but they could probably take down a fully grown adult with bare hands. Correct?”

  Fingers locked around her throat. Its eyes were a feverish green in the darkness. She’d expected its gaze to be purely animal. Inside, a terrifying intelligence regarded her, cold and patient, as the hands continued to squeeze.

  “Yeah.” It came out as a half whisper. “Easily.”

  “You were lucky to survive.”

  “Morgan was lucky. I—barely remember. Why are you making me talk about this?”

  “I’m sorry. It’s just—”

  “Andrew.”

  His left hand was lightly drumming against his pant leg. He was anxious. Finally, he stared at a spot directly above her nose.

  “What if silenoi were hunting on this side of the park?”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “Is it? We don’t really know what they’re capable of.”

  “Look. Your crazy salamander dreams aren’t coming true. Things can’t cross over to this side of the park.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  Shelby looked around to make sure that they were actually alone. Then, lowering her voice, she turned back to Andrew. “The silenoi are a wild gens. They only exist on the other side of the park. They’re characters—just like the ones that we play. Some of them choose to live in the wild, beyond Anfractus. But most of them are part-time players, like us. The moment they return to this side, they go back to being normal people.”

  “How do you know that we’re just playing characters? It doesn’t feel that way. I know that parts of Roldan are rattling around inside me.”

  “If silenoi were prowling the city of Regina, we’d hear about it.”

  Carl walked through the doors. “What are you guys talking about?”

  “Andrew thinks that there’s a pack of sasquatch on the loose.”

  “What?”

  Andrew stared furiously at the ground. “Forget about it.”

  “Pack of sasquatch. That’s a great name for a band.” Carl reached into his pocket and withdrew a granola bar. “Here. Provisions for the journey.”

  Andrew blinked, then unwrapped it. They kept walking in silence, while Carl texted and Andrew chewed. Shelby took the opportunity to study Carl. His thumbs moved rapidly, spinning narrative, as he avoided potholes and weird things on the ground. He’d packed an extra granola bar, knowing that Andrew had probably forgotten to eat. Whenever his blood sugar bottomed out, he had a more difficult time concentrating than usual. Carl’s gesture had a maternal trace to it, but without the pointedness of giving someone a juice box or a handful of vanilla wafers. It reminded her of the time she’d seen a ten-year-old boy flip over his handlebars in the park. His friends had gathered around him, gently probing his injuries while keeping their expressions neutral, like medical interns.

  Carl was attractive, but not her type, as far as guys went. His beard did nothing for her, and she couldn’t understand why he wore hiking boots everywhere. They lived in a flat province, and he rarely left his apartment unless he was renting a movie or visiting campus. He spoke Spanish, but she’d only ever heard him yelling at his sister or pleading—at least it sounded like pleading—with his mother, who would call randomly to ask him about his girlfriend. A year ago, he’d made up a girlfriend named Tammy, and they were always on the verge of getting serious.

  Ingrid was her type. Ingrid, whose gray eyes made her ache slightly, as if she had a low-grade fever. Andrew had actually spoken to her. Shelby had tried to flirt via texting, but after rereading all of her texts for the eighth time, she realized that they were awkward and pretentious, not flirty. She’d kept using the word interrogate, as if she were a police officer instead of a graduate student. She’d admitted that The Fountain was her favorite movie to watch while high—especially during the scene when Hugh Jackman was eating tree bark—yet Ingrid had merely typed hehe in response. She was probably a mature, straight-edge academic with her shit fully in order, someone who wouldn’t drop everything to get stoned and watch a three-hour film about time travel and Mayan spirit possession.

  They crossed over to Wascana Parkway. The sky was a painful blue, and without a scrap of shade to be found, they were all sweating. Andrew was the most sensibly dressed, in a House Stark T-shirt, broken-down jeans, and sneakers. He refused to wear a hat, though, on the grounds that he could never get it to sit perfectly on his head. Carl was sweating the most, but his clothes already looked dirty, so the overall effect was minimal. Shelby worried that her armpits now smelled like the opposite of sugar and spice.

  The park bloomed on their right side, already full of couples jogging in tandem. Beyond the tree line, Wascana Lake boiled in light, its polluted striae hidden by patches of reflected sky. The sun made everything look natural. It was only by night that the contours of the true park grew visible, teased out by long-suffering lamps and the glowing eyes of ducks. All those blind corners and moonlit sutures that made you reach out your hand and push, even when you knew that it wasn’t the best idea. That was how you found yourself naked in a strange alley, wondering where the grass had gone.

  “My students have a quiz today,” Carl said, breaking up her thoughts. “There’s a bonus question on the English longbow. If any of them get it, I’ll be fucking elated.”

  Shelby turned to Andrew. “What’s the lecture on again?”

  He actually managed to look hurt. “The Wanderer. The first stanza.”

  “Ugh. Well, it’s in the reader. I’ll skim it before Laclos arrives.”

  “You’re supposed to break it down line by line for the students in tutorial.”

  “That’s why you’re going to explain it.”

  “And if I refuse?”

  “You’d never refuse the chance to describe that poem to me.”

  “This feels like scholarly blackmail.”

  “It’s not blackmail when you love explaining things.”

  Carl laughed. “She’s got you over an Old English barrel.”

  “I suppose she does.”

  They arrived at the Innovation Centre and refilled their coffee cups. As promised, Andrew recited the first stanza of The Wanderer to her while eating a strawberry-sensation muffin. By the time he reached hrimcealde sæ, his dire-wolf was covered in icing sugar. They parted with Carl at the entrance to the lecture hall. A fair number of students were present, clustered in texting clouds near the back or sleeping near the front. When Professor Laclos arrived, about half of them looked up, while the rest kept staring at their phones. He talked about the nameless wanderer, whose heart was full of rime-cold secrets. He drew connections between the ancient poem and present-day political exile. When all else failed, he showed a picture of the Sutton Hoo helm and talked about warfare. Several of the male students perked up at this.

  Shelby looked over to see Andrew silently mouthing syllables to himself, as if he were part of an ecstatic rite. He grinned as he bit fricatives and tongued plosives. He was tasting English origins, mulling over words ripped from bronze-smelling hoards. Words that had slept beneath centuries of dust and small rain, sharp and bright as scale mail. Poetry had never moved her quite so much as drama. She loved the shock of a colloquy, the beat and treble of words doing what they had to on stage. Andrew preferred the echo of poems buried alive.

  After the lecture was done, they met with Professor Laclos to discuss the midterm. He was still referred to as a “recent hire,” which marked him as a newly minted PhD. He had the youthful energy to survive a thousand-year survey course, but Shelby couldn’t help but notice the deep lines under his eyes or the fact that his collar was lopsided. His desk was covered in books, interoffice envelopes, and photocopied materials of every sort. Whenever he finished a sentence, he would take a sip of coffee, then begin in the middle of the next sentence. Andrew wrote down everything, while Shelby found herself nodding and smiling gently, as if she were listening to one of her younger cousins talk about Dora the Explorer.

  When the meeting was over, they w
ent to their respective tutorials. Shelby taught on the dreaded mezzanine floor, which had no coffee stand and could be accessed only via a hidden staircase in the academic quadrangle. Her classroom was next to something called the CLAW. lab, which must have dealt with the study of robotics, or zoology. She liked her Monday tutorial group. They were lively and asked questions. Nearly half of them did the reading, and the rest were more than happy to offer random contributions that kept the discussion afloat. Shelby had become adept at linking every tangent back to the assigned reading—Jersey Shore, Ryan Gosling, farm narratives, tales of personal growth, and invectives against homework. She compared 3D technology to illuminated manuscripts, and Fifty Shades of Grey to filthy Old English riddles (no, that’s not a skullcap or a loaf of bread).

  She spent the last fifteen minutes of class fielding questions about the midterm, which resulted in a wildly entangled diagram on the board. They ran out of time just as she was drawing a weird arrow that led nowhere. The students filed out, while Shelby tried to minimize the chalk damage to her black T-shirt. Ultimately, chalk dust was better than marker fumes, which had once persuaded her to assign dioramas in a class that focused on the Marquis de Sade.

  Andrew was waiting at their customary bench. He gave her a maple-dip doughnut, which she took greedily. Her pastry levels had already reached a dangerous low.

  “How was it?”

  She mainlined the doughnut. “Not bad. We took turns pronouncing the more difficult words. George—the guy who loves Dragon Age—went on this tangent about falchions, but I pulled him right back.” She made a vague motion with her hands. “I’m miming the tractor beam of focus that I used on him.”

  “Impressive.”

  “What heroics did you resort to?”

  “I spent about a half hour explaining what a thorn was, and why it’s different from a yogh. That was pretty much all they could handle. Then we did a midterm flowchart. I had to assure one student that there’d be no questions about computer science. I guess she’s been having nightmares about that particular test.”