Featured Writer: Anca Szilagyi

Cumulus

She descended into my life like a great swirling cloud—swerving figure eights in and out of the Poulet Frites Kentucky lot across Avenue du Parc. It was about three am and from my second floor apartment I could’ve sworn I heard her laughing in that old green Corvair, blowing bubbles of cherry red gum. In the dark, my beard bristled and I shivered. That was in the spring.

The next time I saw her was in July. I was lounging on the stoop outside, watching traffic: packed up cars and moving vans down the avenue, beeping at each other in hot frustration. She pulled up in the bus lane, and her hair was different. Not that I’d really seen it before, but from the first glance I would’ve guessed it a short, messy crop. In fact, it was long, deep red, and wavy. A silk scarf wrapped around her neck. She looked at me from under enormous sunglasses, gleaming black bug eyes that covered half of her face. Her skin was sleek, and highly polished.

“Look at you, all cool on a stoop with your drink,” she said.

“Pardon?”

“You just look relaxed is all, while us suckers are stuck in traffic.”

“What’s your name?”

“Sordidia.”

“Like the island nation?”

“No, Sordidia. Like sordid. You’re thinking of Sardinia. A lot of people make that mistake.”

“Oh,” I said, scratching my head.

A bus honked behind her and she skidded away.

“What’s the good word?” I asked her as she passed. She wore those shorts with the writing on the bum. Juicy. Sordidia shuffled and turned to me, looking over her sunglasses and holding her pop with two-fingered disdain. A pink patent leather handbag dangled in the crook of her arm.

“Hi,” she said, a little perplexed.

“Remember me?”

“Um…no, not really.”

“Moving Day? You said, ‘You look so cool’?”

“It sounds like something I might say,” she said, shifting her weight and sticking out a hip. The letter J so beautiful in its distortion. She turned to leave. The hair on my toes prickled.

“Wait!” I said as she started to lurch forward.

She turned back.

“What?”

“My name’s Henry.”

“Oh, “ she said, shifting her weight to the other side. “Nice to meet you. Bye, Henry.”

I sighed. She said my name.

Suddenly, I didn’t just see her in Mile End, I felt her all over Montreal. The wheels of her car screeched past the basement window of my parents’ home in Ahuntsic. Under the bright bulbs of Oscar Wilde’s in the Village, a flash of light would reflect off enormous sunglasses passing through the darkness. At work--the Call Center--delirious laughter, bubble gum popping.

In March, the excruciating . Gray ice melts down to puddles exposing bits of garbage that had been encased in clean, January snow. Orange peels, dog shit, cigarette butts. The garbage at the surface, the slush refreezes and melts throughout the month. April isn’t cruel here-- by April merciful delerium sets in.

And that’s when she rang my doorbell, her car parked at the now boarded up PFK, a baby ferret sitting in her pink handbag.

“Hi,” she said, crossing the threshold. “Mind if I come in?” She sat on the metal chair by the picture window, lit a cigarette, and crossed her legs. She wore a straight, dark bob, and held a long cigarette holder between her fingers.

“Sure,” I said, slowly scratching the back of my head.

“Do you like…bagels?” she asked, leaning forward.

“Yes?” I shrugged.

She leaned back, puffed smoke.

“Me too.” She looked at the window dreamily, almost forlorn. “It’s not what it used to be,” she sighed.

“What?”

She gestured toward the window. Sighed again.

“Montreal will always have bagels,” I said, wanting to pat her on the shoulder. The ferret cocked its head and stared me down.

“Yeah,” she sighed. “Yeah.”

Sordidia stayed for almost two days. We talked about city politics, anthropology, cars, and the weather—she had a keen interest in meteorology. We ate Kraft dinner by candlelight and the ferret curled up between the cushions of my gray, tattered sofa. Took long walks and could smell flowers ready to burst from the naked trees. On the thirty-sixth hour she kissed me and left, ferret and all.

Sordidia disappeared again for months. I thought of her lips turned purple by blue Slurpies. I picked out the bits of hair the ferret had shed on the futon and placed them in a neat pile on an empty bookshelf. Began my stoop vigil as the city warmed.

September arrived and no Sordidia. Every sticky day, I thought she’d drive up, and say those words. “You look so cool. You’ve always looked so cool.” But she eluded me. One night in October a woman in a black sequined floor-length evening gown knocked on my door. She held a pair of enormous sunglasses in her hands.

Sordidia,” I said.

She did not answer, but smiled her sly smile. We walked north, toward an industrial section of the neighborhood, wet orange and yellow leaves carpeting the way. We sat by the train tracks in the grass and talked about the purported death of irony.

On the other side of the tracks I noticed a rusting green Corvair.

“I like decay,” she said. She leaned back, resting on her elbows. “I look forward to a post-apocalyptic world.”

I kissed her there, on the mulch, as a freight train clanged its heft through the city’s scars. I fell in love, and she moved in on a Thursday.

By Friday it began. She was gaining weight rapidly. More to love, I shrugged. Her skin maintained the high sheen of enamel that I so adored. A lovely laquer.

We lived on Cheetohs and Kraft, May West and soymilk. I assumed she was independently wealthy. She apparently didn’t have a job, yet she bought groceries and contributed to the rent. This was handy when work was spotty. So I never questioned it.

“Hello, love,” she’d say when I returned home from work. I kissed her on her earlobe and we curled up on the futon. Watched the weather forecast on each channel, English and French. She especially enjoyed channel 35’s forecast.

“No hyperbole,” she said. “Just straight weather. I like that.” I squinted at her out of the corner of my eye, wondering aloud where she came from.

“Sherbrooke,” she said. “I come from Shebrooke.”

“I thought you grew up in the WestIsland.”

“Sherbrooke, via the West Island.”

“Oh,” I said.

We cuddled up for the winter and by March she was triple the size of when I first met her. I began to worry, just a wee bit. I feared saying anything that would trigger her departure. But she’s so arbitrary, I reasoned. She could leave anytime, whether I said anything or not. In my half-dreams this fear erupted. I would turn to her, and clutch her shoulders.

“Don’t!” I would say.

Her reply was always muffled and confused.

I got home one afternoon and saw her moored on the bed, ensconced in a gray jogging suit. She took up most of the bed, sprawled spread eagle, her pet curled up on her stomach, rising and falling gently.

“Hullo,” I said.

“Hullo.”

“Go for a jog?”

“Uh, no?” She sounded annoyed.

“Care to join me for one?”

“Since when do you exercise, skinny boy?” She propped herself up on her elbows and grinned. I thought how good and strong her teeth looked.

“I don’t,” I said, sitting on the edge of the bed and opening a bag of Doritos. The ferret looked up and skittered away to some dark corner of the apartment. We dined on Cool Ranch and pop.

“It’s just---I’m a little worried,” I said later, crumpling the bag and licking orange dust off my fingers.

“About?”

“Well, you. Do you have any, uh, thyroid problems?”

“Thyroid problems? No…”

“It’s just that—well, you know--”

“That what? I’ve become morbidly obese?”

“Well, yes.”

“I’m aware of the change. Does it bother you?”

“Me? No, no, not me. But, aren’t you a little concerned? Shouldn’t you see a doctor or something?” She looked at me with dull eyes and rolled to her side, facing away.

“Don’t you worry your pretty little head,” she replied.

I shrugged and later we fell asleep spooning. I basked in her warmth.

She continued to grow. Soon there was no room for me in the bed and I slept on the sofa. She no longer left the apartment. Indeed, she could not. I thought about all those talk shows and headlines with the very same subject. “Woman Dies Trying to Climb Stairs.” “Woman Airlifted from Apartment.” “Man Crushed by Obese Girlfriend In Freak Airlifting Accident.”

The air inside began to grow stale, as if she consumed it with a great voracity and left nothing behind for me but carbon dioxide. No amount of leaving the window open helped. She began to emit smells. Strange smells that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. I wanted to ask her if she bathed herself in kerosene, but didn’t want to sound like a lunatic.  I looked forward to being assaulted by icy air every time I left the building. And I started to go on lots of long walks. I felt bad about it, because I really did love her, I just didn’t know what to do. The thought cycles were the same on every walk: love ‘er, dunno what to do. Talk to her tomorrow: tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow.

The smells only got worse.

One night the screen that separated the bedroom from the living room toppled over. I was sleeping on the couch, as in the past few weeks. Sordidia wheezed. Before my eyes, I saw her growing. Physically, she was growing, and I, Henry, was witnessing this phenomenon. She wheezed again, like an accordion. Then she groaned. My heart beat rapidly. The streetlights glinted off her expanding skin, the high polish giving way to faint sparkles. Her voice deepened.

“Henry,” she said.

“Yes, Sordidia?” I suddenly felt very small. The bed collapsed. Her belly almost reached the ceiling. She took up half of the apartment. I feared I would be pressed against the wall, and smothered. I wanted to gag. “I’ll—I’ll get help,” I finally said. I ran out into the street, but didn’t know where to go. I began running, I wasn’t sure where. I stopped at a payphone and called 911, said there was an altercation at my address. And then I didn’t go back. I feared the worst. Sordidia was surely dead.

For a while, I stayed with my parents in Ahuntsic. I told them the rent to my apartment had become exorbitant and I began to look elsewhere. My lease would be up soon, so I paid the remainder of the rent and hoped the landlord would not contact me. I worked at the Call Center more regularly, kept busy trying to stave off thoughts of her. Once, I heard her laughter there again—maniacal giggles punctuated with popping bubble gum. But when I looked outside my cubicle, it was not she. I sighed, and dialed another number.

In the late spring I moved to St. Henri. I packed up my few possessions from my parents’ house and took them on the metro. I stuck them in the new apartment and sat out on the stoop. Cars veering around the corner gave me goosebumps—little frissons of hope, and simultaneously, dread and guilt, that she would be in that green convertible looking for me, demanding an apology for abandonment. I had betrayed her, left her for dead.

“Coward,” she might call me.

“Freak,” I might say.

And then she might curl a lip and look at me over her sunglasses perched on her nose. And I would apologize profusely and take her hand, and we’d explore my new neighborhood, Sordidia and I.

Previously published in Ramble Underground

Anca Szilagyi has a BA in English literature and archaeology from McGill University. She is a former editor of Scrivener Creative Review and her work has appeared in Stationaery, Southern Ocean Review, Fire With Water, Montage, Scrivener, Hotel, and Tangmonkey.com. She currently teaches English as a second language in New York City.

Email: Anca Szilagyi

Return to Table of Contents