Writers & Lovers(79)

We sway to his guitar. The words are cryptic, flights of stairs and hamburgers in brown boxes. The song turns faster halfway through, and we pull apart and dance in front of the stage like he wrote it for all of us, about our heartbreaks and recoveries and our friendships that might just last.

Afterward in Silas’s car our ears are blaring, and when I ask him in the driveway to come in, he doesn’t hear and I have to ask again. And when he comes in he flops on my futon like he belonged there all along.





The geese are all asleep. A few tip their heads out from under their wings as we approach. I open the cookie tin and a few more sway slowly over to us. It’s cold, and Silas has wrapped the green blanket around me so I feel like I have wings, too. I shake the tin and walk backward in a circle around them. The ground is warmer than the air and warmer still where the geese have been sleeping. The ashes fall out evenly onto the grass.

They peck at the silver flakes, their beaks moving like machines, faster than the eyes can register. More join them. They don’t fight. There’s enough to go around.

I hold the blanket open for Silas, and he slips beside me and pulls it closed.

‘Is this weird?’

‘Yeah,’ he says. He puts his lips in my hair. ‘I love weird.’

They peck and gnaw for a long time. There’s not much left when they’re done. They putter around for a while on their wide rubber feet. Their necks look made of fur, not feathers. A few return to sleep, curtseying to the ground and burying their heads between the folded wings on their backs.

I’ll miss them when they take flight. I won’t be there. Their fast excited chatter, their wings finally spread wide, their feet tucking in behind them. Wheels up. I’ll miss it. I’ll be in class or at my desk or in bed when they cut across the sky.

‘I want them to go right now.’

‘I know,’ Silas says. ‘They’ll go when they’re ready.’

A book in the library said that some Canada geese may travel as far as Jalisco, Mexico. My mother will like that, the long exhilarating trip, the foreign landing.

But others, the book said, will stay where they are for the winter. Those geese are already home.