Fiction

It’s called the Diderot effect. You buy one thing and that leads you to buy more. I read that in a book I bought off Amazon, next-day delivery. Before I finished that book I had another on the way, as well as a clear shower curtain liner, set of six measuring spoons and a 30-centimetre hanging door hook.

A plush rabbit I got for the children moves by itself. I bought it for my eldest on his fourth birthday. It wasn’t his favourite toy but he didn’t hate it. He cuddled it for a few days and then it was put into a storage bucket under his bed.

I was walking through the brightly lit foyer of the supermarket when I spotted him. I was scanning the room as I always did – the self-checkouts, the fruit and vegetable section beyond – and there he was, a few rows deep, his broad shoulders and large head floating high above the cut watermelon under plastic.

Outside is a collapsing quarter of shuttered banks, checkpoints, brothels, beaches, ruins, sites of worship. Inside was once a sanatorium to treat respiratory and skin conditions by the sea. The building is now a camp, a ward, a shelter, a pill press, a meth lab, a rehab. This place is now nameless because it is already gone.

I pick up the drink when it arrives and I don’t say thank you. There’s something about this guy I don’t like. Maybe it’s his aftershave, or because I think I can hear him breathing through his nose. Whatever it is, I find it irritating. I look over the bar into the pool room where two dickheads in their football colours are chalking their cues. He’s still there at my elbow saying nothing.

I’d seen him only a few days earlier on the train. He had been sitting directly across from me, cradling in his arms a small black stereo playing heavy metal songs. I had been moved by how tenderly he’d held the stereo. Then, as now, his face had been obscured by a long wavy fringe of straw-coloured hair, so I was unable to see if he wore an expression of peacefulness or malice.

The red bike sat on the median strip with a placard tacked to it. Police aware, it read. The bike was a Kawasaki and Astor had owned one just like it years ago. The night he crashed it, Astor was on his way to a friend’s, a girl he’d known for years, and he’d been too busy thinking about the one day he’d kissed her, the one time they nearly made it through sex without him crying, and then he came off hard, except the bike skidded down an embankment, made a soft landing somehow.

Caroline was the death doula on Andrea’s books – a good concierge has at least one of every kind of service professional on her books – and when Andrea mentioned to Caroline that she was considering a career change, the death doula suggested end-of-life care. It’s a booming business, she said. And it’s only getting bigger.

My breed is extinct now and in any case this tale is coming to you from the cloud of history. I don’t speak up often. But there has been so much talk across the centuries about whether the Duchess was poisoned that I have decided to set the record straight. Was the dear lady, in her silken cerulean gown, with the silver lace glinting in candlelight, actually poisoned?

My dad worked in central São Paulo for a long time before landing a payment plan for the boxy white Gol that took us to and from Guarujá. My dad used to take the bus into the city, down as far as Avenida Cupecê to catch the first one of the day, ‘do you remember the dictatorship, dad?’, ‘yes, in those days they’d ask for your work permit before they beat you up’. I used to ask about fighting the generals and all he’d say was how his ears used to get so cold. I used to ask about the rallies and the secrets but he’d talk about how his hands would be freezing and hurting and how his fingertips used to go numb, ‘at the rallies?‘, ‘no, on the way to work’. The cold, his ears so terribly cold because he couldn’t wear a hat, ‘you couldn’t wear one because you were a communist?’, ‘no, it wasn’t that’.