Coralie Loon
THE WINK

Lia woke to the sound of a rooster cawing. Again.

The first time, she convinced herself she had imagined it. The sound didn’t belong here, not in the city, not in the suburbs, not even in the greenbelt edging her apartment complex. Instead, it was a dream sound, real only in the split second before she was fully awake. The rooster was another symbol, dancing in a circus tent alongside her dead grandmother, her credit card statement, the monster under the bed. But then it happened again.

She made her coffee slowly that morning, looking out the window every few seconds. She recounted the coffee scoops twice, forgetting how much she’d put in. Part of her was waiting for a second cry, for the bird it belonged to to appear in front of her and tell her something she didn’t know. But only the usuals flitted through the trees: a finch, a blue jay, a scraggly crow. No flashes of orange or emerald green. Just the usual movements, their dark and muddy feathers.

A to-do list hung from the fridge, fastened by a Texas-shaped magnet. Lia had never been to Texas.

Update resume was all it said. She hadn’t looked at her resume, or the list, since Charlie marked it up with a red ballpoint pen a week ago, then drew a flower on the bottom to make up for it.

When the coffee was done, Lia grabbed the carton of cream from the fridge. She tipped it upside-down and only a drop came out. She held it there, counting to ten, waiting for a second drop.

––

“You ever heard about David Hahn?”

The cheese man slid a block of parmesan through the slicer, weighed it, and wrapped it in plastic. He always wore a brown collared shirt, his nametag pinned on the left pocket: Paul K.

Lia looked at the neatly stacked barrels of cheese, not responding. 

“There was this kid, a boy scout, from the 90s. Tried to build a nuclear reactor in his mom’s backyard. I mean, tried, sure, he wasn’t about to blow up the state of Michigan or anything. Ha ha.”

Paul finished wrapping a small pile of parmesan. 

“Imagine that! Little kid from Boy Scouts of America, blowing up the state. Wouldn’t that be something. Ha ha. Read it in Harper’s magazine.”

Lia pressed her chapped hands against the glass of the display case. There was something satisfying about looking at all those barrels, imagining cutting through the powdery rind, not knowing exactly what you’d find inside.

“You ever read Harper’s magazine?”

Lia held up her phone and took a picture of the biggest cheese: The Golden Pitchfork. That was a good name. 

“Hey.”

“Yeah?”

Paul had stopped cutting. Now he had his hands on the counter. His eyes were the size of macadamia nuts behind his thick-rimmed glasses.

“You gonna buy something one of these days?”

“Maybe,” Lia said, although she wasn’t so sure. It was hard to explain why she came here. She liked the smell. She liked imagining Paul wrapping cheese all day. What a life would be like to be so small, so centered around a single thing.

“Here.” Paul reached behind the counter, pulled out a slab, red-rimmed. He cut just a sliver and handed it to her in a piece of wax paper. “It’s called the Angry Goat.”
Lia took it, put it in her mouth. It didn’t taste angry.

“I can get you it half off, how ‘bout that? Huh?”

But Lia had seen something through the window. It was a boy in a Spiderman outfit, crouching to hand a corn chip to a limping pigeon. And then both the boy and the pigeon turned and looked at her. They just hovered, staring. And, again at the same time, miniature Spiderman turned back and the pigeon grabbed the chip in its beak and hopped away.

“Well you’re a chatty one today. Ha ha.” He said it every time.

Lia still hadn’t responded, but the words wouldn’t come. She had the same feeling she’d felt earlier, when she heard the rooster crow, as if she was supposed to do something in response, something to acknowledge it had happened. Because she had heard it.

Without realizing it, she’d rolled the wax rind of the cheese into a red ball. She held it up until it covered his face. 

“I’ll take a pound,” she said.

––

The cheese sat in the bottom of Lia’s wicker purse during lunch, sweating against her rusting house keys, her camera, a pack of stale gum.

Charlie met her at the Hungry Tabby, a faux-European bungalow of wire tables, plastic mugs, and Rococo art prints. Charlie always looked like she was sparkling— partly her skin, always dewey. But she always seemed to leave something behind in the spaces she inhabited too: a lingering mirage in the shape of her and her brown leather coat. It was like she whispered I’m here to every room she entered.

She smiled from the corner table, got up to give Lia a side hug. “Hi little sis.”

Lia would never be able to tell her that she’d rather just be Lia. Too many years had passed for that.

When the waiter came, Lia ordered a cinnamon latte, and Charlie another tea. The drinks came quickly—they were the only customers there.

“So how’s work?” Lia asked, hovering her camera over the latte—click.

“Christ,” Charlie sighed, “I can’t even tell you.” She twisted her teaspoon between her fingers. Lia noticed a pimple on the side of her nose—a pink pinprick glowing through her foundation.

“Oh, sorry for–”

“No, no, I mean I literally can’t tell you. It’s an unreleased scent. I think it’s stupid, you know, that we can’t talk about it. Like I could use a thousand words trying to describe it to you and you’d still never fully know what it smelled like.” She paused and lifted her bag onto the table. “Here.”

She handed Lia a piece of lined notebook paper covered in scribbles.

“I drew what it smells like. See? Like… a hillside after rain, when the clouds are all low. And like little animals when they get wet. Or like… sleep. See? There’s me sleeping…”

On the corner of the page was a badly-drawn rooster. Lia pushed the page away, feeling sick.

“You shouldn’t be showing this to me, you know.”

Charlie took back the sheet, folding it slowly in half.

“Um, yeah. You’re right.” She squinted. “What’s wrong?”

Lia looked down at her open bag and the cheese looked back up at her.

“Why does something have to be wrong?”

Charlie bit her lip. “Sorry. Yeah, I get it. Being unemployed is stressful. Total sense overload. You’ve got all this stuff to think about and do…”

Lia looked at her sister’s cup of tea. Her sister’s ‘lunch.’

It was hard to explain that it wasn’t just about getting another advertising job. It was that she didn’t know where she belonged anymore. That the more she thought about it, the more she wondered if maybe nothing here could belong to her.

“Do you ever…” she paused. “Do you ever see signs in things?”

“Signs?”

“In people. In animals. Do you ever think they’re trying to tell you something?” But it was already hard for her to believe. Charlie just smiled.

“Oh, little sis, I love that. What are they trying to say?”

But before Lia could answer, “Oops!…I Did It Again” by Britney Spears twinkled through the room. Charlie scrambled for her phone.

“Sorry hun, it’s my boss, gotta run. See ya Sunday?”

Lia didn’t have time to tell her it was already Sunday.

––

She noticed the first spider web as she put the cheese on the counter. A thin veil of silk, running from the nose of the sink to her cereal cabinet. It danced from the breeze of her open window, catching sunlight on its threads.

Strange, she thought. And then she noticed another, climbing from the microwave to the ceiling, and another connecting the dining chairs, and another covering her framed photograph of a bird’s nest: inside, a single cracked egg.

What exactly happened inside her body was elusive–not quite anxiety, tight and familiar, not quite nausea. She reached for the broom and then stopped. What was the use, she thought, of thinking she deserved this space more than someone else, just because she was big, because she was depressed, because she still hadn’t found a place that was hers?

Outside, she sprinkled pieces of the Angry Goat on the porch, the grass, between the tree roots.

Back inside, she made herself tea and sat on one of the webbed chairs without moving it. She put her camera on the table, the point-and-shoot Charlie had given her on her 22nd birthday.

Lia pointed the lens out the sliding glass door, waiting.

Through the pixelated display screen, she watched her little slice of greenbelt shimmy. The pieces of cheese were there, indiscernible to anyone but her. She waited, and a few hours later, kept waiting.

Every so often she got up to make another cup (Earl Grey, or maybe ginger), but the camera never moved. Things shifted through the screen. A robin came to inspect the cheese. A few squirrels stopped, snatching at the pieces with their claws. She took a picture of each one—snap, snap, her camera mimicking the sound of a shutter. 

At 6:30 p.m., the porch light came on. Lia began to snack on the rest of the cheese, alongside a box of Cheerios. She watched as a doe slipped out of the darkness, bowing its head to gather crumbs from the ground. It nuzzled the earth, then raised its neck. She caught a glimpse of its tongue before it turned to her. In the flickering wash of security lights, its huge eyes looked lightning green. And then, unmistakably, it winked at her.

She stared back. As the deer walked slowly back to whatever world it came from, Lia realized she’d forgotten to take a picture.

–––

She heard the rooster most mornings, now.

Sometimes it would cry as she made her morning bowl of oats, a directionless call that almost sounded like it came from her own mouth. Other times, she heard it as the sun was setting or as she brushed her teeth, staring at her lips to make sure it wasn’t really her. Once, she woke at 2 a.m. to a single, lone crow. The sound made the cobwebs around her bed jingle.

Every morning, she sprinkled cheese on the patch of earth just outside her kitchen. The routine itself was simple, the task monotonous. But it was the only thing on her list, and it was easier to give it all her attention rather than only some.

She kept track of the animals that visited, but most things didn’t translate in photos: the rooster, for one. The buck a few nights later, who bowed his head for her. The wild rabbit who, she swore, whispered thank you before scampering away. It was enough to know these things existed, that maybe they existed for her.

Still, she felt she was waiting for something—recognition? Permission? The note on her fridge didn’t budge. Every morning, it told her to work on her resume. She told it in return to try her again tomorrow, if she was in a good mood, and to kindly shut the fuck up if she wasn’t. 

After a week without leaving the house, she woke one morning to find a letter in a peach-pink envelope passed under the front door. Inside was a half-sheet of printer paper, scrawled on with a baby blue marker. It was unmistakably Charlie’s handwriting:

Hi lil sis… where are you? You were so tiny this Thursday at lunch. And you looked funny, too. Like a mouse, and when I called your name you scurried into a hole in the wall. I know you’re okay in there. It’ll be okay, just like last time. But please for the LOVE OF GOD answer your phone! Let’s talk it through <3

Love,

your sis, CH.

Lia read the letter twice, then shuffled through the junk drawer for a pen. At the bottom in black, she wrote: It’s so easy! and fastened it to the fridge with a magnet in the shape of a cowboy boot.

“It is,” she said to the spider on the teakettle, as if Charlie could hear. As if the spider could, either. As she turned to look out the window, she saw it. The rooster, a flush of red and green, standing on top of her neighbor’s roof. Because it was real, all of it. It lifted its throat and sang for her.

She sang back.

–––

Charlie came a few days later. She’d had a key the whole time, since the first incident when Lia moved here. Charlie had used the key to get in and out, to deliver fresh fruit, milk, canned beans, sushi from Lia’s favorite restaurant. And then it was toilet paper, batteries, dental floss, BIC ballpoint pens. She’d come just enough to comfort Lia, stroke her hair and say it’ll be okay, make some coffee in a thermos and suggest they take a stroll around the block, just a little one, won’t that be nice? But Charlie didn’t understand—she got sad sometimes, sure, but she’d never know what it felt like to live in a world that kept changing, changing, changing around you when you didn’t want it to.

This time, Lia watched as the key clinked, the door opened, and Charlie stepped into the entryway. She hadn’t put the cheese out yet this morning—she wanted to wait for Charlie, to show her rather than tell her. She didn’t know how to explain that the world had changed again, but this time it was glowing. It was green. It was everything she’d been yearning for.

“Lia!” Charlie feigned surprise. “I was the one who was supposed to scare you, wasn’t I?”

Lia watched as she shimmied out of her brown suede boots, walked straight into the kitchen, and screamed.

“GOD!” Charlie was bristling. “Lia, when was the last time you cleaned?”

Yesterday was the answer, but she had sponged and swept around the spider webs so as not to disturb them.

“Don’t,” Lia said, right as Charlie began to reach for the broom. And then, “I already called pest control.” She hadn’t, of course.

Charlie stared at her, eyes wide. “Let me just… make some coffee and we can get out of here.”

She opened the mug cupboard, disrupting a web, shaking her hand frantically and then wiping it on her pants. Looking lost, she shuffled around the cups, trying to find the thermos Lia had already put in the closet under the stairs. Not because she didn’t want to take a walk—she probably would, later, once Charlie was gone. But she didn’t want her sister to take over again. 

“Where is the damn–”

“Charlie, please,” Lia said, until she stopped and looked at her. “Please, I just want to show you something.”

Charlie crossed her arms and leaned back against the counter, sighing.

“Okay, fine. Show me.”

She watched as Lia took the Angry Goat out of the fridge and broke off a piece.

“I’ve figured it out.”

“Uh…”

“I’ve figured out what I want to do.”

Lia took her out to the grass, scattering the pieces like she always did. She grabbed her sister by the wrist and took her to the lawn chairs she’d set up a few days ago. Charlie sat down when Lia did, nibbling on her lip.

“Okay, so–”

“Shh,” Lia said. “Not so loud. They’re not familiar with you yet.”

Charlie cleared her throat and tried again, half-whispering. “Okay, so you’re, what… doing nature photography? And feeding the wildlife? Which, you know you’re not supposed to do, right?”

“Charlie,” Lia turned to face her, so she knew she was being serious. “I know it’s strange. And I’m not doing photography, not anymore. Remember what I said the other week about seeing signs from animals? Well, I started putting food out, and then they started talking to me–”

“Talking to you?”

“Okay, communicating with me. Like,” she started gesturing wildly with her hands, “like, spelling out words with leaves and branches. And nodding or making a sound when I ask a question, you know, they do things for me, things so I know they’re listening.” She omitted the time the rabbit had said ‘thank you.’

“Okay…” Charlie nodded slowly. She started to get a certain look in her eye, the look that said she was starting to listen. Lia continued.

“So, I put out food and wait for them. That’s it! It’s so simple. But, it’s like, something’s opened up finally. I’m not searching anymore. Like, this is what I’m supposed to be doing.”

She stopped. She couldn’t read Charlie’s expression. “Does that make sense?”

Charlie reached out and took Lia’s hand, smiling. In the distance, a deer moved out from the undergrowth. 

“Aw, sis. That is so beautiful. Giving to nature and having it give to you in return. It’s… poetic.”

Lia felt the feeling that came often, the feeling that maybe she’d finally touch Charlie, only to have her slip away again.

“Really, I am so glad. But,” Charlie’s smile changed—still a smile, but different. Sympathetic. “I mean, obviously, that isn’t really an answer. You can’t just… I mean, you can’t just feed the animals for a living, for God’s sake. But… nature, yeah. That would be a great idea for a commercial. Parfum Verte, it starts with a girl feeding the birds, then she—poof!—grows some wings, Black Swan-esque, and flies away. What do you think?”

Lia didn’t know what to say. She knew she couldn’t do this forever, that it wasn’t the answer Charlie was talking about, but it was still an answer. She still wanted to sit on the porch with Charlie and feel like, yeah, they were sitting on the same porch, looking at the same tree, the same cloud, the same deer. But Charlie was still Charlie, and Lia was still an anomaly to her.

“Anyway.” She let go and looked at her phone. “It’s getting late, gotta get back to the office, bounce around those commercial ideas. God, Devin’s gonna love that. Thanks, sis.” She put her phone away. “Oh, by the way, you know Daria? Who hosted those block parties? Yeah, she got a rooster! Like, I think that’s illegal. Someone put in a noise complaint, apparently. It’s kind of sad.”

“Huh,” Lia said.

“You might want to check in on her, if they make her get rid of it, give her a little of your wisdom.” She patted Lia on the shoulder, then stood to leave. “You’ll be okay, right?”

“Right.”

“Call me, will you? I’ll be at the café tomorrow.”

As she turned to go, Charlie’s face dropped. She was looking past Lia, staring into the untouchable green.

“Holy shit,” she said. “Did that deer just wink at me?”

Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Issue #47.

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