Liam Keller

Liam Keller is a technical writing student based in Ottawa, Canada. A casual interest for several years, over the course of the pandemic writing has come to represent something more significant to him, as with many others. He is the winner of the Meet Me @ 19th Street Q1 2021 writing competition—otherwise, he is unpublished.

August Vail, in the fall of his senior year of college, has an increasingly loose grip on reality; over two months, a series of bizarre happenings take place around him and within him, stemming apparently from the disappearance of his friend, Nova, one year earlier.
Moonshine Lemonade
My Submission

1

OCTOBER

Sometimes, the yellow-blooded day will be slaughtered on my bedroom floor. Great marigold pools, spilled across pine. But those dying moments are brief, and always shifting. Usually they won’t come at all and this cramped, third-floor space will die a less colourful death, slowly starving in a gloomy Toronto autumn. I might go weeks it seems, without a glimpse of that stuff I want.

There are eventually days like today when things align. I’ll keep an eye on the sun as it falls, facing my steep, angular home with vanity. With a little kick to it I mean—enough, for a string of moments, to hold itself out of reach of the pointed black roofs I can see sprawling hungrily to the west. On days like today my bedroom will bleed. And I will be there to roll in it.

My floor is warped and uncomfortable to lie across, but when the stale light hits it about now, it always draws me in. It offers a pause that’s entirely convenient for me. Often I need it, just to function. On the warped floor, with that marigold blood pooling around me, the world has paused very briefly and so have those other things, like whatever’s in the walls. See, I slept poorly again last night. And the house across the back lane from my apartment’s being torn down and resurrected from the ground up in small increments to something basically identical only more square and with black clapboard siding, but they’ve been at it since I moved in six weeks ago and somehow nothing’s progressed. Foggy nagging thoughts about a pit in my stomach, these are paused. Mostly as I lie in pools of sunlight at the end of the day, I can forget how funny it would be to lose my mind one sluggish drop at a time and that hiding it from myself and anyone else would be no trouble at all.

Today my thoughts aren’t so serene. I’m thinking: There’s something in the walls and I desperately want to ignore it, and lying here is useless and strange and I have another seven months of this place yet to come, assuming I move this summer and find a sublet who’s deaf or doesn’t mind angry clawing sounds. Soon, I think, I’ll give up and stand again. I’ll stretch, I’ll drop myself back on that ugly wooden chair that creaks as I study.

It’s not a joke, the thing in the walls; it wants to escape. The scratching has that kind of urgency to it. It has a purpose. The urgency is a step in the wrong direction (that much is plain) and it puts me on edge. Until last week, I’d hear that ratty noise behind my headboard only at night and barely then. Scritch-scratch, like a shy imposition. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it polite, but it had the feel of a slow-burn to it. This new sound is more of a slasher. So to speak.

I guess I can’t do much. Aside from clutching a hammer at the edge of my bed and daring myself to take it violently to the drywall, to face whatever comes crawling out. But actually it’s not that bad—in all the student apartments I’ve filled fleetingly with thin mattresses thrown to stark corners, through the blurs of chipped stucco and coffee, there’s been worse. Others had it worse than me. This is nothing, in the reality of student rentals. My landlord lives across the ocean besides, and he won’t answer my calls. I don’t have time to deal with it. Every day through undusted library windows I’ve looked up to such slow-shifting leaves, I didn’t even see them change. October now, and somehow I feel weeks behind.

I should mention John Crawley.

Professor Crawley wrote to me personally last week, which surprised me for the simple reason no prof had written me personally before. His email was fairly cryptic, asking me to meet with him in his office on the top floor of Halstein House that Thursday. I wasn’t overly glad for the request. Mostly I couldn’t understand it. Adding to my confusion, the email’s subject line read, Break up the seals and read, which I didn’t understand at the time and I still don’t.

Crawley is a man whose face, until our brief meeting last Thursday, was largely a mystery to me. I’d caught darting glimpses, sure, but nothing more. During that slot of time in which he must lecture us on heat transfer, John Crawley behaves in a wholly predictable way. At five past the hour, he’ll walk with strong intention through a slim door at the very front of lecture hall 255 in Halstein House. In that long and crowded room of identical wooden desks, he’ll drop his briefcase on a front-row table with impeccable symmetry, retrieve a ghostly stick of chalk and begin to write. Nothing more, but never any less. I’ve spent long, tense hours watching chalk grow short as John Crawley looks to the board and scribbles in silence.

Worst of all is that I never meant to take Heat Transfer to begin with. Not that I can blame anyone for it; it’s my own fault. But when I push open the House’s thick wooden doors each week and slink into into its gothic, stony bowels, I usually sulk over that fact for a while all the same. I’d always heard that fourth year engineering is a breeze because of all the electives they allow you—a nasty rumour, actually—and I thought maybe I’d take early impressionism in that slot. With no time to paint, I could listen to someone talk about it. It was an idea, is all.

As it happened, I was blocked when I tried to sign up for the course. I reached out about it and the faculty advised me I’d already spent my allowance of arts electives, that only technical electives remained, which I soon found are pretty vile things. When they sent me a list of acceptable units I closed my eyes and pointed. This is how I wound up in Heat Transfer.

I met with Professor Crawley last Thursday, just before I went home for the long weekend. I’d already booked my train out of the city and I was worried the meeting, whatever it was, might drag out and I’d be late. I had my bags with me, ready to jog to Union if need be, straight down Bay and dodging waves of foot-traffic and decrepit scaffolding.

“I won’t waste your time,” Crawley told me as I took a seat across from him, without even trying to obscure his face from me now. He didn’t lie—our meeting lasted probably two minutes. The second my bags hit the floor, very nearly, he slid a sheet of paper my way.

“My TA brought this up,” he said, monotone. “Why would you write this?” His voice was cavernous and bland, like something a whale might produce after spending a lifetime caged for show.

Glancing down, I saw the final page of last week’s exam. Dominating it, in one cramped and hurried line, were four large words in my own handwriting. Blotted, disgraceful ink. Barely legible. “I’m not sure,” I said in total honesty, looking up again and wincing slightly.

I couldn’t even remember scratching those words into existence, not clearly. A faint memory of it had come to me just now, that was all, like something shouted through the wind. There wasn’t much that was funny about the words themselves, not that they were overly grim or something. They just weren’t very funny. The words weren’t meant as a joke. What were they meant as? Probably it was just that I’d had nothing else to write.

Minute seventy-five of last week’s ninety-minute test was bleak. By then I’d hoarded six or seven half-solved problems together, collecting them for some obscure end-goal I had yet to establish. It seemed like the right thing to do.

The adrenaline, the chemical flood people welcome in when they write these exams, has always disappointed me. Apparently I’m in short supply of adrenaline. It offers me a quick high, a little less impressive each time, and by minute seventy-five last week the feeling was long gone. Once a healthy organ I’m sure, I think my mind must now resemble something ugly washed up on a beach. It doesn’t seem very useful anymore. Still, I do know the drill. I gave some thought to devoting another frantic quarter-hour to checking over what I’d managed to write down, trying to eke out partial marks, but when they called out that fifteen-minute warning I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. Reading over abstract math drives me to a bad state. There’s a cold misery to double checking values and equating variables. I’ve had better luck catching fish with my bare hands, in the shallows by the dock where we spent one sweet summer week each year, growing up.

“I won’t patronize you,” John Crawley told me from across his broad desk of rippling walnut. Once more, he kept his word. He told me I’d failed the midterm, and because that makes for a sort of conversational wall without any clear point of entry I said, “Oh,” and then, “Sorry.”

“Don’t apologize to me,” he snapped back, but not especially harshly. “Just focus. What I want is for you to do well in this course. Really. There’s only the final and a few labs left, so please try to focus.”

I nodded energetically, wishing he wouldn’t emphasize that word so harshly. When he emphasized a word, it came out bland, like his other words, but somehow with an especially drawn out and grating temperament like the word itself was raking its letters over my eardrums, one by one. Every time he tried it I nearly ducked my head.

Sitting very still, I eyed my hands and ten coarse, bitten-down nails. I watched Crawley briefly too, just long enough to note his expression was confusingly peaceful, lacking even the vague disappointment I might have expected. There was only hinted uncertainty. He gave little away, but he did seem genuinely puzzled.

“You can keep this.” He slid four more exam sheets my way. I stuffed them into my pocket. I thanked him and collected my bags.

“And August,” he spoke up as I reached the door, and I turned round to face him again. “If you ever feel you’re struggling, you can come to see me. My door is always open. But I’ll be honest, this is a professional program and there are certain expectations.”

“Of course.” I swallowed the sensation that flew through me—a mixture of boredom, maybe, and shame. A sense of some abstract inevitability. Then I pushed open his office door and was gone.

I had the brief rush of an early escape as I swept myself out of Halstein House in all its heavy, semi-medieval gloom, and back into the daylight. I had time to spare. Bronze bells sounded noon from the clock tower looming behind me, staring down Front Campus from its rounded north-western corner. I decided to walk to Union, a distance of about ten or twelve blocks. My bags were empty, mostly, and the October sky was a bright cloudless blue. Anyway, I like to walk. I’ll walk nearly anywhere to avoid the bus.

As I walked, I rubbed at my eyes and thought of Professor Crawley’s face. That grand mystery, finally revealed. I wasn’t sure what I’d expected. Something taut and angular, probably, with all the give of new leather. Hawkish features that might strike fear into students. But the truth is, the man has a kind face. Weary in a way, but kind all the same. I think it might be his eyes that do it, having a certain spark to them, like the suggestion if not the outright declaration of compassion. Leaving his office that day I believed his words, that he wanted to help me, but still I had a feeling there was little he could do on that front.

Outside the station I still had time and I sat for a moment on a stone bench to feel the breeze and stare at the jagged glass high rise towering over me from across Front Street. Leaving campus, I’d slipped casually from a false old world of grand pointed arches and ribbed vaults into this contemporary one of sleek, looming glass and polished shoes clicking hurriedly on asphalt. I thought I’d better study on the train. Maybe the change of setting would do me good. All I’d known lately were thick volumes on library desks, and dry yellow light from those metal lamps that hum incessantly as if they’re trying to let you in on something. I thought and watched crowds blur for a minute or two, but soon I began to feel like someone had scooped my insides clean out of my body like the flesh of a grapefruit, and I stood again and made my way finally inside.

When I boarded the train home, I tried to cram thoughts of school down. For a few days at least I wanted to wash my mind clean. I pictured a quiet street after a spring downpour, all fragrant and green and still deserted. I couldn’t explain it, but that’s what I wanted for my mind. Still, I couldn’t resist a final look at my exam papers, and glancing round all I saw were other passengers settling predictably in for the five-hour journey. No one seemed too concerned with me. So I reached into my pocket, withdrew crumpled papers and straightened them across my lap. I flipped through them to that final page, until I could lay eyes on the line that had so confused John Crawley, and all its awful, haphazard defiance. My gaze poured over it, letter by letter:

I was never here.

Four words that took barely a second to read. Still, I shot an unthinking glance over my shoulder once again. The phrase tasted so very bitter as it washed noiselessly over my tongue. Staring down at it and thinking how repulsive it was to me, I could feel the dried ink gazing back up at me with an even greater distaste. The phrase was familiar. Nova came to mind again. But I couldn’t recall consciously deciding to write down her words, and why I’d do such a thing was unclear. With a grimace I crushed the test in rigid, mechanical motions, stuffing it back into my pocket. I banished it to the back-burner of my mind. I was headed home.

And I won’t tell you about home; it wouldn’t add a thing, as far as I’m concerned.

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