Free The Mercy Journals by Claudia Casper

wearing an old sweater of mine and her dancing tights. She looked at me with narrowed eyes and a grin.
    Jeez, you sure know how to make a girl feel self-conscious.
    A laugh escaped me. I washed the bowl and scrubbed the sink. Scrubbed my hands. I asked if she wanted tea or something to eat. She said she’d make tea, and I sat on the arm of the chair and watched her move around the kitchen. I walked up behind her, pressed my erection into her hip and … even the cannibal goldfish began to blush.
    Later, when we were sipping our tea, she in the armchair and me on a kitchen chair, our legs touching on the ottoman, I felt relieved enough to ask, You met my brother the other day?
    I did.
    He mentioned you asked about me. What did he tell you?
    He said you used to be different. Confident. Self-righteous. Adventurous. You were a colonel or major something. He barely recognized you now, he said.
    That goes both ways. Was he, I paused, a gentleman?
    What do you mean? Did he offer me his chair? A glass of water? Did he make a pass? He was charming, as I imagine you’d expect your brother to be. He was curious. He grilled me about us.
    Unavoidably. I’m curious too.
    He mentioned a cabin up north. A family cabin that he wants you to go to with him. He wanted me to convince you.
    I don’t know why he wants to go so much.
    He said your mother’s ashes. And he thinks he could survive up there. He said he’s not doing so well down here. Is he your older brother?
    Younger.
    He seemed like the older one. The way he sat in your chair and opened your coolbox.
    I haven’t seen him in eighteen years.
    You don’t look like brothers.
    We both have our mother’s blue eyes and our father’s big hands.
    One short, one tall, one thick, one thin, one hairy, one hairless …
    Clearly there was no way of finding out if anything happened between them without asking directly. I didn’t think that would go over well so instead I continued the list of contrasts she’d started.
    One devastatingly handsome, smart, and good, the other …
    I got up and made two sandwiches with the cheese and solar greenhouse lettuce and tomato we’d got at the market. I had a small jar of mustard and I splurged. Ruby clapped her hands she was so happy.
    I haven’t eaten this well—I can’t even remember.
    I wanted to tell you about the goldfish.
    She nodded and kept eating.
    I’m not normally a rule breaker. I fully support OneWorld. I don’t even want to go back to the old world, unlike my brother.
    She nodded vigorously, her mouth full of sandwich.
    I made the decision to keep my fish a long time ago, and then I stopped thinking about the rule. You know how things can become invisible until someone else sees them? I wouldn’t keep a cat or a dog.
    She swallowed and waited.
    I’m thinking I won’t replace them when the last one dies.
    We all need something, one thing, that’s just for us, she said, free of rules and other people. No rule would stop me from dancing.
    She left sometime after midnight. I offered to accompany her but she said she liked walking by herself. I gave her my Callebaut so she’d have to return it.

March 27 |
    She came over every night that week. I didn’t question it. I gratefully accepted. We threw ourselves at each other, trying to get under each other’s skin through the calisthenics of desire and love. I say love. It wasn’t the love of twenty-year-olds—we’d both already had good helpings of life—nor was it the love of commitment and sacrifice yet, but I would already have given up a lot for her. Sometimes we made love with so much frustration and fear and uncertainty that we bashed ourselves against each other, and these times might have been the most lustful.
    She started staying the night, leaving with me in the morning when I went to work. I noticed something about her. She was often still, and by still I mean stiller than anyone I’d ever met. She didn’t fiddle, or tap or move her head, or rearrange any part of