SINGLE

BY LISA LOCASCIO

RITUALS

Stella’s first months of being single after the end of her seven-year relationship were structured through a series of ceremonial gestures. She and her now-ex-boyfriend had begun dating when she was in her last year of high school and continued through the first year of her coursework for an MFA in poetry. The strange new world of singlehood seemed a sort of Da Vinci Code populated by men who worshipped Charles Bukowski and tall girls who winced when she spoke. She had been the type of twelve-year-old who pursued correspondence courses in witchcraft, so it was natural that she would develop certain rituals, attempts to penetrate this new symbology.

Now, after sending a message to a man she was interested in, she would walk away from her computer and not check her email for as long as humanly possible, waiting certainly overnight and sometimes well into the next day. While she waited, Stella read ornate cookbooks she had received as gifts and never opened before. By hand she wrote sketches for a series of poems about old cars and abandoned furniture. She watched a marathon of television shows about women who didn’t know how to handle men.

Stella created and then tested magic tricks: if she didn’t look at her cell phone for two hours, she would have a text message from the guy she wanted a text message from. If she controlled her vitriolic self-deprecation by chanting a secret mantra under her breath, if she was just quiet for a minute and focused her eyes on the far wall of the room until they watered, a man would seek her out at a party.  For anything resembling a date she donned a panoply of amulets, charms and lucky underwear, and left her house feeling like a human iPhone, decked out with gadgets charged with simple tasks. The gold necklace would make him look at her chest, the bracelet meant that she would be safe, the bleached hair meant that he would want to touch her face, the underwear or no underwear meant that he would spend long enough with her to see what was beneath her clothes.

PARTIES

Each time Stella went to a party that fall, she came home with a story that was like the setup for a tasteless joke.

1.  In September, Stella went to a party with her best friend, Dean, and two of his former co-workers, older women with clear designs on Dean. The women asked strange, vaguely insulting questions about Stella’s life.

“Are you satisfied being a graduate student?” said the wealthy brunette. “You know, with basically taking a vow of poverty?”

“Do you feel like you’ve come to terms with your appearance?” said the Polish blonde, “You are unusual looking.” The party was in a large apartment in a ritzy Brooklyn neighborhood she had never heard of. Stella had never been both single and at a party before, so she got drunk and winged around the apartment looking for a boy to hit on. Instead she found a room of weepy Long Island girls with great legs who told her that the man who owned the apartment was also heir apparently to a large media conglomerate: Hearst, or Conde Nast, or Wenner, but Stella couldn’t be sure which, because the music was too loud.

Things got blurry: Stella found the host and attempted to engage him in a conversation that ended with him asking why he hadn’t seen her before and her responding “I guess you just haven’t been looking hard enough!” Dean was aggressively danced-with by a bespectacled girl who spoke at length about her shoes. He looked nervously over his shoulder, mouthing the word “help” and then laughing to cover it up. The Polish blonde made out with the wealthy brunette’s brother, who had driven to the party from another state. At around four Stella wrapped her hand around the bicep of a passing boy. He looked so friendly, with his floppy black hair and exhausted blue eyes.

“Who do you know here?” she asked him.

“Oh, nobody,” he said. “I just came off the street.”

2. In November, Stella went with her beautiful roommate Yasmin to a party held by some people she didn’t know. Stella had been very depressed all day, and Yasmin convinced her to leave their apartment by telling her that it was “a reading party,” where she could read a new very short poem she had written. But when she arrived, the hosts told Stella that that she could not read her poem. They were tall skinny girls wearing shorts over black tights, oblivious somehow to the fact that it was November, and said they wanted to “keep things professional.” So Stella sat on a thin cushion on the floor and listened to a boy read twenty minutes of a poem about math and language variation. Before he started, he said: “I’m going to read twenty minutes of a poem about math and language variation.”

Afterwards the party turned into a bigger party, and more people who Stella didn’t know showed up. Yasmin helped her start conversations with strangers. The benefit of having a very beautiful roommate was also the problem with having a very beautiful roommate: everyone wanted to talk to Stella because she knew Yasmin, but they did not want to talk to her for very long. Stella complained about the twenty-minute poem to some stranger boys, using an analogy to a popular science fiction show, and one of the boys said, “Wow, you watch that show?”  and Stella felt like a big deal. She went outside with the boy, Sam, and for two hours they discovered together that they had everything in common. He was appealingly rabbity, with a little halo of wavy brown hair and a way of looking at Stella that made her sure he was good in bed. At some point a horrible girl from the party decided they should flip a coin to see if they would go to her apartment or Stella’s, but she left Stella and Sam alone with the coin. He flipped and it came up heads. The horrible girl’s apartment. Sam and Stella looked together over at the horrible girl, who was laughing loudly at a joke about public universities. Yasmin made an apologetic face behind Sam’s head, but Stella touched his arm and said, “Make it tails, make it my apartment, make it tails.” He stuck the tip of his tongue out between his lips a little, more like a bunny than ever, and he did.

On the walk to the train Stella took Sam’s arm, swinging it in hers. His friends were going to come over, too, and Sonia, her other friend, a sloe-eyed Polish beauty who dressed that night like a young soccer player. The evening bounded out in front of her like an excited dog. But then at the last minute the boys mysteriously decided they were tired and elected to head back to the “Slope,” which coincidentally was the most irritating nickname for Park Slope that Stella had ever heard. Stella rode the train home with Yasmin and Sonia, who rested her head on Stella’s lap, her light brown hair splaying over Stella’s black trench-coat, and moaned: “I’m never going to have sex again in my life.”

“It’s cool,” Stella said, touching Sonia’s hair. “Me neither.”

Yasmin smiled down into her collar.

3. In December, Stella went to the Christmas party at the magazine where she had worked for a year. Stella had idolized this magazine as a child and had leapt at the opportunity when she had been offered an internship there. It was a sort of Holy Grail of internships, the end result of several years of lesser internships. Through the window across from her desk Stella had watched the seasons change in Times Square, the sparkling advertisements covered in snow, then gray sleet, then spring rain. Carrying a pile of envelopes to the mailroom and indulging in the free coffee, she had felt a sort of special calm. She had known that there was no real possibility of being hired at the magazine, but in her happier moments Stella had entertained the fantasy.

Now her time at the magazine was ending and the Christmas party constituted a sort of spiritual payment for her toil: an invitation to a gathering of New York’s media elite. At the office Stella wandered through the gaily-decorated cubicles, recognizing no one. She ate several mini quiches and mirthlessly drank a cocktail made from pepper vodka and cranberry juice. Stella had wanted to take the opportunity to network – to make some connections – but the idea of talking to the pulled-together-looking strangers made her hyperventilate. She walked around smiling brightly, making eye contact with people and holding it until they looked away. Her boss talked to her for a while, then said “Wait right here,” and disappeared.

Stella went to check on her coat and found herself doubled over among the bright woolens, dry-heaving as she choked back furious sobs. She put the coat on and ran to the elevator, counting backwards, silently naming the many comforts in her life into being. I love my parents, she thought, and my sister, and my pets, and Yasmin, and Dean, and Sonia, and my boyfriend. I mean, my ex-boyfriend, and then she was outside, the December wind somehow sympathetic as it whipped her face. A huge video screen flashed on the side of a building: HOLIDAY TRAVEL FRAUGHT WITH DANGERS, it said.

SUMO, or, FINALLY, SOME ACTION

During her Christmas vacation home to Chicago, Stella agreed to have dinner with a man from her past. At the time they had first met she had been a teenager and he had been four years older than she was now. The man – Ira – took her to dinner, then to a bar, and then back to the condo that he owned in Wicker Park, a few doors down from the building where Stella used to spend every Saturday in high school, writing poetry in a repurposed apartment with other at-risk teenagers, which seemed appropriate.

At the bar, Ira had leaned forward in mid-sentence to kiss the bare square of skin just below her throat, beginning a tide of elation that rose higher as he opened the passenger door of his car for her, a chivalrous gesture she did not recognize. “Is there something wrong you’re your car?” she asked. He just turned and looked at her. They barely spoke as he drove the short distance to his building. Stella bopped around the bright interior of the elevator like an excited toddler, falling forward into Ira’s soft torso just as the doors opened. She held her breath as he pushed the key into the lock. Ira’s condo was huge, with floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out on the futuristic concrete façade of a hospital with a massive exterior ventilation system that made it look like a set from Blade Runner. A black wire dress form dominated the front room.

Stella’s elation began to ebb at the sight of the dress form. She had lied to her parents about where she was going and was now at the home of a strange older man. She had never done this before. Perhaps Ira was a serial killer. Hadn’t Patrick Bateman owned a dress form? There was very little furniture, just a kitchen island with a Viking range and a brown shag carpet with Ira’s gym bag on it. Stella took off her coat and shivered.

“Where should I put this?” she asked.

“Uh,” Ira said. He had close-cut dark blonde hair and a chewy-looking pink mouth. His hands and face were covered all over with light brown freckles. Stella walked to the far corner of the room, where the windows met. The dull orange glare of the city seeped in through the translucent shades. There was a sort of metal frame in the corner, like a table with no surface. A word was embossed on the side. She moved my hand to touch the letters.

“Oh!” Ira said. “You can just put your coat on that.”

“What is this?” she said. The word was Sumo.

“It’s a stand for a book of Helmut Newton photographs,” he said. “It’s a huge limited edition book. It cost fifteen thousand dollars. But my building was broken into a few years ago so I put everything I cared about in storage.”

Stella glanced around the empty room. “It must be a great book,” she said.

“It is,” Ira said seriously. They looked at each other and she laughed suddenly, her breasts jumping hard on her chest. Ira took her coat and draped it over the stand. Then he came and stood close to her, his body just inches from hers, and looked down into Stella’s face. He put his hands to her face and kissed her with, tonguing the roof of her mouth.

When he pulled away Stella burst into giggles. “I think –“ she tried, and couldn’t finish. “I’m glad,” she said.

“We don’t have to do anything,” Ira said. “I just want to sleep next to you. I can tell you’re nervous, with all this laughing. It’s okay.”

“I’m not nervous,” Stella said, and kept laughing. “I’m just happy.” She kissed him again. She pulled back and considered his face. He seemed afraid to touch her.

“It’s okay,” she said. “I know you’re not my boyfriend.”

SCUBA DIVING

Sex with Ira was like scuba diving. The first kiss was her oxygen mask, all of his smell around her like water, his mouth the only real thing. Then Stella had to sink down to the bed, carefully, so she didn’t get the bends; she felt like she might faint. Ira unzipped her dress, cupping the curves of her back in his palms. “Don’t move,” he said, and undressed her, running his fingertips under the waistband of her underwear like he was opening a letter. Nude, Stella felt like she had put on a new body, like she was wearing another skin.

Ira kissed the indent of her spine, lifted her breasts and licked their shadows, rubbed her knee with his thumb. He sat her on his lap and she felt herself falling deeper down, towards the shadowy bottom of the ocean. She slid off his knees and onto the bed, stretched out her legs and rubbed her cheek into his crotch. Was there anything Stella loved more than the feel of an erection through jeans? No, there was not.

She was down there, at the sea floor, and she had found it, the rare creature for which she had gone diving. The salty wet warmth of his cock in her mouth, lolling on her tongue, sent Stella into a silent paroxysm of languid questions. What had she read that could be applied to this task? What could she summon from her memory to send angels to her jaw? She tried so hard to focus on the tiny, sensate pleasures of the blow job – the bob of his testicles on her wet chin, his loamy scent rising in her nose like bread baking or gingko trees in bloom. Having him in her mouth made her feel completely underwater, like she had grown gills, like she could stay down forever.

LONNIE

After she returned to New York, Stella began calling her younger sister late at night and dreamily recounting her evenings with Ira. “I hope I see him again,” she’d say, her voice husky in her darkened room. Stella’s sister told her that Francie Jacobs, a girl a few years younger than Stella who had grown up down the street, had been dating a thirty-seven-year-old ex-con named Lonnie since she was sixteen. Francie and Lonnie had met on an Ayn Rand message board during Francie’s junior year of high school. For the first four months theirs had been a love affair only of the mind. Then Lonnie had appeared at Francie’s dance recital, and now, three years later, they were secretly living together in Evanston, where Francie studied comp lit at Northwestern and Lonnie cleaned the bodies of the elderly invalids. Francie described Lonnie as “slightly overweight.” He had gotten into philosophy in prison.

It was difficult for Stella to imagine Francie – a painfully quiet girl with whose brown hair seemed to drip from her scalp – carrying on a thrilling affair with a pudgy felon. Could there be a more appropriate name for this man than Lonnie? Only, perhaps, “Ronnie.” And yet, in light of Ira, Stella felt a sudden strange sisterhood with Francie. She swam for a moment into Francie’s mind, felt the thrill of Lonnie’s practiced and grateful embraces, their shared passion for The Fountainhead. Although “slightly overweight” surely meant “quite fat,” and Stella could not avoid picturing Francie and Lonnie’s awkward coupling, Stella felt warmly towards the clandestine lovers.

In this torrent of sympathy, she decided to write a prose poem called “The Older Man Story.”

THE OLDER MAN STORY

I liked the way he looked at me, his eyes full of awe for the miracle of my body. Sometimes he pressed his face to some particularly smooth part – the flatness between my breasts, say, or the inside of my elbow – and breathed in, the way mothers breathe in the scent of their babies. Of course I smelled good: before I saw him I took long hot showers and rubbed my skin with desert-smelling lotion. I squirted tea-scented perfume on the insides of my wrists and at the nape of my neck, where I knew he would lick.

When I did some basic math and compared what he and I had been doing in a given year – You were twelve the year I was born, I was in first grade when you lost your virginity, When I got my driver’s license you bought your first house – he shook his head and sighed ruefully.

“I’m a bad person,” he said sometimes. “I shouldn’t be doing this.”

But then he would do it, he would do anything: drink the sweat from the backs of my knees, hold my hand in his lap as he drove me home, offer up his whole arsenal of weird confirmed-bachelor toiletries: skin spray, leave-in conditioner, a row of eight bars of Arrid XX lined up like an army behind his mirror.

AN INSURRECTION

Stella got fed up with “The Older Man Story” and went to another party, this time alone. At first she thought she didn’t know anyone at this party, and then she realized that she did: Sam, the boy from the party in November, was there. They drank together all evening. Around two in the morning, Stella sat next to him on a couch and said “Will you hold my hand and talk to me about your favorite mythology?”

“Is that what you want right now?” he asked. Stella nodded and he took her hand. She was so proud the successful move that she had made that she could hardly speak. When it was time for them to leave Sam said that he would walk her to the train. On the way she held his arm like she had the night they met and smiled happily into the wind. At the entrance to the subway, Sam turned to her. His mouth seemed blurry, as if he was shaking as he spoke. “As your host, I would certainly be remiss if I did not offer you lodging for the evening.”

“Are you saying I can stay over?” she asked, trying not to slur. His brown eyes seemed rich and true in the reflected yellow light from the subway.

“Yes,” he said. They turned and walked back to his house without speaking.

They went into his bedroom, where Sam put on a pair of glasses. Stella sat on his small couch and curled her knees into her chest, waiting for Sam to sit next to her. Instead, he settled in a chair perhaps five feet from the couch. Her drunkenness exaggerated this distance, made it echo out in front of her like a long hallway. They were silent, and then Stella awkwardly gestured towards a small book of Bukowski’s poetry, which led to a long conversation about Bukowski. It was four-thirty in the morning, they were both quite drunk, and Stella was bluffing by claiming to know anything about Bukowski. Her eyes kept crossing with the effort.

“I don’t really care for his work,” she said. She tried to place her hand elegantly on her knee, but it slipped and fell into her crotch.

“Well, perhaps you haven’t seen every shade of his development as a verse writer,” Sam said thoughtfully.

Stella looked down at her breasts. The shiny pale skin rose up like a loaf of fresh bread. When she looked again at Sam he was flipping through a book. “Here, I think this piece illustrates his engagement with the sensual,” he said, thrusting it at her.

After what seemed like an hour of this poorly functioning critical discourse, Sam said, “Well, I’m going to hit the hay,” and stood. Stella followed him to his bed at the far corner of the room. She stood still, sparkling with anticipation, as he unzipped her dress. He took it off and she was nude. “Why don’t you take off some clothes?” she suggested, covering her chest with her arms. Sam removed off his shirt. Stella lay down and was suddenly and briefly self-conscious about her body, untouched for four months and exposed in the shadowy moonlight from the window next to his bed.

She opened her eyes and saw Sam’s thin pale body standing over her. He had stripped down to only his underwear, tight black boxer briefs, and looked delicate and small, almost pathetic, his thin torso like a feather. Stella felt a great surge of affection. She held her arms out to him and said “C’mere.” He lay down beside her and kissed her thrillingly for several minutes, rubbing her breasts like they were a soft piece of fabric, which was okay, which felt pretty nice. His hand traveled down to her thicket of ungroomed pubic hair and gently poked at her clitoris, which was also okay, which also felt pretty nice. Despite the several hours of intoxicants she had consumed and the near-dawn hour, Stella felt quite awake.

Sam sat up and moved into a kneeling position. Stella smiled with her eyes closed. She knew what happened now. She liked what happened now. She took him in her mouth and rolled him around a little bit on her tongue. The act made her happy, made her feel like she knew what was going on. Ira could become only a memory, her ex-boyfriend only one of a long chain of events that led to her continued status as a lady with many lovers, a libertine. True, her technique seemed less effective than usual – tumescence was not occurring in her mouth – but everything takes time, she reasoned, and applied herself to her task with new vigor.

Stella sucked Sam’s penis for almost as long as they had listlessly discussed Bukowski. The feeling of exhaustion and intoxication returned. Through the corner of her slitted eyes she saw that the sun had begun to rise, the sky behind Sam’s strangely feminine white curtains turning an electric purple. She decided that Sam was hard and withdrew, lying back down. She was tired, and it was his turn. She writhed a bit, waiting for him to touch her. Time passed. Was Sam even on the bed anymore? She felt his weight, but no contact – not even the proximity of his leg to hers.

She opened one eye and saw the instantly embarrassing image of Sam crouched on a far corner of his bed, masturbating.

“Uh,” she said. “Touch me?” A cliché rose in her mind: Sex is like pizza – even when it’s bad, it’s pretty good. Stella suddenly hoped that this was true.

Sam came back towards her, but she felt so far from him now – not that she had ever felt any real closeness, but before she had assumed that their shared attraction was a vehicle she could ride towards a mutually satisfactory conclusion. Now she began to fear that there might be a different outcome.

“You should put your mouth on me again,” Sam said, and Stella moved automatically to do so, still dimly optimistic about the situation. After all, men always complained that women didn’t enjoy giving oral sex, and she had always been eager to prove that this was not so. Then Sam came quickly and silently in her mouth. The consistency of his semen was not right, somehow too thin, as if it had been watered down. He immediately withdrew and lay down beside her. She swallowed, confused, and lay down too, resting her arm on his torso.

“I can’t sleep if anything is touching me,” Sam said, not moving. She removed her arm. A horrible realization began to blossom. She felt a pang of recognition. She knew this story from movies and books. He lay inert beside her. She opened her eyes fully and glared at the shape of his body. Did people really behave this way? There must have been some misunderstanding. Perhaps Sam had thought that Stella’s enthusiasm for fellatio was such that she took orgasm-level pleasure in bringing him to climax.

“Um,” she said. There was no response. “You know, Sam,” she said. “I didn’t have an orgasm. I’d like to.”

Sam’s silence settled around Stella like a miserable wet veil. “So…” she said after a few minutes.

“That’s an awkward thing for you to say,” Sam said finally.

“Excuse me?”

“I don’t really feel comfortable having this conversation,” he said.

“I don’t think it’s awkward,” Stella said, shivering. “I mean – what are you talking about?”

“It’s just not really a topic I think I can talk about right now,” Sam said.

“Um, well, I think this is pretty basic procedure,” Stella said. She couldn’t think up a decent argument for why she deserved to have an orgasm. She had never thought she would need one.

“You know, now may not be the time,” Sam said as if she had suggested they drive to his parents’ house in New Jersey and announce their engagement. His tone was of deep and abject aggravation, and he punctuated his sentences with sighs of disbelief.

“I don’t even really know what to say,” Stella said, horribly awake. “I mean…” She trailed off. The argument stretched out, Sam continuing his rebuke of her awkwardness and Stella more and more incoherent in her attempts to express her rapidly retreating desire.

There had been a few incidents in the past when Stella had been crazily sexually demanding when drunk. Eight years earlier, when she was a sophomore in high school, she had woken up her boyfriend in the middle of the night, enthralled by his sleep-erection, and demanded coitus. And she had been occasionally guilty of a certain insatiability with her most recent ex, ignorant of the fact that multiple bottles of wine had a different effect on her libido than on his. Was this, she wondered, a similar circumstance? Was she out of line?

“I just don’t think now’s the time,” Sam said.

“It would just be nice,” she said.

Sam heaved a sigh of great frustration and disgust and yanked the sheet from her body. He dropped his hand onto her hip. It began to creep forward.

“You know what,” she said. “You know what, it’s okay.” And she moved her body away from his. She felt like crying, but also knew that she would not cry, not even when she was alone. She considered leaving, but she did not have her glasses and she did not know the neighborhood. She had to pee, but the idea of putting her dress back on to go into the hall Sam shared with two roommates was too much. She wrapped herself in the sheet and sat up against the wall. She felt the weak sunlight on her shoulders and the movement of the curtains behind her head. How melodramatic, she thought, and almost laughed, but did not.

“There’s a towel on the floor,” Sam said without moving. She had thought he had fallen asleep. “If you need it.” She lay back down and hoped he would not speak again.

Stella did not sleep, but instead lay awake beside Sam’s lightly slumbering form for the two hours until eight o’clock, when his alarm went off. At the first sound Sam rose and crossed to the other side of the room, where he dressed with his back to her, taking time to button his cuffs and collar. She took this as a sign to scramble into her dress and gather her things.

“I’m sorry we can’t have a more leisurely morning,” Sam said as he led her out of his room. “I have a polo lesson with my cousin in half an hour.”

A polo lesson? At eight-thirty on a Sunday morning? Stella didn’t have time to express an opinion on Sam’s schedule because they were already at the threshold. She stepped outside.

“See ya,” he said, and shut the door.

THEN, YOU’LL KNOW

As she stumbled blindly along the street, squinting into the sunlight, Stella thought of the phrase her friends had used over and over again as they encouraged her to be brave, to act without fear. “I want,” she had said to them, in October and December and February. “I want to ask Sam to come over to my house. I want to go visit Ira in Chicago. I want to go home with Sam.”

“Then you should do that,” they had uniformly told her.

“But,” Stella said. “But what is Sam says no? What if Ira freaks out? What is Sam is a terrible lover?”

“Then, you’ll know,” Stella’s friends had said. “You’ll know he’s a douchebag, or that he’s scared, or that it wasn’t meant to be.”

“Take it off like a Band-Aid,” Yasmin sometimes added. “Just get it over with.”

“But,” Stella kept saying. “What if I don’t want to know? I’d rather not find out if these guys are terrible people.”

“Really?” Yasmin asked.

“Are you sure?” Sonia said.

“Fine,” Dean said, and shrugged.

But now, with the cold Brooklyn wind blasting her bare neck and arms, Stella realized that she was in fact glad to know. Briefly she returned in thought to the waning moments of the party where she had found Sam the night before, a moment not five hours earlier when she had stood in the apartment’s tiny kitchen, pouring herself and Sam brimming shots of Jack Daniels and grinning widely. Had she ever felt as happy as she had in that moment, full of the possibility of the evening, sure that she was signing up for a menu of pure pleasure? Now she stood blinking at a faraway traffic sign, trying to figure out if it was safe to cross the wide avenue. She stepped off the curb and a car suddenly blazed by, nearly running over her foot.

But now, she knew. Her attempts to find fulfillment with the men she had met in the past year – her hope that one might bear out her interest in him, might prove capable of riding her body with her to a different place – had largely failed. But this failure was hardly uninteresting, and her advisor had written all over her thesis, was, in fact, “More interesting.” She began to see the value of this comment. What she had wanted from these men was a good time, an authentic emotional interaction, the thrill of their hands and eyes on her body. She had wanted to feel, always, the shimmery transformation she underwent in the presence of a man’s desire. Sam and Ira had given her moments of this, little half-servings of what she wanted.

What she only realized fully now was that these men had been the barest of hors d’oeuvres meted out by a finicky caterer. Her friends had been the real meal all this time. They were the ones who had sustained her. How may nights had she slept on the lumpen sofa in Dean’s disaster zone bedroom, just passed out stoned in her clothes and woken in the middle of the night to steal his toothbrush and rinse her mouth with his Listerine? How many evenings had she spent drinking draft beer with her MFA classmates, grousing about how small a place the world seemed to hold for them? How many mornings (well, afternoons) had she walked to Café Orlin with her roommate and felt soaringly happy at the knowledge that they would order the same breakfast as always, that Yasmin would sometimes look up and the light from the window would catch just so on her shining hazel eyes? And hadn’t Dean always woken her with a kiss on the forehead, hadn’t he gone downstairs to make coffee so that she could sleep on his couch a moment longer? Hadn’t he stood patiently by when, after they went back to her apartment drunk one night, she had filled a cookie sheet with raw bacon, coated it in brown sugar and chili powder, and shoved it in the over? And hadn’t Yasmin been kind when she came into the kitchen after Dean and Stella removed the bacon from the oven and stood screeching as they burnt their fingers, trying to pluck the sizzling strips from the half-inch of bubbling fat at the bottom of the pan? Hadn’t Yasmin only mildly said, “Can you guys keep it down?” and not mentioned the ultimate irony of waking a Muslim at four in the morning by noisily cooking and then eating bacon? Hadn’t she even smiled a little as Stella and Dean crammed the crispy meat into their mouths?

The wind picked up again, blowing a steady band of cold against Stella’s bare knees. She felt new amazement at the fact that Sam had not offered a jacket. Wasn’t the point of going home with someone that you liked them, even if only a little bit, that you wanted to be nice to them, even if only a little bit? She stood on the corner, feeling a certain appreciation for the ugliness of the big intersection, for its unabashed barren morning self. At home Stella had a little stuffed owl, no bigger than her thumb, which Dean had given her on some happy morning at his place in Brooklyn – a morning when she’d been fully dressed, one where she’d had breakfast. She and Dean had gone for a walk along the shores of the East River, surveying the shapes of Manhattan across the water, and the wind had not bothered her because Dean had loaned her a sweatshirt. On their way back inland they had stopped at a market, and Dean bought her the little blue owl.

“You’re my heart, Stella,” he had said.

Stella kept the owl on her nightstand. She closed her eyes now and saw it there, waiting for her, right where she’d left it. She would go home and crawl under her blue blanket – she would crawl under and hold the little owl in her left hand, and feel the love that had so selflessly been given her, the joy she had taken in loving others.

Stella stepped off the curb. A tiny elderly woman with fluffy white hair wearing an orange leather jacket appeared next to her. The lady leaned towards her and said “Great dress.”

“Thanks,” Stella said, and crossed the street.

Lisa Locascio recently completed her first novel, Peculiar Qualifications. She lives in Los Angeles, where she is Virginia B. Middleton Fellow at the University of Southern California.