Katherine Abbass (she/her) is a writer, editor, and English teacher of Phoenician descent. Her work has been published conventionally in The Antigonish Review, untethered, Plenitude, and Glass Buffalo magazine, as well as unconventionally through EIA’s Short Story Dispenser and on the labels of Blindman Brewing’s beer. In 2020, Katherine was shortlisted for Room magazine’s Creative Nonfiction Contest. In 2021, she won Riddle Fence’s Fiction Contest. She currently resides with her dog, Angelou, in Amiskwacîwâskahikan.
“My short fiction piece, ‘The Flies,’ and the five blackout poems that divide the narrative were inspired by Hiromi Goto’s ‘Notes from Liminal Spaces,’ her keynote address at the 2015 Academic Conference of Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy, later published in Uncanny magazine. I wanted to experiment with the push-and-pull of space and safety within a queer relationship, and I attempted to queer Goto’s original text with the intention of creating space for my queer narrative — or allowing it to ‘surface.'”
narratives rely upon
engagement:
the visceral life of a feeling.
temporary intimacy can be the
bubble world: words and reality
held by
saturated lattices, The architecture not
just what we write, but how.
On an air mattress inside a tent on July 1st, she and I are clinging to each other. Her boyfriend is behind her horizontal, snoring like the others behind him, and she and I have our lips pressed together in whispers and kisses. This is the engagement and she knows it. The ring on her fourth finger digs into my palm.
When we got to the party, everybody had already started drinking. I was handed a Gatorade bottle of something that tasted like fuzzy peaches and made my nostrils burn. I went to her, held the back of my hand to my nose, and said, “Is it bleeding?” She took my chin under her fingertips and tilted my head to see.
Her boyfriend wore a cape, a Canada flag. He was shirtless, barrel-chested, and donned rubber boots for puddle-jumping, for drinking games on Canada Day. The boys’ girls stood in a line along the edge of the muddy water, stood cheering, stood belly-button rings catching the sun.
There were flies, too: houseflies. They came out after the rain and they circled her. “It’s because you smell so sweet,” her boyfriend said, and pulled her in to sniff her hair. “Honey,” he whispered into the black of her curls, and I swore I saw her flinch.
central to the text: a face like one’s own left
a history, a personal
justice (also art, as familiar a
moment of intimacy.)
Much of the draw
is here.
We met in a South Asian history class, quizzed on gruesome stats marking partition and liberation. Her boyfriend couldn’t point to Bangladesh on a map.
“My boyfriend,” she would say. “My boyfriend, my boyfriend.” Her mantra. The first time we kissed she had just finished saying, “My boyfriend.” The rest of the sentence never came, but the flies did – they swarmed. They formed a halo around her head that diffused when she swatted but came back to shape before her hand descended. “I don’t mind,” I told her, but their buzz was incessant and affected the mood. When she lifted her arms so I could pull at her shirt, they flew to her breasts and planted. She cried into my shoulder as I plucked them from her skin, one by one.
Her mother, she said, taught her how to cook. She knew how to make all her boyfriend’s favourites. They were planning for a big family, inshallah, but fought about who would stay home with the flies kids.
gay gay
nestles
invokes
triggers
quickens.
uneasiness has the capacity to persist.
I had nothing to do and so they invited me. We drove out as the rain began but by the time we got there, it was done pouring. The tent had been set up and we threw our bags in it before joining everyone else out back.
There were bowls of chips Saran-wrapped on the table, raindrops from the storm dipping the centres of the shields. A keg stood under a pine tree and two boys were quick to pluck me from the grass and turn me upside down to drink. I opened my throat and searched for her among the spectators, behind the iPhones set to record.
Right-side up, I made a friend. “The flies are bad this summer,” the blue-haired boy said, and shrugged against my shoulder. “But last year was worse. Horseflies.”
I remembered a bite from one of them the summer I was five, pressing an ice cube against my arm and asking my mother how God could have created something so cruel. The horsefly that got me had blue eyes and winked at me before chomping down. Some people get after houseflies for the vengeful way they rub their hands together, but at least they don’t wink at you before they bite.
Representational embodiment: I ask
Whose bodies are the subject? Who is missing? Not
upon the page makes the matter critical.
The marks matter because We exist in the
matter… Our realities are not conscious of
erasure or distortion. the limitations
confine desire.
the body plays out.
She loved Bollywood movies, but this love she kept a secret: there was enough to make her different, that’s what she said. We would drive to the north end of the city and catch them there, sit slouched in the back corner of the theatre sharing Maltesers. I sometimes turned for her reaction, but it would be hidden from me always behind her hair.
Her boyfriend came to one with us. She sat between us and held his hand, elbowing me when I would smirk at his affection. He was always kind to me and that was where the guilt stemmed from, when I would remember his one-armed hugs that felt all-consuming, the way he cared so deeply for her that she became his field of vision, he inanimate in her absence and alive only when she stood near.
He would tell me that evening, before we retreated to the tent, that he had never dated a brown girl before. “I’ve never really been attracted to them,” he would say, shrugging. “But it’s different with her.”
A month after the party she would cut her curls to stop the flies. But they came anyway and in abundance. They came even as she lay naked with her boyfriend, her boyfriend, her boyfriend, they came and they dug at her for her secrets.
Even when she stopped talking to me, they came.
a site
where dreams can be
critical and transformative remains a wonder.
Even as we dismantle,
imagine. things are not impossible. When we
become the best of
space, invite us. Imagine
better.
In the space of the night I held my breath and let her hands run. As her boyfriend slept beside her, she covered my mouth and let me bite. I left deep, purple dents in the centre of her knuckles, drew blood from her lip when I chomped down. We fell into each other, shucked the space between our bodies and gave over to wonder.
The flies buzzed.
By morning, she was covered like a pile of horse shit in the bed. They flitted, they rubbed their hands together and touched her. They moved not even for my hand, my hand across her stomach. They vibrated underneath my palm, tickled and squirmed inside my cave.
“Go,” I whispered. “She’s not for you.”
But they only looked at me, black eyes blinking, hungry, lost.
