Bats or Swallows by Teri Vlassopoulos

walking.
After the pictures they kissed in the field. That spring Toronto was infested with ladybugs, and Nikki saw them everywhere, swarming benches and poles, flying slowly and getting stupidly tangled up in hair or in folds of clothing. After they kissed Nikki forgot all about the infestation and when she looked down and noticed a tiny red ladybug crawling on her big toe she thought, how special .
Thomas lived in an apartment off of College Street just east of Dufferin. June kicked off with a heat wave and the two of them spent nights laying naked on his bed, the television on mute in the corner, an electric fan whirring and blowing cool air onto the soles of their feet. It was too hot to be close, but they were giddy enough to have sex anyway, sweaty before they even touched. They drank his roommate’s cold white wine because he always kept a bottle in the fridge while theirs would still be wrapped in the paper bag, forgotten in the corner.
There was something about that summer, the heat. Nikki was twenty-one when it started and twenty-two when it ended and she kept lists of the places where she and Thomas had sex. Mostly his apartment. Once, High Park. After they left she just wrote, everywhere .
Day 5: Picked up wood for a fire. It cost three dollars, but there was no one around to collect the money, just some envelopes. I put the money in an envelope and slid it under the office door. Thought about not paying, but there are places to be cheap, and someone went to a lot of trouble bundling up the wood.
    Nikki’s brother didn’t know she was gone until he called her cell phone a few days later. She and Thomas had made their way to the Smoky Mountains at the edge of Tennessee. Her brother was in Toronto, visiting from out-of-town. Had Nikki forgotten that he was supposed to stay with her that weekend? She had. The reception on her phone was bad so she walked to the only pay phone on site and called him back.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m in the Smoky Mountains.”
“What are you talking about?” Her brother was outside her apartment building.
“You didn’t call me before you left.” Nikki said. “You should’ve reminded me.”
“The Smoky Mountains?”
“Tennessee. I’m with Thom.”
“What the hell?” he asked. “Why are you in Tennessee?”
“I’m on vacation. I didn’t tell you I was going?”
“Where am I supposed to stay?”
“I’m sorry,” she said again.
When Nikki was younger she dyed her hair hot pink, neon green, black with streaks of grey and many other shades in-between. The frequent variations in colour gave people the impression that she did things without thinking or that she was indecisive, but they were wrong. She was a brunette: if you want pink hair, it takes commitment, patience, bleach kits and latex gloves. When she began art school she grew her hair out to its natural colour after a chunk broke off in her hands, but her reputation for being flaky followed her.
“Nicole,” he said finally. That’s all. He hung up. Nikki started dialling his number again, but stopped herself.
Day 7: “SWALLOWING ANGRY WORDS IS BETTER THAN HAVING TO EAT THEM.”
    Nikki’s grandfather had been a sign painter in Poland before immigrating to Canada and as an homage to him, she bought huge sheets of glass wholesale and painted on them. She’d found a book of church signs at a thrift store and taught herself how to hand-letter a sign by painting out slogans included in the book. They said things like, SIGN BROKEN, MESSAGE INSIDE or HOW DO YOU WANT TO SPEND ETERNITY? SMOKING OR NON-SMOKING? She’d spend hours planning and then painting a single word, making sure the slant of the A’s were at the perfect angle, that the O’s were symmetric.
When Thomas and Nikki drove to the field for their second photo shoot, she told him about her project. Thomas said that the best church signs were in the States, especially in the South. That afternoon they made plans to take a roadtrip