This Is Not Your City by Caitlin Horrocks Page B

She began writing with the lipstick on the upper-left corner, above her ear.
    Â 
    Jukka,
    Have taken your kidney and gone to Estonia. Seek medical attention ASAP!
    Ursula
    Â 
    On the bed Jukka was asleep on his stomach, his breath a liquid snore. She pushed his shirt up and he didn’t stir. She pressed one hand to the small of his back, wondering where his kidneys were, what they looked like. She drew an oval to the right of his spine and rubbed the blunted end of the lipstick with her index finger, drew the finger across her lips. She kissed Jukka’s back in the center of the kidney. “I’m going to find the sleeping area. I’ll get home just fine tomorrow. Don’t worry about me,” she whispered, her mouth moving against his skin. She was embarrassed after saying it that she had imagined Jukka worrying about her, that his sleep might be troubled by her absence. “Goodnight,” she said, pulling a blanket from the other bunk to cover him.
    Ursula found the sleeping room on an upper deck, a humid and windowless space lit by two red EXIT signs. Passengers cocooned in coats and jackets sprawled on benches and pressed into corners. Ursula waited for her eyes to adjust to the dimness, threaded her way through the sleeping bodies. She found a narrow patch of floor between two anonymous shapes, men or women, their faces turned away; she stretched herself out on her side with her backpack wedged under her cheek. The stranger
behind her jerked and flung a hand out, its fingers brushing the nape of her neck. Ursula lay still. She thought of her pretend Mongolian husband and of their little house on the Black Sea, where the summers were long and warm and lit and their breath would be invisible. She slowed her breathing to the quiet pace of the bodies around her, the warm animals curled in the darkness. She imagined the feel of her own vertebrae under the stranger’s fingers, and found herself hoping that the hand wouldn’t move until morning.

Zero Conditional
    Principal Steckelberg was late. Eril brushed snow off the wooden steps of the administrative portable and sat to wait for him. Morningcroft Montessori Academy was made up only of portables, standing in a circle on concrete blocks. In her phone interview, the principal had told her that the portables were the same colors as the pie wedges in Trivial Pursuit. This, he had said, symbolized the value Morningcroft put on knowledge. When he arrived he unlocked Cerulean, where Eril would be teaching the third grade.
    â€œFourth grade is in Vermilion, second Lemon, first Tangerine, fifth Salmon. We have an excellent teaching staff. They’ll be a real resource for you.” Steckelberg opened the door and stood aside, gesturing toward the darkened classroom as if presenting a prize she had won. Eril supposed she had. It was a job, after all. The heat had been off for two weeks and she could see her breath. A long table below the windows on the opposite wall was covered with cages of hamsters, a rat, a fish tank, a tiny garter snake under a heat lamp.
    â€œYour predecessor was quite the biologist. We’re sorry to lose her. She had a last-minute job offer after Christmas. Some kind of fieldwork out in New Mexico, dietary habits of predatory birds. She was coming in to feed the animals up until yesterday.”

    On the table, Eril’s predecessor had left long lists of instructions on the care and feeding of the animals. She had also left bowls of soft gray balls of owl vomit filled with the fur and bones of whatever the owl had eaten. The contents of twenty pellets had been glued, spread-eagled, on squares of cardboard, the bones arranged into the skeletons of voles and shrews. It was an ambitious project for third graders. The skeletons were caked in Elmer’s glue, slivers of rib bones shellacked onto skulls, paw bones the size of rice grains wedged into eye sockets. Larger bones were scattered across the table, sticks and