Working at the fantasy shop was not for the insouciant.

It was not a guessing game, it was a sport. A psychic academy for the only the most agile mental gymnasts.

Every customer was a project, that had to be studied, understood, pitched, softened then satisfied.

We were not selling ‘things.’ We were the connoisseurs of forgotten dreams. Surreal puzzle solvers. We provided the homecoming of subconscious aspirations.

We were the script writers for the forlorn and beaten. And I was the best. I was God.

For a long time.

◈

Lunch time. Go time.

People don’t know what they’re hungry for. Indian? Chinese? A retreat from their monotony, perhaps? We could provide all 3, depending on the headspace. Special instructions were given to those that paid enough to walk through the door. We played into the arcadian aesthetic that everyone wanted. Dark alley way. Spiral staircase. Crimson velvet curtains. Candlelit rooms. Creepy wall hangings. Musky incense swirling its exotic dance.

‘Joe is back,’ says Jen. She is holding her afternoon tea mug with her ritual mint tea tag hanging out the side. She likes to let it brew for a really long time, she says. It’s good for digestion, she also says, though her complaints of her IBS have only increased lately.

‘He wants you,’ she hurries, gesturing to my curtain. Let him wait. Anticipation is all part of the procedure, but there is no use telling Jen that. She is severely Type A with a case of high horse despite working in an ethical question mark of a profession. I abide by her rules because I know she feels held by bureaucracy. Her comfort blanket in this brave new world.

Joe is sitting in the chair, legs always crossed, deigning the expression of an employer looking over your resume suspiciously. He pretends like he calls the shots with his pointy shoes tapping impatiently, filling the air with the cologne that his wife that he ignores buys him. Men like this act like they’re in control because they are never in control. Yet their fantasy is never about having it, it’s about losing it and not caring. Giving it away in free surrender, falling into the abyss, delighting in the entropy. Such an easy read. But I still indulge him, like he’s a mystery. This is standard code of conduct, says Jen.

◈

In my apartment, I can hear the neighbours arguing their daily problem. ‘Can you help me make dinner?’ Cue groan from faraway husband. Faraway husband is in the middle of his news doomscroll. This is his downtime, practical wife. The moments where he has time to himself. He works so, so hard. He’s been doing overtime, which really just means he’s catching up on the pile he neglects for obligatory office banter. I wait for her response, wait for an explosion, a climax. Just once for them to passionately enter the second act, but the scene hardens into paralysis, where it always dies. The forlorn chopping of vegetables, water boiling, utensils grazing across porcelain.

I pull out a cigarette and chain smoke 2, 3, 4, an outdated and expensive vice that I borrowed from my brother, that never left when he left. Cigarettes, vapo rub before bedtime and a small painting. The only painting hanging in my apartment. He bought it in Spain, by the seaside. He wandered through the stalls with no intention of buying a thing when he saw the painting that ‘hypnotised him.’ The package arrived a few weeks later with a postcard from Costa Blanca, ‘this made me think of you.’ It stands out like a child in a prison. Innocent in its bold, bashful colours, swirling around the canvas to form nothing. Just a vague celebration of something that isn’t real anymore.

From my one-man balcony, I am permitted an obsolete view of the starless sky. The only twinkling comes from the lights click clacking from room to room in the apartment block across. I hum with the rhythm of the click clack, the tune always changing. I could orchestrate a symphony, if I wanted.

◈

The ‘Imagining’ is what we call it. The process.

We only get a sentence, maybe an image ripped from a travel magazine, sometimes a family photo. We type a tale and the client bridges the gaps in a surreal collaboration. They say the feelings are more real than waking life. That the landscape is more fragrant, sounds are inviting you in not pushing you out. Traffic noises become countryside bird calls; excavators become rushing streams drifting through untouched valleys.

Never have I been rated below a 9 for my work. Anything below a 9 is instant dismissal. Sophie made the landscape too dismal once. It was supposed to be cosy rainy, not rainy rainy. A fire burning, chai brewing on the stove, bunnies hopping into their hovel. But the clouds were harrowing further down to the earth, stalking the client as she foraged in her dainty milkmaid dress, and when she looked down she could see that her hands were blistered with veins and weathered skin, hanging loosely off her aged bones. I heard her shriek, draw the curtain and stomp out of her derailed fantasy, standing exposed in her sweaty tracksuit, chords still dangling from her head like Medusa. With vicious demise she said, ‘5.’

◈

‘That girl, she really didn’t have a writing bone in her body.’ Her sessions begin precisely detailing her victimhood. I nod through her complaints with what I think is understanding. I make a focused effort to look into her squinty eyes on her blotchy face. Cheeks swelling with a malignant redness, nostrils flaring. She dresses like she’s given up, which she probably has. Her sessions go for the longest, so I know she has money. A lawyer or doctor in a past life. A life lived for family legacy. A life she didn’t want and can never get back.

‘Those are fancy shoes,’ she remarks as she hands me her note. I tap them together like a blushing schoolgirl, so the glossy red reflection meets the light. So her envy could become more palpable.

‘Thank you, I’ve had them for a while.’ I let my fingers meet the keys. And in those brief moments before the take-off, I am immersed in stillness.

Perfectly unphased by the client’s stare, the hungry fridge with scarce shelves in my apartment, the smog that follows me around the city like a shadow, realizing I haven’t seen a bee since I was a child, that my brother is dead.

I write I write I write. Till I feel like my fingers are bleeding all over the keys that form a picture. This might be the best one yet.

And yet, I am nauseous.

Suddenly sick with an urge to destroy it. To keep it close, just for me. Territorial of the imagery, the storyline, the fine details. Knowing I’ll never see it, feel it, taste it, hear it.

‘‘Our job is to facilitate a service.’’ Jen said when I started with my training years ago.

And yes, I knew the potential risks. I had been warned about merges. The descent into insanity, sensationalized tales that management gloomily held over our heads to secure us into docile submission. Anonymous writers, stripped of our intellectual property. Humiliated and without.

‘You’re taking longer than usual,’ remarked Rich Blotchy lady.

The story was finished but my mouth said, ‘just one more minute.’ My fingers typed and I didn’t stop them.

‘Ready now,’ said my mouth. My hands adjusted the cords around her temples, gently put the headphones over her ears and covered her eyes. My hands drew the curtain and reached for another cord, and another, plugged them in and did oh so familiar motions on my body. My finger pushed down on the play button.

The lines spelled out a loophole.

◈

My body is a firecracker waiting to erupt. Tingling, squirming, a newborn opening its eyes for the first time. I am born again, as nothing.

electricity,          the sweet aftertaste of apricots,                   birthday candles,

tangled tree roots in love,  a soft incantation,             a church organ,

finger prints                                 snow falling                                             black

There is something in the corner. A blob. The blob sits limp across from me. Maybe the blob is Avant Garde furniture. I resent the blob. It is tasteless even for this establishment. The cave is echoing. I can’t make out the syllables, but the echo has a scent of peppermint. Is it IBS? Yes.

No! I do not want to be form again. The blob is moving, becoming a chair, becoming a client. I rub what I think are eyes. I rip out the weeds hanging on my head and press a button that says S-T-O-P.

The blob exhales as she takes off her eye mask.

‘Thank you that was really something,’ the sounds say.

◈

It has been a week since ‘the loophole.’ No one had noticed, the world had gone on, like nothing had happened.

I am buying Tylenol again. The packets scattered across the floor of my apartment. 2 days after the loophole, I was visited by a perpetual migraine that I continue to tend. Dulling and exposing my senses simultaneously. I have quit cigarettes, exchanging it for hibernation. The grit of the tobacco smoke began oozing out of the walls. Pungent, acrid. My hands are raw from scrubbing, from bleach dripping into cracked skin. The painting trembles as I scratch at the surfaces around it, but I am careful not to disturb its eternal resting place, afraid that something irreversible may happen if I do.

After the walls and counters are sterile, I collapse into slumber.

I sleep and sleep and sleep and dream of nothing. When I don’t sleep, I go to the café downtown next to the empty store on the brink of dilapidation. I drink my coffee slowly and in silence. I try to write but the sentences fall apart, the words divorcing before being married to the page.

‘Here you go love,’ smiles the waitress wearing the dainty milkmaid dress.

◈

‘What’s happened to you?’ said Jen with a tone of what I think is her version of concern but delivered abject parental judgement.

It had been 2 weeks since I’d worked. I had said it was for some me time. I hadn’t had a holiday in 3 years and so management had begrudgingly said yes yes, of course of course. Yesterday I had said I’m ready to come back and they said great! I wasn’t ready but, there was no other option. I had paced my apartment holding my breath, smothering my nostrils with vapo rub. I longed for the feeling cigarettes gave me, but the thought repelled me. I had cried about it.

‘What do you mean?’ I said to Jen, nonchalant, clueless.

She rolled her eyes, ‘well Joe is waiting there for you.’

Behind the curtain, the red keys glare at me, then smile wickedly. As if they know. As if to say, ‘we have been waiting.’

Joe sits across from me, not quite right. He is chirpy, chatty, telling me stories. About the time he hiked Mt. Fuji, sailed to South America, eloped in Las Vegas, sunbathed in the Greek islands.

I look for something familiar, his pointy shoes, the smell of his cologne. I try to dismiss the wave of cigarette smoke in the air between us. Hiking shoes and stubble. His voice is different. Passionate for the world, the real world, a rare quality in this place. I wonder why he is here and why I already know the next thing he will say.

‘That time you swam with dolphins, yeah I know, you’ve already told me.’

He gives me a puzzled look, raises an eyebrow. ‘What are you talking about?’ says Joe’s voice.

◈

‘Wrong place,’ I affirm aloud, a few times a day.

Doors open to bricks or a barren landscape; lightning scorching the ground or mayday celebrations in Sweden. Bees are everywhere, dead in my coffee, covering my windows. There is a red apple that follows me to my bed. On the tv cabinet, on the bathroom counter, on my pillow.

I look at my bare face, it has been naked for weeks after my foundation and mascara and powders became oil pastels. Gleaming with the colours of the rainbow.

I remind myself of right places. The painting is still hanging. Vapo rub smells the same.

There are other places. Not wrong or right but new. Marigolds blooming outside the stairs to my apartment block.

The scent of pastries escaping the corner bakery and capturing the air above the competition of the city.

A group of schoolkids that cycle through the afternoon. Their laughter bouncing off the buildings as they race.

And I remember old places.

My room in our childhood home. Postcards collected from second hand stores blue tacked to the paisley patterned wallpaper, a remnant from the 70s. My mother’s black coffee breath. Scratched knees collected by my brother like trophies. Edging on higher into the canopy of our fig tree after the fifth get down from there! How he stayed with our father and I went with our mother into the city. A city of inventions, skyscrapers climbing higher than he ever did. My mother took me shoe shopping and I picked out the glossy red flats. They reminded me I wasn’t in Kansas anymore.

That I was in the place where the only thing that could dance was the ink across the page.

◈

On the table, my journal sits open, pen held captive in the crease.

And like clockwork, the room is filled with the scent of burnt tobacco. The air no longer invisible but swirling a grey trail leading to the living room.

And there, I find him.

Below the painting, stubble and hiking shoes. His backpack resting against his legs, holding the guilty cigarette, mischievously putting it to his mouth like it never left. The smoke begins to coalesce into a shape.

‘Is that a dolphin?’

He laughs as he puts out the cigarette on the blank journal page.