Moving Furniture

Michelle Berry

Harper is moving the furniture around. She’s moving the living room into the dining room and the dining room into the room off the kitchen. She’s putting towels and bathmats under the furniture and pushing it across the floors. Over bumps, around heating vents, past the dog toys. She’s building up sweat and has Spotify on a podcast. It’s like a puzzle, placing things in the areas that balance, that aren’t in front of windows, that give the best views of the room when you sit in them. Places that fit, that feel good. The couch needs to be blocking the front door but not get in the way of people coming in. Although for two years no one has come in. The side tables have to be reachable when coffee is poured in case she can eventually go back to pouring coffee for guests. In case she ever wants to have guests in. There aren’t many people she trusts anymore. The dining room table has to balance the sideboard. Everything has to fit and feel right. That’s the goal.
When Damian lived here, he would roll his eyes, groan, whine if she started to move furniture. He would sometimes even throw his arms in the air and then disappear upstairs to his office to put his headphones on and dive back into his work. Harper was never sure, really, what his work was. He told her many times, but she just didn’t get it. It was easy to ignore what he did when he worked out of the house, but during the last two years when he stayed upstairs in his office, it just sounded like arguments. Zoom arguments. It sounded to her like he never really got anything done, or accomplished, but money came in so he must have been doing something. When they agreed to live together, after she asked him for his sperm, they didn’t think they would be together this long. And together through all of this. They both thought one of them would get his/her act together after a couple of years and move out. But now it has become eight years of living together. Two years at the end with the Virus. Now he’s gone, though, and Harper can move the furniture in peace.
Harper could have left everything the same, like it was yesterday, but moving the furniture gives her immense satisfaction. It’s palpable. As she creates new rooms, her anger and frustration disappear. For a moment, for the day after or the week after the new creation, she feels whole again. While she’s moving the furniture, she feels exercised and powerful. She’s creating a new world around herself—sure, the new world has the same crappy garage-sale stuff in it, but it’s markedly different. For example, this couch—right here by the door, now blocking the entrance from the door to the living room—this couch creates a wall. She stands back and admires it. It takes a moment to be sure. Sometimes she has to move everything before she can tell if it works.

Camille comes into the room. Damian’s spawn, Harper likes to think of her. A funny girl. A sweetheart. Perfectly easy to live all locked up with. Camille skirts past the dust bunnies and notices the cat sitting, wrapped up in his tail, on the newly placed couch. The dog is nowhere to be seen; Harper figures she scared her away with the vacuum cleaner. Camille jumps on the couch and snuggles the cat. The cat mews. He sat there quietly, stayed solidly on the couch as Harper pulled it around on the bath mat. He took the bumps with aplomb, letting out the occasional mew. Camille is eight and the cat is eight. The cat came with Damian. So did Camille, if you think about it. The cat and the girl stare at each other. Camille kisses the cat on the nose. She loves the cat. Harper is sure Camille never loved Damian. She hasn’t even mentioned that he’s gone. Harper let him stay in her house because it was big, there are many rooms, and she was a new mom and scared, so what was she to do? Besides, he split the cost of the furniture.
“Why?” Camille asks.
“Why what?” Harper says.
“Why are you moving the furniture again? Didn’t you do this last month?”
“And the month before,” Harper sighs, “And the month before that …”
Camille shrugs. “You’re right. It’s your thing.”
Harper shrugs back.
Every single time Camille asks her why. Harper feels she should know by now.

It’s raining outside, a deep, heavy rain, and the day is cold and dark. For July, this seems odd. Odd even to Harper, who is thirty-two and has seen days like this, and knows people pretend there is climate change. She does realize that June’s heavy heat and drought wasn’t normal, but climate change? Who cares if July is cold now, she thinks. That’s just the way it is. It’s not as if she ever goes outside. At least no farther than the back porch. Camille, on the other hand, is only eight years old and tells Harper it’s a crappy July day and asks how many more days will be like this.
“This isn’t normal,” she says. “Is it?”
Camille watches her mother work, Harper can feel her daughter obviously thinking as Harper holds her hands out in front of her, measuring spaces for tables and chairs, her feet counting out the length of a rug.
“When will it stop raining?” Camille says into the cat’s fur. The cat mews. His name is Augustine and he’s black with white markings on the tip of his forehead, on his ears, on the end of his tail. He’s thick and bony at the same time. Camille is constantly telling Harper that Augustine is wonderful. “He’s a doll,” Camille says. “Such a doll.”
And then: “I want to swing.” Harper stops and looks out the window. She pulls back the curtain to look out. The street is deserted, the rain pouring down. The backyard swing is used on special days. The weather has to be just right, and they have to be able to get inside quickly if they see anyone on the street. There can’t be any mud to slip in, that’s for sure.
“Too wet,” Harper says.
The huge arching light goes over here. That way Harper can sit and read under it. And put her coffee on the table beside her. She breathes deeply. Camille watches closely. The rain continues. Augustine sleeps.

Almost twenty-four months they’ve been stuck inside the house. Even if it weren’t raining, Harper thinks, Camille wouldn’t be with her friends. She asked her daughter the other day about them, friends, and Camille said she can’t even remember them. Even if it weren’t raining, Harper would be moving furniture. For almost twenty-four months the house has been very different every four weeks. Sometimes twice in a month. Harper has always liked to move furniture. But before the virus when she would move things Damian and Camille were gone most of the day. Damian worked out of the house and would come home and discover the change. And Camille would come back from school and notice it. And both of them enjoyed it then. But now…
Once, last December, Harper moved the master bedroom into the living room downstairs. This was a heroic move and took a week, so Harper didn’t touch the set-up for a while. She had to take apart the bed and the couch and put them back together, she had to use her handcart and thump up and down the stairs one step at a time. And then she realized that sleeping in the living room wasn’t a great idea—there were no blackout curtains there, for one, and Camille came in most mornings with her cereal in a bowl and slurped it up while sitting on Harper’s toes on her bed. So a little later it all went upstairs again, and the couch came back downstairs, and now Harper is putting the couch into the dining room and the dining room into the back room and the back room into the living room. It’s a good thing that she has such light furniture. A goal all her life: to populate her house with very, very light furniture.
Harper looks at her emerging creation and realizes that this configuration doesn’t make sense. The kitchen table from the back room is now in her living room. Now she’ll have to walk through doors and hallways to eat her cereal in the morning.
Harper shakes her head. Camille watches her. Harper feels the eyes, all the time, on her. Camille has brown eyes and they fix on a body like a gun scope. If Camille were a little older, say thirteen, Harper thinks she would say something sarcastic like, “On the rag?”
So Harper says it instead: “It must be my period. Every time I move furniture it’s right before or during my period. You’re lucky, Cam, you won’t have this issue for years.”
“That’s good,” Camille says, “because we only have so many options with the furniture.”
Harper laughs.
Harper doesn’t move the plant when she moves the rug and Camille jumps up from the cat to catch it before it falls. And that’s when the doorbell rings.
Years ago, Camille was in the real world. She remembers it briefly. Walking with her mom to school, having to get up on time, having to carry her lunch box and listen to her teachers read her books even though she already knew how to read. And now she is safe, or she was safe, before the doorbell rang.
No one has rung the doorbell for about six months when the guy who delivered Harper’s thyroid pills from the pharmacy rang it and then waved at them through the glass. Harper explained that he has to ring the doorbell and wait to see if you’ll get your medicine because what if they were leaving Oxy at the door and someone else stole it from the front porch. At least that’s what Harper explained when Camille leapt out of the chair at the kitchen table (which was then in the living room)from the unexpected sound. The cat leapt, too. Harper hadn’t needed her thyroid medication for about a year, so they had all forgotten about the pharmacy guy ringing the doorbell. Everyone was startled. Even the guy at the front door was startled when Camille’s freaked-out face popped up. Usually all their packages are left on the front porch in the bin they have there for that purpose. The bin that says, in large letters on top: All Deliveries in Here. But even though it says this, still some of the deliveries end up on the porch, not in the bin. In fact, a lot of them end up propped against the front door, which is horrible, because in order to get outside to get her package, Harper has to push through the package itself. When Harper ordered the arching light, which has a marble base, she had to mask up and go out the back door and come around the front in order to move it so she could open the door. And then the long process of sterilization. It was a hassle.
The doorbell rings again. Harper and Camille are looking at each other. They didn’t order any medication, did they? Harper has to climb over some unplaced furniture to see around the hallway to who is at the door. No one she recognizes. Someone in a mask and a hat, a fedora she thinks, she isn’t sure what a fedora is, but this might be it. A man. Camille looks around the corner behind Harper. She squints and Harper thinks Camille might need glasses. And then she squeals. The sharp sound makes Augustine jump off the couch. It shocks Harper.
“It’s Mr. Whaley,” Camille says.
“Who?”
“Mr. Whaley! My teacher two years ago! In grade one.”
Harper raises her eyebrows. “What do you think he wants?”
“I don’t know,” Camille almost shouts as she leaps over the couch and runs to the front door.
“Don’t open it,” Harper says. “Put your mask on!”
Camille buries her hands into her jean pockets. “He’s getting wet,” she shouts. “We need to open the door.”
“Mask! Do not open the door!”
Harper has her mask on already and heads past Camille, who is still digging for her mask. She waits until Camille has her mask on and then pulls open the door. Just slightly. Their first visitor in over a year. It’s an instinct to open the door even though she realizes in a second that she shouldn’t do it.
“Hi, Mr. Whaley,” Camille says, too loudly, through her mask.
“Hello, Camille. You must be the mom? Harper, is it?” Mr. Whaley extends his hand toward Harper and then sees the horrified expression on Harper’s face and puts his hand back down at his side. “Sorry about that,” he says.
Harper nods and backs away slightly. The door is open only a gap, just enough to hear Mr. Whaley. “What can we do for you, Mr. Whaley?”
Harper stands there, her arms crossed in front of her, not letting Mr. Whaley into the house. Her foot is on the bottom of the door, ready to push it closed in an instant. And then Mr. Whaley does the unspeakable, he does something odd. It shocks both Harper and Camille. He takes off his mask. And he begins to speak.
Harper ducks her head, and rushes back a bit into the house. Camille does too. It’s been so long since she’s seen the bottom of someone’s face. Why would he do that? Take his mask off. Augustine tries to escape through the front door, but Harper moves quickly forward and shuts it on Mr. Whaley and almost on Augustine’s face and they all look at each other through the glass. Mr. Whaley has backed up considerably in the panic.
Nothing is said for what seems like hours. They all three just stare at each other. Mr. Whaley’s nose flares, he grits his teeth. He is fairly young, even with his fedora on. He is around Harper’s age, and he is making her very nervous. Maybe he’s a child molester? Maybe he’s here to get Camille? Harper shivers. If she trusted the police, she would call them right now.
“Why would you take off your mask?” Harper says at the window, and then regrets it immediately when she realizes he will now say something back and spit and fluid may come from his nose, his mouth, when he speaks. It might splatter on the window. She might have to clean it up later. She stands back even farther from the closed door and holds Camille behind her.
“For two years,” Harper says, mostly to Camille as Mr. Whaley obviously can’t hear her, “for two years we’ve worn masks and been very careful. What are you doing?” All she wants to do is go back to moving furniture. Maybe, she thinks, the bedroom, her bedroom, on the second floor, would fit in the guest room at the back of the house? She could sleep there and then move Camille’s room into the master room. That way Camille would get her own washroom. Ever since Damian has been gone there are so many more options in the house. Harper’s mind is befuddled right now, she’s confused, she can’t stop thinking, little explosions of thought—moving furniture, Damian, the man with no mask, the cat. And where is the dog?
When Damian lived here, he wanted everything the same. And he had no right. Although he did own half the furniture. That was part of their agreement when he moved in: he had to help buy lighter furniture. But he rolled his eyes if Harper decided to shuffle the furniture. It was always too much trouble for him, a waste of energy. He didn’t realize that it was Harper’s exercise, it was her brain working out and her body working out. Killing two birds, etc. But Damian spent eight years with it, two years during which Harper moved things more often, and then he left. Complained about a lot of things—her stacks of food, her incessant researching, her negative views on everything—but moving furniture was the number-one problem. One day he just threw his mask off and walked out the front door. She’s still shocked by this. She thinks of it as his suicide. He chose to leave his daughter and Harper and walk out into such uncertainty. What happened to him? And all because she liked to move furniture? They haven’t seen him since, Harper is certain he caught the Virus and died. What other reason would there be? But when she thinks about it a lot, he didn’t want Camille, anyway. He didn’t even name her, Harper did. And he seemed never to like Harper very much. He said he didn’t agree with her choices. And she just asked him for his fluids—he wasn’t really her friend or a lover or anything. Harper and Camille ended up both being messy and talkative and Harper moved everything around and Damian wanted silence to deal with his online work and he only came down from his office (which is now the second-floor craft room) for lunch or dinner and to scowl at the two females.
Phew. That was a long thought, she thinks. She is full of them. Mr. Whaley is at the front door looking in, gritting his teeth, his nose dripping rain, and Camille is behind her mother staring at him.
And then something else unexpected happens. The Amazon delivery guy comes up the stairs with what Harper and Camille think are the new cans of beans and maybe the lentils, coconut milk and lima beans. All the long-term food. Powdered orange drink and Habitant pea soup and canned spinach. The unexpected thing is that he walks right up to Mr. Whaley and they say hello—only STEPS AWAY FROM EACH OTHER—they are so close that Harper (and Camille, and maybe the cat) gasp. And they both aren’t wearing masks! And Mr. Whaley helps the delivery man with his heavy boxes. Their heads almost touch as they both bend to put the boxes in the bin.
After the men put the box of beans and the other boxes in the delivery box the Amazon delivery man leaves. He and Mr. Whaley say something funny to each other, they both laugh, they both point at the Amazon boxes, and then he climbs into his truck as if nothing has happened.
“Shit,” says Harper.
“That’s putting it mildly,” Camille says. “What is going on?”
Neither Camille nor Harper has seen anyone standing close to another person in two years. Sure, they are usually hanging out at the back of the house and don’t really see what happens when the deliveries come. And they don’t live in a busy neighbourhood. But still. It’s dangerous. Most of the time the curtains are closed, too, because the dog barks
“Where’s Bruiser?” Harper suddenly asks. “Where’s the dog?”
“In her cage,” says Camille. “You put her there when you were moving the couch.”
Harper nods. She forgot. That’s why there is no one barking at the front door right now. She must remember to take Bruiser down to the basement for her daily exercise after lunch. The dog is getting antsy without her walks. Two years with no walks.
“How are we going to eat lunch now,” Camille asks. “How will we get our beans? My powdered orange drink?” Harper knows Camille is thinking about the hours of sterilization that will have to happen before they can get their stuff from the porch. Especially with no masks on the men.
Mr. Whaley has turned again to the two females staring at him. He bangs on the door slightly with his knuckles. He says something but they can’t make it out behind the glass. “Open up,” Harper thinks he says. “I need to talk to you.” That’s what she thinks he’s saying but it just as well could be, “Open up, I’m going to infect you.” She watches his mouth move around. It’s odd to see a mouth now. His teeth are crooked and he obviously cut himself shaving.
Two years, twenty-four months, a lost sperm donor, everyone dying, long-term food deliveries in their bin, and at least twenty-four moves of furniture, maybe more, and this man expects them to open the door and end it all. What a moron.
“Never,” Harper shouts.
“Mom,” Camille whispers. “Oh my god, not so loud.”
“It’s been over for a long time,” Mr. Whaley shouts at the door.
“Camille has to come back to school. We are all safe now.”

Harper knows what’s going on. Suddenly she realizes that the news is right, there are people infected with the new vaccine and they are going crazy. This explains Mr. Whaley and the Amazon delivery guy.
“Have you been vaccinated?” Harper shouts at the door.
Mr. Whaley puts his hand up to his ear. “What?”
“Vaccinated,” Harper screams.
“Yes, of course, “ Mr. Whaley shouts back. “Everyone has. Haven’t you?”
Everyone? Oh God, Harper thinks. It’s worse than she imagines.
Just the other day Harper read a news story about how the vaccinations were changing people. How it attacks the brain and makes people do whatever the government asks them to do. Maybe this is a new ploy, knocking on the doors of those who haven’t been vaccinated. Harper doesn’t know what to do.
After the virus came, Harper found her own news—how to prepare for the end of the world, how it was all the government’s fault, how the vaccines were poison, with long term effects, or embedded with microchips. Harper believed most of it. It made sense to her. And then she got her own ideas about how to survive. She found Prepping websites and began to load up on the right food, the food that will last them months, and she covered the windows and made sure she had rubbermaid containers labelled and ready—full of things like peanut butter, pinto beans, Soup Girl dried soups, maple syrup, whole peas, pumpkin, tuna fish. Better safe than sorry, Harper thought. Camille liked to look through the bins, she liked to make lists of what they had and what they had used. She liked the sense of adventure, as if they were camping. As if they owned a grocery store. But Camille was also very scared, her mother’s preparation scared her. Was this the end of the world? Harper knew Camille was scared but didn’t know what to do about it. In a world like this, Harper reasoned, you had to be ready for everything.
Harper even bought a gun. She put it up high in the kitchen, behind the cookbooks they never used. Camille knew it was there but took an oath that she’d never get the ladder and climb up to see it.
And here they are talking to Mr. Whaley at the door. He’s saying the virus is gone, the pandemic is over. The furniture half moved and Augustine suddenly behind them. He stands staring at the door. He arches his back and meows. Time for lunch, is what he is saying. He says this about 10 times a day. Harper has taken to opening the tuna for him because he makes his way through all the cans of cat food too quickly. He’s not ready for the end of the world, that’s for sure. Plus Harper thinks he might have kidney issues or a urinary tract infection or diabetes—but she can’t take him to the vet so he’s going to have to live with it.
Outside Mr. Whaley is digging around in his briefcase—they didn’t know he had a briefcase, they couldn’t see it before and now Harper looks and sees his car too, the Amazon van backing down the driveway and off down the street—but he’s digging in his briefcase and pulls out a pen and some paper. He writes something on the paper—putting the briefcase to rest on the delivery box—and holds the paper up to the window. Camille and Harper can barely make out his handwriting. They squint.
The note says:

Don’t you know the virus is gone? For six months now.
Why are you still inside?

Harper blinks rapidly. Camille looks at her mom. Harper isn’t sure Camille can see the note with her eye problems. It’s small writing and hard to read. She would prefer that Camille can’t see it.
“What do we do now?” Camille asks. Harper figures she did read the note. Maybe her eyes aren’t so bad. Hmmmm, she thinks.
“Nothing,” says Harper. “Move furniture.”
“But….”
“But what? This is a lie. This is a conspiracy. This is how they get you. You remember what I told you about the vaccination. You remember what we read online? This is probably the effects of it. Mr. Whaley is infected with the vaccination. There’s no other alternative.”
“How…? What?” Camille’s eyes water slightly. The idea of going outside, seeing her friends, going to school again, being a real kid, is obviously making her slightly wild. She’s shaking a bit, Harper realizes.
“We’ll go outside, see the world and then what? Catch the virus and end up dead? Or have to get vaccinated, which is way worse. Just so you can see your friends?” Harper never means to scare her daughter, but she’s scared and it’s better to have company. “No way. There’s only one person I trust and that’s not Mr. Whaley, it’s me. I trust my research. You need to trust me too.”
“We’ll live,” whispers Camille. “You said the Virus was a conspiracy two years ago, too. That it wasn’t real. But then it was real and then we saved ourselves, but now we should go out.”
“I learned,” Harper says. “It was a conspiracy then, but once it was out in the world it became real. I’m smart, Camille. You know that. I tell you all the time. Trust me. Besides, the vaccine is bad for you. It kills you. This is all a ploy.”
“What does that mean? What do you mean?” Camille is becoming hysterical. Her hands are shaking, her eyes are wide. “Mom?” She points to Mr. Whaley at the door. “Mom?”
“I mean what I say,” Harper says. She turns away from Camille. She looks at Mr. Whaley’s eyes. She looks into them. She swears she can see the evil theorist, the fake news, she can see the vaccination bubbling up behind his pupils. She sees that he wants to dupe them and she, personally, isn’t so stupid. In fact, with all the research she’s done in the last two years, she is probably much smarter than almost anyone. She just wishes she was this smart when Camille was born—she wouldn’t have let the doctor give Camille those vaccinations for other things, for one. Harper hopes their older neighbours haven’t fallen for this. Is Mr. Whaley some door-to-door vaccine or virus salesman? Why would Damian never come back if he hadn’t caught the Virus and died? Maybe he got the vaccine and went crazy? Why would she have spent two years moving furniture to make their life more interesting? And all the online orders. How many online orders have they made and no one anywhere has said, “It’s all over”—mind you, Harper thinks, she did stop checking out the mainstream, Sheeple news, and, well that’s fake news, anyway. But no one on Reddit, none of the research she’s been doing, nothing she pays attention to says that the pandemic is over. And everything she reads talks about the vaccine side effects.
Harper’s head is aching.
Then it occurs to her that this is her nightmare. The one she had when Damian left. She kept dreaming that one day the pandemic would all be over and she wouldn’t know. Has this happened? How has this happened? Did she just stop paying attention—she had been watching every new outbreak, every new death, the refrigerated containers outside hospitals, the vaccination scam, how it wasn’t really working, she researched everything. When she wasn’t moving furniture, or thinking about moving furniture, she researched. Could the end have happened without her noticing? Is that possible?
Harper walks toward the glass in the door. She looks at Mr. Whaley out there, his note still held to the glass. She looks at Camille. Augustine is licking his butt on the floor. The dog is starting to stir in the back of the house. She can hear her whimpers and a whiny yawn.
Mr. Whaley holds up another note.
The note says:

Camille needs to come back to school. She’s been gone for 6
months. Everyone has been wondering what is going on.
You need to come outside and see that everything is over.
You both need to get vaccinated.

Harper thinks that, for a teacher, his handwriting is atrocious.
Harper looks back at Camille, behind her, half in the “living room” behind the couch. Half near the kitchen table. She looks at Augustine, still busy with his ablutions. Mr. Whaley is obviously wrong. Why doesn’t Damian come back if everything is over? Shouldn’t he come back? He just left her and walked away into a healthy life? That can’t be true. And, most of all, what will she do with all the Rubbermaid containers full of canned and dried food? What about the dried butter?
“What’s the note say, Mom?” Camille asks. This time she can’t see it.
Harper looks at Mr. Whaley’s pleading face. His maskless face. And she reaches up—he smiles, thinking she’ll open the lock—and she closes the curtains over him. He begins pounding on the door.
“Nothing,” she says over the noise. “He must have the Virus. Or the vaccine made him insane. He’s crazy not to wear his mask.”
Camille stares at the curtain for a minute. And then she says, “How are we going to get our beans? Our powdered orange drink? The Amazon guy left our beans out there. How are we going to have lunch?”
Harper thinks, we have thirty thousand dollars’ worth of food in this house, sure it’s dried or canned, but they don’t even need those beans. If Mr. Whaley stayed forever and died on the porch, they wouldn’t need those beans or that orange drink. Harper’s entire bank account, the family trust her dad and mom left her, went into buying this food. They are safe and fine and will be full every day. No problem. Her Prepper research was impeccable. They could live five years on what they have in the house. They have food and they have a place to live, and they have protection. Behind the cookbooks.
“We’ll just wait,” Harper says. “We’ll just go in the back, let Bruiser out of her cage, and wait. We can have rice cakes and peanut butter for lunch. Maybe we can move the kitchen around. Maybe we can organize the shelves again. We need to exercise Bruiser in the basement. The rain will stop soon and maybe you can go outside to swing later tonight. Or at least tomorrow.” Harper thinks that might be a bit of a lie because if everyone is vaccinated and going crazy, they might not be able to ever go out again. She’ll have to turn on her computer and try to figure that out.
Harper knows there’ll be a lot of waiting now. Although for two years there has been a lot of waiting. Harper is used to waiting. She can always move furniture. She’s glad Damian never came back, although she wouldn’t wish harm on anyone. They weren’t a couple, anyway; he just donated his fluid. Who cares if they lived in the same house for eight years? Although she does miss that he used to do some chores.
Camille sighs. But Harper sees her putting on her regular face—the face that says she’ll help. Camille has spent two years doing anything her mother asked, just to make her happy, and to make them both safe—and Augustine and Bruiser safe, too. Camille’s sadness makes Harper sad.
“Everyone needs to remain safe,” Camille says, “This Virus will kill you. The vaccines are bad. Poor Mr. Whaley. Poor Dad. Poor Amazon guy. Going home to his wife and kid, probably, and infecting them. If they are not already infected. I bet everyone out there is infected, don’t you, Mom?”
“The front-line workers,” Harper says. “They are falling like flies. When Mr. Whaley finally leaves, when he stops ringing the doorbell and making Bruiser bark, we will get our beans from the front porch and sterilize everything and then we will sit in the kitchen—no, wait—we will sit wherever the kitchen table is next, and we will eat our beans for dinner.”
There’s no way this can be over, Harper thinks. There is too much furniture to move.
The sudden sound of a siren permeates the air. Coming down the street. Bruiser stops barking. Camille looks at Harper. Harper looks at Camille. Camille sniffs. The pounding on the door starts again, this time louder. Harper sighs. Camille lets out a little cry. She snorts in her fear.
“I guess,” Harper says, finally taking off her mask, “I guess it’s time to get the gun.”

Michelle Berry

has published twelve books—novels, short-story collections, and anthologies—and multiple short stories in literary magazines. She teaches at the University of Toronto in continuing education, and owned and operated Hunter Street Books in Peterborough, Ontario, until the start of the pandemic. Her new novel, Satellite Image, is coming out with Buckrider Books in Fall 2024.