By Andrea Bishop
The surprise came when his bedroom curtains were closed against the brightness of the morning, though he’d been wishing for the light of the sun for many months now, or rather, the curtains were almost closed because they didn’t quite close properly. They were old-fashioned curtains which, ironically, had blackout screening that allowed him both privacy and the ability to sleep, but also restricted his view, and where the curtains joined together the hooks extending from the fabric flopped out of their intended rings on the rod, which happened so frequently it was easier just to leave them off and tuck one curtain behind the other each night, and besides, he would fling them open so violently in the morning—relieved after a night of dreams, of gains and losses, passions and disappointments, to land back in reality, a world solid and definite, possibly dull but at least predictable and explicable—that even if he did secure the curtain hooks in the curtain rings each evening they would just pop out again the next morning. When the curtains were open the view from his window was grass and a patch of mud and part of a low cement wall, with a few weeds in the far corners, but flowering weeds, and the only other things he could see were people’s legs as they passed by, and all of their dogs, usually. Unless it was a very tall dog and then he couldn’t see the ears, or the head, or the neck, depending. In those cases, just two human legs and four dog legs.
Give him a better view, please, he deserves a better view. Okay, then. He has a big backyard. He has budding trees and flowers. He can see all of that but still can’t see the sky at night, not the stars, fixed or shooting, not the moon waxing and waning, so can’t feel gratitude for a full moon in a clear sky. No, an even better view, an ocean, some mountains. And the trees and flowers. And the sky.
Don’t be ridiculous. That would be missing the whole point. Now I’ll only give him a tiny backyard. But it’s private. And he has a balcony. There are still dogs. That part’s real. You can’t control everything. He has a balcony so he can contemplate life and watch the dogs walk their humans. From his balcony, he once saw a young child walk by holding the hand of its mother and the boy looked up at her and smiled, like he was confident this kind of love would surround and sustain him his whole life. And our man knew, though he couldn’t see the mother’s face because she was looking the other way, that this touched her heart in a way that was both warm and sad. He knew she was already aware that bad luck might someday befall her child. That she couldn’t be there always to protect him.
Sometimes, in the mornings, he wished to be part of one of those couples who walked together and whispered to each other. Or the owner of a dog. But he’d thought about it on rainy days too; he was a practical man, and he’d have to be a responsible owner, and how could he know for sure that the dog he ended up with would love him, or that he would love that particular dog, but he did know for sure it would be hard to walk it every single day even in the pouring rain and then come home with a bedraggled wet dog. Plus, he liked his time alone in the mornings on his balcony while he still had it, just like how before he had enjoyed his little patio amongst the patch of weeds and grass. He had the feeling you needed to enjoy the things you have at the time you have them, that it wasn’t the smartest idea to go dwelling in the past or wishing for the future.
Anyway, when the curtains parted slightly that morning, right before he moved to fling them open, he paused, and just a little beam of light wandered in, a beam of light that came all the way from the sun itself, an unfathomable distance from his bedroom, even though the sun that produced that light was however many years ago if the scientists had it right; that light was a gift from the past direct to him, and he was only able to detect it because it was just a beam. He couldn’t have even processed it if he could see the whole thing, the whole sun-ness of the sun. While he stood admiring the beam of sun, he scratched his belly and the rough calluses on his fingers felt so good disturbing his belly hairs which had been laid flat, motionless, all night long, that he stood at the base of that sunbeam and gave a good scratch, and then reached for his pair of morning sweatpants that he liked to pull on while he drank his coffee, out on the balcony by his container garden (which later in the season would produce an almost unbelievable harvest of dahlias and basil and tomatoes).
As his foot kicked into a sweatpant leg, that action stirred the air and raised a whole circus of dust into the sunbeam, and there the dusts danced, and it was beautiful and maybe they were his belly skin cells and maybe they intermingled with the remnants of his night breath, maybe a sloughing off from his lungs he’d exhaled while he dreamed his dreams the night before, and maybe also dust from the cat he was sure had lived here before him, because when he first moved in—it was a sudden move, unexpected, from the place he lived in previously with just a tiny plot of grass—he sneezed a lot and later he found a dissected and desiccated mouse, the little heart and liver preserved like they’d been taxidermized and set in a neat pile beside a flat sack of mouse skin.
He could see each little speck of dust as they floated together, moving up, around, swirling, lighter than air, not in the least solid, even though they had started out as part of solid things weighed down by gravity. These dusts weren’t weighed down at all and it was hard to believe they were even real. And that they were here. And that they were here and real the whole time, even before when there was no sunbeam and he couldn’t see them. They were being blown about by the wind from a fan behind the air conditioner vent and by the warm air around him that rose because that was also science. That was science he knew about, but this must be science too, these dusts floating around inside this astonishing sunbeam. Mostly their movement was upward: they were rising, rising, and soon he’d open the window to let them free, like his own little pets, to do their business out in the world, and maybe they would become dirt that would grow a tree and produce a fruit, an apple tree maybe, or at the least some kind of fruit tree too big for his balcony, a tree that might feed a boy when he’s older and alone, or maybe a speck of dust would land on an apple instead of becoming the dirt that would sustain that apple and would be consumed by a mean old grinchy self-centred hater who finds a way to not pay his taxes even though the single mother who was just trying her hardest and who couldn’t control her cancer did pay her share (even though the grinch had more than enough that he thought was due to bootstraps and all that), and maybe after chewing the dust along with the apple between teeth that never kept him awake at night with toothache (and, if he did get one, just a quick trip off to the dentist) down his throat it all went until finally when the speck of skin cell that our man scratched off his belly arrived into that other man’s gut, the essence of the cell would become separated from the fiber of the cell (which would continue on out to be expelled) and the actual inside part of the skin cell would become absorbed into the mean old grinch. Absorbed into one of his cells only, maybe even into a brain cell, which he thought was a special brain that worked so hard (but really he was lucky to be born into a family where he was encouraged to go to law school and enforce a system of rules that nobody could have predicted would be so vile until they were buried beneath the hopelessness of it all and besides the whole system was there to support him and maintain this inequality because why share if you don’t have to), but let’s be realistic, probably part of his pancreas, or maybe a red blood cell in his spleen, hopefully not a toenail because he would just snip that off, or more likely, someone working for him would, but hopefully somewhere more permanent where it could kick off a series of infinitesimal changes. Maybe that red blood cell would provide extra oxygen to the self-reflective part of that man’s brain and expand his perception, his imagination about what life must be like for others, or maybe it would kick off a series of errant changes to his DNA, a whole exponential series of changes, that would affect him and his progeny as well. Our man was pleased to think how his skin dust would become part of this other man, via an apple, even though he didn’t naturally care for him that much but had to try hard at it.
For a moment he was bothered by the concern that since there is a finite amount of matter on the planet, and as the planet was becoming more populated by humans, including extra dogs presumably, unless the ratio of humans with dogs had changed, where was that matter to make the extra humans and dogs being pulled from? Fever spiders? Angler fish? Algae blooms? Ravens? Meadows? Lightning? Bees? Mice? Oxygen? From the kind mothers themselves? That part’s a mystery. But the rest of it’s as real as you and me and the dust we’ve all ingested
Andrea Bishop’s stories have appeared in Grain, The Masters Review, Cleaver, and elsewhere. She won The Malahat Review’s 2026 Open Season Fiction Award, and in 2025 her work was recognized by the CBC Short Story Prize, The Malahat Review’s Far Horizons Award, and PRISM International’s Jacob Zilber Prize. She divides her time between Vancouver and Salt Spring Island, Canada. andreabishop.ca.
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