Illustration by MGC

The crab trap was neon orange. He whipped it like a frisbee, far out, and watched it sink below the dark blue of the sea. It was early and he was the only one on the pier, cold in his camping chair. The old chicken bones he used as bait were stuffed in a plastic bag beside him, and he could smell them mixing with the salt of the ocean and the damp morning breeze.

One thing he liked about crabbing was that you didn’t have to wait for a tug. You could just sit there and watch the water, read a book if you wanted to, and wait however long you saw fit. Sometimes his wife would come with him and they would sit there together in the sort of silence that came from years of being next to someone. But it had been a while now since she’d joined him.

Usually, he would talk to the other crabbers. They all had the same traps as him, the ones he made. He was famous around here for that. It was a little business; he even had blue baseball caps with his company name embroidered on them in pearly white. They would talk about the weather and their grandkids and debate what bait was the best to use. It was predictable and gave him enough socializing to get by.

The only time he could really be honest with himself was when he sat out there in the quiet of the morning. Then, he could finally admit that this was never the way he saw his life going. He thought about his father wading in the ocean, the water up to his knees. That was in Malaysia, where the sea was clearer and lighter and warmer, and the sun had beaten down on their bare backs. Where he ate mangoes and coconuts from the tree. There was a photo in an old album of his wife and his father, laughing as they pried open a coconut with a machete. In that preserved moment she looked impossibly young, her smile impossibly wide. His father’s dark hair and broad shoulders captured next to her in fading sepia tones.

He thought about the chicken bones sitting now on the ocean floor like some kind of offering. When he was a child, his father was many things: a fisherman, a gifted healer. He could dive for ages, never coming up for air. Down there, on the ocean floor, his father would leave a freshly slaughtered chicken to appease the gods. He had always felt protected, held by his father’s sacrifices. That was a long time ago, and a long way from here, but sometimes when he sat on this pier, he swore for a second he could see his father emerging from between the waves. Then he would shake his head and see nothing but a buoy or the slick head of a seal.

It was funny to be back by the water when he’d spent his whole life getting away from it. For a while he and his wife had lived in Los Angeles, that desert of cars and hot pavement. He’d been taken in by all of it, the gambling and women and shiny things, until there was nothing left. He was proud of a lot of things in his life, but he wasn’t proud of that. He associated LA with death, not of any one person, but of his own upward trajectory. A plane climbing up and up and then crashing to the ground.

After twenty minutes, he slowly pulled the trap out of the water. It was a ring trap, and as he hauled it up it closed quickly, squishing the crabs inside into a mess of legs and pincers. When he opened it, the crabs sat there disoriented for a moment, then started to scuttle around on the wood.

When his granddaughter was little, he used to bring her here sometimes. When he’d release the crabs she would giggle and scream, running away from them down the pier. He would pick up the crabs and chase her, pincers out.

Now, there was no one here to chase and his granddaughter hadn’t called in months. Still, he smiled as he grabbed the crabs. He lifted them up by their back legs, dropping them in the bucket he’d brought with him.

His wife was on oxygen and could barely leave the apartment, but when he got home with the day’s catch she’d still wheel the tank to the kitchen and stand there at the stove. He’d watch her kill and clean the crabs with remorseless, practiced hands. So small and covered in purple-blue veins. The clear tube winding up her body, nubs in her nose above her unchanging smile.

The doctor had told him not to have any salt. His daughter kept reminding him of that, pleading with him. But everything tasted bland, and it didn’t feel like home. That was all he wanted these days, something that tasted like the water he’d grown up next to, that he’d spent so much of his life in.

It was funny that he’d always wanted to leave home and now he was here and all he could think about was the fact that he’d probably never go back, not before he died. And so this was it, the crabbing and the dock and an ocean separating him from his own memories. Maybe he liked being here in the morning light, alone, because he could imagine that right there, past the mountains, the water turned turquoise, and the evergreen trees turned to palms, and his own father was lying on the ocean floor with an offering clutched in his arms.

The trap flashed orange again as he threw it back out into the water. The sun was coming up stronger over the mountains now. It was still beautiful, though he realized then that it was not the sunrise he longed to see; a revelation that came from the middle of his chest like a tether to another world. He would go home in a few hours with his bucket, and his wife would make chili crab and he would hold her small hands in his, and maybe he could call his daughter to come over and have lunch with them and they would lick the spicy oil off their fingers and laugh and maybe that could be all he wanted.

Illustration by Marne Grahlman

You wake up ready for some self care. You stretch, scrape your tongue. Sit still tracking your breath. You’ve been working hard. You need a dose of freshness. What you need is a haircut, and today’s the day you booked one. How timely. As you sip the froth off your oat milk latte, you imagine yourself feeling cute, flashing your new trim to a passerby. There will be just enough wind to fluff it out. It will tumble gently over your shoulders and back. This is because your hair is long. So long that it’s usually the first thing people notice. It reaches your butt. It conceals your boobs. The colour is nondescript, but the length is remarkable.

It’s grown with you and the truth is, you’d feel exposed without it.

That being said, you’ve been spotting people with good hair and they have one thing in common: They have cuts. You could become irrelevant with your long, flat hair.

A couple weeks ago, your friend recommended someone. When you clicked on their profile, you gasped.

“You let a dude cut your hair?”

“He’s been doing this for decades,” she shrugged. “Plus, he’s cheap.”

You’re somewhat reassured, although, how could you be? Give a man full access to your hair? But you trust your friend. You book an appointment.

*

His salon is at the back of a skate shop that smells like weed. You hate weed, although you notice his hair is the same length as yours. He notices too and says “that’s dope,” which is a phrase you haven’t heard in a long time. Maybe he’s a gamer. You feel ill at ease.

“It’s sort of an identity,” you say, referring to your hair. He assures you he can totally relate and you appreciate this. You breathe easier. You tell him you want shaggy bangs framing your face. You tell him not to compromise the length – apart from dead ends, of course.

“Make me look like Stevie Nicks,” you say. “Just longer.”

He winks at you. It’s a gentle wink. You tell yourself you must be in good hands.

He fastens a drape around you and stashes your glasses. He begins to maneuver the scissors quickly. You wonder how he can be snipping so fast—it has to be a mark of experience.

You get to talking about softball and snowboarding, which are the sports he likes. He tells you about his accident, how he tumbled down a black-diamond slope and landed with the board on his teeth. They had to extract him by helicopter, he says, and after that, he got flashbacks. Vertigo, white specks all around, the thwack, a searing pain in his jaw—it wouldn’t stop. You listen as he shares that, one day, he did LSD and dissolved into nothingness and came to terms with the idea of death and the flashbacks went away. This is when you know you have made him feel safe. It’s one of your strengths.

“We’re done,” he says, undoing the drape.

You fumble for cash as he hands you your glasses—could the haircut be over so soon? Then it hits you that you were too nervous coming in, and you forgot to pay for the parking meter. You rush to your car—no ticket! This day has your name written all over it. Your head feels lighter. You set off to the YMCA. The last stop on your wellness train.

At the gym, you change into leggings and tie up your hair and—and that’s when you realize something’s wrong. Your ponytail. It’s too short. Way too short.

*

You enter a state of shock. You leave the Y. At home, you can’t believe what you’re seeing. Your hair has lost a foot. A full foot. It barely falls past your shoulder blades. You burst into tears. You take down the mirrors. You put on a hoodie and tighten the strings until you can only see a tiny patch of light, until you’re almost gone.

You text your friends. They say they are sorry for you. They say it will grow back. They send you links to hair accessories. But you are not ready for this. Your head is full of his hands lifting your hair away, pulling down your pyjamas, groping inside you. You’d been sleeping. That’s why you hadn’t heard him come in. You didn’t even know his name, actually—he was your roommate’s date. Supposed to be.

“Shh,” he said, something wet and warm spreading over your bare butt.

You are losing ground. You tuck yourself under a blanket and cry. You know you are blowing this out of proportion, but this haircut is too short, it doesn’t cover anything.

Your apartment’s gone cold. You want a drink. You want to be surrounded. You want to be left alone. You want to be rocked and told that you’re beautiful anyways. You yank the blanket over your head and wedge it under your body. You wonder how long it will take.

Photo courtesy Rana Abdulla

Razan Samara is a longtime Palestinian activist. She’s volunteered with the Toronto chapter of the Palestinian Youth Movement. She’s made banners and fundraised for Palestinians in the homelands. But in 2021, when Palestinians were expelled from their homes in Silwan and Sheikh Jarrah, she began to feel that she needed to do more for her community. As a way to cope with the expulsion of her people and reconnect with her ancestral land, Samara started holding tatreez, or embroidery, circles with her mom.

Their circles are held at a cafe in Mississauga and include 15 to 20 people, usually from Palestinian and Arab diaspora, as well as a few urban Indigenous people. Sometimes people bring their relatives, but often they are alone, sitting next to a stranger with the knowledge that they, too, have been displaced from their homeland.

“So suddenly we’re back to our villages,” Samara says. She opens each tatreez circle by tossing a thread ball while everyone in the circle names the places they hail from. As they do so, they hold onto a section of the thread and then toss the ball to the next person, which forms a web. By tossing the ball and speaking their truth, grief, and hopes, the thread connects everyone both physically and emotionally.

Samara says tatreez has always been a part of her household as an aesthetic article. But it was more recently that she learned about its historical significance. “The tatreez patterns are so rooted in the landscape and architecture of Palestine; and having been displaced from that, it was a way of being one with [the land].”

The 3,000-year-old art form and its current resurgence represents Palestinian women’s defiance of their oppressors. Palestinian women weaved tatreez to archive the story of Palestine through displacement dating back to the 1948 Nakba (the catastrophe) and 1967 Naksa (the setback), times when Israel forcibly took over Palestinian territories and expelled over 750,000 Palestinians from their lands. The tatreez thobes, or dresses, following that era, notably after the First Intifada, a six-year Palestinian uprising from 1987 to 1993, depict Palestinian flags, the Qubbat aṣ–Ṣaḵra (Dome of the Rock), doves, rifles, and other motifs. Embroidery artists also hide secrets in tiny stitches depicting trees and birds, at times appearing in clusters of fives and sevens to ward off the evil eye.

Palestinian embroiderers in the diaspora in Canada, in refugee camps in Lebanon, and under Israeli military occupation in Palestine are constantly adding to their motifs. The triangle, the cypress tree, and the kite are now common alongside the watermelon slice and the fishnet pattern.

Rana Abdulla, founder of the Canadian Palestinian Association of Manitoba, collects vintage tatreez dresses. Earlier this year, her collection was displayed at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights to commemorate the Palestinian lives lost during ongoing Israeli atrocities in Gaza. As of publication, that number stands at over 43,391. Abdulla says tatreez is nuanced, as it preserves the story of the artist. “It is a form of resistance and the story of each dress is a story of each woman. The colours of the embroidery express the national allegiance as Palestinians and are attributable to each village in Palestine,” she says. In Tulkarm, the town her family is from, the tatreez is rich with pomegranates and leaves embroidered on white fabric.

Tatreez, Samara says, is a living document that archives what the Palestinian people have endured and continue to withstand in their anticipation of a liberated Palestine.

“We’re sitting together and having very open and candid conversations about the occupation and exile. As we tatreez together, we are connecting with it as a practice, creating a pathway back and thinking about the future—in a liberated Palestine where we would invite our friends and allies to our houses for tea.”

With rampant censorship on the expression of Palestinian identity in North America, Samara said that there’s a sense of pride attached to wearing a Palestinian tatreez thobe in a very explicit way. “Every single stitch is in defiance to whatever false narratives that may exist.”

I am a professional writer and spoken word artist. I’ve been sharing my work—and making space for other artists to create and share their work—in Toronto for nearly 20 years. I am of East African descent, with a heritage and history rooted in oral traditions. Toronto is where I was born, and it’s where I call home.

While I’ve written five poetry books, my greatest “publication” to date would have to be my poem, “Song of Sheba,” which was featured on Toronto Transit Commission vehicles alongside such poets as Toronto’s Poet Laureate, legend Lillian Allen. I am who I am because of Black creators who built pathways for the discovery and claiming of my voice. I asked Lillian earlier this year: What am I living for, but to see artists thrive in our city, be given the space to continue our demanding and necessary work? A poem is a verdict, a political act.

On the subway, I see my poem next to a life insurance ad. But no one is reading. I get it; we are all busy, bombarded with information overload. And poems are difficult to read, even when they’re short. “Song of Sheba” is about war and violence in the East African context. A hard-to-absorb poem, perhaps, when life is already hard, maybe even terrifying, and frankly you just need to get from point A to point B because you’re tired.

Meanwhile, artists like myself are being pushed to the margins, and don’t know where to go: how to get from A to B. Whether to flee the city or stay and fight. For Black artists specifically, the challenges of a fluctuating income and an always-worsening housing crisis are compounded by pervasive anti-Black racism, which makes it a struggle to find a place to call home both literally and in the art world. The city needs a strategy to ensure we can access housing—and keep making art.

I don’t see myself being able to live in Toronto securely or long term. Budgeting doesn’t help when nothing is affordable. I entertain the idea of living elsewhere every single day. Of saving money for travel. I fear where Toronto is going and that I will have to go, too, leaving the bulk of my kin behind. The crux is that staying and leaving both feel risky—and somewhat punishing.

Earlier this year, I applied to a housing initiative (a joint effort of Blackhurst Cultural Centre and Westbank Corporation) with 12 units reserved for artists of African and/ or Caribbean descent in Toronto. I felt I had another chance at making a life here. A few mentors read my application, complimenting me on my accolades. I felt the heavy cloud of the contradictory phrase Toronto housing lift.

My application didn’t even make it to the interview stage. Perhaps to be expected; there is so much Black talent in the city and not enough space. The question is, who gets to decide on the contours of that space? Who gets to choose the Black artists worthy of subsidized housing—and what would it mean to “strengthen” my application, should a similar opportunity later arise? I am hoping it does: a dozen housing units for Black artists in a city of three million is direly inadequate.

The lack of artist housing in Toronto is, of course, part of the larger housing crisis—the city ranked 11th on a recent global housing unaffordability list. I know several people, from artists to teachers to doctors, leaving the city for sanity’s sake. Some have been renovicted and left with no other choice.

More Torontonians need to admit that our rental rates amount to robbery. Prices are oppressive and the poor are being removed from belonging right before our eyes. Meanwhile, the city is full of empty condos—an injustice the mayor should be ashamed of.

In the U.S., Elaine Brown, former chair of the Black Panther Party and the only woman to hold that position, is one beacon of light. At age 81, she is on a mission to create affordable housing in West Oakland, California for low-income Black folks. Her 79-unit housing project is called The Black Panther. Her reason for building, she told The Guardian, is simple: “I want us, Black people, to have economic power.”

We need to demand that politicians move tangible resources into Black communities in a public and transparent way. Toronto could learn from Oakland, and the revolutionary tenets of the Panthers, which included affordable housing and breakfast programs for underserved kids. In other words, looking at the roots of the problem, and considering possible solutions rooted in the politics of who has a right to a roof. 

While artist grants, including some for Black artists, do exist in Canada, we can’t rely on them to make ends meet in a city like Toronto—let alone coordinate the time, space, and energy to make things of lasting artistic and cultural value. Grants should account for the reality of inflation, the fact that most artists can work and gig incessantly and still not have enough for a rainy day, let alone retirement. Grants should counteract the need to turn to other work to earn a living. But without family support, this is wishful thinking.

And without access to safe and affordable housing, creating is impossible. For this reason, we’ll likely see artists leaving the city in droves. A 2023 Toronto Arts Council report noted about 26 percent of artists the Council surveyed who hadn’t moved in the past three years were considering leaving their homes because of financial constraints. I can only imagine what this means for the city’s Black artists. Rather, I imagine what it removes. A lack of housing for Black artists results in erasure: nullification of our efforts to make art meant to change minds and even lives. A missed opportunity to create spaces for Black creators to feel safe, supported, and empowered to self-advocate. Our lives matter, and so does leaving behind an archive of works future Black artists can learn from. We need housing that can preserve, expand, and protect the Black arts community, and artists for whom the frequency of the city or their particular neighbourhood is central to their output. To prioritize us in the way that’s needed, and begin to correct the current situation, all levels of government need to work together to be sure we are all safely housed. Otherwise, our future in Toronto will be inevitably dim.

Ultimately, I refuse erasure the same way I refuse to leave the city. Because artists are the soul of this city. Perhaps all cities. But Toronto is home to some of the best artists in the world. To leave Toronto would be to leave behind my soul.

Staying here isn’t my final answer, but I’d like it to be. I wanted this to be a love (not goodbye) letter to artists. Now, I am deliberately trying to leave it incomplete. I don’t want to turn the page on this city just yet.

That said, if you’ve seen my poem on the Toronto subway, take its lines in memory of me. Of Toronto artists who tried to make their mark and move the culture, hoping to survive. Some of us will not. In the end, the artist exists diffusely, but ideas need a place to grow. Being able to thrive in Toronto as a creative is a dream I hope I don’t have to shelve away—nor my own future books, for lack of a room of my own in which to realize them.

Illustration by Blair Kelly

During my second year of college, we killed our father. It was his own idea, but it was Charlie’s idea to do it the week before Christmas. Later, I would regret that we hadn’t waited until afterward. Charlie said that Christmas would have depressed the hell out of us regardless and anyway, it was too late to do anything different.

The night before we did it, Charlie was late to pick me up. I stood on the train platform alone, shivering in the cold, cursing his name. The man in the ticket booth peered pityingly at me through the frosted window and didn’t offer to let me stand inside, although I wished desperately that he would. The benches were far too cold and snow-covered to make comfortable seats, so I remained standing, hopping from one foot to the other.

I sighed in relief and pent-up irritation when a familiar station wagon finally swerved into the parking lot, the bright yellow headlights cutting through the dark. I set off toward the car, suitcase nipping at my heels. Charlie parked and opened the door on the driver’s side, poking his head out. He wore a deep green handknit scarf wrapped around his neck, and a matching hat pulled low over his eyebrows. He waved me over, as if there was anyone else at the station he could have been there to pick up. I could see, as I got closer, that his mittens were deep green as well, made from the same yarn. The set was a gift from our mother; a similar one—made from blue yarn—had arrived for me at the dorms in early November. As twins, everything we had was doubled—life, love, death, and everything in between.

The package had come with a note that read only For Carmen, Love, Mom. When I phoned her to say thank you, I got her answering machine.

“Sorry I was late,” Charlie said breathlessly, as if he had been running and not driving.

“It’s alright,” I found myself saying, and was surprised by how much I meant it, how quickly my vexation had dissipated. I was glad to be there with him. “It’s nice to see you.”

He didn’t reciprocate. I didn’t take offence. My presence was a reminder of what lay before us.

Again, it was Dad’s idea. Because he was sick. Months earlier, doctors had told us that he didn’t have much time left, but what that meant, exactly, they couldn’t say. Mom fled to Florida rather than dealing with it, and Charlie and I couldn’t afford to hire anyone to take care of Dad. Charlie dropped out of school and moved back home. We’d argued about it back and forth and ultimately Charlie had won, or lost, depending on which way you looked at it.

The city was empty without him. When I wasn’t in class, I spent most of my time back at the dorms, sitting by the phone, fearing the worst. Not just about Dad’s condition but about other, selfish things; I worried that Charlie’s sacrifice made me look like the lesser twin, a bad daughter. Like a petulant child, I felt left out.

Charlie called to inform me of Dad’s wishes a month before we fulfilled them. I had just come in from class and only had time to take off Mom’s scarf and one of the gloves. I picked up the phone and was brushing snowflakes from the lapel of my coat and there was his voice on the other end of the line, telling me that Dad wanted to go. That we had to help him go. He was in too much pain to bear, Charlie said.

“Did you tell him we’re not doing it?”

“We have to. Dad and I already talked about it. It’s what he wants, for us to do this together.”

“‘Dad and I?’” I was getting warm. I threw off my coat, the second glove. “What about what I think? What if I say no?”

“It’s not about you,” Charlie bit back.

“If I was there, this never would have happened.”

“Well, you’re not here.”

I slammed the phone down, then laid down on my bed and stared at the ceiling. After an hour, I called Charlie back.

“Look,” he said. “When has Dad ever asked us for anything?”

“Okay,” I said. More than anything, I didn’t want to argue with him. Charlie doing it alone was worse than the alternative. “How soon should I come home?”

Dad wanted me to finish my exams, Charlie relayed, so I should keep the train tickets I already had for Christmas break. He wrote down the date I’d be arriving, and promised to pick me up from the station. When we finally hung up, my index finger was bruised purple from where I’d wound the telephone cord around it.

*

The ride home from the train station was shorter than I remembered. The driveway had been shovelled on only one side, into which Charlie pulled the car. He retrieved my suitcase from the trunk and I stalled, my hand hovering over the door handle. Charlie came around to my side and knocked on the window, startling me.

“You coming?” he called, his voice muffled through the glass and the vicious winter winds.

I stepped out of the car, momentarily plunged back into the biting cold. The house was dark and quiet when we entered—the only sound came from our father’s bedroom, his deep snores coming in fits and starts. Charlie had left the door slightly ajar, and through the crack I could see Dad’s limbs splayed this way and that, detangled from the sheets he had kicked off in his sleep. I watched the silhouette of his back heave up and down with each breath. Charlie had warned me that he spent most of his days sleeping, emerging from the dimly lit bedroom only to use the bathroom or for meals. It pained him to do much else, and even trips to the bathroom were assisted by Charlie and took twice as long as they used to.

“There’s leftover pizza in the fridge, if you want,” Charlie jostled me with his shoulder on his way up the stairs, my suitcase in his hands. I tore my gaze away from the dark bedroom. “Not sure how long it’s been there though.”

I wrinkled my nose. I didn’t think I could stomach any food. “I’ll pass.”

I followed him up the stairs and into my old bedroom. It was even more foreign to me than the last time I was there—the walls seemed to creep closer together with each passing year, compressing the room into a small box painted pale pink and filled with the remnants of some other life. Charlie dumped my suitcase next to the double bed and I cast a cursory glance around the room. There was a pang in my chest when I clocked the thin layer of dust that covered everything from the dresser to the bookshelf. The room was barely touched in my absence, it existed only in tandem with me. I swallowed the panic that threatened to rise about how little time I had spent with Dad in his last days.

Charlie looked at me. “It wasn’t any easier for me here, you know.”

Quietly, I said, “I know.”

“Goodnight then,” Charlie said finally, clearing his throat to dispel the silence that had settled between us like the dust that surrounded us. Our souls were equally burdened with the weight of actions we hadn’t yet taken. He shut the door softly behind him when he left.

*

Charlie woke before me and hogged the bathroom. The second floor of the house was small; there was only mine and Charlie’s bedrooms and our shared bathroom, which had remained an area of contention even into our young adulthood.

I banged on the door and it rattled on its old hinges. “Get out of there, would you?”

I didn’t even care about using the bathroom. It was just that hounding Charlie for it felt natural, normal. Upon waking, a feeling of dread had crept into my stomach and wouldn’t leave.

“I’m almost done,” came the reply through the door. The faucet in the bath was running and I figured he was washing his hair, holding his head upside down under the stream like Mom had taught us when she’d grown tired of washing our hair for us as kids. When the door finally opened ten minutes later, the hem and shoulders of his t-shirt were wet and his brown hair dripped all over the floor at our feet. Behind him the bathroom was full of steam, the mirror was more of an opaque wall than a reflective surface.

“Morning,” the smile didn’t quite reach his eyes. I grimaced. We were going through the motions.

“I’ll only be a moment. Wait for me?”

It wasn’t a real question. Of course he would. We were fated to do everything together, especially this. Life, love, death.

Charlie sat on the floor outside the bathroom until I was ready. When we finally went downstairs, he said he would go get Dad. I wrung my hands together and paced the tiled kitchen floor. My back ached and my feet hurt from invisible pressures, and I wanted to sit down but I remained standing. I kept pacing. I could hear their conversation faintly—Charlie’s soft voice and Dad’s sleepy mumbles. Then there was the shuffling, the heavy tread on the wooden floor. They came around the corner and into the kitchen, Charlie’s arm looped through Dad’s, Dad leaning heavily on Charlie. Charlie’s steps were deliberately slowed, and Dad’s, I could tell, were as fast as they could be. He looked up at where I stood by the counter.

“Carmen.”

I almost started to cry, right then and there. Charlie looked away and told me to take Dad to the living room while he prepared breakfast, so I replaced Charlie’s arm with my own and directed Dad toward the couch. I sat next to him, holding his hands in between mine, trying not to think about how this was it.

Dad asked me about school so I told him about my classes and the horrible food they served in the dining hall. (Also: Charlie pulled a bottle of pills from the cupboard and they rattled furiously as he dumped them all into a small ceramic bowl). I told Dad about the knitwear from Mom, how they kept me warm on the frigid walks to the school library during final exams. (Charlie crushed the pills beneath the backside of a spoon. This took a while).

I reminded Dad about the time he took Charlie and I fishing, how he stuck bait on each of our hooks because we were too scared to touch the worms, how he purchased the three measly fish we’d caught and cooked them for dinner. We’d been violently ill that night but the next weekend, we asked to go fishing again. He squeezed my hand, resting on top of his. I think it hurt him to say anything, but there was so much that I wanted to ask. I wanted to know who he was. I had all these memories of him strung together like Polaroids on twine, the gaps between them were palpable and incorrigible. Has anybody ever managed to be more than their father’s child?

(Charlie poured a glass of orange juice and tipped the contents of the ceramic bowl inside. He mixed them with the same spoon and the metal clinked against the glass with each turn).

I told Dad that I loved him.

Charlie put his hand on my shoulder. He handed me the glass, and I gave it to Dad. In this way, it felt like all of us, together. But in the end Dad was alone. Charlie and I stood on the front porch and waited longer, surely, than we needed to. It was all much quieter than I was expecting.

We crossed the street and called the ambulance from the neighbours’. The trucks arrived within a few minutes and washed the whole street in red and blue. Charlie and I stood in the road and held hands without speaking. We didn’t have to. Everything we felt was doubled. Life, love, death.

Illustration by Jessica Bromer

My friend Lou is visiting from Australia. We do silly things together, like watch Love Island and listen to music. Lou shows me the video for Chappell Roan’s “Casual,” which follows a girl and a mermaid in a situationship. I’m fascinated. The song is good, too: the slow pumping synth and zesty lyrics contrast with the video’s overall sense of campiness.

I laugh it off, thinking this is another artist my friends and I will talk about but who will remain coded in proximity to community, a secret, a love language for what we love together like girl in red or Rina Sawayama. Someone I can ask new friends about, a question inside a question about who they might be as well as what they love.

And then I hear another Roan song (“Good Luck, Babe!”), and another (“Pink Pony Club”). They get poppier and poppier, reminiscent of ’80s pop ballads I love because of my mother but also somehow the feeling I had when I first began loving Taylor Swift in 2008. Something maybe about the storytelling and the texture of feeling for women who are “different.” I have the feeling that I’m sure everyone has when they start to like an artist, a sense of discovering something both about yourself and in them.

It seems that sense of discovery is viral. I am one of many who fell in love with Roan’s music. By the middle of summer, she’d garnered hundreds of millions of streams. She’s performed at Coachella and Lollapalooza. What’s catching traction online, though, isn’t just her fame but her reaction to it. Roan has stated bluntly, “I told myself, if this ever gets dangerous, I might quit. It’s dangerous now, and I’m still going. But that part is not what I signed up for.”

Roan is being praised for setting a precedent for a new generation of artists and celebrities. She talks about having worked at a drive-thru and scoffs at the media for their surprised or sympathetic reactions. “Most people work horrible jobs.” Commenters cherish the rise of a queer working-class artist—but I wonder about the continual obfuscation of her whiteness, which prevents a certain honesty about her impact and how she’s able to make it.

Roan’s fame picks up pace, and so does her reaction. In August, she releases a series of TikToks. She speaks directly into camera, her iconic curly red hair up in a messy bun. “Would you go up to a random lady and say, ‘Can I get a photo with you?’ And she’s like, ‘no, what the fuck?’ and then you get mad at this random lady?” Should we expect a smile from celebrities and a customer service voice, or should we stay away—knowing that certain actions are expected in the workplace and certain boundaries are in place outside of it?

The celebrity as worker and fame as abuse are interesting arguments to make. When I ask Toronto-based producer Anupa Mistry, who also worked as a culture writer and editor, what she thinks, she says: “…[Roan’s] rancor is valid, but it’s ultimately focused on individual behaviour change on the part of fans and photographers, rather than a condemnation of the institutions of power that fund and amplify and set the terms of fame. She’s young and trying to work out if it’s possible to have an encounter with the music industry on her own terms. But even her ‘controversies’ generate value for her label.”

The idea that Roan’s candor is commodifying feels oddly manipulative. Mistry names what has been on my mind too: race and gender. Privilege, even when it seems absent or well-accounted for. “Do we read Roan’s demands and boundaries as more valid because she is white and cisgender? Her queerness suggests transgression only in its continued association with the American heartland, [the Midwest]. I’ll always think of Thelonious Monk or Lauryn Hill when I think about the costs of pushing back. What about Doja Cat’s shenanigans? When it got to be too much she pushed back and people didn’t like the way she did it.” But Roan’s pushback is applauded.

This brings me back to an original instinct I had ignored. As my enamourment with Roan begins to fray, I scroll her YouTube Shorts. In one, she says: “I wanted to be a cheerleader in high school. But I just never felt like I was that kind of girl. I don’t know. I am, now.” It reminds me of Swift’s rise to fame and her beloved video for “You Belong With Me.” Roan makes people feel seen in a similar way: you’re different, but all the things you want can happen to you too. The really distinct marker here, the key to their mass marketability, is that they’re both white American women.

My friend reposts Roan’s recent photo in Interview magazine on her close friend story, wild-clown themed of course. She writes: If I got straight famous, I’d unravel too. There is a point in math where a limit approaches infinity and cannot be quantified further. There is a point in fame where you simply cannot get more famous than you already are. Did Chappell Roan set out to become Mitski famous and ended up Taylor Swift famous instead? Did she strive toward success, the way any artist does, only to accidentally strive too far, primed by her personal privilege and positionality?

I can’t imagine how disconcerting it must be to be in Roan’s position. When talking about her with writer and poet Victoria Mbabazi, they say: “As a Black femme I understand what it is like for people to look at you as a shiny object and think that your existence giving them life means that’s where your life ends. Usually this ends in a disillusionment for both me and the person who dehumanized me into a fictional version of myself.” The parasocial toxicity artists endure is inexcusable and should be checked.

Yet the question I’m interested in when it comes to Roan is not whether fame is good or bad, whether she’s right or wrong, but of what she makes visible in the culture of celebrity, the purpose behind her commodification. And to me, that’s the power that white women have had and will always have. White women’s palatability imbues their art with the power of “relatability” even as it appropriates from communities, cultures and precedents that are usually created by Black and brown people who are then excluded from the material success of their own legacies. Roan’s drag persona and her lineage with activist, drag queen and queer icon Sasha Colby, a trans woman of Native Hawaiian and Irish descent, is a key example. Roan’s slogan, “your favourite artist’s favourite artist,” comes from Colby’s own tagline: “your favourite drag queen’s favourite drag queen.” This is indicative of the ecosystems of cultural transmission and inspiration, which can be appropriative and can not; which can be racist and can not, but which are undergirded by the uncontrollable, uncontrivable machinery of white supremacy. Intentionally or otherwise, Roan’s inspiration and interpretations in this lineage suffers from a sore reality: when white cis people do it, it suddenly just makes sense to a mass audience.

Don’t get me wrong though: Roan and her team are using Roan’s privilege to do good work. They’re against ticket resellers. She pushes back against rude photographers and makes clear contributions to queering pop. In the fall, she made a political stand by refusing to endorse either U.S. presidential candidate and by invoking Palestine.

But I believe it works against her when she refuses to own her success in all of its complexities. Part of me remains suspicious, reluctant as a fan, unable to fully trust or believe her when she has not once acknowledged her own positionality. It’s a place I’ve been before—with friends, coworkers, lovers—why does privilege do what it does and how do we make sense of the discomfort we are left with? How does this affect our ability to make sense of each other, to feel seen and heard?

I guess it just reminds me of the limits. Both for Roan and for myself and for celebrities like Kehlani, Janelle Monáe, and Victoria Monét, who have done similar work as Roan but were not afforded the same understanding: on the toxicity of the industry, on queerness, on politics, in terms of Palestine. What can celebrities offer us and what we can offer them? What are we owed and what do we owe each other?

My original instinct plateaus. I’m left with an old feeling, despite and maybe because of its flattening effect, a feeling like the popping of a balloon at the end of a party, sad and stalwart in its reminders. Clichés that are cliché as pop music itself, maybe because they stick around in the same way.

Sometimes you get where you’re going only by going too far. Sometimes what we think of someone has nothing to do with who they actually are.

Illustration by Jasmine Lesperance

For us acrobats, it was a circus rule to choose our primary apparatus at the age of thirteen. The doors opened to the Big Top and I entered alone. The leftover sawdust on the floor stuck between my toes, the air scented with rain, instead of the usual smells of animal dung and stale popcorn. Each piece of equipment was illuminated with the magic of the Circus—the only spots of light in the dark space: trapeze, tightrope, hoop, silks, chains. The darkness filling the rest of the tent felt tangible, as if all that existed in the world was me and my choice.

Each apparatus had served me well during my training, suspending me high in the air as I contorted my body. The choice was easy—I wanted the hoop. The perfect circle that supported me, spinning high above the crowds, the comfort in knowing I was the same through and through, no matter how many times I rotated. My hand landed on the hoop and I pulled myself up, settling my body against the wrapped steel. It fit in the curve behind my thighs as if I was born to have it there. A spotlight snapped on, focusing on me, and the light from the other apparatuses extinguished. I rose into the air, and my Circus family streamed in to celebrate. I thought my mom would be the most excited by her only child making the biggest decision of her life; instead, she looked frozen, her brown eyes wide and unseeing, her face pale. She was in stark contrast to the others as they ooh-ed and ahh-ed at my tricks. I didn’t think much of it—tonight was about me and the hoop.

Grasping it with both hands, I flipped upside down and stretched my legs into a front split. Long ago, my body registered this as pain, blooming bruises wherever the metal contacted my golden skin. Eventually, the hoop became an extension of me. I hooked the back of my left ankle onto the bottom curve and released my hands; I released everything, letting the single point of contact hold my weight as my right leg floated back behind my head and into my grasp. I smiled into the warmth of the spotlight, my skin glittering as it did when I was in the air.

The Circus had its own magic system, but there was a different magic that bound us Blackbirds to our art. It made us stand out from the other acrobats. We were unafraid, as if the air would never drop us, as if gravity didn’t affect us. If we fell, maybe we wouldn’t even get hurt, but I didn’t know because I never fell. I was born in the Circus and I would die in the Circus; this was where I belonged.

When my performance finished and I dismounted, my mom was in the same spot. As I approached, a mask came up so quick and convincing that I wondered if I’d only imagined the strange expression on her face. She hugged me. “Congratulations, Althea. Wonderful choice.”

*

It wasn’t until five years later that I thought of my mom’s reaction that night. I was watching Vesper train his new hippogriff, creatively named Griffy. An annoyed flick of Griffy’s tail sent the metal trash can skating across the centre ring, scattering its contents all over. While helping to clean up the mess, I uncovered an amber glass bottle hidden amongst the greasy popcorn bags and peanut shells. My name was emblazoned on the peeling label: Althea Blackbird. The instructions read, Administer three drops once daily to maintain memory suppression. I knew this bottle—I’d seen it on the top shelf of my mom’s belongings, higher than I could reach in our shared trailer. The faded text was too small and faint for me to read from the floor so I never suspected that I was its intended recipient.

“Thea—” said Vesper. His cloven feet sent up little puffs of dust as he tapped them nervously.

“Did you know about this?”

“Um.” Vesper was born into the Circus a few years before me, to the family of Fauns that had existed as the Circus’s animal tamers for as long as my family had been aerialists. Griffy lay down at his feet with an audible sigh.

“What memory is she suppressing?”

“Um,” he said again. “Maybe you should ask your mom.”

*

I didn’t ask her, but it wasn’t difficult to figure out how she was drugging me. Besides the occasional snacks from our vendors, all my meals were prepared by the staff in the Dining Car. The only refreshment my mom ever offered me was a steaming mug of peppermint tea that she brewed nightly. I valued our bedtime tea session, usually on the steps outside our trailer if the weather was nice. Besides this ritual, I hardly saw her—she organized the acts and travel schedule, while I trained or helped the others with their shows. She was once an acrobat too, but she quit long ago, something I could never fathom. Sometimes, she trailed her gloved fingers over the seat of the trapeze, closing her hand around it as if she could feel it through the velvet.

After that, I stopped drinking her tea. I’d cradle the mug in my hands, warming my callused skin and taking small sips to appease her, but I’d spit it into a handkerchief hidden in my sleeve when she wasn’t looking. The remainder was discretely poured on the ground between my shoes.

Memory was an odd thing. The smell came first—I woke with the echo of perfume in my nose, like a word on the tip of my tongue. There should have been this scent in our trailer, honey-sweet and floral, swirled in with sandalwood from Mom’s soap and the mothball musk of our costumes. I found the broken bottle in the back of a cabinet full of old cosmetics. The aroma of osmanthus flowers filled me, and I cradled the etched glass, wondering how a smell could make me feel so safe.

That same day, as I inspected the carabiners of the outdoor rigs, I remembered a slender hand, callused and long-fingered, directing mine over the metal links. A female voice said, “Don’t forget—always screw them downwards, never up.”

A shiver travelled down my spine, and my hands shook too much to continue the task. I didn’t know what to expect when I stopped taking that potion, but it wasn’t this sense of emptiness, of missing.

The next morning, I watched the trapeze artists from the bleachers. Across the tent, the movement of air sent an empty hoop swaying, and my mind supplied the vision of a girl in that clear black circle. She could have been me with her long black hair and shimmering skin, dancing effortlessly high above. The differences were subtle—a heart-shaped face instead of my oval one, thinner eyebrows, and a single freckle on her cheek that she absolutely hated. I knew those details were there without seeing them. A wave of nausea hit me, and I keeled over, vomiting into the space between the seats. I yelled an apology before dashing to the cleaning closet and locking myself inside to be alone. Part of me rejected the memory of her, because there was no remembering without hurting. But I couldn’t fight it; the floodgates were open.

Her name was Elyse, and she was my sister. Once the Circus’s star performer, Elyse was one with the hoop. Her skin sparkled as she flipped and hung and twisted, sometimes with other acrobats, suspending each other in ways that made the audience hold their collective breath. She was weightless when she flew through the air; I wanted to be just like her. I thought the aerial hoop was my autonomous decision, but maybe deep down I remembered.

I didn’t notice when it first started—Elyse always looked dreamy when she was performing, but one night she held a particularly ethereal quality. It took me a moment to realize she was translucent. It wasn’t an illusion; the spotlights refracted through her like foggy glass.

She was Fading—something else my mom made me forget, something she herself suffered from, hiding her see-through fingers inside her ever-present velvet gloves. The first night when it was clear Elyse was Fading, she and my mom had a vicious argument. I was outside our trailer, watching their quivering silhouettes scream at each other through the thin curtain, Elyse’s shadow fainter than Mom’s. Their heated words were muffled through the wall, but I heard a smash, the sound of glass breaking. I didn’t dare go in, so I sat under the window with my knees tucked beneath my chin until their voices ceased with one final shout. Elyse ran out, slamming the door behind her, and I followed.

She climbed to the tightrope platform where she curled up and sobbed. She was seven years older than me, and I thought she knew everything. I didn’t think her self-assuredness and calmness could give way to a sadness so profound. She startled when I wrapped my arms around her trembling form. She still felt solid.

“Thea.” She held me tight, and I buried my nose in her hair, breathing in sweet osmanthus. “Mom wants me to quit before I fully Fade.”

“Why do we Fade?” I asked, examining the shape of my hand through hers.

“Humans weren’t meant to surpass gravity.”

Back then, I didn’t understand what she meant. Now I knew that magic was a changing quality that grew the more we mastered it, the closer we got to true weightlessness. But our mortal bodies weren’t made to hold a magic so strong.

“Are you going to quit?” The tears that collected in the corners of my eyes spilled over; I knew her answer.

“I can’t.” She sobbed and I wished my grasp on her could be enough to hold her in my life forever.

*

Once I remembered Elyse, the looks my mom gave me made sense: the expression on her face the day of my thirteenth birthday when the hoop carried me high into the air, the way her gaze blurred every time she watched me until she stopped coming to my shows entirely. I looked too much like Elyse on the hoop, tan skin sparkling, black hair plaited into endless loops behind my head, a mirror image of the daughter she’d lost.

*

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t know what was coming. The first day I noticed the tips of my toes were faint, I cancelled my show. The Circus was unhappy with me—I could tell from the way my trailer lights flickered and how the animals walked wide circles around me like I repelled them. A knock sounded at my trailer door after the show, and I prayed that it wasn’t my mom.

Vesper stood in the doorway with two candy apples, an offering I couldn’t refuse. We sat on the floor, eating our treats in silence. Once we were half done, he asked, “Are you going to quit?”

I can’t, was Elyse’s answer when I had asked her the same question. The ghost of her words hung on my lips. Instead, I said, “I don’t know.”

This was why my mom made me forget—so I could enjoy the art for as long as possible before I faced this turmoil. I could take the route that she took, hanging up her invisible wings to continue on in this world and start a family, or I could take the route of Elyse.

True to her word, Elyse never quit. She kept spinning that endless circle night after night until I could make out the striped inside of the Big Top through her. I watched her until one night, she was so transparent that I could see everything behind her with perfect clarity. It was then I realized she was no longer there. She was gone, and that hoop continued to spin without her. Murmurs rippled across the audience and then they stood, thrilled by the seamless vanishing act, their deafening applause drowning out my sobs.

“If I quit,” I twirled the stick of the apple between my palms, “would I stay here or would I leave the Circus?”

“Where would you go if you left the Circus?” The Circus was the only life we ever knew.

I shrugged. “Where would I go if I disappeared?”

Vesper chewed, cleverly waiting for the moment to pass, then he changed the subject and gave me his take on tonight’s show, the first I’d ever missed, and it was a welcome distraction from the inevitable choice that awaited me.

*

If I said aloud that I was quitting, the circus would write me out forever. I told my mom it was a break, and she nodded knowingly. When I watched the other aerialists, my heart folded in half. The idea that my mom turned her back on her trapeze and stayed here, watching them every night for years, was unfathomable to me.

The acrobats danced above me while I set up the magician’s equipment on the ground below. Even though I kept my eyes downcast, their shadows taunted me with their tricks.

One night, Vesper approached me with a furrowed brow. He said, “You’re fading.”

“What?” I dropped the cables I was carrying to look down at my body. My toes hadn’t reverted to opacity but there were no new signs of Fading since I stopped doing hoop.

“You never smile anymore.”

“Oh,” I said. “Don’t scare me like that.”

“Well, it is scary, isn’t it? To think that you would live the rest of your life like this?”

Like this. Flightless. I felt heavier lately, the pull of gravity stronger than ever before. Maybe it would get so strong that I’d be dragged into the earth as I continued to reach for the sky.

“I don’t want to Fade,” I whispered.

Vesper folded his goat legs beneath him and sat down. “I was glad when you said that you’d stop, because I didn’t want you to disappear, but this is worse. You’re fading on the inside. You were meant to be up there.”

I followed his gaze. An acrobat launched himself from the platform, sailing through the air until he grasped the metal chains waiting for him, and my heart ached to watch. My hoop hung empty, the tape wrapping around steel worn from my frequent use. It grew closer and closer until I realized that I was walking toward it. My feet carried me to the ladder’s base. I climbed rung after rung until I was on the platform, level with the hoop.

Without thinking, I discarded my shoes and leapt. The distance was farther than usual, and I doubted myself for a moment. Did I still have my magic? Or was I earthbound now? I missed my catch, fingers grazing the base of the ring. Gravity was a force that I underestimated.

As I started to fall, I remembered Elyse’s last show. The thought of her spinning, bound by the love of her art until the very end, slowed my descent, and I stretched one inch higher to grab the bottom curve. I steadied my hold and pulled myself up. Everything was right. My skin glittered. I was grounded, as the circle reminded me that with every rotation: I’m still here. I’m still here. 

One day I wouldn’t be, but for now, I kept spinning.

Illustration by Valerie Thai

Bob’s Burgers keeps getting better. Loren Bouchard’s animated sitcom, now in its 15th season on FOX, is bigger-hearted and far more ambitious than when it first aired in 2011. It has the kind of confidence that can only emerge, I imagine, when a project that starts out with tepid-to-terrible reviews goes on to receive years of critical praise and multi-season renewals. A critic at the Washington Post once dismissed Bob’s Burgers as “derivatively dull,” and wrote that “somewhere, once again, Fred Flintstone weeps.” The show has since inspired a film, a cookbook, a comic book series, and perhaps inevitably, the porn parody Bob’s Boners (2014).

For the uninitiated: Bob’s Burgers is about a family running a struggling burger restaurant in a fictional New Jersey beach town. The Belchers are an eccentric bunch. There’s deadpan, pessimistic Bob (voiced by H. Jon Benjamin); his spirited wife Linda (John Roberts); Tina, their nerdy teen, obsessed with boys and horses (Dan Mintz); Gene, the flamboyant middle child (Eugene Mirman); and mischievous nine-year-old Louise (Kristen Schaal). The characters dive into all sorts of hijinks and adventures to keep their restaurant afloat— like participating in a water balloon battle to counter a neighbourhood rent hike—and always return to the status quo in the well-loved tradition of long-running, episodic adult animation.

Except Bob’s Burgers isn’t The Simpsons or South Park. Yes, the writing can be gross and edgy—the pilot includes a recurring bit about Tina’s itchy crotch—but it softens. Below the toilet humour lies a tender heart. It’s what makes Bob’s Burgers spark: its ability to balance absurdity with genuine emotion, and to explore existential questions, like what we owe the dead, with tremendous wit and pathos. “I am a terrible son and a terrible person,” Bob says in season 13, after spending a day trying to find his mother’s grave, which he hasn’t visited in two decades. (Meanwhile, Tina wonders whether it’s rude to pick a wedgie in a cemetery. Gene’s reply: “I think it’s rude not to.”) But in the episode’s emotional climax, Linda tells Bob that his mother would be proud of him. “Look what you’ve done with the restaurant, with this family,” she says, then adds, quickly: “Tina, take your hand out of your butt.”

Like the Simpsons, the Belchers are frozen in time—a fate that’s particularly brutal for 13-year-old Tina, forever trapped in puberty—even as the sitcom clearly cycles through the seasons, marked by holiday-centric episodes. Still, the characters evolve. Socially awkward Tina becomes more confident in her budding sexuality. When a classmate threatens to share her “erotic friend fiction” (secret, sexy stories she writes about her peers) with the whole school, Tina decides to read it to everyone herself. (Her motto: “I’m a smart, strong, sensual woman.”) Early Louise is almost demonic—in season one’s “Sexy Dance Fighting,” she tells Tina she should kill herself. Gleefully, no less! But over a dozen seasons later, we see a more vulnerable side to her character. In season 13’s “What About Job?” Louise spirals out about her future: “What if I grow up and I just am not really anything cool or exciting? What if I’m just a boring-life person?” It’s a gut-punch of an episode. Silly and resonant in equal parts, it marks the series’ gradual shift from a darker, more abrasive tone to something heartfelt and oddly profound. Over time, Bob’s Burgers has positioned itself in a realm that many critics take for granted: the airy, earnest, slice-of-life comedy. TV that is far removed from the stream of reboots, tense dramas, and dramedies that still command the most cultural authority.

Season 14’s standout, “The Amazing Rudy,” pivots away from the Belcher family for the first time. The story follows Louise’s classmate, a recurring character known as Regular- Sized Rudy (Brian Huskey), as he attends a “we’re-still-a-family dinner” with his divorced parents and their new partners. It casts the Belchers as minor characters—they first appear a quarter of the way through, in the background, bickering about whether to steal coins from a mall fountain, while Rudy tries on hats at a kiosk called “Better Off Head.” (Bob’s Burgers is reliably—and delightfully—heavy on wordplay.) The episode is funny and melancholic, scored to wistful piano melodies and Stevie Wonder, like a less-cynical BoJack Horseman. There’s a montage of past family dinners, each one showing Rudy’s parents sitting farther apart. There’s a tragicomic scene in a carwash, where Rudy’s father can’t tell Rudy he loves him without the whirring machines drowning him out. And there are moments that align us with Rudy, like when he watches the Belchers from a distance, drawn to their supportive, close-knit dynamic—a nod to Bob’s Burgers’ secret sauce, the key to its enduring charm.

“The Amazing Rudy” proves that after 262 episodes, Bob’s Burgers can do whatever the hell it wants. It can experiment with tone and perspective. It can arrange a Philip Glass song for Gene’s all-xylophone band in a way that brings me to tears. It can cast comedy superstars, from Paul Rudd to Patti Harrison. And it can channel the quiet, emotional ambition of children’s television, where animated shows like Adventure Time, Steven Universe, Hilda, Dead End, The Owl House, Summer Camp Island, and Infinity Train have often delivered more affecting and complex storytelling than adult animation over the last decade. (A few exceptions: BoJack Horseman, of course; Pantheon; A24’s Hazbin Hotel, and HBO’s terrific Harley Quinn.)

Among that company, Bob’s Burgers stands out for its remarkable longevity. Television has long been a cutthroat arena. The landscape has felt especially unstable since the Great Streaming Panic of 2022—courtesy of Wall Street—when services like Netflix, Disney+, and HBO Max became more selective about renewals, and less willing to nurture shows finding their groove. (Many also removed media from their libraries to cut costs, making a casualty of animated gems like Infinity Train and Summer Camp Island.) A new kind of Comfort Show has emerged: the rare series that gets regular renewals in a painfully commercialized industry. The survival of Bob’s Burgers is a small marvel; that the series continues to surprise and delight viewers, year after year, is an argument for patience. For giving writers time to experiment. For sticking with a TV world as it unfolds and evolves. For playing the long game—despite all the odds.

In the season six episode “Sliding Bobs,” Tina, Gene, and Louise imagine how different life would be if Bob didn’t have a moustache when he first met Linda. Would Bob and Linda have ended up together? Would their family still exist? When Tina panics at the thought that life is ruled by chaos and randomness, not fate, Linda tries to comfort her: “Everything is random, but that’s what makes life so wonderful. Sometimes, all the crap in the universe lines up—like that night I met your father. Everything lined up, and it came out Belcher.” We’re so lucky it did.

Illustration by Paige Jung

We met them first near the hot food. The catering staff were serving a dim sum shrimp dumpling on a bed of rice at the near end of the table. The caterers must have brought hundreds of ramekins to the venue that night, there was an endless stream of them, a new one for each portion.

Her eyes widened with a light of familiarity as she took me in, then gave me a smile. “You’re wearing my outfit!”

I was in a jumpsuit, sleeveless, black, a deep plunge of a neckline, a long string of pearls, black patent open toe pumps. She wore a short black skirt, pleated like a kilt, her legs in black lace stockings, her feet in heavily buckled boots. Her arms, like mine, were bare skinned, but not unadorned—elaborately tattooed. Her hair was stylish in an unkempt, flattering way.

He was in a tailored jacket, slacks a close enough match to suggest a suit, with a dress shirt and blue plaid bow tie, his own nod to the dress code.

He stood by her, encouraging her, enjoying her.

“I’m wearing your outfit?” I responded, puzzled.

“I looked for something exactly like that all day, all over town. You are wearing exactly what I pictured myself in. But I could find nothing. Where did you get that?”

“Eileen Fisher,” I laughed. “Last year’s season.”

“You bought it here?”

“Not here, dear. Your first mistake is to try shopping here.”

The two of us laughed together, discussed the difficulties of getting off the island, eventually parting company after exclaiming over the shrimp, my helpful husband steering me expertly away and back into the crowd.

We didn’t see them again for a while. The room was full, and there was another room besides, with the same food and another bar—a quieter setting, decorated with photos from the 40 years of theatre we were celebrating.

“Remember? We took your dad to see Putnam County Spelling Bee when he was here.”

“Oh, god, and then we got home to find the dog had eaten the chocolate he’d hidden in his suitcase!”

We lingered awhile and then returned to the lobby where things were noisier, gayer, brighter.

We stood at a long, bar-height table, the one nearest the entrance, at the edge of the nucleus of the crowd. Servers and other attendants orbited behind and around us as they found their way with trays, serving food, collecting glassware.

Then we heard it.

“Fuck you, you bitch.”

I turned to look as the two separated. He strode out the door. She circled past me, found an unoccupied length of table a little ways away and took out her phone. She began texting.

I stayed in my place for a few moments, absorbing. It was then that I noticed how young she was. Not yet 30, I would guess.

There I was, nearly 60, a steadfast man at my side, the calm waters of my marriage keeping me buoyant, making my own enjoyment possible. This wasn’t my crowd, either. She bit her lip, then glanced up and around and recomposed her face. I could imagine her heart pounding, her eyes stinging.

No one else had noticed. She was alone and I wished she could know that the room was not staring at her, that if she needed a safe way out, one was at hand. It was the kind of thing I would have wanted at her age. Someone to step up and say, “I’ve noticed you. I’ve chosen your side.”

I moved next to her and when she looked up, I smiled, put my fingertips on her forearm, and asked, “Will you be okay?”

“You heard that?” she asked.

“Yes, we did. But don’t worry. No one else heard.”

“I can’t believe he did that. It’s humiliating.”

I agreed that she was right to be offended. “It was a childish way to speak—and unacceptable.”

“Childish. I know. Can you believe it? He’s in his forties. But what can I do?”

“Do not date children. Of any age. I think you know enough about this man to make a good decision.”

She looked at me. “He’s moved in.”

I held her eye.

She inhaled. Sighed.

“What matters now is only this party, whether you can still enjoy yourself, whether you’ll be safe when you go home.”

She assured me he would not be violent. But he would be hard to get rid of.

“What you do after tonight is up to you. My intent is only to help you stay in this room, if you want, to confirm your right to enjoy yourself and not have someone take this away from you by being vulgar in public.”

She worked for a property manager and had come with tickets the office had purchased. She was texting to see if she could find a friend who might want to come see the show. I looked at her tickets.

“These are some of the best seats in the house. You’re right to want to share them. But if no one can come on such short notice, you will still enjoy the show. It will be fun. Entertaining.”

Her boyfriend approached and I stepped away. Everyone has the right to a little time to apologize.

He didn’t.

I glanced at my husband. We were now some distance from each other, the feuding couple between us. I didn’t look at the couple directly, but I think they felt our fleeting observation. The boyfriend walked out of the theatre.

Moments later, my husband and I and the young woman reassembled. We smiled at the other guests nearby, engaged them in light, brief, cheerful remarks.

Whenever the young woman would start to rail about her boyfriend’s misdeeds, I would let her finish her sentence and then change the subject. I was not there to be her advocate in a bad relationship. I felt she should have no time for him and tried to demonstrate this by having no time for him, or even accounts of him, myself. The path forward lay in choosing a state of mind that excluded him.

The lights dimmed a warning. We were called to the theatre.

I took my seat without optimism and let the entertainment absorb me.

Illustration by Jenny Bien-Aimé

When I was eight years old, my parents entrusted me with $16 in the form of eight $2 coins, an allowance for a school field trip to La Ronde, Montreal’s amusement park. Until 1996, the year during which the $2 tender in Canada was converted from a paper bill to a coin, my parents would have never, not in a million years, given me $16 to take along with me on a field trip, or anywhere else for that matter. As far as my mother was concerned, I had no business with paper money. However, on this particular morning in 1997, my father, quite uncharacteristically, reached into his pockets and offered me eight toonies.

“Why are you giving the boy all that money?” asked my mother, who had been eyeing the transaction discontentedly.

“Oh, it’s just some spare change,” my father replied. “In case of emergency.”

My mother grumbled an unintelligible response, but let me have the coins; whereas only a year ago, if my father had reached into his wallet and pulled out eight $2 bills and handed them over to me, she would have exploded savagely. She would have either thrown whatever she might be holding at my father’s head or reached for the nearest available object that could be thrown at my father’s head and, having thrown it, would have walked over to him, ripped the $16 out of his hands, and shoved them back into his wallet or into her own pocket. In fact, my father would never have offered me $16 in paper currency in front of my mother as it was so obviously an act that would have aggravated her.

My father’s unprecedented offer, as well as my mother’s tolerance, was intriguing. It seemed as if my parents’ emotions about money could be manipulated by something as simple as a change in its appearance.

While this was the first time that I had observed this behaviour toward money manifest itself in my parents, I was already intimately familiar with the ways in which money aroused different emotions depending on its appearance. I had this sneaky habit of roaming around our house for coins like a scavenger. During these hunts, I felt luckiest when I found coins in or under the couch, in the car, anywhere in our laundry room, or anywhere in our garage. I believed the coins I discovered in these circumstances were discovered honestly. The coins I found in drawers (in the kitchen, in the laundry room, in the wall unit that housed our sound system and television) were a morally grey area. I would try to ascertain whether these coins had been forgotten in their drawers, perhaps for weeks or months, or if they had been intentionally left there for safekeeping. If it was clear they had been forgotten, then I was happy to discover these coins and claim them; but if something intangible about their appearance, about the way they were lying in the drawer, told me that my parents knew of their presence, even if their knowledge of the coins might have been broad and abstract—even if I was confident that they would never notice if one of them went missing—then I felt guilty if I took any of them. I felt guilty for even considering whether or not to take a coin. I also felt guilty if I took a coin, any coin, that I discovered in my parents’ bedroom. Even if the coin was jammed under the base of my parents’ bedframe, and had obviously been lost, its location in my parents’ bedroom did not feel neutral. Such a coin had not been thrown in my path through the ordinary twists and turns of fate. I felt like a villainous thief if I pocketed these coins, like a person without a conscience or a moral compass.

In addition to the money’s location, there was also the issue of denomination to consider. I usually scooped up and pocketed pennies without a second thought. Nickels were small in surface area and value, but also thicker and more robust than all the other coins. A nickel weighed 4.6 grams, almost as much as a quarter, which weighed 5.05 grams, and more than twice as much as a dime, which weighed 2.07 grams (measurements which I conducted assiduously on the electronic scale in our kitchen). I always found it difficult to pocket nickels, as their weight was problematic, disproportionate in appearance to their five-cent essence. I usually ignored them in favour of pennies and dimes.

Dimes were the smallest, daintiest, and thinnest of all the coins. You could balance them easily on your smallest fingernail. I would often chew on dimes because I liked their metallic taste and the feeling of the thin, serrated edge lodging itself into different crevices between my teeth. In fact, I liked dimes so much and had such good feelings toward them that I almost never spent the ones I found, preferring to hoard them instead. I would occasionally take all the dimes I had accumulated out of their secret hiding place in my closet and lay them on the ground to examine them joyously, before chewing on them absentmindedly for hours on end. It was a minor miracle that I didn’t swallow about a dozen of them during the course of my childhood.

Quarters tugged at my heartstrings in both directions, almost equally. Quarters were not as thick and unpleasant as nickels, but they were unwieldy in size, and cumbersome to flip and play with. Additionally, the quarter’s purchasing power was 25 times that of a penny, and two-and-a-half times that of a dime. This purchasing power was a double-edged sword. I felt luckier when I found a quarter than when I found a penny, at least 25 times luckier, but I also felt 25 times guiltier. It was at least 25 times more important that I establish and reason through the circumstances of its discovery, to be certain that I was finding it and pocketing it in an appropriate and conscionable manner. This moral standard almost always proved to be one I could not satisfy for myself internally. I always felt a little wretched when I picked up a quarter, even if I picked it up from a sidewalk or from a trail in the woods. Then again, there was the superstitious delight of finding a quarter, which was a rare occurrence, and therefore accompanied by the feeling that fortune was smiling upon me.

Finally, the loonie. It was pure evil. I wanted as little to do with it as possible. I would rather have found four different quarters (for all the moral quandaries that all four findings might have presented). I hated the loonie’s eleven-sided polygon shape, how its edges were often blunted and beaten from use, instead of smooth and circular like all the other coins. I hated the loonie’s bronze plating (that would later become brass plating) to which dirt adhered, tarnishing it, rendering its golden hue murky and anemic.

If I pocketed a loonie, against my better judgment, I needed to be rid of it as quickly as possible. But disposing of a loonie was easier said than done. I usually spent my coins at the dépanneur. As I didn’t like to accumulate coins (dimes excepted), and wanted to leave the dépanneur with fewer of them than when I had entered it, spending a loonie (or even worse, two loonies) usually meant buying more items than I knew what to do with. Those items (gum, chips, candy, flimsy trinkets) would fill my pockets uncomfortably, or give me a stomach ache if I ate them all at once, making me feel nauseous and guilty.

Enter into this hierarchy of coins the toonie, eight of which my father would hand over to me on the morning before my school trip to La Ronde. The toonie was a void, like the vacuum of space. It meant nothing to me. For a person who had such strong and complex feelings toward all other coins, this feeling, or absence of feeling, was peculiar and bewildering. I would often ponder the toonie, while it sat in the upturned palm of my right hand, gently shifting my palm so that it might catch the light at different angles. The more I thought about it, the more the toonie seemed unreal, manufactured. Well, all coins were manufactured. What I mean to say is that it seemed fake, inauthentic. It had a nickel outer ring, a bronze inner core, and a polar bear on an ice floe embossed on its reverse side. These elements coalesced to form a coin which seemed excessively novel. I had the disconcerting impression that I was holding a knockoff, an imitation of money, and not actual money. I hoped that if I exposed the toonie to the right light, I might form a unique attachment to it, but the toonie remained silent, inscrutable.

Given my indifference toward the toonie coin, my behaviour during the field trip to La Ronde was predictable.

During lunch, as my classmates and I sat on picnic tables, eating hot dogs, burgers, and French fries, one of my classmates took three quarters out of his pocket and used them to play an arcade game that was beside the food stall where we had just purchased our lunches. The object of the game was to fish out various toys or stuffed animals from a large bin while operating, with a joystick and a button, a robotic arm and hand that was perched above the bin. When the player thought they had maneuvered the arm into a good position with the joystick, they would bash the button, and the hand would close in what looked like an attempt to secure whatever toy or stuffed animal the player hoped to acquire.

My classmate played three turns with his three quarters, and lost all three. The game was rigged against the player. Once a quarter was introduced, the whole machine began vibrating like it was experiencing an earthquake, making the robotic arm and hand more difficult to operate. Additionally, the hand and arm seemed at times intentionally unresponsive (often these were crucial times, when a toy or object seemed just within the player’s grasp).

I was sorry to see my classmate lose. Before he could walk away from the game, I approached him and offered him a toonie to let him keep playing. After all, it cost me nothing, emotionally at least. This precipitated a frenzy amongst my classmates. Where had I gotten this money? Did I have more of this money, of these toonies, wherever they had come from?!?! About 12 to 15 of my classmates congregated around me and rattled off inquiries about my toonies and whether I might give them a turn, and in that moment, I took all of my remaining coins from my pocket and slammed them onto the dashboard of the console, gifting them to my classmates.

My offering was applauded, but once I relinquished the money, no one paid any further attention to me. I didn’t even attempt to play the game once. I had no desire to play the game. I enjoyed quests for objects that were solitary, undertaken for private, personally significant reasons. The communal endeavour of this arcade, the pursuit of the toys my classmates hoped to snatch from it, was public, almost lurid, and antithetical to my introverted nature. Anyways, it didn’t seem like my classmates would have let me play even if I had wanted to. No one seemed inclined to offer me a place in line, or a turn at the arcade, though they were constantly trading and offering places in line to each other.

Three of my classmates won at the arcade and brought a toy or stuffed animal home with them. On the bus ride back to school, as I watched those three classmates with their toys and stuffed animals, and listened to my other classmates who couldn’t stop talking about the thrills and frustrations of their various turns at the arcade, I starting feeling a bit like a fool. When I returned home that afternoon, my mother asked me where the hell the $16 my father had given me that morning had gone, and why the hell I didn’t have anything to show for it.

“You don’t even have five or ten or 25 cents in change?” my mother yelled at me indignantly. “What could you possibly have done with all that money?”

I lied. Like many liars, I based my lie in truth. I told my mother about the arcade game, but said that I was the one who had spent all of my money on it. I told her that I hadn’t won a single one of my 64 turns, and as each turn had cost a quarter, I didn’t have any money left. My mother was irate. She would relate this story 10 to 30 times a year, whenever she wanted to reiterate how spoiled I was, how unappreciative I was of the value of money.

Despite my mother’s ridicule, I still thought it better to disappoint her in this way. I preferred that she think that I had wasted all that money chasing my silly and childish dreams, than to tell her that I had simply given the money away, given it away for everyone else to take a turn at the arcade, while not even playing a turn myself.

This realization had come to me on the bus ride back from La Ronde. As I contemplated the eight toonies I had lost that day in my mind’s eye, I experienced deep shame and embarrassment. I knew that I had behaved inappropriately, in a manner that was not in keeping with the unwritten rules which governed almost everyone’s emotional conduct toward money. What kind of a fool had I been to surrender $16 so amenably, so accommodatingly, without even being coerced or influenced? What kind of a fool had I been not to value, not just one or two, but all eight of my toonies, all $16 worth of them, when my classmates had spent the remainder of the afternoon obsessed with creating a system to allocate and trade different portions and values of my $16 amongst themselves, a miniature economy from which they had excluded me entirely. I had been a mighty fool, a mighty fool indeed.

Suddenly, the toonie coin, which had for so long remained inert, took on life and meaning. Over the coming days, months, and years, the two-toned coin’s allure would become so powerful that it would subsume my desires and disdains for all other coins. It was impossible for me to refuse the gaze of the toonie coin’s eye. The command of the stern bronze pupil and its scintillating nickel iris was absolute. I abandoned my pursuit of all other coins, and yearned only for the toonie.