Companions by Elodie A. Roy

They live above the butcher’s shop. At six every morning the butcher wakes them up. They hear him pounding the meat. It is sometime in the mid-1980s. They’ve not been married for long. They’ve been married for such a short time that they don’t know what being married is like. When they lie half asleep in bed they hear muffled noises coming from beneath the floor. In the room below theirs, dead animals are being methodically skinned and quartered. It is a horrible thing to picture yet they barely picture it. They’re in love. They live in the unsubstantial space that their love for each other creates. Recreates every day. It’s all a dream.

She works part-time in a travel agency on the rue du Temple in Paris. They live in the suburbs. Paris is not far – ten, fifteen minutes on the train. They feel different there – freer. At weekends they visit her great aunt in the Pletzl. They bring her dates, tiny almond cookies, oranges from the market nearby. Sometimes they take her to the park or to the narrow bookshop across the street. Before meeting her husband she had a Jewish lover. She refused to follow him to the kibbutz: there was no faith left in her. They separated. He must be in Israel still.

Her husband doesn’t have a job. He’s not looking for one. She likes working for the two of them: all day long she sells holidays to people. Trips to Greece and Spain and Italy. People will go wherever the sun is. She enjoys the thought of others traveling. When she’s away he reads paperbacks – Dashiell Hammett and Simenon. He works on his thesis. He misses her all the time. When she’s back home they make love and play records – Kate Bush, Patti Smith, David Bowie. They have dinner very late at night: she likes cooking for him on the small gas stove and watching him eat. They buy their steaks from the butcher. The butcher is fond of them: he always gives them a discount. There’s a mouse living in the flat. Bits of food go missing. The mouse has chewed a corner of the cereal box. They like the idea of the mouse: its soft, invisible companionship. They call it “the third person”. The idea of setting a trap never crosses their minds.

They don’t do much beside smoking and reading and making love and playing records. They’ve only been married for two, three months maybe. They’ve known each other less than a year. They knew from the start they wanted to be together. She wants children. She wants his children. Their flat is very small and when they start a family they’ll have to move out. They don’t want to live anywhere else.

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ELODIE A. ROY — Elodie is a French-born writer living in Newcastle upon Tyne, England. Her fiction and essays have appeared in The Stinging Fly, New World Writing Quarterly, The Oxonian Review, Masks Literary Magazine, Scrawl Place, and elsewhere. As a cultural theorist, she’s the author of two nonfiction academic books. She can be contacted at e.a.roy@riseup.net.

Art by EARLY BOON — Early has been drawing since she could remember. Art has always been inspiring and thought provoking to her, so she strives to provide a moment of contemplation with each of her pictures.