WHAT THE HEY
ALM No.93, September 2026
SHORT STORIES
Sorrow!
Sorrow is everywhere—a bruise that never yellows and never fades, a weed that chokes the crop. Sorrow is every old person who ever died alone in a small, shitty room. Sorrow is alive in the streets and in the shopping malls. Sorrow in space stations and theme parks. In cyberspace. In the Rocky Mountans, the Mariana Trench. All this sorrow.
And here I am in the cemetery eating my lunch: baloney on Wonder Bread, too much yellow mustard, no lettuce or tomato, an apple and a beer. I believe that the dead speak to us, but I don’t think they do it with words. They use the materials they have at hand—a gust of air, a small ripple on an otherwise still lake, or hidden inside a dozing stem some sap is tickled and a flower blooms that would never have opened otherwise.
The sky rains and the world shines, rows of tombstones, the grass like glass. There is a breeze.
Maddy tried to be matter-of-fact about it all when she got the news: cancer of the spleen. What the hell is a spleen? A spleen is a cartoon body part, not something a real person has, let alone something that gets sick and kills.
She tried to tell me that everybody who’s ever lived has had cancer lots of times—even a foetus gets cancer—except our bodies almost always get rid of it before it spreads. Cancer is what we call those bits our bodies fail to slough off. I found some comfort in that. It made cancer feel everyday and approachable. Universal. I wanted to reach inside Maddy and pluck out the cancer—and maybe while I was there I’d remove gold coins and keys and tropical birds—and show you the surprises all of us conceal within.
I think emotions affect your body as much as X-rays and vitamins and car crashes. And whatever it is I’m feeling right now, well, God only knows what parts of my body are being demolished. And I deserve it. Because I’m not a good person—because I’m a bad person who also happens to be lost.
Oh! to travel back ten years—to when I still thought of myself as a good person and before I realized I was lost. Every moment felt like I was getting away with something. Every moment felt like five o’clock quitting time. Paradise!
You know how I met Maddy? I was coming back from lunch one day with Alex and Marty. I’d had three glasses of red, and I knew it wouldn’t be too smart to show up at the office—it was the tail end of the days when you could still plausibly drink during lunch and not immediately be suspended, and I didn’t want to push it—this was my third job in five years.
So I pretended I had to pick something up from the dry cleaners. It was a sweater-optional weather day, and the sun came out from behind a cloud and I was standing at the corner of Sherbourne and Drake in a wonderful liquid yellowness. I felt like I was being teleported into the sun, and the heat on my skin felt like music. Then the sun went behind the clouds, and I felt like I was locked inside an airliner’s bathroom. And then I closed my eyes and opened them again and across the street was a woman holding up a sign: Fortune Teller.
What the hey! I thought and, on an impulse walked over, laid down a five and said, “Fill me in.”
The fortune teller certainly wasn’t cultivating an aura of mystery. She dressed like her welfare check had just arrived and she was off to buy a carton of smokes for her six illegitimate toddlers: sweat pants, no makeup, men’s worn brown leather shoes much too big for her feet.
But I still wanted my fortune told. It’s a mood you get in maybe once a decade, like a thirst, and once you have it, you have to slake it. So I pressed forward.
“What can you tell me?”
She looked at me like I was homework. She grabbed my hand, pressed the meat of my thumb for a few seconds, looked up at me and said, “I see you sitting in a glade, all of the creatures of the forest sitting around you. There’s a blue jay on your left palm, a black squirrel on your right—it’s dozing—it’s resting, completely at peace by the look of it.
That’s not what I was expecting, but I liked the way the words made the inside of my head feel.
She looked down at my palm, then back up at me and went on: “You were trouble as a teenager, and you probably pushed your parents too far, and they probably gave you up for lost.”
She was good.
She said, “You were about twenty, and you saw something that scared you into changing your ways. What was it?”
“Aren’t you supposed to be telling me?”
“A car accident.”
Shit, she was good.
“How many people were killed?” she asked.
“Four.”
“Four people—and afterwards you went to your parents’ house. You said to them something along the lines of, Mom, Dad, I’ve seen the error of my ways, and I’ve decided I no longer want to be the person I was before. I’m going to be someone new now, someone better, somebody I can respect. Your mother cried.”
Traffic and people thrummed around us, but they might as well have been on a TV muted in the background. I didn’t know what to say.
“The thing is,” she continued, “you changed only a little bit, and only for a little while. You lacked the courage to follow through on the criminal promise of your teens, and you were too lazy to become a genuinely good person. You wonder why I look at you funny, well, now you know why.”
I was tipsy, so I said, “I know about my past. Tell me about my future.”
She said, “What am I supposed to tell you—that your future is going to be different, or better? I can’t, because you’re never going to change. You may have a red-haired son and a left-handed daughter one day. You may be stung by a jellyfish in Mexico and die within an hour. But so what? In your head, you’re this neither-here-nor-there person. The experiences won’t change you. Who cares?”
She said, “You think I’m trailer trash, but what of it? I have a certain power, but having it doesn’t mean I have to embrace it. Most of the time I reject my powers, but today I needed money, and that money is going to come from you. A hundred dollars. Pay me now.”
“Why should I?”
“Because otherwise I’ll tell you even more things about yourself you’d rather not know. Buy my silence.”
I did.
She folded up my five twenties and her card table and walked away.
Then, from behind me, a woman’s voice said, “I bet you like animals.”
I turned around and there was Maddy, with a Jack Russell terrier on a leash straining to sniff curb-side newspaper boxes.
“Huh?”
“Animals. I bet you talk to animals all the time, whenever you see them. Like right here, right now.”
She looked to be the same age as me, but without the mileage. She looked almost like Jennifer Aniston from Friends, same blue eyes, same blond hair, same radiant smile. She saw that I was maybe a disaster, and yet she approached me. She began our dance together.
I looked at her dog, which she introduced as Astro.
“Hey there, boy. Yeah, I do love animals.” I squatted down, scratched him behind his ears. “Why would your mistress be telling me that?”
“Why?” she asked. “Because people who talk to animals are people who are disinhibited. Certain situations take them out of themselves—talking to animals, talking to fortune tellers. A fortune teller gives you permission to relax and not keep everything plugged up inside. You can tell them anything. And once it’s over, back in goes the plug and you feel better for having vented.”
“You heard her?”
“I couldn’t help it. Young Astro here had to do his business, and I had to wait.”
“She saw you there, listening, the whole time?
“Yup.”
“And you still want to talk to me?”
Brendan indeed has red hair, and his sister Zoë is left handed.
But I’ve never gone to Mexico, never will.
PAUL ILLIDGE lives and works in a small city north of Toronto, Canada. His fiction, poetry and nonfiction have been published in The Antigonish Review, The Fiddlehead, Grain, Open Minds Quarterly, New English Review, Toronto Life Magazine, Mental Health Talk, Dumbo Press, Exile (upcoming), Sybil Journal, Adelaide Literary Magazine.
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