Marvin was at the cash, having stepped in for an evening employee who was on supper break. Gwen exchanged a few words with him, paid for her food and passed the noticeboard on her way out. She paused when she saw that two more strips had been torn from the notice for the grief discussion group.

So. Other people were grieving. She hoped she wouldn’t know anyone who turned up at the café. Cass would recognize her, but Cass wouldn’t have posted the notice. The city was large enough that the attendees could be complete strangers to one another.

Maybe she wouldn’t go at all. She didn’t want to be part of any sort of group confessional. Woe to the people, indeed.

She cast a glance at other notices and inspected the array of fonts and coloured inks, each attempting to draw attention. What would it be like to brandish her name publicly in outrageous fluorescent capitals? Her full name, stretched across the length of the board.

G-W-E-N-D-O-L-O-E-N-A.

A name she used only on official documents, such as passport forms. Brigg had believed her name to be outlandish. At the beginning, he had teased; later, he’d scoffed.

Gwen knew that her late mother had been fanciful at the time of her birth. She’d become pregnant at thirty-nine, and Gwen was her only child. She’d named her after Gwendoloena, wife of Merlin the Magician, even while writing serious articles declaring that Merlin’s stories were not a true part of the earliest Arthurian legends. Her mother had published a respected paper about the Arthurian portion of Layamon’s Brut, a Middle English poem known as The Chronicle of Britain. She loved any story of Arthur, and especially loved the language of the Brut.

If Gwen’s mother hadn’t approved of her daughter’s marriage, she’d never said as much. She’d died long ago and wasn’t around for support while the twins were growing up.

Gwen stared at the board again. Other people seemed to have lives that were whole, fulfilled—but did they really? She wondered if she had always been on the fringes of that sort of experience. Who on earth did she used to be? How far back would she have to go to find the Gwen who was buried in the past?

She had several days to think about joining the discussion group.

The wind was gusting when she left Marvin’s. She stopped to straighten a potted geranium that had tipped over on its side. Crimson petals were blowing about. She crossed the parking lot and slid the groceries onto the back seat before climbing into the front. Fragments of grey clouds swept across the grizzled sky.

Carry Tiger

CHIYO

Chiyo stopped at Marvin’s on the way to her evening tai chi class. She paid for a tin of olives and a plastic container of arugula, and stuffed both into her backpack next to her energy bars. After class, she would make a salad, add tuna and olives, chop in a bit of celery, green onion. Before leaving the store, she scanned the noticeboard at the end of the checkout aisles. She was thinking of her mother’s illness, the diagnosis of leukemia, the treatments, the long, slow death at home. When her mother had stopped leaving the house, Chiyo became responsible for errands, necessary and unnecessary. Sometimes, for Chiyo, coping had been a matter of walking out of the house for no apparent reason. No reason except to get away from her mother.