"Caviar", An Excerpt From Widow Fantasies by Hollay Ghadery

Widow Fantasies, short fiction from Hollay Ghadery (Gordon Hill Press 2024)

“Caviar”

If I swallow hard, the synthetic punch of his body wash is still in the back of my throat. My skin still puckers into gooseflesh. The heat of the shower is behind the closed door, but I can feel how it ribboned out to meet me.

And I can still see everything, all at once.

Me, standing one arm slack at my side and the other holding the bathroom doorknob. There’s his wide, wet Appalachian back, a constellation of freckles and tendrils of steam rising from his shoulders. His hand, pressing against the shower wall, fingers splayed, his head bowed and his other hand out of sight, but working a rhythm. He must be making noise: the whimpering, jagged breathing I know, but I can’t hear for the buzz of my body and the pressure in my head, even though my thinking is big, big.

For the too-loud bathroom fan and splat of water on the shower floor.

I pull the door closed, quietly, and stare into the grainy expanse of the repurposed barn board. We picked the door together, he and I, at a weekend pop-up antique market in a church parking lot. We laughed at how cliché we were becoming— purchasing overpriced antiques—something we promised would never happen, but also, something that felt inevitable.

Clichés exist for exactly that reason, he had said. Because in part, they’re truth.

And I smiled and nodded, yes, even though, even then, I thought the truth may be too fine, too fleeting to be that easy to hold. I agreed because it helped make everything—the door strapped to the roof of our hybrid, the peripheral blur of other Sunday small-town tourists, the $400 we’d just spent and the twenty-grand on IVF—seem natural. Seem less like we were giving in, already.

And we swore we’d never do that.

Now this.

The wet smacking sound of his hand pumping against himself. A sickening slosh in my stomach. We had salmon for dinner because he read somewhere that it was good for my ovaries. His furrowed brow and slick fish-lipped focus in the shower: I didn’t have to see his face to picture it. My legs spread wide in stirrups, body bare under a thin blue gown and the heavy demand for more of me: more tests, more transparency. My eggs growing gills and the small store of dark mouths I have left inside me.

So it’s my problem, my fault, and all this time, it always has been.

I’m trying to remember why I went upstairs in the first place.

I was standing at the kitchen sink, soaking curled and browned salmon skin off a baking tray. It was almost dark outside. Just a split-lip sunset and the deadweight sadness of Sunday evening, like a broken promise.

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Hollay Ghadery is a multi-genre writer living in Ontario on Anishinaabe land. She has her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, is with Gordon Hill Press. Her debut novel, The Unraveling of Ou, is due out with Palimpsest Press in 2026, and her children’s book, Being with the Birds, with Guernica Editions in 2027. Hollay is the host of the Neighbourhood Bookclub on 105.5 FM and a co-host of HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is also a book publicist and the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. Learn more about Hollay at www.hollayghadery.com.