When the General came into the shop, he came with thunder. He was an arm of the President — the arm with the sword — and his questions were commands to be followed without question.

“Printer!” barked the General. “Will you make posters to hang in the city! Will you tell the people the truth about their glorious President!”

Work was slow and money hard to come by. Food was nearly impossible to find anywhere, every market was empty. The Printer was shaking, he had so little to eat.

The President was generous to his few loyal supporters. His General was ruthless with the rest. It was unwise to disagree with their requests, and really, what bother is it to anyone if it’s truth being printed or not? And what was truth anyway? Truth is printed all the time, by anyone! Let the people do as they will!

At the end of each day, he returned home and in the abundant food for his family he found truth. And each morning, it was lost, and he entered his shop a liar. When the door closed behind him, it sounded like thunder.

And so it went each day for months and years, his hands covered in the dark ink of the government. He could not care what horrible shapes the ink took. He would not look at it any more than to check the coverage. Day after day, he laboured.

The colour was the richest black. It was his pride.

Emma stopped eating meat when she was seven years old. Two years later, she stopped eating milk and cheese, and three years after that she stopped eating processed food. None of this was for ethical or health reasons. Emma just had bad luck with food.

When she was seven, Emma’s t-ball team was going out for hot dogs, and when she bit into hers, she also bit into a severed pinky finger. (It belonged to one of the workers at the factory where the weiners were made.) As soon as she pulled it out and saw it pointing right back at her, she refused to eat meat ever again.

When Emma was nine she found a gelatinous gob of something icky white on top of the butter, and a little while later there was an incident with chocolate milk that she never talked about. On her tenth birthday she found what she thought was a frog’s eye in her ice cream cone. (It wasn’t actually a frog’s eye, though, it was a completely different animal.) This is when Emma stopped eating dairy.

Finally, when Emma was thirteen, she stopped eating processed food. This was an unusual year, actually, even for her. One time she found a little green worm in a fruit bar, another time a hornet’s nest in a bag of chips. A can of pop she nearly drank out of was full of nails, a donut was actually an angry coiled-up rattlesnake, and she found a paint-soaked sponge in a package that was supposed to be her favourite organic tofu. Who knows how these things happen, but they did, and they happened to Emma.

One day, Emma is going to stop eating most fruits and vegetables, all rice and beans and nuts, and everything except for a specific type of apple that she will grow herself. And then one day, something will happen, and she’ll stop eating even that.

But as Emma always said, don’t go letting her stories stop you from eating what you want. She just had bad luck, is all.

Somewhere in the building across the street, in some scattered bit of his confused heart, Marcel admired what his wife had done. He shoved the deed into his pocket and wandered around. Rows and rows of patio furniture, all arranged neatly across the split room, more still in boxes in the back. Each table and each chair had accumulated only the dust since they were last cleaned perhaps two months earlier. Marcel pulled a plastic chair away from a glass table and its collapsed umbrella, and he rested.

When he proposed to his wife so many graying years ago, he promised her everything. They had nothing at the time so everything was easy to give, like a house, a family, food on the table. And all these things, he gave her.

They bought a store together, a little corner store in the small town where they lived. He liked the work but never quite understood the bookkeeping, so she took care of that. And every day, together, they ran the store. People went there for groceries, to rent movies, to enjoy a home-cooked meal. They raised their children there, and their children grew up to raise their own children there, and still, always together, they ran their store.

Looking around the dark room, Marcel wiped his eyes dry. All this furniture ordered from catalogues and shipped here, all set up and arranged and regularly cleaned. He had so many questions. He wanted none of them answered. He wanted out.

Last year, she told him that she was dying. She knew for a while, but she kept it to herself. It didn’t make sense, maybe, or she didn’t believe it, or she forgot. Her mind was getting old, she said. Foggy. She forgot some things, and remembered other things, things that never happened. Sometimes she didn’t recognize where she was.

He thought she was just tired.

She was tired for a long time.

Marcel made sure the For Sale sign was visible in the boarded-up windows. He locked up the building across from their store and put the key that the locksmith made into his pocket. According to the deed, they bought the building together years before she passed away, but this was the first time he’d seen this foggy place. He did not want to come back.