The Withdrawal Method Read Free Page A

cough. He waited until the toilet flushed, the stall creaked open, the taps ran, the hand drier roared, and the bathroom door closed. Left alone, he put his head in his hands and sat there like that, on the toilet lid in the stall in the bathroom, until his lunch break was over.
    HE GOT HOME that night and she was still at work. The slick clock above the kitchen table, all chrome and Scandinavian, claimed it was half past six. She was usually home before him and had something happening, food or booze, when he walked in the door. In the fridge he found half a bottle of red wine; it had been there for weeks. He poured himself a glass and drank it, ice-cold and sour, as he wandered around the apartment.

    As he made his way from room to room, everything struck him as relics: framed photos of a bike trip through the Maritimes, a table that had belonged to her grandparents, the fern that he had nearly killed and she had revived and that now bloomed green and glorious in the living room - artifacts in a museum, a history of their life in things. What would it all mean when she came home with a different skin? Maybe they'd have to get new stuff.
    He sat down at the kitchen table and from his briefcase removed the notebook. What had started as a simple inventory had become something else - notes for a story or a film treatment. Yes, a movie! One of those hipster indie rom-coms, maybe, something quirky starring a hot young actor as him and a hot young actress as her, with lots of talking to the camera and a badass soundtrack. Encouraged, he got out his pen to add another story.
    One summer years ago they were doing a shop together, and the woman in front of them in line at the grocery store had a shocking sunburn - the sort that looks as though the skin is still cooking, that it would be gooey to touch.
    The woman was middle-aged, a typical July mom in a tank top tucked into khaki shorts, a crotch that stretched impossibly from navel to knees. In certain places the sunburn - which spread across the mom's back, down her arms, up her neck - had begun to peel. White fractures split the red, the edges dry and ragged. They stood gawking at the sunburn while the mom placed eight boxes of ice cream onto the conveyor belt in a slow, pained way.

    And then, before he could stop her, she was reaching out and taking hold of one of the flaps of dead skin on the mom's back and gently pulling it free. The mom watched the cashier ring her ice cream through, oblivious. He was horrified, but amazed. What sort of human being would do such a thing? And then something snapped and, before she could be caught with the evidence, she flicked the little ribbon of mom away.
    On the subway ride home, groceries clustered in bags at their feet, he demanded: "Why?"
    "I don't know - weren't you tempted to do it? It was just so ..." She made a noise similar to those she produced during sex.
    "No. No, it was absolutely not'just so' anything. That was sociopathic behaviour. A cannibal might do something similar."
    "Oh, come on. Cannibals eat people, not peel them."
    "What do you think the first step is?"
    "Please."
    They would move in together two months later.
    He sat there, reading the story over. It came floating up off the page with the milky miasma of a recalled dream. Crap. Had he made the whole thing up? There had been a sunburned lady once at the grocery store, he was sure - but had the peeling attack actually happened, or was it just something they discussed, or he imagined? He poured out the last drips of wine from the bottle, tipped back a sludgy mouthful, and closed the journal. He sat there for a long time with his hand on the cover before he looked up at the clock.

    Ten past seven. She was late - very late. She'd never been this late before, not without calling or a plan. Maybe the skin had started to slough away at the office and she'd had to get her colleagues to help with the unwrapping. Or maybe something had gone wrong and she was lying on the floor