IMAN SLUMPED IN front of the computer, her head resting on the pillar of her forearm. Yawning, she rubbed the crusted yellow remnants of sleep from her eyes and checked the clock in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen, which confirmed—not for the first time—that it wasn’t yet eight o’clock. A human hour for the nine-to-fivers, perhaps, but as someone who rarely rose before ten o’clock on weekdays and noon on weekends, Iman thought a seven-thirty start time was nothing short of cruelty.
She opened Microsoft Word and squinted against the fusillade of white pixels, shielding her eyes like a vampire before a cross. Her phone buzzed. She checked her notifications, saw a text from Brian, reading:
“Holy cow. U got up before me?!?!”
Grinning despite her exhaustion, Iman tapped out a reply. “Showered ate and out the door by 7 sharp :S. Even made extra smoothie for you. In fridge.”
The response came a moment later: “W almond milk?!?”
In reply, Iman favoured a simple: “;)”
“U R So sexy.”
Iman laughed, texted back: “Breakfast turns you on? Your mom makes it for you like every weekend. Is there something you should tell me?”
“Not smoothies tho so its kosher.”
Iman forced herself to put the phone aside. There was no point coming in at such an ungodly hour if she was just going to fritter the time away texting. She’d felt the crunch over the last month, as her RAship sprawled from fifteen hours a week to nearly thirty—not all of them compensated. In addition to her normal work editing papers and managing correspondence, Professor Motes had recently had her poring through obscure journals and fetching articles on topics far afield from Western Literature, which was supposed to be his area of focus.
As if summoned by her thoughts, the hallway door swung open and Motes stepped into the office.
“Morning, professor,” Iman said, glancing at him from her screen. Motes’ appearance had become steadily more alarming over the past month. He’d dropped a good twenty pounds from his fleshy frame, giving him the wrinkled look of a balloon partially deflated. His olive skin had a pale greenish hue, and pimples erupted in an oily tiara beneath his thinning hairline. His eyes retained their emerald intensity behind wire-rimmed glasses, but the flesh beneath them was baggy and bruised.
Motes grunted in reply to her greeting. He fished a key ring from his pocket and stabbed a key into the lock.
“How are things?”
“Fine, fine. Check your email. I’ve got more stuff for you.”
“I did. I’m already on it. Do you want paper copies or PDFs?”
“Whatever. Just get it done. Oh, and here.” He dug through the messenger bag for a notebook, tore a page from its spiral binding, and slapped it onto her desk. “Check these out for me.”
“Sure. Do you want me to go now, or . . . ” she began, but Motes was already heading for his office, his head down as if trudging against a strong headwind.He slammed the door behind him hard enough to rattle its pane of frosted glass.
Iman’s hand drifted to her phone and brought up her news ticker app. She scrolled through a few articles, keen to read something not steeped in academia. Her eyes tripped over a headline: Body Found Outside of Local Strip Club. Intrigued (and a bit guilty at her interest), she clicked the link. The article served up a few juicy morsels of grotesquery—severed hand in the parking lot, viscera dragged into a nearby field—but little in the way of hard facts. No ID on the victim, no presumed motive. Just some rhetorical fluff and a few reaction quotes from the shell-shocked manager. She forwarded the link to Brian. He pinged back five minutes later.
“OMG sick!! WTF U think did it?!?!”
“Who knows? Some sicko probably. Though sort of sounds like body was mauled by animals.”
“U think bears?! :O”
Iman shook her head. Though he’d moved to Canada from Hong Kong when he was only five, Brian hard-headedly retained stereotypes of the country as a sprawling backwoods, with wolves and moose cavorting behind every strip of new-growth forest lining the highway. “No bears in Niagara Peninsula, hun.”
“What bout in Marineland?”
Iman typed a response, bit her lip, deleted it. Brian shot over a follow-up message:
“Check and Mate B ^)”
Snorting, Iman set her phone down and resumed her article-trawling between sips at her tea. Its bitter, fragrant taste rolled over her tongue. In spite of her best efforts, her mind kept veering back to the gory description of the body in the field. She wasn’t alarmist by nature, but the fact that something so gruesome had happened so close to home was unsettling. Niagara Falls was only a ten-minute drive down the QEW, and on several occasions Iman had driven past (though never gone into, of course), the club the article had mentioned. She pictured the body lying in the waist-high grass, a shroud of flies rippling over its pulpy remains. Ludicrous to think a wild bear could make it all the way down the Niagara Peninsula unseen, but a cougar might manage it. And there were zoos nearby . . .
She shook these macabre thoughts from her mind and picked up the paper Motes had put on her desk. A dozen call numbers were scrawled across its upper half, sloppy but legible, if only just.
An itch corkscrewed into her sinuses and yanked out a sneeze. Droplets of moisture dappled her monitor. She grabbed a Kleenex and mopped the monitor clean. Another sneeze came, but she was prepared this time and directed it safely into her tissue. She dabbed her upper lip and worked a knuckle into the tender crux between the bridge of her nose and her left eye, where a histaminic itch burrowed into the membrane. Damn ragweed. Shouldn’t the season be over by now? Her symptoms had tapered into mild irritation after prolonged periods spent outdoors. Why the sudden resurgence?
She rubbed her nose. Whatever its cause, an allergy attack offered all the incentive she needed to leave the office. She locked her computer with a few keystrokes and headed for the library.