This selection, chosen by guest editor Kirsten Kowalewski, is from If No One Speaks by Sam Szanto (Alien Buddha Press 2022).
The Second Therapy Session
‘Why are you in this relationship?’ asks Julianne. For our second session, she is wearing a pink cardigan with her hair in a tight swollen bun, like the peonies about to burst into bloom in the yard outside. Around her neck is a crucifix on a thin chain.
‘Lauren?’ Julianne smiles. ‘Why are you in this relationship with Paul?’
‘Well, we have a cat and a flat.’ I laugh at the rhyme, the only one who does.
‘Is there anything else you’d like to add?’ Julianne asks, as if I am on the witness stand. I suppose I am, but in comfier surroundings and with a smaller judge and jury.
‘Did you ever hear about that tree that grew around a bike?’ I ask. ‘The bike was left beside a tree in 1914. Maybe by a soldier who went off to war. Over time, the tree treated it like a wound, scarring and scabbing its way around it until the bike was seven feet off the ground.’
Paul is staring at me.
‘Are you the bike or the tree in this analogy, Lauren?’ Julianne leans forward.
‘It’s just a metaphor for every long-term relationship. You grow around each other and become something different until you’re mutually interdependent. I’m with Paul because I can’t imagine not being with Paul.’
‘I’m the bike,’ Paul says.
‘Can you tell Paul how you feel about him right now, Lauren?’ Julianne asks. ‘And Paul, I’d like you to listen until she has finished, maintaining eye contact. Lauren, remember we talked last week about not blaming or shaming, and working from the ‘I’ perspective.’
Paul and I had ignored that advice. In the first session, emotions flew and landed like small grenades. Neither of us had let the other talk uninterrupted, and at the end Julianne suggested this might be a central issue in our relationship. I hadn’t needed to pay fifty pounds to hear that.
‘I feel like he’s going through the motions,’ I say. ‘Like he’s only here because I blackmailed him into it. Also, he doesn’t want sex any more—’
‘You feel like he doesn’t want sex any more—’
‘He doesn’t even want a conversation any more—’
‘This is just bullshit, Lauren.’ Paul cups his neck as if it’s stuffed with the feelings I’ve been expelling.
‘Paul, please listen to Lauren. You can have your say when she’s finished.’
‘If she ever is,’ Paul mutters.
‘He goes out with his mates every weekend, never makes a meal, never feeds the cat, doesn’t remember our anniversary. I’m presuming you get the picture, Julianne.’ Anger clings to me.
‘You feel he’s going through the motions.’
‘He is going through the motions.’
‘This is just bullshit, Lauren,’ Paul says, as if this is a TV drama and the rewind button has been pressed.
‘Whatever,’ I say, like a child.
No one says anything. Time curls in on itself.
‘Paul,’ Julianne says, ‘I’d be interested to hear from you. Why are you in this relationship, and how do you feel about Lauren right now?’
‘That’s two questions.’
Julianne does not respond. I stare at the vase of gentians on the table between us and her; the flowers smell of pain-relief medicine.
‘Lauren’s a great storyteller,’ Paul says.
‘I am?’
‘You don’t know that?’
‘You’ve never said that.’
Paul sighs, as if my mendacity is a heavy rucksack strapped to his back. He looks at Julianne.
‘Lauren has the ability to turn any mundane experience into a great story. Like, she’ll be on the bus and a drunk person will sit next to her, and she’ll tell me about it at home and it’ll be the funniest thing ever rather than just an unpleasant experience. Then she’ll go to the supermarket and forget her purse, and when she tells me about it later, I cry laughing.’
‘That last one was actually traumatic,’ I say, but I’m smiling. Then something occurs to me. ‘Wait, is this a nice way of saying that I manipulate facts with language? So everything I’m saying here is a manipulation?’
‘You’re manipulating my words right now,’ Paul says, and his rage scalds me. ‘You could never take a compliment, could you?’
‘How would you know; you so rarely pay me any.’
‘We have to end there for today,’ Julianne says hastily, ‘but I’ll see you next week. Until then, I’ll set you homework. Every day, do something nice for the other. Just one small act: set the table if you normally let the other do it, for instance.’
‘Thank you,’ I say, standing up. Paul walks out of the room, biting his lower lip.
I open the curtains to an icing-sugar world; the cars and trees are Christmas-cake decorations.
‘Snow!’ I shriek. Paul opens his eyes and curses: ‘It’s the middle of the night, Lauren.’
‘It’s seven. Come on, Paul, let’s go outside. You love the snow.’
When Paul looks at me, I see the truth, shining hard and white as ice. We are breaking up. Have already broken up; are just two people living in the same apartment. At least it’ll save on therapy bills.
‘Well, I’m going out,’ I say.
After putting down food for the cat, curled-up tight in sleep, I wrap up in what Paul calls my duvet coat, slide into Ugg boots and gloves and open the front door. Breathtaking cold blows in.
There is no one else in the street.
The snow is moist and packable, achingly cold even through gloves. I make three snowballs: one small, one medium and one large, rolling them one way and then the other as my dad taught me. A carrot for a nose, forks for arms, figs for coat buttons. My dad always added a scarf, the most colourful he could find. I don’t have a colourful scarf.
Suddenly, tears flood my cheeks.
‘Lauren.’
Paul is in the doorway, holding his bright-yellow scarf.
Sam Szanto is a short story writer, poet and PhD researcher who lives in Durham (UK) with her husband and two children. Her short story collection, If No One Speaks, was published in 2022 by Alien Buddha Press; her poetry pamphlet ‘Splashing Pink‘ by Hedgehog Press in 2023 (and was a Poetry Society Winter Pamphlet Choice) and another pamphlet ‘This Was Your Mother‘ by Dreich Press in 2024. She won the Charroux Poetry Prize and the First Writer’s International Prize for Poetry. Her poems and stories have been published widely in international literary journals. She also runs a blog to promote independent authors.
