The Lemonwood Quarterly

Title image from Helen Hyde’s Survival of the Fittest, 1916. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.

Dustin Moon fiction short story Sybil and Thanksgiving 2019

Sybil sketched the seating arrangement on a sticky note while en route from Toronto. Nobody else cared, so they obliged:

	Isabelle (Mother)
Jean
Harrison		Roger
Sybil		Evan
	Alby (empty)

Harrison preferred to sit next to Jean; the distance across the table was just that: distance. Sybil knew this about her brother, but Harrison vocally confirmed it at dinner: “I prefer sitting next to you.” He gave Jean a playful nudge and she smirked, genuine.

Then came their mother’s onslaught of questions for Harrison. How is school, darling? How is your program? How are your professors? And Harrison answered in dull detail while everyone plated from the row of hot casserole dishes and platters lining the table’s centre. Boiled carrots slathered in butter, potatoes both mashed and roasted, turkey carved by whomever Mother hired to prepare the meal, stuffing, store-bought cranberry sauce.

Harrison prattled on about his writing workshops at UVic: one fellow student wrote the most interesting story about a cactus. A cactus! Meanwhile, he’s not there yet, Harrison just isn’t there yet—he keeps saying, “I’m just not there yet. So my prof says.”

“I don’t understand,” Mother said.

“I don’t dig deep enough,” Hare explained. “Not honest enough.”

“Art is truth,” Evan said. “Truth is scary.”

Sybil winced but her heart fluttered. Her fresh husband possessed that uncanny knack: pretention borne of authenticity. Or something.

“I’m not scared, I don’t think,” Harrison said. “I want to write about Father.”

Mother sighed through her nose—long and dramatic—and set her knife on her plate. “Don’t be maudlin, darling.”

“It’s not maudlin, Mom. Mother. It’s real.”

Mother said, “Tell me what you have written about.”

The conversation carried in that less-maudlin direction. Harrison tried to relay his work without sounding proud, falsely injecting uhhs and umms to make it sound like he hadn’t already rehearsed a version of this conversation already, likely with an esteemed journalist sedately asking the question in a pitch-black room: Where did this story come from? He filled the air this way for some time. Sybil watched Evan listen intermittently—not used to Harrison’s verbosity yet. So much to say for someone with nothing to say.

But Harrison did find their father’s body. He must have ghosts. Real ghosts. His instinct could be right to go there. To find something worth saying about a parent’s suicide. Whether he would? Sybil couldn’t imagine a real version of her brother anymore. There was only this tall bird man who squawked platitudes he’d heard from professors. He didn’t have proper conversations anymore. Probably not since he was a kid.



The last time she saw her actual brother, she was in tenth grade, had skipped math to read—what had that book been about?—and Harrison caught her while sauntering the school grounds, rudderless on his free period. He said, “Syb?” and she said, “Don’t tell Mother.” Then he lopped his bag to the floor, slunk into an oversized lounger across from her, and they chatted. They just small-talked. No particular topic. No shared vulnerabilities. But their sibling chemistry was enough to sew the moment into her memory.

She and Roger exchanged a couple fleeting glances while Harrison droned. He looked far skinnier than Mother would’ve allowed her or Hare to be at fifteen. His tight-knit sweater hugged his arms but flopped around his gut. They’d become less formal with each other since Roger hit puberty. No reason why. None she could pinpoint. Because he was more mature? No, he’d always been the smartest person in the room. Maybe because he was gay? What a shallow reason. But that was probably it. Somebody with a flicker of perspective outside the protective dome Mother encased her house in. And the fact that Mother couldn’t outright acknowledge it? That Roger had to exist in plain sight—very much in plain sight—but acknowledgement would tatter Mother’s reality? Disrupt the way things are supposed to be? That was delicious. Likely torture for Roger, but to Sybil? Delicious.

“So, in a way, it’s about loss and renewal,” Harrison went on.

Roger stole more than a few glances at Evan beside him. Sybil hid her smile with a mouthful of potatoes. Evan was a trophy husband in many ways, and she’d feel shallow for that too, but Evan’s brains and integrity made him worth more than a place on the mantle. This dinner was Mother’s fourth time meeting him—first since their wedding. Why not show him off? Why not be a little shallow sometimes? If she learned to relish those emotions from anyone, it was Isabelle. And this was what she was supposed to do: find her own path to success—unabashed success—and never apologize for it. Because whatever money remained with the family really remained with Mother alone. Sybil and Harrison (and eventually Roger) were on their own. No telling how long their mother could skirt the drain before finally plunging down it, but it didn’t matter; Sybil already put her privilege to use through law school and a job at a high-intensity firm on the other side of the country. 

“I’m very interested in grief,” Harrison continued. “It’s so potent

Mother said, “Roger writes some.”

“My English teacher gave some encouragement on one assignment,” Roger said. “That doesn’t mean I write.”

“I thought you did,” Mother said.

Without fault, Mother finds any conversation’s path to Roger. The miracle boy. The mama’s boy by default. No father for Roger. No Mother buffer. How Roger even learned to tie his shows defied belief.

Syb and Hare wore Velcro shoes well into elementary school because their father wore loafers. Alby didn’t know how to tie laces and Isabelle wasn’t about to drop on her knees and teach them. The protests escalated when the schoolyard taunts increased and Isabelle turned to Alby and said, “Isn’t this the school’s responsibility? I think Anton is outside with the horses today—get him.”

Instead, Alby bought himself a pair of laced shoes to replace his loafers and spent a half-hour training on the couch every night, often while Isabelle drank wine and watched taped soaps. It became his nightly pastime to unwind after work—like a crossword puzzle. Once he felt confident in a knot system, he showed them to Sybil and Harrison, taught them his patented technique. The lessons were rocky and took long into several evenings, but by the following week the siblings were attending school in newly-laced shoes



She stared at the opposite end of the table. No empty chair. Just space—not taken by anything but still very much taken by that shambling, meek, long-haired little man, Alby Ayers. 

“And you write as well, dear?” Mother nodded at Jean.

“A bit,” Jean said, abrupt and not expecting the spotlight to suddenly shift to her chair. “Some. Not lately. Not a lot.”

“I just assumed,” Mother said. “You met at the bookstore, right?

“Yes,” Jean said. Then: “I mostly read.”

The ends of Isabelle’s mouth curled in passive amusement. “Don’t we all.” Deliberately not a question. Her attention then turned down-table. “And yourself, Eric?”

Evan’s eyes darted to his wine glass. “Uhh—

“Evan, Mother,” Sybil corrected. “Not a difficult name to remember.”

“Tone, darling,” Mother said. “We’re not eating street food in downtown Toronto.”

Sybil stirred gravy into her mashed potatoes. The conversation shifted back to Harrison with minimal effort. 

She should’ve been the writer. Yes, that’s it. That was nice to admit to herself. She had the mind and sensibilities for it. Harrison should’ve been the lawyer. He’d wear fat suspenders to look important. Their destinies swapped somehow. She’d tried to be herself hundreds of times and each attempt left her more depressed than the last. So, she found solace in the blinders corporatism afforded her. Focused success. Never-ending. Like her mother—but different; not personally ruthless. And that worked. She did it. So why the fuck did coming home to Mother’s chic farmhouse for Thanksgiving make her feel so small? Every year the introspection came back and the regrets seeped out of her skin like flop sweat and wouldn’t it be nice if a work call could interrupt this godforsaken feast just once?

“I actually received some encouraging feedback for my last piece,” Harrison went on.

Roger glanced her way, rolled his eyes.

She smirked back the way older sisters of minor siblings smirk: acknowledging but not too much; don’t let them think they’re on the same level as you because they’re not. She didn’t know why she’d honed that smile so expertly, why it seemed important to her that Roger know his place—that he should even have a place.

Roger knew himself. Roger was… Roger. Syb wasn’t Syb, she was Sybil. Sybil Ayers, Esquire. 

No more. No more of these dinners with this stranger. She would know herself now. She would live on the same plane as everybody else. She wouldn’t let her insecurities rend her personal relationships anymore. Her smile widened at Roger. Her eyes warmed. Equals across the table.

But Roger’s attention had waned and he missed it.

She lightly scraped her fork on her plate. She mentally reviewed the details of her current cases for the remainder of dinner.



Everybody was staying the night. The family retired to the sitting room, roaring electronic fire and red wine and blanketed sofas. After two minutes of listening to Mother rant about the latest vineyard she was obsessed with, Sybil excused herself to the bathroom. She found her purse, swiped a cigarette tin from it, then left the house through the back sliding glass door, the curt air a sudden reminder of how hot her body felt, how much water had accumulated in her armpits and the backs of her knees. Her childhood home’s backyard was more of a grassland. Gentle hills and wire fencing.

She opened the case. Three pre-rolls. But she forgot the lighter in her purse.

“Light?” her saviour asked from behind. She half-expected Evan, but the voice didn’t match, and she turned to meet Harrison extending his own lighter.

She took it. “Thanks.”

She lit.

Harrison stood next to her. “You’ve been very quiet this evening. Forgot to pre-party?”

“Who can get a word in edgewise with you at Mother’s side?”

“So you did forget to pre-party.”

Like a stuck clock, Harrison could deliver exceptional insight a couple times per day. She sighed. “Yes.”

“Not a single gibe Mother’s way? She’s gonna think you’re losing your touch.”

“Do you remember when you found me in the library on your free block?”

“What? When?”

“I was in Grade Ten. So, Eight for you?”

“I don’t remember having a free block in Grade Eight. What about it?”

She dragged from her joint—short, quick exhale. “Do you remember…” …What we talked about? The words vaporized from her tongue, tangled with the drifting smoke. She rarely had chances like this to be herself. To be a real person. Be a real person. Be a real person. Be Syb. 

Harrison’s eyes burrowed into her and she smiled at him in a grimacing way.

“Do you remember what book I was reading?”

He ruminated for a perfect amount of time. “Whales.

She snorted. “How’s that?”

“Don’t remember our chat,” he said. “But I remember having it. You’re right—I had a free block that term. And I remember you were super into marine biology then.”

Their chat now could’ve been their chat then. Do you remember that time Father taught us to tie our shoes? Do you remember that song Mother had on the radio last week?

Do you remember what it’s like to be us, Syb and Hare Ayers?

And who would remember a conversation about remembering? For all she knew, they’d been having these conversations their whole lives.

She breathed the October air into every bronchiole of her lungs—sweet and fresh at the same time like sugared gum. “What’s your next story about, Hare?”

“Haven’t decided,” he said. “Bit stuck, actually.

Music wafted through the entryway behind them. Mother had found an instrumental mood-setter, not far from the acoustic coffeehouse genre.

She licked her fingers, extinguished her joint, returned it to its case. Then, turning to rejoin the family, she patted his shoulder. Write about shoes, she told him in her head—too late for either of them to be real.

#

Roger told her the next morning at the breakfast nook table. They were the only ones up—her routine woke her at 5:30 and him sleepless, puffy-eyed, wrinkled clothes that reeked of pot/booze, clearly upset, on the verge of some breakdown actually. She warmed her hands on her mug of black coffee while Roger fidgeted with his hoodie drawstring. 

“Last night…” he said, “Evan and… Evan… we—”

Then he broke and tears rolled, dribbled on the varnished tabletop.

Sybil entered emotional rigor mortis. It seeped into her frame—coffee now too hot against her palms but she held still. Because she knew the rest of Roger’s confession. Because she’d never seen him this upset since he was a literal baby. Because she knew who he was. Because she knew Evan, too. Sort of. How fucking sad. But she knew enough of him. Enough of that hazy mystique he carried, and knew—on a subconscious plane before this minute—that he would degrade their union. Degrade her. Hadn’t it already happened… Sybil? 

“Last night, I—I went to a party—and when I came home—I don’t know…”

“Roger, it is barely dawn.” 

“He was there and I feel so—so fucking bad, Syb. All over.”

“Don’t call me that. Don’t call me anything.” Then she recalled why she treated Roger like a distant cousin his entire childhood, why she gave him condescending smiles, why he needed to know his place: because he didn’t have that Mother buffer. He wasn’t Mother but he was the byproduct of her sole environment: inoperably broken somewhere, in some critical recess, and only self-serving cruelty could soothe him for a couple hours. That hadn’t always been obvious with Roger, but now it screamed in her face across the breakfast table: Oh, darling, you didn’t even know him a full year. The remorse and hand-wringing were just part of this depraved ceremony. The only way he could remember his humanity existed. Somewhere. “Where is he?” She congratulated the steadiness in her voice.

“I don’t know.”

She replayed her five-year plan in her head. Partner. Kids. Her own practice. House in the suburbs—maybe back here on the island? Those ambitious structures—now made of wet paper. 

She must have rushed into it with Evan. 

She could redo. She had time.

But why did her chest heave? Why did her skin sting? 

She needed Hare. They needed to have another one of their chats. She needed a voice who understood the time and place she came from. He’d be in his room. With Jean. How to get rid of Jean. Too many obstacles now. Unknowable sensations quaked through her abdomen, her diaphragm. 

How did Mother overcome her husband’s suicide? They were so different. She never respected him. She always treated him so disposably. 

No. Stop. Thinking about Mother never returned dividends. 

She fled into herself in search of somebody else. She searched for Syb. That girl who enjoyed checker and plaid patterns. And pins. Used to wear them on the strap of her bookbag and the right side of her bleached jean jacket. Pins that shouted “Barbie Girl!” in hot pink or Scholastic Book Club. That girl read marine biology textbooks in the school library because she let herself be fascinated by the world. That girl knew herself and didn’t worry about boys or girls or even grades because fuck math—fuck that shit. She doodled in the margins of her notebooks until she noticed other kids doing it, then felt compelled to stop. She bopped to bands like Prozzak before others said she needed to own the latest Spice Girls album. Again and again she knew herself, then convinced herself otherwise, until she tore down her posters, hid her dolphin stuffy in the closet, and ran far enough away from herself that the path back had overgrown, impassable. 

It never mattered. She never needed a way back. 

Until this morning.

Tears hit her cheeks. And there she was: there stood Syb, pebble-sized inside her, but there she stood for a fleeting minute in the darkness. Enough to let out a cry. Then she vanished before Sybil could will her to stay. Her mug soared across the kitchen, speared on a knife in the dry rack and shattered. On her feet fast enough to knock the chair over behind her. Roger flinched, breakdown in full gear now as his face grew redder and lip quivered. 

“Syb, I—”

“I don’t ever want to see your fucking face again.”

She left the kitchen. 

#

Harrison found their father’s body suspended in the closet, but Sybil found his note. Three days later in the bathroom trashcan of their parents’ ensuite. She didn’t have a reason to be in there—she’d just floated in, aimless, locked in too many thoughts, too many ideas about the man she thought her father was. Small, yes. Weak, yes. But determined, too. Yes, determined. Mother hadn’t slept in the bedroom since, anyway, so the room almost felt like a mausoleum. She wouldn’t return to the primary bedroom for a year—after Roger was a few months old.

The note rested atop other rubbish in the linerless bin. Thick but small paper like a flashcard—crumpled but obvious. She sat on the toilet seat, unfolded, and read:

I’m weak, Izzy. I’m very weak.

Syb imagined he’d stuck it in her nighttime thriller or diary like a bookmark. Some of the details around that idea didn’t add up, but the idea stuck anyway, so that became truth. Alby Ayers left his suicide note in his wife’s bedside book. She found it, sometime after Hare found him, and simply tossed it. So easy. 

Syb was sixteen then. Already dabbling in smokes, so that night she burned the note in the middle of field behind the house—afraid being too close would draw attention. She lit the bottom right corner then tossed it to the moon, sure it would flicker and twist and disintegrate before her eyes, but instead it flopped back to the dark grass and she stepped on it by instinct. 

In the gaps between cases, between downtown coffee orders, nights out, family gatherings, and planning—excessive planning, planning, planning—Sybil recounted her dad’s note, tried to solve a hidden meaning in its message, mentally rotated the thick paper like a Rubik’s Cube. And for some time she understood it to mean he must’ve been terminally sick and needed an early exit to avoid certain turmoil. But that answer tied the tragedy in too neat a bow. An unremarkable man doesn’t make a remarkable decision and get a tidy out like that.

And now Sybil was sure: weak meant pathetic. Feeble. Stupid. 

She raced through the house to find Hare—raced in case she caught sight of Evan, because the only place she’d see his face again was at the divorce hearing. 

Her father’s handwriting spun through her mind. Pliant. Indistinguishable. Worthless. 

Harrison and Jean weren’t in their room. They must’ve gotten up for an early walk around the property. Hadn’t Jean mentioned the idea last night? And they actually did it, the dreadful couple they were: a crack of fucking dawn walk. Fucking hell.

No matter. What did she need Hare for? She hurried to her room instead, emboldened by the intangible disappointment, and tossed her belongings into her suitcase, zipped snug, then carted herself out the front door. She traipsed the gravel driveway to her Lexus.

“Syb? Sybil?”

She half-turned. Harrison and Jean approached from the left several yards away. He wore a brown fuzzy sweater, she wore a cable knit cardigan. Their fingers intertwined between them and Harrison waved emphatically with his free hand. 

“Leaving already?”

Sybil’s stride remained unbroken. She opened her trunk, plopped her luggage in. By the time she shut the lid, they were upon her. “Gotta go,” she breathed.

Jean said, “Everything okay?

Sybil ignored her, made for the driver side door.

“Syb?” Hare said.

“Not okay,” she said. “All right? Big… case thing. Big trial thing.

Harrison placed a hand on the driver window. “What happened? Where’s Evan?”

“Don’t care.”

“Did he—I dunno—hit you or something?”

Sybil laughed in his face—loud and obnoxious. “Fuck off, Hare. If there’s anything from a facsimile to a whiff of me in your next story, I’ll murder you. Flat out.” Then, when Harrison’s mouth opened for dry rebuttal, she added: “You know what you should write about? Shoes.”

That stunned him enough for her to get the car door open. 

The front door of the house opened and their mother stumbled over the driveway in impractical slippers, silk nightie waving in her gait, her face caked in creamy moisturizer. At first the vision made Sybil chortle, but Isabelle’s speed and vexed eyebrows flipped her amusement belly-up; now she was in a zombie movie and had to struggle into the car, jab the keys at the ignition slot in vain panic. She pulled the door fully open.

“Sybil!” her mother called. “This is totally out of line. Your brother is a wreck.”

Then she spotted him in the front door’s threshold: shaking, maybe—hard to tell from her distance—and his complexion redder than she’d ever seen it. 

“You’re here for another day,” Isabelle said, still bearing toward the trio by Sybil’s car. “Whatever nonsense this is, shelve it.”

Sybil placed a foot in her car. “Fuck him! The last mistake you ever made with that simple little man! Don’t ever invite me here again if he’s gonna be here.”

Harrison said, “That’s the Sybil I was waiting for.”

“Fuck you, too.” She sat in the car. “Write about shoes. Pretentious asshole.”

She slammed the door.

Gravel spat behind her tires. They gathered in her rear view—the gaggle of them, like livestock, cage-raised and money-fed to the point of moral malnutrition. She jerked the mirror to the side, useless. The Lexus found ancient pavement on the quiet road, then more tended pavement and painted lines the closer she drifted to Highway 19. Then she fixed the mirror, examined herself for a few fleeting moments. The roads were dead. She cruised without trouble. And the first moment she saw her eyes, she saw the eyes that used to look back at her at that farmhouse—in her room—in the mirror her father had shabbily affixed to her mismatching dresser. 

He couldn’t buy her a proper vanity dresser? 

Syb saw her just now in the rear-view. She existed somewhere ethereal—in mirrorland. A blink and Sybil lost her again. She corrected the mirror to its proper place and crushed the accelerator. 

#

She sped north along the coast until she found a community pool, and without knowing why she veered into the empty parking lot. A chain-link fence bordered the pool, four foot high at most, the gate padlocked, a sign posted that read: LAST SWIM OF THE SEASON: SEPTEMBER 30, 2019. But the light wind tussled the pool water like an invitation; it lapped the tiled edges in sync with the nearby ocean, created the audible illusion that the pool could produce the same sounds as a seashell.

Her dashboard reported the temperature at 12 degrees. The radio whispered static. Apart from the odd car on the two-land highway behind her, she was alone. Intrusive thoughts buzzsawed through her—like how easy it would be to top her father’s departure, how ostentatious it would be to pull the curtain here, so privileged she couldn’t use the nearby ocean like the regular suicidal riffraff—no, they left this pool untouched for two weeks for her. The thought made her laugh, inward. Outward, in the rear-view mirror, she searched for Syb, but she was gone.

She twisted the radio dial until she landed on It Just Won’t Quit, cranked it, flung the door open. She climbed the fence with ease, kicked off her shoes, then crossed the rough cement to the deep end, then sat beside the diving board, then, without discernible impulse, dropped her socked feet into the water. Disturbed chlorine met her nostrils. The water should’ve been much colder. She slipped down, arms propped on the edge, until the waterline tickled her neck, and then she plunged the rest of the way, head fully under. A smattering of red and yellow leaves scuttled across the bottom in her wake.

I’m weak. I’m very weak.

She never knew her parents. Not really. Isabelle—it was obvious why, but that distance manifested in distinct ways with Alby, as well. If anything, that note proved it—proved she didn’t know him—proved she could not identify the genetic makeup between those two that could possibly create her, because Sybil is not weak. She never saw herself that way. Sybil towered, impervious.

Then why did she feel like crumbling? 

Only here, underwater, could she relinquish control, nurture the last flicker of her, of Syb, and she wept from the pain of today, the pain of all days—how they spun into each other, different colours but whole, like peering into a washing machine—and she now understood: that if she were survive today, she would have to stamp out that flame. She’d have to do more than bury Syb—she must salt the grave. Become harder. Activate her floatation devices. Break the water. Meet tomorrow. Only now, while those tears diffused into the stale pool—indistinguishable, unknowable—could she let the last of Syb melt off; could she swim away from her, let her sink with the drowned leaves.

She pulled her head out, now aware of the frigid ocean air, of the weight of her wet clothes. Eyes closed, water streaming down her skin. She blinked to see her car in the lot, the door still wide open, the radio still blasting rock. 

She drifted to the shallow end.

Dustin Moon is a writer from Vancouver Island, B.C. with a Bachelor of Arts in Writing from the University of Victoria. His work has appeared in Freefall Magazine, Pulp Literature, Fusion Fragment, The Good Life Review, The New Quarterly, and others. He lives in Victoria with his husband and their nonstop dogs. Dustin uses He/Him pronouns. He can be reached on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/dustinmoon.bsky.social