“Well, I don’t feel cold,” said Saskia to Sylvie. Though it wasn’t clear how. She was dressed in tight, thin T-shirt, not even wearing a bra, and here her girlfriend was, wearing three sweaters.

“It’s like five degrees in here!” Sylvie insisted. (Celcius, that is.)

“It’s like twelve degrees,” Saskia assured her.

“That’s still too cold!”

“Well, I’m not cold, I don’t know what to tell you!”

Sylvie kept thinking there must be something wrong with the heating, but they’d had it checked by three people and nobody found anything wrong with it. “I just don’t understand how it can be so cold.”

“I’ll keep you warm,” Saskia offered early on, inviting Sylvie in for a snuggle.

“No!” Sylvie soon realized. “I get even colder touching you, I mean not that I don’t want to, but you’re not exactly a space heater.”

One of their friends had joked that it might be worth investing in a boyfriend, if only for the specific purpose of keeping them both warm. He hadn’t stayed a friend of theirs for long.

This was why Saskia had gotten in the habit of taking a very hot shower just before crawling into bed with Sylvie. It was too hot—it was uncomfortably hot, to the point that it made her pale skin unnaturally red, but with the lights off, that didn’t make much difference, really.

“That’s better,” Sylvie would apologize once Saskia curled up against her, nice and warm. “I don’t mean to be such a bitch about this. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

“It’s okay,” Saskia lied. “Whatever I can do that will make you more comfortable.”

They had been living together since they both graduated high school. They went to the KUL together and while they had each had their separate adventures there, they had emerged stronger than ever. Or so they thought. Now Sylvie was working as a speech therapist and Saskia was still studying for her doctorate in Physics and something seemed different. Off.

Sylvie sneezed. “I really should go to the doctor,” she said. “I really can’t go into work like this, what will people think?”

“Well, I do have to go into work,” said Saskia. “I promise I’ll be home for dinner.” But as she kissed her girlfriedn on the forehead, she couldn’t help but notice Sylvie flinch. It gave her pause. They had a moment, during which Sylvie looked embarrassed at what she’d involuntarily done, snorted and reached for the tissues, while Saskia did her best not to look too accusing or confrontational.

At work, Saskia was distracted, which wasn’t like her. She wasn’t used to being this person. If she was preoccupied, it was usually something external or specific to the environment that bothered her. She didn’t carry her emotional baggage along.

“You comign along to that frietkot?” asked one of her colleagues.

“Which one?”

She described it.

“I don’t know if I’ve been to that one,” Saskia said.

Going to a new frietkot on her lunchbreak wasn’t supposed to be the highlight of her day, let alone a big deal, and yet as she set out with four or five other physici to go there, she found herself reeling with the sense of anticipation. It was a feeling she hadn’t gotten since… well, her first day of university, she thought. Maybe even high school.

“It’s the cute one,” Marjolein whispered at her with a grin when they got in and it didn’t take Saskia long to realize what that was about, as her eyes found the very good-looking Moroccan young man behind the counter. It’s so rare, she mused, to find service people smiling like that. Especially immigrants. Especially the young and good-looking.

But why bring it up to her, the lesbian with a girlfriend?

Then he turned and his eyes found her and

something happened.

Something that… Had she ever?… If so, it was…

Suddenly, the young man looked familiar. He took her order and was polite enough, yet something lingered in his gaze. It shoudl have made her bristle, made her quip. Instead, it made her blush and smile.

“Wow,” said Marjolein at their table. “Even Saskia agrees!”

It was the only thing that could have possibly kept her mind off of Sylvie, but it was no more conducive to work. She wasn’t sure exactly why, or how she was going to justify it to herself, what good it would do or even what she was going to do when she got there, but she resolved to return to the frietkot in question after leaving work early.

When she got there, it was the middle of the afternoon and the place was deserted.

The young man was there and when she walked in, he looked at her. And she looked back.

A polite young service worker would have asked “Can I help you, ma’am?” or even “Did you forget something?” in Dutch only very slightly accented with Arabic, but there was none of that. Then again, a polite customer would tell him how he could help.

Did she even know?

“Do I know you?” she finally asked him.

The first thing he did was draw himself up, lift his chin a bit. But then his whole face changed—not his features, nothing quite that bizarre, but his expression was…

“Wait… I do know you.”

Suddenly, Saskia was transported back to a night several years ago—how many years?—back in high school. She was fifteen years old and out with friends and three of them were together—no, that wasn’t right, not till afterwards…

Two of her friends were being assaulted. And she had arrived with… with a boy she’d just met.

Some part of her had tried so hard to forget.

“So you do remember,” said the man, who couldn’t have been that young; not if he was the same man.

He got out from behind the counter and Saskia backed towards the door instinctively—except which instinct was she following?

“I’m not going to hurt you,” he said, as though it should have been obvious. “Don’t you remember that night?”

He had saved her. Her and her friends. She didn’t know from what, wouldn’t say. Nor how.

“There were three of us,” she said. “Liesbeth and Cathérine—“

“That’s not the night I mean.”

She looked at him. She wanted to be confused. She should have been, and she wished that she was.

That was when he called her by a name she hadn’t heard in centuries.

“No,” she said. “Stop.” She needed time, and answers. Which did she need more? “Who are you?”

“You know who I am.” But she didn’t want to. He moved even closer to her—

“Stop,” she said. “You say I know who you are, but do you even know who I am?”

“Of course,” he said, and she could see the breath steaming out of his mouth as he spoke.

“I don’t know who you think I am—“

He spoke that name again, a most familiar name—

“I don’t know who that is!” she insisted. “But whoever it is, I’m not her anymore.”

Now it was his turn to be confused, and he didn’t want to be.

“Goodbye,” she said, reaching for the door without realizing she’d just called him by a name she shouldn’t know.

Once she was outside, she realized the temperature was at least ten degrees higher.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” Sylvie said when Saskia got back to her. “He said I have a cold, but my temperature’s fine and I felt fine while I was there.”

“We’ll figure it out,” said Saskia Van Sneeuwegem, knowing exactly what it was that was wrong.

“Maybe it’s this place,” said Sylvie. “Maybe I’m allergic to this house or something. Maybe we should just move.”

“Maybe,” Saskia lied.

Dear Zeecy, (since that’s the name you want me to call you)

First of all, I want to apologize for the circumstances of my last letter to you. I know my attitude and conduct showed a liberty and familiarity much unbecoming a gentleman such as I should like to be thought. I know that, long as our acquaintance can be said to have been, it began with a single meeting and has been followed exclusively by long-distance correspondence and it has been so long–so long!–since I have seen your face. But you must believe me, I implore you, when I say that it is etched inside my brain as firmly as a nail punched into a wall of wood that’s found a fault in the grain and cracked to the ceiling. I am broken for you.

And perhaps I am mistaken in who I believe that you are. Your grace, your poise, the structures in your language and your thoughts–I hope you can understand what would lead me to believe you were more than just a peasant-turned-playwright. The way you moved at that ball all those years ago, it seemed you were playing the sun, effortlessly inviting the entire room to revolve around you. And I, a comet from far abroad, was caught. I fell down your gravity well and now I’m drowning, spiralling closer to your surface.

But perhaps I’ll never reach you. Even if you are no more than who you claim to be, you are hailed as the most influential poetess of all time, the most groundbreaking playwright ever known, and I, a fourth-rate bumbler with a chip on my shoulder, from a fallen race. How can I hope to meet with you? How can I hope to compete?

Please, though, dearest Zeecy, please, from the bottom of this gravity well you’ve plunged me in, I beg of you, cease this silence. I will believe whatever you want to present me, I will address you how you wish to be addressed, and without question. But please, do not let my heavy heart stand in the way of our friendship and our correspondence. It has meant the world to me and I cannot but think it’s meant something to you. Therefore, please, milady, please, my Empress of Muses, speak to me. Lend me a place in orbit around your heart, and I will be

Eternally Yours,

Lornian Lothcar

It’s kind of weird. When you first meet him and people tell you he’s the hottest guy on campus, you’re, like, “for real? That guy? You look at the way he dresses in those baggy pants, how he walks all kind of bowlegged and slouched down, he’s kind of funny-looking, like his face was baked a little too long after molding and got cracked.

But seriously, once you get to know him, there’s this, like, bizarre animal magnetism that he, like, exudes or something.

I first met him when he started dating my roommate. I woke up from my nap–I take naps in the middle of the day a lot, don’t judge me I’m in college–and they were fooling around on the top bunk, so I told them to shut up and so, they were surprised, because, like, I guess they hadn’t noticed I was there?

Anyway, so he peeks his sub-human-looking face down with a grin like a chimp whose poo just hit the mark and then does this acrobatic somersault off the bed, before exiting the room in a hurry to let Olivia apologize to me (Olivia’s my roommate).

So, like, on the way watching him I noticed how hairy his chest was, because I, like, love hairy chests a lot more than I probably should, but what I didn’t really notice at the time until Olivia started complaining about it was the fact he was wearing pants.

Turns out, he sleeps with all these girls, right? But he never takes off his pants. Or shoes.

Which wouldn’t really bother me, because, like, whatever, I never take off my shirts ‘cause my boobs are all, whatever, but Olivia has this thing about, like, skin, so she was all disappointed and kept whining about it.

Anyway, so that was my first exposure to this boy, but it was not the last. Like I said, I like my chests hairy (well, not mine, of course) and everyone–everyone–kept talking about how epic he is in the sack, so I thought, hey, why not? Get to know him a little.

So yeah, so I fell in love and, like, whatever. You know this story. You really like him, so you don’t want to sleep with him, because then he has all the power? And it worked, of course, ‘cause, like, he’s a guy, hello! Putty in my hands. But then, like, once we’re together, I start thinking, like…

Well, OK, it’s like this–the whole breasts thing? He’s a breast man and, like, I’ve always been, like, you know. But he kept, like, saying all the right things, making all the right noises, and so, in the end, I got over it.

That was when the pants thing started bothering me. “That’s different,” he kept saying. And it wasn’t just the pants, it was his shoes, too, he wouldn’t take his shoes off, he’d just dangle them over the bed. “That’s different,” he said. “There’s nothing wrong with your boobs.”

“So what’s wrong with your legs? Are they, like, robotic? Are they covered in, like, scars? ‘Cause that’s actually kinda hot.” But, like, he didn’t even like me touching his ass, and it was freaking me out.

So finally, he’s like, “Do you really wanna know?”

And I’m, like, “Yeah, asshole, I really want to fucking know what my boyfriend looks like with no pants on!”

Yeah, that might have been a mistake. I mean, sure, yeah, it’s better knowing, but…

So he starts pulling his pants down and his legs are, like, really hairy and I remember thinking, like, having a flash of, like, oh my God, is he a dog? So he gets them all the way down and finally, he takes off his shoes.

OK, so you know when you’re looking at a naked foot how you know that it’s a naked foot you’re looking at? Well… not with him.

His foot, I swear to God, has an opposable fucking thumb on it. Like, not completely, but, like, he could grab onto stuff, that was long enough.

And I’m, like, going, holy shit, no wonder he’s embarrassed, he’s, like, deformed or something.

And then I felt something long and hairy crawling up my back and I saw that it was coming from, like, under his ass, where he was sitting. And it tapped me on the shoulder and, like, rubbed me a little there–rubbed me so totally the wrong way.

Not that there’s a right way for your boyfriend’s tail–actual tail!–to rub you.

Well, I mean, honestly, what would you do? What would you do if you found out you’d been fucking a monkey?

I ran. I ran clear out the room, into the hall, running down the stairs. Running for my life, right? Running for my sanity! Who is this guy? What is this guy? Is he even a guy? He’s a Monkey! OH MY GOD I’M DATING A FUCKING MONKEY!

And then down two of the three flights of stairs, I hear him calling after me, and then hear a weird whooshing and clanging. He’s not running down the stairs, he’s not even leaping over every flight, he is actually using his hands–the ones on his arms and the ones on his *shudder* feet–to swing and flip from one railing to the other, just skipping right over the stairs part.

So I get to the door and he’s caught up to me–’cause not all of us can fucking brachiate–and just as I’m reaching for the door, that creepy fucking tail comes out of nowhere and slams it back shut and then he’s dangling from the pipes on the ceiling by his arms and his feet–those feet! The ones with the thumbs!–are on my face, covering my mouth.

“Shh! Shhh!” he tells me, “Shhhh!”

And fuck if I don’t calm right down when he says it. It’s those cute fucking puppy-dog eyes. It’s that beautiful hairy chest, that charm, and… I don’t know, it’s like I just know this… guy. This boy. My boyfriend.

“Shhhh,” he says. “It’s me,” he says. “It’s still me.”

And fuck if I don’t believe him. And fuck if I don’t fall right back in love with him.

Fucking monkey.