The couple near the window are speaking slowly.

He has thick fingers and puffy eyes, stubble on his face. A tattoo of an evil leprechaun on his drinking hand and a sadness deeply embedded within. She’s as thin as a knife and has very long, very straight black hair that does not shine. Her eyes are wary, churning. There is something dreamlike about two of them, something beyond their control. He sips his drink through a short straw and says to her, “There is something about you I have been missing so much.”

A beautiful woman in a sundress,  her hair still wet from the morning shower, was trying to unlock a door. The sun was falling upon her, the wooden porch, the entire red brick face of the home. She didn’t have the right key and was struggling with the lock, with how her morning was assembling itself, and she tossed her head back in frustration. Tiny, almost imagined droplets of water were cast from her hair and caught in the sunlight, and everything seemed to stop for a moment. 

And then a raccoon, having slipped from night into day, emerged from behind a tree. With his detached animal knowingness he stared directly at us. Jones, astonished, squealed at the miracle, while the raccoon, keeping to the shadows, disappeared back into the night of some protective greenery. Up at the corner, at the mulberry tree and raspberry bushes,  so many berries had been crushed on the sidewalk that they looked like paintball splatters. There were berries hanging above us and growing from the earth beneath us, and it was like we’d passed into a different realm and were now moving through a fertile, green tunnel. As I was picking a raspberry for Jones, a woman sprinted by us toward the subway. Plugged into her iPhone, with a knapsack on her back and a briefcase in one hand, she was ready for the big meeting, ready to present the best version of herself to the world. She was moving fast, like an athlete who still retained her running form from college, days that had recently started to feel further and further away. 

An older man, immaculately dressed in wardrobe that looked from another century, ambled up the street coming to pass a college-aged woman wearing a bright yellow dress. Her face was still new, and she carried with her a pronounced, heaving limp that was mysterious and beautiful and sad, and when she smiled past us, there was the unexpected scent of clove cigarettes and skin cream. A butterfly then appeared and it was a sign. Perhaps a spirit guide, and Jones declared that we must follow it, and so we did– everything around us like still lingering dreams from the previous night, only now beginning to fade into the waking day.

Public shaming of members of President Trump’s administration has become the latest act of resistance against the government. White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was asked to leave a restaurant, Environmental Protection Agency Chief Scott Pruitt was lectured and videotaped while dining out, Kellyanne Conway, a consultant to Trump, was mocked in a grocery store, and most recently Stephen Miller, a particularly loathsome advisor to Trump, threw out $80 worth of sushi after the bartender followed him outside of the restaurant and told him to go fuck himself.

Here, in their own words, are other Trump officials relating their stories of being heckled in public:

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Mira Ricardel, Deputy National Security Advisor:

“ I was called a ‘Shit Donkey’ by some tall woman when I went to see Ocean’s 8 at the Cineplex. It completely ruined the movie for me. This is not the America I know.”

Kevin McAleenan, Commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection:

“ I had just finished collecting the quarters from the washer and dryers at one of my rental properties and was walking back to my car when I felt a little sting on the back of my neck. When I turned around I saw that some old man sitting on a stoop had just spit a sunflower shell on my neck.  He then fired another, and that one hit me in the leg, and as I reached for my taser he called me “a traitor to my nation and to humanity,” before twitching out.

Wilbur Ross, Secretary of Commerce:

“ The woman working on my feet during my morning sports pedicure was extremely rough, almost violent while exfoliating my heels. And make no mistake, it was intentional. I can tell. And when I admonished her  and told her how lucky she was to be living in America, she said something under her breath in a foreign language. I called the manager and had her fired, but it’s getting intolerable, this lack of civility.”

Betsy DeVos, Secretary of Education:

“ I was at the Illuminati sex party in Novgorod and right after the sacrifice, a man wearing a goat’s head refused to have sex with me saying, “Children in cages aren’t my thing, you Trump skank.” I had my mask on so I don’t even know how he knew who I was. Jesus, I don’t even want to think about what they’re saying about me at Martha’s Vineyard!”

Peter O’Rourke, Secretary of Veteran’s Affairs:

“ I was at a Bryan Adams concert with a few of my paintball buddies and while I was out on the floor enjoying the show I saw that they put my picture on the giant screen with the words, EVIL TRUMP FLUNKY across it. Not cool, Bryan, not cool.”

The heat sat upon everything.

Oppressive and exhausting, it slowly disabled the day’s options. You couldn’t go outside. You couldn’t get comfortable. You couldn’t even think straight, and every time you moved it was as if this thing, this heavy, unseen entity, was wrapping itself just a little more tightly around you.

It was a long weekend and most of the people in Toronto seemed to have vacated the city for cottages. As Rachelle, Jones and I drove through the city to the Ontario Science Centre, we passed empty streetcars on empty roads, and on very rare occasion a person—always appearing slightly dazed, as if they’d just forgotten where they were going. There was a distinctly post-apocalyptic vibe in the still, dirty air, and it all felt as much a dream as not.

The Science Centre was very crowded, though, and it was filled with people just like us, people looking for a place that was open to the public, air-conditioned and entertaining for young children. We were all lucky, all of us there, lucky to have such a place available to us, lucky to be able to use it, and lucky beyond the known margins, too, lucky in ways none of us could even imagine.

But still, it wasn’t easy. It was crowded and loud, even chaotic, and Jones was so excited that he ran in crazed and unpredictable zigzags, and after a few hours we felt like cats chasing the red dot of a laser pointer. And as it approached noon, the children, all exhausted and hungry now, began to throw tantrums. It was like artillery going off, like fireworks.

One child would explode into tears, another one would kick a juice box out of a parent’s hand, and another would just flop face first on the floor and begin kicking his feet, screaming. And so it went, a spreading contagion that was simultaneously hilarious and crushing.

We managed to slither and bounce through it all to find a passage that led to descending escalators. There must have been two or three of them, each one travelling deeper and deeper down and through the wooded ravine the Science Centre was built into.

It was like being submerged in a forest, and the air became cooler and lighter as we descended, and when we stepped off into the refreshing, muted light of a wide open museum space, we were transformed.

About fifty feet in front of us rotating light projections were being cast onto the floor from the ceiling. Ladybugs. Stars. Race Cars. Mysterious fish. Geometric patters. All the children dancing beneath and within this light, and everything was beautiful and quiet and astonishing, like we had just been led to an illuminated cave full of dolphins at play in the purest waters.

It was a microburst, and the whole thing was over in about three minutes. There was a sudden blast from above, around and beyond, and it felt like the Mighty Thor had just hammered the earth and summoned forth all elements of sky.

The wind was haphazard and suicidal, as if careening out of control down a hill, and it gathered the falling rain in unequal, horizontal batches and then smashed it against whatever surface stood before it. The big tree in front practically shattered, and as it scattered before us, we could see one of it’s massive branches wheeling through the sky, and then in just a moment or two, it all stopped, and everything was quiet and strange and wonderful.

The power was out, and all the people living up and down the street came tenderly from their homes to marvel at the fallen landscape around us. Jones, so small and alive, jumped in puddles and walked amidst the rent trees like the jungles they were.

There was a clear, cooling wind that felt like it was coming off foreign waters, and people gathered before their homes to share their stories.

In this densely populated part of the city, we catch glimpses of our neighbours rather than actually know them, but with the storm all obligations of habit and place and order seemed to vanish. We were free of that, sort of, and it was like we could no longer pretend we were strangers.

The neighbour who never waved, the organized looking one with the yoga mat and unfriendly ponytail, well, she waved at us for the first time. Buck, the almost-old man who lives alone next door, the one I thought was an asshole until I discovered he was partially deaf and never heard me saying ‘hello,’ was like an 11 year-old. Excitedly, he rode about on his 30 year-old CCM bike, returning wide-eyed to say things like, “You should see Bernard Street! Trees everywhere!” Dogs now on walks, pulled comically massive branches along behind them. Couples, happy to be without power, happy to know they were lucky enough that being without power was a fun little, adventure rather than a life-altering catastrophe, headed out for dinner. And the basement tenant, as thin and mysterious as a pirate, came up and surveyed the scene. After deducing how to solve the most immediate problem, he got a small handsaw and began to wordlessly cut the fallen branches of the tree, quickly clearing a path on the sidewalk– the ash never once dropping from his cigarette.

All of us now, after something so unexpected, powerful and unknowable, felt a sense of shared, mortal vulnerability. The stable, trusted world we had imagined had been revealed a flimsy thing. Lucky for so many reasons, we all lingered together outside, comforted by the other, like ancients around a campfire, small and humble beneath an endless sky.

Rachelle, Jones and I were in the backyard– the adults sipping coffee while Jones patrolled the U-shaped garden that frames the patio where we were sitting. Above us was an incredible canopy of leaves and branches. Somehow, it seemed a deeper and more vivid green than it should have been, and then, cutting through this foliage was the kind of sunlight that makes you think of Bible illustrations, and beyond that, nothing but the rich, blue infinity of a sky that knew everything.

Jones, propelling himself Fred Flinstone-style in a toy car he likes to play in, came over to us. He was the ice cream truck. Cheerfully, almost professionally, he offered us make-believe ice cream cones with make-believe sprinkles. His spontaneous joy in this theatre was a living, radiant thing, and the feeling it gave was not unlike if a deer had wandered into the yard and nuzzled us.

It felt that soft, that pure.

And then after a minute or two had passed, Jones stood up on the one step that leads from our apartment to the patio. The sun shone upon him like a spotlight, and an angelic babble issued forth as he waved his arms about like a preacher in full sermon. The language he was speaking was unknown to us, but it seemed like the right language, the one the voiceless world around him already seemed to understand, and the only one that corresponded to what was shining within.

I was sure Jones was performing a blessing, and it was humbling to feel just how lucky we were to be alive in this flimsy and glittering world, and to be lifted up beyond it by such small soft hands, even if just for a moment.

The system, it turns out, was a terrifying fail, and as a result of this the government has decided to refine the system before launching it anew in a few months. I, along with a number of other writers, have been hired to help write clear, effective messages for the probable alert scenarios the government is most concerned about. These are some of the alerts we have been working on:

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Emergency Alert #1

Emergency Alert #2

Emergency Alert #3

Emergency Alert #4

Emergency Alert #5

Emergency Alert #6

It was a hit.

A really big hit.

It became pretty hard to keep up, and then, after one reader misinterpreted my thoughts regarding the use of fire while giving a reading, I decided to step back to spend more time with my family. Regardless, the letters kept coming, and so I feel I owe it to my loyal fans to resurrect the column, which is what I’m doing right now.

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Dear Bitter Writer:

You’re likely aware of the Twitter Challenge in which women were asked to, “Describe yourself like a male author would.” The point of this, of course, was to illustrate how men objectified women, but what I would find really interesting with you– as an impossibly mediocre white man in possession of a level of confidence that outstrips your very modest competencies by an incalculable magnitude– is to have you describe yourself. I have included a photograph in case you should need a reference point.

Lynn from Montreal

Dear Lynn:

In Havana he was known as “ La muerte incómoda.”

It was a term of respect, of great respect, in fact, and more than a little fear. What had Michael Murray done to earn such a nickname from the gentle people of Cuba?

Well, that’s a long and complicated story that will reveal itself in time, but for now we should just imagine the man as he sat there, commandingly, in the barber’s chair. His face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, and his most striking feature was his opaline green eyes, which could be both alluring or intimidating, as the situation required. A part of his barber’s apron fell open from the cooling breeze of the fan and revealed the shirt he was wearing. There were little baseball players on it. He looked up, his eyes clear and even as he wiped some sweat off his upper lip, “ ¿Cómo está mi calva haciendo allí?” he asked the trembling barber. And in that moment Murray’s beauty was revealed the edge of a very sharp knife.

Dear Bitter Writer:

It recently came to my attention that an author at a major publishing house threatened to slap a reviewer who didn’t like his moronic, insulting book, and I was wondering if the publishing house was going to punish him for it, or if white male authors can do literally anything?

Karen in Toronto

Dear Karen:

Have you seen White Male Author: Infinity War, yet?

Easily the best of the franchise. Just fantastic.

At any rate, this movie goes a long way to answer your question. In it, Thanos

attempts to destroy Planet Earth, and after incapacitating both The Avengers and The X-Men it seemed that victory was certain. Right at this despairing point in the movie, White Male Author showed up and blasted him with his laser pulses.

He then flew around Thanos so quickly that the wind currents kept him pinned to the ground while the other superheroes freed themselves from the Polaris Fog that Thanos had used to trap them, and then all together were able to cast Thanos back into the Canyons of Zorg. So it’s clear that although White Male Author is VERY powerful, certainly superior to Spiderman, he might not be as invincible as The Hulk or The Thing.

At any rate, even though White Male Author is very, very powerful, I don’t think he can do literally anything.

She loved many people, most of them more than me, and my love was cloying and imperfect. I lost her many times. Days, weeks, months later she would return without tears to my shabby and crooked apartment on Coloniale. And I would attempt ferocity and steely eyes, but I was powerless before her. Oh, Monique in new pants, Monique skating at Carre St. Louis, Monique opening a tin of tuna—each moment an act of singular and irreducible beauty.

Her dreams took on the form of divine revelation. Each morning she woke up astonished, unable to grasp the portent of her nocturnal wanderings, but certain of their implicit significance. They became puzzles to solve, ghosts to tend, arrows to follow.

Watching her eyelashes flutter and knowing at that precise moment she was dreaming, I imagined them taking form and floating like mysterious cave drawings in the dark above us. I wanted to pluck them from the air, to preserve them so we could study them later, but even in my mind’s eye they eluded me, curling away like smoke and then disappearing, a trail of phosphorescence reabsorbed into the ocean.

After she left in the morning I would put on the sweater she had been wearing. Intoxicated with her redolence I would wander the streets breathing her in. Everything shining.