Circus by Claire Battershill

an agonizing two-hour discussion about globalization and culture, experiencing a small panic attack as she tried to get out of the building. That day, Leon arrived at their apartment before she did, and greeted her by handing her a wine glass. “It’s okay,” he said, “you’re home now.”
    She quit her English degree two days later.
    Susan often worries about whether she actually loves Leon and whether he actually loves her. There have been signs pointing both ways. Her worry led to a phase last month of picking the petals off daisies one by one, but never saying, “he loves me” or “he loves me not.” The last time she did this she was in elementary school and had had no one in mind. This more recent time was much more distressing, and she hated herself for doing it. Still, she sat in front of the TV and picked at the petals, tossing them onto the coffee table one after another, no longer even keeping track, and vowed never to do anything superstitious again. She simultaneously broke and repeated the vow each time she tore off another petal. Leon came home just as she was about to change the channel. He bent over and kissed her hair, then went to the kitchen. He returned with the dustpan and brush, swept the coffee table clean of petals, and emptied them into the trash.
    Cartooning the end of the world on Post-it notes is not what they pay Susan to do at this new job, but it may as well be. Shesits at a computer all day while hundreds of dots pass across the screen representing numbers. Sometimes she answers the phone, and sometimes she lets it ring. When she first arrived at the job two weeks ago, she tried to make her cubicle more homey by sticking black-and-white postcards to the walls with sticky tack. A starlet dressed in sparkling silver, a team of synchronized swimmers in a star formation, a cowboy straddling a fence. Now the cards fall off slowly, one corner at a time, with a little fluttering sound, onto her desk and her lap and her keyboard. She doesn’t put them back up.
    Susan doesn’t often speak to her co-workers in the cubicles on either side of her, although they sometimes flirt across her, their heads poking out the top of the cubicles like the plastic gophers people beat with soft mallets at fun fairs. Not Susan’s kind of fun fairs, of course, but the cotton-candy kind. She often goes to lunch with colleagues but isn’t very good with names, so all she can ever manage to think about while trying to eat her sandwich gracefully is whether this man is called “Frank” or “Rick.” Whenever anyone says “Susan” she cringes because she feels guilty that he knows her name and she doesn’t know his. Mostly people at work think Susan is self-deprecating and shy, but her hunching and shuddering is actually on account of her terrible memory.
    As Susan smushes her toes into the carpet on either edge of the makeshift tightrope, she thinks about the manager of her department at work. He’d been unusually talkative earlier today when she met him at the coffee machine, and he’d told her all about his daughter’s school play, in which she was going to be a star. “Not
the
star,” he said, “an actual star! Hercostume is made out of chicken wire! She has five points!” He’s an extremely small man, though perfectly formed, and Susan is always tempted to touch his wild, wavy hair, which circles his bald spot like an eagle’s nest. She’s never actually reached out and done it, though. This is not an attraction thing. “It’s just a thing,” she’d told Leon last night, who had replied by looking up from his
New York Times
and saying, “Sixteen across: Meddlesome. N_ S_.”
    “
Nosy
. Don’t patronize me,” Susan said, without pause.
    “I wasn’t,” he said, circling around the
O
. “Just drew a blank.”
    Susan has never been good at crossword puzzles, and has been trying very hard to get better. This is another thing she does at work. There is no shoebox for the puzzles because