Crocodile in the Elevator

An excerpt from "Falling Through the Night" - a novel by Gail Marlene Schwartz

Welcome to the inaugural issue of Qstack—the LGBTQ+ Directory, Community and Platform of Substack writers and newsletters. I’m so glad you’re here!

When I started publishing my serial fiction novel, Lamb, about two gay boys who meet in high school and remain best friends through their twenties, I added a little blurb to the post: “LGBTQ+ fiction and writers remain a marginalized population in the world at large, and even here on Substack, there is a relative paucity of queer content.”

Then it dawned on me that I really didn’t KNOW how many queer newsletters there were, and started doing some digging. Keyword searches—variations on “LGBTQ” and “queer” etc—yielded some pretty spotty results: no rhyme or reason to the organization; many Substacks abandoned months or years ago (Come back! Keep writing! We love you!) while other very robust newsletters buried deep, along with a few anti-queer detractors. So my bit of research revealed that in fact there is a LOT of queer content, but it’s not well organized or accessible without painstaking sleuthing.

With the Qstack Directory, I am hoping to provide a place for us to find each other, to read each other, to resonate, connect, and support each other. Substack has been, for me anyway, the most marvelous platform I’ve found to gather a community and have real conversations with people I’m genuinely fond of—no trolls, no haters, no fear or anxiety. (I know that hasn’t been everyone’s experience, but it has been mine.)

I fervently wish for everyone to find that same hope and connection, to really feel here at Qstack the truth of gentle Miranda’s words from Shakespeare’s The Tempest:

O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in't.

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I’m so pleased to present for our first official Qstack, an excerpt from the novel Falling Through the Night by Gail Marlene Schwartz, one of the earliest supporters of Qstack, and an absolute delight. You’ll find her bio at the end, links to buy her book, and be sure to check out her digital magazine Hotch Potch Literature & Art. I’m truly honored by her generous spirit, and hope you enjoy this touching vignette.

“When best friend Jessica, a recovering alcoholic, helps introvert Audrey with a profile on SheLovesHer, Audrey takes that scary first step toward her lifelong dream. Through online dating, immigrating to Canada, and having a baby with Down Syndrome, she struggles and grows. But when Audrey unearths a secret about her mother, everything about her identity as a mother, a daughter, and a person with mental illness ruptures.” —from Demeter Press

Falling Through the Night is a moving look at the ways in which anxiety and family issues intersect. The book is one part magical romance and two parts unflinching account of a queer woman’s messy journey. Audrey’s path is to create a healthy family despite and because of a past shaped by lies and haunted by a mother she never knew. The book could be described as a page-turning beach read, as we are privy to the whirlwind, sweet, and romantic lesbian love story at the heart of this book. But Falling is so much more than that–it is also a deep dive into family, friendship, addiction, and mental health, at times leaving the reader breathless with all the complexity and beauty that is life.

—Dr. Jennifer Marlow, author and Professor of English, College of St. Rose

CROCODILE IN THE ELEVATOR
An excerpt from the novel, “Falling Through the Night”
Originally published in The New Quarterly

by Gail Marlene Schwartz

Adam prances up to me as I sit at the kitchen table sipping coffee. He stops and stares, like Snoopy doing the vulture. My toddler is wearing nothing but a diaper. He sucks in a little air and opens his mouth.

“Eeeeeiiiiiiggggghhhhh!” 

It’s a definite “wow” moment, and I reach down to grab him, the skin of my arms melting into his warm back.

“Horse! You did it, Boy Wonder! Where’d you get that neigh?”

But he doesn’t answer; instead, he breaks out of my corral and gallops around the living room, tracing the walls and furniture with sticky fingertips, eeeiiiggghhing and squealing. I almost tell him to wash his hands but stop, basking in his joy instead as I return to my coffee and my view of Rue Chambord.

It’s been six months since we started speech therapy, and now that Adam is three, we qualify for public services, a big relief for our budget and for Adam’s progress. Each week, Denise brings him to occupational therapy, speech therapy, and a sign language class. I work on making sure I get out for runs and yoga. The thought of Adam with a lifelong disability feels like enough to unravel any progress I have made since Wellness.

Our days are full of “oof oof,” “haaam,” “oooo,” and now “eeeiiigh.” Adam is dying to make animal sounds. But as the speech pathologist explained to us, the neural pathways between his brain and his mouth are missing, so he’s unable to produce planned speech. Therapy involves cuing him physically to create those missing connections. Parents of kids with CAS are advised to learn and teach the child sign language so basic communication can happen quickly. Teaching a kid with apraxia to speak is a lengthy, complex process that Denise and I feel grateful we've begun early.

Since starting treatment, we notice sounds everywhere we go. During our camping trip in the summer to Ste-Agathe in the Laurentians, we’re treated to warbling wild birds, bellowing bullfrogs, whispery winds. In the evenings, Denise stays inside after supper. 

“Come with us, honey,” I ask, feeling strangely guilty.

“Go play. The sunshine won’t last forever,” she says, winking at me and giving me a thin smile.

Adam and I push through the screen door, leaving space for Mira, our dog. She chases a bright yellow ball I toss, and Adam lurches after her, shrieking and growling. At night, we squeeze into the only bed, which creaks with each micro movement. The night’s thick darkness seems to amplify the sounds: peepers croaking, crickets humming, and snoring, snoring, snoring. I shove my earplugs in and make the best of it.

When we return to Montreal, I receive a notice that I’ve been accepted at a two-week artist residency in January that I had applied for on a whim. I call my brother Freddy and his wife, Natascha, who say Denise and Adam can visit them at their timeshare in Florida during the time I’ll be gone. One Wednesday in August, Denise takes Adam to the library. They return carting canvas bags full of Florida books. Denise smacks a kiss on my lips. 

“Voilà,” she says, dumping the books on the kitchen table. “J’ai soif.” I shuffle into the kitchen and return, offering her a glass of water. She takes it with a quick “merci” and looks at Adam across from her, sifting through the books. He finds something: Florida Flora and Fauna. 

I haul him onto my lap and start reading. His hands push mine away, rustling through the pages, skipping jellyfish, parrot, orange blossom. But he stops cold at crocodile. He points at the picture of the scaly reptile. He looks at me and makes the sign for “speak.” The boy simply wants to know.

“Pas sure,” says Denise. I’m not sure either. I think about his nightmare with the swimming monster from last week and cluck my tongue, considering. Adam hops off my lap with the book and holds it out to his Maman, pointing and tapping at the crocodile. “Auh? Auh?” I hold back a grin. 

“How bad could it be?” I wonder out loud, feeling myself cave. Denise sees my almost smile, rolls her eyes, and shakes her head. 

“Have you ever heard a crocodile talk?” she asks. “I have a feeling it’s not soft and sweet.” Adam runs with the book over to the blue sofa and opens my laptop on the coffee table. 

Apparently, a decision has been made.

I sit down next to him and do a Google search. I notice Denise is wearing the amber t-shirt I gave her for our first Valentine’s Day together six years ago. I remember standing at the register at Village Value in Longueuil with three pairs of jeans over my arm, noticing the t-shirt on a return rack. It’s perfect for Denise, I remember thinking, because the colour matches the honey tone of her eyes. I was right. Now it’s faded, and there’s a small hole in the left side, just under the armpit. But it still warms her look, reminding me of that jazzy feeling I had in our early days together. 

Denise, still sitting at the table, sighs, pushing back a piece of hair that insists on curling at her right eyebrow. She does this repeatedly, daily, refusing the indignity of a barrette. I’ve stopped suggesting.

I scootch closer to Adam on the couch, so my legs touch his, and I find a YouTube sampler of crocodile sounds. My arm winds protectively around Adam as the crocodile appears. We listen. I’m shocked at the variety. A rattle. A snarl. And something that sounds like—a toilet flushing? I hear a rain stick turned upside down, amplified. I look at Adam whose gaze is locked onto the screen. Is it possible—Darth Vader? A grunting pig? One reminds me of Denise’s uncle burping.

But it’s the scariest one by far that my boy likes best: a cross between a lion roaring, a lawnmower revving, and the finale of a fireworks display. He keeps moving my hand on the mouse and we listen to that sound, over and over. After six times, Adam tries it himself. He puts some meanness into his face, tips his chin to his chest, and lets some saliva build up to make a gurgly growl.

A work in progress.

This heightened attention to sound follows me outside my home and into the places where I’m separate from my family. It’s a muggy September evening, and I’m at play practice. Stéfanie has us improvising a scene. My character has been struggling in her marriage to Pierre’s character for years: alienation, apathy, affairs. In this scene, she finally decides to leave him. For weeks, I’d been searching for how to express the depths of her despair. Reliving old breakups, researching why marriages fail, and inventing various given circumstances had all been dead ends. On this night, I decide to just wing it.

I start the scene silently, staring at Pierre. But when he starts begging me to stay, I feel a rumble inside my belly. It grows and grows and then out it bursts, a grief-stricken wail, leaving me parched, shaking.

Pierre stands up slowly. His armpits are wet. He doesn’t speak. I turn to Stéfanie, who is looking at me curiously. Her face is relaxed, and her mouth is slightly open. Finally, she nods, mouthing "Oui, oui." Something in my chest inflates as I wipe sweat off my temples.

After rehearsal, Stéfanie gives me a ride home. I grab the door handle of her old Celica and feel my insides crack, like a light bulb dropped on a ceramic floor. She parks the car outside my house while the engine and my nose both run. 

“I’m lonely with Denise.” 

“Oui, c’est comme ça. I’ve been with Brian for twenty-five years, and we move through cycles. Maybe I’m happy half the time. Maybe I’m angry 25% of the time. And the other quarter, well, sadness, loneliness, everything.”

I pull a tissue out of my backpack. “But do you think every relationship is like that? I want to be in a healthy relationship, and I’m not even sure what that is.”

She looks at the murky night through her windshield. “Intimacy is like the ocean, immense, infinite. It contains everything possible between two people. That’s all.” She reaches over and gives my neck a little squeeze. When I look at her, she smiles.

Her ease slips inside me like a junco’s song. When she drives away, I’m whistling.

Inside, I hang up my fleece, drop my backpack, and go find my wife. She’s sitting at the dining room table with the Florida books spread out around her. I notice the dirty dishes in the sink, but I don’t mention them. I just kiss her forehead and ask her those Wednesday night questions about supper and bedtime. Later, we climb into bed together. We’re both naked, back-to-back, and I feel a warm spot on her spine. 

“Love you.” 

“Je t’aime.”

*

The next day, I take a few hours off to work with Adam. The speech therapist stressed that it has to be a game. The second our boy feels forced, stress will shut down the possibility of progress. We’re playing with some chunky wooden beads, stringing them onto a shoelace. 

Adam turns to me. “Eh? Eh?” 

I smile and touch his cheek. “Bead? Bead?” I make the sign and then do the gesture the speech therapist taught us for the “b” sound. He ignores me, takes another bead, and then throws them both up in the air. Cackles. He’s right. It is funny. I wonder, again, why he doesn’t seem frustrated. He surely has lots to say. But his sounds are full of might, and we nearly always understand. I imagine climbing into his mouth, moving his tongue and his lips around to show them what they’re supposed to do. I sigh and throw a few beads up. 

He claps his hands as they fall. “Aaaahhhh!” 

We roll on the floor together, a tangle of giggles.

Denise returns from the Marché Jean-Talon with leeks and creamy orange daisies poking out of the canvas bag she’s carrying. Some red and gold leaves follow her inside. She gives me a smooch. 

“How did it go?” 

“He just wanted to play with the beads. I tried a few times…” 

She laughs, putting a bunch of beets in the fridge. “Not the right time, I guess.” The kiss, the questions, and the answers are habitual. No roar, no passion, just the ever-repeating sounds of elevator dings. 

“Did you go to the park?” Ding. 

“No, I thought I’d take him after lunch.” Ding. 

“Did you remember his vitamins?” Ding.

The dissonance creeps up from my navel to my throat. I eat a plum-filled jelly doughnut that quiets things down. 

For now.

In the evening, Adam brings us to the computer and finds the YouTube video with the crocodile. The sound is so astonishing, I realize, because it is simply absent from North American kid culture. Find me a kid who doesn’t know “moo” and “neigh,” “quack” and “cluck,” “woof” and “meow.” You could blame it on geography, but the kids also imitate lions, elephants, even dinosaurs.

So why doesn’t anybody know the crocodile?

We stare at the screen and listen. Our boy tightens his grasp around my arm but stays put. We click on another video that provides some information. Did you know that crocodiles are genetically closer to birds than lizards? It seems incongruous that this monstrous teeth-filled killer could contain any trace of the delicate fluttery creatures we feed in our backyard. 

A solo flute in a sonic boom.

A week passes. I trudge to Station Beaubien amid the fall foliage, passing Parc Père-Marquette, Café El Coyote, the Moroccan place. The platform is almost empty until the train screeches in, dumping out the commuters coming home to Rosemont from downtown. I step into the car and sit down next to a fair-skinned woman with braids and ripped jeans reading Marie-Claire Blais. With my iPod on, I stare at the poster for language classes and listen to my heart vibrating through the headphones, mentally reviewing my interaction plan. It’s designed to fix the distortion Stéfanie brings to my soundscape. First, I’ll pretend not to see her, focussing on the other actors. She’ll either greet me first, or not. Fussing with my bag, my script, my hair, I’ll be far too busy to think about anyone in particular.

But then I arrive at the church and the plan fizzles. She’s laughing with Pierre. I smile in their direction, far warmer than I’d planned, and then feel heat radiating in my middle; Stéfanie returns the smile, clearly happy to see me. 

I start stretching on the stage, but secretly I'm paying more attention to Stéfanie. Pierre is telling her a funny story about his niece meeting his dog for the first time, and Stéfanie is cracking up. Her laugh is exactly like her hair only fuller. Her words come out rich, sounds that spin and roll and pulse in mid-air. I want to wrap myself up in her voice.

I know this crush experience. It’s wired into my brain like church bells, car alarms, and camera clicks. The time she introduced me to David’s Tea. The time I trimmed her bangs with my craft scissors. And then the theme yields fantastic variations I compose in my head. Whispered phone calls. The sounds of lips meeting lips. Holding hands looking at a blood moon, its reflection rippling on a pond.

Denise and I must have had a moon. But I can’t remember it. Maybe it’s the new medication.

Stéfanie calls me forth like a shofar. I twist my mind, fighting my feelings with logic, interpretation, analysis. I don’t want this attraction any more than I wanted it when I was thirteen, twenty-three, thirty. The women live inside me, emotionally concentrated, like a tune you can’t get out of your head. I tell myself that if I sing something else, if I crowd the space in my head with other sounds, maybe I can stop it. Maybe then I could jam with the crocodile in the elevator.

The next day, I’m getting Adam ready for bed. He’s in the bath, rubbing his cheek with a sopping washcloth. He looks at me and makes a sound. At first, I don’t connect the dots. “Mmm-ee,” he says, dropping the washcloth. He murmurs, then looks at me, making the sign for “understand.” I don’t. So, then he extends his arms forwards, raises the left one, curls his fingers, and brings his hands together with a smack and then some chomping.

Crocodile. We’d learned that sign yesterday. Of course. Crocodile.

I finger his hair. His warm damp scalp takes me back to my own wet head, in the bath when I was small. We had one of those waterproof radios attached to the wall with suction cups. I was turning the dial back and forth, seeing if I could make it go so fast that the static and the voices and the music would all blend together to make a wild cacophonous stew. In the middle of trying, Mom, probably wrecked with lack of sleep as she frequently was, burst through the door and lunged at the radio, at my hand.

“Stop it! Stop it! Just stop—” I froze and felt the “dun, dun, dun” of my heart under my ribs. Mom ripped the radio off the wet tiles and hurled it onto the floor with a splitting crash. My small body hiccupped in the water, and I stopped breathing. She looked at me, mumbled an apology, shook her head, and slipped out.

As the door closed, my mouth was still hanging open, a skinny string of saliva dangling into the bath water. I remember physically pushing my chin up with my hand, the “chank” of teeth hitting teeth, the splash of my hand falling back into the bath.

That same hand now moves from Adam’s scalp to his body, and I caress him with a damp washcloth. I sing the melody from “Winter Wonderland,” even if it’s autumn, and he chortles. My body vibrates as I exhale, loudly, like we do at rehearsal.

And in the breath, I hear Stéfanie’s laughter. Her face is creased with lines as she gazes into my eyes. She’s earnest, like an awkward prepubescent girl with braces, argyle socks, and an asymmetrical smile, the girl you know in three years will be a knockout. Her hair is coloured a bright mahogany shade, definitely the wrong choice, which makes me love her even more because it tells me she’s not shallow.

 “Ow?” “Ow?” My son’s voice. Ow? He points at me kneeling next to the bath.
“Ow…” I say it and point… out! Out of the tub, of course. I say it back to him but add the word’s consonant sound and the hand gesture for “t.” 

“Ow-t?” 

He grins and tries. 

“OuTAA?” Out! He said out! I repeat, overwhelmed, and he says it again, laughing and smacking his palms on the surface of the bathwater. 

“OuTAA! OuTAA!” I stand and pick him up, soaking wet, and draw him into a full body hug, twirling around, his damp face pushing against my neck, mouth moving, vocal cords vibrating.

After I get him up to bed, I text Denise, but she's at the movies with her phone off. Still excited, I call Stéfanie. “Hey, it’s me. Guess what Adam just did? I was—”

“Sorry, Audrey, it’s not a good time,” she interrupts.

I stop. 

“Just quickly, I had him in the bath—”

“I really can’t talk now. It’s the weekend, and I’m with my boyfriend. I’m sorry. We can talk on Monday.” 

I whisper an apology and hang up. Tears push against my eyelids, threatening. “Boyfriend?” Such a teenage-y word, full of hormones and sex and wildness. How about “husband?” With “boyfriend,” I could only sit, alone with my house’s quiet murmurs, trying to remember that I have a wife and a son and am not thirteen, or twenty-three, or thirty.

I look around the kitchen and open the buzzing fridge. The forced hot-air system mutters. I let the cat out, and a plane thunders by. Somebody’s car engine revs but won’t start. I close the door and return to the fridge.

Not everybody can bring you to that place where your ego lies abandoned on the side of the road, your hair flying in your face. You’re breathless, speeding down the highway, speakers blaring. Stéfanie is driving the car and I know I should get out, but I can’t.

I go to my computer and Google “elevator,” just for fun. I’m surprised that elevators have been around since 250 BC. I’m intrigued to read two alternative descriptions: “lift,” “flying chair,” “ascending room.” I listen to some dings on a sound effects site. A Tibetan bell. The gentle ting of spoon on glass. I’m so immersed in the sounds that I don’t hear Denise when she returns from the movies.

She kisses me, and I tell her about ouTAA. 

“No!” she says, with excited half disbelief. “So, is that why your sweater is damp?” I pat my chest and am surprised to feel the fabric is still clammy. She asks me if I called my mother back. I say “no” and collapse on the sofa. I surprise us both when I start crying. She sits next to me and puts her arms around me. I’m thinking about my son, about apraxia, about being small and scared.

I hug my wife until she pulls away. 

“I’ll bring you a dry shirt, d’accord?” she says, heading upstairs.

The next day, I take a run in the park. I finish my five miles and, huffing, start to walk home. I’m breathing and calm amid the yellows, the reds, and the oranges on the trees. A tiny chickadee sits on an evergreen branch. A flash: the bird opens its beak, revealing hundreds of craggy teeth, and bellows, a sound that echoes down Montreal’s alleyways, over the flat roofs, above Mount Royal.

The chickadee closes its beak and flies away. I stand on the sidewalk. Look at the space where the bird was. Wait for something to happen. For a sound.

I hear the highway in the distance, humming.

My feet start walking, and I think about inviting Denise out for a ride. Maybe our modest Honda Fit could transform into a yellow convertible Porsche with throbbing speakers. Maybe I could open the door for her and jump into the driver’s seat. Maybe I would feel the smooth heat of the new key before sliding it into the ignition. Maybe I would laugh at the engine’s rumble, and maybe Denise would too. Maybe we would fly down route ten, cranking up the radio, clapping, singing into our soda can mikes.

 I walk inside our home, and there she is, sitting and laughing with Adam at his toddler-sized wooden table. They’re both colouring, furtively.

“Tell Mommy…Go on…” Denise whispers. Our son grins and shakes his head, flirting. Then he looks up at me, crimson crayon in hand, opens his mouth and speaks. 

“CWOCK-OH-DYE-UW!” 

He throws back his head and roars, nothing at all like the beast but so utterly and stunningly like himself.

Gail Marlene Schwartz (she/her) is a dual citizen, a relationship artist, and an above-average pianist. Her first adult novel, Falling Through the Night (Demeter Press), launched in February 2024. She is co-author of The Loudest Bark, a picture book, and My Sister's Girlfriend, a middle-grade novel, both from Rebel Mountain Press. Gail is tremendously proud of the collectively-run digital magazine, Hotch Potch Literature & Art, that she founded with several writer and artist friends, and she encourages any interested writers to be in touch about participating (hotchpotchliteratureandart at gmail dot com). She teaches writing at the Community College of Vermont and lives in Montpelier with her partner, visual artist Erin Needham, and their tiny cat Miss Brisket who is 87% friendly. Gail spends every other weekend in Montreal with her best friend, Lucie, and their son, Alexi, who is 14.

Vendors for Falling Through the Night

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Her email address: gailmarleneschwartz at gmail dot com

cute crocodile in an elevator