#NationalShortStory Month Feature: “Caviar” from Widow Fantasies
Caviar
If I swallow hard, the synthetic punch of his body wash is still in the back of my throat. My skin still puckers into gooseflesh. The heat of the shower is behind the closed door but I can feel how it ribboned out to meet me.
And I can still see everything, all at once.
Me, standing one arm slack at my side and the other holding the bathroom doorknob. There’s his wide, wet Appalachian back, a constellation of freckles and tendrils of steam rising from his shoulders. His hand, pressing against the shower wall, fingers splayed, his head bowed and his other hand out of sight, but working a rhythm. He must have been making noise: the whimpering, jagged breathing I know, but I can’t hear for the buzz of my body and the pressure in my head even though my thinking is big, big.
For the too-loud bathroom fan and splat of water on the shower floor. I pulled the door closed, quietly, and stared into the grainy expanse of the repurposed barn board. We picked the door together, he and I, at a weekend pop-up antique market in a church parking lot. We laughed at how cliche we were becoming—purchasing overpriced antiques—something we promised would never happen, but also, something that felt inevitable.
Cliches exist for exactly that reason, he had said. Because in part, they’re truth.
And I smiled and nodded, yes, even though, even then, I thought the truth may be too fine, too fleeting to be that easy to hold. I agreed because it helped make everything—the door strapped to the roof of our hybrid, the peripheral blur of other Sunday small-town tourists, the $400 dollars we’d just spent and the twenty-grand on IVF—seem natural. Seem less like we were giving in, already.
And we swore we’d never do that.
Now this.
The wet smacking sound of his hand pumping against himself.
A sickening slosh in my stomach. We had salmon for dinner because he read somewhere that it was good for my ovaries.
His furrowed brow and slick fish-lipped focus in the shower. My legs spread wide in stirrups, body bare under a thin blue gown and the heavy demand for more of me: more tests, more transparency. My eggs growing gills and the small store of dark mouths I have left inside me.
So it’s my problem, my fault and all this time, it always has been.
I’m trying to remember why I went upstairs in the first place. I was standing at the kitchen sink, soaking curled and browned salmon skin off a baking tray. It was almost dark outside. Just a split-lip sunset and the deadweight of Sunday evening, like a broken promise.
I went upstairs instead of for the walk I told him I was going to go on because I wanted to see him. And I opened the bathroom door without thinking about how we never close it because my mind was on my bobbing ovum. And I was about to say something about wanting to wait for him to walk but I stopped with the words on my tongue, my mouth opening and closing.
This is what he does when he thinks I’m gone, when I never kept a thing from him.
Absence is something you can feel because of the way it bends you. The picture I have in my mind of the stubbled back of his neck and the hunch of his shoulders: an intimacy he never meant to share with me.
I rest my forehead against the door's sandpaper finish and the water stops.
“Babe?” he calls.
I shift to the balls of my feet and try to bound downstairs, weightless.
“Babe?” His voice follows my bubble trail, bound after bound, like I’m on the bottom of the ocean.
—”Caviar” is excerpted with permission from Widow Fantasies by Hollay Ghadery. Published by Gordon Hill Press, 2024. Copyright Hollay Ghadery.
Widow Fantasies was longlisted for the Toronto Book Awards.
Fantasies are places we briefly visit; we can’t live there. The stories in Widow Fantasies deftly explore the subjugation of women through the often subversive act of fantasizing. From a variety of perspectives, through a symphony of voices, Widow Fantasies immerses the reader in the domestic rural gothic, offering up unforgettable stories from the shadowed lives of girls and women.
Hollay Ghadery is an award-winning Iranian-Canadian multi-genre writer living in rural Ontario on Anishinaabe land. Fuse, her acclaimed memoir of mixed-race identity and mental illness, was published by Guernica Editions’ MiroLand imprint in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her debut collection of poetry, Rebellion Box, was released with Radiant Press in April 2023. Hollay's short-fiction collection, Widow Fantasies, was released by Gordon Hill Press in 2024. Her chapbook, the leaves of grass are dreaming, was released in November 2025 with Anstruther Press. In February 2026, her debut novel, The Unravelling of Ou, was published by Palimpsest Press. Hollay is a board member of the League of Canadian Poets, the co-chair of the League's BIPOC committee, as well as the Poet Laureate of the region in which she lives, and a host on The New Books Network. Hollay is also a host of HOWL—the literary arts show—on 89.5 CIUT FM, a member of The Writers Union of Canada, the Creative Nonfiction Collective, and the National Book Critics Circle.