Excerpt from LIKENESS by Samsun Knight
April 11th
Trying to figure out on the day after whether you did something accidentally humiliating the night before has to be the worst feeling in the history of human emotion. Possibly it’s wrong to call it a feeling. The worst constellation of feelings, the worst spiritual condition. The worst kind of thought to hear echoing over and over and over inside your head. Of course it’s not truly the worst. But part of the feeling, the constellation, the condition, is this sense that it is.
The dinner was really nice, to start with. Sebastian showed up only a few minutes after I got in from work and I was still nursing Bobby when I opened the door for him, so he took it upon himself to do pretty much everything: he unpacked the groceries he’d brought, cleared off and wiped down the kitchen counters, chopped up a tomato and a red onion and a head of broccoli and a ball of mozzarella and arranged it all on the pizza crust he’d picked up from the store and then he did the dishes and asked interesting questions while the pizza cooked. It took real effort not to be charmed. I put Bobby down to roll around on his favorite blanket and told Sebastian about all the latest awkwardnesses at the diner, about Mr. Walker’s worsening attempts to flirt with Alice and my suspicion that Esther wasn’t pooling all of her tips, and he told me about the new shopping center that he and his team were laying the foundations for, about all the corruption that had gone into the project so far and all the corruption that was still planned for later and also how odd it was to be the foreman now of his former coworkers, to be the man in charge over his old friends. Apparently it wasn’t so awkward except when they had to make eye contact, and they had to figure out how long to look at one another, and then it was just excruciatingly weird. I laughed. He tried to demonstrate his point by looking me in the eye in the weirdest possible way, squinting with one eye and staring wide with the other, and I smiled and squinted and stared back at him, and then I stood from my chair and hunched over like a monkey and he mirrored me and we started circling each other around the kitchen, leering and hooting and pointing and scratching at our armpits and jumping around from foot to foot, two chimps facing off over territory. He laughed and I giggled and Bobby got so overwhelmed by all the energy and physicality that he started to cry. I picked him up and rocked him on my hip, still giggling a little bit. Sebastian went and grabbed some grapes from the fridge and sang to us while I swayed with Bobby and he ate the grapes at the table. Some Cat Stevens song. “Trouble,” I think it was. And for a moment it was like we were a normal family. For a little flash of a moment it was like I could see the whole scene from a stranger’s perspective, like I was looking down from above, and Sebastian was the generic well-meaning dad and Bobby was the generic cranky newborn and I was the generic happy mother, the exhausted but happy mother, all of us arranged around the table like a sample Christmas card in a shop window, as three. Then the sensation passed and we were only ourselves again. Sebastian popped a grape into his mouth and then popped it out directly above him like a cannonball from his mouth, or rather like a seal bouncing a ball above its nose, and then he caught the grape with his tongue and gulped it down. The tiredness thickened above my eyelids as though hours had gone by. Bobby pushed his head into my chest and whimpered.
It was less of an argument than I would have thought. It sounded less like an argument than I’d expected, in any case. No voices were raised and there was barely any eye contact, not when we put Bobby down in his room together and not when we took the pizza out of the oven and not when we sat down to eat, while we were sitting there eating our falling-apart slices, catching the sizzling-hot tomato sauce on our fingertips. I started telling him that I needed more help from him with Bobby at the same time that he started telling me how he’d recently begun a new spiritual awakening and then those two conversations somehow both continued, but in parallel, almost without touching at all. He said Oh, sure, before I’d quite finished asking and then continued But it’s the strangest thing, and went on to say that he’d become increasingly preoccupied with the idea of births in particular and the continuity of consciousness beforehand and afterward and I interrupted him to say that I wanted him around every weekend, at least, especially when I was working and just needed help with cooking and cleaning and he nodded and said he’d talk to Anne and then asked me about my dreams, which I hadn’t actually mentioned to him yet, and I was so surprised by the question that I forgot what I was about to say and instead stuttered something about my purposeful hallucinations and his eyes practically popped out of his head and I smiled and said But I really mean it, Sebastian, about the weekends and he nodded without hearing a single word and moved his chair closer to me and asked me to tell him everything and I grinned, despite my misgivings, and told him everything, the falling and tickling and the spiraling down, the soaring out, the exhaustion when I woke and the feeling of closeness, of closeness to myself, and he was so struck that he stood and sat down and then stood again and started pacing, shaking his head as he listened, smiling and smiling, his mouth open as he breathed. Incredible, he said. A silence opened up between us that wasn’t a silence at all. Then he remembered that he’d bought hot chocolate on his grocery shop and I put on some hot water to make two mugs, and he mentioned that he’d have to go soon and also that he’d begun speaking to God recently, confiding this to me in a voice like a confession, like he didn’t want anyone else in the kitchen to overhear, and I creased my brow and blinked at him as he detailed his encounter with the archangel Michael at the construction site after dark and the names the angel had taught him, the modes of address he’d given him to communicate with the Creator on his own. I had thought that Sebastian was staying the night. We drank the hot chocolate faster than I expected and then he stood and moved for the door and I told him again that I needed him to help more with Bobby as in today, or tomorrow, or at least this coming weekend, and he said again that he’d talk to Anne about it and I was too bewildered to realize how angry I was at this response until he’d already shut the door, his footsteps on the stairs and then gone.
It was a feeling not so much of smallness as of great distance, a feeling of looking down from miles and miles above on a body that’s fucking furious for not being seen up close. I walked around the kitchen for about five minutes, just walking back and forth and pretending that I couldn’t hear Bobby squawking again—a different squawk, higher-pitched, his Mommy-I-feel-gassy sound— and then I went into his room and burped him and then packed up all his baby essentials and followed after Sebastian with Bobby in a carrier in the back seat of the car, his stroller folded up and jammed next to me in shotgun and a bag packed with diapers and formula wedged in the leg space underneath. Feeling somewhat mentally uncertain but also physically entirely sure, a certain firmness in my shoulders, a straightness in my neck. Things were moving quickly but I was moving quicker, it felt like, turning through yellow lights in the exact half-second before they turned red, or maybe the exact half-second after. I pulled up across the street from what I thought was Sebastian’s house and climbed out to double-check the address. I’d only been to the place once before, one week when Sebastian’s wife hadn’t been there, and it was hard to tell at night if it was the right building. Bobby had been making his lower-pitched throaty noises all the drive over but it was only when I was outside the car that I finally heard him, his sounds coming muffled through the chassis, and I started to feel guilty for ignoring him. The houses on the road all looked too similar to tell apart. A car shushed past on the pavement and I backed up against the driver’s-side door to let it pass. I was going to carry Bobby up to the front porch of Sebastian’s house and I was going to make him take him; I was going to scream at his front walls until he was forced to come to the door; I was going to burn his house down to ashes; I got back into the car and drove home.
It was on the way back that I finally started to feel the humiliation rising. The congealed regret that’s been so thick in my fingers all morning, solidifying in the bottom of my gut as I eased the car down the dark streets toward home. I didn’t wish the day to have gone differently so much as I wanted the day to have not happened at all, no date and no dinner, no non-argument and no drive. I wished that I’d never moved from New York and had never left John, that I’d had Bobby when I was still married and young and had been trying to get pregnant on purpose, in those brief years when I’d known exactly the type of person I wanted to be, when I’d carried a bright and shining idea of the life that I wanted my life to be like and I moved through my day-to-day by its light. I knew exactly where in the city I was but for some reason I kept getting myself lost, taking wrong turns and having to pull into strangers’ driveways to turn around. I felt so angry that I almost cried. Bobby was practically screaming in the back seat. Everyone on the sidewalk and in the lit windows of the houses seemed to be looking straight at us whenever I had to stop and back up and I kept my head down and turned the car slowly, with both blinkers clicking, to make sure that anyone I wasn’t seeing would know that I was backing up.
Text copyright © 2025 by Samsun Knight
LIKENESS by Samsun Knight
On a summer evening in the 1990s, Anne learns that one of her husband’s lovers is expecting his child, only a few weeks after learning that she too is pregnant. He tells her casually, as if it’s just another colorful story about his day. And the tenuous understanding between them—the careful balance of privacy and flexibility that has sustained their open marriage to date—is shattered.
Meanwhile, Sandy, the lover, works to find her own path forward through her surprise pregnancy and all the million tiny miracles and catastrophes that she must now navigate, often entirely on her own. Searching through diaries and grocery lists and seances with the dead, Sandy tries to remember just enough of her original sense of direction to make her own way home.
Literature and Fiction Literary [University Of Iowa Press, On Sale: July 29, 2025, Paperback , ISBN: 9781685970208 / ]
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About Samsun Knight
Samsun Knight is an assistant professor at University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management and a faculty affiliate at the University of Toronto School of Cities, where he studies quantitative marketing, retail demand modeling, optimal targeting and machine learning.
Separately, Samsun is a writer and graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was a Truman Capote Fellow. His second novel, Likeness, is forthcoming in 2025.
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