Quantcast
Channel: Agnes and True

Intentions

0
0

by Beth Goobie

Riley locked her bike to a NO PARKING sign and surveyed the storefront forty feet in from the sidewalk, behind a small parking lot. Four months ago, she had started volunteering at The Good Intentions Emporium, a local thrift store, in the hopes of earning a job reference. At twenty-seven, she was The Emporium’s youngest volunteer, and she had quickly learned that her good intentions were not to manifest in helpful suggestions, no matter how humbly helpful she perceived them to be.

Keep your pride in your back pocket, Riley reminded herself as she headed towards the front door. Pulling it open, she was hit by the odour of vinegar that permeated the place—all incoming clothing was steamed with a water-and-vinegar solution in the back room, before being placed on the display racks. With a wave to Joyce, the elderly volunteer finishing off her morning shift at the till, Riley headed past Boutique and Women’s, along the south aisle to the back room. The store was busy; hangers clanked as customers slid them along metal racks; voices murmured in Linens and Books.

“Look at this!” cried a woman in Housewares, holding up a ceramic chipmunk. “Something for my Christmas village!”

Riley did a discreet eye roll; Christmas villages did not call out to her in April. But such was the culture of the thrift store, kaleidoscoping purpose and frivolity in random conjunctions that included everyone from the refugee to the Internet reseller. And The Good Intentions Emporium was the cheapest thrift store in town, a second-hand retail outlet that left Value Village in the dust; even the Mennonite store on 20th Street was more expensive. This was due mainly to its volunteer staff—the pear-shaped, balding manager, Fred Mikovan, and the cleaning staff were the only employees.

The vinegary atmosphere intensified as Riley passed through the curtained entrance into the back room. Heads turned to greet her—Fred, seated at his manager’s desk, as well as several grey-haired volunteers grouped around a large worktable and shooting tags into garments and tea towels with handheld pricing guns.

“Afternoon, Riley,” Fred smiled. “Thanks for being on time as usual.”

The store’s rear doorbell sounded. “I’ll get it,” Riley offered. Crossing to the back door, she pulled it open to reveal a pair of beaming faces; Joe and Cathy Picard stood side by side, thinning silver hair lifting in the breeze, toolbox and Timbits snack-pack in hand. “Halloooo!” Cathy sang out as they entered. “We had such a time getting here. Construction on Circle Drive, you know. Traffic is backed up for blocks.”

Riley liked to think of the Picards as Those Descended from Above. Although the store was staffed almost exclusively by volunteers, there was a definite hierarchy to the non-paid personnel. Top of the heap were Cathy and Joe, who had been volunteering at the store since Joe had worked off a traffic ticket on the Fine Options program six years earlier. The couple was obviously close; before retiring, they had worked together as custodians at one of the local high schools. Now in their early seventies, they sat as President and Vice President of The Executive—a small volunteer group that met twice monthly and generated quaintly worded memos regarding the running of the shop. Both Picards wore their executive responsibility like a crown and mantle; their entry into the store was trumpeted with loud voices, broad smiles, and the unspoken invitation to join in on the enjoyment of their magnificence.

And Riley did join in. She enjoyed pretty much everything about Cathy and Joe—their nonstop jovial conversation, their enthusiastic self-absorption, their assumption that nothing in the store went on before they entered it (at least nothing of significance). Joe focussed on small repairs that needed to be made around the building, as well as to donated items, and Cathy filled in as needed, presiding wherever she paraded. Wxsith a proprietary glance around the back room, she deposited the Timbits on the counter next to the coffee maker as Joe headed out into the store to fix some loose panelling in a changeroom.

“Everything going okay?” she asked Fred, hanging up her coat.

Riley tuned out of their conversation, hanging up her own coat, then sidling over to the worktable to survey the loot being processed. The Emporium operated on donations—everything from wedding dresses to paint sets to gardening tools. Riley fingered a mushroom-shaped set of salt-and-pepper shakers, then two nightlights lying on a decorative plate. “No way,” she muttered, examining the nightlights more closely. Three-inches tall, they were beige plastic likenesses of Jesus and the Virgin Mary, each with its right hand raised in blessing. A tiny lightbulb had been screwed into the socket behind each figure.

Riley fizzed giggles and diligently choked them back. Several other volunteers had just come in, and details about church potlucks and a Red Hat luncheon were being cheerfully exchanged. If her four months of experience here had taught Riley anything, it was that at The Good Intentions Emporium, one volunteer and one volunteer only would appreciate the humour in these plastic beige monstrosities, but he was not to be found among the chattering, congenial, rotund bodies currently exchanging tips about the best aquafit classes. Nightlights in hand, Riley headed out into the store.

Things had quieted down—an elderly man could be seen poking through Books, a Hutterite couple was checking out an iron, and a young mother pushed a stroller along the north aisle. As Riley approached the till, she caught sight of Joe, one hand pressed to his lower back as he lectured the cashier who had taken over for Joyce. “Just keep an eye out,” he admonished, turning away from the counter. “Not a big problem, really, but we’d like more consistency with the customers.”

With a nod, he brushed past Riley and headed up the south aisle towards the changerooms. In his wake, the stone-faced cashier lifted his right hand and waggled the middle finger. “The Sacred Finger speaks.” In his mid thirties, Pete was the grandson of the store’s founding mother, and he had been volunteering at The Emporium since adolescence. Thinning auburn hair drifted down his back and a beard rounded his jaw line, but on most days the most compelling aspect of his appearance was his wildly weird collection of T-shirts. Pete insisted on showing up for his shifts wearing tees guaranteed to blast the Picards’ eyebrows skyward. Rainbow-hued hemp leaves, Che Guevara, Mr. Poopy Butthole and, Riley’s favourite, TOO MANY RIGHT-WING CHRISTIANS. TOO FEW LIONS.

“What was that all about?” she asked, walking up to the counter.

Pete leaned across the counter and pointed to the sign taped to the front, requiring all bags and knapsacks be left behind the till. “The usual,” he complained. “One week it’s ‘You’re paranoid! Stop bugging the customers and just let them shop!’ And the next, it’s ‘They’re robbing the store blind! Get those bags in behind the counter and keep them there until the customer leaves!’” He rolled his eyes. “You know Joe—always working on his Mount Rushmore profile.”

Riley’s grin widened. Of her two volunteer shifts, Friday was by far her favourite, due mostly to Pete’s quirky subversion. Slouched into a perennial question mark, his slender body was languid, his voice high-pitched. Pete made Cathy nervous and he knew it; Riley suspected that he enjoyed it.

“The man’s in pain,” he added. “Pulled his back clipping his toenails. Old age can be hazardous. My uncle dislocated his shoulder picking up a phonebook. But you know, if you slow down and take a day off now and then like normal people, that stuff doesn’t happen. Only you can’t say that to the precious Picards without them blowing their obsessive-compulsive little stacks.”

Riley placed both nightlights on the counter. “Okay,” she said. “So take a break from the bum facts of life and tell me what you think of these.”

Pete whistled and picked up the Virgin Mary. “These are beauts,” he cooed. “The ultimate in blasphemy. Do they work?”

“Haven’t checked yet,” said Riley.

“Oh man,” Pete purred. Turning to an outlet in the wall to the left of the till, he plugged in the Virgin. The hooded figure glowed benignly. “You know,” said Pete, observing it, “she reminds me of my granny that same divine beneficence. Gran died a coupla years back. When she ran this store, it was a fun place to be. She started it as a service to the community. Now it’s all about making money.” He waved a hand at the Boutique section opposite. “There didn’t used to be an area for designer clothing. That was a play zone for kids. There was a one-for-one barrel there too, you could bring something in and trade it for anything already there. It didn’t earn the store anything, but it was fun and brought people in—the kind of people who needed it, not people with money lookin’ for a steal.”

“It all goes to charity,” said Riley. “Don’t you buy things here?”

“The odd thing,” Pete hedged. “If I need it. The question is: Do I need this place?”

The front door opened, interrupting his ruminations, and a portly elderly woman entered, leaning heavily on a walker. Just inside the door, she stopped to pick up a shopping basket and abruptly clutched at her chest. “Oh, don’t worry!” she gasped, her face contorting. “I’ll be all right. It’ll pass. It comes and goes, I always manage. Just give me a moment.”

Alarm electrified Riley. “I’ll get you a chair!” she exclaimed. “There’s one beside the changerooms.”

“Oh no!” cried the woman, bending forward so her forehead rested on the countertop.

Gasp followed gasp, building to crescendo. “It’s nothing. It comes and goes. I’ll be fine in a bit.”

Leaning onto his forearms, Pete observed the woman with a tiny grin. “Now, Mrs. Gwitch,” he said. “What is it this week? Allergies? Your heart acting up again?”

Mrs. Gwitch’s free hand scrabbled in a pocket and pulled out a tissue. “My doctor says he doesn’t know what it is,” she croaked, dabbing at her forehead. “It’s just one of those things I have to endure.”

Pete’s grin grew. “There, there,” he soothed, patting Mrs. Gwitch’s shoulder. “How’s your cat been doing? Whiskers is his name, right?”

Mrs. Gwitch’s wheezing vanished and she straightened into an ear-to-ear smile. “Whiskers!” she warbled. “Oh, he’s a darling. He makes me laugh with the things he does. But he needs his teeth brushed, and the vet said it’d cost four hundred dollars. Four hundred dollars! But I’d do anything for Whiskers.”

Pete quirked an eyebrow at Riley, and she put away her panic as a renewed Mrs. Gwitch moved off to do her shopping. Moving in behind the counter, Riley assisted with bagging purchases as Pete totalled prices for the Hutterite couple. To his left, a radiant Virgin Mary blessed the proceedings. When the pair had exited the store, Riley asked, “What’s with the jacket?”

Pete looked down, patting his chest. “It is a nice jacket, isn’t it?” he said.

“Sure,” said Riley, “but you’re indoors and zipped to the chin.”

“Ah,” said Pete, glancing towards the back of the store. “Well, y’see, I’m awaiting the moment of inspiration.” With a second glance towards the back, he unzipped his jacket partway and pulled it open. QUEER AS FUCK in bold white caps strutted across his black tee.

Riley’s jaw went into an unmitigated sag. The gender of some of her friends was so fluid they drank it for breakfast, and she had taken some experimental sips herself. But that was in the real world—the part of her life that, by an unspoken understanding, she left behind when she entered The Emporium. No one had to warn her never to mention it to the Norman Rockwell fans in the back room.

Resolute, almost grim, Pete’s dark eyes held hers. “I go both ways,” he said quietly.

“They’re goi—” Riley’s voice cracked. She cleared her throat and tried again. “They’re going to eat you alive,” she whimpered.

Pete shrugged. “Queers used to be welcome in this store,” he said. “My granny was queer. Under the skin, we’re all a little queer, don’t ya think?”

“Queer as fuck?”

“We all want to fuck too,” Pete opined.

You are about to be fucked,” Riley snapped. Stepping forward, she grabbed the front of his shirt. “Will you please,” she hissed, “zip up your jacket?”

Pete blinked. “It’s too hot,” he demurred.

“But you must know it’s totally inappropriate for retail!”

“Not for the store I volunteer in,” he replied.

Riley threw up her hands. Pete was looking for a fight; there was nothing she could do to ameliorate the situation, except hope to god no one noticed the retail apocalypse on his chest. Making tracks up the south aisle, she passed the change-rooms, which emitted a steady hammering, and entered the back room and a worktable conversation in progress.

“I found a dress here last week to wear to my granddaughter’s wedding or ten dollars!”

Cathy was exulting. “We do have such low prices, don’t we? Can’t be beat.”

“The lowest prices in town,” agreed another pricer, her voice sonorous.

“Problem is,” said Fred, keeping his gaze on his computer screen, “I feel guilty if I don’t buy something when I come in. And I’m in every day.”

“I hear you,” Cathy sympathized, her gaze on the invisible audience that followed her everywhere. “My closets are stuffed. Things are so squished, my clothes get wrinkled just hanging there.”

Same old, same old, thought Riley. Boredom sank in its vampire teeth, but she picked up the steaming wand and got to work, inhaling one-hundred proof vinegar as she tried to come up with the magical verbal formula that would instantly convert the back room to gay-friendly status.

“Helloooo!”

Riley turned to see Pete standing just inside the entrance to the back room. A large cardboard box was clasped to his chest, with tinsel spilling over one side. Around his neck hung a wreath; a twig of plastic mistletoe crowned his head. “Someone just left a box of Christmas ornaments by the till,” he grinned. “Can you believe it—kisseltoe in April! Five seconds before this mistletoe slides off my bald spot. Any takers?”

Bending down, he set the box on the floor and dropped in the twig of mistletoe. Then he straightened, shoulders back, hands on his hips, QUEER AS FUCK proclaiming from his chest.

Gasps exploded. Fred’s chair squeaked as he heaved his pear-shaped body to its feet.

Cathy’s face took on a cataclysmic scarlet. “What am I seeing?” she roared.

“I dunno,” Pete said blandly. “You tell me.”

“On your shirt!” shouted Cathy. “What is that on your shirt?”

Pete gazed contentedly at his chest. “It’s a clean shirt,” he commented. “Freshly washed. One hundred percent cotton, locally purchased. Just a normal, regular T-shirt.”

“There is nothing normal about it!” Cathy boomed. “You will remove it this minute!”

A careful smile crept onto Pete’s lips. “Nope.”

Cathy sucked in. “Then you are through!” she declared. “We’ve seen enough of your inappropriate behaviour! You are no longer welcome in this store! Leave now!”

Pete’s gaze didn’t waver; motionless, he observed Cathy without speaking.

Frozen in place at the steaming rack, the wand upright in her hand, Riley felt her panic build until it thundered under her skin. “Please!” she burst out. “Can we just talk–”

Fred cleared his throat. “Cathy’s right, Pete” he said. “This is going too far and you know it.”

Pete flushed; his smile tightened. “I did know,” he said, glancing at Riley. “This is a triumph. I earned this moment. Freedom calls. This place shrinks minds—don’t stick around too long.” Pivoting on his heel, he strode through the store entranceway, taking his slender song of a body with him.

“Oh,” Riley whispered.

“Well!” trumpeted Cathy, staring at the empty doorway. “He’ll look a sight, wearing that wreath in April.”

As if in response, two hands appeared in the entranceway, deposited the wreath on the floor and dropped the till key inside it. Then, for a second time, Pete was gone.

“Well, Cathy, I hope you’re satisfied,” Fred harrumphed. “You just got rid of the most creative thinker in this place.” He raised a hand, cutting off Cathy’s protest. “You drove him to it—you know you did—and now you got what you wanted. Maybe the both of you got what you wanted. Seating himself at his desk, he gave the room his back.

Cathy’s chin jutted and she crossed her arms. “I am going to take over the till,” she announced. “Riley, continue steaming—the rack is full. Excuse me.”

She started for the store entrance while Riley watched, trapped inside her complete lack of options. Getting a good job reference meant keeping her mouth shut, but The Good Intentions Emporium would be an endurance marathon without Pete.

“Cathy,” she said helplessly, without the slightest idea as to what she was going to say next, but before Cathy could even turn around a crash rocked the building. There was the sound of shattering glass, and an engine revved. With a yelp, Cathy took off through the doorway. On her heels, Riley came through the curtained entranceway to find the south aisle occupied by stunned, staring customers. To the right of the store’s front door, the floor-to-ceiling window had been rammed by what appeared to be the hood of an older-model car. Boutique now glittered with glass shards. Through the cracks that webbed what remained of the window, Riley could see Joe assisting a gasping Mrs. Gwitch from the driver’s seat.

“Oh oh oh!” she wailed. “I must have had it in drive instead of reverse. I do that sometimes. Oh my heart, my poor heart! But I’ll get over it. It’ll be over soon. Don’t worry about me, I’ll be fine.”

Riley tapped Cathy on the shoulder. “Intentions in reverse,” she said. Then she picked her way through the broken glass and quit the store.

Beth Goobie

Beth Goobie won the 2021 Carter V. Cooper Award. A new collection of poetry, Lookin’ for Joy, was published in 2022. It was gratefully written on an SK Arts grant. Beth lives in Saskatoon.


Bad Luck and Big Ants

0
0

by Sheila Burpee Duncan

In the darkness, Ella swats the side of her head before lifting it from the pillow. “Fucking ants,” she says and fumbles for the switch. Bedside lamplight blinds her, but soon she can see that the dog on the floor beside her is awake—alert and ready to do whatever is needed. Maybe that’s where the ant landed.

His back to her, her husband mutters, “Wha…”

There’s the ant. On the duvet pulled up over her husband’s shoulder. It’s a big one. Four front legs drag a mutilated abdomen. Ella pats the scar on her belly.

Being awake in the middle of the night still makes her feel uncomfortable. Her thoughts tend to the negative—like how bad luck comes in threes, but she’s already up to four. Not counting the ant infestation. That’s a mere nuisance.

Her cancer is the fourth. Did that reset the counter? Does she still have two more bad lucks to go? The rift with Hannah, her adult daughter from her first marriage, had been the third. They haven’t spoken in two years. Before that was the death of her last dog. Cancer there, too, but in his case they didn’t go for the chemo. “It’s poison,” Ella had said. A deceptively easy choice given how often she later regretted it.

“Weren’t you supposed to spray for those fucking ants?” she asks her sleeping husband. “There was one on my head.” She rubs her downy stubble, only a few weeks old.

He flops over to face her, eyes closed, and the ant is catapulted to Ella’s side. It tries to scale the cliff of the cotton comforter cover but falls back each time. Reversing course, it heads towards Ella’s husband. He doesn’t know. She doesn’t mention.

He smiles, throws off his covers, rolls out of bed, and plods to the ensuite.

The ant is gone. Ella can’t see where it went. The dog rises and plunks his chin on the mattress beside her, wanting something—a pat, a pee, attention. She ruffles his caramel coat, looking for the ant, and his tail wags rhythmically against the bed. He’s huge, though not full-grown, and relatively easy to please.

Ella surveys the bed covers and the carpeting. The ant is somewhere around here. Around her. She whisper-shouts, “Bring me a Kleenex, when you come back . . . please.”

Her husband returns. The tissue he hands her bears a moist imprint. “It’s wet,” she says and drops it instinctively.

“I washed my hands,” he says. Ella can’t remember if she heard the tap running.

The dog is asleep again. He snores. At least her husband doesn’t. Her mother used to when she’d had too much to drink and fell asleep on the couch. Young Ella, those times when she’d gotten up in the night for a pee, had only studied her slumbering mother in disgust. She wasn’t the kind of kid to throw a blanket over a drunk parent.

“You didn’t spray for ants.”

“Well, that wouldn’t really be for them, would it?” He smiles. She doesn’t.

“You told me not to use anything that might kill the dog,” he says. The dog’s ears perk up; his eyes stay closed.

“Should I have to say that?” she asks. The dog’s ears relax.

*****

Her husband had started the bad luck count when Ella’s mother died. Just a throwaway remark, perhaps meant to communicate a mix of regret and inevitability. “Bad luck, sweetie,” he’d said when she got off the phone with the nursing home. He seemed to understand by her silence what she had learned. But such an odd way to put it, something her mother might have said. Maybe he had meant it as subtle mockery. He’d hugged her then, but she didn’t reciprocate.

“Oh, that is bad luck,” he said to the vet months later when they got the diagnosis, before they knew the treatment option.

“Bad luck comes in threes,” he said, almost cheerfully, as if there couldn’t be any more, back when Ella told him about the argument with Hannah. It has been two years since her daughter accused her of being heartless—of not loving Hannah’s beloved Granny, or the family dog, enough to save them. Ella couldn’t be blamed for her mother’s death; that was a lifestyle choice.

“You didn’t even tell me when they got sick,” Hannah had said and threatened to never to speak to her mother again. That seemed overly dramatic. Ella was only trying to protect her.

“Can’t you use vinegar or something?” Ella asks, still looking for the damaged ant.

Her phone buzzes. At this time of the morning?

Ella reaches towards the bedside table. Next to her phone she sees the ant, spotlighted like a celebrity, performing an awkward soft-shoe across the cover of an unread novel. She searches for the tissue.

“I have to use poison to kill the queen,” her husband explains.

Another ant, this one intact, rushes to the scene and proceeds to support its mate, half-carrying, half-nudging it across the stage. Two for one, Ella thinks, as the buzz sounds again. She grabs her phone and sees a message from Hannah: “Up early. Miss u. Breakfast?”

Ella flashes the phone screen to her husband. “Ha. I’m back to three.”

“Three?” he asks as he reads the message.

“Bad luck. You said it comes in threes.”

“Did I? I don’t remember.” He doesn’t seem to be joking. He nods towards Ella’s phone. “But good luck we were up early. Wouldn’t want to miss that.”

Thing,” she says. “Good thing we were up early.”

She turns to the bedside table. The ants are gone. She didn’t want to kill them anyway. That’s her husband’s job. He’ll take care of it.

Ella is typing her reply to Hannah when he says, “’Course, now you’ll have to tell her.”

Sheila Burpee Duncan

Sheila’s short story “Arbour Marie” placed top three in the Penguin Random House Canada Student Award For Fiction in 2022 and one of her non-fiction humour pieces was accepted by Reader’s Digest.

She’s still on Twitter @SheilaBDuncan, where she often tries too hard to be funny.

The Universal Treat

0
0

by Jenny Vester

Even before they chain up that dog in their spectacularly untended back yard, you despise the couple next door. You refer to them as Bitch and Asshole, same as they call each other, and give them the surname Knob so you can lump them together—as in, The Knobs have really done it this time.

The dog arrives on a Friday night while you’re at work. You drive home from another shift of mixing drinks and pouring pints, wondering how much longer you can work at Uncle Tom’s pub. Ten years is too long already. Never your dream, it was just a way to help out and be helped while you figured out what to do next. Your dream, your true life, is in deep Errington. It includes tall trees, a garden, no close neighbours, and dogs. Lots of dogs.

For years now you’ve been saving, but you’re not the only one who wants to disappear into the woods; and property prices keep climbing. When your nest egg is big enough, you’ll never again deal with a skinny nineteen-year-old girl puking and crying in the ladies’ at the end of the night or a belligerent coke-nosed man insisting he’s responsible for her. You should have fought him harder. Lou would’ve. But what were you going to do? Rescue someone who didn’t want to be rescued? The girl chose him over the options you offered. She shook her head when you mentioned calling her parents or the police and folded in her shoulders when you said she could come to your house. She wiped her mouth with her sleeve and left clinging to that fat bastard. You tasted bile when he dragged her out to his car.

When you pull into the back alley to park behind your house, you’re greeted by a torrent of hostile barking. Under the weak streetlight, through the tilting cedar fence that separates your cultivated yard from the Knobs’, you see a fierce, white dog. A bull terrier from the look of her long head and broad chest. She’s straining at the chain attaching her to the lone, scraggly ornamental tree growing in the sea of what had been tall grass before her circling tamped it down. You shake your head in disbelief, and the rage in your belly boils up. Not at the dog—of course, never at the dog, though she seems willing to rip out your throat—but at all the wrong in the world. If you could, you’d destroy all the cokehead men, all the parents abandoning their teens, and these fucking Knobs.

*****

Greasy-mustached Mister Knob and bleached-backcombed Missus never hide their smoking, drinking, yelling, fighting, screwing routine. They even have a soundtrack for it. The background blare of 80s rock music makes your teeth grind. You never want to hear the catchy guitar riffs and raspy voices from songs like “Back in Black” or “You Shook Me All Night Long” again. But you do. Daily. How are these people even real? You wish they’d get sucked back through the rip in time’s fabric that spat them out in the first place. The one thing you appreciate about them is their childlessness. Not that you haven’t fantasized about a cool kid moving into the rental next door and becoming a special friend, it’s just that you hate when damaged dumb fucks procreate. Some people shouldn’t be allowed to have kids, like your own parents—too willing to swing a fist, too broken to stop, too lost to say sorry. You had to leave them behind. Nanaimo is marginally better than Red Deer, Alberta, though people like your parents exist here too—dangerous people clutching to the “glory days” when it was okay to go out with your buddies to beat up faggots and Indians, okay to pick up underage girls.

You hate them. You hate this town. You hate your job. You hate the coke-nosed man and the stupid fucking Knobs, but you won’t hate the wretched dog. You lean over the fence and croon, “Hi nice friend, where did you come from? What interesting ears you have.” But your attention distresses the creature. Her bark hoarsens from the tension of collar cutting off throat. After the horrible shift at the bar, you don’t have the energy to deal. You can’t stop seeing the girl, her short, tight dress riding up her thin thighs as the man shoveled her into his car. You know he won’t offer her water, or clean the vomit from her straggly hair, or tuck her into a safe bed to sleep off her hangover. You can only hope he has a heart attack and dies.

*****

The dog barks on and off, off and on, breaking up what little is left of the quiet summer night. You understand the need to wail. To yell. To not let anyone else sleep because yes the world sucks—but come on! Finally, you pull your pillow over your head, snug it around your ears, rest your cheek on the cool sheet. Sleep comes, fragmented by images of immature breasts and spilled martinis.

Late next morning you bribe the dog with Milkbone treats. She snarfs down the biscuits and barks again, more incessantly when you stand at the fence. How are you going to be able to garden in peace? The peas are ready to pick. You want fresh greens for lunch. As you retreat into your house, you hear Missus Knob. “Ghost, shut the fuck up!”

*****

On the second night, the barking begins before you roll your car into the alley. An hour later, from your bed, desperate to pass out, you shout out the window. “Stop it, just stop it!” Ghost barks louder, angrier. You cry. You actually cry. Is no one else listening? How can anyone in the neighbourhood sleep? Why is no one doing anything? When you finally tip into a dream, you see yourself locking the Knobs into their house and lighting it on fire.

*****

On the third night, you roll foamy orange plugs between your fingers before inserting them into your ears. They expand but can’t keep out the muffled sound of a distressed dog. You try headphones—two Coldplay albums in a row, too loud to be restful, not loud enough to completely drown out the bouts of barking. Nearing a spent and furious edge, you search for your old friends, the sleeping pills, in the medicine cabinet. You shuffle through bottles even though you’re certain you purged the out-of-date Ambien in the last drive to safely dispose of pharmaceuticals.

Finally, at four in the morning you dig the last three pot cookies from the freezer, eat one and a half, and lie back down knowing that tomorrow is your day off. All you need to do is bake for Lou. Not long after, deep, dreamless, uninterrupted sleep takes you. By the time you wake, groggy and unsure, it’s after noon.

*****

When Rumple was alive, you rarely slept in past eight. The clatter of claws, on hardwood floor from his bed down the hall to your bedroom door, was your alarm. You woke with his warm, moist nose pushing into your palm, your face, the soles of your feet—whatever part he could get at. If only you’d recorded the sound of him trotting down the hallway, the rhythm of his clicking claws following you around the house. The odd time, you still think you hear him coming. The Happy Saunterer you’d called him. The Lanky Loper. The Proud Prancer. That dog loved his four-legged body, swishy tail upright, nose swinging from scent to scent.

The death of Rumple was both expected and a surprise. The day before, on the way to the Morell Nature Sanctuary, he’d leapt a ditch and chased one of the university rabbits. Tricked by the daily drug regime keeping him alive, you believed he still had years of good life ahead of him. Even though the vet had warned you: Rumple’s heart would one day, couldn’t say when but sooner rather than later, quit. The x-ray proved Rumple’s huge heart was more than metaphorical; it filled his entire chest cavity. His expanded, loving heart was destined to kill him before he could get old.

The morning he died you stuck three pills down his throat—two for the heart, one for the kidneys. Rumple gobbled down a mound of kibble, and the two of you went for a quick twenty-minute walk. Back at your kitchen table, drinking tea and doing a crossword puzzle, you heard Rumple release his last sound. A wild, keening howl as a deep, full-body, back spasm bent him the wrong way, extending his water-swollen belly. Piss gushed out of him. His breath gone from one second to the next. A few final muscular twitches offered brief hope of his return, but his limp, cooling, purple tongue said no.

*****

Three months, five days and counting. One day you’ll lose track. When that happens, you’ll be ready for your next dog. Rumple was your third, but the first to love you best. Your friend Lou found him wandering a side road in Yellow Point—no tags, no tattoo, hopping with fleas. She got him into her car and brought him to you. The first time you and Rumple made eye contact, his searching yours with naked need, you knew more than anything you’ve ever known: You belonged together.

It’s lunchtime and Ghost starts up again. Kids passing through the alley jeer at her. Action requires either you march next door and demand better from The Knobs or call the SPCA to report abuse. No dog should be chained to a tree for days on end. From your kitchen window you watch Ghost lie down to lick her front paw; you suspect a hot spot.

The ashtray on the table holds three fine roaches. You light the longest one and huff and puff the smoke into curling cumulous clouds. Sweet, potent, first toke of the day. Thoughts defuse and ramble; and for a second you forget about dogs, lost and found.

When the barking starts up again, you cradle your bent head in your hands and plug your ears with your thumbs. Your fingertips rub your scalp. The early afternoon light pours through the window to illuminate floating dandruff. You recall Lou telling you once that eighty percent of the dust in a house comes from live flaking surfaces. The two of you were smoking the latest strain you were growing when Lou had pronounced, “Life is a dance with deterioration.”

You’d both laughed then, but your decaying bits are building up. The vacuum’s been out of commission since you pulled the retractable cord from the innards of the machine a couple of days after you buried Rumple under the hydrangea in the back yard. Now his black and golden hairs have unified with the dust bunnies, morphing and multiplying into furry monsters under the bed, table, couch, chairs, and in all the corners.

You miss his shedding fur, his soft floppy ears, his long slow licks on any skin you bared. Your body misses your two daily walks together. Seven extra pounds have packed around your middle, one for each year you and Rumple were together.

*****

A double batch of medicinal macaroons takes a few hours, start to finish, to bake. Weighing, toasting, cooking, and straining transforms the marijuana buds into bright green coconut oil. You’ve cobbled together a recipe from experience and online suggestions, aiming for consistency, even though you’re dealing with a different batch of flowers most times.

The kitchen smells funky-skunky when the macaroons come out of the oven, lightly browned and a teensy bit crispy. The extra-virgin coconut oil creates crunchy edges, which dissolve on the tongue. Sweetened with maple syrup, the centre is soft and chewy with shredded coconut and almond meal. The right dose promises a solid sleep, a stop to nausea, a prod to hunger, an exit from anxiety and, some say, anti-cancer medicine.

The new marijuana world is all about gummies and over-packaged warehouse weed, but you’re all about the cookies. A decade before dispensaries popped up on every corner, you were immersed in the hush-hush of an illegal grow-op. Your one and only boyfriend convinced you to spark up a show in the unfinished basement you rented from Aunt Cleo and Uncle Tom on Seventh Street. With their permission you blacked out windows, hung halogen lights, and set up fans and timers. Turned out, you cut better clones than the boyfriend, caught the mites earlier, and trimmed the crystal-covered buds with efficient speed. You got used to the hum underneath your feet, the smell of pot wafting up through the vents. When the boyfriend left, you kept the little scene running, distributing the modest amounts you grew through the regulars at the pub. The additional cash went into the “Escape Fund” envelope you kept hidden in a hollowed-out plant encyclopedia on your bookshelf.

*****

When Aunt Cleo got breast cancer, you made the first batch of cookies to ease the side effects of her chemo. Over time, word spread. Now, your cookies have a reputation for being healthy and helpful. For an inexperienced user you suggest a quarter macaroon before bed and then to gradually increase tolerance. Lou’s up to two cookies a day, one in the morning if she doesn’t need to drive anywhere and one in the evening.

Once the twenty-six macaroons are baked, you pack them, still warm, into a big Ziplock, leaving it open so the cookies can breathe. Ghost starts barking as soon as you open your door. She lunges at the fence and spins on her chain. When the idea comes, you wonder why you hadn’t thought of it before. Instead of pulling a Milkbone from your pocket, you pull a cookie from the Ziplock, one of the extras thrown in for good measure. You toss it over the fence, watch it whirl—a perfect miniature Frisbee, a tiny UFO—twirling towards, and then smack, into the dog’s mouth.

All creatures love cookies. A universal treat.

Ghost has already gobbled it down when you wonder what a whole cookie will do to a dog that weighs less that fifty pounds.

*****

You and Lou have known each other for over eight years. When she joined the team at Uncle Tom’s pub, you were smitten by her irreverent, sexy sass and her refusal to suck up to cranky customers. For whatever reason, she liked you back. Without makeup, cleavage, or caring what you looked like, you were never competition.

And you smoked. Your friendship grew over countless cigarettes before you finally quit. She told you things, wryly, as if it was nothing to fuck your high school English teacher or get beat up by your big brother. You’ve always been a better listener than talker, but you told her things too. What a relief to find out she didn’t want kids either—for different reasons than you, but nonetheless. After your brief boyfriend left, you chose celibacy as the best birth control option; but she freely took lovers, men and women. Once, she called you for a ride home from the hospital after an abortion. She told you it was her third. Her eyes, unashamed and hard, found yours, in case you were judging. You weren’t.

*****

Lou opens the door, wearing all black. She’s frail, hidden in baggy sweatpants and a hoodie. A “Fuck Cancer” ball cap covers her baldness. She takes the bag of macaroons from you, nibbling on one as she leads the way to the kitchen where a pot of green tea is steeping.

“So, how’s work?”

“Same same.” You don’t mention the barely legal drunk girl and the blowhard dude.

“Nancy fight anyone lately?” Lou misses the regulars, craves juicy details.

“Nah, she’s been pretty good. Hasn’t said anything about my fat ass or moustache in almost a month.”

Lou takes another bite. “That skinny bitch, maybe someday she’ll swallow whatever sour thing lives in her mouth and shit it out.”

A gaunt girl herself, Lou is dwindling away. Her eyes are big in her face, dark smudges of worry ringing the hollows, like a goth cartoon character. Before cancer you thought Lou was incapable of expressing fear, but not anymore.

“Nancy’s never going to change, she was born mean.”

“Beyond redemption?” asks Lou.

“I’m talking out of my ass. Nancy makes me crazy, they all make me crazy.” You try to smile, apologize for your lack of generosity. “My crackhead neighbours have chained up a dog in their back yard . . . barks all the time. Don’t know what to do about it.”

“Do?” says Lou. She knows you prefer dogs to humans.

You remember the macaroon spinning through the air, into the dog’s mouth. “So . . . how are the cookies working?”

“Yeah, yeah, they’re good for pain and the mental shit. And I’m getting my tolerance up. Only once last week I couldn’t tell if I was floating or lying on the bed. The puking was probably from the chemo though.” For a second, Lou softens. Her hand reaches across the table to touch yours. “I don’t know how to thank you.”

A bristling fat lump swells in your throat. Your eyes brim hot and salty as you get up to hug your best friend. And in your head, you say: Don’t die.

*****

By the time you get home from Lou’s, purple dusk is replacing bright day. No lights shine from the Knob’s house. Ghost doesn’t bark. You creep to the ruined fence and push open the leaning gate. Ghost doesn’t make a peep. She’s a glowing puddle. You whistle softly, and she raises her head slightly. In quiet, slow motion, you step through the thigh-high grass, trying not to break an obvious trail to her worn patch. Ghost’s breath is shallow, but at least she’s breathing.

“Hi, hi, hi, nice white doggie. Too much eh, a whole cookie was too much. Sorry about that.” Ghost wheezes. Her eyes are mournful. “Did you barf? Are you thirsty? The medicine sure chilled you out.” You smell dog shit and hope it isn’t on the bottom of your shoe. You scratch between her ears, down the ridge of her backbone, and give a few gentle pats on her thigh before you pull some garbage-rescued burger from your bag. Ghost sniffs at the half-eaten slab of grey meat with indifference before her head wobbles down between her paws again. “You don’t have to eat it now. Save it for later. You’ll be hungry tomorrow. Sleep is your best bet. And don’t worry, nice doggie, you’ll feel better in the morning. But don’t bark about it.”

Miraculously, you both sleep through the night. By noon, Ghost has found reasons to bark again—the guy noodling on his saxophone three doors down, the construction crew renovating the place on the corner, Asshole yelling at Bitch, whatever. Ghost reacts to all of these but with less intensity, less persistence, less care.

As you head out for your evening shift you dose Ghost again, but with half as much. When you return late and break a new trail from the gate to the tree, she’s less dozy but peaceable, polite even. You whisper as you edge towards her. “Pot got your tongue, little sister? What a lovely side effect.” The dog’s amber eyes train on you as the space between you shrinks. Ghost pants. She whines. When her nose meets your hand, her tail swishes with pleasure. You refill the water bucket and leave gluey blobs of gravied fries and half-eaten chicken strips at the base of the tree.

For the next three nights you play out the same scenario. Ghost catches the cookie out of the air. Ghost gets stoned and quiet. You bribe her with late-night love and leftovers. On the fourth day, you cut the dose to a quarter cookie. That night, when you open the gate, Ghost stands up and wags. Her whine, shrill yet soft, is insistent. She licks your hands. Her nose seeks out the pub food. When you rub between her ears and under her chin, you discover the raw groove where her collar chafes her neck. “Poor thing. Poor lovely thing.”

*****

On your day off, you putter in the garden, deadheading flowers and pulling weeds. Ghost barks intermittently. You throw her Milkbones. When the sun lowers and shadows stretch long across both yards, you watch Ghost watch for you as you watch for The Knobs. They finally leave at ten o’clock, and you slip out of your house. In your hand the coil of Rumple’s old leash, in your pocket a quarter of a cookie.

The early July night smells of the star jasmine littering blossoms in your back yard. You have goosebumps, even though the air is warm on your bare arms. Ghost releases a sharp, excited yip when you push open the gate. You shush her. The dog sits, waiting for your hand to offer the cookie. Someone has trained her. She licks hard at your palm long after every crumb is consumed. When you ask, “You ready for an adventure, nice doggie?” thump thump thump goes her tail on the beaten grass.

You unclip the chain and fasten Rumple’s old leash to Ghost’s collar. The air around you vibrates. “We have to be cool, Ghost. Super cool. No crazy. Just cool, like we’re allowed to do this.”

Ghost tucks in close to your heel, so her nose can meet your hand over and over as you thread your way through Harewood up to the Colliery dam. Someone has taught Ghost to walk on a leash. In amongst the trees, the light of the moon is enough to guide you along the two kilometres of well-worn trails. It’s good to move, good to have a dog at your side again. No one else is out and about. At the parking lot you sit on a bench and comb your fingers through Ghost’s short, thick white fur. If you try to stop, she nudges your hand back to action. When you stand up to go, Ghost rolls over onto her back and invites you to work over her belly.

“What a nice doggie, what a nice friend, what a nice girl.” Ghost squirms, smiles crookedly, showing her teeth, and begs for more.

*****

You’re back on Wakesiah, just two blocks from home, when you hear the rumble of Mister Knob’s truck. There’s no escaping the headlights that illuminate you and the dog. You keep walking until the truck slows to a crawl then stops beside you. Mister Knob leans out the window to stare, his eyes narrow with disbelief. “Hey, what are you doing with my dog?”

“We’re walking,” you say calmly, even though your mouth is suddenly dry and a cold sweat is soaking your armpits.

He looks at you like you have six noses, and you stare back before he pops open his door and steps his beer-bellied body onto the street. “Get in the truck!” He commands.

Ghost slinks behind you, folds her shoulders in and aims her gaze to the ground.

“What the fuck? Ghost! Get in the truck!”

“Are you sure this is your dog?” you ask.

“I know my own goddamn dog! Look here, who the hell do you think you are?”

“Your friendly neighbourhood dog lover.”

Asshole looks at you closer and shows no sign of recognition. In the three months he’s lived beside you, he’s never taken notice. You’re piqued and resigned. If you make a point of not being seen, you shouldn’t be surprised when it works.

“Are you crazy? You can’t just steal someone’s dog and take it for a walk!” His face is red. He’s spitting. You can tell he wants to hit you. He reminds you of the cokehead who crammed the wasted girl into his car. He’s not winning this time.

Crazy? He doesn’t know crazy yet. Because when you open your mouth, screaming comes out. Even you can’t believe that’s you, yelling on the side of the road about the sores on the dog’s neck, about the length of her chain, about the barking, the empty water bucket, the lack of exercise, the undeniable cruelty, the SPCA knocking on his door, the fines he’ll have to pay. About this dog making a choice.

You feel a monster raging in your pulse, and you’re sure Mister Knob can too. Behind you, Ghost growls low in her throat. If the scumbag won’t cave, you’re going to fight. You imagine pulling out his bulging eyeballs, yo-yoing them up and down. Reaching into his chest to extract his useless heart and feeding it to Ghost.

“Jesus, Frank, who cares about the stupid dog.” It’s Missus Knob. You didn’t even notice her. “Let the guy have her. Come on, let’s go home.”

“I can’t fucking believe this,” he blusters as he climbs back into his truck.

“Believe it, you nasty bastard.” The fury that’s puffed up your chest slowly releases as he drives away. Your exhalation turns into a titter and then a few quick tears. You get down to press your forehead to the third eye of your new dog.

*****

Back at home, Ghost follows you inside. In the kitchen you take off her collar to examine the abrasions on her neck. She doesn’t want you to touch them. Close in, her pink nose is the exact shape of a heart. She sniffs and sniffs, skittish, as she investigates your space. She munches a few kibbles from Rumple’s bowl and slurps some water. You show her Rumple’s bed in the living room and pat it repeatedly with the palm of your hand. Ghost’s nose wiggles and computes as she circles round and round and round the hairy, cushioned, softness, storied by a happy and gone dog.

You lie down on the floor and hope she’ll settle, but she doesn’t. She peers down the hallway, returns to the kitchen, and then circles you again. You let your weight relax into the hardwood beneath you and close your eyes. Tears arrive, unasked for, a hot silent stream crossing your cheeks and pooling in your ears. No sobbing accompanies them. You don’t want to alarm your new friend.

You follow the click of her claws with your ears. She’s restless. You want her to lie down beside you. You want her to gaze into your eyes just like Rumple did. You don’t know it yet, but you want her to be Rumple. Here’s the thing: She’ll never be your old beloved dog. All that’s left of him is fur and dust, and soon you’re going to vacuum up even those memories.

Exhausted, prone, weeping—you wait for her. But only her bark comes. It jolts your body into sitting. And there’s Ghost, at the door, wanting out.

Jenny Vester

Jenny Vester is a writer, performer and farmer on a remote island in the Salish Sea. She lives off-grid with a rescue dog in recovery, a furry grey cat and her queer husband.

Donor Fatigue

0
0

by Cadence Mandybura

“Just the blood today, ma’am?”

Marybeth blinked, still distracted by how she’d hung up on her daughter to make this appointment in time. “No, I’ve signed up for the whole regimen, as usual,” she said. “Compassion, patience, tolerance—the works.”

“Oh,” said the nurse—Prashant, according to his nametag—confusion fluttering across his face. “I wasn’t given the extended forms. Wait here, please . . .” He stepped out, leaving Marybeth in the consulting room. She fanned herself with an aftercare brochure as she waited.

One of the benefits of being retired was organizing her activities into the optimal times of day. She always scheduled her donations at 2:30 p.m. so she could buy pastries on the way to her Rotary meeting at four. She normally avoided sweets, but she deserved the sugar after giving up a pint of goodwill.

Prashant must be new. Marybeth had been donating for years and recognized most of the staff. Trying to get a glimpse of his progress, she wondered if he was a regular donor himself. Her working theory was that nurses exhausted their kindness too quickly for it to build up in their bloodstream, but maybe Prashant wasn’t burnt out yet. He did seem far too young to be a qualified professional.

Prashant returned with fresh printouts and an apologetic smile. He sat and laid the forms between them.

“I’m sorry for the delay, ma’am. You’re not eligible to donate today—your anger levels are too high.”

“Excuse me?” Heat trickled down Marybeth’s arms. She wasn’t an angry person. Frustrated, sometimes, but she knew how to channel that into action. Like with Luna. All Marybeth had wanted was to offer her daughter a bit of a boost—it was certainly more than Marybeth had received when striking out on her own.

“That can’t be right,” she said, keeping her voice reasonable, kind, inarguable. “Could you run the tests again?”

“We have every confidence in our equipment, ma’am,” said Prashant. “It’s against our policy to rerun tests.”

“Surely there’s time . . .” said Marybeth, glancing at the empty chairs in the waiting area.

“It’s the policy,” he repeated. “It’s to protect donors’ health and ensure our supply meets medical standards.”

“I understand that, but I donate every quarter, and I’ve never had an issue before,” said Marybeth. “You’re about my daughter’s age, you know,” she continued. “Technicalities over practicalities, that’s her.”

Prashant adjusted the donation forms between them, squaring them millimetre-perfect. “Does your daughter have anything to do with your donation today, ma’am?”

“Of course not,” said Marybeth, wiping away the mention of Luna with a dismissive gesture. “But there must be some mistake. I am not an angry person!”

Prashant didn’t answer right away, giving her space to hear the sharp corners of her statement. She flushed. He was doing the same thing Luna did when she thought Marybeth was being pushy. Deadening his tone, leaving brittle silences.

Never mind. Marybeth pressed onward. “I suppose I might have been a little frustrated with the . . . traffic earlier, but I’m much calmer now. I’m sure if you redo the test, you’ll find that you can use my full donation after all.”

“You can come back in twenty-one days,” said Prashant, checking the calendar and writing the date on a card for Marybeth.

“Twenty-one—? Young man, do you have any idea how long I’ve been donating?”

He slid the card over to her. “Booking options are on the reverse side.”

Marybeth took the card, white-knuckling her grip to keep from tearing it in half. “I’m going to issue a formal complaint about you, Prashant,” she said. “You’re throwing away a perfectly good donation.”

“We’ll be happy to see you after the mandatory waiting period,” said Prashant, unfazed. “You’re always welcome to book an appointment as a recipient, too. Perhaps a little tranquility would do you good.”

That was simply too much. Marybeth stood, trembling. “I have always been a donor—longer than you’ve been alive, I’ll have you know. Not once have I been prescribed an emotional supplement.”

Marybeth threw the reminder card back at the table, her aggression translating poorly to the flap of paper. It landed on her donation forms with a small pat. “Your supervisor will be hearing from me,” she said. “My donating days are done.”

Without waiting for his response, Marybeth left, shouldering through the glassy clinic doors before marching through the parking lot and landing in the driver’s seat of her Prius. She didn’t start her car right away, taking a slow breath and resting her hands on the steering wheel. Tranquility, indeed.

Marybeth flipped her hands over, examining the blue map lines on her arms. Nurses usually praised Marybeth’s veins, which were more prominent, apparently, than average. Prashant must have run the tests wrong. But even if—if—anger had tainted her blood, that didn’t mean she was all out of compassion, did it?

With the donation scuttled, she had a spare forty-five minutes before the pastry run for her board meeting. She could call Luna back. In her hurry, Marybeth had tossed her phone into the general mess of her bag instead of tucking it into its normal place. As she groped past hand sanitizer, tissues, sunglasses, and her emergency flashlight, she wondered if Luna had tried calling her back or texted an apology. Maybe Luna had realized she was being stubborn and would accept her mother’s help after all.

Marybeth’s fingers closed around her phone, and she pulsed the dark brick to life. No new messages on the lock screen, just the stale reminder for her donation.

Her thumb hovered over the unlock button.

Perhaps a little tranquility would do you good.

With a tut, Marybeth released a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. She put the phone back in her bag, in the right spot this time, and jabbed the car’s ignition. An extra forty-five minutes was a gift, she told herself as she peeled out of the parking lot. There was still plenty she could accomplish today.

Cadence Mandybura

Cadence Mandybura’s fiction has been published or is forthcoming in MetaphorosisOrcaPulp LiteratureFreeFall, and Tales & Feathers. 
Cadence is a graduate of the Writer’s Studio at Simon Fraser University, the associate producer of The Truth podcast, a freelance editor, and an avid drummer. Learn more at cadencemandybura.com.

Women of Windsor

0
0

by Preston Lang

The book was called Men of Moncton. Rita grabbed it on the way out of Owen’s apartment to have something to read on the train. She’d thought it was fiction, but it was a collection of short biographies—each profiling another illustrious son of New Brunswick’s most essential city.

The woman sitting next to her, glanced at the cover. “Are you from Moncton?”

“No, I’m from Windsor,” Rita said before realizing that she should’ve lied. But quickly she invented a very different childhood—a nicer school, French immersion, prom at the Serbian Centre.

“Going home?” the woman asked.

“That’s right.”

The woman was a quilter, and quilting was an important art form. She believed that Windsor was a world-class artistic city; but if you wanted real success, you had to get past the gatekeepers in New York and Toronto—the people who saw your work as an amusing novelty and treated quilters like dogs who’d learned to skateboard.

There was some truth to this, Rita thought. Six months earlier she’d met Rick in Moncton, and they’d pulled a nice piece of work together at the casino. When he told her about his cousin Owen who worked for a large jewelry corporation in Toronto, she should’ve shot him down. This was a job for a huge syndicate or a singular talent, not a couple of fish-loving cousins.

The woman went to the bathroom but never returned, and Rita read about Marcel Fortin, a star defenseman who accidentally killed another player during a hockey game. Later he became a pacifist and was imprisoned during the First World War. Finally, he emerged as one of New Brunswick’s most prominent Buddhists; but his temple was set on fire, and he fled the country ahead of a warrant for insurance fraud. The author took it for granted that the charges were fake, but Rita wondered.

Raise funds for a temple, inflate the property value, burn it down, collect double what you’d raised.

A simple plan.

The heist had seemed solid. Owen kept telling them that he was risking more than anyone by putting his job in jeopardy. Rita and Rick would have to make a dash past two armed guards; and if Owen did his part correctly, the doors would be sealed shut and the guards would be unable to stop them as they ran out—unless they fired into the plexiglass. One shot to break through, one to hit the running thieves. Owen showed them the security handbook: “Do Not Discharge Firearm Unless Life is at Risk.” Rick thought this was remarkably human for a large corporation, but Rita knew it was just a liability issue. She should’ve bailed then, but she saw a take north of two million dollars and tamped down all doubts about Rick.

The heist went as planned, almost. The clever entry, the smash and grab, the confusion in security bay as rent-a-cops realized their exit was blocked. Then Rick, in his mask, looked back and waved. One of the guards, against all rules and regs, raised his gun and fired three times.

At first Rita assumed the shots had missed. Rick made it to the car at a jog. But when they sat down, blood filled the passenger seat. He’d taken one in the back, and he wouldn’t survive a three-hour drive. She brought him to Owen’s apartment. Less than forty-eight hours later, Rita was on a train to Windsor. She’d taken it because it was the first one out of Union Station, but her hometown had its advantages. She’d know a few useful people, and she could scurry through the tunnel if that became necessary.

Out of the terminal, into the streets—faded red brick and parking lots filled with the cars of useless people. It was all the same as when she’d left seven years before, except the little storefront on Ferry was no longer a travel agency. It was a café, but something was off; it wasn’t a big chain, and it had no charm. No mellow jazz or soulful folk, no music at all. A few stale pastries lay under a hard, plastic cover. It was shabby without trying to turn that into a virtue, yet coffee was a dollar more than at Tim’s.

Rita bought a cup—cream no sugar. When the girl behind the counter couldn’t find cream, she used milk and shrugged.

“Is Marie around?” Rita asked.

“Who?”

Rita wrote her own name on a sheet of paper, and the girl looked at it blankly.

“Please let her have that.”

Rita took a seat at a hard metal table, and the girl tended to an older homeless woman who balked at the high price of coffee but still put coins on the counter one by one—quarters, nickels, dimes. The girl stayed for the first dollar-fifty then turned and disappeared through a door behind the counter.

The homeless woman looked at Rita. “What am I supposed to do?”

“I don’t know. Take a cinnamon bun.”

The woman lifted the cover off the pastries, put them all in a backpack, and swept her coins off the counter.

“See ya.”

Rita was all alone in the grungy café with Vitus Larsen, tireless advocate for the visually impaired of Moncton. He raised $600,000 to start a school for the blind, but his partner stole the funds when Vitus went to a glaucoma conference in Montreal. More useful than biography would have been a guidebook to the men of Moncton, one that would let you know which ones were unreliable and unlucky, and which ones were neat and fastidious, with secret streaks of brutality. That would be a book worth reading.

Unlucky Rick had suffered his gunshot wound bravely, at first. Rita asked if he wanted to be taken to hospital.

“No. I’ll get better.”

She stole antibiotics, paid for heroin, and kept the wound as clean as she could.

Owen went to work the next morning, nine to five as usual. Rita sat in a chair next to Rick’s bed. She watched Tamron and ate all of Owen’s cookies, the ones that bragged about their own decadence and immorality. She cut her hair short, changed bandages, and tried to help Rick find the best position for breathing. Towards the evening, he started to produce an ugly wheeze and lost his grip on reality.

When Owen came back, he said the office was in chaos, but he’d stayed cool. Internal investigators had interviewed everyone in his division. Three guys had to talk to police, but Owen wasn’t one of them.

“They don’t have a clue. They suspect someone inside helped, but I’m not the one they’re sweating.”

They had takeout Chinese, and Owen went to sleep. A little past five in the morning, Rita woke him up and told him that his cousin would die if they didn’t take him to hospital.

“He said he didn’t want to go,” Owen said.

“He also said he’d get better.” Rita reminded him.

“We’re not doing it.”

He’d spoken to her like he was the adult and she was the child. This soft, office creature was acting like he knew what was best in a time of crisis. When Rita reached for her cell, he slapped it out of her hand before grabbing her by the throat and shoving her up against the wall. Unless she did something quickly, she was going to die, so she stabbed him more than twenty times in the chest and gut.

Both Owen and Rick were alive when she left the apartment. Most likely they were dead as she sat in the café waiting to find out whether Marie would see her.

The girl finally returned behind the counter. “Follow me.”

She led Rita halfway down a long hallway. “All the way to the end,” she pointed. “Knock on the door.”

A big man opened the door but didn’t make eye contact with Rita. Marie sat behind a desk. Seven years earlier, her hair had been greying; now it was jet black. She fluttered her left hand at the big man, and he left the room.

“Rita, my dear,” Marie said. “I heard you were in the States.”

“For a while, yeah. What happened to the travel agency?”

“Time for a change. You try the coffee?”

“Yes, it was excellent.”

Marie smiled. “What do you need?”

“I’ve got a few things. Rare stamps and books. Diamond ring.”

“Let me see the ring.”

“It’s with my guy—he’s getting the stone out.”

“Where’d it come from?

“I get things.”

“I’m not asking for a name and address, but you need to tell me how you got it.”

“Just an old man’s house . . . easy job as it turned out.”

This was how Rita had gotten started, often stealing objects by request from soft targets. She needed Marie to believe the stone came from that kind of ordinary job.

“Is that a rare book?” Marie gestured to Men of Moncton in Rita’s jacket pocket.

“Yeah, it’s listed at seven grand,” Rita said, handing it over.

“You’re supposed to keep them wrapped in plastic. Don’t carry it around in your pocket like paperback romance.” She glanced at the title. “My ex was from Moncton.”

Marie’s ex was a gambler before sports betting was legal. The first month they were together, he made $200,000. He bought her a brand-new ski visor and a heart-shaped pendant. Otherwise, he was very lowkey, didn’t blow much on himself. Everything pointed to him being a man who knew what he was doing. But soon he lost it all, and Marie gave him back the pendant and moved on.

“I’ll give you a hundred bucks for it.”

Marie couldn’t really want it. Rita was guessing that it was a test. Marie was always taking in information. As much as Rita needed money, she turned down the offer. Marie gave back the book.

“Speaking of diamonds, you hear about that big heist in Toronto?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

“Inside job.”

“Probably.”

“They’ll catch them—one of them took a bullet.”

“Maybe.”

“Come back tonight around nine.”

With time to kill, Rita walked down to the water and checked the news. Nothing breaking. The hunt was on, but there were still no suspects. Rita needed real money before they found bodies on the 28th floor of a condo. She was willing to give Marie a steep discount, but it had to happen quickly, and she couldn’t act like she was in a hurry.

She tried to read about Northrop Frye who entered a typing contest in Toronto in 1929. He was nervous and “the big city boys were cruel to the shy, Maritime child.” Pull yourself together and type, man, Rita thought. Across the river, she could see Detroit. With enough cash to think on, she would be better off over there. She’d sell the stones slowly. Would some dealer in Miami or Phoenix really be that vigilant about foreign crimes?

Even though Marie had lectured her on the care of rare books, she’d left a thumb smudge on the copyright page. The original title was Moncton: La Ville des Héros by Stewart Gagne. The same surname as Owen and Rick. An uncle, a grandfather? A man who was so in love with his hometown that he’d canonized crooks and incompetents. This ancestor had infected them with useless civic pride, and now they were both dead.

Back in the office that night, Marie had a short bald man with her in addition to the big guy. Rita handed over one stone.

“This was set in a ring?” Marie asked.

“Yeah. I can’t imagine wearing something this size. But some women.”

Marie nodded then passed the diamond to the bald guy. He raised his eyebrows slightly.

“What?” Marie asked.

“Let me give it a real look.” He took out his loupe and examined it for half a minute.

“What’s it worth?”

“Twenty-eight grand is fair.”

Not really, but Rita would readily take that in cash.

“Anything else I should know?” Marie asked.

He looked at Rita quickly then back at Marie.

“She said it was sitting around in some old guy’s drawer?”

“Rita, are you lying to us?”

Rita shrugged. “The expert here says it’s worth twenty-eight grand, right?”

Marie reached out and gently stroked Rita’s hair above her left ear. “I like it this way, short. You just got it cut?”

“Yeah, I thought it was time for a change.”

“Sure, those times come.”

It now felt to Rita like every strand was sticking straight up.

“Here’s the deal: I’ll give you twenty-eight grand and a passport. You can choose the name. It’ll be ready in forty-eight hours.”

Rita didn’t answer.

“But I am going to need all the stones.”

“For twenty-eight grand?”

“And a chance to run.”

“On twenty-eight grand?”

“Look, if we didn’t have history, I wouldn’t even touch this.”

“What if I told you I only got away with the one stone?” Rita said.

“I would say that you were lying. And I wouldn’t like that.”

“I only brought this one with me.”

“Get the rest.”

“Fifty. Fifty grand.”

“Thirty-five. End of negotiation.”

Marie wasn’t stupid, and she wasn’t kind. There was no $35,000, no fake ID.

“Hal will take you to wherever you’ve stashed them,” she said. “Then right back here.”

Hal, the big man, opened the door of his Lexus for Rita. Up close, she remembered him from the old days. He was about her age, a nobody seven years ago. Now he was important enough to drive luxury cars and babysit 2.3 million in diamonds.

Rita settled in the passenger seat and gave him a Remington Park address. When she asked if she could smoke, he just rolled down the window. He didn’t speak at all. Rita was flattered. Clearly, Marie had given him orders: do not talk to this woman, not one word. She thought Rita was crafty enough to give the big man a story, a reason to deviate from this very simple job.

Rita didn’t feel particularly crafty, but she was just slender enough to dive through the open window when they stopped at the red just before Tecumseh. Hal got a hand on her left ankle, but she kicked with her right, got herself loose, and fell face first onto the road. Up, up. Cars honking and swerving.

Hal gave chase, but Rita had a head start. Off the avenue, down a side road, through a backyard, over a wooden fence, then a hard turn into another yard where she crouched behind a plastic slide and waited. After two minutes, a young woman came out of the house. She kept her distance as she held her cell phone.

“You need to leave my yard. I’ll call police.”

Call police on a woman, panting next to a kiddie slide? Why wouldn’t you assume she was in trouble, chased by a psycho boyfriend or a hulking thug. What the hell was wrong with you, Windsor?

“I’m leaving. Christ.”

Rita held up her hands and jogged off until she hit Ouellette. There she was on TV. A sports bar had national news on one screen, golf on the next. She looked deranged in a still taken from the security camera in Owen’s building. Not just a thief, a murderer. She was believed to have travelled by train to Windsor. Authorities had received a tip from a Via Rail passenger.

In Jackson Park by the light of the moon, Rita read about the last man of Moncton. More than anyone else, Jean McTavish was responsible for the abundance of local blueberries. “Few men understood the possibilities of systematic fruit-culture.” Jean grasped this deeply and intuitively, and he spread blueberries throughout the province. He ran into disputes with local authorities when he’d plant on public land, but in the end he was vindicated by the “unmatched quality and prestige of our berries.”

All at once, Rita understood what it meant to be from a place, to value the forces that made you. You were nothing but a product of the ethos of your people and the fertility of your soil.

She walked through the trees, off a dirt path not far from where she’d had her first kiss and later her first experience with hallucinogens. She was less than an hour’s walk from all her sites of struggle, abuse, discovery, joy. Rita dug a narrow hole with her bare hands as deep as she could. She dropped the bag inside, refilled the hole, and marked the nearest tree with her house keys—a large W. Then she walked out of the park. While she tried to remember where the police station was, she spotted a squad car sitting at a Wendy’s drive-thru.

She ran after stabbing Owen because she was scared. But she’d turned herself in voluntarily less than twenty-four hours later. And Owen had taken the diamonds from her as soon as she’d gotten to his place. Maybe he had a deposit box somewhere. Rita had no idea. She put her faith in the judicial system and the inherent fairness of the people of Ontario. They gave her four and a half years to think about the concepts of honesty, loyalty, and heroism. When she got out, the real story began: the amazing achievements and the dazzling rise of this humble daughter of the City of Roses.

Preston Lang

Preston Lang is a small, honest writer, based in Ontario.

For Solo Voice

0
0

by Tina Silver

Even though Gretchen had little potential as a singer, Renata needed the money. Seventy-five dollars bought the same groceries whether it came from a promising talent or a mom taking a forty-five-minute reprieve from carpools and laundry. Renata privately vowed to train Gretchen not to hurt her vocal chords and respect the physiological miracle of singing. For her part, Gretchen took lessons for fun, to check an item off her bucket list. Devoid of self-consciousness, she sometimes danced around goofily and laughed a lot. She began to intrigue Renata who had insignificance and shame squatting in her mind. When teaching, Renata’s singing was excellent; she demonstrated vocal exercises or a few bars from a student’s song with ease. Her secret remained safe, and Gretchen was none the wiser.

When Gretchen suggested they meet outside of lessons for coffee, Renata readily agreed. She loved having a non-errand reason to leave the apartment where she taught and lived. Sitting at round, too-small café tables, Gretchen talked animatedly about the many joys in her life. Her children, her husband, her pets—there was much happiness gained from the simplest of experiences. Renata inhaled every word. Here was someone happy to live an uncelebrated existence. Gretchen had no need to stand out, to collect accolades, to dedicate years of study to one thing, eschewing other experiences and relationships, only to have that very thing evade her when she needed it most. In the almost three years since Gretchen stopped taking lessons, Renata’s thirst for their coffee dates has only increased.

Now, Renata is overcome with agitation as she opens the electronic invitation to Gretchen’s fiftieth birthday party. “Zen Gardens . . . Fine Japanese cuisine . . . Karaoke.” Dammit.

I had to teach late. I had a blinding headache. But she hears rebuttals in Gretchen’s voice, even though Renata is the one making up the words. You couldn’t come for an hour? I was worried something happened to you. We can’t be friends anymore.

******

The night of the party, Renata lies on her bed with her phone. She wears the black palazzo pants and antique-lace blouse she picked out earlier in the week, but she hasn’t done her makeup. One impulse demands she finish getting ready, but another wants to text Gretchen: Sorry . . . sick.  Then she could put on pajamas, make popcorn, and turn on that channel with the plotless Christmas romance movies.

Her present for Gretchen, a porcelain figurine of a Victorian girl playing piano, is in a gift bag on her night table. It’s already 6:40pm, too late to get to the restaurant by public transit. She taps Gretchen’s name on her contact list, but her finger trembles over the text icon.

Go. You can’t risk losing her.

******

Her taxi stops in front of Zen Gardens with its blazing red “KARAOKE” sign in the huge, horizontal front window. Undoubtedly, Gretchen’s husband chose this restaurant because his wife is a ham and probably many of her guests are too. They’ll gleefully degrade the art of singing in exchange for cheap laughs. The lace fabric beneath Renata’s armpits already feels damp as she pays and gets out of the cab.

Pulling open the weighted glass door, she can barely enter the restaurant’s foyer thanks to a cluster of parka-donning people blocking her way. Rising to demi-pointe, she sees that everyone’s waiting for the attention of a frantic young hostess. A man calls out Gretchen’s name, and the hostess replies with something Renata can’t decipher. As the group moves forward into the sprawling dining room, Renata follows but stays several paces behind.

The dining room hosts mostly couples at two-tops laden with square dishes and wineglasses. As Renata navigates her way around the tables, she sees the group heading to a downward staircase where the dining room ends, beside the kitchen entrance. Conscious of her heels, she carefully descends the uneven-feeling staircase.

Three walls of the private party room are painted the same scarlet as the dining room while the fourth is mirrored from floor to ceiling. An enormous chandelier hangs above but provides only moderate light. At the front of the room, the karaoke machine and two microphone stands sit on a low riser, a de facto stage. Behind, a large flatscreen monitor is mounted to the wall displaying “Happy Five-Oh, Gretchen!” in bright pink and blue, Gretchen’s favourite colours. Miniature Christmas trees decorated with red baubles are centred on each of a dozen very long, rectangular tables. In one back corner, another table is already piled with presents. Renata makes her way over and sets her gift bag on top of an enormous black box sitting on the floor. She knows Gretchen asked her husband for an exercise bike.

Guests from tweens to seniors noisily select tables, scraping chairs over the linoleum. Renata sits at the end of a table in the middle of the room. Four women ranging from their thirties to sixties take seats beside and across from her. They’re dressed more casually than Renata, as all the guests seem to be, in jeans and shirts. A few guests wear deliberately loud holiday sweaters.

Renata’s tablemates don’t acknowledge her.

“Are you ordering sushi?”

“Tempura. Screw the trans-fat.”

“Where’s Ted?”

“Home. Migraine.”

“Is there going to be cake or do we order dessert?”

“Make it illegal for people to have birthdays in December.”

“I have so many cookies to bake.”

People keep arriving; the remaining half-dozen chairs at Renata’s table fill up. Renata hears shop talk, clearly Gretchen’s co-workers and their families from the hardware chain’s head office where Gretchen has worked since she stopped taking singing lessons.

Renata sees Gretchen come through the doorway, beaming and waving, with her husband and two teenagers. Her hair looks freshly highlighted with pale blonde and gold; blown dry smooth, it reaches her shoulders. Renata waves grandly, but Gretchen doesn’t see. Every guest seems to know at least one other person, and there’s easily a hundred people. Over the din of conversations, Christmas music begins to play.

A young server in a short, black dress appears beside Renata. She takes drink orders for the table sans notepad, and then the four women return to their rapid-fire chatter. Renata ponders jumping in. They seem like people who will let her into their conversation, unconcerned with names or their respective relationships with Gretchen until it comes up naturally. Renata’s diaphragm jolts a few times, but she decides not to speak.

Her Late Autumn Riesling is very good, and she sips it quickly, mostly for something to do. This is a waste of time. Gretchen probably hasn’t given you a thought. As it is, she has to raise herself from her chair to see the top of Gretchen’s bobbing head from where she sits with her family at the table nearest the karaoke machine.

Renata can’t remember the last time she was at a party. Her forty-third birthday in August with her parents at their favourite seafood place doesn’t count, even if they did bump into their old next-door neighbors who joined them at their table. The septuagenarian couple remembered Renata singing boisterously each day as she walked home from middle school. She flushed as they spoke, remembering how it felt to sing because she loved to—before she began formal study, before she knew anything about technique, before she cared what others thought, and before she realized how many other singers were better.

When the server returns for dinner orders, Renata requests chicken teriyaki and more wine. Suddenly the redhead across from her, who looks about thirty-five, asks, “How do you know Gretchen?”

A comet-like streak of anxiety passes through Renata’s chest. She can’t let them know she’s a singing teacher.

“We met at a music lesson.”

“Oh right, Gretch said she used to take singing lessons,” the woman replies. “She hated stopping when she went back to work.”

“Really?” Gretchen has never told Renata this.

The redhead’s attention shifts back to her friends. Appetizers arrive, but Renata didn’t order one. She tugs gently at the damp fabric under her arms, trying to move it away from her skin. The server brings her another glass of wine.

Renata’s perfectly cooked food is only a temporary distraction. As soon as the guests’ dinner plates are cleared, Gretchen’s husband Hal—Gretchen’s “Hal-Pal”—steps onto the riser and grabs a microphone. The piped-in music shuts off in the middle of “Holly Jolly Christmas.”

“Thanks, everyone, for making it here at this crazy time of year. It means a lot to our family. We’ll have cake now so we can get to the best part of the party—karaoke! I know Gretch can’t wait. She used to take singing lessons, so you guys’d better step up!” A cheer rises from at least a third of the guests.

The obligatory “Happy Birthday” singing and cake cutting don’t take very long. Renata can’t believe how cheesy the birthday cake looks—pink cake with white and royal blue icing. She shakes her head when the server offers her a dessert plate with a slice. Instead, she orders a third glass of wine.

The chandelier dims as a spotlight illuminates the riser. Renata holds her breath as Gretchen and Hal step onto the small stage, grinning manically as they each grab a microphone. The opening chords of “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” fill the room; Renata figures they rehearsed it. Would Hal prove to be a surprise talent?

No. His voice has power but with tone and pitch both off the mark, it’s closer to shouting. Gretchen’s singing is still monotone, making Renata grimace. The silver-haired woman beside her, the one who was worried about baking cookies, sees her expression. Renata pretends that she was suppressing a sneeze, rubs her index finger across her upper lip. She then relaxes her face and mouths the lyrics flashing across the flatscreen straight ahead, to look like she’s having fun. But she still feels the woman’s eyes.

Gretchen hip bumps Hal several times and dances around the small riser. Some of the guests are up and dancing in whatever space there is between tables. When the song ends, there’s wild applause. Gretchen and Hal kiss in a way that prompts whistles, making Renata feel embarrassed for their kids. As Hal steps off the riser, Gretchen speaks into her mike.

“My dearest friend in this world—Joyce—get your ass up here, and sing with me! Everyone, Joyce has been there for me since we were kids! And she has a beautiful voice, even though she’s a bit shy. Joyce! Let’s do this!”

The guests applaud again as a heavy-set woman with burgundy, pixie-cut hair hurries along the mirrored side of the room to the riser. The music begins even before she grabs her microphone—“If You Wanna Be My Lover.” Gretchen loved bringing Spice Girls songs to lessons. Renata detested how most pop songs sounded with lone piano and tried to steer Gretchen towards musical theatre; she thought “Send in the Clowns” would be good for practice, but Gretchen found it “depressing.”

Gretchen’s voice cracks during the high opening notes. As Renata expects, her friend does not have a “beautiful” voice. Rather, Joyce is a shallow soprano who’s probably been told she has talent by some church-basement choir director. But she has no chest voice and doesn’t know how to mix the lower and upper registers. Was Gretchen being kind to her friend or had she really learned nothing during her training with Renata? When the song ends Renata shifts in her chair, trying to loosen the tension in her back and legs. Given the lineup of guests in front of the riser, who knew when the terrible singing would end? Could she fault you for leaving now, given that it’s after nine? Renata decides to hang on for another half an hour.

“You are my fire / The one desire . . .”

She snaps to attention. On the riser is a sandy-haired boy, sixteen or seventeen, and his singing is spot on. Several tween and teen girls squeal in agreement. Renata can tell he’s had training, yes, but what cannot be taught is his confidence—his knowledge that his talent will be there when he needs it, when it counts.

When she was twenty-five, Renata went to a karaoke bar with a group of her department store co-workers. They didn’t know she’d been studying singing for several years. As a group, they picked “Midnight Train to Georgia” as their song. Renata’s heart pounded madly as they gathered around the lone microphone. She was desperate to excel, to outshine her friends. You’re amazing, Renata! We never knew.

Yet even with only a small audience of mostly drunk patrons, her voice wouldn’t cooperate. So she goofed around with the others, made as if she too were a non-singer there to make fun of herself. But it took several days to shake off her anguish and shame.

After a few more years of lessons, she auditioned for musicals and cabaret concerts. But the audition process was a chasm she couldn’t cross. It was the karaoke bar all over again. Nerves destroyed her every time, snuffing out her painstakingly cultivated vocal technique. The fragile coordination of muscles, readily available when she sang alone, wouldn’t replicate when she tried to perform. The sound log-jammed in her throat; straining and cracking resulted. Producers and directors looked away as she struggled, or stopped her with a succinct, “Thanks.”

The teenage boy finishes singing “I Want It That Way” to manic applause, stepping down from the riser as Gretchen steps up.

“That’s my nephew Jackson; he’s awesome! Me, not so much. But I sing because I love it.” Several guests cheer. “I used to love taking lessons. My teacher has a great voice. I still meet up with her, and I invited her tonight. Renata, are you here? Renata?” Gretchen scans the rows of tables.

Renata freezes to her chair. She looks down to the floor, hoping to hide her face. But then she feels Gretchen’s eyes.

“Renata, come up and sing with me!”

When Renata looks up, every guest seems to be waiting for her.

“Renata?” Gretchen sounds puzzled that Renata isn’t moving.

“I . . . I’m sorry.” She rapidly shakes her head. Her armpits are resoaking her blouse.

Gretchen doesn’t move for several long seconds. Then, like a ringmaster directing the audience’s attention from a circus act gone wrong, she motions to the line of guests waiting their turn. She hands her microphone to a middle-aged man and steps off the riser.

Mortified and distressed, Renata downs what little wine she has left. She watches Gretchen schmooze with guest after guest, praying for a moment when she can approach her. Maybe she should leave and call Gretchen tomorrow. But what if she doesn’t answer? She desperately needs Gretchen to smile at her in her goofy way, to make sure no damage has been done.

Gathering her coat and purse in one hand, Renata stands. Her moderate intoxication makes her shaky in her heels. Gretchen is now in the centre of the room, talking to a group of women including the four who sat with Renata. Seven in total, they laugh about office antics as Renata waits nervously a few feet away. Finally, the conversation winds down and Renata approaches Gretchen.

“Thanks for inviting me,” she says, reaching for Gretchen’s hand. Except when she closes her fingers, Gretchen’s palm stays open.

“Did I embarrass you, Renata?”

Anxiety stabs Renata in her chest.

“What?”

“You looked like you were mortified to sing with me.”

Renata sways and rests a hand on the edge of the closest table.

Gretchen’s expression is unfamiliar, her forehead wrinkled. It may be the low light of the room, but Renata can’t see the sparkle always present in Gretchen’s eyes.

No, Gretchen.”

Gretchen looks away from Renata and scans the room. “That’s certainly the impression I got. That you were afraid I’d drag you down . . . or something like that.”

“That’s not . . . not it.”

“And I get that some of the singing wasn’t perfect. But this isn’t Carnegie Hall. It’s a party, Renata. My party.”

Now, Renata tightly grips the edge of the table.

“Can you meet me for coffee on Tuesday? I’ll tell you exactly—”

“I don’t think so,” Gretchen sighs. “It’s so close to the holidays.”

What does she mean? That she wants to meet up with you and can’t, or that she never will again?

“Between Christmas and New Year’s, then?”

Gretchen shakes her head. “I’ve got tons of stuff planned with the kids and my mother.”

“January?”

“It’s too soon to say. Listen, I wanna make sure I talk to all my guests. Thanks for coming.” Gretchen turns to greet an elderly couple waiting for her.

Not wanting to pay for another taxi, Renata walks to the closest streetcar stop. A tremor in her legs compounds her already unsteady gait. Snow is falling gingerly but in clusters; for now the sidewalk is dry, but she must move quickly.

She begins to sing softly, “I’m dreaming of a white Christmas . . .” She pictures Gretchen singing with her, off-key but with giddy, unapologetic joy. Gretchen would grab Renata’s hand, turn her in a twirl, and their laughter would transform the song from melancholic to joyful. But as Renata walks alone, the only music is the hollow chain of sound that her heels make against the concrete.

Tina Silver

Tina’s fiction has been published in The Fiddlehead, Prairie Fire, The Impressment Gang, Other Voices, Grub Street Literary and upcoming in Redivider. The Fiddlehead’s editors nominated her story “Simulation Camp” for the 2018 Writer’s Trust Journey Prize and the 2018 National Magazine Awards. She has also had numerous plays performed and workshopped in Ontario and British Columbia.

Tame

0
0

by Tannis Koskela

Only a few weeks ago this bushy cat was a feral barn cat. Claws out, hissing, and quick to hide. A bit of warmth and regular food, and he has become a cat of luxury. He moves into the room like an inch worm. Step, then back arched for a pat. Step, then arch for a scratch. Step arch, step arch, tail curling around door frames, purring and pleasing. How far below is the feral, I wonder, and marvel at how quickly he has adapted.  

And adapt too, I must. Time to search for another job in another city, but I grow weary of the game. At my age—just short of retirement—going to interviews, selling myself to employers, and trying to hide my apathy is a trick nothing short of the cat’s miraculous conversion to tame.  

Digging deep into my dresser drawer, I find a pair of panty hose with no runs and put them on. I find a suitable black skirt and a decent sweater and some heels, then kill time til I absolutely must leave. If I get the job, it will mean learning all the new names and routines, the minutiae of a new job. The cat did it. Surely, I can—one more time.  

Driving downtown, wipers on intermittent, I finally find the tall office building and then a parking spot not too far away. The concierge directs me to the seventh floor; on the ride up, I clean the rain from my glasses and make an effort to stand with good posture. Nobody will want a defeated looking sixty-year-old. In fact, I am not defeated. I have hundreds of plans and things to make, with the roughened hands to prove it; but it’s been a few months between jobs where nail care is noticed, and I need to remember to look the part. The elevator door opens. I step briskly out and scan the directional signs before heading to the glass-walled reception area of a new company. I am politely asked to sit and wait; I do as I’m told, remembering to sit erectly.  

Several minutes later a woman ushers me into an office and says my interviewer will be with me in a moment. It’s all so familiar—a game I can’t seem to get out of. With every new job, it feels more and more insincere, each question so old and used up. Tell me a bit about yourself. Why are you applying for this job? What do you consider your strengths and weaknesses? How would you conduct yourself in this scenario, or that situation? Give me an example of conflict resolution. My answers have become so pat that I must pretend to give thought to each one. Does it show? I don’t know, but care less and less.  

Predictably, a smartly dressed woman—younger than my daughter with the confidence that tells me she has seldom been corrected, disappointed, or thought that she has ever been in the wrong—enters the office and introduces herself, and I see the quick glance. She gives me the once over. Already, she has seen my greatest weakness. I am old. To her.  

I have her number now. I must be self-deprecating, but also make it known that I am up to date with technology. I cannot threaten her with my own confidence—hers is too fragile, and mine is earned. I must avoid motherly smiles, but not be stern. I begin to walk the same old tightrope. I glance at her with a smile, then downward so as not to challenge her. Step, then arch. I answer her questions confidently, then add, “Is that what you were looking for?” so as not to intimidate. Step, then arch, inching my way through the interview.  

It goes on for about twenty minutes, during which I learn more about her accomplishments and responsibilities than she does about my abilities. I respond with appreciative nods that say, you are a wonder. I try not to, but begin to feel a deep-seated animosity. She has no idea who she’s talking to, of the things I have accomplished. And she doesn’t want to know. She is more interested in her performance, how important interviewing and judging others makes her feel. She will hire someone like herself. They will talk about how boomers ruined the world for their generation. How we don’t understand. How hard life is for them.  

I am still smiling appropriately, trying not to let my derisive smirk intrude, but I want to stand up and walk out while she’s speaking. Finally, it’s over. I shake her hand but cannot look at her. I thank her for her time and leave. I hold my head up high without self-prompting this time, then get back in the elevator and back to the street.  

The rain is coming down much harder now, and people are scurrying to and fro on their lunch breaks. Some with umbrellas, some dashing between awnings. I walk slowly and shiver against the delightful cool of the rain soaking through my clothes. In the car I remove my hair clip and let my sodden, greying hair down, relieved of protocol. Before driving I search for a radio station, scanning the channels for a song I like. “Come on, baby, light my fire . . .” I sing along as I put the car in gear, release the clutch, and slide into the noonhour traffic. 

This time the windshield wipers are on constantly; in between strokes, the heavy rain almost obscures the view. The downpour hitting the roof of the car competes with Jim Morrison, and the taste of the interview is driven out, like an exorcism by sound. Loud swishes add to the cacophony as cars plow through deep puddles. There is a yellow stoplight ahead, but the road is very slippery. Rather than risk a swerving stop, I continue through just as a pedestrian dashes into the intersection. An umbrella looms into view followed by a sharp, distinct thump.  

The shock of it and the noise in and out of the car leaves me momentarily confused. I have automatically stopped the car, but it takes me a moment to take action. I turn off the radio. One less distraction. Then the windshield wipers. The engine. I step out into the street where several people have gathered around a limp figure on the sidewalk. I feel sick and whisper a short prayer as I walk closer. The person sits up, skinny ankles in high-heeled shoes, and I breathe a sigh of relief. I walk closer. It’s the girl who had interviewed me moments before. I must have been her last interview before lunch. She looks at me, soaking wet and bedraggled, but I can see that she doesn’t recognize me. Good, I think, because I feel an inadvertent smile creep into my face.  

The police have been called, and the girl is sheltering in a nearby shop she has hobbled to with assistance. I get in my car and await protocol. It was the kind of accident that seems inevitable in the city in this weather. Both of us were equally in the wrong. I don’t feel bad, and I don’t care.  

The proceedings take about a half hour. An ambulance arrives and leaves without my interviewer. She is not badly hurt. The police take information, and we all go back to our lives.  

The rain has lessened, but it’s still pouring and the wind has picked up. When I park and walk into my apartment building, branches are lashing the sky and my clothes are blowing around my body. Great transparent spots appear on my nylons where large drops of rain hit, and the spots look like naked flesh. My high-heeled shoes afford no water protection at all. I think of the girl—sprawled on the street, dishevelled and wet—undignified to say the least, and I laugh. I laugh, then smirk, then laugh again as I climb the stairs to my apartment.  

I walk in the door, and the cat leaps high in the air and dashes under the couch. I throw my shoes in a corner, and he scurries. Still smirking, I walk through the place, leaving wet prints. Everywhere I go, the cat runs from. He has forgotten that he is tame.  

Tannis Koskela

Born and raised in Ontario, Tannis Koskela has worked and lived in many different places. Educated in anthropology and museum studies, she has worked in these areas for over 25 years. As time allowed, she  published articles in local newspapers and contributed poetry to a publication of the Niagara Branch of the Canadian Authors Association. Having raised two children, she is now able to devote more time to her love of writing.

Wanderer

0
0

by Alexis MacIsaac

The house sits on a hill, far from the dirt road, partially obscured by half-dead appendages of once mighty trees. A wooden structure: large, square, and battered. Cavernous when unlit. Inelegant in its rusticity. I see this image as might a stranger. But my detachment is always disturbed, because what I also see, as I drive my car along the unwieldy dirt road which leads me back to the familiar, is a swarm of spectral, half-remembered memories—memories that are vital and dying, memories that form a past searching in vain for a home that will birth it into the future. It is a ritual that causes me great pain. Though this time, it is different.

There is no moon. Not even a fingernail hangs suspended in the dark. My steps are heavy and slow in the uncut grass, sodden with the day’s rain. The door, heavy and rusted, barely yields. I stumble into a pair of my mother’s old leather boots in the cramped entrance, startling the silence, and then I walk past a stack of firewood long since rotted to where I know she will be sitting in her rocking chair, her face frosted with starlight.

“Alasdair.”

“A Mhàthair. Tha mi dhachaigh.”

“You’re speaking Gaelic, Alasdair.”

“I am.”

“You are home.”

******

The house was built by my grandfather after his excommunication from the Hebrides. My mother told me her father had barely survived the journey from the Isle of Eigg to Cape Breton, contracting pneumonia on the boat that carried him and his wife across the howling Atlantic to a land overrun with trees. It was, I imagine, like being evicted from one island only to be marooned on another. My mother would tell me that it was a miracle any of them had survived. “How could he have known the land would be so ruthless? He must have been born under a bright star. The man could will vitality, he could.” I suppose that I believed her, for who else but a man like that could build a home with his bare hands under threat of entombment from a Canadian winter. My grandmother soon swelled with a baby whose birth would christen the advent of the home. A baby girl, my mother, heiress to a plain palace.

“Had you ever thought about leaving, Mother? When you were a little girl, did you ever wonder about the rest of the world?”

“Leave? What good would that do me? No trust to be found on the mainland. No trust at all.”

We were two, my mother and me. Always two. My father a ghost before I had even been born, not dead of blackened lungs or a coal mining accident, but lost to the open waters—the other cruel way so many young men died back then as they tried to make a living fishing. “Your father was as devoted to me as he was to the sea. Two marriages ended that day.” I used to wonder if he ever broke the surface to lunge for air or if he sank into those weepy Atlantic waters like a bullet. “Did he know about me?” I asked her once when I didn’t know any better. She closed her eyes for a moment and when she opened them, they stung with tears. “Of course, he did. He used to rest his ear on my belly and listen for you.”

I always felt his absence. As a child I would look for him, standing at the edges of the ocean, searching—searching for a shadow, a thread of hair, a whisper. The waves mocked me with an otherworldly tongue. He’s gone. We’ve swallowed him whole. Goodbye now.

“Don’t ever fish, Alasdair,” my mother used to say. “Don’t step one foot in that water, you hear me?”

She needn’t have worried. I had no use for taunting waters. The geography of the island dictated that we lived in isolation, but I was keenly aware of the world that lay just beyond my reach. I had read about Montreal and Toronto, brimming with bright lights and brighter ideas. I desired the anonymity that those urban dwellings would afford me—to feel out of place, to not belong, to be safely cradled in obscurity. I wanted most of all to separate myself from those who threatened to relegate me to a life of obsolescence.

“What’s going on in that head of yours, Alasdair?”

“Nothing, Mother. Nothing at all.”

But she knew, of course. She sensed that I was planning my escape, for I had grown to resent our house—its ugly, imposing structure which, in spite of its perceived enormity to my child’s eye, encroached upon me with its clumsy chronicle. My grandparents’ paraphernalia littered each room: a rocking chair; woollen blankets; prayer books; a wretched violin, sunken and stringless.

“I’m leaving,” I had proclaimed to her, at seventeen. “I will visit.”

I recall no expression on her face, only the strong scent of stoicism.

******

Toronto. Pulsing, heartbroken, writhing Toronto. Parasitic, dirty, ecstatic Toronto. A balm for my misspent youth. The women—my god, the women—and the blaring streetcars and serpentine cigarette smoke and the people, everywhere the people, marching along the streets alive with invisibility. But the past cannot be ejected so easily. Toronto, for all its scummy glory, was remarkable in reminding me of where I came from. “Forget Not.” In my middle age, I would turn those two words—our clan’s motto—over in my mind, believing them to be foolish for stating something which cannot be helped.

“Where are you from?” A date had asked.

“Cape Breton.”

“Oh. I’ve never been. I hear it’s quaint, that you can go for miles without seeing a person. Is that true?”

“I’m not sure I’m the best person to ask.”

“My sister visited once. She described the people as earnest, simple. Kind of like stepping back in time.”

“Is that so?”

Time seemed to me to be a circuitous thread, binding me to flashes of memory I wasn’t even sure belonged to me. My mother, my mother. Where art thou, my mother? I had not spoken with her since I’d left two years prior.

“Who are you?” A friend had asked.

I laughed, thinking it was a joke.

“What are you going on about? I’m Alasdair.”

“Yes, but who are you?”

“This is you,” my mother once said to me, as she pointed to an image of my grandfather. “This is you,” emphatic, no questions asked. “And this house is you. It was made from your blood, from your bone.”

“No, I don’t think so,” I’d replied. “I don’t think any of that is me at all.”

******

The doctor called me on a Sunday morning in February, three years after I’d left the island. I sat at my window, stained from my fingerprints and foggy with my breath. He spoke as I studied the street below, dirtied from the driven snow.

“I’m sorry to say that your mother has passed away, Alasdair. She died of a heart attack. It was sudden. I’m confident she felt no pain.”

A silence before the breath.

“Can a person know that? Whether someone felt pain?”

“A person can know what he’s told. She’s not in pain now anyway. You should come back as soon as you can.”

So I travelled back to that place I’d not called home for some time. “Scatter me over the sea, Alasdair,” she’d written in her will. “I want to float in death, not be buried in it. Feel no sadness. You’ve always been a good boy. My boy.”

My orphan hands screamed as I tossed those ashes across the sharp waters, and I knew then that I had joined the flock of men who gained wisdom far too late.

“Do you see it now?” She asked me in my dreams. “Can you see?”

Cape Breton. Poignant, heartless, painful, Cape Breton. Soiled, timeless, devastating Cape Breton. I am a pilgrim to your shores.

******

“Who are you?”

“My name is Mairi. I was born here, in this house. When I was nineteen I met a man named Donald, a fisherman. He had ropey shoulders and eyes so dark they were almost black. We were married as soon as we could; the priest blessed us with holy water and the sign of the cross. Donald had forgotten the rings, and we laughed afterward that he’d only had one job but didn’t follow through because he couldn’t cope for his nerves. It poured rain on our wedding day, a sign of good luck; and I think we were lucky, too, because you were conceived that night. But Donald died so soon, taken by a sea he loved and mourned by a woman who loved him more. I always had you though.”

“Did you wonder who I’d become? Did it scare you?”

“No, I was never scared. You had a mind on you just like your father. The difference between you and me was that I liked who I was. I knew my land and my people. You were always searching. Like your father out on the sea every day, looking for a bigger, better catch than before. We are driven by primal needs and tricked into thinking otherwise.”

“Who was he?”

“Look at yourself in the mirror, and you’ll see him. You both felt things so deeply but never could find the words to make sense of it all.”

“I’ve always missed him though I never knew him”

“Of course you did, Alasdair. Of course. Why do you think you ever moved away?”

We would converse like this, the two of us, a third shadow lurking but never appearing, shape shifting with our recollections.

“Who am I?” I asked always. “Who am I?”

I am Alasdair, without wife and without children. I have money in the bank but no need for it. I am a city dweller and a third generation Scot who speaks Gaelic with a Canadian accent, who can recall the briny scent of the sea even in the most putrid subway station, who knows this home—this island—with regret and with sadness.

“Were you lonely when I’d gone?”

“A child can never truly leave their mother.”

What is the past if not the palimpsest of our present and future? What of a discarded loyalty, now rekindled, to something that is now dead and gone? No matter how tenuous the thread that binds us to our parents, it is a thread that clings unrelentingly. I was a sad, breathing, living, contradiction who self-flagellated and self-medicated with concocted conversations. Such guilt.

“I am without family.”

“I am always here.”

“My house is in Toronto. It is narrow and threadbare. I had a cat once.”

“You are old now, Alasdair.”

“I have come home. I don’t think I will be leaving.”

“You have come home.”

“I never really left.”

“I know, Alasdair. I know. I’ve always known. Rest here with me.”

Alexis MacIsaac

Alexis MacIsaac’s writing is featured in the fall 2023 edition of Masks Literary Magazine as the 2023 Story award winner and is forthcoming in The Bookends Review and Dreamers Creative Writing. She has also been published in Flare: The Flagler Review and The Write Launch and is the editor of the novella Cowboy Pyjamas (The Best Western). Once upon a time, she was a professional violinist (RiverdanceThe High KingsThe Paperboys, 2017 Canadian Folk Music Award nominee for traditional instrumental group of the year (MacIsaac and MacKenzie), 2018 East Coast Music Association nominee for Roots/Traditional Recording of the Year, (The Bay Street Sessions)). She now lives in Ottawa with her husband and two sons. She is currently working on her first novel.


For Sale: Heritage Home on Lakefront Property

0
0

by M.W. Irving

It’s a gravelly ten-minute walk from my parents’ place to the lake, with plenty of weeds, loose rocks, and thorny vines to trip on. A childhood spent walking along that path had resulted in countless scabby knees and hot tears. It’s a particularly awful trek at four o’clock in the morning, sleep-soaked and fretting in the dark. The relief when I spot Dad standing at the water’s edge is almost worth the torment. He’s a pale slash against the dark bush that lines the shore. I fish my phone from my jeans and text Mom that I’ve found him. She gets back to me right away.

Of course he’s at the bloody lake.

I tuck that conversation into my jacket pocket for later. The air’s damp chill is familiar and invigorating. I’d rather be asleep than invigorated. Dad’s insipid calves jut from the bottom of his blue robe looking like a pair of unbaked baguettes. He’s been out here for an hour. If it were winter, he’d be frozen.

“Dad,” I say. The ebbing adrenaline quivers my voice.

He doesn’t move. With his bald spot pointed at me, and his white hair pushed into a frenzied crown, he stares into the lake he grew up on. The robe he wears is open wide to the mountain looming on the far side. I hope he has something on underneath. A thin morning mist floats in the air above the water, silvery with a delicate look to it.

“Dad.” I say it louder, with a hint of frustration.

He startles at my voice and stumbles on loose pebbles. I worry he’ll fall, but he catches himself quickly. When he faces me, I’m relieved to find he’s not naked beneath his robe. The red t-shirt that came free with a case of beer and a pair of tighty-whities—neither tight, nor white—are a welcome sight. Confusion pinches his face, a flicker of anger flashes, then a lingering moment of blankness settles in. Finally, I see recognition dawn.

He asks what I’m doing up. He knows I’m not a morning person.

“Yeah, Dad, it’s early. Mom heard you leave the house. When you didn’t come back, she got worried.”

“Worried? She knows the best fishing is just before sunup. Look at that water, it’s like glass.”

The lake is a mirror with the inverted sky reflected upon it, appearing as a bottomless abyss. Dad stands there, on the precipice, tugging his robe tight around him. As I look at him standing there in the diminishing gloom, it could be twenty years ago—the longing for the warm bed I was dragged from, my mounting irritability, the predawn light. He gave up on pressuring me to go fishing with him when I was in my twenties.

“We haven’t come down to the lake in so long,” I say.

“I come here all the time.”

He speaks with the breathy, contemplative tone he sometimes takes on at the lake. It sounds strange without a lip-clutched cherry cigarillo making mumbles of his words. Mom made him quit three years ago after a cough didn’t go away for months. I look away from him to the clear sky. The formerly luminous moon has become ghostly.

“Your mother wants to sell the place.”

“I know.”

“She says it was your idea.”

“It was.”

“I thought you’d talk to me about it first.”

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve talked to him about it. I could bring up how often he’s let the bathtub overflow, or the time he put the electric kettle on the gas stove, or the dozen other things I could throw at him, but would only get him shouting. Mom and I decided it would be better if I just came by and packed everything up.

“I’m sorry, Dad. We can talk about it now if you want.”

“I thought I would leave it to you,” he says before storming off with his elbows thrust out.

I hang back as he rounds the shed that crouches amid a snarl of blackberry. Once he’s out of sight, I consider what to do next. If I demand he return to the house with me, he’ll dig in and the situation will escalate. His stubbornness has hardened over the past couple years, calcifying into a nasty spur. Since the cherry cigarillo ban, he’s become surlier. I have to handle this just right. There’s a grunt and the slap of skin against aluminum. In a sprint, I round the shed and find him struggling to stand, legs wobbling next to his old boat. Damp from the tall grass soaks his robe. The wet fabric clings to him, and he shivers. He’s lost weight.

“Damn thing’s stuck on something,” he says, pointing to the boat and forcing composure into his voice.

“Let me get it,” I say, stepping next to him.

A grunt of protest is all the thanks I get when I put my jacket over his shoulders. At least he leaves it in place. As I bend to lift the boat, Dad puts his arms through the sleeves. Seasons of mossy growth and soil have crept over the hull like patches of spreading mold. Despite this, Dad’s boat remains in decent shape. I tug, and it budges a little. There’s a satisfying rip when I manage to get it free of the earth. A spider, brown and quick, skitters across my knuckles. Electric ripples of revulsion spread through me, and my hand jerks away involuntarily. The boat falls back down with a whomp. Dad cackles.

Before the spider-shivers are out of me, Dad has the boat flipped and grinding towards the water. Midstride, he plucks a wooden oar out of the grass. It’s a blackened, rotten thing. I start after him. I get out a “Dad, wait,” before he pushes off into the calm water, stepping aboard with the hunchbacked confidence of a pirate captain. In order to reach him, I have to take two broad steps into the lake. Soaked past the knees, I clamber in after him.

“I loosened it,” I say.

“Sure you did.”

He grins and, to my surprise, shuffles to the front. The oar he leaves for me. Dad’s always done the shoulder work, always paddled out to the middle of the lake where he’d fuss with his tackle, mumbling. I can’t remember the last time I used an oar. The first few strokes are embarrassingly awkward, but Dad doesn’t seem to notice. He’s too busy launching into the time-tested stories that have always accompanied such floats.

The first story is the one about the boy who lived on the other side of the lake, at the mountain’s hip. He hardly ever spoke and couldn’t bring himself to look another soul in the eye. From spare parts he constructed a fan boat. The boy would zip around on it, leaving a trail of blue exhaust and frothing water. The next story is the one about the first time his mother wore a two-piece bathing suit. They were just becoming fashionable. She packed a big picnic onto a farm horse, and together the family trundled to the lake. Her pale bulge of belly, poking out from between the two pieces of red bathing suit, drew the horse’s attention. It nipped at the exposed skin, and Grandma responded with a slap across the horse’s face as though it were a handsy sailor. Dad’s laughter turns into silent heaves.

The old stories sound different this time, as though it’s the first time he’s told them. New details emerge. He tells the story about the time he worked on the tugboats, dragging floating lumber upriver, but it doesn’t have the usual Huck Finn adventure tone. This time it’s terrifying. The logs broke free of the tugboat while he and two others were still tying them together. Previous renditions of the tale had him saving the day by swimming a rope against the current, back to the tug. This time, though, he tells me about a wave that forced two logs apart. He lost his footing and fell between them, into the river. The lumber came back together above him before he resurfaced, trapping him underwater.

“It was dark beneath those logs, and I was panicking. I knew I was a goner. I’d seen men go that way before. The problem with drowning is that it gives you plenty of time to realize you’re going to die.”

He says it like it’s a joke, but I pick up a hint of the panic he must have felt. Stopping himself from taking in lungfuls of river water was the most difficult thing he’s ever done, he tells me. Like a miracle, the logs trapping him underwater parted, and strong hands yanked him up.

“Wow,” I say.

I hate how inadequate my response sounds. I’m genuinely interested. And how close I came to never existing is alarming, but it has to be the hundredth time I’ve heard this story. Proper astonishment has become difficult to muster.

He grows quiet before telling a story I’ve only ever heard from Mom before. It’s the story of how his younger brother died. It happened not long before I was born. Mom always warned me not to bring it up with him. My uncle Derek was seventeen when he went on a hike with a friend that ended at the bottom of a cliff.

“He was pushed, I swear he was,” Dad says.

I’m desperate to know why Derek would have been murdered. When I ask, Dad can’t remember. It’s clear he feels as though he should. His face contorts like he’s lifting something slippery and awkward. For the life of him he can’t drag it out of the murky depths of his memory.

“There was something shady about it, something about money,” he says. Then he can’t remember his brother’s name. “Oh, for Chrissake, what was it now?”

“Derek,” I say.

“Hmm?”

He spits into the water.

“You were saying Derek was pushed.”

“Pushed where?”

“Your brother, Derek. You were talking about Derek.”

Dad’s eyebrows reach for one another. A look of confusion, or fear. The story of my uncle’s death disappears from him completely. I know hounding him will help nothing, but I remain full of questions. Despite myself, I begin rattling them off.

What was my uncle like?

What was he involved in?

Did he look like Grandma, or Grandpa?

Why are there no photos of him?

Were he and Derek close?

When Dad shuts down, I give up. A cloud, the edge of a creeping overcast, slides across the sun. It grows cooler. I watch a mosquito land on Dad’s neck, latch, then zip away. A breeze ripples the lake’s surface, and the world seems to shrink in half.

“I’m getting pretty cold, Dad. Maybe we should head in.”

He sniffs the air, smelling the temperature, then nods.

“Fish skunked us again,” he says, though we have no rods.

The boat has been drifting. It’s not until I look around that I notice how far we’ve meandered. As soon as I begin to paddle, the ding of a text rings out from the inside pocket of my jacket. Dad, still wearing it, pulls my phone out and is reading before I can react.

“What do you think you’re gonna do with my boat?” he demands.

“What? Nothing.”

“Oh, is that right?”

He throws my phone at me. After striking my gut, it bounces towards the lake. I juggle it briefly before catching it.

“You might as well get rid of me, too, you bloody thief.”

The text is from Mom.

Don’t let him onto that boat, he’ll drown himself. Can you take it to the junkers today?

He turns like a tail-pulled cat to snatch the oar from me. I hold fast. I mean to laugh it off and suggest talking about it over coffee. I mean to tell him my ass has gone numb, and I want to go back to bed. What I do instead is try to wrestle the oar away from him. He holds fast. He tugs, and I tug back. After a brief struggle I hear the earthy splinter of dry rot. The oar snaps, and Dad lets go. The bottom half flips skyward, and he lands hard on his hip. I freeze. For an instant I imagine him going overboard. I imagine pneumonia and a hospital stay he doesn’t return from. He’s silent and motionless for a couple breaths. The flung half of the broken oar lands with a splat a dozen feet away. Ripples draw a target around it, pointing out how stupid I’ve been.

“Look what you did,” he says as he struggles to right himself.

I lean towards him, offering my hand. In my other hand, I’m still holding the useless half of the broken oar.

“Dad, are you okay?”

“You idiot. Look what you did!”

Once I determine he’s unhurt, my concern sours to anger.

“What do you mean what I did?”

“You . . . I can’t . . . How . . .” He grabs the remaining piece of oar from me. I let him take it, not wanting another struggle. Brandishing it like a weapon, he bares his teeth and cocks his arm. I move to restrain him, but Dad’s already swinging. We both miss our targets. The tears on his face stop me dead. His anger deflates, and mine follows in kind. I drop back onto my seat, harder than intended. That exquisite brand of tailbone pain sets in, along with a sullen silence.

“You know what?” I say, unsteadily getting back to my feet.

The boat wobbles, threatening to spill me.

“What are you doing? Sit down.”

The lake slaps at the hull. I peel my shirt off and yank at my belt. My nipples prickle to life in the cool air.

“What are you doing?” he says again.

“I want to go back to bed.”

Shoes next, then pants. Dad stares disbelieving at my underwear. They’re the same shade of blue as his robe. Before I have a chance to evaluate my plan, I leap ass first into the water. The cold bites as my head submerges. The lake’s underwater world rumbles in my ears for an instant before I come up gulping and chirping.

“What are you doing?” Dad says once again, this time with a grin.

The lake has stolen my breath, allowing only gasps. Regret has me clawing the water to get back to the boat. I get a hand over the lip, and Dad covers it with his own. He bends to speak into my ear.

“Slow your breathing down. Let the cold in.”

I do what I’m told, and the shock subsides.

“Well,” I say, the frigid water still clipping my words, “I’m in the lake.”

“You sure are.”

I kick and fan my way to the back of the boat and begin pushing Dad to shore. He barks instructions, guiding us in. The sound of my breathing is amplified and hollow, caught in the space between the boat’s ringing aluminum, the lake’s surface, and my face. Between my hands is a pink-hued spider’s nest. Staring at its fluffiness, I swim and follow Dad’s directions. I can’t stop imagining swarms of tiny arachnids bursting from the cotton candy package at my nose.

The cold’s sting dulls to a throb before fading into numbness. I think about all the conversations I’ve had with Dad on that water—the laughter and the wisdom I’ve forgotten, and will never have back. Perhaps those lost moments have sunk to the bottom of the lake, nestled amongst the fish crap, rotten vegetation, and lost lures. Maybe if I stay in the water long enough, they’ll soak back into me. My heart sinks at the metallic grind of land against the hull. I’m breathing hard. Though lake weeds tangle my limbs, and my shivering has grown violent, I don’t want to get out.

M.W. Irving

M.W. Irving is a teacher and writer living on Vancouver Island. He does his best to convince both his students and readers that there’s magic in words. This story is part of a series of poems and stories that came in the wake of his grandfather’s passing. Other pieces in the series have been published by The Lyre, Flash Fiction Magazine, and won a contest with Globe Soup. He hopes to put them together in a tidy little book one day. To find more of his work, visit mwirving.ca.

War Story

0
0

by Emily Strempler

Light slanted through the bars on the hotel room window, dust swirling in lazy golden rays as they fell across the bed where The Boy dozed, curled up in a nest of blankets. An old computer on the desk in the corner, wedged in next to the hot plate and kettle, played the day’s football match over a stuttering internet connection. Leaning over the bathroom sink, The Woman applied makeup in between the streaks on the mirror. Magazines and old paperbacks were piled in a box on top of the toilet, moisture curling the pages. A garbage bag full of laundry sat on the floor by her feet. The fan rattled and wheezed, and mostly failed to keep down the damp, though The Woman had taken only a quick, cold shower.

Showers were one of the nice things about the hotel, along with the unlimited internet. At the last place, though smaller and more expensive, The Woman had paid for all of those things: the water, the internet, the electricity. And then there had been problems with the landlord. Not that the guy who ran the hotel wasn’t also a creep. He was, only a less awful sort. The kind that leered and joked but never actually did anything. Didn’t extort her for extra rent. Didn’t threaten to call the police, or demand personal favors, or steal her underwear from the common dryer.

Turning her face in the mirror, The Woman admired her work. She picked and pulled at her dress, adjusting it until it sat just the way she liked. She turned the towel hanging on the rack behind her to the nicer side, and posed, snapping photos until she was happy with how she looked in one of them. She used one of those smoothing filters—not too much, not enough that the men would notice. Sitting down on the closed lid of the toilet, she selected a list of clients from her contacts, copy-pasting message and photo from one to the next. Bored at home. Thinking about you! What are you doing tonight? followed by a string of cute little emojis, pink and red and sparkles.

The Woman never used real names for the men, didn’t ask for them; and if she ever heard them, she certainly didn’t write them down. She gave them all nicknames: The Business Man, The Butcher, The Foreigner, The Cyclist. She liked the way “The” names sounded, singular and grand. In her phone, she had notes for each man, full of little reminders—nicknames they wanted her to use, how they liked to pay, whether or not they tipped, places they preferred to meet. She didn’t take clients at home anymore, not since she’d taken in The Boy.

The day before, she had pulled the last of her money together to pay her rent, by transfer, and her phone bill at the shop down the street. The food was almost gone. And there were other expenses coming up—medication, new shoes, The Boy’s school books. She had resolved to purchase all of the books before the start of the school year, this time. She had the most important ones, math and science. And the homeschool booklets, those cost too, even if it was just printing costs at the library downtown.

She could have sent him to school. He was supposed to be in school. But The Boy was a slight, delicate-tempered thing, with a stubborn lisp, and the children had bullied him until he refused to go back. “I’ll run away,” he said. “I’ll run away and I won’t come back, I swear! You’re not my real mom, so you can’t make me!”

The Woman didn’t doubt he would, and so from then on The Boy had to be homeschooled. They did their classes together, taking turns with the laptop, watching instructors on video and filling out their workbooks. The tests cost money too, the ones you had to take to prove you’d moved up a grade. It wasn’t much, but sometimes The Woman found she didn’t have enough for both of them, and then only The Boy advanced.

The Boy knocked on the bathroom door asking about food so The Woman had to go find him something. Then she sat on the floor in the hotel room in her dress and her makeup. They passed the evening playing cards, empty instant noodle bowls and cups of cheap lemon soda between them. She kept one eye on her phone—didn’t tell The Boy off when he spilled soda on his sweater—and answered a slow drip of noncommittal texts from men who wanted to flirt, wanted more pictures, wanted to see her sometime but not right now.

Only The Business Man wanted to meet. He didn’t ask, wasn’t the type to ask. Come at 10. Call a car. Tell them to phone me. I’ll pay. The Woman called a car, checked her makeup, fixed her hair. She went out into the alley behind the hotel where she had told the driver she would be waiting. Curfew had started at seven. The city was quiet. Some of the other women were also leaving and huddled together, sharing cigarettes in the dark before their cars came. The mood was jittery and uncomfortable.

Before curfew, there had never been police in the neighborhood, except when there was a raid. Then the air would fill with light and noise, the street crowded with hazy-eyed revellers, government news cameras flashing. Just once, they had come through the hotel, banging on doors and overturning mattresses. More often, they were customers. Now, they arrived at odd hours without warning—large crowds of them—with cars and barricades, brandishing their batons, roaming the streets in search of violators to beat.

The President had announced the curfew at the beginning of the month, in a special 9am broadcast sent out to all of the country’s televisions and radios. There was a war on, he said, a war against “the criminal element.” Good, law-abiding citizens have no reason to be out on the street past dark. Good, law-abiding citizens would prefer to be at home with their families. Good, law-abiding citizens would be willing to sacrifice, to act in moral solidarity, to help stamp out the evils that preyed upon the country and threatened its way of life. The Woman hadn’t been awake for the announcement, and, anyway, didn’t own a television or radio to have heard it on. She watched it later, on the internet, after The Boy came running home from the market with bruises on his legs from police batons.

She gave The Business Man’s name, his real name because he was someone important, and phone number to the driver. The car was from a private taxi company, it’s interior softly cushioned and freshly cleaned. The driver put his phone on speaker, filling the car with the sound of ringing. The Business Man didn’t pick up right away. The driver looked back at The Woman and her stomach flipped. If he didn’t answer, she would have to dig up some money or something to pay this man who had surely gone far off his regular route to pick her up. She could tell by the way he was looking at her that he was thinking the same thing, thinking about what he might ask her to pay. The call connected and the Business Man’s voice boomed out, “Hello? Who is this? What do you want?”

“Hello, I have a woman here, she gave me your number . . .”

“Bring her around the back of the house. I’ll pay you when you get here.”

The driver frowned. “That’s not usually how—”

“You know who you’re talking to, don’t you?”

“Right, yes sir, but you know I need your card before—” The call ended. The driver sighed. “You wouldn’t happen to have a card on you, would you?”

The Woman shook her head.

“Didn’t think so.” He shifted the car into drive and set off at a crawl down the alley, past the bars and the liquor stores, turning out onto silent streets and picking up speed. His fingers drummed on the steering wheel.

Everywhere, there were blockades. Glitzy, imported cars careened obliviously through the empty city, full of the drunken children of the rich and politically connected. A few yards from one of the permanent checkstops, a woman in towering heels—her wrists and neck glinting with gold jewelry—vomited in the street. The men at the stop pretended not to see her and stopped a boy riding past on a bicycle instead, forcing him to his knees at the point of an automatic and rifling through his pockets. The taxi slipped through with a glance and a wave. As they turned the corner, a cracking hail of gunshots rang out through the night air. The driver turned on the radio, flooding the car with the fizzy sounds of pop music.

The Business Man lived on a palatial estate, down a long winding road at the edge of the city. Private security patrolled inside its towering outer walls. There were police cars in the drive, pulled up close to the front door. A member of The Business Man’s large staff, in a crisp blue uniform, spoke with several officers by the fountain under the trees. His wife was standing in the window, watching over the scene with her arms crossed. The Woman had only ever seen her from a distance, and thought her impossibly elegant, always dressed like one of those slim alien mannequins that stood in all the luxury shop windows downtown. The taxi pulled around the back and parked near the door to the guest wing. The doors locked before The Woman could get out.

“Not until I get paid,” The driver said.

The Woman had known The Business Man for a few years, and had been to the house only a handful of times. They usually met in hotel rooms, nice ones in the city’s tourist and business districts. Once, he had flown her to a different city, where he was attending a big conference, and put her up in a room across the street. He was a difficult man, demanding, and used to getting his way. But meeting him had been a stroke of luck for The Woman. She charged him five times as much as her usual clients, and he tipped her on top of that for extra time and services, little favors. When he was feeling generous, he would send her money for pictures, a few dollars per picture if she did exactly what he wanted.

They waited a long time, listening to the same songs over and over on the taxi’s radio. When The Business Man finally appeared—the sleeves of his monogrammed dress shirt rolled up past his elbows, buttons undone and his hair wild with sweat—he slapped his black card up against the driver’s window, and shouted at The Woman to get out. The door unlocked, and she jumped out. “Go inside,” he said. He leaned in towards the driver. “We’re going to have a word.” She walked quickly as their voices began to rise. “Do you know who I am? Do you? You disrespect me like this, what do you expect?” A security vehicle pulled up behind the taxi. The driver would be paid, probably. But not before calls were made to the police, or the licensing agency, or the taxi company.

The Business Man’s grown son stood by the door, watching the commotion, an unlit cigarette hanging from his lips and a lighter cupped in his hands. He barely looked at The Woman as she slipped past, down the hall, and into one of the many empty rooms. Turning on the light, she fixed her dress, and sat down gingerly on the edge of the bed. She didn’t dare take out her phone. Once, when drunk, he’d become frustrated with her for using it and smashed it against the hotel room wall. He had bought her a new one, a nicer one, the following morning. But still, the experience had frightened her.

She watched the minutes tick by on a little ornate clock sitting high on a shelf across the room. Tried to sit perfectly still. Tried not to look too tired or restless. Over an hour passed before he came for her. When he finally stormed in—seething with energy, doors slamming in his wake, his eyes drug wild and wide—she forced herself to smile. He paced wordlessly, up and down the length of the room beside the bed, one hand on his hip, the other waving in empty air. The Woman resisted the urge to rub her eyes. She reached out a hand, her fingers brushing across his arm as he passed. “What’s wrong, baby? You want to talk about it?”

He didn’t take her hand, but he did stop pacing. His hair was tousled. Pulling a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, he fumbled one out and stuck it in his mouth, then struggled with his lighter. Smoke curled into the dead air of the room. “What the hell isn’t wrong? Who does he think he is, huh? Who does he think he’s messing with? He. Needs. Me.” He stabbed a thumb back into his chest.

The Woman blinked. “Who?”

He called The President by his first name, and several ruder things besides. All he seemed to want to do was talk. He talked for hours, about his frozen foreign bank accounts and his wife’s cancelled trip, about some company The President was planning on nationalizing for “the patriotic effort,” how everyone seemed to think “he was made of money.” A long while after he had stopped making sense, he sat down next to her on the bed and fell abruptly silent, his arms resting on his legs, his head bowed. The Woman approached him with caution, smoothing his hair and rubbing his back until he would lie down. It wasn’t long before he was fast asleep on top of the covers, sprawled out and snoring loudly.

The Woman curled up in the leftover space beside him and lay awake until after the first light of morning drifted in through the window. A maid woke her gently, late into the day. “Miss, there’s a car here for you, just out back.”

The Business Man was long gone.

Traffic was slow on the way back to the hotel, the streets a crush of people struggling to get through the work of the day before sundown and curfew. The Woman rested her head against the frame of the car’s window, refreshing the inbox on her phone, waiting for a familiar message from his preferred transfer service. It wasn’t like him to make her wait. He was not a discreet man. He liked to pay for things. Sometimes he paid her before they’d even done anything, made her watch as he entered the amount, flashing his account balance and tipping generously.

The Boy was still in his clothes from the night before, an oversized shirt from the donation bin at the women’s charity in the apartment building down the street and a pair of old basketball shorts. He lay across the bed on his stomach, blankets piled around his bruised legs. A brightly coloured cartoon played on the screen of the laptop, propped up on the desk. He looked at her with hungry expectation. “You have money now, right? Can we go get food?”

“I have to pay for my pills,” The Woman said. Empty packaging from their last two packs of noodles sat on the floor by the kettle. The Boy was growing, always hungry, always irritable and sore. “I’ll pick something up for you on my way back. What do you want to eat?”

“Don’t you have some money?”

“Don’t you have some respect?”

The Boy shrank back into the bed, his face crumpling into disappointment. “Forget about it,” he mumbled, “I’m not even hungry.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” Picking up a purse off a pile of clothes, The Woman dug loose change out of an inside pocket, counting it in her palm. “I can get a couple of those packaged dinners you like. Would you like that?” The Boy stared at his cartoon, his chin on his arms, his expression sullen and tired. “If you have a bit of change, I could get something nicer . . . What time is it?” She checked her phone—less than two hours to curfew. “Think about it, okay?” Grabbing clothes from a washbag, wrinkled but clean, she stepped into the bathroom to dress and fix her makeup.

The Woman was just touching up her mascara when The Boy knocked on the bathroom door. “Ma?” It squeaked open, and he leaned in the frame, sheepish and small, waggling a foot behind his leg. “I’m sorry, Ma. I didn’t mean no disrespect,” he said, and then, “I have five dollars I’ve been keeping. You can have it, if you want. Maybe you could pay me back . . .”

Later that night, after the pharmacy and the corner store, after an evening spent sitting on the bed eating snacks and watching shows among the blankets, The Boy slept curled up with both pillows in the dark. The Woman sat in the glow of the laptop, sipping a cup of cheap instant coffee, her legs pulled up onto the chair. She sent out messages to the men. Then she looked up The Business Man’s name online. She glanced over glowing press releases, skipped pages alleging corruption and crime, and watched an interview with government news where he talked fast and waved his hands, revealing little. There was nothing unusual. Nothing to explain his behaviour the night before, or why he still hadn’t paid. She checked her bank balance. Negative twelve dollars and fifty-six cents, after the ten-dollar overdraft fee she’d incurred when paying for her medication at the pharmacy.

Curling up in her chair, phone cradled in two hands, she typed a message to The Business Man. Hey, baby! I loved seeing you last night! I’m just a little confused. I haven’t received any money from you, yet. If you could get it to me soon, I would really appreciate it! She followed it with a string of kisses.

He didn’t respond immediately, so she went back to sweet-talking the others. None of them wanted to see her badly enough to do anything about it, though she sent pictures, and a few sent pictures back. As the night wore on, they dropped off one by one, retreating to bed, until she was totally alone, staring at the screen. She was washing her face in the bathroom, dressed for bed in a pair of old sweats and a baggy shirt when her phone lit up with messages from The Business Man.

I thought we understood each other. Are you really that greedy? Can’t you wait a day? And then, You’ll get your money. Don’t ask. It’s a bad look. And then, Low. This is low. It’s beneath you. A second later, It’s crass. Ugly.

She sat down on the toilet seat, the curling edges of a stack of magazines brushing up against the middle of her back. I’m sorry. I’m not trying to be crass. You know I don’t work for free.

I’ve always paid you. I will pay you. You’ll just have to learn to wait your turn.

I know you will, baby. But I can’t come see you again until you’ve paid for last time. I can’t afford to give away my time. Especially not right now.

He didn’t respond, and he didn’t send the money, though she sat up waiting until it was almost morning. Before going to sleep, she sent one more message to a long-time customer—The Butcher—who worked in the market a few blocks down the road. I need money bad. You sure you don’t want some company?

She woke in the afternoon to a reply. Come by after curfew. I’ll see what I can afford.

They ate the last of their food for dinner, splitting a candy bar The Boy had bought from a vending machine in the street out front, with the last few coins scraped up from underneath the bed. They drank water out of refilled plastic bottles. Curfew came down with the sunset. Police prowled. The streets cleared. The Woman got dressed up and waited by the window until the city was dark and empty. She went out the back way, kept to the alley.

The Butcher greeted her with a bowl of hot food. Sitting her down at the table in the kitchen of his small apartment, he watched her as she ate. “You want some to wrap up for your kid? What’s his name? I’ll wrap him something up.” He rinsed out a discarded takeout container off the counter, refilled it with food, and put it in the fridge. “There. Boy could do with some growing.” He was a big man, The Butcher, grumbling and old fashioned. His wife had left him years ago, taking the children with her to live with family far from the city. He’d filled in the loss with a series of extremely young girlfriends. “This curfew. Let me tell you. It’s hitting us all hard—not as hard as those police, mind, but . . .” He laughed at his own joke. “You know they want us all cleaned up and cleared out by quarter to seven now? I heard they’re talking about moving it earlier! To six or something. Well fine, but guess what they tell me now? Can’t cut my meat the night before if I want to display it. Can’t come out early to set up. It’s like they don’t want to eat!” He settled down with a harrumph, leaning his weight against the edge of the counter. “Look . . . I know you’re hard done by, but you mind if I pay you half in the morning and half the day after tomorrow? I can pay. Just need to pick up the cash, sort out some accounts.”

The Woman nodded, still eating. “Fine.”

“Ha! I always liked you. You know that?”

The Woman was back out on the streets within a couple of hours. The night was breezy and cool. She took the long way home, ducking in and out of alleys, creeping around the sides of buildings to avoid a large group of police hanging around, smoking and talking, in the middle of the road by the entrance to the market. She slipped in the back door and ran up the stairs, her heart beating in her ears. Her hands shook as she unlocked the door. Stepping in, she closed it carefully behind her. The Boy lay sprawled out, fast asleep with his mouth open, the blankets kicked half off the bed.

The money was in her account by the time she woke in the morning. Fifty dollars, plus five for a tip and a note thanking her again for the accommodation. If I can find the cash. We can do it again next week. I’ll save up some and let you know.

The Boy wolfed down The Butcher’s food, hot out of the microwave. The Woman went out early to the market, returning after a few hours with the sort of groceries that would keep in the heat; she stacked them wherever she could find room—on the back of the desk, in the windowsill, against the wall in the corner. They passed a quiet week, stretching The Butcher’s money, venturing out rarely. The Woman texted idly with her regulars. Most were at home in the evenings now, with their wives and children and responsibilities. No one wanted to chance the police if they didn’t have to, and neither did The Woman. The Boy picked up odd jobs at the market, carrying groceries and running little errands, trotting back in long before curfew. His bruises faded. The food began to run out. The Butcher didn’t make enough money to see her again. The Woman’s worries returned.

She did her makeup in the bathroom. The night’s football game played on the computer in the other room, the volume turned up loud. The Boy lay on the floor beside the bed, playing a solo game of cards, half-watching the match. A dress hung from the hook on the back of the door, freshly pressed with an iron borrowed from the desk downstairs. Her phone sat face up on the edge of the sink, ringer on, so she wouldn’t miss any texts. It lit up with a payment notification, blinging cheerily into her inbox. Seven-hundred and fifty dollars, from The Business Man. There. You got your money. A minute later, Meet me downtown. I’m sending a car. Or are you too busy for me now?

The Woman picked up her phone. Thank you, baby! I would love to! I was just getting ready. I was hoping I’d hear from you.

Emily Strempler

Emily Strempler (she/her) is a queer, German-Canadian, writer of inconvenient fiction. Born and raised in Winnipeg, Manitoba, she now lives and writes in the famous tourist destination and infamous party town of Banff, Alberta, inside beautiful Banff National Park. Her work can be found in numerous publications, including The Bitchin’ Kitsch, New Critique, and Luna Station Quarterly.





Latest Images