Step into a World

Black Ice

On the way home from Lake Louise, Mira cries in the backseat, quietly, so quietly that I have no idea she’s crying, but she tells me later that she was. We spent the day on the back side of the mountain going off small jumps and having a session midday at the Thank You For Pot Smoking place with a few of the fiends, the group of dudes from our school with special status due to their ability to smoke the fattest doobs. One of the fiends is missing. Coulter Holmes and three other kids from school. They never came home after snowboarding yesterday. They went to Nakiska before it was officially open to get some early snow, hiked up the mountain with their boards strapped to their packs. Kids went out of bounds all the time, but I’d never heard of anyone going up a closed hill. No doubt why Coulter did it.

“It’s probably just some sort of miscommunication,” I tell Mira from the front seat, my older brother Markus driving, his head bobbing to his chest every once in a while until I slap him awake.

“They’re probably in Banff out getting wastie somewhere,” Markus says.

“Or maybe they had some car trouble,” I say.

It had happened to a group of us just the other weekend. We ran out of gas near Chief Chiniki and had to use torch candles from the ’88 Olympics to keep warm, saving our remaining battery power to play the Fugees as we waited for Coulter’s dad to pick us up. Recently moved here from Newfoundland, Coulter had achieved full fiend status despite all odds and accents, and unlike the rest of the Princes of Malibu – he actually deserved it. The other fiends lived in the nicest homes, had the nicest gear and always had weed. Coulter had nothing but a high tolerance and a friendly disposition. We’d bonded on the trampoline at an out of control house party, deciding that it would be a good idea to ring the doorbell of every house on the block as we hid in the bushes.

“I’m worried,” Mira says.

“They’re probably home by now,” Markus says.

Big things don’t happen, I want to explain to Mira. Life is not a movie. People die, but not dramatically. They die of cancer and heart attacks and old age. There is no plot in life. No matter how much you sometimes wish there were.

The car jets down the highway,  the night sky as black as the ice on the road.

My mom is calling my cell. I pick it up and she starts talking about Coulter.

Why is she saying his name?

There were all found dead in an avalanche this morning.

I hear myself burst into tears.

Step Into A World

SAD Light

The summer has cracked. Illiya can feel it sizzling down at him as he surfaces from Okanogan Lake. This means the people have cracked, too. Sunburnt skin covers the blood-orange strip of Penticton City Beach, families fresh out of winter hiding baking on beach towels in low SPF, parents half-watching their children alongside other half-watching parents, their beer disguised in insulated neon glasses. Illiya dives back under the lake’s surface in a long lunge, the cool water a slap in the face. Underneath, beyond the muffled screams of playing kids, the swarms of criss-crossing boats, the reverberating clash of pumping beats from the train of trucks on Lakeshore Drive – everyone exploding into their summer selves, Illiya wades further out, the sand trailing off under his feet. In the winter, there is hardly any snow in the Canadian desert. No bad storms, the Okanogan valley sheltered by the massive Rockies further north, hardly even much frost, but still everything dies for most of the year. Everyone. They lose themselves when the valley drifts away from the sun. Surfacing past the buoys, the bare red mountains rising up with him the way they do when they come up with the dawn – arid and hovering, layers of the unknown rippling through their cores, a heaviness drains through Illiya like the liquid concrete he pours into the foundations of houses – thick, slothful, and grey. It was last September when Ivy first rubbed those firm circles against his scalp, tipped his head back against the cool ledge of the sink and doused it with that perfect push of warm water. She gave him a discount on his haircut, said she liked his hair short, liked the sideburns, the curl. ‘Almost like a black guy,’ she scrunched a fistful. Not one of those words or touches were real. Illiya floats on his back and looks into the vacant blue sky. Leave you when the summer comes rolling…

A football splashes Illiya to his right. ‘Ill,’ he hears his name.

Illiya squints to see Jer from Summerland wading out to retrieve the football, a girl in a bright red bikini taped to his waist. Jer, an old hockey buddy with a knuckle-crushing handshake, drove his truck off a small cliff last June on his way home from a bush party in Naramata, drunk off the early summer sun and maybe too much whisky. As he approaches, Illiya sees that Jer’s drunk now at only four o’clock.

‘What are you doin’ out here, Ill?’ Jer asks, his eyes sloppy in their focus as he squints through the sun.

The girl in the red bikini looks at Illiya with an unpained smile, her wet hair red  like Ivy’s, but her labret, pierced with a silver stud, nothing like the smooth curve of Ivy’s chin.

‘In for a dip,’ Illiya says.

‘Where’s your hot girlfriend?’

Illiya shrugs.

Jer nods half understanding, twirling the football and then dropping it. It  smacks the water’s surface.

‘Come to the bush party tonight,’ Jer invites Illiya, drawing the girl in the red bikini back in close.

Used to be Illiya couldn’t wait to lose himself in the Canadian night air. Couldn’t wait to press his mouth against the cold, white teeth of some girl beside a barely controllable bonfire, digging through her layers to get to her warm skin.

‘Maybe,’ Illiya says.

‘Better see you there.’ Jer and the girl drift towards the shore.

The desert heat presses against Illiya’s face like the palm of a hand. But this year it’s just heat, the happiness siphoned from it. He imagines her taking a red and white straw to the sky and sucking the sun right through it like an egg yolk. Emerging from the water and stepping onto the hot sand, red like clay and thin as dust, the sun dries Illiya’s skin in seconds. He slides on his warm, dirty work jeans. Funny how they call the town blue collar – he’s never worn a collar to work in his life. Walking home, a thin wind rattles the leaves on the sparse line of trees along the beach, a small relief from the pressing heat. Along the strip of party motels people sit on patios and balconies drinking beer, worries burned up, moods melted by the sun, as though this is where they really live – in summer. As though they’re all okay year round. The smell of exhaust from the busy Lakeshore Drive pollutes their joy, blows their cover. What they really are, or what they’ll soon be: drunk and in debt with more kids on the way. Illiya walks down Main Street against the traffic, the long one way street the town’s strategy to churn the tourists through quickly: get em in, get em out, so they don’t overcrowd the already tainted Okanogan paradise. Don’t tell them that Penticton means ‘a place to stay forever.’

*****

Shrieking inside the old white house. A broken plate on the porch, shattered pieces of blueberry pie. Illiya can hear his sister, Angelica, crying inside. The fights have been happening since Angelica started smoking Marlboroughs, wearing tube tops and platforms, and coming home late or not at all, her summer job at Dairy Queen the shame of her new glamorous life. ‘Another victim of the devil’s playground,’ Illiya’s mother has  been saying. But Angelica is like a cat – she doesn’t come for anyone.

Illiya climbs the porch steps, its white wooden posts peeling like sunburnt skin, and he nods at Nate up on the ladder, odd guy around Illiya’s age from down the street hired by Illiya’s mother to repaint the house, always silent, smoking, strange grey halos around his irises that Illiya had never seen on anyone before. Made it hard to look Nate in the eye, literal bull’s eyes drawn around them, he didn’t want to stare. Nate offers a nod, his cigarette smoke wafting down.

Inside, Angelica is yelling, her voice sugary like cotton candy even when she screams. ‘Why are you such a bitch to me?’

‘You read Revelations,’ Illiya’s mother screams back. ‘Illiya,’ she notices him as she removes a steaming hot glass dish out of the oven. ‘Take your runners off.’

Looking around for broken dishes, Illiya does.

It’s the wallpaper that gives the kitchen its crazy feel, red and white checks with different aproned old maids in each white square staring out at you like they blame you for their trapped, wasted lives. At the kitchen table – dark oak covered in a red doily – Angelica holds a bloody paper towel over her foot, her legs wrapped around herself, toasty brown from months of preparatory tanning. Illiya’s younger sister, Kiara, sits beside her cross-legged, a bowl of cherries and an Archie comic sprawled in front of her. ‘Revelations is a crapload,’ Kiara says to no one, twisting a cherry stem in her mouth.

Kiara used the Bible their mother gave her for her twelfth birthday as paper mache for a piñata in the shape of a pink cow, which their mother unknowingly smashed to pieces on Mother’s Day.

‘We’ll see who’s laughing when the sky starts to fall,’ Illiya’s mother slices the casserole with the hack of an axe.

‘Will you be laughing then?’ Kiara asks. ‘Really, Mom?’

Illiya hovers in the kitchen doorway, his mother’s mind like a factory home – an unsturdy frame built from a pre-packaged blueprint, no use even trying to renovate.

‘Only Jehova can read hearts,’ his mother tells Kiara, her stock non-answer to difficult questions.

It was Illiya’s mother’s Seasonal Affective Disorder that got her hating blood transfusions and independent thinking like Jehova himself. Got her handing out pamphlets of people petting lions to her poor ex-league mates at Sun Country Bowl. But even with Jehova, she still spent winter days curled up in bed, the dishes piling up in the sink. Even with the special sunlamps given to her by church elders propped up on desktops and cabinets she still some days couldn’t speak to her own kids. Her SAD lights, she calls them – ten times the brightness of normal lights. Lights as close as possible to the sun, built to drown out any darkness, inside and out. Above the kitchen table, in a stained-red glass pizza parlour fixture, one of them gleams down now – bright as an eclipse.

‘You’re grounded,’ Illiya’s mother tells Angelica with her knife.

‘What?’ Angelica cries. ‘It’s finally decent out and you want to lock me inside this hellhole?’

‘Mom found crystal in Gel’s purse,’ Kiara reveals.

Angelica sobs under the hood of her pink sweatshirt, the smell of hot broccoli casserole braiding the room.

‘What is crystal anyway?’ Kiara asks, delighted. ‘Speed, right?’

‘Shut up, Kiara,’ Angelica shrieks.

‘The devil’s poison,’ Illiya’s mother scowls.

The SAD light burns down on them in technicolor, the wash of light against the sun outside somehow making the room somehow darker. When Illiya was in high school there were budding alcoholics, burnouts, even some cokeheads among the orchard owner’s kids, but meth was new – the poor man’s coke, a fraction of the price for a dirtier  high that grinds your jaw. ‘Why don’t you just smoke weed or something, Gel?’ Illiya suggests.

‘Fuck you, Illiya!’ Angelica shrieks through her smudged mascara. ‘I’m not even doing it anymore!’

‘I can see it in your face,’ Illiya’s mother spits. ‘You’re ruining your beauty.’ She slams the casserole down on the table. ‘Illiya. Sit.’

Blood seeps through Angelica’s paper towel in the thick kitchen heat, the cherry rim around Kiara’s mouth like badly drawn on lipstick. The day’s sweat gathers at the base of Illiya’s neck. ‘I’m going out,’ he mumbles. Chucking his hat on the banister, Illiya disappears into the basement and steps into the shower, its droplets prickling his face like tears. Ivy never cried. Physically shrugged him off when he wanted to know her reasons, just like a dude. Illiya lathers the bar of soap in his hands like  he’s lighting a fire and scrubs his face with it even though it burns his eyes. Ivy wants her summer. With no boundaries. Like that house he’s working on down in Keremeos – no line between its backyard and the bush. Under the hot drizzle of water, Illiya can feel the metallic grit of her scissors skimming his ears.

*****

As the sun lowers itself into the sheer screen of red mountain, Illiya backs his truck out of the driveway, the holographic bumper sticker on his mother’s hatchback flashing in the falling sun: ‘Choose Life, Your Mom Did.’ Stopping at a gas station on Main Street to fill his tank, the attendant slips him his chips and change under the hard plastic window, the town’s transient nature a perfect anonymous setting for lapses in honesty, sanity. Illiya drives through the town centre, one of the storefront shop windows smashed but still hanging in delicate web of glass. Lapse.

The black night air is mild and glazed with salty grease from the French fry truck on Orchard Lane. Across the street, a girl with a perfect body wearing a skirt just short enough to make her look pitiful roams past the lined-up clubs. Lately, the bush parties had been dying out, Illiya’s friends figuring they were grown up now and should be getting dressed up and going to the town bars. A revolving beat thumps into the street as Illiya drives past the waiting girls in white dresses and sandals, guys in white collars and dark jeans. Ivy’s in there now, probably. This is what she wanted. To be in the centre of the things. Illiya lets the one-way lead him out of town.

Each jutting rock on the mountain road clinks together the beer bottles in the back of Illiya’s truck. At the site, fifteen or twenty cars line the dirt road that trails off into the large open field, another ring of trucks further out circling a tall fire of things that probably shouldn’t be burned in the black expanse of night. Illiya parks, grabs his beer, and walks out to the fire, loud, hard, sad rock playing from someone’s fuzzy truck speakers. He kicks the case under the wheel of a truck and breathes in the tannin dry night air.

‘Ill,’ Jer thumps him on the back. ‘Sweet that you came.’

Jer has sobered up since this afternoon. Illiya recognizes that look of paranoia in Jer’s eyes, the look of things falling apart – why Jer drinks in the first place. Why most guys do. If they can get there, to that place where they can pretend it’s all good, it almost is. Illiya’s buddies greet him with half-hugs and handshakes dodging the sparks popping up from the fire. The smell of campfire smoke used to make everything make sense to Illiya, gave him a sense that life was happening. Tonight it stings his throat.

‘You look nice tonight, Illiya.’ A girl named Jade slides into the crook of his arm. ‘Same as always, but nice with that white hat of yours. The only clean thing on you, as usual.’

‘Huh,’ Illiya manages, removing his arm to pull his hat down.

‘You’re always tugging at that thing,’ Jade re-hooks herself into his arm, her waxy perfume too much. ‘Kind of cowboy-like. I like it. I do.’

Illiya removes his arm again to take a swig of beer. In the blur of the fire everything looks as it always has except tonight it’s as though someone has turned the lights on. Exposed them all out here for what they really are – just a bunch of kids drunk in a field.

‘You’re quiet tonight,’ Jade says. ‘Don’t think too hard, baby.’ She brushes his arm as she walks away.

‘Yo, Illiya,’ Jer cups his shoulder, the girl in the red bikini now replaced by a typical Penticton girl – skin cancer tan, lit cigarette hovering between fluorescent-white tipped fingers. Jer looks across the fire.

Through the fire, Ivy sits in the back of an open truck bed, her hair falling over one shoulder like a foxtail. Dark red like cherry wood. She looks at Illiya, her eyelashes blinking their relaxed bat, then looks away. He doesn’t exist. He’s been shut out of his own life. Illiya walks away from the fire, kicking his beer bottle out into the field, and heads over to the shack at the edge of the tree line that burnt down when he was in high school. He unzips his fly and goes, looking over its scorched Blair Witch walls. He didn’t burn it down, but he did watch it burn. The wind jostles the trees with that same beaded shake as earlier, except this time it sounds like shhh… Like they’re telling him to shut the fuck up.

He can’t help but picture her naked. You can feel it when someone is beside you seeing things how you see them.

Back at the fire, a joint is being passed around. It swirls with the beer in Illiya’s head, blurs his thoughts. He chugs beer after beer. Lets the lukewarm poison numb his insides, lets it dissolve his misery like peroxide on a wound.

‘Hey man, you want to come quadding tomorrow?’ Jer is asking.

‘Yeah…’ Illiya can hear himself answering. He tries to grab onto this feeling of actually wanting to do something but the feeling dissipates into nothing like the rising ashes swirling above the fire. In the firelight, Illiya catches a flash of Ivy, a guy in a sweater standing too close to her smoking. She hates cigarettes.

The guy touches her face then slides a hand down her ass.

Illiya feels himself jumping through the fire. Feels his fists melding into steel.

‘Get him off!’ people are yelling as hands lift him off the ground.

Illiya looks down at his fists covered in blood.

Did he really jump through it? It felt like he did.

‘What was that?’ Ivy is screaming in his face. ‘What the fuck are you doing, Illiya?’

Illiya takes his hat off, leaving a red handprint along its white brim, the blood swelling to his knuckles. He backs away from her, spitting blood onto the ground, her skin glowing petal pink in the fire.

‘I don’t belong to you, Illiya. I never did.’

A few people stand and watch, the bloodied guy gone, dragged away.

‘I don’t want you anymore, Illiya. If that’s what you need to hear. I. Don’t. Want.  You.’

The words echo into his pulsating knuckles as the fire lashes at her face. He knows why she said it this way. He can see her looking around for who’s looking, the words meant more for them.

*****

It was the winter, not the summer, that ruined everything. So used to being unhappy, Illiya let himself worship Ivy in place of the sun, saw her as these few perfect images he couldn’t let go of. Pulling the covers over her soft shoulders, the way she would slide her hand up his leg when they were driving. Illiya lies on his basement cot, grateful for its damp chill against his wounds, his stomach ill from the bumpy ride home in the back of someone’s truck. His  mind spins like a stuck tire. The guy’s face who he attacked lingers in a red blur. He messed him up. Badly. He’s pretty sure. He’s become a guy who hurts people. An attacker. He feels it hard now, this version of himself, and it hurts. Not the regret, the unchangeable fact of the man he’s grown into. Common. Unedcuated. A regular hothead. People say your personality is who you are most of the time. But the people here, they save themselves all year for summer. When you save yourself up long enough you’re bound to crack.

Illiya’s swollen fists bleed through the white towels wrapped around them, but his nerve endings have been shot for awhile. Falling into a thick sleep, Illiya wakes up to a crack at the window.

Ivy sliding down through the window like she used to, her ankles cracking as her feet hit the floor like bonfire sparks.

‘Illiya,’ she stands over him. She climbs into bed beside him, peach coolers on her breath, her hair musky with campfire. And he lets her lie there and hold his bandaged hand. She plays with his hair, puts a hand on his forehead.

‘You’re no good for me,’ she says.

*****

Saturday and the desert blazes, the temperature a full 43 degrees by eight in the morning. Hardly any shade in the wide Penticton basin. Nowhere to hide. Turns people skittish like ants under a magnifying glass. Illiya drives Angelica to work for her early shift, stealing side glances to look for grey meth patches on her face, forgetting he’s the one who has wounds to cover up, Ivy’s scent still on his skin.

‘Happened to you last night?’ Angelica asks.

Illiya keeps quiet, knowing she won’t press it given the free ride. At this hour, only the old people are up, the snowbirds – southern desert in the winter, northern in the summer. They graze the donut window in the air-conditioning of Tim Horton’s, their faces fermented like wine, aged more by their religions than the sun, all that stored spite that they might end before the world, unlike what they’d been told for so long.

‘You gonna stop doing crystal?’ Illiya takes his eyes off the road.

‘I told you, Illiya, I’m not doing it anymore!’ Angelica stares at herself in the side mirror, her tanned arms crossed over her Dairy Queen t-shirt – white with a red heart made of the words: I LUV DQ I LUV DQ I LUV DQ…

At dawn Ivy left the way she came, kissing Illiya on the lips before hoisting herself back up the concrete wall.

‘I don’t trust you,’ Illiya tells his sister, turning into the Dairy Queen parking lot. Pulling into a space, he gives her the two-eyes-on-you gesture. ‘Now get out,’ he says.

‘Wait,’ Angelica jumps out of the truck. ‘Just wait a sec.’ She runs inside the store and returns with a large Oreo blizzard. ‘Thanks for the ride.’ She leans on the window frame. ‘Only a few months of summer and I’m stuck inside Winter Wonderland all day.’ She canters back inside taking a quick look to see if anyone has seen her go in. It’s the transition she doesn’t want them to see – the link between this self and the other.

Heading to work, balancing the cold cup against the steering wheel, Illiya leaves the windows down to let in the sauna-dry breeze, a hint of a faraway forest fire lacing the wind’s current – the scent of burned possibilities. He can’t picture Ivy in his bed last night, can’t indulge in that thought. Ivy’s like the pinnacle of summer, no matter what you do it always slips away.

*****

The days get hotter, the town flattened by the sun, and no word from her. From the shore, in the white morning light, Illiya watches a young couple suntanning on the floating dock in their underwear, the only ones on the beach so early in the morning as the beach tractor combs the sand. Illiya walks over the freshly raked ridges, his wounds from that night thick and leathery with dried blood from not taking care of them, swollen, probably infected. Yesterday, in the river that runs the edge of town where people line up to float down in tubes and dingys, a body was fished from the water. One depressed winter body from months back. A few of them every year. Illiya pictures its grey, clammy skin covered in leaf mulch, limp like a dead fish. He walks down to the East side of the beach, the water scummy and green  from the giant beached paddlewheel in the reeds. He used to wonder about the girl painted on its side, waving to another incoming paddlewheel from Sicamous in her old-fashioned bathing suit that covered her elbows and knees. He used to wonder if it wasn’t as hot back then for her to be so covered up. If it didn’t get a little hotter every year.

Jer, Brody, and Emery pull the boat around. Illiya gets into the water, still cold from night, and swims out to meet them, open beer cans already in the cupholders to  drink off last night’s hangovers. After high school, Illiya slowed down but they all kept going, drinking five nights a week, their hockey six-packs padded with solid layers of gut now, their hairlines receding like the summer. Brody rips the boat across the lake. It lashes the water in hard slaps, its motor like a chainsaw. Brody Wooley used to wear wool sweaters to school almost every day in high school, the kind with the red rim around the collar like Levi’s socks. Proof of pre-destination, Illiya was convinced. Last summer, they worked together on an A frame house in Peachland, the hotter the day the less chance Brody would show, his dad’s boat too much temptation. Illiya usually wouldn’t let himself go. Last summer there was a sense in the breeze that something was going to happen. Illiya worked hard in the frame of that still roofless house under the hot sun almost every day, and at the end of summer when nothing out of the ordinary had happened he began to feel the disappointment – he’d waited too long. But then there were her white fingers stimulating every tip of his nerves through his scalp.

As the sun hits the top of the sky, the guys take turns on the wakeboard, lacerating the water along the boat’s choppy wake.

‘Heard you got in a tussle with Brett Holmes last weekend,’ Emery yells to Illiya over the wind, tossing him a beer from the bow of the boat. ‘Heard you messed up his face pretty bad.’

‘I lost it,’ Illiya admits.

Emery’s own record is far from clean, a pink scar across his right eye from a knife fight on Skaha beach last summer.

‘What is it with you and that girl?’ Emery shakes his head.

The way she never looks right at you.

The way she fits his body like a missing limb.

‘She’s not worth it,’ Jer cracks open a can of beer in the captain’s seat. ‘She’s fucking with you, man.’

‘That chick will fuck anything,’ Emery adds.

Laughter around the boat as Jer cuts the engine so Brody can pull himself in.

Illiya feels the blood pumping to his fists. The boat drifts parallel to the shore.

‘Now those chicks…’ Emery points to some faraway girls.

The beach by now has had enough time to form into its speckled mess of bright brand new plastic store-bought poppable things.

Illiya looks at the girls in their bikinis. It’s like eating ice. Nothing. Just nothing. He really doesn’t need the summer. He may have at one point, but he doesn’t anymore. The seasons are just a backdrop, just detail.

Buzzed from the sun off the water, Brody whips the boat around in figure eights, the boys yelling for him to go harder ‘until someone falls out.’

*****

On the porch steps – white, but not the white they were before – greyer, a cloud white, Illiya trips over an empty Dairy Queen cup.

‘Nate gone for the day?’ he asks Kiara who swings on the white bench in a pile of Archies.

‘Gone,’ she says, clearing some Archies off the bench for Illiya to sit.

‘Strange guy.’ Illiya sits, taking off his hat, his hair knotted like rope from the boat ride.

‘He’s just depressed,’ Kiara says.

‘What do you know about depression?’ Illiya laughs.

What would his twelve year old sister know about sadness not worth expressing?

‘Where’s mom?’ Illiya asks.

‘At the Elvis festival in town. I tried to tell her about worshipping false idols. Told her she’ll lose her reservation in the 144 000 witnesses going to Heaven.’

Illiya grabs his sister’s head and messes up her already greasy, tangled hair. ‘What’s that?’ he asks.

On Kiara’s lower stomach is a red raised scar, the word NO etched into her skin.

Kiara pulls her shirt down. ‘It was a dare,’ she says. ‘My friends and I.”

‘Why NO?’ Illiya asks.

‘Just… no. You know… Like ‘fuck it’. Refusal. Defiance.’

‘Don’t do that to yourself anymore,’ Illiya tells her. ‘Don’t wreck your body.’

‘Look at you, trainwreck,’ Kiara looks down at Illiya’s destroyed knuckles. ‘My poor sad brother…’ She shakes his hand as if they’re meeting for the first time.

‘You’re twelve,’ Illiya reminds his sister.

‘I’m a person,’ she says. ‘Just like you.’

Illiya goes down to take a shower, having agreed to meet the guys for pints at the dreaded Nite Moves – girls doing body shots off each other in front of guys with muscle cleavage. But tonight anything is better than himself. Illiya makes a point of putting on his same dirty work  clothes, smelling them to make sure they’re halfway decent, then puts on his white hat out of the dishwasher – four trips to rinse out the blood.

‘I don’t want to hear it!’ The backdoor opens, his mother carrying a full load of  groceries, Kiara trailing behind.

‘Funny,’ Kiara says, her feet black with dirt, ‘how all the messiahs since ancient Egypt were born of a virgin, died on the cross, then resurrected for three days.’

‘Kiara, get out of my hair and go sweep the floor. By the looks of your feet, it needs it.’

Kiara gets the broom. ‘Fine. I like sweeping,’ she says. ‘It makes me feel like a peasant girl.’

‘Illiya,’ his mother spots him. ‘I need you to mow the lawn. I’m having a Kingdom Hall meeting here on Wednesday…’

‘Later,’ Illiya says.

‘It would be nice if you’d come.’ His mother unloads a bag of tomatoes. ‘If you accepted His word you wouldn’t be so down all the time.’

Kiara sticks out her tongue and clamps it with her teeth.

‘I’d rather learn from life,’ Illiya says.

‘What you’ve learned is in the past,’ his mother reaches into the fridge. ‘The future is yet to come, Illiya.’

‘You mean the mass floods and the slaughter of anyone who doesn’t go to your church?’ Kiara blurts out.

‘You have no faith,’ his mother says. ‘Neither of you.’

How can you have faith when you live in a place of ups and downs, highs and lows, hots and colds? A place of no consistency. Untrustworthy.

*****

A rainbow of lights assaults Illiya’s white hat among shouted, beat-fuelled conversations. At a stand-up table, Illiya’s buddies shell out twenties on rounds of Jaggerbombs, Jer swaying like a sawed Douglas fir.

‘That’s what I’m talking about…’ Emery leans back to check out a passing girl’s ass.

Illiya turns to face the dancefloor, letting his full beer bottle sweat on the table. As much as he’d like to think he sees through this town, the truth is he rarely thinks beyond it, the sun sedating his imagination, the mountains blocking him from looking too far. The deafening music does its job of drowning out any incoming thoughts, like he hoped it would. He looks around – the same bright brand new colours of City Beach glowing blue in the orb of the black lights. Gyrating, vodka-guzzling kids trying to squeeze every last drop out of their summers. Their summers, they really see it this way. Across the dancefloor, among the girls grinding up against each other, Illiya spots Ivy, her head tipped against another girl’s. They’re kissing. Eyes closed, hoop earrings colliding under the relentless thud of the beat.

Illiya sits back. It’s possible that everything he knows about the seasons is wrong. The season can change at any moment – each entirely different than the next, the slate clearing with each breath. Clear. Clear… Illiya’s head flings forward from a hard pound on the back.

‘Wake up kid!’ Jer puts his arm around Illiya. ‘Drink your beer, queer.’

They haven’t seen Ivy. They’re too drunk. Illiya looks back at her, a group of guys gathered around her now, getting in on the action. This was all for them. Wasn’t it?  ’I'm out,’ Illiya stands, raising a hand to the guys.

‘It’s midnight,’ Jer blocks him with his barrel chest.

‘Well, I’m peacing out.’

‘Being a good boy?’ Jer asks, that look of paranoia coming through his eyes despite the full day of drinking, so drunk he’s looped back around to sober. ‘You think you’re better than us, bro?’

If it wasn’t for Ivy leaving him, Illiya would never have been able to see how similar to the people here he’d become.

‘You’re wasted,’ Illiya walks away. Head down, hands in his pockets, he exits the lined-up club, Jer too drunk to trail him. Main Street is abuzz with drunk kids singing loudly and smoking, parked cop cars waiting for the bars to close so they can snag the drunkest of the drunk. Outside the entrance, Ivy leans against the wall pressed against some guy. She’s cloned, everywhere at once like in a dream. The guy has a thick arm around her waist, a tattoo rising from the white collar of his shirt. A diamond stud from his earlobe gleams under the Nite Moves sign.

Illiya keeps walking.

Ivy  calls his name.

He keeps walking.

She slips away from and starts walking after him.

‘Look, I get it, okay?’ he keeps his pace. ‘Anyone except me. I get it.’

‘I don’t want to hurt you, babe…’ Ivy drunkenly warbles, her unthinkable beauty dimmed by her generic words.

Illiya looks both ways before crossing the one-way street. No main street can only go one way, he decides. The whole notion of gathering, mulling – one-way streets can’t provide this. This town was built with no centre.

On the street corner, Ivy touches his shoulder. ‘I do want you,’ she wavers into him.

He looks into her eyes, speckled like Olive Lake, a lake the deepest shade of green that no one can swim in. Stepping onto the crosswalk, he leaves her standing in the street.

The sidewalks chug like train tracks under Illiya’s large steps, radiating the day’s heat back up to him. ‘Thank God it’s over,’ he says to himself, quietly. But around here, it’s never really over. There is no point at which you can stop and relax. Always a winter coming, just breaks in between.

*****

In the dark, the old house shines white against the starlit sky, though Nate has only finished one side, the white just a false front. Illiya quietly unlocks the door to not wake anyone up, but a light is on in the kitchen. Pieces of a broken lemonade glass lie shattered down the hall like thrown jacks. Illiya crunches over the glass. At the oak table Illiya’s mother and his sisters sit in the kitchen’s blinding light, a sheen across their foreheads from the hot night, a pathetic fan in the corner spreading the heat, the empty brown paper grocery bags piled at their feet like boulders from Frank Slide.

‘Your sister’s pregnant,’ his mother says, a sour exhaustion across her face.

Illiya looks at Angelica, black tracks of mascara running down her California girl cheeks.

‘When the fall comes, you’ll have to put your shoes on,’ his mother’s eyes lie in slits. ‘Then it won’t be so funny anymore.’

Illiya looks at Angelica’s feet, toes painted pink to match her flip flops, the blueberry pie plate cut across her baby toe. Kiara tucks her dirty feet under her chair, a band of red along her nose and cheeks.

‘I will kill that man,’ his mother slaps the table, swivelling the cherry bowl. ‘You’ll have to fish his body from the river.’

‘It’s not his fault,’ Kiara says, her eyes shaky against her mother’s.

The NO on Kiara’s stomach: Nate Olsen.

‘You’ll get rid of it,’ Illiya’s mother stands, knocking back her chair.

‘What – and stop a beating heart? A living soul?’

‘What have I done to my children?’ Illiya’s mother rubs her face.

‘Leave me out of it.’ Angelica runs upstairs.

‘You’re addicted to that junk!’ Illiya’s mother calls after her.

‘It helps me get stuff done!’ Angelica slams the door to her room.

Illiya looks at Kiara, her face and hands so small at the large wooden table.

The back door slams as his mother storms off, swinging back open behind her like an entering ghost.

‘Did he rape you?’ Illiya stares down his sister.

‘No,’ Kiara says. ‘It was a mistake, Illiya. I don’t love him or anything.’

‘So what are you gonna do, Ki?’ He sits down at the table. ‘Soon it’ll be fall and you’ll have to go back to school. What are you gonna do then?’

Kiara twists a cherry stem in her mouth, tying it into a knot and spitting it into her palm. She stares at it, then stares into the sour wisdomless faces of the beheaded old maids. ‘I’ll kill it,’ she decides. ‘Before it becomes a person.’

In the muggy kitchen, crane flies from the open back door buzz up near the SAD light unable to fight the urge to immolate themselves against its brightness, and Illiya sits with his sister in the muggy kitchen before fall infuses the air and time is up.



Step Into a World (Or Two…)

Sunken Meadow

* The following short story is experimental fiction

She knew she was in Los Angeles because she felt no chill. They were shopping. Alexis and her mother had decided to drive down for the weekend. But this couldn’t be because they lived in Canada. It couldn’t be – but it was. Where else would there be palm trees, bars on the windows, and this much shopping. Alexis drummed her nails against the rubber ledge of the window and hummed to herself: what you waiting, what you waiting, what you waiting for…’

She heard her dog whining. No. It wasn’t the dog. They wouldn’t have brought Scoot. It was sirens, quivering in the distance.

‘Where are they coming from?’ her mother asked.

‘I don’t know.’

It didn’t occur to Alexis to be afraid. She hadn’t done anything wrong. Except what was this? – a Jean Paul Gauthier dress draped across her knees – purple and red patterns crisscrossing against a sheer yellow bodice. She didn’t remember buying a dress. Maybe she hadn’t bought it. Maybe she had stolen it. She listened again for the sirens. Alexis’s mother gripped her long red nails around the steering wheel, ready to drive. But her mother never had her nails done. Maybe she’d had them done for the trip – after all, they were in L.A.. A special occasion. The dress still lay draped across Alexis’s lap. Should she put it on? Then the cops would think it was hers. If Alexis changed in the back of the van, they might pull up just as she was taking off her clothes. Then they would see her naked. What else could she do? Throw it out the window? Alexis looked over at her mother only to notice that it wasn’t her mother at all, but her father. She looked out the window – they were no longer in L.A., but in Northern California, driving through farmland. A distant blue ocean lapped at golden fields ahead.

‘What did Mom buy on the trip?’ her father asked.

‘Um… I don’t know,’ said Alexis, ‘she got her nails done, though. Red.’

The van glided dolphin-like through the falling twilight. They were almost there.

‘Where are we going?’ Alexis asked.

‘I’m taking you to school, remember?’

Ah, yes. School. Alexis had forgotten – it was the first day. Shouldn’t it be morning? she wondered. Driving over a series of curved bridges that looked like mini-golf walkways, they pulled into the school. It reminded Alexis of her elementary school and her high school mixed together. The same layout as her elementary school, but in her high school’s colours: green and blue. She watched three blonde girls in blazers and berets kick around a soccer ball on one of the vast green fields. And there were more of these uniforms. Everywhere. Riding shuttle buses, eating at tables, hooking arms. An excitement bubbled inside her as she watched the students go about their day, which is was now – daytime. It was all so perfect. But just then she remembered – she wouldn’t be able to go to this school because she’d already graduated.

‘At Sunken Meadow,’ said a passing teacher, ‘we are technically a high school, but we allow students to do their university degrees here as well.’

Alexis was overjoyed. She would get a second chance. She would be able to be a part of this. But then she remembered: she’d already graduated from university as well.

‘Damn,’ she whispered, and wondered if she couldn’t just pretend she hadn’t. Maybe she could attend the school simply out of interest. Get another degree maybe. She stepped inside the girl’s locker room. Endless rows of lockers mazed off in every direction. She ran down one, dropping the padlocks against the peach-pink metal in a series of clangs. In the centre of the locker room was a fountain where girls bathed in yellow one-pieces and flowered bathing caps.

‘What a great way to get clean,’ thought Alexis, ‘this is so much better than showers.’

There was a boy standing to the side of the lockers. He wasn’t spying; he looked like he was waiting for someone. It was Cody. Cody was here.  Oh God. Maybe Alexis would get another chance with him, too. She walked over to where he stood.

‘Do you want to kiss me?’ he asked.

‘Well,’ she looked down, ‘your eyes do match the stripes of plaid on my shirt.’ She looked down, hoping she was wearing plaid. She was. She gently tapped her eyes shut as though trying to sink a put, and as their lips met she felt a row of spiky hair above his lip.

‘Oh my God,’ she drew back.

Cody didn’t have a moustache. It wasn’t him after all.

Suddenly it was hot. They were outside. She could feel the heat crushing her against the sky.

‘God it’s hot,’ she said to the stranger with the moustache. ‘I don’t know how you can stand having that thing on your face in this weather.’

‘Oh,’ said the stranger, ‘it’s a peel off.’ The stranger peeled off his moustache and shrunk four feet into a little girl.

‘C’mon,’ said the little girl. She took Alexis’s hand and began to  run through an oceanside ruin of smooth white walls. They were at a resort built in Mexican architecture. Inside the white walls were series upon series of dining halls – all empty, having just been used for some sort of celebration. Yellow and black helium balloons still buoyed from the chairs, a rain of ribbons scattered on  the white tablecloths of the banquet tables.

‘Where did everyone go?’ asked Alexis.

‘Who?’ asked the little girl who wore a tight dress in shades of watermelon pink and green. The dimples on her cheeks were like black seeds. ‘C’mon, we’ve got to get to class.’

‘We have class?’

Was this part of the school?

‘But I haven’t been to class all semester,’ said Alexis.

The girl was running now, away from Alexis down the red carpet of the white walled halls.

‘Hey,’ shouted Alexis. ‘Do you think I’ll still be able to pass?’

Alexis considered running after the watermelon girl but she was already out of breath and slumped against an arcade game. Green and purple flashing lights came on. She’d set the thing off. ‘Good Day,’ it introduced itself.

Hearing it speak, Alexis realized it wasn’t an arcade game – it was one of those fortune telling machines. Not the kind you put your hand on that tells you whether you’re a heartbreaker or a dud, the kind that really grants wishes – like in the movie where the boy wishes to be big at the carnival and gets turned into a man. The plastic face of the fortune teller, Alexis noticed, was her fourth grade math teacher, Mme. Lavalle.

‘Mme. Lavalle,’ Alexis began, trying to muster up her French, ‘je ne savais pas qu’on avais une classe a cette heure. It was an accident. Je m’excuse.’

‘Why should I believe you?’ Mme. Lavalle asked in French. ‘How is it possible that this has all been juste une accident?

Alexis knew she was innocent – that her gaping absence from school had been a mistake at least in part, just another product of her scattered brain. She attempted to explain why she’d missed each class: the first time she’d fallen asleep waiting for class to start, the second she’d had to go somewhere important with her mother… Shopping in LA. It was all coming back to her. As Alexis spouted off the excuses, she became sure they were true. She looked into Mme. Lavalle’s marbled eyes. ‘C’est pas ma faute.’

The tide was coming in now. Tiny starfish began to float around Alexis’s ankles.

How was the ocean coming through the white walls? They were so thick. Everything would be ruined.

‘Je dois partir,’ Alexis told her teacher, looking up out a circular window to a cliff above. She had to get to higher ground. Fast.

Opening the circular window and squeezing herself through it, she fell several stories into the ocean. Snakes began to surround her in the sea-foam green curls of the tide. Wide snakes, with bodies like eels. Their eyes were yellow. Their tongues were slit. A bullet of panic sped through her chest. She pressed down on the surface of the water until she lifted herself into the air. But the snakes began to rise up out of the water as well, like the balloons on the backs of the chairs. They stood upright as if they were being charmed, their mouths open and twisted brimming with teeth. She pressed down on the air below her and rose upwards. The more she pressed down, the higher she floated up. She knew that the moment she forgot she was floating she would fall.

But she no longer had to remember to float, thank God,  because she was at the edge of the cliff she had spotted from the circular window in the white wall. She had floated up all this way. Stepping gingerly from flight onto the cliff, Alexis saw flickering images on the roof of a white dome ahead. There was a movie playing inside. It was a theatre. Finding a seat for herself in the dark, Alexis picked up the familiar scent of sawdust and nicotine. Her grandfather was sitting beside her.

‘What movie is this?’ she asked him.

‘It only looks like a movie,’ he said, ‘really there is no story. It’s just a series of random events.’

On the movie screen, a young boy and a young girl held hands in a picturesque meadow. A flat expanse of verdant grass hidden in the woods, tucked away so secretly that perhaps no one else had ever been there before.  The girl had a crown of white Gerbera daisies on her head. She planted a kiss on the boy’s cheek.

‘There is a story,’ Alexis told her grandfather. ‘There must be. Because it’s making me cry.’

The lights flicked on. The usher came onto the stage in a velvet red coat. ‘A natural phenomenon is occurring!’ he announced. ‘I would advise that everyone forget the movie and go to the side of the mountain. You will never believe me,’ he said, ‘but natural waterslides have somehow formed in the mountainside.’

Ignoring the suggestion, the moviegoers lingered and chatted.  They were teenagers, Alexis reasoned. Left unattended in this pristine white movie dome. Inevitably, a party began to start up. There was music. A techno  disco beat. Yelling and laughing. Girls with their shirts rolled up past their belly buttons climbing over the seats. Someone swinging from the chandelier. Alexis wanted to stay, but the waterslides…

Arriving at the mountainside, Alexis was disappointed. She had expected there would be an entangled series of clay chutes with water running down them into an immaculate lagoon basin. Instead, there were only fibreglass tubes, like the ones you could see at any waterslide park. It was an unnatural natural phenomenon. Although she was wearing her uniform (she must have changed into it in the locker room) she sat down in a tube, the water pressing against her back and then moving her through the tube. The waterslide took her down the mountain slowly, frustratingly slowly. And at the end of the long ride, she had reached ocean level again. Except she was not ejected into the ocean, but a river. A very shallow river, though it carried her with much more ease and buoyancy than the waterslide. Under the river’s clear surface were smooth shining pebbles the colour of walnuts. It was more like a brook. A very wide brook, with pockets of sunshine speckling its surface through willow trees. Eventually, she was joined with a crowd of others floating on objects. The teenagers from the party in the movie dome. She hadn’t missed out after all. The kids drank beer in various flotation devices: inner tubes, loungers, rafts. Never had she been to a party like this before. It wasn’t a party, she decided. It was a forever. The trees on either side of the river were weeping jubilant pink and golden petals into the water. Their lower branches drooped into the water, their  shimmering leaves dipping into the brook’s glistening surface. It was so quiet. The noise of the party acquiesced to the silence of the surrounding trees. What was the destination of this forever party? Where would it end?

The brook was nowhere in sight. Alexis was alone and swimming in the ocean again, out in open water, the sun a speck in the sky. She could see land at a very far off distance. She was petrified, but at least she could see land. She would have to swim back. The horizon engulfed her, seemed to suck her towards it. And now there were rows upon rows of houses with docks and boats attached. These waters were safe. These waters were the waters of dolphins. Finally reaching one of the docks, she pulled herself out of the water and rested her upper torso on its wet wood. She was home, she realized under the steady sun. This was where she lived. This was her dock. And yet she also knew that she was on the other side of the world.

She turned around to see Cody standing where the land met the water on the dock. The sun shone behind him, darkening his contour. He was just a black shape but she knew it was him.

‘Didn’t you see me at the party?’ said Cody.

Alexis couldn’t remember seeing him. Had he really been there?

‘I was waving at you,’ he said. ‘I was calling you, but you didn’t hear.’

Alexis wanted to cry. She wished she’d had the chance to share that moment with him. Now, it was over and she would never be able to get it back. If only she’d heard him calling.

‘Cody,’ she called for him now. But he was gone. And Alexis was propelling forward at high velocity, skimming the surface of a wide deep river in the Amazon. It was half ocean, half river, and she was hydroplaning over it with motor force in standing position as though she were waterskiing, though she held on to nothing. She was barely balancing. She could fall over at any second. Long reeds cut through the river’s surface and whipped at her ankles. The soles of her feet on the water’s surface burned with friction. How did she get herself into this mess? Careening at such speed across this dangerous body of water with no flotation device? It seemed she was always finding herself in the midst of disaster. If she could just slow down, she could think.

Though she didn’t want to sink into the wild waters, not knowing what lurked below, she had to come to a stop. How could she stop? In a moment of epiphany, she understood: the speed wasn’t coming at her from the outside – the speed was coming from within.

‘I want to slow down,’ she thought, fimrly, ‘I want to slow down.’

And then she did. Slowed into a stroll as the surface of the Amazon river turned into red and green patterned carpet. A hotel carpet. Alexis was walking down a long, long hallway, boutiques on either side. She was in the underground mall of a hotel. One of the boutiques was overstocked with items of alluring fabrics and materials. Alexis entered the store. It comforted her, how heavily packed it was with goods. She brushed a black feathered boa up against her face. Along the walls were a full rainbow of colours of every single product. Sequined visors in greens and blues and purples, fun fur in yellows and oranges and pinks. Alexis was thrilled. She was tearing things off the shelves and racks and piling them into her arms. So many colours and textures and shades.

‘You see,’ said a saleslady, ‘we have so much to offer you.’

‘But how much?’ asked Alexis.

In response to her question, the sales lady pointed to the clock, tapping its glass surface with pearly white nails. ‘Closing time,’ she shrugged.

There was a bustle outside of the store. Everyone was rushing. Rushing to get out. Alexis dropped her pile of clothes and hurried into the crowd. But everyone was going in the opposite direction of her no matter which way she turned. Unless she wanted to be caught inside the mall, Alexis figured she had better just choose a direction if she wanted to escape. So she marched against the flow of the crowd. Maybe she was the only one going the right way after all. The hard, tightly stretched Christmas-coloured carpet sprawled under her feet. The hall seemed to never end. She arrived in a grand, airy hotel lobby. But this was not her hotel. She couldn’t remember which hotel she was staying at, but she knew this wasn’t it. Trailing her hand over a brass railing, she continued past several other lobbies, all adjoined, and with her next step, stepped onto the  pavement of an empty mall parking lot lit with a grid of white lights in the midnight sky. She was in Texas. The lights hummed above her as the last car in the parking lot drove away. She sat on a cement meridian and looked at the grassy field beside the lot. If only she could remember where she had come from. She was always ending up this way. The light above her shut off. It was dark now, except for a blurry spot of light in the field. Alexis navigated herself towards it. Following the light to its source, Alexis came to see that it was a single exposed light bulb dangling from the ceiling of a very large house. Its cord swayed above her head as she stood under it. The house was almost empty. It had white walls and old, abused carpet the colour of sand. There was a rocking horse to her left and an antique green velvet couch. All she could think of was to pull the string, to turn off the light. But something inside told her not to. She sat down on the green velvet couch. She didn’t know what to do.

She remembered the young girl and the young boy in the field with the flowers. And then, she was the girl. And Cody was the boy. Younger versions of themselves. They were standing in a meadow sunken into a valley between two mountains. The sun was shining down in diamonds and a gentle breeze played. Trees surrounded the meadow like curtains around a stage. Chirping birds accented the silence. Sparkles of butterflies rose up from the wildflowers. It was entirely possible that no one but them had been there before. As the girl in the movie had, Alexis moved over to Cody to place a kiss on his cheek.

She wondered, how long could she stay here?

How long would this moment last?

Step Into A World

The following short story was originally published, by Twenty3Magazine.

Lighted Souvenirs

‘Lighted souvenirs?’ she drones, sauntering through the flashing casino. Fishnet stockings, tuxedo leotard – she almost pulls it off. Could have twenty years ago. She slithers toward the cards tables adorned with glow-in-the-dark this and that, a heavy tray of lit-up goodies strapped around her neck – glow sticks, magic wands, trinkets blinking neon. ‘Lighted souvenirs?’ she offers them, the guests – those who celebrate while she slaves.

She’s lived in Vegas for years. Made a living off the bright lights. Slept during the days, partied at night. Now an overtold joke, Vegas used to at least  make her laugh. Still she keeps at it everyday. Plays the slots. Drinks her Scotch. Tries to behave.

Everyday they build it up: The Strip. How appropriate. It does just this. Takes it all off.

Stripping had been her ride to the top. Thank God she’d had the body for it. Helped that she drank her meals and smoked her desserts. The booze gave her the nerve to get onstage, the cigarettes rewards for being brave. Nowadays, her job is to make her guests feel at home here at The Stardust, even though she wishes they were. They just keep coming. Never leave. And  it never, ever stops. It’s true what they say: the city never sleeps.

She can’t sleep either. Hasn’t for months. Takes a catnap here and there,  ten, twenty minutes, then her body jolts awake, eyes pop open, spine snaps up. No rest.

She glides through the ruffle of the spinning slots at the end of her shift and punches out. It’s noon, time for bed. She heads to her suite on Floor Nineteen. Sits on the bed, looks out the window. Thick pings of the ice cubes dropping into her Scotch. She swishes it around in small sips – eye twitching, stockings itching. When she sleeps, when she really sleeps, is when she takes off her clothes and stands naked in front of the window for all of Vegas to see. When she shows them who she is. What she was. What she could have been. She sleeps then for hours and wakes up sometimes feeling almost alright. Not today. Today she will strip for no one.

On days like this she heads downtown away from strip, back to old school Vegas. She puts on more make up on top of the old stuff that’s worn off.  It’s always doing that, sliding away in the heat. She smears on cover up under  the bathroom’s red heat light with a dirty sponge. Cakes it on. The thicker, the better. Now the eyes. Damsel Discobeat eyeshadow for class, Moroccan-orange blush for sass. She look in the mirror. Stuff never does what it’s supposed to. Crappy junk. Still she doesn’t like to take it off. Although it does come off, sometimes, late at night, when she sneaks into the pool alone. She leaves it on while she swims, oily streaks of purple and orange chasing her, an eye out for security guards. She never lets them come too close. Even though she doesn’t care what they think.

The Vegas heat hurts as she steps outside. Sizzles up at her from the pavement like a rattler. She staggers down the sidewalk like she’s already drunk in her too-tight hot pink heels. Five naked asses joined at the hips moon her on the tail of a taxi as it sails past. She lifts a sagging arm to flag it down. It pulls over. She shovels herself inside

Billboards shout into the car: Girls, Girls, Girls. Live Young Girls.

‘I used to be a ripper.’ She tells the cabby.

‘Uh huh,’ the cabbie mutters, tilting the rear view mirror away.

She tries not to look out the window. The air-conditioning stings her eyes.

The old Las Vegas is empty today, every day. A few sad hot streets left behind. “Here,” she tells the cabbie nowhere in particular. She chucks a ten at his head on her way out.

She looks around. Can’t decide which one today. Nude Girls Daily. Girls: Barely 18. Girls. Little bitches only. No women. The downtown heat swarms her fast. Overheated after only a few minutes in the sun, she steps into a Seven Eleven and eyes the newsstand from from behind her eyeliner. Picks up a copy of The Daily Star and teeters to the counter, her high-heels too steep, gnarling her toes.

‘Pack of Camels, too,’ she says, eyeing a VLT at the front of the store. ‘And ten bucks of quarters.’

She slouches onto the stool ignoring her reflection in the glowing screen  and pops in the quarters with last month’s fake nails. She’s played this one before. No win. No win. No win.

She goes to stand, falling off her heel, grabs her purse, and stumbles next door to a place called The Cave. Her kind of place. Dark, almost empty. No girls on stage. No girls at all.

‘Can I getcha?’ asks the bartender, his blue eyes on the empty stage.

‘Scotch, rocky.’

She lights a smoke. Drink in hand, she flips through the pages. Worthless fools. Nobodies. Madonna – she’s about this close to washing up. It’ll all come crumbling down. Same story for this Spears – fake ditz with her glamour and glitz. They’ll get what’s coming to them. They’ll see. She orders another drink. At the end of the bar sits a handsome young man who deals blackjack at The Stardust. She takes her ashtray and slides over next to him. ‘You work at The Stardust, don’t ya?’

‘Sure do. How d’ya guess?’ He takes a sip of his beer, his gaze on the  corner TV. Big brass belt buckle, blonde moustache, hairy arms.

‘Work there myself,’ she says, exhaling smoke the way she learned to – like you’re blowing a kiss.

He nods, looks around. ‘Speaking of I reckon I’m due for a shift.’ He tucks in his stool, slaps some cash on the bar, and flicks her a nod as he leaves.

‘I sure don’t bite,’ she says to her drink.

But he’s long gone. Cheesy jerk. She orders a shot of vodka, downs it, and steps into the burn.

It’s dizzy hot out. She grabs onto a bus stop bench for balance. The couple sitting on it leans away.

‘Matter?’ she spits. ‘Never seen an old woman before?’

She hates the term. Never wanted it to come to this. She wonders if she could still sell her body. Maybe she could – give them more for less. She smiles at the thought. No. She doesn’t do that anymore. She’s a lady now. She pulls out her compact and puts on more lipstick – pink to match the sun.

She decides to walk back to The Strip. She wants to see the transition between the old and the new. Wants to feel it. In the baking heat her high-heels draw blood from the backs of her heels. She could take them off but the sidewalk would scorch her feet. How would a lady walk? Back straight, small steps. She can do that. What would a lady do? Go for a nice drink at one of those fancy hotels. She’s good enough for those dumps. She’s what made Vegas what it is today. Shouldn’t she get to enjoy it?

She breathes in the air like nicotine. The Bellagio, the MGM Grand, the Venetian – parties she’s never had the nerve to crash. Maybe she’d fit in there as a lady. A lady on her way to have a nice drink.

Parched, she nears Casear’s Palace. In the gel of tourists, no one steps aside for her. Lousy rich folk. Hussies. Spoiled brats. She hangs her head down to the sidewalk cracks – littered flyers of naked women strewn over the ground. A deep thirst shrivels her throat. She needs that drink.

Her purse slides off her shoulder and its contents scatter. Too tired to  bend down and pick them up, she lets them roll into the gutter. A white limo pulls up beside her. A starlet steps out, wrapped in glitter, head held high, and  takes someone’s hand. Cameras snap as people crowd around. Her bodyguards form a shield.

‘Tramp!’ she calls out as loud as she can.

The star turns, selling her stunning smile.

‘Flooze!’

The star pretends not to hear.

She spits in the star’s direction. It hits the bottom of her leg.

Ladies don’t spit she realizes too late.

The star bends to wipe her leg as her bodyguards encircle the star and the crowd encircles the bodyguards. She’s shut out, left to wither in the sun. It can’t beat her. She knows it too well. Just when you think it will, it fizzles out. Fast.

As night finally drizzles down and the blue-bright lights start to blink  leftover heatwaves steam up from the pavement. Just one drink. That’s what she came here for.

The walkway of The Bellagio stares her down with its perfect curves and soft yellow lights. No. She’s too tired. Too hot. Too damn thirsty to go in there. She crosses the street to a small souvenir store and buys a bottle of water for fifty cents. Takes a sip, then pours the rest over her hot bleeding feet. She disappears down a slim sideway between buildings, looking up at the lights to find her way.  Never could get a good picture of them at night. Always foggy and streaked like a photograph of a ghost. She spots an old ladder beside an overflowing dumpster and reaches up on its rungs.

She starts to climb.

Up one story, two. She drops a heel – lousy knockoff piece of crap. She keeps climbing. She’s never felt this high before, except in her suite on the nineteenth floor. She flings off the other shoe. The pain subsides. Her stomach jitters. She watches her toes to make sure they don’t betray her.

On the roof there’s a sign lit so bright her eyes hurt. She’s too close to read what its bulbs spell. She reaches out to touch one of the blazing lights. It burns her. Melts the print off her fingers. ‘Damn it,’ she curses.

She takes off her sleeveless blouse and wraps it around her hand. Freshly bandaged, she tries again. The bulb dims in her hand as she unscrews it. But nothing else happens. She hasn’t been electrocuted or anything. Dead bulb in hand, she squeezes it firmly. As hard as she can.

It doesn’t break.

She steps to the edge, barefoot and topless, her blouse around her hand like a boxing glove, the lights a nighttime desert rainbow, and looking down onto the people-clogged streets, at the vermin so crammed-in they can barely move, she drops the bulb and watches it fall.

A hole emerges in the crowd.

‘What do you know?’ she smiles.

The next one she tosses overhead like a baseball. Waits for a gap to appear.

‘Lighted Souvenirs?’ she sings.

Step Into A World

“The Luxury of Negative Thought”

On the mountain the sky is red, turned inside out. But though it’s red out there, it’s grey all around you, as though you’re standing at the opening of the sky.

“What button?” Potia asks over the wind, leaned back and gravitating in her camping chair. You’ve always admired her ability to appear relaxed almost anywhere.

You adjust the setting of the camera for her, and position yourself at the furthest point of the edge before freefall, loose jagged rocks like those of an undiscovered planet at your feet, the wind fighting itself so hard in each direction that it feels as though you’ve stepped into a portal.  “Do a pan,” you yell.

Portia scans the blood sky, then lands on you. “Tells us about the future, Clarke!”

“We’re in it,” you shout. “We are the revolution.” And you laugh, because at some point everything is funny.

“Isn’t the revolution dead? Haven’t they tried that already?”Portia prompts you.

“The revolution is calling louder than ever. Just because the media doesn’t cover it, doesn’t mean it’s not happening.”

“How’s it going to go down?”Portia asks. “What’s gonna happen?”

“We’re going to take it all back.” You grab a fistful of wind. “Put the power back into the hands of the people.”

“And… cut.” Portia gives you back the camera. “How was?”

“Well, you kept turning the camera around so it will look like I’m in a vortex. But it works.”

You sit side by side on the peak of the rocky slope, the sweat from the hike chilling your spines as the sun turns its back on you. Portia gets it. She knows what it’s like to fall from a high place. To wake up one day to realize that the belief that you were special was what was holding  you back the most –  entire libraries of your lives burned to the ground while you weren’t watching. You’ve known each other since high school when your shared binocular view of life  was through teen movies and mall-bought trends, and you didn’t yet grasp that in the real world work would take up the time with which you had assumed you would live out your dreams.

“Have you ever had flow?” Portia asks over the wind. “I must have had it at some point,  because I know I don’t have it now.”

“I’ve felt it,” you say. “But I wouldn’t know how to harvest it.”

You take a moment to breathe in the speedboat wind, then scream into the red void of the apocalyptic sky – wisp-white trenches of clouds feathering the mountain’s base, a midnight blue oozing through its slits – a rippled, horror movie scream. You hold it for as long as you can, a carnival bell sledge-hammered inside you to the maximum height of your pain-turned-pleasure.

Portia nods.

As it gets darker, you start down the slope.

*****

You’re painting a 7X7 foot canvas of a crumbling city skyline made entirely of boulders when Portia calls to tell you she accidentally had sex with a stranger at Wal*Mart.

“I just wanted to do something adventurous.” She justifies, describing the average guy she met on the C-Train after work.

You continue painting, offering unobtrusive support: uh-huh, hmm, yeah, because none of this surprises you. Whereas you usually keep your crazy within the lines, Portia tends to waver over them like a drunk driver.

“Okay, okay,” you tell her. “You’ll get through it. No worries.”

Miracle they didn’t get busted by some Wal*Mart god above, evidence that perhaps there is no one at the top after all.

“ I can’t trust myself,” Portia says. “Who am I?”

“Let’s hang out,” you offer. You know the feeling of being physically disgusted with yourself.

“I’m going to sleep for a week.”

“I don’t think so, Snow White.”

It always comes to this – you pretending to be the rock. The time Portia found the injured squirrel and tried to keep it as a pet. Lucid, she named it. The time she smashed in the windshield of her ex-boyfriend’s truck with his snowboard. The time she drove drunk and totalled her car in the Bow River, conveniently yet authentically losing her part of her memory due to head injury. The only reason you keep your cool is that you know on a fundamental level that if you ever fell apart she couldn’t help you. Otherwise, you might be tempted.

“Better get dressed,” you tell Portia, rinsing off your paintbrush and inspecting your unfinished collapsing city.

*****

You step into the winter sunset, the Calgary air stung with ice though it’s only mid-October. You remember when you realized you were from a cold place. That no one -  especially not you – can escape the toll that four seasons does to a person’s emotions. They say your personality is who you are most of the time. Most of the time, this city is winter. You avoid eye contact with all young men on the C-Train to avoid a similar fate, then shoplift Portia some Mango Soft Eating Licorice from a convenience store. In high school, you and Portia used to steal 5 cent candies by hiding them in your slurpees, the candies no longer gummy but frozen hard when you would scoop them out with your spoon-straws, but tasting better because they were free. Since you’ve known each other, your cells have entirely regenerated twice.

Portia answers the door in hot-pink legwarmers, zigzagged shorts, an off-the-shoulder grey hooded sweatshirt, and an electric-blue sweatband, a tub of blood-orange gelato in her white mittened hands.

“Is this dressed?” You toss her the licorice.

The walls of Portia’s place are a green the shade poisonous slugs offset by chunks of seventies flare: a beaded curtain, an orange plastic chair, macramé wall hangings . She calls it: retro-metro psychedelic funk; you call it “splash of clash”. There is no kitchen table. You suspect this may be the missing anchor in Portia’s life, though you don’t have one either.

“It’s eating licorice,” you tell her. “As opposed to the other type.”

“He reminded me of that guy from that movie,” Portia explains. “Except not as smart. Or special. He was listening to his Ipod and it was annoying me. How he could just sit there and ignore me and be so politely fucking Canadian. So I took out one of his earphones. With my tongue.”  She dives onto an unburstable exercise ball, shooting across the room to hide her face, yet landing in front of a full-length mirror. “I’m ugly,” she says, a tube of licorice out the side of her mouth like a dental suction tube.

“You’re a star,” you tell her, sketching a waterfall on the whiteboard above her phone. “Now, let’s go be famous.”

Portia paces her living room, through the dead people’s things scavenged during thrift store breakdowns – ceramic pantomime clowns, German coo-coo clocks, and a framed black velvet 3D owl picture you date back to the great spree of April ’07.

“What do you have in mind?” Portia emerges from the bedroom in a gold satin jacket, still no pants.

“Nothing,” you say. “We’re going to do very ordinary things in a very exciting way. Like usual.”

*****

Portia finally decides to put on pants in the middle of the parking lot, or rather, leggings designed to look like painted on skinny jeans. Better than nothing, but not by much. The Fox & Feather sign sizzles down like cancer, at least one in every town – a Disney-stolen fox with a green Robin Hood hat smiling down his toothy smile (“Robin, you’re so imeptuous!” you remember Maid Marian saying.) Corporate anonymity is alluring tonight. A dense fog full of secrets laps at the white parking stall lines, rolled in from another land, or pollution. You leave cookie cutter prints in the light layer of snow. “It takes so long to find something you want…” you say, mostly to yourself. “Then when you find it, as soon as you want it too much it turns the situation sour.”

“You’re harshing my buzz,” Portia says.

“I want a man with some class,” you elaborate. “I want it old school. Give me a gentleman!”

“That’s not very anarchist of you,” Portia says, heaving open the wooden pub door.

“Just because I reject being confined within a machine-like system, does that mean I have to sacrifice chivalry?”

You trek through the aromatherapy of spilt beer and chipotle mayo to find a booth in the back, expired heavy metal placating what would otherwise be near silence, guys in jeans their wives bought for them talking about sports they don’t have the energy to play. At some point in your life, people began to disappear. The subjects of conversations so base, so preliminary that you’d already dissected them on every angle years ago. Maybe it wasn’t them who disappeared, but you.

“Two Foxy Pints,” Portia tells the waitress – UV tan, spray-on French manicure, small  cracks of sadness already lining her young eyes.

You align the camera on its tripod, trying to find the right angle.

“Clarke, I’m not really feeling the drama today.” Portia slides down the ripped green vinyl booth back. At first, she didn’t want to be a part of it at all, but eventually she began to realize how it makes everything matter just a little more.

“Drama,” you greet the camera. “Have you ever noticed how it’s those who reject it who are the ones who create it? No drama, everyone claims to want. So Top 40.”

A moment of dead air while Portia grinds her jaw at you.

“Don’t be a Debbie Downer, Clarke,” Portia finally comes through. “Be an Uma Upper.” “Debbie Downer,” she does a clown frown, then smiles, “Uma Upper!”

“How about Bitter Betty? She’s always fun.” You focus in on yourself, then her. “What’s wrong with drama? Is any intense emotion I feel drama?”

“Okay, cut!” Portia says. “This is boring me.”

You have a moment of crumbling boulder city.

“If you’re bored, you’re boring,” you reply.

A few guys at the bar have noticed that you’re filming now. They watch you as an option c) to the hockey or basketball on the corner TVs.

“Don’t you want to be a star?” you ask Portia, camera still rolling. “Because you’re always a star as long as – above anything else – you just want people to know you.”

“I thought the most intriguing people were good listeners who didn’t ask questions.”The waitress delivers the beers, glancing at the camera and wondering if she should tell you to turn it off. She doesn’t want any drama.

“Where the fuck did you hear that?” you ask. “No. The most terrifying thing of all is being a legend in your own mind,” you cheers Portia’s unwilling glass.

“That’s assuming there’s another type of legend to be.” She says.

“Friends,” you face the camera. “Have you ever felt deliriously lost? Because there’s nothing like it.” You hand the waitress a spoon as a microphone. “Why not enjoy every second of life? It’s all one big pile of shit…” You read her name tag and look forward to the rhyme, “…Brit.”

Brit uses her tray as a shield against the camera.

Portia winks and nods at the camera in a seductive Wal*Marty way.

You can never trace what wins her over.

“If every thought brings us closer to Heaven or Hell,” you gather momentum, “then can we ever  afford the luxury of a negative thought?”

The barstool men have turned to face you now, curious about the camera. A few women, too, in Costco sweaters and bunny-tested hairspray.

“Maybe it’s healthy to lose your mind,” you offer. “Maybe sometimes you need to have sex at Wal*Mart. Price-dropping falling star sex.”

Portia eyes you with contempt. “Sometimes the pain starts to eat you alive,” she both replies and changes the subject. “Or do we eat the pain..? Run on it like a non-efficient fuel.”

“What show is this?” you overhear a man say behind you. “What channel is this for?”

“Maybe we can afford more than we think,” Portia suggests. “Maybe luxury is being able to relax.”

“I like it,” you agree. “You’re hurting my brain. Let’s get a second opinion.” You unscrew the camera from its tripod. The illusion of flow in video – the flow only ever present once it’s watched.

“Young sir,” you approach a guy playing pool – ironic mullet, slacker flannel shirt, little to no mystery. You shine the soft camera light on his face. “What is your darkest secret?” you ask him over the tap dance of the billiard balls.

“Excuse me?” he holds his pool cue at his side like a spear, like a stranded schoolboy gone rabid after a shipwreck, making him suddenly almost irresistibly hot.

A small crowd has formed around you now, about 10 or 12 people.

“Hey…” the pool guy says, as Portia joins you. “Aren’t you those girls?”

It’s a strange sensation, being recognized by someone you’ve never met. You have no idea what you they know.

“Portia and Clarke,” he says. “You have two hundred thousand views on You Tube.”

“Internet killed television,” you smile, shifting his pool cue towards him as a mic. “Now, can you define luxury apart from the accumulation of material objects…?” You fish for his name.

“Bradley. Two hundred thousand people watching you every day. Huh.”

“Now they’re watching you, too, babe.” Portia grabs his pool cue and sets up a shot.

You film her. She doesn’t sink it.

“I watch it. I mean, I’ve watched it, sometimes,” Bradley says.

You’ve become a guilty pleasure. Someone’s waste of time.

“I don’t mean to sound critical,” he continues to hijack the interview. “But, what makes you think you’re worth paying attention to? I mean, above other people.”

“Nothing,” you reply. “We’re narcissistic, like everyone else.”

Portia rolls the balls into the pockets with her hands, one by one.

“It’s more difficult than you think,” you tell the world, “finding a single real moment.”

“Is she famous?” you hear a woman ask.

“Never seen her before in my life,” a man answers.

When you got wrecked (the best term you’ve found to describe it), when the person who made life worth living to you decided that you weren’t this person to him, you stopped caring – about anything anymore. He took the world with him. But on camera, it didn’t matter if anyone loved you, as long as you were seen. And it also didn’t matter if you loved who was watching, a dimension of melded fiction and non a safe, whimsical, eternal bubble.

“I liked that mountain shot the other day. ‘Ahhhh!’” Bradley mimics you screaming. “But I don’t… really think there’s going to be a revolution,” he admits, his movements a little different now, snagged by the camera’s man-eating draw. “Things just aren’t that bad,” he says. To the camera, not you.

In the limelight, his hotness changes colour. Turns a limegreen shade of hollow.

“Aren’t they?” You turn the camera to yourself. “Because I can’t help but notice that you’re here.” You do a pan of the small surrounding crowd and hope they don’t take it personally, then film Portia as she climbs onto the pool table and flops back onto its green felt like a field of wildflowers, her hoodie pulled down around her eyes. “It’s okay, I  can afford it,” she gives you a thumbs up.

Since no one is harassing her for being a disturbance, you climb up, too, and stand above her to get the downward shot. And then, like a changed channel, the manager is approaching in his rolled up sleeves. To seek and destroy the drama.

“The revolution will not be televised”, you tell the camera. “Or was it: the television will not be revolutionized?”

“Ma’am…” The manager penetrates the bubble as you jump down. Portia stays put.

“Excuse me, Ma’am, I’m going to have to ask you to-”

Portia screams at full volume. A red sky scream. And it pierces and pierces and stabs.

A tsunami of panic douses the Fox and Feather. You feel your own abs clench, your air go. You try to steady the camera.

She then looks up at you and laughs because she knows you think it’s gold. Why she keeps laughing is up for debate.

“He told me I had an ass like a stripper,” she says. “And you know what? That was better than the sex. That, was everything to me.”

The manager whips out his Blackberry – disgusted, professional, furious.

And Portia starts to cry, tears striping her peachy cheeks.

Bradley looks down at her in male horror, then at you. At the camera.

He should be thanking you. Through you, he will see his soul if he chooses to look, then keep it for as long as he likes. Reality is never real until you capture it – every other moment as good as disposable, gone as soon as it happens.

Tears drip off Portia’s face and onto the green felt.

You put the camera down.

As Is

A new short story published in

- The Write Room –

a spectacular online literary magazine displaying leading edge poetry and prose with vivid illustrations.

“As Is”

Come as you are…

Step Into A World

“There Is No Other”

A new short story published through an intriguing Los Angeles literary journal,

Two Hawks Quarterly: A Literary Uprising

“…sparking debate and discussion through exposing the world to the most challenging, edgy, and lyrical prose, poetry, memoir, and artwork available.”

How timely, given the upcoming special day:

“…show your boss who’s boss – no one!”

Storytime… with a Twist

*featured on Storytime today is a piece of flash fiction (under 1000 words) that I submitted to Flash Fiction Online entitled, Chalk. The piece is followed by the editor’s questionable feedback . Hey, it’s a rough game.Thought it would be more fun to post a reply where thousands can read.

Chalk

When K-Sauce hawks a loog in my water bottle in biology, Jaylene and I stop feeling bad about poisoning him with our toxic nail polish remover. A dark shimmery red is my fall colour, even though it gets on my cuticles and makes my fingers look like they got stuck in an electric pencil sharpener – beauty a near impossible craft to master. Jaylene dips her brush into the clear jar as Mr.Wong drones on. She sticks with clear because she worries about what people think. Mr. Wong scribbles madly with yellow  chalk, reaching his entire body across the board as though he’s fallen thirty stories and landed face down on the pavement, chalk smeared across his tweed jacket as he pulls away to face the class. “Fight or flight,” he shouts. “Like a trapped animal. That’s the perpetual dilemma of the endocrine system!”

He draws these mind-maps all over the board every day, and when he runs out of board space, he draws on himself – white lines right down his belly circling his own organs. He really is trying to tell us something. But I just don’t feel that any subject can be linked together by bubbles. Drawing lines between topics doesn’t necessarily demonstrate a connection. Plus, is there ever a centre to any subject? One prime target to link the random to? What would the centre bubble of my life be? I consider asking Jaylene.

Snooze fest, I write to her on a ripped corner of lined paper, adding a P.S. that  Holly Warren has worn the same outfit three days in a row.

“I know,” Jaylene says, not bothering to whisper. “It’s like she says: ‘yep, this looks good on me’, and then can’t get enough of herself!”

Jaylene and I take the time to ensure variety in our wardrobes by drawing outfits on Mr. Wong’s handouts (which sometimes conveniently have images of the human body), tiny arrows indicating fabric, colour, and name brand.

”Stuff goes in, stuff goes out!” Mr. Wong pecks the board with his chalk until it snaps in half. These final sum-ups, these over-simplifications – they don’t mean enough to me. Why do I care to know the inner workings of the human body when there is so much to think about on the outside? I pencil in these irritating blanket statements on our lab tests, regurgitating Mr. Wong’s gibberish right back at him, skeptical as to whether there is a cohesive order to his mind-maps at all, to his mind.

During an excruciating schpiel about the ovaries, Jaylene and I play a game of matchmaker – combining our names with the names of semi-decent guys in our grade, then pulling out matching letters and calculating the probability of whom we’ll end up with.

“K-Sauce!” Jaylene blurts out when she sees her match. “Sick!”

“Shh…” says K-Sauce. “Shut up, ditzes.”

“…hair in embarrassing places!” Mr. Wong projects from the front of the room,   taking a torch to the enchanted forest of adolescence. Dark shadows of perspiration seep through his suit jacket, an emphatic strain on his Shar Pei brow.

‘That’s what you have,” K-Sauce whispers over to us from his lab stool, his flabby biceps inches from knocking over the bottle of nail polish remover.

I give him a stolen-from-teen-movie glance for which he proceeds to give me the finger, then makes a swipe for my water bottle again, knocking over the bottle of acetone. It spills onto the floor and all over my backpack (which already suffered a serious Tommy Girl spill last week) a sharp, noxious aroma dispersing.

“Thanks, asshole.” I tell K-Sauce, the entire class twisted around in their chairs to watch the endocrine system at work.

Mr. Wong begs with his eyes for the outburst to subside, for him to not have to make an attempt at discipline. Another teacher would have already sent me to “le grand bureau”. Not like it hasn’t happened before.

“Sorry,” I mumble to Mr. Wong, sad hormones about to secrete from his eyes under the sick green tint of the neon lights.

After the bio midterm (Jaylene and I both curiously receiving identical grades of  52%), Mr. Wong doesn’t show up to class. His son has committed suicide, the principal comes in to tells us. We’re given a free period to study.

The kid hung himself with a belt, people whisper. It was a cry for help gone wrong.

I picture Mr. Wong at home with his box of chalk, tracing the pain through his arteries and into his heart, then onto the wall when it gets to be too much.

I look down at my red nails and realize just how ugly they are.

*****

Flash Fiction Online’s Feedback

Dear Isla,

Thanks for your patience.

I wish I had better news for you, but I’d like to congratulate you on your
story, “Chalk” passing the first round of our selection process.  That’s no
small feat.  Only 15-20% of stories make it this far.

Unfortunately, the second round proved too great an obstacle.

As a writer I always appreciate feedback.  Our readers had this to say
about your story:

*The characters are bored, so the reader is bored. The drama is in the
suicide, Wong’s reaction to it, and the chalk lines tracing his pain –
that’s a good concept: I’d encourage this writer to concentrate on
that, and use the classroom scene to engage us with the main character, her nails and Mr
Wong rather than make us sit through their boredom. I would also suggest
making the main character more interesting than just another dumb teenage girl stereotype.
*Biggest problem is that the narrative voice does not come anywhere close
to matching up with the protagonist. They are miles away from each other.
Also, what’s the “message,” if any? What should I walk away from this story
with? I left it with nothing other than how inane and shallow the protag
was.
*The characters didn’t interest me much, so the lack of a plot was too
apparent.

We wish you the best of luck finding a home for your story elsewhere and
hope you will consider submitting with us again.

Sincerely,

Suzanne Vincent
Associate Editor
Flash Fiction Online

The Author’s Reply

Firstly, I would like to defend, Chalk, by providing a brief synopsis of what it is meant to convey.

Chalk is about a confused girl seeking the meaning of beauty. She attempts to block out the biology curriculum because it’s an overload of information in her already confusing life, boldly doing her nails in class to build herself an attractive rebellious persona. However, her curiosity does snag on Mr. Wong’s neurotically enthusiastic character. When tragedy befalls Mr.Wong, her connection to him answers her question about what beauty is, or rather, provides her with a shameful reminder on her fingers of what beauty isn’t (Mr. Wong brought to tears the day she walked all over him, how will he handle the death of his son?)

While I appreciate receiving constructive criticism, I don’t feel that most of Flash Fiction Online’s comments were constructive. When you choose to label a character with words like “dumb”, “inane”, and “shallow”, these are not suggestions for improvement – these are put downs.

*The characters were bored, so the reader is bored.

If the characters had been zealous biology students, this would have been a different story.

*The narrative voice does not match up with the protagonist….

Um… the narrative voice WAS the protagonist! Duh?

*What’s the message? If any.

In their writer’s guidelines, Flash Fiction Online advises against “message” stories.

But more importantly, spelling shit out is bad fiction.

*The drama is in the suicide, Wong’s reaction to it

The drama is not in the suicide, or Mr. Wong’ s reaction to it, but in the main character’s reaction to it, which is the last line.

*I would suggest making the main character more interesting than another dumb teenage girl stereotype.

Do dumb teenage girls contemplate the objective nature of conceptual connection?

Okay, I’ve said my piece.

Thanks for reading everyone!

Storytime

Arrivals

My brother Luke and I used to have this Nintendo game called Fester’s Quest – you know, Fester from the Addam’s Family. The show was having a resurgence of cool after a remake had just come out in ’96. We couldn’t wait to play the game, but when we placed the cartridge into the grey Nintendo box, Fester, in his long black Friar Tuck cloak, was barely discernible in the sloppy low-tech pixels. Just steps into his quest he would get attacked by stinging yellow demons, slowing his pace to the point where he was unable to defend himself and where, inevitably – he would die. Game Over, only minutes into the game. Luke and I would hold down those Nintendo buttons so hard trying to make Fester go, we’d get imprints of the arrows on our thumb pads. Who made this game? What were they thinking? Kids don’t want to fight against slowness when they play video games. They want to run and jump, maybe fly. Ideally we’d like to fly.

Cole picks me up in his aunt’s navy Honda at eight o’clock, the front hood caved in sadly from where he ran into that yield sign two months ago, the repair not justifiable for the worth of the vehicle.

‘Where are we going?’ I ask.

We don’t usually go out. We watch movies almost every night.

‘On a date,’ Cole says, his breath a cotton swab of ice.

‘A date…’

‘Well…’ he says. ‘Josh is coming.’

Of course. The deadbeat friend. All hot guys have them. They need something – someone – to downplay their beauty so you don’t expect too much of them.

Waiting for Josh outside his duplex, or as he calls it ‘The Pea Green Motel’, Cole plays ADD-DJ. He never finishes a song. An inability to focus for more than a few minutes, or an eagerness to please his crowd? To please me? I don’t know but it’s annoying.

Josh slides into the back seat smelling of pickled smoke. ‘Sup?’ he mumbles. He lights two cigarettes and hands one to Cole and they smoke out the windows as the snow wisps in swirls along our tires.

We pull up to a rainbow lit Toys ‘R’ US, the R playfully, charmingly backwards.

I don’t wanna grow up, I’m a Toys R Us Kid

Lots of toys at Toys ‘R’ Us that I can play with

The song went.

But Luke and I used to sing:

I don’t wanna throw up, but I already did

I ran to the toilet but I couldn’t lift the lid

The mention of vomit our safe stab at defiance.

‘What are we doing here?’ I ask, the windshield wipers squeaking as the falling snow becomes sparse.

‘I need Leonardo,’ Cole explains.

Cole has a remaining obsession with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles from fifteen years ago.

‘Oh,’ I say. ‘A date.’

‘Niki, I need him,’ he says. ‘He’s my favourite one.’

I try to remember the Ninja Turtles song as I meander into the pink smear of the Girl’s section…

Rafael is cool but crude

Michelangelo is a party dude…

Cole and Josh disappear down an aisle of shiny black packaged cars and libraries of gloss-faced men with small but lethal weapons. ‘Men are like children,’ the ladies at work tell me, pictures of husbands and fiancés tacked into the walls of their cubicles like 1st Place ribbons, no matter how gawky and nerdy the men. But I don’t buy it. I believe in the existence of real men. What do those bitches know? Years of data entry reconfiguring the helixes of their DNA. Read, type, check. Read, type, check. Don’t, look, up. ‘The computers to the computers,’ Rhonda proudly calls us, her pink talons jamming away at the keys, the loose skin under her chin dangling like a turkey wattle. It’s the ladies like Rhonda who are the best at data entry, who make the least mistakes – the ones who are able to stop thinking.

‘Nine ninety nine!’ Cole bounces towards me straddling an alien-green ball with two snail antenna handles. He holds up a toy axe. ‘You wanna axe me a question?’

‘Heh,’ I fake laugh.

‘This place is the shiznit,’ he beams, the look on his face like that of a five year old who’s just grabbed his babysitter’s boob.

The shiznit? No. More a bland kind of fun – like eating low fat potato chips.

As Cole pays for his swag, I scan the Girl toys. See what’s happening with Barbie these days. She hasn’t aged a day, still walking on eggshells up on those tip toes. They should make Stomp Around Barbie: “Real weights in the soles of her feet!” “Perfect for hissy fits when Ken cheats!” Poor Barbie – no nipples, her cooch sealed shut. Girls think they’ll look like this someday. We really do.

‘Hey,’ I catch Josh on the way to the till. ‘How does the song go again?’

‘What song?’

‘The Ninja Turtles one.’

‘Huh…’ Josh tries to retrieve the information from some stashed away marijuana-blurred file. ‘Oh yeah-’ he remembers. ‘Leonardo leads, Donatello does machines…’

Of course. Leonardo leads.

Next stop on this lavish skid-chaperoned date – the airport. No, we’re not catching an impromptu flight to Vegas to pretend were high rollers for a few minutes then come back with unpayable Visa bills. The airport is where Cole works as a baggage handler.

‘Did you forget something at work?’ I ask, as we pull into pay parking.

‘Nah,’ Cole says. ‘I just thought it would be fun.’

Cole loves his job. Although the reasons he loves it have nothing to do with the actual job – the sour cream glazed donuts he buys at lunch from Tim Horton’s, the lottery pool he feeds better than his stomach. It’s almost like he doesn’t notice the working part of his job. It’s almost like he doesn’t notice anything.

‘I just thought… it would be random,’ he says. ‘You know?’

Random. I like this concept. Maybe this isn’t another miss at romance from Cole. Maybe this is ‘random’.

Inside the airport, Cole pushes Josh on a baggage cart, the shiny brick flooring chugging the cart’s wheels. The synthetic eggs from A & W smell strangely delicious, then disgusting; the smell of early morning flights. Spotting an empty baggage carousel, Cole runs up and tries to sit on its black revolving slates.

‘That won’t get you fired,’ I stand back and watch.

Getting his finger pinched between the slates, he awkwardly slides off, his blonde bangs flopping into his eyes. ‘I’ve always wanted to do that,’ he beams.

‘Well,’ I say, ‘you’re definitely baggage.’

He looks me over, deciding whether or not that was mean.

The airport maintains its usual steady mull, people waiting in line and browsing the boutiques, voices down and discreet as though whispering will make the place less public, make their flight, their mission seem special. A Disneyland-bound family reminiscent of the Aussie Shampoo clan in their matching bathrobes makes their way to Gates 5-15, two tired little girls strapped down front to back with backpacks and fanny packs, their parents worriedly shuffling around boarding passes and checking watches. It’s not rocket science. Walking past the Arrivals gate, people wait for their friends and family ready to offer warm welcomes – you’ve made it! You’ve gotten from point A to B! We miss you when you’re in point A. Point B is better, isn’t it? Doesn’t it feel better?

‘M’lady,’ Cole offers me his hand as we step onto the escalator.

‘Flight 393 is now boarding,’ a woman’s voice pages from somewhere above. ‘Last call for Flight 393.’ There is no annoyance in her voice. Everything is okay in her world.

As Cole and Josh let the whirring, snapping, and cuckooing of the wind-up toys inside Who’s Who In The Zoo lure them in, I go the window and watch the planes taxi the runway in the dark. Lights among lights. It seems impossible for things to fly. Even, especially, things that are alive. But it isn’t.

When I was seven, Luke and I designed a time machine. We had it all mapped out, drawings we would redo over and over in scented markers – where our rooms would be, what we would bring, what would go on which shelf. We figured we’d work out the science part later. That maybe if we wanted it to work badly enough, it would. We’d planned other things that had worked out before – puppet shows, lemonade stands – why not take it to the next level?

In the wooden booth of the Western-themed restaurant beside Gate 47, Cole slides in beside me. ‘You’re pretty,’ he says.

‘Pretty what?’ I ask.

He orders a pitcher of beer and two ice cream pies for the table as Josh tosses his winter coat on a pitchfork sticking out of a bail of hay. Across from our booth sits a dad and his two daughters drinking non-stop pop and colouring with crayons on a sheet of brown paper spread over the table. Somebody chose this man. Some woman said: him. I want a half-duplicate of him.

There are a lot of people in the world. All created out of this same decisiveness.

I look over Cole’s thin, white, cigarette laced fingers. He sees me looking at them and wraps them around his empty pint glass, giving me what he probably thinks is a chin chuck. When the beer comes, he pours. ‘Cheers big ears,’ he clinks Josh’s glass.

‘Same goes big nose,’ says Josh, taking a long swig and lifting a forkful of ice cream pie into his smiling mouth.

Always a three-man date, Ferris Bueller style. And when I can’t sleepover, Cole calls Josh.

‘Nother round,’ Cole orders as the waitress walks past, tripping over the sprawling carry on baggage of the kid’s booth. One of the little girls stands up on the booth seat and holds up her red crayon like an Olympic torch. Red belongs to her and her alone.

The wallpaper lining the restaurant walls could be in Cole’s house – splish-splashes of faded rose and lilac in a varicose vein embossment. Cole lives in the basement of his aunt’s house and hasn’t touched the nineties decor his aunt chose for it all those years ago – the furniture covered in coral palm-fronds Oahu motel lobby style, porcelain bunnies dipping their noses into pots of fake flowers, looked down on by framed pictures of horses with manes so windblown they could be unicorns. Along the oak shelves, Cole has lined up his action figures, his single attempt to make the place his own. How can he stand to not be surrounded by his things, things he’s chosen? He doesn’t think of it this way.

When the check comes, Josh pulls for his wallet.

‘I got it,’ Cole pushes Josh’s money back towards him.

We are both being courted by Cole.

Full and buzzed, the three of us amble back into the corridor’s yellow wash of light, a yellow like the yolk of an egg laid by a caged chicken radiating an indelible fizzle of fear.

‘Josh man – go long,’ Cole tosses him a rubber ball he’s snagged from Toys ‘R’ Us.

Around the corner we come across an airplane museum. Cole spots a replica of an old airplane. ‘Let’s go in,’ he says. So we climb the metal staircase and sit in the cockpit, Cole and Josh in front, me in the back.

‘We should bring forties up here sometime,’ Cole says to Josh.

‘That would be the bomb,’ says Josh.

‘Shh,’ says Cole. ‘Don’t say bomb.’

‘Hey,’ Josh leans in to Cole. ‘What do they do with all the drugs they confiscate here?’

‘Smoke and snort them, what do you think?’ I say, fiddling with my  seatbelt button like a Jeopardy clicker.

‘Seems like a waste to throw it away,’ Josh mumbles.

Two weekends ago after a night out we couldn’t find Josh. We drove around for hours the next morning checking all the dumpsters in the area. This is how drunk Josh gets.

‘If you could go anywhere in the world right now, where would you go?’ Cole asks.

‘Tahiti,’ says Josh. ‘Where would you?’

Cole thinks. ‘Iowa.’

‘Why?’ Josh and I both ask, Josh interested, me irritated.

‘I like the sound of it,’ says Cole. ‘I. Oh. Ah.’

Random bothers me, I realize. The way it doesn’t make sense.

‘Where would you go, Niki?’ Josh asks.

‘Nowhere.’ I smile. ‘I’d rather be right here with you guys.’

‘I bet you’d jump on any one of those planes,’ he says. 

For a second, I have the icky sensation that Josh may know me better than Cole. ‘Why do you say that?’ he asks.

‘You look bored,’ he says.

If you’re bored, you’re boring, my fifth grade English teacher used to say. That makes it worse. Not only are you an accomplice in the dullness you’re experiencing – you are the dull. We didn’t used to be, Luke and I. We used to have fun – be fun. Before The Adult World. The daycare Luke and I used to go to was beneath a bowling alley and on the days we forgot our lunches we’d get taken upstairs for bowls of tomato soup and Premium Plus crackers. As we waited for our soup we’d watch people bowl, their lit cigarettes smouldering patiently in their trays between turns. They’d pick up the bowling balls – swirling planets of oranges and purples – then loft them towards the pins in smooth thunderous rolls, a rumbling you could feel from beneath – a full internal gratification. This is what it was to be an adult, we thought.

‘I’ll tell you where I want to go,’ I lean into the front seat. ‘Everywhere. But it doesn’t work that way.’

Josh laughs. ‘You can go some places,’ he turns back to face me.

I look out the window at the white museum wall.

Cole leans his head out of the plane. ‘Iceberg! Straight ahead!’

Josh picks up the radio. ‘Ladies and Gentleman, please buckle your seatbelts. Monsieurs et Madames, s’il vous plait attacher vos ceintures.’

Funny, being in the fake plane doesn’t feel much different from being on a real plane. It’s the plane that’s flying, not you. Like how we can’t feel ourselves being hurtled through space strapped to this big old planet. We don’t feel a thing.

Storytime

The D List

At Balmoral High School, the social ladder has three tiers: the A List, the B List, and the D List. The A List have rooms with attached bathrooms, cars they didn’t pay for, and allowances big enough to pay for clothing, snacks, and weed. If the A List doesn’t have these things, then they have some look or skill that can’t easily be achieved, like large boobs, or a snowboarding sponsorship with Burton. The A List has imaginary cameras that follow them at all times making everything they say, do, eat, and buy important and special. Sometimes the A List spray-paints the school sign “oral Sex School”, because it’s funny and they can afford to fuck up.

The B List grew up with or went to school with the A List, but whereas the A List glimmers, the B List is a little thick around the middle with acne scars and split ends. The B List tries. They’re on the school teams, they throw parties when their parents go away, and they put the appropriate amount of layers in their hair, but although the B List rolls with the A List, the B List does not shine. The B List knows that the A List makes them look bad but they stay with the A List hoping that not only will some of that A List sheen rub off on them, but that they will leave a slight imprint of themselves on the A List to prove they have identities after all.

The A List pretends not to see the B List’s flaws because the A List are truly amazing people. But more importantly, the A List can’t only spend time with each other because they would blind each other with their brightness, and what’s the point of brightness when you can’t see?

The D List attends all the same functions as the A List and the B List, but the D List does not get invited – they invite themselves. The D List has eating disorders, jeans of the wrong cut, and journals of embarrassing moments. At parties, the D List talks to as many A List and B List people as possible (even though the harder the D List tries, the lower their rank). But still, the D List mingles with determination, asking safe, non-intrusive questions like orange-skinned entertainment show hosts. The D List compliments the A List and the B List, then chuckles at their jokes from somewhere in the back of their throats, believing that no one notices when they do a room scan to see if there is anyone better they could be talking to.

The A List and the B List pity the D List because it’s so obvious how hard the D List tries to be something they will never be. And it’s true – the D List is pitiful. They cannot befriend other D Listers since there would be no gain in the relationship, and they are shunned by the A List and the B List. But what the D List doesn’t know is that the A List and the B List cherish them more than anything in the world, because without the D List, they wouldn’t exist.

Storytime

Shangri-La

I look out onto the giant mood ring that is Shangri-La – the tallest building in Vancouver – half-hotel, half-residence, its decorative squares changing from green to orange in the sun. Who needs trees, leaves? “My pleasure,” I put a caller on hold inside the lifeboat-shaped desk, though no one has ever come to rescue me. “Good morning, thank you for the calling The Institution of the Creative Arts, how can I help you?”

I need things, the caller says. I need to squeeze money out of my artistic spirit.

“Are you creative? Do you want to work in the field of the arts but don’t think you have what it takes?” The ads play all day on TV during six hours of courtroom television alongside the depression commercials: “Do you cry all the time? Depression doesn’t usually go away on its own. Participate in this study so we can figure out which drugs will stow the pain away…”

“I’ll transfer you.” I tell the caller and punch in extension 867, red lights nagging on the switch board like a Chrismas tree of Service Engine Soon lights. In front of me, a student stands at the desk waiting to be helped – a slim blonde in aqua kneesocks and a peach flowing dress with pockets, eyes like black paintbrush strokes, the posture of a figure skater.

“May I help you?” I ask the girl at the desk. Your majesty? Your grace? M’lady?

“I here to see admissions officer…” she says with a strong Russian accent, the school a bug zapper for students all around the globe.

Are you sure? I want to ask. Are you sure you want to let them tap into your creativity and suck it up like what’s left of the Canadian water reserves?

I page an officer for the girl, trying to silently transfer warnings through her angled bob. There is a right way and a wrong way to make art and The Institution will tell you if you’re doing it wrong. They will show you how to sear your logos into people’s minds like religion. They will show you how to morph from a person into a brand.

“You learn good skills at The Institution?” she asks.

I look behind me for my supervisor, Nirmala, who is busy on a phone call. “You would learn more at a Hierarchy of Consciousness,” I whisper.

The girl squints in confusion and tilts her head like a puppy.

From behind the electronically sealed door wafts Melina Gravovitch, a melon-pink power suit in a cloud of Jean-Paul Gaultier. She marches to greet the potential student and collect her bounty fee.

“Welcome to the Institution of the Creative Arts,” Melina extends a married hand. She then  waves her pass card against the wall igniting a green light and the girl scurries behind in her heels.

My eyes wander to the window. I scan Shangri-La’s prism clear windows for reflections of foliage below, the squares now a hypercolour mix of tangerine and lime. I wonder if they hold Etch a Sketch powers, if there are knobs somewhere in the boiler room that can be used to write secret messages on them. 9-11 INSIDE JOB, I would write in shaky, loopy letters across the building’s core, sure to irritate  all those who believe that you can’t ask questions if you don’t know the answers.

“Aralei,” Nirmala appears behind me. “Please make 50 copies of these.” She drops a stack of papers on the desk. Nirmala is proof that big eyes are not necessarily a sign of beauty. They bulge from her mocha skin like a pug’s, her white eyeliner making her scleras look as though they’ve leaked out of bounds. Better to see you with, my dear.

I fan through the 2500 slices of tree. Trails of paper seem to stalk me. With every purchase, every decision I make. Can you ever truly regrow a forest? Can you ever recreate that messy, tangled, moss covered wonderland with mere  lines of seeds… Lines do not a forest make.

In the acidic air of The Institution, I blink away the continual sensation that simulated lemon (the kind with the Mr. Clean aftertaste) has been poured into my eyes, an effect of the air-conditioning and nights of sleep cut short. 10:21, the clock says, the longer portion of my day still ahead of me. Outside, my mood building reads green: jealousy of the world outside The Institution. I click away at the keys without looking at them and try to enjoy the sound they make – like a squirrel nibbling on a nut.

“Good Morning, thank you for calling…”

“…thank you for calling The Institution of the…”

“… The Institution of the Creative Arts how can I…”

“Aralei,” Nirmala approaches me from behind, her Cyclops eyes searing into my back. “It’s important that you check the fax machine every fifteen minutes.”

“I know,” I say, the red lights blinking on the phone. One of them stops, a caller given up, set free.

“Well, I just had to deliver some myself,” Nirmala says. “So you want to watch for that.”

May I borrow your telescopic eyeballs to do that? I smile at her tightly, clicking my retracting pen like a trigger. “Thank you for holding,” I swivel away from her and pick up the phone.

“Good morning, will you hold?”

“Thank you for holding.”

“Good morning?” I start to question.

“Will you hold,” I start to demand.

The back up engine of the morning’s Red Bull starts to sputter. Outside, in the downtown shadows, the summer I never got to feel is ending. I staple the report for Nirmala. When I came to The Institution of The Creative Arts, I had the same idea in mind as the students: “I know I’m creative, but I don’t know what to do with it.” I didn’t know what my creativity was trying to tell me, like a crying baby. Didn’t know what to do with myself without people telling me what to do. I pull my nylons up fold by fold under the desk and pretend I’m a hundred years old and have  saggy elephant skin. What would I look back and tell myself now?

Who knows. I’ve forgotten what my own voice sounds like. Couldn’t pick it out of a crowd.

“Good morning, thank you for calling The Institution of…”

Oh. Right. I resister the melodic receptionist coo as my own.

Still pulling at my nylons, I accidentally rip a hole in them. A pool of my real skin peeks through. In the grainy videos we watched cross-legged on the mat in Grade Four about the workers of the world in their factories and uniforms, we were all raring to join in. It was just like playing imaginary – only with real objects. What could be more fun?

“Good… afternoon,” I answer the phone, a pressure tingling in my stomach and behind my eyes like I’m about to puke or pass out, but I can’t even get up from this cage dropped into shark infested waters without permission.

“You have three people on hold,” I hear Nirmala say behind me, always there at the exact wrong  moment.

“Sorry,” I mumble.

It might hurt my feelings, being talked to this way if I had feelings. If I wasn’t a wet match, unable to light.

“I mean good morning…” I tell the caller and laugh off my error.

Nirmala motions for me to put the phone on hold, two fingers in the air dipping into a jar of cold cream. “Never in front of a caller,” she says, untrusting of the secrecy of the hold button.

Bad things happen when I’m tired. I see things. Hear things. Make bad decisions. But the world wakes up early, and therefore – so do I.

Nirmala puts her thumb and pinky to her head to gesture that I should pick the phone back up.

My sister, Ella, used to talk about The Pretty Girl Sphere, a physical law which states that all pretty girls must maintain a certain distance from one another at all times to maintain the authenticity of their positions. Maybe Nirmala has been told her googly eyes are beautiful.

“Hey, thanks for holding… How may I assist you?” I ask the waiting caller in a pitch-perfect nurse’s voice, the ‘may’ and ‘assist’ just for Nirmala  (take that, bitch) – then timely transfer the caller.

“Hey?” Nirmala says as I hang up.

“Oh,” I realize.

“You never know who is on the other end of a call,” Nirmala says, the whites of her eyes like melting ice caps or drowning polar bears. “The phone etiquette is on page two,” she reminds me.

As the phone continues to ring, Nirmala returns to her office and a warm pressure begins to build behind my eyes.

Okay. I still have the ability to feel sad.

I pull out a compact and inspect my face under the grey glow of the neon lighting – sun-forgotten skin blotchy and dry, extra blood pumping through the veins in my eyes to keep them open – they gloss with uncriable tears.

I grab my purse from a lower drawer and without notifying anyone to cover the phones, walk out the glass doors of The Institution and step into the murky mirrored elevator walls, a con artist smile materializing in my reflection. A con-artist is an artist nonetheless. I call for an imaginary soundtrack – a snazzy 80s chica-chica clock-tick drumbeat.

Outside, in the produce-section fall chill, I hear the phone stories above, its slot machine bell-roll ring. I look up at the terrorist magnet of Shangri-La, its squares a purple shade I didn’t know they could become.

I think of the olden days when families worked together cobbling shoes or spinning whatever they spun. When they raised their products as babies and gave them away at the alter. Around the base of Shangri-la, people mull as they were once sculpted to do in the building’s small-scale model – soundlessly, obediently, faceless like a Monet painting. I see the blonde Russian girl among the scene, her outfit brighter than her future, and can feel Nirmala’s gaze staring down at me from above with her go-go gadget rods and cones. Shangri-La draws me towards it, my mouth watering for its Gobstopper colour-changing powers. What do I want to do to it? Draw it? Paint it? Write a book about it? Make a movie about it? But  then my thoughts deteriorate into: what for? My inspiration institutionalized, straightjacketed.

I sidestep the construction debris along the base of Shangri-La and walk towards its entrance, the eyes of the construction workers trailing my behind like Nirmala on a  ‘hey’. The hole in my nylons has spread up my leg – a shedding of my old-lady encasement.

“Hey Lady,’ you wanna see hell?” one of the construction guys lifts up a man hole cover, unknowingly in style in his fall’s must have checked shirt .

I walk curiously to the edge, the fall breeze gusting up from under the streets, and look down into the sewers built to take care of Shangri-La’s everything unheavenly, and laugh, “my hell is much worse than that.”

Storytime

Urth

There was once a planet in a solar system far away named Urth. Urth was covered in Watir – a clear, salt-ridden, semi-solid substance which was in constant motion. Throughout this Watir were a series of large islands inhabited by bipedal beings called Humins who were able to dangle from the planet’s surface by the bottoms of their feet. There were many different breeds of Humins on Urth, with long limbs, various shades of pink and brown epidermis, different shapes of visual sockets, and pelts sprouting from their heads in different colours and shapes. Each of these Humin  breeds had different ways of producing sound with their mouths and different methods of survival. There were two genders of Humins – Min and Womin.  The Min had an extra limb that Womin did not, a tail in the front of their bodies which they used to guide them. The Womin’s bodies had two large sacs on their fronts and were able to expand to carry small reproductions of themselves with a physical donation from the Mins’ bodies. To stay alive, the Humins needed to put Watir into their bodies, but it had to be Watir without salt, only found in large puddles and streams within the large islands or deep inside the ground, or sometimes the Watir would fall from the sky. The Humins also needed to put into their bodies other living things in order to survive; some Humins chose to feast on the array of strange creatures of all shapes and  sizes that roamed the planet with them, and others ate only the faceless green growths on the land, which could move and grow but could not or speak or travel. The Humins named the living things they put into their bodies, Fyde. Acquiring and digesting this Fyde was one of the Humin’s main concerns.Although the Humins were not the most ferocious breed of creature, they could make objects out of their environment to harm and kill the other creatures for Fyde. But despite these objects, the Humins were still afraid of the other creatures, some of whom were larger and or more ferocious than the Humins, so the Humins built angular structures to protect themselves from these other creatures. The structures also helped protect the Humins from: the Watir that fell from the sky, the Ocins of Watir that would sometimes rise up and swallow them, the mountains that would explode liquid fire, and the cracks in the surface of the land that would shake and crumble the land.

But the danger to the Humins did not only come from the outside, but from within themselves. The Humins’ bodies would often cease to function and sometimes they would die from ailments existing in their bodies from birth, or from ones transferable between bodies. These ailments would make the Humins bleed or convulse or become too weak to function, or cover their epidermises with spots and growths. The Humins tried to extract objects from the Urth to remedy their ailments and sometimes these found objects helped, but sometimes they didn’t.

The Humins observed that the more hirsute, long armed creatures of their planet looked somewhat like themselves and eventually discovered that these creatures were an earlier form of themselves. They called this discovery Evilutin, and found that they could use the laws of Evilutin to create hundreds of types of creatures from one single creature. However, the Humins did not apply this concept to benefit their own species in order to improve their genes to combat defects because the Humins practised a concept called Freedym, which entailed any Humin to mate with whoever they chose to. Freedym was very important to the Humins.

To be able to reach distant parts of the large islands faster in order to obtain resources to make objects, the Humins would strap themselves to creatures with hard feet and long legs. But soon the creatures weren’t fast enough for the Humins, so they invented vessels that were able to digest a thick fluid from the Urth’s core to help them race around the planet. The vessels emitted poison but the Humins accepted this because they valued speed over air.

The reason the Humins valued speed was because they believed in a concept called Tyme. The Humins believed that Tyme had a start and a finish and that they were only allowed a certain portion of it – one portion as individuals, and a longer portion as a species. In a reflection of this concept of Tyme, the Humins created Moni, a substance that was exchangeable for any object in existence and which could be given to other Humins to make them do things. Like Tyme, Moni was finite; there was only ever a fixed amount, decided by those created it. But the Humins enjoyed this ‘object of all objects’ so much, that they rarely considered that those who were making the Moni were the ones who were ultimately in control of it. And so the Humins who made the Moni developed a system to ensure that they would always have the most Moni, by only letting the other Humins have Moni if they gave it back with interest after a certain period of time. Moni was like speed to the Humins, they craved it. More than Freedym.

To acquire Moni, groups called Midia began to form. The Midia would try to convince the Humins that the objects they produced were superior to other objects, so that the Midia could in turn could have more objects for themselves. The Midia would convince the Humins to give them their Moni through images of Humins with symmetrical features that fit into a particular mold. The Humins all wanted to look like this ultimate mold because the more symmetrical a Humin was, the better object they were considered. This concept of being an object, was called Buti. Some Humins thought that Buti was better than Moni, but they needed Moni to help them be Butiful. The Midia would use the most Butiful Humins as images to sell their objects and the Humins began to study the Midia’s pictures of Butiful Humins and try to recreate their appearances. The Humins would try to sculpt their bodies into specific forms by inflicting gradual pain on themselves in special rooms with various pieces of torture equipment, forcing themselves to endlessly walk forwards with nothing upon which to focus their minds, or strapping heavy weights to various parts of their bodies and then trying to move. And when this was not enough, they would cut open their skin and break their bones and place objects inside themselves to reshape their bodies.

Certain Butiful Humins who had special powers to move or sound a certain way, or who could take on different personas in recorded image-stories, were closely monitored by the other Humins. The Midia followed the Butiful Humins around with image capturing devices every day. But eventually, with all the Butiful Humin images, the young Womin became sad that their bodies did not appear this same way, and they would refuse to consume their Fyde, or would consume their Fyde and then cause themselves to eject it.

Instead of contributing their more gentle natures to the formation of Humin society, the Womin let the Min take over the decisions, whose more aggressive natures caused them to think up ideas like burning things for energy and creating things that were so solid they could never disappear. The Min discovered that they could create a substance with very little Moni called Plistik, which could last a very long time. But when the Min wanted the Plistik to disappear when they were finished with it, it wouldn’t. It began to take up space on the large islands and clog the Ocins. But the Humins were certain that everything was finite, that an end would come naturally to everything, including their planet, so they continued to make the Plistik and let it accumulate.

The Humins became infatuated with the concept of Tyme. They would arrange their entire lives around it and they began to divide everything – the objects and themselves – into units. Even their Watir no longer flowed freely but came in Plistik bottles. The Humins were certain that Urth was destined to self-destruct either due to themselves, or due to sources high above in the sky. Since Tyme was running out, the Humins began to take more and more objects from the Urth and from each other because they were afraid that soon there would be nothing left. Plotting new ways to destroy each with Fyre to gain the most objects, the Humins with the most objects took away the objects of the Humins with the least, and more importantly – took away their ability to acquire new objects. It was a race to see which Humin could have the most Buti and the most Moni. They felt badly for all the taking and killing but they could not stop because they knew that when the resources ran out, they would die.

By looking at only the visible parts of their existence, the Humins deduced that everything and everyone would die, and death meant gone forever. To the Humins anything that was not visible did not exist. Even the Humins who believed in Gyde knew deep down that it was only a story they had invented. The Humins spent their time focusing on what they could take from their planet and from each other so they did not see the existence that lay outside the physical realms of their minds and their planet. They did not grasp the concept of Infinitium, which allowed every Humin to live forever. And so, the Humins eventually destroyed themselves, as they had planned, bombing  themselves with fire long before their one sun could.

But in the final explosion, the Urth’s particles reconfigured, and millions of years later a new planet was born.

Step into a World

The Back Room

“…the North American dream. What it’s become…”

Are you sure you would like to clock in? the computer asks. Yes/No. These computers, always trying to save us from ourselves. To make my rent tomorrow, I need a hundred dollars in tips tonight. Can the computer save me from eviction? From Visa? I clip on my holster-apron of capless pens and jot down the dinner special, through the windows, the mountain line like frosted glass in the rain, the trees turning gold too early like a greying 22 year old. Winter coming, like the human race – slowly consuming everything. “Every time I do a show, I die a little bit,” Madonna was recently quoted saying, her ripped, veined arms traces of her fighting this inevitable truth too hard. Living is dying, I’m starting to get. 

Willa, table five, Jessica says instead of hello, tapping at the computer screen like she’s trying to scare fish in a tank, her blonde hair tied back into a pokey French braid, her white eyeliner beautiful and scary.

And we have a staff wine tasting tomorrow, are you coming? she asks.

I consider a way to tell her that I place wine connoisseurship in the same category as marriage and the economy – Things That Only Exist In Our Minds.

You’re out of it today, Jessica cuts off my dial-up speed search for words, looking at me like a toothbrush dropped onto the floor of a Super 8.

Can I use your ‘puter? A stray little girl tries to hijack the screen.

Trust me kid, I look down at her, you start pushing their buttons, soon they’ll be pushing yours.

It’s a touch-screen, she corrects me, wandering back to her Blackberry engulfed mother at a nearby table.

The restaurant is full. Pleasant conversations among stylish salt and pepper shakers set to poor Norah Jones stuck on a gerbil wheel of her four greatest hits. The usual designer consignment store clad West Van crew with their complaints that the focaccia bread tastes like it was run through the dishwasher, being placated by servers with efficiently clenched hearts and brows clamped into punctuation marks that may in the end cost more to correct than the tips they’re clamping them for.

Marcel stands behind the bar polishing a wine glass and singing: Ten percent, every now and then I get a little bit more but it always evens out to ten percent … to the tune of Total Eclipse of the Heart , his classic Timmy from Lassie grown-up, golden boy looks a dead match for his show tune warbling.

Here, he hands me a MasterCard. Will-a you ring this through for me?

I take the card and for a guilty flash understand how those shady identity theft circles get started – plastic so much more relaxing to steal than an armoured car.

Willa, table two. Jessica Tasmanian-Devils by. And table seven.

Since I moved out of the rentals’ house – a childhood of Calgary winters I thought were cozy because I was always sheltered from them – life’s changed. Every moment based on tasks completed for money, when you break it down. Money doesn’t buy happiness? Well it does buy the backdrops on which happiness is set. The costumes, the lighting, the props. So: how do I fuel my life? Oil not the only resource up for ethical debate. If serving West Van retirees clinging to their dropping Canadian dollars and deadweight property investments is not a sustainable fuel source, then what is?

I greet my tables with plasticine smiles and free eye contact, wondering how I would prefer to be interacting with them. If I would like to know more about them than whether they want fries or salad, or if I would prefer to simply be a few hundred pages on their bedside tables, my Master’s in English Lit from UBC growing bacteria, not the Activia kind.

Table seven, an old chap from the yacht club and his lipstick-outside-the-lines wife, claps for me as I arrive to take their drink order.

Do you know what it says on the waitress’s gravestone? the cap’n asks, possibly threatening my life. It says better late than never, but never late is better, he says, pleased with himself.

Are you sure you want to take this crap?

Yes/No.

Now, he says to his wife. What do you want, dear?

She opens her menu and takes out a small magnifying glass.

I used to think glamour would save me. Large sunglasses, heels, a daily shining sun, and a thousand cameras recording my every move. Then I realized I live in Canada. Warmth and paparazzi challenged Canada. The true North strong and free, not the true North breezy and current. So I gave the dream up. A dream based on colouring books that asked: Where Do We Go When We Die? (my drawn answer: myself on a director’s chair yelling “cut!”, the Hollywood Hills in the background). A dream based on board games where the players had to choose ratios of Love, Money, and Fame for their faux futures, my choice – all fame. Now, in between dreams like Jack Johnson – I’m blank. My mind, shaken clear like an Etch-a-Sketch, ironically forcing me to empathize with ex-boyfriends who swore: “I don’t know what I want.”

Excuse me, Miss – is the Fraser Valley Pork Loin braised? What does it come with? Can I substitute greens instead? Willa, table three. Could I get more coffee? Do you take American Express? That’s funny, the cap’n lowers his arm, for a moment I thought my hand was broken.

In the xylophone of polished cutlery against white plates, I split into a thousand shards, a three-way mirror fantasy world militia of myself. Pour, lift, wipe, ask, write, type, count, pour, lift – ouch, hot. Try to carve a piece of mental real estate for myself out of this noise, a hundred and six TV channels, and an internet of colourful blog opinions and pictures of celebrities with bottomless closets and theft-proof identities. I try to find some clarity among the impatient glances of my customers (the only flashbulbs trailing me, for now), the gradually comprehended reality that they aren’t the only ones here escalating their appetites into an insatiable me-want-cookie hunger. Maybe I should have told them the truth about the Fraser Valley Pork Loin. That it may or may not be diced with bits of murder victims and dead prostitutes. Pigs will eat anything.

Are you sure you want the thoughts that come in the quiet of clarity?

Yes/No.

From the hostess stand, my manger, Rick, gives me a bureaucratic come hither gesture in his pretty-boy meringue dress shirt and old-world spiffy pinstripe suspenders that indicate he’s not afraid to snap those bad boys against his chest a few times. What’s with the skate shoes, Willa? he asks.

I look down at my shiny black skate shoes, sheer black nylons and a sleek black skirt helping to blend them into obscurity. Shoes of compromise. I will forfeit my individuality if you will only permit me a cushiony sole.

We’re not turning ollies at the skate park here, Willa, Rick says, drunk off authority, rolling on it like a tab of ecstasy; it grinds his jaw.

Rick, come on, don’t be a dictator, I say, printing a bill. And don’t be the first part of the word either, I mumble.

Flats or wedges, he assigns me an ultimatum.

Move it or lose it, Slowy Slowerson, Jessica hip-nudges me aside to use the computer, an elastic, never-enough-hands panic on her face, her loosening French braid an outer snapshot of the unravelling cords of her brain.

Swinging through the kitchen, Chef Tom hands me a sample of blue cheese from the special. I taste it: layers of morphing flavours all just slightly indecipherable like the crossroads of my future. Or maybe…

Tennis balls, I describe the taste to Chef Tom, taking my pear valoute soup for table two.

The heavy door smacks my butt on the way out, sloshing the soup up on the rim, the bowl burning off my thumbprint, literally erasing my ability to leave a trace. When I arrive at the table it’s unoccupied, I put the plates down and look around for the customers, locating them at table thirteen. Evidently the man at the next table was coughing too outwardly, infesting them with his public germs.

Where in the hell is my beer? The cap’n stands from his table and actually pounds a fist onto the bar. How long do I have to wait around here for some friggin’ service, he yells, a clattering fork daring to interrupt him.

Sir, can I help you? Rick listens to the cap’n tell on me like a third grade girl being chased by boys.

We’ve been waiting forever , the wife chimes in.

What’s with Sailor Joe? Marcel asks, as I load my tray at the bar.

Ever read The Twits by Roald Dahl? I ask.

It’s the recession, Marcel says, pouring me two Sapporos and a half litre of shiraz. Makes people stingy and on edge. They still eat out, they just tip less and complain more.

What is a recession? I ask him, stabbing my drink chit. Seriously. I’m from the eighties.

I imagine students writing their notes between lines on old newspapers and young ladies drawing lines up the backs of their calves. As though without money we’d go back in time, poverty the wormhole to the past.

Hey guys, Rick materializes like an unwanted apparition through the wall on a stormy night. Just remember to look like you’re working, even when you’re talking, m’kay?

Living is dying, I say to Marcel, balancing my full tray.

Drink green tea, Marcel suggests. Antioxidants.

Making my rounds, I deliver a lukewarm cappuccino to the Golden Girls

at table three, who take the opportunity to coach me on making foam like Alberto mousse, then get schooled on the difference between rare and medium rare by germaphobe table two/thirteen, who refuse to get Maple Leaf cold cuts disease and have a good lawyer. I make a self-note to stick fingers in all cappuccinos and cut incisions in all steak flanks before serving them from now on. What would I do if I didn’t have to work? Spend the day making concept art about how 9-11 was an inside job? Simulating flight paths with remote control airplanes and making buildings out of old milk cartons? Or maybe I could make indie films with infectious soundtracks that would make people feel sad and contemporary, later purchasing them on Itunes so they could feel like they’re in the film, like they ‘re being watched – the North American dream. What it’s become.

The restaurant moves around me with jolted fluidity, a long line of red brake lights slowly jerking forward – the world stuck in front of me. I empty a bill fold of loonies into my apron. If I had the money, maybe I could make films. Maybe they would even become timeless. Maybe the aliens would find capsules of my DVDs after the world blows up or gets shunned by the sun, and wonder about me. You are free, I remind myself. Free to borrow money at 18% and have a home that doesn’t belong to you until you’re too old to care for it. Bussing table seven, I open the bill fold. The cap’n has left me nothing, his pension already spent on washable handkerchiefs and Axe Body Spray that reminds him of his first bottle of Old Spice, of a time when he felt clean and noticed.

Visa haunts me like a dead loved one. How will I keep up with my expensive self? Will I end up like the kids who hang themselves over the student visas they signed up for that came with free t-shirts on the first day of university? A new meaning to pay-as-you-go.

I take a breather and go to the back room to refill the ice bucket, rain dripping through the slats of the roof, wetting the expensively pressed linens. West Coast rain, one drop at a time like held in tears. I sit on a box of coffee filters and try to meditate on the gratitude of being able-bodied as I staple together completed credit card slips with small pieces of metal extracted from the Earth – its surface being eaten away at like an apple, then transformed it into intricate, disposable things, its circumference shrinking, inch by inch. A savoury smell feathers in from the kitchen, expensive local ingredients being prepared by disgruntled local chefs stuck in the back of the restaurant away from the action like I’ve become stuck in the back of life. I long to just go home, then consider that everything I own, every IKEA lamp and pretty white piece of Apple technology is the fruit of some unwilling task. M y Ipod, a month of bitten-tongue Sundays, stopping myself from disclosing that the Foie Gras mayo is made by shoving a long stick down the throat of an already full duck.

Willa, Rick calls for me. Where are you? What’s going on?

I’m okay, I yell.

I don’t care if you’re okay, get in here, he yells.

What’s my switch up? I wonder, as Anna Olsen calls it on Sugar when she takes peanut butter cookies and turns them into peanut butter ice cream sandwiches. How do I turn the edible into the delicious?

I’m giving Jessica your tables, Willa, Rick yells, afraid of entering the back room lest it soil his delicate metrosexual threads. And your tips, he yells.

I sometimes think it would be easier just to get it all over with at once. If instead of a thousand people chipping away at me piece by piece until I melt into a pile of compliant employee, I could just sell out one colossal time and be done with it. Like the girl who auctioned off her virginity online to pay off her student loans.

Just a minute, I call up to Rick, too late.

If you can’t keep up, they replace you as fast as technology here.

I’m just re-evaluating my life and life itself, I call in explanation, fairly sure he’s not listening.

In the damp room, I curl up on a stack of white linens and crack open a warm jar of maraschino cherries. Chill with the up and coming stock of tomorrow’s meals, contemplating the chain of unhappy workers with neglected hands and permanent frowns it’s already made its way through, my past not so different. Christmas, a mass child bribery ending in a pile of wasted paper surrounding objects that can’t love you back, Disneyland, the breeding ground for virgin-whore pop stars, Gap jeans, a faraway child’s wasted life. So what now, when all you knew and loved never was? What happens when the perpetually dispensing paper towel rack of life – turning, turning, turning in public washrooms across the world daily – runs out? When the forests have all been used to wipe things clean and dry?

But Madonna said more, I remember now, having forgotten or maybe deleted the info to make room for table three’s order. I twist of the stiff gold cap of the maraschino jar and take a cherry from the jar with my fingers, savouring its throat-singeing burst of red dye. “…but no shit is worth doing unless you’re willing to die for it,” is what she said.

What am I willing to die for?

Are you sure?

Yes/No.

Storytime

The Girl In The Roses

With a smog headache, Edie sits in her cage on the corner of Hollywood and Vine, her knees hugged tightly up against the metal, the chemical-hot Los Angeles sunshine emanating down on her a therapeutic warmth like pill-induced sleep. In the strapless white cotton ball dress Edie made herself, crisscrossed now with cage rust, she calmly sweats.

‘Isn’t that Edie Stall?’ a Gap-dunked, still-faced stage mother and her mini-me approach the cage. ‘Excuse me, are you Edie Stall?’ she asks.

‘The Girl in the Roses!’ the little girl says, a thin orange layer of spray-tan coating the perfection of her John Benet skin.

They often refer to Edie as this: The Girl In The Roses. From the movie in which Edie bathed in roses with roses on her nipples, a hallucinogenic kaleidoscope of roses sprinkling down on her in the fantasy of the horny neighbor father. The movie is why Edie can afford to sit here in the middle of the day inside the cage interrupting the paths of people who don’t have time to think, who can’t afford to. She won’t say problem, but the trouble with having time to think is that it becomes hard to communicate with those who don’t have the time to.

‘Yes, hi. I’m Edie,’ she makes the motion to extend her hand and it bumps against the cage metal. ‘Oh. Right. I forgot. I can’t shake your hand. I can’t move past the boundaries of this cage. Can’t interact with other life because…’

‘Are you with PETA?’ the mother cuts in. She has an ‘easy’ haircut and a Botox-bloated string-pulled face like  a marionette. ‘Because PETA are a bunch of hypocrites who put dogs in freezers…’

‘I’m not with anyone,’ says Edie. ‘I’m here trying to show people about the food they eat. About how it ‘lives’ ,’ her knuckles bang the roof of the cage in her attempt to do air quotes.

Along the boulevard, cars sporadically honk at Edie in passing, unable to discern exactly who she is or what she’s doing, but sensing disruption and wanting to be a part of it.

‘I guess you can’t sign autographs from in there,’ the woman taps her acrylic nail on the cage. ‘I mean, I’d tip you or donate or whatever you call it, but you have no jar…’

‘There’s a basket of flyers beside the cage,’ Edie says. ‘I’d pass you one but…’

‘-I get it,’ the woman says.

‘Why’s she in a cage?’ the little girl asks as her mother herds her away.

In the exhausted midday heat, Edie’s head is floating away like a metallic KFC wrapper in the wind. She wouldn’t mind that bath of roses now.

‘This a magic trick or somethin?’ some guys in baby blue sideways caps and matching pinneys approach. ‘Aren’t you hot in there? I mean you’re obviously hot, but…’

Edie knows she has Barbie appeal. Her Timotei-blonde hair thick like a horse tail, her teeth denture perfect, her eyes as blue as gum. But Edie has never understood why people value blonde hair and blue eyes so much, why they value the recessive genes – the ones more likely to disappear. The bitchy girls in high school used to call her Smushed Barbie Head (the unfortunate fate that befell those Barbies whose heads had popped off – attempts to smush their severed heads back onto their plastic necks failing to uncave their features so that they never looked quite the same again.) Edie thinks it’s funny, how much people have to say about the way she looks, but as long as they’re looking it’s one step closer to listening.

‘I’m dehydrated,’ Edie tells the guys. ‘Overheated. Cramped. Stir-crazy. ‘But mostly I’m lonely. I’m frustrated. I’m sad. I’d peck myself to death if they hadn’t chopped off my beak.’

‘Girl, you whack,’ the baby blue melato guy chuckles. ‘Damn fine, but whack.’

‘Aren’t you famous and shit?’ one guy in a baby blue wifebeater pipes in. ‘Why don’t you go lay out by your pool or some shit? Get one of your assistants to do this shit for you?’

‘Go-Go, Go Vegan!’ a guy with a fuchsia faux-hawk leans out of his passing car to yell, grasping the  Chicken Woman concept.

‘You want some help outta there?’ the melato guy asks, his gold chains appearing filled with chocolate.

”I would love to get out of here,’ Edie says, almost in tears. ‘But then there would be no hot wings or drumsticks or Mcnuggets….’

‘Okay…’ the guys laugh. ‘So you’re trying to tell us not to eat chicken.’

‘I would never tell you not to eat me,’ Edie tells the guys. ‘But I am here to remind you of the possibility of free-range to begin with…’

‘She said eat me,’ the guy with the shelf-straight baby blue cap laughs.

‘There are flyers beside the…’ Edie says as they walk away, an imprint of the square caging leaving perfect quadratic welts along her butt like she’s not part chicken, but part rubix cube.

‘Yo, eat this bitch,’ she hears one of the guys joke to his friends down the street.

‘I don’t want any, lady!’ A man speeds past honking his Hummer, what he doesn’t want any of, a mystery to him as well as Edie – at 80 miles an hour, Edie could very well look like a caged foetus.

Her neck beginning to ache from being arched over, the cage meant for a small dog, blood begins to gather in Edie’s forehead. Two more hours.

Edie thought about posing naked for PETA. She thought about taking a bucket of red paint with her to the Oscars. But those things – while they may have done something for animal rights – would do nothing for Edie.

On Tuesday, she took her electric guitar and synthesizer to the Wet Grind and beat six white pillowcases full of red feathers with a baseball bat to a song she’d written called: ‘You Say Their Eyes Aren’t Like Your Dog’s.’ The previous week, she’d been unable to sleep without awakening to the feeling of her head being bashed in with a hakapik like the baby Canadian Harp Seals she’d been seeing pictures of. As the red feathers wafted down into the crowd (her performance – Edie felt – better than any of that polished crap she’d given MGM), half the audience stood up and left the bar. The other drunker half stayed, begging Edie: ‘show us your tits!’ They’d probably never seen a seal in their lives. Probably thought Canada was in New Mexico.

‘So, Edie – what’s up with the cage?’ a one eyed man with a large camera perched on his shoulder approaches Edie, his other eye through the lense, recording her. ‘TMZ,’ he says. Another man comes to stand in front of him with a mic.

‘We’re here with Edie Stall on Hollywood Boulevard,’ the man says  into a microphone. ‘Edie, would you like to explain to our viewers what you’re doing here today?’

TMZ is a toss up. They might put Edie on tomorrow’s Nip-Slip list, and yet they have the most traffic of any gossip site on the net. Plus, it’s not like she can run…

‘Life!’ Edie says, balled up inside the cage, her face squished between her knees.  ‘We need to start examining the systematic, unquestioned daily slaughter of edible life.’

The gimmicky TMZ headline materializes in her head as she says it: ‘Edible Edie’. Damn.

‘You have a key, right?’ the cameraman leans down to whisper to Edie, the camera undoubtedly still on. ‘You’re looking a little dehydrated in there, Edie.’

‘No,’ Edie says. ‘You have the key.’

The interviewer calls her ‘cooky’ to the camera, then goes on to make some Finger Lickin’ jokes.

Cooky. That Edie’s feet are not roller-balls welded to a metallic track between the Beverly Centre, Starbucks, the Ivy, and Les Deux. Cooky that Edie is not dancing inside the cage in a thong.

Edie wishes she could go to Supercuts after this and have a girl with a holster of scissors chop off all her hair, but her hair is her Flamethrower Chicken Sandwich. Her starlet pheromones her twelve piece bucket. Sweat runs like grease down Edie’s back in the relentless sun.

‘Someone get that girl out of that cage!’ Edie hears as her vision dissects into a dark hexagonal blur. ‘Get her out of there!’ Edie hears from the encircling crowd, her pain feathering down like rose petals.

Storytime

Fort Builder

You can see the highway from our front steps and even the big sign that says Jesus Christ Is The Lord Of This Valley, but you can’t see our house from the highway. I’m sure if you could Dad would try to mow the lawn.

He’s pretty busy, usually, my dad, because he has the funnest job in the world. A go-cart track in the valley called Go On. Mom doesn’t get to have fun. She has to get up early and bake stuff in a big hot oven. When she brings me to the bakery she calls me her pumpkin eater to all the ladies, and it’s so so dumb because she knows I’m Noah. It’s not fun there like at Go On where I get to polish the helmets and ride without one.

One day when it isn’t spring yet, Dad starts fighting with Mom and tells us to go play in the yard but we can still hear. He’s calling Mom animal names like fat cow. I try not to squeak on the swing set and kick some dirty old snow around and Drew is singing a song, I don’t know what. Dad keeps saying the same things over and over even though I know Mom already heard cause he’s yelling them. He’s always grumpy on Saturday mornings, he won’t even watch cartoons. Just then we see the door opening and Dad is dragging the couch out onto the deck and he just leaves it there and tells us: get in the truck. So we get in, and Mom stands there and watches us drive away.

Dad says in the truck for me to get his smokes from the glove compartment so I just get them and don’t bug him but Drew starts to cry, real fake sounding. When we get there, Dad buys her a Cream Soda and she gets a pink mouth to match her pink eyes. Dad gives me a garbage bag and says: go pick stuff up off the track. Stuff blows out there from the highway like cans and burger wrappers. So I go do it and Dad starts listening to the cart motors. He never gets in them, the carts. If I was him, when no one was around, I would go as fast as I could.

When we get home, Mom is still in her pjs and on the radio that guy with long black strings for hair is going: pyjamas, pyjamas – I hope you like pyjamas, too. But I don’t anymore because Mom wears hers too much.

Sometime around this time, Mom stops making dinner. But that’s okay because I know how to use the microwave. I can cook stuff like Zoodles and Spaghettios. When I get home from school Mom lets me eat on the floor beside her chairs. She has to have two because she sits right in the middle of them and the couch is still outside and all wet now.

One night when Dad gets home with Drew, he says, g damnit Sophie, what are you going to do with your daughter? The daycare doesn’t want Drew to come anymore because she hits kids and says the f word and won’t drink her milk. Mom doesn’t answer dad, just goes to her room and says to me: go play with Drew.

Me and Drew play house. We’re poor and there’s nothing for dinner and the doll is sick. I go out and find stuff like sticks and pinecones and she cooks them on the lamp. Usually it’s very cold and we might die so we make a fire out of a pile of carebears and Drew makes tea over it. I ask her if she wants me to go get some apple juice but she says she doesn’t want it – that this will taste better.

One day at Go On when this kid drives his cart off the track and underneath the fence and almost right into traffic, Dad says, f it all anyways, and that he’s done with the place. It’ll go outta business anyway, he says, because the Calgary guys are building a better place down the highway with faster carts and mini-golf.

At home that night there are no more clean spoons and I have to get Mom. But she just tells me in a minute, and smokes and laughs at something on the wheel show and her laugh sounds like the laughing on TV. So me and Drew eat dry Macaroni in our house, which is her duck sheet over the desk. It tastes like glue. I wish we had a real house like the plastic one at Drew’s old daycare that came with real plastic bacon and eggs.

The next day on the bus home from school Angela S. leans over the aisle and says to me that our house looks like the dump. I can’t think of what to say so I don’t talk for the rest of the way, and I just want to go home. But when I get home there’s no one there.

I sit on the floor and wait and watch one of the shows with the blond haired people who cry with no tears, then go get some Jello. In the kitchen there are muddy footprints, big ones so I know they’re not mine. I follow them outside and see a bunch of tires beside the couch on the deck. The tires from Go On.

When the truck finally comes up the driveway, it’s dark outside and everybody’s in it. In the back of the truck are some of the carts. Dad takes them out and puts them beside the tires, then goes into the house. He tells me to clean up the footprints. No, I tell him. The vacuum smells like old people, I tell him.

Mom doesn’t get out of the truck for a very long time.

At night, in bed I think of how our house is not like the dump, and how the go-carts will make our house look fun.

I don’t think my dad lives here anymore. Maybe he does but I don’t see him. But I don’t care because the snow is gone and I can go wherever now. Me and the boys from the road go down past the llama ranch to the hoodoos in Timber Ridge. Timber Ridge is where the Calgary people come for summer. Even though they only live here for part of the year their houses are the biggest of anyone’s. But the Calgary kids never play down at the hoodoos, just go to their beach. On the hoodoos we play things like mountain goat herd, and use our hooves to carve things in the clay and fight each other with our horns. The other boys sometimes kick the sides of them and I tell them -  stop, or they won’t look like castles anymore. But they just do it more.

The boys and I are real tired of playing fake stuff though. In Dad’s shed, we found a hammer and nails and a saw and some other tools we didn’t know how to use. Down at the hoodoos we’re building a secret. Right now it just looks like a high-up raft though. We figured out how to make a ladder by sticking planks into the tree. Some of the boys are scared to go high up, but we make them go anyway. Everybody has to help.

One night I’m going to sleep up there. And bring who I want there. We’ll only let who we want in. Girls maybe, but only if we feel like it. Maybe Drew, but only if she promises not to tell Mom, because Mom would break it. One day we’re going to have a TV up there. And a couch. Maybe even live there, too.