The IV Lounge Reader

The I.V. Lounge Reader

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The I.V. Lounge Reader edited by Paul Vermeersch

Copyright © 2001 by Paul Vermeersch All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from CANCOPY (Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency), i Yonge St., Suite 1900, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M$E iE5. Copy edited by Maria Lundin Designed by Mike O'Connor

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data Main entry under title: The I.V. lounge reader Selection of readings from the I.V. Lounge Reading Series, Toronto. ISBN i- 894663-03-9 i. Canadian fiction (English) — 2ist century.* 2. Short stories, Canadian (English).* 3. Canadian poetry (English) — 2ist century.* I. Vermeersch, Paul. PS825I.I82 2001 C8io.8oo6 PR9I94.9.I82 2001

02001-930393-9

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council, the Ontario Arts Council and Department of Canadian Heritage through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program. Printed and bound in Canada Insomniac Press, 192 Spadina Avenue, Suite 403, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, MjT 2C2 www.insomniacpress.com

Dedicated to all the writers who have taken part in The I.V. Lounge Reading Series in its first three years. May 01,1998—April 20, 2001 Christopher Alexander, Sandra Alland, Gordon Michael Allen, Jason Anderson, Phlip Arima, Tara Azzopardi, Ken Babstock, Paul Barclay, John Barlow, Gary Barwin, Jill Battson, Roger Bell, Jonathan Bennett, Moe Berg, Michelle Berry, Dennis Beynon, Deane Billington-Whitely, bill bissett, Ronna Bloom, Daniel £ Bradley, Mark Breslin, Allan Briesmaster, Steven Brockwell, Diana Fitzgerald Bryden, Michael Bryson, Robert Boates, Marusya Bociurkiw, Christian Bok, Stephanie Bolster, George Bowering, Alex Boyd, Nancy Bullis, Alice Burdick, Tony Burgess, Catherine Bush, Stephen Cain, Mary Cameron, Natalee Caple, Chris Chambers, Margaret Christakos, Julie Chrysler, Eliza Clark, Karen Connelly, Kevin Connolly, Ken Cormier, Libby Creelman, Lynn Crosbie, Michael Crummey, Peter Darbyshire, Lynn Davies, Lauren Davis, Sarah Dearing, John Degen, Nancy Dembowski, Giorgio Di Cicco, Tamas Dobozy, David Donnell, Dierdre Dwyer, Stephen Finucan, Beth Follett, Romina Fontana, albert fuller, Kristin Gallagher, Chris Garbutt, Jonathan Garfinkle, Camilla Gibb, Sky Gilbert, Loss Pequeno Glazier, Zaffi Gousopolous, Mary Elizabeth Grace, kristi-ly green, Phil Hall, Kate Harding, Lea Harper, Carla Hartsfield, Steven Heighten, Susan Helwig, Neil Hennessey, Sheila Heti, Michael Holmes, Debbie Howlett, Bobby Hsu, Susan louannou, Gayle Irwin, Peter Jaeger, Catherine Jenkins, Adeena Karasick, Mike Kelleher, Sonnet EAbbe, Dennis Lee, John B. Lee, Alexandra Leggat, Jason LeHeup, Jean LeMaitre, Noah Leznoff, Malca Litovitz, Jennifer LoveGrove, Merike Lugus, Laura Lush, Carol Malyon, Susan Manchester, David Manicom, Derek McCormack, Nichole McGill, David McGimpsey, Suzanne McLean, rob mclennan, Peter McPhee, Jay MillAr, A.F. Moritz, Blaise Moritz, Colin Morton, Karen Mulhallen, Alayna Munce, George Murray, billeh nickerson, Andrea Nicki, Hal Niedzviecki, Kent Nussey, Morgan Nyberg, Mike O'Connor, David O'Meara, Brian Panhuyzen, Gianna Patriarca, R.D. Patrick, Susan Perly, Emily Pohl-Weary, Mary Jo Pollak, Scott Pound, Christine Pountney, Robert Priest, Andrew Pyper, Patrick Rawley, John Reibetanz, Shane Rhodes, Ray Robertson, Matt Robinson, Stan Rogal, Malcolm Rogge, Stuart Ross, Shelagh Rowan-Legg, Linda Russo, Liebe "Libby" Scheier, John Schustyk, Ed Shaw, Ann Shin, Barbara Sibbald, Goran Simic, Mark Sinnett, Jonathan Skinner, Joan Skogan, Adam Sol, Kwame Stephens, John Stiles, Allan Stratton, Fraser Sutherland, Kate Sutherland, Andrea Thompson, Sherwin Tjia, Florence Treadwell, Mark Truscott, Jacqueline Turner, PriscilaUppal, Francis VandenHoven, R.M. Vaughan, Steve Venright, Christine Walde, Anne F. Walker, Roxanne Ward, Adrienne Weiss, Darren Wershler-Henry, Sue Wheeler, Alana Wilcox, Carleton Wilson, Sheri-D Wilson, Michael Winter, Marnie Woodrow, Eddy Yanofsky, Mary-Lou Zeitoun and Suzanne Zelazo - 5 -

The editor wishes to express his gratitude to the following people and organizations: Peter Darbyshire, Kevin Jones, Mason Chiu, Winston Simmons, Tariq Abdullah, Mike O'Connor, Jan Barbieri, Richard Almonte, Steve Venright, Jonathan Blackburn, Wendy Morgan, Adam Levin, The League of Canadian Poets, The Toronto Arts Council and, of course, all the contributors who believed in this project.

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Paul Vermeersch 11 Introduction David McGimpsey 13 Lasting Impressions Say You, Say Me, Says the Guy at the Pharmacy Tate Donovan's Credits The Gap Ads Are Killing Me Derek McCormack 18 The History of Country Music George Bowering 20 Sitting in Vancouver... Tamas Dobozy 30 When X Equals Marylou Jennifer LoveGrove 40 faultlines Fly Away Home Chicken Bone and Charcoal Sticks Andrew Pyper Dirty

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A.F. Moritz 49 The Old West Everything in Place To the Still Unborn Maynard Ferguson Playing "Manteca" To the Strangers Who Talk Loud in My Ear in Public Places Butterfly Michelle Berry 56 Little White Lie Dennis Lee 62 Deeper The Shift The Shame The Mystery

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Jonathan Bennett 66 And The Onions Lynn Crosbie 67 Roach French Fries Natalee Caple 72 The Lilac Fields at Pastroyeny billbissett 76 yuknow whats th point is ths 2 intrikate caretaking have u herd abt th crows uv chatharn cum back pleez henri marshmallow Nichole McGill 85 Blood Letting SherwinTjia 88 voodoo Treasure Hunt Children & Teens Tony Burgess 91 Monogama Me Patrick Rawley 94 Japanese Action Figure My Secret Identity Fastest Man Alive Now Playing Brown Peter Darbyshire Bread

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Michael Holmes 105 Nova Era Resolution Eddie Murphy's Aqualung Her Own Society Stephen Reid Croons

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Mamie Woodrow A Dog's Life

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John Stiles 125 Little Buggers my mom Howyadoon avnight? Scouts are cancelled Alexandra Leggat 128 The Car George Murray 130 Po-Ri: Fight-Script for the Genesis of a Canadian Poem Oscar Predictions for the Coming Year Dropped: a Baby's First Reader kristi-ly green 134 The Happy Diary Ann Shin 142 Speed Of Now Camilla Gibb 152 The Summer My Feces Floated Out To Sea John Degen 155 a girl I don't know bathurst Stephen Finucan 162 Killing Rupert Nolan Noah Leznoff 168 joining the parade Sister Flesh extra help fucking around A dragonfly Kate Sutherland 174 Measuring Up

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Adam Sol 179 You Say The Weight of Fire At the Question Market Susan Perly 182 Dogs Plus Mingus StanRogal 190 Sub Rosa Blaise Moritz 196 Dancing rhythmically, mechanically Dreams of static and cyclopean walls We are the outer space Calling planet earth via the wireless and the telegraph Stephen Cain 203 The Crystal Palace Centipede Asteroids Jason Anderson 206 Sex Comedy Steve Venright 211 Distended Aphorisms The Gated Now Brian Panhuyzen 216 Bald Man Loogie David Donnell 219 October Mick & Keith Dark Side of the Moon Red & Blue Huron Corn Did Keith Jarrett Ever Record... CBC Contributors

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227

Introduction This anthology is not intended to stand as an historical document in the purest sense. Many of the pieces included in these pages were never actually performed as part of The I.V. Lounge Reading Series, though all the writers whose work is included here have performed in the series, some of them more than once. Nor have I been able to include the work of all the writers who have appeared in the reading series in its first three years: there simply isn't enough room in this book for that many writers. This anthology is merely a sampling, one that captures the feeling and spirit of The I.V. Lounge Reading Series, as well as the wide variety of styles of writing that one might encounter there. I hope it proves to be as enjoyable to read in silence as it would be to hear the work read aloud in a room crowded with friendly listeners. A brief history of the I.V. Lounge, because its history is brief: to start with, the house located at 326 Dundas Street West in Toronto (across the street from the Art Gallery of Ontario) hasn't always been the I.V. Lounge, and friends of the reading series will remember that it began under a different name—Cafe Za Che Zu. Before that, it had been Cafe Blancmange, where poet Steve Venright (who not only contributed some fine writing to this anthology, but also created the image for the book's cover) had coordinated the Torpor Vigil Reading Series', hence the address already had a literary pedigree. Some I.V. Lounge regulars still talk of an even earlier incarnation of the Dundas Street address, a cafe called Tall Poppies, and how good the food had been in that establishment. So how did it all begin? In March of 1998 I was one of several people who received an email from the League of Canadian Poets saying that the proprietors of Cafe Za Che Zu were interested in holding regular poetry readings as a way to drum up some business. I was the only one to respond to the email. I went to the cafe and spoke with the owner, a very friendly, professional woman named Ranna. I explained to her how I thought the series should work. I suggested that it take place every two weeks rather than every week; this way, the talent wouldn't have to be watered down just to fill up the slots, and I could be more selective in my bookings than if I were running a weekly series. I also suggested that the readings take place on Friday evenings, because most other nights of the week seemed to be chock full of literary events all over town, but there never seemed to be anything literary happening on Fridays. (Later, some colleagues swore that I would never be able to make a Friday night series work, that it had never been done before, that people wouldn't want to come, that they had better things to do on Friday nights. Oh, really?) Ranna agreed with my plan, and we decided the first reading should take place at eight o'clock on the first of May, 1998. It went off without a hitch. There were five readers that night, and a good-sized crowd of people who seemed to be enjoying themselves. I have to mention that a large part of the reason things went so well in the planning stage is because my

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friend Peter Darbyshire had agreed to take on some of the workload. Peter took care of advertising and publicity, while I mostly did the booking and emceed the readings. The next two readings in the series produced similar results, with good attendance and enough fun to go around. Then, on June 12, 1998, the morning of the fourth reading, we received a phone call. It was Ranna. She called to tell us that Cafe Za Che Zu had gone out of business and closed its doors. She was sorry. I panicked. We had a poet coming in from Ottawa that night, and now it seemed his trip would be pointless. Now, Peter is about the most level-headed guy I know. While I was pacing around the living room in a tizzy, wondering what to do, Peter remained calm. He picked up the phone, called Ranna, got the name of the man who owned the building where the cafe had been, and called him. Peter explained the situation to the landlord, and it turned out Tariq Abdullah was a true lover of the arts. Tariq bought a few bottles of wine, a few cases of beer, and met us at the cafe before the reading, keys in hand. I brought some sandwiches that I'd made at home. When the crowd arrived, Tariq stayed to work the bar. We were saved. We ran the series like that until well into the fall of '98, changing its name to simply The Cafe Reading Series (which seemed to suit everyone just fine, since people were always misspelling and mispronouncing 'Za Che Zu'). In October 1998, Kevin Jones, Mason Chiu and Winston Simmons opened the I.V. Lounge, a place to relax, listen to music and have a cocktail. They redecorated the place, booked in some DJs, and rented the place out for private parties. Business picked up. And fortunately for us, they also allowed us to continue holding our Friday night readings, which brought in a new crowd to their business. With its environment transformed, The Cafe Reading Series took on a whole new feel. It felt more intimate, more arch, a little darker, more fun. It became The I.V. Lounge Reading Series, finally, and its reputation as a cool place to read grew quickly. Eventually, it became a place where writers felt comfortable trying out new material on an attentive audience, a place where people even stayed after the reading to drink together and chat about what they'd just heard. So this anthology, I guess, is meant to complement rather than chronicle what happens every other Friday night at the I.V. Lounge, which usually includes a good deal of fun and interesting writing. What this book can't do, however, is make you feel like you're at a party in a friend's living room, which is how I often describe what it's like to attend one of our readings, so if you've never been to one, you should drop by one of these Fridays and see for yourself. It's amazing what you can do sometimes with no budget and shitload of luck. Cheers! Paul Vermeersch February 7, 2001 Toronto - 12 -

David McGimpsey Lasting Impressions In the very first episode of I Love Lucy Lucy thinks Ricky's trying to kill her; in the apartment, in the hall, Ricky's desire to touch her seen as criminal lunging. Lucy ducks and dodges comedically her eyes peering over a sofa's back and right into the sweet spot of Camera One. She'd been reading mysteries. In the first chapter of Dreiser's Sister Carrie, Lucy surveys the great city's majestic shoeshops and, feeling the pinch, cries for Ricky: "come to me, Babalu, I will buy you turtlenecks till all the turtles come home." Ricky, characteristically, responds in mambo: "why do they want in you in turtlenecks? It's always about woolen turtlenecks, the women in America are funny about sex, no matter where you go, no matter who you know, she's always doing the turtleneck mambo." In the first act of Casablanca II: Rick in Beverly Hills, Lucy is living the single life. She's seeing a man, a sporty senior named Danny O'Day—

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the kind of guy who climbs mountains in margarine ads. "The ideal of beauty," she says to Mr. O'Day "is not caring how you look, it's waking up and saying here I come, world!" To which O'Day says something like "uh, we don't live in an ideal world."

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Say You, Say Me, Says the Guy at the Pharmacy She was miles above me She read books about the Louvre She was more pretentious than the first person who called Vancouver "The Couve" But she looked like Suzanne Somers So I had to move fast Think of something clever to say Or at least just stop staring at her ass Like the idiot sky To the idiot sea Say you, say me Says the guy at the pharmacy I said call me anytime Just let me into your wonderful world You called collect from Colorado Just to complain about your boyfriend "Carl" But I wasn't going to give up Not until I had myself a Scooby Snack But you're quick with the lawyers Sweet as a little pussycat Like the idiot sky To the idiot sea Say you, say me Says the guy at the pharmacy

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Tate Donovan's C r e d i t s Voice-over in a big-budget certifiable hit; Dolby sound for words that are understood, unlike over-written swells from a PhD thesis, rewritten / recombined until there's no trace of original DNA. A failed sitcom set in San Francisco; where no character comments on modern poetry's range and just whose books are shelved upstairs at City Lights— those practitioners of what the gang might zing as "the girly arts." A miniseries about multiple murder in Utah, the last place where evil was supposed to erupt; sterile twills of clean socks and wood-panel wallpaper, The Great Salt Lake swallows a million E-Z Bake Ovens. The serial role as a dressed-in-tweed love interest, off to Madison Sq., pop into a bookstore and there she is, on a magazine cover: a jeweled acrobat's outfit "America's Sweetheart" demurring to her new "Sexiest Man Alive."

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The Gap Ads Are Killing Me Tell the prime demographic they can go fuck themselves with their buying power and their buying power Gap sweaters, Christmas watches and echinacea. Their Saturday night "it sucks" politics fixing cliches to causes at drinking parties, the most successful venturing timorous allegations, misquoting Jay Leno and Hillary. At good-bye time at just such a wing-ding the hostess figures you're just off the street, a dowager invading their escape, from Scarborough, Kanata and Burnaby. She asks you to leave. "Hey fuck you!" you say, "It's not like I stole anything!" and she doesn't know what to do with that holiday package, and you rush past the 18-34 crowd and that (if you add more vulgarity) sums up your winter.

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Derek McCormack The History Of Country Music "The band needs trombones," said Steve, the Class President. "The band needs talent," said me. I sat in back. He ignored me. "The Lions needs jerseys. And the Chess Club needs boards. So Student Council has decided to hold a Halloween Carnival, to raise funds. They've asked us to organize the pumpkin-carving contest." "Goody-goody," I said. "I've divided you into committees based on your skills." He gave Publicity to the arty kids. Rich kids got Prizes. Sports got Clean-up. "Did I forget anyone?" My arm shot up. "Youdon't have any skills," he said. "Except being rude."

The old lady led me to her back yard. Pie plates clanging on stakes. To scare crows. "If you donate a pumpkin," I said, "our Baking Committee will be happy to make it into a delicious pumpkin pie for you to eat after the carnival." She signed the sign-up sheet. I cut one off the vine, put it in my wheelbarrow. The lady at the next house gave me two. She had lots. Her scarecrow was a suit stuffed with straw. My load got tippy. I started out toward the school. Then turned. Tore off my name tag. Tossed the sign-up sheet. Dumped my haul behind my outhouse. Some were heirlooms. My scarecrow was a post with strings nailed to it. Tied to the strings were crows. They were barely flapping. Too tired to caw. "Caw!" I said.

I carved triangle eyes. Triangle nose. Mouth like cogwheels coming together. Not a bit scary. I tossed it. When it hit the ground the face caved in. Now it looked scary. The contest was: The scariest jack-o'-lantern wins. I tried everything. On my practice pile I had pumpkins with one eye. Three eyes. Fangs. Squirrels like smoke inside. I pulled up a fresh one. Gutted it. Gave it little round eyes. Like Steve's. I traced his nose with the tip of the knife. Slashed out two big nostrils. Like Steve's.

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I carved a round mouth. Stuck a finger in to smooth it. Then unzipped my fly It was a little tight. I knifed it again. The knife stuck. When I forced it it warped. My hand slick with seeds. Slipped. My pinky split open. Skin peeled back over flesh and bone. I might've passed out.

Trees the colours of vegetables. I walked to the Hospital. It was three miles. By the crow. My hand held up over my head. As if I had a question. "You get a lot of this this time of year?" I said. "Pumpkin accidents?" "Actually, you're the first. Ever." The doctor swabbed it, then stitched me up with black thread. I didn't feel a thing. "You might have severed a nerve. Maybe a tendon." He mixed plaster of Paris and put a cast on me. Elbow to wrist. When it dried he stapled a rubber band to it. "You've got to exercise the tendon while it's fusing. Or else it'll get brittle." He picked up the other end of the rubber band. Stapled it to my pinky nail. My hand curled into a claw. I picked up a scalpel. It fell out of my hand. "That can be your costume," he said. "The Claw!"

During the carving contest Steve grabbed my cast. "Too bad," he said. "Can I sign it?" He signed it: Derek's a jerk. "Next," the Principal said. "The costume contest!" The carnival was in the gym. Kids piled on a stage. A bum with a silk flower. A ghost in a monogrammed sheet. Next up—Talent Contest. A guy from the Drama Club recited Shakespeare. A linebacker lifted weights. Four girls went up. Their dresses were tissue. They waved flashlights. "Shine little glow worms," they sang. "Glimmer. Glimmer." "I am about to demonstrate the limits of Human Endurance," said the next guy He cleared his throat. "My name is Yon Yonson, I come from Wisconsin, I work in the lumber mills there. As I walk down the street, all ask, 'What's your name?' And I tells them 'My name is Yon Yonson, I come from Wisconsin....'" The crowd booed. I jumped on stage. My rubber band was red. I plucked it. I raised my pinky and the rubber tensed. I plucked it again. Sang: "What a beautiful thought I am thinking, concerning that Great Speckled Bird..." - 19 -

George Bowering Sitting In Vancouver: Central Station Can I get a one-way to Squ'awsh, he says, bus riders, words all over their clothes. who the hell works here? offers hard-eye love at most not a ghost in this place, no real tracks, no smell of sausage this train station's a museum, like the notion of Calgary Old people with vague north Europe accent going to Kaslo, only reality I've seen. So there is, but there isnt a train with my sister on it

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Sitting in Vancouver: Gynecology Clinic, Broadway Women's names uttered quietly inane folksong radio they are pregnant or grey gone from time to time to back rooms, what is there besides thousands of files in sliding shelves

A black hat a good man sitting side by side In this women's place where woman's name "Doctor" is spoken on the phone not necessarily beauty at the door.

17/10/96

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Sitting in Vancouver: Multiple Sclerosis Clinic Dada brains young, mostly, poorly dressed or upcountry, limp beside husbands, charts mysterious on walls, plastic spine bones a motif, you might say. They think about lunch and parking meters —bacteria float in the air like words, like a simile looking for a place to land, like iambic gnats. Behind doors cheerful doctors keep up their spirits. Havent seen a politician for hours, havent read anything better than Gautier for years.

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Sitting in Vancouver: SFU Cafeteria Cant believe all the fat boys fat girls lined up for burgers fries and coke Tomorrowland rocket off the lapel yeah, yeah she says Burroughs wouldnt be here grumbling with necktie Allen wouldnt be here, Atwood she wouldnt be here no fancy basketball shoes, what's that? a slurpee! jumbo, two straws— primary idiots keep these chairs from lifting away, get the hang of it yeah, that's good, she says.

7/10/9

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Sitting in Vancouver: Children's Hospital Cafe Woman with cheap brown hair & two kids, delightful daughter, legs folded beneath her, bright-eyed over Jello & brother, head bent in isolation, no book, a video game? is he lorn or is he bud of painful lovely future, dreaming alone, being, perhaps, me? Chinese woman stares at setting sun, black cedar tips, her hands wrapt around tea. truly live?

—-Where does she Where is her life?

Where are their lives hidden? Written— Where is mine, gone? My dear woman in a machine reading her, another chapter, a good sentence or two?

21/2/97

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Sitting in Vancouver: Student Pub Noise at big windows. peculiar music pounding out of something black, more black than this beer— Where are the poets, are they over in Toronto, under the curvature, wet leaves clumped in front of red brick cubes, poets drinking coffee and newspapers. Here homely girls shoot pool. I could suicide easily. In Kiisnacht it drew dark early, here the carpet is the colour of Martian innards. If I were a pen I would be a girl pen beautiful as a grey boat in the lake, under water, insensible not writing but sitting, having forgotten language unable to grasp a chicken in my sister's yard. Hate chicken meat, grey on legs, love the word.

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S i t t i n g in Van: In Emergency they're all old & no hair combed got blue shiny shins harrup, up on bed, who knows last time they ever read like anything, a book? Is this a waste of life is this a drum with no fife Is this a revolution in the wrong country do they look at you askance or not at all Were any of them ever tall?

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UBC Hospital

Sitting in Vancouver: Vancouver International Airport Prince George passengers watching space opera on TV What's it called? Used to see it in hospital— Here healthy teens with backpacks hitchhike jet planes —hideous carpet would hide puke easy, planning we pay for, bud.

Snap coka can, stretch leg, mumble in Alien, I been there, but I never learned how to do that with my gum, lady You gotta live there, Prince George, I mean, where I'll look around ironic, sleep like a lizard on the plane back.

13/11/96

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Sitting in Vancouver: Vancouver Hospital Laurel Pavilion Fat women pushing walkers, walking wounded, whoosh of air door— One forgets inside —it's grey and looks but isnt, soft. They are, but their week is hard, hard to look at— airplanes can fall on roofs, who cares? I'll be back, she says, did you find that chart, she says — female voices still here, young in uniform, still don't know their lives are stories. I know them, know how they come out. Even these smooth thin ones, names on their chests.

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Sitting in Winnipeg: West End Cultural Centre Cold Indians on Balmoral, skiff o' Hallowe'en snow— I've been like a goose went north, why's that? —music in foreign language or some speaker inside wends black like me Who could walk to that beat? my old short time Metis girlfriend, I made her arm green wearing my ID bracelet in Manitoba. Was that history or mistake— did I play electric guitar a week ago in Port Colborne? Am I dying, meester?

1/11/96

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Tamas Dobozy When X Equals Marylou Confined to a white apartment, Henrik spends three lonely years writing a thousand stories. Needing a human voice, he turns on the radio, needing a face, the TV. The stories run to three or four paragraphs each, with titles like "A Bottle of Cash," "The Beekeeper's Apprentice," "The Erotic Acupuncturist," and occupy an entire notebook; but, no matter how Henrik tries, the stories won't congeal-won't add up-and for two years more he chases the larger narrative until it eludes him in an ocean of rough drafts. In November someone burglarizes the apartment. The following February, police apprehend Manny, a street kid who, when not in custody or a foster home, sleeps in the security tunnels of a mall on the outskirts of Edmonton. For the record, Manny tells Henrik and the police that he gave the notebook to his ex-girlfriend, Marylou, whom he broke up with, in fact, because she was a reader; books bug Manny. The search begins for Marylou. Suddenly, there are hundreds of people to see: dealers, crack-heads, hookers, street kids, the city's roofless residents. Some of the street kids help each other out, some carry knives. It's time for Henrik to fall back on half-forgotten social skills. Twenty-five pounds of beer flab disappear from his midsection, along with the drinking habit that sustained them. Migraines arrive, dense and concentrated as radiation shields. Sleep catches him unawares, when it's least expected: behind the wheel, during an interview, while trying (unsuccessfully) to masturbate. The doctor assures him it isn't narcolepsy, just a recluse's schedule he's gotten used to: sleeping and eating whenever it feels right. "C'mon," Henrik says, "don't tell me it's normal to fall asleep when I'm masturbating?" The doctor just shrugs. "Maybe you're trying too hard." After fruitless months, Henrik's agent, Nadine, says: "You must have other books planned?" "Yes," he grumbles, sipping a double espresso, "but they're waiting in line. It's not that I don't want to move on; it's that I can't." Now Henrik's a liar, too. Nadine wishes he'd do for sales figures what he does for her blood pressure. "I've been more than patient, Henrik." She scowls. "It's been eight years since you started this book! You want another advance? Get me a manuscript!" A map of Edmonton spreads across the wall, its streets, buildings, monuments and public places obscured by millions of colored pins. "Are you still alive, Marylou?" Henrik asks the map, removing all the blue tacks over avenues where kids die every winter. They freeze, shedding Celsius degrees of body heat like skin

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cells. Snowdrifts tuck them in. They die in the steaming of laundromat ventilation ducts, icicles clicking on their bodies like castanets. He finds all of Marylou's discarded friends; most of them are ex-boyfriends like Manny, or like Frankie Malone, who accepts the coffee Henrik pays for, takes a bite from his first croissant ever. Half of Frankie's glasses needs a lens, but when Henrik offers to take him to an optometrist, the boy gets nervous. The invitation's just the sort of trick social services uses to lure you into their confidence; next thing you know, you're in a foster home (and foster homes, in Frankie's personal history, are a memory of beatings, rope burns, and nights spent locked in a closet). He likes his glasses fine, thanks. Henrik hands him a fifty "She went to Vancouver!" says Frankie. "Said she loved me. But she was too much, you know? All this weird shit always happening. I could tell you some stories!" "I'll bet you could," mutters Henrik. He remembers Frankie on the two-hour flight to Vancouver: the thin triangular face Henrik could write about for three more years and still miss the story. The room at the Hotel Vancouver costs more than the flight, but what a jolt, going from the ionized, muzak-enhanced lobby to the lower east side's kiddie stroll, where child prostitutes, nine to eighteen, loiter on corners like public sculpture worn thinner with every season of rain. Henrik wades parades of addicts yapping for change, scrapping over crack crumbs, who ripped off who. Heroin trips them up. A woman injects smack, driving the needle through the upper of her shoe into the foot; she knows the map of her body's veins blindfolded. Henrik blows his last advance handing out twenties. Two winos bop each other in the head with empty plastic two liter Coke bottles; they fence along sidewalks, bottles brandished like swords. A grubby, scabby fourteen year old, scavenging a jacket out of an Army & Navy dumpster, replies to his question: "Marylou Garvey? Sure, I know her. She's with Jank at the moment, conductor-man, runs an orchestra. Called A Function ofX." A long, jagged scar runs from the corner of the boy's mouth halfway into the cheek. Henrik's handsome. Most of his curly hair has retained a lifetime grip on his scalp; it's just slightly gray. When age came, it etched corrective wrinkles into a face innocent and youthful to a fault. By the time Henrik hit forty, last year, strangers started smiling at him. They winked and let him get away with late charges on video returns, extra pounds in his luggage at the airport check-in, administrative exceptions without the correct paperwork. His grin became the universal ticket. So, although the sticker pasted over the band's poster says "Sold Out," the woman in the booth finds an extra ticket. The notebook is close now; its proximity depresses him. Finding itjust means getting back to work.

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The promo leaflets piled on a vintage radiator by the coat-check promise a show of "jazz-metal." Entering the auditorium, he crashes through a wall of music. Screeches, wails and feedback topple on him like bricks. The orchestra plays on a scarred, antique stage. Black velvet curtains flutter in the breeze of a smoke machine. Ultraviolet spotlights flurry over the band. The fans get an hour and a half of original tunes—"Black and Bluebird," "Porn Show Credit Roll," "Story of a Lonesome Skinhead"—blasted, wailed and strummed from cracked woodwinds, tarnished brass and loose six-strings. There are thirteen guys in A Function ofX, thirteen tempos and styles, thirteen flies buzzing at thirteen different stages of dying on a sticky-strip. The drums are minimal—a high-hat, two cymbals, bass, snare and a conga. They play three sets each of saxophones, clarinets and trumpets. The band veers from cacophony to cacophony, notes clattering in the air like iron birds. After the encore, Henrik strolls backstage, perfect grin in place, building confidence everywhere he beams it, and introduces himself with an expired press pass left over from his journalism days. "Oh yeah, writers are cool," replies Jank, a lean-faced impresario with sweat stains on the back and armpits of his cheap suit and shadows swinging in the hollows of his cheeks. Jank cleans a conductor's wand with an old scrap of suede until, held up to the light, it sparkles. "So are you, like, thinking of doing an article on us?" Henrik nods, pulls out a pad of paper, takes down the pen placed strategically behind his ear a minute before knocking on the dressing room door. Halfway through the interview, with Jank relating tales of females, Marylou walks in—torn cargo pants, frayed jean jacket under a puffy, down-filled coat open at the zipper, short spiky hair. Jank skips a sixteenth-note in his narrative to acknowledge her and then continues. "Hey, Jank! Remember me? Your girlfriend?" She brushes a kiss from her lips to his. Jank makes the gestural equivalent of "not now" and goes on: "You see, Henrik my friend, the ladies are, like, sick of punk rock, those boring beats and chords, the same shitty attitude on and off the stage. They like the big band thing. So do we." The rest of the thirteen just stand around, commiserate or shake their heads depending on how far their bandleader stretches the truth; but Jank barrels along regardless. He speaks in seamless sound bites, each one dreamed up and polished to perfection during those long hours touring provincial roads, making sure he'd be ready for future interviews. But when Marylou yells, she yells—"You know what happened to me?"—and everybody must listen. "You guys know the refinery? That pipe pouring yellow water out, that makes a whirlpool, bringing all that shit from the strait back to shore? There's these bottles there and sometimes there's notes inside. Messages. Me and Gavin went down there tonight. He's got a liter and we're sipping and checking out the bottles and know what?" Edward Gore (violin) snorts. "I'm serious, Ed. We found, like, two hundred dollars! So Gavin took me to the Crocodile." Marylou giggles. "They hated us in there, our clothes and hair and stuff, but we had the cash and you can't argue with that!" She lifts up her skirt to show how a normally slack and concave belly protrudes, swollen, when stuffed with food. - 32 -

"Man, Marylou, you've got horseshoes in your ass!" She smiles, hugs Jank, kisses his cheek; Jank barely accepts the affection before shaking her off and returning to Henrik, who flips the pad shut and shrugs. This treatment rankles with Marylou, and she delivers Henrik the look of a rival, of a lover who's unable to compete with fame for a permanent place next to Jank in the warm bed she's slept in these past four weeks, heating a space reserved for the ladies to come after the band lands a recording deal. If only his place wasn't so superior to life on the street. "I've got to go," Henrik says. "Maybe I could see you play again?" "Well, we're in Victoria tomorrow night." Jank rubs the back of his head with the same hand holding a cigarette, and everyone, aware of the amount of airplane glue in that pompadour, steps back three to four feet. "Why don't you come along?" Jank looks up. "You could do an article about our life on the road!" The bus motors onto the ferry's lower car deck. Working past the rusty doors that no longer fold back properly watching that last step to the iron decking, Hank Jones (ist bass) smacks against a sign that prohibits the transport of honeybees on ferries. Edward Gore (violin), the only band member with a post-secondary education (up to and including a half-finished Ph.D.) checks out the sign alongside Hank and then comments: "You know, my friend, if our world wasn't so hysterically fragmented and simulated, we'd actually be able to catch some of the foreshadowing that's, like, going on around us at all times." Hank's got no idea what Edward's on about, so he plays smart and keeps his reply to himself. The two musicians step onto the escalator. Henrik listens, jots mental notes. Everywhere Marylou goes, she carries a small, worn leather backpack off one shoulder, a large square notebook-sized shape poking at the fabric, stretching it outward from within. Jank curls his lip like Sid Vicious whenever Marylou speaks of his apartment as their place, once even going so far as to remind her that she owns nothing, contributes zip to rent and doesn't even clean or do dishes. "But I tell you stories," she says, "and then you write music." Jank scowls. He hasn't a clue as to what he's abusing in the effort to get to where Henrik is. After AFunction ofX, Henrik and Marylou have slurped up fifteen clam chowders and ninety Premium Plus crackers, they settle into a game of crazy eights. The guys play like sharks, taking it that seriously, with poker faces, sideline bets and low tolerance for wisecracks. So it's no surprise when Marylou, tired of Jank screwing her with a two or jack every time her cards get low, yells: "For fuck's sakes, guys, it's only crazy eights!" She throws down the cards and stomps off. "Aren't you going to go after her?" Henrik asks Jank. "Hey, I can't step out midway through a hand!" Styrofoam mugs go up and down from the orchestra's mouths. The shipboard intercom announces wallets found and license plate numbers for cars with their lights left on. Henrik excuses himself with a lame sentence about the men's room and walks off in search of Marylou. - 33 -

She's not on the lower or upper car decks. He stumbles outside, braced for wind and rain, lurches along the deck, gripping the railing and calling her name. On the sea, sunlight plays through the clouds, illuminating and skimming across patches of broken and jagged water. Finally, Henrik sees where someone's untucked the edge of a tarp fastened over a lifeboat. He tiptoes close, his footfalls lost amid the patter of rain and the horn's blowing as the ship enters a channel between Gulf Islands. Marylou is singing from within: "Dancing city / now you're talking / but where's your soul / you've a thousand faces / I'll never know"—the tune and words to Roxy Music's "True to Life," a song Henrik used to like before most music got old, along with most artwork, most writing. He'd overdosed on high culture in his loneliness, compensating for a lack of human contact with the little glow of life offered by art. Henrik feeds on the lives of these runaways, and it's like lead shot in his stomach. He's an addict to their pain, their immediacy—the way they gobble food as soon as they get it, the way they find a better pair of shoes in a field and put them on right away, ass to the grass. Marylou pokes her head from under the tarp and they appraise each other. He smiles and retreats, desire in his throat like a chicken bone. And he'd always thought himself so ethical; but his craving is that of a man shut-up too long, a recluse who overstayed his isolation and did himself permanent harm. A woman's voice announces over the P.A. system, "We are now approaching Schwartz Bay ferry terminal. All passengers please prepare to disembark;" Henrik rejoins the band, pessimistic about Marylou coming back. Jeff Klugman (ist Saxophone) recalls how a Vietnamese committed suicide by jumping off the upper deck a few years ago. "It's the motors," says Jeff. "You can't swim away from the boat. They suck you under. Mulch you up." Everyone except Henrik, but including Jank, laughs at this. They clamber aboard the bus and wait for the ferry worker's signal to go. Bighead Macintosh (2nd trumpet) takes out his horn after they've off-loaded into traffic and blows a slow, note-by-note lamentation that perfectly fits Henrik's frustration. Jank mutters about a "blue period" coming on, and everyone nods and sighs, because, as Edward explains to Henrik, a "blue period" means months of sad concerts where they play one long, muffled dirge after another—Jank's darkest pieces, like "Interlunar Interlude," "Spider in the Drain" and "Blues, One Million Ten." Marylou strolls the sidewalk, knapsack dangling, turning now and again to squint and scan the convoy of traffic driving up the ferry's off ramp. They pull up alongside her and she refuses to get in. So, crabby Jank jumps out and grabs her, shouting how she'll make them late for the show, how she should smarten up. "Where the fuck have you been?" he yells after pushing Marylou in through the sliding doors. "Don't yell at me! And what do you care anyhow?" Her eyes flash on Henrik before resuming their lock on Jank—"It's not like you came to look for me!" The orchestra and Henrik peer from over and under various seats in the back of the bus. "So where were you?" "I was on the lower car deck." Bighead stops trumpeting. Jank pulls out a lighter - 34 -

and sparks up a cigarette. "Hey, it's not what you think, Jank." Marylou rolls her eyes and tells a story, of which Henrik remembers every letter. She descended to the lower car deck to have a smoke. "Lady, you're not supposed to smoke on the car deck." An old man got out of a van. "Mister," she responded, "It's 'fuck' and it's 'you.'Just put them together." "Now listen here, young lady." "Now listen here, old man." She mimicked his voice in a way that made him laugh. "You wanna know why I don't like the smoke?" He put a finger to his lips. The lower car deck's clank of machinery, smell of stove oil and steam, gongs and chirpings from the engine room were like the workings of an enormous iron heart. The atmosphere was pure Nineteenth Century industrial: pistons and power, nuts and bolts, dangerous intermeshings of moving parts—the surrounding architecture a ringing fifty-foot high cavern of I-beams, thick hoses, sheets of reinforced concrete. The sliding door of the van slipped open and Marylou pressed her eyeball to the crack; inside, she saw half a dozen wooden beehives. A loud buzz bounced off the alloy walls of the van, making it seem warm inside, glowing from the insect hum. 'Are you sure it's the thrill of a lifetime?" Marylou asked inside the van, finger on her shirt's last done-up button. The old man nodded. She finished stripping from the waist up. "Okay," said the old man. She felt sugary water drying on her skin, a stickiness near the joints. He delicately opened the drawers. Soon, bees covered her whole upper torso. Marylou laughed as they crawled up and down her breasts and neck, collecting the sugar off her skin. Eventually, the beekeeper opened the drawers and the insects flew back to their honeycombs, leaving Marylou cold. She replaced her shirt and thick cable-knit sweater. "He asked me to become his apprentice," Marylou smiles. "Hold on," interrupts Jank. "You went to the lower car deck, got into some stranger's van, took off your shirt, and let a bunch of bees crawl all over your body?" Marylou nods. "Then the verdict is . ."Jank pounds his fist on the dashboard like a gavel, ". . . that you're a total idiot." Marylou's chin wobbles. "Don't look at me like that, Marylou; you know goddamn well you're an idiot." She settles into the chair with a wiggle, arms folded over her chest. "If I may say something," adds Edward. Everyone shifts attention to him. Henrik closes his eyes, shakes his head, seeing how totally the stories belong to Marylou. Instead of feeling ripped off, he feels happy for her, happy that the stories have found a home. "Considering the illegality of transporting such..." Edward starts, ".. bees. (Note my earlier remark, Hank). Considering also, Marylou, and no offense, some of the past stories you've told us. Considering also the context of this discussion (i.e. you two were fighting when last you saw each other). All these factors in mind, I—a word to the wise, Jank—would not be too concerned with the seriousness of Marylou's words." 'Are you calling me a liar, Edward!" she shrieks, her big hands already in fists. - 35 -

"Uh, no," says Edward, scared. "I was speaking more, uh, statistically." "What's that supposed to mean?" "It means, Marylou," sneers Jank, "the odds of your story being true are, like, fractions." "Is that so?" The whole orchestra nods. "What do you think, Henrik?" "I believe you," he says, earnestly. Marylou smiles radiantly at the man, her teeth slightly blue (which is perhaps an effect and afterglow from her aquamarine eyes); Henrik's passed the test. "Then you're the one who gets the gift." Marylou reaches into a pocket, extends her hand towards him, opening a fist to reveal fourteen dead bees for the orchestra's inspection. "That improve my odds any?" she asks. Henrik bursts out laughing. The orchestra falls silent, except for the in and out of breath and Jank's clean index finger squeaking as it writes in the steam on the window. Coming through Sydney, they stop at a MacDonald's drive-thru and place so many orders the checkout girl gets confused; everyone starts laughing and they drown out Jank's corrections. It takes forever. Afterwards, Gaby Norton Pawlowksi (2nd bass) sparks up a joint, passing it round. Only Bighead and Henrik refrain. Marylou wishes she'd done the same, because the dope's so killer. She thinks that nobody believes her story about the bees, that a truth can become a lie in the form of its telling, and that fiction's ugly twin, untruth, is clinging to her like an evil baby who can't suck enough milk. A streetkid's paranoia kicks in, and every word, every look from the orchestra, especially Jank, spells abandonment; so she waits, waiting for the bus to stop, for the boys to kick her out on some roadside; she's afraid to get out and go to the bathroom when they stop at a gas station because they might leave without her. Four weeks is definitely too long for Jank not to have fallen in love with her; by that time any other guy would have. Jank just loves her stories, and not even those so much anymore. Rain spatters against the windshield, one for each note played by Duke Ellington's Orchestra on the dashboard CD. The bus passes a mound of seashells piled by a roadside shanty with a sign, "Shellfish for Sale," tacked to its weather-beaten door. A pier extends over miles of mudflats at low tide. Arriving at Victoria's Cross and Arms, she flops on the bed. The dope stone subsides. Jank applies make-up while humming the prototype of a tune that will evolve—long after Marylou's moved on—into a song called "The Beekeeper's Girl." After Jank leaves for the sound check Marylou turns out her pocket onto the bed, spilling a handful of yellow jackets. She unzips the knapsack, thinking of Henrik and his commitment to the story, wondering at the man—pulls out plastic bags, each one filled with different articles—buttons, chicken bones, pieces of polished jade, a voodoo doll, vintage hockey cards, a sloughed-off snakeskin—until finding - 36 -

one that says "Bumblebees" on the tab, into which she slips the insects' corpses. The rest of her possessions fall from the knapsack: socks, panties, bra, pants, t-shirt, a sweater—enough clothes for an overnighter. Finally, she peels the cloth knapsack from around a large, hard-bound artist's sketchbook, takes a pen from the hotel room nightstand, leafs to a story, "The Beekeeper's Apprentice," and scrawls in the margin beside it, "Jank, November 3 1998." There are several names there already. She scans the pages to find a story for tonight. A Function ofX plays to a capacity crowd. Jank windmills in front of the band, baton waving like a droopy stick of licorice. The band wears the suits Marylou painted with fluorescent hieroglyphics; they turn and gyrate, flashing a hundred signals from ancient Egypt. The music pours from their horns like tap water. The crowd tries to dance but ends up moshing. Henrik sits in the back, behind Marylou, his perfect platonic love. She's rows ahead, knapsack over a shoulder, head tilted in the direction of the speakers. Over on the stage, Jank bends low, flings sweat to either side with a shake of the head, springs into the air, arms and legs to either side, brings the conductor's wand up as he hovers, and then tucks it into his stomach upon landing, which coincides with the closing note. Intermission is announced. The girl beside Marylou is combing her hair. Marylou turns, "That's my boyfriend up there conducting." "Wow. He's like so hot. I hear he likes groupies, too." "Bitch!" Marylou grips the other girl's face and climbs on top; nails tear into flesh, rip out an earring, pull up chunks of hair. The girl smacks Marylou's face with the bristles of her brush. They roll off the bleachers into a crowd of guys snorting coke, scattering the stash everywhere. Marylou rides it out, stays above, pounds the back of the girl's head into the floor tiles. The coke guys pull them apart. Marylou scrams to the bathroom, wipes her face carefully, checking a battered reflection in a mirror flecked with suds and spit. Henrik waits by the yellow, peeling door to the women's washroom, leans against the wall. A neon beer sign flickers by the makeshift bar. He tries to guess which story she'll use. Marylou goes from the bathroom straight backstage, a no-nonsense walk that takes her by Henrik without noticing him. He follows to the swinging doors where he stops to eavesdrop and spy through the plexiglass window. "What the hell happened to you?" Jank asks, running a towel around his neck in the dressing room, the stub of a roach on the edge of his chapped lower lip. "I made a mistake, Jank." "No kidding." He steps back from her, worried about blood on his suit, about the latest shit she's in, how her constant adventures tire him. It's inspiring, but also an incredible pain and worry that Jank would rather miss. "I needed to go outside, Jank," says Marylou. "Get some air. It was so smoky in - 37 -

there." She snags the towel he tosses her and spins the yarn. Since the concert hall neighboured Chinatown, Marylou crossed the streetfor cultural reasons. Paper lanterns dangled from the awning of a twenty-four hour corner store. Barbecued ducks hung from hooks in butcher's shops. Men and women played mah-jong in second story balconies. The labels on cans stacked in the windows of local stores showed pictures of exotic fruit. Large red Chinese characters covered a lit window of a shop just off Fan Tan Alley. The door stood slightly ajar. Marylou stepped into a room containing a secretary's desk and filing cabinets. She parted the beads hanging from a doorway into the white treatment room. An old shriveled Chinese man in a white lab coat slept on a chair. His snores rattled the canisters and vials in a wooden cabinet beside the bed. The old man held the end of a scroll that had fallen and unrolled along the floor. Marylou gently took the end from him and spread out the seven feet of brittle paper. The scroll contained thirty drawings of a human face, each stuck with a different constellation of acupuncture needles; beneath, and corresponding to, each of these sat a smaller drawing of a man and woman in various sexual positions. Chinese characters ran in thick strips along the top and bottom margins. "Mrs. Manson?" the physician's voice startled her; shefell from her haunches to her ass. He squinted through rheumy eyes. "I dream you not come. Good dream, good dream." He sighed, helped Marylou onto the bed. "But I keep my pan of deal; you keep yours, eh?" His hand scrounged in a pocketfor a bunch of needles. ("I was scared," she says to a sneering Jank). The first needle went under the skin above her eyebrows and caused a tingling in Marylou s groin. "For this: blood," the physician said, his voice steeped in guilt, this forbidden art amounting to a betrayal of his vocation, a misuse of it—bloodletting being the opposite of acupuncture. Needle after needle went in until, pattern achieved, sweat-drenched and con vulsive, Marylou orgasmed. The physician sat back in the creaky chair, staring through Marylou, fat tears streaming down his face. She plucked the needles out and wiped the blood away. The physician buried his face in his hands. Jank pushes Marylou so hard she stumbles and falls. "You expect me to believe that? You just want me to worry about you all the time!" Jank's biggest fear, more than anything to do with her settling into his apartment (which he can always vacate), is Marylou taking permanent residence in his head. Bighead comes into the room: "Jank, man, you're wanted." Jank scowls at her going out. "But Jank..." she begs. He shakes her off, twitches his conductor's baton and jumps out stage left in front of the band. The crowd screams. Marylou collapses into the couch. She frenzies, whips out the notebook and begins smashing it against the edge of the table, pulling up, slamming down, over and over, then just whips the book backhand, like a frisbee, away from herself; it skates along the floor to stop at Henrik's feet. He picks it up. Marylou turns to face him from the couch. "I believe you," he says, resisting an urge to flip through the book to note the boys' names inscribed by his stories, Marylou's annotations finally providing that thousand and first narrative he'd agonized over, despaired at ever finding. He stands there thinking of the trust required before a stray lets you get anywhere near her. Though Henrik rejects

- 38 -

the idea of epiphanies, he suddenly acquires a truth: he needs to hear the stories from Marylou. This is narcissism, this craving: to have the world throw his stories back at him, improved out of all comparison with the original. Marylou crouches on the couch, arms and legs drawn in to the chest in a position of potential. He wants to tell her how he killed the muse by neglect, by denying it access to life, to the people, places and experiences needed to replenish it; instead, he locked himself up and wrote and wrote until his reservoirs of material and emotion ran dry He'd like to say he wants no muse, that he never believed in it from the start, putting faith in hard work over inspiration. But the contrariness of these two statements silences him. Henrik shrugs, raising his eyebrows to Marylou, and then hands the notebook back, not because he wants her to have it but because it's hers, because she authored it. Henrik knows he's starting wrong, but he starts anyway: "After ten novels," he wets his lips, " words lose that 3-D feeling." He stops, licks his lips. After a minute, Henrik starts again. What happens next is part of a larger narrative.

- 39 -

J e n n i f e r LoveGrove faultllnes she was ten, her arm laced with glass from the back door, seeping over skin a sudden latticework of red it wasn't the punching through, but the pulling back in that opened her, from wrist to shoulder, in a network of lines that intersect doors slam against the afternoon a crunch of tires roll my eyes and nothing is out of place here, but the quiet; the air stilling over me three hundred and fifty-six stitches to hold her together, a lurching tightrope walker, sister of edges a decade later, she says Someone is being mean to Bunny, a man writes me stories and poems, one every day and always he kills me at the end this family mapped in white sprawled across her forearm, grafting memory onto skin I trawl my longest nail along, here, and here, I trace this one — our willow tree, branches that cut into palms but still it was close enough to flying. and this one, my cold finger drags, this one

- 40 -

is the jagged feather earring torn clean from my lobe, who do you think you are, anyway? and this one, the arc clawed into the yard at the end of my dog's rattling chain, or the unnamed road Dad left him on. 1wantto peelit back, she says, open the scars and there will be Mother's shrieks swerving across town, the tree, that ruptured house. / want my arm back, what is still under the jigsaw puzzle of skin. write me something mean, and secret, she says, to send back —

- 41 -

Fly

Away Home

Her cousin Kenny is older, maybe ten. Snakes oozing out of pockets, he raises the roof with the cock of an eyebrow. Kim's mom knows he's trouble but he's family, and who else is therefor her to play with? besides Johnny next door but everybody knows he's slow. Summer grass quivers shoulder high, sharp as a porcupine's back, claws roadmaps across their arms and the August sun scorches any hope of rain. An unhinged jaw, a door gapes. The barn abandoned before these three were born, and they squirm through, Johnny in the middle, they ;ire always careful not to lose him. Nestled in stale hay, a litter of kitten skulls. Kenny throws one at Kim who throws it at Johnny, and the afternoon lunges into a game of catch until Johnny catches one too hard and it crumbles in his hand. Kenny distracts from the drying, promises to show them both the latest secret he stole from his dad but first they must swear on one of the two remaining kittens not to tell. Tou hold it like this he scissors the cigarette between his first two fingers, - 42 -

singes it lit on the third try. They all cough and Kim knows it's not as much fun as the kitten skulls, but Kenny is a year older so she squints like this? and they have to light a whole new one when she flicks too hard. Heads buzzing, carried off by bees, their eyes sting and stomachs lurch. Kim laughs when Kenny throws up, wipes his mouth with a fistful of hay and bursts into shouts C'mon! Let's get outta here!

The hay catches first, it billows, fills the barn and pushes Kenny and Kim out, Johnny in tow, but he shakes free, goes back for the kitten skulls. They try to scream him out, he can't see to find the kittens so he stands still, just staring into flame. He's never seen anything so big and beautiful really, the way everything becomes part of it.

- 43 -

Chicken bones and charcoal sticks You sleep brittle with chicken bones and charcoal sticks, share this bed with all the dead birds whose nests you plagiarize, shredded paper surrounding you, as though you want to trap yourself in my words, as though either of us could live like this. You're not as fragile as you think you are; I know you didn't snap any of those feathered necks yourself. It's all just tapeloops and backward masking, take-out wings and old Talking Heads albums — It's not so cool to have so many problems.

Took three years for your letter to arrive, all dissonance and fractured black ink, conservatory paper, listing how many minutes it took to make her come, while I waited up for you in that rattling house. Summer became Greyhound bathrooms and forgotten area codes, arbitrary rail transfers, Saskatoon train station at three A.M. The inventory of bizarre murders in prairie suburbs. Cab driver slurs Tou'restayin'inabad neighbourhood missy, one of'em found just back there.

Limbs in railyards, tufts of hair clumped along pipelines. I smile and tip him more than I should, still racing my arteries with Via Rail and cheap Winnipeg speed, knowing finally how wide the Saskatchewan sky can be when you're angry, and in love with a fire-eater. Or maybe just the fire.

- 44 -

Andrew Pyper Dirty Look around: the same as every other morning — husband gone to work but the sockfarty smell of him still in the air, a suburban sun pushing through off-white Venetian blinds, the disappointing glimpse of my eight-year-married face in the bureau mirror — but with a difference. A feeling, you might say. Like a dream except more real. More real than real life, as a matter of fact, which makes me wonder again if it might be a dream. "Vet here I undeniably am, standing next to the bed, running hands down from my full breasts to my fuller hips (where the hell did I get that crimson nail polish?) and thinking I am the horniest slut on the planet! This thought shocks me. It's not one of my normal kind of thoughts, let's just say. I'm apart-time primary school teacher, I have thick calves, I was brought up a Presbyterian. On the monthly occasions that my husband and I attend to each other it is in the dark wearing T-shirts. Now look at me! Licking my lips at the mirror while parting my other lips with my fingers as though it were a procedure in some wicked physical exam. A feline moan that works its way up my throat. I take a long time in the shower. Soap, shampoo, shaving cream, that body gel my mother-in-law gave me two Christmasses ago— anything that lathers makes an appearance. I'm slippery as an eel but I can't take my hands off myself, every extra inch of flab suddenly a wondrous asset, a gift. And the whole time it feels like I'm being watched. Not that this makes me scared. In fact, I'm hamming it up, making drugged-out faces into the shower curtain. Like I'm doing this for someone else that isn't there. Afterwards I select a loose blouse and the skirt I stopped wearing four years ago because, strictly speaking, it doesn't fit me anymore. But I'm wriggling into it just the same, fusing my bottom into two baked-together muffins. Strap on those ridiculous heels that sent me to the chiropractor after last New Year's Eve. Hike the skirt up another inch and it's time for work. Part of the strange feeling is the idea that everyone around me is in on it. Yet it's the same smile as usual from the kid at the drive-thru window as he hands me my Irish Cream coffee, the unnecessarily stern "Good morn-ing, Pat!" from Principal Davis, the same wink as always from Glenna, with whom I share secrets and donuts. But behind these gestures is something new, a permissive cologne we're all wearing, along with the sense that the flimsy things that hold an everyday scene together — our words, our distances, our clothes — could give way at any second. And soon enough they do, by God! It all starts with Mr. Henkle, the janitor. One of the kids in my morning class has thrown up under his desk and instead of getting on the intercom to Maintenance I'm strolling down there myself, heels clicking out my heartbeat on

- 45 -

the marble hallway. When I open the door Mr. Henkle is kneeling on the floor, pretending to fix a vacuum cleaner. He's not wearing his regulation blue overalls (what would the Board think of that, I wonder?) but a Hawaiian shirt and designer jeans instead, along with a gold chain snaking through the implausible forest of his chest hair. He looks up with a sly smile already on his face as though he's been expecting me. "Jim, I've got a puker in 103," I say. I've never said "puker" or called Mr. Henkle by his first name before in my life. "Another one?" he says, standing. There's a strange pause, as though we're waiting for direction. Then my eyes slip down to his pants and refuse to leave. I know it's rude but I somehow also know Jim doesn't mind. "You in a rush?" he asks me, stepping away from the vacuum cleaner and closer to me. His voice sounds funny, at once deeper and tinnier than it usually is. But I will say this: I've never noticed how attractive Mr. Henkle is, in a cheeseball mustache, yo's haircut, tinted glasses sort of way "I've got all the time in the world," I say. "You know what they say about how good it is to find a hard man." And then, without a thought about what the children in Room 103 might be getting up to or the implications for my marriage or the possibility of giving offence, I unbutton my blouse. Mr. Henkle watches me with a look of calm satisfaction, as though teachers coming into his broom closet and slipping out of their bras was a more or less daily occurrence. "You look fan-tar-tic," he growls, making sure I can hear the sound his zipper makes as he pulls it down. From somewhere at the end of the hallway I'm almost certain I can hear the muffled bass of elevator jazz.

It seemed to take forever. Not that it was boring! Or not exactly boring. Just expected, like working your way from one weight machine to another during your routine at the gym. Poor Jim really worked very hard, you know. I've never seen a man sweat so much doing anything other than mow the lawn. When he finished I was there for him. That's all I'll say about it. And that I felt cheap and exalted all at once. Then whizz-bang, I was gone! No good-bye or "Maybe we could have lunch sometime" or anything. One second Jim is making a scrunched-up face like he was trying to figure out some extremely difficult math question, and the next I'm having coffee with Glenna in the staff room, talking about "those little brats" who filled our classrooms. Glenna looks great, though. An outfit I've never seen her wear before: a rubbery scuba diver top (a chocolate mole peeping out from powdered cleavage) and a translucent lace skirt that offered shadows of varying darkness shifting about within. Kind of cheap-looking, actually, but in the best way possible. "You look great, you know that?" I find myself saying. They are the same words - 46 -

I might have used on any other day, but today they somehow come out bearing a different meaning. "Thanks, Pat. That's sooo sweet," Glenna says, gets up, and before I can ask what's going on slides over and pillows herself down in my lap. Well if you can't imagine what happens next I'm not about to tell you. All I can say is thank goodness the school board recently bought that leather sofa for the staff room! Although to be honest, I have no memory of them adding the floor-to-ceiling mirror or mattress-sized, clear glass coffee table. I never knew I was so flexible! Usually an afternoon pulling weeds out of the garden is about as athletic as I get. But today I'm doing things that require the kind of balance and strength you only see at the Cirque de Soleil. Glenna, too. More stretch in her than the elastic bands she likes to play with while she talks on the phone to her boyfriend, who she apparently isn't giving much mind to at the moment. And then (speaking of moments) who should walk in right then but Principal Davis himself! The gig is up: his brows rolled up thick above his eyes at the sight of us. The same face he makes when a student has been sent to his office for disruptive behaviour. "This is not acceptable," he says, stepping forward with thick hands resting on the belt that loops around his beanbag gut. "I'll have to report this. You understand, don't you ladies?" Ladies? Definitely not official nomenclature for women staff. Glenna wipes back the hair stuck to her forehead and smacks her lips. "Maybe we can make a deal, Bernie." "I'm not sure what you're suggesting." "Oh yes, you are," Glenna laughs huskily, untying herself from me and sliding over the carpet on her knees to squirrel up Davis' legs. "Don't tell me you haven't thought about this for a long time." "This could get us all fired." "Maybe. Or maybe you already are on fire, Bernie." For the second time in what seems like ten minutes, there's the unnaturally loud unzipping of a man's trousers.

Principal Davis took things very seriously, as principals tend to do. Discipline was his profession, after all. But he had the kind of stick-to-itiveness you can only admire, particularly in a man of his age. Afterwards, we all looked at each other blankly for a second or two. It was kind of strange, to tell the truth. Like all three of us were waiting for something. But what? For someone to apologize, or offer an embarrassed laugh to start up the conversation? No. It was more like we needed to be told we could put our clothes on again. After a little while I started to get cold. And then whizz-bang, I was gone again! Before I knew it I was somewhere else - 47 -

— another room with something soft to lie on, another funky jazz tune playing on the other side of the wall. After a few episodes like this things started to get a little blurry, or maybe just the teeniest bit repetitive. But I definitely remember Mr. McCracken, the Phys. Ed. director, asking me if I'd like to "have a little visit" with the senior boys' basketball team (the old devil neglected to tell me they were all in the shower room at the time!). And who could forget the kid at the drive-thru window on my way home who insisted on a very particular reading of my request for "a large Irish Cream." When I finally push open the front door it's all I can do to drag myself upstairs to the bedroom. Every inch of my body uniquely exhausted (and more than a little sore down there, to be frank). I should be worried, but somehow I'm certain that when my husband gets home he will know everything and still forgive me. Perhaps, if he isn't too tired himself, he might even slurp me down as a little nightcap. But for now, sleep claims me. Lying with eyes closed on the unmade bed, I get the feeling that the cameras I imagined following me all day have finally stopped rolling, and are now withdrawing once again into the shadows. "Don't go!" I want to shout, but my throat is too achy from shrieking and swallowing to permit it. "Please! Don't go! Watch! Watch me!" But even with my eyes closed I can see what I would look like from the end of the bed. A nearly middle-aged wife with more dimples on her than a golf ball, wearing too much cheap make-up and a bedsheet pulled around her shoulders in shame.

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A . F . Moritz The Old West Impossible even when one falls in half, into the incompetent and aspiring halves, to quit. Bifurcation is a going on, dispersion and diminishment, into the ground. The woman is left standing by the sod cabin and the man goes dwindling into the dust bowl so shallow no curvature is visible: there is no coming back, or leaving: the flat disc lion-colored opposite and under the sun is entirely closed by horizon, the whole set of horizons. Each circle is the barrel of a gun and the homesteader, old, his bones dice-rattled on his sour Dulcinante, its brutal pad over the earth, now he's turned gunslinger again, checks the infinite weapons at his disposal. No longer can he hit anything. He'll never see most of the revolvers in his belt. The bullets are for archaeologists. The sod house and the woman now are part of the dust he chases across. It's fleeing or it's waiting. Inner embrasure of the silent shell: the line where sky and desert close. Lizards, momentary flowers, and hidden beetles of pain, the administration and prosperity of red rock cities, clouds of airy suspended pathways, tenacious weed machines, stray bones,

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surpassing hunger. That body used to squeeze out its own nourishment from just this sort of error: overstatement of the self creating and the not wanting to end.

- 50 -

Everything in Place Tonight, fountain of sperm, somebody's daughter has been shot to death and he is fountain of tears. She is removed from the renewal you are a part of, although only ritually, shut up in your room. I want to know how one thing can be in its place and the other thing be in its other place, such as the end and the beginning, such as a shooting and a fountain of sperm.

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To the Still Unborn You don't know me but I was once watching films and films of yet another mancaused horror germinating in the depths. I was sitting alone with a television's loud images of fear, repetitious and badly made. I was wondering why I couldn't turn them off. Always an outpost, a small and stupid crew in some corner of sea floor, void, or desert, was being assaulted by a beast that enters the human body and turns it first to a monster bubbling in pain, then finally to a blank, viscid, and implacable enemy: image of the human self-experiment. Or rather, this image as it appears to the hucksters who produced these awful movies and sold them to my nights, otherwise quiet in the hum of refrigerator engine and whistle of aural nerves decaying. I wondered why I didn't turn them off and think of you, didn't pierce through fear of the great strain it would be to compose my mind's noise, my senses' palsy the way hands can be folded or legs formed into a root, the sort of root a canoe's hull or the belly of a tern offers to water, moving on its own pressure and soft shadow. Was I hopeless because you were never thinking of me? But you didn't yet exist then, when I was sitting in my kitchen, hoping soon to turn off the companionable horror of my day and think of you, quiet, powerful, come from the future rescuing me not as I imagined you but as you will be.

- 52 -

Maynard Ferguson Playing "Manteca" He tells the story of a song disdaining to stay in the range of human voice or metal instrument. How the fat gut and the white hair and the black suit and the smashed lips free themselves into a crushed tunnel to scream at the razor disappearance into silence: loudest sound, stretched and thinned as the wind never was. Something part rabbit and part steel mill is being disembowelled by a spiritual hawk, and he can't help smiling as he distorts the story, he's thrust the shafts of pistons through his fingers, it was all his own will, pain's bright obscurity, he flies with it, a forest kindles, a knife's born, purely happy, admiring, to have failed again to tear himself apart, fall back and lie knowing a great limit in his shade.

- 53 -

To the Strangers Who Talk Loud In My Ear in Public Places Cursed be the frog who raised the mythical warts on the labia of the donkey that gave birth to the expert in sixteenth-century Dutch shipping law whose summa was discovered to be plagiarized from the toilet paper of the dysentery ward that inspires your conversation.

- 54 -

Butterfly In the absence of women my own body impresses me as sensual and I suckle fountains and naked battles. In the presence of women, all of that flesh loosely or gently held and at its youngest, most exercised, still trembling lazily on the bones and not fat but promising fat, I see the harvest, I see the harvest and the harvest's fate in fertile depopulated countries: it's like this apple tree here where there aren't enough hungry squirrels and the autumn earth's a slush of half-eaten fruit. In that presence I'm the scrawny flittering, the spirit, assemblage of brittle wing and dark tube of worm, that can't settle long, for how here could one sip with such permanence as the hour without pleasure wants?

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Michelle Berry Little White Lie She sits with him in the restaurant, her dress flowing over the sides of her chair, her feet in thick boots, grounded on the floor, and she says, "have you ever lied to me?" They have been married for fourteen years. They know they are close. They are closer than any couple they know. They go everywhere together and talk about important things all the time. They haven't spent one night apart the whole time they've been together. When he travels for business he takes her with him and she does the same. "Sure I have," he says, his mouth full of pasta, "I'm sure I probably have." She sits up tall in her chair. Stretches her back to its fullest. Pushes her long hair over her shoulders. "You've lied to me?" "Little things," he says. "Like what?" "Like..." He thinks. He takes another bite of pasta. "I don't know." She looks around the restaurant. She sips her wine. "Is the pasta good?" "Great." He is eating with his head close to the plate. A drop of cream sauce spots his chin. He hasn't shaved since yesterday and his face looks rough and dark. "White lies," she says. "Right? Like when you tell me I don't look fat in something I'm wearing. Things like that?" "Yes," he says. "That's right. White lies." 'Anything else?" "I don't know, Sarah. I haven't thought about it." "Well," Sarah says. "Think about it." She eyes the vegetables on her plate. She spears one with a fork. The waiter walks over and fills up her water glass. Sarah notes that the waiter has sleepy-dust in his eyes and she has the urge to stand up and pick it out like she does with her cat. Clean the eyes carefully, softly. "Why are you asking me this?" "I just want to know." "Well, have you ever lied to me?" Sarah is quick with her response. "White lies too," she says. "Like when I told you that I liked that awful tie you used to wear with the ducks and flowers on it." "Youdidn't like that tie?" "David, come on." "No, I'm insulted. I loved that tie." David sits up in his seat and looks at Sarah over his pasta. He picks up his wine glass and swirls the red liquid. He looks around the restaurant and feels a bit like a diver coming up for air. The pasta is good and his appetite is overwhelming. "Whatever happened to that tie?"

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Sarah shrugs. "The point is, we've told white lies, little lies, but have you ever kept anything big from me on purpose?" "Did you throw out that tie?" "I didn't throw it out." "Where is it?" "Probably in the closet. You just haven't worn it in awhile." "Are you lying about throwing it out? Did you throw it out? I haven't seen it in about a year. I feel sad about this." "David." David bends again over his pasta. He starts shoveling it in. "I really loved that tie." Sarah sighs. She eats a snow pea in two bites. She chews slowly "Sandra's having an affair," Sarah says. David looks up. "What?" "Sandra, at work, the receptionist. She's sleeping with Charles." David looks embarrassed. "Is that so." "I think it's a power thing." "How?" David fills their wine glasses and then holds his hand up to signal the waiter. He orders another bottle of wine. "He's one of the lawyers. She's a receptionist." "So?" The waiter conies to their table and stands quietly above them opening the wine. He has trouble with the cork and when it finally comes free he looks relieved. He pours the wine into David's glass first and this frustrates Sarah. She feels a small jab of pain in her head. The waiter's eyes are still dirty but this time Sarah doesn't care. She doesn't feel like reaching up and helping him. "She could lose her job." "She wouldn't have started an affair unless she wanted to," David laughs. "Why are you laughing?" "You think one person forces another to have an affair?" "Maybe. Sometimes." "I'm sure it happens occasionally, Sarah, but not in this case. Believe me, Sandra's asking for it." "Asking for it?" Sarah leans back on her chair, holds her wine glass at chest level and stares at David. David finishes his pasta and sits back. Sarah waits patiently for him to speak. When they first got married everyone said it wouldn't last, they said that they were too dependent on each other, they said they would suffocate in the relationship, but look at them now, fourteen years later. Most of their friends are filing for divorce. Or having affairs. Sarah touches David's hand. "How is she asking for it, David? Tell me." "There are women at my office," David starts. "I know it's an awful thing to say and I wouldn't say it unless it were true, but these women dress and act provocatively in order to get noticed. Sandra's like that. She's even flirted with me once or - 57 -

twice when I've come to pick you up." "Is that true?" "Now you think I'm lying to you?" David laughs. "What would be the point of lying to you about that?" "It's just..." "What?" "What I want to know," Sarah says carefully, "is why is it so easy to accept that a certain type of woman would have an affair but no one would ever suspect me of having one?" David stares at Sarah. "You? You'd never have an affair. What are you talking about?" "Wouldn't I? Why wouldn't I?" "Youcouldn't." Sarah reaches for a slice of bread and notices that her hands are shaking. "We're always together," David says. "You'd never have time to have an affair. When would you do it?" Sarah smiles. "You're right about that. When would I do it?" "You're beautiful," he says. "Don't get me wrong, but you aren't the type to attract the kind of men who have affairs." "What kind of men are these? What kind of beauty is that?" "You know the kind of men. The ones who take control, take over, look at a woman a certain way. Like Dan, in my office, he'd be the type to have an affair. You talk to him in the hallway and his eyes are always looking at the women walking past. He's nodding his head at you, but his eyes are roaming the halls." Sarah crosses her boots under her chair, she tucks in her skirt. She pulls her hair over her shoulders. "I think I'll get dessert tonight." "You are too smart, maybe that's it. Maybe it doesn't have anything to do with looks, maybe it's the way you talk to men." David puts his finger on his nose, something he does when he's thinking. "You intimidate them." "Do I intimidate you?" David laughs. "No, of course not." "What are you having for dessert?" Sarah raises her hand until the waiter is standing over them again. Hovering. "Dessert?" he asks. "Coffee?" "Nothing for me," David says. "I'll just finish my wine." "Listen," Sarah suddenly says to the waiter. "Do you think I'm attractive?" "What?" "Sarah." The waiter looks down at his shoes and then over towards the bar where some other waiters are huddling around a computer screen. "I'm sorry, I..." "Don't listen to her," David says. "She's being silly" "I'm not being silly. Do you think I'm the type of woman who could have an affair on my husband?" Sarah nods towards David. "This is ridiculous," David says. His dark face is turning red. He rubs his chin. - 58 -

"I think you are awfully pretty," the waiter says. He laughs. "You're just fine." "Thank you." "It's the hair," the waiter says. "Your hair is really nice." David clears his throat. "I think we'll have the bill," he says. "But I don't know about an affair," the waiter says. "It's really hard to tell." He studies Sarah. "Don't bring the bill yet," Sarah says. "I want dessert." She holds up the dessert menu and picks a piece of cherry pie. "With ice cream." The waiter disappears. "What was that all about?" "You're saying I'm not attractive, that I'm just smart." "That's not what I was saying." "Well, I want you to see that I am attractive. I'm very attractive." "Sarah, I..." They sit quietly, looking at each other. Sarah notices that David's face looks tired, that he looks overworked and older. She notices that he has circles under his eyes and that his eyelids are swollen. "I think you are incredibly sexy," David leans forward to whisper. "Really, I do." "But just to you?" "What do you mean?" "Am I just sexy to you or do other men find me sexy?" David sighs. He drinks from his water glass. "I haven't really thought about it to be honest." "It's like I'm safe. I'm too safe and so you don't even have to think about it." David leans back and looks at the people eating around them. A strange-looking woman catches his eye. Her head is tilted in an awkward position as if it's stuck. She is twisting her pasta on her fork with a spoon. She is sitting by herself. David stares. "David, talk to me." David looks at Sarah. Her hair is dark brown and long, it covers half her face when it falls forward. She has a small nose and big eyes and thin lips. It's the lips. If her lips were thick, David thinks, than maybe she would be attractive to other men. As it is, he's fallen in love with her thin lips, her small waist, her long fingers. What the hell is he talking about? David is so tired that he can't think straight. He rubs his eyes. It's been a long week at work. Sarah looks bright-eyed and wide-awake. He doesn't know where she gets her energy. "And besides," Sarah says. "It's a mix of the brain and the looks. It's not only looks that make a person attractive." Sarah taps her temple. "And I've got both, right?" "I don't think brains are the problem in Sandra's case." Sarah laughs. "No, I guess not." The waiter brings Sarah's cherry pie and ice cream. He smiles at her. "Here you go," he says. "Thank you." Sarah bites into her cherry pie as if she hasn't eaten in weeks. She - 59 -

eats quickly, barely chewing, the pie melts in her mouth. "This is good," she says to David, "try some." "No thanks." David is leaning back in his chair eyeing the tilted-neck woman. She twists her head around looking at the dessert specials written on the board. Her movements look painful. She is all alone and her eyes are frightened. David feels slightly ill when he looks at her, as if he's looking at a bird that has flown into a glass window and is twitching helplessly on the ground. He wonders for just an instant if she is married, if she has a lover, or if she sits alone like this night after night, her neck skewed and uncomfortable. Sarah sits back after she has finished the pie. She wipes her thin lips on a napkin. She picks up her wine and finishes her glass. "To tell you the truth, David," Sarah says. "If I can get your attention — if you'll just focus on me for a minute. I guess that I have lied to you. Some pretty big lies." David sits up. "You've lied to me? What are you talking about?" "Some real doozers. Some big, big lies." Sarah picks pie out of her teeth. "Bigger than anything you've ever done to me really. Right? You've never done anything to me." David watches her thin lips move around her finger. Sarah laughs. David laughs. "You're kidding, aren't you?" "Well," Sarah says. "For one thing I lied about wanting kids. I don't want kids." "But we've been trying..." "No we haven't. You've been trying. I've been on the pill." "Sarah. The doctors, the tests." Sarah smiles. "Never went." "You never went to the doctors? We've been trying for six years." 'And another thing. I lie about my orgasms all the time." David doesn't say anything. He looks at his plate. "I can't believe you're on the pill." His shoulders fall. "I haven't had an orgasm, actually, since we were first married. Fourteen years and no orgasm." "Why?" David says. "Why have you lied to me? I thought —" "This is nothing," Sarah says. "Wait until you hear the rest." "I don't want to hear anything else. Not here. Let's go home and talk about this." "Coffee?" The waiter is standing beside their table with his coffee pot raised. "Yes," Sarah says. "I'd like a cup." "I think we should get the bill," David says. "I think we'll be going." "I want a cup of coffee." The waiter pours the coffee and then turns to leave. "I'll bring the bill," he says. "You should clean your eyes out," Sarah says to him, "they're full of sleepy-dust." The waiter stops and turns back and stares at Sarah. "I'm tired," he says and walks away. "Why did you say that? That was mean." - 60 -

"It's the truth," Sarah says. "I'm into telling the truth right now." "Why?" "Why not? It seems," Sarah says, looking out the frosted window at the empty street, "that it's the season for telling the truth. Christmas is just around the corner." "Jesus Christ," David says. He puts his head in his hands. "I don't know if I can take this. I don't know what's making you say these things. We were having a perfectly nice dinner." Then David puts his hands on the table, palms down. He rests them there and stares at them. Sarah picks up a fork that the waiter forgot to take away. She plays with it. She turns it around in her hand. "Do you know what Sandra told me after I told her she was stupid to have an affair with Charles? After I told her that Charles was married and had kids and that she would end up getting fired for doing it, not for not doing it?" "Sandra?" "At work. The receptionist." "I don't care," David sighs, "I don't care what she told you. I care that you've been lying to me." Sarah takes the fork and holds it, prongs down, over the center of the table. She rests her elbows on the table but holds the fork high. She holds it there, lets it hover, shakes it a bit, loosely, and then grasps it tightly, squeezes it. "She told me that when she was having an affair with you last year, when you were sleeping together during those hour long lunches when you told me you were working, she told me that you called what you two were doing a little white lie. She said that you kept saying, Tm just telling Sarah a little white lie.' And she said to me, today, when I was talking to her about Charles, she said that she would always laugh when you said that because in her mind if that — sex with her — was a little white lie, than what were the big things you were lying about?" David looks shocked. He sits completely still. Sarah grabs the fork tightly, raises it up and brings it down on David's hand. She watches the fork travel from high above the center of the table, hovering, and then straight forward, finding its mark in David's large hand. She stabs it hard. The fork travels through skin and thick veins. Nothing happens at first as Sarah rushes out of the restaurant, her boots stepping hard on the floor, her skirt swishing around her. Everything seems to be moving in slow motion and all noise is muffled. She pushes past the waiter who gives her a horrible look with eyes clean of sleepy-dust. "I'm just tired," he says, under his breath. "You aren't very nice." Sarah runs out into the cold, dark night, breathing heavily, her hands fumbling in her purse for the car keys, determined to leave David stranded in the restaurant. But suddenly she stands still and all she can hear is the blood-curdling scream coming from inside the restaurant, from between her husband's lips. Her heart beats wildly in her ears.

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Dennis Lee Deeper Often at night, sometimes out in the snow or going into the music, the hunch says, "Deeper." I don't know what it means. Just, "Push it. Go further. Go deeper." And when they come talking at me I get antsy at times, but mostly I stay put and it keeps saying, "Deeper. This is not it. You must go deeper." There is danger in this, also beautiful inklings and I believe it can issue in gestures of homing; but I cannot control it, all I know is the one thing — "Deeper. You must go further. You must go deeper."

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The S h i f t The first time I heard r'n'b, it was on Buffalo airwaves, beaming the sound of the Hound through the night. Was it Screamin'Jay Hawkins? Sam the Man Taylor? I lay in a sweat on the bed. I was fifteen, I was planning to become a minister. But nasty, nasty, the slow hormonal strut came pumping juice & bad intentions, doing its downtown outlaw prowl. And the news took hold of my life, as radio gonad pulsed and faded and pulsed. This was secret information. Whiteboy meets the body. And I hadn't stopped loving math, or Jesus, but revved by the sax in the dark, I lay and sweated; I could feel the shape of the mystery shift for keeps.

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The Shame Among the thousand, or maybe the million things I know, my all-time least favourite is this: how shitty it feels, when you admire somebody for their talent, or guts, or maybe just their nifty way of getting through the day; anyway, as I keep trying not to tell you, how shitty it feels when you admire this person, and then some meanminded jerkoff starts badmouthing them behind their back, and instead of sticking up for them — and remember, this friend has never done anything to hurt you — you just stand there, while the cracks and cheap laughs get meaner and hey you laugh too and then, god help me I did I joined in the trash brigade, I got off this killer putdown, we all cracked up we were howling we were helpless with laughter and I walked away down the hall I was caving in I hated them all and myself I wanted to break something, I walked and walked I felt so helpless with shame, with the shame.

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The Mystery Can't talk about it, don't know if anybody else even feels it, animals live in it, maybe they can't tell it's there, little kids the same; grownups act oblivious, situation normal. Half the time I just mooch along, then I laugh too loud. But it comes through late at night, or in winter when branches glow with snow against the bark, or some dumb old song breaks me up and I want to go howl in the city, or smash windows, or make my life sheer shine in this miracle ache of a world.

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Jonathan Bennett And The Onions Being pigeon-chested runs in their family. Look at Gavin over there, pricking sausages on the barbecue, fat spitting up, the heat burning his face. A beer in his right hand, tongs in his left. And his chest all puffed up, like he's beginning some mating ritual, like we're all now on some barren island home to exotic birds performing a dance to attract partners. No, not the chest of a pigeon at all, but the blue-footed booby or some such nonsense. His brother Rodney is much the same. Uncle George's pigeon-chest looks about ready to collapse. Uncle George is sitting alone, watching Gavin barbecuing, who, in turn, is watching his little girlfriend waltzing through the party serving hors d'oeuvres, just like, "where is Jane?" yes... there she is, eh, Uncle George, just like your wife is doing. But you are crumpled, an ear cocked, pretending to be listening for the cricket score on the old wireless, its volume—by the time it reaches you on the verandah—is hopelessly drowned out by the gossip, the giggles, the drunk neighbours, the cicadas, by the intoxicating summer night. Some here at this barbecue, some who don't know the history, might see the need for a cricket score as a plausible distraction. And Gavin's ready for another beer. "Get another beer for Gavin, honey." Gavin glances over at his uncle. "And the onions. No, the chopped onions, honey." Not to worry, Gavin, you're doing fine, you needn't look for reassurance. Even Uncle George had to learn how to captain a party from the barbecue helm. But Uncle George is a sorry captain. With his thinning hair and his pipe he might be ninety, but he's only sixty-eight. He hunches over. Now, ten years later, the weight of Gavin and Rodney's stepfather's death, Sandy's death, still rests between his shoulder blades. Hunching's all he can do once he thinks of all that water, those rows of teeth, once he thinks of himself transformed into the boys' father-figure. And some of the people here have guessed at the circumstances of that crisp morning. Stepfather Sandy with first son Rodney tagging along. "Oh come on Gavin," they said," why don't you want to come?" But you didn't go, did you Gavin. They didn't really want you along. Fishing. Fishing half a kilometre off the point. You'd just taken up the saxophone, Gavin. Not much of a swimmer were you. Especially in big surf, in that kind of "emergency." Of course you didn't want to start fishing now. Start being the bait again, like when you were a little kid, like when big brother Rodney would whip you with a wet towel, once tore a piece of skin clear off your leg. Crack. No, of course you didn't go. Of course you let them go off together. Stepfather and eldest son. Of course you're barbecuing this very minute to show your old Uncle George that all is not lost. There, stupid, puff up your chest and throw all twelve diced onions on the hot plate at once. Go on. Show him. Show Uncle George how you're not going to cry.

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Lynn Crosbie Roach French Fries I was given this diary by my friend Michael in Vancouver in the summer of 1999. It is a spiral-bound paper notebook. On its cover is a red and yellow carton of golden, ketchup-dappled french fries against a pale blue background. The carton says FRENCH FRIES. Above these words, someone has pasted this large black sticker: ROACH. I was staying in Vancouver a few days before leaving to visit a friend in the Saanich Peninsula. I had packed a number of gourmet items—strawberries soaked in brandy; dwarf carrots, pickled in vinegar. Michael and I drove around in his Ford Tempo a lot, listening to "She's a Rainbow" with the windows rolled down. On Robson Street, I bought a short story written by a homeless kid. Two pages of foolscap, the story involved a viking named William, who "had some blondish facial hair which could easily grow into a flowing beard." Michael gave me the diary, and showed me his rock garden. Turning over the earth, he had discovered pieces of bone china, with disparate patterns: cabbage roses, vines, interlocking gold and silver teeth. I saw a pod of Orcas surface by the ferry; in Sidney, ducklings appeared in the creek. I met a black cat named Lily My friend was desperately ill. I read the diary while I was there. I have not been able to locate the owner of Roach French Fries. I tried the two telephone numbers inside. Calvin + Steve (9301 Avendale Rd., in Redmond) and "Open Distance Learning." The first has been disconnected; the second is an automated student services line. I do not know the writer's name. She is a high school student, who knows 19 gymnastic moves including "Angel, Angel, Mermaid;" "Wappidy up to Standing;" "Toothpick Move;" "Bird's Nest on Ropes" and "Becky Stag." Her poetry is fairly disquieting though I think not uncommon at this age: The loveliness I once found painted/In a flower has been erased &/The contagouse

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smile held in a childs/Eye has been terminated by vaccination. She has made the following, in my opinion, trenchant observations: Her friend Nuala should stop laughing that way. It's fake and frankly unsettling. Lisa and Dido are only interested in clothes and looking cool. Matthew has stopped calling altogether. What's wrong with him? Although there is not much that she wants from life, she has made three wishes: — I wish I had a smile that would put people at ease & make them happy. — I wish people loved me for who I am. — I wish new good 100% friends who loved me would find me. I find myself close to loving the writer I now call "Debbie" 100% and I feel at ease, happy about this. Debbie feels her mother is "bitchy & anal-retentive," that only she can see what she's really like: Debbie, I felt this too. I am looking through my 1977 diary, burgundy leather with an incomprehensible Russian insignia: at 14 I wrote poetry: Grasp the liquid eyeball melt the purple shine squeeze the black dot and poke the white sea. Scream when you see the madness and withdraw in horror... and referred to my mother with very little civility or manners. You are sitting in a restaurant, writing and drawing cross-hatched pictures of men and women falling; a tree of faces; a burning hand. There are two acquaintances beside you who do not say hello, As if you care. I drew and passed around pictures of old men with tree sized erections; a woman lifting her skirt, revealing a man buried inside, legs kicking. I was thrown out of - 68 -

class often for similar transgressions, As if I cared. You are wondering if insane people can read your thoughts; if you could read other people's thoughts, what would that be like? It would be something like this: invasive and obscene. I am thinking about you now, after your diary leaves off. Years passing, and still wanting the same things, love and ease; still wondering why people hurt you; a little lonely, and defiant: I wonder if I'm going to become some minimum wage shiftily paid blue-collar worker or will I make it. Kill me now just do it. You call these fears, what makes you "nervose," "this teendom thing": Debbie, nothing changes. I visited Vancouver again this spring—six years after my first trip, to read poetry at a little club with a bongo-player. I fell in love there too, in a way There was something about the cherry blossoms falling so sweetly and slowly, time seemed like this to me then, suspended and ripe. At the time I was working through a roll of Valium, feeling as high as you get sometimes Debbie ("I saw Jesus/and an Angel in a burst of light"), and filled with half-baked heartache: "Brians leaving for Chilli soon & if he doesn't call before he leaves, I'll cry." When I returned, I called him and he never called back. I cried and began throwing things. Donna, an old friend of mine, moved from Toronto to Vancouver, and lived on Thurlow Street—she had become a lawyer, and enjoyed shopping. I visited her and told her he never called. "I hate life & I think life hates me." My lawyer friend was infuriated by my inability to see clearly He doesn't care about you, she said. She laughed in a fake, unsettling way I'm afraid that's not possible, I told her. I went out alone and bought Chinese lottery tickets, scratched them under a tree. The blossoms fell, tumbling like paradise.

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Something that you wrote, in a poem called "On the Streets, Love," reminds me. That cities contain your feelings, shake and whirl them through the air, love, and hate— Debbie, I was saying that, recently, I visited Vancouver again. "There's no Princes so I'll save myself" The odourless cherry trees looked like plastic kitsch; my friend was not able to come to the phone. I saw an old acquaintance panhandling for junk in Gastown, and he was the nicest person I met. Riding with Michael in the Ford Tempo, we listened to Keith Richards country songs, cruel complaints. Donna and I went shopping and she gave me a dragon fruit. I wrote a poem about it later that I never finished, which was all idea and no execution—

The Dragon Fruit The deep rose oval, its flesh furled like crimson flags sat on the night table at the Sylvia Hotel For three days, simmering. I had not travelled with a knife, defenceless The dragon fruit Nestled with unanswered messages, A pink dress in yellow tissue paper, glasses filled with Sapphire gin and ice. The gulls flew straight at the window, crows and doves. "I've got some awesome ideas," you wrote. The fruit was supposed to be a metaphor for Donna, for the fight we would have, where I walked away, carrying three suitcases up the high streets and moving farther from the ocean, the mountains veiled in storm clouds. The gulls and so on represent a new interest in birds, in taking their pictures.

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At your age I would play Lynyrd Skynyrd and close my eyes: I'm as free as a bird, man— One of your rap songs mentions "the fowls of violation." Donna and I are no longer speaking. Lily was killed by a car; my friend died. I now regard Vancouver to be an ugly city, without allure. "I grew a painful soul." I wondered in my diary what it would be like, at this age, not knowing how I would feel, moving against the wind on steep inclines, immersing pain in anger, pain, like a roach in a box of french fries—you understand this awful paradox: "To be loved and to love. That is the secret. I've got half of it down." I've got half of it down.

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Natalee Caple The Lilac Fields at Pastroyeny Footsteps concatenate with shouts along the black street. Sebastian blinks. He sees the ragged outlines of clothing hanging across the iron bed rails, over damaged chairs, and loosened doorknobs. He rolls away from the window and crushes the pillow to his cheek. He covers his exposed ear with a damp arm. As his eyes adjust to the darkness, the slumped shoulders of rumpled shirts materialize as the desolate ghosts of soldiers. He hears glass breaking and then, finally, the night silences itself. "Four of us were at a table. A good-looking, shorthaired girl served us drinks from two gun holsters strapped by a leather belt to her skinny hips. She clapped a dirty highball on the table and asked me if I wanted whisky or gin. And then she took the bottle from her right hip and uncorked it with her teeth. She poured the liquor from the height of her shoulder and I stared into the brilliant jet, falling past my loathsome face," Barbus laughs. "Did you take her home?" asks the second man. Sebastian doesn't know this second man. He came into the dining hall half an hour ago, inserting himself easily into the famished gaggle of journalists eating breakfast around the long plywood tables. He smiled at Sebastian and lifted Sebastian's coffee cup to toast the group. He introduced himself as "Tamai. I am a good driver. You need me," he said. "I know where to find a dozen women like that for you. With long hair too. You should have a long-haired woman to make you strong." He grins. His front teeth are cracked. "You must see the fields at Pastroyeny for your papers; I'll take you tomorrow, twenty-five dollars each." He holds up two fingers and then five fingers and then points affably between himself and the other men. Strains of American music filter through the parted curtains in Barbus's room. The crimson fabric inflates and deflates gently with the dusty breath of day. Dust motes glisten in the rose light. Everywhere, the fermenting odour of alcohol enlaces the verdant scents of sweat and smoke. "Barbus?" Sebastian calls. "Sleeping," comes the familiar growl from the direction of the bath. The birds outside cackle at the dawn. The rumble of car motors competes with the snap, snap of toy guns fired at suspicious garbage bins, conspiring bushes, and colluding signs. "The kids are up early," Sebastian mutters. He plucks at the muscles along his neck and finds them taut as guitar strings. His spine feels crooked and ruined from sleeping twisted in the bowed palm of the antique mattress. "How many hours to Pastroyeny?" he shouts at the speckled mirror over the bureau.

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"Two," the bath calls back. When the sun rolls into the clearest region of the sky the air ripples with heat. White filaments of cirrus clouds veil the fields in spotty shadow. The light silvers the road disappearing behind them. Sebastian leans his forehead on his hand to shield his eyes from dust and turns his head to watch the landscape. Music winds painfully out from a tape, through the crackling speakers in the front, to shatter his companions' conversation. There are no animals in the leas alongside the road. No chubby sheep or stocky ponies graze the scruffy greenery. Sebastian stares into the citadel of trees set back, metres away from the asphalt divide. Occasionally Sebastian sees a soldier, lounging at the periphery, leaning his narrow length against a birch trunk. Sebastian sits up straighter to look at them. In the city they are always alert and on display. They parade their uniforms down the ruined alleyways as if the cobblestones hold pot-lights, and all the broken windows hide galleries of breathless girls. The mystery of moistened cotton glimmers behind still irises and sullen jaws set over supple necks. Among the trees, from a distance, staring into the canopy and drawing on cigarettes, the young soldiers seem like wardens for the pastoral world. They guard the forest from the city and the ground from the sky. They also seem hot and bored like adolescent boys in Sunday suits. They long for some infringement, some spark to light their consciences. They would prefer to fight. They ache to move. Their pale cheeks are always flushed, and their blue eyes are always shiny. At thirty years of age Sebastian already feels himself drying up, growing old, whenever he sees the white teeth of soldiers. "She has skin as pale and warm as Caribbean sand. I told her I would marry her when they rebuilt the church. She said that was a safe offer." Barbus laughs. He tips his head back and sips from a steel canteen. He glances back at Sebastian. He smiles and his cheeks vibrate as the car hits a hole in the road. "My friend has a fantastic lover. Tell the good driver about your wife, Sebastian. Go on. Ah, he's shy." Barbus turns back. "Never mind." The driver waves a hand, dismissing Sebastian's silence. "My mother was in a movie once, filmed over there, by those stones. You see? That used to be a long, white house where a crazy old man lived. He liked to sit outside his house in his kitchen chair and wait for someone to drive by. Whenever he saw a car coming he would run out into the road waving his arms and yelling so that the driver would be startled and pull over, thinking that he was in trouble. When a car stopped the old man would stand, waiting calmly for the window to roll down and then politely invite the motorist in for lunch. It's so lonely out here. I'm glad that they destroyed that house." "What was the movie about?" Sebastian leans in from the window and coughs. The driver's black hair ruffles in the wind. "It was about a deaf woman who had been brought to the house and locked away from everyone as punishment for letting too many accidents happen around her. The premise was, ever since she was young, people screamed for help near her. I don't know, she was cursed or something. She couldn't hear so she never looked up, never saw any of the disasters that draggled behind her one long life. Children - 73 -

drowned while she bathed. Dogs were run over while she arranged fruit in a basket. Trains derailed as she read poetry in the station, and my mother never saw anything, never knew why she was locked up in this house. She sat in his kitchen chair for months, waiting for the person who left her there to come and retrieve her. At the end of the film she drifted asleep, just as the world was going to war. The camera panned across cannons rolling over desert dunes, airplanes shedding missiles over cities already on fire, water boiling in the oceans, and my mother, asleep in the kitchen, with her head tilted toward her shoulder." "How long was your mother an actress?" "She wasn't an actress. She was in movies made by the neighbour. He had a camera shop in town. He recorded most of the scenes that he needed with a VCR off the television." The driver shrugs. "Nobody is an actress here." "How long until we reach Pastroyeny?" Barbus interrupts. "We're almost there." "Name the five most beautiful places on the earth," Tamai shouts as a truck passes their car on the left side and the car tilts as they slip onto the shoulder. "Countries or cities?" "Places like a city, or a room, or a bed, whatever is a place and also beautiful to you." Sebastian licks his lips tenderly His tongue is dry. His voice sounds coarse. "Port Saint Denis," he says. "The violet wallpaper in the cafes. Port Hope, lying in my shorts in the wild grass watching the water locks open and close. The clear scent of the water as it rises and falls. My kitchen at home; when the sunlight floods the counters Julie sits on a stool by the island and wraps her brown feet around the stool legs and reads the paper. The window seat in an expensive restaurant in Toronto, watching the stream of coloured lights along the highway, red lights indicating departure, and white lights indicating arrival." "He's very sentimental," Barbus says. "What about you, Tamai?" Sebastian asks. "It used to be Pastroyeny." The car hits another hole in the road. Sebastian grasps the frame of the window. "There was a field outside the city," Tamai starts, "where the wind scattered lilac petals from the trees across the grass, and the air was perfumed like a bordello. Boys walked home for dinner with fists full of lilac stalks for their mothers. I had a little dog named Asya, after a girl that I wanted, and we ran together in circles kicking up clouds of purple petals. There was a cafe on the V-shaped corner of a dead-end street, and the fumes from the cars gathered there, but the waitress always wore dresses, and the cakes were sweet and warm. There was a banya, a bathhouse, where I met my friends and we splashed each other and swam naked in the warm pool. There was a gymnastics hall. There were benches along the road where old men sat in rows and argued, or sometimes they recalled their youth and joined in a rain dance with their arms around each other." "What else," Barbus asks. He is writing in his notebook, sticking the tip of his thumb into the end of the metal spiral at the top. Sebastian retrieves a square of - 74 -

folded paper from his jeans pocket and gropes himself, searching for a pencil. "There were long white lines of laundry. There was a house with an orange roof that my mother always wanted, so we walked past it every day. There were schoolyard jungles filled with bullies and pretty girls and athletes and bookish children. There was a camera shop where Salman Bibolt made photograms of coins and lace, and concocted scripts for home movies starring the lovely, married Asya Chermoev. There was a hospital where I had stitches in my forehead from falling off my bicycle. There was a window where I saw a naked woman, pulling down the blinds. There was a room in the preschool where I found my numbered steel pot in the circle of steel pots and sat with all the other children to be toilet-trained at nine o'clock. Pastroyeny held all the most beautiful places on earth. Here we are." The brakes complain as the heavy car slows. Sebastian looks outside and blinks with shock. The green, the scrub and bushes, the soldiers and cigarettes, the dead matches, the hills and trees are gone. The car halts and the sound of the car doors opening and closing explode the quiet. The air smells strange, smells dusky like the smoke of ordinary objects burnt up in the human atmosphere. Sebastian swallows a stone of saliva. The birch trees are shattered. Every brick on the gray ground is broken. The horizon is unobstructed, empty. The entire city has broken down into the tiniest fragments and scattered like a trail, warning don't come this way. If the city were a body, then the body has lain down prone before the tanks, beneath the planes, under the soldiers and become demolished. "Here?" "Yes." Tamai stands stiff with his arms at his side and his chin braced against the sunlight. "Patroyeny," he says, "is Russian for cathedral. But now the city is only a patina of rust cast across the landscape. While I was driving, it really seemed as if I could arrive in the place as it was. It was like I was on my way to visit someone because I had forgotten their death." Tamai scrapes a line in the dust with his heel. "I stand here, and the sky turns to powder above me. All the past, the crying after beatings, the laughing after swimming, the snoring, and the sighing, all of it, dissolves into a monotonous ringing, a bell in my brain that sings: it's over, it's over, it's over. I wanted to be the one to bring you here because I knew that, if you found it at all, you would never believe it was real. Over there, men with tempers played cards at night. Over there, men with sunburned shoulders dug ditches. Lovers ate nothing all day from distraction. Children carried home bundles of sticks and called, 'comrade, comrade,' to each other. And the odour of the leaves?" Tamai inhales. Sebastian looks at the horizon and sees a narrow band of sepia air rising in the distance. Pieces of metal glint in the furrows of dirt. The sky is flat and indifferent over their heads. "The odour of the leaves in the fall was like the glow in your testicles after love. To remember it is obscene. It's ruthless. It's like lighting the church afire with prayer candles."

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bill bissett yu know abt th previouslee hapless prson who workd 4 a long time in th diamond xchange in sierra leone 4 a long time what we call on erth say ovr 30 yeers ovr 30 yeers evree few dayze he was pocketing a tiny diamond on th assemblee line separating th dia monds from th shinee gravl n taking them home aftr 30 yeers or sew he left quietlee unobtrusivlee had nevr reelee spokn much 2 aneewun ths was seen as a sign uv trust he thn in th most undrstatid way went 2 de beers in england cashdthem all in say wun huge bag uv diamonds wun huge bag uv diamonds

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he quietlee thn flew 2 madrid n livd 4evr in a kastul ovr looking th el grecos in th prado wch he went 2 view evree day he livd a reflectiv life he did partee wuns a month at fashyunabul art charitee events uv kours his present name was un recognizablee diffrent thn 04 eithr in sierra leone or britin n he was happee no wun cud tell that or remembr him evr from thees hi end events yet he was ther 2 b reveeld as it wer tho always an uninteresting identitee nowun botherd him

undr th Spanish stars 4evr ther is wun kastul eye know uv in madrid a gud frend hesd2me say we cud go ther we cud go ther

he was polite sinseer n at an say undrground black tie shindig he met anothr man a retird vampire with th most kongenial mind n bodee n they lookd out ovr th el grecos 2gethr from th roof uv theyr kastul

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whats th point is animal husbandree th domestifikaysyun uv men she askd n just thn th carriage ovr turnd n all th toffee n flesh n bone wishes splayd out on th torrenshul drive way thers no way 2 put it all back 2gethr she sighd looking out thru th spidr webs n frosting at them all in th dust men n women laying ther 4 sum wun 2 cum along n tell them what 2 dew o get up she spat at them iuv got 2 moov on thers burnt moons in my hands n a hungr in me that nun uv yu cud o nevr mind she shoutid ium going 2 th parkway races if yu evr want 2 join me chill ther down time down hungr down demons down lust UH WHAAT WHER AR TH UNIVERSALEE ACCESSIBUL DAY CARE SPACES WHER IS TH WAGE EQUITEE PARITEE JOB SHARING TH LONG OVRDUE TAX REFORM REINSTATEMENT UV REEL TAXES ON WEALTHEE N CORPORASHYUNS PEOPUL AR DYING ON TH STREETS HELLO o thees feelings keep on travelling show yr wares whil yu can she aveerd n yul stop sum wher sum how laying back feel th wind teer at th door n th sky hot n daring turn in yr bellee n yr mind as th brain turns 2 gold 2 blu gold 2 sweet grass 2 blessing song whethr or not yu make th journee 4 it YU CAN FEEL IT THRU TH 4EST SHADOW LITE th corgis nevr stop waving

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is ths 2 intrikate caretaking he told me his firend she was having a baybee veree soon n she wantid 2 give her dog away bcoz that partikular breed evn suprvisd can attack n eet baybeez he howevr my frend had strong feelings 4 th dog n wantid 2 save it from prhaps being put down wud yu live with th dog i askd well he sd onlee if we wer in anothr bldg as ths wun him in now he sd duz not allow pets sew what ar yu going 2 dew eye asked well he sd ium looking 4 a building that will take a dog n ask her agen if she will keep th pit bull okay i sd gud luck let me know what happns iul talk 2 yu few dayze latr message on my vois mail he sd i dont know th phone numbr heer or whn iul b cumming back 2 town iuv had an accident with th attempts 2 save th dog ium in a bodee cast n cant moov it cud b a few weeks b4 i get back iul call yu whn idew n hopefulee me n th dog can get a place 2gethr soon n yul cum 2 visit us 41

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have u herd abt th crows uv Chatham manee fathrs wer seen sitting in theyr cars what had bin th last bastion uv privasee b4 neighbours n cops decidid 2 bcum thretend by th practise uv hanging out in th vehikul away out uv th hous n all th frenzee in ther or whatevr a place 2 fart n reed th nuspapr smoke n koff n chill during th day espeshulee on week ends sistrs cud be seen playing in th front n back sects with dolls n clothes n lafftr n taunting sum times sons went in ther by themselvs as did sistrs mothrs seldom went in2 th car tho i suppose it did happn n iuv red it did wer cars such a prized possessyun a noveltee such a large place iul just b out in th car katee i wud heer my dad say n not yet assoseeatid with pollusyun n destrukshyun uv lung tissu n b4 streets wer thot uv as othr 2 outside n ther wer neighbourhoods whn did that all change probablee gradualee n we dont theorize what that meens un til thers furthr changing long aftr i gess tho in Chatham now peopul hang outside theyr guns pointid up at th sky at th omnipresent n ubiquitous crows who arrivd in numbrs 2 vast 4 counting its sd

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they came 4 th tremendous seed they like th space ther 2 drive th chathamites nuts n arint we all nuts alredee sew that word has no meening 2 drive them out uv theyr houses thers sumthing in th wood n masonree uv th houses ther that onlee crows long 4 dreem uv th tastes uv th crows ar waiting hovring flying ovr kaaaaaaa ing n perching with total presens evreewher in chatham ar th crows uv chatham fans uv alfred hitchcocks th birds othr gothik storeez ar th peopul below drivn by disastr mooveez apokolyptik vishyuns time is ticking away close up uv a noisee clock tick tick th crows n th peopul uv chatham ar staring at each othr who will outstare whom in ths crow stand off will th crows take ovr th wall paperd kitchens uv chatham invite neighbour crows in 4 t n sugar sit in th cars fart n reed th latest nuspaprs th peopul uv chatham like peopul in manee places baloon up on theyr own hot air hovr ovr th inkalkubul seed n wait wait 4 th crows 2 leev what wer theyr houses n start 2 howevr faltringlee grow wings n uttr theyr first hesitant n tremulous k k kaaaa s k k kaaaaaaaaaaa

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cum back pleez henrl marshmallow she sighd throwing up yelling out th speeding pontiak th silvr metal gleeming in th vomit n sunshine thats just th beginning she sd thers lots mor wher that came from looking out at th fjord henri henri wher ar yu o why is ths happning ium wanting what isint ther 4 me eye know i sd thats sew oftn what makes me flail n shedules changing sew oftn yet its suave 2 b wher we ar in th far distans henri cud be seen bording a terra daktyl it wasint his fault his voyage card was up altho lumbring it was pristeen scarves shone n flurreed in th amorous winds pants n skirts wer tite wher it matterd what cud b dun abt aneething sumtimez ium skard 2 go alone eye 4 get ium being cared 4 as we all ar n i need a buddee frend 2 hang with 4 sum adventur buffr 4 th awkward timez its not alwayze a sauna but th terra daktyl henri was bording was taking him 2 th fleshier parts uv th ocean hide a wayze n margaret was still freeking tho henri was onlee on embasee beurokratik biz anee way n margaret knew ths tho felt it was not impossibul 4 henri 2 show his film kolleksyun 2 sum wun els undr a palm or 2 n ths

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desperate thot knawd at her as she drank th sacrid liquids n rubbd th flamboyant ointments on her torrid n seeking limbs all nite longing iuv cum a long way from being a faktoree girl in yorkshire she sd en dangring my lungs sew n i hope 2 keep it that way a long way soothsum sweet zephyr soothsum sweet dreem song th lapidaree n moisturd fitfum skreeming end in eezsum lavishing tonguing all ovr th creemee moon slowlee errupting like suddn koffing in th treez stabilizing th vertikul hold was aneething holding tell me henri margret looking at his photo bid tresyure th adirondacks jettisoning th softest murmuring voices lush ovr th tonsil th uvulua falling 4ward out on2 th sleeping blankit n all th fires around silens ensuing til th swelling going down what dew we want alwayze intrakting sexualee n romantikalee with sum wun xcellent n getting enuff work dun 2 adequatelee xchange 4 evreething we need at leest n finding love uv th erth sky mirakuls uv lite n dark we ar givn ths is all givn 2 us a gud start fine i sd at leest thers playing with th tautness uv th suspens uv whn will henri arriv back 2 toy with 2 keep yu gessing maraget i sd its not prfekt but neithr is life as we sew far know it its sumthing n maybe its lasting evree thing is lasting until it isint thn was it lasting th event

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laison or life wch ar yu asking saying her eyez lit as radiant pools twin cigarett litrs in th dark beems both and i sd we dont know i hope 2 reelee slow down soon i sd sew i cud start agen take a deep wun megs nun uv us knows n thats okay how it is sew manee infinit unknowns detailing th amayzing qwestyuns what is knowabul all that hang in ther megs th elastisitee sew veree raging btween yu n henri ium going out now th signal fadesing sumthing els is cumming up is evreething okay evreewher uv kours not n find may we th shinee lites from th sky dazzling star klustrs wash our eyez n skin in see mor kleerlee feel mor in

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Nichole McGi11 Blood Letting Benton Harrison drove up to his ivory clapboard farmhouse at a half past five. Thirty minutes late, he fretted, and he sped up the groomed approach. The traffic had been unusually congested as he exited the bottleneck of the highway that led from downtown to the open sixteen lanes of the main city artery; then he caught the final highway that ran beyond the city limits to his isolated home. Well, it was isolated, nestled between what were farmer's fields, five years ago. Now he might be forced further north. He reached the house, grabbed his briefcase, though Benton was not a grabbing sort of man, and scampered to the front door, not bothering to remove his leather driving gloves, now lined with perspiration. He even took the front steps by twos, arriving at his front door on the wide veranda, keys in pocket. Risa would be mad if he wasn't ready. Oh, he didn't want to think about it. She would be arriving at six, with the rest of their circle following a half hour after Risa performed her inspections. She always oversaw last-minute preparations, assuming Benton had been negligent in his duties. She was like that at the firm as well but subtle about it. And she was never late. Benton fumbled for his keys, imagining her arrival in her cardinal Audi, in a razor-sharp power suit straight from the firm. His hands shook as he envisioned her disappointment. Her unyielding corkscrew curls would turn to razor wire, her caramel eyes would curdle — he was sure of this — to the colour of dried blood, and with that phantom image emblazoned on his irises, Benton promptly dropped his keys, only to have them slip through a crack under the veranda. Damn! He extracted the spare key from behind the stone plant holder and fumbled as the lock clicked open. Must clean! he thought, before beginning the inspection. He surveyed the open-concept room. All appeared immaculate with natural oak pillars and white couches with accents of candles arranged in appropriate glass and resin containers. He had spent all night worrying and cleaning and exhaled with a modicum of relief as he examined bottles of red wine lined like soldiers on the oak table. He had even thought to set out a fruit bowl of mangoes and peaches and other fruit whose juice would dribble down your chin when you sank your incisors into them. All the tools for the evening were secreted in an old travelling trunk at the far end of the room beside the hearth. A white throw over it gave it a homey feel considering the contents inside: the leather straps, the hard rope and the delightful toys. The only thing left to do was light the incense to fill the air with musk, but Risa preferred to do this herself. He removed his gloves, now quite damp with sweat, and began to dry his manicured hands on a white dishtowel.

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My God, candles! And Benton dove underneath the concrete kitchen counter and produced a box containing fat white tallow sticks that he had bought at a discount store. He had made an embarrassing mistake the first time, having bought candles that didn't drip. Benton set the box so it was centred on the coffee table. Annoying things, coffee tables — nothing but accumulators of magazines, glasses and other household detritus, but Risa said the girls liked to have an object to brace their feet on when they were laid back on the couches, so who was Benton to say. After all, Risa had been pleased with him on the phone when she told him she wanted him to have their monthly session at his farmhouse from now on, seeing as his nearest neighbours were twenty acres away, seeing as he was possibly a good host. At five to six he surveyed the scene — perfect — and glanced hastily in the mirror beside the front door. He did look distinguished, a word Risa had used to describe him the first day they met in his corner office with a view of Bay Street. His lips twitched in memory and gazing upon himself today he would say he even looked calm with his mask of assurance firmly on. But what he liked best about his exterior was his white hair, luxuriant and thick as it grew over his chin, upper lips and the base of his skull, a growth so lush that when you pulled a comb through it, it protested against the hair's thickness. He pulled out a comb and allowed himself this one vanity: grooming. This is when he happened upon a pimple in the crevice of his nostril. It was an inflamed ingrown hair and though it was the size of a pin's head, he couldrit let that redness detract from his pure whiteness. He extracted gold-tipped tweezers from the case inside his pocket. He prodded at the red bubble, keeping custody of the lonely hair, and felt a tinge of pain as the tweezers coaxed the hair out with its waxy tip followed by a shiny well of dark blood. Damn! His lip quivered and fingers twitched for a box of tissues in front of him. No. He really should watch it bleed. That's what Risa had instructed him to do. That was part of his "homework" — to not be afraid of bloodily fluids or pain. It didn't quite matter that during these workshops it was he who was meting out punishment, albeit on Risa's orders. She had decided that he should learn to endure and so he did, feeling the blood, alien to his skin, well and bubble, he expected it to fall with its weight; taint the white of his moustache. He watched the liquid bead until he began to shudder. Would she be pleased? Or would she be angry to see his spotless face spoilt? One minute to and Benton peered out the window wanting for his answer. The blood had welled into a pregnant bubble. Benton controlled his breathing so that one unexpected exhale of breath wouldn't cause it to splatter over his crisp twilled shirt. "Enjoy the sensation," Risa would have said, and he noted the blood bead itched the sensitive skin around his nose. He continued to stare out unto the dark lawn, expecting to see headlights licking the long approach to his house. The clock read past six. Inconceivable that Risa hadn't arrived. He walked to the phone; head tilted back in caution, and checked if there were - 86 -

any messages. There were none. He walked to the back door, his neck beginning to ache with the strange tilt of his head, to see if they had played a trick on him — perhaps, Amanda, the mischievous one with a face dusted with fine freckles — was waiting or hiding behind the tall Algonquin chairs on the porch. But there was no one. Panic crawled up the back of his neck like a loving tarantula that clutched his scalp. The bead of blood had burst finally and red liquid was cascading through his moustache, running the lines of his lips. He feared opening his mouth for tasting it. He decided to sit instead on the white couch, his head rigid in an upwards tilt, in case the blood decided to wander, over his chin, trickling down his shaven neck to his collar. This is ridiculous. He fantasized of washcloths, sopping up the blood, making him clean again and weighed the options. If Risa was late (Impossible, he thought), what kind of punishment would she mete out? Silence? The truck? The shackles? Or would she merely forbid him to participate at all? This last would cut him the most, condemned to a dunce's corner to salivate and perspire in silence. No. He crossed his arms in resolve. But what else could he do but await his order? He would wait, fix his gaze on the hands of the clock and will his mistress to come by quarter past, by twenty past, by half past, feeling the liquid dried now on his face until Risa emerged, an illuminated butterfly followed by minions, murmuring of traffic and he could finally weep with relief.

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Sherwin Tjia voodoo It is Wednesday, March 7, 2001 and Gail Cheshire, brown-haired with blue eyes, a pretty girl by anyone's standards, lives at 86 Buckingham Ave. in Toronto, Ontario. The postal code is M4N 1R4. Her phone number is (416) 920-1738. You can call her or write her a letter. She may be amused and invite you over, or be frightened enough by your solicitation to call the police. She has a sister named Maeve. They both attend Branksome Hall, an upper-class private school just off of Mount Pleasant Rd. in the heart of Toronto's wealthiest neighbourhood. A beautiful school by anyone's standards. At 10 Elm Ave., Branksome Hall spans both sides of the road, surrounded by green trees and bountiful bushes. You can attend Branksome as well if you are a young girl living in Toronto, whose parents are willing to spend $14,100 CAN per year on your education. By the time you read this Gail Cheshire may not be living at this address. Maybe the phone number will have been changed. Maybe she will have gone off to the university or college of her choice. Maybe she'll have a boyfriend, or a girlfriend. Maybe some calamity will have entered the lives of the Cheshire household. Maybe her dad who's a doctor will be found too late with a tumor in his brain. Maybe bad things happen to good people. Maybe dirty boys and dirty girls are calling her up and telling her astonishing things. Maybe she is receiving a lot of mail. Maybe she will become a cult celebrity without knowing why. Maybe she will blame herself. Maybe she will be kidnapped by a crazed and obsessed fan. Maybe she will be found on his shrine to her. Maybe someone has taken her picture and stolen her soul. Maybe she really feels way too open right now.

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TREASURE HUNT Hello. I am a 48 yr. old MWM, 5'11", 160lbs, dirty blond hair, blue eyes, have a nice build, am fun to be with and financially secure from the Burlington area. I am a passionate music lover and I have diverse musical tastes. I cook, am down to earth, spontaneous, intelligent and outgoing. I am looking to spend some time with my daughter, Sarah, shopping, basketball and so on. She is a SWF aged 15, 5'6", about 120lbs, very pretty, brown hair, blue eyes, slight build and a recreational smoker. Enjoys painting, rowing and museums. Avid collector of butterflies. She has been missing since Nov. 15,1999, disappearing after school. Last seen wearing a St. Mary's school green uniform kilt (Macinnnes Clan tartan) $45, St. Mary's blouse $25, school sweater $60, Club Monaco brown suede jacket $160, dark blue tights by Hanes $6, and Aldo loafers $80. She is possibly in the company of Jay Thomas Porter. D.O.B: Oct. 13, 1974, eye colour: brown, hair colour: dark brown with bright red streaks. A sharp gentleman who knows his way around the city and needs a classy-looking woman to share unforgettable times. Distinguishing features: a gothic Celtic band resembling barbed wire around his right bicep. Call 1-800387-7962 toll-free if you have any information about this missing child. For the nearest Club Monaco retail outlet near you, call 1-800-5287228. Call 212-752-7822 EXT 8194 ($1.95 per min.) to respond to this ad and leave a personal message. All calls are confidential.

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