Category: City Stories

The Words at the Start of the World

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She looked like she was supposed to be there, under the blanket, on top of the mattress, outside my apartment building, sleeping with her hair haloed around her head at eight in the morning.  Her face, half-hidden by her left arm, looked like a boy’s face, a little boy grown old before his face had had a chance to catch up.

In her open mouth, you could just see the tip of her tongue and the blackness stuck in behind it.  At the root of that darkness were the beginnings of words, getting ready to greet the morning.  They were like the words at the start of the world, waiting to be said, before the humans had arrived to speak them.  They were the words in my mouth too, seeing myself, later that day, reflected in the window of an underground train, holding my face, grown old before it was ready, and whispering, I want to live, I want to live, I want to live.

And Now We Are Assholes

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The night is two feet deep.  Christmas lights reflect in rain slicked street sings while we sit in your car at this lonely intersection, waiting for the light to change.

The children in your radio sing Away in a Manger.  They are meant to sound like angels, but we know they are assholes.

We both sang in children’s choirs, almost twenty years ago, and now we are assholes.  The cool kids used to beat us up, and now we are assholes, sitting in your car, waiting for the light to change, two assholes, two days before Christmas, remembering how the cool kids used to beat us up.

In Rain

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We opened the windows to let the sound in
The scent of wet pavement and swollen leaves
We lay on the bed pretending to be beauties
The two of us
An illicit love story from eighteen-forty
A locket that would not close

We let the sound in
The scent of wet pavement
We lay on the bed
The illicit love story
The locket that would not close

Films in Black and White

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That night you did not see what you think you saw, scenes from your own life played out in black and white on the washroom stall wall.  Sitting on the toilet seat, you leaned your head against the door.  While the other girls took turns coming to check on you, you watched yourself in pigtails eating popsicles and playing dolls while club beats beat out minutes you’d never noticed going by.

Words about the Drunk Man Climbing the Fence

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Part of it was the wind making waves of his oversized sweatshirt, and some of it had to do with the drips of drool dampening the expletives that came spewing from his mouth.  His mouth like a hole in his flesh.  But it wasn’t just that that brought on our sadness.  It was something more to do with the pedestrian unpleasantness of surviving another November that struck us so deeply as we watched the man, head ways on one side of the fence, feet ways on the other and his shirt sleeve caught in a wire spike at the top.

It had been November a lot lately.  Another box on the calendar, but every day in the same month as the day before.

We held our bottom lips between our teeth, wanting to weep, but not knowing how as the man’s head dipped dangerously towards the ground and his left leg lifted like the mast of a sinking ship.

We waited with the good will and patience we hadn’t had that afternoon while wading though subway traffic or talking with our mothers on the telephone.  Once in our lives we were wishing for something outside of ourselves to succeed, and we hoped that for that moment at least, it would be enough.

This is a Picture of My Grandmother Wearing a Bathing Suit

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This is a picture of my grandmother wearing a bathing suit.  Look at the way her legs look.  Even though it’s black and white, you can tell her legs are tanned.  I bet she was a great dancer before she became old and started to smell like lavender soap.

The man she’s with isn’t my grandfather.  I asked around, but no one seems to know who he is or what beach they’re at or who took the picture or how the man came to be missing his hand.  My dad says maybe it was the war, but the man would have been too young for the first war, and the second wouldn’t have started yet.

If you look here, you can see the man’s reflection in my grandmother’s sunglasses.  She’s not even looking at the camera.  She’s looking at the man, making a face.  You can tell she knows the picture’s being taken though, but she decided to look away.  She has this way of holding her mouth that gives her away, a self-conscious twist in her bottom lip that she didn’t have when she got older, when I knew her.

I keep this picture in its frame by my bed.  When I was younger and I’d have nightmares, I’d turn the light on and look at it.  I don’t have nightmares anymore, but I still like the picture.  This is a picture of my grandmother wearing a bathing suit.

Don’t Ever Trust a Man Whose First Name’s the Same as His Last

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“Don’t ever trust a man whose first name’s the same as his last,” I said.  “Eddie Edwards did me in, back when I lived in Petawawa.”

I wasn’t in Petawawa anymore.  Chloe and me we were on luxurious deck chairs beside the luxurious pool at the luxury condo they’d just opened down the street from my apartment.  The condo that looked like a shopping mall, and that was our alibi.

“We thought this was a shopping mall,” we’d practiced saying to each other back at my apartment.  “We didn’t know we weren’t supposed to be here.”

We sipped complimentary lemonade and tried hard not to look like we were looking too hard at the girls in their bikinis and their still papery winter skin.

“Now you go,” I said.  “What sort of wisdom have you gained in your 26 years?”

She said: “The best vitamin to help making friends is B1.”

Head and Shoulders

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The band was from Barrie, Ontario, and they were exactly like a band from Barrie, Ontario, their songs about women, their voices like diesel, their ripped jeans and the bassist’s long hair.  It was hair commercial hair, maybe even better.  The only way to describe it is to say that on those nights, the ones when a single cockroach climbs from your heart and lands on your palm, and you’re left sitting on your single bed on greasy sheets with a single streetlight to illuminate what just crawled out of you, that is the kind of hair, smelling of head and shoulders, that you long to cry into.  I would date that man just for a chance to cry into his glorious golden hair.

One Floor Above

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Upstairs, it might have been people, speaking in a language we’d never had the time to learn, but we think it was television, playing the day in reverse, backwards flying birds putting the dawn back into its box, raindrops stitching themselves to clouds and the windblown trees, unblown by the great gales that surprised us that afternoon.  It was night, with the day a glowing backwards square, playing out in the apartment one floor above us.

Water Bed

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I wasn’t sure why I was there, staring at his body covered in bandages the colour of innocence, only a few human fingers sticking from the fabric and itching for a cigarette.

“He could have died,” his mother said, savouring the words and the effect they no doubt had on all of her guests.

I was still holding the casserole my mum had made, trying to peek through the plastic sheets to the part of the house where the fire had been.

My mum made a sound with the back of her throat and neither of us unbuttoned our coats.

“He could have died,” his mother said again.  “Thank God it was a water bed.”

“He could have burned the whole block down,” my mum had said the night before.  “What was he doing smoking in his poor mother’s bed?”

What was he doing in his poor mother’s bed.  I wanted to know.