by Lisa Moore
Also by Lisa Moore
Short Fiction
Degrees of Nakedness
Open
The Selected Short Fiction of Lisa Moore
Novels
Alligator
February
Caught
Flannery
Anthologies
The Penguin Book of Contemporary Canadian Women’s Short Stories (Selected and Introduced)
Great Expectations: Twenty-Four True Stories about Childbirth (Co-edited with Dede Crane)
Copyright © 2018 Lisa Moore
Published in Canada in 2018 by House of Anansi Press Inc.
www.houseofanansi.com
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
All of the events and characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
House of Anansi Press is committed to protecting our natural environment. As part of our efforts, the interior of this book is printed on paper that contains 100% post-consumer recycled fibres, is acid-free, and is processed chlorine-free.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Moore, Lisa Lynne, 1964–, author
Something for everyone / Lisa Moore.
Short stories.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-4870-0116-2 (softcover).—ISBN 978-1-4870-0117-9
(EPUB).—ISBN 978-1-4870-0118-6 (Kindle)
I. Title.
PS8576.O61444S66 2018 C813'.54 C2018-900705-2
C2018-900706-0
Cover illustration: Jillian Tamaki
Text design: Alysia Shewchuk
We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada.
For Sheila Barry
Contents
A Beautiful Flare
Visitation
The Fjord of Eternity
Marconi
Guard of What
Lovers with the Intensity I’m Talking About
The Challenges and Rewards of Re-entering the Workforce
The Viper’s Revenge
Lighting Up the Dark
Skywalk
Acknowledgements
About the Author
A Beautiful Flare
Do you feel that? Steve asks. The customer, a leggy junior high school teacher, has just taken up running.
Steve rubs small circles on the inside of his own knee.
Right there, he says. He doesn’t break eye contact. The customer has large grey eyes and a habit of hyper-rapid blinking that suggests permanent incredulity. But her weak, caving chin gives Steve hope.
The customer reaches down to touch the inside of her knee, unconsciously mirroring him. Rubbing little circles. She blinks.
I guess so, she says. Then she says: Yes.
Steve nods. Slow, small nods, like a translator with an invisible earbud, hearing foreign things of life-altering importance and simultaneously transforming them into colloquial, sales-savvy koans about bones and joints and mortality.
His nodding affects a reluctant intimacy, as if many a customer could not get this kind of attention out of Steve, the kind she’s getting right now, nobody could, under normal circumstances, but look, lady, you are golden, I can see right inside you, the things you want, you are some kind of charismatic junior high school teacher and the eyes on you, and I get it, you want to run and it hurts. You are hurting.
She is nodding right back. Yes, she says. I feel it.
When you’re running, Steve says. A pain, right here, this muscle?
Now he’s stroking the inside of his thigh.
Yes, that’s absolutely where it hurts, she says. He doesn’t break eye contact because that’s how good he is at selling shoes, but he intuits that behind him another customer he’s also agreed to help is on tiptoes, stretching for a buttery suede hiking boot with fringes, reaching for it, reaching. And he feels the eyes of his manager, Cathy, riveted on him.
You’re right, Aiden, yes, the junior high school teacher says to Steve, and she blinks. His nametag says Aiden. She’s caressing her own thigh.
See this right here, he asks. He’s holding the foot measurer.
The new heat-sensing Brannock foot measurer came with the spring shipment and Steve was the first to embrace the technology.
The old metal foot measurer has sliding parts that cup the ball of the foot and the top of the toes. The measurements are in the grooves that run down the side, like on the foot measurers of yore. The new Brannock introduces the first innovation to the original design since 1928, when the device was first invented; the metal has been fitted with a magic, footprint-shaped inlay.
Can I get you to take off your boot? Steve asks. He is careful with tone. He speaks atonally. Okay, yes. He has a husky timbre, a tamped-down friskiness this side of overtly sexual that is spontaneous, comes over him unbidden with the promise of a naked foot.
I’m not wearing any socks, she says. Does she blush? Steve drops to one knee in front of her, a signature move the other two salespersons, including Cathy, the manager, occasionally adopt, following his lead.
Steve pulls a scrunched little ball of nylon out of his back pocket and, without another word, tugs the zipper on junior high school teacher’s black suede ankle boot, gripping the heel and toe and, gently rocking, breaking the sweat-suction seal of smelly leather: black glitter nail polish, toes like unearthed baby potatoes, a bitsy little corn on the side of the big toe, yellowed, hardened but porous, full of character.
He slips the sockette over the toes, slithering it up to the heel, letting it snap into place.
What do you teach? he asks.
Ukulele, she says. Blinking hard.
He places the foot measurer in front of her on the floor.
Do you want me to, she says.
The Shoe Emporium is packed right now and there’s a lot of noise and distraction but Steve is built. He has a worked physique, balls of tough flesh bugle all down his arms as he moves, ropes of muscles ripple over his back, the curving waist. His face is clefts and crags, a boxy, unbeautiful lean-to of a forehead, shovel chin. He has eyes that came to Newfoundland four hundred years ago, straight from Waterford, Ireland.
Those eyes are a particular blue: Jell-O vodka shooters at bachelorette parties in 1992 were that colour blue. Mr. Freezes. Blowtorch blue. Iceland’s blue lagoon.
I’ll just ask you to scootchie your foot back against that heel holder, he says. She steps onto it. He adjusts the sliding metal cup so it snugs the ball of her foot, and then slides the other moveable metal part so it touches against her toes.
Does that feel good? he asks.
Tickles, she says.
Does it, he says. But he’s doctorish, scientific. His pinkie nevertheless brushes her instep. Her foot curls in on itself, but she does not haul it away.
Okay, step off, he says. He hoists the foot measurer so one end of it rests on his hip. The plastic foot-shaped inlay holds a skim of surging liquid as alive as the primordial plasma from which life first sprang.
It captures the imprint of heat from the sole. Cathy had once pressed it against her heart and shown the print to the other person on the floor, Marty, whose nametag actually says Marty. There had been a beautiful flare
in the plasma, a boiling cherry with a penumbra of aqua surging out all over the place and a black star with a chartreuse aureole off to the left which may or may not have been an imprint of Cathy’s nipple through the rough nylon lace of her bra and the polyester blouse. (The image seems to Cathy an exact and nuanced impression of her emotional state because of Marty — who is her co-worker, along with Steve, both of whom answer to her and basically have to do what she says, both of whom nevertheless make fifty cents an hour more than her, even though they were both hired after her and don’t have to vacuum after closing, or do the scheduling, and both of whom have seen the impression of her nipple, but only one of whom (Marty) threw her way off course from anything she had previously known about love or lust or their heady combo last weekend in the too-small storage room full of boxes of shoes and boots, floor-to-ceiling, behind the cash.)
The chartreuse flare of her nipple in the heat-sensing footprint had bruised up black pretty quick and disappeared.
Steve had seen it, though, and the impression of Cathy’s nipple in the foot-measuring heat-sensing pad pressed in a moment of collegial goofing around (very rare because she’s usually so angry, working two jobs and going to school, not making as much as them, and also hell-bent on winning the trip to Toronto and the tickets to the Broadway musical Kinky Boots, the reward for highest commission sales this fiscal year throughout all the Shoe Emporium franchises across Canada), was sexy as fuck. It made Steve’s mouth water. He got hot, flushed. He got hard.
He might be in love.
But after what he saw in the storage room last weekend he is addled and deliberate.
Steve points out, with the tip of a pen he’s drawn out of his breast pocket, an indigo flare at the instep of the junior high school ukulele instructor’s foot.
That’s what I’m talking about, he says. He taps the pen against the plastic inlay.
Oh my god, she says.
Pronation, he says. You’ve got a problem. Can you see that?
I definitely see something, Aiden, she says.
Right there, Steve/Aiden says. That’s causing a misalignment that is travelling from your knee, all the way up your thigh, all the way up, basically, to your core.
And as he says this he steps backwards two, three steps, and reaches behind him, still holding the eyes of the ukulele teacher, who is abashed by the imprint of her own foot which is aflame with furtive bitterness, bushfires and comets. He sweeps down the buttery suede hiking boot for the other customer, gently tossing it to her.
Marty has an elbow stretched over the top of the Saucony display unit, a hand holding up his head, fingers spread through his gold buzz-cut, and he’s taking in Steve’s charisma.
Marty’s eyes are russet-brown, that feral, ferric sun-struck rust of turning leaves just before frost, his eyelashes orange, his mouth tender. So many freckles they join together in golden tan patches on his neck, his left wrist. A single opal earring in a gold setting surrounded by diamonds in his right ear.
Cathy had kissed Marty’s closed eyelids in the storage room last week. His eyelids are the only part of Marty that don’t have freckles as far as Cathy can tell.
One, then the other, the eyeballs jittering under her lips like the eyeballs of someone in the midst of a flying dream, someone taking in swaths of city, warp speed, black roofs, green roofs, a few pools, little toy ATVs ringed around garage doors, then the prickled carpet of treetops at the outskirts, wrinkled mountains on the left, tinfoil lakes on the right. Eyeballs flicking back and forth so fast under her lips.
Because what was that?
That was the storage closet of the Shoe Emporium at the Avalon Mall at four o’clock on Saturday afternoon, a week ago to the hour, basically, where there was not really enough room for two people, at the beginning of the Buy One Get the Second Pair Half-Price Blow-Out Sale, which was still in progress and during which Cathy fell in love with a gay guy, Marty, who is totally gay, who himself says that on the spectrum, if there is a spectrum, he’s way over here: and he cups one elbow and holds his hand up straight like a blade and then lets it swing down flat against the Saucony display unit to show he is at the very end of the spectrum that basically isn’t interested in women at all.
Cathy, you’re going to have to take my word for it, he says. Marty, who does, though, admit to a preference for straight men, and has lots of secret love affairs with straight guys with girlfriends and can’t explain to himself or anyone else, including Cathy, what happened in the storage closet, the why of it, if he’s so gay, like he says, totally gay, nor has he given it much thought, because it just happened is all, and besides he is suffering because his grandmother died three weeks before, on the same day of the week, a Saturday, and the same hour, maybe, that the thing happened in the storage closet last weekend.
His grandmother used to press his shirts for him and return them in a neat stack with a sheaf of white tissue paper folded around each shirt. She made lemon roll dusted with icing sugar every Sunday and the smell of it when he walked in all through the house. She was professor emerita of oceanography at Memorial University, specializing in the reproductive cycles of sea cucumbers.
She had died in a sauna tent that Marty’d ordered for her over the web, at her request, because she’d heard it would be good for her arthritis.
He’d been over when the sauna tent was delivered and they’d unpacked it together and rolled it out on the Persian carpet. He’d consulted the instruction pamphlet and poured several litres of water in through the nozzle and twisted the cap, untied the twist-ties that bundled all the electric cords, plugged that sucker in, and watched the folded rubberized tent unpook and lift and sigh until it was bloated with steam while they had tea and ate lemon roll dusted with icing sugar. There was a little stool in the tent, and you just got in it was what you were supposed to do, the zipper tab inside and you zipped it to the neck so your head stuck out, just your head, your arms and everything else inside. You sat on the plastic stool that came with it and that Marty had assembled, screwing in the four short fat legs to the seat and the plastic backrest, before he went to work. Because he’d had to go to work.
His grandmother had agreed to wait until he got back in the evening before trying out the sauna tent but she had also given him the pair of opal earrings, like she knew. She put them in his hand and closed his fingers around them, and she patted his loose fist and then grabbed it tight with both her hands, rocked his fist up and down three times before letting go and he didn’t want them. He told her that. But she got very serious and said, If anything happens to me.
Nothing will happen to you, he’d said.
If anything happens to me will you take care of the cockapoos? And he said it was all nonsense, but she made him promise. She had basically raised him.
Marty has been watching Steve, who has passive-aggressively forgotten his own nametag and Cathy was all, Where’s your nametag. You’re on the floor; you wear the nametag.
And: This is something you can consult in the memo I sent out last week.
She’d dug around under the counter where there were a bunch of defunct nametags in a Tupperware container and she drew her hand back out fast because a nametag pin had driven deep into the tip of her index finger. Cathy flick-flicked her hand, really hard, back and forth over her shoulder and the tag, bright red with embossed white letters, flew across the counter and hit Steve in the face, the corner of it, just below his left eye.
Cathy stuck her finger in her mouth and was sucking it and then the look on her, seeing this thing hitting Steve just below the eye. She hates Steve’s guts but she would certainly never maim the guy on purpose or try to take out his eye.
Oh my god Steve, I’m sorry, she said. At first Steve just stood still with his eyes shut and his lips pressed tight, his cheeks getting red. Then he bent down and picked up the tag and fixed it to his shirt pocket.
You get the feelin
g Cathy is really going to be sorry when Steve gets a chance to make her sorry which, you get the feeling, he is well equipped to do.
For the time being, though, Steve obviously plans to sell the shit out of shoes all day long, drawing the most commission ever out of the Shoe Emporium in order to win the two tickets to Toronto, to see the Broadway musical Kinky Boots, the contest for which ends this very day, and right now, Cathy and Steve are both streaks ahead of the rest of the staff, in all the franchises across the country, in terms of winning that prize.
Steve has no desire to go to Toronto or to see a musical about shoes, if that’s what it is, but he solemnly believes that if you find yourself, ever, in the middle of the ocean in a dory with a helicopter hovering over you, and if you are dressed as Santa Claus in the middle of July, and the dory is loaded with cod, two days after the food fishery has shut down, and if you have a bottle of rum in one hand and you’re yelling fuck you at the top of your lungs and waving the rum bottle over your head and if the RCMP are waiting for you on the wharf and half the community is cheering because you staged a one-man protest is basically what it was but you get arrested anyway, cuffed even, and then if you find that Suncor have come out and said they must manage expectations around chartered flights from now on, so if you wanted, say, to continue working six weeks on, two weeks off, as you’d been doing for the last twenty-two years in Fort Mac, if that’s what you wanted to do then you’d have to start booking commercial flights which would mean landing in St. John’s in the dark and driving four fucking hours back to Marystown and eventually hitting a moose, only a fender-bender, but the bawling of the animal, pitched so low and baleful, the anguish of it nearly startling the fuck out of him, and so Steve solemnly believes that, if that’s what’s happening to you, if you find yourself in that situation, you might as well sell the shit out of some shoes.
Steve is serving two women at the same time, and tilts his chin up at a third woman. With the tilt of his shovel chin Steve is saying: I’m coming for you, girlfriend, hang tight, love of god.
