by Amber Dawn
“How many minutes did I generously give you?” Zoya asked.
“Ten minutes,” Trinket huffed. “Ten generous minutes.”
“Well then, there’s no need to go tripping down the stairs, is there?” Despite this warning, on Trinket’s next step she walked headlong into the doorframe. The mild blow shook her confidence. She was tempted to lie down on the floor in a “game-over” fetal position. You know this house, she reminded herself, with your eyes closed. Don’t let it defeat you.
Before her was the staircase. She ran her toes over the top step, twisted awkwardly to grab a hold of the banister, then sidled down the stairs one careful step at a time.
When she reached the main floor she smelled paraffin. Under the rim of the blindfold she spied candlelight and was drawn to it like a moth. Melted wax spilled on Trinket’s toes as she accidentally tipped a votive candle with her foot. It’s nearly impossible to get wax off of an old hardwood floor, Trinket thought as she mashed the hot wax into the floorboards with bare feet: a present for the new owners. She traced the room and found dozens more candles along the baseboard. She left them upright, knowing Zoya probably laid them out to keep her from walking into walls.
The living room used to be an obstacle course of overflowing bookshelves, armchairs crowded with throw pillows, and a jungle of houseplants in the bay window. Once, during a similar game, Trinket zipped herself into a duvet cover and burrowed into their nest of a sofa. Zoya had stormed the house searching for her. Hide-and-seek was their favourite foreplay game. With all her hiding places gone, Trinket wandered in blind circles from the living room to the kitchen, the den, and back again.
She made a desperate attempt to tuck herself under the kitchen sink, but the drainpipe refused to move over to let her in.
She stood at the back door for a while, wrestling the doorknob with her rope-bound hands. Finally the door cracked open and June night air rushed in, making her shiver. Trinket imagined evening dew against her skin. She figured it was all right to be outside naked and blindfolded, since they wouldn’t be sticking around to face the neighbour’s reaction in the morning. She stepped through the door onto the prickly straw doormat. A few more steps and she found grass beneath her feet.
Over the years, the Gambini back garden was dug up and re-sown with every manner of flora imaginable. Vegetables continued strong through the 1960s, although the first tenants allowed dozens of zucchini to overripen on the vine. Slugs dined on the basil and the mint. And not a single tomato was blanched and canned.
An assembly of sunflowers rang in the next decade, and the yard became a supper club for hungry sparrows and squirrels.
Those were crooner days, the early ’70s. Passersby might have heard Barry Manilow or Wayne Newton lyrics being sung in lullaby voices. If one were to have peeked over the garden fence, one would have seen women serenading each other, a record player propped in the open back window.
But there was no holding back “Skyrockets in flight, afternoon delight” on eight-track cassette. Soon enough the sunflowers petrified on their stocks, and the whole, poorly-tended lot was strangled by creeping morning glory, which, by chance, was the perfect weedy bed for a group Quaalude and make-out trip.
Bonfires burned for the better part of the ’80s. Marshmallows browned as impromptu direct-action groups were formed. Anti-poverty, anti-war, anti-Expo, anti-fur, anti-cruise-missile-testing, and anti-industrial protest signs were constructed in the basement. After the sit-ins and marches were finished the same signs were burned in the fire pit to destroy the evidence.
Anne Goldstein, anti-violence activist, feminist collective founder, and tenant from 1981 to 1985, named the house the Fire Brigade after the 1982 anti-porn firebombings of three local Red Hot Video stores.
The next tenants kept the house name but built a skateboard half-pipe over the fire pit. The tenants after that flooded the yard and started a lesbian mud-wrestling federation—Team Fire Brigade held the title of tag-team champions for two consecutive summers.
In the millennium, the house was rechristened the Crotch Fire Brigade, which would have had the ’80s second-wave feminists cringing with disgust. The polyamorous, pomosexual renters transformed the yard into an underground, vintage porn-viewing gallery. Bed sheets were tacked to the house and cast with grainy black-and-white nudes. The projector sat on a dumpstered card table that often collapsed, throwing the lurid images into the night sky. This never really bothered the audience; they kept themselves busy inside their sleeping bags while the projectionist fussed with table legs and reels of film. It was the first time in thirty years old Guido Gambini had to give his tenants a noise complaint warning.
In August 2004, Trinket Campbell bought a wheelbarrow’s worth of sod and introduced the back garden to something completely different: grass. Each day, for weeks, she stood outside with the garden hose and watered the grass to root. Not much later, Zoya Feiz would tell stories about how she fell in love with the impish girl with muddy bare feet and a soaking wet sundress standing in her own backyard.
Trinket’s feet pressed into the damp earth. Outside there weren’t any walls to stub her toes on. She imagined grass tickling her back, mud on her knees; she wanted to get her hands dirty.
More than this she wanted to experience whatever Zoya had in store for her, and she appreciated that Zoya wouldn’t want her best corset, her stiletto boots, and other fetish finery ruined in the dirt. “Where can I hide?” she asked herself, turning back toward the house. A warm glow caught her attention, and although she couldn’t see exactly where the light was, after stumbling several steps toward it she guessed it was coming from the basement window. Had Zoya set up a play scene in the basement? “For the love of fuck,” Trinket said to herself. The basement creeped her out more than the attic could ever hope to.
Her fear was largely Zoya’s fault—whenever something needed to be done down there Zoya would chime in with tales of spiders and bats and loose murderers hiding under the stairs.
Trinket gave over easily to the power of suggestion; sometimes she would actually hear noises. Batwings? The sharpening of a blade?
Even before Trinket moved in she had heard stories about the basement at the Fire Brigade. The rumour most frequently churned around the gossip mill was that an old widower had killed his wife, thrown her down the stairs during a lovers’ quarrel. There were reddish stains on the concrete floor that never washed off, as if to prove it. When Trinket met Guido—the gentle-faced man wringing his meaty hands as he collected the rent—she discarded those horror stories as pure fiction.
Many a story was told about the Fire Brigade; who knew anymore what was true and what was lesbian dramatization? The house had a reputation. Every queer woman in the city seemed to have a fond memory of it. According to Trinket’s rough count, at least eighty-six people had had sex in their bathroom.
There used to be at least a dozen legendary queer houses in the neighbourhood. These veteran rentals were the sight of many a whiskey-and-poker game and spin-the-bottle party. They housed burlesque troupe rehearsals and taiko drum practises and knitting circles. They served as art studios and grassroots soup kitchens and queer dungeons. Most were owned by Italian or Greek, sometimes by Chinese landlords, who had left East Van for the suburbs and paid little attention to what happened on or around their rental properties.
But when real estate rose so high that even a dilapidated wartime bungalow was worth more than half a million, these landlords paid attention. One by one the houses wound up with for-sale signs spiked into their overgrown front yards. These signs may as have well been tombstones; they marked the death of another queer sanctuary. The tenants were forced to split up and move further east, or north, or wherever rent was cheap. Queer neighbourhoods disbanded.
“This is what we’re going to do, Mommy,” Trinket had told Zoya when they received their eviction notice. “We’re going to fucking chain ourselves to the front porch. Us and all our friends, and all our friends’ friends, and,
hell, we’ll invite any homo with a length of chain who wants to stand up to the yuppies that keep buying up East Van.”
But their last night had arrived without a gathering of protesters. Trinket grew sad just thinking about the new owners who would arrive the next morning, probably armed with colour swatches and nonfat macchiatos in hand. She leaned up against the outside wall, not caring about the rough glass stucco against her bare skin. “Fuck it,” she said after a moment of feeling sorry for herself, “I’m going down to the fucking basement.”
The basement door creaked predictably as Trinket pushed it open. The first step groaned under her foot. And her fingers brushed against something sticky and delicate—probably a cobweb— as she searched for the railing. Light came flickering in from under the rim of the blindfold, filling the room with enough warmth to give Trinket courage. Her plan was simple: curl up as small as she could get underneath the last step and wait to be found. It was a good hiding spot, one that Zoya wouldn’t expect her to choose willingly. But before she reached the bottom of the stairs she heard footsteps coming quickly down behind her.
“Not fair. That couldn’t have been ten minutes,” Trinket whined. Zoya responded by slamming the basement door, and Trinket understood perfectly that Zoya wasn’t playing by anyone’s rules but her own. The door screeched open and slammed a second time, then opened again. “You’ve got me good and scared, Mommy,” Trinket said, backing away from the staircase. Something scraped along the stairwell. Maybe Zoya’s fingernails, or maybe something sharper? The sound instantly unnerved Trinket. “Really scared,” she confirmed. The warm, candle-lit atmosphere shifted to heavy darkness. The sound came again from the other side of the basement. And again a few feet from where Trinket stood. “What’s that you’ve got for me, Mommy?”
Zoya didn’t answer. The cruel echo of metallic scrapes and heavy shuffles continued; the sound seemed to literally bounce from one end of the room to the next. Trinket had seen Zoya move fast before, even in heels, but there in the darkened basement she had Trinket spinning in blind circles. A couple of times the noises got so close that Trinket let out a high, uncensored scream, punctuating the long, silent gaps when Trinket could hear only the sound of her own frantic panting. She grew desperate for one of Zoya’s orders: kneel, beg, swallow … anything but unidentifiable scraping. Several agonizing minutes of this had Trinket crying. Her tears soaked into the blindfold, and the small sliver of sight under the edge of the blindfold blurred.
Trinket bit her lip to keep her from using her safe word.
Gradually the scraping turned into loud rattling, like a chandelier or a stack of wine glasses being shaken. “What the hell is that?” Trinket shouted, her voice stripped of any cuteness. She dropped to a squat and frantically tried to pry the blindfold off with her knees. This is when Zoya made her move.
A feather-soft touch grazed Trinket just behind her left ear. Fingers tangled in her hair and yanked her down toward the concrete floor. Her bound ankles were raised high, forcing Trinket onto her back and lifting her ass several inches off the floor. This time Trinket kicked and struggled, but her ankle bondage barely moved. It was as if she’d been strung up—but from what? Zoya must have installed some strong hook in the basement ceiling beams without her knowing. Trinket gave up the struggle. Legs dangling, arms trapped behind her back, she was more helpless than an upside-down crab.
Something slid inside her so deeply her leg muscles spasmed. No warmup strokes or licks, just sharp and immediate penetration. An icy current shot through Trinket’s body. For a brief moment, she tried to grasp what was fucking her: magnetic dildo, electric-pulse vibrator, trickling garden hose? Whatever it was, it took her completely. Before long her guessing gave way to mindless sensation. Her skin tingled with goose bumps and went numb. Her muscles relaxed. She could hardly utter the word “yes.” Her own moaning felt as if it was being ripped out of her mouth; a moment later she was mute. Hallucinations crept in behind the blindfold: strange eyes peering back at her, strange hands reaching out. Then darkness. Pussy juice dripped down her ass crack, oddly chilly, but oozing nonetheless down to the floor where a slippery pool formed beneath her. Zoya was fucking her cold and stupid. It was the only thing Trinket knew or felt—that something unknown and all-consuming was moving in and out of her. More and more of the tangible world slid away with each thrust.
Despite the fact that the Gambinis had very little family in Vancouver, Guido gave Biba a proper Southern Italian funeral.
Teary-eyed, he folded one of her Sunday dresses, tucked it into his jacket next to his heart, and took it to Woodward’s, where a sympathetic sales girl helped him pick out a burial outfit. The chosen blouse was printed with pink tea roses, though Biba never wore pink. “I bet she’d like this one,” the sales girl assured Guido as she led him to the cash register.
Guido ordered too much food from the delicatessen and crowded the table with their best ceramics and silverware. He could have filled a mixing bowl with the olives alone. Calla lily and chrysanthemum wreaths blanketed every available flat surface in the house. All the clocks were stopped at the time of Biba’s death. The open casket was laid in the living room, beside which Guido stood for hours as his neighbours arrived to pay their respects. The wives kissed Guido’s cheeks. The husbands shook their heads and stared at the floor. By mid-day Biba’s coffin was filled with chocolates, candles and matches, rosewater, tiny bottles of lemon liqueurs, and other comfort items for the soul.
The Giampolo girl from across the street, not really a girl anymore but still living with her parents, brought a sugar-soaked fig wrapped in real lace. Guido watched, flabbergasted, as the girl eased the fig into Biba’s lifeless hand then rushed away without so much as a consoling handshake.
At dusk she reappeared in Guido’s living room and shuffled up to him holding a wicker crate in her arms. Guido took his hands out of his trouser pockets, ready to accept what he thought was a care package sent by the girl’s elderly parents. He’d heard that the Giampolos made the best lemon ricotta cookies around. But the girl surprised him by saying, “I hope you don’t mind, I’ve collected just a little of Biba’s canning. Only tomatoes and pears, nothing special. The tuna in oil I wouldn’t dream of touching, unless you yourself didn’t want it. As you know, I spent a lot of time helping Biba in the garden.”
Guido didn’t know. He’d barely exchanged greetings with the young woman standing before him. The only reason he remembered her name was because she was named after the island of Capri—a place Guido had said he would one day take Biba for the honeymoon they never got to have as newlyweds. In fact, it was money from the Capri holiday savings fund that largely paid for Biba’s funeral. The girl was a blight based on her name alone. And who gave her permission to sneak down to the basement? Her cheeks were heavily stained in salt from tears. Has she never heard of a handkerchief? Guido wondered. Why should she cry? Am I crying?—No. So although the girl’s shoulders were hunched in a way that told Guido she was carrying more than just a few jars, Guido’s gut told him not to get into conversation with her as he was about to wrap up his wife’s wake. He threw his hands up at her. “Che me ne fotto?” he said. “What do I care?”
As her internal clock counted down the minutes, Zoya itemized the contents of her briefcase: scissors, self-warming lubricant, extra rope, a large vinyl hand-held dildo shaped like a police baton, and a flannel drop sheet.
The flannel was plagued by stains of every imaginable fluid: bodily, edible, and otherwise. Recently, Trinket had taken up using the spotted sheet as a security blanket and dragged it around the house like a toddler. Zoya couldn’t help but be annoyed that Trinket developed this filthy, shameful habit all on her on her own. What next—she’d start licking her own boots? This is this flannel’s last night, Zoya decided. It would be left by the front door as a welcome mat for the new owners, right after she ordered Trinket to pee on it. She wanted to do worse. Maybe in her younger years she’d have kicked a couple of holes in the drywa
ll or spray-painted obscenities on the floor. Instead she found her-self casting the evil eye on the blanket. A swift moment later she asked that the curse be undone—better not to mess with fate. A moment after that she scolded herself for her unwanted superstitions. Restless, she slung the dildo baton over her shoulder and started toward the main floor. If she crept quietly, perhaps she’d catch Trinket floundering in an empty closet.
She heard moaning before she reached the living room and pictured Trinket bent like a bow so that she could pleasure herself with her tied hands. “She better not be …” Zoya growled.
Sure enough, as she made her way to the basement door, there was Trinket with her legs in the air at the bottom of the stairs.
“Get up,” she barked. Trinket didn’t move. Zoya dropped the flannel sheet and bundle of sex toys to the floor; a gesture that indicated she was not playing. “You’ll be sorry if I have to come down there.” Zoya waited no more than ten seconds, then flicked on the dingy basement light and started down the stairs.
Her temper turned to worry with each descending step. Midway down the basement stairs she stopped short. Trinket wasn’t loose from the bondage. She wasn’t circling her clit with her bratty fingers. Her moaning was off. Listening closer, Trinket was gagging; foamy drool leaked out of the left corner of her mouth. Her arms were pinned under her and her slender neck was twisted like an arbutus branch.
Zoya—who practically insisted on being well-grounded and in control of any situation—froze mid-stairs wondering what to do. The move has made her crazy. Crap, I really liked having a sane girlfriend. She tried to remember what to do when someone loses their mind. Speak in a slow calm voice? Splash their face with water? Restrain them— “Trinket,” Zoya said with unwanted panic in her voice.
“Trinket, I’m going to come, slowly, down the stairs, now. Here I come.” Zoya narrated her careful journey, desperately hoping to catch Trinket’s attention. Trinket made no motion of recognition. With each step closer Zoya noticed something strange.
