by Kat Cameron
On the sixth floor, Rob lingered by the elevators in case the guard decided to follow them. Harry and K’lyn walked past a line of doors to the end of the hall. At the door to the Cutting
Edge office, Harry inserted the key and slowly twisted it in the lock. It stuck.
“Hurry the fuck up,” whispered K’lyn.
He twisted the key harder. The key bent. Harry let go. “Shit. I think I’ve broken it.”
“Ahh, get the fuck out of the way.” Pushing her way past his bulk, K’lyn jiggled the key back and forth, muttering “Damn it, damn it” under her breath. She twisted too vigorously, and the key snapped in her hand. “Christ! What the fuck did you do to it, Harry?”
“I just turned it.”
Rob came down the hall. “Aren’t you guys in yet? The guard will be checking on us any minute. How hard is it to open a door?”
“Harry broke the key.”
Harry started to protest, and then realized this wouldn’t help him in K’lyn’s eyes. Instead, he held up his hands, palms outstretched in apology.
“Great, just great,” said Rob. “It cost me five bucks to copy that damned key.”
The elevator pinged its arrival.
“The guard’s coming.” Harry looked frantically down the long bare hall. No place to hide. He saw them, like rats in a maze, going endlessly round and round the corridors, the guard always one step behind. He started wheezing with anxiety.
Rob pounded the door in frustration. It swung open. They spilled into the room.
Long tubes of fluorescent lighting flickered slowly to life. Partitions divided the room into three sections. Rob led them to the back corner where Cutting Edge had its office. Bookcases lined two walls, sagging under the weight of past issues. Brown eight-by-eleven envelopes were stacked around the edges of the computer monitor, obscuring the printer.
“Christ, do they ever answer their mail?” K’lyn shuffled through a stack, pulled out an envelope at random and opened it. “Look at this cover letter. May 2005. That’s over a year ago and they haven’t even opened it.”
“Look at their computer,” Harry said in awe. “A heavily modded, fully loaded Dell XPS 700 in fire-engine red. That’s a three-thousand-dollar machine. And they have a multifunction HP LaserJet 4345. And a flat screen.”
K’lyn nodded sagely. “Canada Council grants. Someone must be a gamer.”
“What if we take some old issues and sell them?” Harry wondered. “They wouldn’t miss them.”
“Don’t be so stupid,” K’lyn laughed. “Old issues won’t sell.”
“We said we’re taking the submissions.” Rob took charge. “Let’s take them all. Then we’ll leave ours and a few of the really crappy ones. They’ll have to publish our stuff.”
“Awesome idea.” K’lyn beamed on Rob, like a teacher with a prize pupil. Harry sulked.
They stuffed envelopes into K’lyn’s Guatemalan book bag. Harry dug a plastic Safeway bag out of the garbage for the remainder.
“What if the writers ask about their stuff?” he asked.
“We’ll have to send them rejection letters. Hack into the computer and find the form.”
While he was searching, K’lyn and Rob read over some of the submissions.
“Listen to this,” K’lyn giggled. “Dear Sir, I am sending you some of my immortal prose. I have been writing for several years now, but just began sending it out this year. We’re definitely leaving this one in. How not to write a submission letter.”
“Here’s the form.” Harry looked over to where K’lyn and Rob sat on a tweedy orange couch. The sleeve of K’lyn’s filmy red blouse brushed against Rob’s arm. Both of them turned their heads at the same angle. Synchronization. Harry had watched a nature show on the mating habits of birds, how they mimicked each other’s moves. Here it was, right under his nose.
“Just print up some copies. We’ll fill in the names later.”
“How many?”
“Christ, Harry, make a decision on your own for once.” K’lyn stroked Rob’s arm. “Here’s another great one. Love / a busy bee / sipping nectar from my heart. That’s gotta hurt.”
As the final copies of the letter spat out of the printer, Harry thought of something else. “What about the key in the door? If the envelopes are missing, they’ll ask questions.”
“Damn. And the guard will remember us. A redhead, a guy in a Che Guevara T-shirt, and a fat man with a violin. Sounds like a fucking joke.” K’lyn looked to Rob for answers. “What do you think we should do?”
“We’ll sort these at the Red Dog tonight,” Rob said. “I’ll bring the rejects in tomorrow morning. They won’t be meeting on the weekend. As long as the guard doesn’t notice the door is broken, we’ll be fine.”
“I can’t go. I have the gig.” His visions of the way the evening would play out had evaporated. The signs were clear. Thin anarchist trumps fat musician.
He pulled open several drawers, looking for envelopes. In the top left-hand drawer was an envelope with the words “Float” written on it. Harry gave it a surreptitious shake. Coins jingled.
Checking over his shoulder, Harry saw that K’lyn and Rob had moved to the next step of the mating dance. He casually slid his hand into the float, extracted some loonies.
“Hey, can you guys give me a ride to the A&W?” He’d feast on a double burger combo before the gig, courtesy of Cutting Edge. If he was sending their rejection letters, the least they could do was buy him a burger.
A year later, Cutting Edge printed five of K’lyn’s poems and Rob’s story and sent them each two contributors’ copies. Harry’s lyrics came back with a polite rejection letter.
Truth or Fiction
HER WORDS CAME TRUE. AT first, Ruth thought it was coincidence. She wrote a story about an unexpected inheritance. A week later her uncle died, leaving her a thousand dollars in his will. Her character had won the money in a lottery, but wasn’t death a lottery, equally fickle?
Ruth created a teenager, Ann, who wore too much eyeliner, dyed her hair blood-red, and collapsed on her seventeenth birthday from an overdose of Ecstasy on Electric Avenue in downtown Calgary. The next day, The Herald splashed pictures of Anne-Marie, her jagged red hair shocking against white bandages, being wheeled away from a nightclub. The headline read: Drugs Bring Down the Birthday Girl.
It was a close call. Anne-Marie survived, but Ruth was shaken. No more drugs, she told herself. No more death. Write happiness.
A week later, as she did on the first Sunday of every month, Ruth wrote a mystery for a women’s magazine. It helped pay the bills. This time she wove a light plot revolving around a christening and a family secret. Birth equals happiness. Then she went to a christening for her cousin’s infant son.
Over slices of cake with soft blue frosting, Ruth’s second cousin and his wife erupted into a shouting match over the wife’s infertility.
“If you hadn’t had those two abortions in your twenties, we’d be pregnant.”
“It’s because you’re shooting blanks. I never had this problem before.”
She switched to the quirky, a waif named Toni who worked in a bookstore and wrote poetry. Ruth envied Toni’s nose ring, clunky intellectual glasses, and bravado. She wanted to remake herself as Rue with a diamond stud, red hair, and boxy combat pants. But every winter she caught nasty colds, three weeks of inflamed sinuses and tissues heaping the garbage pail colds. Her hair dyed a muddy brown, never the Hawaiian sunset or burnt sienna the box promised. Combat pants made her feel fat. Toni faded into a wisp, blew away.
She started a postcard story about an older woman, a cheating boyfriend, settled on hair as a revenge motif, had Debbie (a 1980s name) stop by Tom’s place with a bottle of Chivas Regal and a six-pack. When Tom passed out, Debbie took out some shears, snipped off his dirty-blond ponytail, collected a trophy. At a girls’ night, Debbie pulled out the hair, laminated in a square of plastic, and drunkenly giggled, “That’s not the only thing that was three inches.”
Two days later, a local woman did a Lorena Bobbitt on her cheating boyfriend. His penis was three inches.
There was nothing Ruth could write about. She sat in her room, staring at her computer screen. Every word came laden with pain.
She went to a reading to see how other writers moved beyond this impasse. In a claustrophobic bar with black walls, she listened to fables about gangs of headhunters, about vampires in the flesh-pits of Bangkok, about haunted houses absorbing lonely seniors. A few smudged columns of type in any newspaper would reveal atrocities as unreal, love stories as strange, dreams as unlikely. Fact and fantasy blended together, a potent brew of “this is” followed by a “what if” chaser. She had dreamed it; therefore, it would come to pass.
She walked up to the stage, her hennaed hair gleaming, and took the microphone from the vampire writer, a faded woman whose hands were laden with clunky silver rings.
“Her words came true,” Rue read. “The world swirls in possibilities that form as we articulate them. Writers legislate the universe. Words kill.” She’d envisioned applause, but there was silence.
Rue whispered to the vampire woman, “Keep dreaming. The demon lover will appear. But then he will rip out your heart. Consider the consequences.”
On her way home, she bought a pair of combat pants. No diamond stud. Variations are always possible.
The Heart Is a Red Apple
WHILE WAITING FOR HIM TO arrive, I eavesdrop on a conversation at the next table.
A thin girl in black, with cropped platinum hair and a diamond nose stud, complains to her green-eyed friend. “So I called my mom and told her. She was like, ‘Do you want me to come up and beat him up? Because I will.’ I said no. Then she asked if she should call me back, so I don’t have a huge phone bill. And I said, ‘I won’t be here when it arrives.’”
“I can’t believe you caught him,” says the other woman. Multiple braids the colour of dried blood snake down her back.
“What I can’t stand is the emails. He just left them there for me to see. He didn’t even care that much. The whole thing seems so unreal to me, somehow. What was I thinking? Why did I let him treat me like that?”
The girls get up to leave just as he is coming in. He checks them out as they walk by, that not-too-subtle flicker of the eyes. The girls swivel past him, hipbones aggressively jutting from their low-cut jeans, bright orange thongs on display. I notice these things: the way the teenage cashier at the grocery store brightens in his presence; the way a server lingers, chatting, after he has paid the bill. I say nothing, but I do notice.
He puts his latte between us and says, “Tell me a story.” Our daily ritual. I woo him with words. Wondering how I will hold him when that waif could not hold her lover, I weave a story of a bridge, of the links that bind separate sides into one.
The wooden bridge was once lined with railway trestles, a transportation link between north and south banks, ferrying lumber, coal, and food supplies. The iron rails were ripped up years ago, replaced with wooden boards. The bridge joins the two sides of the town, like the aorta of the heart, pumping life across the dark river.
On a windy spring day of freezing rain, two women walk the treacherous sidewalks. Rowan’s hair swirls in long red tendrils around her aquamarine eyes. Her long cloak is the pale green of new grass. Men cross the street to avoid her shadow.
Dinar has platinum hair, cropped close as a boy’s, and silver hoops chaining her ears. Above a black sweater and jeans, her face is pinched and white.
“My life is bleeding away,” Dinar gasps. Under the skin of her wrist, a pulse jumps.
“Let him go, love,” Rowan replies. “In his eyes, there is cruelty, in the thin line of his mouth. I have seen it.”
“Can you tell the heart which path it should choose?”
“Come, it’s cold. We must get home.”
By evening the rain turns to sleet. The wind lashes the frozen branches of the trees in a frenzy. Dinar leans against the walls of their tower, staring out into the whirlwind.
“I see him in the glass,” she cries, “embedded in my eyes. When I look out, he reflects back. He smiles and his fangs flash yellow light.”
“Sleep. In the morning, you will feel better.”
But in the morning, Dinar lies drained, her skin whiter than porcelain. “I dreamed of him. His voice dripped knives. He is in my veins and I cannot heal.”
Rowan goes into the kitchen and finds a sharp paring knife. Wrapping herself in her cloak, her bright hair muffled by a scarf, she walks out into the storm.
When she knocks at his apartment, he is alone. He comes to the door, wearing jeans but no shirt. Plunging the knife into his chest, she parts lines of flesh and bone, cuts out his heart, takes it in her hand, a red apple.
Peering out into the storm, he asks, “Is anyone there?” Not noticing the drops of blood staining the threshold. Not noticing the empty space within his chest. He goes back inside, closing the door behind him.
Rowan walks home, blood from the dripping heart marking her trail. In the apartment, Dinar lies in bed, her chest barely rising and falling with each shallow breath.
“I have brought you his heart. Eat it and be well.”
Dinar sits up. Clutching the heart in her white hand, so that red drops ooze between her fingers, she marvels, “It is so small.”
“He didn’t even notice it was gone.”
“It is so cold.”
“No colder than his eyes.”
“It smells of rust and decay.” She pushes back the sheet and stands up. “We will throw it in the river. His heart is worthless.”
The wind blows from the south, smelling of warm earth and grass. Water flows down the sides of buildings in rivulets, the walls wavering and twisting in the pale light.
“Look,” Rowan says. “There are green spears of daffodils in that sheltered corner.”
The wooden bridge spans the river. Crossing to the centre, they throw the heart over the railing. Two women walk home hand in hand, the spring wind warm upon their faces.
“Is that a threat?” he asks. “Are you telling me what will happen if I stop showing up for coffee every day, if I stop listening to your stories?”
“A warning,” I say. “My lover’s eyes are sharp, and her knives are sharper. The heart is a valuable gift. One day I may ask her for yours.”
He does not believe me. Men seldom do when you speak the truth. That is why I tell them stories.
Zoonis County
AROUND THE PERIMETER OF THE back yard, the maples droop. Dangling her legs over the edge of the peeling deck, Sara feels the uncut grass prickle against her shins. Voices float over her head. Evening mist. The taste of watermelon, slippery pits in her mouth mixed with rum. The heat pressing her down. A damp heat, so unlike dry prairie summers, sitting around the firepit in the evening with her cousins under a midsummer sky.
They’re sharing first-time stories: first kiss, first time you had sex, first time you caught your parents having sex. Kelly, who is in her forties, talks about finding condoms in her son’s dresser drawer.
She’s been thinking about this story for twelve years. That summer she was seventeen, the year before university, the last year her cousins lived in Edmonton.
On Saturday night after a shift at the bookstore, Sara rode her bike across the High Level Bridge to Zoonis County, a tiny decaying bungalow with concrete steps listing to one side. In the living room, a black-and-red-checked sleeping bag covered the futon, and posters of The Who and Deep Purple were thumbtacked to the walls. Messages in black marker were scrawled above the phone.
Sara sat down on the floor next to Jesse, wavy brown hair to his shoulders and bright blue eyes. He smiled lazily at her and passed the joint.
“Have you read The Tibetan Book of the Dead?” he asked. “The Tibetans believe that the soul doesn’t leave the body for four days. So a guru stays with the body, prays over it, helps the soul leave.” His voice was husky, confiding, so quiet that she had
to lean in to hear him. Every word a secret. “The soul has to leave through the forehead. Like a camera shutter opening and closing.”
Sara wanted to say something clever, but as so often with Jesse she just felt young and stupid. She couldn’t tell him about what she was reading at school, Animal Farm and Macbeth. When he talked about Jackson Pollock and Henry Moore, she had to wait until she could go home and look up the names in an encyclopedia. So she just smiled and listened.
Jesse was six years older than her. He’d finished two years at the Ontario College of Art before dropping out and backpacking around southeast Asia: Thailand, Cambodia, Malaysia, Indonesia. A framed batik image of an Indonesian shadow puppet hung in his room in the basement: a crimson figure, hands held up in blessing, fingers touching thumbs.
At a midnight showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Jesse started the crowd doing the time warp in line. They jumped to the left. They danced down 109th street into the Garneau Theatre. Inside, they’d thrown toast at the screen, held newspapers over their head when it rained, shouted “Boring” at the professor, screamed approval for the Rockys in gold lamé underwear and Magentas in busty black corsets in the costume show.
Jesse, Andrew, and Lynn had made the trip out west two years earlier in a rusty Dodge van and Jesse’s ’71 emerald Camaro. Jesse and Andrew worked in construction, along with Pete, Lynn’s boyfriend. Lynn worked in a daycare. They’d come to Edmonton from Toronto in the boom years. The boom was over, but they were still here.
Time jerked forward in flipped records, beer bottles raised and lowered. The joint passed around the circle. No one talked except Pete, who was ranting about philosophy.
Sara looked over at Lynn, passed out on the floor. Lynn had low blood pressure and would frequently collapse during parties after her third or fourth beer. The first time it happened, Sara panicked, not sure if she should call an ambulance. But everyone else ignored Lynn, and Pete simply shifted her body so her head was resting on a cushion. Pete was a large man with a full brown beard. His voice grew louder and louder the more he drank, unlike Andrew who succumbed to silence, so that Pete would end the evening lecturing while Andrew slumped against the wall and Jesse smiled ironically, saying nothing.
