The Third Person

by Emily Anglin

  The roof was covered in grass, dark, soft, and wet-looking, so that I felt almost like I was stepping into water. Overhead, coloured lights were strung in rows about a foot above head-height. Flimsy tables were set up under the lights and littered with bottles and empty glasses. Women swayed on high heels that sunk into the turf under the weight of draped beads, long wigs, and furs, haphazard costumes thoughtlessly assembled but still disconcerting.

  A group of people in leather motorcycle jackets encircled a woman. She stood on a tabletop, her body wrapped in black-and-white fabric, a cat mask covering the top half of her face. She was swaying almost imperceptibly, I thought. Maybe she was about to sing. The men appeared to be awaiting entertainment.

  “She’s the goddess of the condo,” said Frank.

  Two arms appeared on either side of Frank’s face and locked his neck in a chokehold. A man’s blond head poked around Frank’s, laughing, and he threw Frank down onto the grass. The blond man was dressed in a wrestling outfit. Frank drunkenly flailed his legs, wrapping them around the wrestler, but he was pinned. They stopped fighting, and just lay there, looking like they thought they should laugh but didn’t have the energy.

  Not knowing what else to do, I joined the biker people around the table and watched the swaying woman. As I watched her from under the lights against the black sky, I started to wonder if she was even moving—if I was seeing her shift and flicker from side to side, or whether the light reflected by the shiny fabric she was wrapped in was playing tricks on my eyes. Yet she appeared to move. The black of the fabric and her mask blocked out a negative space in the sky with no stars, the triangles of the mask’s ears like distant, silhouetted mountains. I became aware of music, a high sound, reedy and booming. The dappling of the coloured balls of light in green, blue, orange, and red swayed as the string of light was blown. Then, it stopped: I could only hear the voices around me, the clinking of glasses and the broad, diffuse sound of the wind. Sensing that her performance had ended, the people around the table started wandering away.

  The woman stepped off the table. She extended her hand to me and smiled under her mask. “Welcome,” she said. “You’re new here. I’ll show you around.”

  Wordlessly, she walked me back through the ballroom, and into the corridor, where she glided to the elevator and pressed the Down button. In the elevator, I started to say something, small talk, but she was peering through the glass toward the lake. “Just a minute,” she said, putting up one forefinger to pause me.

  When we got outside, she ran ahead of me toward the firepit. She looked back at me. “Thank god,” she said. “It’s still here.” She leaned down and parted the reeds away from the boat.

  “I was planning on going out on the water tonight, and I hate going alone. You could come.”

  “Sure,” I said. The prospect was irresistible. Truth be told, I hadn’t left the condo in a few weeks, and I’d always wanted to go out on the lake, to look back at my new home from a distance, to see the lights at night. I didn’t understand who exactly this woman was, but I couldn’t say no.

  She pushed the boat half into the water and I got in the front, sitting with my knees on the floor. She slid the boat the rest of the way in and stepped in, settling herself on the rear seat. The low churn of the oars in the water launched us and we were slipping out onto the lake.

  The wind was cold lifting off of the black lake and I couldn’t see much ahead of me in the dark.

  “How long have you lived here?” I asked.

  “I’ve always lived in Shoreline Terrace. My mom raised me here—you might have heard of her, she was a famous painter. She died when I was sixteen, and I never left. They call me the condo goddess because no one here can remember a time without me.”

  “Where are we heading?” I asked. But I knew. We were quickly approaching the little island at the tip of the point.

  We slid up onto the sandy beach of the island and got out of the boat. The island was tiny. We sat on the edge of the island’s shore and looked back at Shoreline Terrace. It was dwarfed by the city lights behind and around the building, and the cluster of other condo buildings around and behind it. The whole city looked like a massive, distant ship docked for the night, the lights the ship’s windows, with Anya visible in none of them.

  Acknowledgements

  Thank you to those who read early drafts of these stories: Malcolm Sutton, Ellie Anglin, and Matthew Strohack.

  And thank you to those who helped me to shape the ideas in these stories through their support and conversation: Michelle Andrus, Cara Fabre, Phill Pilon, Robyn Hartley, Kamil Rzymkowski, Meagan Snyder, Paul Barrett, Marcia Morse, Fiona Foster, Lisa Rumiel, Janet Friskney, Sarah Whitaker, Ann, Al, Dan, Caro, and Andrea. And thank you to my teachers: Jacqui Smyth, Mary di Michele, Mikhail Iossel, and Elizabeth Hanson.

  Unending thanks to Margaret Anglin for her constant support and for all the quilts. And to Jerry Anglin, for being who he is and for sharing his love of Nine Stories.

  And finally, thanks to Jay MillAr and Hazel Millar for all the tireless and inspired work they do, to Malcolm Sutton for being an exceptional reader and editor, and to Stuart Ross for his excellent copy-editing work.

  Colophon

  Distributed in Canada by the Literary Press Group:

  www.lpg.ca

  Distributed in the United States by Small Press Distribution:

  www.spdbooks.org

  Shop online at www.bookthug.ca

  Designed by Malcolm Sutton

  Edited for the press by Malcolm Sutton

  Copy-edited by Stuart Ross