Hello It’s Me

Hello It’s Me – Todd Rundgren (listen in new tab)

The old clock radio crackles alive, doing its best to make its low, muffled and dispersed noise, drawing in the weak, aging oscillations of the AM band.

It’s a familiar and lonely sound. Like visits to old age homes; music sitting almost quiet, almost in stillness. Songs we all know the words to, but would never ask to hear. Like memories we wish we could shoot into space, but instead they just bounce around the stratosphere of our brains.

Maura’s mouth is pasty, dry. Her nose is crusted, smells faintly of vomit. Her stomach is scratched bare, suddenly cavernous and empty. She puts a hand to her forehead, finding that her arm is surprisingly weak and that her forehead throbs ungratefully when she touches it.

The world is blurry. She fumbles for her glasses, finding them with relief in one of their three usual spots. She looks at the dusty, browned garage sale clock radio, slapping uselessly at it to turn it off. The button appears to be jammed. “Stupid thing.” She regrets the one dollar she’d paid for it.

It’s 8:30, Saturday. The drapes are closed. A crack of sun sneaks in, making a line across the floor. Over the bed and her almost naked body, before disappearing in shadows. She must have slept over the covers.

She tries not to smell her own breath. The taste of stale rye and sick mix uncomfortably. She wonders what she had been thinking. Maybe she hoped she’d wake up with more resolve, a sense of strength. But, really she just wanted to sleep. She wanted to sleep so soundly and securely, so surely cupped in the cold hands of dreamlessness.

But her dreams were warm with hurt and too familiar. Three days since she realized Edmund was in Toronto. Two restless nights during which she tortured herself and twisted the knife further for doing this to herself. The third night she flattened herself with whiskey.

Brae watched her get drunk, offered her consolation. But Maura couldn’t tell her everything. She wanted to. But the words still choked in her throat and cruelly pooled in her mind at night.

And like the last two nights, she dreamt (Are they dreams if they happened?) about a pacific island.

She was fresh out of school, then. The O’Baird family was a legacy of seafarers and travelers that fueled her blood. She wanted an adventure.

At 22, she signed on with a company that worked with indigenous peoples in those places the multinational companies caress with their wet mouths and sharp claws. She was sent to some far flung island to help people fight forced relocation by oil companies.

Exotic locales, peoples in need, the endless battle of the righteous. It was eye-opening.

And then she fell in love. Mr. Edmund Gloucester walked up to her, unstrugglingly handsome in the tropical heat. But even then his eyes were clouds, behind which a hotter sun burned. They met in a bar on a beach, one of those shacks that leaned against the forest, your feet sinking into alabaster sand as you got drunk.

Two months on the island and she was swept away by him. One day after a few weeks, he stopped her on the road, made her come back to his hotel room and he confessed his heart. He worked for one of the oil concerns, Agravaine International, and he was risking his job by seeing her. She realized she was, too.

When she kissed him, pressing her body up against his, it didn’t matter. They were on fire for each other. They were in love. It was bigger than everything. It didn’t matter.

But, it did. Soon, she was spending less time on the job, less time paying attention to the white men and their translators sent by the oil men.

And then Edmund suggested they head to Sydney for a weekend. He had the time off and would foot the bill if she couldn’t afford it (she couldn’t, not on her pitiful martyrs salary). Her colleagues were off island to help coordinate a different project, and she hadn’t left the island in four months. She went. He proposed to her in the nicest restaurant she’d ever seen. The ring slid on with casual care. It fit snug with somnolescent weight.

Years later, she still isn’t sure that Edmund wasn’t in love with her. Maybe Agravaine played him, too. It’s irrelevant now, indistinguishable from the fact that while she was in Sydney (on a trip that was unblinkingly extended three days), the oil company undid all the work she and her colleagues had done.

When she got back. They were loading people on busses. Bull-dozers were standing ready. Some of the community elders stood their ground with their wives and children. They were unprepared to leave. As the buses rocked and rumbled away, these people stood, staring down tractors and armed men.

Maura stood helplessly with her colleagues, cordoned by angry company men with rifles. It looked like it would stay static and angry forever, but there was a scuffle and a young man from the village grabbed a gun and fired. The bullet bounced harmlessly off a bulldozer’s blade, disappearing in a puff of sand.

It was a cue. The men with guns fired back. Thus, their problem with the locals was solved. The village had been there for over a hundred years, maybe more. And it was gone in a little under an hour.

That night she went to see Edmund. He said he didn’t know anything about it. Maura’s mind was torn with rage. She couldn’t hear him, his eyes and his words didn’t match. She threw his ring at him hoping the diamond would gouge a hole through him. Instead, it bounced off his shirt, landing heavy and small on the floor.

Then she quit the aid agency and went to teach English in Taiwan and then Africa. The faces of the dead villagers followed her night and day and then stopped once they felt satisfied with the weight of her guilt. It took three years. The next week she moved back to Toronto.

In three days, Edmund had unraveled everything she tried to put back together.

She listens, prostrate in bed, to the song the radio offers. It is an old jukebox favourite of Edmund's. They slow danced to it once. She quickly puts that aside.

There is a familiar knock on her door. She knows it’s K.

Lua

Lua – Conor Oberst + Gillian Welsh [listen in new tab]

Claire is dreaming. She always dreams about things cobbled and chipped from the confusing, ossified flow of her past. Not like K, who has complicated messianic-conspiracy dreams, or G.T., who says lately he only dreams of airport washrooms he can’t escape.

This time, she’s eight or nine, sitting in the new seats of a summer night’s SkyDome. Claire had never been anywhere so big. There was nothing like it in Cobalt, up north. Her class had won an essay contest and the province paid for their trip and seats at the gluttonous Stadium’s grand opening.

No one on the rattling school bus believed Claire that it was her first trip ever to Toronto.

In her dream, she remembers walking around putting her hand on the concrete and limestone buildings. The city whirred and roared. People bumped her slender pre-adolescent frame around as she tried to look into all the windows. She fell in love with the city that June weekend and spent the rest of her adolescence trying to get back there.

And then she dreams about the Fisher King. The empty bar. It was late. K and Shannon were getting up to leave. G.T. leans back slackly, watches his friend and his new girl make an excuse to go home together. Claire and G.T. had argued all night. Their transcript rattles off pointless, sharp disagreements.

G.T.’s a good guy, despite how much he irritates her, and walks her home. She talks endlessly on the way about how she wants a stake in the city’s life, not just wage-slave her heart away. He listens politely, talks about how he hates the endless drag of the 9-to-5. Claire doesn’t remember what he did to make her pull him in and up to her apartment.

She wishes she could remember. She’d ask him to do it again. All the other time after that were about getting him to do whatever it was again.

When she wakes up she is happy to find herself in her bed, caught comfortably under the weight of the duvet. Through her closed eyes, she can tell the sun is up. Light bleeds through her eyelids, making slow congealing constellations.

Her legs move easily under the cover, and she realizes that Sbeckett didn’t sleep-in with her. She keeps her eyes closed. She wants to be in the dark for a little longer, but her other senses are awake – she smells waffles and hears the low wave of music from the kitchen.

She feels Sbeckett jump onto the mattress, moving with slow paws along the duvet, coming up to poke his flat, brown and grey face close to hers. She feels his small breaths on her cheek. After a moment she opens her eyes. The edges of the cat’s head are aurulent white in the sun.

Claire reaches out with her hand and rubs the cat’s forehead apologetically. “I know. I just woke up. You’ve been up forever, I bet.”

The door creaks. Sbeckett shrugs himself up on all four and jumps down from the mattress. She lifts her head up a little. G.T. leans against the door frame, wearing a white undershirt and yesterday’s rumpled slacks. His belt is undone. The hanging buckle reflects an unsteady shard of sun into her eyes.

“Are you hung-over, Claire?”

Claire rubs her temples lightly. “No. I’m fine. Are you making breakfast?”

“It’s the least I could do.”

“Gregory, how’s your eye?”

He touches the side of his face, tapping the edge of the tender purple bruise wrapped around his left eye. “Fine. Sore. Honestly, I can’t believe you were on a date with a guy who has hired goons.”

Claire: “Well, it’s not like I went home with him.”

G.T. knocks lightly on the door. “No. I suppose not.” Despite the bruise, the night’s drama has washed off him. “Anyways, if you’re hungry, I’ve made waffles.”

“Yeah. That sounds good.” She looks at her faded, digital alarm clock. “I gotta get to the café soon, anyways.”

“You know that if you had a straight job, you wouldn’t have to work on Saturdays.” He laughs a small laugh, shrugs himself off the doorframe and heads back towards the kitchen.

Claire slides out of bed. She’s naked and glows for a moment in the morning sun before she slides into her bathrobe and knots the terrycloth belt around her. Sbeckett reappears and mews plaintively. She reaches down, picks him up, holds his warm squirming body to her chest. “I know, I know. He feeds me, but never you. How will you survive?”

Last night was a fine enough mess. But, it doesn’t matter that G.T. ended up fighting her date, or that G.T. isn’t much of a fighter, or that Edmund’s friends stepped in. Dates go poorly sometimes. The dust settles.

K had gone to a store to get some ice, and G.T sat beside her on the curb explaining everything. At first she thought it was a drunken, jealous rage. But it wasn’t that or just that.

It boiled down to this: G.T. ran into a junior partner from Percy, Bors, and Galahad. He said that Edmund’s company was a big new client and that Edmund was buying up or trying to buy properties in some “hipster neighbourhood” to “turn them around.”

The partner listed a few streets as an example, his voice dripping with casual disdain. “Like Ithica St. Not much there but some oddball stores and a couple desperate coffee shops. Have you ever been to Ulysses? Exactly like that place. Desperate. Off brand. Edmund’s on track to own all of it in a year. Then he’ll knock it all down. He’s a killer. Lines them up - knocks them down”

G.T. confronted Edmund, asked him basically what the hell he was doing. Edmund pushed. G.T. pushed back and was about to punch when some bigger guy caught him across the side of his face. G.T. fell back. K pulled him out the door. Claire followed them. Old ties beat new guys, as she says sometimes.

As G.T. told her all this, it felt like when she was sitting in those uncomfortable plastic seats in the SkyDome or riding a subway for the first time or standing in front of the Sam’s Record Store lights, just like on the Degrassi High.

She’d been drifting a little. Now she wasn’t. She wants to save her store.

Sitting in her little kitchen, at a table she’d rightly placed by the bay window, G.T. gives her a small stack of waffles. The chipped plate makes a small clink as he puts it down.

She pours out some of the maple syrup her mom sometimes mails to her in brown paper wrapped care packages. It’s the good stuff from the guy out on Telemachus Road.

As she cut in to her breakfast, she watches G.T. He is looking out the window, his roughed up eye squinting in the light. “How come you never took on the other guys?”

“Like Who?” He reaches across the table for the syrup and begins carefully filling each of the little indents in his waffles.

“Like Desmond. He was a total douche to me?”

“Johnny Dreads? That loser hippy wasn’t worth my time. And besides, Edmund pushed me first.” He taps his swollen left eye. “This is from one of his goons.”

“I don’t think he really has goons.”

“Whatever. It doesn’t matter. It was a lame party. There were a couple partners from my work there. I’m sure I’m gonna have to tell a story on Monday. Hell, maybe they’ll fire me.” He cuts a corner off and puts it in his mouth. “That’s fine by me.”

“Well. Thanks.”

Later, as G.T. is leaving he stops in the door way, sticks his foot out to block Sbeckett as he tries to make a run down the stairwell.

He reaches out and puts his hand on the side of Claire’s arm. “Johnny Dreads was an idiot. Edmund knew he’d hurt you the whole time.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah.”

“Call me later?”

“I will.”

As he bounds down the stairs, she doesn’t realize her hand has found where his had been on her arm. She stands like that at the top of her stairs, even after G.T. has closed the door and gone. After a while, her cat wanders up beside her, curling his tail around her bare leg.

“Sbeckett, I had a really weird night last night.”

Baby Britain

Baby Britain – Elliot Smith (listen in new tab)

K sits across from G.T. on the subway. G.T. stares into space across from him. His eyes shift left-right subtly, following lazily the passing lights of the tunnel. They’re headed south, rounding the cape of Union station, on the way to King.

The rumble, the air crushed and sliding between the train and the tunnel walls. The thin metal and windows rattle loose, as if every piece of the train can’t decide if it loves or hates the piece next to it. The rivets play match maker.

K can hear the tinny hiss and whisper from the white earbuds hanging from the ears of the teenager next to him. She bobs her head slightly. Her jet black hair (dyed) falls in a 45 degree angle across her forehead. Thickly applied eyeliner makes her look sullen as she texts someone somewhere. Her thumb moves with blind practice.

K knows what song it is. Later, when they’re up on the surface, K still hums it. He do-do-do-de-doos along in his head; his hands shoved deep into his windbreaker’s pockets. The thin red nylon catches in the wind. The sky is dark on dark, lit by the city from below.

The street they’re on is almost empty, except for a few small groups of people waiting for cabs to take them to higher end clubs and slow couples walking expensive dogs with cups from expensive coffee chains.

As they walk, they talk. The bar had been too loud, and the fresh air had loosened their tongues. Maura’s been weird and distant. She didn’t return his calls today. And yesterday. And Shannon. He hadn’t expected to see her, hadn’t expected to ever have his sense of “overness” tested. And how the hell do you know that anyways? And work. Oh, and the library. His contract is almost up with no signs of renewal. And Ulysses’ and where is that headed. It is K’s litany for the night.

His friend’s response is supportive, but not clarifying. He is not pro-relationship tonight. It doesn’t help that Brae had ditched him, too. Everyone has their own problems.
Claire will help. She’s better at this sort of thing. When she’s around.

G.T. shrugs: “I dunno. I guess she’s seeing some rich guy.”

K: “Hence the party.” He points down the road to a large warehouse-cum-condo. Full of what looks like two story lofts. One corner, high up looks brighter, fuller than it’s neighbours.

G.T.: “Hence the party.”

They now walk along quietly.

Nothing in K’s mind feels discrete. Everything is cross-referenced ambivalently. A crammed drawer of ramshackle links between memories, feelings, and on-going debates.

He thinks about his first kiss with Maura, but then he thinks about his about first kiss with Shannon. The sad part about first kisses is that they are always so full of promise that subsequent hurt, lies, or whatever cannot wholly overwrite them. The memories live on, like erased pencil in the margins of old books. The dark grey smudges always outlast the words themselves.

He remembers kissing Claire once. Outside the Fisher King, while waiting for a ride. They were standing beside his Cavalier. The poor car had broken down outside the bar. When their lips met, it was awkward, dry, cut off quickly as Shannon rolled up in her parents’ car (that old grey VW).

K rode in the back. Watching Shannon’s green eyes in the rear-view mirror, he made a joke about his Cavalier giving up its ghost (happily, it would be revived the next day), and Claire laughed. Shannon suggested he get a better job so he could afford a car that worked every time. It seemed to be reasonable advice.

This was what Shannon was like back then. Everything about her when they started dating was reasonable, measured, locked down against some imagined storm always coming. His chest hurt slightly with a familiar welling disappointment that his most emotive, open time with her was after she came back from Paris.

Now he wondered about this new Shannon that had met him outside the library. He runs downs the details in his mind. She was not someone better. Maybe someone who so herself better. But, not someone he was sure he could be attracted to or not attracted to.

They went for drinks after the library. And they talked for a long time, mostly about people they knew and old times. The recent past felt like a mine field. Except, Shannon let slip that she had heard about Maura from Claire. K didn’t dodge the topic, but he was cursory, found himself scaling back his feelings.

Out of consideration for Shannon’s? He hoped.

Shannon didn’t try anything when K hugged her before she went down to the subway. Her body, her chest against his chest, his arms crossed around her, hands flat on her sides feeling the soft cotton of her hoodie. Her arms around him warm on his back. Lucently familiar and inscrutably new.

He tried to call Maura the next day. But, she apparently wasn’t taking calls.

The trees rustle in the wind. Their new leaves flittering light and dark in the street lights. K could tell they were turning over, opening their underside for what was on the rising breeze.

K: “It’s gonna rain.” He stops out side the condo. In the lights that some of the original façade had been preserved. He can barely make out the faded white paint. “O’Baird Shipping Co.?” He read it out loud without meaning to. “Is this the place?”

G.T.: “Looks hoity-toity enough.”

K: “Oh, totally.” He walks ahead, runs his fingers along the list of names in the foyer. “What’s the name we’re looking for?”

G.T.: “Gloucester. Got your gaiters on?”

Too Young

Too Young – Phoenix(listen in new tab)

Moments pile on. Seconds compress under the cumulative weight and ossify into minutes, days, years. Your life becomes dense with the particulate matter of time, eroding fossil memories. It is dense, but not indistinct. Some things still hold shape, so that when you look at them…

The first few bars are familiar; they clear a swath, like a hand wiped across an old pane in a dusty western. Or palms on a fogged shower door in any kind of sexier film.

K’s face is screwed up as he tries to hear over the music. “What?”

V. I. Lenin is busier now, swirls around as if he and G.T. are static, pillars in the wake.

G.T. thinks for half a second, wondering if he had said anything. He holds up his glass. It is three quarters empty. The amber fluid sloshes against the fingerprint smudged walls when he taps K’s glass. It is too loud to hear the glasses connect. Except for the settling foam and small waves there would be no proof they had touched.

This pint, the last before they leave to catch up with Claire (she had invited them to some “rich people party,” where the “liquor runneth free” – her words), had waxed G.T.’s brain, glossed it with slippery circumspection. “Nothing,” he says. “Haven’t heard this song in a while.”

K: “It was in that movie. It makes me think of Billy Murray.”

G.T.: “That’s a shame buddy. He wasn’t the high point of that film. At least, for those of us who the view the female form un but de chaque jour.” The movie, though, wasn’t what G.T. was thinking of. Not exactly.

G.T. looks at his cell phone. It’s almost 10:30. “We should go.”

K barely hears him, but he can guess. They finish their glasses, leaving them in a neat pair on a table they pass on the way out.

K taps a poster near the door. Squares, like from an old video game, form a barely discernable unicorn driving an ice cream truck for other smaller unicorns. The thick paper hangs loosely. The scotch tape that was holding the upper left corner, floats in the small drafts, weighed down by a few specks of red paint form the wall.

K: “Hey, the Pixel Kings. I thought they broke up.”

G.T. “Nah. They’re on again, off again these days.” Carefully, he grabs the loosened corner. He smoothes the paper against the wall, feeling the slight irregular textures of the acrylic inks the screen printer used. Colours in Braille.

K: “Remember when we saw them?”

G.T. “Yeah. It was the night you met Shannon.”

K reaches back and rubs the back of his head, feels his hair under his hands as he considers the facts. “Yeah, well, we didn’t “meet” meet that night.”

G.T.: “History is a complex mix of antecedents and accidents. I can understand how you’d get confused.” Besides, before it became the night K met Shannon, it was the night they met Claire.

And they are now outside. Their lungs bring in the damp, spring’s night, exhuming and casting out the silt of the bar’s air. The overcast sky, lit by the newborn weekend’s blithe city, hangs low with promises of rain.

Five years ago, it was already raining. Inside V.I.’s you could hear the pounding, thick and heavy drops obliterating themselves on the roof, adding a low syncopation to the world inside the bar.

It was the lull between bands. The music playing over the sound system, sounded smooth and clean after the fuzzed-out reverb that had driven the close of the opening band’s set.

K and G.T. stand against the back wall. They had come later than they normally would, squeezing in just before the bar reached capacity. No one was there for the opener (some trio lost to the annals of Toronto’s ambitious youth). They were all there for the Pixel Kings (on their way up, that spring – on their way down by the winter).

The only spots left were near the swag table. G.T. watched K try to give the girl selling shirts and CDs a sly look. Both he and his friend were facing a months long girl-drought, such furtive efforts had become common.

It was at that point that Claire walked by. G.T. didn’t see her at first. She was blocked by her friend (G.T. never saw again). But, K saw her for sure. G.T. watched his friend’s head turn to follow them. This meant, historically speaking, that G.T.’s first view of Claire was from behind.

During the Pixel King’s set, K and G.T. had pushed forward. They found themselves crushed in the middle of the dance floor. At some point, Claire reappeared again on her way back from the bar.

She placed a palm on G.T.’s shoulder. Her palm was warm, gentle on his shoulder. He turned to let her pass. She smiled gratefully at G.T. The band tore into a new song. She held to her chest a brace of beer bottles. Her mouths formed a “thanks” as she moved confidently and casually by, into the pumping press of fans.

She disappeared, swallowed into the crowd ahead of him. G.T. was impressed. Moving through that crowd that night was a feat of skill and determination.

They ended up at the bar together after the set. K clumsily started a conversation. They talked about the Pheonix song that was playing. And Lost in Translation. Claire said she liked it. K agreed a little too ingenuously. For some reason G.T., driven to contention by something Claire said, demurred and suggested that better songs and movies existed.

Claire smiled a gracious, cutting “whatever” and left with her drinks. Left with that breezy bounce that G.T. did not yet know was typical of her.

Later, outside, they ran into her again. The rain had stopped. The asphalt, the sidewalk, everything glistened in the street light. She was getting into a car that had just pulled up.

G.T. a little drunk and happily petulant yelled: “Hey! See any better films yet?”

K told G.T. to cool it and ran up to her. He put on his best, “my friend’s a jerk, but I’m ok” act.” The woman driving was nonplussed, annoyed at being held up. Claire, half in the car, quickly scribbled her number on a worn paper customer rewards card from a coffee shop he hadn’t heard of.

K backed away as Claire closed the door. G.T. walked up.

Through the open windows they heard the driver ask: “Who was that loser?”

Claire gave the driver’s headrest a sprightly slap. “Take it easy Shannon. We’re going.”

A small moment. As the car pulls away. Claire looks back at K. Then at G.T. , who doesn't know that look yet, somewhere between disdain and something inexorably gripping. But, he has since learned the language of her face.

Underwater Heartbeat

Underwater Heartbeat - Saturday Looks Good to Me(listen in new tab)

You could pass it on the street if you weren’t looking for it.

The neon sign above V. I. Lenin’s hasn’t been lit since the late 90’s, when the tubes’ noble gasses gave up their spirits, flickered and darkened. These days the silhouette of the bar’s namesake, traced abstractly in dead glass, keeps a dim vigil over the regulars and intrepid new comers.

Few except the bar’s owners, two failed band mates who took up the cause when the first owner disappeared, remember when opening the faded and scuffed, peeling red metal doors meant passing under the sign’s stern glow.

Tonight the doors swing open. A cluster of girls come out for a smoke. The door drags shut behind them, dampening the sounds brazen enough to escape into the night. The loose corners of hanging gig posters flutter in the spring night’s lazy wind.

Two 30-something men, bearing the clothes and meager wages of their self-absorbed, unending liberal education arrive. One pulls open the door, while the other makes quick eye contact with a skinny blonde as she casually lights her cigarette. He follows his friend inside. The blonde watches them enter as she gently waves her match in the wind to extinguish it.

Inside the music is cranked up and loudly echoes down the short hallway that leads from the door. The walls there are lined with gig posters of various currency and importance.

The two men walk past the folded-up table where cover is usually collected and passed the dormant empty coat check. They pass a few people who came into the hall so they can hear their cell phones, straining ears against the noise.

As the two enter into the main part of V.I.’s, they crane their necks looking for friends, their faces etched in a vain look of confident frequency. They are regulars - capital R regulars. With practiced ambivalent looks, they peer through the crowd milling back and forth from the bar to tables or the slowly filling dance floor. They mark paths through the complex valleys of necks and shoulders.

One looks with disdain at his watch. It’s still relatively early, only 10:00pm. Friday night is still getting into its swing. The other waves to someone off at the tables where a large group sits crammed in on the raised floor along the far left wall. He taps his buddy on the shoulder and heads in that direction. The other follows, and in his inattentiveness, shoulder-checks K.

K, pint in each hand, does his best to dodge, executing a 180 degree turn to avoid spilling. It ends up being more of a 140. He stops short of colliding with a heavy set man in a varsity football jacket.

G.T. leans against the rail that hems in the dance floor, watching K’s evasive maneuvers. He laughs to himself as K mouths a silent curse when the football player turns to tell him to “watch it”.

G.T. finishes his current glass. The slightly warm beer catches in his throat, causing him to cough into his fist. He places the empty glass on the wooden ledge behind him without looking.

A cluster of women walk by back from having a smoke no doubt. They’re maybe 23. G.T. eyes them discretely, but but not so covertly as to prevent himself from making eye contact with one of them when she looks back.

He’s not on the market. But, he loves that moment, the brief second when you meet eyes and your mind ripples. That second of tangible mystery. He lets it pass unchased and chastened.

He loves this bar. He met K here during an undergraduate pub-crawl way back when, and they latched onto it as favourite watering hole. G.T. does not view himself as one who is in the habit of living in the past. But he enjoys his history in place.

He likes the gentle wash of his past indiscretions. When he’s here, he gets to wade into them. Like tropical waters, safe and warm near the shore, but they drop off quickly - more often than he’d care to admit. And then you’re out to sea…

G.T. is also not in the habit of reliving his mistakes.

K finally navigates his way over. He hands off one pint to G.T.: “You’re up next.” It has been almost eight years that they’ve known each other, and K insists still on reminding G.T. whose turn it is.

G.T. taps K’s glass with his. The fragile clink is lost in the bar, washed over and under by a sudden burst of “Wooos!” from the dance floor.

K: “You hear from the girls?”

G.T.: “No. You?”

K doesn’t feel his phone vibrate in the pocket of his windbreaker. A few moments later, G.T. PDA, tucked into the pocket of his jeans start to ring. He barely hears the little jingle, but somehow senses. He pulls it out, looks at the display, his face lit blue-grey in the LCD glow. He takes on an unintended pallor. He smiles, shows K the display. “Hey, it’s Claire.”

Military Madness (Nathan Graham)

Military Madness (Nathan Graham) – Woods(listen in new tab)

9:30, that Friday.

Brae closes her apartment door, locks it and drops her key into a green leather clutch. She’s ready to go out, dressed in tight dark jeans and a strategically fitted t-shirt.

The music in the hallway is muffled by the building’s yellowed wallpapered walls. Brae thinks to herself that those kids down the hall always play the worst music way too loud. She’s happy that the old building, thinned with age, still lets only a little through.

That no-fi or whatever is just not her cup of tea. Not enough sex; no groove.

Unperturbed, she bounces through the hall and bounds down the stairs, carried on the syrupy wings of a few well made rum and cokes.

Maura and she live in the same building. Brae on the third floor, back corner. Maura on the second floor in a small apartment stuck in the middle of two older couples. It’s probably the cheapest building in the city. It doesn’t hurt that Brae’s dad owns the place.

Brae passes a familiar stain on the stairwell wainscoting as she jumps the last few steps to the second floor landing. A light brown splotch, on the irregularly faded fake wood, washed out by decades of sun from the stairwell’s southern exposure.

It makes her think about when Maura moved in five years ago.

It was snowing; one of those early March days that threaten to paralyze the city with snow. Brae was coming back from some cloying grad seminar run by a vainglorious Proust scholar. She had felt battered by his appraisal of a recent paper; she was ready to sink into a meditative beer.

When she saw the white rental van parked out front, she ignored it. There was almost always someone moving in or out. Brae was used to it.

Brae literally crashed into Maura (on her way back down). Brae habitually blindly, tore up the three flights of stairs, and having gained some momentum collided with Maura. The two of them spun off each other, came to rest in orbit.

Maura was bronzed back then. Her skin had that legitimate brown that came only from long exposure. Her dark hair, longer than she ever keeps it now, was pulled back in a loose pony tail.

She wore track pants and a hoodie, slightly unzipped from the heat of running up and down the stairs. But she wasn’t sweating. She was fit, a creature of solid endurance encased in parsimonious skin.

Brae apologised for not looking. Maura smiled kindly, introduced herself as new to the place. Brae realized, hearing a lilt of fatigue, that she was moving in by herself. So, she offered to help.

As they ran up and down the stairs, they raced a blizzard that made each load increasingly treacherous. But, there wasn’t that much to move in: a sparse collection of boxes and some furniture with the tags still on them from thrift stores where she bought them.

When they were done, Brae brought down some wine and Maura produced some plastic glasses, cutting open a box with a jackknife. She wielded it readily, slicing the tape with judicious skill.

To Brae, Maura seemed a person of aplomb force. She exuded a tension, a practiced rigour that took years to dissipate, as over the years her skin whitened and her body softened. She relaxed into the city, letting herself expand as she grew used to its ambivalent comfort.

As they drank, the chill in the apartment lifted. Maura warmed by the wine, took off her sweater. She only wore a faded green tank top. She had no tan lines, except one. Brae never asked about the thin pale band on her left hand.

Over the next weeks as Maura settled in, Brae would visit. The apartment gradually became a home. But, some things were missing. There were no photos, no pictures of Maura and her ex, no family barbecues, no awkward photos of some summer vacation during high school.

Maura never talked about where she came from and why she moved to Toronto, though she mentioned she was from there originally. Brae enjoyed the mystery, happy to have something in her life that defied penetration and analysis, enjoyed the thickness of her life that her grad school friends didn’t offer. Maura, probably, liked the peace of Brae’s disinterest with her withdrawn past.

That tacit, palpable naturalness formed the foundation of their friendship. One night a year later, the two of them were falling down drunk, outside a night club. Maura leaned on the wall of a bus shelter, her body lit, a pallor in the white light of the perfume ad. She said quietly that she’d almost been married once.

Brae replied that she had guessed. And, Maura told her a story. It was something that seemed so constrained and edited that it hardly seemed accurate. But, it felt true. Brae was satisfied with that and never pressed for more. It was a breach in Maura that never really opened again. Until K. Since last winter, she seemed more in the world then ever.

Now, she raps her familiar three taps on her friend’s door. “Honey, it’s me! Let’s go out! K and G.T. are at V.I.’s and waiting for us!”

Maura takes her time coming to the door. Brae knocks again. The door opens quickly. Brae steps back. Maura’s eyes are red, ringed in dark sleepless holes. Her body hangs loosely on her shoulders. The sweet, stained smell of whiskey on her breath.

When Maura tries to say hello, she almost falls out of the door. Brae puts her hands on Maura shoulders to steady her.

Brae: “Whoa. Having a… are you ok?”

Maura, leans against the door frame. She fishes into her pocket, pulls out the ring. “Edmund. He…”

Get to Leave

Get to Leave - Howe Gelb(listen in new tab)

The rain started slow; now it drives against Ulysses’s windowpane, strumming the glass in low notes along with the music playing inside.

Danielle sits on the counter, near the sink. Hera leans with her back against the espresso bar. They’re watching the rivulets of rain water fracture and refract the streetscape.

The next day, Thursday night, 7:00 pm, and the café’s been empty for a while.

Hera: “Danielle. I don’t know if you should sit on the counter like that. I mean…”

Danielle gives her a look. She lifts a hand; from it a set of brass keys on a worn shoelace, shaking them for effect. It’s been a frequent display lately. “Claire gave me these. So I’m in charge. I declare that I may sit here with this commanding view.”

Hera shrugs. “Whatever.” She eyes the place. It’s clean. She checks from habit the pastry case. Its white lights frosts the few cookies and cakes that remain in fresh stasis. The bakery run hasn’t happened yet. A day, no two days late. “I hate when there’s nothing to do.”

Danielle’s turn to shrug. “You could clean the washrooms.” She pushes herself off the counter with a flourish. “I guess this counter, too.”

Hera rolls her eyes. “Claire only gave you the key because she’s out trying to get some action from that rich guy. And, K couldn’t come in today.”

Danielle grabs a wide cream-white ceramic cup from a shelf. She casually rotates it in her hands, watching the coffee slosh against its curved walls as she fills the cup from a brushed steel carafe. “I am a woman who, despite her failings, has always made the most of the opportunities that present themselves.” She sips the black coffee with caliphatic pomp.

Hera: “Is that on your underwear?”

Danielle spits, spurting in a amber mist from her lips. “Jesus. Totally.”

The bell rings. The two girls look to see who it is. The noise of the rain is chaotic, but hushes the rain as the door closes behind Maura. The little bell shepherds back out the torrent damp taps.

Danielle, wiping her mouth with a piece of paper towel: “You got soaked right through, dear.”

Maura comes across the room. Soaked shoes tile leave dark stains that slowly dry and shrink. Her dark hair is matted, sticks in clumps to her forehead and her glasses. She pushes them out of the way, shaking her wet hands dry. Her nylon jacket, dark, damp and heavy, clings to her torso.

Maura: “Yeah. I guess I got caught.”

Hera: “You want a tea or something? To warm you up?”

Maura looks at her. Her glasses have fogged a little. Her face is etched with worry, or consternation, a look exaggerated by streaked mascara.

Maura: “No. Umm. No thanks. I’m just kind of blowing through. Is K here?”

Danielle: “No. He called me last night, late, asked me to switch Saturday’s close with this one. How could I say no?”

Maura: “Oh right.” Her voice is clumsy, caught off guard. As the fog on her glasses dissipates; Hera sees her eyes - red and tired, they are lost somewhere between confused, crestfallen, and relieved. A triangulation of discomfiture.

Hera: “He didn’t tell you?”

Maura, lies: “No. I must have forgot.” She proffers a weak smile. “I ran here in the rain, too. God.” A weak offering. “I should have called first.”

Hera: “You sure you don’t want anything?”

Maura backs away: “No. Really. I should go.” She turns and is out the door.

The rain rattles in, and is shooed out again. Hera leans out over the counter and watches Maura move out of sight, her body compressed into as little space as possible against the rain and whatever else.

Hera: “What was that about?”

Danielle: “Communication error. Also, way to push too hard. That could have been a sale.”

Hera scratches her shoulder. “Whatever. I mean, I hope she ok.”

Danielle: “She’s a big girl.” She sighs deeply. “It’s so dead here.” She flails her arm at the door. “It’s so dead, that counts as drama.”

Hera: “Yeah. I wish Claire would reconsider my idea.”

Danielle: “That competition, the café contest?”

Hera, hands in the air in frustration: “The Café Olympics. Arg! You should take it seriously. So should Claire. It did wonders for Johnny Bean Good across town.”

Danille: “That’s a terrible name.”

Hera: “It is a terrible name, but they’re busy as heck now. And there’s a prize for the barista or whatever who wins the most events.”

Danielle slaps Hera on the shoulder: “Prize? Now you’re talking.”

Hera: “Good luck, there. You know what espresso is, right?”

Danielle pushes her playfully. “Easy now, showboat.”