Tag: Toronto

Categories
Street Photography

When The Words Run Dry

A topless woman leads a leather-clad man by leash and collar.
Toronto Pride 2013

As Scheherazade drew her thousandth story to its close, she knew her master, Shahryar, would expect her to begin the next story. But earlier that afternoon, in the time she normally allotted for preparing the next day’s offering, she had discovered to her horror that she was stricken with that most dreadful of creative afflictions: writer’s block. The well of her creative waters had run dry.

Scheherazade did everything within her power to start the waters flowing afresh. First, she took a long walk in Shahryar’s gardens. When that failed to help, she paused by a window and listened to the musical stylings of an itinerant minstrel singing just beyond the palace walls. She thought surely a sad ballad would prod her imagination. But, again, her mind lay barren. Finally, she sought out her sister and they took turns recounting memories of their shared childhood. But this prompted nothing she hadn’t already fashioned into a story to satisfy Shahryar’s insatiable narrative appetite.

Scheherazade knew how matters had played out when her predecessors failed to please their sovereign. He had ordered them beheaded, and moved on to the next. With a trembling voice, the young woman concluded her thousandth story, the story she had begun on the preceding night, then paused and in that silence heard the thudding of her own terrified heartbeat. Shahryar prompted her with his eyes. Haltingly, Scheherazade confessed that she had no more stories; the spring of her creativity, which had once burbled to overflowing, now offered the merest trickle.

At first, a shade descended over the Shahryar’s face and Scheherazade fully expected the man to pass a sentence of death. But the shade lifted as quickly as it had fallen, and the man smiled and declared that a thousand tales is a wondrous thing. Besides, his acolytes had transcribed her every word almost the instant it issued from her lips, and he had arranged for those words to be bound between ornate covers so that he could revisit them any time he wished. The pleasure of her nightly visits had not evaporated, but could be summoned at will.

With those words, Shahryar leaned towards the young woman, lowering his voice and assuming a confessional tone. I must tell you, he began, when I examine the progress of my feelings these last thousand nights, I find that love has blossomed where I had thought there was only rocky ground. It defies all expectation, but I suppose that is the way with love. And so I wish to take you as my queen.

Scheherazade was widely read, or at least as widely read as is possible for a young woman living amongst the Taliban. And in her reading, she had stumbled upon critical feminist theory and was able to apply its teachings to the dynamic at play between her and her sovereign. Although he had declared his love for her, she recognized that the man had a child’s comprehension of what it means to love. For him, love was a transactional proposition. But when a man routinely engages in non-consensual sex with virgins then beheads them on the following morning, it is clear that he is a psychopath, and a momentary suspension of the violent habit to hear a few stories will not change that fact.

By any account, a thousand stories is a good run. Scheherazade had done her best to defer the violence, not only out of self interest, but also out of a desire to protect her sister. If something happened to Scheherazade, she knew her father would not hesitate to surrender her sister into Shahryar’s keeping, just as he had not hesitated to surrender her nearly three years before. Such a cowardly man! Her stories had protected both her and her sister from the wrath of a powerful psychopath, but she could think of nothing that would protect them now from the mincing prostrations of a father without a spine.

Categories
Street Photography

Ordering À La Carte

Black & white photo through a window of a man sitting at a restaurant table and texting.
Texting at Sorrelle's, SE corner of Avenue Rd & Yorkville

Nice restaurant. Upscale. A little beyond us. But now and then, when we’re in the mood for something special, we change our clothes and go out for a treat. The people at the other tables are beautiful. Bright smiles and perfect hair. Gleaming eyes and posture that never flags. The brighter the smiles, the more Barb tells me not to slouch. I want to tell her that, unlike the other people in the room, I’m subject to the laws of gravity which drag me down toward the ground, and one day under it, but I hold off because the waiter has magically appeared beside our table. I realize he didn’t magically appear; it just seems that way. It’s more like he was a predator stalking our table from the long grass when he suddenly pounced. He asks if we’d like a drink to start. Or an hors d’oeuvre? We both ask for cocktails. Barb asks for some duck pâté while I settle for something from the vegetable realm. Two minutes later, the waiter appears again at our table, this time without the magical aura, and announces they have no more duck pâté so madam will have to select something else.

An underling arrives with our drinks, a sub-sub-bartender, someone who lost the latest round of dominance contests: head butting or chest thumping or whatever it is the wait staff do to decide who gets to wear the smartest clothes. Me Tarzan, you busboy. We smile at one another. We clink our glasses. We watch the hostess seat a couple at the adjacent table. Your server is Raoul and he’ll be right with you, she says, and she sashays back to the entrance. Our neighbours are young, hip, unsullied the way Brad and Angelina were unsullied before the tabloids turned them into twisted freaks underneath a Barnum & Bailey circus tent. He wears tight-fitting pants and reminds me of a flamenco dancer. She wears a black dress with a V cut so low we can see the diamond stud in her navel. Raoul creeps from behind a pot of tropical plants and asks if they care for a cocktail or an hors d’oeuvre. They order their drinks and tell Raoul they will be sharing a plate of duck pâté. Raoul says very good and waddles away.

Did you hear that? I whisper. And Barb whispers back that, yes, she saw how Raoul nodded and didn’t advise that they were out of pâté. It isn’t long before our neighbours are swiping dollops of pâté across their crackers and stuffing them into their mouths like kids with popcorn at the movies. I wave the waiter over to our table and challenge him, pointing to our neighbours and the dainty bits of pâté stuck in the corners of their mouths.

You told us you were out of duck pâté.

That is true.

Yet you served them duck pâté.

No, that is not pâté.

Of course it is.

Raoul looks to our neighbours and shakes his head. That is a spreadable meat made from duck liver.

Which is the definition of duck pâté.

You are mistaken, sir.

Increasingly, I find myself experiencing vertiginous moments like this when I grip the edge of the table and gaze across it to Barb and beg her to assure me that the table is real. I don’t think this is me growing old; I think this is the world turning on it’s head. Should we stay for the rest of our meal? I worry they’ll set coq au vin in front of me and try to persuade me it’s the aged bison I ordered. Carrots are beans. Water is wine. Jolly fascists will march from the kitchen, singing the national anthem, and serve my head on a silver platter while telling everyone it’s wild boar.

Categories
Street Photography

Flash Fiction: Passion

Black and white photograph of a man in business attire pulling a roller bag behind him with one hand while glancing at a smart phone in the other hand.
On his dating profile, he said he was passionate

Soooo…It sez on your profile that you’re passionate.

Ordinarily, Janice wouldn’t be so forward, but it was only two minutes into the meet-up and already they’d fallen into an awkward silence and Janice was desperate to move things along so she didn’t drift into her usual daydream about an alien spaceship that beams her aboard and whisks her away to the planet of men who are actually interesting.

Yeah, passionate.

That was it. Nothing more. No elaboration. No self-aggrandizement. At this point, Janice would’ve been happy for some straight-up bullshit. But nothing. Christ, she couldn’t even remember his name. She was afraid he’d coalesce into a generic cardboard cutout. She’d toss him onto the heap of generic cardboard cutouts she was collecting in her bedroom.

The boy pulled off his beret and began to fondle it nervously on his lap. Janice noted that—Oswald! That was it! The improbably named Oswald. With his goatee and receding hairline and his cup of dark roast diluted with half a cup of milk and five packets of raw sugar.

What’re you passionate about, Oswald?

About?

Yeah, what about?

Was that a shrug? It was hard to tell. He’d raised his shoulders, but that could’ve been him shifting in his seat. 

Maybe I’m wrong, Janice said, but I don’t think of passion as something that happens in the air. It’s attached to other things. Passion for justice. Passion for poetry. Passion for synaesthesia. See what I’m saying?

I suppose what I meant is that whatever I commit to I commit to with passion. No half measures. I dive in. All of me. That sort of thing.

So, Oswald, what’re you committed to? Right now?

Again with the shoulders. He may have been shifting in his seat, but this second time around was pushing the needle more to the shrug end of the scale.

I guess I’m passionate about being passionate.

Oh, come on.

Why not?

It’s…it’s… (Janice knew there was a word to describe what Oswald was doing, and not a complimentary word either, but the word eluded her in the moment.)

This is the world we live in, you know. Where people are expected to be passionate about things. What’s wrong with being passionate just for the sake of being passionate?

But listen to you. We could have a good argument about this, but you don’t even raise your voice.

As an answer to her spaceship daydream, Janice had a passionate argument daydream where she and her coffee date get into a blistering disagreement, practically strangling each other across the table, and the whole thing leads inevitably to the kind of sex that sets the world on fire.

Oswald shrugged. This time it was definitely a shrug. An indisputable shrug. She could get others in the coffee shop to swear affidavits attesting to the shruggishness of the shrug.

I don’t know, Oswald said. It just seems like the sort of thing you’re supposed to put on your profile. Most of the time, I couldn’t give a shit about what’s going on.

So. What? You’re passionate about slacking off?

I guess. Doesn’t really matter to me.

Categories
City Life

Flash Fiction: Why I’m Still Repaying my Student Loans

Night photograph of a sculpture called Pair, by Neil Campbell, at the 2012 Nuit Blanche in Toronto. Pair is a pair of giant pink balls sitting underneath the court house library on University Avenue.
Scotiabank Nuit Blanche, Toronto

On the morning of his 18th birthday, Jonas disappeared. His mother found him hiding in the loft above the garage. They had to leave in two hours if they were going to make it on time for the ceremony and Jonas wasn’t even cleaned or dressed yet. She pleaded with her son to climb down the ladder and get himself ready.

Jonas told his mother she was nuts if she thought he was going to the ceremony. It was cruel. It was barbaric. It was something stupid from their primitive prehistory. They lived in the modern world now. And whatever meaning the ceremony had in the past, that meaning had vanished with the invention of things like cars and airplanes and the internet and Twitter.

His mother called up to him from the foot of the ladder. We’ve been through all this before. I thought we agreed: your reluctance is just a product of anticipatory anxiety. You’re afraid of the pain. And yes, there is an initial pain, but beyond that is a much deeper reward. Look to that reward.

If, on the day of his birth, he could have chosen his parents, Jonas would have asked for a mother who was anything but a clinical psychologist. She was always ruining her parental talks with psychologist buzzwords. Jonas couldn’t give a shit about anticipatory anxiety. All he knew was: the thought of taking part in the ceremony made him want to hurl.

The last time he’d been to one of these things, it was for his brother, Simon. That was almost enough to make Jonas tear off to the north country and live in the bush. He remembered how they made Simon disrobe in front of everybody, then lay his genitals on the ceremonial block of wood known in the old tongue as the ptarchuck. He remembered how they isolated Simon’s left testicle with the metal casing called the sinistrabölle then flipped the lever that sliced through the flesh. It was so sudden, Simon didn’t even know it had happened, but when they applied the boiling tar to cauterize the wound, he screamed and doubled over. Two hooded acolytes dragged him off the platform to make room for the next boy waiting for the rite of passage.

Jonas. Honey. This is a beautiful thing. It makes you a full participant in our community. But more than that, it gives you a sense of connection to your ancestors. Our young men have been doing this for as long as anyone can remember.

The boy’s father appeared in the doorway while he was complaining that he liked having two balls and didn’t see why he had to give one up for some stupid superstition.

Where the mother was soft and looked to persuasion, the father was hard and just as apt to speak with a leather belt as with his tongue. He had no patience for the boy and demanded he come down this instant.

It’s not the pain. It just makes no sense to me.

Who cares what you think? It’s about being a part of something bigger than you. I did it when I was your age, and my father before me. We’ve always done it this way and we’re none the worse for it. I’ll be damned if I let you float through life without knowing the suffering I’ve had to suffer. You think you’re better than me? Is that it? You think you deserve to have a pain-free life while I suffer to put food on your table and see to your education? Is that it?

As you might expect, Jonas relented and went to the ceremony. Backed by a massive social machinery, the force of his father’s words seemed unassailable. Privately, he promised himself he’d never end up like his father, that when his sons came of age, he’d give them his blessing to challenge the system. But we know how that goes. If you give up a nut when you’re 18, then you’ve pretty much set the pattern for your whole life.

Categories
City Life Public Art

When your eyeballs explode in the vacuum of space

A child wearing a Toronto Blue Jays hat climbs on a sculpture of a Toronto Maple Leafs goalie with a sign that says: Please Do Not Climb On Sculpture
Sculpture in The Distillery District, Toronto

My son attacked me with a baseball bat the other day. Obviously I’m fine. Even so, it’s left me on edge.

My relationship with my son changed the minute he discovered that I’ve played bit roles in action flicks. When the robbers storm the bank, I’m the first guy they shoot in the head. When the platoon takes the hill, I’m the private who steps on a live grenade. And when the aliens attack the spaceship, I’m the astronaut whose eyeballs explode after he gets sucked into space without a helmet. Each time, I’m gone in the first big scene and the movie goes on without me for another hundred minutes.

Josh thinks it’s the coolest thing to watch his old man get destroyed a hundred different ways. So the other day he invites all his school friends over because they don’t believe him when he brags that his dad is indestructible. I walk in on a roomful of nine year olds and all they want to know is if I’m made of rubber or maybe titanium wrapped in latex, like in that movie, you know—what’s it called?—Sperminator? And they giggle.

I try to explain to them how the studio applies CG effects in post production, but their eyes wander and they start to squirm. They want to watch more clips of me getting my arms blown off. I try to explain that when I have that look on my face, it’s because I’m acting, not because a bullet is actually going into my head. I go: you know how you can send photos of yourself and the messaging app puts cat ears on your head? They all nod. Well it’s like that, only instead of cat ears, it’s high res blood. I hear the creak of gears turning inside their tiny little heads, but the gears don’t turn fast enough to make the connection between cat ears and exploding eyeballs.

I tell them I’ll go make some popcorn. Josh says he’ll put on the next scene. As I’m walking to the kitchen, I hear the familiar dialogue from a motion cap scene I did for GTA. I’m a loser who gets rear ended driving a Ford Pinto. I get out before the car blows up, but the thugs come at me with a baseball bat anyways. It occurs to me then that the kids are too young to be watching this scene, what with all the gratuitous violence and swearing. I’m sure I’ll get a call from somebody’s parent.

I come back to the TV room with a bowl of popcorn and Josh comes at me with a baseball bat.

He shouts: He’s made of rubber and I’ll prove it!

It’s amazing what happens to time when the adrenaline kicks in. I’ve noticed the same thing on movie sets. It’s like the frame rate jumps to ten thousand so you can slow things down and still keep your movements smooth and seamless. In that instant, I see how Josh’s face is contorted, not with malevolence, but simply with effort. Popcorn explodes like there’s a tiny grenade planted inside the bowl and the kernels seems to hang suspended in mid-air. A roomful of nine year old jaws gape in wonder as the rubber man executes a sideways twisting move and avoids the baseball bat.

I snatch the baseball bat from Josh’s hands and order him to his room. Then I tell the kids the party is over. Call your parents and have them pick you up. Nobody whines because they’re too busy going on about how Josh’s dad really is made of rubber. Did you see how he moved? Next time I come over, I’m bringing my dad’s gun; I bet Josh’s dad can dodge bullets.

Categories
City Life

Flash Fiction: I Sang with the Choral Mafia

A choral conductor in casual dress stands before a grand piano and choir, right arm raised, left hand resting on his hip

When it was my turn to audition, an assistant in excessively formal dress ushered me into the room, low ceiling, dimly lit, walls covered in oak paneling. Positioned in the far corner, the accompanist sat at a grand piano and affected an air of indifference. In the corner closer to the entrance sat a large wooden desk and, behind it, the maestro himself. Immediately, I understood that the room’s arrangement was strategic: I would have to pass before the maestro in order to deliver the audition music to the accompanist and that would give the great man an opportunity to see how I moved in a performance situation. I confess that I felt awkward. I had stepped into the presence of one of the world’s most intimidating choral figures and it seemed to me that he could hear every breath I took and could even feel the motions of my diaphragm. He could descend to the cellular level and uncover the workings of my larynx.

I handed my copy of Samuel Barber’s “Sure On This Shining Night” and, in halting tones, announced what I’d be singing. Although I wanted to explain my choice—how I thought it was better to sing something simple with sustained notes (rather than something flashy and operatic) as a way to demonstrate my potential to blend with a choral ensemble—my voice teacher had advised against saying too much. She said it was disrespectful, especially when dealing with a man of the maestro’s stature, because a long and involved explanation implied that the man was stupid.

I nodded to the accompanist and started into it. While I can’t say that it was the best performance of my life, it was pretty damn close. Half way through, the maestro waved an arm and the accompanist stopped playing and I continued one note into the silence, hovering there like the coyote before he realizes he’s run off the cliff, and I waited to drop into the abyss. 

Enough! the man shouted. Mr. Barker, you come into my presence today, asking if you can sing tenor in my choir. And you think because tenors are god’s chosen that I have no choice but to grovel and beg you to join the tenor section. But you have no respect. For years, you could have joined my choral family. But no. You wait until today. You come into this room and you don’t even kneel to kiss my ring.

At first, I thought that I had failed the audition. But the maestro paused and I took advantage of that instant to approach the great man, to abase myself before him, to kiss his ring and to ask him humbly, and with all respect, if I could become a member of his choral family.

The maestro urged me to my feet and said that he would be happy to have me join the tenor section. But remember, he said, one day—and that day may never come—I might need a favour, and I expect you to be ready to offer your services.

So began some of the most fulfilling years of my life. Not only was it musically rewarding to belong to the maestro’s choral family, but it was also socially stimulating. I developed many enduring friendships and I felt more connected to my community than I’d ever felt in years.

But I knew this couldn’t last. As I was beginning my 10th season with the choir, the maestro summoned me to his oak paneled office. It was time for him to call in his marker. He explained the situation. There was a soprano who was beginning to squawk like a parrot. For the last two years, he’d been able to mask the sound by cleverly positioning her with other voices. But this season, at the first rehearsal, he couldn’t help but hear that the parrot was sick and no amount of clever positioning would mask the sound. He had asked the soprano to leave. He had asked politely. He had asked respectfully. But no. She said the choir was her family and she wouldn’t abandon her family.

The maestro looked at me and said: I need you to make her an offer she can’t refuse.

At the next rehearsal, I showed up with a length of piano wire. It tends to be messy, but it makes a real statement, especially in the choral community when people see what it does to a windpipe. I realize one day I could suffer the same end, but let’s be realistic here. I’m a tenor, one of god’s chosen, whereas sopranos come through this place like there’s a revolving door.

Categories
Street Portrait

Flash Fiction: The Race

Street portrait of an elderly woman wearing a hat and watching the Pride Parade marshall at the corner of Park and Rosedale Valley Road in Toronto
Waiting for Pride at the corner of Park & Rosedale Valley Road, Toronto

I visited my grandma three weeks before she died. Two days after I visited, according to my mom, the old woman drifted into a cognitive fog and never came back. But on the day I visited, a cool Saturday afternoon in April, my grandma was as sharp as grandpa’s fresh stropped razor. She knew her lungs were failing her. She knew her time had come. With her clear blue eyes, she stared at me from her recliner chair and said: “I hope Ethel dies by July.” Those were her last words to me, or at least the last words that made any sense.

Iris and Ethel had been inseparable. That’s what everyone said, though anyone who knew for sure was long dead. They’d grown up on neighbouring farms, played together as infants, went to the same one room school house as children and, when the time came, stood in each other’s wedding party. While everyone said they were two peas in a pod, it was a pretty competitive pod. When their husbands died and it seemed a good idea to move into an assisted living residence, it was Ethel who was first out of the gate, scoring a lovely apartment in the Blessed Garden Seniors Home on Maple Street. Iris followed a few months later, but she got a unit that had an extra bathroom so guests would have their own place to pee. Ethel said she’d rather have the view than an extra pee closet. Ethel was on the fourth floor whereas Iris was only on the third floor. The building was ell-shaped which meant that Ethel could sit on her balcony and gaze sideways down into Iris’s sitting room and track all her guests. The two kept guest books by their front doors and once a week compared notes to see who had the most visitors.

I think that competitive edge explains my grandma’s last words to me. If Ethel lived into July, that would mean she won. She would have lived longer than grandma. They were both 97, which I figure is a remarkable thing, especially when you can hit 97 and still play with all your marbles. But grandma was damned if she’d let Ethel hit 98. She toyed with ideas like poisoned darts and curses, but didn’t have the energy to follow through with any of her plans. When she said she hoped Ethel died by July, she waved a hand up and to the left, indicating the balcony where her friend usually sat and watched.

Three weeks after my visit, mom called and said grandma was fading fast; if I wanted to be there when she went, I’d better scoot. It was a two hour drive and she might be gone before I got there. There’s something about imminent death that heightens the senses. When I arrived, I took in so much more than I usually do. It was the first time I’d noticed that grandma Iris lived in a Christian residence. I stepped out of the elevator onto the third floor and faced a big picture on the opposite wall. I’d always assumed it was a bearded millennial at a local Pride celebration. But no. It was Jesus. The lamb gave it away. You’d never see a lamb at a Pride celebration.

They’d provided one of those roll-away hospital beds with side rails so grandma Iris could die in familiar surroundings. We sat with her in the living room, me on one side of the bed, mom and dad on the other side of the bed. Mostly, she lay with her eyes closed, shallow intermittent breaths, then a long stretch of silence which we spent wondering if she was gone. Then a big gasp and another series of shallow intermittent breaths. Sometimes she opened her blue eyes and stared directly at me. At least I thought she was staring at me until I realized that I was sitting in line with her view out the living room window to the far balcony where Ethel sat watching.

Blessed Garden had provided a nurse to attend to grandma’s care, a millennial with a well trimmed beard. We asked how long, in his experience, it took for someone in grandma’s position to, you know. He shrugged and said it was impossible to say. She might go in a minute. Or she might hang on ‘til midnight.

I said I was hungry. Mom and dad telepathically agreed that they wouldn’t be much good to anybody light-headed and stomachs rumbling, so we left grandma with the nurse and went to an A & W. While we were waiting for a bored teenager to fill our order, mom’s phone rang. Uh huh. Uh huh. Nod. Nod. When she was done with her call, she said: Well, Grandma’s gone. We asked the bored teenager to wrap things up to go and we took our burgers back to Blessed Garden.

With a small tear trailing down his left cheek, the nurse said Missus Iris just stopped breathing, no distress, just a gentle fading. Peaceful. I took my burger and sat in my usual chair. The nurse hadn’t closed grandma’s eyes so she was still gazing past me, on and up to the balcony where Ethel sat. I eased the lids over the milky blue eyeballs, then thought maybe I should use some hand sanitizer before I handled my burger. Mom checked her purse but couldn’t find any and grandma didn’t appear to keep any in easy reach, so I gave my hands a good wipe on my thighs before I pulled my burger out of the bag.

I could tell the nurse was trying to be super sensitive. Probably nurses have a code of professional conduct they’re supposed to follow. He wondered if we’d like him to say a prayer. Maybe ask for Jesus to be present at this difficult time. I stared across the body to my parents, who were both busy with their burgers, and did my best not to laugh out loud.

When July arrived, mom phoned the Blessed Garden Seniors Home and learned that Ethel was still kicking around on her balcony. Mom and dad sent her a big bouquet of spring flowers. I sent her a card. Actually, I bought two cards but I ruined the first one. I wrote: “Congratulations on winning the race!” I decided that was inappropriate, so I threw it out. The card that made it to the mailbox congratulated her on reaching 98 and wished her health and happiness for the year to come.

Categories
Street Photography

Flash Fiction: The Fuck Fairy Visits Dave in a Dream

A person dressed in drag does a high kick.
High Kick, World Pride Parade, Toronto, 2014

In the deepest part of sleep, when the night sky is darkest and the stars shine brightest, a fairy came to me and hovered off the end of my bed. It poked me with its starry wand and scared the shit out of me. I could tell it was a fairy by the wings and the makeup. The fairy started off by explaining how it’s rude to call a fairy “it” and said I should use the they/them pronouns instead. I rubbed my eyes and said I was sorry and wondered in the privacy of my own thoughts how many times I’d have to vacuum the room to get rid of the glitter and fairy dust and shit.

So what kind of fairy are you? I asked.

Oh, I’m the fuck fairy, sweetheart.

Like the tooth fairy, but for fucking?

Not at all. Not at all.

The fuck fairy looked with disgust at the dirty underwear heaped in a corner and explained that theirs was more of an editorial function. They pointed their starry wand at me and acted all disdainful, nose stuck in the air like I was a lesser being who emanated a foul odour (which I probably did seeing as I’d forgotten to shower for a couple days).

It’s come to our attention that when you write your stories you use the word fuck with alarming frequency. We’re here to excise the fuck out of your stories.

But it’s one of my favourite words. (In retrospect, I think I may have whined.)

There are more genteel alternatives, you know.

So how does this work? You wave your wand and all the fucks magically disappear from my stories.

I could do that, but I’d rather you participated in the process. Own your vocabulary, if you know what I mean.

A feeling of panic rose from my gut. If the lights had been on, the fuck fairy might have seen how my face turned blotchy and how my hands started to shake.

I don’t think you understand, I said. It’s not just a matter of personal taste; I’m addicted to the word fuck. If you make me stop cold turkey, I might spiral out of control. Stand on a street corner yelling swear words all night. Rearrange the letters on those mobile signs. There’s no telling how bad it could get. I might target nuns. School children. Bus drivers. I could turn into a public menace.

The fuck fairy held the tip of their wand to their lower lip and thought for minute. I see what you mean and, just to show that I’m not an unreasonable fuck fairy, I’m willing to make a compromise. Let’s forget about the stories you’ve already written. Start with this one.

You want me to edit the fuck out of this story?

Precisely.

Oh, I think it’s way the fuck too late for this story.

Categories
Street Photography

Flash Fiction: The Very Best Of Mediocrity

Lying on bench doing nothing on Queen's Quay in Toronto
Lying on bench doing nothing, Queen's Quay, Toronto

It began as a simple idea. The virtue of mediocrity. Like so many of his friends, Stephen had grown up with calls for excellence buzzing in his ears. Even in the parody of a film like Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure there was a lurking sincerity: Be excellent! We should aspire to be the best. But Stephen wondered if collectively we hadn’t taken these calls to a pathological extreme.

Stephen had exhausted himself. He had exhausted himself in the gym where he tried to sculpt his body to match the manipulated images of underwear ads. He had exhausted himself at work where he tried to reach the upper echelons of the corporate hierarchy even as he recognized that these positions were reserved for the well born and the well connected. Even in his marriage, he had exhausted himself trying to meet a TV standard of free-spirited hyper-attentive love.

One morning, Stephen rolled out of bed and vomited on the floor. Leaving the stinking puddle where it lay, he phoned the office and said he wouldn’t be in because he had vomited on the floor. The woman in HR asked why he couldn’t tough it out. Stephen suggested he come to work with a plastic bag and a bottle of Scope. The woman said that sounded like a plan. Stephen listened for even the faintest note of irony, and hearing none, he hung up the phone. He passed his wife who was running on their treadmill, noise cancelling headphones bobbing up and down. Maybe the headphones would filter the sarcasm from his greeting which she didn’t hear in any event. He flopped on the couch and stared at the ceiling and decided it was time for a mid-life crisis.

From that kernel grew a book: In Praise of Mediocrity. It had begun as a few pages he banged out half in anger half as a prank. But it gained a huge audience when a national weekly picked it up. Their editors pared it to a 500 word manifesto and, without intending it, Stephen became a Jim Jones figure fronting the Cult of So-so. Soon he had an agent and a book deal. A Ted Talk shored up his reputation. Working with a marketing team, his agent branded him Even StephenTM and his call to action started with the words: Level Down! There was a web site and social media accounts managed by people he never met and a monthly newsletter filled with suggestions of things that people of good intent should try their very best to fuck up. He went on a fifty city tour and word spread about his passionate call to slack off. By the end of the tour he was drawing audiences that could fill a concert hall.

The whole thing came crashing down when his agent phoned to say that the Winnipeg Chamber of Commerce wanted to present him with an award for excellence. Stephen said he couldn’t accept the award; it was completely off-message. His agent thought about it for a minute then said he was sorry.

I guess I fucked up.

Stephen told him to chill. He never would’ve hired him as his agent if he hadn’t sensed that, somewhere deep inside, the man had the potential to orchestrate a royal fustercluck.

I picked up some good shit yesterday. Maybe I bring it over and we get wasted?

Stephen said sure. So they spent the afternoon staring at passing clouds and talking about life and, as mediocrity goes, it was a pretty okay afternoon.

Categories
Nature

The Authentic Self

A snail crawls across wet Queen Anne's Lace in early morning light.
Snail on Queen Anne's Lace in Toronto's Evergreen Brick Works

Ron had to run some errands. There was the post office to send a parcel, then the bank to deposit donations he’d collected for a charity, then the convenience store for groceries. However, it took him longer to move from one location to the next, and when he checked his watch, he realized that at his current pace the entire morning would be gone by the time he had finished at the convenience store.

He couldn’t explain why he was moving so slowly. It felt as if there was more resistance from the sidewalk. Maybe the city had sprayed a special coat on the sidewalk to make it less slippery. With winter coming, a non-slip surface would be useful.

At the corner, where a huge billboard overlooks the parking lot, two workers were putting up a new ad. Ron paused to watch them unfurl rolled up sheets of paper then smooth them into place with glorified squeegees. The ads featured young people, physically exceptional, like everyone in the world of advertising. They smiled with gleaming perfect teeth and wore brightly coloured clothes. Each held a smart phone, some, texting, others, talking. The workers hadn’t unfurled all the words yet. Something about living your most authentic life. Sharing your true self with your true friends. Sentimental goop. Ron didn’t wait for them to finish, but moved on.

As Ron was arriving at the post office, his cousin Andrew approached from the opposite direction and seeing Ron, his stony face came alive. He shouted Ron’s name and asked how he was doing. It was an animated exchange until Andrew glanced over Ron’s shoulder to the sidewalk behind him and his lively face turned to stone again. He excused himself. Said it was great to see Ron. Would love to shoot the shit but he was late for a dental appointment.

On his way to the bank, something similar happened. He saw an old friend named Marty who was drinking coffee while sitting on the edge of a concrete planter, so he stopped to say hi. At first, Marty seemed happy to see him. All smiles and sunshine. But after looking past Ron, on down the sidewalk behind him, Marty’s expression clouded. Unlike Andrew, who tended to be contained, Marty was more inclined to let everything out.

Geez, Ronny boy, you having bladder control issues?

Christ, Marty, what a thing to ask.

Despite the insult, Ron checked the crotch area of his trousers to be sure he didn’t have any leakage and found that all was dry. He pointed emphatically at his crotch and told Marty to check it out. In turn, Marty pointed to the sidewalk behind Ron and told him to check it out. Ron turned and saw a wide line of moisture trailing from the place where he stood and extending all the way back to the intersection. The moisture gleamed in the morning light.

Christ, Marty, what’s happening to me?

Not your bladder?

No.

Ron knelt beside the trail of moisture and dabbed it with an index finger. The fluid was clear and felt viscous, like the gooey trailings of a slug. It was clear to Ron that this was coming from him, this leakage, but he had no way to account for it. He raised his gaze from the sidewalk to the workers in the distance who were putting away their tools and climbing down from the billboard. Why was it, he wondered, that in the world of advertising, the authentic self was so neat and so pleasing to look at while here on the ground it was such a messy proposition?

Categories
Street Photography

Wine Pairing Suggestions For The End Of The World

Night photograph of a homeless person sleeping underneath an orange blanket on the sidewalk at the intersection of Queen and Bay in Toronto.
Reclined on sidewalk, NE corner Queen and Bay

As a matter of habit, Peter Hadley III turned on his TV. He was now more than 90 days into it and yet another day with no TV signal, no internet connection, no cellphone service. He’d even tried old media like radio, shortwave, and CB, but all he heard at any frequency was a fitzing sound like when he pressed his ear to the mouth of a freshly opened bottle of Champagne. He wouldn’t even have electrical power if it weren’t for the building’s backup generator and a stack of jerrycans filled with diesel fuel. At least he could keep his wine collection chilled at the proper temperature.

Every day, Peter wandered the city streets, finding no one, not even human remains, and only now was he beginning to reconcile himself to the possibility that he was the sole survivor of whatever mysterious holocaust had taken everyone else. But on the 91st day, he discovered Cliff sprawled by the entrance to the city’s largest grocery store and eating potato chips and gulping diet cola from a two litre plastic bottle. Peter introduced himself and asked how long Cliff had been on his own.

Cliff answered that it’d been maybe two or three years.

Peter said that was impossible since things had gone haywire only 91 days earlier.

Still, Cliff said, I been living rough maybe two or three years. The rest of the world vanishing don’t really change that none. Tent in the ravine, just like always. Come up in the morning, just like always. Only, instead of begging for change, I bust into grocery stores and eat Twinkies.

Peter suppressed the customary feeling of revulsion that seized him whenever he encountered a homeless man. He observed that Cliff’s clothes were ragged and dirty. The man smelled. His fingertips were black with grime. Even so, Peter had grown tired of eating alone and craved the company of a live body, even if it was the live body of a homeless man. Besides, as Peter Hadley II had once said: You cannot drink a fine wine in solitude; it tastes so much better when you share it in the company of men. Given that, in the current situation, it appeared the only people left alive in the world were men, Peter was inclined to overlook the sexist undertones of his late father’s dictum.

Peter asked if Cliff wanted to join him for a proper dinner back at his apartment. Cliff could get himself washed up and put on some clean clothes. Peter had caught some fresh trout off a pier on the lakeshore and they could fry it up and, in lieu of lemons, they could accompany it with a crisp Sauvignon Blanc from Marlborough.

Cliff didn’t care one way or the other about a snooty wine-paired dinner, but he did like the idea of simple human contact. He followed Peter to his penthouse condo and when he walked through the front door said holy god almighty. Peter had been the CFO of a Fortune 500 company before he retired at 40 with his stock options and his Bentley. It was easy for a man in Peter’s position to forget that most people aren’t accustomed to sprawling accommodations with views that go forever.

While Cliff whacked off in one of the guest room showers and picked at a corn on his foot and trimmed his fingernails, Peter prepared dinner in a kitchen whose hardware rivaled that of any Michelin rated restaurant. Cliff gulped his Sauvignon Blanc in precisely the same way he had gulped his diet Cola and, as before, finished with a belch. He took no time on the nose, didn’t pause on the front end, ignored the mid-palate. And as for a finish, the wine had disappeared before there was any hope of that. Then again, it wasn’t as if he’d wasted a Lafite Rothschild on the man.

Peter Hadley III kept a wine room weighted heavily in favour of left bank Bordeaux wines along with a selection of Grand Cru Burgundies. One of the challenges in the current situation was finding appropriate pairings for his wines. While he found it easy enough to catch fresh fish and had even slaughtered a couple chickens while wandering through Little Portugal, locating red meat was a greater challenge. When the power went out, butchered meat began to rot. Peter had grabbed whatever cuts he could find and had stored them in his personal freezer, but that was no long term solution. There were still cows grazing in fields north of the city, but Peter had no idea how to slaughter a cow, much less carve it into pieces suitable for laying out grilled on his fine china. He wondered if maybe a pig would be easier. Burgundy would pair well enough with pork. He lived in Hogtown. Surely there must be pigs nearby.

Peter savoured the grassy notes as he took a modest sip of the Sauvignon Blanc. He gazed across the table at his guest, and beyond to the open kitchen door where he saw a wide selection of knives stuck to the magnetic strip across the far wall. With a roofie in Cliff’s glass, the man would be easy to handle, certainly easier than a fat sow. Peter could drag him unconscious into the guest shower and drain him there. What makes a good pairing with human flesh? he wondered. He had a twenty year old Romanée-Conti he would love to try with a well seasoned flank.

Categories
Street Photography

Socialist Poker

A man walks down the middle of Toronto's Bloor Street holding a sign overhead that says: "Freeze the accounts of the World Economic Forum!"
Anti-Vax Protest, Bloor Street West, Toronto

Saturday night poker. It was Norm who hosted these things, but given his unspecified underlying condition, he had decided to suspend our weekly ritual until such time as the local public health unit declared it safe to hold in-person gatherings. Nearly eighteen months had passed before he phoned and said he felt comfortable sitting with five others around a felt-topped table in a close room. On the side, a couple of us speculated about the nature of Norm’s underlying condition. We doubted it was respiratory given Norm’s custom of puffing on a fat stogie from one end of the evening to the other. Had it been fear of respiratory complications that prompted Norm to cancel his weekly games, he wouldn’t have answered the door, as he did tonight, in a haze of smoke. That would have made him a hypocrite and Norm was too principled a man for that. So, for the first time since the pandemic began, six of us gathered for a night of stud poker, all while knocking back shots of whisky in our own strange communion while cigar smoke settled over us like the tailings of an old censer lately swung through our holy chapel.

Aubrey got the first black jack, so she began to deal while the rest of us ante’d up. I wouldn’t call this a high stakes game. But it wasn’t a penny ante proposition either. It sat somewhere in the middle as did its players. Our host, Norm, was a retired history teacher and his wife, Hanna, was librarian at the school where Norm had taught for years. In fact, that’s how they met. Norm had presented himself at the counter, asking if the library had a copy of Jack Layton’s book, and it was love at first sight. Together, they had retired to healthy pensions, active in their respective unions, and remained relatively unaffected by whatever financial strains the pandemic had imposed on others.

By contrast, there was Aubrey’s husband, Sergei, who worked in a meat packing plant and, when things were at there very worst, was deemed an essential worker. It sounded noble, but really it was just another way of saying expendable. He tried to wear a mask at work, but the mask kept slipping below his nose. Inevitably, a sick co-worker who couldn’t afford to take time off infected Sergei who came home and, in turn, infected Aubrey. Both were miserable, but never so badly off that they had to go to the hospital. Even so, they were both too sick to work and lost their jobs. When she recovered, Aubrey found a new job soon enough. But Sergei’s was a case of long Covid and he had such aches and pains and feelings of malaise that he still struggled to get out of bed in the morning. That’s why he hadn’t joined them this evening.

In Sergei’s place, Norm invited an old buddy from university days named Grant who, in before times, had been a sports writer for a national news organization. Sports writing of course had dried up during the pandemic, so they shifted Grant to medical reporting since there were so many breaking stories about the WHO and the SARS-CoV-2 virus and vaccine development and conspiracy theories. It wasn’t as much of a stretch from sports to medicine as you might think. Grant used to write all the time about concussions and soft tissue injuries and doping, so he already knew some of the medical lingo. Most importantly, it meant he went blithely along without a blip in his personal income and since he could do much of his work from home, his employer was grateful for the savings and gave him perks along the way.

Finally, there was Janice, younger than the rest, someone Hanna had met while shopping for clothes at a leisure wear store. The pandemic had been hard on retail and Janice’s employer had boarded up the windows when the government first declared an emergency. They promised that her job would be waiting for her when things opened up again but, in the meantime, they couldn’t afford to keep her on the payroll. As a gesture of goodwill, they helped her file her application for the government handout. It wasn’t enough to pay all the bills, but with the occasional cheque from her parents, she’d survived. She shared with everyone that she was hoping this evening to win enough to cover next month’s rent.

It was a good evening and the time vanished in a fog of whisky and smoke. We enjoyed catching up with old friends and getting to know the newcomers. We told stupid jokes. And we shared our unique stories of life in the time of Covid. Sometime in the early hours of the morning, we decided to bring the game to a close with an all-in hand. Grant and Aubrey were already tapped out so there were only four of us in the final hand. In a strange piece of good luck, I took the kitty with a pair of sevens. I reached into the centre, but before I could draw all the chips to my corner of the table, Norm wagged a raised finger as if I had done something naughty. I saw in Norm’s expression something of the teacher he used to be: he had caught me doing something I shouldn’t and he was going to send me to the principal’s office.

Not so fast, Dave, he said.

I withdrew my hands, unsure what to make of Norm’s wagging finger.
These past months, I’ve had a lot of time to think about our poker games, and I’ve decided we should do things differently. Sure, this pandemic has been tough, but if all we do is talk about how tough it’s been, then we miss the opportunities it’s given us. We can build back better, you know. Even when it comes to poker games. So I’m proposing a reset here.

I eyed the pile of chips waiting for me in the centre of the table and thought about how that would translate into a couple of bottles of really good Bordeaux wine.

Aubrey asked Norm what he had in mind.

Well, I was thinking: no more winner take all. The fact is, Hanna and I, we’re all right, and Dave there, well, financially he’s okay too. I don’t know about you, Grant, but you give the impression you have a good income. So I’m thinking we should split the kitty between Aubrey and Janice. To each according to their need. That’s how I’d like to do things from now on.

As you might expect, I objected to Norm’s idea. It didn’t seem natural. It sucked all the fun out of poker night.

Norm gave me his sternest look. Fun? You didn’t have any fun tonight? Laughing with friends? Catching up? Good drinks? Good company? That didn’t do it for you? Not until you could take everyone’s money, too?

But those are the rules, I whined.

And I say: Fuck the rules. It’s time for a reset.

Christ, I said. Those World Economic Forum types have really sunk their teeth into you, haven’t they?

I could’ve stood on my rights and demanded the kitty, but the whole evening had faded into a fog of whisky and cigar smoke and didn’t feel real. I’d wake up in the morning with fuzz on my tongue and a dull ache behind my eyes, and maybe I’d have more cash in my pocket or maybe not, but whatever Norm said, at least I’d have the satisfaction of knowing, in my deepest truest self, that I’d played a better game of poker than the rest of them. It’s not how you play the game. It’s whether you win or lose.

Categories
Street Photography

Managing The Little Shits On The First Day Of Wizard School

A person wearing a sun hat and a T-shirt with the word "Slut" on it walks down the middle of Toronto's Church Street holding a soft drink.
Slut, Church Street, Pride Toronto 2022

It was the first day of a fresh term at the Academy of Magical Arts and the air crackled with excitement as the children took their seats in the Great Hall. The new students, young and fresh-faced, had been allotted seats at the front where they had an unobstructed view of the raised platform where the Head Wizard and other members of the teaching staff waited for the children to settle.

The hall was a fine example of late Gothic architecture with its stone columns rising to a rib vault ceiling and its pointed arches inset with stained glass windows. To the left, the windows featured scenes of wizardly prowess drawn from the Academy’s own ancient lore; to the right, a procession of the Academy’s luminaries literally illuminated by a brilliant morning light shining through the glass. Had the children been older and more attuned to affairs of the world, they might have appreciated that the grandeur of their surroundings demanded a tuition that only the most privileged could afford, billionaire fantasy authors, for example.

The Head Wizard rose and greeted the children with a tired speech he had delivered year after year until now, well on his way to senescence, the best he could manage was a somnolent drone. The aging pedagogue thought to himself how much he hated the little shits and prayed that none of them possessed enough natural ability to read his mind. He concluded his greeting by announcing that it was time for the sorting hat and he surrendered the proceedings to his number two.

A buzz rose from the children, none of whom knew anything about a sorting hat. On acceptance to the Academy, the children had received reams of printed material describing everything from payment to code of conduct to curriculum to travel instructions. But nowhere did the printed material mention a sorting hat.

The Head Wizard’s number two, a benevolent woman with a not-so-secret addiction to certain potions, rose from her seat and settled the children with soothing tones. The sorting hat was nothing to worry about. Just a fun way to divide the student body into its appropriate groups. She explained that each new student would take a turn putting the sorting hat on their head and the sorting hat would assign them to their proper group and, as a bonus, it would assign their proper pronouns.

After the greater part of the student body had submitted to the game, the children began to recognize a pattern. Invariably, the sorting hat took the children who had penises and put them in the boy group and assigned them the he/him pronouns. As for the children with vaginas, the sorting hat put them in the girl group and assigned them the she/her pronouns.

The process was quite orderly until one of the children with a vagina (whom the hat had put into the girl group) corrected the benevolent elderly teacher when the old woman referred to them as her.

The child said they were non-binary and insisted on being addressed as they/them. All their life, people had called them she/her but it didn’t line up with the way they experienced their body in the world.

Are you suggesting that the sorting hat is wrong? The benevolent woman’s tone was not so much patronizing as indignant.

I don’t know that it’s a matter of right or wrong? Right and wrong are simple binaries, just like boy/girl, and that’s the problem. In a way, I feel sorry for the hat for having such a limited view of human experience. One of the reasons I’ve come to the Academy is to find a magic that might transform my body so that it lines up with how I feel. 

The Head Wizard wasn’t having any more from the precocious shit and interjected, speaking with more force than at any other time that morning: This is the way they’d always done things. They trusted the hat. The magic the girl sought came from the dark arts and the dark arts were forbidden at the Academy. The only magical transformation the girl would find here went in the opposite direction; it would transform how she feels to line up with her body. And that was the end of it. If she didn’t like it, she could go back where she came from and live amongst the Muddles.

Categories
City Life

Flash Fiction: Houston We Have A Problem

A Nuit Blanche outdoor contemporary art exhibit on Toronto's Queen Street West featuring orange cherry pickers extended high above the crowded street and laden with palm fronds.
Gap Ecology (Still Lives With Cherry Pickers and Palms) by David Brooks

A dick pic started circulating around mission control and, after some investigation, Dr. Laura Bybis discovered that it had been leaked from Commander Niezosi’s confidential medical file. Niezosi complained of tinea cruris and had sent a photo of his groin area to the ground-based medical team. Unknown to everyone involved, the default email settings automatically copied communications from the crew to a minor administrator who didn’t realize the sensitive nature of Niezosi’s complaint and laughed when she saw the poor man’s penis floating weightless between two patches of flaming skin. She’d been sleeping with a kid on the engineering team and forwarded the pic with a note: “If you ever let it get to this, don’t even think of crawling into my bed.” Once in the engineer’s hands, the image went viral.

Bybis called a team meeting and addressed everyone about the indiscretion and what it meant for crew morale. The crew, of course, was not present at the meeting because, at twelve million kilometres from Earth, a signal took forty seconds to travel in one direction. Forty seconds doesn’t seem like much time, but it’s enough to make live meetings unworkable. Instead, Bybis played a pre-recorded address from Niezosi to his colleagues on the ground. Bybis hadn’t screened the video before she pressed play, a decision that struck her in retrospect as regrettable.

Niezosi appeared on the main screen in mission control and addressed the team while framed on either side by screens that displayed diagrams of the mission’s trajectory to Mars. He was unshaven, haggard, dark circles under his eyes. But there was no hesitation. As you’d expect of a mission commander, he got right to it: “I want to thank all you assholes, all you dim witted engineers and shit-for-brains medical people for failing to anticipate the obvious. If you add up all the time we were confined to our space suits during the initial phase of the mission—prep in our cockpit twiddling our thumbs, then blast off, then the initial burn—you get nearly three days confined to our suits. Plenty of time for the rot to take hold.

“Now I know what you’re going to say. You’re going to tell me how Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin spent nearly nine days in their suits and neither of them complained about jock itch. But look what you give us to wear for the rest of the mission. For more than three fucking years we’ve gotta prance around in these skin-tight get-ups. No natural fibres. No breathable cloth. It’s as if you’ve vacuum sealed my dick in a Petri dish. What the hell were you thinking?

“And then there’s the medical team. I’ve searched our module from top to bottom and I can’t find a fucking thing. No anti-bacterial creams. No anti-fungals. I’ve searched the pantry for ingredients I could throw together. Make some kind of powder or balm. But the rest of the crew is worried I’ll compromise our food supply. I’ve taken to floating around au natural. At first, the rest of the crew thought it was funny, but between my feelings of humiliation and their feelings of embarrassment, it’s starting to take its toll on morale. Never mind morale, I’m so fucking itchy I’m going out of my gourd.”

The ground crew at mission control was an international team, and Dr. Bybis worried that many of the people wouldn’t understand the phrase “out of my gourd” but, as she later discovered, it’s an expression transferable to many cultures. Everyone on the ground knew exactly what Niezosi meant. And although a few of them suffered the same malady, they at least had the reassurance that, whenever they liked, they could drive to the corner Walgreens and pick up some ointment.

A man wearing special glasses stands in a crowd gazing at the sun. In the background is Toronto's Old City Hall on Queen Street West.
Gazing at the sun during a solar eclipse
Categories
Street Photography

Flash Fiction: A Ghost Story with a Scary Ending

A black and white photo of a man walking past a steam vent while a cement truck passes in the background.
Temperance Street Steam Vent, Toronto

When he showed up at the office ten minutes late on a Monday morning, everyone noticed. They didn’t notice that he was ten minutes late; they noticed his general appearance. No one came right out and said: Geez, dude, you look wasted. Instead, they stabbed him with their judgmental, Puritanical stares and that was as good as coming right out and saying what he already knew. He’d seen it reflected back at him in the subway window as he rode to work: the bags under the eyes, the coarse stubble that made him look apathetically desperate, the tie that never quite settled into place. All in defiance of the office ethos and its strict professionalism. But most striking of all was the shock of white hair. On Friday afternoon, he’d left the office with a thick head of dark brown hair, and on Monday morning, he’d shown up with the scalp of a man thirty years his senior.

His office colleague (the one people assumed was his friend) approached and put an arm around his disappointing shoulders: Geez, dude, you look like you’ve seen a ghost.

That is precisely what had happened, but he was afraid to say anything. The ghost had arrived at midnight, teetering on the fulcrum between Sunday and Monday. He wasn’t sure whether he was awake when the disparate wisps coalesced at the foot of his bed or whether he’d been dreaming when it first assumed its form. He had thought the ghost was there to scare the bejeezus out of him since scaring people seems to be the point of ghosts. But things didn’t play out that way. They shot the shit for a while—this and that—and things grew comfortable enough that he excused himself to get a beer from the fridge. When he returned, he found that the ghost had cracked a cold one, too, and was lounging with its feet up on the spare night stand.

He wasn’t Roman Catholic, so he couldn’t be sure, but he’d say the ghost was in a limbo situation. At one point, the ghost mentioned the bardo, but that could’ve been the brand of beer. Limbo. Bardo. Whatever you call it, the ghost had unfinished business on this plane and he expected that, as the night progressed, the ghost would ask for help concluding whatever it had to conclude in order to release itself from its entrapment in the netherworld. But the request never came. The ghost had another drink, and then another and another. The ghost was having too much fun to ruin it with talk of unfinished business, preferring instead to ramble on about the joys of a full life, the love of a good woman (or man, as the case may be), the passionate pursuit of interests, a deep curiosity about the world at large.

As the earliest light began to unfurl itself across the city, he interrupted the ghost and asked: but aren’t you going to frighten me, you know, say boo or something?

The ghost laughed and swung its feet from the night stand: Really? You want me to say boo?

The ghost excused itself to take a piss and when it came back it said: You know, I’ve been thinking about what you asked and, to be honest, you don’t need me to say boo. You have enough to be afraid of as it is.

As the first light slipped through the cracks in the window shade, the ghost vanished. He was angry. This was the best the ghost could do? He’d stayed up all night, talking, drinking, baring his soul to an apparition. And this? This? He slapped on a rumpled shirt and didn’t bother to shave. He skipped breakfast and ran to the subway station. Riding into the office, he stared at his reflection and noted that he looked like hell. He rode the elevator to the 33rd floor, coffee in hand, and steeled himself for his office job, noting the semantic detail that he didn’t actually work in an office, but in an interior cubicle with no view of anything except a stupid screen saver of his employer’s corporate logo jittering across the monitor.