Tag: People

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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: The Hero’s Secret Identity

A young man in jeans and T-shirt and wearing a lanyard with ID card emerges onto the sidewalk from an underground subway entrance.

Greg didn’t think it was a coincidence he shared his given name with the famous movie star who inspired his best idea to date. Like Gregory Peck posing as a Jew so he could report on what it’s like to get the short end of the cultural stick, Greg thought he could work up an amazing exposé by posing as a front line health care worker. Greg wanted to know what it was like to live with the exhaustion, the stress, the heartache, of working as a medical professional in the middle of a global pandemic. An opportunity like this doesn’t come every day, you know.

Greg had stolen hospital greens from a cleaning truck parked on Bond Street on the east side of St. Mike’s Hospital, and his buddy, Gordy, a digital artist, had agreed to make a fake ID. While Greg posed for his fake employee mug shot, Gordy confessed that Greg’s scheme made him feel uneasy. Gordy thought it was unethical. Greg told him to chill. It was a standard journalist thing, going undercover to find out what it really feels like to be on the front lines. Besides, he said, it’s not as if I’m gonna do anything medical; I’m just there to feel the vibe. As Gordy laminated the fake ID card, he made Greg promise not to touch any patients and, for god’s sake, don’t catch anything. Greg promised, then went home to binge watch old episodes of Grey’s Anatomy so he’d be up on his medical jargon.

Greg rationalized his plan by saying it was in the public interest to know about the suffering of health care providers, but he had to admit that he was equally drawn by the desire to know what it felt like to be called a hero. Normally, nobody would ever call a schmuck like him a hero. He heard how people leaned out their windows at night and banged on pots. And he heard how newscasters talked about their extraordinary sacrifice. Who wouldn’t want some of that recognition? On the subway for his first shift, ID dangling at the end of his lanyard and glasses steaming above his blue medical mask, he couldn’t help but notice the way people looked at him and the way it made him feel. He would have to make a note of this for his exposé. As he got out at Queen Street, a couple guys patted him on the back and thanked him for his sacrifice. He said thank you back and told them how he was just doing what anybody in his position would do.

Walking east along Queen Street toward the hospital, Greg kept his head low, trying not to draw attention to himself, especially as he got close to the entrance where a group of security guards stood in a row, arms folded and looking stern. When he crossed Victoria Street, he noticed the news van with the dish on the roof and big logo on the sliding door and the cameraman and the talking head with perfect hair and microphone. This wasn’t the only news van. There was a whole row of them lined up behind the first van. And a whole row of reporters standing along the curb opposite the row of security guards.

The two rows—reporters and security guards—formed a gauntlet and running the gauntlet right down the middle of the sidewalk was a group of protesters shouting and waving signs. At first, Greg had no idea what the protesters were going on about, but as he got closer, he saw they were a bunch of whack-a-doodle conspiracy theorists who said the whole thing was a hoax perpetrated by the global elites to keep ordinary people under the boot. They were spreading the disease with cell phone towers. The whole thing was a big eugenics project. It was the product of covert biological warfare.

The marchers drew up to where Greg stood and they stopped. Greg was astonished at the number of marchers who needed major dental work. Another observation for his exposé. Somebody in the back yelled how health care workers were complicit in spreading the disease. That just set Greg off. He couldn’t help himself. He had to respond. It was a matter of honour.

Greg tore into an impassioned speech about being an ordinary working guy who suddenly found himself with a difficult choice: either play it safe and sit at home collecting welfare, or step up even though that meant risking infection. Well, virtually every one of his colleagues had chosen to step up and take the risk. Not because they’re special. But because it’s the right thing to do. What’s not the right thing to do … And Greg lit into the marchers, calling them ignoramuses and selfish buffoons, and giving all the news services terrific sound bytes. But Greg wasn’t about to go easy on the news services either, taking a step towards one of the cameras and pointing a finger at the lens and calling them irresponsible for their hackneyed bothsideism which tried to give legitimacy to a side populated by ignoramuses and selfish buffoons and …

Greg reached the climax of his set piece when a fist magically emerged from the crowd and flattened him. Stars burst like fireworks in a black sky. The copper taste of blood seeped down the back of his throat. He heard the sound of crunching bone and, afterwards, as he lay on the sidewalk, he felt a throb across the left side of his face that made him wonder if maybe rodents hadn’t burrowed into his head. Christ, he thought, I’ve taken things too far.

A police officer tackled the owner of the fist and two orderlies attended to Greg while one of the security guards ran off for an ice pack. The news services did what news services do best and made an indisputable record of events from seven different angles. When the police officer had cuffed the assailant and read him his rights and left him to cool off in the back seat of a cruiser, he returned to the scene and knelt beside Greg. The more the police officer leaned in to him and spoke in sympathetic tones, the worse Greg’s face throbbed. When the police officer explained to him the charges against the assailant and how they’d like Greg to make a statement if he was feeling up to it, Greg waved the man off. He struggled to his feet and wobbled a bit, then, unrecognizable beneath his purple eye and swollen face, he turned to the same camera he had accosted only minutes before, and said he bore no ill will for the man who punched him in the face. These are difficult times for everybody. For extra effect, he spat blood into his shirt sleeve. I’m sure that guy’s got it tough already. The last thing he needs is criminal charges against him.

Greg hoped that would diffuse the situation and give him a chance to slip away before someone recognized him. But it only made things worse. He heard one of the security guards shout that he was a hero. And one of the news people started rehearsing lines in front the camera: Now, folks, this is what real heroism looks like. Only moments ago …

Someone called for his name. Someone else asked what department he worked in.

Greg wanted to run away, but his legs felt like rubber bands. He wanted everyone to leave him be; he’d be fine if he sat here alone for a while. He wanted to tell them all to fuck off. But he couldn’t do that. One thing he knew for certain is that a real hero doesn’t tell his admirers to fuck off.

Categories
Street Photography

Flash Fiction: High Noon at the Schrödinger Corral

Black and white photograph through the window of a bar where a person sits alone at a table, legs crossed, right hand on a glass.

I heard a couple bangs like slamming doors, then I saw a couple plumes rising from the pavement at my feet, looking for all the world like miniature Old Faithful geysers. Someone further down the sidewalk screamed at me to get down but I stood in a dissociative befuddlement, doing my best to interpret the rising chuffs of dust, and failing. It wasn’t until long afterwards, when police questioned me, that I understood someone had been taking pot shots at me from the other side of the street.

Know why anyone’d wanna hurt you?

I’m a conveyancer.

That’s a reason?

I shrugged and floated away like an empty plastic bag pushed around by an afternoon breeze. The breeze didn’t have far to push before it found the door to a pub and pushed me right through and onto a vinyl covered stool where the bartender was all too happy to pour me a lager even if I was only an empty plastic bag. A couple mouthfuls of lager was all it took to set me off on a philosophical meander whose basic theme was meandering itself, or at least the randomness that a good meander depends on.

Although nearly an hour had passed since a stranger shot at me for no discernible reason, an image of the rising plumes stayed fresh in my head. And the feeling that went with it, too, the feeling of utter randomness. The stranger hadn’t been shooting bullets, but quantum particles. They had hit me. They had missed me. They were Schrödinger’s bullets. In law, the bullets had missed me. But in every way that mattered, the bullets had pierced my flesh and lodged deep inside me.

I stared at my pint glass and watched how the bubbles rose up through the straw coloured liquid, some bursting when they hit the air, others clinging to the inside of the glass. When I bent my ear close to the mouth of the glass, I could hear the tiny bubbles screaming. Maybe they thought I was their god and they were either screaming in pain as they burst out of existence or they were screaming in supplication: let this cup pass from my hands. As with my rising plumes, there was a randomness to the bubbles. Who’s to say which bubbles burst and which clung to the inside of the glass? I could make no more sense of the bubbles than I could of the bullets.

There was a feeling of randomness, too, in the sensation that rose to my brain each time I drank another mouthful of lager. It was as if, once inside me, the lager continued to release bubbles and they rose through my blood/brain barrier and attached themselves to neurons where they whispered subtle instructions to my soul, some of rage and some of consolation, some of fear and some of wistfulness. I had no idea which feeling would prevail. To be truthful, I’m not sure prevailing was their game. In keeping with the quantum bullets that had/hadn’t come hurtling at me that afternoon, I was inclined to think these were Schrödinger’s feelings. I felt angry and I felt at peace. I felt consolation and I felt desolation.

I ordered a second. It would take me all afternoon to figure out what I was feeling. Even then, I had no confidence I’d be any further ahead. I’d figure things out. I’d never figure things out.

Categories
Street Photography

Flash Fiction: Interview with the Greatest Living Poet

Candid street portrait from behind, focussing on ear lobes and facial tattoos. The subject has hair slicked back and smokes a cigarette. The smoke obscures an already blurred background.
X’s features lay indeterminate inside that grey smog.

Everyone has heard of X, our country’s preeminent poet, a fact made more remarkable because, in today’s prosaic world of Tik Tok influencers and power-hungry demagogues and anti-vaccination marches, it seems improbable that there would be widespread interest in the traces of one person’s poetic imagination. I already knew something of the enigmatic X because, when I was an undergrad student, I roomed with someone who went on to do a Ph.D. thesis on the poetics of X so, when I got the call to do a profile piece for the zine, I had an in.

My friend sent me to a non-descript address in the suburbs. It could have been anywhere. Dandelion infested lawns. Power mowers whining like cicadas in the heat. Garden hoses left uncoiled by the garage. It was a matter of some embarrassment that I hadn’t read anything by X, but every bookstore (even virtual bookstores) told me they had nothing in stock. I couldn’t even reserve any of X’s works through the public library system; the people I spoke to speculated that maybe clients were stealing X’s books (even virtual books). X was, after all, a popular figure. Legendary even. If it came to specifics, I’d have to bluff my way through the interview.

I found X sitting in a garden of plants I couldn’t identify. X was smoking a cigarette—vaping is for pussies (not my words)—and the hot afternoon air was so still that each exhalation added more smoke to a growing cloud that had settled around the poet’s head. X’s features lay indeterminate inside that grey smog. The hair might have been blond or brown; the eyes, green or blue. In fact, I couldn’t be certain X was a man. I had assumed, but maybe I wasn’t even using the right pronoun. When X greeted me, the voice gave no clue as to gender. Years of smoking had turned the voice into an understated gravel pit that could have belonged to anyone.

So what’ve you written lately? And as soon as the words had bounced off my tongue, I felt like an idiot.

Through the cloud of smoke, X offered what may or may not have been a smile. I am a poet, X answered.

The economy of words. The compression. The indeterminacy of meaning. The shamanic vibe. All these things were the hallmark of a great poet. And yet all these things were also a source of frustration for someone trying to nail down a piece for a struggling arts zine.

I am a poet because I am a poet. Not because I write poetry.

But if I apply a Butlerian approach to identity, I’d challenge your poetic essentialism and say your identity as a poet depends on the performative aspects of poetic production.

X laughed and laughed until the laughter turned into a hacking fit and X nearly fell onto the patio paving stones. Christ, you’ve been spending too much time with that postdoctoral nitwit friend of yours.

But you still write poetry, don’t you?

I tried once, but it scared the shit out of me.

Referring afterwards to my notes, I see that I wrote a gigantic “PHEW!!!” And underneath: “At least I know now why I couldn’t find any of X’s works.” Then, on the reverse side of the same page: “This A-hole has never written a single fucking word!”

So what is it? I asked. Anxiety? Fear of failure?

X drew on a freshly lit cigarette, held the smoke in for a minute, then expelled it into the ever-present cloud: Nothing so pedestrian.

As I understand it (assuming there’s anything at all to understand), X rests the full weight of personal poetics on a notion of opportunity cost which (because X wants to appear intellectual) can be reduced to the Latin maxim: expressio unius est exclusio alterius. Saying one thing forecloses the possibility of saying something else. If we say X has green eyes, then we have prevented ourselves from saying that X has blue eyes. But X wants to savour the possibility of having both green and blue eyes and wants the feeling to go on and on forever. So it’s impossible to say either. X struggles against the law of non-contradiction. X wants to kick the young Wittgenstein in the nuts. X wants to drown positivists in Heraclitus’s river.

In a way, said X, I’m the greatest poet who’s ever lived. By writing nothing, I leave the field open to infinite possibility. No other poet has been so expansive.

X wrapped things up with a personal mantra: Specificity destroys possibility!

Even so, for all this abstraction, I faced the practical matter of a deadline. Zine publishers love their specificity. In the end, I wrote the best article it was possible for me to write. I submitted a blank page and a yellow sticky with a note: “Feel free to make of this whatever you like.” I may well be the greatest zine writer who’s ever lived.

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

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
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

Things Are Opening Up

A man wearing a mask passes a store window that has been papered over but has the word "open" in red letters still stuck to the glass.
Man Passes Store Window, Yonge Street, Toronto

Things are opening up now.

That’s what Jeremy’s father had said when his parents came upstairs to his bedroom to tell him he’d be going back to school.

But I’m already at school, and Jeremy pointed to the tablet sitting upright on his makeshift desk.

Honey, we’re talking about real school. You’ll get to see your friends.

Jeremy didn’t think much of his first day back at real school. The problem with friends at real school is that when they shove you at recess you fall down in the pea gravel and tear a real hole in the knees of the new jeans your mother bought you special and when you get home you’ll have to tell your mother how you tore your jeans on the first day and she’ll give you a lecture about not appreciating all that you have. Jeremy didn’t see how appreciating your new jeans would keep your so-called friends from shoving you at recess. Maybe he’d figure that one out when he got older. If his friends didn’t kill him first.

On the way home after his first day of opened up school, Jeremy noticed something he’d never noticed before. Standing at one end of the longest street between school and home, Jeremy looked to the far end of that street and saw how it was littered with discarded masks. Most were blue or white. Some were cloth with logos or patterns stamped onto them. A couple were funny, with cartoon characters or teeth or giant lips. Some lay in the dirt by the curb. The wind had blown a few under shrubs in front of the building where he went to get his teeth cleaned. There was even a mask hanging from the lowest branch in a tree. When Jeremy got close, he saw that it was an Arthur the nerdy aardvark mask, nothing any normal child would wear.

Jeremy had an idea. His mother would give him proper hell for this one but, seeing as she was already going to give him proper hell for the knees of his new jeans, he didn’t see how things could get worse. He pulled off his own mask, a white N95, and tucked it into his back pack. Then he pulled down the Arthur the nerdy aardvark mask and put it on. It didn’t smell as bad as he thought it might. He could hear his mother scolding him, telling him he was being gross, yelling at him about germs and the need to be hygienic. Jeremy didn’t know what the word hygienic means but he figured it had something to do with not putting on masks that other people have worn.

As soon as Jeremy put on the mask, it felt as if he was somewhere else, like someone had flipped a switch and there he was, instantly transported. He could hear three older kids, like the bullies he knew from school, teasing him. Only they didn’t call him Jeremy. They called him Arthur, or shitface, and they kicked him, and when he wet himself, they howled like animals. Jeremy tore off the mask and when he looked down at his crotch, he saw that his jeans were dry. What he’d felt seemed real enough but it must have been virtual, like going to school on his tablet before the world opened up.

Jeremy threw the Arthur the nerdy aardvark mask into the bushes and tried another mask, a blue medical mask that was clean except for a patch of lipstick on the inside. Right away, the mask dunked him in a world of chatty Cantonese and, for reasons couldn’t grasp, she understood every word. She was complaining to a friend that she never had enough money, always behind on the rent and the car payments, and although the books she kept told her there should be enough, there wasn’t; the money seemed to evaporate. She worried that her husband was gambling again. If one of them got infected and they couldn’t work, she didn’t know what they’d do. When Jeremy pulled off the blue medical mask, he found that he was gripping his stomach like there was an acid hole burning through the middle of it.

Finally, Jeremy put on a mask the colour of night. It was dirtier and smelled of something he couldn’t name, though it reminded him of the smell on his father’s breath whenever he went out with the men his mother didn’t like. There was a sweet yeastiness mixed in with the mud. He became a man of few words, with no friends to speak of, who drifted through the streets cadging coins from strangers and taking shelter underneath the bridge behind the school. He didn’t like to wear a mask, but he needed it to get into certain places, like the shelter where he sometimes slept, and the clinic where they treated the scabs on his feet. He’d only had the one mask for months but now he knew where he could score a clean one.

Jeremy tossed the black mask onto the street and ran home. He didn’t understand why everybody was so excited about the world opening up. As far as he could tell, it was open enough. Any more open, and it would make him bananas.

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.