“Let me come over, at least,” Christmas pleaded, “I miss you, K.”
“Hello, who is this?” K. asked officiously. “Who am I speaking to, please?”
Christmas laughed and hung up. She pulled on her itchy Guatemalan mittens. Fall had turned, suddenly it was crisply unforgiving outside. She would stop on Queen Street, on her way over, to buy a boneless chicken roti from the Roti Lady for K. to take to work tomorrow. A little Caribbean might help, that shitty institutional food was enough to make you murder someone.
To say that K.’s apartment was a disaster would have been a compliment. There was Beefaroni on the low ceilings and two weeks worth of unlaundered gitch cobbled out an enchanted trail toward the bathroom. Stacks of papers, magazines, and take-out menus were splayed across the floor in fanlike phalanxes. In the middle of the kitchen floor was a rank-smelling can of opened baked beans which even K.’s cat, Soya Sauce, eyed with outrage.
“On that decorating show I watch, they say never to sacrifice your personal mementos and sense of style for the overall aesthetic, even if—”
“Where are your skateboards?”
Christmas had opened up a closet and found it stuffed with duct tape, rolled gauze, and an enormous vacuum cleaner, which had all the technology of a NASA telescope. Boxes of Lean Cuisine and Hungry-Man fell on her head. “Where is your record collection, Ken?”
K. looked at Christmas and frowned. Who was this girl with so much brown hair? It was everywhere. On her sweater, on her face, stuffed behind her ears. Why was she rifling through his apartment? Why was she wearing so many bangles? Bangles. Is that what they were called? What an odd word for bracelets. How very British. Only the British could have a snooty word for bracelets. What skate things was she talking about? What records?
“What records?” he asked cautiously, as if he knew her answer already and was merely testing her. Christmas turned then, from the mess, from the close, fusty food odors of the kitchen. She focused on K.’s vitreous stare.
“What the fuck?” She took a step forward and picked at something dry and scabrous just above K.’s ear. A clean strip of his curly hair had been shaved away for a series of crude incisions.
“Ow!” K. flinched, slapped away her hand. He took a step back, nearly slipping on an open Food magazine featuring a section on crème brûlée recipes. In a trembling voice, one that fought for patience and the concomitant emotion of understanding, K. asked her again, “Who are you?”
Christmas held a tiny thread in her hand, one of K.’s stitches. Attached to it was a pinkish bit of matter the size of a dust mote. Which memories had Bot taken? Which had he left? Where was the part of K. that cried to Bob Seeger songs? Where was the piece that liked the cheese on his open-faced grilled cheese sangers a little puckered? Where was the memory of K.’s drunk mother climbing onstage with a magician so that she could be sliced in two like the assistants with curler-wrought hair, wearing spangly costumes and flesh-colored tights?
K. held onto the cuff of her sweater lamely. His mouth formed a weak “o” as he breathed out his final question. Again, he wanted to know who she was. Instead of answering him, Christmas shook him off, picked up a heavy knife from the kitchen island covered with pizza boxes, ants, and ashtrays, and stabbed her best friend: first, in the liver, then in the kidney.
He bled in her lap until morning. She sat in the dark listening to the people on the first floor shower, then make a noisy breakfast of smoothies and cereal. When she was sure they’d left, she pulled a fleece blanket over K. and left his apartment, her itchy autumn sweater soggy with blood.
She took the Queen car. It was filled with pierced and tattooed indie warriors, drunks, who reeked of urine and mouthwash, and a few finely polished high-earners who’d been too lazy to take their Beamers to the car wash. Christmas hated all of them. She got off at Spadina and walked north, up through the stench and crowds of Chinatown, toward the CAMH, clutching the thick chopping knife in one hand, a lock of K.’s curly brown hair in the other. She was going to finish this now.
Inside the Centre, on the eleventh floor, Dr. Bot unwrapped a sticky blueberry muffin and blew on his Tim Horton’s double-double. He looked outside his window. He could see her, his favorite little rodent. The one who managed to scurry away from his blade, the one who’d always woken up before he could shear that beautiful hair and lacerate that fine-tuned, if lazy, brain. He watched her move into the building with determined steps. Her hair was messed, sweater soiled and lopsided.
I’ve killed a lot of rats to reach you, he thought, as he sat back in his ergonomic chair and waited for her.
The emancipation of Christine Alpert
by Nathan Sellyn
Toronto Airport
Isabella Gauthier’s husband Carl was still warm in the grave, and she had forgotten how to live alone. That spring was a rainy one, but those first weeks without him rolled forward so slowly that it seemed fitting they took place underwater. So she ran errands, to keep herself busy. On that day alone she had met with the lawyer, had the car’s oil changed, boxed up all the books in Carl’s office, and eaten dinner at the bowling club. But she still found herself home at 6 with nothing to fill the hours before she might find sleep. So she watched the hockey game with the sound off and a record on, then sat down to read her magazines in his chair by the window. At just before 11, she removed her glasses to rub at her eyes. When she put them back on, she noticed the headlights in the street. Six, on three matching black sedans.
The cars all arrived together, but could only find two parking spots, and so the last in the convoy drove on, beyond the block of town houses and out of Isabella’s sight. The others parked and cut their engines, but their doors remained closed. Tinted windows made it impossible to tell who sat inside. Isabella reached over and turned off her reading light. Yet nothing happened. The sedans lay still, waiting, like a pair of polished steel crocodiles feigning sleep by the riverbank.
After several minutes, footsteps broke the silence of the street. Isabella pressed her face against the glass, but the man to whom the footsteps belonged didn’t require much effort to notice. He wore a tuxedo, and with each streetlamp he passed she gained a better view of both his solid build and the corkscrews of glossy black hair that fell toward his shoulders. His skin had an olive tone, and she guessed him to be of Middle Eastern descent, or perhaps Spanish. As he approached the two cars, their doors opened, and Isabella brought her hand to her mouth.
Four more men emerged, also wearing tuxedos. The first man, without speaking, raised his palm, and they moved toward him. As all five came together they threw their arms around one another in a mass of silent embraces. The first man went to a lawn across the street and looked up at the second-floor window, then made a gesture to the four, who immediately returned to the cars and began pulling black boxes of varying shapes and sizes from their trunks. They too then moved to the lawn. They laid the boxes on the damp grass, then kneeled to open them. When they stood up, each raised a different instrument — one a clarinet, one a violin, one a French horn, and the last a bass. The first man looked at the four, glanced at the window, then looked at the four again and said something Isabella couldn’t hear. And then they began to play, and he began to sing.