Calgary [first part]

by Jordano Aguzzi

Laura is a post-Lisa. Lisa was a post-Olivia. Olivia was a post-Emily. Emily was a post-Julie. Julie was the one that fucked me up.

Comfort is a difficult thing to let go of. That’s what Laura told me. Baggage, briefcases and overcoats. Hidden in concessions rather than the crowd. Like fast food; ageless and becoming. Manufactured and shipped. Attached and long lost when dropped by the airport luggage handlers. Worried about, constant and distant. Aware.

Laura is smart, though. Smarter and older. Twenty-six and I’m only twenty. She calls me a child. When I slept with her for the first time and my loving was perceived as teenage tempo. This probably had something to do with the ripping of two rubbers before giving up on them completely. Guidance by the blind guide-book of free online pornography. Pornhub, redtube, youporn. They all failed me. I learned for the first time that I didn’t know how to fuck. And then I thought of Julie and how I accused her of her poor laying. Her subpar riding. Her self-respect out the window. I destroyed it while riding a white horse of delusion, faceless and emotionless.

It’s been six months since the break-off. My departure. I haven’t been sleeping very well.

Laura is shy. If her roommate didn’t tell me that she was hot for me, not even Bond could’ve guessed the apparently obvious. Completely oblivious. It happened when we went out for a smoke on her balcony. Roommate Ali was out at a gay bar with a woman who loved her but she did not love back. Laura looked over the edge of the apartment balcony. It was raining and cold and not summer in Montreal, even though it was supposed to be.

I tell Laura to look at the puddle. I smoked a joint earlier and now I was talking nonsense. But the nonsense was an image that I found beautiful and ran endorphins through my veins. And I don’t even know if that’s biologically plausible since I study the arts, but it was a passive thought, like most of the other ones.

The lamppost reflected in the black puddle had raindrops surrounding the yellow luminescent circle. A sun with dancing rays. Stop motion action in realization. Urban nature fleeing its primordial coil and expressing itself among concrete.

“You’re so deep, Adam.”

“Was that sarcastic?”

“Yes.”

“OK,” I mutter. Silence. She bites her inner lips while sucking them underneath her front teeth. “It’s hard to tell sometimes.”

She scoffs.

“Well. All the time actually,” I reiterate.

She takes a drag of nicotine. Lets it out through her nose and looks me in the eyes and gets shy and looks down at her all-white keds.

“And you got me all wrong. No philosophical revelations here. Honestly. I was just pointing out something aesthetically pleasing, Laura. But thanks for discouraging enlightened thought.”

“Don’t let it get to your head, dude.”

“What get to my head?”

“That stuff I said about you being smarter than most guys your age. Trust me, that doesn’t mean much.”

“Thanks for that.”

And then I reach underneath the back of her blouse and hold her breasts tight against mine, my arm against her flesh, hands on her bumpy spine, and I kiss her with the taste of cardiac arrest on her tongue. She looks away. I lift her up and carry her to the bed. I graze her cunt over her skirt. Under her skirt. I kiss her under her bellybutton piercing. I lift my hands up her skirt and she jumps.

She walks to her doorframe quickly and pats her clothes down and becomes wound up.

“Hey so do you want anything? Like tea? Or coffee?”

“Um.”

“I can do that.”

Laura’s now on her way back home to Calgary. The blue province. Cowboys. Tar sands. The inevitable champion of Canadian Suburbia. Not that that’s a bad thing. Just a repetitive one.

Morning is blue before the sun comes up. Then you hear the first bird chirp around 5:05am after illegally streaming British sitcoms. Apparently they want to make that felony now. Streaming copyrighted work. Once again, I’m a crook. As if spending every second minute smoking pot wasn’t. No matter how many I’ve smoked in the past or will smoke in the future, I will be crooked. The bad guy in-between places. Crashing at the parents place until I find a new place or my fatass ex-landlord decides to stop being a fuck. Open window waken bake. Writing in my mind but none of it taking place on paper. Further lost in the novel battle, laziness and ADD mindset swaying concentration and swooning self-conscious women because I have nice bone structure. Iced coffee is no help. Neither is a second spliff. A little self-medicated pain relief to dance away in the morning haze.

The bird’s whistle is clear again, almost like a human. Or almost like a bird. Just a single whoooo. Train smoke on a receding plain. Then two fleeting cries, then some vibrato towards the end and a break the third whistle. Wake up call symphony serta-fied. It’s very nice actually. A sort of peace coming through the cracks my window-blinds along with the pre-dawn blue. Blue.

The world is blue before the sun comes up.

That would not be empirical evidence. Locke would cringe. But my world is blue before the sun comes up. Subjective relativity and all that 20^th century bullshit. My parents tenant microwaves a breakfast snack. The beep beep and vroom of the circling glass tray. Then she showers away the sleep-sweat. And as she gets ready for work I’m trying to fall asleep. Asleep or maybe just fall. I wouldn’t know. The bird whistling stops.

Laura skyped with me tonight (this morning) and made me feel good about myself. She mentioned that whenever she says something positive about me I never reply. I tell her that maybe it’s because I don’t believe her. She asks why I wouldn’t believe her. Then I rephrase it and say I either don’t believe her or don’t know how to react when I know the good thing she’s saying about me is true. She says that she’s a sociopath but I highly doubt that.

The whistle twirls in again through the blue. I wonder what color the bird is and if it’s the mother. And when the other birds will begin singing with the early riser. The blue bird jazz. The wood pecker probably hung over after a long night of partying. The crow probably despairingly waking toward another day of life. A tenant. The pigeon shits all day. The blue bird cries. Undoubtedly, I know nothing about birds.

Work comes next a few hours later.

The Bookstore hired me a week after the interview because I was cute with the female interviewers. The name of the bookstore was The Bookstore. An attempt at irony, or something. How am I supposed to know; a job’s a job. It was a corporate place, with quantity of over-aged artists. Burnouts. They had me shacked up in the back warehouse with stacks of mass-market paperbacks surrounding me like a plastic in a dollhouse. My co-workers in the warehouse were all nut jobs themselves. Mutes, thieves and manic-depressives. The job was to count the quantity of each title, scan them, rip the covers off, put an elastic around the ripped covers, put them in the box, and throw the book in the large garbage bin with wheels that they brought down the compactor every night to crush together into small cubes to be easily sent to a landfill near you. As it turns out, throwing out books in the garbage is a more convenient alternative to big publishers than actually, dare I say, giving the books away for free. Egad. Shipping the books themselves was undoubtedly a waste of money because the majority of mass-markets were fluff and rarely appealed the Montreal-born reader. So all the extra Cussler’s, Patterson’s, Roberts’ and Brown’s would end up in the compactor. Into square cube beauty.

At some point, when it began to get repetitive, I started to think up theories (of which I convinced myself were philosophical, though nowhere even close, I soon found out). I questioned, what’s the purpose of ripping the cover off of the book? And what is so goddamn satisfying about it? Maybe the TSSSSHHH sound. Or was it the rebellion against knowledge or some shit like that? Then again, I don’t know how much knowledge Nora Roberts can provide on a daily basis.

Then the preachers enter the back-warehouse. The “documentary-folk”, as I call them. I’m about to dump a whole slew of Dan Brown’s Deception Point into the trash when I’m interrupted.

“What are you doing?”

I turn.

“Listen love, I don’t want to throw these books out in the trash. I want to give them to some poor house, or even recycle them. But this is a corporate business. You do realize that we work for a corporation? You do what they say because it is cost-efficient. Humility is long gone.”

She didn’t understand what I meant.

“I’m going to report you! And make a formal complaint to the bureau.”

“The fucking bureau—”

“Head office—”

“You call head office the bureau? That’s fucking retarded.”

“Do you know how many sea animals die in a regular a year because of chemical and garbage disposal dropped into the ocean?!”

Give me a fucking break.

“Listen. I’m out.”

Snuck out the back because the alarm wasn’t on. Normally I’d have to ask a manager if I can leave by there and they’d walk over with their magical key and let me go with the wind. Child and parent. I hung out back for a smoke around the shippers and receivers. The muscle-men. The uneducated and wisest. True knowledge of time. You can see it in the crow prints next to their eyes.

“Adam man. Gino says that he’d wouldn’t wanna ever fuck his woman in the ass. What a fucking pussy, right?.”

“Suck my dick, Rick! Not my fault you enjoy rubbing your tiny cock with shit every night, bro.”

I pass the blunt to Gino after he throws a box labeled “EXTREMELY FRAGILE HANDLE WITH CARE” onto a pallet.

“Shatap you little bitch. I’m not saying I would go out of my own way and ask my bitch if I can fuck her in the ass. I’m saying that, that you know, if she just came to bed at night and asked you to fuck me, I mean, to fuck her in the ass, you sayin’ you wouldn’ do it? You’re a fucken liar.”

“Listen fag, I didn’t know you loved fagget sex so much.”

They yelled these profanities while carrying tons of full crates in and out of trucks at the import dock. It was beautiful. Gino passes the blunt to Rick and he inhales nearly half of it.

“Hey stop hogging the bud, Rick,” I mumble.

“You didn’t hear, Adam? Rick enjoys hogging it. But mostly up the ass.”

I force a laugh, eyes glazed.

“You’s all pricks. Fucking pricks.”

He passes it to me and leaves me with the roach.

“It’s alright Rick,” I say. “If you’re the receiver, then Gino’s probably the shipper.”

They stop walking and both stare at me blankly.

“You tryana’ be funny, kid?” Rick asks quite seriously.

The Bookstore became a funny place where employees masturbated in the changing rooms and stripped cover books ended up in my schoolbag where I auctioned them off at The Cock & Bull Pub for dirt cheap prices and extra brews. I tried writing some stuff myself, but nothing really came of it. Anyway, being labeled a poet or philosopher has always been more interesting than writing poetry or studying philosophy. A romanticized notion of permanence.

Then Meltzer told me to write a short story for his writing group and the prompt was “and that other dentist was a Nazi.” I went for the easy joke and tried to write something about Lars von Trier.

The Little Shore Maid

An adaptation of Hans Christian Anderson's The Little Mermaid.

[Hey guys! I know commenting has been sparse and this is kind of long, but my prose classmates told me I should submit this to publication so I really wanted some opinions. I edited it so it's longer than the one they read; let me know if it's too long-winded, or too meandering. Any critiques would be really appreciated. Thanks!]

She appeared the morning after the storm, draped in seaweed and without a tongue.

The night had been a bad one; the prince had almost drowned as his ship was crushed and sunk by the waves. Despite the exhaustion of disaster, however, he had been unable to sleep, and went for a walk on the beach to calm his mind.

It was as the sun drenched the horizon that the prince noticed her, crawling like a crawfish through the shallow tide. At first he thought it was a dog, but as the waves subsided, he noticed the bald skin beneath the shaggy kelp. He moved closer to investigate and she looked up. Her eyes latched onto his.

They were small and black, lashless, like eels coiled inside her skull looking out through the two gashes of her eyelids.

While he stood, unable to move, she cocked her head and transferred her weight to two tiny feet. The seaweed fell away as she wobbled there, exposing her naked body to the prince. He could not help looking at her small breasts and puckered nipples.

She took a step forward and her mouth gaped open. The ocean heaved and swilled around their ankles, the smell of blood and vomit strong in the air. Beyond her uneven yellow-black teeth was an empty, bloody cavern. She tried to screech something, but it only sounded like the keel of a ship grazing a shallow rock bottom.

The sound set his nerves on fire. He ran back to the castle as fast as he could.

At dinnertime, the court was spreading the latest gossip, which seemed to involve a recent pirate attack.

“What’s all this?” the prince asked his father when they were alone.

The king, swelled with importance and wine, said some servants had found a young girl washed ashore with her tongue cut out, clearly a victim of piracy.

The prince’s eye twitched. “But where is she now?”

His father turned from him suddenly and boomed, “Here she is!” to the court at large, which announced the otherwise silent entrance of the seashore girl. She looked clean now, garbed in a plain beige dress with her black hair braided around her head. She could have been pretty, in a pale, bony way, but a seaweed stench still hung about her, and the prince feared what he’d see if she opened her mouth again.

The women all gathered around her, and the men, after a good look, grouped in clusters of rational discussion. The prince clung to a corner for the remainder of the evening, where the girl’s gaze would graze over his body every few minutes. When his father passed him a goblet of ale, his hands were shaking.

“Don’t be so anxious, dear boy,” the king said. “It’s all meant to be a bit of fun before the wedding!” He turned round to the roomful of people. “Shall we not invite this lovely new guest to the marriage celebration next week? I’ve no doubt she will wish to partake in the festivities of my son’s nuptial bliss!”

The court cheered, except for the girl, who smoothed the dress on her thighs and looked down at her feet.

Over the week’s preparations for the wedding, which was to take place on the largest, most lavish ship of the fleet, the prince felt an uncanny presence around him.

“You’re just anxious for the honeymoon,” his father winked at him, clapping his shoulder. “Be grateful for your time left as a free man.”

As if to emphasize this fact, the king ordered the seashore girl to dance for the prince every night while they dined. She did so with utmost grace, undulating like a sea snake caught in an eddy. The court clapped and shouted their delight, but the prince’s mouth stayed as straight and tight as the girl’s.

She never took her eyes off him until the music ended and the dance was over.

During the days leading up to the ceremony, he tried to stay occupied and keep all thoughts of women out of his mind but he couldn’t rid himself of that tingling awareness of being watched. At times he’d smell a salty stink and look around to see the seashore girl with her pallid cheek pressed against a pillar, body limp and leaning. Her eyes were never in his direction, but he sensed that as soon as he’d look away, she would drink him in with her bottomless black eyes again.

Sometimes the prince would follow her, certain she was part of a suspicious plot. He’d find her tucked away, sitting behind a potted fern or within the closed curtains of a window seat, tears spilling down her gray face as if a summer rainstorm was hanging over her and her alone. The brown boots given to her by the royal shoemakers would lay unlaced on the ground while she clutched at her tiny, bloody feet. He’d watch her, hunched like a crone with shoulder blades sticking out like fledgling wings or twin dorsal fins as she’d wrap material around her blisters and open scabs, and he’d slowly back away.

Although he never made a sound, somehow he felt she knew he was there the whole time anyway.

The night before the wedding, while the prince stood on his seafront balcony grooming himself for bed, he saw the girl walking back from the shoreline. She was bright white in her moonlit nightgown, and her hair was undone from its usual braid so that it twisted long in the ocean breeze.

He squinted into the darkness at a shiny object that she kept turning over and over in her hands. It looked like a dagger, but the prince forced himself to believe it was his imagination. His servants had been commenting lately on how high strung he looked.

He went to bed, huddling beneath his goose down duvet.

The next day went surprisingly well despite the girl’s presence in the royal audience. By the time he slipped the gold band of matrimony over his new wife’s slender finger and kissed her delicate pink mouth, the prince was beginning to feel calm again. It had been a bad last three days, but things had evidently seemed more sinister due to lack of sleep and too much salt air.

He went to bed with his bride, feeling he was the center of the cosmos.

He awoke a few hours later to the creak of a floorboard and a shadow moving towards him and his wife, who slept softly on his chest in a pillow of her own flaxen curls. A seaweed stench inundated the room. He cracked an eyelid open, and was blinded by moonlight for a moment before he recognized the seashore girl. Gripped bone-white in her short fingers was the dagger he thought he had only imagined. Paralyzing fear tore all courage from him like a riptide.

As the prince watched, the girl shifted, leaned forward; rank fish and saltwater stink filled his nostrils, and he had to force down the ball of panic punching at his throat. The blade moved towards his chest. At any moment he expected to feel a sharp pain and the warm spill of his own blood. His eyelids flickered as he squinted, straining to keep the dagger in his sight. Up it went, tip pointed at the skin left bare and vulnerable by his wife’s head.

It came down. He squeezed his eyes and ceased breathing. But there was no blow, just metal clattering to the wood floor. He was still expecting pain when instead he felt the seashore girl’s lips press down on his cheek, just beside the corner of his mouth. They were moist, cold, and tender.

As she pulled back, he opened his eyes. They looked at each other. Her black pupils were empty and soft. She dropped his gaze and shifted with slow, deliberate movements to the direction of his wife. For a heart-stopping moment he thought she was going to harm her, but she only brushed his bride’s bright cheek in another light kiss. Their faces shone in the moon glow for a moment, one thin and sharp as fish bones, attached in a pucker like a remora to the other’s soft, round face.

And then she was gone, running from the room, fluid as eroding sand. A moment later the prince heard a solid splash, and knew she had thrown herself over the edge of the boat. She would certainly drown if he didn’t get up now and sound the man-overboard-alarm at once.

He let out his breath and reached toward the curtains, gently so as not to wake his wife, to drag them shut against the moonlight.

Walk of Blame

In the words of the skeptic:
"I don't believe in any of this,
but I believe in truth
and even that
is subject to questionning."
But I get sidetracked.
I just wanted to know her name,
but instead I got
a quiet walk home.