He sat, defeated, against his now-defunct car. The sun reflected off the hot tarmac as though it were a mirror, blinding him as he grimaced. With face contorted in a futile attempt to beat the sun, he looked first west and then east. The vacancy of the horizon suggested the advent of unwilling solitude on a stretch of unfamiliar highway hours from home.
After a moment of struggling to make out little more than the shimmering waves of heat lying low along the road in the distance that straddled him, he slowly let his head fall into his hands with brows furrowed and eyes shut tight. He rued the moment.
Begrudgingly, he lifted himself off the ground. He supported his clumsy rise with her body—an unlikely source of aid, given the circumstance. Standing upright, with shirt glued to his back as only perspiration can adhere, he again surveyed the landscape. His fears were confirmed as he lay his hands on her for support.
I am alone.
(more…)
Furious, she ripped herself away from my embrace. “Don’t fucking touch me,” she screamed with a venom that could have bored holes in the dust-covered kitchen tile beneath her would it have fallen from her mouth rather than been spit into my face with inhuman force. She stepped away hastily, nearly tripping herself on the half-built shelving unit that lay in pieces on the floor.
Here we stood, a newly-unionized couple enjoying the first weekend of togetherness. We stared at one another for a moment in silence, her venomous ire dripping down my face in the form of sweat and a stray tear. Her anger began to engulf her: her face turned as red as the pits of Hell, her eyes burned with the fire of a thousand suns, and she clenched her fists around the house’s best wrench, no longer screwing dainty screws into untreated wood, as though it were my very throat.
We stood at odds with one another across that pine-felled battlefield; wood chips and scattered debris punctuated the scene, signifying the great war that had taken place.
As the dust settled, I caught her eye. Not a moment passed before her mouth went from ajar to fully open, giving way to an erupting, streaming spew of ceaseless and deafening noise. The spring sun beamed into the room as though it was the hellish rays of God’s own punishing eyes burning into my back at the beckon call of her demonic roar. The pine boards across the battlefield glimmered in the soon-summer light.
Time stood still as she mouthed her discontent for my eyes to behold. Each word thrust from her mouth like an epee, carefully and precisely piercing my soul further and further with each strike. My soul fell as blood to the floor as it seeped from the unseen wounds, seemingly staining the wood as an everlasting reminder of my crimes against humanity.
So began the ballet: she twirled about the kitchen, deftly dancing around the modern marvel of unfinished furniture, as she sung the song that would end the world in the name of deriding my very being. And when she was finished, nothing remained but the completed shelving unit which stood in all its miraculous beauty anew.
All the devil asked for its creation was an unwilling man’s corpse.
GORM. Now $29.99.
There once was a girl who had an apple tree. Every day, she would visit the tree. She’d climb his limbs, swing from his arms, and nestle in his trunk to sleep in the sun.
For 10 summers, she continued the ritual. She’d return every summer to see him—her tree. Until one year…
(more…)
The Spring of ‘86
Waves crashed on the coast’s dark banks. “White sand is overrated,” I’d heard more than a few times already in my days. Ultimately, there were more wrongs than rights—on the trip, and in life.
The wind playfully carassed my burnt face as I lay peacefully on the beach one day, her fingers draping down my cheek to my neck before being drawn away. How good her touch feels, I thought, even if it was phantom and fleeting. No one stepped in to take her place as she drew calm and left the beach. “Ca va mal,” I responded to her abscence in the spirit of the vacation. But she was already gone, and my words fell to the soft, hot sand below. (more…)
Jakub stood uncomfortably by the door at the end of the subway car. The TTC was never a particularly comfortable ride, he reflected, though it certainly was component enough—compared to the GO Train, at least.
While the TTC served its purpose, he couldn’t escape the feeling Toronto’s line paled in comparison to his native Métro. He laughed to himself as he remembered his home. Ironic, he found it, that the only thing he really missed about Rue St-Denis and his old haunt was the damned subway.
Nevertheless, the ride home remained as medicinal in the Anglos’ world as it was in the Francophones’. He’d grown to love public transit in the city, if only because it gave have time to collect his thoughts and afforded him an ever-shuffling array of people to watch. He relished the short break from the workaday world.
He was not afforded the same luxury today, however. He’d come to realize he had an ailing condition. The disease he suffered from became clear as he was soon confronted by a sea of striking, suited business-women and gorgeous university girls who frequented the Yonge line.
He felt malnourished. (more…)
