In Which We Drop Our Tired Glamour

Getting Away With It

by VICTORIA HETHERINGTON

The following is an excerpt from the novel I Have To Tell You, available for a limited time in pre-release from 0s&1s Novels.

I work as a secretary for LunchKase Games, a mobile gaming company based in a loft on King West. They’ve got more venture capital than they know what to do with, so it’s a pretty sweet gig: we have a patio, a home theatre-sized screen on one side of the office, and a lavish kitchen on the other. The other secretary, Sherene, kind of hates it here though: she talks a lot about her trysts with professors and poets, and punctuates her hourly smokes and our daily tasks with heavy sighs (we order office chairs at Grand and Toy, we purchase ever-more envelopes, we refill drawers with granola bars for the BWs – which stands for Boy-Wonders, our secret name for the LunchKase developers, designers, and programmers.) It’s Monday, so this morning I hear all about her weekend: she was too hung over from cigars and Cristal to do anything but stay in bed all Sunday, reading some theory she’d forgotten she’d hated in school, and eating canned soup. “So much psychic tiredness I couldn’t even shower,” she says, dropping her tired glamour and condescending academic-speak for a moment, and I am touched.

Irving, our boss, peers out from his office and points at the overfull sink, and I stand. I collect Tupperware containers from the BWs and peel limp crusts and lasagne from them, then scrub each with green apple detergent. Restocking the office fridge with dozens of soft drinks I’m painfully aware that I’m being watched: the BWs watch me in mini-shifts, popping their heads up like groundhogs, staring as I strain, lift and stack; strain, lift and stack. I’m never so aware of my body as I am when I restock the drinks. I feel squeezed into whatever I’m wearing, my belt always too tight, as sidewalk slush dries inside my slow-rotting shoes, as I clop back and forth with armfuls of cans, hating them all. Sherene doesn’t look up at me once, though I wish she would.

It’s hard to explain how Sherene gets away with everything, though I understand it perfectly because I’ve known a dozen girls like her. She hardly does anything and complains about everything, and everyone falls over themselves to cushion her experience of the office – of carrying boxes, of answering the phone, of purchasing new software, of the spectral men in her stories. Of course I don’t know her specifically; I don’t know her at all – she wouldn’t bother with me. Once I spotted her lingering by Irving’s desk with the mail cradled in her arms, and overheard her describe me as ‘cute,’ and I understood she meant ‘boring.’ I don’t resent her, and I don’t envy her either – I really don’t. Her magic is exhausting and unsustainable, and I think – I know – it’s running out.

So even if it’s Sherene’s fault, Irving only addresses me when something’s wrong, and it’s always immediately accusatory: “You didn’t…’ ‘You didn’t…’ ‘You didn’t…” I guess I’ve had it coming: for the past few weeks I’ve been drinking too much at night with my heartbroken roommate Mark and spending the daytime all glazed, ignoring the slow drift of paper from one side of my desk to the other. I’ve been getting thin pink invoice slips from the Pepsi supply company, from office-chair delivery people, but allow them to sit in my plastic in-box undisturbed. Last week I started getting yellow slips, playing dumb for the grim-faced delivery-people who smell like King Street traffic, then stuffing those in my in-box as well.

Later in the morning Irving calls me into his office. He closes the door, picks up a letter, and returns to his desk without once leaving his wheelie-chair, steepling his small fingers and giving me a long look. He tells me I’ve been careless. I cry. He shifts around in his seat as I cry, hands me a tissue box, then rolls over to a stack of receipts, gossamer-thin and four inches high, secured with a dirty rubber band. He curls my fingers around it, telling me to tally the expenses, and I spend the rest of the day tallying four-hundred dollar dinners and two-minute cabs, ignoring Sherene’s hissed whispers about the sexist Pepsi delivery man and his busy hands, and ignoring the BWs too, as they put the newest game Smash Princess through final tests and throw paperclips at each other. In the washroom Sherene and I stand side-by-side in front of the marble sinks, and her eyes seek mine in the mirror. “It’s not worth it,” she says, so matter-of-factly I don’t ask what ‘it’ is supposed to mean until she’s almost out the door.

“What do you mean, what do I mean?” she asks, her eyes focusing on me, then flicking to her own reflection in the mirror behind me, and then back to me again.

I clear my throat. “What isn’t worth it?”

She pauses, and then takes a couple of steps towards me, then a few more. She lowers her chin and fixes me with a long stare. She touches one of my hands.

“You strike me as very young, Ashley. Don’t tell me how old you are specifically – I’ll get jealous.”

She laughs, so I laugh too.

“The thing is, you’re not only young young, you’re…I get the feeling you’re from a smaller place, a smaller town. Am I correct?”

“Yeah, I’m from St. Thomas.” I’d already told her this maybe four times. “What do you mean, you get the feeling?”

“Well,” she begins, and to my amazement she blushes a little. She looks down at my hand and then, after a pause, grabs the other one. I stiffen up.

“Listen to me, Ashley. You call this the big city, and maybe that’s true – for Canada anyway, this is it. And maybe it’s great here in Toronto – I think it is. I certainly couldn’t leave. But there are such fucked up people here, such twisted sickos, and the city produces and attracts and encourages them. It gives them ample and luxurious venues to do fucked up things together and to others and just… and Irving is one of them. You hear me? And so if he makes it easier for you when you let him…on days like today when he, when you, you know –”

She lets go of my hands. “I mean just what I said: it’s not worth it. It might feel like an exchange, but it’s robbery.”

She turns. She leaves.

The sun that afternoon slants through the blinds, slowly lighting up my desk. I bring Irving the final sum and he wheels over to take the still-warm printout and banded receipts from me, then rubs my palm.

“I make you nervous,” he tells me. I allow him to rub my hand, terrified that I’ll lose my seventeen-dollars-an-hour job, accustomed as I’ve become to overpriced King Street lunches (fifteen-dollar salads; nicoise with artichokes and truffle oil one day, peppery green with seaweed and avocado the next.)

“How many boyfriends have you had, Ashley?” Irving asks, wheeling over to close the door, then rotating to face me. I look down at him, and he looks up. “Hundreds,” I say, and we understand each other at last.

“I think you misunderstood,” he says. “You see, Sherene and I…we’re basically dating.” I think in a flash about how she’d tower over him, then wonder what they could possibly talk about, then wonder what ‘basically’ means.

I trail Sherene to the bathroom, scrub my hands, watching her in the mirror. “He said you’re dating. Irving.” I say, but maybe she can’t hear me over the water, because she doesn’t respond. She smells foul with cigarette smoke and rub-on perfume, and squeezes her hair in her hands as she leaves.

Irving is standing in front of the BWs when I get back, buttoning up his coat and knotting up his nice scarf and saying something that elicits a scattered cheer. “We’re having a release party for Smash Princess tomorrow,” the lead illustrator, Seth, explains to me, and Irving glances over. “I’ve compiled a shopping list of party snacks and alcohol for you, Ashley,” he says, then turns back to the BWs. “Booze!” he says, eliciting one more cheer as they get up and drift out separately.

I watch them leave, stacking some folders, then walk over to the giant screen. I’ve Windexed the whole thing dozens of times – tight little circles, standing on a chair to reach the top – but I’ve never turned it on before. I flick the switch now. The screen glows brighter in some patches than in others, then a massive jungle shimmers to life.

I pick a controller off the coffee table, and Smash Princess herself jerks awake, blinking huge eyes and flexing her biceps. I make her leap into a tree, then leap down, her skirt fluttering; I guide her through a river where she fights with an alligator, and I grind the controls and shout my exhilaration as she grips its pebbled back and rips it in half. She stands in the river as the alligator bleeds and melts into the molten water, straightening her back – she’s almost life-sized on this screen – and another alligator brushes her leg, and she roars. I drop the controller on the floor with a yelp and she dives dutifully into the water, and no matter what I press, I can’t bring her back again.

+

“You messed up, dude,” Mark whispers. “Companies like yours are legally required to provide food at boozy, you know, gatherings.”

“No way,” I say, slurping my wine.

“Yes way! Hey, do you think the BWs will play the new game with me?”

“Shh, don’t call them that here! You should hope they don’t play it with you, they invented it,” I say, and he looks around the room, then asks, “Which guy’s the one who leaves mouldy lasagne every week?” I look through the small clumps of BWs, sipping their Gatorades and beers. “The ginger one,” I say, nodding toward Seth, then poke Mark – “Jesus! Don’t stare.”

"Fucker,” Mark growl-whispers, sort of flexing his skinny chest, and I laugh. “You went on a date with him, didn’t you,” he retorts, and I blush: I did, it was awful. I ate too much and too quickly; he scrolled through his iPhone and took his blazer on and off.

“Did you cut his steak for him? Did you throw in a massage?”

“What are you saying?”

“What I’m saying is I should’ve gone into engineering like these guys – look at them, fresh out of school, a hundred-ten pounds each, ordering beautiful women around all day.” He puts his empty beer bottle on the floor, then walks to the conference room to replace it.

“Irving – that’s Irving, short guy in the kitchen – he said yesterday I’d be an exotic dancer in another life,” Sherene is saying very quickly to Seth and his brother, laughing a little into her wineglass, rubbing a sequined shoulder with her free hand. “And while that’s enormously problematic and maybe a year ago I’d slap him silly, I understand he gets such a thrill from old-fashioned, painfully gendered behavior, and hell, so do I. I mean, what you like in bed doesn’t always align with your politics, right? He’s not saying it’s because I’m slutty, you understand, but because he knows how I am with people. You know: lots of people, that sort of connection, all easy. You know?”

“That’s fucked up,” Seth says, and his brother snorts. Sherene laughs again – her earrings jangling – then turns to me and Mark. We’re still lurking by the conference room, and I’m feeling swollen-headed and oafishly drunk, suddenly terrified I’ll start giggling and not stop for hours. “What a shit. I don't care. I could have him fired if I wanted. My name’s Sherene, how are you, you’re Ashley’s boyfriend? How you both doing for wine and beer?” Sherene says as she grips the fleshy part of my arm and leads me into the office kitchen. Mark follows, and drains his new beer in three long gulps. “She’s friendly,” he whispers when she steps away.

Sunlight streams through the kitchen windows, reminding me that it’s daytime and that I’m drunk. It’s so bright that I squint a little, and Sherene – her dress fiercely aglitter – hands my glass to Irving, who is drinking by himself. He leans back in his chair and, with his free hand, yanks the blinds down. Seth comes into the kitchen again. “Hey, uh, I didn’t mean to come off as rude before,” he says.

“That is so OK, Seth,” Sherene says, rubbing his arm, and Irving watches her do it. “Me and the other illustrators are wondering if you’d pose for us sometime, Sherene,” Seth continues. “We’re starting Smash Princess 2, and we’ve got this new, like, bikinied revenge character. We need a tall, sort of Amazonian woman for reference.”

“Sure,” she says, “When?”

“I’ll have to talk to the guys and get back to you,” he says, taking out his iPhone.

Sherene stares at him for a moment, then grips the hem of her sequined dress, and yanks it up over her head. Her hands are veined and beautiful and her breasts look heavy, striped with the light coming through the blinds. I gawk at the freckles, the mottled nipples, the paleness and pinkness and brownness and blood vessels. I could stare for an hour. I’m red down to my neck. I understand the five dollars men forked over for Penthouse before the internet made porn cheap and grainy and free. I start prickling with sweat.

“No. Do it now,” she commands.

“Whoa,” Seth says, then recovers: “can you stand with one foot up on this chair, like a warrior? Perfect. I’ll be right back, I gotta get my pencils.”

“Irving and I were talking – are you really just twenty, Ashley?” Sherene asks me, scratching her elevated thigh. “You seem so mature.” I look at her, understanding her envy and her fear, and Mark glances at me quickly, then says: “You bet she is! She’s been keeping me out of trouble since she was sixteen.”

“My first wife was pregnant at your age,” Irving murmurs in my ear, and then Seth returns, trailing three other BWs laden with pencils and massive sketch pads. I watch the stream of dark wine as Irving refills my glass himself. I watch Sherene pose, shivering in the chill of the too-bright office, feeling too sad to speak: she will never be on my side, and they will never be on hers.

You can purchase I Have To Tell You here.

Victoria Hetherington is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Toronto. Getting Away With It is an excerpt from her novel I Have To Tell You, for which she gratefully acknowledges the support of the Ontario Arts Council. You can find her website here. You can find an an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

"Love Don't Owe You Anything" - Strays Don't Sleep (mp3)

"For Blue Skies" - Strays Don't Sleep (mp3)

In Which We Write An Unanswerable Letter

Dear Girl

by VICTORIA HETHERINGTON

Dear child of undetermined sex:

This is Mozart – here, I’ll bring my belly close to the speaker, a shiver of cold contact, there – his Soave sia il vento, yes, it’s vibrating all through me and through you. Listening to Mozart is like running a comb through my brain. You won’t know yellow or red, the ecstatic whiteness of the sun through leaves and over water or the remarkable formation of ice on black branches, the full-body sensation of roast beef sandwiches when you’re ravenous, or lips on your skin. But you feel the vibrations of Mozart, and maybe the sensation of cold when I’m outside a long time, and the itch of heat while I drowse by his fireplace. He says don’t get attached, but how can that be? You’re neither asleep nor awake but alive, growing helplessly and amazingly on whatever I ingest – however you lie in my amniotic sea.

Dear child of undetermined sex:

Here’s how you erode someone’s love for you, your love for them, the love between you both that – not unlike a child – throbs with life: you lie still when he begins roughly kneading your breasts with frustration, and indicate that you feel nothing aside from guilt. You chastise him for snapping at you and inform him he’s difficult and testy, though when you were happier you deftly elevated him, and felt pride in understanding him better than anyone else. You say, wearily, that his limited emotional intelligence is wearing you down. You ruin a winter walk in the icy dark, the snow under streetlamps illuminated in beautiful colors; you begin shivering and focus on the limits of your body, you wish the rabbit crouched near the frozen pond could make you feel something. You say so, and watch him stifle a sigh.

You realize that you’ve been a loser all your life – a wealth of evidence glows in your memory – and you’ll become more and more of a loser as you go. Just like your fucked-up father but far worse off because he’s a man and a baby boomer and had the goddamn world at his feet as your mother used to say, long after she’d had her decade of giving up and had come out the other side. Your face will fade and by 40 you’ll be invisible, unhirable, the seeds of pariah-dom your father sowed within you and your mother didn’t bother plucking the poisonous shoots from will grow around you entirely, the vines are already curled around your wrists. You voice this to your companion, who is expected, he knows, to be really empathic and understanding about this development, instead of exhausted. When he finally cracks and tells you there are people in the world with real problems and demand you tell him what’s so wrong with your life, you laugh and tell him OK you get the picture, you’ll go home, as soon as you get back to his place you’ll gather your stuff, and you’ll go home – but for now he’s stuck with you. Poor him.

You’ve gotten a little fat and you don’t shut up about it, and watch the rabbit twitch its head and lope towards a larger tree, and you think if you had to live the life of a rabbit yeah it’d be hard, but at least you’d be skinny. You think, if I walked into traffic right now and got killed it might make the news and a lot of fuss would go into saving my life, but who cares? I’m just one animal, and a terrible one: I’ve used so many resources and given back very little, and now I won’t even allow myself to reproduce. You walk briskly into the street and feel the relief of the dark, of the pavement – no ice – and he yanks you back, screaming. You scream at each other. You suddenly stop screaming, stop speaking, stop looking at him and curl gently down, lie down on the slushy sidewalk and become immediately soaked. Might the squirming life within you register cold, might it flip or twist faintly, might it shiver? He looks around quickly, steeped in sudden social agony – you recall, from the ground, that he hates humiliation more than anything.

You feel heavy sobs come out of you, you start wailing, you shriek like that rabbit might in the jaws of a dog – horrible, horrible the thoughts you have. Guts and dying. Violent, violent thoughts. One day your father will die. This is how. This is how: he loves you so much that to ruin your love, you must become completely unrecognizable. But you know the truth: this is the real you, it’s just taking over. You’ve always been sick, haven’t you?

Dear child of undetermined sex:

I realize I’m addressing you as a girl. I’m addressing you as myself. I’m being hard on you, I was imagining you imbued with all my neuroses and crevices and sex spots worn threadbare and brain spots rubbed blank, with the crusted-over gashes and heavy milky bulges I nurse and pick at, not yet born but curled and ready to adopt them as soon as your lungs open and dry, born into them without a prayer of becoming anything else. A girl. Already I resent you, but I feel for you too. If I’d begun addressing you as a boy I’d become coy and a little distant – halfway flirting and halfway maternal – an arrangement of ciphers, nothing of me. It’s dangerous to ascribe you humanity but I can’t help but think: so you’re a girl – or at least, you would be. Could have been.

Just now I was pitying myself through pitying you, but at least I’ve been alive. Even the bus ride to the clinic had its pleasures. Even the dreary repetitions structuring my life aren’t repetitions at all, every morning is new and my will and that of others makes them newer still. Despite the nurse’s tone and her tiredness her wrists glittered with rhinestones, and his phone vibrated in his jeans as if the outside world was nudging us along. Even in the clinic there were reds, there were yellows. And knocking against the window an icy, dripping bough.

Dear girl,

I was sitting on his couch, and he had his arm around me but twisted up, with his hand pressing my head to his shoulder. The TV is flashing in front of us, and between us and the TV a bag of ketchup chips sit half-eaten, and I am locked against him and cannot reach them. I felt a deep pain like hunger – amazing to have different pits of self, one full and one empty – but even if it’d be OK for me to move, I’d know not to reach for the crinkly bag. He’d understand this eating as dutiful maternal fattening, eating for two, which is contrary to our decision.

A news story comes on and I forget about chips: just this afternoon a woman of about thirty had run staggering from a home, clung to a postman and hadn’t let go. She’d been kept in a heavily insulated basement for thirty years, it turns out, deprived of everything except for what her twisted captor brought her in on grimy plates. And I can’t help it – though you’ll never know different, you won’t in fact know anything – you have a face now and it’s that woman’s face, her eyes squeezed shut against the unimaginable brightness of day, shaking and clinging to the postman’s big body like an impaled matador struggling for breath. I ask him to turn off the TV.

Victoria Hetherington is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Toronto. Dear Girl is an excerpt from her novel manuscript I Have To Tell You, for which she gratefully acknowledges the support of the Ontario Arts Council. You can find her website here. You can find an an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

Paintings by Vincent Giarrano.

"Don't Smoke In Bed" - Peggy Lee (mp3)

"I'm A Woman" - Peggy Lee (mp3)

In Which We Confront The Zing Of Sun-Warmed Meat

Good at Keeping Limp

by VICTORIA HETHERINGTON 

[—Brie should be left out in kitchen to ripen for a ;few days. She stands as afternoon light deepens and bends through the kitchen window, softening then melting the brie, which comes apart in her fingers. Folding pieces of pita past her teeth against her tongue, rough on her throat from not chewing. Delicately unpeeling the spicy salami package, the zing of the sun-warmed meat muted by excess –]

• S. said: 2 girls she knew went rehab for heroin ‘habits,’ are successful artists now. remember: don’t let her influence me into thinking this ok/normal/glamorous
• don’t eat for the next 2 days. but don't smoke either
• sunny today, didn't go outside. I hate how quick time passing, months all superimposed on one another esp. when remembering dates
• it was feb 1 I got into university; it was june 20 grandma died; it was september 17 when I met P.
• it was first day of gr. ten, me & classmates played orientation games all day
• I was face-painted & sweat-salty & carried full plate of cookies w/another paper plate folded over it
• I won big plastic lei during games & kept it on during bus ride home. It was packed bc. rush hr, people pressing into me & still climbing obstinately up the stairs, & I picked patch of september sunlight thru dusty window & stared
• taking up as little space as possible: how typical, & crushing cookies against chest to maximize space (but carefully; I still stuffed bra w/socks)

[—Her stomach squirms with desire as the tidal bingeing urge rushes over her, and she seizes her hairbrush, and as she drags it through her hair, trying to feel pleasure in its shine, its resistance against the brush, the crackle at its ends, pulling herself back into her body from the bad, floating place she crams food into, registering pain in her stomach and back–]

• bus lurched lots & man standing closeby caught my eye
• he raised arms to press hands up against ceiling for balance, smirking at me. Long nails, I remember.
• Him: what’s in the textbook? Deep voice with strange warble at its ends. he wasn’t like my craggy father, more of mountain than person still, & he wasn’t like peach-fuzzed beanstalk boys I knew either
• he was young man & he was very, very dangerous
• Me (shyly): it’s actually a sketchbook. Like, duh. Check out stippled black covers, ever seen textbook like that? I showed him drawings: me hanging from cross with wires coming out of skull, flower with bones as stamens, woman balding like water-damaged doll
• I remember there was printout of trent reznor glued to inner front cover
• Him: Interesting, eyes fixed coldly on last drawing, & 3 people looked on
• Him: I am an artist in every sense of the word. I make music that, in my opinion, will crack the world wide open and teach these monkeys a thing or two. I also make art. What do you do?
• Me: I’m a student, I just started gr. ten. People started watching, & older woman openly stared. I misunderstood these gazes, & he ignored them
• Him: I would like to buy you a coffee
• He was losing hair, widow’s peak exposed white, & hair glued down forehead in strands. I remember standing beside him at counter, in dim Second Cup, thinking he seemed out of place
• Me: I need to be home by five for piano lesson. Back outside again. Him: I can see from your eyes that you’ve suffered.
• I hadn’t really – he changed that

[—Now ice cream, melting too quickly in the summer heat, her teeth freezing. After tonight, she tells herself, she will fetishize red peppers, carrots, smell them – so fresh and dew-bathed, yanked from the earth! – and she will lovingly pluck the right nectarines from the grocery store piles. The embarrassment of riches here. Doesn’t she want thin upper arms, a thin face, ropey legs? To make a certain impression? –]

• The next day: us sitting in park, he a big unwashed animal/gigantic stain under a sun-lit oak tree, me sitting v straight so socks wouldn't fall out of tank top
• Him: some people shouldn’t have children. We’re just brains piloting meat puppets. That squirrel has huge nads. I feel like I could say anything with you. Could I give you a hug?
• he got up on knees, shuffled over to me on knees, thighs long & broad, arms outspread
• he ran nails between my shoulderblades & I shuddered. Him: Now you like these nails.
• Me (thinking): I still don’t like them because they’re gross. I never opposed him though. Childhood taught me 100% compliance, withstanding furies of my father & cold indifference of my mother, arctic stream that, even in more clement times, never completely melted
• He was angry to discover my socks, pressed them against his nose: at least they’re clean
• It hurt so much & I cried whole time
• he didn’t wash the blood from his sheets for months
• Lived w/father in dark basement ‘apartment,’ worked 1-2 shifts at all-day breakfast place (pre-recession obv., no way he could get job now)
• I would fake sick days to go & visit him at restaurant
• always nearly empty. One day, late autumn, he had to rake patio & I sat on damp chair watched him do it
• He went inside to wipe rake & I folded hands & looked down at them, sucking in stomach, wanting to look right for when he got back
• Door to patio was all glass; when done cleaning rake in resto bathroom he, instead of  coming back out, came to door & stood staring at me, pressed against glass
• His fingers pressed so hard against glass his finger-pads going white from pressure, long nails bending back

[—It comes up by itself the third time, jumping up from her stomach over her teeth, clouding the water like delicate watercolor washes, excess paint springing from a brush and running through an enormous cleaning bowl –]

• He showed me picture of his mother, looking back over shoulder at sink, surprised, hands blurred w/long-ago domestic activity
• Me: so pretty! Him: She looks like a monster now, too much drinking & smoking & fucking & fighting
• he too damaged (he explained) to give me Christmas present or to water plants long-dead in basement window
• I didn’t recognize infections he gave me, suffered quietly & walked funny & soaked in baths until pain eased
• I would come back to him like windup toy, back to his father’s house through browning falls leaves then ice
• thinking: this is how it works, you’re assigned to someone & that’s it, you do everything they say
• When I broke up w/him he got on knees, begged, lower lip wriggled, all the sad things except tears
• Said he wouldn't stop sending me emails & would do everything to prove he could be better
• Wrote & recorded song for me, still remember whole thing like yesterday: ‘you think I won’t change/that I’ll stay the same/as if I loved torture/you must be insane…’

[—Spreading powder over her face, evening out the red patches and blurry sleeplessness, settling in the deepening cracks around her mouth. Lora texts: ‘my darling is it all right if you bring whiskey instead? im staring down world’s worst wine hangover.’ She rubs in lipstick, mashing it together, and waits five minutes before responding. ‘Esophagus,’ she thinks, tapping a cigarette into her hand, is a very onomatopoeic word when you think about it –]

• After I took P. back he revealed: was in love w/his sister (1 yr younger than me, so 14 then)
• Kissed her on her mouth in front of me, pretending like playing around
• My parents baffled – just 6 months before meeting P. on bus things in household went like this: father discovered I’d put on makeup one morning so drove around school 3 times until I removed completely w/wetted hands; had to be home 4:30pm every day; phone calls monitored; certain outfits, books, cds confiscated & thrown out; hours of solitary confinement for swearing. Me 100% compliant & things went fine. Now this
• Confronted P. about incestuous feelings. I feel angry, he confessed in flat tone, w/same blank curiosity he looked at balding woman drawing. It makes me want to hit you
• Me: So hit me. Nothing you can do will make me love you again. You little shit, he hissed, ran after me
• Never known fear like that, never ran down a hall – & halfway up flight of stairs – like that, never screamed like that, never struggled like that fighting with elbows knees & feet
• Dragging me over to counter, yanking me one step at time, grabbing knife from beside empty Puritan cans, pressing to my throat, making thin bleeding line all around my throat
• By then I was v good at keeping limp
• Started drinking w/Tara many times/wk, her boyfriend bought booze for us & started drinking w/us too
• Would empty whole bottle in alternating vicious gulps in coffee shop washrooms, baby duck ‘champagne’ mostly, before school, after school
• I would stumble home fantasizing about putting on new dress, coming over to cook P. dinner, descending into nightmare basement & sweetly accepting his horrid gratitude
• Would slip tiny nugget of palytoxic coral from Tara’s exotic fish tank into boiling pasta along w/spices, enough to kill us both
• Little sisters would wait by window for me every night, crying
• Parents stopped talking to me
• This boyfriend, tall dude named Eliot, slept w/me after Tara left him
• Sweaty together in his bed as his big dick shrunk down & I tried not to stare at Pokémon posters on walls, I told him everything
• Cried, streaming from entire face, choked out whole story
• Eliot stood, shiny long back in front of me, bright in afternoon light, & punched wall
• Pulled fist out of big hole in drywall, Pokémon poster collapsed inside of it like miniature tent
• Eliot, rubbing tender knuckles: I am going to break his legs
• Me, seized by desire: I’m going to watch
• I would arrange meet P. in Pizza Pizza, Eliot would identify, I would suggest smoking joint, Eliot would follow us to nearby park
• Slipped out of house at 9:15pm into thick winter air, shaking like leaf
• Bright shop, saw P. examining wilted slices w/fingers on chin as if posing, clothes so dirty, clownlike feet, hidden swordlike cock
• Spotted Eliot w/jolt of recognition, sitting on nailed-down stool & watching us over a book, & stifled strange wild laughter: Eliot prided self on never reading
• P. shook hot pepper flakes & squirted BBQ sauce all over pizza & followed me out of shop
• Can recall every streetlight lighting up every naked branch, felt like walking to my own death
• Can remember everything he was saying: I am so pleased to see you, Grace. I now work at a belt factory. I have a casual relationship with a woman named Natasha. I have suggested bondage & she is considering it. I am thinking of her dripping wet cunt right now.
• Motion out of corner of my eye: Eliot, head lowered, charging towards us
• Tackled P. & both go down hard on hard ice, Eliot punching P.’s head over & over
• P. flopping like huge fish & screaming: Grace! Grace! Call 99! Call 99!
• Eliot yanked baseball bat from backpack he carried our booze in, leapt up & kicked P. in stomach, P. stopped squirming away, curling into ball
• I run & run & run run run

[—They tumble into the car and Lora is all flirty business before the door even shuts, accepting the white bag offered by the shadow-faced dealer in the front seat, passing up the bills she rolled and unrolled and rolled in her long-fingered hands on their way to the car. “You all must be busy tonight,” Lora tells them, getting more comfortable, taking out her key already, making room, easing herself into a little nest within the bunched-up clothing. It would be so easy, Grace thinks, for them to kill us. Lora looks over at Grace, and grinning with benevolent, intoxicated misunderstanding, squeezes Grace’s hand –]

Victoria Hetherington is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Toronto. Good At Keeping Limp is an excerpt from a work-in-progress made possible by a grant from the Ontario Arts Council. You can find her website here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

Images by Alexander Calder.

Explore The Best Of The Saturday Fiction Series At Your Leisure

Dan Carville's The Artist

Damian Weber's Conan The Barbarian Priest Poet

Rachel Monroe's An Index of Fears

Erica Ciccarone's Host

Delia Hamish's Universal Love

Linda Eddings' Your Pawn

Mark Arturo's Yom Kippur

Sarah Wambold's Night Created Image Silent

Christopher Urban's Random Penguin

Spencer Campbell's TV

Jean Hallman's The Blue Marble

Antonia Ringle's Velka

Justin Erickson's Ingleside on the Bay

Elizabeth Manos' All Move

we are always looking for new work, send it along and cross your fingers