Waving Not Drowning

Every day at 3 pm he gets into his car, a 2006 Toyota Corolla 4 door sedan in  a sunfaded navy, plugs in his gps, turns the radio on to Jazz FM and buckles himself in. Even though Curtis is the only person who ever drives his car, he checks then rechecks and adjusts his mirrors, just in case they've shifted over the course of the 8 hours the Corolla's been parked in an underground secured employee only parking lot. Monday through Friday, Curtis drives the 38 kilometre return trip from his 1970's- era one bedroom walk up apartment on a quiet one way dead end street in the city's east end all the way across town to the hip new enclave of design warehouses where he works as a program developer in the land of web design. A drone tethered to his computer in a medium sized start up company where he manages to disappear into the fabric of his surroundings. Milquetoast amongst a sea of brightly coloured walls, hyper lit screens, geometric patterned floors and dynamic, gregariou...

A boy named Gren. A beautiful, long limbed, willowy boy with wide eyes, a high smooth forehead, and a dirty blonde mop of tangled waves at constant war with gravity. A shy boy. Spirited and curious but terrifically shy. Quiet. Silent. He's a runner. He runs and runs and runs. A perpetual motion machine smelling of black licorice and bazooka gum, lemonade and peanut butter, and the earthy, pungeant odour of sweaty young boy. Wormy when the ground swells after sudden rain. Old wood crumbling into dust after years of age, splinters melting in his hands they're so soft from rot. Every day he makes up stories off the top of his head as he gallops through the trails of giant redwoods, scaling walls of verdant green moss, ducking under canopies of ferns and pine, imagining the backwoods his own private kingdom. He communicates with the birds and deer and frogs and spiders and tiny red squirrels and they animate his tales in play by play fashion. Gren can't tell who's leading w...

Bumper to bumper, Shawn's inching along, moving at a snail's pace. It'd be quicker to walk at this rate. Some crazy motorcyclist flies by weaving in and out of traffic, along the emergency shoulder, across 4 lanes of traffic. He's the guy that's gonna hold us all up later as the emergency services peel him off the back of some trailer or scrape him off the asphalt, all blenderized up with his fibreglass crotch rocket and ballistic nylon body armour. Why did he take the car? Shawn's beyond frustrated, he's moved into aggressive affirmations: Please someone hit me in the face the next time I decide to drive through the city at rush hour on a whim to pick up tickets. Please please please, with a blunt  object, right to my temple. Hard. The cars inch forward, red lights fading then slamming back on, re illuminating the creeping dusk like angry fireflies. His favourite time of day, quickly being lost to gridlock. The magic hour. At least the humidity broke. Windo...

It starts in her groin. Flowing down her legs, all the way to her toes, and surging back up her spine, vertebrae by vertebrae, radiating like a hot molten core in her belly, throbbing in time to her pulse. It's like a stack of Marshalls welded to her sternum. Thunderous bass, screaming guitars, a cacophony of interwoven melodies. The sound shoots through her capillaries, bursting out like full-bloomed magnolias in an early spring storm. She starts to undulate in her chair, creating wave after full-body wave, slowly rocking her head back and forth, shoulder to shoulder, chin to her chest as her arms extend to the sky, fingers splayed, starfish reaching, clenching, unclenching until she propels herself up and out and onto her feet. This is what a volcano eruption feels like. This. Is. Loud. The sound emanates from every pore of her being, she is humming, every cell is pitch perfect. Two hundred and thirty eight seconds of a perfect storm of sound, a grand mal in motion with  a happy ...

It's the shuffle that undoes her. La da da, la da da da da... melodic melancholy, the combination that swells her heart and fills her eyes with tears she lets roll down her face the way only actors do in movies. For a  moment she wonders if she should wipe the raccoon stained makeup from under her eyes, clear the corners of the black gobs, that salty, pearlized waste, the detritus of a half hour's concerted effort to make herself attractive. Alluring. Worthy. In real life, pain is messy; sadness undoes all her hard work.  She's uncomfortable to witness. Strangers are stumbling head on into the dark night of her soul, in full red eyed, puffy lipped, snot nosed display. She knows better, she thinks, than to put herself on display like this. Billboard like, she stands immovable to the throngs milling around her, on their way to who knows where. Headphones on, eyes half shut, her lips move almost imperceptibly to the music. Somewhere in the back of her mind she recalls building...