No Poem Is the Only Poem. No Story Is the Only Story. No Kings.
He wore a name badge like the rest of us. Easton University, Class of 1995. The same blue border, the same insignia that always looked to me like the Cowardly Lion from The Wizard of Oz crashing through a crusader’s shield. Like everyone else, his name was printed in bold 16-point font. ELMAR W GRAY. He would probably spend much of the next four days insisting it was not a typo, that his name was spelled with an -ar, not an -er, much like he might have done while a student at Easton.
Out of all the dirty jobs in the world, the worst was working in the spaghetti mines.
“There’s something to be said,” Elizabeth begins, at which point I stop listening. She holds a glass of white wine at the stem and her chin points in her usual degree of superiority. I glance over at Nana, who mirrors the expression with white wine to match. I sip my diet coke. My sister makes me a little mad. Her mouth is overdrawn in caramel lipstick. Her highlights golden and fresh. She is beautiful and such a snob. These two will kill me this weekend. But she’s here now and I’m glad, or maybe relieved. I’m not going to overthink it. Herding us to the Chinese buffet for dinner was her idea, All-you-can-eat puts Nana in a good mood. Nana, however, smiles easy enough and her saggy face seems small under the white cap of feathery hair, but I know better. The room bustles around us like a train station with winding red silk lanterns dangling off the ceiling. People roam the buffet, eating long past stopping, until they almost explode, and the yellow fish in the tank are barely swimming, staring blandly at me. I haven’t spoken a word, and won’t, unless they make me.
Helen grumbled when dispatch sent her on a fifteen-mile drive to pick up a couple in the suburbs. It was a half-hour before the end of her shift, November and already winter cold in Montreal. She wanted to soak in a bath, watch tv. But City Cab made it clear. You took calls or you looked for another job. After fifteen years, she still hated being told what to do. Just once, she’d like to tell dispatch to shove it.
After the gig, I stood in the lobby and in the street outside and there was no sign of Mike. There was an edgy feel to this space that didn’t encourage hanging around. The venue attracted a lot of affluent punters and some of the more predatory locals gathered at the end of gigs to pick off the weaklings, like big cats around a watering-hole.
We used the trashcans to hop on the roof of the garage. There wasn’t much to see up there, and it didn’t make the neighborhood look any different. Old, narrow houses stood too close to each other like a huddled crowd of sick people. The windows made me think of sad eyes. There were never any dogs or children in the small cramped yards. But I no longer thought someone could get stuck here, that a street like this could keep you trapped in one place. Colleen even called us birds, and I pictured us as two tiny ones side by side, wings fluttering, when I saw a flock of black birds take off against the storm clouds.