“Ricky? Open the door!” The knocking continued but I was fixated on Marnie.
“You want your sanity, Ricky? To be free of the ghosts stalking you at every turn?” She nodded to the counter. Right beside the Risperidone was a plastic bag that hadn’t been there before. Something red and raw inside. Three strips of flesh.
“Taken in context, it doesn’t seem like such a steep price to pay.” She nodded to the door where Murray still pleaded. “And time is running out.”
I swallowed. Sanity, something I’d never had, the lack of which had crippled my life. Both June and the calico woman were standing behind Marnie, shaking their fading heads at me.
“Will it hurt?” I asked.
A pointed, toothy smile. “Everything hurts.”
I picked up the bag of June’s flesh.
The banging continued. Baby on the hip of the younger, stronger body, I answered the door. The madness was still there, but fading into the background of me now.
“I’m still me,” Ricky said out loud.
The voice tasted strange on my mouth.
Yes, of course, I whispered. Now wipe your mouth before you answer the door.
Murray stood in the hallway, angry. His eyes drifted from my new face to the baby. “What the hell?” Confusion, and fear. That was a familiar smell.
Smile, just smile.
“Come on inside,” Ricky said. “I’ll explain everything.”
Stitches
by Don English
Crab Park
No one sees as he wrestles her plastic-wrapped body out of the backseat of his Volvo and carries it down to the beach in Crab Park. He’s sat alone in his car every night at this time for two weeks; he’s confident no dog walkers or drifters or kids smoking a joint under the stars will be around as he lays her body down gently behind a log. He walks close enough to the ocean that when he kneels in the sand the waves lap his knees. The wind blowing in over the water seasons the air, heightens the smell of the still-warm pavement, the sunburned grass, and the overflowing trash bins.
He’d seen her waiting on the sidewalk on Hastings Street and there was room enough for him to pull over right in front of her, like it was meant to be. He’d leaned over to lower his passenger window and asked her if she did Greek. He’d heard that on TV once and thought it sounded good.
“Nope, I took French in school for a bit but I dropped it. I know a bit of Spanish. Chinga tu madre.”
She was trying to be funny and he didn’t want her to be funny. He had to deal with enough women trying to be funny whenever he went on the Internet. For a minute he was angry and thought about driving away, but she looked too perfect in the short skirt and the jean shirt tied under her breasts. She leaned into the window looking impatient.
“Are you supposed to be lost? Should I pretend to give you directions or something? No one gives a shit. Thirty bucks and I’ll take you where you need to go.”
“Thirty is too much. Twenty bucks. For mouth stuff.”
“Twenty-five for mouth stuff.”
He unlocked the door in a hurry and told her to get in. She was beautiful; he didn’t like that she tried to be funny, but she was beautiful. Confident too, she took one look back over her shoulder before she got in the car and then sat with her arms crossed, glaring a hole in his windshield. He decided to break the silence.
“What’s your name?”
“Pilot.”
“That’s a funny name, did your parents want you to fly?”
“You’d have to ask them.”
He wanted her to smile a little. He thought the look on her face would be better later if she smiled. “I don’t know much French or Spanish. But I learned a lot of Japanese in high school.”
“So you didn’t need the subtitles on the cartoons, right?”
He blushed a little. “Right! That’s exactly right. My favorite was—”
She clicked her tongue against her back teeth. “We’re not doing small talk unless you’re paying me more, sport.”
She looked different to him then, more like the girls at work. Another reality TV watcher. He was looking for a genuine connection with someone who liked substantial things, things out of the ordinary. A girl who lit up when she saw you, listened to you, had a laugh that coated you like butter. Not someone who looked at you funny in an elevator when you told them their hair smelled nice. He nosed his car into an alley between a warehouse loft space and the chain-link fence that separated it from the railway tracks. It was always deserted there. They sat for a minute listening to the engine ticking and he waited for her to reach into her purse for condoms before he grabbed her by the throat.
Pilot Cassidy is lined up to get into a concert at the Astoria and is amusing herself by eavesdropping on the two women behind her in line. The sound from the bar leaking out into the street is brutal, but the women are drunk and loud and Pilot can’t help but overhear. One of them had met a guy though Craigslist who was willing to exchange a six-pack of beer for a hand job, any kind of beer, and so she’d done it and would totally do it again.
“Weren’t you afraid he was going to murder you or something?”
“Nah, he wanted to meet in Dude Chilling Park, daylight and everything. It took about five minutes, max. Didn’t even get any on me. I told him in advance what kind of beer I wanted and he had it right there in the trunk of his car.”
“You went with him to the trunk of his car? You are so stupid!”
“Bitch, I shared that beer with you!”
Pilot lies on her mattress after the show, the room lit only by her phone. She makes herself scroll through pictures of the night first — a sea of raised hands obscuring the shitty opening band, a bloody-nosed selfie taken in the bathroom mirror after someone threw an elbow back and hit her, one of her roommates barfing with scary accuracy into a pint glass — before opening Craigslist and cruising Men Seeking Women. She answers the first one that seems weird, offers the most money, and doesn’t get specific about what her body looks like.
Rob messages bright and early the next day, tells Pilot he hasn’t had many replies so far, and she blinks through her hangover and tells him that she doesn’t imagine vaguely worded ads involving punishment has ladies beating down his door. He seems quiet, rich, and boring, and he likes it when Pilot tells him she isn’t scared of anything. He sends Pilot a series of wardrobe ideas, tells her not to wear underwear (followed by a wink emoji that curls Pilot’s lip), what corner to stand on, and what he’ll be driving.
He struggles to keep the plastic wrapped around her. He wasn’t sure if he should buy it all in the same place so he went across the city to multiple dollar stores to buy shower curtains that he stapled together. His hands tremble as he tries to tear off strips of the duct tape.
Pilot walks out of her house and makes it a quarter of the way down East Pender toward Heatley Avenue before her brain starts to pester her about whether she locked the door. She’s almost all the way to Hastings when she realizes it’s no use arguing with herself and she heads back. Her annoyance dissolves the second she sees the house; she’s lived here for a year and her heart still swells to look at it.
When Pilot first came to Vancouver she lived in a shelter, and then a tent, and then a car that wasn’t hers. She lived in a house with three pregnant vegan Wiccans where the black mold was so bad the city inspectors Pilot called walked out when they saw it, said their union wouldn’t let them be in an environment like that. After that she moved to an unfinished basement where a series of bedsheets on a clothesline separated her “room” from a ska band’s rehearsal space.