A New Beginning...

It is mid-July but last night I left a window open and an autumn chill snuck in. It brought a squirrel that ran haywire across the kitchen windowsill and knocked over a couple of empties. The noise woke me up too early. 
The cat is content on the warm place in the centre of the stove.
I have the window to the fire escape rigged so that it is always open a couple of inches. The constant flow of air masks the smell of natural gas that would otherwise fill the apartment since the pilot light went out a couple of months ago. I am too embarrassed to let my landlord in to light it. But not enough to make an effort at scrubbing the crust off of the burners and sweeping and washing the floors.
Half-awake, I turn on one of the other three burners to boil the kettle for tea. The cat is startled but doesn't jump down in time. The fur around her butt and tail are singed.
I try to console her but she wedges under the bed in the far corner where I can't reach.
Aside from the cat, I share my apartment with two cacti, a dressmaker, a record player, and a typewriter. If it weren’t for the murphy bed, I wouldn’t have a single piece of functional furniture.

Ghost Story: Part Three

Utterly deflated - I need new life. So I put a record on.
I shimmy my bones to the record playing. Close my eyes and feel it fill out my hips, my ass, my soul. Dance real slow. A cold beer in one, numb hand. A clove cigarette in the other. Slink around the apartment. Pause in the bathroom to tap the ashes into the sink and glare at myself in the mirror.

The First Omen: A Bird in the Sink

The bird in the kitchen sink is an omen, I think.
The house is sealed against the humid summer heat: the window frames are swollen and stuck; blinds and drapes are drawn defensively against sunlight.
I don't know how it got inside.
Uninterested, the cat is a puddle on the cool kitchen tile.
Overall, the household is undisturbed.
I dig out a pair of mittens from the hall closet and carry the bird outside, onto the front lawn. It doesn't flinch. A few bully crows gang up and encircle the small bird, who is motionless and unaware as they close in. I save the unfortunate creature and put it in a box in the garage .

Twilight stirs me from the sofa, where I have been dozing all afternoon. Night spreads upward from the horizon like an indigo stain, dousing the burning sky.
The house is tense, so I open the windows easily and they exhale the stale breath it has been holding in. I open my lungs to the warm, fresh air and go outside to check on the bird.
It is where I left it, but something is changed. The box is transformed into a coffin.
The moon is unblinking. The air is static, and unaffected.

Ghost Story: Part Two

Darkness pours from the sky. It swirls and eddies around me, cold and cajoling. It is thrilling and frightening, the way my body responds to the cruel night air. How easily my flesh excites. How my own darkness reflexively leaps to the surface. The little life remaining in me barely keeps me inflated. I exhale and watch it come out in a puff of smoke. Then disappear.

 

Ghost Story: Part One

An apparition in black silk and lace. The shift dress hovers around her form like a spell.
The gust of wind that brought her was exhilarating and terrifying. You can tell a spirit by the way the wind moves her. It enters her orifices and bends and shakes her limbs like a sapling.

The slurp and hiss of a bottle of soda being opened - that's what it sounds like when my head pops off. It's one of my favorite sounds. Last evening I uncorked myself and let my soul out to roam. It wandered the whole night looking for a new vessel.
I awoke in a fetal position covered with bruises. It has been a brutal rebirth. Upright, my vision turns to static. Slowly I regain reception and stumble into a scalding shower to thaw. I wash my new body with soapy hands and marvel at how dangerous the soft, downy skin feels stretched taut around such sharp bones.
This body has a weak grip on me, so close to death as it is...

Fortune Cookie

This is a short story that I had good intentions to submit for a writing contest I saw on geist.ca. I believe that the premise had to have something to do with a fortune cookie. Of course I didn't finish the story in time for the deadline. Here's what I have pieced together from my attempts:

Florescent street lamps chill the November air. We trudge home from Champions Canadian/Chinese Restaurant across its small, cratered parking lot, vacant of cars but full of slush and salt. This will all be frosted over by morning, but for now my canvas sneakers sop up the wet mess to my ankles.
As we walk it starts to snow.
At home, Sam changes into dry clothes and lends me boxer shorts and an old soccer t-shirt that says THE HONEYBEES on the chest and 13 across the back. The house is empty. We hunker down in the basement to watch one of three fuzzy channels on the old TV set, and pick at cold tofu and broccoli out of its Styrofoam container. The basement is damp and the air smells earthy. The carpet is light-brown shag; there is a grungy yellow foam mattress in a corner, a tweed couch and a small television on a built-in shelf in one pine-paneled wall. High school parties always took place in basements like this, and there is something cunt-like and sexy about it that makes me self-conscious, exposed.
Anxiety builds up in my mind, flake by flake.
I don't know.
Later, Sam shows me her new record player and SLR - gifts from her grandparents. She doesn't own a single record. I'm the one who took photography classes in high school.
During a rerun of SCTV we crack our fortune cookies.
My slip of paper is blank. I show it to Sam.
"Ooooooooh, spooky!" she says, "Do you think that means you have no future?"
I wad up the paper and toss it at her head. "Fuck you. What does yours say?"
"It says: 'You will soon have an important decision to make.' Duh! Bo-ring!"
While she eats both of our cookies, I break off a piece of Styrofoam and crumble it into tiny white pieces on the rug. "Maybe one day we'll go to a Chinese food place that actually uses those little folded-up Chinese food boxes..."
"Ha! First you have to get the hell out of this hick-town!"
I already know this. So long as I am stuck here, my future is a blank.
The wind blows a drift of snow against the high, narrow basement window.
I think, 'What did I want my cookie to predict?'There are times when something comes out of her mouth and I swear it came from my own head. And it thrills me, makes something leap in me that I didn
Now I think about it and I am scared to death that I don
I resolve to keep close tabs on my ideas at all times so that they don
"Since when do you take pictures?" I say.
She shrugs. "Max is gonna show me. And there's a darkroom downtown that's cheap to use."
The last time we hung out alone, I took a picture of Sam in a spiralling yellow stairwell at the university. When I saw it developed, it was black and white and embarrassing. I was amateur and uncertain with my camera, and all of the prints were out of focus. Sam was blatantly bored and restless, her expression drugged. Her black-rimmed eyes were ghastly, ghostly streaks. But that is not why it makes me wince.
What is most revealing about the photo is the obvious vulnerability of the photographer.
I hadn’t know was there, and I'm either going to be sick or scream or cry or explode.’t have a single original thought in my head. ’t escape. ’t seen Sam in a few weeks and she had chopped off all of her hair and dyed it black. Her face was shocking - she had had bangs and long hair since we had first met years ago. Max had cut it for her the previous night, and afterwards she had dropped acid with him for the first time...

Literally Editing My Past

Here's some "found" writing from one of my many abandoned notebooks. Unfinished stories. Stories without beginnings, middles or ends; without heads, torsos or limbs. Cut and sewn into something with a semblance of sense.

Perched on a headstone, we take sobering swigs of coffee from a mason jar. I point out Orion's belt, the only constellation I can find. We have that in common.
Her legs are bony and downy, like a little boy's. Her black bob haircut has light brown roots.
I rub my hands over my freshly shorn head. It makes my molars tingle and my body turn into pins and needles. At home the bathroom is littered with hair. My head was getting so heavy and morbid that I had to get rid of some excess weight before I snapped.
I've drank too much coffee and my mind is humming, my nerves and bones are vibrating inside my sore, exhausted limbs. I'm a twenty-watt lamp with a sixty-watt bulb. I'm shooting sparks but nothing is catching.
Eventually day cracks on the horizon and slides its sickly yellow yoke across the sky. It's a queasy, greasy Sunday morning. My stomach won't settle until dusk.
Like a pair of zombies, we stumble out of the graveyard towards home.
We pass by the park where she first got me drunk on vodka and orange juice, and sent the world hurtling. It has been spinning wildly ever since. I look into her cole-smudged eyes, and the world spins and spins. I look up at the stars. They pin me down.