Edit 2, with some new shit slipped in: literary erotica

“Gross,” Talon’s laughing so hard, he’s clutching his ribs.
“What’s he laughing at?” I say.
“Just a video. Have a look,” Garth says, his one seeing eye taking in my builder’s dark-grey-with-diagonal-black-lines spandex I wear to show off my quads and hams.
“Can’t,” I say, “Going to Strictly to train Barbara.” I coach three women at Strictly now—an Italian with straight jet black hair from World’s Gym who’s fed up with fitness-style instructors and wants to try hardcore, although hardcore core isn’t something you try like sampling a new dish, you move to the country, damn it, and you live like they live, eat what they eat; Alla, who bares her tanned midriff in a new outfit with that stylized “U” symbol on it every time she trains and worries because she doesn’t get off on her husband anymore although he’s a handsome Moroccan Jew and makes a pile of cash in his import/export business; and Gloria, a fashionably skinny, past or in her prime however you look at it, ex-hippie who’s made her fortune in the body bag business and setting up high-class abortion clinics in the Caribbean for women from South American countries, who find themselves in the family way as my Bobi would say.

“Just one look, it’ll take one second,” Garth says while Talon echoes and I can’t refuse, we’re still in our beginnings.
“So? I don’t see anything . . . What the hell is that!” I say as I stare at a puckered-up out of focus hole. Talon and Garth are out of control laughing and slapping their thighs.
“Wait,” Garth manages.

I shift from one foot to another, and then the focus becomes sharper and what I’m watching as Talon absolutely loses it and Garth does too, alongside, and he never loses it, is the rear of a woman bending over and her ass hole all puckered up and opening wider and wider until it’s the size of a melon, not a piddle of a melon, but a ripe, full-size grown one.

“Disgusting,” Talon’s yelling and skipping around.
“You two are crazy out of your minds,” I say. “And you . . .” I shake my head at Garth, but I’m grinning.
“No way is he going to be like his mom now,” Garth says.


“Garth! In the kitchen, it has a hard brown back like a shell.” Garth can move quickly when he wants to. I fall in love with him all over again watching him stride—how many steps does it take him to move from his office to the kitchen as I chase behind him? “Cockroach,” he says, grinding it with my favorite white muscle shirt. “You might want to get rid of this,” he says. “There’s more where that came from. And by the way, when you move, you throw everything out. Everything. Unless you happen to be lonely and desperate for company.”
“But Garth, again? We gotta move again? I like it here. It’s close to Strictly. And I’m just up the Allen and I’m at Talon’s school—and Caroline, I’m practically at Lawrence with the Allen and then I just take Lawrence.”
“I know the route, Janice.”
“Where we going to move to? And what about first and last?” I sit at the edge of the black sofa. “I’m not moving again. I know I shouldn’t have unpacked.”
“You won’t have much to pack this time.”

So much jostling in my brain. Like a whole schoolroom of chairs being moved around.
“Don’t worry,” he says. “We’ll have plenty cash.”
“Oh yes,” I say, “the Deal.” She said, her lips curling. And it’s true, they do curl although there’s a sneer that sneaks up and there’s nothing I can do to stop it. Whose life is this? Whose wild wingy life?

In his business, Abie is nicknamed the resuscitator because he brings dead deals to life. Sometimes he exercises mouth-to-mouth on still-warm deals. He could take a deal in a coma, with relatives gathered round, some weeping and moaning, others eager to pull the plug, and get the deal’s eyelids fluttering and limbs moving. One deal involved Seven-Eleven and a machine delivering videos instead of pop; another one a shoe with replaceable heels of different heights and widths; a power line in the Congo; a company with the rights to sell credit cards of variable denominations in variety stores and supermarkets—and wouldn’t immigrants and illegals just love that; then there’s due diligence, escrow, more due diligence, a sudden glitch which Abie triumphantly solves, signatures, a key player flies off to Spain for his mother’s funeral, another glitch, an additional clause necessitating more signatures. Closings in two weeks. Delays. It’s the end of summer and monsoon-time in Tibet. It’s September 8 and Independence Day in the Republic of Macedonia. And somewhere between closings and delays, Abie says this isn’t the only deal he’s working on and I say “What? What else you got?” like I’m pulling seconds out of boxes on The Main. And though it may not be a good thing to suddenly switch similes, I know if this were a fuck and I, a tangy broad impulsively changing postures in mid-ride, it’d be OK—at the Expo 67 fairgrounds Abie pulled me over to the Spider. “I hate rides.” I said. “C’mon. You’ll like it, you’ll see. C’mon. Trust me.” “I hate it. I hate.” I yelled from the moment we started spinning. Abie’s airplane glasses flew off. “Hold onto the bar. It’s out of control!” he screamed, pressing me into the seat with his left arm. Looking back, deals had their seasons as predictable as the Ferris Wheel, but it living through them was like riding on the Spider, sure enough.

And now Garth is working on a deal. He says it’s not a bank trading program like the one Abie was involved in, the one he lost two point five million in although he insists it was bad luck, the money being placed into an American account whose holder keeled and slam-bam kicked the bucket one spring day, the wife and step-son moving in and staking their claim. Garth says his deal is different—it’s a fund he explains, investors go in, the fund grows, and after a specified time, investors get their outlay back plus a pre-set portion of the interest. Simple and legit. Garth puts an ad in the Globe and Mail. Some guy from Sudbury has one hundred thousand, a widow from Toronto has only fifty and will that be sufficient she asks. Garth gets faxes. Contracts have to be rewritten; the wording in one clause is not acceptable to the British lawyer. The British lawyer is satisfied but the American attorney is not. “Garth,” I say my voice like sugar and sex, “are you sure this is not a bank trading scam? They’re cracking down you know. I don’t want to sound negative.” “Then don’t,” he says. “Why say ‘I don’t mean to’ and then go ahead?” I don’t know the lingo, but I hear the calls and read the contracts. And then I hear about delays, new signatures needed, clauses requiring alteration, and I know. I know the way I feel Garth’s cock slamming the back of my cunt when I lie under him, my legs cradling his neck, same as I lie on him and kiss his lips that are so miraculously smooth and soft and the way I know the span of his forehead. I just know. And I can’t tell him.

Garth doesn’t have a job. We didn’t talk much about how he was going to make money when we started fucking. I knew about his neighbor in Guelph who sold stocks and bonds and moved to Florida to start a hedge fund. And that he planned to make his million before he was thirty. It’s his destiny, he says. He figures if he works smart, he could get by working four hours a day at first leading up to maybe two hours one day a week; he says when he was a bouncer those nine to fivers would head on down to their local bars every weekend and blow their paycheck. Dirt bags wear shirts with white and blue collars, at the bar you can’t tell them apart. “Reminds me of Clearwater—you know that old quarry for nudists on the way to Freelton. Steel workers and university professors, you can’t tell one cock from the other.” I know I’m losing him, Garth being one of those linear types. I have to edit with him just as I had to with Abie. Only Sabina thrives on my presentations—I think like a drunken choreographer, which she appreciates. Maybe my style is impacted by my backlog of filed thoughts. A person can die from backlog. I know this from one of Caroline’s stays in Mount Sinai when she was trying on Resperidone to see if it would suit her, like clothes shopping. Except she almost didn’t come out of the changing room, that’s how backlogged she became. The nurses finally refused to continue the six-week trial run. “You saved her, you just don’t get the recognition you deserve, even the doctors wouldn’t stop although I told them her body couldn’t take it, wouldn’t, like that movie was it Network when Peter Finch tells everyone to open their New York windows and scream ‘I’m fed up and I’m not going to take it anymore!’” I said this to every nurse on Nine South. They were overworked and hungry for recognition. So I quickly slide in with “the thing is Garth, sometimes you have to work for what you want” even though I know the door on his face is going to slam shut and I’ll be left huddling in the cold without him.

Garth says people are afraid of being alone. He says you come into this world alone and you die the same way, so you better get used to it. “But you get angry when I visit Caroline every day.” I say. He says he didn’t visit Talon as much as I visit Caroline, even when he was a baby. “She’s sick,” I say. “And if you could have seen Talon every day, wouldn’t you have? And if I could have Caroline here—why isn’t she here? Tell me why she isn’t here with me!” On Nina Street Garth would talk me upright and back into the ring whenever grief delivered a packed ab punch. Now he just watches from the sidelines.

The old widow and the Sudbury man are threatening to sue. Garth isn’t afraid. He says he’ll get off with paying seventy-five dollars a month; he just has to show the courts he’s on a repayment schedule. His forehead remains as smooth as ever. If someone wants to gamble one-hundred thousand that’s not his business. He feels sorry for the old widow. I can’t remember how Garth got to keep one hundred thousand. I’m like the old man in Moonstruck in the closing kitchen scene when Cher and Nicholas Cage are sitting around the breakfast table and Cher’s fiancé returns from visiting his Mama in Italy: “I’m so confused,” the old man says.

So Garth hops on a plane to Orlando and hands this American scammer named Jim Steel one hundred K cash. “What? You did what!” I said when Garth phoned. “Well, he had a suitcase with a live one hundred thousand.” “It was fake, Garth. Who carries around that kind of money and shows it to a stranger? The man’s a southern cracker for fuck’s sake. What’s he doing showing this huge black man cash?” Turns out Garth spoke maybe five or six times to an agent named Jack Tabac, and Jack passed on information about an owner of a thriving import-export company who was wanting to retire. For one hundred K, Jim would teach him the ropes and then move into the background, leaving Garth to manage the day to day. Of course Mr. Steel skipped town. Garth left messages about personally hunting him down and calling out the FBI hounds, which Jim picked up, subsequently setting up a meeting with Garth in the Manhattan’s Lower East Side where, coming face to face with Garth’s hulking angry frame, he thrust out eight of the one hundred thousand and promptly disappeared. I never said “what were you thinking?” to Garth who had gotten such a laugh about Abie forking over that two point five million and his dog loyalty to shady deals. And now here is Garth pointing his finger at fat people, gullible investors, and charlatans.

I’m in the kitchen cooking on a gas stove. There’s something sexy about gas stoves, something gesmucked. More than delicious, gesmucked has to do with smells that get the mouth watering, the eagerness of piercing food and holding it in place, the arc of fork to mouth, the satisfying roll of food in the mouth, and discovery of flavors. It has to do with texture. I’m thinking about geshmuked which I learned from Abie and how it’s one of those fulfilling all-purpose words and how it’s a zen word sweeping you into the moment, when I hear a syncopated long-distance ring. My father asks me about the girls. I tell him I miss Caroline. He asks about Lisa. I tell him she’s living in the east part of Toronto, she has roommates, she’s working in a call centre and she answers the phone in English and French. She’s had another poem published. Then I tell him I’m working on a new canvas. He asks where I paint and I say in the kitchen. I search for another topic. “I want to get married, Dad,” I say looking at my canvas­­—a female without eyes, a red open mouth, naked breasts nipples generous and rouged, a vertical crocodile in place of a skirt and a butterfly wing as a wedding veil. To the left side, an old-fashioned face, a cherub with an ancient knowing visage. “I want to marry Garth,” I say. And my own father says something about Cultural Differences. “What do you mean, cultural differences?” I say. “There were cultural differences with Abie. Garth was born here. What do you mean?” He repeats. “Cultural differences, that’s what.” And then he pulls out his sharp shooter and lays it on the table. “If that’s the action you take, I’ll have to rethink my will.” I stand quite still in this kitchen with its old gas stove and grey linoleum. My eyes dart through the diner-like opening in the wall with Garth and Talon head-butting on the other side. I’m the short-order cook. “Enemies in thy midst,” is all Garth says and walks away. I phone my father. “I can’t take your calls, anymore,” I say. “I can’t believe you told him. How could you misconstrue my words like that? That’s not what I meant. You know that’s not what I meant. How have we raised you?” “‘Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,’ Dad,” I say.

I’m an instigator.

Ferris Wheel Fuck (Up) - edit one, erotic non-fiction

There are those restless sleeps when you search out a groove to slide into and you settle into one, but that’s not it, so you rummage around for another—we’re moving again. This time to Overbrooke just three blocks from Strictly Fitness. We looked at so many places, Garth and I.

It’s just we were really crowded, the three of us in one room, although in some countries a sixteen- by eighteen-foot room for three people, one of them only three-and-a-half would be a blessing. And even though Garth isn’t the noisiest lover, it’s kind of tough to fuck with a kid in the room. Garth’s lips are soft and deep and I know his heart is in his kisses, but he’s so quiet you wouldn’t even know he’s in the room. I listen for his hands on my skin. My hair feels like it’s held in the tightest tony tail when he gathers it up in his fist. He shudders when he comes. One place we checked out was smack over a pizza joint, but it was stark white gleaming with brand-new appliances and a Laundromat just downstairs. “Why don’t you drop by now, dear?” the agent said. “You sound just like the type of couple we’re looking for.” The agent was tanned rich sepia brown any artist would admire, her lips, finger and toe-nails jumping out ruby red.

“It was just taken,” she said, opening the door just a crack.
“But five minutes ago, we were just around the corner, actually, and you said—”
“Sorry, but someone came by with a deposit.”
“In five minutes, someone came by in five minutes?”
Garth: “Janice, Janice it’s OK.”
“No, no it’s not. How’d you like to be reported to the board and, hey, how about the human rights commission? I happen to know a contributor to Toronto Life—she’d pounce on this. Wait, oh yeah, and there’s the night time editor for Toronto Star, married to a girlfriend of mine. I think you chose to mess around with the wrong people this time. You’re Jewish, right? That’s what gets me.”
“How do you know I’m Jewish?”
“Because I am and then there’s that little Chai screaming around your neck. You should be ashamed, you know, didn’t Hitler teach you anything?”
“Did you see how she looked at us,” I said. “How would you describe it that look?”
“It’s that oh-I didn’t-know-you-weren’t-white look.”
“Which is, what is it? Really. Tell me.”
“You ask too many questions, you know that? It’s when the face takes on a confused look. And then it goes back to normal, whatever normal was for that person.”
“But what do you mean by confused? What happens to the features? You answer in such generalities.”
“I answer.”
“So tell me then.”
“It’s generally a sharp breath, a look of surprise, a few quick blinks, and then a quick regaining of composure. It’s very quick.”
“That’s what I want. That’s it. Thank you.
“You’re welcome.”
“I love you, you know that?” I rub his hair. I love the feel of his hair, it’s not just that it’s
soft; it’s that you can get your fingers into and roll around in it, his hair has this sweetness like a whispered kiss. I love him, even when I know it doesn’t make sense.

The Overbrooke flat is on the third floor. The old man and his wife live on the second floor. They own the whole place which was also home to Danny their middle son who is as fat as Garth; it just doesn’t suit him. Fat curdles on white skin. Garth loves hardcore descriptions while I grew up in a staunch politically correct household where I was summoned for even minor transgressions. At the close of one of my parents’ garlic-bread Communist parties, I was not yet twelve—I know this because Zadi was still alive and it’s not that in my fishbowl memory I can see him at the party that night; I just don’t have a physical sense of his being absent—I surveyed my father’s second cousin Harry Mayerovitch as he stood in the foyer under the hanging gold lantern, my father being proud of finishing touches. “Your resemblance to my father is uncanny,” I said. “Except you’re shorter.” “How could you say that?” my father said after the guests had gone and I was in the kitchen, sipping my bedtime milk like fine wine with the party staff environs in their black and white uniforms clearing and sorting. I did a thorough memory search. Which can take a while. Here I am at forty-eight and still I haven’t learned how to organize life and mind. Instead I go around moving furniture, sorting contents of rooms, cupboards, drawers. I’m the opposite of a squirrel, I guess. Still, I couldn’t find what I’d said until my father located it. Harry was short. I’d said that. And now I’m merrily flaunting the “f” word and sometimes I go all out and feature “ugly.” Not often and never with the fond gusto reserved for a hearty “Fuck!” There’s something cleansing about that word. People scatter off for a toxic cleansing, that up-your-colon power clean, when all they really need is an emphatic apple-a-day “Fuck!” Too many times and it’s like an enema—you feel empty afterward.

I would like to share all these thoughts with Garth or anyone for that matter. But I have to edit with him just as I had to with Abie. Only Sabina thrives on my presentations which are like flipping through a book, reading the last page first, then the opening paragraph, a bit in the middle and back—I think like a drunken choreographer—but Sabina’s never home, working for the TTC as she does and doling out her spare time to friends with their palms up like any old street beggar: any time, any time? Maybe my writing style is fueled by my backed-up words. A person can die from backlog. I know this from one of Caroline’s stays in Mount Sinai when she was trying on Resperidone to see if it would suit her, like clothes shopping. Except she almost didn’t come out of the changing room, that’s how backlogged she became. The nurses finally refused to continue the six-week trial run. “You saved her, you just don’t get the recognition you deserve, even the doctors wouldn’t stop although I told them her body couldn’t take it, wouldn’t, like that movie was it Network when Peter Finch tells everyone to open their New York windows and scream ‘I’m fed up and I’m not going to take it anymore!’” I said this to every nurse on Nine South. They were overworked and hungry for recognition.

Garth says there’s a carbon monoxide leak in the building and we should inform the basement tenant next to the boiler room. “I thought you don’t care about people—if you had your way, anyone crossing your path would drop like a mosquito blasted with Raid.” “I don’t care. They have a right to know. Simple as that. I’m not as complex as you think.” “So then— it’s your biblical sense of justice,” I say. Garth is convinced he should go into politics, and I tell him his mask would never hold up. Could he imagine himself shaking hands with all those detestable people and cooing at babies? “You may have a point there,” he says, although he has a thing for kids and babies. And they take to him. Babies smile back and kids attach themselves to his huge calves. At his discount dollar store, the old man called Garth a prince among men, which is understandable given Garth’s size and color.


Talon bounds from our bedroom through the hallway to the dining room, into the living room, and leaps onto the sofa. The old man below thumps on the ceiling. We buy Jamaican bread at the supermarket on Wilmington. Garth checks plantains and lets them ripen until they’re black. Then he fries them. “How can you eat this way?” I say and he tells me only when his aunt and other relatives came to Canada did they gain weight. It’s not the oil, he says, but all the enriched foods and the preservatives. Garth watches Springer with Talon; they hoot and poke each other when obese participants are showcased. I never knew who Springer was before I met Garth. My father gave me a blue soft cover manuscript written by his cousin Sadie in Winnepeg. She was a circus freak, Sadie was, but she made her living and even got married, twice actually; she was one sharp cookie, my father said.

Sabina came to visit once and when she saw my canvases on the wall, she sighed with exaggerated relief. “At last, some color!” she said. “I get the walls,” I told her. “And you have a plant,” she said. Every day I pick up Talon from Dalemount. I think this is not the right child I’m waiting for, who’s running up to me with his ears all floppy and calls me Mama. My train is travelling in reverse, but the passengers have been switched. Or maybe I’m in reverse on a parallel track.

Today she says she’ll see me. She’s wearing a brown checkered flannel dress. She has the same one in olive green. The dress hangs on her. She has a canopy bed and a matching high bureau. Also a long dresser with eight drawers. Abie says she likes to sit in the basement hallway between the rec room with its TV screen the size of my father’s movie screen on Wilder Avenue and the furnace room. She sits surrounded by open books. My mind runs to Garth when I’m with her and back to her when I’m with Garth. I watched a race once, with Abie. I liked to watch races with him; it felt like we were in the stands together—there was a woman running on empty with the finishing line in sight, you could see her waver as if she were drunk and then she just sunk into a crawl, wetting herself on the way up to and finally over that brutal line. Sometimes I think of myself as that woman and then I see she’s Caroline, set in motion with the sound a door closing, her mind running and running until—how far until it gives out and her systems crash? Her dress hung on her like a cast-down frock.

“Garth! In the kitchen, it has a hard brown back like a shell.” Garth can move quickly when he wants to. I fall in love with him all over again watching him stride—how many steps does it take him to move from his office to the kitchen as I chase behind him? “Cockroach,” he says, grinding it with my favorite white muscle shirt. “You might want to get rid of this,” he says. “There’s more where that came from. And by the way, when you move, you throw everything out. Everything. Unless you happen to be lonely and desperate for company.”
“But Garth, again? We gotta move again? I like it here. It’s close to Strictly. And I’m just up the Allen and I’m at Talon’s school—and Caroline, I’m practically at Lawrence with the Allen and then I just take Lawrence.”
“I know the route, Janice.”
“Where we going to move to? And what about first and last?” I sit at the edge of the black sofa. “I’m not moving again. I know I shouldn’t have unpacked.”
“You won’t have much to pack this time.”
So much jostling in my brain. Like a whole schoolroom of chairs being moved around.
“Don’t worry,” he says. “We’ll have plenty cash.”
“Oh yes,” I say, “the Deal.” She said, her lips curling. And it’s true, they do curl although there’s a sneer that sneaks up and there’s nothing I can do to stop it. Whose life is this? Whose wild wingy life?

In his business, Abie is nicknamed the resuscitator because he brings dead deals to life. Sometimes he exercises mouth-to-mouth on still-warm deals. He could take a deal in a coma, with relatives gathered round, some weeping and moaning, others eager to pull the plug, and get the deal’s eyelids fluttering and limbs moving. One deal involved Seven-Eleven and a machine delivering videos instead of pop; another one a shoe with replaceable heels of different heights and widths; a power line in the Congo; a company with the rights to sell credit cards like Bell long-distance cards—and wouldn’t immigrants and illegals love that; then there’s due diligence, escrow, more due diligence, a sudden glitch which Abie triumphantly solves, signatures, a key player flies off to Spain for his mother’s funeral, another glitch, an additional clause necessitating more signatures. Closings in two weeks. Delays. It’s the end of summer and monsoon-time in Tibet. It’s September 8 and Independence Day in the Republic of Macedonia. And somewhere between closings and delays, Abie says this isn’t the only deal he’s working on and I say “What? What else you got?” like I’m pulling seconds out of boxes on The Main. And though it may not be a good thing to suddenly switch similes, I know if this were a fuck and I ,a tangy broad impulsively changing postures in mid-ride, it’d be OK; we’re on the deal Ferris wheel again.

How Long Have You Been Evil? (erotic memoir)

Fall 1996

The deal is I work from nine to twelve and then I drive Talon to junior kindergarten on Dalemount near his mother’s apartment where she lives with her girlfriend Diane. Actually Diane has lived in the basement of this triplex for nine years; she has a steady job doing the books for a Jewish furrier on Spadina. But then Nelly got evicted from her coop in the east end, which was the place where Garth first fucked me—I had to get on all fours after he tried every other way and I didn’t really enjoy it all, bashing down the front door of my uterus as he was. Garth got a kick out of keeping me up to date on Nelly’s eviction proceedings. I’d listen for a bit feeling antsy like when your bladders bursting and you’re doing your Kegals like a deep sea diver going for a world’s record. Garth says there’s nothing he can’t talk about. Even death intrigues him. “What can you talk about,” he says to me at these times.

Still, evictions aside, which I never thought I’d be writing—that old what doesn’t kill you will make you stronger and that bit about making lemonade—I met Sabina at Kelly’s Gym near the Austin Terrace house, and she’s been with me longer than anyone else except Abie who really doesn’t count since it wasn’t by choice, not really, my reasons being circumstantial. There are so many Kelly’s gym stories—a TTC driver from Iran who got off on muscled females took a liking to me. But that’s a whole other story, except he gave me fifteen hundred dollars so I and the girls could eat and Abie could pay some bills. And still he requested more. “What are you? Some fucking pimp? Don’t you have any pride?” I yelled. Of course he didn’t know anything about Iqbal or our post training ritual of frozen yogurt at Dutch Dreams or how he’d take me to his flat on Vaughn Road and whip my thighs and ass. I have a high pain threshold, I guess I always did although my being a power-lifting body builder sure set the meter higher. “Kiss Mister Whip,” he’d say among other stupid lines. “No,” I’d say, “No way.” “No way? No way?” he’d answer. I had bruises shaped like zoo animals on my thighs and ass. Once I stood in front of pink changing room lockers and showed a Kelly’s woman my thighs. “Wow,” she said. After the Austin Terrace eviction when we were settled into the Deloraine house, I left Sabina a message: “By the way, I never told you Iqbal was impotent.”

Anyhow, Nelly with her new youth worker certificate and job in a group home for lesbian adolescents told Talon she was going to send him away to a foster home if his father didn’t take him for one full week every other week. She says she needs more time to work on her relationship with Diane whom she punched out last week; actually, she punched Diane and Diane punched her clear out, which Garth said served her right, except that Talon was sitting quietly on his cot, watching and crying. Last night Talon asked Garth “What’s foster mean?” and Garth who doesn’t believe in shielding his son from life and its sordid truths laid it bare as a tree in winter in three sentences while they were playing Duke Nuke ‘Em. I drive Talon to Dalemount which is around Bathurst and Lawrence and then I go east on Lawrence to Yonge to visit Caroline. Sometimes she refuses to see me and I breathe really shallow on my way back to the basement apartment because otherwise my heart might crack like the skin of ice on puddles; when I was a kid walking home from school in Montreal I used to watch the water seeping out as the cracks spread like spiders beneath my feet.

Questions spring out at me; I’m in my royal blue bathing suit in the shower with Talon who is also wearing a bathing suit; I’m sitting on our unmade queen-size bed eating Garth’s six alarm chili and I’m gulping down water while Garth and Talon are laughing away; Garth tries to airplane me at the park behind Seven Eleven but I fall to the ground and hold onto his ankle, then his shorts, “I’m going to pull down your shorts,” I say and he gives up because he’s not wearing anything underneath, I don’t know why. How come Talon is here with me and my girls are not?

I can’t figure it out. Maybe I’m evil. We had this impromptu skit, the girls and I: “How long have you been evil?” one and then the other would ask. “All my life,” I’d say and we’d burst into giggles. We did that from the time they were little on Bluffwood Drive. And then there was another one: “Women of the world take over/ cause if you don’t the world will come to an end/ men have had their chance.” I made that one up in the mouse house in Haliburton. I was listening to Ian and Sylvia singing “Women’s World” and I wanted to compose a song on the guitar my parents gave me for my sixteenth birthday and which I still have. After everything it stays with me still. Caroline was four and a half; Josie, two and a bit when I brought them into the feminist fold. Almost two decades later, I kneel naked on an industrial grey carpet, being fucked from behind. "You love this, don't you?" he says. And I say, "Yes."