by The Journey Prize Stories 32- The Best of Canada's New Writers (retail) (epub)
I liked having Nevaeh with us because it meant that Melba wouldn’t talk to me about Karen Carpenter or about men. Instead she asked Nevaeh yes-or-no questions about school and Nevaeh nodded or shook her head. Melba asked Nevaeh if she had any plans to see her friends that weekend, and Nevaeh shook her head no.
“I like your macramé bracelet,” I said to Nevaeh because I wanted to make her feel not ugly. She smiled ferociously, and then slapped her hands over her mouth.
Melba said, “Look,” and pointed to a glass case. Inside was an artificial cross-section of a human body. The display was labelled “Feed Machine.” Melba said, “Feed Machine.”
Nevaeh looked deeply sad approaching the Feed Machine. She returned her hands to the sides of her face and then turned her head to the side so as not to see the Feed Machine.
“Hold Nevaeh’s hand while I’m in the bathroom,” said Melba.
I reached for Nevaeh’s hand and she put it inside of mine, which was much larger than hers. She had dry skin with red sores on her knuckles and around her fingernails. Her cuticles were torn and bloody and her nails were bitten down to the quick. I held her hand very gently and it felt at risk of slipping right out. It also felt like holding on to a crumpled paper bag.
“Nevaeh,” I said, and Nevaeh turned her head away from me but wrapped her fingers around my hand to suggest she was listening. “I hate the Feed Machine.”
Nevaeh, I could tell, did another one of her ferocious smiles.
“The Feed Machine is our enemy,” I said.
Neveah turned her head back to me and tilted it up in the way she tilted it at Melba when she wanted to whisper to her. I leaned down so Nevaeh could whisper to me, and she very quietly whispered, “Yes.”
“I want the Feed Machine to feel the immense pain that we feel,” I said to Nevaeh. “Plus some.”
Melba returned from the bathroom. “Do you want to feed the Feed Machine?’ she said. She rubbed her hands together in excitement, like a villain.
“Yes,” I said. “We do.”
There was a spout on the left of the glass case around the machine, and beside the spout was a bowl of produce. Nevaeh was too small to reach the produce so I picked out a green apple and gave it to her, and picked out a green bell pepper for myself, and Melba picked out a peach. Melba dropped her peach into the spout and a conveyor belt delivered the peach into the artificial body’s cross-sectional mouth, and the peach was ground up by a series of gears and rotating barbed metal cylinders inside of the torso. The machine made a chopping noise when it processed the peach pit. Nevaeh covered her ears and turned away.
“Help Nevaeh feed the machine,” said Melba.
“Okay,” I said. I lifted Nevaeh so that she could drop her green apple into the spout, and then I put her down. I wanted to apologize for controlling her, but she had heard Melba tell me to do it, so I felt that she understood. Nevaeh’s apple was processed by the machine and moved through the system shortly after the peach. The peach now was near the bottom of the intestines, and it was no longer recognizably a peach but more of a wet, brown mass. The wet, brown mass of peach matter arrived at the end of the intestine, the ass, and was dispensed into an oval hole in the floor beneath the artificial ass. It was then followed by Nevaeh’s apple. I put my green bell pepper back into the bowl of produce.
“Look at that system,” said Melba.
The way she said that system reminded me of how I’d said that pussy to her. This pussy, I thought to myself. Fuck this pussy. I imagined a similar machine to the Feed Machine, called the Fuck Machine, in another more private area of The Living Body exhibit. “Do you want to fuck the Fuck Machine?’ Melba would say. “Yes,” I would say. “I want that cock to fuck this pussy.”
Another small girl who probably was Nevaeh’s age pressed her face against the glass case on the opposite side from us, and her nose got scrunched up like a pig’s. The other girl was fairly overweight, which was fine, but I did notice. Nevaeh also pressed her face against the glass, and scrunched her nose into a pig’s nose, and put her dry bloody hands flat on the glass also, and the girls stared at one another, and I looked away so that they could live their lives.
Melba was reading a guide she’d taken from the lobby. She showed it to me and pointed at the middle page and read, “The Body in Society. 12:30.”
“I think,” I said, “that I will go with Nevaeh to the food court while you watch The Body in Society. If that is okay?’
“Yes,” Melba said, “great idea.”
When Nevaeh heard me say her name, she backed away from the glass and turned to me. The other girl was gone. I walked Nevaeh out of the main exhibition room directly through the crowd of other visitors so that she would not need her blinders and would not see anything she did not want to see.
In the food court I ordered four square-shaped slices of pepperoni pizza and two Cokes and one slice of Oreo cheesecake to go, and held the to-go container in one hand and held on to Nevaeh’s scaly hand with the other.
“I want to kill the Feed Machine,” I said to Nevaeh. She looked up at my face and then at the to-go container. Then Nevaeh pulled her hand out of my hand. I worried I had upset her by saying the word kill.
“I am sorry for being hostile,” I said. “The Feed Machine makes me feel worked up.”
Nevaeh shook her arm violently, the one attached to the hand I had been holding. Her macramé bracelet fell off onto the floor and she bent and picked it up and held it out to me.
“Thank you,” I said, and I put her macramé bracelet on my wrist and it fit. I felt immense relief that the bracelet was not too small for me. If the bracelet had not fit I would have felt that I had let Nevaeh down, by being overweight like the young girl on the other side of the glass case.
Nevaeh tilted her head as if to whisper again, and I leaned forward and she said nothing. She had changed her mind.
“I am going to make the machine have a letter B,” I said. “And then we will write it in the machine’s agenda.”
Nevaeh scratched at the back of her hand and it started to bleed. She put the skin up to her mouth and sucked on it. I looked away so that she would feel like I had not noticed.
The other girl returned to the Feed Machine. She came to stand at Nevaeh’s side and Nevaeh continued to suck on her hand skin. I felt respectfully invisible to the two of them.
I opened the to-go container and stacked the four square-shaped slices of pizza on top of one another like book pages, like an agenda full of letter Bs. I put all four into the Feed Machine’s spout, and then I opened the Coke cans and poured Coke into the spout, and then I fed the machine the slice of Oreo cheesecake.
Melba approached the glass case. “The Body in Society,” she said. “Fascinating. The body can be an instrument of freedom, or it can be a prison.”
“Like a glass case,” I said. “The Feed Machine is in double prison. For being bad.”
Melba looked into the glass case at the Feed Machine. “Yum,” she said. “It’s the machine’s lucky day.”
I thought about Melba feeding the Feed Machine seed, like the ducks in her pool.
Nevaeh pulled at the macramé bracelet around my wrist. I took it off and returned it to her, and she offered it to the other girl. The other girl held out her hand so Nevaeh could put the bracelet on her, but the bracelet was too small for the other girl’s wrist.
Nevaeh’s hands worked like gory spiders unravelling the macramé and then tying a series of chunky knots around the other girl’s wrist. It was tight like the string tied around a pot roast. I wondered if Nevaeh tied it so tight to punish the girl, but the girl looked at the macramé bracelet on her wrist and grinned, and Nevaeh grinned and whispered something to the girl.
Melba and the girls and I stood around the exhibit’s case with our faces pressed up against the glass. The mass worked its way through the intestines and the m
achine made a sound like an audience cheering underwater. Drowning. The binge food reached the end of the system and the Feed Machine took a large but normal shit into the hole at the bottom of the display. I wanted to laugh, but no one else did, so I stayed still like the ducks being rained on by seed.
JOHN ELIZABETH STINTZI
COVEN COVETS BOY
On the back of Volume 48 of her series of diaries Sandy wrote: “your that dreamy.”—David W. in large sans serifs with a red permanent marker, as if it were a blurb from the New York Times. The excerpted quote came from a text message David W. had sent her, in which those words were a shunt from the context. David W.’s full quote ran:
Oh come on Sandy. Not even your that dreamy.
Sandy, in her seventeenth year, took David W.’s words not with a grain of salt but through a sieve. She let all the possible iterations of David W.’s digitized inflection squeeze away, allowed each word to stand dry in the glory of its own merits, bearing with it textbook definitions.
Dreamy : |’dri:mi | adjective.
1. Having a magical or dreamlike quality.
—This song that is playing on the radio is quite dreamy.
2. A word you use to describe the person you’re in love with.
—Sandy […] your that dreamy.
* * *
David W. was the second hottest boy at Sandy’s school. The hottest was Brice Q., who had all the natural, anthropological qualities of attraction. He was taller, he had superior muscle tone, his hair was wavier and smooth and always clean. Brice Q. was popular and smart.
Brice Q.’s backswing in tennis was almost as legendary as his backside in tennis shorts. In almost every girls’ bathroom in town there were printouts of iPhone pics, photocopies of Polaroids shot on expired cartridges, newspaper clippings of Brice Q. stuck to the walls of select stalls with chewing gum and double-sided tape. There was even, on top of a ceiling tile in Stall #3 of the girls’ bathroom near Mr. Bartlett’s class, a white towel stained in Brice Q.’s sweat, which he discarded after an intense final set against a high school down in Waterloo. Three vans of his fans had followed him there, though only one was able to take the towel back. The girls in the chosen van remembered that trip as a pilgrimage, while the others remembered it as a mistake of destiny. A test of faith.
Every now and again, in the bathroom, a tall girl would climb atop the toilet’s cistern and carry the towel down from the ceiling, pass it around to the others like a priest passing out the Eucharist. While the old faucets dripped through the quiet, the girls took turns burrowing their faces into the dusty, pheromone-crusted folds.
* * *
The only girls’ bathroom frequented by teenagers in which there was not any sort of shrine to Brice Q. was the bathroom at the local bowling alley, The Lois Lanes, where almost every lane was warping, splotched with wax-less patches. There, on dead Sunday afternoons, Sandy and her coven would gather to discuss the second hottest boy, David W.—the inferno in their fledgling hearts.
Their rituals of devotion did not include photographs, did not involve overwhelming their senses with idols or iconography. They did not have a collection of relics to pass around, but instead they shared memories, moments. Some, like Sandy, brought in their diaries to read from, some brought printouts of blog posts they’d written and published online—where they changed all the names and pretended they lived in strange places like Paris and Boise. Two simply came in and followed the oral tradition, would just stare at the ceiling and shed the words as they came. There were only six of them in all—five girls, one boy.
On Sundays, in the bathroom of The Lois Lanes, they’d each recite stories featuring David W.–like psalms. One of the six would go into a stall, stand or sit on the toilet, door open or shut, and read or recite while the others stood scattered around the rest of the bathroom, eyes often closed, leaning back against sink taps and stall walls, heads bobbing, possessed hands navigating their solitary topographies, each word an incantation. Stories of being brushed by in the halls. Stories of steam-stained dreams. Stories—from the boy—of David W. in the gym locker room nudely whipping other boys with his wet towel, of the boy’s harrowing attempts to hide his desire. They were beating-heart stories, stories like witnessing fight after fight between David W. and Principal Wayne over grades and pranks and tardiness. Stories of David W. looking at one of the coven girls and smirking, and even once sticking his tongue out at her when he caught her staring at him for the third time during a study hour before lunch, and then finally—after class—walking over and saying hello, his maroon uniform untucked from his shorts. The small beginnings of a blond moustache, which was visible only from a foot away or closer, punching out from his semi-coarse skin.
This girl, of course: Sandy.
* * *
With keen attention, it was possible to see the palpable magnetism of Brice Q. when he came down the hallways or bent down to pick up a book from the bottom of his locker. Bodies angled toward him as they passed, eyes ever glancing and grazing and surveying on the sly. When he was not at his locker, girls would reach out and touch the door as they passed.
After school, when he was training for a match in the gym, or on the court outside—or when he was studying for a final in the library—folded love notes would be stuffed into his locker through the little grate at the top. Every morning, when he opened his locker, the notes would tumble out like perfumed leaves in fall. He only ever smiled at them and put them in his pockets. He had never been known to read them. His head had always seemed to live elsewhere.
David W.’s locker was on the other side of school. The top hinge was broken so that it barely shut, releasing an aroma of dull smoke and mildew. Those who watched him did so from a distance. Unlike Brice Q.’s, David W.’s eyes were always on the lookout, trying to catch the glances that came his way. He stared out sharp from his spindle of bangs.
When he’d caught Sandy, when he had fully encircled her, she thought he would never let her go.
* * *
Volumes 26 through 58 of Sandy’s diary series, an accelerated pace ranging from Sandy at sixteen to eighteen, show the spectrum of Sandy’s obsession with David W.
Throughout, his role fluctuates. He begins as a casual mention, transitions into a minor character (whose use is largely to contrast others, like Brice Q. or herself), then quickly—in Volume 28—becomes a catalyst for Sandy’s metamorphosis into a girl mature enough to fall in love with the second hottest boy. Volume 30 talks about the coven, outlines its meetings, takes notes of all the stories shared there.
From that point, David W. begins to turn, starts displacing Sandy as main character, relegating her into something little other than the speaker or—farther off—his author. In Volumes 33 through 46—written in a few frantic months—there is almost no mention of Sandy’s life at all, except insofar as its function as a witness to him. The diaries begin to read like a field book, as if an imperceptible Jane Goodall had been airdropped into Sandy’s school and had followed the somewhat chimpish David W. from room to room, watching him smoke and spit, pinning down his existence page by page, learning his habits of feeding, fighting, and love.
In Volume 47—after the Hello—Sandy steps out from the authorial sphere as a possible love interest, and David W. begins to contort into a possible anti-hero. Volume 48 is giddy and befuddled and blurbed. Volume 50 plays with the idea of David W. as a somewhat malevolent god, and Sandy as benevolent minion or casual girlfriend. Volume 51 is completely devoted to a long night in the fall of Sandy’s seventeenth year. Volume 53, the first written almost entirely in red ink, toys around with the idea of David W. as a comic book super villain. Of Sandy as the represesntative dead on this page.
The last five volumes—54 through 58—the rubble of old screams.
* * *
After David W. first kissed Sandy, the coven was still with her. It was widely cons
trued by each of the other members as an accident of darkness and proximity during the 1st of July celebrations of Sandy’s seventeenth year. There’d been a large group of girls and boys at the edge of the trees in the park that night, including the rest of the coven. Every other body was a chance for an excuse. They each believed it could have happened to any of them.
Sandy described the kiss, late in Volume 49, as a magic, aching moment. For the sake of the coven, she shared details about the feel of the fuzz of his face, the bony clasp of his fist on her shoulder, his smoke-sewn tongue twigging into her mouth like a blinded snake. She described him as his physical manifestation rather than an ethereal blast. For herself, in Volume 49, she wrote the effects on the beat of her melodramatic heart:
It was as if an instant had taken me into its arms, as if the lips of his lips and the lips of mine had spoken while our real true heart-lips were unable to part.
* * *
After the kiss, the orbit that the coven had kept around David W. began to tighten. His magnetism increased with the knowledge of his capabilities. The coven started to inch closer to him, to try and fall into the same net of his eyes that Sandy had been trapped in.
At their meetings, they listened to Sandy talk about how he had driven her home from school one rainy day in his dad’s old Ford, how he had confessed to her that he had been the one to slice the tires of Brice Q.’s Honda, how he had given her a cigarette that made her sick, and they began taking notes. They listened to her and drew close to her. On a weeknight, two weeks into Sandy’s senior year, the boy went to her house to study chemistry with her and when she went to the bathroom he wrote down all the names of the perfume bottles on her dresser, recorded her bra size, the material of her clothes—anything of hers that could have been part of David W.’s apparent attraction—and reported everything back to the others.