by Sybil Lamb
THE GIRL WHO WAS CONVINCED BEYOND ALL REASON THAT SHE COULD FLY
THE GIRL WHO WAS CONVINCED BEYOND ALL REASON THAT SHE COULD FLY Copyright © 2020 by Sybil Lamb
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any part by any means—graphic, electronic, or mechanical—without the prior written permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may use brief excerpts in a review, or in the case of photocopying in Canada, a licence from Access Copyright.
ARSENAL PULP PRESS
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Vancouver, BC V6A 1Z6
Canada
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The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the British Columbia Arts Council for its publishing program, and the Government of Canada, and the Government of British Columbia (through the Book Publishing Tax Credit Program), for its publishing activities.
Arsenal Pulp Press acknowledges the xwməθkwəəm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̲wú7mesh (Squamish), and səilwətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations, custodians of the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories where our office is located. We pay respect to their histories, traditions, and continuous living cultures and commit to accountability, respectful relations, and friendship.
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance of characters to persons either living or deceased is purely coincidental.
Cover illustrations by Sybil Lamb
Cover and text design by Jazmin Welch
Edited by Shirarose Wilensky
Proofread by Alison Strobel
Printed and bound in Canada
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication:
Title: The girl who was convinced beyond all reason that she could fly / Sybil Lamb.
Names: Lamb, Sybil, 1975– author.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200202723 | Canadiana (ebook) 20200202731 | ISBN 9781551528175 (softcover) | ISBN 9781551528182 (HTML)
Classification: LCC PS8623.A48265 G57 2020 | DDC jC813/.6—dc23
Dedicated to
Squeaky & Twitchy.
Plunder every highway of all the chili cheese 4evr.
You can’t park here.
CONTENTS
1 The Girl Who Was Not a Bird
2 The Weirdly Specific Market
3 Can a Girl Fly?
4 The Ground Is Hot Lava
5 Splendid Fairy Wren’s Space Book
6 Fourteen Floors in Forty-Two Seconds
7 No More Hot Dogs
8 The Egg Factory
9 Borrowing Stuff
10 Edge-of-the-Roof Nightmare at 100 Feet
11 If Everyone Hates Him, Does He Tell the Truth
12 The Most Least Reasonable Thing
Acknowledgments
1
THE GIRL WHO WAS NOT A BIRD
This one time there was a girl who was convinced beyond all reason that she could fly.
She was shy and bold at the same time. No one knew where she came from. She mostly kept to herself, but she was always nearby, perched on roofs and fire escapes. If you caught a glimpse of her bouncing around in the air, you would probably squint and rub your eyes and think you got confused.
The first person to talk to her was Grackle McCart. Grack had a bicycle hot dog cart with the longest menu in town. Everybody loved him because he had every kind of hot dog—100 of them, in fact—seriously every kind, like tofu, turkey, tongue, and even toffee and tamarind.
Grack himself? He was just super chill, smart, silly, and charming. He was dorky in a cool way and cool in a dorky way. He’d always be pedalling his hot dog cart around the market, smiling, and then if he caught your eye he’d go, “Hungry? Good thing I got here in time,” and then wink at you.
Shopkeepers and cashiers flagged him down all day for hot dogs: he’d sell them to the pet store and the Popsicle store and the broken electronics store and the scissors store and the misprinted T-shirt shop. Afterward, the loud, crazy punk rockers and art weirdos from the notorious trash-strewn five-dollar hotel would try to talk cheap hot dogs out of him all night.
Running a hot dog cart meant he was parked on the same corners for hours. Grack spent oodles of time watching the busy market streets, scanning for hungry hot dog buyers. So he noticed small details all the time.
Then came the day. Grack was refilling the ghost pepper chipotle mayo when he looked up and saw—he was pretty sure?—a girl jumping back and forth between the three-storey brick buildings. It was surely an unjumpable distance. There were two lanes of traffic and rows of parked cars, and a bunch of shuffling pedestrians too busy shopping or lugging giant boxes to notice.
The next day, it was a slow afternoon, and Grack was cleaning his grill and throwing stale hot dog buns to the pigeons. Out of nowhere a feral-eyed girl jumped down off the fire escape behind him, grabbed a bun out of the air, and landed atop a mailbox, all without touching the ground.
Grack’s mind was blown. But as the youngest son of the biggest hot dog family in town, he had seen all kinds of crazy things, so he played it cool.
“What kind of bird are you?” he asked the girl.
She looked thoughtful while chewing her mouthful of hot dog bun, then said bashfully, “I’m not a bird, I’m just a regular flying girl.”
She stuffed the rest of the hot dog bun into her cheeks and scrambled up the fire escape. When she got to the top, she kept climbing up into the air and disappeared.
Grackle McCart was in awe and kind of smitten.
Ever after, the flying girl would roost on the phone poles and window ledges and fire escapes by Grack’s hot dog cart. When no one was buying hot dogs, Grack would look up and search all the roofs and windowsills for the girl who seemed convinced that she could fly. Sometimes she’d bounce from the roof on one side of the street to the other. Other times he’d see her almost hidden next to an air conditioner or nestled in the awning of a shop.
One day, Grack honked his two AHOOGAH horns and rang his three bike bells until she looked his way. Then he made his cool-guy-eyebrows move and grinned.
“Hey, I got too many hot dogs again this afternoon. Help me eat a few?” He said the first thing he could think of to get this weird, wild girl to hang out with a regular, nerdy hot dog guy like him.
To his delight, she chirped, “Okay!” and launched-fell off the nearest roof, bounced off a store awning, floated over a parked car, and landed in a gleeful crouch on top of the closest trash can. She was all a jumble of motion that seemed like the routine of a clumsy, careless trapeze artist, except she didn’t have any ropes.
Without discussion, the girl and Grack decided they should probably hang out every day from now on.
The girl would drop out of the sky and stick around for brunch, lunch, snacks, and dinner. At first, they never talked about themselves. The girl would tell him about stuff she’d seen from up high, like a giant hats-and-guitars party in the courtyard of the burrito place, or the glow-in-the-dark Frisbee she’d found atop the ice cream shop. Grack would gossip about how he’d made hot dogs for a bunch of hip-hop stars and some big-deal sports guys, plus he knew a place with free video games as long as you kept buying milkshakes.
He invited her to check out the video game milkshake place maybe? But she said she wasn’t really great with the indoors, and Grack didn’t argue ’cause he didn’t want to leave his hot dog bike alone for long anyways.
And then someone would come along for a hot dog and the girl would tumble sideways up the nearest building like a tumbleweed that made a ninety-degree wrong turn.
2
THE WEIRDLY SPECIFIC MARKET
The Weirdly Specific Market always had people coming and going, buying weirdly specific stuff at the market’s weirdly specific stores. Shoppers came to buy enough T-shirts to fill a whole truck or a new set of number buttons for their elevator. Or they went to the strange, dark underground club for eating cheese and looking at pictures. One store only sold bolts and screws, and one store only sold empty takeout containers. There was a specialty shoe–boot place that converted shoes into boots and vice versa. One store was made entirely of rooms of milk crates filled with stereo cables in an old, abandoned department store. The point was: everybody needs some kind of weirdly specific thing at some point. When they did, they came to the market.
The market also had dozens of butchers, cheesers, and bakers. There was a grocer that sold rare, fancy purple and blue apples, and one where you could get a bag of 1,000 carrots for twenty bucks. There were dozens of ice cream and hot snack carts, and Grack? Well, he was the most popular one, thanks to his Infamous 100 Hot Dog Menu.
Since Grack had been running a hot dog cart since before he could read, he had the experience to cleverly figure out that most people would stop and hang out, waiting to see what happens, if, say, they saw some bananas hijinks like a shoeless girl endangering herself by climbing up and jumping off roofs and street lamps and phone poles. Then, once she didn’t actually smash herself into the ground but instead kept on fluttering about like a featherless bird, most people would eventually look down and see the Infamous 100 Hot Dog Menu, which was carefully designed so at least one dog appealed to someone’s particular vice, craving, or guilty pleasure.
With the girl who wasn’t a bird around, people walked past Grack’s cart at half speed and then got even slower.
His business doubled and kept increasing. Before long, regulars at the market had started saying stuff like:
“Hey, let’s get hot dogs from that crazy bike cart with like 100 different kinds of dog. There’s a girl who’s always there and she was probably born and raised in a travelling circus, then abandoned here a few summers ago and adopted by pigeons. She hangs out on top of the traffic light and will jump off it and catch french fries in mid-air. One time, a guy bet her a corn dog that she couldn’t hop, skip, and jump herself to the top of the market water tower, so she took his hat and bounced crazily and carelessly twenty metres up the tower and almost plummeted onto the cement sidewalk a bunch of times. But then she stuck the hat on top like the water tower was wearing it. It’s still up there!”
All the nearby punk rockers from the five-dollars-a-night hotel started called the girl Eggs after her one and only T-shirt that she always wore, all faded and torn up. It read, EGGS, and it was from a TV commercial recommending people eat two servings of eggs daily. She loved that shirt so much that if you tried to tell her chickens can’t fly, she’d just climb up the closest wall away from you.
3
CAN A GIRL FLY?
All day and every day Eggs would fly around town aimlessly fluttering. She’d appear not long after the sun came up and disappear just after it went down. (Flying at night, she once mentioned, causes ten times as many crashes as during the day.) She would get all over town most days. She claimed to really like the roofs of the food carts at the mall ’cause people would let her finish their fries all the time, and she could fly to the drive-in next door and see movies but without the sound. Afterward, she would go back to the food cart roofs and listen to people who’d just been at the drive-in talk about the movie.
Two of the hotel punks told Grack they had seen Eggs at the amusement park a week ago. She had been riding the roller coaster but the opposite way to everyone else. She’d flutter all over the tallest parts of the roller coaster, and then when the coaster train cars with people in them came by, she’d jump-fall off the track and flip and land on the next ride. For this she got in mega trouble with amusement park security, who chased her around for an hour with a giant butterfly net. The guards said they’d put her in a giant birdcage if she came to the park again, but the joke was on them ’cause by then she’d already been on all the rides.
Once, Grack couldn’t help but kind of sort of ask her: “How do you do it? How can anybody move around in the air like that?”
Eggs had made a grave, serious face, like she was gently breaking bad news. She said she couldn’t remember a time she didn’t fly. In her earliest memories, she wanted to be everywhere. See everything. And always keep going up and up and up and up.
She said, “Flying is my favourite thing in the world. When you fly, you never want for anything, but you get to see everything. A bird’s-eye view of stuff everyone thought no one could see. The city becomes a big unfolded map of itself, and you can see how the world fits together. You can see how everything works. When you get in trouble, nothing bad happens because you can get away fast and you’re almost impossible to catch.”
She explained that most people can’t fly because of a common misunderstanding of how flying works.
“Most people imagine flying is done by falling sideways instead of down. This is precisely right but also totally mixed up and wrong. Yes, that is what flying is,” Eggs said, “but it is not how it works! People mistakenly think they’re supposed to fall and then just forget to hit the ground. But then they focus on trying not to fall, instead of on doing flying stuff.” Grack laughed and said, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know exactly what you’re talking about.”
He actually had no idea what she was talking about, but it wasn’t reeeeeeally a lie. He was always pretty sure he was on the verge of being able to understand her. At the very least, he really liked her and thought being friends with her was the coolest. Grack was Eggs’s best friend pretty much, and no one else spent much time hanging out with her, so that must mean he understood her, right? And, logically, that must mean he understood what the girl had just told him.
Grack decided basically that Eggs had superpowers. Like a superhero but more realistic and hard-won. In Grack’s mind, a superhero who was also basically a regular girl was more possible than a flying girl.
Undeniable was the fact that she did possess a superhuman climbing ability. She could scurry up to any roof in seconds. She would flutter up a featureless brick wall with an ease powered only by her own belief that she was flying. The other half of her conviction that she could fly was ’cause she had jumped off more than 100 buildings and not died once. Her record flight would be a leap off a fourteen-storey building, even though she was utterly un-aerodynamic-looking. She was just a little bit taller than a short person, with a bit of a tummy from Grack giving her unlimited hot dogs.
Grack said the dogs were just in exchange for Eggs flying around the neighbourhood for him flyering for his hot dog cart. But really, he felt so proud and special that this new, strange, amazing girl liked him. And he wouldn’t let her eat his trash, even if she dove off a building to grab it out of the air.
Eggs could balance teetering on chimneys and phone wires with a dumb luck more powerful than any practised skill, flinging flyers at passersby below with okayish accuracy. And when she ran out, she’d climb as high as she could and stretch upward, testing the air, flapping human arms that were neither strong nor skinny, threatening to launch herself into the sky, if she ever found the wind she was waiting for.
So, that was Eggs, the girl who was convinced beyond all reason that she could fly. Mostly harmless, kind of cute, sweet, and funny, and, if nothing else, possibly the luckiest nut on the roof.
Everyone let her get away with everything, including believing that she flew. We all wished it were true. She was like a fairy-tale superhero, but she was real, and we could say we knew her.
4
THE GROUND IS HOT LAVA
Eggs seemed to live nowhere.
If anyone asked, Eggs usually claimed she lived in the bird feeder at the tiny park next to an old mushroom and root vegetable market. Everyone knew that couldn’t be true, but no one wanted to
call her on it.
Grack would start pedalling his cart around at dawn, selling his bacon, sausage, and hash brown–bun dogs, to catch people on their way to work. Eggs would appear before any of the half-awake shopkeepers had even gone for coffee, so nobody noticed her groggily hanging off a street lamp, looking more like a bat than a bird.
One time, a woman buying a party-size bag of fish hot dogs told Grack that she had been getting her braces tightened at an orthodontist up on the sixth floor of the tallest building on the edge of the market, and mayyyybe it had been the Novocaine, but she thought she’d seen the flying girl sleeping between the air conditioners on the roof of the wholesale coffee mug warehouse.
Grack was pretty sure that Eggs was living behind the sign of the old department store full of milk crates of stereo cables. It was a giant old metal sign that said DEPARTMENT STORE in big red neon letters and had 992 burnt-out light bulbs and eight flickering ones that worked. It had wires and pigeons all over it. He wondered if Eggs got along with birds, how they negotiated who got to nest where.
The truth was, sometimes Eggs fell asleep balanced on top of a phone pole in sight of Grack’s hot dog cart. She’d tried sleeping in trees at the amusement park a bunch of times, but the security guys with the giant butterfly net were increasingly on her case every week. She definitely didn’t want to stay at the five-dollar punk hotel, even in the discount room on the roof. The whole place was just punks trying to talk the loudest and breaking things 24-7. Oh, sure, they ate lots of hot dogs and were mostly all chill and funny, but any random misinterpreted comment could lead to dozens of punk boys and girls stomping in circles and breaking TVs while screaming made-up songs and then setting a chair on fire. Eggs thought it was a nice place to visit but an impossible place to sleep.