by Suzette Mayr
At home Monday night after the grad ceremony, she stuck her hands into the armholes of the blue argyle sweater, pushed her head up through the folds and bunches of wool. She held her breath as she nudged her head through the blue, nudging for the round hole of air. Her hair covering her face, her hands lost in the long sleeves, the boy-cologne, the smell of Ginger belonging to someone else. She fingered her hair out of her face, tucked the strands behind her ears. The sweater hung down past her bum, the sleeves at least a hand’s length longer than the tips of her fingers. She saw a streak of silver on the wool hairs of the sweater, then another streak, warm water falling out of the front of her face. She had acted cruelly, selfishly, but she was not a murderer. She was just in love. Petra in love, and Ginger in love with someone else.
As she crossed her arms and pulled the sweater up over her head, stitches in the armpit ripped when one of the sleeves hooked on her blouse button. She heard each stitch unzip, the seam of the one arm, then a seam on the right side, the argyle diamonds sliding and pulling apart, puddles of ice and glass and navy blue wool hanging on to each other by threads when she finally tugged herself free of the sweater; it fell to pieces around her feet.
Max and Suzette — The digital clock at the T-intersection in front of the Ethiopian Restaurant clicked 26:72 a.m.
He sat at the table the furthest back and waited for Suzette. The red lampshade above and behind his head, a photo of an Ethiopian coffee field on the wall to his right. Ethiopian sun. Ordered a Guinness. They would sit just like a regular couple, and for the first time in his life, he would not glance at the door whenever another customer swung in, he would not flinch away from talking too close. He might even kiss her. Right here at the table. He might even ask her to meet him in another restaurant after this date. A restaurant downtown. Just a regular man and his beautiful girl.
Max stepped to the washroom to wash his hands with pearly pink soap. Checked his tieless self in the mirror.
Suzette finished her cigarette before she entered the restaurant, butting it against a brick wall and slipping it into the trashcan beside the restaurant entrance. Last night she did her Dance of the Sixty-Nine Veils, and she wished Max had been there, he would have appreciated her hair, the way she beckoned people in the audience to each tear away a clump of veils until she was naked in her gold Shakira catsuit.
One of the waiters in the Ethiopian restaurant, Solomon, slapped her on the back and shouted hello; his mother Makeda toddled over and smothered her in a hug. Suzette exclaimed over Makeda’s new lipstick, Suzette’s head smooth, four o’clock shadow bristling awake on her cheeks and chin. She wore a hint of shimmer on her cheekbones. Her wig and the pink sherbet frock she picked out to wear tonight soaking in the sink because Vaseline Dion dropped her waterproof eyeliner brush on them. The straw that broke the drag queen’s back. She pulled on a plaid shirt and jeans. Vaseline Dion promising to buy Suzette caffe lattes for the rest of their lives.
Come watch me now, Suzette thought, hunting for Max in the restaurant.
Max straightened his tie and closed the bathroom door behind him. His time had come. He licked his lips. Dry.
Tuesday
Gretta
The doorbell, bing-bong, and you hunch deeper into your chair, the paintbrush between your fingers, the tiny square canvas, the size of a baby’s face, clamped in place on the easel in front of you. Your husband’s mumbles, the loud tooting of another man’s voice, and booted footsteps clobbering across the floors. You wipe off the brush with a rag and dunk it into a jar of grey water.
You can’t imagine who this visitor might be, intruding on your fortress. Your husband waving more strangers into your house.
— Who are you? you snarl at a man in overalls and baseball cap in your kitchen, quite rudely, for this is yet another person asking for money in connection to your dead son, of course it wasn’t preplanned, who preplans for the burial of a seventeen-year-old kid? The casket, the vault, the embalming, the plot, the grave marker, all that stuff flushed out an entire bank account because who saves up money for the burial of their seventeen-year-old son? Who’s picked out a casket for their teenager? Who in this world? Who?
You reach for the wall to prop up your crumbling body when two more men trundle into the kitchen carrying a long, thin, granite headstone between them, you rise and start to scream and thrash, wild with your claws and fangs, at this headstone in your house, more death in your house, who has died? Whose name will be on that headstone? Whose? Your husband grabbing you by the shoulders, shouting and speckling you with his saliva and stabbing you with his jagged, rancid breath, his hands rough and hard as his fingers dig into your upper arms, — Stop Stop.
The men set the first half of the granite countertop on your floor. The headstone a pool in the middle of the room, a cupboard already down to nothing but wood skeleton, whoofs of sawdust, the tang of raw wood. The cupboard just a pocket of space decorated with wooden bones, circled by a pine ribcage.
— Empire Kitchens and Baths, the first man says, the big, stupid galoot.
— Oh no, you say.
— Here to do your kitchen counter and cabinets.
— Maybe you could come another time, you say.
— Stay, says your husband. He has a hammer in his hands, he plans on smashing things.
The freezing starts on the soles of your feet, the frost creeping crystal, grabbing handfuls of you as it travels up your legs, coats your belly, crusts your mouth, you can smell your skin lotion, perfume and sweat, the rosewater and sage shampoo in your hair jump up and out as the skin that covers all of you shrinks and tightens. Your skin clammy as your son’s.
His name is Chuck. The other workmen are Callum and Zenon. Zenon looks nineteen. He looks like he might have gone on a date with your son.
Chuck’s saw and crowbar claw and rip through the cupboard above the sink, Zenon hammering and prying, exposing. Chuck, Callum and Zenon’s grunts, the guitar, drums and the voice of a writhing singer filtering in from your husband’s television set. You, in the other room, slumped in front of an empty canvas the width of a baby’s face.
Ginger
Ginger doesn’t want to understand, but he reads The Pride and the Joy to the very end, the paper so thick he can see some tiny specks of the wood pulped into it. He reads it even though it’s like trudging through thigh-high mud, even though they rough him up and choke him, those mirror words.
He pulls the sharpest knife out of the drawer, skims the blade under running water against the whetstone. He holds the blade against his skin, the metal warm and spotted with droplets of water, and he slices an F over his heart, not enough to need stitches, but enough so that it will bleed, will scar, so that he will remember, the angle of the knife at first hard to negotiate, he is startled at the sharp, the pain, the flinching response of the meat shell that covers him, he doesn’t want to die. He presses a wad of tissue onto the cuts, another wad he claws from the box of Kleenex, his chest pouring, the tissue soaked and dripping, the box empty, one of his T-shirts gathered up and stuffed against his chest, the stains on his fingers, the gobs of tissue so red, the T-shirt horror-movie gory, until the blood stops welling and tearing along the lines of the F, then he flushes the paper down the toilet. Four flushes total. He dabs at the cuts with disinfectant, pats on some gauze from his grampa’s first-aid kit, tears off pieces of medical tape with his teeth, the stabbing on the lunar surface of his chest.
He sits down to dinner with his grandfather, sits with the book tucked in the small of his back against the back of the chair, dumplings and goulash tonight, his favourite. His grandfather pouring himself a beer and arguing that there’s no such thing as drinking too much beer, how can a person drink too much beer, that’s like saying you can drink too much water, there is such a thing as having so much education you can’t enjoy life anymore, people telling you what you should or should not do getting in the way of living a happy life, right Tomáš?
— Interesting, Ginger says
.
— Proud of you, boy, says his grandfather.
Faraday
We didn’t know him well
But we knew him gone.
What was wrong he would not tell,
His face now only dawn.
Patrick, we think about you,
A Great Guy we now all kiss.
Without you, our school’s so blue,
Think of us, when Angels you kiss.
Fumiko reaches for her Brown Cow in a crystal glass rimmed with gold, and a swirled chocolate and vanilla cookie. The glow of the computer screen reflecting off her whitened face, her kohled eyes and black lips. Faraday crunches on her own cookie, the flavour not quite vanilla not quite chocolate on her tongue. She scoots her chair closer to Fumiko’s so she can get a better view of the screen. She bites again, scattering crumbs on the floor, wondering if anyone would fault them for rhyming kiss with kiss.
— Uncle Suzie! she calls. — Is it okay to rhyme two identical words?
Uncle Suzie in the other room, the hum of his sewing machine as he polishes off the hem of Faraday’s graduation dress.
Furey, Patrick — Under two tonnes of dirt, Patrick’s eyelids and lips curling as he dehydrates, his skin suctioning to his bones in air so dry it makes the noses of the people who walk above him— his own little solar system — bleed, their cuticles crack and peel. In a semi-arid city such as Calgary, Alberta, the problem is maggots, but the boy was young, his remains found almost immediately after death, and the decomposition arrested before it could really begin. It was a very thorough embalming. George M. would be impressed.
The boy a supernova in this unicorn constellation.
The Unicorns
Faraday lies in bed in her unicorn flannel pyjamas, contemplating her blessing. The tapestry above her bed, the glinting Kirin bottle on the edge of her little white desk strewn with binders and papers, the poster and paper reproductions of four-hundred- year-old unicorn woodcuts and engravings taped to the ceiling and walls all around her. The figurines on the shelf ricochet the dull lamplight. There’s no such thing as being normal, she’s figured out. And now, more than ever, no matter what Dr. Linus Libby and Brecken and Jésus and all the rest of them say, unicorns are all she needs. Unicorns stand serene and uncomplicated, even if all she’s got is pictures, sculptures, souvenir trinkets.
She abruptly jumps up on her bed to standing, the quilt sliding to the floor. She bounces lightly on the mattress as she unsticks the poster of the Quedlinburg unicorn from beside her bed, her feet landing in a solid thump on the floor then back up on the mattress as she replaces the Quedlinburg for the Jonstonus camphur on the other side of the room. The paint on the walls peeling in patches because of the pieces of tape she’s stuck and peeled and restuck.
She clicks off the lamp. Gathers up her fallen quilt and burrows back into her bed. There.
She yanks the quilt edge up under her chin, pulls it in around her hips, then works it in around her shoulders so there’s no cold air pockets. She’s slung her unicorn bag, the one she bought the day she learned that Patrick died, from her desk chair. The unicorn faces out so even in the dark it’s looking at her. She closes her eyes now. Goodnight, Patrick Furey. Her digital clock glows 11:11 p.m. Goodnight.
On the city’s outskirts, the trailers’ brakes exhale to a stop at a red light, their cargo clopping nervously on the trailer floors at the sudden stop. The light clicks to green, and the trailers inhale back into diesel motion, picking up speed, rolling faster and faster. Three trailers speeding through the periodic cones of light along the highway, the whine and windy blasts of oncoming trucks, the trailers jostle, belch scat stink, cloven hoofs inside the trailers shifting, clopping from side to side. The trucks trundle down the Trans-Canada highway toward Faraday’s house.
Under glittering streetlights, the trucks and their trailers bullishly manoeuvre the tight corners of the inner city, bumping up over curbs, bending stop signs, ploughing over pylons. Alicorns clang against the inside trailer walls with the lumbering over potholes and too-long meridians. Abrupt lurches at lights, streets narrowed by rows of parked cars. Hooves occasionally stamp and circle the rubberized floors, nostrils snort in the Stygian dark inside the trailers. The route to Faraday travels past St. Aloysius Senior High School. The traffic light in front of the school unfortunately red.
The convoy pulls to a brief stop at the red light, in the deserted heart of downtown, under the ring of red lights on the alicorn that is the Calgary Tower.
Simmering in the dark, exhaust fumes coiling, the unicorns inhale the smell of the school, their heads swinging as they snort, their tails swishing. The residual smell of Faraday, her locker stuffed with books and papers redolent with her odour, they smell it in the school, they need to turn toward it. They bump their shoulders and hips against the constricted insides of the trailers, against each other, they paw the floor, the wall, thump, bang. They scent her, they belong to her, they want her. But they also smell the school’s sweaty, seedy smell of death, sweat squeezed out by fear and judgment. The blessing of unicorns seizes, ears pinned back, teeth bared, they begin to whinny. Eyes roll back, they bite the walls, strike the walls with their front legs, kick high with their hind legs. Pissing and shitting in fury, one shrieks. They all shriek.
Hooves slip. Hooves stamp kick bash burst the rocking trailer doors, welds pop, the doors slap open, hinges screaming. Unicorns gallop, hooves sparking asphalt, leaping the cracked concrete sidewalk, they lunge for the sleeping school and its enraging scent of failure, guilt and grief, unicorns crashing through the door frames, pounding through the doors. They careen on the slippery floors around the hallway corners, gut, gore the walls, stab, shatter fluorescent lights, their lions’ tails whipping as they litter the floors with their shit.
They rush into the principal’s office, the vice-principals’ offices, kick over the desks, gut the filing cabinets, smash the windows.
In office after office, classroom after classroom, papers explode and flutter, books fly and shred. They stamp through the gymnasium, trampling the wood floor, stumbling in the growing, splintering holes.
They slash with their alicorns, stampede; driven mad with vengeance, they batter cabinets, puncture trophies, windows, desks, televisions, computers, pry chalkboards from the walls. Fluorescent lights crumble, walls crash. They tear the lockers from the walls, dented, sharp metal shreds. The roof buckles above the cafeteria, caves in above the chemistry lab, the roof yawns opens and exposes the school’s guts to the stars. In the blessing’s wake the clawing smell of billy goat, of carnivore, corruption, unicorns glutting, a giant aneurysm, a cardiac arrest speeding down venal corridors.
They crash out the back walls of the school, a blessing, a reckoning, a wall of fury at full gallop, they bunch and lurch into the river, leaping into the brown water, bobbing, sinking, snapping legs, alicorns, necks, unicorns flailing, a breaking blessing. The school gored, broken, and now empty.
Credits
The unicorn images on the section title pages are from the following sources:
P. 9: De Monocerote. 1551. Historiae Animalium; liber primus, qui est de quadrupedibus viviparis by Conrad Gesner. Turning the Pages Online (National Library of Medicine). Web.
P. 17: Detail from the broadsheet Come, come all you that are with Rome offended, come now and heare from whence the Pope descended, The lineage of locusts or the Popes pedegre. 1641. Early English Books Online. Web.
P. 57: Tab XI: Monoceros seu Unicornu Iubatus / Einhorn mit Mahnen. 1678. A Description of the Nature of Four-Footed Beasts: With their Figures Engraven in Brass by Joannes Jonstonus. Trans. by J. P. University of Wisconsin Digital Collections. Web.
P. 89: Tab X. 1678. A Description of the Nature of Four-Footed Beasts: With their Figures Engraven in Brass by Joannes Jonstonus. Trans. by J. P. University of Wisconsin Digital Collections. Web.
P. 117: Tab XI: Onagur Aldro / Wald Esel. 1678. A Description of the Nature of Four-Footed Beasts: With their Figu
res Engraven in Brass by Joannes Jonstonus. Trans. by J. P. University of Wisconsin Digital Collections. www.fromoldbooks.org. Web.
P. 141: Unicorn and a Stag [Tertia Figura: In Corpore est Anima & Spiritus.] 1678. Musaeum hermeticum reformatum et amplificatum by Matthaeus Merian. Images from the History of Medicine (IHM). Web.
P. 161: Fig. Rr. 1690. Prodromus Astronomiae by Johannes Hevelius. National Digital Library Polona. Web.
Pp. 177, 185, 187, 195, 203, 207, 219, 229: Adapted from Figura sceleti prope Quedlinburgum efossi. 1749. Protogaea by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Ed. Claudine Cohen and Andre Wakefield. Trans. Claudine Cohen and Andre Wakefield. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2008. Academic Complete. Web.
P. 253: Master E.S.The Wold Woman and the Unicorn [Queen of the Beasts, from the Small Set of Playing Cards] / La jeune licorne. 1450-1467. The Illustrated Bartsch. Vol. 8, Early German Artists. Photograph reproduced with permission of the Warburg Institute, University of London. Artstor Collections. Web.
The author gratefully acknowledges the following for permission to reproduce quoted material: