But then his pet rooster skittered over to him in the dark, glowing red, orange and gold. It chirped when he ruffled its painted feathers, and popped out of the wall to nestle right next to him on the bed. And it made him think about other glowing graffiti out in the night, awaiting death by excavator.
Daniel stood outside the Haitian dive bar and steeled himself to step inside. As if it wasn’t enough that he seldom went to bars at all, this was the kind he would never have stepped into on his own. Designed to look like a blackened shanty in the smouldering shadow of a red-hot volcano, the theme seemed to be a cross between tiki and gothic, if there were such a thing. And it was packed full of Creole-speaking Montrealers. With his pidgin French, Daniel had no hope of understanding them.
Pushing his way into the dark and cluttered interior, he ignored the bemused looks of the drinkers at the sight of a buttoned up Asian guy trying to blend in. Everyone grooved with ease to the thumping music but he felt hopelessly out of sync. Finally, he reached the bar right near the inside wall and started looking for the bartender that the graffiti snake had described. There was only one there, a woman with a shaven head wearing a black leather halter-top. Her tattooed back was turned to him.
“Excuse me,” he said, and she turned around, fixing red-lined eyes on him. Large gold hoops gleamed in her ears and the bar lighting turned her complexion dark blue, and then dark purple.
“Excuse me,” he said again in his faltering French. “Is it that you are La Guéparde?”
The woman pointed to a back door behind the bar. As he walked towards the door, she followed him, wiping her hands on a towel. The door opened onto a closed courtyard covered with dirty graffiti, and there was nobody there. The woman slammed the door behind them, and shoved Daniel against the wall.
“Who told you about me?” she growled in accented English.
“Nobody… Nobody real I mean,” Daniel said, and realized he was making it worse.
“Whose crew are you from?” she asked, pushing him harder. “Did you see those bouncers out front? If you don’t talk, I’m going to call them to beat you right here right now. Who sent you?”
“Your snake sent me! The snake you painted in the alley, the big one. He said you knew what to do, he said you would help me.” It all came out in a rush. In his chest, Daniel’s heart was lunging about more furiously than the thumping club music.
“What are you talking about?” The woman’s expression unfurrowed and reknitted itself into confusion. She stepped back. Now he saw her examining him with narrowed eyes, reassessing her impression. “Who are you?”
“It said you can see them, the graffiti. Is that true?”
“I don’t know what you are talking about.”
“If you do, then you should be able to see this.” Daniel turned to his side and picked up the nearest graffiti he could reach, a set of red and blue letters that came off the wall like a spider’s web, glittering and pulsating.
“What the… How is it that you can do that?” The aggression fell away from her stance as the bright floating letters drew her in.
He smacked the art back onto the wall. “Not by choice, believe me.”
By the time the bar closed at three, Daniel had almost dozed off from waiting at a smoky corner of the counter, under a sooty palm frond. He would probably have to call in sick. There went another precious vacation day that he was planning on hoarding. He wanted to go to a beach, somewhere wild and pristine, not dark and dirty like the bar, with not a single can of spray paint for hundreds of miles.
A whip from a bar towel woke him up. The bar was empty and the music had stopped. La Guéparde stood there, arms folded.
“Okay,” she said.
“Huh?” Daniel asked, still half-asleep.
“Okay as in yes, I’ll help you. On two conditions. One: that you never tell anyone who I am. I write solo. Nobody knows my identity and I intend to keep it that way.”
“Look at me,” Daniel said. “I don’t know any graffiti artists. I don’t even like graffiti. I’m not interested in blowing your cover.”
“You’re an idiot,” she said. “This gift is wasted on you.”
“You’re welcome to it if I could just find a way to transfer it. What’s the second condition?”
The woman unfolded her arms and leaned her arms onto the bar. “Secondly, I want you to tell me what they’re saying. My pieces, all of them. I see them but I can’t hear them. They’ve never spoken to me.”
Daniel wanted to tell her that it wasn’t anything particularly enlightening, but he knew when to keep his mouth shut. “I promise. What next?”
“I have a plan,” she said.
The plan apparently involved him waiting over an hour on a chilly spring night next to the tunnel of screaming men near his home. The seven men still screamed when he crossed in front of them, but when he stood next to them they were silent, swallowing their rage. Beads of sweat ran down their red faces. Daniel felt sorry for them. They probably only got to let it all out when he came by. Perhaps he ought to visit more often.
La Guéparde showed up close to one a.m. when the moon was high in the sky. She was carrying a large backpack full of equipment. Without her gothic makeup, dressed in a black hoodie and cargo pants, she looked much younger, almost girlish.
“What?” she asked.
“Nothing,” Daniel said. “You just look shorter than I remember.”
“Shut up. Let’s go.”
La Guéparde knew exactly where to go. The block of derelict homes stood forlorn in the moonlight, stripped of their original grandeur and pomp from the days when Canada’s richest lived in the city. Roof shingles were broken and missing, grand casement windows were boarded up, and the brownstone was crumbling. Even the trees and shrubs were dead and withered after the long winter.
The only vitality left was the graffiti that had been tagged all over the walls, from archways to balconies, splashed with neon-bright colors that glowed and danced as Daniel and La Guéparde entered.
“You came!” The murals sang out. A sunglasses-wearing goldfish swam round and round on the wall. Next to it, the slinky anime vixen covered her mouth in delight.
“Save us!” called out the purple vine-climbing gorillas from the next house.
As La Guéparde took down boarded barriers with silent ease, Daniel passed from room to room, wall to wall, touching the graffiti pieces in each area. Each one peeled off the wall like putty and followed him in the air like floating luminescent jellyfish.
As he added to the growing line, the motley ensemble took on the air of a parade. Soldiers marched, creatures gamboled, written words bounced like rubber balls. When he was finished, the floating suspension was so voluminous it stretched high above them all the way down the block. While it felt like nothing to pull them along at first, Daniel now felt the sky tug at them, like a very large kite. And he couldn’t walk too fast, or the cloud broke apart with pieces drifting off.
“Tell me you have somewhere to put them,” Daniel said to La Guéparde, who had silently put down her tools to gaze at the glowing cloud of unruly apparitions.
“I have somewhere in mind,” she answered.
On foot, she led him through the streets in a nearly deserted city, save for the occasional drunk or homeless person. The graffiti cloud followed in their trail, attached to Daniel’s hand but swerving left and right as they fancied.
A regular passerby would just see two people walking home, maybe after pulling a late shift. But Daniel imagined that perhaps, somewhere, a child who had woken up in the night would look out the window and discover an aurora borealis above Montreal, swirling with many dancing colors.
Daniel recognized the Lachine Canal when they came to it, the old industrial water passage that led in a straight line across the city through Lachine and Lasalle into Lake Saint-Lo
uis. The winter ice had melted and the water was mirror-smooth. A motorized rowboat awaited them, secured to the small dock.
“We’ll go by the canal,” La Guéparde said. “It’s easier on you than walking, and we won’t be noticed as much.”
She dumped her bag into the boat and pull-started the motor. Daniel clambered in unsteadily, the graffiti bubble breaking up and hovering around him as he did so.
The canal was dark except for the illumination from the graffiti cloud. The boat skimmed the water, accompanied by the low hum of the engine. Above them the holograms chattered and gossiped but their tones drifted on the wind as a jumble of muddled sounds.
The moon shone down. It was almost romantic, like a weird sort of date, going along the Lachine Canal in a boat with a tattoo-covered mystery woman and a trail of floating lanterns in their wake. But that was a stretch.
“Why did you start tagging?” he asked, to break their silence.
She shrugged. “I was an angry teenager looking for a challenge. I started with just writing my name, here and there, in hard-to-find places. And then after that, I started to see a flicker at the edge of my vision. I trained myself to see them. The more intensive and painstaking the piece, the more alive and animated it is. That made me want to make more, to see them come to life.”
“Why not just do it on canvas? You know, instead of on buildings?”
“Maybe it’s the risk. And maybe it’s about making your mark on something physical. Have you thought about why it is that they talk and move? Not the pictures on a canvas or in a poster?”
Daniel shook his head.
“Maybe the city gives them life,” she said. “Maybe it’s the soul in the brick and the stone that flows into them, powers them.”
“You think they can’t go anywhere else but on man-made surfaces?” Daniel asked. Acting on curiosity, he lowered his hand and dipped it into the water. Without even a splash, the cloud of suspended graffiti followed into the water, illuminating the murky depths of the canal. He pulled his hand out again, and they rose back into the sky.
Clearly, they didn’t go with water. Daniel shrugged, and turned back to La Guéparde.
“You still haven’t said where we’re going.”
“You’ll see it soon.”
First, he saw the glow, and then the black silhouette looming against the night, flanked by huge cylindrical silos. It was some kind of derelict manufacturing plant, left to rust and decay. As their boat approached the landing, he saw that artists had turned it into some kind of wonderland, covering the plant’s surface with every kind of graffiti from simple tags to enormous murals that must have taken paint rollers to complete. The wind brought a faint odorous whiff that grew stronger as they pulled up along the structure.
“We call it Stinky,” La Guéparde said, mooring the boat. “It used to be a malt factory.”
Sheet fencing had been put up all around the abandoned factory, clearly as an attempt to ward off foolhardy graffiti crews and teenagers. But a neat rectangle had been cut out along one side, allowing them to climb in.
“That was easy,” Daniel joked.
La Guéparde scowled. “I had to pull some serious favours for this, okay?”
The site was lit up with graffiti everywhere, as far as his eye could see, like the Las Vegas lights on the casino strip. They buzzed in excitement like VIPs had crashed their private party. The malt stench added to the hallucinatory effect.
“They’re here!”
“Look at who they brought!”
“What fun!”
There was only one problem that Daniel could see. “Where are we going to add ours? This place is already covered with graffiti.”
“I thought about this. In my opinion, there’s only one place that’s got enough room.” She pointed. “Up there.”
“You’re crazy,” he said when he saw what she meant. “You’re absolutely fucking nuts.” The curved concrete walls of the factory silos were hulking, steep and forbidding.
“Look at all that space. It’s perfect.”
“Why do you think it’s free of graffiti? It’s because no one can get on them!”
“Ah, but it’s because they don’t have the right gear. I’m a rock climber so I do. We’ll get to the top and rappel down.”
“I’m not doing this.”
“Listen, it’s now or never. Do you know how much work it took to organise this stunt— the boat, the fence cutting, and not a single witness here? If you don’t do this, where are you going to go with a parade of floating graffiti above your head? Here is the best place. Now are you in for this or not?”
It was not like he was being given a choice.
Strapped into his climbing harness half an hour later, Daniel tried not to look down. “You better make sure this is secured to something strong. Not a rusty door handle or something.”
“Hard to find anything not rusty around here,” La Guéparde said. “But it should hold.”
“Should?”
“Relax, I’ve anchored the rope to several places. It’s reinforced steel; it will hold.”
Sitting on the edge of the silo, Daniel’s heart thumped like it would break out of his rib cage. He’d rappelled before, but it was in the presence of skilled instructors, not alone on an abandoned building, having to trust someone he barely knew.
He snuck a look behind him over the silo wall, and that was a mistake. The ground was a long way off. His hands were sweating, and they shook holding the nylon rope.
“I can’t do this. What if I let go of my end?”
“Then don’t let go of it,” La Guéparde said. Her face softened. “Look, go as slowly as you want. Use the lock mechanism like I’ve shown you, and then just release the one hand you need to do the job.”
Daniel nodded and stood up. He leaned back on the rope, almost sitting. Muttering a brief prayer to all his childhood deities, he took his first step off the edge.
The first couple of awkward bounces took an eternity as he stopped, locking the mechanism each time, trying to feel what he was doing. But the next ones were easier. He found his rhythm and started descending at a controlled pace.
“Great work, keep going!” La Guéparde shouted down at him.
Keeping a tight grip on his brake hand, Daniel started placing the graffiti on the silo walls. The pieces surged onto the concrete with joy, bouncing and sliding to the side to make way for their friends to join them.
Releasing a bit of rope at intervals, he descended, touching the wall as he went down, each touch transmitting a piece at a time. The murals couldn’t be happier in their new home. They glowed brighter than all the other graffiti surrounding them. They squeezed and wrapped around one another like exchanging warm embraces between dear friends and neighbors.
“Keep going!” They called out words of encouragement in unison. “That’s the way!”
“You’re doing great!”
On that rope, surrounded by glowing murals, all weird and wonderful, Daniel thought he had never seen anything more beautiful.
Finally, when it was all over, La Guéparde and Daniel stood at the base of the silos looking up at their handicraft. The grey and dull concrete was now splashed with vibrant, mixed up tags of all kinds of styles. Dawn was breaking into a deep violet-blue, but the neon figures on the silo glowed as bright as ever, as if they had no plans to ever stop partying.
“So, are you going to tell me your real name?” Daniel asked La Guéparde.
She smiled. “Maybe next time.”
“You don’t mean a next time like this, do you?”
“Well, I think we’re fine for now.”
“What do you mean ‘for now’?”
“Well, all this is perfect as long as Stinky stays here, as it is.” She lifted her arms into a lazy stretch.
“But I hear there are plans to redevelop the site. If so, Daniel, you’re going to have a big refugee problem on your hands.”
Daniel slowly panned his eyes across the entire span of the factory complex, taking in the multitudes of happy, celebrating graffiti plastered over all the walls, silos, pillars and fences.
It wasn’t too late to rethink that exit strategy.
* * * * *
Born in hot tropical Singapore, Lisa Poh now calls Canada home and lives with her husband in Montreal. Having lived in several countries, she enjoys exploring issues of culture and identity. She is a graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop 2009 and has been published in Expanded Horizons.
My Child Has Winter in His Bones
Dominik Parisien
Each winter I drill a hole in the ice
through which I fish my child.
My son is a flesh aquarium, with strange fish
swimming beneath his skin
driftwood protrudes
from his spine like a stringless guitar.
Spring melts his ice-hair and flesh
leaving a pile of bones
a few flopping fish
on my living room floor.
In summer I weep at the warmth
curse the green and the waves
until, come fall, I give his bones back
to the bay, then I go carolling, singing
My child is dead, my child is drowned
But with the winter he’ll come around.
And, when winter arrives, my boy returns to me
cold and clothed in a skin of the season.
* * * * *
DOMINIK PARISIEN is a Franco-Ontarian who grew up in Rockland, Ontario, alongside the Ottawa River. His poetry has appeared in print and online, most recently in Mythic Delirium, Shock Totem, Ideomancer, Strange Horizons, and Imaginarium 2013: The Best Canadian Speculative Writing. He currently provides editorial support to Cheeky Frawg Books, and is a former editorial assistant for Weird Tales.
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