balzac

the girl, like most people these days, hates christmas shopping. she loves it when it happens incidentally throughout the year, just finding something she knows a particular person will love and buying it to set aside for months on end, but the first three weeks of december when suddenly the whole obligation of buying for the dozen or so poeople on her list sets in are always brutal. she's always broke. she often conceives of good ideas for this person or that person, and then has difficulty putting them into practice.

this day is one such. she is looking for a good luck troll, the sort that she used to play with when she was about eight years old. so far, she has tried two different stores downtown with no success. she has also just perused the shelves of the town's preeminent toy emporium, also to no avail. she is beginning to get frustrated--more frustrated than she already was by the simple insanity of being in an unfamiliar mall throbbing like a diseased heart with streams of busy people wafting fast food smells into her path. sometimes, she thinks, you used to be able to get them in "gift" stores. noting one such on the list of establishments within the mall, she gets her bearings and wanders towards it.

the name of the store is "spenser gifts." she realises quickly that this place will not have what she wants as she enters and finds that unlike most stores, which are bright and airy, this store is dark and seems oppressively low-ceilinged. the reason for this becomes clear as she steps inside--or, not clear, but bright. the store is filled with a vast variety of flashing, glowing, and sparkling items. the back wall is lit by black light, and glowing mushrooms and Adult Novelty Items hang from it like luminous mold in a fantastic tunnel. the girl likes glowing things, but this store does not appeal to her. everything in it seems offensive. no novelty gift store is complete without its selection of rude birthday cards, shirts featuring such gems as "you say BITCH like it's a bad word" and "you've been a naughty girl. go to my room!" and sundry other items of crude sexual and scatological humour. normally, the girl tries to be patient with these things. in the right context, she even enjoys them. but today, perhaps because of the long hot hours of shopping she's endured, perhaps because of the slickly styled, petite, cute employee with just enough piercings to seem like a really cool girl who asks her if she's "finding everything," or perhaps just because it is a monday, the girl can't stand it. she nearly vomits on bobble-head jesus, offended by a pair of twentysomething guys writing rude words on the zen chalkboard. she blinks back tears as she wrestles her way through the crowds of satisfied patrons to get to the outside world, which is of course filled with more of the same.

much later, the girl is walking home, still seething. the frost on the ground does nothing to cool her anger; not even the delicate tracery of ice beginning to form on the puddles she stamps past is enough to draw her attention away from her hatred for other people. she walks past a house gaudily decorated for christmas. there is a happy family of inflated snowmen in the front yard, and a lighted reindeer bobs its head on the roof. festive mice and raccoons also put in an appearance, obviously much older than the mechanical toys as evidenced by their hand-painted signs. "let it snow...please?!?" a venerable apple tree is floodlit to showcase the beautiful baubles dangling from its branches, and the girl is suddenly seized by the urge to release her anger into the world. she grabs one of the mice two-handed and swings it at the tree, breaking glass balls on branch after branch. the broken glass is mysterious and beautiful on the frosty grass at her feet, and she stares at it stupidly, lost in the whirlpool of this moment, until a light comes on in the house and she decides to run.

that night she dreams she is a bird, and her eggs keep getting stolen by snakes. she wakes feeling barren. there is no record of her crazed vandalism, not even a shard of glass caught in the sole of her shoe or the cuff of her pants. later, she tells the story as though it had happened to somebody else.

the boy who was plugged in

the girl is passing by a local computer store. several police cars are parked in front of it, obstructing traffic. it is not until later that she hears the news: a masked young man had, some time earlier, stormed into the building waving a gun and demanding the very latest in sound systems and gaming technology. staff loaded the war3z into a shopping cart that the youth provided; he then hightailed it out of the store, presumably to some getaway vehicle. the police did not catch him, nor did anyone manage to follow him and get a description of the vehicle. of course, rumour would soon suggest that he had simply covered up the expensive electronics with a ratty blanket and pillow and a double-handful of other miscellany and posed as a peaceful, law-abiding bum, but this was never proved nor disproved.

several weeks later, the youth is caught when he attends a LAN party, the host of which just happens to be one of the employees who had been threatened at gunpoint. it's sort of a friend-of-a-friend connection, and this braggart arrives at the party with his tricked-out system and his belligerent boasting about how he p0//n3d The Man and now he's going to p0//n you with no idea that one of the guys is going to call the cops as soon as all the wires and popcans get put away until next time.

his face is plastered all over the news for days. in retrospect, the girl is almost certain she saw him that day, pushing his shopping cart up the street towards her. but maybe she's making that up: she's a bit of a braggart too.

parable

the girl is walking down a rutted dirt road that slopes steeply. partway down is a hill of dirt almost as tall as she is, and for some reason she goes over instead of around it. perhaps there is someone on the road in front of her who she is loathe to pass. perhaps she is experimenting with a sense of adventure. perhaps this is a dream, and she does it because it is mandated by randomly firing neurons, or perhaps this is a parable and she does it because it is mandated by later developments in the plot. whatever her reason, she does it. on the way down the other side, she leaves a shoe behind in the soft, loose dirt, and because whatever this is, it is not the real world, she makes no move to retrieve it. an old man missing feet and hands is gardening by the side of the road. he smiles gap-toothedly at her and warns her to treat his dirt with respect. that's his property, you see. the girl is embarrassed. she tries to excuse her trespass, but she gets the sense that the old man doesn't care. he formed his ideas about her the moment she set foot on the earth and nothing she can say will change them now.

thirty or fifty or a hundred years later, the girl is walking down the same road. the old man is long since dead, she thinks, although who knows for sure? now the girl inhabits a grim futuristic dystopia full of information age versions of the cynical-eyed howling cripples and human monsters of a Breughel streetscape. one of them limps towards the hill of dirt. somehow, he is wearing three shoes, although he appears to have only the usual number of legs. she spies her shoe, still waiting patiently after all these decades. or is it? she realises that it is a different piece of footwear just as the beggar humps up to it, cackling gleefully. he strips the three shoes from his feet and plucks the waiting shoe from its dirt nest as though it were a precious treasure, then carefully places his three shoes in the soft, loose earth at the bottom of the pile. as he puts the single shoe on, the girl can see his future brightening like that of one who has touched a saint or drunk from a magic fountain. he limps away, straightening more and more as he moves towards the good fortune he knows is on its way, secure in the knowledge that he has taken his luck and left a little for the next person. the girl watches his offering to the next needy soul intently.

and the snake curled lovingly around my arm

the girl sleeps poorly, her rest broken by frantic and irritated awakenings to the sense that something is wrong, though she never quite wakes up enough to comprehend just what it is.

she dreams that she is in bed with her ex-lover. they are lying naked together in his bed, and he reaches over to her caressingly. she responds in like kind, but almost immediately he pulls back. he wouldn't want people to say he was a Bad Person, he explains, for having sexual relations with someone who was already in a relationship.

the girl is on the point of responding that it doesn't really matter, that all their mutual friends have always thought he was a bit of a cad--a pleasant one, and one who they respect for his many talents, but not by any stretch of the words a Good Person--when suddenly another mutual acquaintance enters the room. at first, the girl is mystified and wants to know how the hell he got into the house, but he sits down on the bed and begins preaching about the current lover she nearly betrayed. his hair is tawny gold and falls to his shoulders, but he's not who she might think he was if she heard him described.

okay, she says, hugging her ex-lover from behind, how about you two have sex and I'll just watch.

cotton candy is not enough

two other girls walk down the sundrenched street, oblivious to the bustling world around them. they wear white sundresses and sandals. they are perfectly in step with one another. the slender brown legs move briskly but entirely without seeming to hurry. the sleek black hair sways a little with the movement of their bodies. over their heads arches a teal umbrella.

the girl sweats profusely, exposed to the killer sun.

live without the sunlight?

the girl's stomach is rebelling.

even it is not sure against what, exactly.

however, the girl has isolated a few entities who affect it, in particular one who ties it in knots and another who soothes it. but it's not enough to spend time in the calm presence of the quiet one. she can never spend enough time to prevent future upheavals, and the upheaver lives in her mind, omnipresent. she is no longer sure how well the thing in her mind represents the entity that exists outside her, and that causes a bitter wave of nausea as well. this effect of the outside world on her inner systems also unnerves her, frightens her, makes her gut churn.

there are three things the girl is not sure she can differentiate between: pain, possession, and love.

really, she thinks, it's all about being alone.

pop this cherry in your mouth

as has been mentioned before, the girl loves donuts.

lately, the girl often stops at the local tim horton's on her way from her boyfriend's house to her place of employment. she has enough time before her day officially starts to savour a cup of coffee and a donut while reading a novel. the girl likes this state of affairs.

this morning, the girl is standing in line, contemplating the selection. the donuts stare up at her from their little baskets, looking like baby puppies only more deep-fried and less hairy. she looks at the soulful ranks of cherry logs, and thinks about their bright pink insides. I wonder if anyone ever eats those, the girl thinks. she, herself, only ever eats them in the form of timbits. when she orders timbits, the girl asks for a mix of everything they've got--who doesn't? but she likes the cherry timbits. thinking back, she suspects that she ate every one. she revelled in their pink flesh and savoured the faux-cherry taste. on a whim, she decides to eat an entire log with her morning double-double.

when the girl takes her donut from the hands of the cheerful, plump woman who calls everyone "dearie," it is warm. the cherry logs are roughly rectangular, though they are rounded by their leavenedness. the girl finds that the warm, soft donut fits in her hand perfectly, like a flaccid penis.

although the pinkness inside is moderately disturbing, the girl enjoys her breakfast with gusto and fondness.