magical sleep recipe, but the crowd seemed willing, for now, to go along with the charade. With TV over, they were here for the freak show.
She swept out a knife and held it high. I looked around for a cop, but we hadn’t seen one all morning. Just an abandoned uniform in a heap on a bench.
‘This is how!’ she cried, then took the long thin blade, held it toward her wide open right eye with one hand, then reached out and slammed the palm of her other hand into its base, driving the blade in to the hilt.
The crowd dilated spasmodically as the woman fell, a dropped doll.
What was left laying there mid-roundabout
did
look a lot like sleep. She lay on her back, the smooth wooden handle of the knife pointing straight up from her face like the gnomon on a sundial. No blood just yet, just a little clear liquid running down one cheek like a tear. Soon ravens would come and be unkind to her.
The crowd kept spreading; I grabbed Tanya’s arm and pulled her along as fast as I could manage, trying to stay ahead of its thinning perimeter.
‘I won’t tell anyone, Paul,’ she announced suddenly, in a tattletale voice. And then she was angry. ‘Don’t be so fucking paranoid!’
Several stragglers looked our way, but we looked mad enough together, and any kindling suspicions soon evaporated.
* * *
A block from our apartment, two blocks from Stanley Park, a shocking sight. Five children stood clustered together on the sidewalk. Children like from before, not like the ones we’d seen all morning lurking in alleys, crouched and lidless with terror. These ones were smiling, just like the boy in the ER and the little girl behind the Safeway. A little grubby, but otherwise they appeared unaffected by the chaos.
Tanya and I stopped in our tracks, like record player needles when a late-afternoon storm hits and the power goes out. In the ensuing silence, the children nudged one another.
‘Who are they?’ Tanya asked in wonder, briefly emerging from her fog.
‘I’ve no idea.’
The oldest was a girl of around ten who wore a T-shirt and pink shorts. The youngest was a boy with longish blonde bangs who couldn’t have been more than two. He held the older girl’s hand and stared shyly at me. These were fellow Sleepers, clear-eyed and unconcerned. As we stood facing one another in our aquarium of silence, the oldest girl kept looking toward a row of shrubs that stood outside a stucco Vancouver-as-California condominium complex.
I cleared my throat.
‘Are you okay?’
The other four looked to the oldest girl, who stared at me for them all.
‘Can I—?’ I began, but they turned and ran, fluttering down the sidewalk toward the park and the slow-waving willows that ringed the perimeter.
Across the street, a young man with no shirt and tangled black hair raised a quivering arm in the direction of the children’s flight, looked in our direction, and opened his mouth silently. Then he turned and began to plod after them, but much too slowly to ever catch up.
Then a sound from behind the scraggly row of shrubs that had attracted the children’s attention: giggling.
* * *
The little girl we discovered playing hide-and-seek behind the shrubs wouldn’t tell us her name; like the other children, she either couldn’t or wouldn’t speak. She wasn’t silent in a war-traumatized way, but in a shrugging, nothing-much-to-say manner. A pretty little thing, around four years old, with blonde hair and a wide brow—Alice In Wonderland-ish. She returned our smiles and didn’t flinch from Tanya’s touch when she picked her up.
When we got her home, placed her on the couch and began to pelt her with questions, she simply replied with a bemused tilt of her head. It was as though our enquiries about names and the whereabouts of mommies and daddies weren’t quite up to snuff, but she was too well-mannered to tell us.
We called her Zoe, Tanya having plucked the name from a mental list of future-children names that women seem to carry
She swept out a knife and held it high. I looked around for a cop, but we hadn’t seen one all morning. Just an abandoned uniform in a heap on a bench.
‘This is how!’ she cried, then took the long thin blade, held it toward her wide open right eye with one hand, then reached out and slammed the palm of her other hand into its base, driving the blade in to the hilt.
The crowd dilated spasmodically as the woman fell, a dropped doll.
What was left laying there mid-roundabout
did
look a lot like sleep. She lay on her back, the smooth wooden handle of the knife pointing straight up from her face like the gnomon on a sundial. No blood just yet, just a little clear liquid running down one cheek like a tear. Soon ravens would come and be unkind to her.
The crowd kept spreading; I grabbed Tanya’s arm and pulled her along as fast as I could manage, trying to stay ahead of its thinning perimeter.
‘I won’t tell anyone, Paul,’ she announced suddenly, in a tattletale voice. And then she was angry. ‘Don’t be so fucking paranoid!’
Several stragglers looked our way, but we looked mad enough together, and any kindling suspicions soon evaporated.
* * *
A block from our apartment, two blocks from Stanley Park, a shocking sight. Five children stood clustered together on the sidewalk. Children like from before, not like the ones we’d seen all morning lurking in alleys, crouched and lidless with terror. These ones were smiling, just like the boy in the ER and the little girl behind the Safeway. A little grubby, but otherwise they appeared unaffected by the chaos.
Tanya and I stopped in our tracks, like record player needles when a late-afternoon storm hits and the power goes out. In the ensuing silence, the children nudged one another.
‘Who are they?’ Tanya asked in wonder, briefly emerging from her fog.
‘I’ve no idea.’
The oldest was a girl of around ten who wore a T-shirt and pink shorts. The youngest was a boy with longish blonde bangs who couldn’t have been more than two. He held the older girl’s hand and stared shyly at me. These were fellow Sleepers, clear-eyed and unconcerned. As we stood facing one another in our aquarium of silence, the oldest girl kept looking toward a row of shrubs that stood outside a stucco Vancouver-as-California condominium complex.
I cleared my throat.
‘Are you okay?’
The other four looked to the oldest girl, who stared at me for them all.
‘Can I—?’ I began, but they turned and ran, fluttering down the sidewalk toward the park and the slow-waving willows that ringed the perimeter.
Across the street, a young man with no shirt and tangled black hair raised a quivering arm in the direction of the children’s flight, looked in our direction, and opened his mouth silently. Then he turned and began to plod after them, but much too slowly to ever catch up.
Then a sound from behind the scraggly row of shrubs that had attracted the children’s attention: giggling.
* * *
The little girl we discovered playing hide-and-seek behind the shrubs wouldn’t tell us her name; like the other children, she either couldn’t or wouldn’t speak. She wasn’t silent in a war-traumatized way, but in a shrugging, nothing-much-to-say manner. A pretty little thing, around four years old, with blonde hair and a wide brow—Alice In Wonderland-ish. She returned our smiles and didn’t flinch from Tanya’s touch when she picked her up.
When we got her home, placed her on the couch and began to pelt her with questions, she simply replied with a bemused tilt of her head. It was as though our enquiries about names and the whereabouts of mommies and daddies weren’t quite up to snuff, but she was too well-mannered to tell us.
We called her Zoe, Tanya having plucked the name from a mental list of future-children names that women seem to carry
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