Chapter three: Lily.
Lily sat outside a coffee shop, chilled red fingers holding onto a cup of green tea, the steam flowing off its surface into the darkness of the autumn night. Beside her, Carl smiles over his own tea, staring at her distracted profile with quiet interest. The lights from inside the store reflect off their backs, a warm glow creating a halo on their heads, ethereal and gentle. Lily grips onto her tea with one hand, and in the other, a lit cigarette is held between two relaxed fingers. Sip, smoke, sip, smoke. She takes turns between the two, between life and death, in a dance curiously parallel to her decisions in life. Good, bad. Good, bad.
She locks eyes with Carl and squints, before voicing the thoughts her mind had been chewing for the last half hour like an overcooked steak.
“Where’s my manual.”
Carl doesn’t respond, instead his forehead furrows and he sips his drink.
Lily laughs out loud, a forced chuckle with a muted undertone of madness. It’s overly boisterous, and rings off the brick structures around them, dancing off the parked vehicles in a ricocheting echo before it is devoured by the fog that sits in wait, preying in the crisp darkness.
“My Manual, Carl...My Manual! I sure as fuck didn’t get one when I was born, or if I did, my mother would have scrap-booked the damn thing like she did with all my baby albums. God, it would be radiant and glittery, ribboned, stickered, lacquered, pop-pommed and coated in plastic. It would be sitting on the shelf in her pristine guest room, on the shelf stenciled with “LILYBEAN”, right next to the book with my childhood art, and the shadowbox with my dried up umbilical cord twisted in the shape of a heart.
But last I checked it’s not there, or anywhere for that matter.
This leaves me with a constant conundrum. I don’t know what to do when I break down, when I feel like maybe I’ve been put together with missing parts.
I don’t know what to do when life hits me with a two-by-four of circumstance.
I would really love to have a Manual. I want to not have these choices, this confusion. I want to look into a dog-eared book, find the chapter marked “Love” or “Career” or “Crisis” or “Blind Luck” and read some step-by-step instructions describing to me, in detail, how to deal with it all.”
Sip,
Smoke.
“So instead of looking in a nice book, I fuck up. A lot. I get in debt, I get an abortion, I marry a seemingly loving man who is indeed loving, only he loves boys.
Now, here’s the confusing part. As a reward for all of my fuck ups, I hit jackpot. I win the six-fucking-forty-nine with a ticket I find on the cement outside a job agency.
I found the ticket! I didn’t even buy it! I cheated in the game of chance!
Carl, I was applying to be a sandwich artist. A sandwich artist. Is my life a cosmic joke? Riddle me this, Batman!”
Carl senses the madness in her voice escalating, and places his hand on her slender knee.
“Whoa, whoa there Nelly. Calm down. Let’s go for a stroll. The way you’ve been inhaling those smokes like they cure cancer instead of cause it is unnerving. Stop over thinking everything so much. You’re giving me a headache, and I think you’re losing your mind.”
Lily chuckles and crushes her cigarette butt on the sole of her designer shoes.
“How can I lose something that I never fully had in the first place? Besides, I find priceless things that other people lose. I’m sure I’ll find my mind on the cement outside of a homeless shelter or something.”
They rise together, and as Lily adjusts her jacket she looks to the curb and sees an unusual rock underneath of an oak leaf. It’s wet, glistening, iridescent. She picks it up and places it in her jacket pocket, wondering if after it dried it would be as boring as every other pebble. She remembers being a child at the beach, picking up these imagined jewels expectantly, only to discover that once they are taken from the shore they lose their glamour and become grey and marred. Something inside of her decides to give this little gem a chance, and she smiles to herself as Carl pokes her side and starts whistling “La Vie En Rose.”

Chapter four: To be a meteorite.
Imagine this: Floating in darkness, surrounded by…. nothing. Absolutely. Nothing. No air, no atoms, no friction, no gravity, no time.
Imagine floating in nothingness, your speed only determined by your fellow travelers speed towards you, with you, or away from you.
Suddenly, you sense light, you sense a force pulling you towards something, and… BAM your journey switches polarity.
You’re on fire, you feel pressure, you have weight, and you’ve fallen 50km (or so) into a dense forest, your molten skin sizzling the fallen leaves, scenting the ferns with the acrid aroma of smoldering dirt and tannin.
You’re small, alone, rapidly cooling and thrust into a strange world.
You’re worth more than gold, and an alien to a strange planet, only you don’t know any of this.
The world absorbs you, and over decades you become a silent form in the scenery. You’re covered with earth, walked upon by man, animal, and even tree, its roots tickling you in a gradual embrace. You rest and adapt to your surroundings, but as you become comfortable with your new home, you hear the roaring and chugging of enormous metal machinery, your guardian Cedar is torn from it’s protective sentry, and over several months you’re thrust about as the forest is savaged in a gruesome display of economy. Then, a man, sitting on the corpse of a Douglas fir, eats his lunch. Drops his keys on you, and as he bends his enormous frame over to retrieve them, his gaze fixes on your peculiar coloring. He picks you up with one blackened hand, turns you about before throwing you in a tin lunchbox with only crumbs and an empty sandwich bag to keep you company.
You wonder why you’re here.


Chapter five: Melanie goes to the zoo.
Melanie – 26 years old. Caucasian (of Polish and British heritage.) Born to Ruth and Joseph Onnoway in the border town of Cold Lake, Alberta. Joseph Onnoway worked in the Military as a weapons expert; Ruth spent her adult life as a part time housewife, part time alcoholic, and part time mother to twin girls. Melanie is an identical twin to Felicity Onnoway.
On abbreviated documents their names read Mel-On and Fel-On.
Ruth was both sadistic and Creative.
Felicity Onnoway is in her last year of Med school, and a promising future of Pediatric care fronted her horizons.

A dream I had last night:

It's fragmented, like always.
I'm on a monorail that's going over an expanse of water. It's more like a shoddy little car, on a rail, far above an ocean on a track. The metal is rusted, and convoluted, and the sun is setting. I pick up speed, and can't control it. There are bridges and cross-rails, and I'm trying to get to the track that gets me to a city on the horison. Only, every turn I take seems to be the wrong one, and the metal of the rails gets more and more decayed. Suddenly I realize that the track is ending soon but I can't stop my car from going towards the jagged end and into the black of the dusk ocean.
Flash to an enormous empty tank, and a platform at the top where I'm sitting, with a fire hose in hand. I'm responsible for filling the tank with water to send as relief to some country without enough clean water. So, I'm filling the tank, very slowly, and my water cuts out.
I try everything I can to fix it, and am told that the water supply relies on a steady supply of human blood, and that I was taking blood from a baby. The baby has no blood left now, and that's why the water stopped.

Will I ever stop having extraordinarly fucked up dreams?

The squall of children, confined to their strollers, creates a piercing siren-like noise that echoes off the domed roof. Music from the surrounding stores add to the activity; Brittany spears from the junk jewelry store, Enya from the soap shop, the low booming from the “alternative lifestyle” establishment, it all contributes to the humdrum passivity that creates the ambiance of the largest mall in north America - an ambiance of consumption, and the cheap thrill and momentary satisfaction that comes with purchasing something new assaults ever sense.
Melanie is standing next to the “Dolphin” tank. The dolphins are years gone, dead from countless pennies thrown into the water, from the miserable failure of a fabricated enclosure, from swimming circles in the same pattern until a skin disease picked them off, one by one, like a flippered little leper colony of three.
Melanie is standing next to this ex-dolphin tank in her black trainer suit made of lycra, and her young body is surreptitiously hinted at, firm and lean. This is not a coincidence, as now, among the haltered children and their parents are young men, wondering at this bubbly blonde making enthusiastic announcements over her headset.
Her face is equally alluring, bright skin, strong jaw line, expressive eyes, all beaconing the crowd forward.
“Our Sea-Lion show starts in twenty minutes! See them show off their talent up close! Price of admission is ten dollars, children under three get in free!”
Her eyes graze the crowd, and her body seems weightless as she skips from one side of the enclosure to the other, addressing the crowd, making eye contact, smiling demurely to the group of three men in the back. The sea lions mirror her health by swimming playfully behind her, in circles that hint at a grim future following suit of the dolphins.
She finishes her announcement, and the animals speed by the plexi-glass wall. Then, with one quick whistle and a slight hand gesture they disappear from sight, down below and behind the constructed rock face.
Melanie waves like Cinderella on a glowing parade float in Florida, and then she too disappears from sight into the bowels of spray-painted concrete. The crowd slowly disperses. Children start to whine. Their mothers pull from a Disney-character shoulder bag a pouch of animal crackers and a Tupperware container of apple juice, hastily shoving them at their squalling children in an attempt at pacification.

“Fuck get me a hit, I’m dying here. Those goddamn creatures smell, and I’m not talking about the lions.” she glances at the sea lions, barking for more food, frowns, and grabs her purse from the rusting locker.
Keith smirks and hands her a small bag- it’s contents will have changed various hands until it finds its way up Melanie’s dainty little button nose.
“You know, Mel, if you hate those people so much, why don’t you go get an office job. Hide behind a desk, push buttons all day until you’re not sure if you exist or are part of a really bad, really boring dream.”
Melanie hands him a fifty.
“Fuck you.”
“Suit yourself, all I’m saying is who else gets to play with giant seals all day for a living.”
She ignores his question and walks to the table, littered with fashion magazines, pop cans, whistles and water toys, clears off a spot and starts to make little white lines of cocaine with her visa card.
“You know, Kirk, you’re one to talk. I’ve seen you down there, with the penguins, a half bucket of fish in one hand, and the distinct stare of inward death glazing your eyes.”
Her palms are against the table; she stares at Keith as he moves little puddles of water around on the metal railing.
“That was the smack Mel, you know that.”
“Don’t change the subject! We come here, Wednesday through Sunday, while the rest of the world spins around, and we whistle at sea life. We smile. We dance-monkey-dance, until the sweet release in a moment of rebellion soothes our restlessness.” Melanie gestures towards the bag in front of her, and then leans the chair backwards on two legs, her hands behind her head, closes her eyes, and sighs.
“It’s the text-book challenge of the mid twenties; the uncertainty, the doubt. When I came here, I loved those fucking sea-lions. I was a visionary. I would educate through interactive amusement, I would help re-habilitate, I would contribute to society in a socially and ethically responsible way. Now look at me. I’m fucking railing coke off a rusty table that smells like fish, next to a Cosmo, having an existential crisis with my co-worker slash dealer.”
She opens her eyes and stares at Keith, who is throwing plastic balls at the sea-lions. He tilts his head sideways and over his shoulder, shrugs, and scratches his eyebrow in apathy.
They stare at each other, and breaking the silence is a muffled announcement of a missing child over the mall intercom. After that, mall hours and the promise of fantastic deals at Zellers.
They look at each other with disinterest, with internal conflict. Keith glances at Melanie, then the door.
“You want to go Vaseline the stair railings?”
“Fuck yes. Let me change.”


Sunshine poured through the large window facing Howie Avenue. The hiss and clanking of buckles from several pairs of jeans interrupted the hum from the cycle of an industrial washing machine. Janet sat in the stagnant heat, watching a grayed sock rise and fall in a circle in the little round window, smeared with dirt and soap. Outside a couple walks by, holding hands and laughing in the carefree merriment of a hot summer day. Inside it smells of a dozen chemically created scents: alpine air, summer flower, white lilac, crisp breeze. All promise to provide the comforting scent of nature, but together they smell unnatural, harsh and simulated. The air is humid, and a middle-aged man in torn sweatpants whistles as he folds his undershirts, eyeing Janet every so often. The sock continues to rise and fall, and a little drama between it and a pair of lace panties begins to unfold.
“Go little sock, don’t let those pretty panties take the limelight. You may be boring, but at least you’re doing a good job.” she muses to herself. The sock disappears into the soapy background. The panties paste themselves to the window. Janet scowls.
Watching the cars roll past, and now beginning to sweat, she opens a book a friend has leant to her, and begins to read. It’s a story about people, about challenges, about witty little anecdotes and lives that seem to be painfully relatable but glamorous. She chews her nails and forgets the panty drama.
Janet has been living in the same ground-floor apartment for six months. Sometimes, when it’s exceptionally nice out, she’s afforded a small patch of sunlight through her kitchen window. Beside that, it’s dark, small, cave-like. A mattress sits on her bedroom floor, a knitted afghan from her grandmother gracing the end in its brown and orange glory. She found the couch in her living room at a yard sale, spent an hour tying it with bungies and rope to the top of her uncle’s Oldsmobile.

“I’m not sure how those damn Swedish make any money on the stuff they’ve got at that Ikea place. Why don’t you go and buy a new one? What are they these days… a hundred bucks? Jesus Janet, who knows how many people have fucked on this thing. Well, look at it. Probably a thousand. Sometimes I just don’t get you.”

Her uncle, propping his weight against a fire hydrant, squinted at her. Janet liked the old couch, it was one of the enormously over built love-seats from the 1970’s. It’s velvet, and a color that can only be described as something in between olive and shit brown; maybe it was emerald at one point but now it’s a distinctly earthy and neutral. They loaded it onto that Oldsmobile, her uncle giving disapproving glances with each knot in the rope, shaking his head but grinning at her persistence when he thinks she isn’t looking.

School begins in less than a month, and the growing anticipation has begun to affect nearly every part of Janet’s life. Her hours will be cut back at the pita pit, and another student loan will have to support her caffeine and e-bay habit. She is sleeping far too much, even know it’s often a restless slumber filled with anxious dreams of term papers and social cliques. This will be year five, and even know her grades are sufficient, Janet has begun to wonder why she has applied all over again. “Bachelor of arts with a major in Art history. What exactly will this degree offer me?” she thinks to herself, and looks at her pay stub from the Pita pit with the sickening knowledge that once she decides to leave the comfort and routine of classes, she will likely be no closer to satisfaction. Her goals are non-existent, and she knows it’s only a matter of time before she succumbs to a mediocre relationship, gets married and slowly looses herself with each PTA meeting and weekly meal planning routine. The thought of a family and daycare and Sunday evenings tethered to a baby monitor are more frightening to her than the idea of being robbed or raped. At least that would only last a little while.

Janet turns from her book to a bored looking women in her thirties, blinks twice, places the book face down in her lap, her thumb marking her place.
“Happiness is so fickle.”
The interruption in the silence is sharp, unexpected. The woman looks at Janet questioningly, Janet continues.
“When you’re happy, you think that is standard. You think that happiness should be constant, but soon you adjust to the happiness and you no longer appreciate it. When you’re sad, or upset, or dissatisfied, you clasp any sort of semblance of happiness in a death grip. It looses it’s meaning then too, because then you take this little glowing light and compare it the darkness that surrounds. It becomes sad, lonely… desperate.”
It’s the woman’s turn to blink at Janet. She cocks her head to one side and looks at the floor, wondering about this strange girl, this pretty, troubled girl.
“I think you’re looking into it too much perhaps. We’re born, we live, we go through challenges, disappointment, excitement, we work at several jobs – most of which we hate, we spawn little copies of ourselves in the hope that their lives will be different in some way…better I guess, but ultimately this is our grand prize for our work; we die, often in the same stare we were born in. Drooling, diapered, incoherent and simple.”
Janet turns her body towards the woman, and places her elbow on the counter and her hand on her chin.
“So what’s the point then”
The woman smiles in a sly half-grin.

“Learn to appreciate it all. I know that sounds cheesy, sounds like a cop out answer from an aging woman you hardly know, but think about it. Look outside. Look at the sky, the colors, the subtle way the clouds reflect the dying light. This is it hun. Love who you can, recklessly. Get hurt, be impulsive. Experience it all, and when you’re old and senile, enjoy that too. God knows you’ve earned that right. “
The woman looks toward her dryer; it has stopped it’s cycle.
Both were now accustomed to the constant low rumble, and it’s ceasing makes their ears ring.
“Oh, that’s me. Best get it out of there before it starts to wrinkle and start to smell like the metal from the dryer drum.”
She stands up, but pauses before walking towards the silent machine.
“You know what? I don’t know you, well not really. And some people would find this strange, but I have a feeling that you may find meaning where it would be normally lost. I want you to have this, and not ask any questions as to why I’m giving it to you, or where it’s from, or what it means. Maybe you’ll find the meaning you’re looking for, maybe the meaning you need will find you. And maybe that meaning won’t be what you’re looking for at all.”
She reaches into her jeans pocket and pulls out a pebble, about an inch in diameter, round, and speckled with little craters across its black surface. It’s heavy; far too heavy for something so small, it would seem.
Janet is paralyzed by this random act, this immediate connection with an average woman at the wash-n-wait. She stares into the women’s kind brown eyes, past them, and touches the heart of deja-vous, or perephral vision, or the elusive moment one has just before awakening. She tentitavely brushes this subconscious ghost, but suddenly, as if shocked by the electricity of anticipation, she reaches her arm out, and takes the stone. The woman clasps her hand over Janet’s, and then turns toward her dryer and begins to unload towels and Spiderman pajamas; it was as if they never had a conversation at all. Janet opens her hand, and stares at the little token of…of hope? Of promise? Of mystery, and uncertainty. She grips it once more, noticing that it has already begun to warm to the temperature of her palm, of the pulsing blood that flows through her fingers, up her arm, and into her heart. She doesn’t put it away, but holds it, feeling it growing warmer and warmer as each beat continues to pump her life in strong rhythm.





Lily sat outside a coffee shop, chilled red fingers holding onto a cup of green tea, the steam flowing off its surface into the darkness of the autumn night. Beside her, Aaron smiles over his own tea, staring at her distracted profile with quiet interest. The lights from inside the store reflect off their backs, a warm glow creating a halo on their heads, erethral and gentle. Lily grips onto her tea with one hand, and in the other, a lit cigarette is held between two relaxed fingers. Sip, smoke, sip, smoke. She takes turns between the two, between life and death, in a dance curiously parallel to her decisions in life. Good, bad. Good, bad.
Suddenly she realizes Aaron is speaking. Speaking to her, trying to speak with her.

Behold, I have resurrected this prehistoric beast!
I will now share my ideas, observations and opinions with the world-wide interweb. More.