Skirt Event
Kate Story
The girl walks fast. School uniform, bare legs, open face like a heart. When the wind gusts sharp through the Parliament cemetery, it catches the skirt, and the girl’s underwear shows pink.
No. It’s white, plain white.
Some men see the skirt event: cat calls. The girl takes out her cell phone and photographs the men. She spins and captures an old man in his car staring through his windshield. Also a bike courier. They all stop staring, they diminish.
The girl turns right. She skips to the bridge and leans over. She photographs the long way down, the stifled highway below in the Don Valley. Far below the river winds. It’s a good place to throw yourself off; so good, in fact, they’ve erected a special fence to stop people from suiciding there. The girl photographs the descent.
“Is she thinking of jumping?”
“I don’t know.” Sarah’s fingers work at the label. She’s drinking 50 because that seems tough, or like an ironic stance.
“Oh, it’s a work in progress?” The girl Sarah is talking to is like a rainbow maybe, or seeing an eagle, something unexpected that stops you dead. Is she still working on the story? The experience of reading it out loud was horrifying. The beautiful girl goes on. “That’s brave. I always finish everything and revise it, like, eight million times before I show it to anybody. Let alone read it at an open stage.” The girl sits with a kind of loose-bodied confidence that Sarah associates with guys: legs apart, hand draped over the back of her chair, dark skin shining in the candlelight.
Sarah shrugs and tries to look normal. She agonized over what to read and in the end, in an act she identifies as attempted social suicide, picked that half-baked story about a girl with a camera phone. “Yeah,” she says suddenly, “She’s thinking of jumping.” It’s true as she says it. The other girl smiles and nods. She wishes she could remember the girl’s name.
“See ya, Cherisse!” someone calls out and the black girl waves. Right: Cherisse.
“I loved your story.” Sarah tries out the name, “Cherisse.”
“Oh. Thanks.”
“No, really.” Disturbing but made you laugh. A teenage girl starts an online relationship with an older man and then arranges to meet him in a playground, alone at night. “The audience loved it. It was creepy but funny and somehow you’re not worried about the girl.”
Cherisse smiles, shakes her head. “I’ve got a playground problem,” she says, leaning across the table. Her eyes sparkle; Sarah finds her so attractive that she pulls back. What is this heart-beating, palm-sweating feeling, all because a strange girl is leaning across a table at her? “Every story I write, there’s a damn playground in it,” Cherisse says.
And she likes playgrounds. Sarah doesn’t like thrown balls, or tag; she remembers her bewildered and slightly exasperated mother talking her down after a Grade-Three bout of hide-and-seek. Mom, it’s the hiding. And the waiting. People who like playing, the Tiggers, the bouncers – players – they’re like her sister Debra. People who thrash through life and don’t overthink everything.
“You have anything like that? A motif that keeps rearing up?”
“No, I…” Sarah stops, the room brightens. “I’ve got a bridge problem.” Bridges and attempted suicides. Her writing insists on sinister underpinnings. Dark secret longings and… bridges.
Cherisse leans back, holds up her beer. “That’s it, then. You take my playgrounds, I’ll take your bridges.”
Sarah feels something shifting, coiling between the galaxies. She pictures a playground from above, in the sky. The colours are bright, the equipment has hard edges. She can’t put children there. The playground is empty.
Cherisse is holding up her bottle. She wants to drink on this, Sarah realizes, make a bargain to switch obsessions. “See you here next week.” Cherisse’s smile is a gryphon, golden and dangerous. Sarah picks up her 50 and meets Cherisse mid-air. “New stories.”
Sarah takes her feelings and swallows them with the rest of her beer.
Her sister phones.
“He’s gone again,” she says. When Debra talks she runs her words together, so this sounds like scone again.
“Shit!” Sarah’s stomach clenches. “Did you call Mom?”
There’s a pause while Debra lights a smoke. “Yeah.”
“Where’s grandpa?”
“Says staff’ll lookafterim. Butegets that mood, only listens tamomerme. Snot fair.”
“Where is he?” She pictures her sister, eyes raccooned in black, pale lips. Did she just leave their grandfather to wander? “Where are you?”
“Tis partment.”
“Where’s Grandpa?” Sarah almost shouts.
“Jesus. Here.”
As if to prove her right, Grandpa yells in the background. “They’re trying to take my money!”
“Foundim. So get overere, I’m done babysitting.”
“I can’t do anything,” Sarah says. Her eyes tear up. “He hates me now. You know that.”
“Yeahbig s’prise.”
“And I can’t believe you’re smoking in his apartment!”
“He doesn’t fuckincare. D’ya, Grandpa?”
“You’re a sweet girl. Come here. You don’t steal from me, do you? Come here, you sweet thing.”
Last week Sarah caught her sister taking some of Grandpa’s pills. He won’t missem, Debra had said. Willya Grandpa? And he’d said, You’re a sweet girl. Sarah had tried to tell Mom, but it was You have to get over this sibling rivalry thing.
“’Kay gotta go,” Debra says.
“You can’t just leave him!”
“Mom said.”
“But…”
There’s a muffled sound and then Debra’s voice. “Look, gotta go, m’meeting Dan.”
“Who’s Dan?”
Debra sighs noisily. “Godyouaresostupid. He’s that guym’dating?”
Sarah pushes her lips together. “Like I can keep up. You’re a revolving door.”
“Oooh, jealoussisterwhonevergetslaid.”
Anger fills Sarah; she’s nineteen and still a virgin. “I can’t do anything!” She shouts this and hangs up.
Her phone buzzes. A photo from Debra comes through: Grandpa, smiling in a chair. He’s wearing a bathrobe that has slipped open and his underwear is bunched up, but he looks happy. He’s reaching out toward the camera, toward Debra. Sunlight halo coming in behind.
There’s always been something wrong with Debra, a rage or something dangerous. Everyone loves Debra, she’s so much fun and pretty. Sarah rides her bicycle across the Bloor Street Viaduct, toward the seniors’ facility. Their mother went away for a week and asked Debra and Sarah to keep an eye on him; he’s tried to escape every day since she’s left.
Since the Alzheimer’s his preference for Debra has become a kind of mania. “Don’t take it personally, honey,” her mother says. Debra has round, open features like Scarlett Johansson, like their mother, like the girl in Sarah’s story. Sarah has pointy features like, Debra is fond of saying, a rodent. High cheekbones and a big nose that sticks out – big eyes – a narrow jaw. Pointy.
A car door opens in front of her and Sarah swerves. “Watch where you’re going!” the driver yells. She makes it to the facility and takes the elevator up to his room. A nurse is there; Grandpa will like her because of her round, open face. “Who is that girl,” says Grandpa, his eyes on Sarah’s nose. “Make her leave. She’s trying to steal my money.”
Sarah is so upset that she has to go eat waffles. As she rides home she licks her lips, tastes sweetness. She remembers Cherisse.
She has to write a story with a playground in it. No bridges.
She detours into a park and sits under trees, until the autumn chill drips into her. Children scream like birds, parents watch. Grandpa used to do this, she remembers suddenly. He took her and Debra to the playground. It was their Sunday morning treat. Debra, the older one, never wanted to go. She’s always been perverse.
The girl sits on a swing. She starts out slow, then higher, faster. The swing and the swoop of motion sends a thrill through her crotch and legs. Her panties are showing. She laughs. Her cell phone falls out onto the dirt below and she kicks it away.
There’s an old man. Sunlight shines behind him; it’s hard to see his face. He reaches out as she swings; she thinks he’s smiling. He’s coming toward her, bends and picks up her cell. The girl can’t stop swinging, it’s taken over now. The girl’s dress is red. The old man takes pictures. He smiles. He has long yellow teeth like a wolf.
Sarah can’t read that. It’s like some Little Red Riding Hood thing, some sexual molestation thing, so done. Sarah pulls the story across her desktop to the trash.
But she can’t shake that girl.
At the next open stage, Sarah reads an old story and just leaves out the inevitable bridge-suicide bits. The story doesn’t really make sense, but it’s the best she can do. Only thing is, Cherisse isn’t there. Sarah reads slowly, her voice low.
A new writer gets up, a guy, looks so much like Cherisse he could be her brother. In his story a man builds his sister a paperback bridge. Non-fiction piles, mystery arches, science fiction balustrades, romance pavement.
This story makes Sarah feel like she could walk across the sky, stepping on letters like stones, like stars. She is certain she could never write a story like that.
Afterwards she notices the guy smiling at her. She pretends not to see; she never knows what to do when guys pay attention to her. What would Debra do? WWDD. Go over, buy him a beer, give him a blowjob by the end of the night. He’s really good-looking. Sarah ducks into the bathroom. Maybe he’ll be gone when she comes out.
But he frightens her by being right there, leaning against the wall. “You avoiding me, girl?” he says.
“No,” she lies.
“You like my story?”
Sarah flushes. “Yeah twas great.” God, she sounds like Debra. She drops her gaze; he’s wearing cool boots. “Mine, not so much.” His proximity makes heat travel down her thighs. “Seeya.”
“Hey, seeya?”
She stops, mid-turn-away.
“I’ll get you a drink. 50, right?”
She doesn’t quite know how but she’s leaning on the bar next to this guy. “Do you know Cherisse?” she bursts out, then turns bright red. Great, Sarah. All black people know each other, right? But he just shakes his head. “She was here last week, she read this great story about a playground. Well, actually, it wasn’t about a playground, it was about a girl who started this online… never mind.”
The guy is looking at her strangely. “Started an online relationship with an older guy?”
“How did you know?”
The beers come; the guy hands the 50 to Sarah. “Because that’s my story, weirdo.” He holds out his right hand, palm sideways. “Sarah, Charlie. Charlie, Sarah. Me no playgrounds, you no bridges. Right?”
Sarah stares at his hand and realizes he’s holding it out for her to shake. He looks like Cherisse, really, they have to be related. She takes his hand, and the bar tilts around her, whirls like she’s drunk. She hangs onto Charlie like he’s the only stable thing in this whole world, holds on until the swirling stops.
Charlie’s looking at their hands, hanging onto each other. “Whoa,” he says, under his breath. “Whoa.” He looks up at Sarah. “You got some kind of electricity, Sarah,” he says. And he smiles.
When Sarah leaves the bar she throws her hat up into the air like that old TV show and twirls around. She whoops and skips and thrashes through the streets. She passes the darkness of a park, tall trees whispering darkness. A playground. With a gulp she jumps onto a swing and stands on it. The chains rattle like a horror movie, they’re cold. She swings.
In her memory the playgrounds are empty. It’s always too early in the morning for other kids to be there. Maybe they’re all at church. Grandpa says to her, “You stay on the swings now. I’m going to go find Debra.” Sarah sits on the swing, swaying back and forth, digging grooves in the sand with her foot. Waiting for them to come back. Debra is older, thirteen, she knows things, she already has boyfriends. Sarah is only six – the baby.
Sarah swings. She’s going higher now. She’s never been on a swing as an adult. Power flows through her thighs, her stomach and shoulders. She can swing into the sky.
Even now, when Debra is a massive drug-head who steals his pills and money, Debra is still Grandpa’s favourite. Sarah remembers sitting on the swings, looking at one of those orange tube slides. She wishes she hadn’t been told to wait on the swings; she wants more than anything to climb that little ladder and go under that tangerine wave, whoosh. She waits for Debra and her grandfather. There they are. Debra’s face, crumpled a little as she comes out of the trees with Grandpa. A leaf in her hair. She’s wearing a short skirt. Grandpa comes up behind her; his face is angry. He leans forward and mid-stride, smacks her ass. Debra whips around, says something Sarah can’t hear. Then she’s running; Debra is running past Sarah on the swings, she runs for the street.
Sarah jumps off the swing. It’s like falling, from a great height, into darkness, into something entirely new.
The next week she’s almost late for the open stage because the seven-twenty barge across the Don is full and she has to wait for the seven-thirty-five. Traffic is backed up the river, and she envies the people on private sea-doos, so fast.
She has a new story to read; two teenagers try to have sex inside one of those orange tube-slides and they keep sliding out, tangled up. Sand gets inside their clothes. It’s a pointless story. While she was writing it, it kept making the two teenagers girls, but this makes her afraid and she forces one of the kids to be a boy.
She gets to the bar breathless, just as Charlie is getting up. Her body jolts when she sees him. She gives him a tiny wave and he waves back.
His story is sad and it makes her want to cry. A girl is afraid to tell her family a secret. She tries to live with it but it becomes an animal inside her and it eats her heart. Heartless, she commits suicide by throwing herself off something called a bridge. It sounds like something in-between, with all those soft consonants clumped together. You don’t have to know what it is to get that feeling: something suspended, on the way between somewhere and nowhere. The room gets very quiet when he reads.
Sarah’s name gets called next; she reads her story and people are laughing appreciatively. She wondered if she could write about sex, never having had any. She relied on imagination.
After, Charlie stays alone at the back of the room. Why isn’t he approaching her, the way he did before? She decides he doesn’t like her any more. Then in a flash she pictures what she’ll feel like if she leaves without talking to him. Because already she’s pictured what she hopes will happen. Charlie will kiss her. She can’t get much further than the kiss, but she has to talk to him at least.
“I loved your story. Again,” she says.
“Thanks. Yours was funny.”
“You think so?”
“Only I didn’t know what that thing was, that they were fooling around in.”
“Oh, you know. One of those stupid kids’ playground things.”
Charlie smiles a little, shakes his head.
“Almost all playgrounds have them.” Like the one in the Sunday morning park. “They’re…” Sarah searches for the word, “fun.” Debra walks out of the woods and at first Sarah thinks she’s alone. Then Grandpa appears. His face is bewildered. Then angry, and he smacks her ass. The trees are dark, they frighten Sarah. Something dark in the trees. Grandpa comes out behind Debra, there’s a leaf in her hair – yes, this, she’s remembered already. Then a piece of darkness detaches itself from the far corner of the woods. It’s a man, a boy. The teenaged boy is dangerous, the way Debra is dangerous. He comes from the woods and runs up the hill, disappears.
Debra is everyone’s favourite, she’s the bad girl, she makes out with boys like a normal girl. She’s bad but people want Sarah to be more like her sister.
Sarah doesn’t want to make out with boys.
This thought sends the room whirling; like last week, like when she touched Charlie’s hand. All she can really see is Charlie’s face, beautiful eyes looking into her. “Playground,” he says. It’s like he’s tasting the word, testing it.
“Charlie,” Sarah manages to say, “didn’t you go to playgrounds when you were a kid?”
“I don’t know. No. No.” He rubs a hand over his head. “I remember… happy. I was happy then.”
Sarah’s arm jerks and she knocks over her beer. Golden liquid cascades over their laps. It’s a symbolic image, maybe cheesy? Sarah doesn’t care. She types faster, feeling the wetness on her thighs, and Charlie’s head comes up. Their eyes meet. “You don’t know what that is, do you?” he says. He takes her hand.
“Happy?”
They go out into the night. Charlie gets shorter and rounder. Sarah puts her arm around Cherisse’s waist. They are going into the city together, one bridge and one playground. Because there has to be room in the world for both.
Vote for this story at the Broken Pencil Magazine Indie Writers Deathmatch
Kate Story is a Newfoundlander washed up in Ontario. She writes. She also sings in a rock band and acts in plays and makes performance art.
This is the last week for the Broken Pencil Magazine Indie Writers Deathmatch. Be sure to check their site to see how the stories progress through the contest!
