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raziroo · 3 years

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Cotton Candy

Pairing: Lotor x gn!reader

Genre: Fluff

Warnings: Saying "Shit" twice

Word count: 2,076 (yay) (also, I edited this, I still need to update the word count)

Author’s Note: I'm crap at writing dialogues, and this is my first time writing for a gay couple. I'm so sorry if it seems forced or unnatural or shitty. Don't be afraid to call me out.

Story Moodboard!

It’s with a grunt of effort that I manage to lift the carton containing the cotton-candy-maker.

‘Here, dad,’ I say as my dad takes the box from my hands. ‘That’s all?’

‘Yep, that’s all of it. We’ll conquer this carnival with our delicious cotton candy,’ I nod, doing jazz hands while saying the last part. Dad chuckles. I grin.

‘Hey, Honey!’ I turn back, squinting to spot where my other dad is in the crowd of bustling people. Where, where…? Yep, there he is – in his embarrassingly brilliant sunshine yellow and bottle green striped shirt and hot pink trousers, a sharp contrast to his natural bright red hair. Don’t say that it can’t look that bright; you’ll never know just how blindingly bright bottle green can really be until you see the shirt my dad’s wearing. And trust me, he usually dresses in simpler tones; such bland tones that you’d be surprised to know he was capable of wearing colourful hues as well. It’s only that he’s very passionate about his job, and so whenever we set up a booth in fetes such as the current one, he never misses to match the shop logo.

‘Hul-lo, father dearest, how seems to go your day?’

‘Oh, quite lovely, if I do say so.’

‘Well, that’s simply charming –’

‘Alright, enough,’ my other, not redhead dad snaps with an exasperated sort of smile on his visage. You see, my not redhead, a.k.a. brown-haired dad happens to be British. And that means that me and dad would rather paint our teeth blue than to not tease him. ‘You both need to shut it and start helping me with the decorations, now. You know I’m trash at all that.’

‘Aw, now don’t get discouraged,’ I say, patting dad on the back. ‘After all, not everyone can be as blessed as me, can they?’

‘Hey, why don’t you go look around for a bit? You’ve been helping out since before I have.’

‘Yeah, he’s right, pet. You should.’

I huff, rubbing my palms on the fabric of my jeans. ‘You guys sure? I’m not tired, if that’s what you’re worried about.’

‘We’re not worried, we’re just saying you should also get a look, you know? There’s a lot of surprising booths this time around. I mean, there are aliens participating too, so…’

‘Hmm,’ I play with my bottom lip a little, then, ‘yeah, okay. I’ll be back in like, an hour? Forty five minutes? Sound okay?’

‘Sounds great.’

‘Bye, then.’ And with that, I turn on the heels of my Converse, wandering about the pretty stalls and eager children and kissy couples and aliens with curious features.

It really feels bizarre, just how astonishingly fast mankind has accepted the existence of aliens. It seems simultaneously ages and just a day before when conspiracy theorists raged all around the world, presenting baseless theories and concepts as to why and how the three-man squad on the Kerberos mission disappeared. Then came the Galra, bringing along with them global terror – because alien life, intelligent alien life existed and humanity remained oblivious all these millennia, and now they were actually attacking us. It could’ve been, perhaps even was, in some other dimension, the end of Earth. But then a defender appeared; Voltron appeared in all its glory, bringing along with it proof that however much these purple aliens claim that humans are scum of the universe, humans were, in the grand scheme of things, the ones that saved the universe too.

It feels even more puzzling to actually be on a first-name basis with the leader of Voltron; that’s right, I’m personally acquainted with Keith Kogane. It was around six months after him leaving the Garrison did I come across him. He’d been loitering around the neighbourhood, had ended up in a fistfight with some other kids, and along with that a split lip and bruised cheek. I’d been watching. When the fight ended, I (somehow) persuaded him to come along so that I could at the very least provide him with a band-aid.

Long story short, we’d bonded over how our moms were no-shows and how dads were the best and we became surprisingly close friends; the only difference was that after the death of his old man, he lived alone. I’d been adopted by my two current fathers. I told him about how when they’d initially adopted me, I was excruciatingly shy. I wouldn’t even come out of my room except meals. It was only when I came to know that they knew how to make candy floss had I timidly approached them if I could have some, because previously I’d always been grossed out at the thought of having to eat that. I’d overheard this group of kids saying that cotton candy was actually just dyed granny hair, so that’s where that came from.

I love cotton candy now. So much so, that even at the age of twenty-six, I will pout if someone takes some of mine without my permission. As if I’d ever allow them to.

Speaking of Keith, I haven’t seen him in years. We lost all contact when he turned eighteen, and then he went off into space, and even when he came back, I didn’t get a chance to meet him. I bear no ill will, though. He must have formed some close relationships. Our past friendship is comparatively much more trivial.

I spot a booth selling grilled corn. I instantly head there.

As I’m about join the crowd of humans and aliens who also want corn, a familiar call of my name leads me to pull a three sixty.

Lo and behold. Keith Kogane.

Despite him having obviously grown a lot, the face was still the same. I’m sure that, if he gets a split lip and bruise on his cheek right now, he won’t look all that different.

There’s a questioning hesitance on his features; he’s probably wondering if he’s got the right person. My pleasantly surprised smile and raised eyebrows assure him. As I step away from the grilled corn stall, I notice a motley crowd behind him; some are purple, some are holding Voltron plushies, and some look way too curious to be in a carnival. The introduction is going to be fun.

‘Keith! You're gonna live a hundred years - I was just thinking about you. But anyways, it’s – it’s great to see you,’ I say with a little giggle. ‘Though I am kind of surprised you actually approached me. The sixteen-year-old you would never.’

He smiles awkwardly in return. ‘Y – yeah… I, just… oh God, this is – I’m sorry,’ he says, his inner turmoil evident.

‘It’s all good. I know you’re shit at small talk, so… like, introduce me? Maybe?’

He nods rapidly, brows furrowed. ‘Yeah, um,’ he turns to the people behind him, telling them my name, how we met, the whole affair. I give them a wave. Most of them greet me back.

‘And, this is Shiro and Curtis,’ he points to the tall, white-haired yet young man, holding hands with a tanner guy, ‘Lance, Pidge and Hunk,’ he points to a lanky, bright-smiled guy, a buffer, kind-seeming person, and a short chestnut-haired woman who, despite wearing baggy jeans and a baggier tee, looks somehow better dressed than me. ‘Then that’s Allura, Coran, and Romelle, they’re Alteans,’ a woman with enchanting beauty and a regal aura surrounding her, a redhead who’s significantly older than the rest with an impressive moustache, and a youthful appearing girl with a big grin, ‘and Lotor, he’s Galran. The Galran Emperor, in fact.’ Lotor is a tall, lilac-skinned man with aristocratic features who shares the same cheek markings as the Alteans. Oh, and he’s unfairly gorgeous, his hair a luscious mane of white which I just know will be soft. It’s hard not to stare. You remember how I said Allura looked like royalty? Yeah, the way this man carries himself, he has the aura and visage of a God. Even in a white tee-shirt and jeans he looks way better than should be legal.

I rip my eyes away.

‘So…are Noah and Oliver here too? I’d love to see them. I mean, I never did get to thank them to permit a possible criminal to sleep in their house.’

I laugh. ‘Never mind that, but we actually sit up a stall here. I could, you know, maybe even get you guys something to eat.’

‘Free? Please don’t.’

‘It’s nothing, really, just… I don’t know, accept it as a small thank you present for not letting the planet go to shit.’

A bit of thinking. Even after a nod from Shiro, it was Lance who said yes. Good ol’ Keith.

When we reach the stall, my British dad is the only one we find there. He looks up, about to say something to me, when he notices Keith.

‘Dad. You remember Keith?’

‘Your possible criminal friend who turned out to be the saviour of the universe Keith?’

‘That Keith. He wanted to see you.’

‘Oh? Well then,’ he dusts his hands, stands up, and greets Keith. Both of them engage in a conversation.

‘You guys wanna try something?’

‘What do you got?’ asks Pidge.

‘What do we got? Um, we got chocolates, candy, marshmallows, jellybeans, tortilla chips, ice cream, popcorn – butter, cheese, caramel, peri peri – Lays, like, a lot of Lays, and the good old cotton candy. What d’you want?’

So, after providing the humans with two Cream n’ Onion Lays, a pack of tortilla chips, a double scoop of butterscotch and chocolate, a small tub of popcorn, and three cotton candy sticks, I turned to the aliens.

‘I’m assuming you guys aren’t familiar with a lot of this stuff, so you could either pick whatever looks to be good, ask your friends, or I could recommend something. What’ll it be?’

Romelle was the one who asked, ‘What’s ice cream like?’

‘It’s sweet. It’s cold. And it’s like… heaven in mouth.’

‘Ooh. I want an ice cream. The… pink one?’

‘That’s strawberry. You can eat it in a cone, or in a cup.

‘What’s the difference?’

‘Well, the cup you can’t eat. The cone is like a crispy biscuit,’ judging by her face, she didn’t know what biscuit was. ‘I’ll just give you a cone. It’s all on the house, so no worries if you don’t like it.’

I watched eagerly as she licked the ice cream. An unreadable look crossed her face. Then – ‘This is almost as good as Hunk’s cookies!’

‘Really?’ Coran asked, twirling his moustache. ‘Well, then…’ he squinted to read the names of the various flavours. ‘I would like “cookies and cream”. Yes.’ A cone of cookies n’ cream was served.

‘Allura?’

‘Do you have something that isn’t sweet?’ That was a plot twist. I’d have taken her as someone who appreciated sweeter foods.

‘We do. You want spicy?’

‘…Sure.’ Peri Peri popcorn was given and enjoyed.

And last… ‘Lotor. What would you like to have?’

It takes me a lot of will to not laugh at Lotor’s way too analytical expression. ‘What would you recommend?’

‘Me?’

‘Yes.’

‘Out of all this stuff, candy floss is my favourite.’

‘Candy floss… the item that looks simultaneously like a cloud and an old woman’s hair?’

‘Yeah.’

‘I would like a helping of candy floss, then.’

As I hand Lotor a stick of cotton candy, I wait with anticipation for his reaction.

‘How am I supposed to eat this?’

It takes me a moment to process that. ‘Uh, you just… pinch a little of the stuff in between your fingers, then eat it. Or you could just, um, go in directly, which I’m thinking isn’t really your style.’

He narrows his eyes, but follows my instructions nonetheless. Only a second after putting the stuff in his mouth, Lotor purrs.

Everyone around him, being me, Coran and Romelle (Allura’s off telling Lance how great Earth food is), looks with wide eyes and raised eyebrows. Lotor appears as if he’s just died inside. The berry-shaded blush on his face is adorable, though.

'I didn't, like, poison you or something, right?'

'No. It's that... I would never in my lifetimes have expected something so tooth-rottingly sweet to be this delicious.'

'So you're okay?'

‘Yes. In fact, I quite like… this cotton candy.’

I grin.

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bittywitches · 3 years

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Gone in the Night - Pt. 1

| Schedule + Event Info | Masterlist |

Summary: Y/N and the twins are looking for a fun Halloween adventure, but it seems they’ve gotten more than they bargained for.

Warnings: Explicit Language

Word Count: 3k

A/N: It’s finally here! Hope you guys enjoy this spooky treat <3

Tags - @brockdolan @livelaughlolobelle @grxysgxrl @guiltydols

• • •

The house itself should have been enough of a warning.

It was an old building, the only one in the neighbourhood that hadn’t been torn down to be reconstructed into bigger houses with much less yard space. It’s grey and blackened wooden walls looked brittle. It seemed unreasonable that the house hadn’t toppled over in the late evening breeze, but it stood firm. Even so, it was uninhabitable still, as the skirting around the sides had been torn off. The front porch, however, looked like it had been torn up and out of the ground as if it were a vegetable a farmer had carelessly plucked out of his garden. The wooden support legs from the front could be seen halfway up, pulled through the earth. In Y/N’s mind it seemed only plausible for something like a tornado, maybe an earthquake to have caused that kind of damage, though she knew that wasn’t possible. While California had many earthquakes year round, usually none were great enough to cause too much damage. Plus, she had a deep feeling that this had nothing to do with unpredictable weather. That feeling made her want to puke.

The railing of the porch stood up at an awkward angle, some of the poles snapped and broken, other’s splintered. The backside, the part connected to the house and leading to the door, had sunken into the dirt, so the entire surface was tilted. Looking at it from the front, seeing the empty dark space below the base with the support beams sticking out of the ground, Y/N couldn’t help but feel like the weird positioning of the porch disturbingly resembled a mouth. She found herself leaning to the side, looking past the beams and the staircase into the empty abyss below the porch, as if waiting for something to appear. It seemed childish looking back on it later, but she was half-expecting a pair of glowing yellow eyes to materialize. But she shook her head, scolding herself, because the only thing she’d probably find under there would be a family of raccoons.

The more she stared at the house however, the more things she found that eerily resembled a face. The dirty and tinted windows at the top with their broken shutters and cracked glass felt like a pair of old eyes, watching as people passed by. There was a dormer that was conveniently placed almost directly center of those windows further down, looking like a crooked nose. She could barely see the top of the roof, but noticed missing shingles, underneath them being ashy gray squares, as if bald spots on this menacing figure. And of course, the deep and dark mouth of the porch with it’s rusty wooden teeth did nothing but send shivers up her spine.

Her sickly feeling only intensified when she realized how starkly this reminded her of 29 Neibolt street. This house, however, did not have a number; she could faintly see the markings of a number near the front door, but the metal plates had either been teared off too long ago for the contrast of the wood to show, or the degeneration of the house over time had simply just taken its effect. Either way, Y/N surely was not eager to look back under the porch now; for if she were to be faced with a sickly leper, she’d most definitely shit her pants.

“So, what’ll it be?”

Y/N and her two friends stood on the front lawn of the lean dwelling, the grass beneath them dry and crunching beneath their feet with each step they had taken. It was funny; she wasn’t really sure how they’d even ended up here in the first place. She remembered them deciding to go buy pumpkins… Grayson was eager not to put off decorating any longer. They’d piled into the car, but… had they bought the pumpkins?

“I don’t know man, these are a bit pricey.” Y/N finally looked away from the house at the sound of Ethan’s voice, only for her attention to be caught by the eager man flaunting the tickets in their face.

That’s right, tickets. This was an event of sorts. A haunted house? Something like that, she thought he had said.

“Why, but it’s a buy one get two free special, you won’t find anything else out there,” he spoke, more directly to Y/N than the twins behind her. Of course, they’d been walking down the street- but why again? Was this near the patch they were going to? Whatever the case, the man had seen them passing by, stopped them with his vivacious attitude and grand voice, barking about the great deal on these tickets.

Y/N looked at the man. He wasn’t a pleasant sight to see. His sunken and hollow eyes seemed almost skeletal, his pale skin an ashy color against the darkening sky. He was tall, unsettlingly tall for a man who looked ancient. He was around 6’1, bordering 6’2, which only freaked Y/N out even more considering he loomed over the twins, the two of whom she’d always thought herself to be quite large. The man’s lanky body parts seemed disproportionate to his narrow frame, his bony arms dangling awkwardly from his sides, his hands seeming too big for them. The wrinkled fingers of his left hand gripped firmly onto the tickets, though they did not crinkle or bend under his touch. They alone seemed to be the one thing in front of her that were crisp, clean, perfect. Almost too perfect, and it hit her in a bad way, almost as much as the outfit the old man had on.

His outfit was one you’d see a vintage carnival worker wearing, one who sat inside a ticket booth at the front of a circus, for example. He wore a stiff white dress shirt, blindingly white compared to his stale fingernails and his yellowing, stained, and chipped teeth that showed with every creepy, crooked grin. The shirt was much too large for him, however, the cuffs of the sleeves coming down to his thumbs. But it didn’t feel like it was too big; no, it felt like the man had shriveled up in his clothes, withered down into the frail man he was within the cotton. He had a crisp suit vest on top, with white and red stripes running down vertically. It too seemed weird, awkward, almost like a protective guard more than a piece of clothing. A bright red bow tie was tied at the base of his neck, matching the color of his shoes, but much of them were covered by his overly large white pants. The same pattern of colours were seen on his top hat. It had a short and flat top with a narrow brim, a pattern of red and white lines going around it.

Now, all of this Y/N could get by with. So the man was a little strange, and he was a bit eager to get rid of the tickets in his hand. What was the big deal?

But there was just something about his face that irked her. The details of his wrinkles, the spots on his forehead, the random tufts of hair from his ears and his nose, the dangling ear lobes and the non-existent eyebrows. His sunken in eyes, almost swallowed by his skin, the bags of them highlighting the yellowing whites even more. His terrible cackle, his horrifying grin. All of these things, but something deeper, some other visceral gut reaction within her told her that something was off. She just couldn’t place it.

“What do you say, my lady?” The old man garbled one more time, raising an eyebrow and giving her a toothy grin, only making her shudder once more. The man raised a frail arm towards the house, gesturing towards the door.

“A haunting experience awaits.”

Y/N’s eyes followed his arm and his gaze, settling on the tall black door resting shut. It gave her a similar vibe to the void under the porch, like something was lurking just past that thin piece of wood. It was an ebony black, a stark contrast to the greying planks of the house. You’d expect the paint to be chipping, but it looked like a fresh coat. It actually seemed to be the one thing from the house that hadn’t been touched by age, other than…

The staircase.

God, why hadn’t she noticed the stair case?

While the porch had been ripped well out of the ground, the staircase leading up to it, the one she had leaned to look around into the darkness under there, was perfectly intact. The wood was still perfectly symmetrical, no splinters, no cracks. It had a different hue compared to the rest of the wood, it didn’t look aged, weathered, or beaten up like the rest of the house did. But how did she not notice it? She swore she looked at it when they first passed by… she’d seen a squirrel scurry across it. It hadn’t looked this new then, did it? No, it seemed blended into the rest of the house, but now… It was distinguishable. It had a presence.

It was still connected to the porch, but somehow still firmly grounded into the earth. This seemed impossible to Y/N, if it was still connected, shouldn’t it also be ripped out of the ground? Wouldn’t there be cracks in the wood from the pressure?

Apparently not. All Y/N could think was that the staircase felt like a long, winding creature. A snake or a serpent grasping onto both ends of this creepy house and the world in front of it, growing and shrinking along with it’s changes to keep it anchored to reality. To provide a pathway to what lies within.

But then again, it could just be her imagination. She had been watching a lot of scary movies recently.

She turned to look behind her at the broad twins, them in their sweaters and sweatpants, Ethan with his hands stuffed into his pockets and Grayson with his hoisted on his hips.

“Sounds like it’ll be fun.” Grayson piped in, a small smile appearing on his face. Y/N’s eyes fluttered over to Ethan’s, and he gave an encouraging nod as well.

She sighed. It was the Halloween season. What better time to get spooked? “Alright. Why not?” She replied and took two wrinkled twenty-dollar bills from the wallet she had stuffed into her back pocket, and handed it to the man, who let out a screechy giggle when he plucked it from her fingers. He placed the three white tickets into Y/N’s hand, leering at her almost maliciously all the while, making her shrivel back.

“A wonderful decision, you won’t regret it.” The man almost carelessly stuffed the money into his back pocket, then clapped his dry hands together.

“Alright folks, “ He threw his arm up in an over the top gesture, His voice seeming to magnify in volume as he did so. “Step through the Stygian door to discover what awaits. Remember-” His other hand came up to suddenly grip Y/N’s arm, his cold palm making her gasp. He drew her close to him, his crooked nose inches from hers when he gave her another foul grin.

“Time is precious.”

He released her, and she stumbled back into the two boys behind her, their arms coming up to keep her balance.

The man stepped back from them, spreading his arms out in a demonstrative gesture as he did.

“Good luck,” he cackled, stopping when his foot met the pavement of the road. He tipped his hat at them and bowed, looking up one last time so they could meet his old eyes. “And have fun escaping.”

A sudden screech came from behind the group, causing Y/N to jump once more, and the three whipped their heads towards the house. A murder of crows squawked and cawed as they flew from the roof of the house, somehow still clear in the darkening sky. There were so many, it seemed like they were spilling out from inside the house.

Y/N let out a nervous chuckle. “Alright, you sure put a lot of effort into your effects-” she turned around.

But the man was gone.

Another shiver went down her spine. She decided to push that feeling of unease away, however, sure that it was just an act the man was putting up for extra effect.

“That guy gave me the creeps,” Ethan mumbled, and Y/N chuckled at him half-heartedly before clearing her throat.

“Alright, come on.” She and the twins made their way towards the house.

Y/N hesitated before stepping onto the stairs, cautious of the darkness so close to her now, even more aware of the strangeness of the porch’s architecture.

But she shook her head. She wasn’t going to let a bundle of nerves stop her from having a fun Halloween experience.

She and the boys walked up the steps, the three of them irked that they didn’t hear the expected moans of the floor-boards.

Y/N took a deep breath. She grabbed the black door knob, twisted it, pushed it open, then stepped over the gap caused by the sunken porch, and into the house.

“What in the Hocus Pocus is this?” Ethan asked, getting a laugh out of her and releasing the tension in her tight shoulders.

Inside, they were greeted with a furnished living room, though it still didn’t look like anyone had lived here in decades. The paint was chipping, wallpaper was peeling, the room just felt musty and old. The walls and ceiling were a yellowy colour, with stains covering many spots. A deep maroon carpet at their feet covered the dark brown planks of the floor, and extended into the center of the room, leading to the old rustic looking couches and coffee table arranged in the middle. A fireplace was placed at the left wall, soot covering the insides and surrounding area, much like the dust covering almost every other surface. A mounted deer rested high above the fireplace, feeling like a sort of gatekeeper for the room they had just entered. It’s dark beady eyes shouldn’t have bothered Y/N as much as they did.

“This is literally some rich dead old white guy’s house.” Grayson finished his brother’s thought, walking into the room, which was dank and dark, the window at the back of the room not helping at all since it had grown late.

“So your guys’ house in fifty years or so.” She followed him, Ethan at her heels behind her.

Ethan scoffed. “Shut up.” He walked past one of the couches, dragging his finger across the leather material only to recoil when he saw how much dust he’d picked up.

“Okay, so where do we start?” Grayson asked, squatting down beside the coffee table. “We’re probably looking for something escape-roomy. A key? A button? Switch?” He ducked his head under it, probably to see if there was anything on the underside.

“I guess so.” She walked past him towards the fireplace, the cobblestone border and burnt up kindling seeming to call at her.

Ethan headed over to a cabinet against the back wall, with some ornate frames settled atop it. Grayson, after finding nothing, got up and walked over to the opposite side of the room, stopping in front of an oak door. He tried the handle, but it was locked. He turned back towards Y/N, and nodded towards the door. “I’m assuming we’re trying to figure out how to get this thing open. To actually start this whole thing up.”

“It’s locked?” Ethan asked.

Grayson rolled his eyes. “No, I just pretended it was for shits and giggles. Yea, dick-for-brains, it’s locked.”

“Damn okay jeez,” He muttered, turning back to the cabinet. “Don’t know what’s got you all worked up.”

Grayson breathed out. “Sorry. Think I’m just a little on edge. Didn’t think I’d be this spooked already.” He turned back to the door, jiggling the handle again before letting his hand fall.

“Yea, that guy was weird…” Y/N crouched down beside the fireplace, leaning her head in to get a better look.

“He looked a million years old.” Grayson added, his voice sounding distant behind her.

“Haha, yea-” Y/N turned her head to the side to look up through the chimney, thinking there may be something hidden up there, only for her eyes to meet two beady red ones.

“Holy SHIT!” She yelled, and screamed when a pair of fluttering leather wings shot down through the chimney and into her face, making her fall on her front into the charcoal and soot of the fireplace.

“Fuck it’s a BAT!” Ethan yelled, flinching away from the spazzing creature.

“GET IT OFF!!” Y/N screeched, pushing herself up and swatting her arms around her. Grayson ran forward to try and help, but the creature swooped down and stuck it’s tiny claws into Y/N’s back pocket, grabbing the three white tickets. Before Grayson could reach it, it flew up into the air, then darted to the other side of the room.

“Are you okay??” Ethan asked, rushing towards Y/N.

“No! That was a fucking BAT-” but she and the boys were interrupted by a loud rattling sound. They turned their heads to see the oak door shaking, almost vibrating, when it finally slammed open with an enormous whooshing sound, a sudden burst of air and wind shooting through the doorway causing the door to slam against the wall, chips of the crumbling paint falling to the floor along with a cloud of dust forming when it did so. The tiny bat, somehow hovering right in front of the door, seemingly unaffected by the currents coming through, flew through the door into the darkness of the other room, still clutching the three tickets in its claws, blending into the sea of black.

The three friends blinked. Slowly, Y/N got up, doing her best to dust herself off before turning to the two brothers, the shocked expressions on their faces still apparent.

“Well,” She pressed her lips together. “I guess it’s begun.”

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rimurutempest-bounced · 4 years

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soft asks, im just gonna answer them all:

1. cherry - what is your sexuality?

gay

2. lollipop - favorite makeup products?

eyeliner. i usually like stuff by e.l.f.

3. daydreams - if you could be anything or anyone, who would you be?

assuming “shapeshifter” is off the table, i’d be an unkillable dragon.

4. october - what month were you born in?

september!

5. caress - do you like to snuggle?

rarely, actually! sometimes i like it and seek it out, but i have a capacity limit.

6. ivory - describe your pajamas?

uhhh, right now? grey t shirt and black shorts. sometimes nothing. sometimes t shirt and underwear. i dont have any specific pjs.

7. golden - favorite stationary product?

stickers. metallic paint pens and, like, gel pens are pretty high up there too.

8. freckles - most-worn article of clothing?

boots or poncho/shawl.

9. twilight - best friend?

@skulloflibitina, @aftermidnightblue, @papamoomin(he’s my husband, so he’d better be my best friend)

10. silk - do you like k-pop?

i only know a couple of songs, and they’re all pretty damn old now. not into any specific bands. i love BoA though, just in general.

11. poppy - favorite pastel color?

lavender

12. dimples - most attractive features of a person’s face?

eyes!

13. sunkissed - autumn or spring?

autumn.

14. buttery - favorite snack?

probably seaweed snacks, i think. im picky though, some days nothing is RIGHT.

15. whisper - how much sleep do you get?

........not enough. usually maybe 6 hours?

16. pencil - do you own a journal?

i do, but i never use it........

17. cupcake - are you a good cook?

yes! i rarely cook though.

18. honey - favorite term of endearment?

darling, beloved, sweetheart. in that order.

19. clouds - describe one of your favorite dreams?

i have a recurring one about being in a dinghy on a small sound and the water is so calm the surface is like glass. the sky is grey and heavy with clouds. im rowing, or drifting, to a point with a rocky shore, and when i get out, i walk into a beautiful forest(not quite boreal/taiga) and it’s warm and sunny and green. i walk to a stump, covered and surrounded by beautiful cushion moss, and i feel like someone very important to me is with me, but i dont know who.

sometimes there’s more to the dream, but often the other elements are stressful or upsetting, so. that much is really nice and calm though!

20. velvet - who was your first crush?

i guess a boy named ashton i saw during the summers for a few years. he and his family had a summer house up the street. i honestly cannot fathom why anyone would want to leave jamaica in the summer to stay in THAT neighbourhood, it was not a particularly special place imo. he was really nice to me though, and said i could call him my boyfriend. i think we kissed once or twice. his family was wonderful. i think the people who started staying in that house after they stopped going there were pretty rude, but my memory around that is kinda hazy. apparently i was so upset about his family not visiting any more that i keyed my name into the new peoples’ car? i got in trouble for it anyway.

21. paper - favorite children’s book?

the hobbit. or the last unicorn. or blueberries for sal. i dont know, i loved a LOT of books as a kid.

22. peaches - do you have a skincare routine?

nah. not really. i use a face cleanser/wash in the shower, but not with any routine.

23. mochi - favorite studio ghibli film?

princess mononoke.

24. backyard - did you ever have an imaginary friend?

yeah, i think so. i played alone a lot, but usually not with any imaginary friends. but i DID have a tiny pocket journal that i would write letters to my “friend in fance” in. his name was pierre i think. i dont remember writing his responses, and they were in completely different handwriting. even into high school i would sometimes write him a little note when i cleaned my room and found the book, out of nostalgia, and every time i found it, he’d written a reply. usually asking why it had been so long. i think he might have said some kinda creepy/wierd stuff, too. wonder what happened to that little book lmao. (it was a teeny tiny lisa frank notebook i think. with a little snap button clasp to close it.)

25. strawberry - favorite fruit?

obligatory, apples! also blueberries and mango. botannically, non traditionally for culinary speaking, avocado too.

26. kiss - have you ever kissed a friend?,

i kiss my husband a lot, but in a purely platonic way, uh. on the cheek, sure, plenty of times. on the lips, i think only once, and i was not comfortable with it at all.

27. nightlight - do you read before bed?

if social media, wikipedia articles, and/or video game dialogue counts, then yes. if only books do, then no.

28. shampoo - favorite scent?

mint and rosemary, for shampoo. in general, my fave scent is wood smoke. briney, salty, sea air is up there. and pine(especially balsam), cedar(technically cypress), juniper, sage, leather...........

29. skin - what distant relative are you closest to?

uh, idk what’s considered distant honestly. im not really close to most of my bio family, in any sense tbh. maybe my cousin faith? we rarely talk and she lives in north carolina, but i think probably her somehow, lol (she’s my 1st cousin though, idk if that counts?)

30. aphrodite - favorite actress/actor?

mmmmm.......maybe lupita nyong’o? or jason momoa. i also like michael b jordan, elijah wood, shia labeouf, dolly parton, daniel radcliff, robert patterson..... idk, i dont actually usually have fave celebs like that much.

31. cuddles - do you have any pets?

my son, a beautiful but not very bright fat clumsy goblin of a cat whom i love.

32. lace - if you own any dresses, which is your favorite?

no, even when i still wore skirts sometimes, dresses werent really my thing. i gave my skirts to my friend anna, and she still has some. my fave is probably the long, black skirt with autumny coloured vines and leaves. apparently the style of skirt is called broomstick, according to google?

33. sheets - sanrio or san-x characters?

i had to google the difference, but sanrio. they’re all cute though.

34. cream - frozen yogurt flavor?

usually taro! i also like just plain, tart froyo, or pomegranate. i generally go for fruity flavours, aside from taro. it’s also one of the only times i’ll sometimes opt for coconut, esp if it’s paired with taro!

35. watermelon - do films ever make you cry?

almost always. the genre DOES NOT MATTER. im less likely to cry watching horror/slasher/gore stuff (but im also less likely to watch those vs suspense thrillers/psychological horror anyway)

36. sapphos - favorite poet?

emily dickinson, i think. despite my love for simple rhyme and meter, i just love how evocative her writing is. each of her poems is so personal, but because of that, they’re pretty widely relatable, so it’s easy to resonate with them.

im also very fond of frost and poe’s poetry(and poe’s writing in general, ofc)

honestly, this is making me want to just binge a ton of poetry by poets i havent read before. (if anyone wants to send me recs, PLEASE do.)

37. plush - how many stuffed animals do you still own?

i am not counting them, lmao. suffice to say, too many to count without a good deal of effort.

38. roses - what flower do you find most beautiful?

most beautiful i’d say wisteria, but my faves are chrysanthemums and hydrangeas. wisteria is my 3rd place.

39. sweetheart - favorite mug/cup?

i have a few i like a lot, but my husband bought me a World’s Best Dad mug that is a particular fave right now.

40. sunset - what are your pronouns?

exclusively he/him/his

#shooting the breeze with zeph #about me #there's a link to the OP at the top of this post btw #long post

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shonarollo-blog · 5 years

Photo

panning Kensington Market is not just a market, but a vibrant, living community, home to numerous waves of immigrants over the years.When visiting, I was struck by how many different people from all walks of life gather here to work, eat, live and play. With so many cultures and generations all layered on top of each other, the whole place has a DIY feel you don’t really find anywhere else.

As a destination for art, global street food and community events, there is so much life tucked into every corner of this bustling neighbourhood. It’s nearly impossible to take it all in at once… so, where to start?

Make the Most of Kensington Market

Golden Patty

Eat your way through a world of food

Although Kensington Market has some finer dining establishments such as Grey Gardens, more casual spots that only specialize in one or two items are really where it’s at. True to the market’s immigrant roots, you’ll find mom and pop restaurants serving quick street food and authentically cooked meals that bring a taste of their home countries to you.

Seven Lives is a neighbourhood favourite for getting Baja-style tacos, and they’re in demand. This cash only counter has mouthwatering tacos loaded with all the right toppings, and lots of hot sauce options to pick from. Another popular street food, empanadas, are perfect for a quick and affordable snack. At Jumbo Empanada, you can get a taste of Chile for as little as $1.75 for one of their mini pastries.

Fish and Chips from Fresco’s

As a Montrealer I also have to mention NU Bügel. They serve classic Montreal bagels wood fired to perfection and topped with the works, if you wish. Fresco’s Fish and Chips has meanwhile mastered and upgraded a British classic with an optional extra crispy batter made from Miss Vickie’s “crisps.” Then, Golden Patty will deliver on all your flaky, spicy, delicious, beefy needs.

Kensington Market also has a lot of options for vegetarian and vegan eats. Options like Urban Herbivore, Hibiscus and King’s Cafe are sure to make your little plant-based hearts sing.

Kensington Market & Chinatown Toronto Food Tour exploring the back alleys

Take the Kensington Market and Chinatown Toronto Food Tour

If you’re new in the area or want to get to know it from a different perspective, taking a tour can be the perfect way to connect with the place. You’ll get to know the stories and the history that helped make Kensington Market the way it is today, and get a taste of what a community like this really means. Plus, it’s clear there’s a lot to taste in this high density foodie destination.

Food samples on the Kensington Market & Chinatown Toronto Food Tour

On the Kensington Market & Chinatown Toronto Food Tour, you’ll have the chance to visit 7+ different food stops to taste delicacies that are inspired by global cuisines, and yet take root at a small local business, each with its own story. No single restaurant could bring you a seven course meal this diverse! You’ll definitely get plenty to eat, but you’ll also be enriched by the guide’s insider knowledge as they take you to explore off the main streets and into the real heart of Kensington Market. Have a look at Local Toronto Food Tours.

Outside FIKA

Take it easy at a local cafe

You might need some extra energy to soak in as much as you can of Kensington Market, so why not treat yourself to a delicious cup of coffee, and maybe a scone?

My favourite place to refresh as I explore the market is Moonbean. The locally owned coffee shop and roastery brings the streets’ energy inside with a sprawling chalkboard menu, loose leaf teas lining the walls, and a cozy art-filled room in the back. They also have two patios, front and back, plentiful baked goods, and just about every drink you can think of, even smoothies. Plus, if you need to make another kind of rest stop, you’ll find kind messages from strangers scrawled all over the bathroom walls.

Another great coffee shop is FIKA, a bright and stylish Sweden-inspired spot that’s a favourite for studying, reading a book, or simply taking it easy. They serve specialty drinks such as a spiced cardamom latte, lavender white hot chocolate, and a mean iced coffee, too – perfect for enjoying on their airy patio in the summer.

Other local favourites include famed Toronto chain Jimmy’s Coffee as well as i deal coffee, Cafe Pamenar and Livelihood Cafe.

Exploring the alleyways of Kensington Pl.

See where creativity spills onto the streets

Music, street performances, murals and more fill the streets of Kensington Market with endless inspiration and photo opportunities. With so many artists around, you’ll be pressed to find wall space that doesn’t boast even a speck of paint. They’ve truly made Kensington their own.

Some of my favourite murals are a photo collage on Kensington Ave off St Andrew and a huge Alphonse Mucha inspired mural at Augusta and Oxford. Parked in front the latter, you’ll also find Yvonne Bambrick’s infamous Garden Car, a teeny tiny city park/community art project which has been sprouting in the same spot each summer since ’07. Make sure you keep your eyes up as you explore hidden corners and back alleys, you never know what else you’ll find!

Street performers

While street performers and pop-up concerts may be a little harder to track, if the sun is out you’re sure to stumble upon some talented buskers at Bellevue Square Park. To increase your odds, come by for Pedestrian Sundays. The whole market is blocked off from traffic on the last Sunday of every summer month, opening it up for people and their experimentations. Support artists directly, too, by checking out the Kensington Market Art Fair.

The Winter Solstice Festival also takes over the market annually on December 21st, lighting up the longest night of the year with creativity and passion.

Lanterns on display at Dancing Days

Shop around for locally made goods

Naturally, the storefronts in Kensington Market sell products by people just as diverse as its residents. Creativity is concentrated at a few charming stores offering handmade and locally produced goods that range from artwork to accessories to home decor, and more.

First off, Kid Icarus is a sweet, stylish screen printing studio and gift shop all in one. They focus on paper products like greeting cards and stationary, but you’ll find pins, soap and other creative crafts, too. Everything in store is made by Canadian artists and artisans, and it’s irresistibly cute.

Painted house

Outside of Dancing Days

Another good place to pick up Canadian-made gifts is The Blue Banana Market. The giant store is practically a warehouse for locally made goods and novelty items from around the globe. Then, for comic book lovers, manga fans, and graphic novel enthusiasts, there’s The Beguiling. You’ll find the famed comic book store just a couple steps from the market on College Ave. Even if you weren’t looking for any of those, there’s something about it that just draws you in.

Finally, if you’re looking for some unique jewellery, you’re in luck. One Love is one man’s tiny storefront selling handcrafted goods and jewellery, with a smile. You can also find other similarly handmade pieces displayed on tabletops around the market. Follow your instinct as you stroll the streets and see what speaks to you!

One of Kensington Market’s many fruit stands

Pick up some specialty ingredients

Grocery shopping might be an underrated form of entertainment, but one of the big draw-ins of Kensington Market is its high density of specialty grocers. There’s nothing better than treating yourself to some of the freshest ingredients you can get. Whether you’re cooking up a special meal or just having a snack, you’ll see the difference that freshness makes.

Even if you don’t have a kitchen at your disposal, these spots can help you feel right at home. There’s nothing better than fresh bread from Toronto’s favourite Blackbird Baking Co. topped with your favourite creamy delight from the Global Cheese Shoppe just around the corner.

Global Cheese

For carnivores, Sanagan’s Meat Locker is your local go-to. They emphasize building relationships with farmers, meaning you can trace everything in store back to its source. All that’s left to do is let the helpful staff guide you to picking the perfect cut. Next, you’ll find fruit and vegetable stands all around the market to add a little colour to your meal, while House of Spice will help bring the flavour. You’re sure to discover something new while you’re in there, too.

If you’re looking for place to shop that’s a little better rounded, 4 Life Natural Foods has it all when it comes to organic goods. With spacious aisles, wooden shelves and so many ethically sourced food options, the whole experience of being there is simply a pleasure.

Kensington Mall

Discover the wonder of thrift shops

Kensington Market is truly a haven for lovers of vintage. With shops selling unique finds around every corner, its no wonder the area’s residents all look so cool. Plus, buying secondhand clothes is a simple way to take it easy on Mother Earth.

Perhaps the most well-known vintage shop in the area is Courage My Love, a cozy and colourful store perfect for finding cashmere pieces, theatrical accessories, beads, buttons and other DIY necessities, as well as the perfect pair of cowboy boots. Another favourite is Sub Rosa Vintage just next door, which boasts a hand picked selection of clothes more in line with today’s fashion trends. Meanwhile, Vintage Depot has top tier threads in just about any shape or colour, including some designer finds, Exile delivers on the costume department and Bungalow mixes the old with the new making it a one-stop shop for any lover of retro style.

If you’re in the mood for a little shopping spree, you’ll find the highest concentration of other vintage shops on Kensington Ave around Courage My Love and Sub Rosa.

CN Tower seen from Chinatown

Explore neighbouring Chinatown

A mere block away from the heart of Kensington Market is another bustling urban community. Chinatown is full of family-owned business of all sorts, but the main attraction is definitely the food. While the number of restaurants serving different variations on the same cuisine was a little overwhelming at first, after a little exploring I’ve narrowed down my favourite spots, depending on what you’re looking for.

Chefs working at Mother’s Dumplings

Dumplings? Try Mother’s Dumplings, and watch the little bundles of flavour be made right in front of your eyes. Noodles? Despite the name, Chinese Traditional Buns serves some awesome Dan Dan Noodles, without the frills. Soup? Phở Hưng has all you could want, and more. Sandwich? Banh Mi Nguyen Huong serves Banh Mi that’s quick, cheap and most of all delicious. Buns? Now, those are top-tier at Mashion Bakery.

The post What to Do and See in Toronto’s Kensington Market appeared first on To Europe And Beyond.

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watchtheworldburn · 7 years

Text

Midnight Stalker (M)

Rated M for mature themes | Trigger warning: minor psychological abuse

Prologue

Despite his lip and eyebrow being pierced, and the multiple rings on his ears, his face still screamed innocence. His skin was milky white and unblemished, his eyebrows a sandy blond. His lips were unnaturally red, compared to any other guy I’d seen. His cat-like eyes were tinted with eyeshadow and liner, beneath his lids were pale blue eyes. His hair was many shades darker. Both, I figured, were artificial. Koreans don’t have blue eyes... His face was like that of a porcelain doll’s, untouched by anything impure. His shoulders were broad beneath his white shirt and black vest. Someone whispered that he dressed like a 21st Century pirate. The new boy remained silent and still as the teacher introduced him, before politely lecturing him about hair dye and piercings. After that first day though his eyes and lips remained unnaturally pigmented, while his hair was bleached and his facial piercings were left at home. It was almost unreal to me, how he radiated of beauty like a model, instead of a 19-year-old student. The stoic look and lack of dialogue didn't help the living doll impression either. His gaze fell straight ahead, but every so often I noticed it drifting to Melita, one of few girls making googly eyes over him.

Justin sat at the back of the room, one seat behind Melita and I watched her body pivot as he moved to take his seat. The initial curiosity of the other students died down after a day or so, but not for me. There was something about him that seemed...off. He was unusually quiet. Everyone assumed he knew English, as he had chosen to come to a school with minimal diversity and didn’t appear to struggle when writing down his answers on the board or on paper. He never raised his hand, which I originally thought had to do with the fact that he didn’t understand anything, but from the few assignments I’d peeked over at, he was doing as well as me, if not better.

Was he just shy? There had to be more to it than that. He actively avoided people. In the front of the school, in the cafeteria, he was always by himself. I’d glance over and see people offer to sit with him, but he’d smile and shake his head. What was it with him? I mean, I considered myself to be a loner and I at least had one friend.

He loved to draw though. That was what Melita and I discovered when we went out for lunch one day a couple weeks into the school year. Justin sat under a large tree with a sketch pad. He didn’t appear to be drawing anyone nearby, just someone from memory. He’d drawn the figure with her back facing him, her head turned to the side, smiling. We asked him who it was, to which he simply answered, “my muse”. Melita thought it was adorable; I thought it sounded pretentious.

Up until that point, I still couldn’t pinpoint what it was about him that wasn’t sitting with me right...but I didn’t like it.

Part 1: Justin

It was a cool day for September, just one more sign that summer was over. I woke up to my alarm feeling stiff. I was on my back, my head propped up against the pillow that was squished against the headboard, my arms in some odd position above my head. That’s gonna hurt later…I mentally groaned.

I sat up slowly and turned off the alarm before slipping into a tank top and pair of shorts.

When I looked in the mirror, I was met with a grim face as I brushed my teeth. I stared down the bags under my eyes. My hair was matted and took a few brushes to look decent. I was starting to hate that I’d agree to do this because apparently sharing homeroom and walking home together every day wasn’t enough time for two friends to spend together. This school year, Melita and I decided we would meet once a week before school as well to hang out in the music room. But I loved her, so I was willing to suffer.

I walked through the front gate of the school, still yawning. Part of my brain had begun bargaining to just skip the morning and go back to bed. Melita was already in front of the school, her light brown hair pulled back into a ponytail, a bright smile on her face. We greeted each other and went inside with the plan to make a quick stop at our lockers. The school was, unsurprisingly, deserted, the halls echoing each of our footsteps. What did come as a mild shock was seeing Justin leaning against Melita’s locker. Did he know that was hers? Was he waiting for her? Why was he there so early in the first place? His baggy jean jacket was open, his blonde hair falling in front of his face as he stared down at his phone.

I felt Melita cling to my side like a giant magnet, her face mostly hidden behind my shoulder. She wasn’t scared, this I knew. She was too busy metaphorically drooling. Since day one whenever she saw him, she’d freeze up and stare at him, only to go on about just “how cute” he was, once he was no longer in earshot.

“Why don’t you talk to him?” I asked, undoing my lock with my freehand. Melita gasped softly, her grip tightening on my arm.

“Talk to him?” She repeated as if the idea were something preposterous.

“Well, yeah. You’re gonna have to eventually if you want to get into your locker.” I said, trying to shrug my arm free. “Now will you let go, so I can get my binder?”

Melita sighed and let go. I could hear her feet drag as she slumped over to her locker. I pulled my binder for first period from the shelf in my locker, noting the increasing chips in the pale, blue paint. I leant against the next locker over. I realised I’d begun staring at the inside of my locker door. Below the dollar-store mirror were pictures of various female rappers that I admired. I was trying not to eavesdrop on their conversation since I couldn’t care less. But at some point, I heard Melita gasp again and I assumed Justin smiled or breathed or something. Melita and I have very different tastes, I reminded myself.

I shut my locker and thankfully, Justin was already gone. Melita stood with a red rose in her hands and stars in her eyes. I tapped my friend on the shoulder.

“Chelsea, he gave me a rose! Can you believe it?” She exclaimed excitedly.

“You asked him to move from your locker so he gave you rose?” I deadpanned. “That’s odd. Now, are you gonna get your stuff or not?”

“I am, I am,” she giggled.

When we finally got to class after the bell, there was a gift on Melita’s desk. It was a small container of shredded dried squid, tied with a purple ribbon. There was a note on top that read: These are your favourite, right?

“Who’s it from?” I asked, getting my pencil case. More kids filed in, increasing the volume, to the point where we nearly had to shout.

“I don’t know!” Melita exclaimed happily. “Did you do this? You know my birthday passed already, right?”

As much as I wanted to take credit, I was not that organised. I had to wonder who it was since not many people knew about Melita’s favourite snack. What was more bizarre was when more gifts started showing up for Melita. First the squid, then a small, stuffed teddy bear, then a small basket of strawberries, and then a handful of colourful paper cranes. While I wasn’t sure how he would know exactly what she liked, it started to become abundantly clear that the new boy was behind these gifts. He was usually the first one in class, he smiled and winked whenever Melita glanced over her shoulder, and he sometimes delivered these gifts by hand.

I wanted to believe this was all out of the goodness of his heart, I really did. It wasn’t until we started running into him outside of school that he started to seem suspicious. Normally I wouldn’t judge someone for wanting a life outside of school, but since this guy appeared to have no social presence to speak of, it was odd that he would go to bars and clubs to sit or stand alone.

We would go to the mall and Justin would be standing across from us at the fountain. We would be joint babysitting a neighbourhood kid, Justin would be walking his dog on a similar route. I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt; maybe he lived nearby. He and Melita took a lot of the same classes, it must have been safe to assume they liked a lot of the same things, hence why I kept seeing his doll-like face everywhere.

I decided to bring up my suspicion to her after we met Justin in one of the parks near her house where he ‘just happened’ to pick a rose on the way for her. Melita blushed and smiled, her eyes bright and sparkly. My heart sank. There was no way she would take what I was about to say lightly. In an effort to keep my friend happy, I gently suggested that something might be up. She told me not to worry, but it wasn’t enough. I didn’t know what Justin’s endgame was with Melita, but I knew one thing was for sure: I definitely didn’t trust him.

***

Our homeroom teacher announced a partner assignment in which we had to make a presentation based on arguments for both sides of debate topics we had to choose from. Melita and I locked eyes immediately. We always worked together; we hated group work, but we knew how to accommodate for each other’s learning styles and work efficiently. Let us pick our groups, let us pick our groups, let us pick our groups. I chanted in my head as Mr. Laeviculus handed out the assignment. To my dismay, Melita was paired with Justin, and I was stuck with a girl named Hailey.

The class broke off into groups and a petite girl with short brown hair came and sat in the empty place next to me.

“’Kay which question do you wanna do?” She asked opening a comic book. I later found she was much more interested in the comic book than the assignment.

“Doesn’t matter,” I muttered. We decided to go with the topic of whether the death penalty was an acceptable punishment for crimes and we I came up with arguments for both sides. Despite the extra work, I assumed I would have to do, I couldn’t help but be distracted but the pair sitting not too far from us. Justin and Melita were laughing and I couldn’t help but feel left out. I’d give anything to switch places with Justin. When the bell rang, all I heard about was how he was ‘so cute’, as I packed up my things.

“I feel like you need to find a new adjective to describe him…” I said, tugging my friend up from her seat. “Come on, you don’t want to be late for your next class. We’re still on for lunch, right?”

“Sure,” Melita grinned. If there was one advantage to this whole boy-craze thing, it was that it kept her in high spirits.

I sat through my next class drumming my black fingernails on the desk. The period passed slowly and I was thankful when I could finally escape for lunch. I made a bee-line for my locker, where Melita and I usually sat for lunch. I unzipped my bag and took out the container of leftovers from the night before. I waited, periodically checking my phone, but Melita never came. I frowned and finished my lunch, later learning that she had spent the hour in the music room writing in her diary.

The next couple weeks carried out more or less the same: we’d go to class, work separately and then she’d want to sit alone with Justin. She claimed it was so they could continue to work on the assignment, but I knew better. Unfortunately, she used this excuse to not walk home with me on certain days too. On one of the days, I convinced her to walk home with me, I explained my frustration in not getting to see her as much.

“Aw, Chels. If I didn’t know better I’d think you were jealous of him,” Melita teased, nudging me in the side.

“I am not.” I scoffed. “I just…Be careful, is all…”

“Careful? Why?” Melita tilted her head in confusion. Her brown hair was down today and resting over her shoulders.

“I mean, I don’t trust him.” I corrected myself.

“Why not? What’d he ever do to you?” She asked defensively. Melita stopped walking and turned to me, one thin arm on her hip. Jeez, you’re not his mom, I thought to myself.

“Think,” I told her. “He shows up out of nowhere and he suddenly knows everything that will make you happy? And haven’t you noticed he’s everywhere? He’s in all your classes and he just happens to do all the same things as us in our free time?”

Melita frowned. “So, we have common interests. What’s the harm in that?”

“Look, all I’m saying is there are just way too many coincidences for there to not be something going on here…” I said, massaging my temples.

“I think you just need to get to know him more,” Melita pouted. I hated when she made that face. It made her look even more like a child.

“Hey...” I murmured, placing my hand on her petite shoulder. Melita continued to pout, avoiding eye contact. After having stayed at school longer, the sun was beginning to set, casting shadows across Melita’s face.

“Just be—” I paused as I heard something rustle in the bushes. I glanced over at the large hedge not too far behind. The rustle came again and I swore I saw a pair of eyes staring back at me…two, sickeningly familiar eyes.

“Uh, Chels..?” Melita waved a hand in front of my face. “What is it?”

“Nothing, just be careful okay?” I sighed softly. Melita nodded and we walked the rest of the way to her house before I went home. I wondered if I should have mentioned what I saw to Melita. Since I knew I was already walking on thin ice with her for speaking so critically of the boy she was crushing on.

She soon started going out with Justin and I regretted not speaking up about the stalking incident. The two were happily joined at the hip day in and day out. My hands balled into fists whenever I saw them. I cursed his pretty-boy face—he hadn’t just stolen my friend, he changed her. Melita kept worrying about her looks, especially her weight. Additionally, Justin guarded her like a hawk. The two walked everywhere together and if anyone stared at Melita, Justin would give them an icy glare right back. He was given detention on more than one occasion for starting fights with people who tried flirting with his girlfriend. Lunches, after school, before school, too. I had no chance of spending time with my friend anymore. It wasn’t long before Melita skipped up to me with the “happy” news.

“Chelsea, Chelsea, Chelsea! Guess who’s getting married!”

Does the universe hate me?

Part 2: Melita

It was a morning in late October when I woke up with my body all contorted again. My alarm squawked at me like a robotic parrot until I had the energy to reach over and feel for it. By some stroke of irony, I knocked my phone off my nightstand and the alarm continued. I sat up, my head starting to throb. My mouth felt dry as I shoved my toothbrush into my mouth and I wondered if the bags under my eyes were becoming permanent fixtures on my face, as I stared at the zombie in the mirror.

I texted Melita to ask if she wanted to hang out in the music room before school, for old time’s sake, since Justin had been routinely giving her rides in his fancy schmancy limo.

I scraped together a lunch from the little food that was in the fridge and checked my phone…no response. Hm…that’s odd, I thought to myself. Melita and I didn’t text very often, but when we did she usually got back to me right away. Maybe she left already and just had her phone off…or maybe she was ignoring me because he was with her. I shook that thought from my head. Melita had been my friend since we were kids, she wouldn’t just ditch me for some guy…she wouldn’t…

The walk to school was chilly and I constantly found myself tugging my leather jacket tighter around my body. I checked my phone every few minutes…still nothing. I was starting to worry. I walked through the front doors of the school, entering the empty hallway. I half expected Justin to be lingering somewhere, waiting for Melita, but even he was nowhere to be seen. The music room was deserted, the lights off. Where is she?

I went back towards my locker and decided to call. The phone rang once, twice, three times, and soon went to voicemail. Did she forget to charge her phone or something? I leant against my locker, sliding down to sit on the ground. My legs were shivering slightly as I pulled them to my chest. There was a sinking feeling in my stomach.

Melita’s seat was empty in first period and I knew something had to be wrong. Melita was a model student. She got good marks and she had a near perfect attendance. As far as I knew she wasn’t sick and it wasn’t like her to skip. So, when the second period bell went, I gathered my things and went to her house.

Strangely enough, the door was unlocked and I stepped inside, calling out that it was me. A loud wailing came from upstairs. I glanced around briefly around the room. Nothing looked out of order; the furniture was still in place.

“Ms. Chang?” I called jogging up the stairs. There were three bedrooms in that hallway. The crying seemed to be coming from Melita’s room. I pushed open the door to see Ms. Chang knelt at the side of Melita’s bed, weeping. The bed was empty.

“What happened?” I asked softly.

“She’s gone…” her mother sobbed. My eyes widened.

“How long has she been missing?” I asked, trying to help Melita’s mother off the ground and onto the bed. The woman’s round face was red and puffier than usual. Her jet-black hair was tied back into a messy bun and she appeared to still be in her pyjamas. Much like my own parents, Melita’s mother was normally at work early in the morning. She must have been taking the day off, to be home to notice her daughter was missing.

“What if she ran away?” Ms. Chang asked in a semi-panicked voice. The woman blew her nose. I shook my head.

“No, that isn’t like her. She must have been kidnapped…” I started looking around for clues. The window was closed, the pop star posters were still hanging on the lilac walls, the closet was closed and all her clothes were tucked away in drawers. The bed was the only thing that was remotely disorderly. Based on the surroundings, it was unlikely that anyone had broken in and kidnapped her. It honestly looked like she just got up and left.

“My baby has been kidnapped? But how? When? I would have heard it.” Ms. Chang began sobbing again. This doesn’t make any sense I thought to myself. Where would she go? And why? Why would she have any reason to leave when she has everything going for her here? I continued looking for a sign, something to tell me that my friend was still the person I thought she was … And then it hit me, her diary. I started lifting pillows, stuffed animals, looking in her nightstand until I finally found it in her pillow case. Melita wrote in her diary religiously and would never run away without taking it with her.

“I think you should file a police report,” I told Ms. Chang, hiding the diary behind my back, not that she was paying much attention to me anyway. “I think I know who did it.”

“Who?”

“Justin.”

“Justin?” Ms. Chang echoed me. “But he’s such a nice boy—you mean he..?”

“Yes, and I’m going to prove it,” I said getting off the bed and heading back down the hall. I knew there was something wrong with him and from what I’d seen, all the clues pointed to him. He had Melita wrapped around his finger, if he wanted to lead her out into the middle of nowhere unsuspectedly, he could’ve.

“Wait, what?” Ms. Chang called after me. “Chelsea?”

“Go to the police station and file a missing person’s report,” I called back as I shoved the diary into my bag. The police in this town were not very reliable. I didn’t trust them to be able to do their jobs. They would probably just read the diary, conclude Melita ran away because she was madly in love and stop looking for her after a week. For all intense of purposes, the missing report was the last resort. I was going to solve this thing myself.

The police arrived at the school the next morning to question some of the students. I answered each of their questions honestly, making sure to hammer home that this was unlike her and that Melita had no reason to run away. But I already knew the cards were stacked against me since barely any of the students knew her and the ones that did were convinced she ran way. I was able to corner Justin on his way back to class, after giving his statement.

“Hey, what did you with her?” I asked, crossing my arms over my chest. Justin turned to face me.

“With who?” He asked innocently.

“With Melita.” I snapped. “I know you did something with her!”

Justin’s hands were tucked in his pockets and I noticed his posture wasn’t as straight as normal. I found myself examining his facial expressions, searching for some sign of remorse. Who am I kidding? He probably doesn’t feel guilt; he’s probably proud. Just a twitch in his lips was all I needed to confirm my suspicion. He knows I know, so why doesn’t he just give it up already?

“What?” Justin blinked at me.

My eyes narrowed. “You know what I’m talking about. Your girlfriend, the one you keep tabs on 24/7, is missing. What did you do with her?”

“Whoa, hey. I have no idea what happened to her, okay?” Justin’s eyes widened slightly, his hands up in surrender. I’ll give him one thing I thought. He’s certainly a good actor. My hands balled into fists, my face heating up. I was trying not to yell, but I could barely contain my anger.

“Right, you’ve been stalking for weeks, and I’m just supposed to believe you know absolutely nothing?” It was then that I noticed I’d been backing him into a locker. “You’re obsessed with her!” I said, my finger jabbing his chest. A few kids had stopped in the hallway to stare at us, but I didn’t care.

“Look, I know nothing. Maybe you should hold off on your accusations before you get some real evidence.” Justin said, leaning towards me. I swear his voice makes my blood boil. “If I didn’t know any better, I would guess that you’re jealous of our relationship.” He said flashing the long-anticipated smirk. “Now if you’ll excuse me.” He turned and walked back to class just as the bell rang.

“Hey!” I called after him, as a wave of students blocked my view.

***

Monday, Sept. 19th

He’s sooooooooooooooooo cute! Oh my god. Words cannot express how cute he is. So Chels and I went to school early, like we do on Mondays so we can hang out in the music room before class, and Justin was waiting at my locker! Oh my god, I was so shy and awkward and I probably made a fool of myself... Anyways, Chelsea went to the bathroom and then Justin gave me a rose and he told me I looked cute. Can you believe it?? A hot guy thinks I’m cute!

I’m writing this at lunch while he’s playing the piano for me, how romantic is that? Well, it’s not really for me, I snuck in while he was playing—and oh my god … he’s not that good, but he’s still trying. Maybe he can play for our vocal class. How I would love to sing while a handsome man played the piano.

Melita’s writing made me want to roll my eyes after every paragraph, but I had to power through. I was determined to find something worthwhile.

Thursday, Sept. 29th

He’s started following me home … At first, I thought that maybe we lived in the same area, but if that was the case, why does he hide in the bushes when I turn around? I think he believes he’s being clever. Silly Justin; blonde hair doesn’t camouflage behind a green hedge. Maybe this is just a game of hide n’ seek and I’m supposed to find him?

I wonder if he knows I’ve noticed yet? I’m kind of too scared to tell him, though. If it was anyone else, there might be something wrong here, but he likes me. As long as it’s him, it’s alright, right? He’s just worried about me. He just wants to make sure I get home safe. Yeah…that must be it…what am I even worried about?

It occurred to be that this was something I probably should’ve taken to the police, but I couldn’t help but worry that if I did, the diary would be confiscated as evidence and I’d never be able to see it again. I’d effectively be removed from the case and I wasn’t going to let that happen.

Friday, Sept. 30th

JUSTIN’S TAKING ME TO THE DANCE! JUSTIN’S TAKING ME TO THE DANCE! Did I mention Justin’s taking me to the dance?? I’M SO EXCITED!! I went by LBD the other day, and I already know what dress I want! It’s white, with a sweetheart top, and it’s sparkly eeeee! I’m going as an angel. I’m so happy!!

I skipped ahead a few pages. I wasn’t skimming my best friend’s diary to hear about dresses for a Halloween dance. Go back to the stuff about how your boyfriend’s messed up! I thought to myself.

Tuesday, Oct. 4th

Justin wants me to lose 5 lbs.… I mean, I was considering getting a bit into shape at some point. Guess this is a good excuse to start now. After all, I don’t want any lumps on the sides of my dress. I should ask mom to get more lettuce the next time she goes shopping—and maybe I’ll pass on dinner tonight. Heh, Chelsea hit me when I told her that.

“Damn right, I hit you. You were being stupid!” I sighed to myself and kept reading.

But she doesn’t understand…Justin really likes me. I’m sure he knows what’s best for me. Besides, it's 5 lbs. What’s the harm anyway? And plus… I can’t complain… I can’t make him angry—I mean I don’t know what’ll happen if I do, but I don’t want to find out. Bad things happen when I make people angry…It’s best if I just stay on his good side. I have a good thing going, here…I don’t want to lose it. I can’t tell Chelsea any of this. I know she doesn’t understand. She just tells me that he’s “controlling”, but I know he isn’t. He’s really sweet once you get to know him. And he calls me his love, isn’t that adorable?? He means the world to me right now… I don’t want to disappoint him.

No wonder she wasn’t talking to me. I had to give her one thing, though, she was right. I didn’t understand the appeal in having a boyfriend/fiancé that was so controlling and, oh yeah, stalking me!

Wednesday, Oct. 5th

This is so weird…and I don’t know if it’s real or if I’m imagining it, but I think Justin might be breaking into my room at night. I’m sure that must sound insane…no, it must be insane… Sometimes when I wake up in the middle of the night, I see a shadowy figure hovering over my bed. I never see its face, and have always associated it with dreaming but…maybe? No, it can’t be… that wouldn’t make any sense…But I swear, sometimes just as I’m about to sleep, I hear someone whisper “my love” into my ear, as large arms embrace my body. It terrifies me, not because it may be him, but because I have no idea what’s real and what isn’t anymore…not after the lights go out. I’m sure if I told anyone this I’d be called crazy. And I’m sure if I then said that as a lonely person, “I’ve always longed for a midnight stalker, who comes through the window to see me off to sleep”, I’d be labelled just the same… I don’t know. There’s something kind of romantic about it; if it’s real.

Friday, Oct. 7th

The poor thing…he’s so lonely. Chelsea apparently yelled at him for leaving presents on my desk today and I’m so mad. He just wants to be loved…he just wants to feel appreciated. Why can’t she see that? Why can’t she cut him some slack? He hasn’t done anything to her. I love her, but she needs to get over herself. Justin’s a good guy. He’s incredibly selfless and kindhearted. And who can blame him for being a hopeless romantic? He was talking to me about his parents this afternoon…and how they’re never around. He told me everyone leaves him at some point. I felt so bad. I wish I could have been there for him sooner… I promised him I would never leave his side. He loves me… I know he’s worth it.

I continued reading whenever I had free time, including during some meals. Some entries were long in detail and I cringed at having to read about her fantasies with Justin, but I knew there was more to be discovered. A couple weeks into the month, her entries began mentioning running away with Justin. He’s got her brainwashed…that’s the only explanation.

Monday, Oct. 17th

This must be the happiest day of my life. I can’t believe the sweetest guy on earth asked me to marry him. So you know how excited I was about the dance? Multiply that by infinity because AHH I’m so happy!! Of course, I said ‘yes’, a million times yes. Spending every day with him is not enough, I want to spend the rest of my life with him too! He tells me he’ll do anything for me. No one’s ever told me that before. Last night he told me he would die for me… How did I get so lucky??

Tuesday, Oct. 18th

I’m so scared right now… I think someone just broke into my house. I just heard someone trying to open the front door … I thought it was my mom at first, but I think they picked the lock. I’m hiding under my blanket with a flashlight because I’m too scared to have the overhead light on. I can hear them coming up the stairs—oh my god I hope they don’t come into my room. I need to turn off my flashlight. If I die, tell Justin I love him.

Weeks after her initial disappearance, the “missing” posters were all torn down. The school seemed to stop caring and eventually forgot altogether. I was losing hope. Talking to my classmates was useless. I’d open my mouth and before I got a word in they’d be lecturing me about how I needed to stop spreading false accusations and that I was “harassing” Justin. The diary contained clues that pointed to Justin’s involvement, but it still appeared as if Melita had run away on her own. The last entry was something big, but it wasn’t definitive evidence that it was Justin who broke in.

I felt dead in the water. I had no idea where she was or how to find her. I was starting to question why I decided to take this on in the first place, and why I didn’t just hand the diary over to the police. Since I proved to be just as useless as them.

The weather was still chilly, with the occasional rainy day. It was on one of the dry days that I decided to ride my bike to school to shorten the trip in the cold. After the final bell went, I unlocked my bike from the fence and walked it to the corner. The skies were dark and cloudy, the air carrying an earthy aroma. I zipped my jacket up to shield myself from the oncoming wind. My hands were drier than normal as I clutched the handlebars on my bike. There was a car parked across the street from where I was standing, a black limo. I knew exactly who that belonged to.

I leant my bike against the fence again and ducked behind a nearby bush. I wasn’t sure if Justin was keeping her captive in his home or some other secret hideout, but if I at least knew where he lived, that was a start. Soon enough, the boy emerged from the crowd of students out front and got into the back seat of the car.

I hoped on my bike as the car pulled out and followed them down the street. The limo was going the opposite direction from home and I knew I would probably have to apologise to my mom for coming home late—but this was important.

It wasn’t long before it began to rain and then pour. The rain water quickly soaked through my jacket but I didn’t have time to stop and take it off. I peddled faster, staying roughly the span of another car behind the limo. It was easy to blend in the busier streets, I just had to keep my eyes on the one fancy car. The limo finally drove out into the middle of nowhere—because of course, he lived out in the middle of nowhere. To add to the growing stack of clichés, not in my favor, the path had gone from pavement to dirt. The rain continued to pour and I started feeling paranoid about the muddy ground. At some point, the driver must have seen me trailing behind because the vehicle then sped ahead and I had to peddle twice as fast as I already was just to keep up.

I kept up for as long as I could, my lungs and legs burning. My knuckles were white from gripping the handle bars so tight, my eyes squinting to see through the rain. My clothes were soaked and clinging to my skin, I could barely feel the pelting rain at the rate I was moving. The limo sped up again, the tires spraying muddy water as it drove through a puddle. I continued to peddle, my calves were screaming.

The limo then turned a sharp corner and I tried to follow my front tire slipped in the mud and skidded to the side, throwing me off my bike. I rolled across the dirt as the lime, groaning in pain. I looked up as the limo sped off. My legs were scraped through the rips in my jeans and my entire front was covered in mud but I would run if I had to. Unfortunately, the limo was long gone from sight.

I stood up slowly, my body finally feeling the effects of peddling so fast for so long. After all that, I decided it was better to walk my bike back…at least until I was on pavement again. When I arrived back home, I examined my cuts in the bathroom mirror and bandaged myself up. Afterwards, I tossed everything I was wearing into the laundry. Next time I would be more prepared.

Part 3: Chelsea

Justin was absent the next day at school. It worried me, not because he might be at home guarding Melita, but because he might have skipped the country already before I could turn him into the police. The day progressed slower than normal and I often found myself drumming on my desk, anxiously. I had a plan: after school, I’d do my best to navigate my way back to Justin’s house and break Melita free with the hedge trimmers I snuck into my backpack. I wasn’t sure what Melita would be tied with, but I highly doubted she would be allowed to roam free. Otherwise, she would have run already. Ah, who am I kidding? She’d probably be too in love to leave, anyway.

When the long-anticipated bell rang, I jogged out the front door and unlocked my bike. Unfortunately, I couldn’t remember exactly where I’d gone, but I knew the general direction and I knew that once I found that dirt road, I was on the right track.

Much to my surprise, the weather held up and I was able to ride towards his house with ease. I peddled through the streets until I came to the same dirt road (which was surprisingly much easier to see with the sun out). The houses were spread out, separated by large bodies of grass and trees. The grass looked healthy and well groomed, despite the size of land—damn rich people, I thought as I continued down the path.

Justin’s house was at the end of a long gravel path, in front of which was a small garden, surrounding a white fountain in the middle. The house itself had to be twice the size of mine, with two large, white columns on either side of the door. With the exception of the columns and porch, the house was largely built of red brick with ivy growing along the sides.

It occurred to me then that Justin probably wouldn’t be pleased to see me, ergo it wasn’t wise to simply waltz up to his doorstep and try and get invited in. I was going to have to find another way in. To my surprise, there was a window open on the far side of the house. I hide my bike in some nearby bushes and tugged the window open enough to slip through.

What I assumed was a living room was both large and gorgeous, with several fancy chairs and couches. There was a fire place, framed with a white mantle. The floor had a wood finish, with rugs under the furniture. There was even a crystal chandelier hanging from the ceiling. I made my way through the room, trying to keep my footsteps as quiet as possible. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, but I knew that if I were a kidnapper, I would keep my kidnapee somewhere where there were no windows. I went through a couple more rooms that carried the same magazine quality as the first. While I was pretty sure Justin wasn’t even home, I was starting to get the sickening feeling that I had been wrong about him. What if Melita wasn’t in his home and I was only wasting my time risking getting caught breaking and entering?

Just as I was about to give up and go home, one particular door caught my eye. It was only open a crack, but no light could be seen from behind it, unlike the other doorways. At first, I thought it was a closet, but then upon opening it, I saw that it lead to a staircase into the darkness.

I took out my phone to use as a flashlight; I was going to call Melita’s mother and then the police. I made my way down the stone steps.

At the bottom of the steps, there was a large room, lit only by candles. There was a love seat in the far corner of the room, beside which was a large bed. There was a small girl with long dark hair, chained to the wall. Her pale body was curled in a fetal position against the wall, her hair draping her bony arms.

“Melita…” the words barely left my lips above a whisper. Her head snapped in my direction before immediately shielding her eyes from the light. I turned the flashlight off and ran to her side. I was at a loss for words…moreover, I couldn’t believe I was right.

Melita’s tiny limbs were trembling as she peeked through her fingers at me. “Ch-Chelsea?” she said softly. “W-why are you here?”

“I’m rescuing you from a psychopath,” I said as I pulled the hedge trimmers out of my bag. Melita flinched at first, and then relaxed when she saw that I was going for the chain.

“Y-you can’t be here…” her voice sounded old and tired, hardly like that of a young girl’s. She sat still when I attempted to cut the chain. I still couldn’t believe he’d shackled her to the wall of a dungeon instead of handcuffing her to a bed (that would have been way easier).

“Well, I am, and I’m not leaving here without you,” I said firmly. The hedge trimmers were next to useless on the metal chain and I started to worry. I hadn’t accounted for extra time in the physically-freeing process—if Justin were to walk down at that moment and I would be screwed.

“Why?” she whispered. “I don’t deserve this...” she looked up at me, her bangs falling in her eyes. She looked like a lost child. “He told me you hated me... that you were glad I was gone...” she continued, softly.

“What? Why would I be glad you were gone?” I frowned going back to cutting the chain. “You've been my best friend since Elementary school.” The trimmers continued to snap shut, merely scratching the surface of the metal. I clenched the handles tighter. “You shouldn’t listen. He was lying to you.” I muttered, trying to cut the chain faster.

“He loves me. He would never lie to me.” Her voice cracked

The trimmers snapped shut again and I found myself hitting the trimmers against the wall in frustration. “He kidnapped you!

“He was trying to protect me!” Melita shouted back.

“He’s crazy!”

There was a loud crash from behind us. My head snapped towards the doorway where Justin was standing, a tray of broken glass at his feet.

“You...” he growled, pointing at me. “How did you get in here?” Justin stepped over the glass to me, lifting me up by the shirt.

“Whoa, hey—oh wow you’re really strong!” I said as I was pulled to my feet. The candles casted eerie shadows over his face as he scowled. I had to get out of the basement and call the police while I still had him in one place.

“Don’t hurt her!” I heard Melita cry from behind me as she yanked on her chain.

“Nothing can stand in the way of my love for you. She must be eliminated.”

“I don’t think so,” I said using his moment of distractions to whack him over the head with the hedge trimmers. Justin cried out in pain, clutching his head and I scrambled towards the door. I was able to get signal halfway up the stairs. Ms. Chang picked up after the first ring.

“Hello?”

“Ms. Chang no time to talk—call the police! Justin has your daughter!” I shouted. I gave her the address and pressed that she hurry. Justin growled again like a monster out of a comic book, charging after me. I bolted the rest of the way up the stairs but he caught my ankle, pulling my leg out from under me. I fell, having the wind knocked out of me as my torso hit the tile. I turned on my back, swinging my other leg up, which he only caught as well, dragging my body down the rest out the way. I cried, my phone still clutched tightly in my hand.

“Chelsea!? What’s going on??”

“Ms. Chang call the police—get off the phone and call the police right now!” I shrieked throwing the phone right at Justin’s head. Man, I’ve got good aim today. I smirked, kicking my legs free. I sprung up and pushed him down to the ground.

“Mom?” Melita shouted, continuing to yank on her chain. “Mom!”

“My baby!” Ms. Chang cried over the line. I went to get the phone again but Justin caught one of my arms pulling me down with him. He rolled over on top of me, pinning my wrists.

“Hang up and call the police!!” I shrieked, squirming violently beneath him. We continued wrestling and I managed to get on top long enough to get up and run back up the stairs. I made it to one of the living rooms. I dashed through the room, knocking over as much furniture as I could. I wasn’t sure I could outrun him, so I had to create as many barriers as possible.

“Come back here!” Justin shouted hurdling over the few obstacles I was strong enough to move into place. My heart was pounding in my ears as I heard him gaining on me. The hedge trimmers in his hand.

My heart skipped a beat and I scrambled into the next room. It appeared to a kitchen, with a long wooden table with several chairs on each side. This room seemed to be the farthest I could go towards that side of the house. I looked around frantically, trying to figure out which direction to run next. Where’d he go?

I suddenly felt something hard hit the back of my head. I stumbled forward into the table, my nails digging into the surface as I tried to hold myself up. My head throbbed as I turned onto my back, his strong hand clutching my throat. I could feel my pulse in my ears again as I tried desperately to pull his hand away. Justin looked down at me, smirking.

“No one can stand in between me and my love.” He said bringing the hedge trimmers dangerously close to my head. I gasped, squirming under him—it was ad if he’d suddenly gotten twice as strong. I felt my stamina diminish; I wasn’t sure how much longer I could do this.

“If you hurt me... it’ll only add to your sentence,” I managed to say, using my last bit of strength to dig my nails into his arm. His grip tightened again. “You’ll be locked up for good. You won’t be able to see your love again-”

Justin raised the trimmers above his head. I squeezed my eyes shut, knowing that I’d black out any second if I didn’t feel the strike to my skull first.

Then, by some stroke of luck, I heard sirens in the distance. I heard Justin curse under his breath as he dropped the trimmers. One of the handles hit my head before falling on the table. Justin let go of me before bolting from the kitchen and climbed out the nearest window.

It was then that my legs gave out and I collapsed on to the floor, massaging my sore neck and jaw. The police busted through the front door within minutes.

Melita was later cut free and I held her in my arms in the car ride back to her house. Her slender fingers clutched my shirt as she cried softly. The police weren't able to catch him...just as I suspected. I was just glad my friend was finally safe...

#short story #kidnapping #yandere #male yandere #danger #dangerous romance #angst #crime #stalking #cautionary tale #infatuation #emotional abuse

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norafinds · 7 years

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ATWWV - Laila Shalimar

Third post of the Around The World With Vintage and I cannot be more excited for you to read this. Today I would like to introduce you to the Australian-Pakistani pin up Midcentury Mermaid aka Laila Shalimar. I was really excited when I discovered Laila as she is definitely the perfect person to feature on this series. I started this series because I wanted to talk to vintage wearers about culture, nationalities, and identities. Laila has the most fascinating stories growing up in Pakistan and moving to Australia at 16. I thought it would great for me (and you) to learn about Pakistan and its history. I asked her about the Westernised Pakistan that I've seen in vintage photographs as well as her views on being a Desi woman and a pin up girl.

Hi Laila, tell us a little bit about you!

My name is Laila Shalimar. I am a twenty something tattooed pinup of colour from Western Australia. When I am not working one of my two reception jobs, you can find me in the library of Edith Cowan University where I am a student of Criminology and Counter Terrorism. I am passionate about writing and the art of storytelling. Being able to speak 2 languages other than English, linguistics have always been a source of comfort for me. The written word has been a source of solace during some of the most isolating and vulnerable moments of my life and I am grateful to be able to share my experiences with others through the power of writing. I have had some of my pieces published by magazines such as Adore Pinup Magazine, Retro Vintage Review, Damsel Magazine, Dircksey and I hope to continue writing for as long as my mind will let me tell stories.

What is your racial and cultural background?

Because I don’t have an Anglo Australian accent, I often get people asking me where I am “really from”. This is usually after a long and embarrassing guessing game where every country but Pakistan is thrown in as a possibility. I dread these kind of interactions because it makes me feel like my accent, name and appearance prevents me from being considered “Aussie” and also because I never know how people will react to my “identity story”. For one thing, I never know whether they are asking about my ethnicity/race or where I have lived before I moved to Australia. First and foremost, I consider myself a Desi Australian. I was born in Peshawar, Pakistan to a Muslim Pashtun father and a mother of mixed Indo European ancestry. I grew up between Karachi, Islamabad, and Peshawar. I have also lived in the UK and briefly in some parts of Europe. Because I went to an English Grammar school for most my life and was practically raised on American cable, I have a very American sounding accent. I moved to Australia with my family in 2013 and have lived here ever since. Because I was sixteen at the time, I never managed to pick up an Australian accent.

People make the mistake of assuming that “Pakistani” is a racial or ethnic identity when it is merely a nationality. Pakistan is a small country that only came into existence in 1947. Prior to that it was part of the Indian subcontinent and fell under the British Raj. My father’s generation was the first generation to be born in Pakistan. My grandparents were born in British India as it was called. Pakistan hosts a multitude of races and ethnicities much like Australia does and many of us refer to ourselves as Desi or “of the motherland/subcontinent”. I like to think of myself as a Desi Australian because I have a very mixed ethnic background, most of which can be traced to the Indian subcontinent. I value all these beautiful aspects of my ethnicity and often wonder what stories lie hidden in my genes. In my appearance I see a kaleidoscope- as time progresses and my features change, I cannot help but wonder about the ancestors in the obscured and missing branches of my family tree.

First prime minister and first lady of Pakistan during their US visit. The two have been credited for the Pakistan Movement that gained the country its independence. Photo by unknown, provided by US Department of State as part of the album "Visit of his Excellency Liaquat Ali Khan, Prime Minister of Pakistan, to the United States of America, May 3 to May 26, 1950." (Missouri Digital Heritage) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Tell us about your family and your childhood

My mother was 25 when she had me. She had only been married to my father for a year and they lived in a teeny tiny little studio apartment in Peshawar in a “not so desirable” part of town. My mother said she spent a lot of her pregnancy reading and eating tropical fruits. The day I made my entry into the world, she had been reading Valley of the Dolls and eating pomegranates and rock melon. It was a scorching 39 degrees and they had no air conditioning in their apartment. I was born on the 12th of June 1987, in the middle of a heatwave, in a small maternity home at 3pm in the afternoon. My parents did not know they were expecting a daughter and in a society that valued a male heir so strongly, my birth went largely unnoticed outside my immediate family. I was given an old Persian name that I wish I could share with your readership because it has the most delicate sound when pronounced correctly. I was raised in a household full of books, laughter, kitchen table science experiments and the concept of a Ubiquitous but loving God who didn’t care whether I prayed to him in the customary Arabic or my mother tongue of Pashto. I was raised to ask questions and my parent’s ensured they always answered truthfully and to the best of their knowledge.

I was soon joined by two siblings, a brother and a sister and we lived a pretty happy and carefree life amidst the political turmoil of Pakistan’s 90s. I grew up worshipping The Spice Girls, swooning over Nick Carter from the Backstreet Boys, having slumber parties with my schoolmates where we watched movies like Clueless and Never been kissed over and over while painting our toenails bright blue. Summer vacations were spent finding inventive ways to stay cool during ”load-shedding” (where an entire suburb loses power for a week at a time), trips to the British Council Library in Islamabad to borrow books like Matilda and the BFG, eating gola ghanda (local shaved ices) with the other neighbourhood kids and going on long road trips to see our grandparents in Peshawar. And in the background of my childhood and early teens governments were sworn in, governments were kicked out. Each party made promises it would not or could not keep before being replaced in some kind of political ousting. Sometimes there would be Union strikes that would result in school being called off for a few days and we would grow bored and restless indoors waiting to get back to our schoolyard and our friends. Pakistan in the 90s was the best bits of the west and the east tossed together like Chaat Masala on fries, coca cola with Naan Kebab, and Friday prayers after the Power Puff Girls marathon. Had I known what was to follow in the years to come, I would have committed more to memory.

I feel like my life can neatly be divided into two parts: pre and post 9/11. The collapse of the Twin Towers on September 11th and the so called “War on Terror” that followed had a major impact on the world I lived in. While Pakistan has by no means known peace and tranquility in its short existence thanks to our politicians, our military and our religious right, this time the instability was coming from politicians in an office more than 12,000 KM away from us. In war, they say, it is children that become the first casualties of damage physical and spiritual. The thing that will haunt me for the rest of my life are the tired eyes of small Afghan children attempting to sleep in strange doorsteps on freezing winter mornings. It was October when they first started piling into Peshawar, children no older than 5 or 6 unaccompanied by parents in the back of trucks huddling together like chickens roosting. The local hospitals were full of children with injuries from shellings, shrapnel embedded in limbs that often needed amputation, sometimes with very little anaesthetic. Often times the littlest ones would perish due to chest infections left unattended. Our country did not have the finances nor the infrastructure to take on the sheer volume of refugees that were making their way across the Khyber Pass once more. Aid arrived from the UN at a snail’s pace and the US happily wrote off these people as “collateral damage” forgetting that they were the children and family of the men and women who fought the Russians for them in the 80s.

My mother and grandmothers helped where they could by organising “khairaat” (charity food) but there was never enough food to stave off hunger just as there would never be enough comfort for children displaced in the middle of the night. I remember hearing a doctor ask an Afghan boy of maybe six what he wanted to be when he grew up in an attempt to distract him from the tetanus shot he was about to receive. The boy with big fat tears rolling down his cheek replied that he wanted to be “a grown up” and look after his mother who was still “back home”. Things like these hurt to think about even a decade later. I was 15 then but when I look back I feel as if I was watching the world with old eyes. I feel younger now than I did then somehow. Perhaps it is because I am now watching the same things happen from far away, on a television set that I have the luxury to switch off. Some nights I think about that boy and his mother, and other children I saw on my way to my grandmother’s house or our in Baara Market. I can switch off the Tv but the human mind refuses to co operate in the same way.

How did your family decide to move to Australia? How was the experience like for all of you?

Shortly after my 15th birthday I fell into a deep and unshakeable depression. It manifested itself in very violent and angry behaviour. I got into numerous physical fights, refused to hand in assignments and spent most of my time in the school library reading instead of attending classes. I remember thinking of the futility of education when it was likely that we would all end up dead at the flick of a button. What was the point of calculus, social studies and human biology in the event of an all out World War like they kept talking about on TV when I went home every evening sulking, writing terribly morose journal entries in my diary and crying myself to sleep. I could not eat because of constant anxiety and made several attempts to end my own life when it got out of hand. My parent’s sensed that the environment I was in was causing me great distress. They were also extremely worried about the political circumstances in Pakistan and what it meant for my father’s job and our futures. My parents had applied for American, Canadian, Dutch and Australian visas. The interview processes were often followed by months of silence and then rejection letters. In January 2003, I was 6 months shy of my 16th birthday, due to sit my O level exams and had completely stopped attending school altogether. My parents were frantic. What future was there for a woman in Pakistan especially if she didn’t even have a basic high school graduation? They tried over and over to talk to me about my poor performance at school and my lacklustre behaviour at home but to no avail. I was not living, merely surviving day to day, waiting for something to drop on my house or hurt someone I loved. It was an awful time for me.

On the 11th of March 2004 at 2pm in the afternoon, I was at home with my father who was reading a newspaper in the living room. I remember every detail of this day because that was the day the mailman brought the one envelope that changed the rest of my life. I cannot remember if it was from the Australian Embassy or whether it was from my father’s colleague who had ties to the embassy but I remember him opening the envelope, reading its contents several times before looking like he was going to throw up. “As of tomorrow” he said “I want you to start considering options for your future. Australia is a very competitive country with very intelligent people and you’re going to need to be on top of your class to go to their Universities”. That was it. We were moving to Australia. My family had been granted a 5 year multiple visa and with it came the option of residency and citizenship. The only catch was that we had to be in Australia by the 5th of May. We had little under 2 months to move across continents and start a new life.

With a suitcase and a backpack each, we said our final goodbyes to family and relatives at Peshawar Airport. One of my father’s work colleagues accompanied us to the terminal gates. They had been friends since college. I heard from my mother several years later that he had been assassinated. Rumour was that someone from a rival political party had decided to take a hit out on him to ensure a district election win. The more I think about things like this, the more I take comfort in the workings of Australia’s political and legal system. It is by no means perfect but the safety it offers those of us who are lucky enough to yield it is comforting.

Does your love of vintage stem from your cultural background?

There is a Pashtun saying that our home comes alive in our stories. That is to say our histories and therefore our cultural identity provides us with a sense of belonging or home and this really resonates with me. My family moved to Australia on such short notice, with such little time on our hands that there was never any closure. We barely brought anything with us to the new country to remember it by. I never got to say goodbye properly to my life, my family or friends. I was under the impression that our move was temporary and that I would one day return to my life as I left it. Nearly 14 years have passed and I have not visited “home”. I have lost grandparents, schoolmates, and relatives. Shops, restaurants and parks I went to as a child have been reduced to rubble or ruin. People have moved on. The Pakistan I felt safe in, the Pakistan I grew up in is like a little figurine in a snow globe, a place frozen in time, in a little bubble of reminiscence. There is no reclaiming it nor will I be able to return to those carefree and happy times.

We have seen numerous articles about how Westernised Pakistan was before the 1980s. Is there a lot of vintage now in Pakistan? Do people hold on to those memorabilia or were they destroyed?

One of my favourite pieces of furniture back home was a chest of drawers that my mother had as a teenager in the 1970s. The drawers were part of an old deco set that my maternal grandparents were given as a wedding gift. In the topmost drawer, underneath some very “groovy” 60s lining paper was a little peace symbol, “Janis Joplin forever” and my mother’s initials. When I inherited the bedroom set at 13, my mother showed me this little bit of graffiti and said “When I was a teenager, i wrote this in the drawer to piss your grandmother off”. I was equal parts mesmerised and weirded out. My mother was once a teenager who liked scribbling on furniture to make her mother angry. When I recounted this story in my year 12 drama class, my classmates attempted to discredit me. In their minds it was impossible to believe that a teenager that lived in 1970s Pakistan had ever heard of Janis Joplin. The Pakistan they had heard of in pre social media 2003 was the one overrun by the Taliban and women in blue burqas. It was hard for them to comprehend the Pakistan my parents grew up in.

My father fondly recounts stories of his American Hippie friends whom he met in Peshawar restaurants en route to Kabul. They had been traveling from India and wanted to visit the Bamiyan Buddha statues in Afghanistan. Pakistan was an important destination on what was called the "hippie trail" – an overland route taken by young western backpackers between 1967 and 1979 that ran from Turkey, across Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India, usually ending in Nepal. Numerous low-budget hotels and a thriving tourist industry sprang up (in Peshawar, Lahore and Karachi) to accommodate these travellers. The hippie trail began eroding after the 1977 military coup in Pakistan, the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran and the beginning of the Afghan civil war (in 1979).

My father delighted in telling me stories of discos and cinemas in Kabul and how he and his cousins would go on weekend trips to buy the latest in American style fashion from the markets there. I have seen photos of my mum in smart embroidered Kaftans wearing ridiculously wide bell bottom trousers topped off with big round sunnies. Like many teenage Pakistani girls of her time, my mother’s fashion choices were influenced by the 1974 box-office hit Miss Hippie. A cautionary tale of sorts, the film depicted the "effect hippie lifestyle and fashion were having on Pakistani youth" but ironically this movie seemed to draw more and more youngsters into the hippie fashion scene. When my parents and my relatives talk on skype its not long before the conversation turns to “the good ol days in Pakistan” and if I had not seen the photos with my own eyes I too would have thought they were lying to me. Live music, great food, lots of booze and dancing were the hallmarks of the scene in cities like Karachi and Lahore. Sadly, a lot of the amazing venues and attractions they spoke so lovingly about were closed down by Military Dictator Zia Ul Haq’s government in April 1977.

[Hippie trail into Aghanistan] - By Karte: NordNordWest, Lizenz: Creative Commons by-sa-3.0 de, CC BY-SA 3.0 de, Link

Is there any Pakistani vintage piece that you covet?

There are 3 pieces that I hold very dear to me that I managed to bring with me from Pakistan. The first is a pair of gold earrings my grandmother wore at one of her wedding events in the 50s. My mother wore the very same earrings to her engagement party in 1985 and I wore them as part of my day wear for Miss Pinup Australia 2016. The second is a pair of italian leather shoes my grandmother pestered my grandfather to buy her from Bata Shoes in the late 60s. The number of times they have been cobbled and resoled is incredible! I still wear them in photo shoots from time to time. The last and most important piece to me is my grandmothers rosary. My grandfather had bought her the rosary when he went to Mecca to pay pilgrimage in the early 60s. They are made of a strange kind of early plastic that glows in the dark. My grandmother would constantly be clicking the beads of the rosary, passing each through her nimble calloused fingers, reading short passages from the Quraan. She was hardly ever seen without them. The last time I saw her, she was sitting in front of an old gas heater all misty eyed with her rosary in her hand. When I sat next to her tying my shoelaces, she looked at me and said “i want you to borrow this rosary from me for now but remember to bring it back with you from Australia”. My grandmother passed away two years ago. The rosary has been on my night stand for 14 years, i never got a chance to return it to her.

Are there many Desi women in the vintage scene?

I think there have always been a number of us interested in vintage in some form of the other but the problem has always been exposure to our history and one another. With the advent of social media platforms such as instagram and facebook, we have started becoming more visible. It has become easy to find treasure troves of images, articles and videos from the bygone days showcasing our unique cultures. I know of several vintage loving Desi women that I met on autonomous Women of Colour spaces but wouldn’t have otherwise met because they are self conscious of how they look in vintage. The fact that the presentation of vintage culture and pin up culture is so euro and anglocentric makes a lot of pinups of colour, particularly darker skinned and more ethnic looking pinups feel too self conscious to put themselves out on social media. They often feel like they are “doing it wrong”. Our features and even our vintage ethnic fashion don’t readily fall into the already pre ordained and celebrated vintage or pinup look. An example of this is how coveted pale and almost snowy white skin is in the vintage community. Darker skinned Desi women are already maligned in their own communities for their complexions, and yet are indirectly made to feel unwanted and unattractive in their beloved subculture as well. It is harder for Desi pinups to gain visibility and popularity on social media because history has never placed us in a position to be thought about or considered desirable or conventionally attractive.

Do you find it difficult to be a Desi woman in the pin up industry? Do you think people are surprised that Desi women can and want to be sexy?

I remember when I raised the issue of the lack of diversity in Pinup and vintage publications in Adore Pinup Magazine last year. There was a slough of accusations thrown at myself and the magazine. I was labelled everything from a “reverse racist”, to “a toxic negative nancy”, to a “jealous and ungrateful pinup” all for that one article that discussed the need for change in the Australian vintage scene and the global pinup industry. Apparently, if you are a Desi woman, or a woman of colour, you are expected to be grateful for the one or two token pinups of colour a magazine publishes a year. God forbid you raise hell over the lack of diversity you see in the vintage scene or if you attempt to claim an autonomous online space to celebrate women like yourself. I was lucky that the editor of Adore Pinup Magazine, Brianna Blackheart, addressed the issues I discussed in the article publicly on all of Adore’s social media platforms and backed me up in my arguments. I don’t think I would have continued writing about these issues without her support so early on in my writing.

As far as creating Desi and PoC representation in vintage and pinup goes, the conservative desis in the community feel that I am too racy, too vocal and too sexual to “appropriately” represent Desi femininity while the conservative non PoC feel that I am trying to create a “racial divide” by working on projects such as Pinups of Colour that exclusively celebrates racially and ethnically diverse pinup communities. There is no winning! I feel like people want women like myself to pick a very narrow and carefully constructed box and sit in it very quietly. Every now and then a nice whitewashed hand will come in and either grab my ethnic outfits to be appropriated and if I am VERY good and quiet I will be paraded around like a ventriloquist's dummy parroting phrases that implying (non existent) diversity in the scene. I am sorry but I cannot do that. I refuse to shrink myself to make other people feel comfortable by helping to maintain a status quo and it is just as well as I find it impossible to follow guidelines in order to fit into these boxes anyway!

Staff and students of St Patrick's Teachers' Training College, Karachi, 1956. You can see that for some time during the 1950s-1970s Pakistan strongly adopted Western fashion and culture - Source - Wikimedia Commons.

How did you start wearing vintage? Have you been back since? How do you think you will be accepted there with your tattoos and your look?

I will be honest, I spent my teenage years riddled with insecurity and self doubt because I was one of the few ethnic Desi girls in my predominantly white high school. I stuck out like a sore thumb and at a time where there was a growing mistrust of people from Muslim countries, I was either isolated by my peers or ostracised by them. Vintage clothing gave me a way to feel comfortable with a body that at times felt like a battlefield. As a new migrant whose parents didn’t have much of an income, op-shopping was equal parts necessity and thrill! Much like vintage fashion, tattoos have helped me embrace my body. I wouldn’t say all my tattoos have stories behind them but a vast majority of them were inspired by moments in my life where I felt something move me to my core. I view my body as a passport and see each tattoo as a little stamp for moments in my journey, from my darkest moments to the happier ones.

Tattooing in the Indian subcontinent is not unheard of but it isn’t as common as it is in Australia. This is partly due to conservative culture in countries with little separation between church and state. Tribal facial tattoos were common among the early pagan Pashtuns, however, my ethnic group gave up these customs upon the advent of Arab Islam in the 12th century. While some tribal women in Pakistan’s far north still practise stick and poke facial tattooing, a manual method involving charcoal pigment being inserted into the skin using hand fashioned bone needles, tattooing as a Pashtun art form is almost non existent these days. When our tattooing history is brought up in conversations nowadays, our people refer to that period in our history as the “dark ages” and dismiss the practise as uncivilised. As I haven’t visited Pakistan since starting my body modification journey, I really don’t know how people would react to my body art or style of dressing. I suppose it would be no different to how tattooed ladies got treated in the 20s and 30s in America or Australia!

What is the one thing you want people to know about you?

I am one of those people who is passionate about social justice issues, particularly issues pertaining to the representation and rights of people of colour. Sometimes this passion is severely misread as spiteful. I am angry. Of course! How can you not be angry in this day and age when women, especially women of colour, receive the short end of the stick? My anger derives from hurt, from isolation and from the yearning to have my identity recognised as valid. It is frustrating to be denied representation in the subcultures I love. It is disappointing to be overlooked on the basis of appearance. It is heartbreaking to be denied a space in my own ethnic and cultural group because I defy convention. I am angry but I am not doing it to be spiteful. I am doing it because nice women seldom make history. There are some people who have the luxury to stand by idly and watch the world plummet into darkness. I do not have this luxury. It’s not in my nature nor is it in my favour to do so. Besides, I would much rather be a cactus than a wallflower any day.

#norafinds #around the world with vintage #atwwv #interview #series #blog #pakistan #pakistani #australian #australia #pin up #midcentury mermaid #laila shalimar

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its-lifestyle · 5 years

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The gabled roofless conservatory is probably the first thing you notice as you approach the row of single-storey houses. Set against a white facade, it stands in stark contrast to the nondescript link houses surrounding it, and exudes an appealing freshness.

One thing noticeably missing from the front porch is the mandatory parking space, which has been purposefully relocated to the back. That space is occupied by a small garden and a partially-walled pathway, leading us towards the main door.

Once inside, there is an immediate brightness to the interiors – elusive of typical intermediate terrace houses – thanks to the two courtyards within. Rays of light filter down generously to the staircase on the right, illuminating the rectangular water feature below.

Welcome to 113 Ikon, a 2,150sq ft (200sq m) double-storey house that serves as a short-term rental property. Located in Taman Tun Dr Ismail, Kuala Lumpur, the three-bedroom property is a project by design studio Paperspace.

Wooden pendant lights anchor the dining area.

Renovation work was completed last April – after about a year – and the space opened for business about a month after that. Owner Penny Chow first bought the house – which is at least a decade old – to rent it out.

“But I felt I couldn’t get much rental from such an old house, which had various issues. So I figured I’d renovate it, be happy with it when I look at it, and then thought why not rent it out on Airbnb.

“This was a single-storey house with a high ceiling. So what I did was build a mezzanine floor to accommodate the bedrooms and a conservatory upstairs,” says Chow, 30, who lives with her parents a few streets away in the same neighbourhood.

The steel diamond mesh-based conservatory and front garden are meant to green up the streetscape, according to the designers. The roofless conservatory features a swing and some plants, making it a great hangout place at night.

The conservatory is fitted with a swing and makes a great place to relax, especially at night.

Maximising the living space within was also one of Chow’s objectives. A room originally located downstairs was done away with to double up on the living room area. Chow also did away with the typical sliding door and installed one that opens outwards and upwards.

“I wanted to make the living space as large as possible, so this single-piece door actually opens all the way up to 90° so you can see the garden,” she explains as she pushes out the glass door that separates the living room from the outdoor garden.

“What my architect friends and I wanted was to be able to see the garden from every corner of the living area,” adds Chow. Architects Winston Zane See and his wife Amy Ang, a husband-and-wife team at Paperspace, wanted the place to be unique and did a complete makeover of the place.

Besides the eye-catching conservatory, they also designed two courtyards to introduce natural sunlight and ventilation into the house. Realising that Chow was fond of white, See and Ang worked with that theme, both inside and out.

“The black and white look really appeals to me. Then I basically added some colours with the furniture pieces,” says Chow, who trained as an orthoptist, or eye care practitioner who specialises in eye movement disorders, in Australia.

The result is a contemporary chic interior with an eclectic mix of furniture and furnishings curated by Chow, who currently works in her family business. Wooden pendant lights above the dining table anchor the dining area, while a dark green sofa bed, arm chair, rocking chair and some side tables dot the rest of the living room.

A touch of the traditional comes in the form of a dowry chest gifted to Chow by her best friend’s grandmother, as well as some Oriental drum stools.

Recently, Chow had the roof redone. She maintained the skylight there but added horizontal shades under it, which can be opened up manually. “Originally, this entire area was all polycarbonate sheet so it was very, very hot,”she says, pointing to the roof as we stood on the second floor.

Chow says what she loves best about the house is the white theme.

To further add colour to the interiors, each bathroom features a different colour theme. Parts of the wall and the sink cabinet are in either blue, pink or yellow, set against otherwise white subway wall tiles.

So what does Chow like best about the house? “I like the colours. I definitely love the fact that (the designers) have fulfilled my want and need with the whites. I think what’s great about white that people don’t realise is if you’re not happy with the white on the wall, you can just paint over it again.”

Despite the time and effort spent during renovation and furnishing the house, Chow is happy with the end result. “(The project) becomes almost like an obsession really. But there is great satisfaction in seeing how it has turned out despite all the hard work!” she ends.

Creating a liveable space

The carpark was moved to the back to free up the garden area in front. Photo: Paperspace

Architect Winston See, co-founder of design studio Paperspace, talks about the design process behind 113 Ikon.

What were your initial thoughts and plans when you were first asked to design 113 Ikon? When I was engaged to design Ikon, I pitched the idea of having a design which prioritises human lifestyle instead of possessions such as motor vehicles. Penny (Chow) was very encouraging and open to new ideas and we never looked back since.

How did the final design come about? Since the house is located very close to the corner lot and it has a 10ft (3m) wide back lane, I thought it was a good opportunity to explore a new design prototype, where the car park is now switched to the back of the house. This arrangement allows the living and dining areas (which most likely will be occupied most of the time) to have a garden view. (Inspired) by some of the old shophouse designs, we introduced not one, but two courtyards to provide lots of natural sunlight and cross ventilation.

In terms of the interior, we’re just trying to incorporate Penny as much as possible into it. Having a white space with pops of colours and textures is literally who she is; on the surface she’s a simple person, down-to-earth, and kind of minimalist. But she’s incredibly bubbly and outgoing at the same time, always smiling and laughing beneath the calm exterior.

Which was the most difficult aspect of the design and/or renovation and why? I would say the most difficult part of the design/renovation was the budget management. Having a very, very old house and trying to completely change the configuration of the house is an expensive thing to do. However with many compromises and endurance, I’m proud to say that we’ve done the best we can with what we’ve got and have absolutely no regrets.

What kind of feelings do you hope to evoke in people who stay at Ikon? I’d like the people to experience the essence of tropical living in a modern context. A lot of people prioritise floor area and are always looking to maximise the built-up but I dare say that size does not matter. It’s all about balance between outdoors and indoors, and hopefully merging them together to create a very liveable and sustainable environment in our hot and humid climate.

from Style – Star2.com http://bit.ly/2JPofzy

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jeremystrele · 5 years

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A Home Of Joy and Light, With Alex McCabe Of Kip&Co

Homes

by Lucy Feagins, Editor

The bright and joyful house of Kip&Co co-founder Alex McCabe, partner Bobby Babb and 10-month old Quincy! Pink concrete bench by Rutso, ‘the one thing I absolutely wanted for the house and love it’, Alex tells. Crocodile bamboo quartz splashback, found by Bobby and Alex peeking out from a dusty corner of a stone warehouse in Melbourne. Aged brass cabinets ‘roughed up” by Alex and Bobby with some apple cider vinegar. Black paper maché vase from India. Blue and white Italianate ceramic pot handed down from Alex’s grandma. A mix of European pottery and Indian paper maché vases on the shelf. Custom-made stools by Jason Blake. Mud Australia Pebble Bowl Large in Slate used as a fruit bowl. Photo – Caitlin Mills. Styling – Annie Portelli.

The hanging garden is one of Alex’s greatest green thumb achievements ‘though it’s on a watering timer so I can claim no credit’. Black and white vase on shelf by Claire Johnson. Jimmy the Wheaten Terrier in the background! Photo – Caitlin Mills. Styling – Annie Portelli.

Quincey (dressed in new season Kip & Co tracksuit, ‘The Patch’). Panther statue named George by Melissa Grisancich. Ivy Muse plant and pot. Vintage German and local pottery sourced online and ‘from the back of grandma’s cupboards’. Alex and Bobby, Photo – Caitlin Mills. Styling – Annie Portelli.

Vintage lotus couch from a Modern Times warehouse sale. Cushions by Kip&Co. Black and green paper mâché vases from India. Table from Angelucci. Mid-century chairs from eBay. Beenleigh Rum bust from a family pub. ‘My dad’s family were in the pub business in Western Victoria a long time ago. Beverage companies used to put these statues in bars as sale advertising. This little man sat out in the elements for over a decade at my parents’ house before I rescued him’, Alex says. Photo – Caitlin Mills. Styling – Annie Portelli.

Crocodile bamboo quartz splash back. Aged brass cabinets. Black paper mâché vase from India. Blue and white Italianate pot handed down from Alex’s grandma. Photo – Caitlin Mills. Styling – Annie Portelli.

The butler’s pantry is ‘a real mish-mash of textures, materials and colours that we love and couldn’t fit into another spot,’ Alex explains, ‘We can close off the whole space from the main house with a giant floor-to-ceiling swinging door’. OSB Cupboards. Green tiles from Earp Brothers. Black terrazzo floor. Photo – Caitlin Mills. Styling – Annie Portelli.

Painting over fireplace by Mignon Steele. Plant and planters from Ivy Muse. Rug and cushion by Kip&Co. Chairs from Grandfathers Axe. Spirit men from Elcho Island were a gift from Alex’s family for her 30th. Assorted knick-knacks on the shelves include: ceramic bowl by Kaye Clancy; blue vase by Brooke Thorn; tractor painting from Alex’s sister’s neighbour in Newcastle; stone Ganesh from India; stone bookends from a Mornington Peninsula market; 70s/80s neon case/bottle from the south of France. Table base by TUCKBOX Design, with Cat’s Eye stone top from India. Green painting by Fred Fowler, part of a ‘huge triptych’ (about 6m x 2m) Alex and Bobby commissioned for the space. Black painting by Nyah Isabel Cornish. Photo – Caitlin Mills. Styling – Annie Portelli.

A snapshot of Quincy’s nursery (UMMM….COOLEST NURSERY EVER?!). Blue cushion by BFGF. Other cushions and rug from Kip & Co. Couch from Bisque Interiors in Byron Bay. Table base from Obtainium, ‘a vintage store in Mornington with lots of crazy and off things’. The table top is an offcut from the honey onyx bench in the bathroom (the piece they cut out for the sink!). Wall hanging from Kip & Co, no longer available. Photo – Caitlin Mills. Styling – Annie Portelli.

Outdoor chairs from Bali. Marble table top sourced on a trip to India. ‘Kip&Co’s manufacturing base is in India, so we try to get there at least twice a year’, Alex tells ‘Sometimes we get some time to sneak off and connect with amazing local artisans, like those in the stone workshop where this table is from’. Photo – Caitlin Mills. Styling – Annie Portelli.

Looking into the house from the backyard. Photo – Caitlin Mills. Styling – Annie Portelli.

Bedding and rug are new season Kip&Co (available in March!). Simple bedside tables from Grandfathers Axe. Bedside lamps from Cove Island Essentials in Canggu, Bali. Paintings are by Nancy Nodea and Peggy Patrick from the Warmun Art Centre, ‘both artists are from the Kimberley and work in traditional style, including using ochre from the local area.’ Photo – Caitlin Mills. Styling – Annie Portelli.

Gold brass taps from Brodware. Honey onyx bench. Handmade Light from Portugal. Photo – Caitlin Mills. Styling – Annie Portelli.

Five years after purchasing this 1910’s house in a leafy pocket of St Kilda, Alex McCabe of Kip&Co and family undertook a total rebuild of their home. No mean feat! The renovations included extending the footprint of the house, creating a large open kitchen and living area, and introducing natural light with new windows and skylights.

Alex describes the home as ‘light, bright and personable’ – and we can only agree! The new design deliberately brings the outside into the house, with huge floor to ceiling glass doors. The styling is eclectic and fun – Alex explains her approach as underpinned by the philosophy that ‘too much is never enough!’ She highlights ‘there is no strict style, period or colour palette in the house, just a collection of pieces that make me happy and treasures I’ve picked up along the way.’ Of course, Kip&Co pieces are smattered through the home, lending texture, colour and personality.

Beloved treasures include a triptych the family commissioned from Fred Fowler, which runs the length of the living area. Alex explains, ‘it somehow creates a sense of space rather than closing it in, which is really beautiful.’ The eye-catching crocodile bamboo quartz splash-back (!) is identified by Alex as ‘the biggest statement in the home.’ This incredible addition looks like an artwork, but comes from deep underground, in Brazil. Alex explains how ‘having a beautiful new kitchen made me want to stay home and cook – that’s a really awesome part of our lives now.’

The families new living style is enhanced by their new-found love of St Kilda. Alex highlights that as ‘a bit of a south-side convert, I like to think this hood is as ‘north’ as you can get this side of the river.’ With the St Kilda Botanical Gardens and foreshore walking distance away, the local neighbourhood becomes their backyard over the summer.

The renovation process itself was a joy for Alex and family, with the only niggle being remaining within budget. Alex admits, ‘I am not very good at sticking to one!’ While the budget may have blown out… this home is incredibly successful in capturing and celebrating the identity of its inhabitants. Alex explains ‘I like homes that really reflect the personality of the people living in them, and tell a bit of their story.’ This story is one of sheer joy and over-the-top enthusiasm – we love it!

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randrvstheworld · 6 years

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From Rio to Guaratiba & my first Brazilian Christmas

Since my last post we have changed location - we are now in Barra de Guaratiba, essentially a tropical paradise of gorgeous beaches & jungle & glorious, continual sunshine & tiny monkeys. However more of Rio was explored before our departure, starting with the Casa de Escala: a very long set of steps decorated with lots of tiles & mosaics by a Brazilian artist called Selaron. As a massive fan of colour, tiles & repeating patterns this was literally my stairway to heaven. A riot of bright hues & a total mish-mash of tiles sourced from around the world, decorated with anything & everything from floral motifs to renderings of the places they were from; images from old film posters, famous faces, inspirational quotes, sheet music, you name it. It was so beautiful & fun & after we made it to the stop (via lots of shameless hipster-y photos & messing around on the tiled slides & climb-able bits at the edges of the stairway) we sat in the sun & drank coconuts & listened to someone playing wonderful latino guitar music.

In what continued to be another Art Day we then went & spent a blissful hour at Rio’s modern art museum, which was for me a peaceful opportunity to sit, uninterrupted, & draw a very interesting brass Mark Bill sculpture. I just love art galleries; they are such calming spaces, always cool & quiet & great places for a good bit of quiet time drawing, plenty of inspiration. As I have not been feeling quite myself of late it was a really nice time to restore some calm & just immerse myself in my sketchbook quietly. It definitely helped.

After the gallery we headed to the top Rio tourist spot: Christ the Redeemer. The Big Guy. The Head Honcho. The main event. This involved a walk through a very pleasant, floral neighbourhood before boarding a little funicular train up the mountain upon which JC is perched. Blimey. It’s a high mountain, let me tell you. And none of this gradual incline nonsense; this mofo is STEEP. Literally like an arrowhead. The mountains here are crazy, I’ve never seen anything like them. They barely look like real mountains. But up we went, through the jungle on the little train, leaving Rio behind as we went up & up. I was frightened at the top. The whole of the city was spread out below us, so far down. It was officially the highest thing I have ever gone up. You can see for miles & miles. And then of course there’s JC himself. He’s intimidatingly tall. But oddly peaceful; there’s something in his stature & expression that feels calming. We wished him an early happy birthday & took in the frankly breathtaking views & larked about taking pictures (& oddly, starred in quite a lot of photos with a bunch of Asian tourists at their request). And then down we went, planning some fun for our final morning before we left the Big City.

This involved taking a guided tour of the Santa Marta favela; probably the most famous favela in Rio as it provided the setting for Michael Jackson’s ‘They don’t really care about us’ music video. The favela is huge, home to over 300,000 people, like a city within a city. We took the lift to the top & then walked down; our tour guide stopping to point out the first church, Michael Jackson square, & making time for some of our group to play football with some local kids. The favela is like houses on top of house on top of houses set into the hillside. The best views over Rio & the only place in the city where you can see Jesus looking down on you from the front. It’s difficult for me to find the right language to describe our experience here. I loved it, but is it patronising to describe it as humbling? But in a sense of course, it was. It certainly reminded me of my privilege to see how people live there. But is it insulting to assume that the residents there are less fortunate than myself? Less happy? Perhaps they are not. We all just live how we live & make the best of it. The people there were simply people; polite, friendly, welcoming, going about their business like you or I, taking care of their homes, kids playing in the street: just human. Very interesting & for me a real highlight. One of my main desires for this trip was to see how different people live around the world, experience different cultures & get some insight into humanity I guess. If anything it is excursions like this that make me realise that while we are all different, we are also all similar. Just people.

Unfortunately despite all these wonderful experiences - & they truly were wonderful - my time in Rio was somewhat blighted by a real cacophony of negative thoughts I was unable to shake. Feeling depressed is like a black cloud that settles over you & casts a shadow over everything you try & achieve. You can’t escape it, you just have to wait it out, which is horrible when you are trying valiantly to make the most of the travel opportunity of a lifetime. But what can you do? Try & appreciate as much as you can. Hannah got me started on something that I’m called the Positivity Project, where I make a list each day of ten things I am grateful for. Sometimes it can feel like everything is wrong but this is really helping me to see that even something that may seem trivial & meaningless to other people - or to yourself at less trying times - like eating a good, nourishing breakfast is in fact something, even a small something, that you can be positive about. In any case I feel it’s a small step in the right direction, to adjusting my ways of thinking, to helping me see good things when the dark cloud has taken residence.

After the tour we packed our things & headed off to where we are now: the Banana Leaf Eco Hostel in Guaratiba. This has been the best-timed change of location of all. We are surrounded by lush greenery, a beach just ten minutes away, a beautiful & comfortable hostel with a very welcoming host & his sweet daughter who have gone out of their way to make us feel so at home. On our first morning our breakfast was interrupted by a gaggle of marmosets who came to join us on the terrace & ate bits of banana out of our hands, which for me was truly magical. I have tried to restore a little routine into each day; making time for exercise, healthy food & art, interspersed with plenty of sunbathing & swimming in the pool, trying to rest & just trying to get myself right. It is working. I am feeling positive & grateful again. We celebrated Christmas here the Brazilian way: an epic feast at midnight on Christmas eve, surrounded by lots of local friends of Mark & Luna’s. We wore party hats & ate until late, roast things & local dishes, everything you could think of.

Today however, was Christmas morning - as a South African, Mark also traditionally celebrates Christmas on the 25th so fully understood our excitement at breakfast as we ate fresh fruit & exchanged gifts. From Hannah: a bag of useful travel goodies including bite cream, facewipes, painkillers, plasters, & two ginormous bars of Galaxy chocolate & a package of English Breakfast tea. From Roxy: a tiny Nutcracker trinket box, purchased in Rio, as she knows that’s my favourite ballet & I’ve been listening to the music on repeat as I do every Christmas because it’s so delightful. I gifted them some fluffy alpaca socks & a painting respectively. I spoke to my brother & my mum & discussed my plans to go home, which made me really happy. We ate more delicious food & sunbathed & swam in the beautiful turquoise ocean in the late afternoon sun. It’s been my first ever Christmas away from my home & family & although inevitably that did make me a little emotional there are certainly worse ways I could have spent it. I’m now lying on a comfy sofa, writing this in the warm, listening to the sound of light jungle rain tap-tapping away outside. I can feel the dark cloud drifting away & I am feeling glad about lots of things. It’s been a lovely way to spend the holiday.

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theburnishedopal · 6 years

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Metamorphosis, a police escort and the Midnight Fremont Summer Solstice Parade

I kneel down on the deck of the float, sun cloaking my shoulders in warmth. I am absorbed in the action of stitching blue thread through pale blue netting. The stitches are rough but regular. Slowly I make my way across the chassis floor, following the rough line Dave has cut in the shape of butterfly wings, occasionally making mistakes, breaking and tying off the thread, then rethreading and starting anew along the same line.

I am helping to make wings for ‘Metamorphosis’, a butterfly-inspired float. The float will house Dave and Jon’s long-running band, The Shamaniacs, while they play peculiar reggae-rap-psychedelic-rocknroll for two hours as they are pushed through Fremont with thousands of people lining the streets, under the Solstice sun. The float is human-powered, although a generator will project the band’s sound.

The float is pale green and flat, with a pull bar at the front and a push bar at the back that are wrapped in foam and duct tape for comfort. Dave and Jon will be relying on friends and family to push them along the length of the parade. A clear plastic U-shaped gazebo stretches over the float, and handmade paper flowers dangle and decorate all the support beams. I ziptie plastic cutout butterflies onto the front post. One of them is a Camberwell Beauty. It has a smear of free chocolate across the center – I think it’s been in the hands of Jon’s seven-year-old daughter.

We work through the evening, surrounded by bustle and creativity. Up the street, a gigantic Sasquatch is taking shape. His hand now waves slowly, just like a dull giant, but his flesh and eyes glow with colour and thought. Next to us people paint bright yellow and glitter on wood. People stick faces of police brutality victims onto a float which resembles a four-poster bed opposite us. Some kids practice their stilt walking. Outside the Powerhouse, the Art Studio which is vomiting all this creativity out into the street, guys with waxed mustaches and quizzical green eyes use power tools to build the centerpiece float. Designed by Pacific Northwest artist Carl Smool, it will have four giant gargoyle heads atop fabric skyscrapers – the ‘Corporate Gargoyles’. Yesterday evening, I spent hours stipple painting one of the heads to resemble stone. Carl creates papiér mâché pieces of art for activism. Somehow he is overseeing everything.

Jon’s daughter, Samantha, was the inspiration for Metamorphosis, as she flitted about the solstice last year in butterfly wings. She runs around in a black leotard, occasionally coming back to check on progress.

I am privileged to work on the float and get to know Dave and Jon a little. Jon plays me the Shamaniacs’ music. It is unashamedly exuberant and upbeat and I say so; Jon looks at me knowingly and nods. “I am joyful, I’m very joyful,” he says. He is. He talks constantly about life in Seattle, where he has ended up, things he considers achievements, ideas, channeling spirit energy. “I opened the first vegan restaurant – truly vegan restaurant –in Seattle. We didn’t even serve coffee ‘cause we thought it was bad for you.” I find comfort in his take on things. He is wildly positive with childish enthusiasm, but just a shade of self-reflection adds an edge. A girl needs an edge to know where to look. It’s like a horizon.

Dave is wild-haired and thoughtful. He has a quieter, focused energy. He talks of science and ideas too. “I think the next scientific revolution is that we are going to find we are all interconnected”. Wow. A girl likes a conversation to get her teeth into.

Dave and Jon’s old, old friendship is touching. Dave needs a box to sit on during the parade – his detached cruciate ligament won’t let him stand on shaky or wobbly things, like a solstice parade float! He looks around for Jon, and calls to him to make him a wooden box. Jon goes down to the Powerhouse, finds the right tools and pieces of wood, brings them back and makes him a wooden box. Is there any purer expression of friendship than making a friend a box to sit on?

The night gets darker and the wings are complete. We mount them onto the rods and hoist them. Other band members arrive, smoke, eat pizza, tell stories of busking. The floats surrounding us take shape – a rotating silver cone covered in inflatable sharks; a red robot with cake costumes; Sasquatch has hair. The preparation and frantic clean-up is so good natured. Jon and I agree that the community art process is the same fix, somehow, as spending time out in the hills or forests. Soul-making.

We gather outside the Powerhouse and the heads of the Fremont Arts Council explain to us with megaphones and cheering what happens now. It is Friday night, the night before the big Solstice Parade day. The floats are to be moved to the parade head location on Leary Way, in what is known as the Midnight Parade. This involves all the floats being drawn down through Fremont in the middle of the night with a police escort. There is palpable excitement. I hadn’t planned on being there so late, but I agree to stick around and help push Metamorphosis down through to the parade head.

Cops on motorbikes have arrived. Night has fallen and the flashing blue and red lights gleam off their white helmets and off the glittering floats.

As it turns out, to my joy and fortune, the Shamaniacs’ float is last in the main parade tomorrow, which means it is first out on the midnight parade. The safety vests check the Avenue up and down. The cops line up either side, Danny DeVitos in shades and uniforms straddling their bikes. Two organizers pull out a giant boombox on wheels, begin playing Motown, and we wheel out Metamorphosis onto the road. We go slowly down the hill, and each float comes out one by one behind us, with whoops and cheers. I look back when we are stopped at the traffic lights to see this ghostly parade of peculiarities which cannot really be made out in the night light. There are enough hands pulling/pushing Metamorphosis that Joe, a busker and band member, and I, sit on the front of the float, at the head of the parade, laugh and dangle our legs off the side, as we make our way through the late night neighbourhood streets. I couldn’t have stopped grinning if I’d wanted to.

People spill out of bars and cheer as we go by. The cops’ lights continue to flash. The organizers with the boombox at the head announce the parade will be taking place tomorrow. Joe pulls out a selection of small percussion instruments from his backpack and presses some into my hands. We make rhythmic noise in time with Stevie Wonder blasting out into the street and laugh at Jon’s mad dynamism. He and his wife Betsy are pulling the float and Jon is stamping, leaping, getting off on the energy. The whole experience is surreal. We pass by my office building, which has a large Saturn planet atop the roof. Tonight, the Saturn is lit up. We see the clear yellow sliver of moon straight ahead in the west.

We reach the parking lot that is the head of the parade and pull Metamorphosis in to her overnight resting place. The other floats follow suit and people toast with plastic cups. We gather and breathe. I try and express my gratitude for sharing the experience. Betsy nods knowingly too. I feel like I have found some of Fremont’s blood.

*******

The next day, I gather my housemates and friends, we dress in green, and make our way out into this sunny day to Fremont. The streets are now full of daygoers, children, street stalls, dogs, tents and free sunglasses. We stop at the Brouwer’s Café for pre-parade Dutch courage. Then I feel like we should head back up to the parade head, to join our parade crew.

I was asked if I’d like to be in the parade when up at the Powerhouse working on the floats, and thought, why not. I have roped my friends in to being green ‘money bunnies’. This is the crew that surrounds the Green Hat float. A giant green top hat turned upside down. The money bunnies wear green bunny ears, a white rabbit comes out of the hat, and we poke sparkling green hats on sticks into the crowd for donations to Fremont Arts Council. We have the boombox to explain to the crowd how the parade happens every year and ask for donations, and we also have our own ragtag marching band. A little apprehensive about getting my friends to fundraise – no-one likes asking strangers for money – they are wonderful, game, and it soon becomes apparent that it’s pretty fun. People are very generous. It’s fun to interact with the crowd. They clearly love the parade. Women put five dollar bills in my hat and blow kisses.

Lily dances and shimmies her way through the whole thing. Somehow Kristin hops up onto the boombox and dances as it is maneuvered down the open streets. I have no goddam idea how that happened because that thing was almost impossible to push in a straight line, so who knows how she managed to stand and dance on top of it in actual motion.

It is blazing hot and we are soon thirsty, but this energy keeps us going. For sure I have felt Solstice fever the whole weekend. I couldn’t concentrate on a thing on Friday. The fever gets channeled through a creative act, like stipple painting a gargoyle head or stitching a giant butterfly wing. This is the culmination, the celebration.

Around us are naked cyclists body-painted rainbow colours, samba dancers, marching bands, overtly sexual hoopists, musicians and photographers. It’s a colourful riot.

We finally get to Gasworks Park, the parade finale, and shore up the green hat, now full of dollar bills. We get free beer tickets and t-shirts. We go claim our beers and sit in the beer garden. Everyone is talking to everyone. Half the people outside the beer garden are half naked. I proudly show the housemates the Toilets sign I painted. We watch someone climb bare-handed up a pole on the gasworks tanks and then proceed to do parkour to the top of one of the giant silo ladders.

“I love that we can see a family and a baby in a stroller,” says Suz, “and then right behind them is a woman with painted gold tits.” What’s weird is how normal it is. Some dude is wearing nothing but sheep bones. Vertebrae down his front, and a ram’s skull slung around his waist cradling his penis.

The sun fades from its sixteen hours on Seattle. The Solstice fever abates. Now we are into the lengthening and the ripening, with a harvest on the horizon.

#art #fremont #fremont arts council #solstice parade #seattle #ecology #creativity #gasworks #joy #art&experience

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middlecountries · 7 years

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By Any Means Necessary

My problem with sex started with the fact that I was shy. I was always nervous approaching women and yet always lusting after them. The lust was an aching feeling that started in my groin, crawled up my abdomen and nestled deep in my skull. I fantasized constantly about sleeping with women I met or merely saw. The fantasies grew deeper if I’d gotten to know the women in them. Depending on the personality or specifics of the woman in question, I’d picture us driving along the French Riviera or curled up in a cabin in the woods. There was always of some form of skyrocketing career success to these scenarios too – my career success, of course.

The second part of the problem was more practical. I hadn’t sold a single painting from my last series and they’d been up for months at one of the hottest galleries in the city. I drew a salary from teaching Introduction to Abstract Art at York, but it barely covered my food and rent. Most of my friends and family were married with children and had well-paying jobs. If they weren’t married, at least they ate at upscale restaurants and took overseas vacations. I couldn’t compete with those things. The best I could offer someone was the occasional dinner out at a neighbourhood restaurant and maybe a movie afterwards.

I thought of a way to resolve my lust-poverty conflict but hesitated to act on it. Hiring a hooker went against my natural timidity, not to mention most standards of moral behaviour including the law’s. At the same time, I felt really handcuffed. I couldn’t work in my state of sexual frustration and I couldn’t date in my financial disrepair. Besides, what was so wrong with seeing a prostitute? In some ways wasn’t straight forwardly paying someone to sleep with you better than misleading them into thinking you were something you weren’t?

One problem with the solution was that I had no idea where to start looking for a hooker. I thought about going to Shuter and Sherbourne and picking up a streetwalker but I didn’t have a car. I could call one of the ads in the street newspaper, the ones with over-saturated pictures of women posing in lingerie, but which one? There were hundreds of them and who knew who would show up at my door. At least with a streetwalker you knew upfront who you’d be getting.

I thought the best option was to go to a strip club and see where that led me. There was bound to be a ton of desperate guys there and that would surely attract the sex trade’s attention. That’s the best means to undertake this unscrupulous affair, I decided. Go to a strip club.

I went to Jilly’s for the first time one night in mid-March. Its biggest selling point was that it was only a ten-minute streetcar ride or twenty-minute walk from my house. It occupied the main floor of the old five-storey brick building at Queen and Broadview. When I arrived I noticed that all the first and second floor windows were covered with grey-painted plywood and the rest of the building looked like a rooming house or derelict apartments. The entrance to Jilly’s was in a discreet alcove on Broadview.

I walked through the doors and as soon as I did my eyes shot straight to the stage. The room was darkly lit but clearly and unmistakably, there was a woman dancing less than twenty feet away wearing nothing but platform shoes. It had been so long since I’d seen a woman naked that I got a hard-on instantly. Her breasts were small but visible and her hips shot out from her waist at that angle so alien to the male body. The sight of her hips reminded me of the arc that the top of the sun makes as it sets on a clear day. I tried not to stare as I found a seat at a table ten or twelve feet from the stage.

A waitress in a short black skirt came and took my drink order then came back a minute later with my drink. “Eight bucks,” she said as she set the vodka-soda down in front of me.

Eight bucks? It was a lot for a drink but not for the sight of those beautiful hips swaying in front of me.

I gave the waitress a ten and told her to keep the change. She tightened her cheek muscles and walked away briskly.

As soon the waitress left I resumed ogling the girl on stage. I let my eyes travel up and down her body several times. At closer inspection she wasn’t as attractive as I’d thought. Her legs were bruised and she had blemishes and stretch marks on her ass. But worse than either of those things was the expression on her face. The corners of her mouth sagged sullenly and her brow was wrinkled above her sharply raised eyebrows. She looked as if she was trying as hard as she could to imagine herself any place else.

The blood continued to flow below my belt all-the-same. At first I’d enjoyed the sensation; it wasn’t that often I became turned on enough to get a hard-on in public anymore. But soon I wished it wasn’t happening. The most any of this – the over-priced drinks, the image of the stripper’s ass etched in my mind – was going to accomplish was make me poorer and more desperate to get laid. My thimble-sized drink barely numbed my doubts and misgivings. To an on-looker I was as pathetic the other three or four men sitting around the stage.

I finished my drink and took the streetcar home. As soon as I walked in the door my two half-started paintings glared at me from across the room. They looked at me as disinterestedly as the stripper had.

I went to my bedroom and got undressed and washed for bed. As soon as my head hit the pillow and I closed my eyes I saw the stripper’s hips in my mind. I got up and grabbed one of my bath towels. I’d had so much blood-flow to my dick recently it hardly took a minute to cum.

The next morning I eased myself out of comfortable dreamland by browsing social media. I looked at pictures of people I knew on my phone. It was a parade of vacations, kid’s birthday parties, pets and food. There were also posts with links to articles about political, social and environmental causes I couldn’t be bothered to read. Once I felt sufficiently guilty, I got up.

For some reason I wandered into the corner of my loft dedicated to painting before going to the kitchen to make coffee. I hadn’t worked in months and it showed in my studio’s disorder. I took my tennis racket and running shoes and some dirty dishes and beer cans to the couch and kitchen areas. I put my half-started canvases out of sight and started making a frame for a new one. It took me an hour to make the frame and another half hour to stretch and staple a blank canvas over it. When I’d finished, I checked the corners to make sure the fibers of the canvas hadn’t separated. Victory, they hadn’t.

I put the canvas on an easel ten feet from the large steel frame windows and looked at it. I thought it might look better without me touching it further. My last series of paintings, the ones hanging unsold in the hip Queen West gallery, were an experiment with space and colour. I’d tried to challenge one of the conventional rules of composition that stated that darker colours should always fall towards the bottom of a piece. The result was a collection of work with dark blues and blacks and reds bleeding down into lighter pinks, grays and yellows. I felt that a few of the pieces left the viewer with the feeling they were floating like I’d intended but the critics felt differently. One of them, writing for one of the same street newspaper with escort advertisements in the back, said the series reminded him of the inside of a burrito. (Asshole.) But I had to agree something was wrong with the series. If there wasn’t, why weren’t any of the paintings selling? Maybe I’d been too conceptual. Art was meant to evoke an emotional response from the viewer. I needed to connect with people on a visceral level. I put a coat of gesso on the canvas in front of me and went to make an espresso as continued to think.

When I came back to the studio again something strange had happened to the canvas. The primer was absorbing more quickly down the centre of the canvas than at the sides. This wasn’t that unusual, gesso always absorbed unevenly no matter how evenly it was applied or how well-stretched the canvas, but the image I saw in the pattern was. I saw a head-on view of the hips of the stripper from the night before. I hadn’t painted or even sketched figures for almost a decade. My reputation – such as it was – was as an abstract artist so what did this mean? Was I supposed to venture off into a completely new direction almost two decades into my career? The idea was absurd. My skills at representing real objects would be rusty at best; not to mention the fact that I regularly lectured my students on the merits of breaking the shackles of directly observable reality.

Then something else happened. The place where I envisioned the stripper’s crotch flipped upside down and moved as if she was standing on her head. As this happened the rest of the canvas morphed into an assortment of shapes and lines originating from her crotch. Bright reds and blues began to fill the rest of the canvas so I grabbed a tube of scarlet and ultra-marine and began mixing colours.

It was thrilling to have started working again. I thought my vision for the painting could see me through for at least a week of solid work. I felt the rush of unbridled creation again and it was heavenly.

But then I thought what had inspired the painting: at a dirty strip club and a disinterested and presumably lost woman undressing for money. I slowed my paint mixing as I kept thinking. What did it say about me, or art in general that this is how I drew my inspiration? Fortunately I was experienced enough not to pursue the question any further. I had to concentrate on my materials, on bringing my mental image to life carefully but quickly. If I didn’t, the image would soon dissolve into the sea of other concerns in my head. I’d be back surfing Facebook or porn sites and thinking about my wasteful existence in no time. Being an artist was no different from other professions in that respect: you had to check things off your to-do list and try not to get mired down in the meaning of it all if you wanted to succeed.

I worked non-stop for eight or ten hours the day after I first went to Jilly’s. Eventually I let up the pace to get some proper food and rest. Deciding when to walk away from a piece – even if for a night – was always the hardest thing for me.

I ate and slept and the next morning I woke up with renewed energy. I put in another eight hours and the routine continued for four more days. I only left the house to load up on coffee, rice cakes, almond butter and bananas, my preferred rations during periods of intensive work.

By then it was Wednesday, the day I had to teach my class at York. The nearly hour and a half commute from my house was even more annoying than usual. I was anxious over being away from my work and my re-discovered routine. Worse yet, I couldn’t really talk to my students about my new painting. How could I explain to fresh-faced, wide-eyed twenty-year-olds that I’d begun a new study of shape and line by way of sexual frustration and craven desire? I got through the class by repeating a talk on the process behind some of my older pieces. The class was visibly bored during my lecture but it beat risking my workflow by telling them the truth. The whole time I was talking I felt they could see right through me. I thought one of them must had surely seen me duck into Jilly’s and told the rest of them. Then again, how bad was what I did? Lots of people went to strip clubs. And it wasn’t like I’d even come close to my original plan of hiring a prostitute. The most I’d done was watch from a distance as a woman took her undressed to bad dance music. Big deal. Remembering my original plan made me think I’d like to know more about the history of sex work. Going to a hooker surely wasn’t always such a taboo. I went to the main library on campus and found as remote a computer stall as I could to look up books on prostitution on the subject. I entered ‘prostitution’ into the search bar, clicked ‘enter’, and got over three hundred hits returned. Many of them were books on sex workers’ rights and arguments for legalizing the sex trade. Others were histories of prostitution ranging from ancient civilizations to modern day sex tourism. One book title grabbed my attention especially. It was called Women for Hire: Prostitution and Sexuality in France after 1850. I liked the sounds of it because 19th France had spawned Impressionism and I wanted to learn more about the social conditions of the period, especially its sexual mores.

I wrote down Women for Hire’s call number, found it in the stacks, and checked it out. I was eager to read it on my commute home not only for my interest in it, but also because it would keep me from checking out all the women on the bus and subway.

I got on the bus that took me to the subway back downtown. By the time I got home I’d read nearly forty pages my book and learned a number of interesting facts. One of them was that the population of Paris almost doubled between 1850 and 1870 on account of a boom in trade. As a result of this, there was a large number of young men with money to spend. Women who worked as seamstresses and chambermaids took the opportunity to make extra money by selling sex. Prostitution became such a lucrative business that regular, ‘honest’ women were indistinguishable from prostitutes, or ‘courtesans’, as they were known at the time. This climate of social ambiguity attracted the attention of artists and writers. Toulous-Lautrec, Degas, Manet, Van Gogh and Picasso all used prostitutes in their work. The poet Baudelaire said “What is art? Prostitution” and Honoré de Balzac wrote an entire novel centered on the sex trade.

I read some more Women for Hire before going to bed but didn’t recall anything more that was very interesting. The next morning I got up and went to the studio first thing. I looked at my hips painting and didn’t see anything I immediately wanted to change or expand upon. I went and made myself an espresso and came back and looked at the painting some more. Still nothing seemed glaringly wrong or in need of work. This feeling indicated to me that I needed to spend some more time away from the painting. (That or I’d lost the original thrust of the work by going to teach my class.) I put on my shorts and running shoes and headed out for a jog.

I came back from jogging an hour later feeling clear-headed and ready to work. I went straight to the studio but still nothing jumped out at from the painting. It was possible that it was almost finished but I was reluctant to think so. I wasn’t unhappy with the piece but if it was in fact finished, then what did I have to work on next beside my financial disrepair or romantic void?

I went out for lunch at my local pub and brought Women for Hire with me. I ordered a second pint after eating and read for an hour. Then I went home and fiddled around on the computer for the remainder of the afternoon and into the evening. Around 10:30 or 11:00 PM I peaked in the studio. The painting still looked docile so I went to the bedroom, undressed, and got into bed. I turned off the lights but I wasn’t tired at all. I thought about jerking off to try induce sleep but I knew that that would only make me more anxious and guilt-ridden in the morning. I decided the solution was the same as the last time I was blocked: go to Jilly’s. I dressed quickly and left the house. I brought a sketchpad and pencil with me, ready to be inspired. I went to Jilly’s the next three nights straight. I was too distracted by the naked women to actually sketch anything. I passed the days and early evenings making frames and stretching canvases in preparation to paint. Now and then I went for a jog and gradually I started sketching some ideas I had for new pieces. I made two large charcoal drawings and although I wasn’t unhappy with them, I didn’t think they were worthy of painting.

The fourth night in a row I went to Jilly’s I got wasted. It was a Monday and the drinks were half-price. There was only one girl working the stage so didn’t have much else to do. At some point in the course of the night, I felt horny and drunk enough that I decided to ask someone about finding a prostitute. I asked my waitress – the one in the short black skirt who’d served me the first night I came in – if she knew of anywhere I could find a courtesan.

“A what?” she said, turning her head and looking at me with her eyes narrowed.

“A courtesan. You know, a woman who accompanies you to court…”

She pretended not to hear or understand and walked away. I resumed drinking, then, after a few minutes, signaled her to come back again.

She came back, crossed her arms and glared at me. “What?”

I took out my sketchpad and pencil and wrote, “I’m looking for a prostitute.” I tore the page out and handed it to the waitress. As she read the note her eyes widened slightly. She turned and walked off quickly without saying anything. I watched her walk up to a bouncer sitting on one of the bar stools. She handed him the note and pointed at me. The bouncer wore a black leather jacket and his back was so meaty it looked like his ears connected directly to his shoulders. He got up from the bar stool, crumpled up my note, and walked towards me.

The bouncer got to my table and before I could say anything he grabbed my sketchpad and pencil and shoved them into my chest. With his other hand took the back of my shirt and coat collar and yanked me to my feet. “You’re out of here, fuckhead,” he said. “This isn’t that kind of place.”

“I’m just trying to paint,” I slurred as he shoved me towards the door. “I’m no different from Manet. I’m the same as Degas!”

We reached the door, which he opened with one hand and pushed me out with the other. I nearly fell down the three stairs leading down to the sidewalk and my pencil and sketchbook tumbled to the ground.

“Fucking asshole,” I muttered as I stooped to pick up my things. “You’re as bad as a yuppie with your narrow views and self-righteousness.”

Mid-lambast, the bouncer reemerged. I started to run away but he raised his hands in a non-threatening gesture. He looked up and down the street and took something out of his inside jacket pocket. He motioned me towards him and handed me a small business card. “Call this number tomorrow after you’ve sobered up,” he said.

The card was all white except for the words “First Choice Entertainment” and a phone number.

“’name’s Jimmy. Tell me where I met you and don’t let me catch you in here looking for pussy again. Got it?”

“Uh, yeah. I will…and, uh, I won’t…”

“Good. Go the fuck home and sleep it off.” He stepped back in the bar and slammed the door behind him. I quickly pocketed the card and left, looking over my shoulders to make sure no one had just seen me talk to a real-life, living, breathing pimp.

I woke up the next morning feeling badly hungover. I was so dehydrated that my tongue was caked to the roof of my mouth. I forced myself to get up and piss and refill my bedside water glass. I took two Advils from the medicine cabinet and chugged another glass of water. I went back to bed and thankfully fell back to sleep.

I woke up again an hour later feeling marginally better. I looked at my phone for my usual transition back to reality. Memories of the night before flashed in my head as I browsed pictures of my friends’ children and spouses. In my head, I saw the disgusted look of the waitresses after I’d handed her my covetous note and heard the scorn in the pimp’s voice as he said the word “pussy.”

I got up again and went to the bathroom. I tried to avoid looking at myself in the mirror as I washed my face and brushed my teeth. Then I went back to the bedroom and got dressed. I was too weak to make myself coffee so I headed downstairs to my usual café. I also wanted some sort of human interaction that wasn’t marred with sin.

I got my coffee and made sure to thank the barista extra nicely. I sat in the shop’s front window and watched people pass by outside. I finished my coffee in a half-numbed state and ordered another along with a croissant. I opened a street newspaper and flipped through it absent-mindedly as I ate and drank. I stopped at the art show reviews out of habit and there was a small description of my ongoing show. The description was so lackluster I wanted to puke. I slammed the paper down in anger and looked back out the window.

In the bottom of my eye-line, I noticed an American Apparel ad on the back of the street newspaper. The ad showed a young woman lying face down on a faux-fur rug above a hardwood floor. She wore nothing but tights and looked over her shoulder seductively. I felt a flicker in my pants and I put my left hand on my thigh. I noticed there was something flat and rectangular in my pant pocket. Slowly it dawned on me that I was wearing the same pants as the night before, that the thing in my pocket was Jimmy the pimp’s business card. In spite of myself, I got even harder knowing I could get laid with the push of a few buttons...

What the hell? Who would I be I hurting?

I got up, went back up to my loft, and called the number on the card.

As soon as it was over I tried to erase that day from my memory. Buying sex is nothing like you see on TV. She was no Julia Roberts and I was no Richard Gere. Did you know you have to pay a time and a half to get to kiss her on the mouth? It’s call it a ‘girlfriend experience.’ I declined the add-on and the sex was as unromantic as possible. All I knew about her was her name (“Destiny”) and that was likely as contrived as our meeting. But I paid the requisite hundred and fifty bucks and thrust my dick inside her all-the-same. We avoided eye contact the entire time and when I came I felt something sharp and hot in my crotch. It felt more like a blood vessel bursting than anything orgasmic.

The following day I could hardly get out of bed I was so disgusted with myself. I deleted my Facebook account to avoid a complete meltdown via self-comparison. I narrowly gathered the strength to get up and go teach my class. For some strange reason though, maybe as a way to purge myself, I told my class about the process behind my hips painting. I avoided looking at any of the female students as I spoke and I heard some snickers while my back was turned at one point. As soon as the class ended I hurried out of the room to avoid any awkward questions about my lecture.

Eventually the thought of my lecture made me feel better but not by much. I thought about Destiny, wondering where she might be at that moment. Probably injecting or smoking something in a drug-den. Or maybe lying on her back, head to the side as some other reprobate-loser fucked her. That’s just what I was, a reprobate and loser. I was a desperate outcast incapable of competing in the regular dating market so I had to resort to the illegal one. I deserved the worst kind of judgment. I imagined myself getting arrested and arraigned. I’d be trotted out in front of a judge and condemned to prison. I’d rot in a dirty like I deserved to.

Oddly, I received no judgement or condemnation for my buying sex. I went home after my class and started painting one of the charcoal drawings I’d made the week before. It was of a stripper between the neck and the solar plexus. For some reason I put the notch where the sternum and the collar bone meet beneath the breasts rather than above them. The result was the breasts (nipple-less) looked like closed eyes and the notch, a down-turned mouth. It resembled la full-body frown and enacted the feeling I got from hiring Destiny.

I worked steadily on my bodies pieces for the next six months. I painted most of them from start to completion before starting another. A few of them I bounced between, adding some details to one then another. In the beginning the work kept me from more self-reproach. Slowly I forgot about what I’d done and got lost in the technical aspects of my work. Teaching and the occasional coffee or drink with friends satisfied my need for social contact.

When I finished the series I showed it to a couple gallery owners I knew. Both of them loved it and begged me to let them show it. I chose Jeremy Espadrille’s Mercer Union in Bloordale because I thought a more down-market audience might be more receptive than the galleries on Queen.

Jeremy and I set a date for the opening and I packed up and brought my paintings to him in a rental van. But as the opening night approached I grew increasingly nervous. I thought my work was good but I worried about people asking how I’d conceived it. What was I going to say? I went to strip club? I paid marginalized or oppressed women to undress in front of me and one of them to let me fuck her?

My anxiety over grew stronger and stronger and I spent longer and longer in bed. I reactivated my Facebook account to try and distract myself but it only increased my guilt and shame. Compared to my responsible, family-having friends and family, I was horrible. In two nights’ time I’d be showered with praise from complete strangers while good, honest people sat in their living rooms or bedrooms unrecognized for their daily effort and sacrifice. The injustice of it made me nauseous.

Then an idea hit me. I thought I could relieve my guilt by inviting Destiny to the opening, If anyone asked me where I’d gotten my inspiration for the series, I’d just nod in her direction. I’d pay her for her time and not her body. In addition to being honest, hopefully this would undo the psychic damage I’d caused her. It was a beautiful solution.

The only hitch was that I’d thrown out Jimmy’s card in self-disgust after screwing Destiny and had no way of getting in touch with either of them. I decided to go down to Jilly’s to look for Jimmy. I got there and walked up to a man sitting at the bar I assumed was him based on his leather jacket and husky physique. But when I tapped him on the shoulder and he turned around I discovered he was someone else. The stranger looked at me. “Whadaya want, bud?”

“I, uh, I was looking for Jimmy…”

“Jimmy don’t work here no more.”

I kicked myself again for throwing out Jimmy’s card. “Uh, do you know where I can find him?”

“What do I look like, a fuckin’ phone book?”

The man turned back around on his stool and I looked around the room hoping that Jimmy would somehow appear. Then I looked for my old waitress thinking she might know where I could find him. She seemed to have changed jobs too or else had the night off.

I wandered back outside, picturing myself at my opening surrounded by interrogators with no chance of escape. I felt light-headed and sat down on the sidewalk with my back against the outside of the building. I rubbed my eyes and temples and felt slightly better. Then a squad car drove by and I had to get up so I wouldn’t look suspicious. I considered going home before I had another thought. I could go look for Destiny at Shuter and Sherbourne. At the very least there’d be some streetwalkers there I could talk to. There couldn’t be that many prostitutes in Toronto. Surely they must all know each other somehow.

I headed towards Shuter and Sherbourne on foot. I crossed the Don Valley and the din of traffic beneath the bridge almost made me turn around. I got to the other side and felt much better in the relatively quieter streets of Corktown. Then I passed a low-income or social housing complex at Queen and Beverly. The complex consisted of two twenty-odd-storey-buildings and a parking lot and playground straddling the block between Queen and Shuter. The playground and parking lot were full of litter and debris. It looked like the kind of place I might find Destiny and I thought about cutting through to Shuter on the off chance of bumping into her. At second thought, I decided against it. It was after mid-night and the area was badly lit and dangerous looking.

I continued along Queen glancing in some bars and restaurants looking for Destiny. They all had dirty windows, little to no decoration, and all the customers seemed to be outside smoking.

A few minutes later I arrived at Sherbourne and turned north, bracing myself to interact with a prostitute in plain view. Hopefully I’d find Destiny quickly and we could go to the late night Pakistani restaurant at Dundas that all the cabbies went to.

I got to the corner and saw a couple women I assumed were hooking. I walked up to one with dyed red hair. She wore platform shoes and seemingly no pants or skirt beneath an oversized winter coat. “Hi,” I said timidly. “I was wondering if you knew a girl named Destiny. She’s got blonde hair. She’s about your height….”

The woman’s cheeks were pitted and her bug-eyes darted in all directions. She wore a thick layer of cover-up and blue-black eye-shadow. She stuck her lower jaw out and looked me up and down frowning. “Yeah I think know her maybe.” Her voice was hoarse and halting.

“Well, could you give me her phone number or tell me where she lives?”

“I’m working her bud.”

“I’ll pay you...”

“Alright. Eighty bucks.”

“Yeah, no problem.”

“K Follow me.”

The woman led me away, back down Shuter in the direction I’d come from. I hoped she might take me to one of the row houses on the north side of the street but I feared otherwise. I suspected she was taking me to the apartment complex on Beverly that I’d passed on my way over. A few minutes later we arrived at the complex and she turned towards the entrance to one of the buildings. I was walked fifteen or twenty feet behind her and when I got to the door, she was already inside calling someone on the intercom to buzz us in. The inside doors buzzed and she opened them and walked through. I followed her into the elevator area and she pushed the button for one. She was even more run-down and haggard in the indoor lighting and I avoided looking at her as we waited.

The elevator came and we got inside. She pushed the button for the 22nd floor and the doors closed. As we started going up I grew nervous. Everything seemed to be going too smoothly. Why hadn’t she asked me for the money yet? “Hey,” I said, “You want the money now?”

She pointed at the security camera inside the elevator. “Later,” she said, and I felt less tense.

We got to our floor and she led me down a brown hallway with flickering lights florescent lights. We stopped at an apartment and she knocked on the door. I heard a couple people talking inside but couldn’t make out what they said. The door opened and the woman walked in. She stuck her head back out and motioned me inside.

Inside, the apartment was darkly lit. It reeked of cigarettes plus another stinging, chemical odour I couldn’t place. I saw another woman’s standing at the end of the hallway. I couldn’t see her face but she reminded me of the first woman by the way she stood. “Hey, I’m looking for Destiny,” I called to her.

“She’s down here,” she said and disappeared around a corner.

The first woman walked after her and I followed them both. I passed an open door and darkened room I assumed was the bathroom. The hallway opened up onto a living room and kitchen. All the lights were off except for the TV. I turned a corner to a second hallway and saw a door with light coming out from it at the end. “Down here,” said a voice that sounded like the second woman’s coming from inside the room.

As I stepped towards the door I heard quick footsteps approaching me from behind and I spun around. In a blur, I saw a frowning face and raised arm. The arm was holding a dark L-shaped object that came crashing down on the side of my head. I felt a brief shearing pain on the left side of my head before my legs gave out and the ground came rushing up.

I came to to the sound of birds chirping and a streetcar clanking. I was outside, evidently, but beyond that all my brain-power was directed towards the ear-splitting pain in my head. I forced my eyelids open and took in more of my surroundings.

I was lying on the ground. I shielded my eyes from what felt like equatorial mid-day sun. In the middle distance I saw the outline of trees and a row of two storey red-brick buildings. Directly in front of me there was a car tire and various pieces of litter. I realized I was outside the apartment complex at Queen and Beverly. The night’s events came back to me: looking for Destiny, following the streetwalker…

The I remembered my reason for following the streetwalker and pushed myself upright against the wall behind me. My natural painkillers must have kicked in because the pain in my head lifted and in its place a lightness and euphoric feeling took shape. I couldn’t remember feeling felt such a physical joy since my first serious girlfriend, Alice Dreifelds. We’d gone to art school together and started a relationship after a protracted flirtation in Sculpture I. I remembered lying in bed with her on a spring morning similar to this one. The sun crept through the curtains in her apartment on the Grange and everything felt dewy and new. She was the first person to encourage me to treat art as a career, to take myself and my work seriously. Of course I grew impatient for success and blamed her for hampering my productivity. I broke up with her over tea and pastries at a Chinese bakery on Baldwin after around a year of seeing each other.

But in my endorphin-addled state I didn’t dwell in the negatives of the memory. Instead, I just remembered the pleasure of that spring morning in bed with Amber, the pleasure of knowing what was in front of me and being confident I could undertake it successfully. I decided I didn’t need to explain my methods to anyone. That was the point of art, really, to stimulate the imagination. If anyone asked what had inspired my bodies’ series I’d tell them whatever popped into my head at that time. Maybe I’d tell them I that it was inspired by strippers and prostitutes; maybe I’d tell them that they were inspired by my first girlfriend. Both were decently honest answers. Art was meant to express the inexpressible and explain the inexplicable. I couldn’t give them simple, comfortable answers because there weren’t any.

I got to my feet not only unafraid but excited to go to my opening. I breathed in the morning air and felt as tall as the trees. Then I took another breath and noticed an unpleasant odour. I followed the scent downwards and was shocked: I’d shit myself in my sleep.

#amwriting #short story #realistic fiction

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