Excerpt from Naked Girls & the Grinch by Christopher Meades
On December 23rd, two days before Christmas, I call up all of my friends. “Did you see page A17 of the newspaper? We have to go to this.” None of them, it turns out, reads the newspaper anymore. And none of them is able to go. Explaining the details of the show only makes it worse. Four friends in, I call my best friend from high school knowing full well he won’t be able make it. He has two small children. His relatives are in town, that aunt with the spastic colon and her wounded-dog-faced husband are no doubt sleeping in his guest room. There’s no way he’d be allowed to leave the house for dinner with his friends, let alone what I’m asking him to do. Still, I pitch it like it’s the most important sale of my life.
“It’s naked girls reading How the Grinch Stole Christmas.”
“I don’t get it,” he says.
“What don’t you get?”
“Are they strippers or are they girls who act out a play?”
“I have no idea. That’s the best part. You don’t know what it’s like until you get there.”
He pauses. In the background I can hear children playing. His wife’s gentle nagging. Aunt Linda complaining about her challenging bowels.
“Why don’t you just go to a strip bar on Christmas Eve like all the other pathetic single guys?” he says.
His wife’s voice sounds again, closer this time. Any second now he’s going to get dragged off the phone. Whenever his wife approaches, my best friend’s eyes dart around, his ears shift back ever so slightly in high alert. I can sense it even through the phone.
“It’s not about the nudity. There’s no pole involved. Guys don’t place singles in g-strings. It’s like a burlesque act. The kind they used to show back in the 1920s. Only they’re reading, so it’s literary, you know, a mix of high and low culture.”
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Christopher Meades is the Vancouver author of The Three Fates of Henrik Nordmark (ECW, 2010). His second novel, set in 1930’s Russia and entitled The Last Hiccup, will be released in April 2012. One day he hopes to escape his cubicle and live by the beach. Find him online at ChristopherMeades.com.
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Rib Cage by Lynn Davies
I walked into the night
under a moon flicking
sparkles on snow. Angel-
spit? Hallelujahs?
Past the alders, usually
thick and overwritten,
so slap-me-in-the-face;
now slender ebony,
a rough comb laid aside.
Straight into the darkness
I walked — me, the arrow —
in boots and a long coat,
the snow’s crunch brittle
as I was fierce with doubt.
Like, why death? We’re
never ready, we’ve never
learned enough. I’d write
you into these stanzas
but something broken
stops me. It’s that rib cage
by the side of the road,
all that’s left of the bird
turned beast, in pieces
before it hit the ground.
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Lynn Davies is the author of The Bridge That Carries the Road (Brick Books, 1999) and Where Sound Pools (Goose Lane Editions, 2005). Her work has been published in journals across Canada and broadcast on CBC Radio. She also sells books at Westminster Books, an independent bookstore in Fredericton, NB.
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Excerpt from The Problem with Babies by Jill Sexsmith
Ava told you she was watching figure skating on TV when she decided she wanted to have a baby. She said one had nothing to do with the other. Not really. Except that now, whenever she thinks of her impending child, she also thinks of triple salchows and the one-foot lutz.
“But how did you know it was what you wanted?”
“My TV was on the fritz. It paused while Midori Ito was mid-leap. And I just said, by the time she lands, I want to have made a big decision. So I chose baby.”
“Just like that?”
“Figure skaters,” Ava said, “They just fling themselves in the air and hope for the best. I wanted to do the same.”
You have always thought of babies as being a bit like cancer — tumours with arms and legs. You have never understood why someone would willingly grow one. Except that recently you’ve been feeling a bit restless, gassy, empty and wonder if a baby might be the answer. Your doctor says not to get too crazy, it could just be an irritable bowel.
* * *
You watch for Ava through the crack in your office door. She is coming to the gallery today to show off her newborn — something you both swore you would never do. You told her you refused to congratulate people for having sex without using birth control.
“Your husband sure can cum!”
Ava howled.
She is pretty much your last friend to become a mother and, as these things go, the latest friend you have lost or are about to lose. As soon as she arrives, you will get your ooh ah over and done with. You will get on with your day.
* * *
When Ava arrives, the newborn is cradled in her arms — a tiny wailing thing wrapped in a blanket covered with ducks. She takes it to the lounge for its installation. They quickly draw a group of admirers. You hide behind them and assess everyone’s sincerity, willingness to lie, desperation to get out of work. Faces are scrunched up, lips are puckered, there are genuine sounding oohs and ahs, soft tickles on the baby’s chin and cheeks.
“Awen’t you pwecious.”
You wonder what happens to Rs when a baby is present — an entire letter from the alphabet disappears.
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Jill Sexsmith's work has appeared in journals such as PRISM international and The New Quarterly. She is currently working on her MFA through UBC’s optional-residency program. She lives in Winnipeg where she works as an editor.
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