Do We Eat Here? Do We Shit?

We, Max Load and Alex Oliver of Midnight Ryders Productions, loaded up our bags, a camera, a laptop, a box of condoms and a c-light and headed to a Best Western two hours north of the city.

Max’s cousin’s wedding started with a long ceremony in a hot church lead by a preacher or minister or priest or whatever who mumbled into his chest for much much much too long.

The whole service, Max was trying to make eye contact with some other cousin, his favourite cousin, the cousin he’d told Alex about on the way to the hotel, the cousin who Max described as probably the hottest person he’d ever known. Alex thought, No way she’s that hot, thinking, we work with hot women almost daily, actually said, “No way she’s that hot,” but Max pointed her out and, yes, she was remarkably sexy, definitely someone that Alex could work with, but it was only really specific women who we approached to work with him, to work with us—Max did camera and sometimes P.O.V. videos—women with an often messy combination of self-hate and a desperate need for approval or validation or confirmation sometimes masquerading as who-gives-a-fuck confidence. And this cousin, Morgan, she had a different type confidence, something much closer to grace, but grace without the high-religious chasteness that word might imply to you. Grace on a human scale, as Max might have said when he was studying art and filmmaking, as Max might have said if he was in a mood to be mocked. Dirty grace, is the type of phrase Alex would have preferred Max use, but dirty didn’t describe Morgan properly at all.

At the reception, we were seated at the back table, the table for singles and childless individuals. We got our food last and we had to strain to hear the speeches, one of which included a warning to Max’s now married cousin and her husband that they should enjoy themselves in the bedroom now because maybe someone has told them, but probably not— as soon as the kids arrive their sex lives are through. Alex worked his charm on some modestly pretty maybe twenty-year-old relative of the groom’s who as soon as she sat down was giggling over the attention that he paid her. Max watched Morgan and her husband and saw the way that they avoided each other’s eyes, the way that he kept his elbows in like he was afraid of bumping against her.

During the dancing, we really saw what Morgan might mean for our modest website. When the DJ started playing “Like a Prayer,” all Max’s girl cousins let out this excited, sustained, “Oh,” and threw their hands up. One of the girl cousins, smiling and off-balance because of her shining new heels, scurried over to one of the speakers and pulled from behind it, like, twenty hula-hoops and gave them all out.

You’ve never seen anything like Morgan hula-hooping. We’ve talked about it and for each of us our favourite thing is when a leading lady rides cowgirl and grinds her hips like she’s possessed or she’s dancing. Before the work made us sadly desensitized to these simple pleasures, such moments could produce, in either of us, an instant effect. Morgan’s hips have a range and nuance of movement, a language of wiggle that could make her an instant adult film star. Alex thought, “I’ve never seen anything like it before,” and Max thought, “I must have seen Morgan do that before,” but we were too entranced to even turn and share a look that might have conveyed our thoughts to each other.

Somebody was whispering in Max’s ear. Annoyed, he turned and nearly collided with a beefy bicep. The arm moved, wrapped itself around Max’s shoulders. “What?” Max asked.

Alex turned then. The large, veinous hand and forearm reminded him of an engorged cock. He backed away instinctively, then turned back to watch Morgan keeping the hula-hoop up.

The owner of the beefy arm said, “Erin wants us to go over to the fairgrounds.”

Behind the now slender, jaw- and cheekbone-defined face, somewhere in the tilt of the smile or in the light behind the eyes, Max thought he recognized the bride’s little brother. “Fat Phil?”

“I haven’t heard that name in too long.”

“You liked it?”

“No, I didn’t.” He gave Max a squeeze. A very tight squeeze.

“You look great.”

“Thanks. The exercise is better than the anti-depressants I was on back when I was— Back when I had that nickname.”

“Uh,” Max said. Needing an out, maybe, or trying to be polite as some sort of act of apology—hard to say—Max introduced Alex. “Phil, this is my business partner.”

Phil stood and extended his powerful right arm. “You’re the ‘talent’?”

“What’s that?” Alex asked.

Max started burning. How did Phil know what we did?

Phil repeated himself, louder now so he could be heard over the church choir singing, just like a prayer, I’ll take you there. “You are the talent? In Max’s movies.”

“You a fan?” Max’s smile was just weaker than hopeful.

“Before she passed, your mom told my mom what you do.”

Alex went back to watching Morgan, but Max wilted in the heat of his understanding. The internet, so public. Pornography, so hated, so automatically scorned. His family, so? So? So what? Wholesome. Righteous. Ugly.

“Like a Prayer” ended and we went to the bathroom.
Alex unzipped his pants and started pissing into the urinal. “So? Everybody knows.” 

Max stood there with his dick out, but he couldn’t pee. “Keep your voice down.”

“We’re the only people in here.”

Max closed his eyes, took a deep breath and tried to imagine that he was standing over his own toilet in his own bathroom in his anonymous studio apartment in one of now six nearly identical buildings clustered near the train tracks and the bread factory, but his meditation failed because two men came laughing into the bathroom. They stopped when they saw us. What did that mean that they stopped? Max zipped up, made quick eye contact and nodded his head to try and gauge their reactions. Alex washed his hands.

As we gathered at the margins of the big group waiting to walk to the fair grounds, as grandmas in high heels fretted at the change in plans and tried to arrange cabs for them and their grandchildren, as people made their excuses and left for their hotels, Max was scanning the crowd, concentration making his brow crash angrily down on his eyes and fear forcing his head to jerk this way, that way and back again. “You look crazy,” Alex said.

“I’m just trying to figure out how many people know,” Max said.

“Should we do a survey?” Alex suggested.

“You can survey me,” said the girl, the young woman, the vulnerable female relative of the groom’s that Alex had been working.

“Hi Deborah,” Alex said.

“Debbie, please,” Debbie said.

“Easy. Hi Debbie.”

She touched Max on the arm and he flinched and turned. “Hey.”

“Is something wrong?” Debbie asked Max. When he didn’t reply, she turned to Alex. “Is something wrong?”

“No,” Alex said. He saw a man turn towards them and look Alex up and down, appraising him. Alex nodded an acknowledgment, then asked Debbie, “Who’s that guy?”

“My dad.”

“Hunh.” Alex started to feel the weight that Max was carrying, the suspicion.

“He hasn’t talked to me in years.”

“Years? How old are you?”

“Twenty-one. When I was seventeen I had some trouble with drugs and with boys. Somebody found a video on my phone and it got back to Dad.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah. He called me a slut and kicked me out and that’s that.”

Alex nodded. “You haven’t heard from him since?”

“Every once in a while he’ll get a bit drunk and show up at my house to bang on the door and shout things.”

“Who’s this?” Max asked, suddenly aware of the conversation.

“My dad,” Debbie said. “We don’t really get along.”

“Sounds like it.”

Debbie wrapped her arm around Alex’s and put her face against his bicep. He moved back a step, recognizing Debbie for the storm she was. She definitely would go back to the hotel with them and she would probably be a little crazy, too. Which was good, for the videos anyway.

Debbie’s dad looked at them again, only this time the big brush-cut kid with him, a younger double of the old man, turned too, menace on a rolling boil behind his eyes and under his broad shoulders. Debbie grabbed Alex’s hand, squeezed it and smiled up at him.

Alex knew he was being used.

Max realized he hadn’t seen Morgan in a while. Had she gone home? Maybe she’d been in some advance party to the fair. Was cousin Matthew giving Max some critical side-eye? Wasn’t Matthew the one who always left crying from the woods behind grandma’s house? There was Morgan, sitting on a leather loveseat behind the table of photographs of the bride and groom and all their dead relatives. She was rubbing her feet, a pair of sneakers on the cushion beside her. She smiled at Max and held out her arm, reaching for him. As Max walked towards her, some kid ran into him, knocking him sideway. “Sorry,” the kid said breathlessly. Max looked around to see what grownup was responsible for this child and would therefore be also looking to scorn Max. Morgan called his name before Max could find a head turned towards him. The kid had been swallowed up by the crowd.

“How are you, Cuz?”

“Hi, Morgan.”

“Please, Maxy, you’ve never called me that.”

“How are you, Mo?”

“It’s a decent party, don’t you think?”

“I haven’t seen any of you in years.”

“That’s right, you weren’t at Sarah’s wedding.”

“I think I was in Vegas.”

“Vegas? What for?”

“Work.”

“There’s a porn awards thing there, isn’t there?”

Max looked at his shoes, thought maybe he’d throw up all over them. Morgan touched his knee, her fingers long and gentle. Max wanted to tell her to wash her hands. What was wrong with him that he ever imagined involving Morgan in his nasty work? He loved her. Which explained something, he supposed.

“What’s wrong, Maxy?”

“Does everybody know?”

“It’s exciting,” Morgan said. “That’s the wrong word. It’s something to talk about.”

“Right.” Max looked over at Alex, Deborah standing so close to him, talking to him about whatever.

“Is that they guy? The actor?”

“Alex? Yeah.”

“I’m sorry. I’ve never watched anything you’ve done.”

“It’s probably better.”

“It’s not really my thing.”

“No.”

“Maxy. I’m— I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“You are one of my favourites.” Max made sure to look at her.

“Oh, Max. You too. You too.”

She hugged him. He tried not to picture what her body, the parts he could feel through his chest and chin and hand, would look like naked. “I hate these family things, Mo.”

“I hear you.” People were starting to leave the hall for the street. “Looks like it’s time to go.”

Max stood. He made eye contact with Alex. He flicked his head in the direction of the hotel. Alex shrugged, grimaced a bit, looked at Deborah. Max nodded, thinking he understood.

To Morgan, Max said, “I think I’m going to cut.”

“What?” Morgan asked.

“Leave.”

“There’s so much more party left.”

“I know.”

“It’s really great to see you.” She hugged him again. “Are you on Facebook?”

“Uh. Yeah. I don’t check it much, but.”

“I’m going to find you. Okay?”

“I’ll watch for that.”

“Great. Bye.”

“Bye.”

Max walked out the door with Alex and Debbie. “I’m done,” Max said. “You coming with me?”

“Yeah.”

“Can I join you guys?” She lay her hand across the front of Alex’s belt.

“I gotta talk to Max.” Alex lifted her hand.

“Okay, whatever.” Debbie turned towards Alex, grabbed his wrist and forced his hand against her breast, her mouth open.

“Mmm, that’s nice,” Alex said. “Real nice. But not tonight.”

“Fine.” She nodded to Max then jogged to catch up with the long trail of people making their way along the sidewalk to the nearby fair.

We didn’t talk all the way back to our room. Alex opened two cans of Budweiser from our cooler and we sat in deck chairs on this small patch of flagstones level with the black asphalt driveway to the back parking lot. We could see the Ferris wheel’s light through a thin stand of trees.

“That girl Debbie was trouble,” Alex said.

“In the good way?”

“I think she wanted her dad to fuck me up. And did you see her brother?”

“No.”

“Carbon copy of the dad, man. And mean looking.”

Max nodded.

“Saw you talking to Morgan.”

“Yeah.”

“What she have to say?”

“You know, I think I love her Alex?”

“Your cousin? That’s some kinky shit.” 

“Ah.”

“I see it, though. She’s super hot.”

Max could feel something open up in himself, something parting.

We didn’t hear Debbie coming because she’d taken off her shoes. She was crying. She wiped her face when she spotted us, then tried to hurry past.

“Hey, hey,” Alex said. “You look like you need a drink.”

He stood up and went inside. Debbie sat down in Alex’s deck chair and stared silently ahead. “I’m staying here, too,” Debbie said.

“I figured.” Max sipped his beer.

“We’ve only got Bud,” Alex said, holding a can out for her. “Sorry.”

She took it from him. “That’s fine.”

Max stood. “I’ll leave you two.”

Max smiled at Alex. Patted him on the shoulder.

Alex sat down beside Debbie. Max listened to the two of them talking, the words obscured by the sliding glass door, until he fell asleep. 

Toronto, Jan. 2016

Emoji sequence: Writer and educator, Nadia Pecaric

Story: Lee Sheppard

New Love

I sorta loved my Art teacher and I really loved Art so at first I thought Heather was talking about raku, which I remember from a graduation party that my Art teacher hosted at her house for all her Art kids. She’d set up a kiln and some tables with clay so that we could create raku pieces. I don’t really remember the process. I remember that it was cold out, despite it being late June, and that even with my sweater on, I stayed near enough to the kiln that I at least believed I was getting some heat off it.

But Heather, my companion, my date maybe, was talking about chakras suddenly and the colour of the root chakra, which was at the base of the spine, and I started to understand that she wasn’t talking about some Japanese technique for making cool looking tea cups. Near Bloor and Christie, maybe right across from Tacos El Asador, there is some diagram of a silhouette in lotus position with seven circles of colour from her crotch to the top of her head. The red one always looked, to me anyway, like it was censoring her labia or anus, though I knew enough not to vocalize that thought and if I even had, I knew enough to do it apologetically, like, I’m sorry to be ignorant of these ancient understandings that I just don’t get, but.

And Heather was still explaining about the chakras and about her understanding of what each one was, and we were still waiting in line for the Ferris wheel and the CNE was crazy this year so there were families and groups of other teenagers and kids running around, seemingly supervision free, playing maybe tag or something, then breaking the illusion that they were unattended and racing back to nag their lagging family to hurry hurry hurry off to whatever, the cotton candy place or the food building or that ride there or there. 

There was this big guy who was giving me the creeps a bit, standing against the temporary fence that kept people out of the area around the Ferris wheel. Something about the way he was still and watching for something. Of course I reasoned that he could just be waiting for someone, that even some dude with sausage hands and sagging sacks of skin under his eyes was just as likely as me to have someone to meet at the Ex. There was a blob of mustard on his chin and he was trying to wipe at it, but his dense bristles of facial hair seemed to want to keep it there. I imagined him scrubbing at it with a toothbrush.

“Yellow is the colour of power,” Heather was saying. She touched me at the base of my rib cage. “It’s associated with right here. Your solar plexus.”

There was a terrible coughing, then people were shouting for help. The man who’d been creeping me out had dropped to the ground.

Heather said, “I have first aid training,” then left the line.

I stood there for a bit. The Ferris wheel had stopped and the people on it were looking over the edge of their little eight-sided pods with the eight-sided roofs to see the fallen man. After a few minutes, during which people’s compassion quickly became irritation at that guy for being so inconsiderate as to come to the CNE to collapse, it became clear that Heather would not be coming back from the ring of people around the man and I couldn’t see her head at all, so I looked behind me at the impatient faces and braced myself to squeeze by. I employed a steady chant of “excuse me, pardon me,” as protection against the stinking eye.

The same chant worked as a wedge so I could drive myself to the center of the thick donut of people which had, at its open heart, the unseen man and, I hoped, my date. She was holding the man’s head on her lap, her hand against his chest, and speaking to him quietly. The man was holding onto her forearm.

The mustard spot was gone.

A second man with the consciously relaxed face, the bedside manner brow, of a doctor, was on his cell phone. He stood up and stretched onto his tiptoes to see over the now thinning ring of people. When he started waving, I looked where he was looking and saw people parting for a slowly approaching ambulance.

I started saying, “Heather, Heather,” but I was speaking quietly, not wanting to disturb the people beside me, so of course she couldn’t hear. I tried to move into a spot where if she looked up she would see me, but I was conscious of not wanting to obscure anyone’s view either. When Heather looked up, it was at the sky. It was as if she, as if all of what was happening, was underwater and that seeing that sky was what she needed to breathe.

By the time the ambulance arrived and the paramedics broke through the congregation of onlookers, my eyes were wet with admiration and overwhelming affection for Heather. When the man was forced to let go of Heather’s hand so the paramedics could put him on a stretcher, he moaned and reached for her, his hand flapping desperately. I knew before it happened, that Heather would get into the ambulance with him.

The paramedics closed the door on Heather and the collapsed man and the ambulance started to move. I followed along behind it, keeping pace easily with the honeycomb bumper. My plan was to walk the ambulance all the way to the hospital, but as we neared the borders of the fairgrounds and the crowds thinned it picked up speed and I began running, realizing that of course I couldn’t keep pace with it. 

“Where are you going?” I shouted. The siren’s scream lowered in pitch as the vehicle moved away. “Which hospital are you going to?” The ambulance disappeared over a hill up Strachan Avenue. The busy street didn’t answer my question, though a few passersby turned, looking over their shoulders and hoping, I suppose, to be able to acknowledge, to recognize, that I was shouting at someone or something real. As I trotted up Strachan, I nodded at people and smiled with tight lips, a sort of Thanks-for-checking-on-my-sanity-type nod and smile. One lady stepped into the bike lane and nearly got hit by a cyclist, so eager was she to get out of the way of the crazy guy that was, of course, me.

At the top of the hill, I had to rest. The siren’s cry blended with the sound of a GO Train passing underneath me. I strained by eyes to try and see the ambulance at the lights by King St., but it wasn’t there. If the ambulance had turned right, they’d be going to Toronto Western. If they’d gone left, they’d be going to St. Joe’s.

My watch wasn’t helpful on the subject of where they’d taken Heather, though I checked it anyway. I texted Heather, “Which hospital?” though I didn’t expect a response. I stood there looking at my phone as an irritated woman in a designer tracksuit discouraged her pug from sniffing my stationary feet.

On my way to the corner of Strachan and King, I thought about what Heather had done and my legs felt wobbly, maybe because of all the running I had just done, I guess, but I think because of the surge of admiration I felt for her. I mean, reiki I didn’t give a shit about, honestly, and Heather was too calm and levelheaded and nice to really rank amongst my greatest all-time crushes, at least up to that point. But here was someone who would hold the head of a stranger, a kind of gross stranger, one of only two people in a crowd of at least hundreds who was even willing to help. My heart beat fiercely at the thought.

The siren’s song had disappeared beneath the city’s sounds by the time I got to the intersection. I went over to the streetcar stop where there was a cluster of people waiting. “Hi, uh. Um, did anyone— Did any of you see an ambulance come through here?” There were a pair of short ladies with buckets of cleaning supplies who looked Filipino and maybe legitimately didn’t know how to answer me, but, I mean, there were a lot of people, the rest of the people, who looked at me for a second, then made a point of staring past. “Which way did the ambulance go?” It was actually one of the Filipino ladies who pointed east.

“It went that way?” I held out my arm.

She nodded.

“Thank you, thank you.” I left quickly because I was crying again, this time with gratitude. Toronto Western, then.

I checked my phone. Still no texts from Heather. “Coming to Western,” I wrote and sent.

It’s really not that far a walk, you know? My phone says it’s under two kilometers. My phone also says it should take 20 minutes, but I made it in, like, 10.

There were two ambulances parked outside and I stopped behind the bumper of the one with the same markings as the one Heather went in and I knew that it was the ambulance I was looking for. I went and stood in the waiting area for longer than it took me to see that Heather wasn’t there. I panicked. If I hopped on a streetcar, I thought, maybe I could get to St. Joseph’s in 20 or 30 minutes. I texted, “At Western. Where are you?”

She wasn’t in the bathrooms, either. A woman in scrubs approached me. “Hi, can I help you?”

“Yeah, um,” I said. “It’s sort of weird. My girlfriend, or my friend or whatever—”

The woman in scrubs was nodding for me to go on.

“—Heather is her name, she came here, at least I think—”

“Was she hurt?”

“No. She was with a big, older guy with thick fingers and all this dense stubble. He collapsed at the Ex.”

She kept nodding, though she was looking off at other people now and didn’t seem to notice that I’d finished.

“Are they here?”

She was still nodding. “From the Ex, yeah. They’re just,” she held up her arm and was about to tell me where to find Heather when there was this horrible screaming. 

“My fiancée!” Two ducking paramedics wheeled a bloody person right past the reception. “That’s my fiancée!” A police officer had his hand against the chest of the screaming man. “Let me go with my fiancée!” He had a bike helmet in each hand. One helmet was a mess of red and road grit, its plastic shell peeled like an orange skin as if by some absentminded monster. Suddenly, the woman who’d been talking to me was standing behind the policeman and speaking quietly, trying to soothe the screaming man. “I need to be with my fiancée!” He grabbed the policeman’s wrist. “Why don’t you go out there and find the fuck that did this to her instead of keeping me from my fiancée?”

No one noticed me come in. There was a station in the center of the large Emergency Room with computers, the nurses and doctors moving in private purposeful orbits. Most curtains were closed. The bloody fiancée had been swallowed up by the quiet order of this place. I was walking around looking for Heather’s purple Converse under each curtain, when I was again asked, “Can I help you?” by a woman in scrubs.

“My grandfather,” I lied, “he fell at the Ex. Collapsed. They said he was brought here. With a girl.”

“One minute,” she said. I stood there while she whispered something to another woman in scrubs, this one wearing reading glasses. “Okay,” the woman said as she approached and held out a hand. “This way.”

The collapsed man, his eyes closed, looked much less disgusting under the hospital’s sheets. Heather gave me a tight smile and put her phone down in her lap. “You found us.”

“Yeah. Hi.”

“Hi.”

I opened my mouth because I was here now and I thought I should say something. “Is he okay?” I asked.

“Well, you know.”

I nodded.

The man coughed and shifted in the bed.

“I can wait outside,” I told Heather.

“You don’t need to. My parents are coming.”

“Okay,” I said. “Okay.” I looked at my watch again.

“I’m sorry,” Heather said. “I was having a good time.”

“Me too.”

“I’ll text you. When I’m free again.”

I nodded. “That’s great. Yeah. Thanks.”

“Okay?”

“Okay.”

“We’ll talk.”

“Can I get you anything?”

“No. I don’t think so. Thanks.”

I nodded again. “I’ll see you.”

“Kay.” She picked up her phone. Why hadn’t she texted me back?

“Later,” I said.

I wasn’t ready to leave, though. I sat down in the waiting room. There was a baseball game on the TV. I hadn’t followed the Jays since grade eight. They were doing great I knew. I pulled my phone out and called up my texts to Heather. They had all been delivered. I texted, “Sure you don’t need anything?”

The shouting man with the bike helmets was gone and everyone was quiet like he’d never been there.

My phone buzzed. “No. I’m fine thanks. Thanks for checking up on me. I’m really fine. I can’t wait to see you again.”

I smiled and my diaphragm bounced a laugh past my lips. I looked up at the TV feeling overwhelmingly happy. I stayed to watch two innings and focused on taking deep breaths and keeping an eye on the Emergency entrance, hoping to see Heather’s parents arrive.

When I left, the sun was still warming the north sidewalk along Dundas so I walked home as happy as I could remember being in a long time. 

Toronto, October 2015

Emoji sequence: Harmony Trowbridge,  whose idea it was to combine the two sequences.

Story: Lee Sheppard

County Fair

Tyler stroked his burgeoning and profoundly disappointing mustache as he watched the rigs hauling the rides onto the fairground like meandering elephants. The entryway was, one of the drivers complained, encroached upon by the subdivision that had sprung up in the last year. One of the trailers left a rut in the new sod lying like shingles on the soft ground in front of the corner house. The fairground earth was much more solid and the tracks the vehicles left there were faint green lines where the patches of clover and dandelions and grass, fresh mown, had been pressed down and turned over. Beside the Ferris wheel, Tyler found a tire-flattened garter snake. When he moved it with his boot and it flipped belly up, he had to look at the sky to keep his eyes from crying. Somehow the paler flesh reminded him that the snake had been, until the carnival arrived, a living thing.

That night, Tyler worked the chain between the line and the Ferris wheel, whose thousand lights he thought could have been a beautiful compliment to the night sky if they weren’t so bright as to be, rather, a disappointing, yellow attempt at daylight. The white sweatshirt he had to wear hung over his jeans in an obscuring way that he was unhappy about, but they hadn’t had his size when they handed the uniforms out and they said if he cut anything off the bottom that they’d take $20 off his next pay cheque. He was fiddling with the hem when a guy who had such a great mustache that he actually looked like Freddie Mercury walked up to the chain beside a girl in a poodle skirt with a big, pink fake flower in her hair. “What’s that flower called?” was all Tyler could think to say.

“Hibiscus,” the girl said.

Tyler checked the bulge in the guy’s pants.

“You got a problem, faggot?” the guy said.

Mack was working the wheel. “I said, Next, Tyler,” he shouted.

Tyler unhooked the chain and got out of the way as invisibly as he could manage.

He lay on his thin mattress for a long time that night, staring towards the ceiling and thinking about the guy who’d called him faggot and the bulge in the guy’s pants.

Mack came in around two a.m. He’d been with Marie from the ticket booth, his sweetheart, and he smelled like beer, cigarettes, sex and dusty, dying summertime.

Tyler rolled over.

Mack said, “Hey!?” in that late night voice that is more whisper than shout, but a bit of both. 

“What?”

“You jerking off?”

“I can’t sleep.”

Mack walked over, holding out a can of beer.

Tyler sat up. The can held a distant memory of cold. “Will this help me sleep?”

“You really are a good kid.”

Tyler cracked the can and took a bitter sip. He hoped it was dark enough that Mack didn’t see the distaste on his face and read it as ungratefulness.

Mack’s can snapped and hissed. Mack drank. “Tastes terrible warm. Sorry.”

“No. Thank you.”

Mack sat down at the foot of Tyler’s cot and lit a cigarette. They sat there like that, silent, each happy for the company.

Tyler woke to the sound of passing voices, his empty can a few inches from his nose. Mack was asleep across his legs. Tyler gently slid his feet from beneath Mack’s thighs, ribcage and cheek.

He went to the mirror and looked at the wisps on his upper lip. If he moved a few inches to the left a sunbeam crossed his face and rendered his mustache invisible.

That first full day of the fair, the crowd was mostly kids and parents and old people bringing their “famous” pies for a contest in the tiny agricultural tent. Around noon, Tyler spotted the Freddie Mercury guy trying to lean nonchalantly on the temporary fence surrounding the Ferris wheel. The girl with the hibiscus in her hair was nowhere to be seen. Freddie was alone. When he looked over at Tyler, Tyler looked past him, to where people were starting to line up for the demolition derby. Undettered, Freddie walked over with a swagger half-murderous, half West Side Story. When he was a few steps from Tyler, he adjusted his penis through his tight jeans. “Hey, you, fag.”

“Hey.”

“Come over here.”

Careful to stay a few feet behind the fence, Tyler walked the ten feet to where Freddie had stopped.

They were far from the line, but Freddie still spoke low and vulnerably. “You get a break, ever?”

Tyler checked his IRONMAN watch. “In twenty minutes.”

“Meet me behind that school.” Freddie pointed with his chin then rolled his lower lip from between his teeth out to meet his upper lip in a sneering pucker.

“Why should I?”

“I want to show you something.”

Tyler caught his involuntary laugh and turned it into a spittle-spraying snort and Freddie’s face broke character for enough time to reassure Tyler that if he did go behind the sand-coloured, single storey primary school across the ditch and up five feet from the fair-grounds that Freddie was not planning on beating him up, but probably make out with him. “Sorry.”

“Maybe I’ll see you,” Freddie said, his features fixed, his act back on.

Tyler spent the next twenty minutes craning his neck looking for Jerry, who was coming to relieve him, and angling his body so that the people in line didn’t spot the press of his penis against his jeans beneath the hem of his sweatshirt. He wished he’d shaved his mustache. His “mustache.” He wished he could be absolutely sure that Freddie wasn’t going to have a bunch of hick cronies hiding in the bushes to help him kick Tyler’s ass.

Jerry was stuffing the last half of a hotdog into his mouth when he arrived, three dollops of mayonnaise having streaked the dense stubble on his chin on their way to staining his already condiment-mottled shirt. Jerry had to finish chewing before telling Tyler to go take a break.

Tyler walked with his hands thrust into his pockets, dodging children racing away from calling parents. He slowed before he reached the ditch. Freddie wasn’t visible, but was, Tyler figured, probably behind the oversized bit of building that could only be the gym. There was a row of cedar trees along a chain-link fence that separated the back yards of a row of bungalows from the packed dirt and determined grass of the playground. Tyler easily hopped the fences separating the back yards until he found a yard that, through the hedge, gave him a clear view of Freddie leaning against the tall, blind wall of the gym against which, during weekdays from September to June Tyler would bet boys threw tennis balls and red, white and blue Indian rubber balls. Freddie had one foot flat against the wall, the other planted far enough out onto the asphalt that he achieved the angle of lean he wanted. His face was still and calculated, too—tough-guy pursed lips under his black mustache—but his hands were flitting like tiny birds searching for the perfect perch.

A screen-door squealed and slammed shut somewhere behind Tyler and Tyler flinched. When he was sure that the door wasn’t right behind him, Tyler turned back to Freddie. Freddie was craning his neck as if he could lift his head high enough to see anything over the row of tall cedars. Crouching, Tyler searched for a gap between the trees that he could squeeze through to hop the fence. When he found it, Tyler awkwardly rolled over the top of the chain-link, his too large sweater catching unnoticed so that when Tyler tried to turn to walk towards Freddie, he was held back. Of course, the hated garment didn’t rip.

This time when Tyler looked, Freddie had spotted Tyler and settled his hands against the pale brick. Once Freddie was satisfied that they’d made eye contact, he placed his head gently against the wall, then looked upwards. It was a pose Tyler recognized from his father’s Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition. Tyler smiled. A giggle lifted his chest and shoulders; it wasn’t all giddy arousal that set his diaphragm dancing.  Theatricality was distasteful to Tyler and with the threat removed from Freddie’s act, the act became clownish, sad, too human for Tyler.

An engine backfired over by the grandstand and Tyler suddenly heard the storm of engine noise that had been growing steadily for who knew how long.

Freddie reached out one hand and with his other he clutched his erection. “I knew you’d want to take a look, Sweetheart.”

Tyler walked into range of Freddie’s arm and Freddie grabbed his shoulders, pulled him closer.

“You do want a look, don’t you?”

Tyler could feel a laugh tugging at his cheeks, tickling his ribs. “Uh. Can’t people see us here?” Tyler glanced over his shoulder at the row of cedars, the row of houses.

“You’re safe with me, Baby.”

“My name’s Tyler.”

“Have a feel, Tyler,” Freddie breathed into Tyler’s ear. Freddie grabbed Tyler’s wrist.

“What’s your name?” Tyler asked.

“Call me Daddy,” Freddie said.

Tyler pictured his father in his navy-blue janitor’s uniform, the Brant County Board of Education logo embroidered over his heart, his modest, direct, honest heart. “What’s your name?” Tyler asked again.

Freddie pressed Tyler’s hand against his penis. “I know you want to take a look, Baby.”

Tyler’s laugh announced itself with a pfft and a spray of spittle. And of course the timing couldn’t have been worse. Freddie let go of Tyler then. Tyler stepped back, covering his face. Freddie wiped his face on his upper arm.

“What the fuck?”

“I’m sorry,” Tyler said. There was a collision by the grandstand, the rain of glass and scream of metal much less horrible under the chorus of engines, but reminding Tyler of the potential for violence here. “I’m sorry, it’s not you.”

“You should get out of here,” Freddie said.

Tyler knew Freddie was right, but he still asked, “Are you OK?” So he felt like he maybe deserved the punch in the gut. Whatever boney thing that Freddie hit Tyler’s head with was maybe less deserved.

It was still daylight when Mack gave Tyler a cold can of beer to drink and a second one to put against his goose egg. Other than Mack offering to find and punish whoever did this to Tyler, who said, No, it was OK, the two didn’t speak. Mack didn’t ask how it happened, so Tyler didn’t have to make anything up. After Mack left to go see Marie, Tyler lay looking up at the ceiling wondering if he could clear enough of what actually happened from his mind so that he could fantasize about Freddie. He fell asleep before he could figure it out.

Toronto, June 2015

Emoji sequence: Anne-Marie Longpre, the brains behind West End Alternative's Sweatshop, a fashion business program.

Story: Lee Sheppard