FICTION

9 Oct 2015 FICTION

Underwater Calisthenics – Maisonneuve

Sofi Papamarko

Photograph by Jennifer Rowsom.

Underwater Calisthenics

After the third dollar store pregnancy test, I asked Miranda what I should do about it.

By Sofi Papamarko Oct. 9, 2015

AFTER THE THIRD dollar store pregnancy test, I asked Miranda what I should do about it. On a piece of stationery bordered by dancing teddy bears, she wrote out a list in her puffy script: Natural Cures, double underlined in pink. The scented marker made my underwear drawer reek like bubblegum for days.

I followed Miranda’s list like gospel. One hundred jumping jacks before breakfast. Loads of parsley. Mug after mug of strong black coffee. (“Since when do you like coffee?” asked Aunt Ruth. “Since always.”) As the caffeine cartwheeled around my system, I’d swim violent lengths at the community centre.

Hard, punishing strokes. An imperfect, floundering butterfly until I choked back water and felt like passing out. I threw up triumphantly once or twice afterwards, but later realized it was probably just morning sickness.

At church, the other girls asked God for clear skin and Friday night dates. I prayed for cramps and blood. And forgiveness for the sinful acts I’d committed that got me into this mess, offering an extra special sorry to Jesus Christ if He’d ever seen me and Trevor go at it.

The first time I attempted to fall down the stairs, I teetered for several minutes but didn’t have the guts. I begged Miranda to push me the second time. She didn’t throw enough power behind the shove so I just kind of got turned around, landing a few steps below her. We laughed in disbelief at my carpet-burned knees until the tears came. I didn’t try again after that.

“If I have an abortion,” I said as Miranda dabbed Polysporin on my knees, “will I be sending the doctor to hell for murder?”

“It’s their job,” Miranda said, rolling her eyes. I noticed she didn’t answer my question. I was taught in Sunday school that dead unbaptized children go to this place called Limbo. Limbo is not quite bad and not quite good. I picture a huge white room with endless rows of chubby babies just floating around, shaking silver rattles and cooing at each other. It doesn’t sound too terrible, actually.

Once, a mouse got into our Sunday school classroom. It ran all over like a little wind-up toy. Miss Alma jumped onto a chair and screamed, “Somebody kill it!” All the kids tried stomping on the mouse as it scurried by. Eventually, Miranda’s brother Michael trapped it under a waste paper basket. Everyone clapped. But we could still hear it fluttering and scratching in its tin prison. The janitor came and crushed its tiny body under the weight of the Old Testament. Miss Alma herded us into theantechamber to wait for our families. I asked her if the janitor was going to hell for killing one of God’s creatures. She pretended to not hear me.

“Adoption is an option worth considering,” said the wall-eyed nurse at the walk-in clinic, pushing pamphlets into my hands.

I parroted this sentence at Miranda.

“Like anyone’s gonna want your retard kid!”

“My kid’s not retarded,” I said, with only a little hesitation.

“Obviously it’s retarded,” said Miranda. “It’s got a full retard for a dad.”

Miranda had introduced me to Trevor. He went to her brother Michael’s school (“A special school,” Miranda called it, lolling her tongue around and slapping at her chest). It sounded just like our school, except the kids took fewer classes and called the teachers by their first names.

The thing about Michael is his spine is crooked. He wears a brace but you can’t really tell because he mostly wears loose-fitting sports jerseys. He also wears winter hats all the time, even in summer. Michael almost died when he was a baby. He had water on the brain and doctors had to drill in a tap-like thing to keep his head from expanding like a hot air balloon. I picture it being like my bathroom sink tap, with a side for cold water and one for hot. Now the tap or whatever is on the inside. It’s called a shunt.

“Why did your head have so much water in it?” I’d asked him once when we were younger.

“We are all a large percentage of water,” he replied, before showing me his action figures.

Michael brought Trevor along to a Canada Day barbecue at the park. Trevor was really cute. He had these crazy blue eyes and so many freckles that they all kind of blended into each other.

“Hey there, Ribfest,” Miranda pushed two fingers into the concave of Trevor’s chest. “This is my friend Bethany.”

“I brought butter tarts,” I said.

“So I guess I’d better try one to make sure they’re not poisonous,” Trevor smiled and took a bite out of the one I was holding, so I was feeding him. Miranda shot us a disgusted look.

“You’ll have to make some just for me sometime,” he said, snaking his arm around my back.

“She got them from Mariposa Market,” said Miranda. “They’re famous, you know. You can buy them basically whenever you want.”

Miranda looked me up and down. Then she turned her back and made a big show about announcing it was time to light the sparklers.

MY PERIOD WAS THREE WEEKS LATE when Trevor drove us to Bass Lake. We got freezies that made our lips blue and a can of Mountain Dew. We started making out but then I ran off to puke in the bushes. I figured that was as obvious an opening as any.

Trevor snapped a long blade of grass that had gone to seed and chewed on it, looking like a farmer chomping on some straw and inspecting his acres.

“So what makes you think it’s even mine?”

It felt like a slap. I wanted to slap back.

“You think I go around doing it with every boy I know?”

Trevor hugged his pale grasshopper legs to his chest. I started counting the freckles on his face because I didn’t know what else to do. I made it to twenty.

“So what are you going to do about it?” I shrugged.

He stood up. “So maybe you should tell me when you know.”

He sucked back the dregs of the pop, tossed the can onto the grass and headed back towards the car. I didn’t feel like following him.

After that, I figured we were broken up.

LAST SUMMER, I leapt into lake water so cold that I could barely gulp in air when I surfaced.

I felt that same breathlessness when one of our wooden kitchen chairs made full contact with my abdomen.

After I managed to wedge in a breath, I bolted. My Aunt Ruth chased after me, screaming that I was a Jezebel and a whore and that I owed her everything, not the least of which was a new chair.

I sprinted and sobbed for ten blocks before leaning on Miranda’s doorbell. It was Michael who answered.

“Greetings, Bethany,” he said. “Would you like a cup of water?”

When Miranda’s mom came home, I told her what happened through tears. Lainie held me in her ample arms and sighed. “Poor dear. Poor little soul.”

Miranda raised an eyebrow when she saw me sipping chamomile tea on the couch.

“Bethany is having a rough go at home, dear heart,” said Lainie. “She’ll be staying with us for a while. She’ll sleep in your room.”

“But I don’t want to share my bed.”

“Sleep on the floor, then!” Lainie slammed a fist on the coffee table. “Christ, girl! Where’s your head?”

Miranda’s bedspread smelled like Love’s Baby Soft and mildewed towels. On the wall facing me was a constellation of glow-in-the-dark star stickers that I picked at idly while waiting for sleep. I usually slept on my stomach, but the mottled bruises splayed across my belly kept me from that. Miranda talked in her sleep. Otherwise, she’d stopped speaking to me entirely.

I was alone a lot. Miranda worked at a day camp and Lainie was back and forth at odd hours, taking on as many cleaning shifts as she could handle at the new casino. She used to clean private homes, but stopped after a client got too “handsy.”

“Just because they’re paying you for one job, they think they’re entitled to another,” she said, shaking her head. “Never be alone with men, Bethany, no good can come of it.” She regarded my still-flat belly with pity. “But you already knew that.”

Michael went to summer school and had also gone silent. I wondered if he felt weird about what happened with Trevor and me. Or worse, hated me because of it. Maybe Trevor said awful things. Maybe Michael believed them.

One day in late August, instead of immediately hiding in his room, Michael disappeared into the kitchen. He emerged a few minutes later, presenting a plate of perfect grilled cheese sandwiches. We ate them while watching The Price is Right.

“Have you noticed how no one seems to bid on the first Showcase Showdown?” said Michael. “They just pass and wait for the next one.”

“The next one’s always better.” I replied. “Not always,” he said.

We watched in silence for a minute.

The second lady won the first showcase. Bob reminded us to have our pets spayed or neutered.

“I want to see your scar,” I said. Michael hesitated for a moment before doffing his toque and tilting his head towards me, smacking the fleshy horseshoe on top.

“Do you think it’ll bring me luck if I touch it?” I asked him.

“It hasn’t brought me much luck, so I don’t know why you’d bother.”

I touched it anyway.

UNDERWATER CALISTHENICS replaced the frantic butterfly as my pool ritual. Sub-aquatic jumping jacks, handstands and back floats. The floats were my favourite because they blocked out the world. I’d dip my head back just enough to have the water cover my ears. The echo chamber of the pool deck was muted, the world made gelatinous. I’d stretch out my arms and legs like a snow angel, the water supporting me like a trillion tiny hands.

I watched a Mommies and Toddlers class starting in the shallow end and became very aware of the tiny swimming pool inside me. Somewhere in there, a veined jellybean floated and throbbed. I positioned my body into another back float.

“We are all a large percentage of water,” the fluid amplified the sound of my own voice, words humming within a skull that felt as vast and white as Limbo. “Adoption is an option worth considering.” Salty tears and chlorinated water stung my eyes in equal measure.

As an experiment, I curled up into the fetal position and promptly sank.

The world could end in bee colony collapse disorder, for example. The bees die and there goes our food supply. Cashews require pollination. Green peppers, too.

25 Apr 2014 FICTION

The Pollinators – The Toronto Star

Sofi Papamarko

Star short story contest 2014: Third place

The Apocalypse will not happen all at once. It may very well unfold slowly, over time

The world could end in bee colony collapse disorder, for example. The bees die and there goes our food supply. Cashews require pollination. Green peppers, too.

By: Sofi Papamarko Published on Fri Apr 25 2014

The world can end in so many ways.

Gamma rays are my greatest hope for us, really. It would be blessedly quick. Not entirely clean, of course, but nothing that annihilates sentient life on a planet ever could be. If you really think about it, gamma rays are the brain aneurysm of doomsday scenarios. Instantaneous death. Painless, probably. We’d be dry roasted like trussed-up turkeys in a nanosecond.

“Min.” There is a note of warning in David’s voice. “Perhaps we should talk about something else.”

Stuart and Camelia are here. We are sitting in the dining room. Rich, dark mahogany. Candlelight. The nicest room in our house. We never use it.

“Gamma rays, you say?” Stuart’s eyebrow is raised. “What about the Rapture? That would be something to behold, eh? All of those naked, righteous souls floating like hot air balloons to meet Jesus. Quite the elegant mass exit!”

We are eating cashew chicken and jasmine rice with chopsticks. It is the closest approximation of Chinese cooking that I can muster. More North America’s notion of Chinese cuisine, really, but I’m Vietnamese, so what do I care? Whenever we entertain colleagues, I know that David wants me to play up the role of Young Asian Wife, even though I’m not specifically young anymore. He says that my whipping up a pot roast and scalloped potatoes tends to make WASP wives squirm in their seats.

“This is delicious, dear” Camelia says. She is wearing a maroon pantsuit, a string of black pearls and smells of L’Air Du Temps. “Very exotic.”

The sweetly compliant Young Asian Wife smiles and thanks her while emptying her glass of Pouilly-Fuisse.

“Atomic bombs, now there’s a whole other thing,” booms Stuart. There are beads of sweat on his brow. “War. Escalation. Radiation. Some loony toon in North Korea or somewhere in the Middle East pushes his red button and it’s all over. Kaboom! Done.” Stuart makes the motion of washing his hands of a situation. “So long, Charlie!”

“We visited the Middle East once,” says Camelia. “Dreadful place!”

“It’s not the bomb that’s going to do us in,” I say. “It’s going to be the honeybees.”

“More jasmine rice, Stuart?” David wipes his mouth with a napkin. Stuart waves David off and looks at me, head cocked.

“Colony collapse disorder. The bees die and there goes our food supply. That’s what will bring about the end of our civilization.” I gesture to our table. “Cashews require pollination. Green peppers, too.”

“The bees will be just fine,” laughs David, embedding his elbow in the general area of Stuart’s ribs, sheathed as they are in a dense, fleshy parabola. “They’re nothing but pests, so they’ll stick around forever. Like cockroaches. There will be honeybees buzzing about long after we’re all dead. But go ahead and sign another online petition.” To no one in particular. “My wife, the activist! Can you believe it?”

“I saw another dead bee in the rose garden today,” offers Camelia.

“I don’t see why people are frothed up about the extinction of some bloody insect or another,” Stuart starts up like a diesel lawnmower. “We can pollinate crops ourselves. With technology. Hell, even by hand! Saw it on TV once. All of these Chinese on ladders, dipping feathers or paintbrushes or some-such into apple blossoms. One at a time. Agriculture — science — will find a way.”

I pour myself another glass of wine.

“Did you know,” David tells them, “that we own five different can openers?”

“Five of them!” Camelia gasps in wonderment “What on earth for?”

“To be fair,” I feel my cheeks starting get hot. “The electric one was a present from David’s sister in-law.”

“And the other four?” Stuart’s eyebrow seems to hover in mid-air.

“The other four don’t require electricity.” My voice is staccato, quavery. I calmly gather up the dishes. “We’ll need multiples down the road, because what if one breaks? What if two break? What if the pollinators all die and there aren’t any hosts food sources left and all we have are cans but no can openers? We’d have to survive on whatever had been canned the year before. Peaches and lentils and beets.”

“Oh my!” That was Stuart.

“David doesn’t like me to talk about it.” I glide into the kitchen and place the dishes in the sink. I open a drawer and turn the faucet to full blast, hoping it’s enough to mute out the sound of the cap popping off my bottle of Lorazepam. “He thinks it makes me seem crazy. But it’s better to be prepared. Better to look silly than starve.”

“You should see the storage room under out stairs,” I hear David tell them. “Bottled water everywhere.”

“It’s this global warming I’m most concerned about,” Camelia says as I take my seat next to her. “Melting ice caps. All of this coastal flooding . . .” She is gently shaking her bourbon glass so that the cubes within repeatedly clack against themselves. An Orff ensemble in miniature. I wonder if she’d ever been beautiful.

“You’re worried about global warming after these wretched winters we’ve been having?” Stuart shakes his head.

“Ridiculous,” agrees David.

“Absurd!” says Stuart.

David pours more wine. “Dessert, anyone. Min makes a wonderful khanom krok . . .”

“London will look so beautiful under water, don’t you think?” I say dreamily. “Big Ben as the centrepiece of a new Atlantis . . . “

“Har!” is Stuart’s one-note response.

“Perhaps a pandemic will get us first,” I absently sip at my wine. “That, or an asteroid no one ever saw coming. A super-volcano that blots out the sun!”

“Honey, you’re being morbid.”

“I’m being realistic!”

“You’re being morbid and dramatic and you actually sound like an insane person. Can we please change the subject.”

It’s a command, not a question. Stuart and David go on to talk about stocks and dividends and the gold standard. Camelia and I regard one another benignly. My wine-drunk mind flits about lazily, like a honeybee, from one flower to the next.

I think about dead fish washing up on shorelines. Dead birds falling from the sky. Ominous harbingers of a system much bigger than ourselves. There’s something sexy about the ending of things. Like how a highway car crash or neighbourhood fire can be bizarrely exciting.

There’s something in my chest, a feather in my ribcage. It tickles and I giggle. Now it’s on my chest and I have to get it off. I have to get it off of me because I’ve kept it in for so long now and I will otherwise jump out of my skin.

“Did you know,” I laugh, “that David can’t get me pregnant?”

And suddenly, I have their full attention.

“Oh, he’s tried and tried, you know! Poor dear! I know it’s not me, because . . . well, let’s just say that I know. Good at stocks, bad at storks, aren’t you, darling? And did you know that he’s too proud to even talk to his doctor about it?”

“Min.” David’s eyes are saucer wide.

“Maybe we should try feathers, David. Or, I know! Let’s try paintbrushes!”

I laugh harder, looking from David to Stuart, Stuart to Camelia, Camelia to David.

Dinner is over.

He didn’t leave a note explaining himself, but then again, he didn’t have to.

I touch each of these four walls, one at a time, hoping that the cool hardness will give me clues. Hoping that, in this quiet and empty dining room, he left a vibration of what he was thinking, of where he was going. Had he hesitated, even for a moment, before closing the door behind him? These walls reveal nothing. They don’t tell me whether or not he is ever coming back, but I already know the answer.

The Apocalypse will not happen all at once. It may very well unfold slowly, over time. Floodwaters slowly rising molasses-slow until there is nowhere left to migrate. And we won’t even notice that there is no air left to breathe, that’s how slowly it will all unfold. Our way of life dwindling until there is nothing left of it. Just nothing left at all.

The world can end in so many ways.

1 Dec 2013 FICTION

Ark – Taddle Creek

Sofi Papamarko

Ark

by Sofi Papamarko

From the Winter, 2013–2014, issue

(No. 31)

“I need a man who will kiss me like he’s about to be sent to the firing squad,” Shelby declared between drags of a half-smoked cigarette. “What kind of man are you looking for, Julia?”

“Dunno,” I said, picking at my scabs. “Somebody nice, I guess.”

We’d been sitting on the football bleachers, watching the junior boys on their warm-up run. They were a small army made up of sharp elbows and concave chests, rosy cheeks marred by freckles and acne. Shelby insisted they were handsome.

I looked over to her, admiring her near-translucent skin and Vidal Sassoon–inspired bob. A delicate blue vein pulsed on her temple.

Shelby had spent that summer living in France with her aunt and uncle. She had developed an impressive vocabulary and world-weary attitude.

And also breasts.

I’d noticed that the boys were noticing her now.

I remained invisible.

The mid-September air that day was as oppressively hot as it was in mid-July. Remnants of summer remained. Near my toe, a bottle cap caught the late afternoon sunlight in such a way that I remember thinking that it was a very large, very still blue beetle.

When the boys started doing jumping jacks after their laps, I tried not to laugh at the pallid, sweat-stained marionettes. Shelby applauded and let out a flirtatious whoop.

“Tommy looks a little bit like Burt Lancaster, don’t you think?”

I squinted hard. I couldn’t see the resemblance at all, but I nodded sagely before getting back to picking the scab on my knee. It bled around the edges, but it itched.

“Darling, don’t pick at your scabs!” Shelby slapped my wrist. “C’est vraiment grossier!”

I never even tried to keep up with her French. I only knew bonjour and pomme and the French word for “seal,” but only because it sounded like something rude.

I stopped picking my scab and headed straight for my cuticles. Shelby sighed.

“Whatever will we do with you?”

I didn’t know who else she meant, because we were the only ones there.

When practice was over, Tommy waved in our direction. Shelby waved back. He barrelled over to us like an oversized Saint Bernard, grinning and glistening.

“Hiya, Shelby,” he gasped.

“Thomas, dear!”

She acknowledged him with a demure cheek kiss and I winced at the sight of her cool cheek on a collision course with his sweaty jowl.

“Aren’t you forgetting someone?”

“Oh hey, Julia. Good summer?”

I mustered up the necessary levels of enthusiasm for a sincere-looking nod. Tommy was something of a dolt. I didn’t want to confuse him by using complicated language.

Shelby and Tommy moved down the bench and chatted for a while. She’d purr run-on sentences and he would answer her in sheepish monosyllables. I made no effort to participate or even eavesdrop. I was too busy weaving some dandelions into a chain—a complex task that demanded my full attention.

“We’re leaving,” Shelby announced. I felt relief wash over me until I saw Shelby and Tommy lock hands. “Get home safe, my darling girl.”

It sounded like a taunt.

“I made you a bracelet,” I said, extending thin arms toward her.

Shelby smiled and held out the hand that wasn’t all tangled up in Tommy’s paw.

Underneath the old stone footbridge. That was our hiding place. Every Wednesday evening, when our mothers thought we were at choir practice, we would make our way there. Sometimes together. Sometimes separately.

“There used to be water here,” I told her once. “When I was very little, we would play in this creek. We’d catch tadpoles sometimes. But it’s all dried up now.”

“I can still feel it,” Shelby whispered.

“Feel what?”

“The memory of water.”

Shelby brought a flashlight sometimes so we could see well enough to read chapters of Lady Chatterley’s Lover to each other and string found buttons onto dental floss. She would show me how to pull the thread taut taut taut so that the buttons would vibrate in mid-air. We pretended that they were magical fleas at a flea circus and we were their ringmasters. For the grand finale, we would touch them to our tongues.

The footbridge was not a footbridge. It was actually a bomb shelter in disguise. Invisible glass surrounded us.

One day, we imagined the bomb came. And when we re-entered the outside world, everybody was dead. Our mothers. Our fathers. Our teachers. Shelby’s pet rabbit, Ginger. An H-bomb would drop while we were innocently playing gin rummy and we wouldn’t even hear a thing. Not a whisper.

“It’d be like that episode of The Twilight Zone,” Shelby said.

I hadn’t seen the one she meant. She told me that we would have all the time in the world to read books to one another, so long as our glasses did not break. Shelby seemed relieved to hear that I had perfect 20/20 vision.

Shelby was always so beautiful in the half darkness. In the half darkness, so was I.

I can’t really remember how it started.

Except, no. That’s a lie.

She had been very quiet one afternoon. I was worried that she was upset with me about something. She told me that she had half-Frenched a boy at overnight camp when she was eleven, but hadn’t done anything with anyone since. She asked if I had ever been kissed and I shook my head no. She said that I could practice for the real thing with her if I wanted.

Everything went perfectly still. It was as if the big one really had happened and we were all alone in the universe. I couldn’t process anything except Shelby’s unsteady breathing and the scent of laundry detergent and the sound of running water, but there was no water anywhere to be found near that bridge, so maybe I was just imagining it.

Shelby wasn’t at school the day after we watched the boys’ football practice. During attendance, Mrs. Macpherson announced, “Shelby is excused.” After class, I asked and she told me Shelby’s mother had called the school to say Shelby wasn’t feeling well.

I hopped on my bike during lunch period and rode to Shelby’s house. I was going to take her the orange my mother had packed in my lunch. I decided I would give Shelby’s mother a little break from playing nurse. I would read Keats aloud to Shelby and feed her chips of ice with a spoon and smooth her hair away from her sweaty, feverish forehead. And she would feel better. And maybe she would teach me some French words. She’d be so grateful that she had a friend like me.

“Shelby’s upstairs, resting,” her mother said, barely looking up from her rapid-fire knitting. Knit one, purl one. Green and yellow yarn.

I walked upstairs and quietly entered Shelby’s bedroom. She was facing her window, her body curled up tightly, like a snail or a sea horse. Her breathing was steady and rhythmic. Inhale, exhale. Silence in between.

I sat on the corner of her bed.

“I brought you an orange,” I whispered.

She didn’t say a word.

I remember thinking that she must really be sick if she didn’t feel like talking.

I slowly unravelled the orange so the skin stayed all in one piece—something I learned from an old camp counsellor. I lay the orange peel down in front of her face, hoping my trick would make her laugh.

Shelby didn’t speak, and she didn’t move. She continued breathing steadily. I put my hand on her cool, exposed shoulder and started to hum a French lullaby. I wanted to sing it properly for her, but I didn’t know the words.

Shelby’s breathing got less steady. I thought she had the hiccups until I realized she was crying. My hand was still on her shoulder. I got to thinking about electrical circuits in science class and how I didn’t ever want our circuit to break so I was never going to take my hand off of her shoulder. I would keep it there forever. Or until I ran out of lullabies. I started to hum another.

Shelby finally turned her beautiful, swollen face toward me.

“It’s not like in the movies,” she sobbed. “It’s nothing like the books say.”

There was a loud noise. The room tilted and Shelby’s bedroom filled up with water. Cold water. Dark. It crept up so fast. Her bedside lamp sparked and the bulb popped like a champagne cork. Shelby’s bed began to float, like Noah’s ark. The sound of rushing water filled my head, but instead of the ghostly rustle of a creek that had since wasted away into nothing, the whole of the ocean surrounded us now. I could hear the waves collapsing around our two warm bodies, waves that pushed and pulled sand and debris in its wake, accompanied by a greedy undertow that clutched onto anything and everything it could carry along with it.