trying to keep up.
A paper skeleton attached to a door made him scream: “Dead!” And then he laughed. James called Finn back, calming him, then watching him sprint away again.
Finally at the door of the daycare room, James released Finn and the boy ran as if unhooked from a leash. Coloured pictures of bats lined one wall; white paper ghosts made of tissue paper balls hung from the ceiling. Across the room, Bruce, two silver hoops replacing the gold ones, smiled his mournful, supportive smile and waved at James.
As he waved back, James’s BlackBerry beeped. The sound had become less and less frequent over the past weeks. Exiting the daycare, James looked at it: Fun night. Going to the Ossington @ 10. Halloweeeeeen. Em.
He walked to the row of cafés, selecting the one with the unflattering mirror above his bald spot. James left his hat on and ordered a coffee and sank into a chair at the window. With his laptop open, he became one of several men gently clicking away. Then he pulled out Finn’s picture, the mouth-less boy floating in space. He stared at it for a long time. He wanted to hold Finn, wanted his body close to him.
Then he began to write. It made no sense, what he was writing. There was no money in it. There was barely a story. But he felt clear. He was writing a confession. And he continued to write, and in doing so, forgot about Emma and the green door, did not even notice it open. He did not look across the street and see the girl in the black coat put her key in the lock, checking the knob twice. He did not see her waiting at the streetcar stop just outside his window, or hear the sound of the streetcar, or notice her remove her gloves to root around for her bus pass. He did not see as it carried her away.
Leaving the café, James deleted the text. Tingling with accomplishment, stopped in a small CD store, a place where he had spent a few hours a week only a decade ago. He didn’t recognize the name of one single band in the window. It had happened, then; he was not just outside the loop, the loop was unrecognizable to him, a new shape entirely.
The girl behind the counter was difficult to take in all at once. She had a metal stud in her chin, another in her lip. Black eyeliner seeped into her acne. She wore black leather cycling gloves.
To this, James posed the question: “Do you have any children’s music?” She smiled, then, not bored, not angry, but young, very young and pretty under the armour.
“Sure. Follow me.” The children’s section was small, a single row underneath “consignment.”
“These guys are awesome. Local. This is a compilation, money goes to fighting poverty or something,” she pulled discs out one by one.
“I’m looking for a specific song. It has the word ‘light’ in it.”
The girl laughed. “That’s all you know? Who wrote it?”
“That’s what I’m telling you. I don’t know. This kid I know keeps requesting it. A song about light.”
“Man! That’s insane!” Still, she divided the row into two stacks and handed James half. They put their legs out in front of them, the discs in between like they were dividing Halloween candy. “Light … light …” she muttered. At the end of ten minutes, they each had three discs with songs containing the word light in the title.
“Thank you,” said James, pulling himself to standing.
As she bagged the discs, she said from her black chapped lips: “Thanks. That was fun, sir.”
Ana had missed three days of work. This long an absence was unprecedented, a fact underlined for her by others several times during the day. In a meeting, Christian’s small, loud greeting: “Nice of you to join us. How was Aruba?” But the evidence against Aruba was in the looking; Ana was pale, thinner. The skin around the bottom of her nose glowed, ravaged and chapped, its redness unsuccessfully damped down by copious amounts of foundation and concealer. But even tired and only slightly recovered, Ana fell deeply into her work, investigating those seeds spliced in laboratories. Genetically modified. Ana typed the phrase eight times in one hour. On the issue of patenting life forms, the Supreme Court says …
As a researcher, Ana could pluck the legal issues from any subject she was assigned like a butcher removing the feathers from a dead chicken. But the