Fist of the Spider Woman (22 page)

Miraculously it worked. Trinket's left eye rolled down followed by her right. And with her eyes came vision, new vision for both of them. The room lit up with a strange haze that made

Zoya squint. There was the deafening noise of glass smashing; shards spun from out of nowhere, turning in a ghostly storm around them. Something dark and horrible and inhuman was mounted on top of Trinket. Zoya's stomach flipped and turned to rot as she realized the thing had a face and hair and hands— one of which was sunk deeply between Trinket's legs.

When Zoya screamed it plunged its other hand inside her mouth and Zoya felt it burn down her throat like hot whiskey.

She tried and failed to bite her way loose. Her jaw was paralyzed. The thing jerked her head side to side. It had them both like hand puppets. A ribbon of slimy drool rolled down Zoya's chin. Trinket's thighs glistened with sticky wet come, and also with swatches of crusty, egg-white film, evidence that she had orgasmed more than once. Zoya watched feebly until she could no longer stand it.

With all the fire in her gut she screamed “No!” The word came choking up. “Get off of her!” The thing turned lighter, like smoke, and seemed to pause to listen. Trinket's body went limp for a moment. She cried Zoya's name and Zoya shouted, “Run!”

Their legs moved without thought. Zoya's high heels pounded up the basement steps. Trinket's bare feet paddled across the kitchen floor. Before they knew it they had crossed the front yard, leapt over the wooden fence, and locked themselves inside Zoya's car.

Zoya counted to ten out loud, and then from ten down to zero, and repeated it as she drove shakily down the street, shouldering the curb a few times. Trinket counted with her, although she wouldn't lift her head from the fetal position. At least if Zoya crashed into something, Trinket was already prepared for impact.

Her driving steadied by the time they hit the highway. The road was theirs at this hour. A half moon hung low on the horizon. In a few hours there would be daylight. Zoya started planning: bank machine; coffee and a bagel at Tim Hortons at six a.m.; call Visa when they open to tell them, “No, my credit card wasn't stolen. Yes, I did mean to take out a $2,000 cash advance”; call Dad and beg him to keep Banjo for the week; send the office an email saying, “I'll be taking bereavement leave”; and, finally, turn off my Blackberry. After that Zoya had no set agenda.

“I think it was a lady ghost,” Trinket said as she unfurled into an upright position. She yawned and propped her feet onto the dashboard. Zoya relaxed back into the driver's seat a little more. The sight of her girlfriend sprawled out naked greatly reassured her. Maybe as a joke, Zoya'd buy her a children's Tim Hortons T-shirt. Maybe when the roadside tourist shops opened she'd get them matching tacky tracksuits. It would be days, at least, before they were home and could get at their own clothes.

“I heard her saying a woman's name, Kathy … Katie … something,” said Trinket. “Maybe that was her name. Did you hear it?”

“If I can't find a drive-through, I'm going to have to go into Tim Hortons wearing my corset.”

“Don't change the subject, Zoya,” Trinket said. It was true, Zoya was avoiding any talk about the thing, the ghost.

“No, I only heard the gurgling noises you were making. I thought you were choking.”

“Hmm. Did you see her?”

“I wish I hadn't,” said Zoya. She fidgeted with her seat belt. “It will take me a while before I get the image of that monster out of my head.”

“Monster? Really? You didn't see a young woman?”

Zoya shook her head and clenched her jaw.

“I always knew there was a ghost in the basement,” Trinket said. “Lots of people knew.”

“Oh, Trin, you would have believed the entire crew of the Titanic was haunting the house if that was the gossip.”

“I believe what I saw. We both saw it.” Trinket turned to Zoya, waiting for her to confirm her statement. Zoya's resistance to talking about it was beginning to frustrate her. “I wonder why she didn't come out until now?” Trinket said, probing for a response. Zoya shrugged, her eyes fixed on the road.

“Maybe she knew it was her last call for hot dyke action.”

“Trinket!” Zoya gasped.

Trinket let out a little giggle. She had Zoya's attention now.

“Aren't you the least bit curious about what just happened to us?” she asked.

“Did she hurt you?” It was the only detail Zoya really cared to know.

“No,” said Trinket. “I don't think so.”

Zoya took Trinket's hand in hers. She rubbed Trinket's wrist where she'd tightened the ropes. “Did I hurt you?” she asked.

Trinket looked at Zoya with her mascara-smudged eyes.

“Never,” she said and smiled assuredly. “You never do.”

Capri Giampolo, seventy-one years old, the neighbourhood spinster as she had been know by her generation, sat in the dark staring out the front window.

For her entire life, the house on Sixth Avenue were she lived had remained exactly the same. A reproduction of Gainsborough's Blue Boy hung above the mantle. Gold brocade sofa set.

A bowl of dusty glass grapes in the centre of the dining room table. This was the backdrop to her silence and loneliness. She prayed that her parents, may they rest in peace, would forgive her for selling their house and giving away whatever the Goodwill agreed to take.

She had packed according to her own heart: “Does this make me happy?” she asked herself about every last possession. “Not happy enough to hold on to.” Before the week was done, she'd managed to condense the entire split-level bungalow into the living room. The movers were due at eleven the next morning.

It took forever to convince Guido,
that old coot
, to sell.
And
what was he going to do with the money now?
Capri fumed. He was eighty and arthritic and had no grandchildren. Though Guido didn't matter much to Capri; he never had. She already had possession of the keys. The deeds were all signed. The tenants had certainly left—and made quite a spectacle of it. Through her window she had watched them peel away in their car, screaming, like heathen banshees in the night. Normally Capri would have clicked her tongue disapprovingly at the sight, but she took the girls' mad flight as a sign, another one of Biba's many signs.

In just a few more hours it would be eight a.m. on July 1, 2006, and the house across the street that Capri had always wanted to live in would finally be hers. She was moving in with her one true love.

Not long after Biba's funeral, Capri began to notice small, yet decidedly odd events at the Gambini house. The lights would flicker. The door would unlatch by itself and swing open. On more than one occasion Capri walked past and swore she saw Biba peeking through the basement window at her, still waving her secret wave like she did when she was alive. And every spring all of the cherry blossom petals from the tree in front of Biba's house blew into, and only into, Capri's front yard.

It took years, decades, for Capri to believe. She waved these strange signs away as grief-induced hallucinations, or perhaps God's way of punishing her for her sins. But she was an old woman now, and reason and religion had little value left in her life. In fact most everything important to her had changed or moved on.

But the house was still there, and she was sure that Biba's presence remained inside. She was too excited to sleep; all night she had been beckoning her spirit to wake up, whispering to it from her window, “Rise, Biba, rise, I'm coming. I'm coming to you soon.” Capri saw the wild light flickering in Biba's basement window and knew her incantation had worked.

And in the basement was Biba's canning, which Capri had saved from time. She held a jar of apricots in her weathered hands. For nearly fifty years she had babied this jar. Kept it cool, kept it from denting or bulging. At dawn Capri decided to greet the day with some of Biba's long-awaited fruit. The preserved apricots sighed as she pried the lid off. She raised the jar to her lips to sip the nectar. It tasted as sweet as the day she and Biba canned it. Capri remembered the taste of sugar straight from Biba's fingertips. She raised the jar in the direction of her new home and toasted, “
Salute, amora mia
. To us.”

Fear of Dying to the Wrong Song

Amanda Lamarche

There is no such thing as slowing this down.

You are on your way to a day you planned

to spend alone. You now know only that

you are alive in the taxicab, seconds before it pours

itself around a pole. You hear the prayer

of the driver, a woman yelling through the inch

of your opened window, and then neither. Just

the song coming softly through the system.

And it is not the kind of song that makes you

hang your head in your hands, give up, not

the gravelled voice of a poisoned smoker

about to outlive you, or a hymn that lets

you go. It is the soundtrack of a hand

on your back, the way your mother hums

when she picks up the telephone. You think

of it as you clamour to the curb, as you

prop yourself against the collapsed salt box.

You can still hear the strings. Kissed

on the face by a leaf, you cannot bother

to remove it. You know when the song

picks up. You picture the cello being

crushed between the knees, the pianist

pedalling in coal black shoes, the femur

of the flute in the flautist's lap, shining, geared.

There is the taste of that steel on your lips. You

inhale to make any sort of sound. You almost

place your mouth there and breathe.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES

Mette Bach
is a freelance writer who contributes to the
Advocate
, the
Globe and Mail
,
Xtra! West,
and
Vancouver Magazine
. She wrote the syndicated column “Not That Kind of Girl” for nearly four years, sharing her queer adventures with the red states. Now she writes a column called “From Queer To Eternity” for
Xtra! West.
One of her short stories, “Unfriendly,” is in the Lambda Award-winning anthology
First Person
Queer
(Arsenal Pulp Press, 2007). She's currently working on a book about femme identity and finishing an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia.

Elizabeth Bachinsky
is the author of
Curio: Grotesques and
Satires from the Electronic Age
(BookThug, 2005) and
Home
of Sudden Service
(Nightwood, 2006), which was nominated for a Governor General's Award for Poetry. Her third collection,
Strange Ritual,
will appear from Nightwood Editions (2009). She lives in Vancouver, BC.

Kestrel Barnes
is a butch dyke single parent of five who lives with her family on unceded Coast Salish territory in Vancouver, BC. “Shark” is dedicated to Kestrel's wife, Sally Diana Rowe (1957–1990).

Kristyn Dunnion
, a.k.a. Miss Kitty Galore, is a wig-wearing party on wheels. She is the author of
Missing Matthew
(Red Deer Press, 2003), a quirky mystery for rebels of all ages,
Mosh
Pit
(Red Deer Press, 2004), a queer punkrawk teen novel, and
Big Big Sky
(Red Deer Press, 2008), a speculative novel about female assassin warriors. Her short stories are widely anthologized. She likes big boots, shaved heads, and loud music. Visit Kristyn at
kristyndunnion.com
.

Aurelia T. Evans
graduated in May of 2008 from Trinity University in San Antonio, TX, with a major in English. She was part of her college Sexual Diversity Alliance and Bad Movie Club. Aurelia loves horror movies, Tex-Mex, scented lotions, and philosophical discussions about religion, gender, and sexuality. She is a voluntarily bald woman and proud of it, and she works to raise awareness of trichotillomania.

Amanda Lamarche
is a poet and good girl from Gibsons, BC.

She has a BA in English from UV ic and an MFA in Creative Writing from UBC. Her work has been published in numerous magazines and anthologized in
Breathing Fire
2
: Canada's
New Poets
(Nightwood, 2004). Her first poetry collection,
The Clichéist
, was published by Nightwood Editions in 2005. Most recently, she has moved to Summerside, PE I, where she works as a medical transcriptionist. She is currently writing her second collection of poetry that is about, among other things, Lucy Maud Montgomery's fictional character Matthew Cuthbert. Although she is not all that queer in the modern sense, on a genetic level she is at least 88 percent oddity.

Nomy Lamm
is a writer and musician currently living in San Francisco. She is an advice columnist and section editor for
Make/Shift Magazine
(
makeshiftmag.com
). Her writing has been published in anthologies including
Listen Up: Voices
from the Next Feminist Generation
(1995),
Word Warriors:
35
Women Leaders in the Spoken Word Revolution
(2007), and
Working Sex: Sex Workers Write About a Changing Industry
(2007), all from Seal Press. She is currently working on her first novel,
The Best Part Comes After the End.

Larissa Lai
is an Assistant Professor in Canadian Literature in the Department of English at the University of British Columbia. Her first novel,
When Fox Is a Thousand
(Press Gang, 1995; reprinted by Arsenal Pulp Press, 2004), was shortlisted for the Chapters/
Books in Canada
First Novel Award. Her second novel,
Salt Fish Girl
(Thomas Allen Publishers, 2002), was shortlisted for the Sunburst Award, the Tiptree Award, and the City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Award. In 2004,
West
Coast Line
published a special issue focused on her work.
Sybil
Unrest,
her collaborative long poem with Rita Wong, was published by Line Books in 2008.