The Fallarian 🔥 Alberta

Between the Sheets

On the other side of the mirror Beatrice saw a bed just like her own, but full of strange flowery dreams. She slipped between the soft sheets that were made from the spliced tendrils of the gandleflower, a rare alpine plant that sprouted on the margins of the upland brooks of Eden Valley. The fabric of the gandleflower was so fine that her fingers could barely distinguish between the touch of the sheet and that of her own skin.

In the air she could smell a warm, cinnamon current of melted brown sugar on buttered toast that drifted up from the floor below. She heard a commercial coming from the TV downstairs, something about white creamy dove skin, Shirley Temple locks, and tap dances. But the current of cinnamon was all she wanted to know about the world below. A world that had its own strange logic, yet didn’t respond to any of her needs. A world that heaped ashes over her spirit, all the while smiling and prompting her to accept her fate and look on the bright side of things.

She heard a girl called Annie singing, Tomorrow! Tomorrow! but that only reminded her of Lady Macbeth and the fact that she would have died hereafter. She saw her hands endlessly washing themselves, in Sartre’s lavabo of nausea, and in sinks of blood. She was the stranger, the water that Camus talked about that ran through her fingers. In her mind she saw her mother, lines running all the way from her sad eyes to her permanent smile, urging her daughter to be thankful for their daily bread. Urging her to ignore all those sad existential thoughts and look instead up at God's bright blue sky.

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Antonio watched her desperation with glee. He could see that she would sacrifice everything, even her silk lavender panties, just to live in a place where people didn't spend all day talking about crop yields or fuel tanks. She yearned to escape to The City, to find a district teeming with coffee shops and martini bars; a place where she could discuss philosophy and poetry, perhaps even glimpse the outline of Sophistication as it drifted into a shop selling silk ties and Cuban cigars.

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She ran her fingers across her lips as she thought of the great cities she might travel to. She pictured Edmonton in her mind, that famous city of high culture that rose majestically from the plains. She repeated its name, Edmonton, Edmonton, and thought of its Disneyland parliament sprinkling fireworks into the cobalt sky. She thought of its High Level bridge over the mighty North Saskatchewan River, its Ukrainian philosophers, and its geology poets of renown. In her nostrils she could smell the vodka and feel the rough hands of the immigrant farmers twirling her warm body and heavy breasts from one end of the community centre to the next.

Her breath quickened as her mind searched for a fantasy even more satisfying than the first. This led her to Calgary, that exotic outsourced Texan branch plant, jam-packed with cowboy hats, skyscrapers, head offices, and geological surveys. Sliding the fingers of her left hand along her neck, she repeated the word: Calgary. She twirled her tongue around the name, mumbled it, moaned it, chanted it out loud — Calgary, Calgary! Calgary! — while the fingers of her right hand moved like horse-hooves over the mountain passes and grass-covered foothills into the rodeo of her delirium. In a muffled roar she cried out Calgary, Calgary! Calgary! clamping her lips around its hard C and its guttural G. Her middle finger plunged into her thick wallet of flesh, while her other hand descended from the foothills to probe the valley from behind, releasing a deep underground seam of premium grade sweet light Texas crude. Her whole body started to shake as she imagined that great metropolis, where poetry pulsed through every street, and where Pindaric odes flowed up from the depths of the earth and were then pumped hydraulically into the carburetors of the collective soul.

All across the Central Plains, from the pillaged soil of the Hobbema Reserve to the clear-cut wastelands of Fort McMurray, she saw rising the steel girders of a desolate beauty. She saw a vast landscape of derricks manned by elegant cowboys who pumped their creative fuel up to the mastheads of the refineries which dotted the heavens like so many floating pyramids of Ghiza.

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Watching all this within the vortex of his mirror, Antonio smiled. She was now ready to do anything to get out of Vulcan, that hellish town whose street names once echoed the glory of Greece and Rome — Minerva Street, Apollo Street, and Zeus — and were now named First Street, Second Street, and Third. She'd do anything to get hold of one of those boxes she had heard about, which a lucky girl named Pandora had learned how to open. 

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Next: 🎲 By the Light of Fractals 3

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