Seen Reading (5 page)

Her side table holds her lemon cuticle cream, a packet of tissue, an eyeglasses case, and a bottle of Aspirin. His side table holds a nail clipper, a packet of tissue, an eyeglasses case, and an emptied glass of Scotch.

Her book is in her lap, traded instead for a journal and pen to write with, a quick scribble to jog the memory tomorrow. His book is a collection of jumbo crosswords, resting on his chest. His head back, eyes closed.

Her feet are elevated, ankles swollen and aching. His feet peek out beyond the comforter, his long frame never having spent a night entirely on their marriage mattress.

Her breath is steady, pleasantly winding down. His breath has stopped.

Her kiss on his forehead.

Her body rolling away.

Her hand reaching for his.

READER

Caucasian female, 60ish, with white hair, wearing square glasses, beige jacket, and purple scarf.

Close Case

Alafair Burke

(St. Martin's Press, 2006)

p 254

The man beside her on the streetcar wears a long buckskin jacket with fringes lining its hem, the backs of his arms. He's in his late 50s, face worn, a shock of spiky, bleached blond hair growing out at the roots. He hunches over his cupped hand, pinching marijuana sticks and twigs into as fine a powder as possible. He looks up at each stop, squinting at each passerby, then going back to the task at hand.

Another man boards and stands over him. His skin is baby smooth, tanned. He wears a pressed shirt under a high-collared, half-zipped, Jacquard pullover. His tweed cap is jaunty and cocked to one side. He considers his reflection, bumping the elbow of the man in the buckskin jacket who yells, “Hey, Buddy! I don't got all the room in the world!”

The dapper man kneels down to eye level and speaks in a low voice. “Hey, brother. I didn't mean to get in your space. We good, friend?”

The man in the buckskin jacket presses his knees to-gether and shelters his stash, turning his weight toward the woman reading beside him. “Yeah, man,” he mumbles back. “We're good. I just don't got all the room in the world.”

READER

Caucasian female, late 40s, with short brown hair, wearing black coat, dark violet scarf, and black leather gloves.

Payback

Margaret Atwood

(House of Anansi Press, 2008)

p 42

He was thirteen years old, stretched out on the carpet in the basement, watching television before bed. The windows were propped open, screens in place to deter the neighbour's curious dog from poking in her head. The sound of feet passing by didn't startle him. All outside noises had become one — ball hockey, wrestling cats, a car radio. The gate was locked. If someone was in the backyard, it would mean they'd scaled the fence.

That was the night he learned to believe in monsters.

READER

East African male, mid-30s, wearing brown leather jacket, white dress shirt, purple bow tie, and tweed cap.

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

Max Brooks

(Three Rivers Press, 2007)

about halfway in

She stands in front of the pot, stirring through the bubbles, the room lit only by the dim yellow stove light. Steam rises in her face. She rests her hand on the stovetop and finds it warm to the touch. It calms her. She turns down the burner heat and lets the stew simmer, scratching her ankle with the heel of her piggy slipper. She draws in a deep breath and exhales loudly, plunging her hands into the pockets of her fleece housecoat. The stew settles into a steady roil, peppers, onions, and carrots turning up over thick chunks of cubed beef. She pulls the Bisquick from the cupboard, ripping open the top, giggling as the dry mix puffs up in her face.

She doesn't feel like cleaning tonight.

There is so much food to share. It's a shame he won't be here to taste it.

Oh, but if she doesn't clean tonight she'll dread the coming day.

She puts the lid on the stew and turns the heat right down, heading into the bathroom with gloves and garbage bags, the tub filled with stripped bones.

READER

Caucasian female, late 40s, wearing puffy jacket with hood and powder-blue hand-knitted cap. Her book is covered in a bright green fabric jacket, patterned with gift boxes and red stars.

Misery

Stephen King

(Signet, 2010)

p 107

She's sitting in her wicker chair in the sunroom, looking at the ravine outside her window, wondering if the rabbits have been digging in her garden. She pads her thumb over the cheese tray, picking up the last of the Melba toast, leaving nothing to waste, and finishes her port. She thinks about the children. Quiet down now, she imagines. Eyes front for the national anthem. She bumped into one the other day, married and with such good posture. Remarkable. Did she know she'd been her favourite teacher, the woman had asked. Can you imagine? After all this time. A favourite? Still, she'd struggled to recall, settling on a memory that could have been any number of students. There were so many, after all, and not one sick day. But, yes, she'd responded. Thank you. Of course, she remembered her. Such a bright child. A happy child. And she'd grown into a beautiful woman. Just like her daughter, she'd have to imagine.

READER

Caucasian male, mid-50s, wearing burgundy
t
-shirt, grey shorts, and sandals.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

J.K. Rowling

(Raincoast, 2007)

p 186

The sight of the baby squirrel frozen inches beneath the iced-over surface under the cottage's drain pipe was enough to scare her. She chipped around it, her pants pocket full of seeds, an offering to the grouse she'd come to call Pet. The squirrel's eyes were haunting, loose and broken, like those of an old porcelain doll.

When the grouse flew up in her face, she instinctively swung the spade, batting the bird to the base of the nearest birch. It hissed and spread its wings when she tried to get closer, striking at her wrist when she palmed a pile of seed at its feet.

She felt her finger twitch against the spade. Resting it against a neighbouring tree, she backed toward the cottage to resist temptation. She didn't trust nature. But she'd give the grouse five minutes to get out of there.

READER

East Indian female, mid-20s, wearing skinny jeans, jean jacket with hoodie, and light scarf.

Mean Boy

Lynn Coady

(Anchor Canada, 2006)

p 20

In the eighth grade, she became best friends with a boy whose father owned the carpet store in town. They had three cars. One was an orange Corvette that sat on blocks in the garage until his sixteenth birthday. His family owned a big house with a huge lot, close to the canal.

The summer after grade eight, she learned how to crack a whip like Indiana Jones and pump up an air gun to shoot the necks off discarded vodka bottles.

One afternoon, they'd come running out of the brush — Pow! Pow! Pow! — and only then saw the line of cars parked alongside the neighbouring cemetery. A row of heads above dark suits looked up. She lowered her gun, her friend snickering, his blackened big toe poking a hole through the tip of his Converse sneaker. Passing the open grave, she flinched, shooting herself in the ankle while paying her respects. The boy would swear she pulled the trigger on purpose.

READER

Caucasian female, mid-20s, blond hair pulled back in neat, freshly washed ponytail, wearing white leather jacket, purple scarf, and purple heels.

Three Day Road

Joseph Boyden

(Penguin Canada, 2008)

p 118

He stands in the doorway of a hair salon holding a bag from La Vie en Rose. He stares out into the street making strained eye contact with random pedestrians like a hostage in a bank robbery. They return his gaze as if to say, What's keeping you? Whitney Houston's
Greatest Hits
are in rotation with The Scissor Sisters, the
Sliver
soundtrack, Bette Midler, and Gino Vinnelli. Men in tight
t
-shirts, some of them with pierced nipples, he can see, tend to a salon full of women much like his latest wife, women in their early 30s straddling the line between casual youth and business casual. She's calling to him. Would he come back and sit down already? Her hairdresser repeats the plea, emphasizing his sibilants just to make him uncomfortable. He's older, true, but he's not that guy. He really couldn't care less who the hairdresser's banging. It's his wife's head. When it's wet, it just looks so small.

READER

Native Canadian female, mid-20s, wearing jean jacket with brown turtleneck sweater up over chin, taupe scarf, green cargo pants, and leather shoes with a thick tread.

Baby Proof

Emily Giffin

(St. Martins Press, 2006)

p 115

Out of eleven-thousand applicants, a woman from Concord, New Hampshire would represent them all, the first teacher to be launched into space. At another school, another teacher calls the students over to the portable television cart. The broadcast is about to begin. The teacher gathers her young students closer, her arms folded tight over her chest as they wait for the countdown to begin. From the impossible to the remarkable and then — in a single deafeningly quiet moment — the unimaginable, it is done. A plume of smoke inflates across the sky like a parade balloon. The children squeal. Many of them think it looks like a caterpillar, its antennae reaching out, seeking. The teacher prays that once its folds plump up, its body extended in full, it will unveil something hopeful, a sign of life. Instead, it fades, a bright blue sky all that remains.

READER

Asian male, mid-20s, with neat black hair, wearing fogged glasses, black wharf jacket, and black corduroy cap.

Stiff

Mary Roach

(Norton, 2004)

p 114

Her breath is still caught in her chest. She had to run from the streetcar to the office building to escape the rain, her hands too full of Tupperware treats to carry an umbrella. She stamps her feet on the soaked runner, a trickle of foundation tickling her upper lip. She's not in a rush for the elevator, but looks up in time to see her colleague holding her purse in the door. Sure, there's enough room, she says, signaling to “those women,” the ones who work a floor above them, who look at her, then each other, to clear a space. To make their point, they inch back against the walls of the elevator, and she knows that one day she'll end up alone with them and they'll tell her to take the stairs, it's not like she couldn't use the exercise. She lunges into a half-spirited jog, the candied smiles of her shortbread snowmen jostled out of place.

READER

Caucasian female, late 30s, wearing large knitted ski sweater and hat, large leather carryall in lap.

The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman

Richard P. Feynman

(Basic, 2005)

about halfway in

A blizzard blows in the background.

“I'm in the street outside my house,” she yells into the phone, “holding a severed leg. I'm guessing a deer. It's a clean cut, only slightly crude. A hunter, I'd say.”

“Grand of you to go out in this weather and get it,” I say, and settle in for the tale.

“Well, it was just sitting here in the snow. I didn't want a child to come across it.” The sound of her blowing into her hands to warm them up. “What?”

“I said, what are you going to do with it?”

“I don't know.” Long silence. “How does one dispose of a severed leg?”

“Maybe we should dispose of you.”

She enters her house. “Hold on.” She's back on the line. “That'll do. It's in the backyard.”

“It's . . . ?”

“Hold on.” It seems she's hung up, but eventually picks up the phone. “
ok
. All done. I threw it over the fence.”

“‘Into your neighbour's yard?!”

“No, no. The back fence.”

“What's over the fence?”

“A park.
Hold on!
”

READER

Caucasian female, late 30s, with short greying hair, wearing long black coat, red scarf, and glass bauble ring with flower petal floating inside.

The Glass Castle

Jeannette Walls

(Scribner, 2006)

p 102