Difficult People by Catriona Wright
Author:Catriona Wright
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Short Fiction, Canadian Fiction
ISBN: 9780889711334
Publisher: Harbour Publishing Co. Ltd.
Published: 2018-10-19T16:00:00+00:00
The Copy Editors
The Copy Editors decided not to pay back their student loans. This decision wasn’t motivated by lack of funds—though between them their bank statements didn’t read above four hundred dollars and their combined Visa bills were triple that—no, it was a matter of principle. Who would pay someone who sent a letter that read, Please be advised that your balance are outstanding? Surely, the twins reasoned, such egregious subject-verb disagreement rendered any contract null and void.
They were celebrating their airtight logic on Ronnie’s patio in Kensington Market. The patios had just opened across the city, as tentative and splendid as cherry blossoms on a branch. It wasn’t warm, but people were acting as though it were—the boys in short-sleeved shirts, the girls in dresses. Sitting across from Mike, Will squeezed a lemon wedge. The mist clouded the beer in his long thin glass. Mike was a step ahead, a wrung lemon in his mouth serving as a smile, juice dribbling down his chin. Spread out before them were enough wedges to make four normal lemons or one and a half genetically modified ones.
It had been a productive day. Not only had they stroked out a glaring but previously undetected redundancy from their lives, they had also, in the early morning, spray-painted over the second L on the shop sign Youthfull Flower Designs, thereby ridding Toronto streets of one more typographical error. Yesterday, from the grubby window of a westbound Dundas streetcar, Mike had spotted the sign’s superfluous letter and jotted down its location. Today Will rattled the can and guided the nozzle into a curative curlicue. That’s how they divided tasks: one detecting, the other correcting. The perfect copy-editing duo, each with his own strength. Mike could find a misspelling in a haystack; Will could spot a comma splice a mile away.
The benches around them filled and emptied with people, like the successive tides of immigrants—Jewish, Portuguese, Caribbean—who had surged through the area, opening stores and restaurants, painting houses, planting tomatoes, stuffing empanadas with chorizo and spinach. All the while they sat there drinking, talking only to each other and planning tomorrow’s edit: a missing S on a make-your-own-wine establishment sign on Ossington that currently read, Ferment on Premise. Everything was hunky dory until the Cerebral Experimentalists, also known as the Cerebralists, showed up. Composed of two girls and three guys, the Cerebral Experimentalists were a group of poets who had all removed or damaged parts of their brains with the aim, according to their website, “2 disinterrupt the ruts of language and find nu wayz of no-ing.”
The Copy Editors and the Cerebralists did not see eye-to-I.
“Who is that girl?” Mike asked.
“I’ve never seen her before,” Will said.
The girl in question was sipping on a gin and tonic and nodding serenely at George, also known as Wernicke’s Area. Like all the other Cerebralists, his name sprang from his lack. George was the most prominent member of the group. He gave poetic performances in bus stop shelters and graduate seminars.
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