\u201cWhat happened?\u201d Zlata demanded. His sister, the preachy schoolteacher, who made him read aloud a few chapters of War and Peace<\/i> every day the summer she was forced to babysit him, called from the family house in Beaverbrooke in Northwestern Ontario, where even the phone number remained unchanged for fifty years. \u201cYou were the best ever parking enforcement officer, ever.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI never said anything so outrageous.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYou raised more money in parking fines for the city than any other parking enforcement officer in Toronto.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI know a few parking officers who ticketed more.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cBut you were even profiled in the Toronto Daily News.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThey were looking for a scandal, Zlata.\u201d He remembered a reporter from the Toronto Daily News<\/i> called him at home and at work every morning for over a week to interview him after reviewing documents obtained from municipal government for the city of Toronto under the freedom of information act. The investigative reporter loudly expressed amazement parking enforcement officers earned the city coffers so much money. Sergey\u2019s ear was still ringing from the reporter\u2019s booming voice after he hung up the telephone. \u201cI wrote over a million dollars in parking tickets for the city in the most previous fiscal year, but still I was suspended without pay.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019re easy prey for women,\u201d his sister said.<\/p>\n
\u201cEasy prey?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYes, you don\u2019t know how to talk to women or relate to them, period. That\u2019s why you\u2019re willing to let off some pretty face without giving her a ticket.\u201d He agreed he found certain women attractive and that vulnerability may have precipitated his downfall\u2014that and a case of the Mondays. \u201cYour niece is coming with your friend. Do you remember them? You looked after them over a decade ago.\u201d Sergey couldn\u2019t even remember how long over ago it was when he had first met his niece\u2019s best friend, when his sister asked him to look after them, but he remembered them binge watching Walt Disney movies, while his sister travelled for several job interviews she lined up in Thunder Bay. \u201cThey\u2019re grown young women now. They\u2019re both entering their first year of nursing studies at Humber College.\u201d<\/p>\n
When Zlata called to ask if the girls could stay with him, Sergey thought she sounded exceedingly optimistic when she said, \u201cThe world is their oyster.\u201d<\/p>\n
He might have shared the same attitude when he was a youth, but age and harsh realities had made him jaded and cynical and he replied, \u201cIt is? That\u2019s what I thought when I first moved from Beaverbrooke and went to the University of Toronto. I took an honours degree in sociology and a master\u2019s degree in anthropology, and now I\u2019m parking enforcement officer.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cBut Sergey you\u2019re the best.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m not the best. I don\u2019t get you.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019re on the Sunshine List. You make over one hundred thousand dollars a year. I know because I clipped the article from the Toronto Daily News.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThose articles are a year old.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThey say you were like a maniac: you never stopped handing out parking tickets; you made more money for the city than any other parking enforcement officer.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cOver a million dollars year.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAnyhow, your niece and her friend are ready to go to Humber College for nursing.\u201d<\/p>\n
She opened a can of beer over the telephone. \u201cThey\u2019ve just celebrated their nineteenth birthday over the summer. They truly feel as if they are adults, and, as if they know everything. I love them, but they\u2019re going to learn plenty of tough lessons, but I suppose the experience will make them strong in the end. If anything, I think they\u2019ll learn they\u2019re not as smart as they thought they were.\u201d<\/p>\n
The girls were friends from childhood, possibly even infancy, as far as he knew. Sergey had been privileged to observe occasionally how his niece had grown. He could remember the large amount of time she had spent, growing up, with her friend Donatella. Now, making their sojourn to Toronto on the passenger train, he realized they probably would be late, since he had travelled the thousand-mile distance by rail many times, years ago, on journeys from his hometown of Beaverbrooke in northwestern Ontario to his adopted city of Toronto. His experience had taught him not to assume a hurried or frenetic state of mind while travelling on the train and not even to expect to arrive according to schedule. He remembered arriving in the city extremely late, which he hadn\u2019t minded so much because he always made certain to bring plenty of magazines and newspapers to keep mentally occupied from becoming bored and ornery on the trip. Indeed, the girls arrived later than the train schedule indicated. Nonetheless, the lateness had only served to excite and arouse the young women, perky, gripped by the swift pace their lives had taken recently. They planned to spend two nights at his house, near Eglinton Avenue West and Dufferin Street, centrally located in city, and then they would move into their dormitory rooms at the suburban Etobicoke campus of Humber College. With the transcontinental train late, he camped out in the waiting lounge of the train station, reading a John LeCarre novel. Their quick footsteps on the hard floor aroused him from the funk into which he had fallen during a nap. He rubbed his eyes, the paperback book sliding the length of his plaid jacket.
\n<\/p>\n
For a moment, Anastasia was concerned he may have been angry with them for their late arrival. \u201cI\u2019m sorry, Uncle Sergey,\u201d she said apologetically, \u201cbut the train was extremely late.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s all right. I wouldn\u2019t be concerned if you were having a good time or partying downtown. I\u2019d be surprised, might even be worried, if you hadn\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cBut the train was late, extremely late.\u201d She looked up at his fogged, weary eyes. \u201cAnd you must be tired. You probably have to work in the morning, don\u2019t you?\u201d<\/p>\n
Sergey almost could not resist chortling. \u201cOh, I wouldn\u2019t worry about being to work on time.\u201d When he first saw Anastasia, light-skinned, pale, and Donatella, darker, brown-haired, fully proportioned, in the light of the door, he was taken aback by their presence, their physicality. No sense of immaturity and girlishness lingered about Anastasia and Donatella, no air of childness, no chubby arms and pudgy hands, no baby fat, not much of a physical hint of adolescence, which was actually the last time when he had seen his niece, and their bodies were toned and tanned. He gazed for a period of time, maybe even longingly, at the pair of gorgeous young women. His eyes particularly fixated on Donatella\u2014the litheness and shapeliness of her legs, which ended incongruously in construction boots, heavy duty work footwear, leather, with steel shanks, remnants of summer employment tree planting, and the muscular strength he saw in their hard, lean, curvaceous bodies. He made a mental note to ask his niece\u2019s friend if she was working out much in the gym and weight training.<\/p>\n
\u201cUncle Sergey, this is Donatella. You remember Donatella, don\u2019t you?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cOf course, how could I forget?\u201d Looking down at her smooth, silky, shapely legs, he became self-conscious. He noticed how physically the girls had matured and how they must have worked on their legs. His palms were warm and moist, as he inhaled deeply, and reached out and took the hand she extended out to him. He firmly clasped her flesh, which was cool and dry. Meeting them at the arrival gate for the transcontinental train, he could see how they were excited by their final arrival into the city. They didn\u2019t want to be weighted down with luggage, duffel bags, or backpacks. The urban environment, the hustle and bustle, of Toronto was novel to them, and they insisted on leaving their suitcases in the luggage department of the train station. Outside the massive historic landmark of Union Station, which frowned upon the extremely tall office towers clustered so closely and densely downtown, they bought hotdogs and canned cola from the street vendors, whose carts and propane charcoal grilles littered the broad boulevard. Then they looked around for the entrance to the underground station of the subway.<\/p>\n
\u201cAre you sure you don\u2019t want to take the subway? We\u2019re actually staring the entrance right in the face.\u201d<\/p>\n
Instead, they ended up hailing a cab outside the grand entrance and front of the historic train station, and the pair of girls insisted he drive in the front seat with the taxi-driver. They found the air surprisingly chilly, although he warned them it wasn\u2019t unusual for the summer night to turn cool, particularly because of the city\u2019s proximity to Lake Ontario. But they looked chilly, wearing short shorts, cut-offs, made from faded, worn denim trousers, which they had worn over the summer when they camped in the bush as part of a tree planting crew, far outside of Beaverbrooke, far from the normal realms of civilization. Through the night they chattered as the taxicab drove steadily north towards his modest house. They grew particularly excited, as they cruised through the downtown area, by the skyscraper office buildings, the busy traffic, the specialized retail stores and boutiques. They tittered as they rode the taxi through the buzz and a rush of seemingly endless kilometers of variegated city blocks. The city had an electrified ambience as they passed tall buildings, teems and masses of people, lines and trails of city lights, and the revelers, the nightclubs, the brightly colored fluorescent, halogen, incandescent, and neon lights, the storefronts, office buildings, billboards, cars, even early in the morning, at two am.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe city of Toronto isn\u2019t anything like Beaverbrooke.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t care what anybody says and he doesn\u2019t mean to be hateful, or critical, but in comparison Beaverbrooke is Hicksville,\u201d Anastasia said.<\/p>\n
\u201cBelieve it or not there are advantages to being small, isolated, and underpopulated. You get excited realizing you escaped a stifling town, oppressiveness attitudes and the smallness of the place,\u201d Donatella said.<\/p>\n
His eyes met those of the cabdriver as he glanced at the girls through the dimly lit cab in the rear view mirror. \u201cYou\u2019re two smart girls, and I think you\u2019ll go far.\u201d When the cab arrived outside the house, Anastasia expressed surprised at the house, unexpectedly small and narrow, the yard the size of a postage stamp, which was significantly smaller than what she was used to and expected in Beaverbrooke. \u201cI hope you weren\u2019t expecting a mansion in Rosedale.\u201d He reminded the duo he had been a parking enforcement officer with the city of Toronto.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut you have all these university degrees. Anastasia says you even have a master\u2019s degree.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYes, and look how far it has gotten me. I\u2019m a parking enforcement officer, which we call the most dangerous job in the city.\u201d He possessed a bachelor\u2019s degree, but he was also a bachelor, he joked, despite certain efforts he had made, in a city of thousands of attractive and unattached women. Indeed, his niece informed him a later that her mother, his sister, sometimes wondered if he was gay. For some reason, these suppositions made him defensive, and he felt the need to inform Donatella and Anastasia he wasn\u2019t gay. He also told them he hoped they weren\u2019t expecting the estate of a wealthy stockbroker, dressed in tweeds, smoking a pipe, walking his immaculately groomed schnauzers at night, living in a mansion, in the wealthy part of the city, which was actually only a few blocks up Eglinton Avenue West. He turned around and looked back inside the house, as if checking to see if he had left a stove element on, briefly debating if he should be frank. Earlier in his life, he might not have said anything about how he wouldn\u2019t be going to work in the morning. Now Anastasia was an adult, and he thought she was steeled to be recipient of bad news, and he was a much older adult. He couldn\u2019t see any virtue or even sense in holding the truth from her, and his openness and indifference to maintaining appearances, perhaps was an evil portend, in hindsight, of what was to come, in her.
\n<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve been fired.\u201d<\/p>\n
Anastasia\u2019s eyes widened with surprise, not expecting such openness, to say nothing of the down-to-earth revelation. He did not know if you could classify it as a letdown, or a disappointment, but she certainly seemed surprised. Maybe she did not want to come down to the hard knocks and details of reality so soon.<\/p>\n
\u201cYes, I\u2019ve led an honest and incorruptible career as a parking enforcement officer. I\u2019ve ticketed Rolls Royces, I\u2019ve ticketed Lamborghinis. Mind you, the owners of these superfast and luxury cars probably didn\u2019t give a damn. They probably were glad somebody noticed their cars were accumulating piles of tickets beneath the windshield wiper or on the dash. Anyway, I\u2019ve ticketed scooters and motorcycles, trucks, electric cars, lawn tractors, and just about everything in between. I\u2019ve unwittingly ticketed city councillors, public works supervisors, my own bosses, mobsters, police officers, but they\u2019re were all the same to me. I didn\u2019t care who they were, if they were famous, wealthy, or how important or distinguished their job titles were. Nobody was left unscathed by his ticket pad. That may have been why he went down\u2014why he got caught in a sting. One Monday, on a Monday when I had a case of the Mondays, an attractive woman, who looked like a porn star, asked me to take care of her ticket. She offered me money to fix or junk her parking ticket. For some reason, I still don\u2019t know why, I wasn\u2019t outraged, as would have been my usual reaction. I guess I found her so attractive I\u2019d say she had a certain roguish charm\u2014I offered to purge her ticket for free. Next thing you know I\u2019m caught up in the dragnet of this anti-corruption task force.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYou were set up, entrapped by the gross fucking capitalists and bourgeois,\u201d Donatella interjected.<\/p>\n
Anastasia was surprised with the vociferous language Donatella had used; it wasn\u2019t as if she was a raving communist, or a devoted socialist. The zeal surprised Anastasia and she thought her stance was uncharacteristic. \u201cSince when have you become a socialist?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAnyhow, the union and his lawyer are fighting to get his job back, but I\u2019m not sure I want it anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n
Donatella remembered Sergey as a figure she had admired years ago, when he had supervised his niece and her best friend as children. He caught Donatella\u2019s eyes and her plump lips broke into a smile. Even Anastasia sensed the sudden spark in the emotional chemistry and the excitation roused between them. Donatella was still stunned by his lack of censoriousness, his forthrightness, straightforwardness, and blunt honesty. Then, as he explained, as he learned firsthand, losing one\u2019s job sometimes had a certain radicalizing and potentially liberating effect.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen I think about it, think twice, three times, maybe more, I don\u2019t know that I really care about parking enforcement anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cBut you lost your job, Uncle,\u201d Anastasia said. \u201cIt pays good money from what I hear. Mom says you earn more in parking enforcement than most people with university degrees at other jobs.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cBut it\u2019s the work of a zombie. You\u2019re running around the streets, tucking parking tickets under windshield wipers, handing out fines that make car drivers go ballistic. I think it\u2019s time for a career change, to switch jobs, if I can find another. I\u2019ll miss the benefits, the dental plan, and the pension no doubt, but\u2014\u201d<\/p>\n
Having already invited the young women into the house, this time he took each young woman by the shoulders from behind and gently joked and mocked as he pushed them inside. Since it was late and their eyes were showing signs of tiredness, he escorted them upstairs to their bedroom. He showed them the thick down-filled sleeping bag on the floor where one could nap, then the single bed where the other could sleep.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou can toss a coin to see who gets the sleeping bag.\u201d<\/p>\n
The two girls looked at each other knowingly and laughed. Not quite knowing what to say, not privy to any secret or not-so-secret life the duo shared, he shrugged. Still, he could not help mentally drifting along the stream of memories and remember the time his niece had made Donatella blubber and cry. Over a decade ago, he graduated from journalism school at college, with no trade towards which he could apply his diploma: He didn\u2019t see how anyone could earn a living in journalism in Canada, even though he had spent the last three years attempting to make a career out of news coverage and reporting. He thought he was educated to an almost excessive degree, indeed to a college degree, with nothing productive towards which he could direct his training, without being able to find a job and he felt lost. Meanwhile, his sister, desperately needing somebody to look after her kid, invited him to live with her young burgeoning family, her and her daughter. He decided to fill the role as au pair for his sister. He remembered his niece Anastasia had insisted that her little friend play in the guest room in the basement where he slept at night. Looking after the two youngsters for his sister, he had been helping them put together a huge jigsaw puzzle of the CN Tower, in the living room, when Anastasia encouraged Donatella to help her wreck the puzzle and fled the scene of the vandalism. Hearing Donatella cry, he had gone back downstairs where he collected the scattered pieces of the jigsaw puzzle, while the music television the girls had left on blared in the background, and he attempted to calm her down and figure out what was wrong. He had even ended up calling Donatella\u2019s mother because her daughter was so upset and could not stop crying. Donatella\u2019s mother, who heard her daughter\u2019s shrieks over the telephone, remained unconcerned. Having gone so far as to seize the telephone from his hand, Donatella sobbed, cried, and shrieked into the receiver, to his horror. Perturbed, Donatella\u2019s mother finally decided to take some action and hurried over to the house. The incident had surprised and almost panicked him, since he had never expected his usually sweet and compliant niece to bully anybody, particularly at such a tender age. But that was the past, when they were children, and now they were young adults.
\n<\/p>\n
He returned to his bedroom and his waterbed. Leaving the door open, he shuffled back into his bedroom, which was located right beside the washroom. Donatella saw him slip into the washroom through the light of the open door, stepped into his bedroom, and slipped into his waterbed. He stepped back into bed, his body nearly naked and uncovered by sheets because of the extreme heat and stifling humidity, which he hadn\u2019t bothered to attempt to combat and control with the air-conditioner, because he was attempting to conserve energy, to save money on his electrical bill, conserve his low funds, due to his unemployment. He attempted to find a comfortable position in bed and constantly adjusted the position of the overhead lamp. He was trying to read a popular novel with philosophical themes and overtones, virtually the first time he had read any such type of book, since he graduated from college, when he first sensed Anastasia huddle in bed right beside him. She had stripped off her t-shirt and placed his hand on her breast.<\/p>\n
Early in the morning, Anastasia heard her friend crying passionately, moaning obliviously, beside herself, in that peculiar fusion of pleasure and pain. She expected to find the reassuring presence of Donatella\u2019s body beside her as she threw her arm over to the other side of the bed, but felt nothing but the cool blank sheets. Anastasia opened her eyes and glanced at the empty crumpled sheets, confirming Donatella was not in bed beside her. Wearing only her bikini swimsuit bottom, clutching at her side the pocketknife, which she had bought from a sporting goods store during a trip to Beaverbrooke in the midst of her tree planting days over the summer, she rose from the waterbed, and went down the hallway. She stood outside her uncle\u2019s bedroom door, now slightly ajar. She saw Donatella with her legs stretched and upraised, in a yoga position they had learned together, gasping \u201cRight there, right there, right there, Oh my God, Oh my God, right there, right there, yes, yes, yes.\u201d Spying Donatella in bed with her uncle sent a surge of energy through her body. Her heart palpitated. She threw herself back into the bed, gripping tightly the open knife, slicing the uppermost layer of skin on her thigh, sobbing against the pillow. (So began a habit of cutting and slicing herself that lasted years.) She had kept the knife as a keepsake, souvenir, and for handyman purposes and rather perversely for protection on the train, since she had never travelled on a passenger train before, and was not certain what she should expect. Only halfway through the journey from Beaverbrooke, twenty-four hours long, did she realize that knife, for protection purposes, was unnecessary; the best use to which she could put the blade was to slicing microwave sandwiches and pizza slices from the snack concession. When Anastasia woke again, she went to his bedroom and pounded against the door, but they were nowhere in the house.<\/p>\n
She meandered and wondered throughout the house and then watched them through a laundry room window. She spied them through dusty window down the back alley, in the early morning sunrise, holding hands, and she screamed in frustration. Later in the morning, after Sergey returned from an early morning walk, with Donatella, feeling more refreshed than he had in months, actually looking forward to the day ahead, for the first time in months, he promised them he would help them retrieve their luggage from the station. Donatella, still excited about being in the city, asked if they didn\u2019t mind excusing her from breakfast, so she could get the newspaper, since she was anxious to check the classified ads for available rental accommodations. Although the girls had already paid a damage deposit and first and last month\u2019s rent for a dormitory room with twin beds, she still wanted to find an apartment. Sergey was prepared to tell her she could stay at his place. He gave her directions to the nearest newsstand at a convenience store down the street from a row of crackhouses.<\/p>\n
\u201cOh, Uncle, how could you,\u201d she shouted after Donatella departed.<\/p>\n
Sergey was taken aback. \u201cI was reading. Donatella needed to go to the washroom, and she saw me reading this novel she says she loves, Zen\u2014\u201c<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cZen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance<\/i>. Oh God. What a piece of\u2014\u201c<\/p>\n \u201cYes, well, she wanted to talk about the book then and there, and she was wearing this sexy bra and panties.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cShe is always wearing a sexy bra and panties,\u201d Anastasia exclaimed in exasperation. \u201cWe were with a tree planting crew this summer, in the middle of the bush, with nobody around for three hundred miles, camping, swatting flies, smearing bug repellent on ourselves, not having showered for four weeks, smelling like a fish, and there she was wearing sexy lingerie. She\u2019ll wearing a Victoria Secret\u2019s bra and thong anywhere, like she\u2019s expecting to seduce and impress some bearded logger with a chainsaw, an outdoorsman with a fishing rod, or hunter with a big game rifle.\u201d<\/p>\n He put some whole grain bread in the toaster and the slices popped up out of the toaster. He poured coffee and sipped it, but it tasted far too strong and bitter and he winced. \u201cAnastasia, what did you expect? I\u2019m single. I\u2019ve never married. And I\u2019m getting older. I can\u2019t remember the last time I slept with a woman.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cBut we\u2019re lesbians.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cSo you\u2019re lesbians. That doesn\u2019t mean anything.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cBut we\u2019re lovers, and best friends. We\u2019re supposed to look after each other, trust each other, and be faithful to one another.\u201d She looked away from her Uncle Sergey and sobbed. \u201cMy own uncle, fooling around with my girlfriend. I can\u2019t believe this.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cDonatella, please forgive me. I\u2019m sorry.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m sorry. We can\u2019t stay here. We have to go.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s nonsense. Where will you stay?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ll camp out in the park, or on the beach, or in the arboretum at Humber College, if security doesn\u2019t rape us. We only have three days until our dorm room is ready.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cAt least let me help you with your luggage.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cNo, no, no. You\u2019ve done enough damage already.\u201d Saying nothing more to her for the time being, Sergey decided, would spare her any further suffering and tears. Meanwhile, she sat on the front steps to the house, waiting for Donatella to return. After pouring herself a coffee, he got two coffee mugs ready for the girls, to help soothe the hurt. When he next checked outside, the girls were arguing and quarreling outside on the veranda. They were lovers, all right, not just friends, or best friends, he saw, realizing even more profoundly the depth of his error, his blunder.<\/p>\n \u201cAnother faux pas, or something along those lines.\u201d He could not bear to watch or hear the girls fighting and arguing. They continued quarreling and fighting, as they slowly walked down Eglinton Avenue West. They walked a few footsteps every few minutes along the sidewalk that ran alongside the row of townhouse and brick houses, and, every few minutes he saw a hand lash out, and the spectacle caused him to gasp, as he worried about sparing the neighbours the commotion. After he finished his cup of coffee, he resumed his watch from the doorstep, but they were gone. All he found was a blood stains on the doorstep.<\/p>\n \u201cJesus Christ.\u201d Trying to stay calm, unemotional, reserved, he walked along the yard path to the sidewalk. He looked up and down the length of the residential street, wondering if any neighbours had caught wind of any potential disruption to their well-ordered lives. His beloved niece and her friend were nowhere in sight, but had left a trail of droplets of blood, as if from a nosebleed, or who knew what else. He walked back up the steps and went inside the house. There was a loud engine revving, and he saw a city police patrol car slowly cruising by. He slammed the side door and returned to his mug of cool coffee and the mound of unwashed dishes from the sink that he had stashed in storage bin in the closet and the additional stacks of dishes that had accumulated seemingly overnight in the sink. He finally noticed the pile of bills, paperwork, and mail that he had allowed to pile up unanswered and unopened. He had spent literally days tidying up for the girls\u2019 arrival. After he had been laid off\u2014he didn\u2019t like the sound of fired\u2014which, after all, was potentially revocable and being appealed by several union representative and a lawyer he had been forced to hire, he had let the normal domestic chores slide. He didn\u2019t bother to vacuum carpets, sweep floors, dust furniture or the computer, scrub the toilets and sinks, or clean anything, or even shave, or get a haircut, for weeks. Instead, he had sat in his reclining chair like some severely injured car accident victim, reading science fiction and fantasy novels, detective fiction, pornographic potboilers, anything to lose himself.<\/p>\n Only later in the early evening did he manage to rouse himself from his torpor and actually left the house. The telephone rang and he saw from the caller identification box his sister had mailed him for Christmas the call came from Humber College residence.<\/p>\n \u201cI love you, Sergey,\u201d Anastasia said.<\/p>\n Why was she cold calling him like this, he wondered, as he cleared his throat.<\/p>\n \u201cDon\u2019t you understand? I love you, I want you, and I want to live with you.\u201d<\/p>\n He was starting again to see the error of his ways, although he wasn\u2019t certain if he was committing actual error or sin or if it was Catholic guilt. He didn\u2019t know how to deal with her and he abruptly hung up the telephone, much to his regret.<\/p>\n Along the broad sidewalks of Eglinton Avenue West where he strolled to the twenty-four hour convenience store he regularly patronized. He bought some groceries, mostly less than nutritious snacks, potato chips, roasted peanuts, ice cream sandwiches. As he stepped through the sliding doors, withdrew some cash from the automated teller machine, offered pocket change to a homeless man checking the coin boxes of a bank of pay phones, and set of the bell from the gasoline pumps behind him, he had noticed the silhouette of a shapely female\u2019s form following behind him. But he thought nothing of it, until he had turned onto the side residential street and then heard lightweight, fast-paced footsteps rapidly behind him, the crunch of the soles of work boots on asphalt behind him. Wearing a bandanna to cover her face, Anastasia seized him by the arm, wrenching it behind him, and pushed him down to the pavement. He smelled her before he saw her, the spiced rum, the fumes from the beer and hard liquor exuded by her breath and body spray exuded by the pores in her body. His niece. She started punching him in the head and the blows from her clenched fists landed against his body. She grabbed him by the collars, dragged him around, manhandled him, and pulled his jacket up over his head. With his head covered, she managed to bring him down to the residential street he sidewalk, so that the plastic bag of groceries fell to the ground. The bottle of lemonade smashed, scattering fractured and broken glass, spilling the juice. Large sized bags of tortilla and potato chips were scattered about. In a squatting position, she started kneeing him in the head abruptly, deftly. Then she rose and stood back on her small feet and swiftly kicked him in the head with those constructions boots, which she had used for tree planting work earlier that summer. The blows landed about his ears, eyes, bruising them, his mouth, causing blood to trickle from the corner of his lips, stinging his open cuts. The impact of the steel toes caused him to lose and break a few teeth. The kicks showered against his temples and skull, causing bruises the shape of goose eggs. Then she fled while he groaned and mumbled his apologies and she continued weeping unabated tears.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A Case of Mondays \u201cWhat happened?\u201d Zlata demanded. His sister, the preachy schoolteacher, who made him read aloud a few chapters of War and Peace every day the summer she was forced to babysit him, called from the family house in Beaverbrooke in Northwestern Ontario, where even the phone number […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":2287,"parent":148,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-567","page","type-page","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/567","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=567"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/567\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2426,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/567\/revisions\/2426"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/148"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2287"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=567"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n<\/p>\n