5:55 pm | 27 June 2003 | on the pier

Here's a story for the weekend. Those of you who missed it on Friday, check the guest spot Yermomsawookie busted out for me, like the big ol' sweetie he is. Until monday, 3 you later, folks. clm.

On the edge of a city that slumps incrementally towards the shore, a long grey pier jabs the ribs of the Atlantic like a finger. The sea rocks sand concrete broken-down cyclone wire billboards birds and sky are grey, all grey, time muddling the colours together and no matter what your art teacher said about light and pigment the sum of all colours is grey, my love. An impatient wind is rolling over the uncertain edges of the waves, the rushy sounds of both slurring into a great indefinite shhhhhhh. They have left the hunkered-down cement cubes of their city and gone to wander the pier.

They have been friends for so long that neither remember what they first said to one another; unusual for them, they to whom words are so important. He will only telephone, and then only sporadically; this morning her telephone sounded startled when he called to say, �Let�s go to the pier. Do you want to? It�s like a big stone to climb on.� She said, flatly, �Pierre is French for �stone.� I bet that�s where it�s from. Get dressed.� She has always written letters to him, wondering as she did so what he could possibly need her for. She stopped worshipping him years ago.

A Ferris wheel lists stiffly on the end of the pier with the proud decay of something that was once important and that is now merely tended to: a retired war general, her slightly loopy grandmother. They circle the base of the wheel, looking up at the faded banners and painted poles, once-pink, once-blue. She no longer cries in his presence; he is less and less fascinated by the astonishing fragments she utters when she is napping on his couch�something once about ice cream, another time a frightened foreign monologue, a third: �You taught your cat to use simple tools?� incredulously. He woke her up, that time�her face a jumble of expressions trying to unsnarl itself.

At the base of the Ferris wheel, she steps behind the control panel and sits mournfully on the stool. He leaps mock-balletically onto a low-hanging seat, trying to make her laugh; the wheel�s corroded metal screams in protest, bits of rotted stuffing spring from the seat under his boots. She winces at the salt-crusted steel�s animal shriek, turns her back to the wind and walks inland towards the midway.

He catches up to her long stride, gives her an underbreath Hey, and tugs gently, annoyingly, at the sleeve of her crimson coat like a child or dog. She will not look at him. He mutters some kind of excuse or delay, some reason to be forgiven. They walk past a disappointed canvas tent that has collapsed in on itself, a popcorn-and-cotton-candy booth of splintered plywood and broken glass, the face of a frontiersman peering dimly through weathered paint like an echo. It is at this booth she stops, the incongruity of the Great Mountain Shoot-Out game on this pier appealing. Wooden targets mimicking logs are placed at varying heights and distances from the once-red countertop; these are printed with various point values and slogans. Get �em Cowboy: 10 points. Sharp shootin� Tex: 20 points. Et c�tera. A row of metal rifles, brown paint strategically worn from thousands of vanished eager little fingers, stand at crooked attention in their stands. She looks at all this placidly, notes detachedly the distasteful presence of a woefully typecast Injun Jim figure in the scenery and the rotting brown rubber hoses going to each rifle. She runs her hand along the stock of the nearest gun; it is smooth, and hard, and cold, as guns ought to be. She turns back towards him.

Bored with her lingering examination of the booth, he has gone to sit on a coil of rope that has fossilized onto the pier like a callus. The wind whips tears to his eyes, and he sniffs, sharply, shortly, then drags his sleeve across his face. He looks up at her, tries to inject some guilelessness into his face. She knows him too well for this, knows that if he is �innocent� it is only for lack of attention, lack of motive. People die for less.

She looks back at the booth. What could the prize have been for this game, she wonders, remembering the thrill of a cheaply-made toy beige alligator in her youth, her tiny blond brother so proud when he won it for her. The hooks which must have once held the coveted bounty of this game are empty, deserted. To the leering frontiersman�s right hangs a plastic replica of a stuffed deer�s head, somehow more plangent than the taxidermied head of an actual deer. She feels a misplaced, foolish empathy. The booth is all this plastic deer�s head has ever known, she thinks melodramatically, and the curls of brown lacquer on the deer�s neck flutter lonesomely in the wind. Its unseeing plastic eyes stare glassily out over the sea, past him, still hunched on his rope.

He tries again. �It�s not that I don�t�I just don�t think�� the wind wiping his words off the air, then again��right now I don�t feel like I can�� Sniff. More excuses. She longs for a noun. He looks pleadingly up at her, but as she extends a hand tipped red with cold to him, she just says �have you got a nickel,� impassively, flatly. He jams a hand into his pocket, extracts a coin. She takes it; the metal is warm from his thigh. She turns, slips it into a slot with a definite clank. He straightens.

�You don�t think that�ll actually work, do you?� he says. �Come on. There�s no way it�s gonna operate after this long.� A bitter laugh. �There�s no prize, anyway. What�s the point.� She turns back towards him, raises the rifle (metal so hard so heavy) to her face; the cold of the definite metal soaks into her cheek, chills her clenched teeth. She pulls a stiff trigger.

Setting the rifle down, she pushes herself up onto the rickety counter. The deer�s head is easy to remove from the wall. The shiny eyes of the deer stare at him from beneath her arm as she walks back towards her grey city. He stares after her retreating form, the red coat like a bloodspot on the pier, and with his nose-wiping sleeve he now mops streams of stale cold water from his chest.

-november 2002