VenCo(14)

He breathed a sigh that ended in a rumbling groan. This was the one he had to stop. He felt it where he felt most serious matters—in his testicles.

The witch had a jump on him, and she was closer to the mark in Toronto, which was far away and cold and boring. He had to get moving. But first, he’d finish his bath.

He leaned back, luxuriating in the heat. The last thing that came to him before he closed the portal that had opened in his mind was the word luck. It was something he would need.





5

New Colour in the World




After Lucky hauled their laundry back upstairs, she realized she didn’t want to tell Stella about the key, or the tunnel, or the spoon. She needed time to let it sink in, or maybe she just liked having something completely and utterly to herself for once.

Instead, she threw herself into a deep cleaning of the whole apartment. By the time her grandmother rolled back in after a long day with Clermont, it was dinnertime and the place was spotless for the first time in months. Lucky was tired, a good tired, the kind of tired that lived in your muscles. So she ordered in shawarma, and she and Stella watched sitcoms until midnight.

After Lucky went to bed, she lay sprawled out on top of the covers, examining her spoon. Using her fingernail, she dug more dirt out of the engravings on the handle and realized the figure was actually an old-timey witch. Odd and, somehow, also exciting. Sticking her earbuds in, she swiped to a meditation app on her phone and fell asleep clutching her small prize.

Her dream was a memory. Lucky was a little girl again, and there was Arnya walking in the front door of their old apartment with a bandana wrapped around her head so that it covered her right eye.

Lucky jumped off the couch and reached for her mother’s swollen face. “What happened?”

“Ah, some asshole decided it would only be a fair fight if I had one eye tied behind my back.” She went directly to the fridge, grabbed a two-liter of Pepsi, and drank directly from the bottle. “I still whipped him.”

“You got into a fight? With a man?” Lucky was only seven, but she understood the rules: A man never hit a woman. No exceptions.

“More like we didn’t see”—Arnya paused, then pointed to her face—“eye to eye. See what I did there?”

Lucky didn’t laugh. She didn’t smile. Instead, she padded on bare feet past her mother. She got up on tiptoes and retrieved a bag of frozen peas from the freezer.

Arnya accepted the bag and went to sit on the couch. “Thanks, Muffin Man.” She tipped her head back and placed the peas over her bandana. She tried to be all nonchalant, but Lucky saw her wince at the sudden, slight weight.

“Did you moydur him?” Lucky asked, employing the old-timey gangster voice they sometimes used when discussing such things. Pushing aside her Goonies sleeping bag, she crawled up onto the couch close to her mother.

Arnya didn’t answer. Her lip trembled a bit, and she covered it by taking another swig of pop.

“You can smoke in the apartment if you want,” Lucky offered.

She got up to get her mother’s at-home pack from the top drawer of the dresser under the TV, but Arnya grabbed her arm. “I have a better idea. Since I already have the patch, why don’t we be pirates?”

“Now?” Arnya was prone to wild bouts of imagination, but pirates? In the middle of the night?

“Yeah. We need a box for our treasure chest. Look in the bedroom closet. Just dump out the shoes or whatever.” Arnya sat up and plopped the peas on the table. “Make sure it has a lid.”

Lucky brought back a Nike box, only a little battered. While she was gone, Arnya had found a glass and filled it with Pepsi, to which she added a bit of rye. She took a big swig, set down the glass, and rubbed her hands together. “Alrighty then, the first thing pirates need is treasure. I mean, we probably need a ship. But we be land pirates, so this’ll have to do.” She slapped the couch cushion beside her. “Off you go—find me some jewels!”

Lucky ran around the apartment scooping up trinkets and coins. She brought each find back to the “Captain,” who squinted her one eye at the potential treasure and declared it be thrown back into the deep or added to their chest. A pile of discards quickly accumulated on the floor. Soon the box held coloured pencils, a plastic bubble from a gum machine that once held a ring, two nickels (Arnya pocketed the quarters), a stick of incense, a single beaded earring, and the worn copy of Cujo Arnya read to Lucky when she couldn’t sleep.

Downing the rest of her drink, Arnya leaped to her feet, retrieved her cigarettes, and lit up, turning in a circle in the centre of the room.

“What else do we need?” Lucky couldn’t stop yawning now, but her mother seemed energized.

“We need real treasure. The kind thieves would kill for.” Her hair was wild, sticking up and out from the bandana. “Go get the wench’s jewels!”

“What’s a wench?”

“A badass like your mother, that’s what. Now grab the jewels!” She raised her cigarette like a sabre and pointed to their bedroom.

From among the piles of odds and ends on top of their dresser—an Allen key, pantyhose, sample-size bottles of lotion and mouthwash, four different half-finished packets of gum, and a pile of old photos—Lucky grabbed two boxes. She flipped open one box that used to hold bobby pins and hair elastics, but they always forgot to put them back, so now it just held some safety pins and an empty can of mace. The other box was where Arnya kept her jewelry.