Better Living Through Plastic Explosives by Zsuzsi Gartner Read Free Book Online Page B

hand, he scootered up Commercial from pole to pole. That goofy hat, the orange hoodie. It was Rufus.
    The poster read: Shuffering Shuccotash at the Iberian Club, Wed. April 13th . It had a picture of Sylvester the Cat as St. Sebastian, pierced from cartoon ears to foot-paws with arrows. Tweety Bird fluttered above his head with a shit-eating grin and a bow in his fist. A creepy cupid. A malevolent angel.
    It was the year of the Benevolent Municipal Bylaw (section iii, clause 8d) that allowed the homeless to camp out in construction sites as long as they signed a personal-injuries waiver. Developers didn’t like it, but since the 2010 Olympics and the overextension of credit and enormous cost overruns, sites sat empty. A waste, the majority Farsighted People councillors decided. The opposition FRF agreed, but had wanted to charge rent.
    Across the street from Alex’s house, under the rib-like girders and jutting rebar, a troupe of Kamper Kids slept each night in a tangled mound like buttered noodles, the remaining stained-glass window casting a fractured mosaic over them whenever the street light came on and flickered through it. During the day they moved on, forming their silent, almost biblical tableaux outside the off-sales, loonie stores, and coffee bars all along Commercial Drive. At dusk they drifted back, lit a small fire, and sat companionably around it passing containers of takeout back and forth until the flames extinguished themselves. And then they slept again.
    From: < [email protected] >
    To: < [email protected] >
    Sent: February 10, 2008
    Subject: way2go!!
    Congratulations on your award!! That’s Mammut , baby.
    You’re a green machine, Roof.
    Same-same here. Hot, heartbreaking—jaded professionals, desperate people. My fingers feel like molten lead just typing about it. Latest in tomorrow’s paper. Maybe already online. Sudan still denying it’s backing the rampaging Islamic rebels.
    Don’t worry so much, the Human Rights Watch boys are good to me and share their tp & tipples.
    forever & ever, Lex
    Why couldn’t anyone else smell the damn carpet? Alex sat at the front of the classroom pinching the bridge of her nose and ignoring her students. For the past two weeks she’d been letting them do whatever they wanted, waiting to see who would crack first, her or them. There were only nine days left until the end of spring term.
    She was playing hangman on the whiteboard with Xmas Singh while the rest of them deployed blue rinse bio bombs and plasma grenades against digital enemies or thumbed away at their PDAs. All jacked into some device, busy and bored. The only truly weird thing about the situation was that most of them still showed up at all, as if attending class was a condition of some kind of day parole. Or maybe they thought this was all there was, maybe they were satisfied that Alex had sunk to their level of expectation. There was no longer any doubt in anyone’s mind; she was simply a bad teacher, as opposed to a badass teacher, the kind who could inspire a group of inner-city toughs to excel at calculus or develop a healthy dollop of self-respect. Sidney Poitier’s Sir (“I am sick of your foul language, your crude behaviour, and your sluttish manner”—Alex could just imagine the blank stares if she said something like that), Morgan Freeman’s “Crazy Joe” Clark, Edward James Olmos’s Mr. Escalante. Maybe she was too white.
    Corinna D. hadn’t shown up for almost three weeks. The one call Alex had made to her home had been answered by a tired-sounding woman who said Corinna was out visiting her cousins. The college’s privacy rules prevented Alex from mentioning that Corinna had been a no-show for an awfully long time.
    Xmas Singh asked: Is there an X?
    Alex added a second leg to the stick man dangling from the noose.
    Xmas Singh clutched theatrically at his throat and made gurgling noises.
    Alex said: Best of