"Roxane and Julieta"
“And it was curious and sort of hot how Julieta gawked at her body without saying a word. The feeling of anticipation had been almost unbearable, and for Julieta too, who knew she stared but couldn’t help it. And when Roxane called out to her, it was like a fresh breeze coming up off an ocean and delivering them from the beating of the sun.”
Short story. The Fiddlehead. 75th Anniversary Issue. November 2020.
The idea for this story emerged many years ago during a heatwave I spent lurking in the Dufferin Mall for air con. I had this very clear image of two teenage girls sitting on the 29 Dufferin bus, needing and wanting of each other completely different things.
Disgust throbs alongside love, lust, and sex. The tensions arise as much from the characters’ good intentions as they do from their oblivious selfishness. Then there is the loud, brutish man living upstairs whom they can hear stamping around at night as he brings home different drunken women. In the morning, the girls sit on the fire escape and wait for sightings of him and his latest conquest. The summer is long and fierce. Things do and don’t end well, depending on how you look at it.
This was not an easy story to write. Stitched together using three different perspectives, I tinkered and tinkered away at it for years. I’m glad I did.
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Excerpt of Roxane and julieta
“Juls, you want to know something?” Roxane swiveled on her stool in the Dufferin Mall food court. She was loud and her eyebrow was pierced and she didn’t care who heard her when she talked.
“What?”
Julieta was the heftier one with round, wet eyes, and soft, pulpy features that even when she worried seemed puffed up with extra skin.
“I had an abortion once – before I knew I was a lesbo, obviously.” Behind Roxane, a row of old men drank coffees, greedy in their stares; she grabbed a French fry from its carton, and the spring of the chair swiveled her back around towards her girlfriend.
“When?”
“Like, six months ago, maybe?”
“Whose baby was it?”
“It was a fetus.”
Roxane’s long, white arm moved to fetch more fries. The tattoos on it of sea creatures and waves seemed alive.
Julieta’s jaw clenched. She swallowed.
“Okay, well whose fetus was it?”
“Juls, I just felt like telling you that and now that’s all.”
“So like, what? Was he married or something?”
“Juls, stop.”
Roxane sucked the salt off of each of her fingers. She felt concern vibrating off of her girlfriend as if it were an invasion. Even the pulsing eyes of the old men nearby seemed less threatening.
“Oh my God,” Julieta said. “Or did he like… assault you?”
“Juls…”
Fingertips still moist from licking them, Roxane pushed a strand of Julieta’s black hair back behind her unpierced ear. Julieta gave a little kick with her voice – this was how she always whimpered when she felt powerless – and Roxane kissed her. She wasn’t supposed to kiss Julieta in here. Any one of her mother’s friends who worked in the Wal-Mart down at the other end might spot them. Julieta pulled back then, receded alongside the eyes of the men, and put her mouth on the straw of her drink.
“Those old, creepy men behind us think we’re so totally hot, eh, Juls?” Roxane shot her eyes at them.
Six months ago, when Roxane was already a high school drop-out Julieta was finishing up her senior year. In every classroom she’d sat in the front row. Her evenings, she’d spent studying. Her Sundays, she’d spent in church with her mother. She’d never even kissed a girl before.
“Well, don’t worry,” Julieta said.
In Roxane’s broken, blinking eyes, Julieta saw something like sadness slinking.
“About what?”
“I don’t think you’re going to Hell or anything.” ∞