Born Again at Granny's Cave

I hadn’t known what was happening at the time. There’d been no lighter fluid or gasoline, no exploding boilers or burning SUVs… Kara had just been lying there in my arms. The shaking had stopped and her eyes had turned glassy, and I’d just realized that I’d lost her.

It started in her chest, right near her heart. The flames spread quickly. Within seconds her entire body from her hair to her toes was on fire, burning up in front of me.

♥♥♥

I’m no expert, but I’m pretty sure that Granny’s Cave is a shithole by design; god-awful music, dark wood panels on the wall that make you feel like you’re trapped inside a giant tree… I think they do it all on purpose, some way of getting you to drink a few more of their eight dollar draughts.

If it hadn’t been for Callum and his baseless optimism I would’ve been halfway home to East Van and the comfort of my neatly-categorized porn folders. But I decided to stay, even though there weren’t that many women around. The place was mostly packed full of guys with edgy piercings and poorly-placed tattoos, wearing those skinny guy t-shirts I’ve never had a legitimate reason to wear.

“Nice talent, eh, Lanny?” Callum said as we circled, checking out every woman in the room.

What I’d seen so far was nothing I wanted. All I saw were girls who were definitely the wrong flavour of nasty. You can’t just take those women home and scrub them in the bathtub, hoping once they towel off they’ll be good as new; there will always be a little bit of grime left on women like that.

“Most of these girls are too young for us,” I said, not bothering to mention that they were probably too drug-addled and disease-ridden for us as well.

Callum grinned, immune to my doubts and to basic common sense. “Confidence is everything.”

He nodded towards a couple of girls talking together by the vintage cig machine; even the girls took notice, throwing smiles our way that didn’t seem altogether mocking.

“They’re into us already,” he said.

He marched right over to them as I followed behind, more anxious about being left behind than I was about making an ass of myself.

Callum claimed his target, the ultrathin blonde with hoop earrings and a stud in her nose.

That left me with the spindly brunette.

She had all the markings of a girl who’s been called plain a lot: a purple streak in her hair, an ironic wool beret tilted to one side, the standard thick black glasses with the thinnest lenses known to science… and she looked like she hadn’t eaten in a week.

She was nothing like my ex-wife. I considered that a plus.

“I’m Lanny,” I said.

She gave me a cute little smirk.

I wanted to spontaneously combust.

“You girls going to school?” Callum asked, making it even more obvious that we are old and they are not.

“UBC,” the blonde replied in a way that wasn’t at all convincing. “You guys remember going to school back in the day?”

Callum didn’t skip a beat. “I’m a student, too… going for my doctorate. Architecture.” He’d learned long ago never to tell women what he really did for a living; the only girls who are into funeral directors come with some pretty heavy baggage.

“Ooohh… a doctorate,” she said, giving a little roll of her eyes. “Student debt is so very sexy. Tell me all about your part-time job at Burger King.”