All right, I admit, I’ve been lazy. I said I was going to start writing for 70 Days of Sweat and I’m already dropping behind, and not even because I’ve been busy. For some reason I can’t really get an idea to solidify in my head, and I always have a hard time writing if I don’t know just where I’m going, at least on longer pieces. So instead, I went back to editing some pieces I plan on submitting to lit mags soon.

The piece I ended up working on (one of two I currently consider almost done) is called Fever, and was written this past spring for the writing workshop I was taking at the time. I really wanted to do something utilizing the theme of brevity, the idea of the makeup of a city, and a sort of surreal, floaty sort of setting (which was what I particularly wanted to focus on), so I started with those, and the idea of bathroom stall graffiti. When I was younger, my grandparents lived in Toronto, and as I’ve always loved the city I took this opportunity to write about it in a sort of different light. It was nice not having to do as much setting research as I usually do – you know, things like having to wiki highways in Alberta. I’d just read Liza Ward’s Snowbound, and without even realizing it, I actually took a lot of inspiration from the piece. It was pointed out to me by my workshop leader Jaimy Gordon (whom I love and give unending credit to for helping to shape my writing thus far, seriously check her out) that I almost inverted some of Ward’s themes – and as a writer who takes pride in pulling inspiration from the (spoken, written, hell, scribbled on a bar counter top) stories around me, that made me particularly proud of this piece.

I don’t intend to post full-length pieces here, especially in the case of something like this where I hope to soon find a source of publication, but I like the idea of posting excerpts, both of what I’ve done and of what I’ve been working on, so here is a section:

The hockey year, daylight savings time, and the Toronto Police strike all started with an Indian summer that refused to let go of the city even at night. October was miserable, a sticky, insufferable month of soggy Reuben sandwiches at Shopsie’s and a lingering static haze of heat that suggested we would never make it to winter at all.

The Leafs started off the season five and six by the time daylight savings took away one extra muggy hour of evening, but the arena was full every game even so, just because this was Toronto, and the crisp, sterile chill of the ice reminded us that there was an opposite to this maddening summer.

It was almost November, but the city issued a heat alert and handed out manuals on dealing with Excessive Heat Events and studies done in the United States on heat mortality and successful media-based warning systems. It felt like it would never rain again, let alone snow. Just walking around downtown you started to think you could honestly hear people sweating around you, or at least you could smell it, the heavy, noxious moisture hanging in the air, slowly suffocating the city. Midway through the month, Aleš said he would go crazy inside with the air-conditioning on for one more minute, and even though it was hot and sticky he turned it off and left the windows open for the non-existent breeze. We went driving with the windows down, even though Aleš hated taking his car out of the narrow, crumbling cement parking structure, in hopes that if we went fast enough we could break through the oppressive stagnance of the air – and it would work, sometimes. Sometimes, we’d just stand on the busy street corners and let the cars passing by too fast do the work for us.

The police force wasn’t legally allowed to strike, so instead they dressed down in blue baseball caps with the Union insignia, aviator sunglasses and mock turtlenecks and stood by, ticking off boxes on crossword puzzles and ignoring their radars while cars blurred past them at double the speed limit. Between the heat and the police, the city existed in a sort of otherworldly miasma, like our own sort of Vegas. What happened there wouldn’t count when we came back to reality, when the heat melted away and the cityscape remained behind.

Everything flowed to Toronto. Power, immigrants, money, hot air masses, and twenty-three years of my life; it wrung the days out of me and still latched on, determined to resonate through, past, the last few meager weeks.

Fever; 3421 words; 2007

If you’re curious about the rest of the story I’m more than happy to e-mail it to anyone; contact me at ninja_breakfast@hotmail.com, or leave a comment with your e-mail address.

And no. It has nothing to do with Hemsky.