Free The Weight of Stones by C.B. Forrest

warm, and McKelvey felt himself teetering on the brink of the beautiful escape. I could die in my sleep . A heart attack, a stroke, an aneurysm. This rattle in my chest, this burning in my stomach.

Eight
    T he dressing room behind the stage was a whirlwind of garments and flailing limbs. Lanky girls wearing lingerie tops searched frantically for the missing bottoms as the bass line from the first song of their three-song set began to pound in their chests. Their scrawny legs were made all the more precarious in four-inch silver heels as they teetered about like strange, twittering giraffes. The cigarette smoke mixed with the blue language, the foul and candid mouths of the itinerant workers rising above the music like voices at a house party, or perhaps a sorority in full swing. The smells of strong perfumes and makeup, body glitters and glues, even the smell of body odour, everything blended together to produce this surreal orchestra of the lonely and the damned.
    The girl with the coal black hair was seated on a stool in a corner. She rolled the black stockings open so she could slip her painted toes inside, then she uncoiled the roll as far as it would go, to mid thigh. She stood to smooth the short black skirt, then sat again. Suddenly she was a schoolgirl. How ironic, she thought, for a Grade Nine dropout. She had a cigarette going in an overflowing ashtray, and another dancer appeared out of nowhere from stage right, a petite black girl wrapped in a ratty house coat, who grabbed the cigarette and took it with her on her way through the room.
    â€œGoddamn, Janine, buy your own,” the girl said without much conviction.
    She was olive-skinned, and she had her long black hair tied back while she finished with her makeup. She was just eighteen, but in this dim lighting, she passed easily for twenty-one, twenty-two. When she removed the makeup in the earliest hours of the morning, she looked like a teenager once again, perhaps as young as sixteen. Everything except for the eyes. For these green eyes had seen much. Sometimes, when she closed her eyes, she saw things that had happened but that didn’t seem real any more. Time was all mixed up. Memories played tricks. The drugs didn’t help matters. There were a couple of years in there, the years of the street, which were tangled together in a knot of memories, dreams. Stepping from the Greyhound downtown, nowhere to go, nobody to turn to. Fifteen years old. A thousand miles, a thousand regrets since then.
    When she closed her eyes, silently willing the strange men labouring above her to reach the end of their lust, the blackness of her clenched eyelids gave up the secrets of her heart. The pictures came into focus then, the faces and places of home and family. It was too much sometimes, and this is what the drug counsellors did not understand, what her aunt did not understand. There were things from which a person could not return. Not whole, anyway. Once you’d seen or done something, you couldn’t undo it. Once something had been done to you. No amount of bathing could ever wash away the physical memory. Sometimes when she got high, she pretended that certain things had never happened at all, that she would be discovered one night while dancing. An agent passing through the city on his way to Hollywood. Or perhaps a wealthy businessman who would marry her and give her a fancy home near a lake, a trip in an airplane. It happened, and it could happen to her. Why not? She was pretty enough.
    â€œAre you ready yet?” a man called from down the hallway.
    â€œRelax, Gerry,” the girl said, using her compact mirror to adjust her eyeliner.
    It was almost one in the morning, and the girl was just beginning her work for the night. The dancing was done now, the easiest part of the gig; it was so easy to pry cash from the men that sometimes she wondered why she hadn’t tried this sooner. Much easier than washing windows or bumming pocket change down