Free Girls Fall Down by Maggie Helwig

Jordan, Palestinian girls fall down in dozens with spasms and blindness and cyanosis of the limbs, stricken by some illness that can’t be rationally diagnosed, and they are given oxygen in the hospital until they somehow get better. On assembly lines in factories in Asia, girls collapse in convulsions, one after another, moving along the lines like a chemical reaction.
    Then there are girls, sometimes, who gather in groups and choose one of their own to cast out, a girl like them but faintly different. Perhaps they surround her underneath a bridge by a river and begin to hit her, and her blood falls on their clothes, and in the nicotine air there is somehow no way to stop, and perhaps when she runs away they drag her back, and when she falls in the water for the final time they do not pull her out.
    In little ingrown villages around Europe, girls walk into the fields and see the Virgin Mary, who has ditched her son and gone outto travel the world, whispering secrets to them that they must tell everyone, that they must conceal forever. The Virgin Mary wears blue, and hints at revolution.
    â€˜Tell me about your dissertation.’ He was drinking his second beer very slowly, knowing that ordering another one was out of the question.
    She opened a bag of potato chips she’d brought from the bar. ‘You’ll only make comments about academics.’
    â€˜I won’t. I promise.’ He reached over and took a chip, then made a face when he realized it was barbecue-flavoured. ‘God, how can you eat these? Sorry. I
am
listening.’
    â€˜Network analysis as such is nothing new.’ She ate around the edge of a chip as she talked, then broke the centre between her teeth. ‘But it hasn’t been applied so much to these really marginal populations. People think, I guess people assume they don’t have relationships as we understand them, that they’re not … they’re somehow outside the social world. Like they don’t – you know, that there’s no one they know or care about? But they do, they have a world that’s as complex as anyone’s. Hierarchies. Networks of acquaintance. I don’t know, people they love.’ He looked at her torn nails again as her hand moved on the table. ‘I don’t know what more to tell you. I go around and interview people. Fill out questionnaires with them. I doubt that this is going to lead to anything useful at all, but at least I’m providing them with a few hours of cheap entertainment.’
    â€˜But do you like it? Is it what you want to be doing?’
    â€˜It is, I think. Yes.’ She ran her finger around the inside of the bag to capture the last of the salty dust, then licked it off, delicately, with the tip of her tongue. ‘To me, it seems like a good thing. I don’t know why. But I’m surprisingly happy as an academic.’
    â€˜That’s good. It really is.’
    There was something she wasn’t saying. How did he know her well enough to know that? He shouldn’t be able to tell these things, but he could.
    â€˜Maybe it’s not so different, what we’re doing,’ she said. ‘Putting together pieces of the city.’
    â€˜Mmmm. I don’t know if I put them together, though. I think I just … watch them.’
    â€˜Well, that’s all right. That’s all right too.’
    An hour or more after midnight, the rhythms of the city change, the last subway trains running almost empty, the night buses beginning their schematic crossings of the major corners; the streets still crowded where there are clubs and bars, and elsewhere quiet, single figures walking alone, the streetlights detailing their clothes and hair.
    Before the final train set out for its run to Kipling, a man walked by the McDonald’s inside Dundas West station, his pockets filled with sweet crumbling cookies flavoured with rosewater, and stood on the platform, his face shadowed with