September 19, 2016 | Occasus | Issue 6 | Fiction

Three Ways to Meet Penelope Rose

She knew that she had to go to sleep, or else Santa wouldn’t come. She watched the streetlight flicker its caramel yellow, trying to ignore both her boisterous excitement and her full bladder. She crossed her legs tightly. The bathroom was all the way downstairs, and she never went after dark. If she got up, her parents would think that she was trying to spy on Santa. They would be upset with her. What would they do? What if they took away her presents?

Penelope couldn’t leave the room. There was no way.

Instead, she flung off her covers and tip-toed to the closet. The old piggy bank. She was beginning to sweat—she really had to go. She grasped the ceramic pig and turned it upside-down. She unplugged it, dumped its few coins onto the carpet, and thrust it under herself. She squatted down and let it go.

Some of it splashed into the piggy bank, but she could feel most of it, wet and sticky, streaming down onto her legs and ankles. That rotten, piercing smell. She tried to hold her bladder and re-adjust her position, but the warm urine was streaming incessantly now.

She suddenly heard steps in the hallway. Her mom creaked the door open, whispering:

“Penelope? Are you asleep yet?”
 
“Of course I’m not asleep.”

His voice was quick and whiskered, spat harmlessly out of upturned lips. She couldn’t see his lips, of course; the room was coal black. The only light outside was the flashing blue dot of a distant, passing plane—the only sound, the gentle white noise of the nearby river (like the static from an old-fashioned TV) and the occasional pitter-patter splashes of geese, whipping up water with wide wings.

Her parents slept down the hall. Had they heard him clawing up the rotting apple tree, climbing onto the roof? He almost fell down the chimney, he had laughed to Penelope earlier, but finally stumbled to her bedroom window. They had crawled into bed together, talked about school, until talk dried up and he whispered: “Can I take off your shirt?” He had cupped her breasts—so soft, treating them like sacred hatchlings—as she unbuckled his belt.

“Just hands, just hands,” she thought to herself as he stroked her bare hips. She had invited him there with first-snowfall giddiness, it’s true. But the condom he had placed on the dresser had looked like an ugly package of candy. He moved his hand to her legs, stroking smoothly down like a dry river. The blue dot of the plane passed out of sight. All dark.

She had joked that he must have fallen asleep; he had been quiet for so long. They both exuded shaky, nervous laughs. But now: quiet. She felt his stroking. She felt like a lawn being groomed for rocks.

“You need to start feeling better about your body, Penelope”.

A lawn being groomed for rocks, so that the lawnmower runs smoothly.

“You know that I—“

The geese took off again. Ploosh. Ploosh.

When he finally continued, his voice was quiet as a fridge door squeak:

“Are you afraid?”

“You’re damn right I’m afraid! I’m terrified!”

Rachael was over again.

Penelope’s bed wasn’t made—blue covers splayed like an acrylic ocean—but she had packed six brown boxes, and the furniture around her room was so naked it was nearly shivering. She was going to find the last few things (headphones, hair straightener, paint supplies) after a pedicure from Rachael.
               
Penelope sat on the edge of her bed, staring meditatively at her poster of Bob Dylan pinned to the adjacent wall. She liked the way he could make so much sense without making any sense at all: “I looked up my chimney hole, I even looked deep down inside my toilet bowl, they got away…”. Tomorrow was the first day of university, and her friend was much more vocal about it than herself.
               
“I’m seriously freaking out, Penelope. What if everybody there sucks? If residence doesn’t work out, I swear to God, I’m sleeping on your floor for the year.”
               
They both laughed hysterically. Rachael continued painting Penelope’s toenails while swinging her head this way and that. She cried:
               
“But what if you hate residence too?”
               
The chimney swifts chirr-ed gently outside. They must miss the apple tree, Penelope thought. As her mind wandered, Rachael continued her monologue:
               
“Who am I kidding…everybody loves you, Penelope!”
               
They could both hear Penelope’s mother crying downstairs. It was painfully faint. Her only daughter’s imminent departure was not easy to accept.
               
Rachael suddenly dotted nail polish onto Penelope’s leg. Penelope squealed as she felt the cold tickle, and her friend began laughing maniacally. Penelope started to chuckle. She looked down to see a scribbly yellow heart painted onto her leg.
               
“But the question is,” Rachael continued, screwing the cap onto the nail polish, “are you afraid?”
               
The tangerine sunset was visible through the window. A faint glow. It looked like the dying sparks in a fireplace.
               
Penelope sighed:
               
“I’m just worried about which room they’re going to put me in.”

SAM BOER is a student of English, Writing, and Music at Western University by day, and a songwriter and performer by night. His poetry has been published in undergraduate journals such as Symposium and Semi-Colon, and his essay on the musical minimalism movement was published in the national undergraduate journal Nota Bene. He co-wrote and acted in a short play in the Toronto Fringe festival in the summer of 2015 titled "This is Not Porn," and he has performed original musical material all across Ontario, from the main stage of the Hillside Festival to the Silver Dollar Room in Toronto, as both a solo musician and as a member of various bands. His second solo EP, "Crossed Legs," was released in January: https://samboer.bandcamp.com/.