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Volume 1 Issue 2
Dec/Jan 2009
F REE
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BY GLEN O’NEILL
WILL JOHNSON
AND GLEN O’NEILL
GARETH GAUDIN
N& DENVER JACKSO MARC JUNKER
Editors/Creative Directors Contributors Managing Editor
Gareth Gaudin, Denver Jackson, Will Johnson, Marc Junker, Glen O’Neill
Glen O’Neill
Printed In Canada
www.stripcomics.ca
All content © respective creators
Marc Junker & Denver Jackson
ISSN 1918-7947
FILM ANIMATION ANIMATION VISUAL VISUAL FX FX
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DJAXXSTUDIO.COM
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PIGEON HEAVEN WRITTEN BY WILL JOHNSON
ILLUSTRATION BY GLEN O’NEILL
Darryl always ends up in shopping mall food courts. He doesn’t mean to. But anytime he rolls into a new town, it just seems like the easiest and most logical place to retreat. He’s having trouble capturing the whole Jack Kerouac-Into the Wild vibe he’s been going for. Escaping civilization, enjoying the thrill of the open road. Instead, he eats A&W hamburgers and watches people shop. He can’t stop thinking about Kris.
This was supposed to be their trip together. They’d planned it since elementary. But somewhere along the line Kris had gotten lost in a fog of bong smoke and ended up a heroin addict living on the street in Downtown Eastside of Vancouver. The last time Darryl saw Kris, Kris had begged him for twenty bucks then punched him in the head when he refused. “Don’t ever come back here,” Kris snarled.
Darryl scribbles nothing in particular in his journal. It’s been three days since he left the coast and he hasn’t even made it out of B.C. yet. With random overnight stops in Hope, Osoyoos and Kelowna, it’s been slow-going so far. He glances around, watches the people milling with their shopping bags, eating fast food. “What’re you writing?” she asks.
She’s young, maybe 18. Lots of bangles and bracelets, a heavy hemp necklace. She’s blond, with one thick dreadlock trailing from the side of her head. Her eyebrow is pierced, her nose and labret too. She has excited eyes. “Um, it’s just my journal,” Darryl says, with a shrug.
She sits across from him, clumps down a tray crowded with smoking thai food. She smiles, rips open her chopsticks and starts to eat. Noodles slop against her chin as she slurps them and she wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. “I’m a total pig,” she says. “Don’t worry about it.”
He pretends to go back to his journal, but he’s lost his train of thought. Instead he doodles in the margins and tries to look like he’s lost in deep thought.
“I do some writing. Poetry mostly. Do you write poetry?” she asks. “My stuff is pretty silly. I like rhymes, like nursery rhymes. You know?”
“I don’t write poetry,” he says. “I’m trying to write a novel.”
“You’re not from Nelson,” she says. She slurps up some more noodles. “I mean, I can just tell. You’re obviously from somewhere else. You know?” “I’m trying to drive across the country, but I just started a couple days ago.”
She claps her hands in excitement, leans forward on her arms. “For real? Like you’re going to bust all the way through, like, Ontario and the Maritimes and everything? That’s so cool! Are you doing it all by yourself or what? That must cost a lot for gas. What kind of car do you have?” “It’s a civic. My brother’s car.”
She nods like this is the most interesting thing anyone has ever told to her. Darryl’s impressed with how quickly the girl devours her food, considering how much she’s talking. She twirls a dripping clump of noodles around her chop stick.
“I saw a dead pigeon today. It was really sad,” she says. “Its whole head was mashed in and pink and someone had just like kicked it off to the side of the sidewalk and it was just laying there and I don’t even know who’s supposed to clean that up. Like who’s job is that? Your job is to clean up dead pigeons? That would be a brutal job, don’t you think?”
He nods. “I didn’t even know there were pigeons in Nelson.” “I know, right? Like, we’ve got Canada geese everywhere but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a pigeon here before. And I’ve lived here since I was like, five years old. My family comes from up North. I was born in Quesnel. Where were you born?” “Uh, Vancouver.”
“I wish I was born in Vancouver,” she says. “You know what I like about Vancouver? The sushi. My friends took me and it costs like six bucks and you get so much sushi and like, all this other shit, like chicken teriyaki and gyozas and this weird salad. I love sushi. Do you like sushi?” “Totally.”
“I know, right? And in Nelson it costs like twenty dollars to just get like, nothing, like, a couple rolls and some soy sauce. It’s totally effed up. If I could move to Vancouver tomorrow, I would move tomorrow. Like without blinking, I would do it.”
He’s having trouble keeping up with this conversation, so Darryl decides to introduce himself. “I’m Darryl,” he says.
The girl freaks. She jumps up waving her hands and laughs. “Omigod, omigod! Your name is Darryl?” He nods, not sure what’s so funny.
“That’s my name,” she says. “My name is Darryl!”
He laughs with her as she sits back down and continues to scoop up piles of food.
09 works her way down the rocks, then plunks down and searches through her purse. “Sit down, Darryl,” she says. “I feel like I’m talking to myself.”
He sits with her, watching the water lap against the rocks near his feet. It’s beautiful out and he wonders what would happen if he stayed. No one’s expecting him. He doesn’t have anything better to do. As she lights the joint and passes it to him, he feels settled for the first time in a while. “I like you, Darryl,” she says.
It’s skunky, gross weed but it gets the job done. He passes the joint back and forth a couple of times, then lays back on the rock and closes his eyes. “Do you ever feel like time is going so fast you can’t even keep up and there’s never any present? Like all you’ve got is the past and the future and you never get to just stop and be here?” he says. “Um, like, not really. But I get what you’re saying,” Darryl says.
“Sometimes I feel like I was six years old yesterday and tomorrow I’ll be fifty and all I want is for everything to stop so we can all chill and that will be the world. People won’t get older or younger or anything. We’ll all just hang out and have picnics in the sun and no one will be in a hurry.” “You’re high,” says Darryl, covering her mouth and laughing.
“That’s so crazy we’ve got the same name. Like that must be fate, right? We should get married and the wedding invitations would be like you’re invited to Darryl and Darryl’s wedding. Like, people would think we’re a gay couple and they’d be totally surprised that we’re just a guy and girl. Darryl and Darryl! I can’t even believe it,” she says.
He gets up to throw away his tray, dumps his wrappers in the garbage. He looks over at the mall entrance. It’s getting dark outside, late. “Hey, do you wanna get stoned with me,” asks Darryl, appearing beside him. She’s done her meal already. “Like, we should totally roll up a mad spliff and smoke together ‘cause come on, we have the same name, man.”
She leads him into the parking lot. The sun is disappearing behind the mountains and the few cars cast long, looming shadows across the concrete. At the end of the parking lot are a couple trees, a rock wall, then the lake. Darryl
The two of them sit there for an hour, the darkness descending around them. He likes the lulling sounds of the water burbling against the rocks. He feels safe. Darryl pulls out her cell phone and starts texting. “Hey, remember the pigeon?” he says. Darryl nods.
“You think its’ still there. All alone? Like do you think we could go see it?” he asks.
She jumps up the same way she did when she found out about their matching names. She waves her arms around and almost tumbles off the rock in her excitement. “Omigod, Darryl. You’re an effing genius. For real. We should go rescue it and like, bury it and then it won’t be alone and it will go to pigeon heaven.”
He knows he’s being goofy but he works his way up the hill with her. She hooks her arm in his and rests her head on his shoulder for a moment.
“Here it is!” she yells a couple of moments later. She runs ahead a block and jumps up and down like a little girl, pointing at the tiny carcass. Sure enough, the pigeon is curled up in the hollow of some tree roots. A couple of feathers are scattered around and one wing slightly flaps in the evening breeze. White maggots crawl out of the bloody eyehole.
Darryl pulls a plastic Safeway bag out of her purse. This seems like a strange thing to carry in your purse, but he doesn’t say anything. She scoops up the dead bird and neatly ties the handles of the bag in a bow. She holds it up for him to see and it reminds him of a bag of dog shit. ‘That’s gross,” he says.
“Death is a part of life, Darryl.”
They make their way back down the hill to the water and his head starts to feel like it’s being packed inside Styrofoam. He feels a little uneasy on his feet and when he trips, Darryl puts a supportive arm around his back. They walk like that for what seems like forever, until they’re back at the water. “I’m just gonna hurl it way out there,” she says, smiling at him mischievously. “Isn’t that illegal?”
“They can totally arrest me for like pigeon murder, but I’m gonna throw this effing bird in the water and give it a proper funeral. The police can effing come and put me in handcuffs but I don’t even care because she deserves more than that and she deserves someone to care about her,” says Darryl. She’s crying.
“Are you okay?” he asks.
“Do you have anything to say to her?” Darryl asks, holding up the bag. It swings lightly from her fingers and he can see the murky shadows of the bird against the plastic. “It sucks you died. But…at least you got to fly,” he says.
Darryl smiles. She nods, wipes away her tears with the back of her hand. She swings around and tosses it like a shot put. It hurtles through the air, spins in wild loops, then plops into the lake. Everything around is quiet. Darryl watches the bag sink.
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Gareth Gaudin
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