What’re you doing?
She stopped swiping the rag against the peeling fence and studied the boy who’d asked. He was out late for a kid. An actual kid, not a 20-year-old like her.
“What it looks like,” she said.
“Why are you wearing a mask to clean graffiti? It’s not like you’re doing graffiti.”
She was wearing a ski-mask over her face and had pink hair. It was too warm on a night when the day’s heat was still blazing from the concrete. And the kid wasn’t wrong. She could have gone without it.
“It’s not graffiti,” she said. “It’s street art.”
The pink and grey rose was blending into the wood, making a hypnotic swirl under the scattered alley lights. A garage motion sensor here, a row of path markers there. White droplets limning someone’s aluminum and polyester patio cover. A string of glowing flamingos.
“Why’re you cleaning it?”
She let her aching arm drop.
“There used to be a bridge in Paris that people put padlocks on, to say they were in love forever. They called them love locks. Did you know that?”
“No.”
“It’s something I heard,” she added. “I’ve never been to Paris.” “Me either,” the kid said. He didn’t sound unhappy about it.
“I was supposed to go to a few places around there. It got cancelled.” She gave him a moment to… sympathize? Whatever. He didn’t. “The locks are gone now. There were so many locks that the bridge couldn’t hold the weight. They got taken off, and the city made a law against them.”
“What does that have to do with–”
“They could,” she said, “have made the law that you had to go get your lock if you broke up. Problem solved.”
He blinked. Thinking. He said, “these are your roses? Did you, like, break up with your boyfriend?”
“My band broke up. See, I made a rose symbol for us, for T-shirts and our instruments, all that stuff. Branding. Then I put it around town because I thought it would be a mystery. And people would talk about it. Like the Listen birds.”
From his face, she guessed he’d never seen the black birds that had perched on Edmonton’s fences and walls when she was a kid. An outline of a songbird and the word Listen, painted every-where by someone and, in time, everyone. She’d done some, too.
“But we’re finished,” she said. “And the tour’s cancelled. So.”
“You could leave the roses.”
“Don’t wanna break the bridge.”
The kid kicked a pebble. It skittered away like a mouse. What bridge? he didn’t say.
“I’m going to design school,” she said. Like he cared. Hell, like she cared. “I’m gonna work for other people. Move out of my mom’s house.”
She took the bottle hooked on her back pocket and gave the fence another spray. The solvent stung her fingers.
“I’m going to make things I never cared about,” she told him, “so I never have to do this again.”
Gayleen Froese is an Edmonton writer of LGBTQ detective fiction including The Girl Whose Luck Ran Out and The Man Who Lost His Pen from DSP Publications. Her superhero novel, Lightning Strike Blues, is set for release in October 2023.
This article appears in the Sept/Oct 2023 issue of Edify
