TSBA TGC : Sunrise Set

Stopwalk

Redwhite

Hustlebustle

Shufflestep one two

Somewhere in the world, a jazz quartet were playing a sunrise set, brushing the sleep from patrons’ eyes with soft, flitting rhythms, sharp, swelling melodies; their faraway fingertips pressed gold light up the side of a brick building with a breeze, made the leaves on a nearby tree shiver. It was spring in the capital, in the capital.

The light changed.

And everyone toed across a paper-thin painted ladder, washed up over away from a concrete island, one built to memorialize the unnamed.

Crosstalk

Half conversations

In whole languages

Buzz humm

Her thoughts were staccato and roly-poly all at once, her usual haunts in the city coming alive in a strange way with the music filtering in through her earbuds, music from halfway around the world, live and in a different time zone — and wasn’t that just fantastically odd? She was nearly breathless with it, with the light spring breeze, with the stroll over the stone walkway that was a straight shot along the side of the Château Laurier. In the distance, over the guardrail that hugged the entire length of the park, the setting sun made the Ottawa River shimmer in patches of burnt orange and too-bright silvers.

Dominique side-stepped a young family and the song came to a sharp close, bubbling up into another after a moment’s pause.

The string lights were already lit by the time she arrived at the park bar, most of its tables filled with groups sitting back for a drink and conversation after a long day of sightseeing. Dominique was directed to a table for two near the kitchen doors that gave a good view of the tail-end of the park path; she could see the National Gallery’s glass peak peeking over the tops of the trees. A server came by to take her order, and when the song ended, a glass of wine had been set before her, the air coming suddenly alive with the indistinct jumble of a dozen strangers’ back-and-forth, the clinking of glass, barked laughter, a faint sizzle coming from the kitchen. There was a small exhalation, too, as close to her as it was impossibly distant.

“Thanks for joining me tonight,” Dominique said to the empty seat opposite her.

“I could have said the same.” A pause, coloured with mirth. “Though it’s morning for me.”

“Right.”

And it was. On the other side of the world, Iori nursed a lukewarm glass of water, tucked away in a crevice that was the size and shape of a café, in a city slowly waking, under a wide-brimmed hat. The band were packing their equipment away, flashing the occasional grin at one another through snatches of murmured conversation. The verdant patio was full the way it always was on Sunday mornings, mainly with older women, their painted nails poised over plates of petit-fours, fingers crooked through teacup handles, conversing always in low tones until a shrill peal of laughter escaped the corner of one of their mouths.

Iori enjoyed the perfectly runny yolks, mainly.

But the people as well.

Iori knew the other regulars the way you know an album just by its enticing track list, its cover art.

Dominique’s voice murmured in Iori’s ears as they each gazed across their separate tables.

“Not once—not once did I ever imagine that this was how it would go, that this is how we would spend an evening—well, morning—alone together for the first time.”

“Are you sad?”

Dominique let out a breath despite trying for a laugh. “No…” She sighed. “Yes? No. I’m—I’m not.” A pause. “You?”

There was a faint chuckle in her ear after a moment. “Yes, a little.”

She did laugh this time, in amused frustration. “Well, if we’re being honest…”

“I like it when you’re honest,” came Iori’s reply. “With me.”

“I imagined that I would be over there, or that you would be over here; I… never imagined the borders being shut this way. For so long.”

“No one did.”

They’d spent months exchanging messages, images, sounds, thoughts, in a postmodern heart to heart, the world having shut down, shifting all around them. Weeks had turned to months had turned to a year, two, more. So when a call had gone out for beta-testers, they’d both jumped at the chance to try InSense; a bypass for the lockdowns and border closures that remained in place while the world struggled to get new strains of the virus isolated and under control. InSense was a new way of connecting, mind-to-mind, a neuropathic link.

They had known one another for a long time, in an oblique way that some couples never got to experience.

But they’d never been on a date in the usual sense of the word.

Today was their first.

Iori reached out across time and thin air, brushed the back of Dominique’s hand with a thought.

It was like a jolt in the pit of Dominique’s stomach, and she let out a ragged breath.

“That felt… real.”

“It was real.”

“Are we sure it wasn’t just the wine?” Dominique asked weakly, holding up and inspecting her glass in the light of dusk.

“Oh yes.” Iori assured her with calm humour. “I’ve had nothing but water and eggs all morning.”

“It is a very nice red, though. I was going to describe it as dry, a little floral, but after that… I think full-bodied is the only word for it.”

“You have a very discerning palate.”

“The way you’re laughing, I think you mean the opposite, but thanks, I’ll take it,” Dominique chuckled, without a hint of reproach.

Iori looked down at both covered forearms and felt the curious sensation of Dominique’s fingers ghosting over bare skin.

“Could you feel that?”

Iori said nothing, imagined instead how it would feel to breathe a kiss onto Dominique’s collar bone, recalling the delicate shadows it made in photographs, in grainy videos. Imagined each breath warming and getting caught in the hollows next to her shoulder, near her throat, with each press of the lips.

Dominique’s voice came through slightly static, heavy with unspoken feeling at Iori’s tactile daydream of a reply. “Do you know what I was thinking this morning? If you put our initials together, we’re I.D., we’re une idée, an idea.”

“And where do you get all of yours, I often wonder…”

She could hear Iori’s tiny smirk through the spoken words, feel it as a common thought against her skin.

“The Tenth Dimension,” Dominique replied with a considerable amount of dignity.

“Aa, sou…”

She didn’t need to understand Japanese to know that she was being humoured.

The warmth of that mirth was butter spread between them, soft — melting.

It was an unspeakably strange sensation, as if Iori were in two places at once; to be sitting at a table outdoors, unmoving, and to feel your face, in spirit, being taken gently by another, being pulled in for a kiss. Iori’s hands curled around the glass top of the real table, pads of each fingertip pressing into spilled grains of sugar, thumbs brushing against a crumpled napkin, then the cool stainless steel handle of a butter knife. It was impossible to say whose imagination was feeding whose with each successive press of the lips, with each layer of breath, of warmth, of pressure — at a certain point, the joint image was so well painted with sensation, its individual brush strokes were no longer distinguishable.

A strong breeze rifled through the empty pockets of the park, stirring Dominique’s hair, breaking her concentration, and making the electric lights overhead sway. When it was calm again, she raised her glass to her lips and took in a breath before another sip. The drink rounded the edges of her thoughts while phantom fingers tucked imaginary hair behind the shells of her ears, the dry heat of Iori’s skin making her shiver. She returned the favour, but drew his face against her chest, made of it an embrace, one that spanned thousands of miles, that was invisible to anyone but them.

“How was your day yesterday?” She finally asked, her physical body taking another sip of wine, string lights reflecting in the glass.

“Productive.”

He considered for a moment, his physical body crossing an intersection in Tokyo, cup of coffee in-hand, then gave her a different word.

“Unremarkable.”

She smoothed the bangs away from his forehead, felt him kiss the tops of her breasts, eyelashes closing against her collarbone, the sensation of a hand curling around her hip, suggestive and warm.

“Tell me about it anyway,” she murmured, smiling against her glass.

.

.

Though an early version of this short story was written and submitted to a writing contest on Vocal in the spring of 2021, I modified some of the phrasing while I was reading it for the podcast in the summer of 2022, and that newer edition is the one that has been posted above.

I hope you feel the wholehearted, distance-bridging love in it.

April 21, 2021.
The 66th episode of The Side B Anthology podcast.
An original short story by Janique EA Bruneau (Jea).
This standalone short story is part of the jumble that has been stowed haphazardly in The Glove Compartment sub-anthology, as it doesn’t yet fit with another narrative.
If you feel so inclined, I would gladly welcome a comment below, or a tip.