Better Living Through Plastic Explosives by Zsuzsi Gartner

her lawn as if she were divining for water. With her tidy silver-grey pageboy and batiked sarong wrapped around her sturdy, late-middle-aged body, she exuded an obnoxious serenity. The grass, smooth as a green sheet yanked tight over the yard and tucked in with hospital corners, appeared spotless save for a few stray leaves from a Japanese maple. Nina stopped, ignoring the warning in her head that was whooping like a car alarm, and stood on the sidewalk with her hands on her hips.
    â€œI thought you might like to know,” she said loudly over the ear-splitting roar of the blower, “a leaf blower causes as much air pollution as seventeen cars!” The woman didn’t even glance her way. Nina strode onto the lawn, yelling, “I said, I thought you might like to know that a leaf blower causes as much air pollution as seventeen cars! ”
    The woman trained the nozzle on the one remaining red leaf, which quivered slightly but stayed where it was. Nina wrenched the leaf blower out of the woman’s hands and aimed it at her face. The pageboy lifted off the startled woman’s scalp before she could grab it. The wig hovered overhead for a few seconds like an antediluvian bird before blowing off and snagging on a bare branch of the maple. The woman stood there, impossibly wide-eyed and bald, an anime character, as Nina screamed about carcinogens and decibel levels and the end of civilization while wielding the leaf blower like an AK-47. Later, Nina would recall that this was the moment she understood how something like Columbine could happen.
    The woman pulled pale pink wax plugs from her ears and, backing away slowly, said, “I’m going to call 911.” Or maybe just mouthed the words before Nina lunged.
    Honey sings to maintain her equilibrium, “Thome of them want to use you, thome of them want to get used by you …,” her long, black hair blowing across her face in the breeze from across the water. Driving over the Lions Gate Bridge always tightens her guts, but not as badly as crossing the Second Narrows does. That one, she’s determined, is just plain bad luck. The Ironworkers Memorial Second Narrows Crossing, as it’s officially designated, a name no one uses, was consecrated in blood. Whenever Honey traverses it she makes the sign of the cross in deference to the dead. The last time she took that route to the North Shore, she lifted her hands off the steering wheel at the halfway point and veered into the next lane, almost clipping a motorcyclist with a helmetless passenger.
    Her older friend Judit’s father was one of the workers who died when the bridge collapsed during construction, Judit fresh in the womb, her mother maddened by the loss. Judit dreams every so often of falling men, she’s told Honey, men falling from the sky like bad rain , like laundry .
    Dear Judit, who still works at the Subway franchise where they met, despite her advanced cake-decorating certificate from the Pacific Institute of Culinary Arts and her uncanny ability to retain statistical information. She doesn’t have Honey’s drive (as Judit’s admitted more than once, with admiration but not envy), which is of the old-fashioned sort, almost Presbyterian in its austerity. Honey has never taken a vacation, doesn’t have time to devote to dating, and still lives in the salmon-coloured stucco townhouse under the SkyTrain line near Nanaimo Station she’d shared with her late mother and Charity, the trains juddering overhead at intervals as reassuringly regular as her paycheques. But Honey is nothing if not aspirational. And when she launches her home-decor shop after this Decourcy Court sale closes, she’ll have jobs for Judit and her sister. Jobs that allow you to lift your chin sky high, you can bet your sweet bippy , as Judit liked to say.
    Far above Honey, the lights strung along the Lions Gate’s suspension cables, Gracie’s pearls , haven’t winked on