Monstrous Attractions

Blanca secured the heavy belt round her waist as best as she could—a bulky, chapped leather affair that was as unwieldy in her small hands as it was unflattering to the human body. The thing righted momentarily, coming level just under her hip before tilting suddenly and heavily to the left, nearly dragging her cheap, polyester pants right along with it.

“Dammit!” she said, beyond annoyed. 

So much for “one-size-fits-all.”

“Sorry we couldn’t get you outfitted with more suitable gear,” said Ed, his voice reminding Blanca of microwaved margarine, equal parts smooth as silk and greasy as hell and unpleasant in any circumstance. He looked away after she locked eyes with him, choosing instead to engage in a careful study of the uneven door frame of their shared office.

“No, no. It’s fine. It’s just…Ed, I’m going to need, like, a minute here, okay?”

Ed shrugged. “Suit yourself. Meet ya in the car, Rookie.” He tucked two square thumbs into his own rather tight-fitting belt and ambled towards the exit. 

Blanca made one last heroic effort to secure the belt. Failed.

#

They weren’t police, not by any stretch of the imagination. They were barely what you would classify as security. Rather, they were “Wranglers”, the hired eyes and ears for the town of Prosperity (pop. 902) and the neighbouring town of Abundance (pop. 1100). 

An unusual arrangement, but one that Ed assured her suited everyone just fine. Home base—a tiny, one-room cabin with a corrugated metal roof, set just off the side of the road—was split between the two towns, a fifty-kilometre drive from one to the other. Forty minutes one-way, give or take, depending on the weather and traffic.

“And what, exactly, do we wrangle?” Blanca had asked. Not that she was particularly concerned. A job’s a job, after all. Mostly, Blanca imagined stray cattle or sheep or the occasional antelope. 

“You’ll see,” said Ed.

Ed drove east towards the town of Abundance. He avoided the main artery of road that was the TransCanada, choosing instead to ramble their battered pick-up along the rough network of capillaries that branched out to the distant hamlets and homesteads that dotted the landscape like faded Christmas lights. 

“Take it all in while you can, city girl. Though most days, we’ll be using the main road. Either way, I hate doing all the driving.”

The assertion surprised Blanca. Ed had seemed to her quite…typical. “Oh?”

Ed winked. “Old guy like me just ain’t what he used to be.”

Blanca said nothing. Instead she watched as the kilometres rolled by, marvelling at the barrenness that surrounded them: the steep hills and winding canyons, the odd rock formations thrown up across the land like shadow puppets, the strange vegetation, hardscrabble grasses and scrub that hugged the sun-bleached earth. She noted signposts promising a break from the tedium of the road, a reprieve in the form of some local attraction. “Wayside places,” as she’d come to think of them, whose continued existence remained inextricably tied to their ability to attract the weary, the restless, and the curious, and to hold their attention, if only for a moment or two.

CINDY PHAN is an emerging writer who currently lives on the outskirts of Toronto with her partner and her tiny son. She writes about the everyday fantastic, in which the boundaries between the tragic and absurd shift, merge, transform and misbehave.