Lost Girls by Claude Lalumiere

LOST GIRLS

    It’s obvious to Sandra that Aydee feels like she doesn’t belong here. Aydee, wrapped in layers of tattered and dirty clothes, wearing a tuque thattries hard to hide her face, fidgets nervously while she recounts the latest adventures of her “other self.” Sandra begins to regret bringing her inside.
    It’s only midmorning; The Small Easy isn’t very busy yet. Sandra—petite, extravagantly tattooed, fashionably underdressed—is sitting with Aydee at a table that looks out onto the street. Their muffins and coffee arrive. Sandra thinks the waitress is kind of cute: plump, friendly, frizzy-haired, sporting a nose ring.
    Sandra expects Aydee to resume her story, but Aydee’s attention has wandered. Russet—a brown mutt nearly as tall as a Great Dane but with the robust musculature of a Rottweiler—stares at her through the glass, one paw held up against the window. Aydee matches the dog’s gesture.
    There’s a slight drizzle today, and the year’s first hint of autumn chills the air. Sandra had insisted that they come inside. Aydee reluctantly agreed after Sandra suggested they could sit by the window to keep an eye on Russet. Aydee dislikes leaving him alone outside; even more so recently. Dogs are being found stabbed, murdered, and the city isn’t doing anything about it.
    Aydee sips her coffee silently, while Sandra thinks about today’s story—some intricate yarn about Aydee’s alter ego helping a group of time-lost prehistoric proto-humans find their deity, the Green Blue and Brown God—a primordial “god of life”—one among the several outlandish recurring characters in Aydee’s fabrications. Sandra wants to prompt her to continue, but she hesitates.
Poor crazy Aydee and her crazy stories
, thinks Sandra, yet she’s nevertheless fascinated by Aydee’s imagination. Those weird stories of ancient tomes, powerful gods, and outrageous monsters excite Sandra—they sometimes seem more real to Sandra than her own dead-end life. She feels guilty about indulging, maybe even encouraging, Aydee in these delusions, but what else is she to do—ignore her?
    As Aydee tells it, on the evening of her tenth birthday, she, hopelessly lonely and with nowhere to go, walked away from her abusive parents. She’s been living on the street ever since. She believes that when she fell asleep in an alley that night, she was split into two people. The other Aydee had awoken to find herself rescued by a giant lioness—“the god of lost children”— only to be flung in the middle of an eternal conflict between the supposedly benevolent Green Blue and Brown God and Yamesh-Lot, a violent, amorphous god of darkness, which led her to discover a strange bookshop called Lost Pages. She ended up being more or less adopted by the shopkeeper, living with him and his many dogs, and apprenticing at the shop. Lost Pages is at the centre of Aydee’s fantasy life, and Sandra’s been seduced by the allure of this surreal bookshop: its inventory of arcane books that can’t be found anywhere else; its knack for attracting—and helping—people (and other creatures) who are desperately lost.
    Aydee breaks her muffin in two, slipping half of it into a coat pocket. “Gotta keep some for Russet,” Aydee says, responding to Sandra’s inquisitive stare, and then falls abruptly silent again.
    Sandra feels selfish—she’s already wolfed down her own muffin in three hurried mouthfuls—and wishes she could afford more food, but she barely has enough money to leave a tip. She should get a better-paying job, but together she and the boys make enough to get by; being a twenty-year-old high-school dropout with no special skills limits her options. Cleaning up the tattoo shop isn’t exactly stimulating, but at least, in addition to the under-the-table slave wage, she gets her tattoos done free.
    Recently she’s been thinking of moving out on her own. For that she’d need more money, though. Tom’s mood swings are getting