EXCERPT - City by Night

Chapter Two : A Prince Who is Less than Charming

Mary wakes up in the hospital feeling indignant. There was no need to drug her into oblivion just because she called their existential reality into question! All she can smell is the heavy yellow reek of iodine and the sickly sweet nothing-smell of industrial cleaners. It's awful, and a damn sight better than the nothing-nothing of outside. Back there it felt like someone had just...forgotten that the outside world should have ambient smell, too. Hot pavement and car exhaust, old garbage and freshly cut grass, rain on the sidewalk and street meat.

The heels of Mary's hands, elbows, and knees sting with the slight burn of antiseptic. They're covered in bandages. Something itches and pulls along her left forearm and she turns her head. She manages to ruck up the sleeve of her hospital gown enough to see that there's a line of stitching there, and a matching one on the thigh of her left leg. She reaches up, and yes, there are a few small stitches right above her left eyebrow, too.

Fantastic. Great.

Indulging in a swear twice in one day would call for something really extraordinary. She considers carefully and decides that this is something really extraordinary. Licking dry and stinging cracked lips, she hisses out: "Fuck."

Mary wouldn't drop the F-bomb for anything less than...well, whatever the fuck this is supposed to be.

She lays back and sighs, and hopes that her trip in the ambulance and the patches on their paramedics arms had just been a hallucination. That's all it could be. She hit her head; a van hit her head. She was imagining it all. Too much City by Night and not enough social life, her mother would say.

Mary has friends outside of the show, friends from the film school she graduated from three years ago. Sometimes she hangs out with them. Even though the last time was months ago and there was a flu bug going around that kept half of them away, and then a few others had forgotten about prior commitments, and someone's dog got sick... But she does have friends.

Doesn't she? She can't remember the last time she saw any in person. Her birthday, maybe. But they're still her friends, even if they're all too busy with their new careers, just like her. That's what happens when you graduate. When you get a job in your field. When you're in demand.

She scrubs her eye with her hand and the sting reminds her just where she is. Only...she can't really be here. It's a...yes. A dream, yes.

Except that the illusionary hospital room she's in is way too nice and way too private to be anything except a film set. Real hospitals never give patients who arrive on the universal healthcare bill private rooms, not ones like this. Mary gives in to the urge to look up, to check that the room actually has a ceiling instead of a row of pipes suspended on thick cables for the mounting of hot, heavy lights. There is only a row of fluorescent lights, turned off, and a solid ceiling painted a slick, calming cream. A lamp glows golden on the bedside table, an island of warmth in the darkness that throws the rest of the room into a sort of gloomily ambient perfection of chiaroscuro.

What the hell? she thinks, and then says it out loud. "What the hell?"

"Hello again, Miss," a voice replies, and Mary yelps at the unexpected words and nearly gives herself whiplash yanking her head around. "You're awake."

The window is open. It looks out onto a city skyline that she has never seen in any travel brochure, but knows the way that she knows Toronto's. Intimately. She has walked amid its imaginary canyons of cement, and steel, and glass. She has helped build them.

There is a man seated on the window frame. She can see his silhouette against the faint skyscraper lights and a sunset that is revoltingly perfect. There is no telltale criss-cross of shadows that would indicate a fire escape for him to climb up.