The Girl Who Was Convinced Beyond All Reason That She Could Fly. Sybil Lamb
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THE GIRL WHO WAS CONVINCED BEYOND ALL REASON THAT SHE COULD FLY
THE GIRL WHO WAS CONVINCED BEYOND ALL REASON THAT SHE COULD FLY Copyright © 2020 by Sybil Lamb
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any part by any means—graphic, electronic, or mechanical—without the prior written permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may use brief excerpts in a review, or in the case of photocopying in Canada, a licence from Access Copyright.
ARSENAL PULP PRESS
Suite 202 – 211 East Georgia St.
Vancouver, BC V6A 1Z6
Canada
The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the British Columbia Arts Council for its publishing program, and the Government of Canada, and the Government of British Columbia (through the Book Publishing Tax Credit Program), for its publishing activities.
Arsenal Pulp Press acknowledges the xwməθkwə
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance of characters to persons either living or deceased is purely coincidental.
Cover illustrations by Sybil Lamb
Cover and text design by Jazmin Welch
Edited by Shirarose Wilensky
Proofread by Alison Strobel
Printed and bound in Canada
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication:
Title: The girl who was convinced beyond all reason that she could fly / Sybil Lamb.
Names: Lamb, Sybil, 1975– author.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200202723 | Canadiana (ebook) 20200202731 | ISBN 9781551528175 (softcover) | ISBN 9781551528182 (HTML)
Classification: LCC PS8623.A48265 G57 2020 | DDC jC813/.6—dc23
Dedicated to
Squeaky & Twitchy.
Plunder every highway of all the chili cheese 4evr.
You can’t park here.
CONTENTS
5 Splendid Fairy Wren’s Space Book
6 Fourteen Floors in Forty-Two Seconds
10 Edge-of-the-Roof Nightmare at 100 Feet
11 If Everyone Hates Him, Does He Tell the Truth
12 The Most Least Reasonable Thing
1
THE GIRL WHO WAS NOT A BIRD
This one time there was a girl who was convinced beyond all reason that she could fly.
She was shy and bold at the same time. No one knew where she came from. She mostly kept to herself, but she was always nearby, perched on roofs and fire escapes. If you caught a glimpse of her bouncing around in the air, you would probably squint and rub your eyes and think you got confused.
The first person to talk to her was Grackle McCart. Grack had a bicycle hot dog cart with the longest menu in town. Everybody loved him because he had every kind of hot dog—100 of them, in fact—seriously every kind, like tofu, turkey, tongue, and even toffee and tamarind.
Grack himself? He was just super chill, smart, silly, and charming. He was dorky in a cool way and cool in a dorky way. He’d always be pedalling his hot dog cart around the market, smiling, and then if he caught your eye he’d go, “Hungry? Good thing I got here in time,” and then wink at you.
Shopkeepers and cashiers flagged him down all day for hot dogs: he’d sell them to the pet store and the Popsicle store and the broken electronics store and the scissors store and the misprinted T-shirt shop. Afterward, the loud, crazy punk rockers and art weirdos from the notorious trash-strewn five-dollar hotel would try to talk cheap hot dogs out of him all night.
Running a hot dog cart meant he was parked on the same corners for hours. Grack spent oodles of time watching the busy market streets, scanning for hungry hot dog buyers. So he noticed small details all the time.
Then came the day. Grack was refilling the ghost pepper chipotle mayo when he looked up and saw—he was pretty sure?—a girl jumping back and forth between the three-storey brick buildings. It was surely an unjumpable distance. There were two lanes of traffic and rows of parked cars, and a bunch of shuffling pedestrians too busy shopping or lugging giant boxes to notice.
The next day, it was a slow afternoon, and Grack was cleaning his grill and throwing stale hot dog buns to the pigeons. Out of nowhere a feral-eyed girl jumped down off the fire escape behind him, grabbed a bun out of the air, and landed atop a mailbox, all without touching the ground.
Grack’s mind was blown. But as the youngest son of the biggest hot dog family in town, he had seen all kinds of crazy things, so he played it cool.
“What kind of bird are you?” he asked the girl.
She looked thoughtful while chewing her mouthful of hot dog bun, then said bashfully, “I’m not a bird, I’m just a regular flying girl.”
She stuffed the rest of the