Rayanne was in the break room at the craft store drinking coffee and staring into space. She was wearing her red lipstick, like she did every day since it happened a year ago.
The town’s Totem Pole Festival is a tradition that has been a sort of initiation for teenagers, because sixteen is the first year they can ride on the totem pole-masted sailboats with the torches at the top. From far away when you see the dozens of boats twinkling on the moonlit lake, you hear the clinking of glasses and laughter, and when you’re growing up, you want to be a part of the party.
So it was with Rayanne. Her best friend was going, and she wanted to go, because it was their first year being able to.
“You’re still too young,” Rayanne’s mom told her when she asked to borrow her red lipstick.
“Sixteen is the legal age!”
“I don’t care. There are boys there.”
“There are boys at school. Are you going to put me in a convent?”
“It’s different. The mayor lets the kids have a glass of wine, and I don’t think you’re mature enough to drink it.”
“I drink it all the time! I don’t get drunk. I’m not stupid!”
“You can’t go.” Rayanne’s mom left the room. Rayanne ran into the bathroom. She pouted and plotted against her mother, then opened a drawer. She took the red lipstick and snuck out the window.
Rayanne met Bernadette by the docks and their friend Yamesha was holding a boat for them.
“Rayanne! This is the totem pole we helped carve!” she yelled. They got on and floated among the other boats.
After a while, the three lied down on the planks and looked at the stars.
“I like your lipstick,” Yamesha said. Rayanne remembered what she had done. She sat up and wrapped her long monkey arms around her knees.
“It’s my mom’s. She doesn’t know I have it,” Rayanne said.
“Is that why she’s coming after you?” Bernadette asked with her arms folded on the edge of the boat and her head on top. Rayanne saw her parents paddling over to her boat across the windless lake.
“I’m not supposed to be here,” Rayanne told them.
“Everyone is supposed to be here over age sixteen, even your parents,” Bernadette said.
“It’s tradition,” Yamesha said.
“So I’ve heard,” Rayanne said. She watched her dad paddling and noticed their torch was very bright.
“Their totem pole is on fire!” the mayor yelled, and everyone looked and saw Rayanne’s parents’ boat burning, and the parents jumped off and started swimming to the nearest boat.
Unfortunately, Ogopogo, the town’s version of the Loch ness monster, mistook the parents for prey and they were dragged down to the bottom of the lake.
Rayanne spent her seventeenth birthday in the break room, sipping her coffee and rubbing the red lip marks off the mug with her thumb. She didn’t talk as much anymore, and that was fine with her, because she didn’t want to meet anyone who might die in an accident and leave her alone again. Her day was filled with blurry people and Rupert.
Rupert was nineteen, very tall, and when he got mad, which was often, his powder-white face turned as red as his hair. He would be the Antichrist’s right-hand man if he ever rose up in his lifetime.
Rupert came into the break room. “Think you can take an extra two minutes because it’s your birthday?” he said, pouring himself some coffee. “Well, guess what,” he said, wobbling his head around at Rayanne, “I’m the assistant manager, so you have to listen to me.” Rayanne ignored him.
The Boss came in. “Poopert! Get back to work,” it said. No one knew what The Boss was. It could be a man, with the peach fuzz and beer belly, but his chest was ambiguous, along with his reddish-grey ponytail and rosy cheeks and lips. Its sweatpants bulged at the side where The Boss kept her switchblade tucked into her underwear and at easy access so he could scrape the grime from under his nails.
“Happy birthday, Rayanne,” it said. “My wife’s birthday was around this time, too.” In America, “wife” would clear up the gender confusion, but in Canada, gay people can marry, so Rayanne still wasn’t sure what The Boss was. Maybe a hermaphrodite.
“Thank you,” Rayanne said. “Did you and your wife have any kids?”
“She didn’t want to adopt or anything, so we didn’t,” The Boss said.
“Can I ask you a question?” Rayanne asked. Paul came in the break room. He watched. “What’s your name?” Paul smiled.
“Pat,” The Boss said, then left to go harass some employees. He didn’t even see Paul.
“Pat can be a man or a woman’s name,” Rayanne told Paul. It was the first time they’d talked since Rayanne started working at the craft store a few months before, after she dropped out of high school.
“That’s why we just call him ‘The Boss’,” Paul said.
“I see.” Rayanne sipped her coffee and put her mug in the sink. “Maybe we should look for a bra strap.”
“I don’t think I’d want to find one,” Paul said.
“Right.”
A year later, Paul and Rayanne wed on a yacht at the next Totem Pole Festival. They had a set of twins the following year. The Boss made Rayanne keep her kids with a babysitter until they turned three years old, at which point they were allowed to sit at a desk near the entrance and hand out coupons. Rayanne was pregnant again, but at five months, you still couldn’t tell. She kept it a secret from The Boss, Rupert, and the other craft store people because they would make jokes about her infinitely fertile husband.
One day, Rayanne had to leave her register to help a customer find some pastels, and she felt her kids would be fine. It was only a few minutes.
Paul was in the break room, drinking some eggnog. He had a picture of his twins on the small fridge, on The Boss’s lap. The Boss was dressed up as Santa Claus. It was the year before, and Pat had since died of heart failure. Rupert was the new store manager.
Surprisingly, The Boss had left the store to Rayanne and Paul’s kids when one day he saw them tell the customers that paintbrushes were $3 instead of the real price, $6. The Boss liked their innocent swindling and hoped to mold them into himself, or herself, one day.
Rupert walked to the heirs’ desk and glared at them with his hateful eyes. “Your mommy and daddy want me to take you to get some ice cream.”
“It’s too cold for ice cream,” Jade said.
“We don’t have our jackets,” Cooper said.
“I have some in my car,” Rupert said.
“Mom said we can’t ever go anywhere with you because you’re a plonker,” Jade said.
“They were joking,” Rupert told them. He grabbed the kids and told them he would buy them hot chocolate, too, to keep them quiet.
An hour later, Rupert came back to the store. He had been jealous and afraid of the midgets ruling over him one day, so he took them to his house and locked them in a closet to deal with them later.
When Rayanne and Paul noticed their kids were missing, they assumed someone coming into the store saw them and took them. Rayanne cried and Paul called the police. Despite Rupert’s orders, they left the store to drive around and look for the kids themselves, finding it hard to just sit and wait for the police or go back to work.
As time went by, Rayanne grew bigger and Rupert saw that, but being the disgusting creature he was, he would just say to Rayanne, with his perfectly straight green teeth shining with spit, “You’re getting fatter every day.”
Paul and Rayanne kept both the pregnancy and birth, which happened at the annual Totem Pole Festival, forcing the couple to paddle home and look for scissors, a secret. They were afraid whoever kidnapped Cooper and Jade would want this baby, too.
Fifteen year later, Rupert was at his desk, wondering why he had kept Paul and Rayanne employed for so long, when he got a phone call.
“Meester Rupert, the twins are gone!” a man on the other end said. Rupert hung up. He panicked, then thought that there was no way those kids remembered anything from their past lives, so it was better not to worry about it.
One year later, the third child, named Thunder because Rayanne’s water broke during a clap of thunder, was the legal age to inherit the craft store and all of its responsibilities. The day after his sixteenth birthday, Paul took Thunder to a lawyer and the deal was made. Thunder took the day off to explore his empire for the first time.
“Who’s this?” Rupert asked Paul. Rayanne was baking a cake for her new boss, her son.
“This is my son, Thunder. You can call him Mr. Thunder,” Paul joked.
“Your son? You’re joking.”
“No. This is our new boss,” Paul said, proud of having a son with such a high position in the workforce.
Rupert took the rest of the day off to recover, and all of the store’s employees ate their cake in the break room. When Rayanne sat down, a girl came into the room.
“Excuse me? Could I get someone to help me?” she said. Anita, an employee who had been working for twenty years at the craft store, about as long as Paul, Rayanne, and Rupert had, left the room with the teenage girl. The girl led Anita to an aisle and tapped a boy on the shoulder.
“Coop, tell her what you’re looking for,” the girl said.
“Twins! We haven’t had twins here since Rayanne and Paul’s babies were kidnapped,” Anita said, reminiscing. “Little Jade had the cutest mole next to the corner of her eye.”
“My name is Jade,” the girl said.
The town voted on what they would do to Rupert once had had been found guilty of kidnapping and selling people into slavery.
“It wasn’t slavery,” Rupert said in his last speech, made from the boat he was tied to the totem pole of. “Jade liked it. That’s what girls are for anyway.” Everyone spit and peed on his feet. “I even had one of the freaks in our circus cut off that mole of hers.”
Initially, Rupert’s punishment was for him to be tied to that boat for a week. Some suggested they set the boat on fire and shove it into the middle of the lake, but Jade said she would like to keep the totem pole in her room, since her mom made it.
Rupert was left alone, and after the first night, he was eaten by Ogopogo, and all that was left was the totem pole washed up on the shore the next morning.
Knight In Shining Scales
My version of the myth of Cronus & Zeus, based in Kelowna, British Columbia.