"Bonjour/Hi" by Kim Poirier

An aging retail employee meets a beautiful youth—ageless, mercurial, and (allegedly) a space alien.

Photo by Fikri Rasyid on Unsplash

Genre: Short Story
Tags: Magical Realism, Manic Pixie Dream Boy, The Crushing Nihilism of Working Retail
Warnings: Mentions of suicidal ideation
Word Count: 5500

Author’s note

'bonjour/hi' came about at a specific time in my life, when i was paying my way through undergrad by working at a depanneur (ie, montreal convenience store) — surrounded by older adults who'd fallen through the cracks and eked out meagre paycheck-to-paycheck lives while struggling with sickness, injury, disability, mental illness, you name it. i've always felt one false move from slipping into that same kind of marginal existence. but at the same time, i often think it wouldn't be so bad, that kind of life. because it's still a life. 'bonjour/hi' is a somewhat immature and self-pitying story that came from that state of mind. also, i'd been rereading a lot of vonnegut stuff at the time.

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Bonjour/Hi

Kim Poirier

Rue Sainte-Catherine is boiling with human beings. American tourists mill about with their phones out. Givenchies and Guccis teeter along on tanning bed stilts. Sans-abri nest in the gutters like little ovenbirds, weary and overhot, surrounded by Trojan wrappers and bent cans of Belgian Moon. The streets are, of course, congested with traffic. Horns blare and sirens wail, but nothing much seems to move.

Under the mid-August sun, Montreal frenzies. Montreal pulses, heaves, seizes; rhythmic, sickly, tonic-clonic. She reeks of urine. She reeks of malt. She buckles beneath the weight of so many bodies.

Inside, the dépanneur is empty.

The A/C groans and the fridges rattle, but the slush machines hum loudest of all. They churn viscous, icy elixirs in wicked jewel tones: Wild Cherry glittering like a garnet, Baies des Champs turning ‘round the plastic agitator with a kind of chalcedony glow.

The overhead lights are yellow-white. The walls, where they are not covered en publicités, are red. The floorstones—expertly engineered to conceal all manner of grime, wear, stain, and fault—are nonetheless starting to show scuffs.

Behind the counter, behind plastic, behind a baby blue mask, an ugly girl lies draped over the scratch ticket display. One elbow is braced over Roue de Fortune. The other obscures Mots Cachés. There are two pins clasped to the front of her screen-woven polo. The first is a big red macaron inscribed with bold text, ungently reminding anyone who might be staring at her right breast that the sale of tobacco products to minors is prohibited, and that anyone under twenty-five will be carded, C’EST LA LOI! The other pin is a nametag. It says Veronica.

An old man comes in, mask strapped to his chin, and hobbles straight toward the fridge without saying a word. He grabs a fat bag of Béatrix 2% by the tail, hauls it toward the counter.

“Bonjourhi, that’ll be seven twenty-five, ça serait sept et vingt-cinq.”

She says it both ways, French and English, all in a rush. She says some variation of the same phrase maybe two hundred times a day.

“It went up again.”

“Huh?”

“The milk. I said it went up again.”

“Oh! Did it? I’m terrible at keeping track of prices.”

Veronica’s being sincere, but she knows she looks like she’s playing dumb. She always looks like she’s playing dumb. You could say her face was made for it—she has these big, black, vacant cow eyes; no matter how much Proust she reads, she can’t seem to get them to show a little light.

“Do you want a bag?”

“I better, in case it leaks. The last bag I got started leaking on the way home.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Made a mess of the car, that’s for sure.”

“Voulez-vous votre facture?”

“What?”

“Do you want your receipt?”

“Why did you ask it in French?”

“…It was just kind of automatic.”

“This is Canada, you can speak English. You know, that boss of yours refuses to speak English with me—”

“Well, he’s from France, ha-ha…”

“But still, with a paying customer—”

A common sentiment, but not a very Quebécois one. Veronica thinks, He must be from Ontario. Or Alberta. She’d spent a year in Alberta, once. As a younger woman. She’d spent the bulk of the year unemployed, single and friendless, renting a lone room in a condominium with two men she didn’t know. It was a lonely existence, but there was a plenitude in it: she’d felt much closer to her own mind. She filled the hours and the days with long walks of the mind out into the greywhiteblue…the ice cold prairies had stretched for miles beyond her eyes, a snowscape as glitteringly vast as the ocean, and she would sometimes hear coyotes in the far distance…

She’d known then that if she chose to die, it would be weeks before her family found out. Her roommates wouldn’t search for her, not until her disappearance was absolutely impossible to ignore. Meanwhile, her family was accustomed to her long silences; she slid off the brain quite easily.

For that reason, among many, death began to seem a rather delicious prospect: a long secret, then a grand reveal.

The man pays and shuffles back out into the sun. Veronica slumps, almost involuntarily. The counter is cool, like a salve. The scratch tickets beneath the plexiglass wink up merrily, garishly: purple, pink, iridescent silver. DEVENIR UN GAGNANT À VIE!

In plain English, a winner for life.

When she goes to empty the garbage can, it’s overflowing. When she goes to check the fridge, there’s milk cud congealing on the lower racks. When she stops to clean the Loto-Québec self-check, she finds it littered with abandoned tickets: losers, each and every one. A couple have fluttered down the ground and lie trampled and grayed. With a twinge in her knees, she bends down and scoops them up. A strange, strangled pathos overtakes her as she recognizes them for what they are: a collection of small, doomed hopes.

*

“Bonjourhi, that’ll be 14.89, ca serait—”

“How much was the milk?”

“It was 7.25.”

“It went up again.”

(This time, she plays dumb for real.)

“Did it really?”

“It went up. It definitely went up. It was 6.89 last week.”

(How do you even respond to that? What can you even say?)

“…Was that all, sir?”

“A pack of Du Maurier.”

“Signature?”

“Distinct.”

“Regular or king size?”

“Regular.”

“Here you go.”

“That’s the king size.”

“Oh, sorry—they must have been mixed together. Let me just, um…”

“Crisse de tabarnak.”

The store clears out. The work remains. Veronica stocks the shelves with milk, Heineken, Coca-Cola. Little tintack cases of mints. She fills up the slush machines, watches in a kind of daze as sodium-silver syrup—a flavor inscrutably titled White Mystery—sluices into its clear plastic receptacle. She mops up near the coffee machine, shucks Pall Malls from their cartons, stacks solid sacks of sugar and salt. And when there’s nothing left to do, she squats down to sit on the little step stool they keep behind the register—a daring and illicit act—and lets a perfect beam of Montrealais sunshine pool over her oily, pockmarked face. The light is sweet, enlivening. The A/C at her back is equally delicious. Cold nothing. Kind nothing.

A woman slopes in, slaps a case of Belgian Moon onto the counter. A silent little boy buys a Roblox gift card and a Kit Kat. A rheumy-eyed old man plays a stack of crumbling lottos, complains about the roadworks.

“Bonjourhi, that’ll be $18.99. Did you need a bag? Do you need your receipt? Okay, you’re good to go. Have a great day!”

She is the chunk of air; she is the non-playable character, she is the arm of the apparatus.

The work is a gun.

A repeater.

*

She’s thinking about Alberta again when a boy steps through the door.

He’s—well. He’s a Michaelangelo. He’s beautiful. In fact, he’s so beautiful that it nearly hurts to look at him; he’s a flashburn on the brain. His skin is White Mystery pale. His eyes are Blue Raspberry vivid. When his lips part, a Wild Cherry tongue darts free—and he wears his Sour Mango hair in loose, cherubic curls.

He isn’t wearing a face mask, but she doesn’t fault him. Insanely beautiful people, she thinks, should be granted certain allowances.

“Bonjourhi.”

“Hi, Veronica,” he says.

(It takes her a half-second to remember she’s wearing a nametag.)

“What can I get you?”

“Veronica. Ver-on-ica,” he says. He sucks and savors through her name like a lollipop. “Have you ever seen wild veronica?”

“What?”

“Wild veronica flowers.”

A clear non-sequitur, and one that takes her off-guard.

“I—don’t think they’re indigenous to Quebec.”

“They aren’t, no.” The boy presses an elbow against the countertop, leans forwards. “But you’ve seen photographs, right?”

“…Yes. They’re purple, I think.”

“They’re usually purple,” he agrees rather warmly, tucking a springy yellow curl behind one ear. “But not always. Sometimes, they’re pink. Sometimes, they’re even silver.”

“I see,” she says. She looks down at her own hands: little seashell fingernails bitten down to sandy stubs. “Well. I wasn’t named for the flowers. I was named for Veronica Lake.”

“The silver screen legend?”

“Yeah.”

“Goddamn,” he says, and she makes the mistake of looking back up at him. He’s smiling a big, handsome Hollywood smile. His teeth are shockingly white and perfectly straight. “No kidding. But you know, I think you’re even prettier than Veronica Lake.”

A statement so transparently false that it frankly stings.

“Ha-ha, that’s…kind of you to say.”

“I’m not trying to be kind. Just honest.”

“…Is there anything I can get you, sir?”

“Don’t call me sir,” he says. “My name is Vincent.”

“I’m sorry?”

“It feels wrong that I should know your name and you shouldn’t know mine.”

“Well—okay,” she says. The length of this conversation is beginning to exhaust her; she wishes, from the very bottom of her heart, that he would just ask for his cigarettes and leave. “Okay. Is there something I can do for you, Vincent?”

“I’m glad you asked, Veronica. As a matter of fact, there is something you can do for me.”

“Okay.”

“Something important. In fact—something vital, something critical.”

“Okay.”

Vincent regards her solemnly.

“In just a few seconds,” he says, “a couple of very large men are going to come in here looking for me, and you’re going to say you haven’t seen a thing.”

“Ehm—haha.”

“I’m not joking.”

“You’re—huh?”

“Also, I’m going to hide behind your counter.”

“I’m, aha, huh?”

He looks her squarely in the eyes, brilliant blue into matte black.

“I trust you, Wild Veronica. I trust in you. Don’t let me down.”

Vincent braces one hand against the counter, swings a skinny leg up—Veronica backs up instinctively, the dormant, disinterested neurons in her brain fizzing up in wild confusion. Vincent makes a clean leap over the countertop, landing with a neat, well-tucked military roll on the industrial carpet at Veronica’s feet. She glances down in open bewilderment as he arranges himself on the floor at her feet.

For the first time in a long time, she feels wide awake.

The front bell jangles. Two men push in, dough-faced, unhappy. They’re wearing cheap sunglasses and expensive black suits. Their bodies are solid, well-muscled; their expressions are stentorian. Their suits are very, very clean.

At first, Veronica thinks they might be cops. They move with the same big-dog self-seriousness. But they don’t really look like fuzz. They look like the fucking Men in Black, or Hugo Weaving in The Matrix. In other words, fucking goofy.

In a carefully modulated baritone, one of the suits says, “Excuse me, miss. Did a man with blonde hair happen to come through this way?”

One of them is wearing a lapel pin shaped like an apple pie. The other is wearing a lapel pin shaped like a butternut squash.

Aloud, instinctively, Veronica says, “Huh?”

“A man, miss.”

“A man,” she repeats, feeling helplessly lost. Beneath the stainless steel countertop, she can feel the soft, kitteny pitter-pat of Vincent’s breathing. His exhalations land against her calf, warm and wet. “Um…”

“White, blonde, blue eyes, very pale, very tall. Wearing a cream-coloured shirt and—”

“Has something happened?”

“I’m not at liberty to say.”

“Oh…huh…well, um…”

Look. She’s not trying to play dumb. She’s not trying to cover for Vincent. It all happened way too fast—she hasn’t had enough time to assess the situation, to decide if Vincent is even worth covering for.

But her face, her eyes. Her body. They were made for playing dumb. Without her consent, they do it for her.

Some people carry themselves with an immediately identifiable air of intelligence. Veronica is quite the opposite: she was born with blank, moronic features. Her resting expression is a slack gawp. And her eyes—god fucking damn it, her big, dark, stupid cow eyes. They meet with the men, round and black and vacant. They swivel, they pan; they’re flat, inert; two glasses of Coca-Cola left out in the hot sun. Two holes in a mask. Idiot-eyes.

She’s fully aware of what she radiates, aware of her power. But like many practitioners of great magic, she doesn’t know how to control it. She doesn’t know how to turn it off.

She looks at the suits, and the suits look at her. And that’s all it takes, really: just that one, perfect look. That force majeure of brainless boredom. The holy seriousness flees from the suits’ faces. Instantaneously, they decide she has no fucking idea what they’re talking about. She hasn’t seen anything.

“Waste of time,” Apple Pie says, addressing his partner. “You check next door; I’ll check Argo Books.”

Butternut Squash nods. “Right.”

“Ping me if you find him. If not, rendezvous beneath the portico.”

“Got it.”

The door swings open, jangles again. And just as quickly as they’d come, the pair of suits leave, breaking off like bacteria and swarming in separate directions of Sainte-Catherine.

In the clear, Vincent rolls onto his back and lets out a massive sigh of relief. Handsomely tousled, he rests both hands on his belly and treats Veronica to his very best television smile.

“My god. That was amazing. Veronica Lake has nothing on you.”

“Who were they?”

“Enforcers.”

She tenses, fearful. “You mean police?”

“No,” Vincent says. “Enforcers of the Epikureische Empire. Evil from beyond the stars.”

First, she thinks: Oh, okay, he’s making fun of me. This is a prank. Then, another possibility strikes her: This man is a lunatic.

The first possibility is uncharitable, yet realistic. The latter is sympathetic but dubious. She sees—the mentally ill all the time. They accost her each and every morning at Atwater Station, moaning in agonies both legitimate and imagined, begging for a relief she is incapable—or unwilling?—to provide. Very few are as handsome as Vincent. Very few are as cogent. None are so meticulously groomed.

Veronica presses her fingers to her temples, thinks for a moment. She decides that it doesn’t really matter if Vincent is crazy or a liar or just pranking her. It doesn’t really matter at all, because it doesn’t alter her strategy. In her experience, both good-looking jokesters and overly confrontational panhandlers could be pacified with the very same tactic: an affectation of lukewarm, I’m-in-on-the-joke agreement, swiftly followed by polite dismissal.

“Oh, I see,” she says, lowering her hands. “Evil from beyond the stars, huh. Well, that’s something you don’t see every day. You should probably get a move on, then.”

“Not yet,” Vincent says, pushing himself up off the dirty carpet. The white-yellow-blue of him is overwhelming; he smells bittersweetly of lemon rinds. “There’s something I still need to do. Something I need your help with.”

Veronica angles herself away, says, “Um.”

“We need to create an O-Pulse Beacon and send a distress signal to the Angels of Venus.”

“What?”

“An O-Pulse Beacon,” Vincent explains in a tone of maddening calm. “It’s absolutely imperative that I transmit our current coordinates to Starbase Vega, so that the Angelic fleet can—”

Hastily, Veronica says, “I don’t think I can help with that.”

“But you can help, Veronica. In fact, you’re the only person who can help me.”

“I really don’t think that’s true.”

“It’s true. It’s truer than you can possibly understand. It’s ineffably, fundamentally, galactically true. It’s predestined. I can’t do this without you. Without your Juice.”

Her what?

“I’m pretty busy right now, sir, so…”

“Don’t call me sir, my name is Vincent.”

“I don’t care what your name is,” she snaps. She has a new thought. “You’re—you’re disturbing my place of work. Please leave.”

Vincent shakes his head; his bright, Apollonian curls shudder and sway.

“I know it’s a lot to take in, but you have to trust me, Veronica. Please. We can’t defeat the Epikureische Empire if we don’t trust each other.”

“...When you said angels, did you mean literal angels, or…?”

“I’m so sorry, Veronica, but I don’t have time to explain. Time is failing—time is escaping, sifting through our very fingers, do you understand?”

“No.”

“You don’t have to understand—you just need to believe. To trust in me,” he says.

His tone of absolute conviction is starting to grate on Veronica.

Vincent dusts himself off, turns around, and begins to march towards the black door labeled EMPLOYEES ONLY. He has a funny way of walking: tight and fast, back ramrod, very military. His movements are, in a word, economical.

“We need to act now, before the Enforcers realize I’m actually here. Now, I believe I can fabricate the base mixture for a beacon on-site…with your help, of course…”

He pushes past the door and into the backstore. Veronica startles, jogging around the register to catch up with him.

“Hey, you can’t go back there! Hey! Can’t you read the fucking sign?”

“Profanity!” Vincent beams. “That’s excellent! Quite a relief, actually—that’s a sign that the Juice is doing its job. We’ll need that.”

“What the fuck is the J—actually, nevermind. I really don’t give a shit. Just leave the store right now.”

To his credit, Vincent seems genuinely dismayed.

“I can’t, Veronica,” he says, reaching for the empty yellow pail she uses to mop up at the end of the night. “Not until we have an O-Pulse up and running.”

Vincent moves on the shelves where they keep extra stock. He takes a can of lukewarm AriZona iced tea right off the wall and cracks it open. He upturns the can, letting its contents pour out into the bucket. Once drained, he tosses the can aside and reaches for a tall bottle of Labatt Bleue, which he empties just the same—dark, ambery liquid guzzling into the plastic bucket with a gluck-gluck-gluck.

Veronica feels dizzy with horror.

“What the fuck,” she says, tearing off her face mask. “Are you going to pay for that?”

“I don’t have any Earth money on me,” Vincent says quite gently, tearing open a packet of Fuzzy Peaches and then tossing them into the brew. “But you can forward the bill to the Northern Celestial Embassy. They’ll cover it.”

“Leave right now.”

“I can’t leave, Veronica—not while the fate of this beautiful planet hangs in the balance.”

“I’ll call the cops.”

“No, you won’t,” he says. He grabs a bottle of shit wine by the neck, swinging it like a dinner bell before popping the cork.

Maybe I’m dreaming, she thinks. The thought is mildly comforting.

Vincent moves about the stockroom with workmanlike efficiency, scouring the shelves for useful components—though his criteria for selection remains an absolute mystery to Veronica. Half a Twinkie goes into the mixture; two passionfruit vape pods, a half-pint of bleach. A dash of dry slushie mix. The Blue Raspberry.

“Do you guys have kombucha?” Vincent asks.

“What?”

“We need the bacteria. For the O-Pulse.”

“I’m seriously going to call the police.”

“You aren’t going to do that.”

“Yes I will. Fuck you, man,” Veronica says. She turns around, picking her way through the low storage shelf. “We have Peach Mango and Ginger Tangerine.”

“The Ginger Tangerine, if you please.”

Veronica hands a cannette to Vincent, who pops the tab and pours it out.

“What’s an ‘O-Pulse’ supposed to do?” she asks.

“It’s something like a distress beacon. It’ll alert the Angels to the fact that Imperial forces have infiltrated this planet.”

“And so the Angels will come and fight them?”

“Exactly.”

“What does the Empire want with this planet?”

“Resources.”

“What, like oil?”

“Oil?” Vincent has a good laugh at that. “Oh, that’s adorable. No, no—The Epikureische is an empire of gourmands. They raid for delicatessen. They’ll enslave all of humanity just to ensure a steady supply chain of goat cheese, sweet almonds, and caviar.”

“Wow.”

“Millions will die. Entire continents will be converted to agricultural monocultures in order to better serve the decadent tastes of Imperial epicures. And god forbid they develop a taste for this planet’s meat—then the whole world will become their abattoir.”

“Wo-ow.”

Vincent makes a face. “You seem remarkably blasé. I am describing the violent suppression and enslavement of an entire planet, you know.”

Veronica shrugs, says, “Well, this planet is already kinda…”

“Kinda what?”

“You know.

“No, I don’t know.”

“Already kinda fucked, I mean.”

“Oh. You think?”

“Yeah,” Veronica says. “So, you know, it’s hard to get too pressed about this stuff. I mean, isn’t this world already kind of an abattoir?”

“Maybe for you, it is,” Vincent says, not unkindly.

Veronica leans up against the wall, her panic washing out into a kind of anthropological curiosity as Vincent fusses over his brew. Ground coffee goes in. Then half a Redbull. Last, a teaspoon’s worth of milk.

By the time he’s done, the liquid within the bucket is gloopy, brown, and smells quite unpleasantly of hydrogen peroxide, malt liquor, and citric acid. Vincent stands back with her, admiring his handiwork with a look of open pride. Veronica is less impressed.

“Vincent,” she says. “That doesn’t look like an intergalactic space beacon. That looks like a pail of fucking slop.”

At this, Vincent actually looks somewhat abashed.

“It is now,” he admits. “That’s because we’re missing the final ingredient. The most important one of all—one for which there is no substitute, no proxy, no ersatz, no alternative. It’s the Juice.”

“There’s apple juice on the shelf behind you.”

Vincent laughed. “Not that kind of juice.”

“What kind of juice.”

“The Juice, Wild Veronica. The Juice!”

She studies him. She studies his beautiful, perfect Chalamet face. Cream and lemon and blue curaçao. Typically, guys like him don’t even register girls like her: double-chinned, charmless, still pizza-faced despite her age, squeezed into her hideous work polo.

“Okay,” she says. “Okay. I’ll bite. What is the Juice.”

There’s a beat. The cheap overhead lights flicker. The beer fridge groans like a ruminant animal. And a kind of quiet buzz can be heard from the naked electrical panel—an omnipresent undertone here, in the squalid, unkempt backstore.

Vincent’s eyes move toward her face. You’ve never seen a paler boy. Like printer paper. Like December snow.

Words unfurl from his Wild Cherry tongue.

“…I know you, Wild Veronica. I know about the winter you dropped out of college and traveled out to Calgary, pissing money away and taking long walks at the edge of town. I know all about the print-on-demand romance novels you buy off Amazon, full of chiseled viscounts and dukes and billionaires and outlaws. I know that you haven’t had sex in almost eight years. I know about the hundred dollars left in your bank account, the English teacher who believed in you, the boy with the bad teeth you wanted to marry—the one who dumped you when you turned twenty-one and immediately became a male stripper. I know you still long for him on some level, even though you now struggle to recall his face.

“I know you still can’t cook. I know what you sustain yourself on. What potions. What brews. Pre-packaged ham salad, fruit cups, Diet Mountain Dew; I know the pleasure-pain of it, the hot-cold carbon sizzle that sears your throat. Wild Veronica, I know all about the wretched porn you watch on your cracked Samsung Galaxy.

“I know your hopes and your dreams and your fantasies. I know what you thought life would be, and what you now know it is. And I know you could’ve easily died out there in that ice cold prairie. You had a foolproof method in mind. But you did the hard thing instead. You came back home to Montreal, moved back in with your mom, took the Effexor that made you fat, and grinded your shitass bones into the unsexy work of living.

“I know retail is destroying you. Your feet were the first to go; fallen arches, cracked nail beds, a persistent ache in the plantar fascia. Then it was your knees. Soon, it’ll be your back. Last, your hips. And then you’ll be all used up, too crippled to stand behind the register nine hours a day, living off disability payments and your younger sister’s pity.

“You’ll buy scratchies and strong beer at the store you used to work in. You’ll take feeble walks around Verdun just to fill the hours. You’ll listen intently, desperately, for the whistle of that Albertan coyote. But you won’t hear it. Just traffic and construction.

“You’ll do this, all of it, because the alternative is death. And for some strange reason you yourself do not comprehend, you cannot let yourself die.”

“Vincent—I—”

“That’s the Juice, girl. That’s the Juice. Deep inside.”

And all of a sudden, she believes every word of it. She believes in O-Pulse beacons and evil galactic empires and Venusian angels. She believes everything, everything.

It’s too much. It’s too much entirely.

She feels a deep tearing inside herself. A brittleness. A splintering. A fissure opening up all across her body: first a crack, then a canyon. And she’s trembling, trembling all over.

Veronica sinks down to sit on a milk crate. Her broken knees can no longer be depended on to carry her.

“Vincent,” she says breathlessly, teetering somewhere on the edge of a hysterical laugh. “What you’re describing is—it’s pathetic. It’s misery.”

Vincent shakes his head. His expression is one of pure, undiluted wonder.

“Are you kidding me? Wild Veronica, you are amazing.”

There is a tear on Veronica’s face; she isn’t so sure how it got there. But Vincent reaches for her, cups the swell of her cheek—and swipes it away with his thumb.

She stares at him, frightened like a child; he stares back. Her tear rests suspended on his fingernail, like a single perfect pearl.

The Juice, she thinks. The Juice.

Vincent lifts his hand up like an orchestra conductor.

He flicks his wrist.

The tear sails through the air.

It catches the light, shimmers.

It lands in the bucket.

A drop in an ocean of shit.

And within the grotty backstore of a Montreal convenience store—

A sun seems to explode.

Hot, blinding light bursts from the bucket in brilliant streams—purple, pink, and sometimes silver. She reaches up instinctively to guard her face, but she cannot bring herself to close her eyes. Through the fan of her fingers, she watches starfire pour out…

It runs over her feet, curling past her like a wave, but it doesn’t hurt. It just sort of tickles. It’s a kind, kind light.

When the light show finally dissipates, the bucket is empty—save for one tiny object, about the size of a nickel.

Vincent reaches down into the bucket. Straightening back up, he holds the object out to her. It’s hard as a rock and perfectly round. It blinkers with a soft red light, like a security camera does.

“Take this,” Vincent says. Then, when Veronica makes no movement towards him at all, he moves his hand a little nearer and says, “Go on.”

Tentatively, Veronica uncurls a hand.

“This is the—pulse?”

“An O-Pulse, yes.”

“You called it a beacon.”

“A homing signal,” he agrees. “And you are the engine that powers it.”

He drops the beacon into her palm. She recoils a little, expecting it to be hot. But it isn’t. It’s quite cool. So she closes her palm around it, wondering at the shape of it against her fingers.

“If I hold on to this, then…the, the Angels…”

“They’ll know where to find us. And they’ll save this planet from Epikureische influence. I’ve seen them do it before.”

“Oh,” she says quite dizzily. “I see—that’s nice.” She stops short, then asks, “After they’ve done that, Vincent, do you think…”

“Think what?”

“That they’ll take me away with them? To Venus?”

He blinks. “That’s a very strange question. Why should they?”

“Oh,” she says. “Um, I just thought…”

“I need to run,” Vincent says. “Get the Enforcers off our scent.”

“You’re leaving? But—”

“No choice, unfortunately,” Vincent says.

“But I still don’t understand a thing—”

“I’m sorry, Wild Veronica, but it is absolutely critical that I draw the Enforcers’ attention away from that beacon,” he says. His eyes slide toward the back exit, the one they use to take out the trash. “Can I leave through the back?”

Veronica nods dazedly.

“Atta girl.”

He turns around, moves on the door—but before he can leave, she’s up on her feet again, grabbing him by the cuff of his sleeve.

“Wait. Wait. Will—will I ever see you again?”

“Oh. Maybe?”

“Promise me,” she says. “Promise me that you will.”

“I—well, alright. Sure,” he laughs. He has a youthful, buoyant laugh. “Sure, I promise. How’s that?”

Honestly? It sounds kind of phony, kind of plasticky. But it’s everything. It’s all she has.

“Hang tight,” he says, shaking her off as well as he knows how. “And don’t you let go of that beacon, hear me? That’s my girl. My Wild Veronica.”

The door swings. A perfect rectangle of August sunlight invades the backstore, then narrows, dims, escapes. His footsteps scrabble over the graying asphalt of a Montrealais trash alley. And she’s all alone again.

Vincent is gone.

She sits down for another minute, allowing herself the indulgence of a moment’s stupefaction. Then, not knowing what else to do, she stands up and tidies the mess he left behind: empty cans, pilfered packages, broken milk tabs.

All in all, she thinks he ruined maybe seventy-five dollars worth of stock. If she’s lucky, none of her bosses will even notice. She can write it off as a broken shipping crate.

Once finished, she heads back to the front of the store. No one has come in. It’s still completely dead, despite the human swell beyond the windows.

Veronica slips the little beacon into her pocket and goes back behind the register. She watches the slushies turn around their plastic agitators. Kiwi Lemon is emerald green; sloppy and cold and chunky, like springtime snow. White Mystery hurls like a blizzard.

How long will it take the Angels to arrive? An hour? A day? A week?

Will they come and find her?

Will they take her with them?

Giddy hope washes over her, cool and slightly foamy, like the first mouthful of an iced coffee.

They have to, she thinks. They have to. Because—because I have the Juice. I have it deep inside me. Once they see it, they’ll definitely take me away from this place.

They’ll know I’m meant for more than this.

Where only numbness once presided, Veronica instead feels a kind of beatific, saintlike calm. A beautiful purpose. What once felt humid and overhot now feels impossibly delicious: the strawberry-tight promise of summer, the youth-shiver of future things.

The door jangles. Veronica stands and she smiles. It’s the perfect retail smile, the smile of a grateful servant. The little beacon digs against her thigh. The weight is so wonderful. So welcome.

Bounjourhi, how are you today? Good, yourself? That’ll be 9.94. Did you want a bag? Did you want your receipt? Thanks, have a good day. Bonjourhi! Est-ce que je peut vous aidez? I’m good, yourself? Ha-ha, wow, yeah. It is pretty hot today, isn’t it. That’ll be 22.94. Did you want a bag? Did you want your receipt? Thanks, have a great day, enjoy the sunshine! Bonjourhi, how are you today? Bonjourhi, how are you today? Bonjourhi, how are you today? That’ll be 14.99. Do you need a bag? Thank you, have a great day. Enjoy the sunshine. Bonjourhi!

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kim poirier is a montreal-based bioarchaeologist who is sometimes new york-based and sometimes athens-based and sometimes yorkshire-based. you can find her in a trench in greek macedonia, whacking the earth with a big-ass pickaxe.

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“Bonjour/Hi” was originally published in issue #3.

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