Trigger Warning : mention of violence towards women.

I can still smell the smell of the elevator. A skyscraper apartment story building on the upper banks of the North Saskatchewan river.

My Gram’s apartment faces the river, University of Alberta and the Victoria golf course. In the dark slick 1980’s hallways there was always that smell of potpourri.

trust me, I’m old. all of these OG’s reeked of potpourri and Shalimar.

The walls are black and burgundy with mirrors and often you’d find a table and a small sitting chair - Italian slick furniture- with a flower arrangement on it.
I’d sprayed my White Diamonds perfume on my collar and wrists before I came to Gram’s apartment

i bought it downtown, i took the bus downtown to buy it.

I was an adult at Gram’s apartment.

I was sent to other people’s apartments to fix their VCR’s at Gram’s apartment.

One of them had shingles so bad I wanted to die for her.

But anyways. I’m out there in the streets of Edmonton, wearing White Diamonds and fixing senior citizens VCR’s a few times a week- as both of my parents work.

By fixing their VCR’s I honestly think I was just timing them to set to record these people’s shows: Matlock, Columbo, Wheel of Fortune, Masterpiece Theatre, Austin City Limits.

I was exactly that many years old. Wearing Elizabeth Taylor perfume to my Grandmother’s apartment house to work on VCR’s when I heard a woman being stabbed to death from my bed.

I sat up when I heard the screaming.

I looked out the window from the foot of my bed in the white house, in the ravine, in the woods.

liter-ally

When I tell you my house was in the woods I kinda mean it was ravine both in front of and behind. I had fox on my doorstep. I could cross-country ski to the edge of the city without crossing a street.

Growing up in the woods was mad scary though- please see above.

As I was saying, I looked out the window from the foot of my bed. I was on the second floor of the A frame country house and I could see into the trees because there was light coming from a car behind my house. In the alley. The only street for miles this deep into the ravine.

And the woman screamed and screamed.
And I heard her bang on the fences.
And I woke my parents up and I told them to call 911.
One of them got on the landline and called.
I was so scared that the line was going to be cut, that to this day it is one of my PTSD dreams about this event.
But the line was not cut.
The police came.

”A woman was stabbed by a man behind the house. She ran to a neighbor’s house. The girls who answered the door had just rented the new horror movie, SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, and were watching it when a woman stabbed and bleeding came to their front door. Isn’t that crazy?”

I tell my Gram this, over strawberries with sugar and absolutely refuse to continue to fix VCR’s for her friends. No way I’m getting stabbed my some random man in my lifetime.

Instead, I try on her fancy lame and rhinestones shoes and do my nails, watch Entertainment Tonight and Lifestyles of The Rich and Famous and read Cosmo magazines. Because those were the sorts of things widows had around the house in the 1980’s.