LACING UP TO REALITY
By Maggie Clark
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2011 by Maggie Clark
LACING UP TO REALITY
Maggie Clark
Blackout Bettie could take a lap in eight seconds flat and an elbow to the face without complaint, but for the life of her, she couldn’t turn back time. Sure, when the scoreboards kept counting down during official timeouts, and refs were too busy quarrelling amongst themselves to notice, someone needed to intercede on the teams’ behalf—but that was different: that was derby. Goddess help them all, this was her daughter’s sweet sixteen.
These days, her daughter’s full name rang out often around the house, on the back of various adolescent transgressions for which only its ominous, sing-song weight would do, but Beatrice Montgomery could still remember how those same, choice words had once rolled off her tongue like spun gold, when the doula at her bedside first set that eight pound, two ounce baby girl with dark, filmy eyes and a flat, ruddy nose into her tired, propped-up arms:
Janelle Lafayette Montgomery-Hill.
Most family and friends just called the name beautiful, but a few of the Hills couldn’t help but huff and add, “Quite a mouthful!”, though Beatrice understood they were just traditionalists about last names for married women. Then there were those whose tweezed-to-death brows furrowed a little as they said, “Isn’t Lafayette a boy’s name?” But to these Beatrice would simply reply, “Yes, but it’s almost strong enough for a woman, too,” earning her at least a titter or a smile.
In truth, however, Beatrice had undergone remarkable transformation in preceding years—hurtling from an orthodox Pentecostal upbringing into work with feminist action groups, aggressively anti-poverty secularists, and the local gays and lesbians alliance—and after listening to stories from the transgendered community (then still just struggling for an equal share in the conversation), her heart simply broke at the thought that she might be placing even the perception of limitations on her daughter’s as-of-yet unknown soul. To Beatrice, “Lafayette” was like a little bundle of emergency cash sewn into Janelle’s jacket at birth, as her own mother had once sewn real bills into the hem of Beatrice’s winter coat, “just in case,” before letting her walk back from youth group all alone. Still, years would pass before Beatrice felt comfortable explaining this thought process to Janelle’s proud papa, Damon Hill, for reasons which to this day she could not rightly place. He had never so much as asked for a justification, after all—wasn’t that enough to earn her trust?
Damon was also a bear of a man in every way—teddy on request, grizzly when required, slow-moving panda when left to his own devices—but for all their marriage had survived the years more in tribulation than in trial, Beatrice couldn’t always believe they’d ever made a go of it at all, so different were their routines, and tempers, and general reactions to daily happenstance. That the two of them had first hit it off at a roller rink during a church social was even more mind-boggling, especially considering the different paths their faiths took them on soon after. (Though it helped, certainly, that Damon’s was a quieter kind of belief—Matthew 6 held close to his heart even as Beatrice’s spirit turned emphatically Wiccan, a direct response to what she saw as the innumerate betrayals of her mother’s Christianity towards all womankind.)
But that first afternoon, under the glaring, doctrinally-acceptable day lights of K-City’s Roller Fever Skating Rink, with “Perfect World” blasting at a cool medium from tinny loudspeakers while church seniors commandeered the observation deck, judgment grudgingly reserved over all that proceeded within that glossy, hardwood rink, Beatrice couldn’t give two shakes about religion so long as Damon kept smiling at her in that small, inward-looking way neither yet realized he would for life. Though at seventeen Beatrice was already legendary in her vintage high-top blue suede quads, she had no qualms that day pretending she needed a helping hand “for balance,” and even fewer doubts the moment Damon leaned in, lacing his fingers tight with hers, and said, “You can stop pretending, Bettie—I’m not going anywhere.”
It was that same gentle smile which spared Damon now, hands laden on entry with four grocery bags, from a whirlwind of petty grievances Beatrice had been shoring up on the back of an all-too eventful day inside Planned Parenthood’s tenuous fortress of yellow brick and gated glass. (Twenty-three years together, and still just having Damon in the room did wonders for her cardiovascular health.) Quelling her urge to climb the now grey-bearded fellow like a tree before dinner, Beatrice arched a brow instead and gestured at the items her husband was gradually unpacking. “You know Janelle’s not turning ten, right?”
“Uh huh,” said Damon. Undaunted, he laid out the rainbow bit icing, the rainbow bit cake mix, a small pink bear with a ‘Happy Birthday’ heart cradled over its chest, and two giant, rainbow-speckled number candles reading ‘1’ and ‘6’. “Do you?”
Beatrice gave him a quick peck on the cheek in lieu of response. Of course she knew: ever since her baby girl turned eleven, the age of the youngest client Beatrice had ever seen walk through her gun-resistant workplace doors, Beatrice was all too aware of Janelle’s ever-increasing age, to say nothing of its terrifying potential ramifications.
But Damon’s meaning was different here, and they both knew it: Beatrice had even painstakingly avoided her study since getting home, just so she wouldn’t have to glance at the paperwork awaiting her signature on the desk. It was true that either one of them could lay their parental mark to those in-take forms, thereby permitting Janelle to join the only Junior Roller Derby League in one hundred fifty clicks, but it was pretty clear that without Blackout Bettie’s express and complicit consent, their daughter would be crushed—and rightly so, for all that Janelle had wanted in on the sport since the day Beatrice’s starter gear arrived in the mail, four years’ past; and for all Beatrice and Damon had negotiated Janelle’s sixteenth birthday as the date at which, if her interest level remained, they would commit to driving her once a week into the big city for all the Junior League’s low-contact derby practices and games. But now that Janelle’s actual birthday was nigh upon them, a terrible constriction had settled in Beatrice’s chest instead, and so long as it persisted Beatrice found herself unable to put her name to that dread, dotted line. Worse, Beatrice couldn’t even begin to explain to Damon what trepidatious force stayed her hand, and the prospect of talking it out—an inevitability, she feared, at this late date and time—would surely end in disaster so long as her gut reasoning for resistance lay in such a deeply emotional place.
League practice this evening, however, meant at least a couple hours’ reprieve from that impending storm, so Beatrice consoled herself with small, meditative rituals while setting aside Damon’s and Janelle’s dinners (her own soundly consumed an hour earlier, to spare her any added difficulty during tougher scrimmage drills) and running through the contents of her duffel bag with great care, so as not to forget hockey tape (again) for her run-down knee and elbow pads. Damon had interesting work stories of his own, in any case—all told in the usual, meandering way that never failed to surprise her by arriving at a clear and measured thesis in the end—and she rode the wave of them to further inner peace until at last it was time to go. By then Beatrice could just hear Janelle coming in through the front door, her daughter’s presence declaring itself more by the thump of a backpack on the front runner and the rapid click-click-clicking of fake nails on last Christmas’s bright pink smartphone than anything resembling an assertive, interactive “Hello!” Any other day, and Beatrice would have made decisive, verbal note of it, but tonight she simply gathered her coat and the car keys and hurried out the side door.
“Hey, baby,” she called out behind her. “Dad’s got dinner for you—don’t let him eat it all like he did last week. Love you, girl; talk soon.”
“Kay,” said Janelle—and though Beatrice didn’t have her daughter in sight, she had a hunch this was said without Janelle so much as looking up from her text screen. “Have fun, mom! Don’t break anything!”
Beatrice rolled her eyes, but there again was the knot in her chest, the smothering anxiety that greeted her whenever she so much as thought of her daughter’s fresh meat in-take forms, and which compelled her now to turn sharply from the house, letting the screen door clatter shut behind her. Setting out in the ancient minivan, it struck Beatrice suddenly how short the days had grown again, and how quickly everything had changed after Mabon, the harvest celebration not two weeks’ past. How was it October already? Where was her sense of perfect communion with the planet as a whole? Not for the first time, Beatrice felt a flicker of regret for declining her last offer of initiation into a local coven, but no greater flame would leap from such ancient embers: however unwittingly, her derby team and league had long become more of a sisterhood than her Craft had ever been. After all, Beatrice reasoned on the short drive over, even White Witches were known from time to time to get a bit… witchy… and then there was nothing to do about it but sit and stew and maybe pray. But the K-City Roller Girls? And especially her own league team, the Kink Sisters? Well, almost by definition, these girls were team players at heart, so if ever they needed to duke something out amongst themselves, at least they knew they could always save it for the—
“Don’t touch me, asshole! I said, don’t touch me!”
Beatrice swung her minivan into the arena’s makeshift second parking lot—wheels squealing to a stop on the ruined soccer field grass—put on the brakes, cut the engine, and hauled ass to grab a girl in each hand by their upper arms, breaking up the shoving match just as it was starting to get serious in the mud, and despite how well a broader audience might have enjoyed the imminent sight. Sure enough, from porch seats across the street, two rough beasts, their hour come round at last, stood up in band t-shirts and baggy jeans and cupped their hands around their mouths, shouting, “Aw, and it was just getting good!” but for the moment Beatrice paid them no heed.
“What on Earth’s gotten into you two?” she said instead, giving each roller girl a little squeeze and a shake before cutting them loose. Jess My Luck and Helen Back Again shook off the physical restraint, rubbing their arms without taking their eyes off one another for a second. Beatrice recognized the look in both venomous pairs as one that could just as easily end in biting and spitting as, well, biting and kissing, and raised her own set heavenward.
O great goddesses Tārā, black and blue, thought Beatrice, hesitating just long enough to appreciate the humour in the bodhisattvas she’d invoked, grant me strength enough for love’s young war, so I don’t smack these two dipshits clean to Sunday.
“She started it,” they said in unison, and Beatrice sent another, furtive glance up to the heavens, adding a quick please? to her impromptu prayer.
“Well, then you can both unstart it, and get your asses inside already. If you’re fresh enough to fight, you’re fresh enough for time-bombs, crunches, and laps—ten apiece before Tracy’s whistle sounds. Now move it.”
“Yes Bettie,” said Jessie. Helen’s subsequent mumble sounded a bit like “Yes ma’am,” but it might just as easily have been “yes Mama,” so pronounced was the age gap between them. What were they, nineteen, twenty? Babies. Beatrice shook her head and hauled her gear out the back seat, watching at a distance as both agitated sometimes-lovers trooped dutifully inside. She wasn’t a coach, she wasn’t a trainer, and she wasn’t even the captain of any league team: but when big mama Blackout Bettie called a fellow Sister out, Sister listened if she knew what was what.
Just outside the arena doors, Beatrice paused, frowned, and glanced across the street to the offending peanut gallery. Now that the main crisis had been averted, she had a special retort in mind for just those two layabout boys, but before she could so much as loosen her tongue her hapless targets bolted for cover inside one sleepy bungalow. Well, thought Beatrice, hefting her duffel bag over a shoulder. At least there’s that.
On the track, of course, age ceased to matter. Certainly, for half of league practice the refs did their own exercises to one end of the rink, while all other league members in good standing ran endurance drills in and around the taped-down track, but no matter how far apart the two groups resided, league rules and regulations were no less universally understood: for everyone’s long-term safety, corners were never cut, for anyone, and especially not where corrective instruction was concerned. If a K-City girl was out of line, it didn’t matter if she was twenty and out of line, or even sixty and out of line: ten and ten served as equal punishment for them all.
Yet even in the change room the “age thing” carried a different weight, and not always to constructive ends. Despite bearing the alter-alter ego “big mama” (which Beatrice still tried to imagine had nothing to do her Caribbean-Canadian heritage—and when that failed, every time, tried simply not to mind), Beatrice was by no means the only mother on the Kink Sisters—Yvonne-a-Party had her three-year-old, after all; Marcy Fartsy had two girls, six and eight; and Dawn Patrol was currently on middle-of-the-night patrol with her colicky ten-month-old twins—but when they joked about doing derby until their girl-children could carry the torch in their stead, the thought of quitting this sport on those or any other grounds was still a far-flung bit of fancy.
For Beatrice, though, the same had never been true. It wasn’t just the fibromyalgia diagnosis twelve years back, or the sedentary rut and related, now-routine stresses of her day job; it wasn’t just the ceaseless new challenges of raising a burbling, bouncing baby into a self-correcting, globally-conscious human being; and it wasn’t even the myriad other tasks required for daily functioning as both loving wife and daughter, good neighbour and exemplary community member at large: it was all of these, and more, and how, in the face of these all-too-often conflicting external obligations and internal impositions, Beatrice had started losing all sense of who she was in the grander scheme of her one and precious life.
And as Beatrice realized from the very start of her fresh meat in-take process, the time at her disposal—the scant few years she had to turn it all around—was quickly running out.
Back in that preliminary boot camp, Beatrice had recognized some of the younger roller girls discounting her from the outset—the old broad who wouldn’t be able to pass the derby association’s minimum requirements; the huffin’-and-puffin’ plus size gal who’d bust her soft and saggy gut trying to make 25 laps in five minutes, or shatter a knee dropping in and out of 180 turns. Oh, they were nice enough during practice, true—cheered her on, gave her pointers, commiserated in change rooms while rarely remembering to invite her to all their fresh meat-‘n’-greet events—but nothing could mask the look of sheer incredulity on some of those girls’ faces when testing rolled around and she was in the first batch through. Was it slightly petty that Beatrice looked on with relief as some of the more judgmental girls dropped off of their own accord—first by failing to show up at practice, then by failing their own minimums testing? Maybe, but Goddess knew Beatrice wasn’t perfect—and never made any claim to be. And Goddess also knew that, sometimes? being petty felt really, really good.
Beatrice wasn’t alone in the upper years, of course: coaches, trainers, refs, and skaters alike laid claim to that dread “forty plus” mark that saw waistlines broaden, bodies slump, and new bone injuries ratchet ever upwards in individual player counts. She was, however, the only active player league-wide with a kid just about to turn sixteen, and right now that made all the difference. When Beatrice broke her ankle in a match two years back, and the inevitable fear crept in that this was it, this was the end of her derby life, Beatrice wasn’t thinking to herself, as the other mothers sometimes joked, “I’ll only do derby ‘til Janelle can take my place.” No, she just kept saying, over and over—through physio, in her day job, even in her dreams: “Come on, Bettie, you have to hold out; Janelle’s too young—she
can’t take your place.”
But now Janelle could. And Beatrice had no idea how she should feel.
“All right, ladies, let’s move move move it!”
Thankfully, introspection took a hard sideline as the K-City Roller Girls wheeled out for warm-up drills—falls and laps, scrimmage lines and obstacle runs, shopping carts and coffins: the works. Beatrice kept Jess and Helen in sights for the first few minutes, just in case, but her own workout soon took precedence, and besides, on the rink tonight they were training coach Tracy’s problem if they stepped out of line. For the first hour or so the group’s energy was too tense and impatient for petty spats anyway: all the girls, even non-aligned members, were too eager to get to more explicit game prep. The league was coming up on a major inter-regional tournament, and no one intended to rest on last year’s laurels of a clean sweep victory for three of the league’s four teams. “Title defenses, girls!” Rowena Bobeena crowed, gliding on one foot through ragged, panting lines of Kink Sisters, Moral Die-Lemmas, Wicked Wenches, and Ornery Orders of Vagitude. One of the Wenches gave the motivational Sister a playful hip check as she came by, but Rowena, though not the most aerodynamic of the lot, simply dropped her right foot into a sprawling crossover and scrambled out a few steps before regaining balance, grinning, and sticking out her tongue under a bulky blue boil-and-bite.
Beatrice couldn’t help but smile in turn. Though Rowena was now undeniably a fount of team-building energy, Beatrice knew better than most just how hard the girl had worked to regain even that much inner strength. Rowena hadn’t been the first at-risk youth to end up at big mama’s doorstep (whether it was domestic abuse, fallout from an unplanned pregnancy, or overnight homelessness on the back of outed sexual orientation, any kid who knew Blackout Bettie knew they always had a couch to call second home), but Rowena’s condition on arrival had been worse than most; and in any case, Rowena was the first of Blackout Bettie’s personal recruits to the K-City Roller Girls, so Beatrice also had the privilege of watching Rowena’s personal growth continue long after she’d moved out. And sure enough, Rowena had grown plenty in the past two years.
“Bring it in, girls—squads of five!”
But Tracy didn’t leave much time for reminiscing, either, so Bettie quickly slipped on a red rag of a shirt and poised herself as third among the blockers behind pivot line, “skins” and fellow reds from all four league teams T-stopping in around her. Beatrice wasn’t one for small talk during drills, so she kept her eyes forward and her breathing deep and low as the first whistle sounded and the pack eased forward. At second whistle she minded the pivot’s motions, glancing back just once to confirm jammer positions as those two lithe, opposing skaters caught up with the other eight. The skins’ jammer looked ready to take a dive from the inside, but Molly Molly Foxin’ Spree, sporting red togs and second position, blocked her clean and swift, pushing Two-Bit Gore instead to the outside of the track and pack, well beyond Beatrice’s reach. Nonetheless, Two-Bit Gore recovered quickly, hopping past another red blocker in the process and deftly side-stepping their pivot to break ahead. The moment her jammer ref signalled lead status, head ref Time & Punishment called off that leg of the exercise with a shrill third report, and Tracy was immediately on the skins and red to switch off with the next motley crew, consigning the losing squad to a brutal pyramid routine of escalating then de-escalating intensity, and the winning skins to a 180 turns obstacle course set up on the far end of the rink, under the watchful eye of the Wicked Wenches’ especially fiendish coach. Upon completion of their separate tasks, each league girl trooped back into the general line-up, with human variations in timing ensuring no two squads ever had quite the same complement heading in to their next Trial by Jam.
Back and forth a grab bag of K-City squads took to the track, with blockers each time failing to hold off opposing threats for long. “Come on, girls, push push push!” Tracy shouted to little avail, in and about the sound of refs’ whistles and the occasional sliding off of girls to do push-ups and crunches in lieu of major penalty time. Beatrice slumped to the offside concrete after an especially swift obliteration from her opposing squad (this time, wearing red), catching her breath and working her kneepads straight again as Yvonne-a-Party sailed past. As much as the K-City girls skated together during league practice, there were just too many of them to get a good feel for everyone’s styles, strengths, and weaknesses in mere seconds of play, and as Kink Sisters captain, Yvonne had no qualms giving voice to the teams’ growing impatience with the drill in light of the impending tournament.
“Hey, Tracy, can we square off formally now?”
Tracy eyed the line-up of greens and skins falling in along the track, then the increasingly late hour on the arena clock, and nodded. “All right, ladies, bring it in. You can switch into teams now—Moral Die-Lemmas, Kink Sisters, I wanna see your first lines on the track in five, four, three…”
Red and green shirts sailed through the air until majority rule and the threat in Tracy’s tone finally established this as a bout of greens against skins, with Beatrice heading up the former, one sleek, lined pivot panty wrapped snugly about her black helmet. With Beatrice’s own girls shoring up one track line, and Molly, a Kink Sisters jammer, in need of her help behind the other, a fresh, bracing heat coursed through Blackout Bettie, her whole body aquiver in wait for the whistle.
This is what I’ll miss the most, she thought suddenly. But what is this, exactly? What am I even— The first whistle sounded, then the second, and Beatrice didn’t even hesitated to shut off her brooding thoughts: every fibre in her being knew derby came first. Yes, this—she added a few seconds later, involuntarily and without follow-through as the pack tightened around a corner, her hands reaching out instinctively to bridge the gap between her and her fellow Sisters’ thighs. Bearing hard to the outside to clear a path for her jammer, Beatrice looked up just in time to see one of the skins come around sharply on her left and C-block her clean past the outside line. But as Blackout Bettie crumpled out of bounds all she could feel was the blood in her limbs singing: their opposition had come too late to undo her work, and as Molly took lead status, and Time & Punishment called off the jam, Bettie, raising both hands victory high, just held them there as long as she could.
In the change room after practice, in the frantic few minutes the girls had to pack up and head out before the arena closed for the night, Rowena dropped beside Beatrice on the bench and gave her a huge and radiant smile.
“Wow,” she said, undoing the chin-strap on her helmet. “You really feel it, huh?”
“Definitely do.” Beatrice rapped the hard black shell of her left knee pad. “These guys are really starting to wear on me, too. Gotta add new ones to the order I’ve got coming up—Janelle’s first fresh meat package.”
Rowena’s eyes widened, and she turned on the bench to set her hand on Beatrice’s knee. “I thought she was only fifteen?”
“Sixteen tomorrow,” said Beatrice. “Starting Junior League once a week, soon as her first kit comes through.”
“Congratulations! You must be so proud.”
Beatrice nodded in lieu of response, a lump still working in her throat, but Rowena, ducking to undo her laces, didn’t seem to notice a difference. “It’s crazy, you know,” she said instead. “Those jam practices? The way they just feel better when you’re with your team?”
“Easier to keep the pack together, for sure.”
“Yeah, but, it’s more than that. I—” Rowena winced while undoing an elbow pad.
“You okay? Hard fall?”
“A few of them.” Rowena shook her head, rubbing the back of her upper arm. “I’m getting into a bad habit while falling; it’s causing me to hit the same part of the bone over and over. Hopefully it won’t get me into any trouble during the tournament.”
“You’ll be fine,” said Beatrice, accentuating the point with a nudge to the ribs. “You were great tonight.”
“You think?” Rowena flashed a grin. “Thanks. It’s like I was saying: it’s one thing to be on that track with everybody in the league, but it’s still not the same when you’re fighting with one of your own, you know? When it’s you in a green shirt and another Sister on the skins? You just don’t fight as hard—the motivation to really lay into one of your own just isn’t there.”
“Yeah,” said Beatrice. “I hear you.” And a light was indeed starting to turn on in her head. Rowena rolled her neck to stave off the first wave of the week’s inevitable aches and bruises; Beatrice blinked rapidly to stave off the first wave of something entirely else.
“But then you get the Kink Sisters altogether,” Rowena went on, “and it’s like, hey! Here’s my family. Here’re all the people I would fight for ‘til the end of time, you know? And then it’s a no-brainer—your real opponents are out there, and in here”—Rowena set a hand to rise of her chest—“here are all the people who’ve got your back. You don’t compete with them because you can’t compete with them. Because they’re you.”
Beatrice considered pointing out that, yes, you could still definitely compete with yourself—in fact, Rowena had been doing precisely that herself a few years back—but ultimately decided that would be a rather disingenuous response. In the end, they both knew perfectly well what Rowena was driving at, albeit in her clumsy and overly dramatic young way. Still, for all its faults that innocently-delivered point was already replacing the terrible constriction in Beatrice’s chest with something softer and, in their current environment, altogether riskier, so for the sake of her “big mama” persona Beatrice knew some kind of witty, distancing rejoinder was required to level the field.
“Well,” she said at last, dropping her voice and leaning in. “Unless you’re Jess and Helen.”
Rowena snorted. “Oh yeah, those girls are crazy-competitive. Exception that proves the rule.”
Across the twenty-plus years between them, Beatrice and Rowena grinned and touched guards. Then Tracy popped her head inside the change room and hollered at all the girls to hurry up already and haul out. “Yes, ma’am!” a couple of the K-City Roller Girls replied—and even though Tracy by no means held biological seniority over every girl within, not a woman in her vicinity didn’t pick up the pace.
“See you next week?” said Rowena in the parking lot.
“And many after,” said Beatrice, hearing the words come unbidden, and believing them unquestioningly for the first time in a long time.
It was just past twelve when Beatrice rolled up the driveway. By then her entire body ached, and entering through the side door, she immediately grew suspicious of the lights in the kitchen, and the soft murmurs of laughter that trailed down the stairs.
“Damon?” she said. “I’m home.”
Poking her head around the corner, Beatrice had to fight to keep a stern cast to her lower lip at the sight of her husband and daughter seated at the kitchen table with considerable slabs of rainbow-bit cake and ice cream set before them. Damon met Beatrice’s affected countenance with a sheepish, silly grin, while Janelle looked every bit as guilty as a fresh sixteen-year-old could after being caught enjoying something she was, by her own near-adult insistence in past conversations, supposedly too big now to enjoy.
“Hey mom, we were going to wait for you, but—”
“It’s a really tasty cake,” said Damon. Janelle beamed at her father.
“Yeah. Dad remembered this was my favourite. And I’m going out with my friends tonight anyway, so we figured, I mean, we might as well…”
Beatrice glanced at the clock to confirm the auspicious occasion before smiling at the both of them. Setting her reeking derby gear by the counter, she gave Janelle a big kiss on the cheek and held out a hand for the slice Damon was already in the process of cutting.
“You were right,” she said, making a mental note to stop by the study for a quick bit of paperwork before booting her almost grown-up girl to bed—after they’d all finished with the birthday cake, of course, and just before Beatrice intended to treat herself to some real dessert, and most certainly a shower. In the meantime, Beatrice committed herself as fully as she could to the moment—looking at the closest-knit team she knew and thanking the Goddess for all those small and accumulated blessings that had somehow brought them to where they were today. The cake was still warm, but this, the ever-elusive this that lived between them, was warmer still. “Might as well enjoy it while we can.”
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Maggie Clark is a Canadian writer with a first novelette recently released at Vagabondage Press, and publication credits for other fiction and poetry at Lightspeed, RATTLE, The Pedestal, ditch, and Ryga Magazine. Her first play earned a reading at the Magnetic North Theatre Festival in 2010, but her mind’s all “derby this” and “derby that” just now, so expect more short fiction tales of the Kink Sisters soon!