ravaged face simpering a teenage fantasy-Edna would stop. Satchmo, Vera Lynn-they played songs for girls with blushing cheeks and curls that clustered like bells at their temples. Girls called Lilly or Marianne who vied for the attention of the unknown soldier and won. Every time. Edna knew her limits. She was as plain as the two parts that made up her name, as rigid as the gritted teeth that hinged the two syllables together. She had no children, no pets and few friends. Every week, she went to Loblaws to buy her groceries, beetling up and down its aisles in her boots and coat, pausing to study a tin here, a bottle there. EIGHT MONTHS AfTER HER MEETING WITH MADAME Traore, Edna was doing just this, leaning over her shopping trolley to pluck a large can of tomatoes from one of the shelves. She had to stand on the very tips of her boots to reach it, and still it was just out of grasp. Her fingers scratched its papery label, made contact with its metal rim, but her palms remained empty. Around her, families shopped, striding up and down aisles, plucking cans off shelves with nimble fingers. A child inside a shopping cart reached up and snatched a tin of pulped tomatoes. A young man hurried along with a clipboard, checking off items. Edna swallowed. She couldn't trouble people, not with something as trivial as this. Even if she did, she knew they would be distracted. They would stare at her face instead of listening to her words. Edna frowned and re,adjusted her position, this time moving the cart out of the way so she could use her full sixty,one inches. The can remained on the shelf. Again, Edna struggled up on point, building up a sweat inside her woolen coat. Her fingers grappled the paunch of the tin, and then the tin lifted off the shelf. Edna looked at her hand. It was still empty. There was a sound-the unmistakable breath of trumpet snapping a groove through the intercom. Edna blinked. The tin was a lot further away now, but in the space where the can should have been was a hand. A hand was hovering in front of her. Edna's eyes twitched up and down. Trumpet tripped through speakers, peeled louder. Edna saw she was sitting on the Aoor, one arm outstretched. She looked up again. The hand was still there, just inches from her own. She reached for it. Edna blinked-once, twice-grabbed hold of the hand, and found herself spinning through the aisle at Lob laws with the ease of a child on a skateboard. Bolts of fuchsia and green silk unraveled in her mind. Edna's feet scarcely touched the linoleum as she spun from canned goods to produce with all the effort of a smile. "Freddy," he whispered. "Just call me Freddy." Edna startled at the sound of his voice, was surprised to find she was still on the ground, hand in his, surrounded by waves of pebbled shadows thrown by an unseen glitter ball. His words twittered around her like a ring of tiny birds. A row of stars and medals hung from colored ribbons on his Wimer ZOOS
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