VANCOUVER – Penelope Fagan doesn’t know exactly when she became a supporting character in a horror movie but she’s certain that’s what’s happening to her.
“It all started when my friend Bethany told me something weird was going on with her,” Fagan says. “I was just dismissive enough to make her doubt her sanity, but then she said some random thing that triggered my memory and instead of telling her, wow, sorry for disbelieving you, let’s get to the bottom of this, I left her in her haze of self doubt and paranoia to go do research on my own.”
Fagan, who up til now assumed she was the single career gal at the beginning of a kooky romcom, has been cataloguing all the ways her life no longer makes sense unless it’s as part of a horror movie, from noticing a conveniently placed occult bookstore near her work to randomly running into an old college professor who happened to give her the one piece of information she needed to pull together a comprehensive theory of what’s happening to Bethany.
“I would think I’m the main character because I’m doing a lot of the heavy lifting, backstory wise, but during my research I didn’t once find myself in a single poorly lit location or get startled by what turned out to be an innocuous librarian or pigeon, so I’m pretty sure everything I’ve been doing is being conveyed to the audience in short expositional bursts, probably as a way to break up the unrelenting horror that’s concurrently happening to Bethany.”
Fagan, who has discovered vital information about the mysterious events happening to her friend, has arranged to meet Bethany in the isolated parkade of a mostly abandoned shopping mall to share her findings.
“I couldn’t help myself. I could’ve had her meet me in a safe location like outside of a police station or in the ER of a busy hospital, but noooo, I’m here waiting like a dope to get torn apart in murder central. I have no illusions about what’s about to happen to me.”
“More than anything,” Fagan says, “I’m just angry that after getting so much agency as a character I’ve been relegated to a such a pointless death. I deserve better than an afterthought killing meant for shock value. I mean, shit. I can read Latin. Apparently.”
At press time, Fagan was hoping she could extend her life indefinitely by fighting the overwhelming urge to send Bethany an email that will posthumously convey all of the crucial exposition she has uncovered.
