FROM DECEMBER 2022 ISSUE OF WEST END PHOENIX

There are places you walk past and don’t notice except when they are lit up at night. Loja do Espirito Santo is one of those places. Fluorescent tubing makes the window display, lined in red taffeta, glow. Children’s suits and white holy communion dresses, pinned flat, fly out of the faded backdrop like clothes meant for ghosts. The flattened outfits remind me of those puppets that went to space on a kids TV program, where occasionally you’d witness the betrayal of a filament lifting a wrist or the movable jawline of a talking papier mâché astronaut. During the day, the storefront competes for eyeballs with Arya Tattoo & Piercing and the Bloorcourt Veterinary Clinic, where my dog, at night, still halts at the closed entrance, hoping for an after-hours treat. Loja do Espirito Santo – the Holy Spirit Store, which closed this season after 48 years in business – was best viewed from the Gladstone Library, the illuminated window display bookended with a drawing of a brother and sister holding hands at one end, and a cozy backlit illustrated “bed” with a warm, blood-coloured duvet draped over it at the other. There is something both broken and joyful about the scene at Loja, like Liza Minnelli in Cabaret, a taint of the dark side – the pinned smudge of butterfly wing coupled with Dirk Bogarde in The Night Porter, all dubbed, of course, in Portuguese. There was always something unsettling about the lack of shadows in this puppetless terrarium, where a few outfits remain with faded price tags. Now a handmade sign has been added to the display: “Everything must go.” And more urgently, “This is the last month.”