PAUL SASGES & JOEL FISHBANE // fiction
MISHA SOLOMON & ADEBE DERANGO-ADEM // poetry
GIN SEXSMITH & MURGATROYD MONAGHAN // creative nonfiction
SHASHI BHAT // interview
LUKE PAINTER // art
XIAOXIAO LI // comic
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FROM THE EDITORS 3
// FICTION
ERIC RAUSCH 5 Rot
JOEL FISHBANE 25 The Only Twin
PAUL SASGES 49 P=VI
// POETRY
MISHA SOLOMON 12 [Three Poems]
ADEBE DERANGO-ADEM 18 [Two Poems]
RAEGEN MONTAQUE 32 [One Poem]
Y.S. LEE 44 [Two Poems]
// CREATIVE NONFICTION
GIN SEXSMITH 14 What’s With All the Gay?
MURGATROYD MONAGHAN 21 The Train
LAURA OLLERENSHAW 35 Of Least Concern
CORNELIA MARS 46 Icebreaker
// COMICS
XIAOXIAO LI 38 Suicide Camp (excerpt from The Slenderest of Leashes)
INTERVIEWS // REVIEWS
SHASHI BHAT 54 [Interview]
REVIEWS 60 SUKUN (NEW AND SELECTED POEMS) THE BOULEVARD
COMRADE PAPA
FRASER MACPHERSON: i
CONTRIBUTORS 66
LUKE PAINTER 68 [Featured Artist]
MASTHEAD
PUBLISHER
Michelle Jordan
EDITORS
Eufemia Fantetti
D.D. Miller
FICTION EDITORS
Sarah Feldbloom
Kelly Harness
Matthew Harris
CREATIVE NONFICTION EDITOR
Leanne Milech
POETRY EDITOR
Meaghan Strimas
REVIEWS EDITOR
Angelo Muredda
ART/ILLUSTRATIONS EDITOR
Cole Swanson
COMICS EDITOR
Christian Leveille
COPY EDITORS
Eufemia Fantetti
Claire Majors
D.D. Miller
PROOFREADER
Claire Majors
DESIGNER
Kilby Smith-McGregor
ADVISORY
Vera Beletzan
Senior Dean, Faculty of Liberal Arts & Sciences and Innovative Learning, Humber College
Bronwyn Drainie
Former Editor-in-Chief of the Literary Review of Canada ; author
Alison Jones
Publisher, Quill & Quire
Joe Kertes
Dean Emeritus, Humber School of Creative and Performing Arts; author
Antanas Sileika
Former Director, Humber School for Writers; author
Nathan Whitlock
Program Coordinator, Creative Book Publishing Program; author
Humber Literary Review, Volume 12 Issue 2
Copyright © January 2025 Humber Literary Review
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without prior written permission.
All copyright for the material included in Humber Literary Review remains with the contributors, and any requests for permission to reprint their work should be referred to them.
Humber Literary Review
c/o The Department of English Humber College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning 205 Humber College Blvd. Toronto, ON M9W 5L7 humberliteraryreview.com
Literary Magazine. ISSN 2292-7271
Layout and Design by Kilby Smith-McGregor Cover Image and Portfolio by Luke Painter
Humber Literary Review is a product of the Humber College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning’s Department of English
Printed and bound in Canada by Paper Sparrow Printing on FSC-certified paper
Opinions and statements in the publication attributed to named authors do not necessarily reflect the policy of the Humber College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning or its Department of English.
FRONT COVER | LUKE PAINTER FABRICLAND FABRICLAND FABRICLAND (DETAIL), 120” x 60”, INK ON PAPER, 2022 Image courtesy of the artist.
FROM THE EDITORS
IN ERIC RAUSCH’S SHORT STORY “ROT,” A YOUNG WOMAN IS RELENTLESSLY HARASSED ONLINE. She’s turned to an OnlyFans-inspired website for work, and some anonymous user from her life is threatening to expose her work to her family. No matter what the young woman does to block the unknown abuser, he keeps coming back under different usernames. The speed with which he is able to switch accounts implies algorithmic support.
The story describes a very real issue—and not only for sex workers. The relentlessness of the attack and the pervasive reach of the abuse is indicative of the pernicious side of online life in 2024. What’s striking about the story is how much more common this kind of abuse is now than it was five or six years ago. Amateur online sex work existed, sure, but OnlyFans was still a year or so (and a pandemic) away from the cultural ubiquity it now has. Online harassment obviously existed as well—with many heartbreaking examples—but also not with quite the reach or the tools that perpetrators have access to in 2024.
Yes, “times change” has become a cliché, but change in these times feels as if it’s accelerated. That’s part of the reason why it feels both like yesterday and also a hundred years ago since our current editors Eufemia Fantetti and D.D. Miller took over stewardship of the HLR. Beginning in the spring and summer of 2019 (Volume 7, Issue 1), the two have overseen the publication of twelve issues of the review, culminating in the issue that you are reading now (Volume 12, Issue 2). This issue marks their final at the helm.
But, as with editors past, they are not going far, and you’ll see their names on the masthead, where
they will work under the new editors, Sarah Feldbloom and Neesha Meminger, both professors in Humber’s English Department. Sarah has been with the publication as a fiction editor for some time, while Neesha will be bringing fresh eyes (and an extensive publishing history) to the HLR. Rest assured readers, the journal remains in good hands.
One thing that will certainly not change is the quality and diversity of writing you’ll find in the pages of this publication. Illustrated by the hauntingly beautiful work of Toronto artist Luke Painter, this issue features the kind of writing you’ve come to expect from the HLR: unsettling fiction, inventive poetry, insightful creative nonfiction. You’ll find more established poets like Adebe DeRango-Adem alongside emerging poets like Raegen Montaque (a student in Humber’s Bachelor of Creative and Professional Writing undergraduate degree). Another creative writing undergrad (UBC), Paul Sasges, shares a gritty urban tale alongside novelist Joel Fishbane’s heady metafiction-like story. There are also four very different creative nonfiction pieces—dealing with issues around sexuality, terminal illness, and family—that range in style from the meditative to the propulsive.
We’re also proud to continue to feature comics in our literary review, and this issue contains an excerpt from Xiaoxiao Li’s The Slenderest of Leashes. Plus, we’ve got our usual reviews and an interview with professor, editor, and short story writer Shashi Bhat, focusing on her new collection, Death by a Thousand Cuts.
On behalf of outgoing editors Eufemia Fantetti and D.D. Miller, thank you for your support and readership. Keep reading and keep supporting Canadian literary journals.
Best wishes, The HLR Collective
SLOWBLINK, 14” x 11”, INK ON PAPER, 2019 | LUKE PAINTER
Image courtesy of the artist.
ERIC RAUSCH
More threats arrived over the weekend. They were anonymous in the sense that whoever sent them used a series of usernames to keep coming back after Kim blocked him on various platforms. Ten usernames is the same as no name at all.
Amanda’s theory is that it’s an ex-boyfriend, harassing Kim because he’s ashamed to admit he’s still thinking about her. It’s the kind of conclusion Amanda would reach. Exes are a great source of trouble for her, always wanting Amanda back or screaming outside her apartment that they don’t want her back. Her advice? Go on the offensive: scour social media for evidence of an ex coming unhinged, try to goad him into an admission, then humiliate him right back. Another conclusion that makes sense if you’re Amanda, who kickboxes twice a week and keeps a crescent-moon brass knuckle on her keychain. It’s normal for Kim to receive hate-messages. Comes with the territory. But it’s rare to get fifty such comments from a single user, and Kim knows trouble when she sees it. Each message was accompanied by a $1 tip—the minimum required for Kim to read a message from someone who wasn’t on her friends list—and it seemed he was determined to get a rise out of Kim as cheaply as possible.
In the old days she might have engaged with him— looked through his comment history for clues about insecurities and used them to provoke an argument that would cost him $1/message. But she doesn’t do that anymore, not for nickels and dimes. So she blocked him.
But every time she did this, he was back in sixty seconds flat under a new name. The same abuse, the same tone, the same guy. As an experiment, she raised the price for direct messages to $5, just to see. The insults kept coming, faster than ever.
You can’t live off men’s charity forever. You’ll get old. And you’ll get ugly way before that.
What happens when you’re forty and can’t get a regular job because all you’ve ever done is
CONTENT WARNING : depictions of online harassment and the description of a dead deer
ROT
show your tits to strangers online? You won’t like working as a waitress. Six months of actual poverty and you’ll end your own life.
From now on I’m taking screenshots from all your live streams. That way we can watch your decline, year over year, until you’re gone.
Kim continued to block him. If he wanted to keep pulling this trick, he’d have to deal with an everincreasing paywall. At $50/message, she’d let him talk as much as he liked.
During her latest live stream, one of Kim’s moderators informed her of concerning activity in the chatroom. A user was going wild, posting long antisemitic tirades and getting himself banned, only to return moments later complaining about the unfair treatment he’d received.
Kim replied,
Okay, ban him again. Stay on it.
She expected this would be the end of it; it usually was. But her moderator had more to say:
I’m sorry to bring this up, but he’s saying your real name is Kimberly Harlow Dess.
Kim, who performs under an alias, still remembers the prickle at the back of her neck, telling her this might be the beginning of a problem it takes years to solve, the kind of problem that leaves you with a drinking habit and a burned-down house by the end.
KIM: Excuse me?
MODERATOR: He’s posting it in the chat over and over. Is that you?
KIM: Delete those messages. Now, please.
MODERATOR: I am. I banned him but it’s hard to keep up. There’s more. He’s saying you live on Wade Avenue.
KIM: Old address, thank god.
Wanting to see for herself, Kim navigated to the chatroom. What she found, on arrival, was a battlefield: pages and pages of messages destroyed, each indicated by a placeholder phrase, “This message deleted by Moderators,” followed by a time stamp. She scrolled up for nearly a minute and couldn’t find the beginning. The messages of regular users, interspersed throughout, were just blips in the larger wreckage.
Then a new user appeared and began posting large blocks of copied text at a rate that was truly astounding. Kim watched in real-time: her name, her age, her old address, published on the screen again and again. Kim’s moderator was slow to pick up on this, so Kim deleted the messages herself, banned the user. His username was Give_Kim_Harlow_Dess_Cancer.
All the while, Kim strove to maintain a neutral expression. She sat in front of her laptop semi-nude while the webcam mounted on her desk captured the scene for viewers around the world. Men in chatrooms, a certain subset, were always looking for their opportunity to say something that would make a performer freak out (get angry, start an argument, cry on-camera), and Kim knew not to react. They could smell blood, these men, the smallest trace.
Her enemy’s next alias was Kim_Dess_full_of_ Maggots. He wrote:
I see you. You’re looking right at me, Kim. Hello.
Feeling the prickle again, Kim realized it was a mistake to involve herself directly with the deleting of messages. When Kim does this in her own chatroom, the placeholder phrase reads, “This message deleted by Admin.” In essence, Kim had signalled that she was not just aware of what was happening but was upset by it, enough to become personally involved.
Committed now, Kim decided that there was something she’d like to say to him. She wrote:
I think I’ve made $200 off you by now. Keep it coming.
KIM_DESS_FULL_OF_MAGGOTS: Look at you, Kim, just look at you. There’s maggots coming out of every orifice. You’re COVERED with them.
She sat with this message, weighed it carefully, and killed the live stream. She got up from the desk. She switched a load of laundry. She put on baggy clothes.
A stranger? A total stranger who had the internet full of girls to choose from and chose Kim? She supposed it was possible. More likely it was one of the men she’d provoked into an argument long ago, returned to avenge the few dollars he’d lost. But even this was unsatisfactory. How far had any of those arguments really gone, once the men realized they were being fleeced? How many months since she’d gotten into one of those arguments at all?
An ex-boyfriend. It would have to be someone she’d dated in the last three years, if they thought she lived on Wade Avenue. Dicky married that girl with the forehead and started pumping out kids immediately, and it seemed to Kim that a father of two children— two girls—could not do this.
That left Shawn, who’d always thought the guys in Kim’s chatroom were lower than dirt. He hated them, their fake confidence that was never asked to prove itself away from the keyboard. Shawn was big on proving himself (Kim knew his stats simply because she heard them so often: 240 lb. bench, 350 lb. squat, 375 lb. deadlift). If it really was Shawn, something had happened. Something had changed him from someone who could never be bothered with this sort of thing into someone who could.
The good news: whoever he was, he didn’t know where she lived now. But he could do plenty with the information he already had. He might find more. Kim searched her name online, in hopes of anticipating what her enemy might find. Except for social media accounts (set to private), and a few instances of her name appearing on old volleyball rosters, the results were clean.
Calmer now (she’d mixed a tall drink), Kim selected a gentle playlist and began poking around Shawn’s social media. Nothing much to see. A few public remarks about vaccines that Kim wouldn’t have made, some selfies with people Kim hadn’t seen since the breakup. Nothing that tied him to the chatroom or to Kim. Dead end.
Purely as a reflex, Kim checked her unread messages. Sure enough, there were message requests from strangers. Auto generated names with no profile pictures, no mutual friends. She might not have accepted them under normal circumstances, but she was becoming desperate for a clue.
One message consisted of a YouTube link with no context.
The video was so blurry at first that Kim decided the audio must be the important part. Full blast on her speakers couldn’t make much sense of that. It sounded
like rain falling on crumpled-up newspaper. Not quite: it was also a dry sound, like wind through tall grass, if the grass was full of rattlesnakes.
Soon focus was achieved, and the image settled into a shape: an animal, a medium-sized deer, lying sideways, dead. It was time-lapse footage of maggots working on the body. The way it was framed, it seemed someone had placed a high-definition camera in front of the deer and allowed it to run continuously for weeks, indoors, under controlled light. The footage was then sped up so the maggots, rather than jitter and lurch like the awkward larvae they were, moved like comedians in a silent film, rocketing through the frame, sliding under and over one another in thousands of tiny vaudeville routines. Meanwhile the deer, inflated with death gases, gradually opened at the seams, revealing huge cavities where maggots, packed under the skin like pasta, spilled out in vast numbers. Occasional close-ups showed the breakdown of the skull as it sank into a pool of released liquids.
While Kim watched, new messages came in.
A whole group of us will come to your funeral and join the procession. When your relatives ask how we knew you, we’ll tell them we’re your friends from the internet. We’ll tell them the things you did for us whenever we threw a handful of tokens at you.
A small camera will be placed inside your casket when no one’s watching and will accompany you underground. At the right moment we’ll turn it on.
One last live stream.
A limp, weary noise came from the back of Kim’s throat that she had no conscious part in making. Panic attacks did not run in the family as far as she knew. Summer never talked about having them; neither did Mom or Dad. Only Kim, it seemed, possessed the ability to unglue herself from reality this way, to sweat like a distance runner while lying face-down on the floor. She’d gone years without having one, but here one came.
probably not aware of what you do in front of your webcam, but I’ll be happy to enlighten them with some screenshots.
KIM: Why are you doing this?
ENTANGLEDQUANTUM: Good morning, Kim! Another beautiful day on Wade Avenue, I hope. To answer your question: some people want to be destroyed. They give off an unmistakable odour of gasoline—quite irresistible for those of us travelling with a book of matches. I smelled you a mile away and came running.
KIM: You should know that everything you say is being saved for the police report.
ENTANGLEDQUANTUM: They’re welcome to come arrest whoever they think this username belongs to.
KIM: I’ll do better than that. I’ll give them your real name.
ENTANGLEDQUANTUM: Oh? I can’t wait. If you think you know, show me. Make me sweat.
KIM: You’re Kevin Vogelsang
It came to Kim the other night. It’s the only thing that makes sense. The place she rented for two years on Wade Avenue was a detached house split into three: the main floor where the owner’s son lived and two upstairs units stacked on top, each with their own balcony. Kim lived in the attic unit, which got so hot in the summer she took her meals outside. One evening Kim and Amanda were out there, cackling and reenacting scenes from high school, and Kim dropped a hot dog into the street. You could smash bottles of mustard on the sidewalk for hours and never duplicate the perfect splatter she made, from one crack in the sidewalk to the next.
ENTANGLEDQUANTUM: There’s so many things I’d like to know, Kim, but you don’t seem interested in talking to me. That’s why I’ve decided to start talking to your family and friends. They’re
And who should walk by but Kevin Vogelsang. Amanda shouted down to him; Kim didn’t even recognize him. The acne, the fedora and trench coat—all gone, replaced with the sandals, sunglasses, and confidence of an adult. Somebody had cut his hair who understood that the right thing for his face shape was shaved sides and a part on the left. He looked at the hot dog, picked it up, and asked if they wanted it back.
“All yours,” Amanda shouted. “How are you? Do you live around here now?”
“I don’t live around here,” Kevin replied. “Some people are having drinks on Duncan Street.”
“Still living at home?”
“No, no.” Before placing the hot dog back where he found it, Kevin wiped each of his hands on the bun to prevent any transfer of mustard to his maroon shortsleeve. A kind of conscientiousness he never used to possess (the hem of his trench coat always seemed to be caked with mud).
“Duncan Street,” Amanda repeated to Kim, as if contemplating whether they should invite themselves along for drinks. Kim made it perfectly clear with her eyes that she wouldn’t go.
“Come up for a minute,” called Amanda. “Have a beer.”
Kim swatted the back of Amanda’s knee for that.
Up close, Kim could see the depth of Kevin’s transformation. He had developed not just fashion sense but social skills, the rudiments of comedic timing. And more. He knew—with the kind of certainty that suggested he had studied—how to get people like Amanda to laugh almost nonstop. Amanda loved a story that twisted and turned, and he just kept it spinning. Kim was getting a headache.
“Would you ever move there?” Amanda asked. “To California, I mean.”
“Only if someone agreed to peel the sunburn off my shoulders every night. It literally came off in sheets.”
“Does the university reject you forever once you say no?”
“I can reapply,” said Kevin, “but I don’t see the point. Spend four years finger-painting with cultural Marxists or get a real job. I’m hoping someone will hire me here.”
“Finger-painting? With cultural what?”
Kim, who’d stubbornly watched the sunset this whole time, finally weighed in: “Cultural Marxists. All the white boys are saying it now. It means, ‘people I’m sick of having to listen to.’ Mostly women.”
Kevin looked right at her then. The slightest turn of his neck, but the face had completely changed. Humour, lightheartedness—these things were gone.
“That’s not what it means,” he said.
His eyes were eerily brown. In Grade 11 Kevin had stopped wearing glasses and purchased contact lenses—electric green, a colour that wasn’t meant to seem real. A colour that signalled inward withdrawal. An ironic reference to a video game or TV show you’d never seen, or an indication of how radically the world would need to change before Kevin would have any interest in looking at it. Somehow electric green was the colour Kim still expected to see there.
They argued about terms and definitions for a while until Kevin stood up sharply and excused himself. He descended the metal stairs on the side of the house and continued toward Duncan Street with what Kim identified as a vengeful walk. Amanda was annoyed—what did politics have to do with anything?—and stayed another hour, but they never got back to cackling. For weeks, whenever Kim sat on the balcony after dark, she attributed noises near the house to Kevin Vogelsang, who was probably down there with a can of spray paint, writing “snowflake” or “libtard” on the front door, or slowly letting air out of her tires.
Recently Kim went looking for Kevin on LinkedIn. Sure enough, his resumé was loaded with techie certifications. Information technology, cybersecurity. Nerd shit. Everything he’d need.
KIM: You’re him. You’re Kevin Vogelsang.
ENTANGLEDQUANTUM: Oh, you must tell me. Who is Kevin Vogelsang and what did he do to you? I’m salivating for details.
KIM: Mostly it was the things you didn’t do. Wash your hair. Give off any vibes except “worm.”
ENTANGLEDQUANTUM: I’ll overlook that remark. But you must tell me about him.
KIM: God, there’s a million things. You did this poster for Civics and Citizenship. It was a flowchart: on one side there’s a stick man, labelled SINGLE. First the stick man tries to date people who are hotter than he is, and the arrows go in two directions: MARRIAGE or FAILURE. If it’s failure, then the stick man dates people at the same level of hotness he is. Same thing, MARRIAGE or FAILURE. If he fails again, he dates someone less hot than he is. Same thing, except this time FAILURE leads to VIOLENCE, with a question mark. Like, “Maybe violence is the answer?” Mr. Klemm took it down after people complained.
ENTANGLEDQUANTUM: What a marvellous little shit-disturber, at such a young age!
KIM: Do you feel embarrassed when you think back on it? Or proud?
ENTANGLEDQUANTUM: If what you say about him is accurate, I do pity poor Kevin. He really believed he could change the world by
educating it. We’ve all been young enough to believe such a thing.
KIM: Are you back to wearing the fedora and trench coat yet? Only on holidays maybe?
ENTANGLEDQUANTUM: We’re getting bold with the accusations, aren’t we? Perhaps you don’t understand the position you’re in.
After a moment, he sends her a link. Kim doesn’t click it, but by the words contained in the link she can tell it’s someone’s profile on X.
ENTANGLEDQUANTUM: I believe I found your sister. I’m guessing from her appearance that she’s the elder. She seems … wholesome, conservative, destined for a happy life. Nothing at all like you.
Panic is guiding many of Kim’s actions now. She closes her laptop, leaves the room. She leans over the kitchen sink, certain she’ll puke if her stomach finds anything to send up.
He’s going after her. He’s going after Summer. Kim breathes deeply, opens her laptop, clicks the link. Summer changed her profile photo recently. In the old one, she stood proudly beside a metal sign, “Dess Heating & Cooling *** Furnaces and Hot Tubs ***” In this new one she’s sitting in a boat, making kissy faces at the fish she just caught. Pastel-blue bathing suit, no makeup, in a half-squat: she looks vulnerable. She has no idea whose crosshairs she’s in.
Kim won’t beg him to stop; that’s what he wants, and she won’t give him that. All she can do is ask the question again.
KIM: WHY?
ENTANGLEDQUANTUM: I know it’s early in your time zone, but we should celebrate. I’d like to raise a toast.
KIM: If you’re going to send shit to Summer, at least give me an hour before you do it.
ENTANGLEDQUANTUM: Pour yourself a drink and I’ll consider it.
KIM: Alright.
ENTANGLEDQUANTUM: What drink?
KIM: Vodka.
She’s lying. But she’s half-suspicious he’s hacked her webcam, so she fills a shot glass with water and places it beside her.
ENTANGLEDQUANTUM: My country is small and remote. But our proudest export is the national liquor, which is a golden colour and very strong (and that’s positively the last hint I’ll give you). To Kevin Vogelsang! A few more like him, and western civilization may survive after all.
KIM: TELL ME before you send anything to Summer.
ENTANGLEDQUANTUM: Honey, I’ve already sent it. ///
Kim waits what she feels is a respectful interval before reaching out. It’s a weekday. Summer will be in the office, perhaps meeting with her team. Kim’s limit is lunchtime; any longer and she risks Summer leaping to conclusions of her own and taking action. It’s important that Kim talk first.
KIM: Hey. Got a minute?
Almost immediately, Kim’s message is marked as “Read.” Kim rehearses her explanation: a new AI tool is going around that lets you create videos of naked people based on social media images. Perfectly innocent images. Someone at work is using this tool to try to get Kim fired. She doesn’t need Summer to believe it; she just needs to tell the story well enough that Summer can’t rule it out completely.
SUMMER: Can’t talk to you right now.
KIM: I just need a minute. It’s important.
SUMMER: Mom’s heart will break, you know. She’ll hit the floor. Dad will hit the ceiling.
KIM: Ok. You’ve seen it. Let me tell you what’s going on.
SUMMER: It’s weird because I don’t know how far you’ve taken this. You could be filming this interaction right now for your fans, I’d never know. Hello, creeps of the world!
KIM: I am NOT.
SUMMER: The normal way to feel in this situation would be SHOCKED, I guess, but I don’t feel it. This makes sense for you. All that shit with the eyebrow pencil.
KIM: ???
SUMMER: You BEGGED me to use my eyebrow pencil and I said no. Over and over. I knew right away what you would do. Shave off your brows and come running to me for help. “NOW YOU *HAVE* TO TEACH ME HOW TO USE AN EYEBROW PENCIL!!” Except you fucked it up and cut your head open. Dad had to get rid of his straight razor because of you.
KIM: I was NINE.
SUMMER: Something dad loved, gone forever because Kim needs to do things her way. Twenty years later it’s the same.
KIM: I have more to worry about than dad right now.
SUMMER: God of COURSE you do. Ever wonder why dad didn’t come to the emergency room with us? He was ashamed of you.
KIM: Wow, thanks.
A moment passes. The sisters, having gone to their corners, prepare for round two.
KIM: Be mad if you want. But at least tell me who else you’ve told.
SUMMER: I haven’t fully recovered from seeing it myself yet.
KIM: Ok, good. Then listen. The guy who sent you this stuff is moving fast, but I don’t think he’s found mom and dad yet.
SUMMER: Jesus Christ, Kim. Who IS he?
KIM: I had a theory, but I’m not sure anymore. If it’s who I thought it was, he shouldn’t be having this much trouble finding mom and dad. Or our classmates. Or a bunch of other things.
SUMMER: Is he dangerous? Are WE in danger?
KIM: I’m not sure. I have an appointment to talk to a cop tomorrow.
SUMMER: What do you mean appointment? Call them right now and tell them you have a stalker who’s threatening your family.
KIM: Not yet.
SUMMER: If you don’t, I will.
KIM: Please, don’t. Not yet.
SUMMER: WHY?
KIM: I want one dinner with mom and dad. You can come if you promise not to tell them. I want it normal. Sunday dinner. Steak and bbq shrimp.
SUMMER: Fuck off. Something could happen BEFORE Sunday. I’m not waiting.
KIM: I’ll have the cop’s opinion on that tomorrow. Honestly, I don’t think this guy lives in the same country as us. He doesn’t know where we live. He can’t do anything in two days. If the cop says I have to tell mom and dad for their safety, I will.
SUMMER: And what am I supposed to do? Sit across from you? Pass the shrimp and pretend everything is fine?
KIM: Be nice to me for a couple hours in front of mom and dad, and then go back to hating me. Should be easy for you.
SUMMER: The longer you wait, the worse it’ll be.
KIM: If one night is all I get, I want it. ///
Pulling up beside her father’s pickup truck, Kim nudges forward to leave space in the driveway for another car. Summer hasn’t arrived yet.
Mom answers the door: blond again, with jaunty bangs and an ensemble of jewelry in shimmering silver. She’s rosy-cheeked from wine and looking boisterous. It makes Kim nervous: she told Mom specifically that there was no special reason behind her wanting
a family dinner. Had Summer phoned afterwards and told her otherwise?
“Kitty-cat!”
“Hey Mom,” says Kim, ditching her flip-flops before setting foot on the waxed floor. “Something smells amazing.”
“It’s nothing. It’s bacon-lace twice-bake.”
Standing there in the foyer, Kim feels like she’s been peeled off a sticker sheet and placed gently on the page in the picture book where she belongs.
“You didn’t have to go through all that trouble,” says Kim sheepishly.
“Go say hi. You want a half glass of red?”
“Please.”
Kim enters the kitchen. Dad, bearded and looking trim from all the jogging he’s done, is working a bowl of Caesar salad with tongs.
“Kimbo,” he says. “How’s the car running?”
“Fine.”
“It’s a nightmare that thing Summer drives. Can’t hear it backing up.”
Kim pulls up a barstool at the island and opens the wine. Summer bursts in, flustered and apologizing for being late.
“Nothing to worry about,” says Dad. “We don’t stand on ceremony here.”
A joke. Ceremony—everyone seated in their proper place at the proper time—is definitely stood upon here. Pleased to not be the late arrival, Kim hugs her sister and compliments her sundress.
“Chris couldn’t make it tonight?” says Mom.
“He had to work late,” says Summer.
“Oh well,” says Kim. “Next time.”
Summer gives Kim a warning look. She’ll play along for an evening, but Kim is crazy if she thinks Summer will drag her boyfriend into it.
Kim sets the table, her chore since childhood. The choice of dishes being hers, she selects the nice plates, the scooped black ceramic ones.
There’s an exciting little exchange over dinner: Summer needs a new HVAC technician, and Dad wants her to hire the son of an associate—an apprentice technician, not yet certified.
“He’ll learn anything,” says Dad. “Fast.”
“Then he’ll learn this: I don’t hire techs without their cert.”
The dispute is put on hold as everyone tucks into their meal. Bacon-lace twice-bake has been settling arguments in Kim’s family for years.
Cocktails in the back yard, board games under the verandah lights. It seems improbable that all Kim’s favourite things would be gathered
like this without specific instructions (all Kim asked for was dinner), so at an opportune moment, she sends a text across the table to Summer.
This is nuts. Everyone dressed up. What did you tell them?
Summer replies:
Told them you were sad and needed cheering up. They obvs want deets but I didn’t share… Bought you a few days at most. You NEED to tell them.
KIM: A few days is all I need. Thanks.
There are numerous unread messages on Kim’s screen, visible as previews whenever she looks at her phone: fragments of sentences, notifications of photos and videos.
ENTANGLEDQUANTUM: Do any of these people look familiar? I imagine they do, because …
ENTANGLEDQUANTUM: I’m not sure which of these companies employs your father, so I’ll simply …
Kim puts her phone away. Her parents are taking out the board games.
At one point, while trying to get her mother to guess the word on a card, Kim says something nonsensical and gets her to laugh, to really laugh. It’s a meltdown of such proportions that the buzzer goes off and they lose the round, but that isn’t the end of it. Mom keeps laughing at whatever desperate thing Kim gave her as a clue, to the point where Summer and Dad can’t start their turn until things have settled down.
“People are waiting here,” says Dad sourly. Her perfect evening. Kim has it now, but she’s careful not to let her hopes run away with her. The temptation is to believe that Mom will be able to laugh just as hard tomorrow after hearing the truth as she was tonight, before hearing it. This may or may not be true. The thing to focus on right before the disaster is survival. First you survive; later you assess the damage.
MISHA SOLOMON
THREE POEMS
A FAILURE OF SCIENCE
My little dog once was smaller, lived inside his shih tzu mother, was born and grew and now kicks grass after he urinates, a reflex from deep within.
It took centuries, millennia to make my little dog, his mother made to sit on royal laps, his yorkie father made to rat, bred and inbred and crossbred to make a dog made for nothing at all.
Made for me and my fiancé, if you believe in something like fate, two men who can’t make anything when we make love.
My little dog’s mother made milk for him— I’d have let his needle teeth tear up my nipples, all I want is to make things, not with my hands but with my body.
A RECIPE FOR MUG CAKES
Making a mug cake is very simple all you need is one banana, one egg, two tablespoons of cocoa powder. All you need to do is unpeel the banana and put it in a mug and mash it with a fork and crack the egg into the mash and measure two tablespoons of cocoa powder and mix it all together and microwave it for 90 seconds. Making a mug cake is very easy but sometimes the banana is frozen so you need to let it defrost on the counter first and then the unpeeling hurts your fingers because the banana is still quite cold and often you spill cocoa powder all over the counter and cocoa powder is always tricky to clean up and you could leave it for your boyfriend to do but you said you’d make these mug cakes for the two of you even though there’s a perfectly tasty real cake sitting in the freezer waiting to be eaten and you’re worried if you don’t eat it soon it will be freezer-burned but he says that’s not a thing that happens to desserts, that your parents made that up and also the cake is full of sugar and butter but the mug cake has no added sugar and no butter at all and butter is your favourite food but is a source of deep stress for your boyfriend so you make these chocolate-banana omelettes in two souvenir mugs (one professional, one academic) and you add some rainbow sprinkles to make it clear these are desserts and not punishments and you eat the mug cakes hot hot hot, as hot as the banana was cold, and now your fingers and the roof of your mouth are both numb. Your dog is also named Mugcake, did I mention that? Because you love mug cakes so much. Mugcake is peeing on the floor.
BUNDLE OF JOY
It is uncertain, then, that all want to be happy since there are those who do not want to find in you their source of joy.
— SAINT AUGUSTINE, CONFESSIONS
The midsummer day my friend L— had a 9.3 lb. baby ripped from her belly was the day I knew I had to give away my puppy. I said I couldn’t wait to meet baby A— so L— FaceTimed me and I saw her massive spawn and she said “show me your baby!” so I held up my puppy, M—, whose name is his name and also a dessert I often make in the microwave. I held up my dog even though I don’t consider it, him, it to be my baby, even though sometimes I tell it “go see your other daddy” because I do live in society and am influenced by it, even though I chastised my parents for asking to see their grandson. I knew the day A— was born that I would watch him grow, watch him learn to walk and talk, watch him develop a personality I might very well dislike, and that I’d wish I could resent M— for, say, his poor table manners even though we raised him better than that, instead of for nipping a hole in my new socks. I find M— cute, I do, I like him just as I like my new socks, a lovely new possession I want the world to see but L— made A— and I paid a suburban breeder $— for this heated toy that pees at will. I do not want to find my joy in socks, I yearn for more.
CONTENT WARNING: homophobia
GIN SEXSMITH
“Your partner is a man?”
WHAT’S WITH ALL THE GAY?
She stares at me with a slight look of bewilderment, and I resist the urge to say that he’s the worst kind of man—cis and heterosexual—and I’m starting to really believe that there’s no hope for a queer breakthrough.
I always used to think that het people would finally let me in on their gay fantasies once they knew me well enough to be vulnerable. I know all my partner’s childhood traumas; I can read his anxieties by a shift of energy in the room. I have photos of his moles and hemorrhoids and have spent evenings squeezing his blackheads between my nails, squealing with glee at the worms of beige oil. I’m beginning to believe that the breakthrough will never come. Yet still, I wait.
“If I had the option to be with men or women, I’d never date another man again.”
I roll her words around in my head as if I’m warming a ball of dough between my hands, kneading into its potential. She’s happily married, yet she gets it, the comfortable loneliness that slinks around our shoulders when we’re in love with men. The knowledge that our cis het partners will never truly understand us— worse than that, they’ll never truly try. I always say that if he ever messes up—the idea inevitable re: every other man I’ve ever known—it’ll be shes and theys for me. Yet, can I let you in on a secret? I really hope he never messes up.
Instead, I find myself wishing I could live two parallel lives at once.
I knew that I was gay from the tender age of seven while watching Digging to China and seeing Mary Stuart Masterson contemplate life’s stresses on a tire swing while Joan Jett’s cover of “Crimson and Clover” played on the soundtrack. I didn’t know Mary, but I was pretty sure I was already in love.
My childhood was playing house with my girlfriends, flitting comfortably into the role of Daddy. My first kiss happened at twelve. She hit my teeth, but it still provided that shiver of validation: I like girls and girls like me. Yet I could still hear my grandmother asking “Are you gay?” when I was eight with that judgmental tone reserved for people who ordered bagels in the Tim Hortons drive-thru. I could still hear my tiny voice saying “no” too quickly, knowing that my obsession with the taut, pale skin of Gwen Stefani’s stomach was somehow wrong. That the food fight in Fried Green Tomatoes, the raw, playful intimacy and humour, Mary Stuart Masterson (again) in sleeveless plaid flirtatiously splashing a glass of water into Mary-Louise Parker’s face, shouldn’t make me feel in desperate need of a little coolin’ off.
I recently read that one of the first indicators of being bisexual is that you think that everyone else is gay too. I have a tough time saying straight without the addition of air quotes. I can’t fathom feeling that limited, yet I’ve predominantly dated cis het men.
I’m even engaged to one.
There’s always a time in the relationship, when the animalistic adrenaline rush of who’s texting first and where you’re meeting next has settled into cozy “good mornings” and late-night fast-food runs, where I realize I’ve done it again—I’ve let a man choose me.
I picture my lesbian-self braless in a tight, white muscle tank, perfectly fitted Levi’s, and black Doc Martens. Her hair is buzzed off and she looks like she smokes cigarettes, but she doesn’t because she loves herself. She is unthreatened by the men checking out her nipples; she knows these tits are only for the girls.
She’s whom I would be, if I could shed my bisexuality and dive straight into sapphism.
She might sometimes go by they, the gender binary always making them feel trapped anyway.
There’s something about our present-day hookup culture, where so many men order women up like pizzas, push them around, take them for granted, that when you find a Good One, you feel a surging need to Make It Work. You are one of the lucky ones. He doesn’t even like other hot girl’s pics on the gram. He listens to you—even if he starts talking about something completely unrelated the second you’ve stopped speaking. He refers to you as his partner because wife made you want to jam a fork into your eye and old lady made you want to castrate him in front of his friends. He’s learned that you need to come too! He’s also learned that you have the ability to come multiple times! He greets you with smoochies when you get home and is so excited to tell you about his day. He has the energy of a golden retriever, so smiley and eager to please. He reaches for you in the middle of night, his calloused thumb rubbing over the smooth skin on the back of your hand, and you feel as if you’re exactly where you’re meant to be. He wakes you up in the morning with a kiss on the forehead and a piping hot mug of coffee. He is sweeter to you than he’s been to anyone in his life. When your father makes you cry, it is his arms that feel like home. You are hopelessly in love with him.
And yet.
She tightens her boots in the back of my psyche. She licks her lips. She smirks.
This woman I’ve never truly let myself become.
Women have this ability to share their thoughts with a glance. We are strangers at a bar, yet we are connected. There’s a callous that forms from making it out of girlhood alive. It’s made us tough and telepathic. He’s talking, talking, talking, not aware enough to realize that his self-deprecating jokes are obvious bait for reassuring compliments. We are too wise to be baited. Our eyerolls go undetected; we speak a secret language. We don’t know one another, she and I, yet we understand each other more than he’ll ever understand us. Our eyes don’t only poke fun; we are tender in our pity of men. This poor thing, no one has ever told him to shut up. He’s not like us. He hasn’t been interrupted from the moment he learned to speak. He hasn’t been dismissed as dramatic, emotional, bitchy.
She goes back to her conversation and I to mine. We never share a verbal word between us, but I sink into myself, feeling seen. She’d refer to me as they/them to her family without mocking my identity crisis as a cry for attention.
I wonder again what it must be like to have a woman as a partner.
The thought consumes me.
When I’m with my friends and their babies, I wonder if strangers think that I’m her partner, the more masc mommy. We talk about the developmental stages of their children and how we want to be better influences for the next generation. We halt any signs of toxic masculinity and get excited about raising compassionate, responsible boys. I catch the glances from my friends’ husbands, boyfriends, baby daddies, how they detect a slight threat in my strong jaw and broad shoulders and the ease with which I speak to these women whom I know better than they ever will. I resist the urge to tell the worst one that his son called me Dadda today.
I can’t stop talking about being bisexual, finding pauses in conversations to insert the information, posting cheeky captions on selfies, sharing memes in the hopes of procuring community, my Threads account a queer haven.
I’m the first to tell my straight friends that they deserve better, but what I don’t know is if any straight man will be able to reach the bar I’ve set for them. My friends are brilliant, gorgeous, intelligent, hilarious, yet so many of them allow themselves to beg for scraps from men. Men who take them for granted. Men who don’t mind if their partner has sex with them out of spousal obligation. Men who forbid them from getting tattoos or cutting their hair. Men who tell them to put on a bra. Men who never stop inadvertently screaming, Your body belongs to me!
“What’s with all the gay?” my mother-in-law asks in a voice that contains all of its hard edges. A voice
When I recently read that one of the first indicators of being bisexual is that you think that everyone else is gay too.
that makes me want to buzz off my hair in her bathroom sink. She never tells me outright what bothers her so much about my sexuality, which works to irritate me even more, this cheese grater against my agency. It
leaves me only to speculate: my bisexuality is a threat. A worry that one day I’ll vanish into the silky night with a silky woman who’s taken the time to understand me on a level that her son never could. I want to ask her if she’s jealous that she’s not gay too. She’s always had to rely on the lacklustre emotional depth of straight men.
My brother tells me I look disgusting when I get a pixie cut before Christmas, going on a spiel about “woke” culture that he’s undoubtedly heard from Joe Rogan. I’ve been obsessed with Tegan and Sara since I was ten and out as bi since a teen, but his comments reveal that he wouldn’t have accepted me if I’d have come out as a lesbian, even though he knows all the lyrics to the entire If It Was You album. The namecalling makes me cry, but what makes me cry harder is that this air of homophobia always existed. I just wasn’t getting the brunt of it because of my long hair and revolving door of boyfriends. Yet the shame was always there, slightly out of my line of sight, rotting my psyche still. We’ll accept you as somewhat gay, but watch it.
I tell my partner “I think I’m a lesbian,” and he brushes me off with a flick of his wrist.
“You’re my lesbian,” he says, before changing the subject.
My partner’s lack of depth terrifies me. The only thing that terrifies me more is my love for him.
He has known that I’m bisexual for the entire decade he’s known me, and I’ve watched it shift from boyish glee over potential threesomes to a dull realization that my sexuality exists completely outside of him. Threesomes are fun, but it is difficult for two women to stop being performative in the presence of a man. He tells me that no part of him minds if I date women and the tenderness of his voice gives me pause. On one hand, I want to believe he’s making a compromise for my happiness. On the other, I fear that heteronormativity has taught him that love between two women is non-threatening, illegitimate. I can have my fun and then come home to him. I continuously push the most cringy idea from my mind: he simply thinks my bisexuality is hot.
I feel hypocritical as I judge him. My bisexuality is hot. People who are attracted to all genders are free. And freedom is only gained through bravery, resiliency, and shame-shedding. Those who have fought to stand firmly in their identities are sexy, period. I daydream that he is bisexual too, us lapping up all the juices this world has to offer in the name of Queer Love. A world where I don’t have to choose, and he doesn’t have to compromise.
Because when he tells me he doesn’t mind if I date women, I immediately think of him sitting at home while I’m on a date, and it feels so selfishly unfair. Monogamy is the utmost hopeless-romantic power move, and we are hopelessly in love. Yet, I feel as if my bisexuality robs him of the romanticism of it. Back to my parallel lives I go, one where he is my entire world and another imaginary existence where she is my entire world, and I never have to deal with the messy human emotions that would come from those worlds actually colliding.
As much as I envy my poly pals, I find myself wondering where they find the time to nurture true intimacy with multiple people. I already don’t have enough hours in the day for all the goals I want to accomplish. My partner is also too busy. Where would we find the energy for other people? We are each other’s safe landings after hectic days. I picture messy jealousies cracking the fragile egg that encases our love. What if we learned that our love wasn’t as strong as we believe it is?
In my parallel life, I am raising a baby with a woman I love. Our backyard is a sprawling garden, and in the evenings, we collect veggies and fill our kitchen with belly laughs as we cook. At night I read to her, her head resting in my lap, my fingers mindlessly playing with her hair. We close the book and talk about our big emotions without shame. We draw connections to our pasts as if we are solving the puzzle of who we are. We are also hopelessly in love.
I’ll never be able to braid these parallel lives together. I don’t think I’ll ever feel whole.
My mother-in-law recently watched a silly Instagram story where I am interviewing my partner, the mic a half-empty can of Miller Lite.
How does it feel to be dating a bisexual feminist icon?” I ask, in mock preparation for the interviews he could give now that I’m a published author of a ball-busting debut called In the Hands of Men.
Too much information, she snarkily typed to him, as if calling myself bisexual is the equivalent to live-streaming our bedroom mid-romp. I wish she would have sent the message to me. The inability to have a conversation about my own sexuality fills me with an angst reminiscent of high school, of being neither gay enough to be of romantic interest to my gay best friend, nor straight enough to dodge the homophobic tantrums of my straight best friend. I was an imposter in both lands, thirsting and starving for love, acceptance, and community.
My bisexuality shouldn’t have come as a surprise then either, my locker decorated with grainy printouts
of Katherine Moennig as Shane from The L Word, Tegan Quin, and Rachel Weisz. I feel like I’ve been shouting I’m super gay! for my entire life while everyone says, Hmmm, not gay enough. My parallel self has started to smoke; her buzz cut is growing out.
I came out at 16 and spent parties making out with the girls and gays while my boyfriends paced, unsure of whether they should be angry. You see, straight men are told that bisexual women are gifts to them. Three-way tickets to paradise. They almost can’t help themselves; there isn’t a Lesbian Vulnerability category on Pornhub.
In university, I set my dating app preferences to women and men, yet failed the Bechdel test time after time, sitting at dates with women talking about my ex-boyfriends. I didn’t yet know what my identity looked like without male validation.
I fumbled for connection, bringing my ex-boyfriend as a buffer to queer nights where I would pretend that he was my gay best friend. I was an imposter. Yet, I felt freer than I’d ever felt before, my utopia nearly aligning with my reality.
She saw me dancing from across the room, our eyes meeting as we continued our separate conversations and then meeting again and again, our mouths mismatched smirks. Me, a baby bi, her, a seasoned lesbian. She boldly approached me. Androgynous yet undeniably feminine, her nipples exposed through her white mesh top, a slightly more masc Jessica Biel. She held the kind of power I wanted. We shared a cigarette, and I let my ex leave, not wanting to tell her that I had one at all as we made our way to my apartment. I no longer wanted to be in the hands of men; I just didn’t yet know how to pry myself from their grasp. We talked all night, her movements languid and confident. I realized a man wouldn’t have let the conversation grow to what ours had grown to; hours ago he would have placed his hand on my thigh. I was grateful for her patience, yet terrified. Virginal. I drank to the point that I passed out. She tucked me in and slept on the couch, and I remember thinking the next morning when I woke up alone, A man would never. I was only twenty but had already been dodging men hovering above my sleeping body for the last six years. When she kissed me goodbye and said she couldn’t wait to see me again, I thought, This is the beginning of the rest of my life. It wasn’t. She broke my heart but taught me the most important lesson: I like women and women like me.
What’s with all the gay?
I’m super gay; I wish you were too.
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There is a story to be told here.
ADEBE DERANGO-ADEM
TWO POEMS
BLACKLIGHT
in da club minefield for catching bugs counterfeit bills bloodstains on the carpet
x ids the spot where our beloveds ODed used for curing also resin / revealing messages in invisible ink bodily fluids / a history for so little glows these days that is not pathogen phosphor eschaton our era bearing a light it cannot see
DIRECTIONS OF OBSCURATION
I spy with my third eye
an ocean rising then regressing a school of mermaids dropping out
en masse
[ see my ariel was always a black pearl
/ odd fish who fucked with leagues earned her sea-washed voice all those years in the fathoms
below alone with the gidgets & gadgets of the academy hiding in the ribs of the abandoned crafts
stormy weather
compass gone awry
I washed up like this
SCENE 03, 14” x 11”, INK ON PAPER, 2021 | LUKE PAINTER
Image courtesy of the artist.
CONTENT
WARNING: sexual discussions and depictions of miscarriages, alcoholism, and racism
MURGATROYD MONAGHAN
THE TRAIN
The first time I ever take a VIA Rail train, it is a quarter to midnight in downtown Toronto, and the stars in my eyes more than compensate for the lack of them above me. To my right, my eleven-yearold is holding the hand of my seven-year-old, the latter of whom is chewing on a rubber duck on a necklace and making loud pterodactyl-like noises. He is stuffed into a neon green T-shirt emblazoned with my phone number and a warning label declaring that, yes, he is developmentally delayed, no, he can’t understand your inquiries, whether casual or panicked, and no, he shouldn’t be found alone, and if he is, to please phone the aforementioned phone number. To my left, my three-year-old is upside down. That whole period of his life, I don’t think I have a single photograph where he is right side up. I am pulling luggage behind me, carrying coolers over me, and wearing multiple backpacks and a very wide smile. The entire platform groans.
“I see a moose!” We have barely pulled away from the station and have probably reached a speed of about five galumphing kilometres per hour when my youngest son declares this to be true.
My eleven-year-old makes a quick retort. “No, you don’t.”
“Yes, I do. We’re going across Canada. There are moosies in Canada. I saw one.”
“There aren’t any moose here. We’re still in the station.”
“Then it was a bear.”
“Nope.”
“It was! You don’t know! You don’t know anything! Hey, stop the train! I want to get off! I’m running away!”
And as I wrestle him unsuccessfully back into our little seat, the one thing the siblings agree on: “Momma, I am not spending five days in here with them like this.”
Oh, but he is. Every person on that train is. Five glorious days, crossing the country, Toronto to Vancouver, eating baked beans and Mr. Noodles with plastic spoons.
The train is packed with artists consuming melancholia in moderation and last-stand students rebelling in drunken conformity and an energetic generation of Indigenous youth whose time and hearts are split between the city and the rez. My children waltz between them, starving for the attention of strangers. Unlike other mothers who stop their children from interfering in the lives of others as a matter of habit, I relish the opportunities for my children to grow by listening to stories that only others can tell. Stories are sacred, precious possessions that have the power to preserve families, illuminate enemies, and create friends. They cannot be stolen, only gifted. And children are shameless gift-seekers.
When I open my eyes on the first morning, it is to administer a curious mixture of sedatives and amphetamines to my middle child, who, if he is not
I am pulling luggage behind me, carrying coolers over me, and wearing multiple backpacks and a very wide smile.
medicated into veritable oblivion, cannot regulate himself enough to even hear someone saying his name. I am not at all shocked to see him absent from his seat when I awake. The shock hits when I hear sounds floating from the very tiny bathroom closet that suggest that my son is struggling to get out of the bathroom and is being restrained from leaving. Panic pierces my groggy subconscious and electrifies my sock-feet. My heart is doing jumping jacks. I bang on the door. “Sweetie? It’s Momma ….” My words are not actually directed at
him, but at the other person inside. My voice doesn’t conceal the warning. I know he’s in there.
“Thank God, you’re his mom? Here—” Fingertips with lemon-yellow nail polish shove my son through a crack in the door. “He just kept opening the door on me. And the lock is busted. So sorry ….” The voice is cracking broadly and the words sound like the first survivors to fall through it. Two pale knees touch each other at a sharp angle, and I smell vomit.
My son struggles to get back inside the bathroom with such effort I can barely contain him. His frantic shrieks carry the length of the train. With surprising force, his tiny hand slips in through the crack and flaps, then pumps open and closed, an invitation for the girl inside to hold it. Seeing a way to stop the sounds, she holds his hand and mumbles to me, “I don’t mind if you don’t.” With a heave comes more vomit, into a sink that is so close to her she can almost reach it while seated, and then a sound like a bowl of chunky leftovers dumped into the stainless-steel toilet. Blood spatters the edge of the seat as she leans up over the tiny sink.
“Baby now?” calls my son curiously through the crack in the door.
My breath stops in horror. The woman looks too tired to even be alive. “Yes. Baby now.”
“Yay! You did it!” My son bursts through the door so hard that I think it will bruise him and hugs the woman around her shaking middle. Large tears dyed black from the promises of yesterday’s hopeful cosmetics fall helplessly onto his head.
“Let’s get her some tea, okay?” I manage, feeling terribly undercaffeinated myself. With new purpose, my son sloppily kisses both of the woman’s bare knees, and then hurries along by my side. The door closes behind us so quickly that I can barely hear the muffled sobs.
When the light breaks in through the windows, eight lemon-yellow fingertips are visible around a large Styrofoam cup. Steam rolls gently over its rim. The knees are no longer bare, but are pulled up to the chest and covered by a red-and-white ski jacket.
“Should I get them to call a doctor for you?” I ask, overwhelmed. I have not experienced miscarriage. I am not sure of protocol. I feel suddenly self-conscious— even ashamed—of all my live children running around. The woman doesn’t answer me. God, this is awkward.
“My son was born with a genetic condition,” I press on, apologetic. “He cares about people. I’m sorry he kept bothering you when—”
The woman interrupts hurriedly. “You tell him thanks. And no, I’ll make it home okay. They’ll probably do a D & C there. I can wait. I know my body.
Anyway, condition or not, at least he was born. Mine never manage that.” The interruption doesn’t seem prompted by irritation at me so much as by admiration for my son, but I assume the former anyway and feel embarrassed.
“How many babies did you have?” My daughter’s eyes are wide.
“Four.” The woman smiles.
“What were their names?”
I cringe. Little children give names to everything. Naming each doll or toy is of utmost importance when you are small. By the time I was eight, I had chosen the names of my future children and had names and nicknames selected for each Beanie Baby, backpack, and even pencil that I owned. In retrospect, that is what hurt. When a pencil was broken, it was not a broken pencil. It was a broken spirit, a death, something that could not be reclaimed or forgiven. Adults tend to avoid this sort of pain. We know of impermanence, and we depersonalize everything possible, accordingly.
“Nita.” The woman surprises me. “This one was Nita. And there was Jasper, Tilly, and Damon.”
“Woah.” I see my daughter adding names to her mental list. “Is Nita the only baby who was born on a train?”
The woman’s fingers whiten against the Styrofoam and her eyes fall through a space in my daughter’s chest into another dimension, perhaps one where Nita is alive and sitting where my daughter is now. “Yes,” she says. “She was.”
One boy has bet another boy a mickey that he can teach my youngest son to write his name. Both boys are college aged. My three-year-old is sitting between them, riveted by the appearance of a phone in his hands. The boy plans to teach him to type the letters of his name. My son has only co-operated on the condition that the boys use the names that he has given to each of the persons on the train. The names he has given them are names of fruit. The boy trying to teach him is Banana. The boy who bets he can’t is Blueberry. Banana begins by showing my son the keyboard. A beer sits in front of both boys on trays. My youngest son thinks this is hilarious. “You’re drinking Uncle Hog!” he cries, laughing. It takes the boys several tries to realize that this is how my son is saying “alcohol.”
“He knows about alcohol!” roars Blueberry. “Oh man! What do you know about Uncle Hog, little buddy?”
“That’s why we are on this train,” he says, and nods wisely. “Because of Uncle Hog.” The boys think this is hilarious. They press on.
“Yeah? You want to be here for the Uncle Hog, eh, little man?”
“No. We want to be here for not the Uncle Hog.”
Sitting across the aisle, playing chess with my daughter, I feel her stiffen. She wonders what her little brother will say next. I rotate a bag of candies to face her, inviting her to sweeten her memories.
But the moment has passed. The boys are talking about booze and back-home and my daughter has made her move. “Check,” she says. I don’t know how I didn’t see this coming.
Blueberry and Banana are drunk by noon. There isn’t much else to do, to be fair. My toddler has fallen asleep on the seat beside them. The boys have covered him up with a large, plaid scarf.
The ski jacket that covered the pale woman’s knees yesterday is slung across the seat beside me. I see a man there that I didn’t notice before, writing furiously. I stare at him just a moment too long, and he looks up; a raccoon in headlights, dark circles around his sunken eyes.
I make a wrong assumption because of the jacket. “How’s she doing today?”
“Who?”
I backtrack as quickly as I can. “So sorry—I thought you must have known the girl. You know, the jacket—maybe you lent it to her.”
“Oh. Her. Yes. She didn’t want to keep it.”
There doesn’t seem to be anything else to say, so I say, “Oh.”
“Do you?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Do you want to keep my jacket?”
I am not expecting this. I don’t want to offend, because I am Canadian. But rather than decline, I find myself simply asking, “Why don’t you want it?”
“It’s my last worldly possession,” the man says smartly. “My journey is finished. I don’t have a use for it anymore.”
“You’ll never need a coat again?” I laugh, good-naturedly.
“No. I have to give everything away. That’s the last part of my journey.”
I realize, with alarm, that the man is either contemplating suicide or planning his winter very poorly. I start to talk, because the alternative is not talking, and that doesn’t seem like a good idea right now.
“Hey, uh … you okay?”
The man dodges my curiosity. “Thanks for asking. I think I’m going to lie down for a bit.”
Everything is very quiet. My daughter has been reading a book to my middle son, but most of the train car is listening. My littlest one is awake again and sitting on Blueberry’s lap. They are sharing the scarf as a blanket.
The pale woman is curled up in the corner seat, listening, and Banana comes back with a beer for her as well. He asks if I want one. My toddler’s eyes go wide. “Don’t do it, Mommy, it has Uncle Hog in it!”
“Don’t worry!” laughs Banana. “Your mommy’s a big girl. She’s allowed to have Uncle Hog.”
“Later.” I smile at the offer and take my son up in my arms. “I don’t want this little guy to worry.”
The kids are sleeping, finally, except for my daughter, who I can tell is only pretending. I’m on my second beer, and I’m listening to Blueberry speak.
“It’s bullshit, man. I go down to work in Toronto for the summer, then I come back, and more cousins are dead. It’s bullshit. Every year.”
We sip and nod. Banana is from Germany. He wants to travel the world. But his world doesn’t include the world Blueberry is from. “Dead?”
“Yeah, man. Dead. And the fucking white people don’t care. They send us more drugs and hope we’ll just keep killing ourselves, get rid of their problem, one Indian at a fucking time.”
“What do you do when they die?” Lemon-Yellow is speaking so quietly it’s as if she has hiccupped into her sleeve.
“Do? What do you mean what do I do?”
“Never mind.” Tears begin.
“Nah, it’s fine. What do I do. I get mad. That’s what I do. I drink, and I bitch about it.”
“Oh.”
“You look like you’ve never been mad in your life. That’s why you’re so sad. You’ve gotta get mad. Mad stops the sad. It works. And liquor works too. Here.” He pushes her an almost-full beer.
“But then, how do you stop the mad?” This voice is my daughter’s. She’s been found out, and she tiptoes over to sit in the centre of the adult chit-chat.
“The mad? You don’t. You don’t ever stop the mad. Mad is what keeps you going, little one. One day you’ll understand, eh?” Blueberry chuckles.
“My daddy understands.”
I would normally be inclined to stop her from speaking further to veritable strangers, but this time, I am not. Something has happened to all of us on this train. I can’t explain it. Secrets feel somehow safe here.
“My daddy stopped his sad. He got real mad and drank way too much. He stopped feeling sad, even when he hurt us. And now we are on a train, running away from him.”
Blueberry is listening, but there is a lump in his throat. It is not a smooth lump. It is sharp, like a fivepointed star drawn by a child, the kind that overlaps
sloppily at the tips and has an overinflated sense of its own importance. The star cuts at his words as they emerge from his chest. “Hey. My daddy too.”
Banana feels like he is in another world, a world he did not bargain for. He has not seen death, but the fear of it is what moves him. He tells us he has cystic fibrosis. This train is an item on a bucket list he felt forced to write. He knows he will die, but he has never felt sad or mad about this, only driven by a helpless positivity that has been thrust upon him by well-meaning people. It is Banana that wants to know the answer to the question Lemon-Yellow has asked before, but with a twist. He elbows Blueberry and clears his throat. “Hey man, uh … when they die, you know, what does your community do?”
“Um ….” Blueberry is far away. He finishes the mickey. “Well, we burn sage over them. We do a service kind of. And then, you know, we take them up to our family’s trapline, and we do the same thing. And before we bury them, we put a cigarette on their chest, and anything else we want to send with them to make them comfortable. You know, and then we cry.”
Lemon-Yellow is crying. She can’t stop the sad. My daughter sees this. She knows what happened yesterday. The whole train car knows. My daughter says, “We can burn sage and give a cigarette to Nita.”
The Boreal forests are passing into the plains, and the stars’ pitiful reflections beat themselves sadly against the Plexiglas skylight. The train wails obscene songs of loss into the darkened sky as it picks up speed, urged onwards by tracks it didn’t lay, and none of us flinch. We are half-drunk and half-sad and both of these halves need a purpose to be complete.
Blueberry offers the sage, and Banana gives the cigarette, which my daughter drops down the toilet. I offer a prayer, and we wait for Lemon-Yellow to flush.
When she does, we are different. The racoon-eyed man drapes the ski jacket around the woman’s shoulders. “Keep this.”
This time she accepts.
JOEL FISHBANE THE ONLY TWIN
We can’t all be like Lana Turner, discovered at a drugstore. But David Boreanaz was spotted while walking his dog and this, at least, gives me a reason to hope. It helps that my dog tends to attract attention. He’s a Borzoi, better suited for the Russian wilderness than the streets of Manhattan. Shaggy white with brown streaks. People often ask me about him and, someday, one of them might give me their card.
Is today that day? They’re filming a movie in the park, and I pass by the security barrier, hoping fate will intervene. But my timing is off. Everyone’s attention is elsewhere as people surround the woman playing the lead. We’re turning to leave when we crash into Appleby. He’s just been to Starbucks and his low-fat midnight mocha spills all over my shirt.
“You don’t look so good,” he says.
“I looked better a minute ago.”
“You here to watch the filming too?” Appleby looks off at the woman who is signing autographs. “Oh, to be mobbed by your fans. An honour bestowed on the chosen few.”
“I wouldn’t know.” No one has ever mobbed me. I get work but my IMDB profile speaks for itself. Defense Lawyer. Sleazy Businessman. My specialty is playing people who aren’t important enough to have a name. Even now, I’m Random Dog Walker. Chekhov gets all the attention—everyone asks for his name, but they never care about mine.
“Hey, since you’re here, why not loan me fifty bucks?” Appleby’s always asking for money. He does it the way other people breathe. “I’m good for it,” he adds. “This is my week. Sophie’s putting me in her movie.”
God. Is that still happening? I’ve been hearing about Sophie’s movie for a while. It’s a memoir disguised as fiction in which the names have been changed because she’s never liked hers and is happy to change everyone else’s. I stopped thinking about it because I didn’t think she’d ever find investors. Clearly, I underestimated her.
“You should send me the script,” I say.
“You know, I think I’m late for an appointment.”
“I’m asking as an actor. This is professional curiosity.”
“The movie is fiction. It isn’t about your family.”
“All the more reason to let me read it.”
“The script is confidential. I’m a man of honour and my word is my prison.”
“I’ll give you your fifty bucks.”
It’s a memoir disguised as fiction in which the names have been changed because she’s never liked hers and is happy to change everyone else’s.
“Make it a hundred.”
I Venmo the money and he promises to send the script by the end of the day.
I head for home. Borzois were bred as wolfhounds and Chekhov moves as if his prey is about to get away. I have to stop to catch my breath and I’m sweating by the time I reach my building. Upstairs, Nikita’s on the couch, drinking Lady Grey and reading a thick medical textbook, the sort that could be used to brain your enemies. Her scrubs are on the floor and the apartment is a haze of shampoo and scented candles.
“How’d it go?” says Nikita.
“Not a casting agent in sight.”
“I was asking about the doctor?”
I’d rather talk about seeing Appleby but Nikita is carrying that brain-smashing textbook, so I tell her about the appointment I had earlier that day. When I show her my many prescriptions, her almond-skin pales. Her mouth is as thin as those wires gangsters use to cut your throat.
“Pretend you’re at work. Professional detachment.”
“I have to be detached all day. I’d appreciate the freedom to cry.”
Nikita orders takeout and I pretend to have an appetite. She makes small talk and wipes her eyes a lot, presumably from the spice. We met during a medical simulation. Nikita was the student and I was the actor hired to pretend that I was sick. Now I really am sick and she’s probably wishing she was back in school. Chekhov watches with unhappy eyes. I read somewhere that dogs can smell disease. I think he feels guilty that he didn’t warn me in time.
Appleby sends the script when I’m in bed. I’ve been trying to read Sophie’s copy of Infinite Jest—it’s been weighing me down since she moved out. I should focus on the book, but a man isn’t made of stone. Sophie’s screenplay opens with a scene in which David storms out while Marianne breaks his prized guitar over her knee. The scene is an echo of history. When our father (who was
Nikita was the student and I was the actor hired to pretend that I was sick. Now I really am sick and she’s probably wishing she was back in school.
over-analytical. You don’t really appreciate a thing until it starts to go wrong. Take your sister, your health, your girlfriend of eight-and-a-half months. For a while, these things are fine. Then you become aware of a malfunction, a malaise, some ever-present ache. You hope it’ll fix itself. By the time you realize it won’t, your doctor’s giving you a dozen prescriptions and you haven’t talked to your sister in a year. As for the girlfriend, you just watch her slide away. Nikita used to mention marriage; these days, she never brings it up.
After high school, Sophie went to LA to study film and eventually showed up at Penn Station with a degree and a dream. By then, I had dropped out of acting school and was bouncing around the city, looking for work. We both needed to save money and moved into an East Village apartment. At first, there was peace in our time. Sophie had this idea for a film about a man who falls for a girl he only meets in a reoccurring dream. He was modelled after our father; Dad was always chasing illusions too.
“You’re perfect for the part,” she told me as we got drunk at the Sparrow.
“Dad’s not like that anymore.”
“You don’t know that. When did you last speak?”
a Dave) left, our mother (Mary) wasn’t strong enough to break his guitar; she had to throw it into the road.
From here, Sophie’s story jumps back to happier times. It’s like a murder mystery: the audience knows the marriage will die but it’s unclear who will kill it. But the failing marriage is only a subplot. Mostly, the film is about the young daughter trying to distinguish herself in a world where her twin brother is always around. In other words, it’s about us. Sophie was born two minutes before me and once called them the happiest in her life. Our parents dressed us the same and sent us everywhere together. It gave her a serious case of solitude envy.
It’s no wonder that in the movie version of our life, she’s reduced me to a supporting role. In the script, her nom de film is Arielle; the narrative conceit is that her brother’s name is never known.
I put the script away when Nikita comes to bed. She kisses me and then passes out. Is it my imagination or is the kiss a little too chaste? I’ll admit to being
It had been a while. Dad was touring with his band. He used to send postcards but lately it had been texts on Christmas. As Sophie went back to explaining her film, a wandering psychic made her way toward us. We’d seen her before; the Sparrow’s owner gave her special treatment after she’d correctly predicted he would marry a girl with false teeth. The psychic ran a jagged fingernail down the cracks of Sophie’s palm.
“You make bad decisions,” said the soothsayer.
“You’re your own worst enemy.”
Sophie thrust my hand at the woman. “Now do him!”
The woman took my palm and studied it. “You should see more doctors.”
“I think she’s right,” said Sophie after the woman had moved on.
“Why? Do I look sick?”
“Not about that. I make bad choices. I get it from Mom.”
“He’s the one who cheated on her, you know.”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“I just think the bad decisions might have been his.”
“But she put up with him for way too long,” said Sophie. “They had a life and he wouldn’t stop dreaming of being a rock star.”
We made Sophie’s film and she sent it to a few festivals but no one was interested. She found work as a script doctor, which is when they ask you to change
just enough so it’s better but not enough so they have to give you a writing credit. Sophie’s next boyfriend was married and the one after that got indicted for tax fraud. As for me, I took survival jobs and roamed from one audition to the next. I didn’t see any doctors. We both should have taken the psychic’s advice. But when you’re young, you’re not thinking about the dangers; you only want to know the future because you think you can defy it. We were chasing illusions too.
On Tuesday, we take Chekhov to the dog park. I’m still hoping to be discovered so I comb my hair and wear my nicest shirt. Nikita wears one of her flowing, shapeless shifts. Her body’s the lake and her head is the little sailboat, floating on the waves. I tell her about the audition I had yesterday. It was for a zombie film and the scene required me to transform into the lively dead. My character is murdered and then resurrected, but I can’t tell anyone who killed me since being a zombie has scrambled my brain. Still, I would be integral to the film. I would even have a name.
“Appleby says I look terrible,” I said. “Maybe that’s an advantage when you’re trying to play someone who’s dead.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t audition for a while.”
“But I could corner the market playing the undead.”
“Why don’t you just play a corpse if you love it so much?”
She takes Chekhov toward the doggie water fountain. I should go after her but Appleby calls to complain. He did a cop drama a few months back and just learned his scene was cut. These things happen but they happen to Appleby all the time. He’s made a dozen movies, but you’ll only see him in five. Directors like him in the audition; editors like him on the cutting room floor.
“This business!” says Appleby. “I could have played football. I’d be dead from a concussion but at least I’d have glory. Now I won’t even have that.”
“I read Sophie’s film.”
“God, are you angry? You can’t tell her you got it from me.”
“I’m not angry.”
“You aren’t going to sue?”
I hadn’t considered it. “You think I should?”
“What? God, no. The truth is, we’re sort of a thing right now.”
“A thing? You and Sophie? God, that psychic was right. She really did make bad choices.”
“You didn’t get it from me, all right?” Then he adds, “Can you loan me seventy bucks?”
“Why don’t you ask Sophie?”
“It’s for Sophie. I want to take her out.”
I end the call. At the end of Sophie’s movie, Arielle finds a rapport with a handsome stranger. She tells him all about her tense relationship with her brother and the stranger sighs in understanding. “You think you have it bad?” he says. “Try being an identical twin.” Arielle gives the camera a knowing look. At last, she’s found someone who understands. That’s probably what Appleby is. Someone who doesn’t argue with her. A handsome stranger to treat her like the star of the film. Nikita asks if we can go home but I want to walk around a bit more. Maybe a casting agent will come by with her labradoodle. Nikita is sour as the clouds gather and it starts to spit. I’m getting tired but I try to endure it like an action star at the climax. It doesn’t do me any good. Suddenly, I’m in the pike position and then I’m on my knees. Breakthrough pain. A sharp flare as ruinous as a bad review. Chekhov sits like that stone lion outside the public library. Nikita stoops to help me, eyes wet from the rain.
One night, Sophie came home determined to watch the Oscars. She’s a big Ethan Hawke fan and he’d been nominated for best something. But award shows are just a four-hour reminder that I’m not Ethan Hawke and I wasn’t in the mood. We fell into a good oldfashioned fight just like we had as kids. I accused her of being self-centred, like our mother, and she accused me of being a hack, like our father, and then we wrestled over the remote control, and I took an elbow to the chin. It knocked a filling loose and caused me to bite my tongue. She got her Oscars and I got a trip to an allnight drug store for something to deal with the pain.
It took me a few days to get to the dentist and, my hand to God, I walked into the waiting room and there was Ethan Hawke, sitting there like it was his second home. His craggy features were obscured by hair and looked to be in a state of bliss as if he liked nothing better than reading an Architectural Digest that was six months out of date. I knew he hadn’t won the other night, but I didn’t have the nerve to rub it in.
When I came home, Sophie was drinking wine and looking at old photos of when we were young. I told her about Ethan Hawke but she didn’t believe me.
“Ethan Hawke wouldn’t use your dentist.”
“Why not? She’s very popular.”
“He probably just looked like Ethan Hawke.”
“No, it was him. The hygienist got an autograph.”
“Did you get an autograph?”
“Why would I get an autograph?”
Sophie just glared at me. “You’re a real car wreck, you know that?”
Later, I found her in her bedroom packing her things. She was stuffing everything into her bag, one, two, three.
“Are you moving out? God, it was just an autograph.”
“I’m sorry I knocked you in the teeth.”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“Being with you brings out the worst in me. Fighting you is something Dad would have done.”
“Do you have to bring him into everything? You don’t see me bringing up Mom.”
“Because you’d probably burst into flames if you ever mentioned her. God, I mean, when was the last time you even called?”
She seemed out of control, so I went to take a piss. After our parents split, we were made to choose between our parents. Sophie went with Mom, and I went the other way. Mom never quite got over it and, in recent years, conversations have been sparse. I stewed in the bathroom for a while and then came back with Sophie’s fancy shampoo.
“Take this if you’re leaving. Nobody wants to smell like coconut.” I threw the bottle onto the suitcase. It was a good shot but the top was loose and shampoo spilled out with a glug.
Sophie didn’t seem to notice. She was staring off into space and, when she spoke, she seemed close to tears. “I don’t know what I’m doing. Nothing is working the way it should. I can’t make a movie right. I make bad choices. I’m not ready to be motherless too.”
“You’re not motherless.”
“Mom’s boyfriend called. They were hiking and she had a bad fall. I wasn’t packing so I could leave. I need to go to the funeral.” Sophie sighed. “I didn’t think you’d come. I wasn’t sure you’d care.”
Now the clothes were wet with floral soap. Sophie tossed them to the floor and they made a splotch, like how a body probably sounds when it falls during a hike in Yosemite National Park. Splotch goes the liver. Splotch goes the heart. Mom called last week. I hadn’t even listened to the voicemail. It was still in my inbox, waiting with the menace of a lesion ready to bleed.
Many months later, I would see this scene in Sophie’s film. It’s all there: the loose filling, the Ethan Hawke sighting, the coconut shampoo. Still, she allowed a single artistic flourish. In the movie, as his sister cries over their dead mother, the nameless brother pulls out a dental insurance form. On the back is an autograph from Ethan Hawke. It’s moments like these that make us envy the movies. We see such grand gestures and wish they had been our own.
On Wednesday, I try to find Dad. He still doesn’t know I’m sick but he changed his cell number and I have to send emails into the void. His band manager is no help. “You could always try showing up at one of his shows,” he says. “I’ll swing you backstage passes.” I can’t quite swallow my pride. “Save them for his fans.”
Needing something to do, I print out Sophie’s script and spend an hour noting everything that’s wrong. Reading a history you lived through can be dizzying. Pick up a book about the Korean War in America and you’ll learn it started after North Korea invaded the south. Go to the Victorious Fatherland Liberation War Museum in Pyongyang and suddenly it’s America who invaded and America who lost. Sophie’s film isn’t propaganda, but it suffers from the same problem: too much misinterpretation.
Take the crucial moment where I had to choose between our parents. In reality, it took me days to decide. I cried. I didn’t want to break my mother’s heart. But I also knew what Sophie was going to do and it seemed unfair for our father to lose both of us. I thought I was making the charitable choice. I thought I was being honourable. None of this is in the film. Sophie presents it as if I made the choice without debate. It’s these sorts of lies that gall me. Someone needs to tell her what she’s doing wrong.
I fall asleep with my face in my notebook. When I wake up, Nikita is sitting across from me, reading the script. The title page is in plain view. The Only Twin. A screenplay by Sophie Michaelson. Nikita’s halfway through but that’s long enough to get the gist.
“Your sister’s a real piece of work. How’d you get this?”
“I bribed Appleby. Apparently, they’re sleeping together.”
“She’s using your whole life.” Nikita has worked herself into a fury. Now she hops up to grab her phone from her purse. “Someone needs to talk to her. She steals your life. Robs you of your name. Ignores you when you’re sick.”
“She’s not ignoring me. She doesn’t know.”
Nikita pauses with her hand in her purse. “You haven’t told her?”
“We’re not really talking these days.”
“You’re still her brother. God, why are artists always such children?” Nikita throws the script at me and there’s a snowstorm of pages. For a moment, I’m surrounded by scenes from my life. Apartment hunting. Learning of Mom’s accident. Picking out the urn. “I don’t know what’s worse,” Nikita says. “Not telling her or lying to me about it.”
“I didn’t lie. You made an assumption.”
“You could run for Congress with logic like that.”
“I think it’s a side effect of the drugs.”
“You expect me to believe that?”
“They said it could metastasize. Maybe the tumour’s in my integrity.”
“You and your damn jokes. You won’t tell people. You won’t talk about it with me. You’re sick and I feel like I’m the only one who cares.”
She takes a bath. This is a standard reaction; she likes to stew while she stews. I collect Sophie’s script and play with Chekhov, but an hour goes by and Nikita won’t answer my knock. Since it’s frigid outside, I urinate in the sink. I need a stool to get to the right height and, while I’m balanced, I have a spasm of pain and nearly break my neck. The crash brings Nikita running, towel dangling in her hand. Chekhov comes too and there’s almost another accident when they crash into each other in the hall. The dog sniffs me but Nikita just stands with folded arms. Professional detachment, at last. Like I’m someone she doesn’t know.
“Maybe you should move out,” I say.
“Now you’re going to evict me? Boy, when it comes to relationships, you’re a real pro.”
“You’re always seeing people at their worst. You shouldn’t have to do it at home.”
“Are you really asking me to go?”
“I’m not giving you what you need.”
“At least you admit it,” she sighs. “The really bad people are the ones who don’t.”
Sophie took Mom’s death hard and that’s why I got her a puppy. She had always wanted a dog but Mom was allergic. She named him because she’s partial to Chekhov’s story about the lady with the lapdog—she underestimated how big Borzois become.
Chekhov was still young when Sophie found a producer who had seen the film in which I fall for a girl in reoccurring dreams. He wanted to expand it into a feature and they went about looking for money. Sophie said the cast would be the same and I became obsessed with the idea that the movie would change my life. Actors think this about every part they have, almost have, or desperately want. There are no small parts but there are always big dreams.
One day, I came home to find her reading Infinite Jest.
“Since when do you read so much?”
“My producer told me to expand my repertoire. He has all sorts of ideas for the film. He thinks he can get a name to play the lead.”
“Am I being recast?”
“You can still be in it.”
“As something small and nameless?”
“I knew you’d be angry. The film needs to be marketable. It’s just business.”
I waited for her to change her mind, but she never did. The producer had his teeth in her—whenever she came back from seeing him, her face was flushed like she’d been flying near the sun. I wasn’t happy with being replaced and, after a month of fighting, Sophie decided we had reached our limit. Nine months in the womb, fourteen years at home, four years in New York. Technically, we’d lasted longer than our parents. When it came time to leave, we stood at either end of the room and called to Chekhov. The dog went right to me. Sophie didn’t fight for him any more than our mother had fought for me. But I know the betrayal hurt. On our birthdays, Mom sent Sophie a card but purposely sent mine late, as if she somehow forgot. As for Chekhov, he isn’t in Sophie’s movie. Instead, the nameless brother brings home a cat.
On Thursday, I buy coffee and bagels and have the whole thing set up when Nikita comes out of her room. She’s pleased but suspicious. “Do you need money? Oh God. Have you gotten worse?”
“I don’t want you to leave.”
“You’re still her brother. God, why are artists always such children?” Nikita throws the script at me and there’s a snowstorm of pages.
“I took that only as a suggestion.”
“And now I’m un-suggesting it.”
Nikita eats a bagel as if each bite is a thought she has to consider with care. Chekhov puts his head in her lap. She tears off chunks of bread and lets him eat from her hand. “You’re always so unhappy,” she says at last. “And it’s not because you’re sick. I see sick people all the time and they aren’t like you.”
“I think Sophie’s movie is getting to me.”
“You were like this long before that. It’s like you don’t want to be you.” Nikita sighs. “If Sophie’s movie is really bothering you, go talk to her. Crash the auditions if you have to. Just do something already. We have more important things to worry about.”
She leaves the house wearing her scrubs. Nikita used to hate when people do this. She said it was a
sign of social degradation, along with sweatpants and people who talk about the weather. Exhaustion has wrecked her convictions. I’m ruining all the things that make her her.
Chekhov paws at the door, the leash in his mouth. Our walk turns into a marathon and leads to another episode of me leaning on a lamppost holding the stitch in my side. Pain is a monster; it eats your joy. It’s getting hard to take it with any stoicism. It’s right then, as I’m at my worst, that a woman in a striped power suit makes her approach.
“That’s quite the dog. Russian Wolfhound?”
“That’s right.”
“Big dog to keep in the city.”
“He’s a New Yorker and so am I. We’ll never leave.”
“Is he well trained?”
“More or less.”
The woman gives me her card. Top House Casting. She’s looking for animals for an upcoming film.
“I’m an actor too,” I say.
She looks me up and down. “Sorry. I’m only casting the dogs.”
I’m left alone catching my breath. Chekhov busies himself with his crotch. He’s just been discovered but couldn’t care less. Success happens to those who don’t want it. I take him to the Sparrow where the bartender lets me drink on credit. He’s happy to tell people Chekhov is my therapy dog. Which I suppose he is. The muted television plays a trailer for a movie I’m not in. Ethan Hawke saunters onto the screen. It’s some kind of Western and he’s three kinds of Hollywood cool.
“My ex-wife loves him,” says the bartender.
“I saw him once,” I say. “At the dentist.”
“Life in New York. Stars everywhere you turn.”
“City of dreams.”
“Didn’t you go to acting school?”
“I dropped out. Couldn’t afford it.”
“It’s a tough game, no matter who you are. At least you have Nikita.”
“Maybe not.”
“Seriously? Brother, you have the worst luck.”
“I think I just need to make better choices.”
At home, I take my drugs and watch Sophie’s first full-length feature, the one that should have starred me. It’s not bad and I’d be lying if I said the well-known actor playing my role isn’t any good. The camera likes him, and he can do a lot with his face. But it still hurts.
I understand the character, a man who is happier in his dreams. That’s all acting is. Dreaming while awake. You get to be all these other versions of yourself. The Defense Lawyer. The Businessman. Then they call cut
and you’re back to being you. The son who might have picked the wrong parent. The failure who got cancer young. I skip ahead to the movie’s end. The dreamer learns his lesson and ends the film with a real live girl. A sentimental finale but I like it. It gets the job done.
It isn’t hard to find Sophie. All I have to do is call Appleby and send him some cash. He tells me she’s having auditions for some final roles and sends me to an agency near Central Park. Sophie’s assistant is in the waiting room when I show up. She’s confused when she sees me. She probably forgot I’m not just someone Sophie invented for her film.
“What is this? You want to audition?”
“Who better to play me than me?”
“We already have someone.” The assistant looks down at her tablet, on which she has some master schedule. “I suppose I could squeeze you in. If you’re serious. Are you serious?”
Tempting. I could walk into that room. Confront my sister. Defend myself until she admits that I’m worth having a name in the story of our lives. But I suddenly don’t want to get into it. The past is a film. You can cut it and change it all you like but, at some point, you have to stop editing and admit that it’s done.
“I just wanted to give this back to her.” I take out Infinite Jest and quickly scrawl a note that I shove in the front. “So who is it? The guy who’s playing me?”
She tells me the name of an actor, someone you’ve heard of, someone I’ve heard of, someone even the isolated natives on a Polynesian island in the South Pacific worship and adore. Acting, that waking dream. In the story of my life, I’ll be played by the actor I’ve always wanted to be.
Auditions don’t start on time and neither do doctor’s appointments. The sterile room is full of men and their partners. One argues with his wife. Chemotherapy is a scam cooked up by radiologists, he says. Why are we even here? Nikita takes my hand, and I squeeze her leg through her flowing dress.
I’m weak after the treatment and Nikita helps me home where I sleep the rest of the day. When I wake, she makes me hot water and honey, promising it will help my throat. Country remedies from my city-dwelling nurse. God bless that Hippocratic oath. First rule: do no harm. Second rule: when your patient has a tumour as hard as a fist, give him honey water and walk his enormous dog.
“Don’t start liking sweatpants,” I say.
“What’s that?”
“And don’t start talking about the weather.”
“I think you’re loopy.”
“I don’t want to be someone else.”
“We had that conversation a week ago. You really need to stop living in the past.” But she smiles that razor smile and kisses my face. My real live girl.
When I wake up, there’s good news in my inbox: it looks like I’ll get to play a corpse with a name. When
you’re an actor, the best day is the day you book a part. It’s the moment of victory, the moment you’ve won. No, it’s not forever. But for a few minutes, you can dream that your life is about to start.
///
RAEGEN MONTAQUE
SPRING SINNERS
i never loved for long— fleeting & far between in the fresh soil; they were never mine for long either: disease, decay & rot
—“PERENNIAL
LOVE POEM” BY JAYE SIMPSON
For years i longed and hoped to find someone to love i’d pick and choose the boys that caught the other’s eyes Feelings felt so fake To myself i would lie
Disinterest in my heart was strong Attachment to boys felt so wrong And years would pass me by feelings weren’t true
Couldn’t relate to straight love songs i never loved for long—
The spring would come and go The girls would sing love songs And in the fields i could never sing along Rows of scarlet flowers turned my mood to spoil Feelings would bloom and grow for others in my wake i pressed them into oil
fleeting and far between in the fresh soil;
Mushrooms grew and stayed
And with the girls i played Running on the fields grew lonely day by day Quick glances, while we play— incoming is the stormy weather when they would find someone better i wish i was okay although i’ve always been a dreamer they were never mine for long either:
i couldn’t recognize the feelings that didn’t bloom from their bulbs in the spring i couldn’t recognize love not yet
i didn’t know this secret But when I finally knew … the risk with getting caught With myself, i fought
To kill this thing inside That writhed—so i besought disease, decay, and rot
MOVING IMAGES, 14”x11”, INK ON PAPER, 2024 | LUKE PAINTER
Image courtesy of the artist.
LAURA OLLERENSHAW
My earliest memory is of my mother looking for me, but I was so young, I don’t know if it’s a real memory or a story told so many times that I remember the retelling as my own. The meaning lives there—where the memory and retelling touch.
My mother’s lung cancer isn’t progressing, so her doctor stops her chemotherapy and starts her on immunotherapy.
“It’s easier on me,” she says. “It works with my body to fight the cancer.”
I don’t know the validity of this, but I don’t press. Because her doctor is an expert. Because she sounds fine with it, and I don’t want to question her choices. Because I am busy with my own life. I balance between respecting my mother’s autonomy and being an advocate, and I struggle negotiating these two kinds of love. I end up doing as much as I can, while feeling it’s never enough.
Baby hares (or “leverets”) are best raised by their own mothers, and we should do our best to ensure this bond is not broken while we maintain a position of environmental stewardship.1
I’m out for a run. Ironically, the healthiest motions are often the most stubborn to start, but I’m here now. The sky weighs down on me, heavy with grey. I hold my breath close with short, quick gasps. I’m ready to bolt. These days I cope by focusing on my to-do list—change oil, book eye exam, write will—a small square of control. Running doesn’t help my worries, but it lengthens and deepens my breath, opens my lungs, and reminds me I am alive. Maybe I can keep moving forward.
OF LEAST CONCERN
My mom and her best friend laugh at my mom’s oncologist behind his back. A small clutch for control. When I meet him, I see he takes particular care of his appearance—his clothing is quality with a capital Q. His glasses are chic works of art. His shoes are beautiful, soft leather, like kidskin. I wonder if his parents pushed him into medicine when he really wanted to be an architect.
1 https://www.albertaanimalhealthsource.ca/content wild-baby-hares-and-proper-handling
Running doesn’t help my worries, but it lengthens and deepens my breath, opens my lungs, and reminds me I am alive.
Kidskin or kid leather is a type of soft, thin leather that is traditionally used for gloves. It is widely used for other fashion purposes such as footwear and clothing. Kidskin is traditionally made from goatskin—more specifically, the skin of young goats (or “kids”). 2
In September, Mom goes to the emergency department. She doesn’t call to tell me until she’s home.
“I have blood clots on my lungs.” Each word is an effort, pushed out by grunting breaths.
“That sounds …” I search for the right word. “Dire.”
“Well, they prescribed me blood thinners.”
She sounds so sure, so accepting, that I don’t question, but odd problems compound—a hole in her nasal
2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kidskin
septum, her larynx half paralyzed. Over the next few months, she goes to the hospital again and again— blood clot on top of blood clot. During one of her stays in the hospital, when she complains of being out of breath, of not being able to walk from her bed to the bathroom, an on-call doctor tells her she needs to lose weight. I rage at his insensitivity and bias, but I am not there to do anything about it.
Left, right, inhale.
Left, right, exhale.
The paved path curves alongside a man-made storm pond with a fountain in the centre. Homes backing onto the pond are marketed as “lake view.” An empty chip bag floats among the reeds and goose poop marks a paved path that ends halfway around the water, leading to future construction. A bridge spans the pond, and as I cross, I startle a crow and it lifts, dropping the object it held. I near the small body it discarded. The grey baby jackrabbit’s fur is wet, like it has been mauled by a dog. I stop a few feet back. It scuttles away from me to the edge of the mowed grass. You’re not any safer there. I consider leaving—this is the cycle of life—but I stay as I consider what to do. The crow settles on a light pole ten yards away and cleans its feathers.
A bridge spans the pond, and as I cross, I startle a crow and it lifts, dropping the object it held. I near the small body it discarded.
The white-tailed jackrabbit (Lepus townsendii), also known as the prairie hare and the white jack, is a species of hare found in western North America. Like all hares and rabbits, it is a member of the family Leporidae of order Lagomorpha
This jackrabbit has two subspecies: L. townsendii townsendii, occurring west of the Rocky Mountains, and L. townsendii campanius, occurring east of the Rocky Mountains. 3
As a young child, I had a recurring nightmare that terrified me because it took place in our house, making me think it was real. It always began with swirls of light in the air above my bed like sparklers on Canada
Day, spinning faster and accumulating. As they faded, a man dressed in a black top hat and coat would appear. Panicked, I would jump out of bed and run down the stairs through the living room—kitchen—bathroom— into the tub, where he would grab my foot and I would cry out, waking myself and ending the nightmare. Again and again, the chase looped, following the same path through the house. Some nights, after I’d woken, I would go downstairs to sleep on the couch. The nightmare began again, except it opened in the living room. Over and over, it repeated, only ending when I crawled into my mom’s side of the bed, where she spooned me, and I fit into her curved body. I would snuggle my face into the soft spot between her shoulder and breast and I’d inhale the smell of her, a combination of Noxzema cold cream and Charlie perfume. The nightmare never started there.
In February, I visit Mom at home. Her living room is full of warm light. Plants thrive under her touch, stretch toward the sun. An embroidery hoop with sewing sits to the side. Trips to the emergency department have multiplied, and the stack of puffers and medicines beside her chair threatens to upset. There’s a rattle when she inhales.
“Why aren’t they asking why you’re getting blood clots?” I ask. “If you were twenty-five, this wouldn’t be happening.”
She has no answer. We trust our doctors—they are experts—yet they do nothing to find the cause, only prescribing more drugs, making her comfortable until she goes away.
“When did they start you on immunotherapy drugs, Mom?”
“End—of—August,” she says, separating each word with a breath.
“What is the name of the medicine?”
Whitetails are often seen in urban parks and on suburban parks in Western Canada. People often come across [leverets] alone during the day in spring and mistakenly assume they are abandoned by their mothers. The Edmonton Humane Society has issued public statements asking that [leverets] not be brought into animal shelters 4
An adult hare—the mother, I assume—hovers behind hedges farther up the path. She paces, watching me, eyes bulging. On high alert, she rises on her hind feet, her large ears flicking, like satellites searching for the answer. I remember hearing you should not touch baby animals because the mothers would reject them. How can I move this baby to safety without touch? I have
3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White-tailed_jackrabbit
4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White-tailed_jackrabbit
only my hands. The leveret shivers in the grass. The crow clacks and flaps from pole to tree, closer to the leveret.
My mom’s quilting frame fills the living room, each corner supported by kitchen chairs and pinched together by large red clamps. The bottom and top fabric is tacked to the 1 x 4 frame with huge thumbtacks, sandwiching the batting inside. It is a permanent fort, a home for my Barbies, a sky for my brother’s Lego towns, a quiet space to read. From underneath, all I see of my mom are her crossed legs and right hand pulling and pushing the needle through from underneath. She hums quietly, sewing neat little equally spaced stitches in and out, a straight, perfect line.
[The hares] attempt to evade detection by crouching in the vegetation where their cryptic colouration makes them difficult to observe. They may slink away, but if detected, they bound away at speed, adopting a zigzag course. They can run up to 55 km/h (34 mi/h) and leap up to 5 m (16 ft.). They are also hunted and eaten by humans. 5
T he mother hare creeps to a clump of bushes across the path from the leveret and digs a hole. The leveret doesn’t move. The crow caws. Shit. What do I do? I step forward, and the mother hare runs away. She pants, gasping, like she can’t catch her breath. The crow flaps closer. I cannot leave now.
In March, I show Mom’s oncologist the scientific journal articles I’ve found that say the safer immunotherapy drug he has prescribed for her lung cancer can create blood clots in the lungs. It was only when I changed the web search from “blood clots” to “thrombosis” and the medicine’s brand name to the generic name that I found the medical journals to support my suspicions. The information was right there; I only had to find the secret words. I sit with Mom in the exam room, gripping the papers. I am there to fight for her and convince the oncologist he’s been carelessly killing her.
He flips through the pages.
“Hmm …. Those Japanese will write anything to get published.”
He hands the printouts back to me.
[Whitetails] generally make no sound but will emit a shrill scream if they are injured or caught. 6
I pull long bents of grass missed by the mower from the lawn border and cover the palms of my hands. I scoop
up the baby and, crouching, walk it across the sidewalk. It weighs nothing, less than a baby doll, and except for its twitching nose does not move in my cupped palms. I set it in the shrubs where the mom had been digging. I have no idea if I’m helping or hurting, but I must do what I can, if only to satisfy my feeling of responsibility. The mom stares at me with eyes huge and wide. I circle around behind her to guide her to her baby, but I’m at the wrong angle and she runs towards the water.
I don’t know how to reply to the doctor, but he follows as if it was his idea.
“Besides, it doesn’t matter. I’m changing your mother’s medication. It isn’t working. The cancer has spread to her bones and liver. It’s just a matter of time.” He speaks as if she is not there and has already disappeared.
“What do you mean? How long?” I ask.
“Not long” could be days, months, or years. Cancer is odd in that the deadline keeps moving, until it doesn’t. For most cancers, for large periods of time, you can pretend your mom won’t die. But we all eventually die.
“Four to six months.”
My mom shrinks in her chair. I stare at the doctor’s soft, caramel-coloured wingtip leather shoes with their perfect, neat stitches.
The white-tailed jackrabbit is assessed as being of “Least Concern” by the International Union of Conservation of Nature in its Red List of Threatened Species because it has an extensive range and is fairly common across most of its range. The population size may be declining slightly, but not at a rate that would justify listing this hare in a more threatened category.
7
In my earliest memory, I was a baby in a crib. The overhead light did not work. The back-side base of the crib had collapsed, and I had slid down into the line where the wall met the floor. I cried, but Mom could not find me, her arm’s reach too short. I sensed her fear, but I didn’t worry because while she couldn’t find me, she still searched. She would save me.
I loop around between the pond and the mother.
“Go to your baby,” I say to the mother hare.
She does, and together they shelter in the brush. The crow squawks in annoyance and wings off to find an easier meal. The sky has darkened—it will rain soon. I turn and continue my run.
//
5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White-tailed_jackrabbit
6 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White-tailed_jackrabbit
7 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White-tailed_jackrabbit
TWO POEMS
FAMILIAR
In my grandmother’s language, death is a chronic condition so hot you could die but not a metaphor. More like invisible aura, little tic so cold you could die sidekick with a knack for the dramatic so sour you could die, so sweet It bumps our elbows at many moments of each day so dirty, so clean while we ignore its same-old same-old face—until so happy, so sad the night it pivots, surveys, summons by name so far, so close And we shatter when forced to greet it
Y. S. LEE
PAINTER
THINGS I’VE NEVER FEARED FOR MY CHILDREN
Taylor Swift agnosticism. Not enough pyjamas. Repetitive strain injury from too much music practice. Roblox phobia. They might run out of dental floss. Growing exceptionally tall. Long-term silence. Miserly use of white glue. Incuriosity. Reluctance to sing at the dinner table. Spinach addiction. Failure to understand potty humour. Lego shortage. A hatred of dessert. Forgetting how to pedal a bike. Instantaneous, unquestioning obedience. Untreatable toothache. A war in our own country. Encounters with occupying soldiers. Extinction of public education. Consequences of stepping on a land mine. The need to flee because missiles are targeting our town. Eating flour because there is no more bread. That their lives are worth a fraction of some other lives. Being bombed in a so-called safe zone. That their dusty, still-beautiful bodies will be eulogized only on a newsreel in the ruins of an ancient, once-beautiful city.
CORNELIA MARS
ICEBREAKER
We arrived at the harbour in the late afternoon.
The winter air was cloudy from a long lineup of idling cars snaking its way into the red-and-white ocean liner. Dad was bringing us, my older sister and me, on a Viking Line cruise from Stockholm to Helsinki and back. The bow was cranked open at the front, and it looked, I thought, like the mouth of a beaked dinosaur. Dad’s jaw set at the sight of the lineup; a cruise like this wasn’t his idea of fun. But my parents had been fighting a lot and the tension in our apartment had swelled to an all-time high. Some nights there was no telling what would happen, and I got the sense that it was Mom who had booked the cruise for us. Taking trips was Mom’s solution to all of life’s problems.
This may have been the reason we had left our cozy suburb north of Montreal two years earlier and moved
to Sweden, although I didn’t know much about the reasons at the time. All I knew was that the move had been difficult on all of us. Mom complained the most, even though she was Swedish herself and had done everything possible to keep up Swedish traditions while we were in Canada, including eating fermented herring and dancing around a maypole dressed in birch leaves and Swedish flags. Her perspective changed once we got there, and things got even worse.
My sister especially had a hard time. She was older and had learned her ABCs in French. Her tendency to mispronounce the Swedish soft “g” and her brown ’70s glasses didn’t go unnoticed. She didn’t look very Swedish either, but was petite and had brown hair and brown eyes. My own foreignness was camouflaged by a bowl cut of canola-yellow hair, blue eyes, and an unrelenting
disposition to please. My apparent assimilation must have stung. I’m not sure if she ever forgave me for it. Dad, being Dutch, took classes with other short, dark-haired men in the “Swedish for Immigrants” program, but somehow that wasn’t enough to secure him a stable job. He became prone to sulking on the couch, nursing one Heineken after another. I remember one day in particular. Dad had been in a really dark mood for days. He wasn’t speaking, that I recall, and we tried to cheer him up by making him a four-decker tuna sandwich. He loved sandwiches, and I remember thinking—as we piled on the next layer and then the next—that the higher we made it, the better he would feel. By the end it was so high it teetered on the plate: full of our love and sloppy goodwill. But it didn’t work. When we presented it to him, he just said he wasn’t hungry and to put it in the fridge. After that, we mostly left him alone.
The line on the dock eventually started moving, and Dad inched the silver hatchback into the ship. The air inside the garage was thick with fumes. My sister and I couldn’t wait to get out, but we weren’t allowed to leave the car until the bow was properly secured. Someone in a reflective vest came around to tell us this. When the door closed, it made a series of mechanical clanks, and we bounced out, shoes slapping onto the steel-tread floors. We raced up the stairs, Dad following quickly behind. Soon, however, he realized we were headed in the wrong direction. Our cabins were below the garage, in the economy section. I was disappointed and, for a brief moment, I panicked. I had expected windows, like on an airplane, but of course once we got there, I saw that there were none. Instead, our cabin was covered in rivets the size of my six-year-old palm, or that’s how I remember it, with the bunk beds welded to the walls. My sister immediately called dibs on the top bunk, and of course I let her, not only because she was older than me but because the authority of her demeanour made it hard to argue. Instead, I set my focus to finding the fun stuff we had seen in the brochure: ball pit, pool, smörgåsbord, sauna, and a tax-free shop with enormous bags of candy.
Most of all I wanted to try the pool because swimming on a boat seemed like a strange thing to do and because I missed swimming. I had learned how to dive as a toddler, and in Canada, I had had free reign of the neighbour’s pool. Sometimes I feared I would forget how to swim, the same way I was forgetting how to speak English. But by the time we got settled, it was getting close to dinner, and Dad thought it would be better to take a walk and wait for the buffet to open.
Somehow, we ended up on the top deck. The cross winds made it almost impossible to open the door, and there was a lip to step over to get out, but finally we spilled out, gripping each other for balance. The only other person out there was a tall, skinny man leaning on the railing, smoking a cigarette. He gave us a nod, which my dad returned. The world seemed full of these adult understandings back then: nods, handshakes, little waves. Sometimes these things made me feel like the world was held together by something; other times, they made me feel like the world was conspiring against me, and one day, when I was big enough, I was going to tell everyone what I thought about it.
“If you fall in that water, you die instantly.” This was the kind of thing Dad would have said without blinking and probably without realizing the terror it struck in my bones. Or maybe he did realize but wanted to make sure I didn’t mess around. He needn’t have worried, however, because the sight of that black sea tamed any bad impulses I might have had. I clung to Dad’s leg as if my life depended on it, sure that if I let go, the wind would whip me under the railing into waters the temperature of instant death. Then there would have been one less passenger at the dinner buffet because I had no illusions about my father jumping in after me. He may have been strong and brave, but he was no fool.
Afterward we went for dinner, and the whole time we cruised easily through the slush and floes of the archipelago. We hit the open sea by bedtime. The Baltic, however, was neither open nor sea, just pure ice. Surely a metre thick and, I imagined, stretching all the way back to the ice age. We went down to the cabin where the skull-numbing roar of ice exploding against the hull was the worst thing I could ever have imagined. Worse than bats outside your window, worse than turnips covered in butter, worse than getting spanked and sent to bed without supper.
I begged my sister to switch bunks. Somehow, I believed moving a few feet up in a closed cabin would save me when the inevitable crack opened and the whole ship broke apart. But she did not offer pity lightly. Even though I was only six, I was supposed to be the brave one, the fearless, diving wunderkind. Why should she believe that I was scared shitless?
“Suck it up. Go to sleep,” my sister said, unfazed. She probably thought my tears were a ruse for attention, and, in her opinion, I had gotten enough of that already. If I had been older, I might have explained that being fearless and being brave aren’t the same thing. But then, all I could do was cry.
Eventually, she softened and offered me her Walkman with a Michael Jackson tape on it. In any other context,
“Thriller” induced a special kind of anxiety in me. But here, with the ice banging on the walls, it had the opposite effect. I pushed the headphones hard over my ears, trying to revive my fear of zombies and werewolves, hoping it would drown out this new, worse fear of dying at sea. I was used to plugging my ears with my own fingers, when Mom and Dad fought, but there was no blocking out the sound of the boat churning up the ice; it reverberated all around us as if we were locked in a steel drum. I turned up the volume and covered the headphones with my hands, and even though my sister started whining that I was mucking up the sponge, she didn’t snatch it back. She let me fall asleep with it, and I loved her so much for that. I was ready to forgive all slights, past and future, for her sudden grace.
I can’t remember where Dad was through all this. Maybe he was asleep, or sick and tired, having a Heineken at the bar. Or maybe he had joined that skinny figure out on deck, to watch the ship slam through ice and plan his eventual escape. It wasn’t long after that that he disappeared. But of course I had no knowledge of that then—only a sickening feeling that something was not quite right.
When we docked in Helsinki, I was too tired to even feel relieved. Finland only registered as a drained sky and a snowy square. A smudged, Karelian-white drawing. We made an attempt to walk around, to see something, so that we could tell Mom about it when we got back. But it was early Sunday morning and everything was closed. Also, on some level we knew that our enjoyment wasn’t necessary: simply not being at home was enough.
Before getting back on the ship, Dad bought us something, a treat. Not ice cream because it was winter, but maybe a pretzel with sugar crystals on it. Something bready out of a bag. Sometimes he gave in to us this way when Mom wasn’t there, buying foods and sweets that, according to Mom, were a waste of money; this was especially true with an all-you-caneat buffet on the ship. We left without turning around for a second look. Dad said something like, “Come on girls, let’s get back on the boat. Let’s have a steam. We’ll be home this evening.” I’d like to think that was it, something cheerful, because he could be tender that way sometimes. It was just that he didn’t seem to enjoy being with us anymore than Mom did. He more likely stated “let’s get back on the boat,” since we all knew that there was nothing left to do but turn around and go back the way we’d come.
The mood lightened once we got back on the boat. The sky was brighter, and Dad was looking forward to a sauna. My sister and I waved to Dad and padded off to the ladies’ side, clutching our towels. We were used to saunas, but the heat was unlike anything we had experienced in our local aquatic centre, even on the lowest bench. There were two old Finnish ladies there, working hard to get the heat up past a hundred degrees Celsius. I remember this number specifically because they made a big show of spooning the icy water from the wooden bucket onto the hissing rocks and then looking at the thermometer. This was something I could tell Mom when we got back, to make her proud, how they had gotten it up just to one hundred degrees and how we had stayed and taken it.
“That’s it, one more splash, get it up to a hundred now.”
“Why are you sitting down there? Milkweed you two. What are you, Swedish?” one of the ladies asked, not meanly.
“Yeah, Swedish ….” we said, even though we knew this wasn’t really true. We didn’t know what we really were. They laughed, winking at each other, their flesh jiggling.
“That explains it.” The lady with the spoon nudged her friend, and she shook her head sadly as if being Swedish was some sickness we would never be cured of. As we wilted off the bench and got ready to leave, they seemed dismayed but not surprised. “What! Leaving already? You have to get used to it, girls. The heat is good for you.”
The ship returned through the path it had already broken the previous night, before the ice had a chance to freeze back up. After our steam in the saunas, we had a long lunch at the buffet, ran around the foyer, and hit the store to get salt licorice for Mom. We only went back to the lower decks at the very end, to pick up our bags and get back in the car. By then there had been enough daytime distractions to make me forget about the terror of the ice from the previous night.
For a long time, I didn’t think about this cruise, because there seemed to be a lot of little trips like this. I wish I could remember if we went in the pool or not. I can’t picture it, and yet, whenever I think back on our time on the boat, that woozy feeling returns. As if we had been floating all along, swimming, looking for land or a horizon but not quite making either out, between the white sky and the ice.
///
CONTENT WARNING : alcoholism and discussion of suicide
PAUL SASGES
P=VI
None but ourselves can free our minds.
—BOB
MARLEY, REDEMPTION SONG
The #14 bus turned onto Hastings on that day in 1981. What happened with my mother earlier had left me wishing Vancouver would succumb to a megathrust earthquake. It would be nice if the city slipped off into the ocean and saved me the bother of committing suicide. Due to the meaninglessness of modern life, French existentialist philosopher Albert Camus claimed whether to take our lives was our most important question. Camus said in the face of absurdity that our only option to keep us from this was to imagine ourselves as happy.
The overcast sky of Vancouver suited my dismal thoughts.
When I had awoken that morning, a bagpipe was whining inside my head and a bodhrán drum was beating out a rhythm on my retinas. I had heard familiar footsteps on the basement stairs. I begged that it wasn’t who I had a suspicion it was—the one person I did not want to see me like this. I could smell the Varathane from the plywood walls, and the Day-Glo orange of quarter-round trim and built-in furniture was burning my eyes. I was flat out on a gold, rust-red, blue-and-green checked bed cover. This was going to be a nightmare. My mother entered the room, but she wouldn’t look at me. “You’re just like Danny,” was the first thing out of her mouth. “I could smell the stench of booze at the bottom of the stairs.” Then she shot me a look. Her face was scrunched like someone who realized they might have dog shit on their shoes.
One thing my mother knew was how to shame someone. From where I was lying, she seemed to hover over my feet. Short and a little stumpy, she still had a full head of hair, which had always been permed neatly to neck length, but I could see the grey streaks she couldn’t hide anymore, even when she tried to dye it black. Who the hell was Danny?
“Who’s Danny?”
“I don’t know why, but your father always thought you were the brightest.”
Really? That’s a revelation.
“But I have always known you weren’t any good.”
That wasn’t.
Travelling downtown Hastings Street was like navigating a churning river running east to a confluence of human misery at the intersection of Main and Hastings. The city had always divided itself there into east and west sides. I was coming from the west side, where I grew up, to my east-side basement apartment, where I moved when I returned from living in the Maritimes. Initially, the street was lined with nicely kept office buildings and department stores. People were dressed decently and primarily middle class. As you went east, past the Woodward’s Department store, the street took on a darker hue of cheap bars, run-down single-occupancy hotels, and boarded derelict buildings. People were dressed raggedly and were down and out.
I liked sitting on the first transverse bench seat nearest the bus driver because I felt safer there. A few stops in, I heard a commotion in the back of the bus. I turned. It took a while to locate the source, but finally, I saw a man shouting at another passenger.
“Don’t you fucking look down your nose at me. Piss-ant asshole. I had a few drinks, but what makes you think you’re better?”
The loud passenger was drunk. He wore an old army coat, and his hair hung in a greying ponytail down his back.
“Quit starin’. Going to rip you another asshole if you keep starin’.” He started to reach across the aisle.
The other guy, a young man, was tall and thin. He kept trying to stare straight ahead and ignore the drunk. The drunk lunged at him, but he stood up quickly and brushed him off. His belligerent attacker fell face forward into the young guy’s seat and landed on his knees. The bus driver pulled over to the curb. All
heads were turned to focus on the action, with everybody riveted to see what might happen next. The tall, thin guy reached down and pulled his attacker up.
“You want to fight,” he said to the drunk who was now wobbling in the aisle. “Get—off—the—b-bus. Then I’ll fight. We’ll see who the real asshole is.”
When he said this, he stepped around the drunk and pushed the paddle to open the back door. He held the door open and motioned for the drunk to go first, even helping the drunk down out of the bus. Then, quick as anything, he stepped back and let the door paddle go, shutting it and leaving the obnoxious man standing like an idiot on the sidewalk. “Go, go!” he yelled at the driver. But the driver didn’t leave the curb. “Go!”
All the other passengers started clapping and laughing. I had to admit it was one swift move to avoid an obviously violent and dangerous scene. Much to everyone’s relief, the bus driver pulled away and left that dumbass standing dazed on the sidewalk.
A few blocks on, the bus driver started to pull over for a stop. He braked and honked his horn. I looked to see what was holding the driver up. On the curb, I saw one massive hammered man sitting in front of the bus. Unbelievably, there were two tanked-up incidents at two consecutive stops. The bus driver honked his horn again. The guy turned and seemed to swear at the bus driver. The driver honked again. The man stood up. He was over six feet and about 275 pounds. His torso, with a colossal chest and belly, looked like a beer barrel. His face looked like the head of a bull. He walked towards the bus, and when he got close, he punched it right on the nose.
I almost died laughing. It was like that scene in the Mel Brooks classic Blazing Saddles when the murderous Mongo punches the tenderfoot’s horse and the horse with the rider keels over on the ground. Only this time, our Mongo fell over on the sidewalk, holding his fist and screaming. Mongo was out of the way, and the driver took the opportunity to drive away. Of course, the passengers who wanted to deboard weren’t too happy and started to curse the driver. I found myself in a slapstick comedy. My mother’s earlier conversation only added to its absurdity.
Irecalled how my mother continued with me that morning after saying I wasn’t any good. I was right back in it. She’d said, “I never told you about my father, have I? He made me sick to my stomach.”
Nobody ever talked about our grandparents. Never.
“There’d be him at the back of the bus on my way home from school and me with all my girlfriends. He’d be hanging on to his trumpet, coming home from band practice, and spending an afternoon in the soldier’s mess drinking.”
A grandfather who played the trumpet. Now, that impressed me. If you’re around long enough, you learn something every day.
“He’d be singing one of his Irish ditties drunkenly. It was so embarrassing. Sometimes, he would even vomit because he was so drunk. How do you think that made me feel?”
Finally, the truth of why my mom treated me so distantly. I reminded her of her father. It was all too sad, and I wanted to tell her I wasn’t anything like that, but I knew something was wrong with me. I had always known. If truth be told, I was more like her, often down and distant. Like her, I found it hard to form close relationships and was prone to mood swings.
Because I was never a good college student and not one who liked authority or discipline, I started drinking heavily while in the Coast Guard College. Booze was cheap and readily available in the officer’s mess. Since my career as a navigator faltered and I returned home feeling like a failure, I found myself getting drunk more and more. Lately, when I drank, like the night before, I blacked out.
“Your father wants you to join us for lunch.”
She spun and left.
I could smell the booze emanating from my pores. It smelt distinctly like Southern Comfort. How much had I drunk? I was sleeping in my street clothes. I sat up and lowered my feet to the cheap blue Berber carpet. The stiffness of the cement floor under it was precisely how I felt. I’d be damned if I joined them for lunch because I could not face one of my father’s judgmental adages. I imagined what he’d say at this moment: “It’s a good life if you don’t weaken.”
After failing as a marine officer in the coast guard—because I got seasick and seriously lacked seamanship skills—I knew that it would make him happy when I returned and enrolled in tech college. However, after my mother dissed me with her disgusted eyes, I could not take any more approbation.
My jacket lay crumpled on the floor. I picked it up, and I got a whiff of Southern Comfort–tinged vomit. I put it on anyway and headed for the back basement door.
Passing my younger brother’s bedroom door, I noticed him at his desk doing homework. I needed to know what happened. I stepped in.
He looked up at me and smirked.
“Can you tell me what happened last night?”
“You don’t remember.”
“Sort of. A bit. I want to make sure.”
“Your friend brought you to the back door and knocked. I thought ….”
He didn’t finish.
“What friend?”
“I think his name is Gabriel. The guy used to come here to pick you up on his motorcycle. I think it was a 550 Triumph.”
Memories. Good memories filled my head. I smiled. God, we used to bomb around town with me on the back hanging on for dear life. I was pretty large, and I always wondered why he picked me for those rides.
Did I even talk to the guy?
“Did he say anything?”
“He said you passed out on the Broadway bus bench.”
I remembered drinking the Southern Comfort on the beach, but nothing after that. “Right, I got to go.”
“Don’t drink so much,” my little brother counselled.
“I won’t.”
I left quietly, opening the door and checking if anyone was outside before I slipped into the garage and out to the lane.
What preceded this bout of drinking was I failed my first exam at college—a physics exam. I thought I’d be okay because I had previously done college physics while training as an officer at the Coast Guard College. I probably killed off all those memory cells because I drank heavily while out at sea and the officer’s mess was always open. If last night was any indication, I was still drinking too much, even if I had promised myself I’d quit when I came back to Vancouver from the Maritimes. Blacking out like last night was becoming more frequent.
After two incidents aboard, Bus #14 passengers arrived at the darker part of its run. This started as we passed the Only Seafood Restaurant, which was still famous for its excellent fish and chips. People would brave this part of Hastings and eat there, sometimes lining up around the block to get in. The local paper wrote that the small “seafood-only” cafe was where you could find the downtrodden dining beside the well-todo, chowing down on clam chowder, Alaska cod, and salmon fried in the house specialty: lemon butter. Even the famous Liberace and one of our prime ministers had eaten there.
At the next stop, the front doors opened, and two very large and boisterous women got on. The first one began to plead with the driver to take them for free because they lacked “bread” to pay the fare. While she was doing this, her friend behind her dropped what turned out to be a bottle of vodka, shattering it. The alcohol fumes wafting from the street and off their clothes filled my olfactory senses with a sickly, heavy, sweet smell that I liked and knew well.
The first one turned laughing. “Katie, what the hell. You’re so drunk.”
“No’m not. You’re more drunk than me.”
“The bus driver’s going to kick us off. Act like a lady.”
“Ladies, get in. Let’s get going,” said the driver.
I guess the driver felt they were harmless enough.
“Thank you,” they echoed.
They swung on the bus and plunked themselves on the longitudinal bench before me.
“Sally, we need more booze. God, where we going ” There was a pause for a boozy burp. “To get another bottle?”
“Dunno,” said Sally. “Do we have more bread for it?”
“Do you have any?” asked Katie.
Sally pulled the pockets out of her jeans.
“Naw. We can ….”
“No way, I’m not doing that again.”
“No stupid, not that. We’ll find Alexander. He’s working now and he’ll probably have something,” Katie said.
She laughed and turned to survey the rest of the bus, letting her eyes come to rest on me. She gave me one big-ass smile, which I tried to deflect by looking away at my fellow passengers. She pulled on Sally’s sleeve and nodded toward me.
Looking back at me, she said, “There’s my prince, Sally. My prince, Sally. Ain’t he cute? Sunny boy, I’m goin’ tuh marry you.”
I tried to look anywhere else but at this large drunk woman. She and her friend broke into peals of laughter.
“Katie, come ’on. Leave the boy alone. He’s not going to buy us booze.”
“No, no. I’m serious. He’s going to be my boyfriend.”
She slid over on the bench, onto my lap, and grabbed my head. She began to kiss me, tongue, and all. This is the strange part. I didn’t care. No, I was enjoying myself as much as she, vodka breath notwithstanding. She pulled back laughing, and I started laughing.
“You goin’ tuh marry me?”
With her dark hair and dark eyes, except for being so large and weighing a ton sitting on my lap, I thought she was quite beautiful.
The bus pulled to a stop. We were on the east side of Main now.
“Ladies, I’m going to have to ask you to get off,” the bus driver called back. “You can’t go bothering my riders.”
Sally was trying to pull Katie off me, who was kissing me with slobbery kisses all over my face.
“Katie, we’re going to get in trouble.”
Katie stood up but tried to grab my hand, which I quickly sat on.
“Come on honey, we’ll get a bottle and get drunk-married. You ’n me.”
Sally pulled her to the bus door.
“You’re my prince, baby, and I’m your princess. Forever.”
The bus driver closed his doors and pulled away from one more set of down and outers. Maybe I should have gone with her.
The rain had started to fall, lining the bus windows with those heavy drops that fell obliquely across the pane. Suddenly, the bus’s air brakes hissed to a halt on East Hastings, bringing me up short. I looked out to see what had occurred to cause the sudden brake. It was nothing but a traffic light. I looked out the window and realized I had missed my stop two stops before. Shit. I would be soaked by the time I walked back home. I pulled the buzzer to get off.
Out on the sidewalk, the cold sting of the rain made me shiver, and I started to take long strides home. I was dripping wet by the time I got there. When I got around to the side of my house, my basement door was kicked in. Terrified, I listened. Somebody was in there.
I looked over to my roommate’s parking spot, which was empty. I pushed the damaged door open and glanced left to my bedroom in time to catch two feet shimmying out my window. I said something like, “You fuck, get the hell out of my house,” and rushed into my room, hoping to catch the intruder. Of course, had I, I didn’t know what I’d do. There was no need to face that difficulty because the burglar was long gone when I got to the window.
I was angry and feeling personally affronted. Now, it all added up. Life was a complete shit show. I looked around. My mattress was pushed off its bed frame, and all the sheets were tangled around it. The contents of my top drawer had been dumped on top of the dresser, and the thief had thrown the drawer on the floor. I looked at my precious nothing. For fucksake, I was a poor student. The only thing of value, to me anyway, was my penny collection, which was strewn about the dresser top. It was meaningless. Did this asshole think he was going to become rich with my stupid pennies? I started to sob. I pushed my mattress back on its frame and sat down. I wept into a sullen silence and looked out the window, watching the heavy raindrops spatter mud on the sill.
I heard my roommate’s car pull up out back. I knew because he had a big ’70s Olds with no muffler. Jackson was a piece of work. He was a pack-a-day, cowboybooted Calgarian with a permanent three-day stubble. He always arrived home from med school with a sixpack of Blue, which he finished each evening in front of the TV. This was after he’d been at his favourite strip club on the way home from UBC. He stopped at the No. 5 or the Drake for about an hour after lectures and labs. When he got home, his usual routine was to heat up a frozen dinner, crack open a warm beer, sit on the couch, light a cigarette, put his feet on the coffee table,
watch sports, and drink until he passed out. I don’t know if he slept like that all night long. I’d turn the TV off when I woke to go to the can, but he’d be long gone when I woke in the morning. Once, I asked him how he managed to get by in medical school and drink so hard.
He smiled and said, “Photographic memory.”
I went out to tell him we had been broken into, but it didn’t even phase him.
“It’s to be expected,” was all he said.
“Yeah, but aren’t you worried about your stuff?”
“What stuff? TV’s still here. The only other thing I care about are my textbooks, and I keep those in the trunk of the car.”
I turned to the kicked-in door.
“That? I already called the landlord, and he’ll be over to fix it.”
He was one cool cucumber, my roommate.
“Wanna beer? Watch the Stamps play the Roughies with me.”
He always wanted me to have a beer and watch sports with him so he could extoll the wonders of Leanne, his favourite stripper.
“Naw.”
“Suit yourself.”
I returned to my room and looked around my tossed post-burglary bedroom. What a fucking mess. I picked up a cassette tape. Bob Marley. Cool. I popped it into my boom box and tried to remember where I’d stashed a joint. I opened my desk drawer and shuffled everything until I found it hiding at the back. I picked it up, but as I did, the vision of Jackson drinking beer with his feet up came to mind. TV and beer, was that it? Was that how it ended, drunk in front of a screen?
I put the joint down. Bob Marley sang, asking us to join him in singing redemption songs, songs of freedom. My physics text lay unopened on my desk. I sat down with a smile, opened the first chapter, and began to read. Power in Watts (W) equals Energy in Volts (V) times Current in Amperes (I).
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[INTERVIEW]
SHASHI BHAT: MAKING MOMENTS MATTER
HLR EDITOR D.D. MILLER TALKS WITH SHASHI BHAT ABOUT BODIES, EXPECTATIONS, AND THE ENDURING POWER OF THE SHORT STORY
PHOTO CREDIT: OLIVIA LI
In “Dealbreaker,” the opening story of Shashi Bhat’s exceptional collection Death by a Thousand Cuts, we are introduced to Asha, a “thirty-seven-year-old woman who does not want kids, but she does want a serious relationship.” Swiping through a dating app, Asha comes upon a man “with a goofy, open-mouthed smile.” His outdoorsyness, his travels, and the fact that he came across as “Indian but no so Indian that you can’t relate to [him]” make him an “acceptable” match. They date, and despite obvious differences—she’s serious, studious, and thoughtful; he’s boisterous and aloof—they seem to be making progress. There is, however, something ominous lurking at the fringes of their interactions, a tension created by Asha’s uncertainty and her date’s unpredictability. The story makes an abrupt, chilling shift when he confronts her about her not wanting children. “Motherhood just isn’t for me,” she says, prompting him to lean into her and utter, “Don’t worry, I’ll put a baby in you.”
He becomes physical in the car ride home, tickling her in an increasingly aggressive manner. She eventually gets him to stop and gets away, ending things, and is then forced to block him after he becomes aggressive in texts. The story ends with Asha back on the app, swiping right on a profile that becomes a match, giving her “a rush of hope so sharp it felt like violence.” It is an unsettling conclusion, indicative of so many of the endings in Death from a Thousand Cuts.
“Dealbreaker” captures much of what the collection is about, so much so that it acts like a guide for how to read the book. Bhat acknowledges the intention behind this, citing short-story writer Danielle Evans as inspiration, who, in an interview with Fiction Writers Review, said the opening story should “contain the collection in miniature in some way.” The themes of independence, work-life balance, consent, and bodily autonomy—the struggles and absurdities of modern partnering—are all laid out so explicitly in “Dealbreaker” that the stories that follow feel perfectly aligned.
On his website The Shakesperean Rag, critic Steven Beattie referred to this collection as “resolutely, almost defiantly contemporary” with its focus on online dating and COVID-19 lockdowns and its reference to Reddit forums. “I’ve been telling everyone that,” Bhat says in appreciation of the description. “I feel like it’s just so accurate.” And in the sense that the book does not shy away from these trappings of contemporary life, it is undeniably true, but the collection’s ultimate strength is in the timelessness of its subject matter. Those themes of women’s bodies under threat, of the struggle to connect and to partner, of the persistence of microaggressions, of the often-complicated process of defining and refining ourselves as we age, are the
reasons why the collection will endure after this most recent pandemic is succeeded by the next and old social media platforms make way for new ones.
“Ithink I’ve probably spent more time thinking about short stories than maybe anything else except food,” Bhat admits. “So much of my life is spent thinking about stories,” she continues. “It’s my day job to teach how to write stories [… and] as editor of a literary magazine [Event], I probably read more short stories than anything else; they’re just constantly on my mind.”
Shashi Bhat has devoted her life to the craft of shortstory writing in a way that few contemporary writers do. She’s been nominated for a National Magazine Award, has published widely in journals on both sides of the border, and has had numerous stories appear in Best Canadian Stories and Journey Prize anthologies (including winning the prize in 2018). Plus, she teaches short-story writing at Douglas College in suburban Vancouver. Given all this, it might seem strange that this third book, Death by a Thousand Cuts, is her first collection. Her first two books, 2013’s The Family Took Shape (Cormorant) and its acclaimed follow-up, The Most Precious Substance on Earth (M&S, 2021), were packaged, marketed, and celebrated as novels.
“I think both my novels are really novels in stories,” she explains. “With the first one, I don’t think I realized that [at first].” The first chapter of The Family Took Shape began as a short story that she wrote for a class. “And then I took a class [on] the novella, and we had three weeks to write [one]. So, I just wrote three short stories and then it kept growing and became a novel,” Bhat says.
The second novel also started as a short story, or series of short stories. “With my second book, I knew it was a novel in stories,” she says. “It developed in a similar way where I was writing stories and realized they could all be the same character. But I think almost every story, every chapter in that book is also a standalone short story, and I published them in magazines as short stories, and that’s how I pitched it to my agent.” Although she says she was ultimately fine with the publisher’s wish to call it a novel, she also thinks it “throws readers off a little bit when they reach the end of the a chapter and it has that unsettling short-story ending.”
“I think I see things through the lens of ‘could this be a short story?’ Which helps me process experiences too. Like even the other day I had coffee with my high school band teacher just because I’m in town and it was such an interesting conversation that I was like, Oh, I wish I could write about this,” she describes with a bit of a laugh. Then she becomes a little more contemplative. “Sometimes it maybe even distances me from things that I’m experiencing because I’m thinking about it that way,” she says. “And I think short stories make moments matter. Like, I wonder if I had never read or written any short stories at all, would I notice the things that I notice?”
Part of our conversation occurs while she is in her childhood home in Richmond Hill just on the northern edge of the GTA, where Bhat is visiting her parents and nurturing those connections with former secondary-school teachers. It’s fall and festival season, and she’s in the midst of city-hopping to tour the book. When we first spoke, she was in a hotel room in Victoria and has since been in Calgary too. She’ll be heading to Halifax for the Afterwords Literary Festival after we speak this final time.
While most contemporary writers see the short story as a necessary stop along the way to writing longer works of fiction, Bhat is thoughtful about the differences between the forms and is articulate about what it is that draws her to the short story: it’s about what the story can do that the novel can’t.
“Withholding is something I love about short stories and the tension that comes from that,” she says. “What I think distinguishes it from the novel, is its shape and how the narrative arc gets heightened
and compressed because it’s in a small space. A novel meanders and goes in these different directions, and you can do that to some extent with a short story, but in my head, you always have to have the focus on the arc and there’s a momentum that comes from that.”
She describes telling her students that with a novel you have a full narrative arc that extends to a definitive conclusion. “You get the resolution, the winding down,” she explains. “Whereas in a short story, you end up in a place of irresolution. I think that creates extraordinary opportunity for emotional impact.” She pauses as if questioning herself, but then concludes, “Yeah, I think the ending is what draws me most to the short story.”
Given this deep appreciation and consideration of the form, it’s fascinating that her first two books began as stories before being reshaped or packaged as novels. When asked what it was about the stories in the current book that made them remain as such, she says bluntly, “Some of them are just a little too weird to sustain over the length of a novel. There’s a weird intensity to some of them […] or [some] are more about moments and small experiences” that didn’t necessarily lend themselves to larger investigations. It may also be true that many of the stories in the collection simply don’t need expansion. They are complete in themselves.
Interestingly, the story “Giantess” seems on the surface the most different from the others, yet it may be the story that explores the themes most explicitly. The story is about Genevieve, a giantess librarian, and it details how “she is careful” with the difficulties of navigating a giant body around a space known for silence: “She wears rubber-soled shoes to minimize the sounds of her steps”; “she never cracks her enormous knuckles”; and “when she speaks, she whispers.” The themes of work-life, of yearning for connection, of isolation and independence are all there, but then there is also the body. This story, Bhat explains, “is about a woman afraid of taking up space.”
If there is a single theme that pervades the book, it is an examination of the body and women’s relationships to their bodies, more specifically. Bhat herself says that the collection is “about the everyday horrors and isolation of being a woman and having a body.” Sometimes this is literal, like in “Giantess” (which started as a story featuring a male protagonist); other times it is expressed through resistance to an unwanted touch (like in “Dealbreaker” or “Am I the Asshole” where a boyfriend continues to randomly grope his girlfriend’s breasts despite her telling him not to). But other times it is more explicit: in “Chicken & Egg” a young woman’s hair is inexplicably falling out and her doctor does not
take her or her concerns seriously. Then, in “We’re All in This Alone,” the protagonist finds the perfect partner, only to discover that his touch reignites a chronic illness she’s been dealing with her whole life. In this story, the character proclaims that “the body is an unreliable narrator,” explaining “why you can’t trust the body” before recounting her life’s challenge with her illness. “Have you ever witnessed an illness sweep through a body?” the narrator asks. “Not a simple infection, but an illness with the potential to cause severe damage, and with no foreseeable end. It feels like you are rotting. Like you are a piece of rotting fruit.”
The discussion of the body and its relationship to the characters in the book is complex. There is a tension on the surface between explorations of the various ways bodies fail us and the idea that the body and bodily autonomy must be protected. Bhat doesn’t dismiss the idea of this particular tension, but it’s not something she was necessarily conscious of either. “It’s funny, I guess I was thinking about what themes hold together this collection, and I had stories about the body because I’ve been dealing with chronic illness for most of my life, so it’s just something I think about a lot: that lack of control we have over it.”
Bhat makes another connection as well, a more personal one as someone who herself has lived with chronic illness. “I guess in treating chronic illness, you are in a way trying to protect the body or get ahead of it. And the same is true often when you’re a woman,” she says. “I guess that’s where bodily autonomy comes into it. And just the fact that your body can make you a target and your identity is so tied up in your body.” She also confirms that the attack on women’s right to choose is wrapped up in this exploration, and there are women in the story who are unapologetic about their choice to not have children.
The title story of the collection deals with duelling body-issue narratives. In it, the South Asian narrator is horrified by her partner Alex’s webbed toes, terrified that (like some chronic illnesses or conditions) it could be passed on to any potential offspring: “What a mutant,” she admits to thinking the first time she saw them (also noting how beautiful her own feet are in contrast). But when her father says that Alex is too handsome for her, she concludes that it must be because of his striking blue eyes (notably from a recessive gene that would lose out to her brown eyes). Alex’s off-hand remark that she “would look fantastic with blue eyes” sends her off to research eye-colour and blue eyes in particular, discovering a company that can change eye colour, which she obsesses over even after she and Alex break up. The story ends with her imagining what would happen if someone from the company called
her: “What if the call arrives at my exact moment of weakness? What wound will she inflict? What answer will I give?”
Given the prevalence of the theme, the reader can’t help but consider their own relationship with their body, particularly through the second-person story “Chicken & Egg,” the third in the collection. It opens with “your body” in a yoga pose, then after the session is done, while showering, “you glance down and see a slender claw reaching through the water towards your feet. You vault over the side of the tub and fumble for your glasses. No—not a claw, but a dense twist of our own hair sliding into the drain, a snarl of skin cells and grime.” Here the reader can’t help but be implicated in the anxieties around the body; it is an unreliable narrator that can’t be trusted. It’s failing us but also must be protected.
Bhat acknowledges the conscious decision to shift this story’s point of view to the potentially “off-putting” second person. “I wanted that story to be a kind of nightmare story about dealing with chronic illness, searching for answers, and then navigating the healthcare system as a woman.” The initial drafts experimented with first- and third-person points of
“I guess in treating chronic illness, you are in a way trying to protect the body or get ahead of it. And the same is true often when you’re a woman.”
view. “Then I tried second and that’s when it clicked because now the reader is in that position and having to feel the horror,” Bhat says. “Second person made it uncomfortable in a way I was aiming for.”
It is an incredibly effective use of the second person, a point of view that can often come across as contrived or alienating. If anything, the impact here is the opposite: it feels organic and inclusive.
Bhat handles issues of identity in her writing subtly and without cliché. She is a South Asian writer in that her family’s heritage is South Asian and many of the stories feature characters (at least judging by their names) who are South Asian, but beyond that, identity is not something she’s necessarily interested in writing about in a way that might fit with expectations. “Some-
times I see reviews or in interviews people say like, oh, you write about South Asian women or like all your characters are South Asian. And then I have to think, are they? I don’t think they actually are, but I think people make that assumption. I think maybe a little more than half of the characters are actually identified as South Asian in my book.”
Not that she doesn’t think a character’s identity is important and can be critical in character development. Due to this, she laments the lack of specific identity in a lot of the writing by students in her fiction classes, noting that many students of colour end up defaulting to “raceless characters” with white-sounding North American names.
“Last year I had a student who was writing about his Punjabi Sikh background,” she begins as way of explanation, “and I think that’s when I realized that a lot of students weren’t doing that. I was so delighted by it.” But, she’s quick to add, “he wasn’t doing it in a way that was cliché.”
“When it turned dark, I heard this woman in the audience gasp and say, ’Oh, no,’ and it was just the best feeling.”
She understands the impulse though and explains that she too used to unconsciously write “default white characters” when she was young, which is understandable when you grow up in a Canadian suburb and are raised on North American fiction. It was a professor in one of her undergrad fiction workshops at Cornell who finally snapped her out of it. “I was writing all these stories about people who demographically were not like me,” she explains, “but he says ‘I’d sure like to see you write about something you care about,’ and I don’t know if he was talking about identity, but now that’s the way the comment hits me.”
There is a fine line to this, however, and one that Bhat has found a way to balance. “I went from first putting no Indian culture in my stories to then putting all the Indian culture in my stories in a way that was expected,” she admits, saying that now it’s simply a facet of the character’s identity. “I’m interested in the ways that people’s intercepting identities affect their experience in the world. So I’ll have a character who’s
on an uncomfortable date, and more of the focus is on the way she’s been conditioned to behave as a woman.” Ultimately, she concludes, she wants to “accurately represent that character’s experience but not make it the whole story […] I think I’m now more conscious about how I write about culture, and I think I feel more freedom to not have to write to those expectations.”
Some of this may come from the fact that she deconstructed these expectations so well early on in her short-story writing career. The oldest story in the collection is “Indian Cooking,” which opens in a way that seems to satisfy clichéd expectations, when the ingredients for chakli are listed as the opening line. The expectations are quickly disrupted, however, when the narrator declares, “I hadn’t known these were the ingredients.” In the very next paragraph, the character explains that “chakli are what [her mother] makes when other Indians are visiting our house and she wants to convince them that we are still as Indian as they are. On other days, we eat Triscuits.”
Later, as the mother is frying the chakli, the cumin seeds which were mixed in the batter “must have swelled and burst in the heat of the oil, splashing her face.” The mother is disfigured enough that when the daughter sees her reflection in the mirror she thinks “that the mirror needs to be cleaned.” The obscuring of the mother’s once beautiful face is like a metaphorical obscuring of the expectations of discussions of identity that the story sets up in the opening.
What ends up being most instructive about Bhat’s writing from this early story is not the way she handles identity; rather, it’s the way that she is able to play with tone and particularly how humour and horror can intersect. The burned mother becomes morbidly funny about her disfigurement, though it’s an uncomfortable sort of humour, as dark humour so often is (the final scene of the story has her yelling “I’M A MONSTER” as she’s laughing, though it’s “a laugh that is pained and mangled”).
Bhat’s been quite open about her enjoyment of combining pathos and humour and the reader discomfort that can come from this. “I’m interested in tonal range,” she explains, noting that Bong Joon-ho’s celebrated Parasite is her favourite movie because it’s “the ultimate example of tonal range.” Perhaps what’s most fascinating about this, is that Bhat can cite the exact moment when she knew that this was the voice and tone that she wanted to explore in her writing, what she refers to as her stylistic “origin story.”
“I used to write more serious, descriptive, lyrical writing. I think I thought that’s what I was supposed to write like: serious literary fiction, which was emulating
a lot of the South Asian diaspora writers that I was reading at the time.” Then, while in grad school in Baltimore, Bhat did a reading at an event she knew was going to be full of pre-med undergrads, who, she assumed either didn’t read literary fiction or certainly wouldn’t have been in the mood for it. “So I wrote something that was funny. It was from a teenager’s point of view, had a bunch of pop culture references, and then I knew at some point I wanted it to turn into something dark and uncomfortably real.”
The story ended up becoming the opening chapter of The Most Precious Substance on Earth. It starts with a couple of teenage girls being teenage girls: doing homework, bantering, one joking with the other about her crush on her English teacher. “And when I was reading, I heard the audience laughing at my jokes, which is such a high,” she describes. The story shifts abruptly on a line that itself blends extraordinarily uncomfortable teen humour with very adult subject matter. “When it turned dark, I heard this woman in the audience gasp and say, ‘Oh, no,’ and it was just the best feeling. I was like, Oh, this is what I can do with fiction? I can make someone feel something,” Bhat recounts, her pleasure still evident all these years later. “And now I think that’s much more my style: balancing the dark with the humour.” She explains that it’s all about timing: “When do you twist the knife? I think you have to be so careful, especially given the kinds of themes and topics that I’m writing about. I don’t want it to seem like I’m joking about sexual assault, for example.”
This is something that she had to contend with directly in the final story in the collection, “Am I the Asshole.” It’s in this story that a boyfriend continuously grabs his girlfriend’s breasts. The beginning of the story is not funny exactly, but it’s light in tone, largely through the male character’s cluelessness; there’s a balancing act between pathos and humour established that begins to erode when we learn how often and for how long his groping has gone on for. Eventually he discovers that she’s written about him on a Reddit thread, r/AmItheAsshole, where people are left to debate who is at fault in various situations. Finally, it begins to dawn on him that what he is doing is wrong. The story takes one final turn when he admits that he sexually assaulted a passed-out woman in college, connecting his “harmless” groping to a pattern of non-consensual acts that date back years. At the beginning, it seems as if the story could go in a number of different directions, but when the truth is revealed, it becomes obvious that this is the only direction the story could have gone.
Bhat says she doesn’t really write from character nor is she all that concerned with plot. “I think I write from emotion; I think I write from feeling,” she says. “I start with the feeling and then it’s what people and situations will best deliver that feeling to the reader.” She also borrows from her life in a way that captures an emotional truth as opposed to a literal one (for example, her mother really did burn herself while cooking, which became the impetus for “Indian Cooking,” but she’s quick to note that her mother’s burn was not as serious and she didn’t handle it with the kind of nihilistic humour that the mother in the story did).
This balance between real life and emotional truth comes to a head in the story “Her Ex Writes a Novel.” The story features a very Shashi Bhat–like character coming to terms with the fact that her ex-boyfriend has written a novel that is reflective of their life together. The narrator at one point wonders, “Who is the woman in this book? A shadow self. It is her and not her.”
The story reads like autofiction, a form very much in vogue right now, but Bhat has been elusive when asked about the verisimilitude of the story, instead redirecting to the story’s more obvious fascination with metafiction (in response to the ex’s novel, the character writes a story called “Her Ex Writes a Novel”). “I really enjoy metafiction,” Bhat says. “I think it’s fun to write about storytelling, and how we do it and why we do it that way and the effect of it.” With “Her Ex Writes a Novel,” she explains that metafiction “naturally entered the story because I was trying to play with those assumptions that a reader would make that the story was true.” The style of the story is also different, more “expository,” she explains, than her typical style, and this departure helps play into the tension between the real and the maybe-not-so real.
Regardless of the veracity of the story, thematically and stylistically, it fits perfectly in the collection. The narrator’s feeling of helplessness that drives her obsession is just another side effect of the amassing aggressions (both micro and macro) that pervade each piece and build perniciously through the collection. “The title Death by a Thousand Cuts gets at something that exists in all of the stories,” Bhat explains. “Those small, accumulating harms that ultimately become devastating.”
And this is reflective of the reader’s journey as well. Each story on its own is filled with so much humour and insight that it’s only at the end when the accumulated devastation of what you’ve just experienced begins to sink in.
REVIEWS
SUKUN (NEW AND SELECTED POEMS)
By Kazim Ali (icehouse poetry)
Reviewed By Keith Garebian
Kazim Ali is a queer writer who was born in the UK to Muslim parents of Indian, Iranian, and Egyptian descent, a “constellation of identities” in the words of Anjali Vaidya. A prolific poet, editor, translator, and prose writer, Ali grew up in three countries (the UK, Canada, and America) and is a professor of poetry at the University of California (San Diego). His name, “Kazim,” means “patience,” and the title of his anthology is the Arabic word for “stillness” or “rest.” A reader needs to be patient with Ali’s poems because his ceaseless inquiry into the themes of identity, migration, home, and the intersections of cultural and spiritual traditions allow little mental stillness or rest.
A selection from seven poetry collections, Sukun is a mixed bag of forms. Ali emerges as a pilgrim wandering in several countries and landscapes, literal and psychic, in an ongoing quest for a spiritual space of enlightenment. Evidently steeped in various poetic traditions (Anglo-Saxon, Eastern, Elizabethan, modernist, etc.) and modes (measured confessional, ghazal, abecedarian, quatrain, floating singlet, elegy, etc.), Ali deliberately twists and fractures syntax in spirited homophonic wordplay, as in the anthology’s opening ternary: “Always instead this dealer / Of done deals of what’s / Done after dun plain / Grass wanting then to lie” (from “Prayer For Chasm”). Musical and tender at best, Ali does suffer from extravagance when he adopts mannerisms or imitates Gerard Manley Hopkins’s sprung rhythm. In these instances, he sounds obsessively narcotized: “The soul not the spirit breathes through / Spirited wend or wend why true / Weave wove we’ve woven” (“Golden Boy”). I have sacrificed some of the cleverness by not copying the visual layout of the lines, but my point is that Ali’s wordplay often seems to be on steroids—as it is even in later works. Take these lines, for instance, from “Good Boy” in Crib and Cage (2022):
Good boy for know enow I no I-land disappear in the aft oh brave
Noh whorl in the riven hand scriven
A ridge down which waves ruff
Aves spindle in the air spun the jour
A feast for devotees of Gertrude Stein or James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, and caviar to gluttonous academia
Overall, the anthology is rife with tensions between the poet’s religiousness and apostasy. Ali’s first collection, The Far Mosque (2005), moves between biblical and Qur’anic stories, provoking questions of comparative faiths, though the poet is not free of echoes of Hopkins (“Wonder well foundry, well sunborn, sundered and sound here / Well you be found here, foundered and found”) or of Rumi and his devoted friend Shams-e Tabrizi (“One day in the marketplace, estranged and weeping, / you will understand the farthest mosque is the one within”). The painterly minimalism and open field of the poems, with homages to mystics, other poets, painters, and queer victims are interesting, but the selection from this collection is not as rich as expected, and I missed the sense of a great meditative fire.
In Bright Felon (2009), Scripture and hadith (traditions of the prophet) reveal a veil “between what you want to see and cannot see, what you wish to have heard but did not hear.” This collection is a fraught, self-censoring queer autobiography—one marked by internal struggle, as a counterpoint to the secular and political battles of others (e.g., Emily Dickinson, the Bush-Powell Iraq war): “What is my war? Not the one you think.” The dominant form is the prose poem, which allows Ali more space and elasticity by which to indulge in montage and epigrammatic insight. The poems move backwards in time and geography from Marble Hill, New York, to Carlisle, Pennsylvania, while also extending retrospectively to Cairo, Paris, and Home (his metaphorical or spiritual place), where he feels welcomed by God despite being unclean and where he can practise patience—the very meaning of his first name.
The Fortieth Day (2008) is epistemological, where admissions of ignorance justify the assumption that questions can be more important than answers. There are splendid short lyrics and tone poems (“Sleep Door,” for instance), and in “Ramadan” a sense of mystery pervades meditation: “You are never going to know which night’s mouth is sacredly reciting / and which night’s recitation is secretly mere wind—.” “Perish” exemplifies Ali’s skill with enfolding one line of inquiry into another, though ultimately even prayerful poems cannot decree definitive poetic or philosophic closure. It would not be wrong to call Ali a formalist who knows his literary forms, but he also loves to experiment. Ali created the Hesperine form (mixing fluidity and breakage) for The Voice of Sheila Chandra (2020), just as in Silver Road (2018) he blurred genres by incorporating literary criticism, essay, memoir, and verse fragments. This collection constructs a complex narrative of the poet’s biography, while fusing historic voices with his own and stitching together recurring words, images, and concepts about identity and metaphysical truth. Here homophonic verse succeeds in transcending mere mannerism:
Kazim knot what you told me
not what I claimed not what stayed with me
naut what I was named
Ali shows how latent meanings can be embedded within words and sounds. In Sky Ward (2013), rhyme and homophone bridge gaps in meaning, while Ali expresses tensions between prayer and silence, void and profusion. On the one hand, there is express existential futility:
My time in the world Was only a gesture
My body a lonely stranger an ache I never knew
On the other, faith intervenes with significance: “Wisdom will not carry you skyward / Your own body is the only mosque you need.” This utterance provokes silent meditation not only about Ali’s spiritual conviction but also his literary versatility, which eschews narrative hierarchy in favour of an interrelation among musical sound, poetic rhythm, and contemplative silence.
THE BOULEVARD
By
Jerrod Edson (Galleon Books)
Reviewed by Margo LaPierre
God is coming in Jerrod Edson’s The Boulevard When Satan’s office receives an email announcing that God is ending his absenteeism and coming down to visit, consternation ensues. Hell’s Boulevard, a work of beauty and defiance, covered in murals so vibrant they illuminate hell and make existence there bearable, must be renovated, every hopeful hue eradicated. Accompanied by his demons Mr. Gregory and Mr. Graves, Satan journeys plushily on his private train car traversing hell, seated near fellow travellers Ernest Hemingway and Jean Rhys (romantically involved post-death). Hemingway and Lucifer give Rhys the boot—Hemingway plans to meet up with her later. How I adore being a fly on the wall for the conversation between Edson’s Lucifer and Hemingway, gleaning insight from the latter’s musings, which inform the novel as a whole: “Writing and painting are the same once you peel away the gloss. When I write of a writer or a painter, they’re both the same character” (p. 55).
In the frame narrative of Edson’s fabulist historical novel, Satan tells Hemingway, while they travel to see Vincent Van Gogh in hell’s foothills, about how he and the demons were disfigured under God’s guillotine and ejected from heaven for smuggling flowers from earth. There are to be no flowers in heaven or hell. In lively, voice-y dialogue, Satan tells Hemingway of the project he led for several centuries to “commission” a human artist to beautify hell and bring light to the underworld with their brushstrokes. Satan’s power is possession: he can inhabit any living being to observe and influence those whose talent he seeks to corral for his purposes. Satan visits Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Monet (interestingly, too perceptive for Satan), and in the swirl of the 1886 Parisian arts scene, Van Gogh.
The Devil’s greatest flaw? He’s a coward, though dignified and well-meaning. And his new, fastapproaching future promises two of the most daunting confrontations since he lost his wings. The stress of it, it seems, might kill him. He’s sick and getting sicker, but at least he’s got his medicine.
The Boulevard closely examines artistic process and collaboration. Some of my favourite moments were the scenes in which the artists argue about whether to work from memory, how an artist should live and which art scene will best benefit the work, whose work is selling and whose isn’t, and how much and what colours to use. There’s so much camaraderie, rivalry, and passion in these pages. The social realities and individual quirks jump off the page as the painters rib Gauguin for abandoning his children and Seurat for living with his mother. Edson shows, in deft scene-work and inspired dialogue, one of the greatest truths about art making: creativity is ratcheted forward through collaboration and working within community, with peers who are unafraid to challenge us.
The challenges Satan sets for Van Gogh go beyond that. At risk of spoilers, I won’t say more. What I will say is that as a person who lives with the same illness as Van Gogh—bipolar disorder, then called la folie
circulaire—I found Edson’s depiction of the disorder accurate and validating. Edson shows the way depression can literally dim the eyesight, leeching colour, and the way every mania, every “insanity,” holds to a truth that can’t be denied. Van Gogh dips into great frustration and psychosis while always maintaining the grumpy, buzzy undertone of la tristesse. Yet even at his least stable, he is respected, beloved, and cared for. Edson’s approach to suicidality on the page is profound, affectively true, and never sensationalized: “By the time he’d set up his easel the clouds had taken over the sky and a brisk summer wind swept across the field in gusts and made waves in the wheat. Vincent worked through this, changing his palette to match what he saw—more black, and darker blues” (p. 199).
I enjoyed the late-1800s Van Gogh story in Montmartre as much as I did the framing story in (presumably) present-day hell. Some scenes in hell (Bukowski getting kicked out of a bar) get a laugh, while others (a living dahlia difficultly sourced) make me grateful to be alive on earth with its sensory delights, take my dog for a walk, smell the flowers.
My only gripe with the novel is not with the author but the publisher; the copyediting is rather hairy, with a number of typos, misspellings, and punctuation and formatting issues. I recognize the budgetary and time constraints that limit independent presses, as well as Galleon Books’s print-on-demand model, without staff or government funding. My hope is that the novel will go into at least one subsequent printing and that Galleon will opt to hire a copy editor for another pass to match Edson’s care and artistry.
Above all, this is a novel about beauty and the risks that artists are willing to take to create it. The Boulevard is as smart, funny, and entertaining as the similarly themed film Midnight in Paris, and it comes without the Woody Allen stink.
COMRADE PAPA
By GauZ’ (Biblioasis)
Reviewed by Marcie McCauley
GauZ’ is a sliver of this author’s tribal name, “Gauzorro,” bestowed by his grandmother, the person who sparked his thinking about Africanness, language, and storytelling. GauZ’’s second novel, Comrade Papa , presents kaleidoscopic fragments that invite readers to query personal and political mythologies and understand the relationship between past and present.
His first novel, Standing Heavy (2014), was shortlisted for the 2023 International Booker Prize, with Frank Wynne’s English translation winning the Scott Moncrieff Prize. Wynne translated this second novel as well, with Comrade Papa winning the 2018 Grand prix d’Afrique. Both novels present a broad cast of characters whose experiences are distinct but reverberate to highlight ideas about alienation and identity, exploitation and exploration.
The men standing in place, burdened by boredom and necessity, are Ivorian men working as security guards in France. GauZ’ spoke in an interview with Biblioasis about how his family members’ work in that sector differed from his because of the trade’s historical evolution. This sensitivity to micro- and macro-scale experiences ensures the author’s storytelling is layered, rich, and complex.
Comrade Papa also recognizes patterns, alignments and divergences across time and space. In the first dozen pages, readers receive a colonial history of Côte d’Ivoire, a vivid shoreline scene from 1893 wherein the French regime triumphs, and a portrait of a working-class boy in Amsterdam walking to school with Comrade Papa nearly a century later. Readers shift in time again in the next dozen pages, where the focus changes to an orphaned boy in Alsace who finds work on a ship travelling to Africa.
The cross-century narrators situate the reader in a colonial context, purposefully but precariously.
Brief segments in a contrasting font display additional perspectives: some vivid and intense scenes showcasing the author’s screen-writing skills, with some pseudo-historical documents and records in elevated language. It’s perpetual motion, like travelling by train: “Outside, the countryside is still flashing past, inside Comrade Papa is still dashing forward.”
The novel’s structure reflects the process of assembling truth and the ever-shifting power struggles of colonialism: “One additional barrel of gunpowder and he would lower one flag and hoist another in its place.”
But although GauZ’ presents a disorderly structure and disrupts characterization, his authorial voice roots readers in intelligence and humour.
Like North American writers Paul Beatty, Ishmael Reed, and Thomas King, and as in novels like Mateo Askaripour’s Black Buck and Percival Everett’s Erasure, GauZ’ unites edification with entertainment in his storytelling. Readers, for instance, join one young narrator and Yolanda, who cares for him at home when Comrade Papa is preoccupied by revolutionary activities. A humorous, light-hearted scene, in which one of Yolanda’s “gentleman’s all-sorts” manages to “escape from her flowery blouse,” is followed by a tender moment, in the context of her storytelling about “Boni-Marron” ancestors, wherein each presses four fingers flat against their own heart and then the other’s.
One source of comedy is the examination of political allegiance from the perspective of a dutiful son—“a champion of class warfare” who faces off with the school bully. Where a ticket inspector is “a lackey Sick O’Phant of big capitalism,” Adolph runs with “his gang of swas-stickers,” and an obsession with tulips permanently affects the “stalk market.”
Also amusing are relationships between individuals with contrasting (sometimes conflicting) interests: “In a single day’s walk, you encounter various ethnic groups who understand each other about as well as a church-yard pigeon understands a priest.” Where secondary characters “regularly come close to fisticuffs”
but modulate the underlying tension with their “shared loathing of the British.”
GauZ’ combines puns, humorous imagery, and whimsical word selection with other wordplay throughout. The chef is christened Cébon (“C’est bon” mirroring the response of his satisfied consumers). Another character whose layers unfold throughout the novel is revealed to be “Anouman” (a new man). Another is named Amédée (sounding like “aime” and “idée,” a quiet celebration of theories that are easier to adore than practice).
Simmering beneath all this playfulness, however, are critiques and queries, as when GauZ’ probes the concept of exploration—“You have discovered nothing; you have arrived uninvited”—or the underpinnings of empire—“Goods are enduring colonists.” Whether mythologizing a parent or a “nation,” narrative reflects belonging and selfhood, “home” and “away.” GauZ’ invites readers to shatter the glass, study the remains, and recreate a whole that tells another kind of story— about how people come into the world and coexist. And, most importantly, he reminds us that we learn to understand one another by sharing—not only ideas but also laughter.
FRASER MACPHERSON:
i don ’ t have to go anywhere – i ’ m already here
By Guy MacPherson (Cellar Music Group)
Reviewed by Andrew
Scott
If jazz history stands alongside popular music’s tales of salaciousness in open strings as a lost history, then let’s call Canadian jazz history the double lost. Books exploring the rich but often underacknowledged tradition of jazz north are few and far between, and given the fact that the titular saxophonist was an understated individual who seemed to lack the self-promoting gene, the forgottenness of this important bit of Canadian musical history seems all but guaranteed. But,
thanks to the efforts of Guy MacPherson, son of “Fras” (rhymes with jazz) as he was widely known, this is not the case. Released as the first book on Cory Weeds’s Cellar Music Group’s publishing arm (full disclosure: I record music for Cellar and consider Weeds a friend), I Don’t Have to Go Anywhere – I’m Already Here is a welcome addition to the canon of Canadian jazz research and would make an easy shelf mate with any of the contributions from Mark Miller, Jack Chambers, and Jack Litchfield.
Fras is an unlikely subject for a meticulously researched, nearly 400-page biography, not just because most Canadian jazz players lack a significant profile. Even among this country’s many accomplished but understated musicians, MacPherson was famously subdued, with his radio-ready baritone voice exuding none of the self-aggrandizing boastfulness that is de rigueur if one hopes for career success beyond the jazz cognoscenti. In one of the many quotable notables that pepper the book, we learn that for MacPherson, there was “no prize for being first.” Whether he was talking about his enviable laid-back eighth-note time feel or his approach to life hardly matters. There was a supreme congruence.
Born in Saint Boniface, Manitoba, but raised in the Fairfield neighbourhood of Victoria, British Columbia, MacPherson grew up during Canada’s prosperous interbellum years, playing music for dancers up and down Vancouver Island before studying commerce at university. If recordings and collegial jam sessions were what first stoked a teenaged MacPherson’s interest in jazz, a 1945 performance of Norman Granz’s Jazz at the Philharmonic—making its only Canadian stop in unlikely Victoria—sealed the deal. Arguably the lessons learned from hearing such American jazz royalty as Roy Eldridge, Lucky Thompson, Thelonious Monk, and, perhaps most meaningfully, fellow tenorsaxophonist Coleman Hawkins, would last a lifetime.
In many ways, this book is as valuable for what it captures about a nascent West Coast Canadian jazz
scene—filled with such important figures as PJ Perry, Don Thompson, Chris Gage, Terry Clarke, and Phil Nimmons, and jazz haunts such as Mandarin Gardens, the Palomar, and the Cave Supper Club, where Fras led the house band—as for what it illuminates about MacPherson. His rise to prominence maps elegantly onto the establishment of one of Canada’s most vibrant jazz communities, ultimately producing some of this country’s best respected musicians. Further, MacPherson’s discography, punctuated by his most famous recording, 1976’s Fraser: Live at the Planetarium, offers a discussion in miniature of Canada’s then recording industry (or lack thereof). In telling the story of how the elder MacPherson raised the funds with the help of a behind-the-scenes bank manager, set up his own record label, and self-produced a seminal Canadian discographic contribution, the author rightfully writes his father into history as not just a great jazz improvisor and creative but as someone who “revolutionized independent recording” in Canada.
As the book makes clear, the recording, which was ultimately picked up for distribution by RCA Records, gave MacPherson’s career a much-needed shot in the arm. Despite the fact that by the late 1970s MacPherson ranked among Canada’s most accomplished jazz players, he had hardly played outside of the Lower Mainland (apart from a year and a half leave from Vancouver’s Cave Supper Club to move to New York City and study with Jimmy Abato and Henry Zlotnik). Enter George Zukerman, a classical bassoonist and music impresario who, in 1955, had founded Overture Concerts to bring world-class music to emerging rural markets. By decade’s close, MacPherson along with Oliver Gannon and Wyatt Ruther were working with Overture, bringing Canadian jazz east to Banff, Drumheller, and Sault Ste. Marie, and then, famously, even further east to the Soviet Union. Although MacPherson’s trio was not the first Canadian jazz ensemble to tour the Eastern Block (that distinction would go to Oscar Peterson’s group), they numbered as only a handful of musical ensembles
from North America to go behind the Iron Curtain, bringing what the US State Department and Canada’s Department of External Affairs had hoped would be a type of democracy in sound to the communist state.
One thing that becomes imminently clear when reading this valuable book is that MacPherson was a sui generis musician who was anachronistic even by 1980s standards. Be it the repertoire he chose (American compositions of the 1940s), the way he played (emphasizing a tune’s melody rather than potential harmonic extemporizations), his look (more banker than jazz hipster), or his decision to tour such unlikely jazz hotspots as Salmon Arm, British Columbia, or the Soviet Union, where he concertized numerous times between 1978 and 1986, MacPherson, it seems, was one of one.
Thankfully the world, or at least Canada, caught up with this singular man. Before his premature death from cancer in 1993 at age 65, MacPherson had been feted with an Order of Canada, a JUNO Award for Best Jazz Recording, and, in 1989, the Prix Oscar-Peterson from the Montreal Jazz Festival. As for the younger MacPherson, he had been encouraged to write a book about his famous father many times in the ensuing twenty-five years between Fras’s passing and the COVID-19 lockdown, when he decided to finally claim the mantle and put pen to paper.
Sadly, this compelling book and valuable addition to Canadian jazz literature will be Guy MacPherson’s last. The author, only 61, died of pancreatic cancer in early 2024 during the final production stages of I Don’t Have to Go Anywhere – I’m Already Here, standing therefore as a double testament to the remarkable talents of MacPhersons young and old.
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ADEBE DERANGO-ADEM is the author of four fulllength poetry books to date. Her last collection, Vox Humana (Book*hug Press, 2022), won the 2023 Raymond Souster Award. As of 2024, her poem “Song of Sheba” can be found on Toronto buses, trains, and streetcars, thanks to the Poems in Passage program.
JOEL FISHBANE’ s novel The Thunder of Giants is now available from St. Martin’s Press. His short fiction has been published in a variety of magazines, most recently Event and Blank Spaces. For more information, you are welcome to visit www.joelfishbane.net.
KEITH GAREBIAN has published thirty books to date, including many books on theatre, his autobiography, Pieces of My Self, and ten poetry collections, including Frida: Paint Me as a Volcano (2004), Blue: The Derek Jarman Poems (2008), Children of Ararat (2010), Poetry is Blood (2018), Against Forgetting (2019), In the Bowl of My Eye (2022), and Finger to Finger (2022). Several of his poems have been anthologized in Canada and the US, and one of his Jarman poems was set to music for choir and instruments by Gregory Spears, in the company of a poem each by Thomas Merton and Denise Levertov. Garebian has been shortlisted for the Grit/Lit, Freefall magazine, and the Gwendolyn MacEwen/Exile poetry awards, and some of his poems have been translated into French, Armenian, Hebrew, Bulgarian, and Romanian. His 11th poetry collection, Three-Way Renegade, was published by Frontenac House in the fall of 2023.
MARGO LAPIERRE is a freelance literary editor and writer of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. Her second poetry collection, Ajar, is forthcoming with Guernica in Fall 2025. She won the 2021 Room poetry award and the 2020 subTerrain fiction award and was shortlisted for Editors Canada’s 2024 Tom Fairley Award for Editorial Excellence. She is Arc Poetry magazine’s newsletter editor and a member of the Ottawa-based poetry collective VII. She’s completing a creative writing MFA at UBC.
Y. S. LEE is the winner of CV2 ’s 2022 Foster Poetry Prize. Her lyric essay “Tek tek” was shortlisted for the 2022 CBC Nonfiction Prize and her fiction includes the YA mystery series The Agency. Ying’s debut picture book, Mrs. Nobody, will be published by Groundwood Books this spring.
XIAOXIAO LI is a cartoonist and zine-maker based in Scarborough. Her comics have won a Doug Wright Award and Broken Pencil Zine Award and are stocked by The Beguiling and Librairie Drawn & Quarterly. They are also available online on Gumroad. She is studying anthropology at the University of Toronto.
CORNELIA MARS is an emerging Swedish Canadian writer who lives north of Montreal. Her work has most recently appeared in The Capra Review and The Keeping Room. In 2023, Mars was selected for the Quebec Writers’ Federation mentorship program in the nonfiction genre, and she is a graduate of Concordia University’s joint honours program in English literature and creative writing.
MARCIE MCCAULEY writes and reads in Tkaronto (Toronto) and N’Swakamok (Sudbury) on the homelands of Indigenous Peoples—including the Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabeg, and Wendat—land still inhabited by their descendants. Her writing has been published in American, British, and Canadian magazines and journals, in print and online.
MURGATROYD MONAGHAN’ s writing was recently published in Chapter House Review and is forthcoming in Ex-Puritan. Within the last year, she has been a finalist for the Joy Kogawa Award for Fiction, the TCK prize for nonfiction, and the Newfound Prose Prize. Murgatroyd has devoted her adult life to motherhood and is pursuing writing now that her children are older. She is working on several book-length projects. A former asylum-seeker, Murgatroyd was raised in Ontario.
RAEGEN MONTAQUE is a poet, writer, and visual artist. They are a poetry and art editor for Arrival Magazine and have edited for HLR Spotlight. Raegen’s poetry has been published in PPL’s Writers’ Anthology ’23 and their artwork is featured in Black Fruit Press’s 2024 Anthology, The Goblin Markets.
LAURA OLLERENSHAW has a BA in English from the University of Alberta and an MA in creative and critical writing from the University of Gloucestershire. Her work has appeared in HuffPost, The Brevity Blog, Explore, and WestWord. She lives in Edmonton, AB, and is writing a memoir about building a mountain cabin in Nordegg.
ERIC RAUSCH grew up in north-central Saskatchewan and earned a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Saskatchewan. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Prairie Fire, the Humber Literary Review, and Existere. He lives and works in Kitchener, ON. Instagram: @rauschwrites
PAUL SASGES is member of the Métis Nation BC, with deep roots in the Red River Métis Nation. He resides on the unceded territory of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. He is retired from his previous careers as a marine officer, technologist, and energy conservation manager. He has returned to the University of BC as a BFA creative writing student.
ANDREW SCOTT lives in Toronto, ON, in a house amongst children, antiquated technology of yesteryear, and many, many instruments. From this location he makes music, writes letters, narrates radio dramas, composes poems, and submits journalistic pieces. He is a professor in and the program coordinator of Humber’s Bachelor of Music program.
GIN SEXSMITH is a Mohawk writer and musician from Kenhtè:ke. Her debut novel, In the Hands of Men, was released May 2023. Gin’s work explores sexuality, love, loss, familial structures, and mental illness.
MISHA SOLOMON is a poet in and of Tiohtià:ke/ Montréal. He is the author of two chapbooks and his work has recently appeared in Best Canadian Poetry 2024, Arc Poetry, The Fiddlehead, Grain, and The Malahat Review. His debut full-length collection is forthcoming with Brick Books in 2026.
[FEATURED ARTIST]
LUKE PAINTER
LUKE PAINTER’S PRACTICE EXPLORES A WIDE RANGE OF HISTORICAL AND CONTEMPORARY SUBJECTS IN RELATION TO PATTERN, ORNAMENTATION, SET DESIGN, INTERIOR DESIGN, TECHNOLOGY AND HIS OWN PERSONAL HISTORY. He creates atmospheric, fictional spaces that sample and purposely reimagine these subjects in surreal, humorous and narrative ways. His work has been shown in numerous local and international exhibitions including Moving Images at Patel Brown Gallery in Montreal, Ways of Something at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Five Years of Contemporary Canadian Drawing at the Art Gallery of Sudbury. Luke has received grants from Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council and the Toronto Arts Council and was nominated for the K.M. Hunter Award in the Visual Arts through the Ontario Arts Council. His work has been reviewed by Canadian Art, Border Crossings, The Globe and Mail and was included in Carte Blanche Vol 2 – Painting, a national survey of Canadian painters. Luke is an Associate Professor in the Experimental Animation program at OCAD University in Toronto.
JUNK MAIL AT DRACULA’S CASTLE (DETAIL), 60”x40”, INK ON PAPER, 2024 | LUKE PAINTER
Image courtesy of the artist.
ADEBE DERANGO-ADEM // JOEL FISHBANE // Y. S. LEE // XIAOXIAO LI // CORNELIA MARS // MARCIE MCCAULEY // MURGATROYD MONAGHAN // RAEGEN MONTAQUE // LAURA OLLERENSHAW // ERIC RAUSCH // PAUL SASGES // GIN SEXSMITH // MISHA SOLOMON // LUKE PAINTER