Soliloquies Anthology 20.1

Soliloquies Antholog y 20.1

Soliloquies Anthology 20.1

Copyright Š 2015 Soliloquies Anthology Soliloquies Anthology retains first North American Serial Rights.

Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this anthology may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

ISSN 2369-601X Manufactured in Canada Printed and bound by CaĂŻus du Livre Design and layout by Maxwell Addington Soliloquies Anthology, c/o Concordia University Department of English 1455 de Maisonneuve Blvd. West Montreal, Quebec H3G 1M8 soliloquies.ca

Editorial Committee Editor-in-Chief Kailey Havelock Artistic Director Maxwell Addington Managing Editor Daniel Macaulay Poetry Editors Simon Banderob Meredith Marty-Dugas Maya Popovich Fiction Editors Mike D’Itri Lindsay Richardson Media Editors Alex Custodio Travis Wall

Contents Foreword 7 Poetry Smudge Brianna Ballard 12 in another universe Kara Bowers 13 Small Roommates Emily Carson-Apstein 14 Driftwood Rachel Laverdiere 15 Hawley, PA Lucia Pasquale 16 Litany of Lost Things Lucia Pasquale 17 Winter Break Mia Poirier 18 St. John’s Melanie Power 19 After the time your lips lived under my shoulder Olivia Raco 21 To Susan Olivia Raco 22 The Iron Garden Jenny Smart 24 Hunger Délani Valin 25 The Salt Eater Délani Valin 27

Fiction A Houndstooth Blueprint for the Creation of a Myth Adam Huening 31 Portage Michael Juretic 44 Magpie Assassin Fran Kimmel 55 What Happened to Sadie Palmer Lauren Mead 71 The Least Graeme Shorten Adams 81 Creative Non-Fiction Peering at the Horizon Barbara Janusz 97 Kiss It Better Gitanjali Kolanad 111 Flash Fiction The Drain Andrew Catone 119 Contributors 121

Foreword Kailey Havelock

S

oliloquies Anthology has played a central role in my undergraduate career: this journal was the first to publish my writing, and later became the first for which I worked as an editor. This year, I have the honour of giving a little bit back to a publication that has shaped the four years of my degree.

As the Editor-in-Chief, I have the rare privilege of reiterating the words of two of my predecessors: “When asked whether the experience of editing Soliloquies was comparable to anything else I have done in Concordia, my answer is simply, no.” Nothing can compare to turning a call for submissions into a printed and bound publication.

This year, we celebrate the twentieth edition of Soliloquies Anthology. I have taken this milestone as an opportunity to revisit our legacy of dedicated and talented writers and editors—and the publications they have produced—in hopes of understanding what has enabled Soliloquies Anthology to become such a significant landmark in the Concordia and Montreal literary

Foreword

communities. The Editor-in-Chief of our tenth edition described that milestone publication as “a testament to the fact that some things do get better with age.” Since that statement nearly a decade ago, the journal has developed its place in the literary community through bi-annual publications, online publishing, Flash Fiction contests, events, and, as of this year, through our Soliloquies Writes online engagements with past contributors and our Soliloquies Reads reading series as well.

Soliloquies Anthology has become so much more than a publication. It is a network of writers, editors, and readers, all of whom share an interest in remarkable writing. The pages of Soliloquies Anthology 20.1 are filled with exquisitely crafted poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction by emerging and established writers from Montreal and abroad. It is with great pleasure that I present this anthology, which surpasses the ambitions of the preceding nineteen editions in this journal’s history.

The writers in this publication have crafted unique and immersive worlds within the pages that follow.

Readers are brought to Saint John’s, the lakes of British Columbia, and a dinner table in Pennsylvania.

Through a small moment, a month, or generations, and across lakes, train tracks, or bus routes, these poems and stories use verse and prose as passports to the lives of characters, to relationships and feelings, to images that linger long after putting this book down. I would like to offer my sincerest thanks to our writers for the 8

Kailey Havelock

opportunity to publish such stunning work.

Thanks as well to the Arts and Sciences Federation of Associations for funding our journal, and the Concordia Council for Student Life for their contribution to Soliloquies Reads. Thanks to the Concordia Association for Students in English, for sharing the office—and much of my focus—during the semester. Thanks so much to the wonderful faculty and administration at the Department of English for always being so supportive of student initiatives. And congratulations to the Editorial Committee, without whom this publication would never have made it to print. I eagerly anticipate what we will come up with for our next issue.

Taking part in the production of Soliloquies Anthology is an incomparable experience, and the honour of introducing this milestone is not one I will soon forget.

Happy birthday, Soliloquies Anthology. Wishing you many more years of writing.

Kailey Havelock, Editor-in-Chief

9

Poetry

Brianna Ballard

Smudge The morning train is sleepy, as if we haven’t stopped dreaming.

Nearly-October sun struggles golden, through windows of the upper deck and we press our foreheads onto dust-covered glass as if we can hold onto our summer-smudged rays.

We see in brown, and yellowed green and magenta rust of train tracks, faint on the edges of our eyes. We match the colours of rot.

We are hurtling and the outside is in distort as if there are no individuals in the leaves, or the trees, and we can’t distinguish ourselves anymore.

12

Kara Bowers

in another universe we live slow-motion in the sunset you wash my hair in the kitchen sink winter only lasts a month

13

Emily Carson-Apstein

Small Roommates Black cat stares, black cat stares hunched, black cat stares hunched at me and poops in the bathtub.

Black cat watches me google “why does my cat poop in the bathtub” and click the first link that comes up; it reads “because your cat is an asshole.”

Black cat sits on my laptop, black cat stands and turns lazily, black cat has no time for your English papersssssssssss ssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss sssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssqqqqqqw67eg_ Black cat conveniently forgets that until a month ago he lived in a three foot square box, to remember this would require some sort of gratitude, this is not black cat’s style.

Black cat is not too keen on the dark, or heights, or wind, or loud noises, or feet, or citrus fruits.

Black cat has claimed one side of my futon, black cat will come and go as he pleases, he will deposit his warm body against my chest and make it clear he prefers when I am home.

He will not specify this preference for my company or ability to open things.

14

Rachel Laverdiere

Driftwood In the rear-view mirror alfalfa fields play tricks with my eyes; wheat fields chassĂŠ; swaths of stubble become fading fish bones, the colour of clutched driftwood.

I do not glance down knowing all the blooms have wilted; pollen puddles in my lap.

15

Lucia Pasquale

Hawley, PA In the old house by the lake the “Great Santini Says Eat.” So we eat.

Under the heavy beams we allow small rituals to be set aside; the setting of tables, the clearing of plates.

We break bread with our bare hands over paper napkins.

We don’t say grace.

16

Lucia Pasquale

Litany of Lost Things i.

Eating blackberries.

Dark pods full of dark juices.

My teeth pierce the tiny cells of flesh.

Blood on my tongue, and I think of you. ii.

I am waterlogged.

My lungs, two blocked drains.

My body, stupid and white, floating downriver to the sea. iii.

It is small and it is somewhere, fallen. Trampled underfoot, perhaps.

Invisible in the custard of linoleum.

Poor gemmed little thing, so delicate.

Of things that come in pairs, it is easy to lose what is small.

17

Mia Poirier

Winter Break The day we broke up, we wore elf hats.

Banging our heads just to listen to the bells in downtown Montreal.

We were cold but held hands, we were trying.

At my kitchen table, we ate chocolate cake sweet enough to break our teeth. Roll cake with layers of jam.

In my 100-year-old bedroom, I built a blanket fort and lit a candle that smelled like ginger, too strong, too sharp, like the way you said I was.

The day we broke up, I poured you cups of water until three in the morning, hydrating your dried out eyes, your cheeks sticky with salt.

18

Melanie Power

St. John’s On the corner of Gower and St. Patrick’s, the smell of boiling lobster hits you in waves, wafting from The Jigger, teeming as usual with anyone who knows better than to go to god-forsaken Gus’s for dinner instead, where ordering what’s on special will warrant a trip to Healy’s Pharmacy. it’s the best place to go to after Friday night bingo at The Hall, conveniently appended to the church, the proximity of Jesus and all that holy stuff only enhancing the chances of winning the godly bounty: two tickets for the St. John’s Sea Dogs. when you’re at the game, you pray to God for a win, and when you’re at mass, you pray to God for a win, adding a post-script for your great aunt’s health, of course.

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Bridie Molloy’s stays open past 3 and lets you smoke inside to boot. if you come back the next day for brunch, they’ll spike your orange juice to ease the hangover and the Catholic guilt for dirty dreams about the new high school teacher at Brother O’Heir’s.

When you’re back on the boat again, spinning the rope into the big blueness, days begin before dawn and are qualified in two ways: “fish” or “no fish.” the first one means the wife might put out and the latter means keep trying.

20

Olivia Raco

After the time your lips lived under my shoulder I became fluent in the language of people left behind.

I understood the dialect between two pairs of ghost eyes, the connotation of a stranger’s hand pressed deep in a lower back.

There was a poem you read to me with a toothpaste tongue, sheets littered with bagel seeds of a man watching the woman he once loved pee after sex, the sun lingering on her thigh at just the right angle to be romantic.

I like to think of it as funny, the number of beds I heat since I’ve stopped climbing your fire escape because if it isn’t funny, it’s something else.

21

Olivia Raco

To Susan Or at least that’s what I think your name is.

Definitely starts with an “S,” which fits since you are many “S” words like soft-spoken and still.

From the seat behind you I see your hair go from blonde to red back to blonde. I witness your hat phase. I like the pink toque, the one that goes with your gloves.

I know three of your purses personally— I must have spent hours over our morning bus rides watching them get dirty as they shrugged against the floor.

I know you never do homework before 9am and that you listen to Katy Perry from cheap headphones right before we get off at the metro station.

22

I’ve never seen your eyes naked of eye shadow or your cheeks not substantially blushed.

I have noticed your chewed nails when you pull on the yellow cord— I’ve seen the trail of your spine when you take off your jacket and you’re wearing that silver top.

One day, you will take a different bus and buy new bags but I will always know from an eavesdropped conversation that at one point in your life your favourite colour was purple.

23

Jenny Smart

The Iron Garden The train bridge grows rust like a gardener, tending its tidy rows of oxidization, a different species flourishing on every beam.

Common red rusts, hardy and trample proof, endangered exotic rusts only adapted to certain fertile alloys, poisonous truss-killing rusts crimson with toxicity, scattered patches of wild rust germinating in dark crevices.

Neon graffiti tags nestle like garden gnomes between beds of flaking blossoms, screws that budded and burst into petals.

Rivets and bolts forsake their forms and unfurl as iron reacts botanically with rain.

In autumn, the dead metal ripens.

Passing trains send red leaves spiralling.

The bridge’s trembling boughs shake their ferric seeds into the river.

24

DĂŠlani Valin

Hunger i.

My kid sister is an aspiring bodybuilder. She adores the fitness model shape-shifters in Natural Muscle and Flex. She eats Clif Bars, curbs dairy, counts calories, and considers taking creatine. But at least she eats, instead of starving for survival, scaling her way to some scant little after-party, for which the guest list grows sparser by the second. I stood there once. The food was terrible. ii.

I was told I must have done it for attention. The Luna Moth larvae eats leaves of walnut, hickory, and sumac.

After molting, it emerges with a wingspan of four-anda-half inches. Its wings are green like the foliage on which it had fed. However, it no longer eats. As an adult, the Luna Moth is mouthless. It starves to death, living only for a week. iii.

The squirming organs under my skin eventually win.

Amino acids and lipids and polysaccharides enter the esophagus. At this point, the saliva’s enzyme, amylase, has already begun disintegrating the starch. It is microscopic.

25

iv.

I am small on the bus carrying me from Alma to Main.

The woman standing next to me smells like coconuts and honey. She is warm and slightly overweight. She is wearing an orange tunic and she winces as she shifts her weight from left to right. She is grateful it is seven o’clock and she is grateful for frozen French fries. She reminds me of my mother. v.

My Kokum used to tell me stories before bed. She said to beware the Rugarus—large furry creatures that ate any living thing including Metis children who get out of bed too many times, and their grandmothers, too. She said they mostly live near the Red River, but if they’re hungry enough they’ll travel as far as Australia. She told me: “If you see a Rugaru, you become one straight away, because that sort of hunger is contagious.”

26

Délani Valin

The Salt Eater Afloat, she’s only afraid when the moon waxes: bloated wishing convex to concave, wishing waxy skin molded The mesh sewn onto her tongue a threaded fisherman’s net comes up bare and tightly wrung She holds a small sachet full of coarse crystal sea salt grains pulls out a single granule puts it on her tongue. It wanes.

27

Fiction

A Houndstooth Blueprint for the Creation of a Myth Adam Huening

A

midst the silence, a man stood to speak, a notebook in his hand, houndstooth newsboy cap on his head, which he held deceptively high.

“Let me take my hat off. I was raised that way, that it’s proper etiquette to remove your hat when you’re inside or at dinner or when you’re speaking of things that matter and some things that don’t.

“I love this hat. It gives me a strange sense of purpose, of confidence. It makes me feel like the person I believe myself to be.

“I want to lie to you and tell you it’s my grandfather’s hat, well-preserved through decades of dust and memories formed and forgotten.

“I want to lie and tell you he wore it as a young man—younger than I am now, but somehow much older—that it fit him well. Brand new, as he walked the streets of Cincinnati: a reluctant hero in the post-war dream. I want to say he bought it for a dime, or maybe a quarter with a bit of the pittance they gave him for

Fiction time spent in the trenches of Europe; that he put it on his head and went down to the riverfront and watched the river ebb and flow. He knew it flowed through him —already there streaked with a little blood—feeling the water within washing away recent memory for what was downstream. He walked the sidewalks to Proctor & Gamble—his medals on paper and his hat on his head—for his first interview, and emerged onto the street with a new direction.

“I want to tell you it framed his triumph as he walked tall below the shadows of skyscrapers and the steel and brick bridges burgeoning over the Ohio River; that he strolled down the sidewalk smiling and humming some Louis Armstrong tune, which lifted into the air and twisted with the brick stacks billowing smoke and steam into the azure-painted sky.

“And perhaps he tipped his hat slightly at a pretty woman in a pale yellow dress passing by, with pearl earrings and a purse to match; that a smile skipped coy and cautious across her lips; that it bristled against her skin in the allure of sky blue eyes and wry smile, but was brushed back by her sophisticated sense from some Indian Hill or Hyde Park upbringing. It was just a passing phase, and—because I will tell you this woman was not my grandmother—he kept his hat close to his skull for fear dreams of the future might escape in a few seconds of misplaced, elated friskiness; like they almost did in war-torn France with the bombs and the bullets and that local woman I heard about much, much later, and 32

Adam Huening whose name I refuse to remember out of respect for my grandmother. Although, that was all a dream in itself, conjured as the spectre of death so readily clung to shadows and bootstraps; and because of this, it could all be forgiven.

“My grandfather, on the whole, was a good man, a kind man, a joker, a light-hearted spirit who found joy in the simple things (gardening and working and hunting and baking) and was always quick with a smile and a cookie for his grandchildren. I can tell you this because it is truth to me.

“I don’t actually remember him wearing a hat, except in his old Army picture exhumed after his passing so pride could finally find its way to a past he wanted to forget. In faded black and greys, he wore his soldier’s dress hat just like I do or—like him—cocked to the side, a tilt of slight arrogance, confidence, of knowing something others don’t. I would like to say this is me as well... but I won’t lie. I just wear my hats tilted to the side. I always have.

“I never saw him wear a hat like this, but I want to tell you it was his. I want to lie and say it was on his head in those early days when he made his way from the outskirts (which was still fields and farms and fresh air before the city slithered northward and swallowed it in its sparkle-spangled strip malls and suburbs, coloured it in commerce classes of little box houses and banks). He made his way from Sharonville into the dreamscape of the city on those first days of work, and kept his hat tilt33

Fiction ed as he smiled wide, even as the soot and grime wore the luster off the bridges and buildings: that he wore it with purpose as it collected the sweat of his labour.

“I want to tell you he wore it on a sunny day when he and my grandmother went for a drive, and he covered her eyes with it to surprise her with the home he bought for her, and how she had to take it off to give him a kiss, and her brown hair blew in the breeze beneath an apple tree in the backyard.

“I want to say he wore it on the days my aunts and uncles—my father—were all born, that he used it to wipe away the very few tears he shed (because he was a strong man) and tears can only fall inside to collect in that river within, which fills the well every man must make in his soul, and from those depths we draw our strength, our inspiration—to create, to persevere, to dream, to conquer, to love.

“I want to tell you it rested on his head when he used to sit in his rocking chair or on the porch, his children one by one on his lap: that they ran their tiny fingers around the stiff brim, and all the sweat that gathered in the lining within was beaded in contentment, and my aunts and uncles were comforted by the soft wool: that my father—fascinated by the buttons that held it together—marvelled in undoing the clasps but fumbled to snap them back firmly.

“I want to say it graced his head on Sundays after church when he would teach his boys to shoot, and he looked out from under the brim across the barrel and 34

Adam Huening showed them how to take aim: that he wore it as he stomped through thickets, thorny and twisted, beating brush while beagles sniffed, then barked, and the boys braced for cottontails to dart across fields—a trophy for the taking if the lesson was executed with precision and without hesitant triggers.

“And I want to lie and say the hat was always present in his past, through the days and weeks, through work and leisure—that he wore it through passing seasons as streaks of silver slowly snuck into his dark hair. He wore it to his own father’s funeral, after the man’s brittle body broke in a bathtub and was discovered by boys too young to be men. At the graveside, he held the hat in his hands beneath bowed heads as the priest in his vestments said prayers adorned with Latin words oscillating in the crisp, autumn air like leaves crackling to make their final peace with winter. Sadness ringed his eyes, but only three solitary tears would fall—one for anger, one for grief, and one as blessing—and the hat caught them all.

“I want to say that my father wore this hat on his first date with that pretty girl from Princeton High: the one with the long, black hair and supple body and that certain way she used it that ran roughshod against the waves of Catholicism in which my family was baptized; the one that would break his heart; the one with the name Van Morrison—and later Patti Smith—spelled out in that song, and every time my father would hear it, he would feel the phantom kick in his chest and remem35

Fiction ber my grandfather placing the old hat on his head and telling him now he was a man.

“My father wore it straight, not tilted, with an aggressive precision over ice blue eyes, and he would get his own hat—a Stetson—and he would fill his own well over the years, although his had more alcohol mixing with the sweat and tears. He would let the horses drink from it, the ones he broke and trained. Those were the wild days, when a bronco could buck and kick and throw him hard to the dirt and give him a hoof to the ribs, and he’d laugh, deep and fierce. He’d pick himself up from the dust, put that Stetson back on his head and hit that horse square in the jaw, like he was hitting a man. Maybe his brother, the older one who would tame machines to properly put Pringles in cans and seal soda bottles, and not the younger one who would astral project into flowers full of hippies and get hooked on that Laurel Canyon sound.

“And maybe, one night, the horses and the hat were trickling liquid through his thoughts as he drove a vacant, misty road, and that song came on the radio and pricked his chest with each singly spelled letter. The tears unshed and the sweat and the alcohol churned as the road blurred and disappeared. The Dodge Charger growled in defiance of yellow lines because ‘Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine,’ and that car screamed, then screeched and crashed and flipped over and over and over and over until the world tilted (like the way my grandfather and I wear our hats), and metal 36

Adam Huening crumpled like an accordion producing a banshee wail of crunching steel and shattering glass as the machine with all its horsepower broke brambling branches and split solid earth until it finally came to rest upside down in a shallow creek. The cold water woke him, stinging his cheeks where sweat and tears and hot blood mixed and ran thin, and everything was inverted. Maybe, as he crawled out and up to the road where he wobbled woozy on his knees in the deep darkness, it never righted itself.

“I want to lie, to confide, to make you understand that when my grandfather got the call in the dead of night—that hour when phones interrupt dreams to bring parched demons to drink from wells within—he woke my grandmother, put on that hat and drove the three hours to a hospital in Indiana to tell his grown son—my father—he was just a boy.

“I want to tell you that afterwards, my grandfather put the hat away: that he never wore hats again, except for ones made of construction paper created by tiny fingers of grandchildren. These were the only hats he needed. I want to say that hat went away in a closet kept safe by the comforting scent of mothballs, an essence that always invokes visions of my great-grandmother— impish and saintly with weather-worn, wrinkled hands crisscrossed by veins that traversed her bones like roads on a map I was meant to follow someday, and her sky blue eyes and white hair like snow caps on mountain peaks would be my guide from somewhere above 37

Fiction as I travelled forefinger to back of hand and onward to forearm and elbow. In my early twenties, I drove fiercely from sea to shining sea trying to escape the ghosts of memory and secretly hoping to never lose their haunting, and I dug my own well with shovels fashioned from the bones of all my ancestors.

“So I want to tell you, in the closet with the mothballs, that hat was put away, and my father walked wounded from the hospital and got a steady job in a factory and traded his cowboy hat for a mesh cap, and he found a woman who wouldn’t break his heart, and he settled down with my mother and brought my sister and me into the world.

“Dreams were built. Memories formed. Rabbits killed and babies born. There would be baptisms and communions, cookouts and cousins and Christmases and curiosities behind closed doors. Cookies baked and eaten. Gardens grown. Veins would become road maps.

Hatless heads would offer smiles, and dry lips would be quenched by water in wells so deep they touched the centre of the earth.

“There would be a sense of knowing a grand secret, these whispers of origin. I would piece together the past through jigsaw-shaped snippets spoken softly in hushed tones between grown-ups, the words forming little rain clouds in the adult atmosphere above my head. They would trickle down, and I would use them to begin filling my well (tiny buckets, small increments).

My great-grandmother passed, and her spirit mixed 38

Adam Huening with the scent of mothballs hiding in closets, and the grandchildren grew up, and my grandfather sank into the seas of time, his memory drained slowly by the disease. The eyes glazed. The smile evaporated. The well ran dry.

“On that last visit in that small room by the sun porch (in that new house they bought after the old one was sold, and the basement Christmases and apple orchard and the ghosts of a thousand cookies were buried beneath a glistening Super Kroger built to appease the slithering, suburban monster), I looked out the window at the leaves blowing in the backyard breeze and felt nothing was as it once was or would ever be again.

In my memory, I etched the details of what was left of him in that mechanical bed (there but gone, wisps of a Louis Armstrong song silently hummed), and I whispered it was okay to let go because he had forgotten the hat, and he forgot France and the pale yellow dress and the job and the dreams and the smoke stacks and my grandmother and becoming a man and taking aim and hunting and cookies and tiny hands that reached up for him—for security, for acceptance, for love, for understanding: that reached because they had yet to dig their own wells, and his was plenty deep enough.

“As the hat hid in the closet, he evaporated, became vapour in the ether of this world. He forgot his life and his words, and he forgot we wore our hats the same, if he ever knew because I didn’t until he was already past tense, and we laid him to rest in a mausoleum in Price 39

Fiction Hill, and I can’t go there and tell him, so I will tell you.

“I still want to lie and say this hat waited for me in a closet with my great-grandmother’s ghost, and how I found it when I needed it most, years later, at a mock Christmas made for convenience so we could all be together. It was long after my father took a big bucket and flooded all the rooms of the home I had already abandoned and set himself free. When the waters receded, he put a Stetson on his head, got back on the horse and found his smile riding rough into the sunset, though he was aware he could no longer handle hard tumbles, even if he would never admit.

“It was after my own well had grown as deep as my imagination, and I had seen cities and countryside, crossed rivers and stood at the edge of oceans. I had settled down and brought tiny hands of my own to the world. Eventually, my own heart was fractured, completely shattered, and the tears became the noose I wrapped around my neck to choke me. The dam burst, and the waves nearly drowned me. From the depths of the water, I heard my father’s muffled voice in echoed words bring me back to the surface. He said simply that I was just a boy. The tears flowed backwards, and the well replenished and plunged deeper because tiny hands were reaching for me.

“I want to tell you how I pulled the box from beneath old newspapers, neglected yearbooks, and worn Bibles, and opened it and removed the hat: that I put it on—tilted to the side—and felt all the dreams and hopes of our 40

Adam Huening blood in which it was baptized rush through me, and my well became a river wild—wide and endless and deep—racing to fill an entire ocean.

“I want to tell you this is my grandfather’s hat. That would be a lie, but truth and fiction become so deeply intertwined that it is difficult to discern which way the words flow.

“I want to tell you this lie because it is so much more real than the truth. I found it in the dirt one day not long ago. It was just lying there, on the ground, lost or left behind by someone I would have to invent anyway.

I would still have to create elements and attributes, and craft pretend prose for this person, and put dreams in their heads to hide under this hat. In the end, it would mean nothing to me.

“This is my grandfather’s hat, and now, it is mine.”

And the words were replaced with silence. He put the hat back on his head, with a slant to the right, and stepped through the door into the sun, bearing the light on his straightened shoulders.

41

Portage Michael Juretic

T

he first campsite of the trip was on an island, on a point that jutted south into the perfect waters of Green Lake. The sun was high when they landed. Samantha, Jenny, Cat, and Parker pulled their canoes onto the beach and hauled out their bags. When Jenny and Cat began setting up their tent, Samantha chose a spot far enough away to imply things. Parker dropped his pack and, hands on his hips, smiled at her. Samantha hadn’t told her friends anything about Parker, only that she’d found a fourth for the trip. When asked who he was she’d said, “A friend.”

After supper, Samantha and Parker left the others sitting and talking, poking at the fire with sticks. Hand in hand, they explored the wooded island until they found another beach. They sat near each other to watch the sun dip behind the mountains across the lake. It got dark quickly. Stars were splayed across the sky. Samantha stood, unhooked her bikini top, slid off her bottom and kicked it away, and stepped into the water. “Come on,” she said. She dove away from the shallows, want-

Fiction ing and not wanting him to follow her into deep water.

They swam naked in Green Lake, now cutting close to each other, now pushing away. His skin breached in slices, glinting under the starlight. The flesh of lake monsters, something from the depths, glimpsed fleetingly.

Naked in the night on the slope of the rock ledge beach, they held each other, the water black and limitless, warm around their ankles. On the other side of the island, the fire they’d built must have been burning down.

Parker said, “This will stay with me.”

Careful, Samantha thought. She pictured the apartment that he’d worked to make a home. Rack shelving with his books too carefully arranged; the mattress and box spring on the floor, always made when she arrived; the table and two chairs; in the closet, beneath hanging shirts and pants, piled boxes labeled in magic marker— BOOKS, FILES, WINTER STUFF, and one with the initials E.K. Low down on the shower stall wall, the tiles were cracked as if someone, showering in boots, had kicked out in anger or frustration. Bits of mortar grit ground under her feet the one time she showered there.

Despite herself, she pulled him tighter. She walked ahead of him to the tent, naked in the woods in the night, his words swimming in her head.

The next morning Parker slipped from the tent to relieve himself in the woods and smoke a cigarette. When 44

Michael Juretic he got back, the girls were tearing down camp. He noticed that Samantha avoided looking at him. He stood around for a time very badly wanting a coffee, then busied himself with the breakfast fire. She didn’t look at him. It was suddenly very important to him, as he twisted newspaper pages and split kindling with the hatchet he’d bought the week before, to get the fire lit fast, have it burn hot and high.

Breakfast done, gear loaded, Samantha decided they would switch up canoes. She stuck Parker with Cat, the fat friend who was supposed to be funny but wasn’t, and took the stern with Jenny, the pretty one who was. They paddled straight out across the lake for the far shore.

Cat had a comment for everything, an inanely positive comment that stretched Parker’s patience. To Cat, everything was amazing. That mountain was amazing.

Those clouds were amazing. This wind was amazing.

When the clouds darkened and the wind really picked up, his mood got worse. High swells buffeted them and Cat’s weight in the bow made it difficult to steer. He cursed inwardly as the wind turned the boat every way but the one he wanted. Her ass spread on the wicker bench before him. She made useless, tentative gestures, switching sides with her paddle and then, just as Parker corrected their course, switching back. When they hit an especially choppy patch in the middle of the lake and she scurried to strap on her lifejacket, the canoe listed sharply to port. Parker jammed his paddle across the gunwales to steady the boat. “We’re not go45

Fiction ing to dump,” he growled.

In the other canoe, Samantha struggled too. She didn’t have the dead weight Parker had to deal with, but she wasn’t a very good paddler, twisting up her face, wasting energy as she slashed at the water with her paddle. Was she even that pretty? Jenny was prettier. Neither were in the same league as Elena. Elena was beautiful. But he wasn’t going to think about her. Elena was a satellite in decaying orbit, falling away from him. Sam was right there.

The wind blowing, the sky looking like it did, they decided to cut the day short and check out the next available campsite. The place was wrong. Tin cans rusted in the bushes, scraps of desiccated toilet paper littered the underbrush. On the trail to the outhouse, half-buried in the leaves of the forest floor, was a pair of men’s underpants, blue, flat, stiff as cardboard. Next to the fire pit slumped a folding chair, a hobo throne in a hobo court. There was no debate. They got into their canoes and hugged the shore until they came to another site.

Here someone had set up log benches, and a board table between two tree stumps. Spruce needles carpeted the tent clearing.

“It’s a hobbit living room,” Jenny said.

“Perfect,” Samantha said.

“Amazing,” Cat said.

Parker forced a smile. “It’s great.” He emptied the canoes while the others chatted excitedly about the campsite. But there was something about this place as well, 46

Michael Juretic this little salon cleared out of the forest. Being there was like playing house in someone else’s basement recroom.

The sky cleared before evening and soon the bottles, baggies, and rolling papers came out. Parker made the mistake of taking a hit off a joint. He went dry. He tried to irrigate his parched insides with rum and tepid beer.

The drink and drugs cast him off into dark silence and he was left to drift on his own. Samantha was here with her friends now and, as Parker had come with her, he was now alone. Out on the beach, away from the fire, the others trained their flashlights over star charts printed off the internet. They sought out Draco where he curled faintly over Ursa Minor, searched for Aquarius without finding him, talked about the stars as deep past. Travel out to them, they said, and you’re traveling toward the crust of the universe as it had been at the moment of the Big Bang, and so also back in time. They wondered about the blinking green and red light that seemed moored to Bootes. “Maybe it’s a KGB spy satellite,” Sam said, “left over from the Cold War.” “Shh!” said Jenny. “Big Brother’s listening.”

While they nattered on, Parker’s gut argued with his head and heart. His gut growled and snarled, drowning out everything else—Elena, untenable finances, ailing mother, overdue rent. He knew what Samantha was doing and that building walls was reasonable. But without really admitting it, he knew that he would lay siege to them, try to tear them down. Those walls protected 47

Fiction something that he wouldn’t stop himself from trying to take. Did he even want it? Did it even matter? In his darkness and silence he was a wolf circling the edge of the campfire light. He wanted to howl, to call out from where the light bleeds into night. He didn’t, and she didn’t look his way.

Samantha could feel Parker’s eyes clutch at her through the dark space of the tent.

“Sam?” he said.

She said nothing.

He said, “Things are different now. Things are changing in your mind.”

Nothing good could come from this conversation.

She was having fun with her friends; she didn’t care about this, not really. But she said, “What’s different?”

“I thought that when we were together we could just be together.”

Samantha turned onto her back. A root poked through her sleeping mat. She shifted. His fingertips poked past the hem of her T-shirt, brushed the bare skin of her side.

She searched for the words to draw a map, to point out where it was that she stood and where he stood, the expanse between them, what it would take to cross it.

She searched for words like “perspective” and “emotional availability,” but her words were lost somewhere in the Bermuda Triangle of her head, heart, and gut, so she said, “It’s not so simple.”

48

Michael Juretic “I came here because you invited me.”

Had she obliged him to come? Was it a chore for him to be in this perfect place he never would have otherwise seen? To have this time in the mountains, on the water, under the stars—was this a burden? Suddenly she wanted for Parker to be anywhere but there, next to her, in her tent.

“I thought it would do you good,” she said. She almost said, After what you’ve been through. That he carried the last decade of his life packed up like an itinerant, with nowhere to put it down, was something they didn’t talk about.

“I’m here to spend time with you, Sam.” A child’s whine. Samantha turned away from him and closed her eyes.

Just after dawn, Samantha was roused by the sun on the tent and a low fire in her belly. It wasn’t Parker who stoked this fire. Hundreds of others, thousands might have. It was hers. But Parker was here, and she was here.

When she saw the door of her friends’ tent still zipped shut, she shook Parker awake and led him by the hand through the woods to a spot on a cliff, open to the sky and the lake. She kissed him, pulling him to the ground with her, rubbed herself against his thigh.

He rose up on his elbows but she pushed him down, then pulled off her shorts and straddled his face. Parker groped for his belt buckle, yanked his jeans down to around his thighs. She closed her eyes then and thought of Bo, the Dane she’d bummed around Edinburgh with 49

Fiction for five days, last summer. He was younger, a student.

He was sweet. They’d made quick, exciting love in the stall of the hostel’s coed bathroom. He’d given her a book of Robert Burns’ poems, a sprig of heather dried and flattened in its pages. “For you to remember me in Canada,” Bo had said. Samantha didn’t like Burns, but she’d said “Tak,” and cried a little when they parted.

The heat of her fire spread lower. Samantha stifled her moans so her friends wouldn’t hear.

Parker’s neck was rubbed raw on the dry grass and he felt his jaw might crack. Samantha rocked back and forth until she started to shudder. She squeezed his head in her thighs. Then she relaxed, bit by bit, pressure releasing like steam from a slow valve. Finally she stood, put on her shorts and walked away. Parker lay on his back, erection reaching for the marshmallow clouds.

He rolled onto his side and stood. Through the trees he saw a thatch of dirty blond receding. “Fuck,” he said.

Then, leaning a hand against a tree at the cliff’s edge, he masturbated, not thinking about her, until he shot his load off the precipice.

Later that day they made the portage from Green Lake into Lake O’Hara. The trail between the lakes climbed steep overgrown slopes, crossed a great wet bog. Samantha complained about back pain and Cat, who was the stronger of her friends, had hurt her foot recently, so Parker reluctantly offered to carry both canoes. As he sweated under the hull of the second, meth50

Michael Juretic ane rising from the bog and mixing with his own stink, stewing him in the midday heat, he cursed his chivalry.

The boat bounced with every step. Every bounce drove the yoke into his shoulders, sent pain jolting down the knuckles of his spine. With every step the hull dipped, erasing Samantha on the path ahead of him. Parker counted the hours before he’d be back in the city, sleeping in a bed. He lagged, nearly stumbled, stopped and lodged the prow of the canoe in the crook of two close growing birches, and folded over like a pocket knife.

Hands on his knees he fought for breath. Samantha’s hiking boots stepped into view. She said, “Isn’t it beautiful?” She breathed in deep and coughed. Parker looked from her boots to his sneakers, ducked under the canoe’s gunwale and straightened painfully. All around them was a tangle of reeds and vines and bulrushes.

Where the bog gave way to drier land grew ferns like tentacled creatures. Moss crept over rocks, crawled up tree trunks. Giant mushrooms were fleshy eruptions in the green. Parker wiped sweat from his eyes, wrinkled his nose. The place was obscene, of a primeval savagery.

Decomposition, reclamation. All around them new life choked out old. It smelled of the inexorable advance of time.

“Sure,” he said. “Beautiful.”

The portage let out next to a hunting lodge with a dock that reached out into the deep water of Lake O’Hara.

51

Fiction They all stripped down to their swimsuits and dove in to wash off the dirt and sweat of the crossing. At the bend of the bay was another lodge where three men were taking in their boats. Samantha and her friends waved at the men. The men didn’t wave back, but kept looking at the girls. Samantha felt their stares. Who were they really looking at? Jenny was maybe the prettiest. Samantha had noticed Parker looking at her more than once. But maybe they were looking at Cat. Some men liked that, she knew. While they ate a lunch of dried sausage and warm, sweaty cheese, she imagined that the men meant trouble. Later, in the night, they might come and find them, wanting to take what men want to take from women. And what would Parker do to stop them? What could he do?

For the afternoon paddle, Samantha stayed partnered with Jenny but something kept pulling her glance toward Parker. He was handsome. His forearms were tanned and strong, thick veins popped out when he paddled. Was he a good man? What did that even mean? She felt she’d been alone too long, without real connection. She didn’t know what it meant. He said his troubles were over, it was as if he’d never been married.

This was him, here, now. Why, then, did all that seem to her so close in time?

That night, as they sat by the fire, she let go. They were here together, after all. She put her head in Parker’s lap, reached up to stroke the back of his neck. He bent to her. She let him kiss her, not caring if her friends 52

Michael Juretic saw. A razor-thin slice of moon climbed in the sky, silver like a fish in black water.

After the fire burned down they all went back to their tents. Samantha and Parker made love. It was nice. There was something in it. Then they slept, he on his back, she in the crook of his arm, fingers of one hand curling on his chest. But in the middle of the night he called out a name, the name of another. It reached Samantha like the howl of some far off beast. Tangled as she was in the cobwebs of sleep, she wasn’t sure she’d heard it at all.

Parker’s dream woke him. Then there was a hand on his shoulder, then a voice.

“That’s her name, isn’t it?”

He blinked into the darkness. Sam. He said, “Are you all right?” It sounded hollow in his ears, idiotic. Samantha didn’t answer.

Parker pulled on his pants and left the tent. The door’s zipper tore open the night. He went to the shore of Lake O’Hara and stood in the shallows. The water soaked the cuffs of his pants. He smoked half a cigarette and flicked the rest into the lake. With a split-second hiss, it died. He took off his pants and tossed them onto dry land, dove into the water and swam. The water was black under him, around him. The stars in the black sky were silver and ancient and eternally distant, coins of a treasure lost, scattered on the ocean floor.

53

Fiction The thin skin of polyester rustled in the breeze, separated Samantha from the larger night pressing down on the tent. She heard low splashing, the water’s surface breaking and remaking itself. He was swimming.

A boy at play in the water, moving when he should be at rest. She closed her eyes and waited for sleep, which she knew would come, and decided not to think about morning.

Parker dove under, he floated on his back. Black, empty space surrounded him. The abyss above, the abyss below. He was suspended between the past and the future, and they were the same thing. Suspended perfectly, perfectly floating. For this moment her name was gone, the one that would soon be a ghost, and the name of the other was gone, the one that haunted him already.

I’ll remember this, Parker thought.

But already the future was dragging him away, already the past was pulling him back, and already he was beginning to forget.

54

Magpie Assassin Fran Kimmel

O

f the brothers, I’m the one who can shatter a beer at two hundred yards. That’s what got Arnold’s magpie business going. Every June, he’d line up a dozen city customers and I’d travel nine hours south from my place in Bear Creek. I’d shoot magpies on city lots in the mornings, go fishing in the afternoons, and sleep on Arnold’s pullout at night. Arnold lives alone, takes weekly baths, pays with cash, watches Wheel of Fortune. These getaways with my brother recharged my batteries. Margaret didn’t mind; I think she was glad to see me go. With $75 per client, less fifteen bucks to Arnold, the money paid for the trip, with a little extra to buy the boys summer runners. It gave Margaret a chance to play canasta with her sisters all night, “And besides,” she said, “you always come back that much fonder.”

The day I met Lizzy was my fourth day in Calgary.

Eight magpies down, and I had a headache. It wasn’t yet 8.00 a.m. and already the air felt muggy and suffocating. I had to work at finding her place. On a leftover

Fiction street by the river, the house was barely visible from the road. The street sprouted out of another and angled towards the river as a three-pronged gravel driveway that led to three separate lots, a good acre each. Her lot was furthest from the regular city street, and butted up against a soupy lagoon at the back, close to a wooden footbridge that led through a forest, and then to the river.

Lizzy’s house was surrounded on all sides by giant trees—elms, spruce, and cottonwood. I was wearing my khaki pants, and as I stepped out of the truck, I retucked my cotton shirt, and slicked back my hair before replacing my baseball cap. I liked to dress smart for these look-about visits. Shooting magpies is unsavory to city folks, and I needed to come off as legitimate.

I crunched down the gravel, walking slowly, and passed the fork that split off into the other two lots. I kept my eyes upward, scanning the leafy screens. A single magpie circled over my head. Arnold would have crossed himself as he passed beneath, so I did too, for Arnold’s sake. The bird hopped from one tree to the next, following me.

I was so busy eyeballing the treetops that I didn’t notice her until I was almost directly underneath where she stood. She stared down from her large glass-walled deck.

“Hello ma’am,” I said, taking off my cap, craning my neck upwards. “Name’s Russell Knight. I’m the hire for the cleanup job.”

56

Fran Kimmel An uncomfortable space grew between us. I stared back, my neck crinked from looking up. She was small, more girl-like than woman, jet-black hair that tangled down to her shoulders, tiny white fists closed around a shiny white wrap.

“We have a yardman already,” she finally said. “You must have the wrong house.”

“No, no I don’t think so,” I said, bristling at “yardman.” I reached into my shirt pocket, pulled out the client referral slip, and called out the name: “George MacDonald hired me. Your husband?”

She gave a little snort then, wrapping the white fabric more tightly around her. “I can’t imagine that,” she said. “As you can see, there’s nothing needing cleanup.”

We both looked over the manicured yard, its symmetrical hedges and trimmed grass, nothing edible or useful in sight. The magpie’d decided to quit squawking and I lost sight of where he’d got to.

“Not yard work, ma’am,” I clarified. “You have a problem with magpies.”

She stared back, saying nothing.

“That’s what it says here,” I pointed to the paper in my hand.

She looked out into the trees. I followed her eyes until I spotted him too, resting on the edge of the elm branch.

“George actually called you?” she asked.

“Well, let’s see now.” I scanned the name in the box labeled Caller. “The call came from Fred Waters.”

57

Fiction “The yardman.” Her eyes narrowed, back on me now.

“If you say so, ma’am. George MacDonald wrote the cheque.” I always got the money upfront, with a moneyback guarantee if the job was unsatisfactory. “Says here you’ve got magpies creating a ruckus. Going after the song birds.”

She leaned over the deck rail towards me. I stepped back a few feet. “Of course,” she said. “And you take care of that sort of thing.”

Mostly, I wanted to get back in the truck and dig the Tylenol bottle out of the glove compartment. Arnold and me polished off his whiskey the night before. We’d been fishing in the dark on the Bow, mulling over the stupidity of city birds.

“People can trap ‘em down here no problem,” Arnold slurred. “The city lends out the traps even. And they’re not like country birds. Here they’ll hop right in and clinch the door behind ‘em.”

“So if trapping’s so easy, how come our magpie business is booming?” I asked.

“City people are skittish,” Arnold said. “Can’t wring their scrawny necks.”

I wasn’t used to all that whiskey. I’d just as soon been back at the river, propped against a cold rock. But I looked up instead, and said, “I’ll take care of your magpies, Mrs. MacDonald, like I’ve been paid to do.”

“Then please, Mr. Knight. Do come up. You’ll get a much better view from up here.”

58

Fran Kimmel She walked to the side of the deck where the stairs joined and waited. When I got to the top she pointed to one of the lounge chairs with plump zebra-patterned cushioning. The highest branches of a crab-apple tree tipped over onto the deck. White blossoms stuck to the cedar planks like paper snow. Their marmalade sweet clogged my head, like being trapped in an elevator with a perfume-drenched woman.

I sat. She turned away, walked unsteadily towards a cedar cupboard stocked like a liquor store. A nearly emptied wine bottle rested on the shelf. She reached into the cupboard, pulled out a new bottle, and concentrated on opening it. Then she brought a second crystal glass and the old bottle plus the new one over to the round table. She set everything down and curled herself into the chair beside mine, feet tucked under her.

I stopped myself from looking at my watch. I knew it was just after eight in the morning. From this close, she looked older, more my age. Maybe thirty-five. She had that morning softness that women get until they scrub the night away and the day takes over. She’d been drinking for some time. Even if the bottle weren’t almost empty, I could tell from the pink flush high on her cheekbones and near the tip of her nose. “So you kill magpies?” She looked at me directly. “A magpie assassin. That’s what you do for a living?”

I felt angry, foolish. “No. I just come down to the city a few days every June.” I wanted to tell her that I’m the best mechanic north of Edmonton. That there’s noth59

Fiction ing I can’t fix. “Seems Calgarians need considerable help in the magpie department.”

“Helping city people take care of their city problems.”

I didn’t respond, but when she said nothing more, I added, “You have a beautiful home. Have you lived here long?”

“Long enough to develop a problem with birds, it seems. Do you know I allowed a massacre on my deck this spring?” Then she laughed, covered her mouth with her palm as she said, “Of course you don’t. We just met, you and I.” She kept talking, obviously not expecting an answer from me. “Cedar Waxwings, dozens, flew from the sky, landed in that tree and ate the dead berries.” She pointed to the crab-apple. “It was a spring afternoon and I was watching the birds outside the sliding glass doors.”

She spoke quietly, eyes shining. “I couldn’t really hear them, only imagined their bird chatter. They zipped back and forth between branches like waiters at a cocktail party. My party. We were celebrating together.

George was coming home.”

She leaned towards me, raising her voice slightly.

“The first bird charged out of the crab-apple tree, thudded against the glass panel, stuck there for an instant, then dropped. Yellow fluff painted the glass where the bird had just been. I heard a second, then a third thud before I turned on the stereo to drown out the sound.”

I looked over to the crab-apple tree, imagined it two 60

Fran Kimmel months back, its brown curled leaves, the spring air reeking of fermenting crab-apples. The birds must have used this as a stopover place on their way north. Got drunk. Hit the glass.

She leaned into one hand and rang her fingers like a comb through her tangled black hair. “That night, I lay on my side of the bed and listed clever ways to warn the birds. Stringing Christmas garlands along the glass, or buying decals in the shape of butterflies. In the end, I did nothing. The birds stayed three days. Fred disposed of the stack piling on my deck.”

Fred? Ah yes, the yardman. But where was the husband?

“What kind of woman allows such a thing?” she whispered, reaching for her legs, tucking them closer.

“It’s not your fault,” I said, overeager. My face burned. “Cedar Waxwings are stupid birds. The berries made them drunk.”

“George didn’t come home,” she said, her voice distant now, like from a radio through an open window.

She twisted her hair in her fingers. “George has this largeness about him, although he’s not nearly your size.

His voice fills the room. But he called from Hong Kong a little before six. I planned on telling him but he didn’t come home. Now it’s too late.”

I’d not really been listening, stealing glimpses instead of her white neck and dark eyes, feeling blood pump through me, wondering when the husband might walk through the door. Only later, as I lay beside my 61

Fiction sleeping wife, did I hear Lizzy’s confession of it being too late. The magpie lifted from the tree, circled once directly above us, then landed back on the branch, hopped to its tip, and stared back at us.

We looked at each other then. She smiled and poured me a glass of wine. When she leaned towards me, handing me my glass, I caught a glimpse of the top of her breasts, white against white. I wanted strong coffee, but took the glass. We sat in silence, gazing into the trees.

“You wouldn’t know where their nest is would you, Mrs. MacDonald?”

“No, I’m sure I wouldn’t. You do it in the nest do you? Of course that’s the best place. Crush the eggs or the featherless, blind babies before they can fly away or turn into a problem. That makes the most sense doesn’t it?”

She might as well have said, “You disgust me.”

“Perhaps you and George should talk it over, about the magpies I mean.” I thought of Margaret then. She’d have been up for hours, biscuits baked already, herding the boys with her sergeant’s voice.

“There is no nest and only one magpie,” she continued. “And please stop calling me Mrs. MacDonald.

George and I aren’t married. My name is Lizzy. You’re here now. George is in Hong Kong. Or is it Malaysia this time? No, I think you should carry on.”

I wondered if she thought I might jump up shooting.

“They’re powerful birds, sure of themselves,” she said. “Beautiful really, with their sweeping black tails.

62

Fran Kimmel Don’t you think of them as beautiful?”

“No. I don’t.”

“Then tell me. How do you think of them?”

I thought she was poking fun of me. A country hick, pulled in for the grunt work. But when I looked at her she was leaning towards me, her chin resting in her cupped palm, her eyes staring so intently into mine I had to look down.

“To be honest, I think magpies bring bad luck and you’re best to be rid of them.”

My palms were wet and I started to worry that the crystal might slide through my fingers and shatter. I pinged my glass onto the patio table.

“Do you really believe that? About birds bringing bad luck?” She uncurled her legs and stretched them before her, circling her toe along the grain of the cedar.

“Well, bad luck is a slippery thing,” I said slowly, following the movement of her leg. “Slithers in based on what we don’t do. Mostly I believe that magpies can take over a property if you give them free reign.”

“I’ve heard stories that birds have souls,” she said.

“What do you think about that Mr. Knight? Do magpies have souls?”

“Old wives tale mostly.”

She squinted her eyes and pulled in her shoulders.

Her wine spilled down over her fingers and trickled down her hand and under the sleeve of her glaringly white robe.

I wondered when she’d last eaten. When she’d last 63

Fiction spoken with her misplaced, unhusband?

She gulped in air, looked over to me, paler still. “You see I’ve taken an interest in birds lately. Or they’ve taken an interest in me.” Her shoulders curled inwards, her robe bunching at her chest. “And you seem to be an expert. I want to know about magpies. The stories that wives tell.”

She waited for me to say something.

“Some say a magpie carries a drop of the Devil’s blood under its tongue,” I said, calling on lines I’d heard from my neighbors.

“People believe that?”

“Some do. But these tales go way back and take on a different slant depending on where you live in the world.”

“Where do you come from?”

“Bear Creek. Up north. Lots of open space. Lot of bush.” I didn’t want her to know about trying to spot the magpie before it spots you. About Arnold and the rest, crossing themselves twice. About all the folks who’d take another route to church if they saw one, just one magpie, circling overhead.

Lizzy continued to drink wine. I couldn’t figure out how a woman so small could still talk straight.

She said, “I like that you assess other people’s situations, clean up their problems.” She picked up the bottle, ran her finger along the label. “You’re like a doctor.

A woman merely has to step through the sliding door, fix her eyes on the wall’s greenest green, tuck her fists 64

Fran Kimmel under that paper-thin sheet. The doctor will take care of the rest. You’re like a doctor that way.”

She turned to me and stared at my hands. I stared at them too. My ring dug into the flesh beneath my mechanic’s swollen knuckle. I twisted it back and forth.

“Do you have children?” she asked, her hands pressed tight against her stomach.

“I have three. All boys. Quite a handful.”

“Three normal healthy boys?” she asked, still looking down. “Of course they are,” she said, rubbing her wine stained lips with the back of her hand. “Three sets of perfect little fingers and toes, three sets of healthy lungs, strong hearts each.”

I was about to tell her of Rodney’s asthma, but she’d moved on already. “I’ve been asking Fred about magpies. He says that the magpie’s colours, black against white, reflect both the holy and the evil. Do you believe that? ” Lizzy leaned towards me, her hand on the arm of my chair.

I remembered the drawing in The Birds of the World book Margaret gave me for Christmas. It was a fuzzy charcoal sketch of a woman in a long dress kneeling at a tiny grave. A giant magpie perched on the gravestone, looking down, its beak a stretched “V.” I must have been remembering out loud, because Lizzy said, “What?

What did you say?”

“Sorry?”

“What did you say about the babies?” she repeated, her fingers pinching my arm like a claw.

65

Fiction I was shocked she had grabbed me like that. “Magpies squawk as they do cause they carry the grief-stricken souls of the unbaptised babies,” I recited from the book.

She stood and stumbled backwards into the wall of the house. I turned and stared at her, her wide eyes holding mine. That magpie sitting in the tree let out a high-pitched shriek. I jumped in my chair, my knee thumping against the side of the table. I felt light-headed, dizzy. My cotton shirt stuck to my skin.

“With all the world to choose from, that magpie chose me,” she whispered.

The bird launched itself out of the tree and dove towards us, breaking just short of the deck before it circled sharply and returned to its branch I put on my cap, pushed myself away from the table, and walked to the railing. My head started pounding again the minute I stood. “Magpies don’t choose people. And it’s a bad season, that’s all. They’re everywhere.” I searched the trees, trying to find others, but only the one magpie stared back.

She stepped towards me, braced herself against the table for support, then stumbled to the edge of the deck and grabbed hold of the railing.

“Mrs… Lizzy. You’re just spooked with all this superstitious mumbo jumbo we’ve been talking. This stuff doesn’t mean anything.”

The magpie screamed like its tail’d caught fire. Lizzy stood beside me now. She turned, took a hold of my 66

Fran Kimmel arm, clinging to me with remarkable strength. The skin under her eyes was purpling like a fast-forward bruise.

I felt sick with her reek of sour wine, the heavy sweet of the crab-apple blossoms. I quit breathing, kept my body perfectly stiff.

“Tell me the part about the babies? What happens to the babies’ souls?”

I couldn’t make sense of it, my part, or what she was asking of me. I tried to move from her but she kept a hold of my arm, collapsing into me as I backed away.

She stumbled and dipped, sliding down and back up my arm.

“Let go of my arm,” I said, trying to release the panic inside me. I could no sooner hit that bird than fly to the moon. “Let go now. I’m going.”

I shook her off me. She fell heavily against the glass.

I reached out my arm to help her back up, but her mumbling stopped me cold. Her jumble of words about the baby and its soul and evil swooping down.

I phoned 911 when I got in the truck, told the operator there was a woman in distress, read out the address, and hung up before she could ask any questions. I waited with the magpie until the ambulance rolled in, siren blazing, Lizzy a crumpled heap on her deck. No sign of George. Just two clean-cut paramedics fresh out of school, scrambling up her stairs. They stayed with her a long time, down on their knees, checking her pulse, cuffing her forearm, shining a beam in her eye, asking none of the right questions. She stood, finally, and stag67

Fiction gered through the glass door, waving them away.

I still can’t remember my route out of the city. All I know is I drove nine hours straight, stopping for gas and nothing more. I was back in Bear Creek before midnight. Margaret and the boys were sleeping. I tiptoed from room to room with my flashlight, studying the soft lines of cheeks and fists, the unashamed noises of sleep, the lazy way the sheets moved up and down.

The next morning I sent Arnold a cheque and the bird gun, told him he could finish the magpie business as he saw fit.

I try not to think of her, but it’s not been that simple. That magpie follows behind my truck when I drive down our graveled road. He stares from the aspen branch when I work in the shop. I tell myself I’m being foolish; I look over my shoulder just the same.

And there are the moments of panic. Usually when I’m outdoors, working on a motor, or weeding out back with Margaret and the boys. Our zucchinis are fat as babies this summer. We’ve got single carrots that can feed our whole family. The corn shudders as we walk through the rows, plotting ways to wrap around us, swallow us whole.

The magpie loops above the garden. Margaret might unbend and stretch, rub her dirt-caked hands down her thighs and mutter something like, “These carrots needs thinning real bad.” There’ll be something about the way she sighs or the resentment in the motion she uses to swat at black flies. I watch her closely as she works, 68

Fran Kimmel wondering what she’s trying to tell me. Finally, she turns to me, smiles widely, and says “Get a move on it, Russell, or we’ll be here all day.” Then she yells throatily at one of the boys for stomping over the onions, or for yanking too hard on the vines. The moment passes and my heart slowly quits its banging.

69

What Happened to Sadie Palmer

T

Lauren Mead

he trouble with arriving to a wedding early, you decide, is the small talk rising into the air like poisonous gas. There’s an expectation here, to open your mouth, breathe deeply, assimilate. You fidget with the ankle strap of your maryjanes and avoid making eye contact with anyone, least of all Jeff, who smiles moon-faced at his bride. The hemline of your dress picks away at a spot on your chest and a rose pattern of red bleeds up your neck, ink spilled below the surface. Jeff is old, you think. Everyone is old except for Sadie Palmer.

Hello, there. Nice weather. Nice tie. Nice cupcakes.

Yes, you think. Everything, including the whitewash bride, corpse pale under the fluorescents, is nice.

You slip off of your stool, make your way through the crowd and let your body jump to the beat. Pounding up your bones, rearranging your sensibilities. You turn.

It’s a hand, attached to a slender arm. You dare to look, your furtive gaze glancing at the face, you bite your lip, jive away from her. Sadie’s perfectly symmetrical face,

Fiction her eyes two black marbles, liquid rainbow reflected in them.

We need to talk, she mouths.

You crumple in her direction, ducking the words, but they wriggle through the jungle of noise and you follow Sadie, because she is—was—your friend. You run your arm up, across your chest. The red ink has spread, a vicious butterfly with too many eyes.

Go away, Sadie, you shout. Go home. But she traipses off to the bathroom, the music like chanting. How has she come to be here? How is it that she watches you from across the room? The door closes behind you.

When you look up, you are in a separate space, ten years ago, in your dorm room. Sadie has been gone for a long time, you think. Sadie might have called. You hunch on your bed, letting the scratchy sheets itch your bare legs.

No breeze, just those sickly beige curtains. The deadbolt is drawn. You, inside your bubble of light, wonder briefly about calling the police.

Sadie would be mad, you think. Sadie can take care of herself. A faint slap of plastic on metal; the numbers change over. You float to the shared bathroom down the hall in a dreamlike state. Square tiles like the teeth of dead elephants sunken into the tar pits where you spent all of your summers. They crawl up the walls, meeting chipped green paint. The hum of fluorescents, rotten yellow.

A trail of black oil, you think, bending down. When 72

Lauren Mead you dip your finger into the ooze, it smells like pennies.

The trail leads you into a stall, the drips and dribbles bleed into a sluggish river that pools underneath flesh like marble.

Sadie, on the floor, slumped to the side with eyes like wet cement. You resist the urge to retch, swallow roughly, and the bile claws at your insides. You reach out a shaking hand and are shocked to see that it too is steely grey.

Sadie, you say. Come on. You shake her, which you know you probably shouldn’t do, but she falls on her side. The neon pink earrings she had on, the ones you let her borrow, tinkle, and the sound feels all wrong for the occasion.

The floor is dirty, you say, trying a new tactic. But of course, she doesn’t know this anymore. Her mouth, purple, open slightly. Red, spiked hair askew.

When the police finally do arrive, you are asked too many questions.

When did you see her last?

This evening? This morning? You think you caught a glimpse of her leaving the campus coffee shop, you say. You don’t mention the way she told you to “eat shit,” because that doesn’t seem to matter now. What does it matter if a dead girl told you to eat shit and die?

You linger on the possibility of ironic situations, but have to move on. The officer has asked you three more questions.

No, you answer to all of them.

73

Fiction Do you know who might have done this?

No, you say. Her boyfriend, maybe. He’s odd.

Seemed pissed when he picked her up.

Jeff is too nice to kill someone on the John, you think. The hum grates at your temper. Blotches burn your chest.

That’s all, says the officer. His partner whispers something as you leave, but the humming whines in your ears, filling up with pressure.

Sadie’s eyes follow you in the mirror; she’s got something more to say. Last words? You close the bathroom door and turn your back, shrinking from the room.

A knock on the door. Jeff squints at you from the doorframe, hair sticking up. He’s holding a bag of Doritos.

My roommate’s having sex, he says, sitting down on Sadie’s rumpled bed.

She’s out, you say.

Jeff shrugs. He slides down onto the floor, your knees touching his. Bio chem’s a bitch, he says, picking up your textbook.

You inch closer.

Sadie is and always has been a “free agent.” This is what she said the first time you met. All the time that you were roaming that summer, two girls with too much hair and a dirty camper van, you slept nose to nose, giggling at the way your breath felt on each other.

She’d say don’t bother trying to pin me to the ground.

74

Lauren Mead I’ll just fly away.

In the fall of that year, you walk hand in hand across campus almost every day.

You and Sadie, legs crossed on your bed, orange wool blanket underneath you. The closet-like dorm room a womb. She leans in. Cinnamon breath to cover the pot you both smoked earlier. Her eyes are ink pools. A chameleon green line drawn expertly over the crease of almond eyes. Globs of mascara punctuate the sweeping of her lashes. Sadie leans in, lips soft as butter, and kisses you. There is a jolt, the earth opening up underneath.

You push her away.

January turns into April. Sometimes, words hang in the air between you like old balloons, withered but still hanging limply from their strings. Once, your fingertips touch reaching for the same book; you withdraw before there can be another jolt.

In that time, you live in the library, secluded between the non-fiction section and a lonely window. You begin to see Sadie everywhere. In lecture, the same street corner‌ in line at the coffee place, at the movies, the bookshop.

Sadie is everywhere.

Sadie is still everywhere.

On the night you find Sadie, you are waiting in the library. Eyes trained on the page, the words turn to black 75

Fiction dots, dance across the margins. The clock keeps taking nibbles at the silence around you. A bleat makes your chest tighten. You reach for the phone and stop. SADIE, the display reads. There is a picture of you and Sadie, arms waving, faces welded together by sweat. A glow on your faces laminated by the display. Before the last ring, you open the phone, hit answer, but Sadie’s voice never emerges. You don’t recall if you say anything just then.

Instead, you find yourself wandering into Jeff’s room, even though it is across campus.

Slippery, the jeans, the grey button shirt sticks like loose skin. You are reminded of the Subway man and wonder if this is what he feels like every day. Outside, the rain continues to beat at the windows like tiny fists.

They want to wake you up to this moment, but you are frozen in the middle of the room. Jeff wipes a drip from your cheek. It might be a tear.

You miss her, he says. Stick around; she’ll be back soon.

What gave it away? you ask.

The water on Jeff’s lashes shimmers. His eyes, arctic and intense.

I should go, you say. My floor is only one down.

Click click click click click. The radiator gears up. A foggy warmth thickens the air, makes it hard to breathe.

You take in shallow breaths. Your shirt like cellophane peeling off brand new merchandise as Jeff pulls it off, a slick plop when it lands on the floor. Your jeans are a tougher problem. He has to yank at the waistband, but 76

Lauren Mead the sandpaper fabric scratches your leg, pulls the hairs.

You are shaking when he manages to pull them off of you. Someone laughs. Maybe it is you. Somewhere in the musty, awkward silence of rain, he loses the shirt, the pants, your fingers fumbling. His skin a cold fish at first against your chest, flopping in fits and starts.

There, on the pile of clothes, you make love to Sadie’s boyfriend. The clothes make a muddy slapping noise, or is that your skin as you glide across one another? When you are finished, you just lay there, slick and crumpled, watching your chest rise and fall.

Tile crowds the air out of the bathroom. You can hear the booming bass through the door. You peer into the glass, a pool of mercury untouched. God, the creases have become gouges now. An earthquake, you think.

Tearing up the smooth outer layer, opening the world to your inner thoughts.

Unlike the bathroom of your dorm from so many years ago, this one has marble counters, the floors glittering. A shadow catches your eye and you follow it. A river, sluggish and dirty. Light, shuddering sobs are coming from the toilet stall behind.

You push the black door open to the stall.

There is no one there.

Sadie, you say. What are you doing here?

She is perched like a parrot on the seat. Eyes ringed black, her hair hangs across her face like strings of ice77

Fiction berg lettuce.

I was wrong, she says in between the sobs.

That’s dumb, you say.

Sadie leers at you, one black, slitted eye peering at you from a part in the hair.

You did this, she says. She’s saying it into her hands, which are wet. When you reach out to grab one she pulls away.

You don’t say sorry. Skin prickling, you stand up to leave, but instead, you let the bubble of rage that has been building rise in your throat. You reach out. She looks up, eyes squinting. They reflect two white plus signs, the lights, on black marbles. Maybe she is expecting you to cup her cheek. She tilts her head as if you might reach down and kiss her. You grasp her hair, clenching, the strands sticky with sweat. Sadie gasps, one short, open-mouthed eruption of breath as you bring her head down across the porcelain, the crack breaking the silence.

You let go. Red ink on a page, dripping into the grout, staining those pearly white teeth, as if they will swallow her up. A fuzzy hum grows louder inside your head. It’s the lights again.

Your eyes ache. You get up, pad across cold tile and flip the switch, reveling in the dark.

You expect this kind of thing from horror movies. The kind that ends with everyone dead. The kind where the dead girl comes back, gets revenge.

78

Lauren Mead Come here, you say.

Sadie stares at you from inside the mirror. Outside, some long, lonely ballad plays and you think, Jeff is dancing with his new bride.

Come and get me, you say. Maybe you’re screaming.

Sadie only smiles back at you, that sweet, mysterious smile, her black eyes shining. You expect her to reach out, pull you into the mirror, drag you down into her hell. Only she doesn’t.

The lights go out.

And yet, even in the cool darkness, you know that Sadie Palmer is watching.

79

The Least Graeme Shorten Adams 1. Two worlds

D

ead cat on the road on Wednesday, about six in the evening. As I cycled up behind it I thought it was a raccoon. One of its eyeballs had fallen out and lay about two inches in front of its face. It was perfectly round and white behind the iris, like a human eye. I felt sad for the cat, but I felt worse for the small child huddled up with his parents by a car about ten feet behind it. The parents were likely trying to figure out a way to get him away from the cat without arousing his curiosity, or maybe they had seen the cat and gotten out of the car because he was upset. But what were they going to do? I guess they could have backed into the one-way just behind them but on that street it was a dangerous move. They would have to pass the cat, unless someone cleaned it up before they got back in the car.

The image of the dead cat and its perfect eyeball stuck with me for the rest of the night at work, when I decid-

Fiction ed I was better off never speaking again. In the past few months I’d come close to achieving this anyway, without making any concrete decisions. I’m different from Niall in this way. He says very little during the day, less than I do, but when he’s alone, or thinks he is, he almost never stops talking. He uses a sharp, dry whisper, running his mouth off at a clip, occasionally rising in pitch or intensity—that’s when I can make out the harsh bite of his S’s from my room, although I can rarely distinguish much else. It’s sort of a romantic idea, talking to yourself, and for that reason it would be a nice habit to cultivate, but I know I can’t commit to it. Less difficult to commit to, maybe, than never speaking again, but I’ve made my choice.

At Meredith’s the other night, in the courtyard, I said very little. The courtyard isn’t really that; it’s a sort of improvised enclosure just outside her back door, which leads onto a parking lot. There’s some patio furniture that was there when she moved in, and screened off by a couple SUVs is her landlord, in a similar enclosure, with his adult sons who occasionally visit to stand around and smoke. On a summer night when the thoroughfare on the other side of the buildings has quieted down it’s nice to sit in that sparse, artificially lit place and watch the organic traffic pass through: a cat, the sons, the landlord himself with his newspaper. I honestly prefer it even to something like a real courtyard or back garden; the human resourcefulness it took to turn a square of asphalt into a home is comforting to me.

82

Graeme Shorten Adams He’s unusually conscientious, the landlord, but I suppose that’s because he’s retired and bored. He even tells Meredith and Nida when they have mail in their mailbox. As he sat down with us he gave us one such report and went as far as to say what kind of mail he thought it was (an electrical bill). It’s true, Nida said, that you can sometimes intuit what sort of message a letter might contain before you open it or even read the envelope. Her mother rents out her basement and once saw a letter for her tenant arrive in the middle of the day.

By the timing and shape of the letter and maybe something else, some accumulation of tiny patterns that culminated in this visit from the mail carrier, she became sure that her tenant had just been fired.

“There’s a parallel world to our own,” the landlord said. “There’s this world and the other, running together.” And he told a story that was different but really very similar, about how he and his wife had visited a psychic in Florida who correctly predicted his wife’s death in six months’ time. While I stared out over our grilled corn and zucchini Meredith handled everything gracefully, never touching the death. “Eighteen months my wife’s been gone,” the landlord said, trying to press the issue, but Meredith somehow managed to touch only the contours of this event without making the landlord feel unattended to.

They’d gone down to Florida in weather that I imagined matched the cool summer evening that filled the courtyard; I imagined the same gray and pink sunset 83

Fiction flattening the car as they drove back from the psychic’s. The same features of the courtyard transposed into their van: tangled plastic bags, tiny toy cars the landlord’s sons had probably outgrown, the housing flyers no one reads, a pop can, an air freshener. Things that had passed through the useful stage of their lives to become something bizarrely eternal.

The landlord asked if Meredith and Nida’s coffee machine was okay, if they needed new light switch covers; maybe he’d come by tomorrow morning and check out the range hood. And the bill, he said, they should really check the bill. The pink light got grayer and Meredith took a corncob off the barbecue.

2. Description of the perfect human being I want someone to talk to me about something completely mundane. I want a soft presence—soft, but firm, like freshly tilled soil. I want this person to welcome me when I get home from work, to talk to me without expecting a reply as I get a drink, to be the voice of something gentle in the world. This avatar of decency would show me a face of life that’s somehow interesting without being threatening, neither pretentious nor disingenuous, and very clear. This is a life where failure has no consequence but a small delay, like a skipped heartbeat, and even that delay means nothing because time in this life doesn’t move forward and disappear, instead it gently asserts its infinite nature. But this abundance 84

Graeme Shorten Adams isn’t terrifying either; in the light of this kind of time you can feel yourself become elastic, like your strength is not so much boundless as boundlessly adequate, and any harm you could do is so obviously small in the perspective afforded by this abundant time that there’s no need for censure or shame. It’s the voice of the expert in some narrow field, someone who’s endlessly fascinated by every single crevice in their area of interest, every mundane detail charged with both consequence and a complete lack of consequence, the unsteady world diminishing in the light of a single, gentle obsession.

3. Opponents Since Niall and I don’t talk, in spite of—or maybe because of—paying rent together and having attending the same schools for years, I imagine us having theological debates instead. I imagine us as representatives of bodies of thought that have no distinction for anyone but the most committed hierophants. I don’t know which of us is the conservative in the following situation: “Even the poisonous pain of solitude is to be treasured,” Niall says, “as a private, enlightening agony, as a test that both strengthens the soul and makes it fertile.”

“Au contraire, mon frère,” I say. “Solitude should be a narcotic, it should numb everything so that you just float through the world.”

“You idiot,” he says, “You absolute moron. Then all 85

Fiction of that isolation would be pointless, wouldn’t it? You have to feel the pain, you have to feel it press up right against the nerve, like you’re going insane, because anything less cheats you out of grace.”

“Maybe grace is the kind of thing that strikes you when you’re blind,” I say. “Like you have to get numb and lose all sense of time and space and self to really be ready for it to hit you, like a lightning bolt. You know, revelation and such.”

Now Niall narrows his eyes; the sharp suspicion I’ve always suspected he has for me is, in this scenario, out in the open. “There’s a duty to be aware,” he says, “a duty to be an active participant in renunciation, to know how shitty things are, to really feel it.”

“I’m not saying you have to be unaware,” I say. “I’m just saying maybe you have to dull one kind of awareness to be aware of something else.”

4. Meredith To distract myself I make drinks—and I don’t mean alcoholic ones, although I dabble in those. I mean drinks of any kind, beverages; I’ve decided to dedicate myself to the single, solitary pursuit of being good with liquids. There are three reasons for this. The first is that they won’t let me make the drinks at work; by attaining a kind of backdoor mastery of the art I want to get some kind of secret sense of security, even superiority, when I go there. The second is that I can make drinks in silence 86

Graeme Shorten Adams while still being allowed pleasure (working with food or drink is a sneaky way to insert indulgence into a work ethic that, on the surface, seems austere; I can taste my own creations regularly as an essential measure of the discipline). The third is that I want to be the perfect human being. I think about this endlessly and over the course of several months I have made one drink, a green tea latte with milk that wouldn’t froth right.

Meredith is the only heartbeat, the only interruption. She’s often busy, often away for weeks at a time, and because of work and school I don’t see her often even when she is in town. But she lets me tell myself that at least I still have one friend; I still know how one functions in the capacity of a friend, even if I don’t know what being a friend is, so to speak.

At one time I must have had friends, or maybe I was just unaware that I didn’t, but in any case I never had a friend like Meredith, who uses time so well, who isn’t time’s enemy. She and Dahlia go about their business like planets that occasionally pass through one another’s orbits in some kind of mathematical dance, and in turn the other people in their lives, the abundances of people, also swipe by cool and regular. They’ve worked out an ecosystem, they resolve each other’s needs.

Meredith fixes small things, halfway between a hobby and a passion; things like sewing machines, eyeglasses, cameras, toasters, clocks. I see myself as one more thing passing through her expert hands, briefly worked through before the next thing floats onto her table.

87

Fiction How could I ever tell her that she’s the only thing that passes over mine? That she’s the only thing that doesn’t remind me of some mistake I’ve made? It wouldn’t be silly or embarrassing, it would be something outside of that, something frightening, to admit the state I’ve gotten to. To tell her that the outline of her bent over the table, calmly solving a problem with her fingers and tools, has replaced any present, past, or future I’d ever remotely known about—it’s better to see her happy and to have her keep me where she does, to treat me well, with care but not too much, and we can share grilled food and I can ask to borrow her milk frother, one that she fixed as easily as if the object itself wanted to please her.

5. About monks Maybe, I think, I could become a monk, but a bit of research on today’s abbeys shows there’s not much to be excited about. It feels oddly cruel to see those hooded figures sitting in rooms like college dormitories, with cheap chairs and vaguely cheery curtains. Every monk, or so it seems to me, should at least have the dignity of a real cell, something with dripping stone and flickering candles, but it’s obvious that today’s ascetics need a more modern home, even if that home looks like a minimum-security prison. I had a thought about how well the three fit together—the student, the monk and the prisoner—but I couldn’t get very far with it beyond the 88

Graeme Shorten Adams idea of a life centred on contemplation, and I scared myself.

There’s either too little to contemplate or too much, that has to be how it works—either a Zen blankness or an overwhelming sea of noise, where the veins of leaves, the patterns on stones, the fibres in cloth, everything comes into focus and demands your attention. I imagine becoming so maddeningly familiar with the same patch of land—the courtyard in the abbey or the prison where the cell-dwellers go—I imagine becoming so familiar with it while having it remain terrifyingly alien to me, tracing the little whirlpools on the concrete, remembering the new patterns they make as my foot blocks off parts of them, the angle at which I hold my foot changing the patterns further.

6. Something hanging One night I stared up at my ceiling and thought, Are you with me, God? Is the test over?

Have I been good? Have I been made holy by my penance?

But I realized I know nothing about penance, or penitence, or patience, or how much horrific silence is needed to make the soul fertile. Then it occurred to me that even now I’d gone at it wrong, that no true penitent had ever pitied themselves—and that was what I felt, pity, for myself and for everything around me—or rather that the world revealed itself as screaming for pity, for 89

Fiction the cat and the kid and my roommate and Meredith’s landlord and how he would probably die looking out at that parking lot. Maybe pity wasn’t far from it after all—was this what a religious epiphany was? Some kind of inkling of the oneness of all things, floating in a spiritual soup called pity? That as the son of God died for pity, I could easily die for pity, or of pity, maybe that was it, pity, pity—but the word stopped making sense and a nocturnal blankness slipped into my soul, resetting it, and I only hoped I could keep it in me for as long as possible.

That night I couldn’t remember what I’d been punished for anymore; only the fact I must have deserved it. Exile sounds too romantic but it’s not far off, like I’ve been somehow exiled from time, or maybe fused to it.

Now I can notice other exiles, or other spots where time acknowledges its own variations, containers for eternity, courtyards of slow and well-rooted despair across the planet. Inhabitants of these zones, or people who carry these zones with them, the voluntary and involuntary renouncers, people with nowhere to go because they’ve accessed nowhere as a place, the truest and most widespread place, floating above the regular places normal people just pass through. A truth hangs there, the secret these people have seen, people I notice on benches in sunset, always in fucking sunset, with their eyes blurred so they can see that hanging secret better.

I can’t pretend I didn’t glimpse it too and it scared me, what it was coloured with, because it was just raw and 90

Graeme Shorten Adams ubiquitous and basic death in the end, just like you’d expect. But to see that truth, to really know it and not just glimpse it and look away in fear, wouldn’t that open up the other world, wouldn’t that be a crossing into life’s real territories? I keep my head down, I try to make green tea lattes.

Monks, nuns, ascetics, celibates, hikikomori; drifters, agoraphobics, pariahs, divorcées; prisoners, addicts, abandoned teenagers, aimless mourners, runaways, soldiers, alcoholics, janitors, insomniacs, people on bench after bench on the brink of death, people with knives in their backpacks, people teetering into rivers, leaning into phone booths, sick from a gigantic loneliness transmitted through the warm air of endless summer nights in their empty bedrooms—how arrogant to think I’d have anything in common with them, how crude to think I could do anything but ape their paths, how absurd to think that Niall and I could be frères in some cement abbey, frères at all—how stupid to think that thing hanging there could change its skin and unite us.

Maybe I’d come to silence for the same reason monks had, as a sort of compromise: they’d figured out a way of dying while staying alive.

7. What we can share “I get it!” I tell Niall in the imagined debate. “The landlord discovered the parallel world because he really had 91

Fiction nothing to do! He was really, really feeling loss—not like we’re feeling, who knows if we lost anything at all— he knew his wife would die! Can you even imagine? He really had the fertile soul because he’d seen the true emptiness of—I don’t know, retirement, boredom, misery, adult children, bereavement, mortality—and he cultivates this divine compassion for the mundane with his rituals and the courtyard—Jesus, do you think he’s gonna die there? I know you’ve never met him, I know you’ve never been to his house—have you even met Meredith? Jesus, which of us do you think will die first, you or me? If one of us dies, does that mean the other’s days are numbered? Would I tell you if I was about to do it? Would you tell me? Or would we know, through little patterns building up?”

I can barely stop to breathe. “I thought that was the challenge, right, to not die? You come so close to killing yourself just so you can see God and say ‘fuck, it’s all so beautiful now!’

“The trick is to get just that far, but no further—and how far is that, exactly? How will we know when we’re at the brink? When everything becomes so empty that we’re finally prepared for death—and it’s the mundane things we’re supposed to notice, that’s what’s supposed to save the agonized mind—it’s like, the principle of meditation, of contemplation, of awareness or semi-awareness or something, isn’t it?”

I struggle to imagine what Niall says now, beyond a silence he’d present to me at even the ghosts of these 92

Graeme Shorten Adams questions in real life. In my mind, I make his mouth move and something comes out like what he must tell himself when he thinks I’m not listening, when he’s raving like mad.

“No no no no no,” he says, “No no no no no no no no, there’s no end to the brink, you live on the brink forever, the brink recedes infinitely, it subdivides itself into half after half after half after half so you’re always, always this close, always waiting, that’s the good pain, that’s the good good good pain, we must have deserved it, we must have deserved it, we must have deserved it.”

This last part a psychotic mantra, the S’s like nails going in.

“It’s really sweet,” I say, scaring myself again, feeling flushed. “And it really hurts me a lot.

“And I’ll bathe in it, I don’t care if it hurts me too much. Jesus,” I say again and I reach out like I’m going to touch him. “This is so, so real to me, this is the realest thing in the world to me, like there’s a finger on my nerve, oh Jesus, oh Christ I’m gonna die, oh God oh God I’m gonna die I’m gonna die I’m gonna die.”

Now I can’t see if he wraps his fingers around mine, or embraces me, or does anything to touch me because his form has gotten blurry, I’m going blind, mad, and sick all at once, my body and mind are dissolving in tandem; what is there, though, through the curtains of numbness alling through me, is some expression like I’ve never seen before on his face, the features rising to another plane of revulsion and resignation and tender93

Fiction ness all at once, something with a horrific, muddy glow that stretches over everything, murky and ubiquitous except for the round whites of his eyeballs.

8. Meredith Meredith is moving away and the landlord’s conscientiousness has become predatory; he wants to make sure the curtains are hung right, that the mattress covers haven’t been stolen. He steps into her house abruptly, scarcely announced, and lists the bits and pieces of the building he wants preserved like it’s baggage to heaven.

94

Non-Fiction

Peering at the Horizon

I

Barbara Janusz

breathed in, and expected the gammy rancidness of a rotting carcass to hit my nostrils. Instead all I picked up was the scent of desiccated sterility, like the odour of clothing coming out of a dryer. A flock of turkey vultures circled overhead. The predators had likely picked clean the latest casualty of the twoyear long drought. Rather than feeding, the vultures were hunting and pickings, evidently, were slim.

The grey dust-caked trunks of the cardon cacti, shrivelled, like the wizened faces of old people, had slid into dormancy. The spindly branches of the creosote bushes, bleached by the relentless blaze of the Baja sun, emulated dried driftwood, their woody epidermis polished to a dull sheen by the erosive combination of wind and sand. Only the distant swaying crowns of a palm grove punctuated the colourless aridness with a splash of verdancy.

We walked briskly, anxious to arrive at Punta los Lobos—named for a sea lion colony, but also known colloquially as the Fishermen’s Beach. Tire tracks suggested

Non-Fiction that some traffic, not far removed in time, had traversed the sandy road. Even though it was still mid-morning, it was late for fishermen, particularly of the deep sea ilk.

Had we set out earlier, we might have caught a ride in the back of a pick-up. At this later hour, we were prepared to walk.

The chapel, nestled within a shallow cave of the mountain that jutted out into the ocean on the southern end of the beach, was the first landmark that came into view. I visualized the women kneeling before the icon of our Lady of Guadalupe, tucked within the concave recess of the grotto, fingering rosaries with heads bowed, their lips silently mouthing prayers of intercession for the safe return of their husbands and sons. Today, the grotto stood empty. It was mid-November and thus past hurricane season, which this year had been a non-event on account of the colder-than-usual temperature of the ocean.

A dozen pick-up trucks were parked in a row under the shade and northern flank of the rocky outcrop, but the beach was deserted. Stepping out of my sandals, I traversed the sand to the watermark, delineated by a sharp uplifting in the shoreline—evidence of the combined power of the ever-shifting tide and a strong undertow. To the north, another mountain separated the beach from the barrio of Todos Santos, home to los pescadores and their families. The palm grove that we’d spotted on our trek down the road fringed its southern perimeter.

98

Barbara Janusz A lone dog, a nondescript breed, chocolate brown in colour, followed us to the rise in the shoreline. It appeared within less than a foot of my elbow. I jumped up, shouted at it to leave us alone, and waved my arm for emphasis. The dog rose to its legs and moved away a little, but I could tell that it would stick to us like glue for the rest of the day.

We descended onto the hard packed stretch of beach to trek further up the shore towards the lighthouse.

Looking back, sure enough, the dog had aptly targeted us as a couple of beachcombers who’d packed a lunch, and it persisted in trailing behind.

The resonance of the tide receding and colliding with the shore—the rushing sound of the water being sucked up and thrown back against land—took my mind off the dog and lulled me into a frame of in-themoment consciousness. It was as though whatever I’d been ruminating over had been flung out of my head like a gull that lifts off from its perch, extends its wings to catch the updraft of a breeze and embraces the litheness of its being. Within a depressed expanse of the beach stood a few dozen birds, their feathers ruffling in the breeze, their beaks pointed out to sea as though in anticipation of the landing of the pangas with the catch of the day, when los pescadores would promptly clean their catch and fling the scraps onto the sand for the gulls, cormorants, and pelicans to fight over.

We skirted the flock of marine fowl and resumed our trek on along the beach, looking behind us to see 99

Non-Fiction whether the dog still followed behind.

“Can’t you chase him away?” I asked Garry, irritation seeping into my voice.

“He’s not bothering anyone.”

Giving Garry a look of dismay, I stopped, turned around, and charged at the dog as a bull would set upon a goading matador. “Shoo!” The mutt stopped for a moment, but no sooner had we resumed our trek than it renewed its stalking.

“What about here?” I dropped my sandals and slid down on the edge of the dune, creating a hollow in the sand for my back and bum.

“Sure.”

“Here, pass me the pack.” Pulling back the zipper, I retrieved one of our water bottles. I took a drink and passed it to Garry and dug around for the sunblock.

“You want some?”

“Yeah, maybe I’d better.”

We’d arrived at our vantage point, a spot from which to savour the rhythmic abatement of a day. Apart from the waves rolling in and pulling back out to sea, only the small, skittish crabs crawling out of their holes and scurrying furtively towards the water disturbed the serenity of the seascape.

As though seeking the answer to a pressing question, I scanned and studied the fluid horizon—a welcome respite to staring at a computer screen. The expansiveness of ocean, and, behind us, the breadth of the strand, albeit circumscribed by dunes, induced a sense 100

Barbara Janusz of being liberated, of throwing off handcuffs, shackles, and blinders, like those borne by horses harnessed to a carriage, forced to navigate a street teeming with motorcars. I felt like a sea creature that had emerged triumphantly, yet surreptitiously out of the murkiness of its shell. At home, I’d begun to squint and had noticed how other people, as of late, had also assumed a slit-eyed countenance. My eyes had been feeling strained and tired, but as I settled into my sand backrest and rested my gaze upon the undulating marinescape, I seemed to have regained my peripheral vision and shed a little of my myopia.

“What are those black things in the water? Over there.” Garry pointed near the rock outcropping.

I was able to make out some black, rounded shapes bobbing up and down in the surf, but, without binoculars, it was impossible to determine whether or not they were the heads of sea lions. “I don’t recall ever having seen any sea lions out here, but to be honest I never knew that this beach was named after them. I’ve always known it as the Fishermen’s Beach.”

Fifteen years earlier, I’d lived as an expatriate in La Paz, the state capital an hour’s drive east, and had spent time on the west cape, particularly in the summer when it was typically much cooler on the Pacific side of the peninsula, but this was the first time that I’d vacationed in Todos Santos. That the little fishing village was becoming commercialized was borne out by the recently published Journal del Pacifico, a copy of which we’d 101

Non-Fiction picked up the day before in the resto-café La Esquina (The Corner) on the way to Playa la Cachora, further north. The publication, to its credit, emphasized the stunningly pristine beaches of the Baja Pacific shoreline by including under the typical headline in the table of contents of “Things to See and Do,” maps with the names of points of interest. Punta los Lobos had figured prominently on the map as one of several beaches south of Todos Santos.

Scanning the horizon, I cast my eyes a little to the right of where Garry had pointed. A vertical gush of air snagged my attention. Not wanting to lose sight of what I recognized as a whale exhaling through its blow hole, I cemented my gaze upon the spot and pointed. “I think there’s a whale out there.”

A second exhalation through the blow hole confirmed my sighting, followed by the great mammal flinging its tail flukes out of the water and into the air.

“Wow, would you look at that! Did you see that?”

“Yeah, I did,” Garry confirmed, standing up.

“Man, are we ever lucky! But it looks like there’s only the one. Usually they travel in pods.”

The beast was too far out for us to see its submerged back, but from time to time it appeared as though something of a concave configuration lurked near the surface of the water. I wondered whether humans had evolved an innate ability to identify and zero in on an object, like a ship, or movement, such as the lob tailing of a whale or its exhalation of air through a blow hole far 102

Barbara Janusz out on a horizon. It wasn’t something that we witnessed every day and yet it seemed so natural, instinctual, even for someone like me who’d suffered from myopia since early childhood.

I wondered too whether the whale was aware of our presence, perhaps had even seen us and was mischievously drawing attention to itself. The entire display lasted no more than five minutes and was finalized by one final lob tail that generated an even bigger splash, and which we interpreted as a farewell gesture.

It was inordinately early for the grey whales to be frequenting the warmer Pacific waters of the Baja coastline. It was here that they migrated annually to breed, and the females, a year later, would give birth to their calves in the warmer lagoons up the coastline. The peninsula’s shallow bays are ideal environments for newborns which have little insulating blubber to protect them from the savage natural habitat into which they’re thrust upon leaving the warm, secure bodies of their mothers.

I knew that the grey whale’s migratory route is one of the longest of any mammals on the planet. After abandoning their feeding grounds off the coast of Alaska, their journey typically doesn’t culminate in their arrival to the Baja until the end of December or beginning of January. For whale enthusiasts, their arrival every year is greeted like a Christmas present.

I’d also learned that it isn’t the temperature of the water that propels the grey whales south, but the waning 103

Non-Fiction hours of sunlight that, over the span of millions of years, had induced their adaptation to migrate towards warmer climes. Lately in sunny Alberta, everyone was complaining about the duller skies, and I too pondered the phenomenon of global dimming—precipitated by increased evaporation and cloud formation—and whether at higher latitudes the whales were being tricked into misinterpreting the thicker cloud cover as the shift in seasons that propelled them south to their mating and breeding grounds.

The mutt had begun digging a hole with its front paws and nuzzling its nose into the burrow. It had evidently grown bored with merely sitting on its haunches and watching us. “Why do you think it’s doing that?” I asked.

“Maybe trying to cool off.”

“It’s not that hot. I’m willing to bet it’s sniffing for crabs.”

“Why do you care what it’s doing? I thought you hated that dog. I’m going to take a walk.”

Unsurprisingly, the dog followed on Garry’s heels as he headed up the beach towards the lighthouse. To its credit, though presumably to avoid arousing any further protests on our part, it maintained a respectable distance to the rear.

A pair of pelicans flew overhead, their wings outstretched, gliding on the breeze that was blowing southwards. They were what scientists called a crepuscular species—more active at dawn and dusk—taking advan104

Barbara Janusz tage of the sun’s more oblique angle in the early morning and late afternoon to avoid having their shadows spotted by swimming prey. It was still too early for the pelicans to engage in hunting. They continued soaring south.

But it wasn’t too soon for the fishermen to return to shore with their catch of the day. Out on the horizon, I spotted a panga riding the waves and I looked forward to their orchestrated landing. I knew from previous forays onto this beach that the undertow here was tricky and that the fishermen were masters in appraising which wave would safely deposit them onto shore. I watched as the approaching small vessel veered back out to sea before circling back towards shore, and then repeated the maneuver twice more before gunning it, harnessing the force of a breaker that almost lifted the panga into the air before depositing it smoothly onto the beach.

I’d been so engrossed in watching the first in the series of returning pangas land onto shore that I didn’t notice Garry’s return, pesky mutt in tow. “They’re coming in now,” Garry remarked. “No wonder they call it the Fishermen’s Beach.”

“Pretty cool, eh?”

“Yeah. Should we wait for another one to come in or maybe we should check out their catch?”

I was afraid that, like the turkey vultures that we’d spotted on our trek here, circling and scanning the desert for prey, pickings for the fishermen might be slim.

I didn’t want to witness the disappointment on their 105

Non-Fiction faces. “Let’s just wait for the next panga to land.”

“Okay,” Garry agreed, sitting down beside me. He raised his hand to create a visor over his eyes and I aligned my focus with his on the horizon, where a band of clouds had amassed.

The skinny little dog didn’t pass on checking out the catch of the day. Tottering off toward the returning fishermen, it then broke into a scamper, presumably having picked up on the sea breeze: the pungent scent of freshly caught fish.

Resuming my contemplation of the horizon, I focussed on the spot that had delivered my inaugural sighting of the first panga that had just landed. I deferred jumping to any conclusions until a dark object reappeared over the crest of a breaker. Pointing, I declared, “Here comes another one.”

“How do you manage it?” Garry asked. “I thought you were going blind.”

Shrugging, I kept my eye on the black object that gradually grew in size as it drew nearer to the shore, all the while considering Garry’s question. I’d read somewhere that while women had evolved a knack for differentiating between subtle colours of blues, purples, and greens, men were more inclined to catch rapid movements of prey and predators. Perhaps the gender specific adaptations to eyesight, that to which had ensured the survival of Neolithic hunter gatherers, also accounted for men being so glued to their big screen television sets when watching Hockey Night in Canada. I had trouble 106

Barbara Janusz keeping my eye on the puck and some of my girlfriends also complained about being optically challenged when watching a game. But both sexes, I reasoned, had evolved an innate ability to zero in on something on the horizon, be it fluid or static, obscured by fog or undulating heat waves. Evidently, the eye strain that I’d become stricken with through intensive computer use could be eased by a change in perspective, by stretching the muscles in my eyes to decipher something barely discernible on a vast horizon.

Beyond the second panga—now gunning its motor to orchestrate the same strategic maneuver—I spotted a third incoming craft. This time, though, I didn’t doubt myself. Pointing, I said, “There’s another one following close behind.”

It wasn’t even close behind, but now that I had my perspective back, the distance between the panga that had come ashore and the one following seemed to have diminished. While zeroing in on the third panga, readying to land, it hit me that I was a product of a long line of hunter gatherers who’d set their sights on the distant and random rather than the near and predictable.

When migrating into alien, hostile territory, it would have been necessary to scan the horizon in anticipation of what might lay ahead. As I zeroed in on the third panga, riding the wave that would safely deposit it onto the shore, I considered whether such a precautionary exercise had played a part in our evolution of foresight.

While the metaphor of the eyes as windows to the soul 107

Non-Fiction waxes poetic, from an evolutionary perspective, eyes could veritably be said to be the conduits to our brains.

I knew enough about Darwin’s theory of natural selection to say that our evolutionary path could be traced to sea creatures. I thought about the affinity that I sensed with the whale who’d saluted us earlier while straying so close to shore and I wondered whether these giant mammals’ ability to accurately interpret the angle of the sun helped them map out their 10,000 kilometer migratory route.

As I peered at the horizon, I noticed how the undulating seascape at this later hour in the afternoon now reflected the sun’s rays. The sun’s diminishing angle alerted the fishermen that soon they’d be competing with pelicans for the fish and it was time to head back to shore. And, just like early migrating humans had had to be on guard to plan ahead to ensure their survival, so too had the whales, in response to changes in climate, evolved the good instincts to adapt their patterns of mating and feeding and giving birth to the shifting seasons, which, on our tilted revolving planet were demarcated by the angle of the sun. The whale’s early arrival to the Baja Pacific coastline was a harbinger, a bellwether of climate changes on the horizon. My innate ability to catch sight of the cetacean from a considerable distance was an evolutionary adaptation that affords me the possibility to take heed.

As we watched the fourth panga navigate the surf onto shore, I turned to Garry and asked, “Should we 108

Barbara Janusz check out what they caught today?�

Garry shot me a look of bewilderment. Although I hadn’t told him earlier why I preferred to hang back and watch the boats come in rather than appraise the day’s bounty (or lack thereof), he likely picked up on my trepidation about a poor yield. Besides, he was accustomed to me changing my mind, and to following rather than leading when it came to us visiting my old haunts in my familiar stomping grounds.

Nodding, Garry leaned forward to raise himself from the dune and, upon regaining his balance, held out his hand to help me up. As he pulled me to my feet, I lingered for a moment and cast my eyes upon the horizon for one last glimpse.

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Kiss It Better

I

Gitanjali Kolanad

’m standing ankle-deep in the icy, fast-moving water of Fletcher’s Creek in the Kootenays, barely balanced on slippery rocks. In my cupped hands I hold a Kokanee, a land-locked salmon, pulled from its medium as it swam upstream to spawn. Now the scarlet body flails as it slowly opens and closes its thousand-petalled gills.

Does the fish feel pain? The Jains say yes, and in order not to cause even the wince-like response of bacteria or the writhing of worms, they won’t eat yogurt or vegetables dug out of the earth. The rest of us establish hierarchies for what we’re willing to inflict without a rational basis: it’s not pain for a mosquito, but it is for a fish; it’s not pain for a fish, but it is for a pig; it’s not pain for a pig, but it is for a dog, a dolphin, a fetus; it’s not pain for any of them, but it is pain for a human being, for me.

What I can be sure of is my own pain.

I woke up one morning and I could feel it, just a little twinge along the blade of my shoulder. At first it was easy to ignore, but now it’s like a thin wire winched too

Non-Fiction tight inside the muscle. When I raise my arm to slip it into a sleeve or bend it behind me to undo my bra, the wire thickens and burns, bringing my awareness into movements that used to be unconscious, automatic.

It seems obvious that the pain is wherever I feel it to be—in my shoulder. But amputees experience sometimes severe and debilitating pain in the limb that’s been cut off, feeling pain in hands and feet that aren’t there to feel the pain. Some philosophers say that pain has no bodily location. When I say that my shoulder hurts, all I really do is note the cause or effect of pain.

The pain itself is somewhere else. As the philosopher Truls Wyler points out, “in experiencing pain, I am wholly present in the hurting part of my body.”

This is the usefulness of pain. At the dance school I attended in South India, I was initiated into the basic position of bharata natyam—heels together, toes apart, knees bent so that the thighs and calves form a square— as if into a new religion with “no pain, no gain” as its first sutra. When the simpler positions were no longer painful, we went on to more difficult positions that were.

When even these became easy, we went faster, jumped higher, did more repetitions. A dancer not in some kind of pain, I learned, is not working hard enough.

According to those who seek to define it, pain is not the sensation alone, but the process by which we decide that sensation is pain. Since there are no pain waves we can measure, what it feels like is all it is. To describe it we must resort to metaphors: “like a clamp,” “like being 112

Gitanjali Kolanad pounded by a meat cleaver,” “like a hot nail entering the eyeball.” Here the fish is at a disadvantage. It expresses a muscular intent on my palms to escape, but its sickleshaped mouth, which moves a little, as if gasping, can’t describe what it feels. In my dance style, there are the patterns performed for the pure beauty of the lines the moving body etches in space, and there are the stories told with gestures of the hands and stylized facial expressions, like in the old silent movies. In the stories, your lover ignores you, he doesn’t show up when he said he would, he sleeps with your best friend.

Where is the pain when a lover leaves you? There’s a reason it’s called heartache. The metaphors too are all physical. I mime his betrayal as being pierced by arrows, parched by a hot wind, crushed like petals underfoot.

Physical pain and emotional pain light up many of the same pathways in the brain; either way, a kiss can make it better. “I feel your pain” is not an empty platitude. We have special neurons that make us feel what the other is feeling based on the arrangement of their facial features.

We place ourselves in the space the other occupies. The fish seems to suffer because I would suffer if I was exposed. And yet we can turn away, grab the remote, and click past the image of the starving child with flies clustered at his eyes and mouth. This is a paradox. We don’t want to see real pain, but we wallow in its depiction.

Sanskrit has a word for that—rasa, meaning juice or essence, for the pleasure we feel from representations of pain, that move us more than the real thing.

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Non-Fiction When my mother died, suddenly, without any warning, I was half a world away. My sister called to tell me.

The next day I had to put on my makeup and costume, tie the bells around my ankles for a performance. At first I danced on autopilot, going through the patterns I’d endlessly rehearsed. But then these words were sung: In lily ponds the plump colourful buds are forced open by bumblebees on his cool seashore.

The poem goes on to tell the usual story of infidelity. All alone on the stage, the audience a black sea of eyes, the real pain of my mother’s death intersected with the pain I was faking over my lover’s betrayal. At first it felt like a trick that cheapened and trivialized my love and my loss. But I had no choice but to weep real tears for my false lover.

Now that the fish hardly moves, I can hold it in one hand and trace my index finger along its lateral line, the nerve receptors that run from head to tail, through which the fish senses vibrations in the water. One eye like a bead of mercury takes in and gives back all the molten. During the Thai Pusam festival to the Goddess, men walk to the temple with black, oiled skewers through their cheeks. They have lemons on strings sewn into their flesh, so that as they shake and twirl, the lemons bounce and swing out, pulling the flesh into 114

Gitanjali Kolanad points. Some men drag carts with huge hooks piercing their upper backs, the skin stretched as if it will rip away from the person walking. All the men wear the same expression and it is not pain. Ecstasy? They’ve crossed some threshold. They are on the other side of something we can only watch.

I thought I was learning some dances, but really I was becoming a person who could do those dances. What I chiseled was myself. I’ve given up my body to this art form that has no afterlife, leaves no residue. Dance flickers into life on stage, becoming and dissolving in the same moment, leaving nothing I can point to, to say, “This is my life’s work.” It is the perfect metaphor, that Nataraj, the god of dance is both creator and destroyer.

I’m here in the Kootenays to let go of dancing, after almost forty years. The not dancing is as painful as the dancing.

I should let the fish go.

The sage Valmiki, while sitting in meditation on the banks of a river, saw a pair of sarus cranes, who mate for life, engaged in their elaborate mating dance. As he delighted in the spectacle, a hunter’s arrow pierced the male bird’s chest. It fell to the ground, bleeding, as the female bird showed every sign of distress. Moved by compassion and anger, Valmiki cursed the hunter. The words spoken in the heat of the moment came out of his mouth as a metrical Sanskrit couplet, sixteen syllables to the line. Valmiki noticed the structure of his words with surprise and pleasure. His curse is considered to 115

Non-Fiction be the very first poem.

Valmiki used the form he had created to compose the 24,000 slokas of the Ramayana, telling how Prince Rama, heir to the throne of Ayodhya, is exiled to the forest for fourteen years. How he, his beautiful wife Sita, and loyal brother Lakshmana survive there, having many adventures. How, near the end of the exile, Sita is kidnapped and held captive by the ten-headed Ravana, until finally Rama kills Ravana in a great battle.

Actually, I never managed to catch a Kokanee. I stood in the cold water until my feet lost all feeling while the fish fled from my shadow. Intent on spawning, they waved over the golden rocks like silk prayer flags. All I managed was to squeeze one fish between my two hands and feel for a few moments its slippery strength.

So does the fictional fish feel pain? Even less than the real one, one would think. But the suffering of the fish tortured for the writing of these paragraphs seems more real to me than that of the fish I ate for dinner.

The real fish dart from the shallows into the deep centre and immediately go back to the serious business of depositing eggs and milt. But the fictional fish opens its mouth and says, “I’ll give you an ending for your story.” Who knows how a thing is done, a poem written, a dance created? It rises up, and we catch it. From the stream of consciousness, where the thoughts escape before I can catch them, I’ve managed to pull out just this one. I let it go in your mind.

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Flash Fiction

The Drain

I

Andrew Catone

can see them through the gate. They move with unsure footing, some sinking into the mud. The babies are crying and the mothers are shushing.

The only visible faces are those looking back with wide eyes and trembling lips.

“Mama,” I whisper.

Her eyes are narrow. She isn’t listening.

“Mama,” I say louder.

She takes my hand, still looking forward. “Hush, baby.”

“But mama—” “Baby, hush.”

The uniformed men stand along the gate and at its rusted entrance. Their rifles swing lazily at their hips, dangling off their strong shoulders. The black metal glints in the sunlight and we all steal glances. I doubt if any of us has ever seen one so quiet.

We shuffle forward a few feet. I can feel necks stretching behind me trying to see over the crowd.

“Let us through,” they whisper.

Flash Fiction “Let us through,” they hiss.

The clog loosens some and I’m behind the woman talking to the guard. He looks indifferent towards her sobs, her broken face, her sad children. She crosses through the iron gate, dragging her youngest to the ground as she falls into the dirt. The older boy pulls at her sleeve as tears slide across his cheeks.

Mama speaks quickly and softly. We cross under the harsh stare of the guard and I look to the ground for the black line Mama pointed to on the old map back home.

All I can see is scuffed dirt. No grass.

I turn and look back. The crowd stretches behind us, fat and slow. Mama said the whole country would show up, all of us one big group. I wonder if this is how they think of us. I wonder if they think of the gate and each of us passing through, one at a time.

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Contributors Brianna Ballard is a 19-year-old Journalism student at Concordia University in Montreal. Her work has been published in Bandersnatch, WNQ-Writers and was chosen for the editor’s pick in Locus. She was shortlisted for the November Prize in poetry in 2014. In addition to being a full-time student, she is a national-level equestrian athlete, an avid lover of poetry, and a self-proclaimed coffee addict.

Kara Bowers is in her third year of Creative Writing and first year of Studio Arts at Concordia University in Montreal. She is from Toronto and has an outie bellybutton.

She enjoys astrology, babysitting, shopping at secondhand stores, salt lamps, swimming, and telling her secrets to others.

Emily Carson-Apstein was found in a tide pool on the west-coast and has been drifting her way east since then.

She is a musician, activist, and competitive spoken word poet currently in her second year at Concordia University.

She has a cat named Squid and collects strangers’ grocery lists.

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Soliloquies Anthology Andrew Catone has been writing since he was five years old. At first, he wanted to become a professional novelist. Get paid to write! But after pruning his aspirations and analyzing his prospects, his biggest dream in life is to just quit his day job—and he knows he doesn’t have to be a writer to do that.

Adam Huening lives, writes, breathes, sleeps, and does various other things around Bloomington, Indiana. A graduate of Indiana University, he has toiled as a journalist and is often listening when no one thinks he is. Some of his favourite words are myriad, ennui, and detritus, among many others in the dictionary. His influences range from Jack Kerouac and William Faulkner to Kurt Cobain and Conor Oberst. He drinks a lot of coffee. This is his first published story.

Barbara D. Janusz is a graduate of the University of Alberta with degrees in Arts and Law. She is the author of the novel Mirrored in the Caves and has published poetry, short stories, essays, book reviews, and editorials in literary journals, magazines, newspapers, and anthologies across Canada. A contributing writer for Alternatives Journal: Canada’s Environmental Voice, Barbara resides in Crowsnest Pass, Alberta.

Michael Juretic’s fiction and poetry have appeared in Headlight Anthology, The Nashwaak Review, Lantern Magazine, The Anthology of Montreal Writers, vol. 6,

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Contributors CV2, and Arc Poetry Online. He lives in Montreal with his family and is currently working on a novel about a boy, his mother, a cult, and a retired stage magician, set during the slow death of the Age of Aquarius.

Fran Kimmel lives in a small town in central Alberta with her husband and overly enthusiastic Labrador retriever.

Fran’s short stories have appeared in many anthologies, including twice in The Journey Prize Stories, and her first novel, The Shore Girl, was winner of the 2013 Alberta Readers’ Choice Award and a Canada Reads Top Forty selection.

Gitanjali Kolanad has been involved in the practice, performance, and teaching of Bharata Natyam for more than forty years, performing in major cities around the world.

Her collection of short stories, Sleeping with Movie Stars was published by Penguin India. Presently, she is developing a performing arts program at Shiv Nadar University, Dadri, and working on her first novel.

Rachel Laverdiere currently writes and teaches in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. She has worked as a language teacher in South Korea, Quebec, and Saskatchewan. Rachel lives with her husband and two rambunctious Chihuahuas.

She is grateful for her husband, who enjoys critiquing her work, and her son, who has turned into a fine young man.

Rachel’s poetry has appeared in Spring Magazine and In Medias Res.

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Soliloquies Anthology Lauren Mead is a secondary school teacher of English and drama who has been writing short stories, poems and novels since she was thirteen. She has been a columnist for The Cannon, fiction editor for Carousel Magazine, and published in The Danforth Review.

Lucia Pasquale writes poems and resides in the golden state of California. Her work has been published in issue sixteen of Literary Orphans, as well as the inaugural issue of the Alcala Review at the University of San Diego. She is currently Art Editor for Vagabond City Literary Journal.

When she’s not writing poetry, she is most likely knitting a pair of socks.

Mia Poirier is majoring in Creative Writing at Concordia University. Their work has previously been published in The Void, The F Word, and as a poetry collection. Mia resides in NDG. When they aren’t writing poems, Mia can be found eating bread in their apartment, or napping in Concordia’s English Department.

Melanie Power made the move from her seaside home in Newfoundland to the big city to pursue undergraduate studies in English Literature at Concordia. She had romantic notions of mastering French and finding true love, but has settled for poor translations of Verlaine and the security of a pest-free apartment. Her dream job is a love letter ghostwriter. Her probable fate is bankruptcy.

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Contributors Olivia Raco is a Montreal writer studying English and Creative Writing at Concordia University. She focuses primarily on poetry, and likes to explore different narratives in her work. When she isn’t busy running late and losing things, you can find her eating cheesecake or silently crying about all the homework she isn’t doing.

Graeme Shorten Adams fears time. He will be graduating from Concordia’s Studio Arts program pretty soon and is largely unhappy about it. He saw the leg of some kind of bird on the road the other day, only the leg. He tries to draw and read as much as possible.

Jenny Smart’s past poetry exploits include co-founding Discordia Poetry Collective, being a poetry editor for Soliloquies Anthology, and representing both Montreal and London in Canadian national poetry slam championships. Her work has appeared in The New Quarterly, Headlight Anthology, What If? Magazine, and Live Lines.

Jenny hopes to be a plant when she grows up and would like to be your imaginary friend.

Délani Valin is an author living in a sleepy British Columbian valley. Apart from writing, she enjoys vegan cookery, indoor gardening, and petting dogs. She studied Creative Writing at Vancouver Island University and has previously been published in Portal. She blogs at dualmindguides. wordpress.com.

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Soliloquies Anthology is a student-run literary journal published out of Concordia University.

We publish emerging and established writers in Montreal and internationally, twice annually in print.

soliloquies.ca Printed and bound in Montreal, Quebec

ISSN 2369-601X