photos: Ayelet Tsabari (becky blake); Barbara Stoneham (VincentLam)
know each other well, she remembers that rules are made for a reason. After the fourth time, there are no surprises and all words can be said out loud – even ugly words that ruin everything. His breath is hot against her and she’s melting in the middle. She leans back. Her heart speeds up and her mind slows down. The see-sawing comparison between what she’d hoped for and what she’s got loses momentum, then stops. She checks the time on the alarm clock: 3:52. It will take her fifteen minutes to come and ten minutes to go. She’ll be at work by five. She closes her eyes and revisits the skating image, presses it hard to the front of her mind. The effort sets off sparks of other memories: a damaged blue book on a high shelf, a road-trip smell of doughnuts and gasoline, a patch of soft fur being ruffled by the breeze. Trying to connect these fragments distracts her. They present like a puzzle but they don’t mean anything, don’t belong together. She returns to the skating, rewinds and replays, wringing from the memory what she needs. Finally, she lets it go. It’s her second time today so she feels it less – just a quick pirouette of excitement, then ice. This will not classify as normal wear and tear. She knows that. For a moment she can feel herself aging, the sound of it like crinkling paper. She rolls onto her side, peeling the creased pages of the porn magazine away from her body. “I’ll get rid of that,” he offers. She shrugs. “It’s fine.” The skating image will soon be worn through and after that she knows how things will go. They will have a maximum of six more days together before she can’t stand the sound of his breathing, the number of times he chews his food, the way he latches onto a word and repeats it again and again until its meaning disappears. It’s one of the cruellest things, she thinks, to adopt something, then destroy it.
He’s watching her from under his overlong eyelashes, and his mothbrown eyes fill her with shame. Once, when she was little, she’d caught a moth in the playground at school, cupped it in her hands and brought it in to show her teacher. She remembers the tickle of its tiny feet tapping back and forth across her bottom palm, its wings fluttering from time to time across the top. She’d been able to feel the flutter in her stomach as well. “That’s very nice,” Mr. Jeffries had said. “But next time you shouldn’t pick it up.” She’d thought he was concerned about it getting loose in the classroom. “Don’t worry. I’m going to let him out the window.” Mr. Jeffries shook his head. “It won’t be able to fly anymore. The oil from our fingers” – he held up his hand and his fingertips glistened – “it damages their wings.” The tickle in her stomach had gone still. She’d set the moth on the window ledge anyway and checked on it throughout the day. The breeze had ruffled its furry body from time to time, but otherwise it hadn’t moved. It’s the first thing she remembers killing. “What are you thinking about?” She opens her eyes, takes in the exits: the window, the door. He is stroking her very softly, but still it’s too hard. She moves his hand away. “It’s like you’re rubbing the dust off a moth’s wing.” He frowns. There’s a flicker of hurt in his eyes. “Is that a euphemism?” “No. It’s just—” They don’t mean anything, don’t belong together. “—just nothing.” She restarts the search for her panties, fighting hard against a surprise attack of tears rising up in her like a dirty memory, like a faltering oil-soaked moth. It’s one of the saddest things, she thinks, to hold onto something until it becomes useless. It will be a long time before she breaks her rule again.
Jurors
Esi Edugyan’s most recent novel, Half Blood Blues, won the 2011 Scotiabank Giller Prize. It was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize, the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. She has held fellowships in the U.S., Scotland, Iceland, Germany, Hungary, Finland, Spain and Belgium. She lives in Victoria with her husband and daughter.
s h o rt s t o ry r e a d er s
Lawrence Hill is the author of seven books, including The Book of Negroes, which won Canada Reads and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, among other awards. He’s now finishing a new novel, co-writing the adaptation for a television miniseries of The Book of Negroes and preparing to deliver the 2013 Massey Lectures. A volunteer with Crossroads International and Book Clubs for Inmates, he lives in Hamilton.
Vincent Lam’s debut novel, The Headmaster’s Wager, is the story of a Chinese gambler in Saigon during the Vietnam War; it was shortlisted for the 2012 Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction. His collection of short stories, Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures, won the 2006 Scotiabank Giller Prize and was adapted for HBO. Lam is an emergency physician and a lecturer at the University of Toronto.
Tom Abray (Montreal), Kevin Chong (Vancouver), Cherie Dimaline (Toronto), Bonnie Dunlop (Swift Current, Saskatchewan), Tess Fragoulis (Montreal), Greg Kearney (Toronto), Suzette Mayr (Calgary), Michael Murphy (Halifax), Grace O’Connell (Toronto), Corey Redekop (Fredericton), Anakana Schofield (Vancouver), Niigaanwewidam James Sinclair (Winnipeg)
83