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issue 51

CONTENTS

editorial 2

Why Does a Person Practice a Religion? BY KAREN GREEN

fiction & poetry

subTerrain A LITERARY MAGAZINE

4 Maurice BY ELAINE MCCLUSKEY 11 Get a Big Stink BY WES SMIDERLE 38 Buildings Missing Like Teeth Knocked Loose

EDITOR

BY KEVIN HARDCASTLE

Brian Kaufman

MANAGING EDITOR Pat MacKenzie

42 Triumvirate BY ELENA KAUFMAN 44 A Very Small Fairy Tale BY ANNETTE LAPOINTE

EDITORIAL COLLECTIVE Brian Kaufman, Hilary Green, Jim Oaten, Peter Babiak, Day Helesic, Jenn Farrell, Robert Strandquist, Nadine Boyd, Karen Green, Sharon Bradley, Kate Lancaster, Paul Pitre, Pat Mackenzie

2008 LUSH Triumphant Literary Award Winners

L AYO U T HeimatHouse

ADVERTISING Brian Kaufman, Janel Johnson

8 14 35

COVER IMAGE

The Night Shift (fiction) BY KELLY WARD Refinishing (creative non-fiction) BY KIM SUVAN Gone, Gone (poetry) BY TOM HANDFORD

Karen Justl

feature folio: Religiosity

PHOTOGR APHERS Derek von Essen, Karen Green, Katharine Jackson-Kaufman, George Omorean

I L L U S T R ATO R S Derek von Essen, Karen Justl

B OOK REVIEW EDITOR Karen Green

ART EMISSARY Sharon Bradley

INTERN Janel Johnson

IMAGE: CROSS CLOUDS BY KATHARINE JACKSON-KAUFMAN

subTerrain Magazine P.O. Box 3008, MPO, Vancouver, B.C. V6B 3X5 Canada Tel: (604) 876-8710 Fax: (604) 879-2667 e-mail: subter@portal.ca website: www.subterrain.ca

issue 51

The End BY MICHAEL HEMERY Five Percent Dilation BY NICK MAMATAS My Jesus BY DENNIS H. LEE Poem to a Teenaged Nihilistic Existentialist BY TARA THOM Hsün Tzu BY KAREN GREEN 26 Beat Me: My Search for the Spirituality of Self-Harm 20 22 24 25

BY YASUKO THANH

29 Weight Watchers BY KATHRYN MOCKLER 30 Cross to Bear BY ALLISON BAGGIO 33 Bride BY SHANNON QUINN 45 Book Reviews: Peter Babiak on Anne Rice’s Called Out of Darkness (plus an Interview with the Former Vampire); Pat Mackenzie on David Odhiambo’s The Reverend’s Apprentice; Christine Rowlands on Daphne Bramham’s The Secret Lives of Saints; Carolyne Van Der Meer on Rishma Dunlop’s White Album; Gerilee McBride on Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo; Heidi Greco on Mike Oulton’s Dystopia.

Cover Image: “God” by Karen Justl

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EDITORIAL

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Why Does a Person Practice a Religion?

FAC T U M

KAREN GREEN

GENERAL GUIDELINES Fiction: max. 3,000 words Creative Non-Fiction & Commentary: max. 4,000 words Poetry: no unsolicited poetry submissions Photos and illustrations welcome: please send samples or direct us to your website.

LETTERS ARE WELCOME

; CHURCH IN DIU, INDIA, BY KAREN GREEN

We encourage your comments about what you find between our covers. Letters become the property of subTerrain Magazine and may be edited for brevity and clarity.

B O O K S TO R E S & R E TA I L O U T L E T S subTerrain is available in Canada from Magazines Canada (416) 504-0274 and in the U.S. from International Periodical Distributors (IPD) 1-800-999-1170.

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IMAGES THIS PAGE: ABOVE BY KATHARINE JACKSON-KAUFMAN

Sniff the ether

ISSN: 0840-7533 Volume 6 no. 51 • publishing since 1988 We gratefully acknowledge the support of the B.C. Arts Council and The Canada Council for the Arts.

We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada, through the Publications Assistance Program (PAP), and the Canada Magazine Fund for marketing and promotional initiatives.

COVER ILLUSTRATION BY KAREN JUSTL, COVER DESIGN BY DEREK VON ESSEN

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subTerrain is published 3 times a year (Spring, Summer, Fall/Winter) by the sub-TERRAIN Literary Collective Society. All material is copyright of subTerrain, the authors, 2008. SUBSCRIPTION RATES: INDIVIDUALS: Canada/U.S.: One year $15.; Two years $20.; Elsewhere: One year $25.; Two years $38.

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No e-mail submissions—queries only, please.

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I’m neither religious nor a practitioner of a religion. But I am, and have for a long time been, interested in religion, and it was religion—the whos, whats, wheres, whens, and whys—I was interested in, not the practice or its reputed rewards. In high school, I knew I wanted to major in religious studies in university. I was especially interested in Hinduism.

I went on to complete two degrees in religious studies; I studied “religiosity,” so to speak. During my BA, I studied all the religions and, generally, their major texts. In my MA, I studied a version of the Ramayana, an epic story of the god Rama and his wife Sita, by Tulasidasa, an Indian poet and philosopher who wrote around the same time as Shakespeare. I was particularly interested in the character Sita, often considered the ideal female figure in India. At the end of the epic she needs to prove herself innocent of charges of infidelity by saying that if she has been faithful then let the earth open up and swallow her. Which is what happens. Sita was faithful, but as a result she was gone.

I was also interested in spirituality, but I didn’t see my studies as having much to do with that. “Spirituality” was candles and Leonard Cohen, contemplation about the universe and such things. Spirituality and Religion were two different paths.

I believe I wrote an intelligent thesis. I had much to say about Tulasidasa’s portrayal of Sita. I didn’t care for Tulasidasa in the end. I had become quite fond of the heroine and protective of her. I didn’t like Tulasidasa’s version. I was young and cocky and had gathered up “a little” knowledge—and, as we know, a “little knowledge can be a dangerous thing.” I felt I could say anything I wanted, though I didn’t write anything that was “wrong,” but several years later, I realized I’d missed something in Tulasidasa’s Ramayana, something important.

Eventually, I left academia. I’d experienced the big egos in the ivory tower. I didn’t understand what the point of it was. I didn’t see a connection between that world and the world outside. My

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EDITORIAL

understanding of “university” or “universitas” at the time was that it was meant to be a communal searching for truth and understanding, “uni” meaning “one” and “ver” meaning truth.

I didn’t see this. But later, after some reflection, I wondered if I had been practicing a level of the religion I was studying and had not realized it; perhaps, unknowingly, I had been on the path to the goal.

So I veered away and chose a career, but at the same time I became more interested in, and more drawn to, yoga and kirtan, Sanskrit devotional singing. Both are Hindu practices, but I wasn’t making the connection that what was happening to me was that I was moving from the study of Hindu texts to some practices found within the pages of those texts, or that my study was “religiosity.”

A few years later in a yoga class in Massachusetts, I realized something. In the middle of the Moon Series (a series of yoga postures) I understood that I had completely missed an entire level of Tulasidasa’s writing. My thesis was not incorrect, but I had missed the devotional nature of the text: everything Tulasidasa wrote was an expression of his devotion to God, every metaphor he wrote was a metaphor for God. He wasn’t writing a social commentary, but rather an expression of his love for his God. Rama equalled God and Sita the devotion to God. That is what it ultimately was about, and studying a text like the Ramayana was also a level of “religiosity.”

religion, but maybe not. The urge had to be there. Then, afterwards, came the attempts to put that “urge” or “knowledge” of “something” into disciplines called “religion” that would in theory—and for better or for worse—lead to that indefinable “something.”

Hinduism is different from religions like Christianity or Buddhism where the core teachings revolve around one individual. The more one learns about Hinduism, the more one realizes how little one knows.

Under the word “Hinduism” falls many texts and many practices that have evolved over thousands of years all over India. But, there are some basic concepts that my progression of interests matched, e.g. the trio of concepts central to Hinduism: bhakti, karma, and jnana. Bhakti is devotional love for God. Jnana is knowledge, which can be seen as ultimate knowledge of God, but also encompasses knowledge of scripture. Karma is good action. Perhaps my years of book study were jnana. Was I now practicing bhakti (e.g. yoga, kirtan)?

Another central component of Hinduism is four stages of life, originally for the upper castes, especially men: that of a student (study of scripture with a guru; or, professor?); a householder; retirement (with time to focus on the spiritual); and, finally, the life of a hermit—devoted entirely to God. I had been privileged enough to enter the student phase.

This was a real “wow” moment. And, interesting that it came to me in the middle of a practice from Hindu texts, a practice meant to bring one closer to ultimate realization.

So, am I Hindu? Maybe. Maybe not. I’m sure I may be more religious than I originally thought. But, I’m probably a little Christian and Buddhist, too. “Doing unto others as you would have others do unto you” makes sense to me, and I think the Buddhist “middle road” is a wise one to travel.

A year or so later, I met with my thesis advisor, someone whom I consider to be a very wise man, and who is also very academically learned. I was thinking about studying again— bhakti poetry—more out of a desire to write along such lines, but I was looking for structure. I told him about my realization at the yoga centre. He smiled. I think he was a very good teacher. My feeling is that he was aware of so much regarding these texts, the levels, but was able to let his students be where they were and learn for themselves at their own paces.

So, why does a person practice a religion? What is the goal? If you find yourself practicing religion without realizing it, is the result the same? Does it feel as good? My guess is the answer is “yes,” that the “urge” is the most important thing, the “desire” to get there. The “urge” leads to paths, some of which end up falling under “religion” or “religiosity”—whether you know it or not. My guess is the end result is the same.

Over the years, I’ve thought about this realization. I might be more religious than I thought. Not because a religion was prescribed, but because I was drawn to paths that are, as it turns out, “religiosity.” It struck me as a chicken and egg thing.

Which came first, the religion or the practitioner? Probably the

issue 51

There are numerous other musings on “religiosity” in our feature folio (p. 19-34). We hope that these pieces provide you with cause to pause and reflect on what spirituality and religiosity means to you and to others. ■

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Maurice ELAINE MCCLUSKEY I L L U S T R AT I O N S BY K A R E N J U S T L

Maurice and his family lived next door to us on The Island. They were all dwarves: the mother, the father, the two girls and Maurice. The old man worked on the coal boats and their house was chock-a-block full of miniature furniture.

One day, Maurice came by and said he wanted me to lead his gang. I said, “Okay,” and he said, “Good, I’ve got a forty-five.” I told him: “I ain’t goin’ with you if you got a forty-five.’’ So he said, “All right, I’ll take my BB gun instead.” Just then my brother, Butch, showed up wearin’ one of them cotton dresses the Old Lady used to put him in. He was around six, covered with soot, with hair the colour of ginger taffy. Butch would follow me anywhere so I slapped his head and said, “Get lost, Shorty.”

Me and Maurice looped Dizzy Square like G-men. There weren’t much to see: a travellin’ salesman haulin’ pots, a farmer pickin’ up labourers for four bits a day. Just when we figured we’d be better off at the track fillin’ water buckets for the horses, Maurice spotted three nuns and got off a dandy shot. Spooked, they scattered like pigeons. One was the biddy who cuffed my ear when the old lady sent me beggin’ for food when Butch was sick and the old man was down in the Maine lumber woods scrapin’ for a buck.

I don’t think Maurice hit ’em, just scared the meanness out of ’em, so I said, “Man, we better split. You ain’t outrunnin’ nobody, not even three old nuns, with them short legs.”

After a week, Maurice was back like the peddle wagon.

“Sparky,” he said. “I need your help with somethin’.”

Maurice had a voice like a scrub-board. I remember his eyes gettin’ hard and starin’ at something I never could see. Maurice would talk and his eyes would widen like he was watchin’ a movin’ picture, a silent flick with Charlie Chaplin, but there weren’t nothin’ there.

He’d read a book, he said, and he had it aced. This Lebanese neighbour had a pig named Larry in his yard and Maurice was going to operate on him.

I said, “Count me out, man, I ain’t operatin’ on no pig.”

When the war broke out, I joined the Navy, thinkin’ I’d be a hero.

They turned down Maurice which made him feel pretty low, all

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washed up, like one of them old horses the farmers fed to the foxes. He started to hit the hooch and hang with the shakos. I heard he smashed a guy over the head with a two-by-four.

Around 1942, Maurice caught a break. He signed on a merchant ship with a bunch of Norwegians. Runnin’ grub to the crew, helpin’ Cookie, he was what they called a messman. Some guys fall apart after shit like that: duckin’ subs, watchin’ men die, but Maurice said it was good for his nerves, and at night he slept like a Philadelphia lawyer.

After the war, Maurice moved to Norway and married a woman he’d met on a flag tanker. She was a radio operator, a real tomato.

They said Maurice opened an auto-body shop. I don’t know what kind of cars they had in Norway, but Maurice was sharp with his hands, he could fix anything. All my hands were good for was fightin’, which was why I stayed in the game for fifty years: fighter, trainer, cut man.

A couple years after the war, I was downtown Halifax with Butch, who was tuned for a ten-rounder with Sailor Boy Doyle. Butch had a bad hate-on for Sailor Boy so I had him on a short leash to keep his anger bottled up. Around midnight, we rolled into a clip joint that smelled like a card game and Minard’s Liniment. Butch was feelin’ pretty big in a double-breasted suit he’d bought with his last purse. Most of the time, Butch was whingy, but he looked sharp that night and he knew it. “Let’s check ’er out,” he said, noddin’ to the back.

We made our way through the smoke, and who was playin’ but the midget wrasslers, in town for a show at The Forum. I loved to watch them perform. Man, they were agile. When The Little Beaver was young, he could cover the top rope like a squirrel. Sky Low Low could stand on his head with no hands for balance. Outside, they could be bad little buggers; one guy got caught pissin’ out a hotel window, another liked to drink moonshine and yodel.

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The Little Beaver was my favourite, naturally. They called him the King of the Midget Wrestlers. The papers said the Beaver was four-foot-four and weighed sixty pounds, but I thought he was bigger, the way he could lift a grown man or airplane-spin Sky Low Low. In my mind, Beaver was a better showman than Ali. Years later, I heard he died from emphysema in a little Quebec town.

Anyway, sittin’ at the table with a dead man’s hand was Maurice in a hand-woven Panama with a pleated pearl ribbon. You’d have thought he was Howard Hughes, not some spud from The Island. I rubbed my eyes. “Maurice, what are you up to, man?”

“Sparky,” he said. “I’ve gone into management.”

Well, I let that pass. I was too busy lookin’ at this tiger they had chained to the table, a full-grown animal with paws like hubcaps. Now, I seen tigers in South Africa when I had Rockabye Smith fightin’ for the Commonwealth title but this was a bit unusual.

We started talkin’ and Maurice laid out some heavy shit he’d seen in the war: deaths, explosions, mutilations. He chucked her all in, bullshit chowder.

Norway was as boring as The Island, he said, and they never done nothin’ for the sailors after the war. I never asked about his wife; there was women there if you get my drift. I told him I got tinfished in the English Channel but survived. Maurice laughed, which kind of insulted me, and when he did, that tiger’s head shot up and snarled.

So the next time the midgets came to town, me and Butch went.

I remember that night because Butch had fourteen stitches over his right eye; it was the same year that Marcel Cerdan was killed in a plane crash. Little Beaver was puttin’ a hoofin’ on Fuzzy Cupid and some big fool in the front row jumped up and screamed, “Beaver is an animal!” Beaver was agile as a cat, but he weren’t no animal.

When we went to the dressin’ room, there was no sign of Maurice. He had split.

Years later, I had Archie Lucas down in New York for a six-rounder.

Archie didn’t have no papers and they held him at the border for eight hours on accounta him being black and quite possibly, in their minds, a Cuban hitman. Before it was over, Archie confessed to breakin’ into the Legion and stealin’ two dozen hams.

Archie weren’t ready for nothin’ but a do-si-do, but we went to Gleason’s and put on the gloves. When we came outside, Archie

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said he wanted a giant hotdog from the street vendor. I looked at Archie and said: “Man, you ain’t gonna make weight as it is. You already ate them hams.”

We hailed a cab and headed to our digs, Archie still jawin’ about that goddamn hotdog. His brother, Jermaine, was the exact same way. The whole family had an awful weakness for cheap meat. Sittin’ there, tryin’ to ignore Archie, I looked at the driver’s mugshot and it seemed familiar despite the moustache.

“Man, I know you, don’t I?” The driver nodded.

“Yeah, it’s Maurice, brother. I’m a Neeeww Yawker now.”

I told him to come to the fight on Friday night and we’d hook up after. He never did, or I never seen him, and that was that.

A few years back, my brother Butch got sick.

They said it was from fightin,’ too many shots to the head like Ali, but I don’t know. Butch liked to feint, to cover up. When Carmen Boucher fought him in New Brunswick, he said it was like tryin’ to trap bubbles.

They put Butch in an old man’s home on The Island, out in the country near some farms. I went to see him and it weren’t that bad.

The place was clean and Butch was out of it, jingle-brained. Someone had made a scrapbook of his clippings with a front page that said, Island Boy Fights to Draw in Madison Square Garden, and they set it on his dresser for visitors to see.

The nurses had big signs on everything. Socks. Underwear. Today is Harry’s Birthday. The place had that old man smell, as musty as a root cellar. It was the guys who still knew what was happenin’ that I felt bad for. One old guy was wearin’ his service medals and talkin’ about a 1928 Chevy he’d bought for a grand. Another guy kept drummin’ the edge of the table with his fingertips. He was wearin’ a trucker’s hat and yellow tinted aviator glasses, with the hat tilted down over one eye like a badass.

And then there was Maurice. After all he’d been through and all he’d seen, there he was, parked in a chair in a Habs bathrobe and slippers.

Maurice seemed like somethin’ out of a fairy tale. He was wearin’ a porkpie hat and starin’ out the window at a dusty clay road that looked like a roll of dried blood. It made me think of all the hand tapes I’d kept in a box, cut off and stained. After each fight, I’d add the name of the fighter and the date in ink, and they became records, really, of wins and losses, and wars that never shoulda been.

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The nurse told me Maurice was having trouble with his legs and couldn’t walk right. He was real hateful to the other guys, she said, he’d call them washerwomen or ignorant spudheads.

I looked at Maurice and said, “What’s happenin’ man?”

He shugged and hauled himself up in his chair. Pretty soon, it all came out. Maurice said that a few years back, his wife, the tomato, took up with some skinny accountant who looked like Howdy Doody. They were skatin’ around, meetin’ in cars, makin’ a monkey out of Maurice.

Maurice said he tried to shake it, but it stuck like sand in his shorts, so he cut the brake lines to the guy’s car. You know the end of that story: Howdy Doody in a wooden nightshirt.

An old farmer in wraparound sunglasses shouted, “They said they’d build a trout pond.”

“Gout?’’ said his buddy. “Who the hell wants gout?”

Some hayseed with mud on his boots arrived to see an oldtimer named Berle. His shirt was open to the waist like a flamenco dancer. He wore his hair in a style from the fifties, short on the sides with a greasy slip in front. His eyes looked half-crazy.

“Look at that fuckin’ rhubarb,” Maurice cursed out loud.

I looked at Maurice and shook my head. He had a rubber ball in his hand that he kept squeezin’ like he was pumpin’ blood to his

heart over and over to keep himself alive. Maurice was always cool as ice, shootin’ at nuns or cuttin’ up pigs, but I could tell by the way he was squeezin’ that ball that it weren’t all right.

I never had much brains to work with, but I know that life is a card game. At some point, your luck runs out. The cute moves, the clever shit, it all gets old. Stanley Ketchel, the Michigan Assassin, got himself shot to death at twenty-four for being a wiseass. Men, you see, always believe they’re gettin’ away with it: the missed anniversaries, the jackass excuses. It’s like gettin’ a paycheque with no taxes taken off. Somehow, they think the dough is theirs and no one will come lookin’ but they are wrong because women are the most unforgivin’ tax collectors on Earth. Women keep track of every nickel, every dime of deceit, and women are just waitin’ to collect. Probably when the kids are grown or the house is paid. Then it will all come down: every hurt, every grudge as bad as the goddamn Irish. And she may not leave in body, just in mind, movin’ to a place she’d worked for, and it would be her place not his because he weren’t never there to build it.

“You know, man,” I said since there were no moves left for me or him or Butch. “You’re just tryin’ to get through life and there are lunatics all along the way friggin’ you up. No wonder I punched so many guys in the mouth. Half the bastards probably deserved it.”

Maurice nodded like he’d heard it all before, and then he said, eyes as blank as a dead man, “Amen, brother.” ■

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issue 51

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WINNING ENTRY 2008 LUSH TRIUMPHANT LITE RARY AWARDS « FICTION C AT E G O R Y »

The Night Shift K E L LY W A R D

Brandy watches the city skulk by the bus window: the sparkling dry asphalt; the dollar shops and convenience stores with doors propped open to the dusty swirl of sidewalk; the old man with the sweaty pot belly showering water from a hose over three nearly naked kids, the water spraying out from under his thumb like fireworks.

The bus has a smell like an old laundry hamper—damp clothes that have gone sour. Most of the people in the bus are probably quite lovely, but Brandy has sat next to the one woman who still uses mothballs. Can an entire wardrobe be devoured by moths? Walking the eight blocks home would have been smarter. But as she stepped into the parking lot of the supermarket the bus was just rounding the corner to the stop. Her register had been eleven dollars short at the end of her shift and the extra counts and “Cashier Loss Statement” she had to fill out had made her later getting out of work than usual. She doesn’t like to be late getting home to Justin.

Like the time he sat Randy on the kitchen counter and let him hack away at a tomato, a knife the size of his little one-and-a-halfyear-old arm in one hand. There was also the time she opened the door to the apartment to find Justin lying on his back across the couch with Randy sitting upright on his chest, a Lego block in each fist, watching the final few frames of Hot Nurses of Cockstown General. “It’s not like it’s anything old Randle here hasn’t seen before,” Justin laughed. It wasn’t as if these were everyday occurrences, though. Most evenings Justin would simply hand Randy out to her like a football tucked under one arm, smile, and walk past her into the bedroom and be snoring within minutes, catching the last hour or so of sleep before his night shift.

The familiar last block before her stop—three boarded-up storefronts graffitied red and blue—scrapes by the window and Brandy pulls the yellow string over head, slips her ass awkwardly past the face of the Moth Woman and is standing suddenly in the shocking heat of the street. The door to her apartment is in a small alley next to the last store. A blue and silver Christmas wreath that she keeps meaning to take down has fallen from its hook and is lamely pushing the storm door open. She steps over the wreath, kicking it into the stairwell as she enters.

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Inside the apartment the television flickers, giving the living room a cool, fluorescent blue. Randy sits on the centre cushion of the sofa, his legs splayed wide—as only a one-and-half-year-old can—in green khaki shorts, his shaggy blonde hair a thin bowl around his head like a halo, his tiny Buddha belly bare and beautifully plump. He looks up at Brandy as she enters. A single-toothed smile. Through the wall she hears the flush of a toilet and the sound of Justin washing up. She moves to the couch and trundles Randy onto her lap. Her and Randy are the first things Justin sees as he exits the washroom, and though she’s seen it before, his reaction to her unexpected presence unnerves her. A slight, almost imperceptible, roll of his eyes, then a smile, forced or genuine she cannot tell, and a quick shift to speak. “Hey.” His voice is gravely and low, as if he hasn’t spoken in days. He tosses himself onto the couch next to them, arms crossed over his eyes, and groans. “Randle here hasn’t stopped crying since he woke up. Had to plop him in front of the tube for three hours to get him to shut it.”

“Teething,” she says, turning Randy’s mouth upward for inspection.

“Yeah, well.”

He swings his feet to the floor and sits with his elbows on his knees considering the carpet at his feet. The men of Brandy’s household rarely wear shirts, and as Justin leans forward beside her she can see the scar that runs from his left thumb up his arm and across his scapula. His hair is the same crisp, unsullied blonde as Randy’s; his face carries the same angular jaw and demure nose as his father’s. From inside the bedroom the loud hum of the window-mounted air conditioning unit suddenly sputters into a crackly fluid eruption and then dies.

“Shit.” Justin stands, places a hand on Brandy’s head and enters the bedroom. A couple of slaps and what sounds like a filtration

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cover being removed and replaced and he’s got the machine humming again. He closes the door, quietly, and Brandy knows she will not see him again that night.

A voice on the television dramatically tells a weeping woman that she will never walk again and Brandy stamps the mute button on the remote, tosses it onto the cushion beside her. She stands and carries Randy to his second-hand pink playpen in the corner of the room.

He stands there, taller than most kids his age, looking like he could climb out at any moment but content to hold on to the padded top rail and kick one foot against the bouncy mesh of the playpen wall.

From the bedroom the hum of the air conditioning unit rises and falls in volume as Justin’s sleep sounds mask and reveal it. Brandy interlocks her hands over her eyes and looks upward through her fingers. Cars passing outside have flicked on their headlights in the dusk and the ceiling is a muted screen of pink dusk light and flashes of stark white. The headlamps pirouette the ceiling for a moment and chase the cars out the window and down the street—flashing in the silence and then gone. Randy makes a sound like a tractor with his lips. He makes the sound again and laughs.

He wasn’t born easy. He’d been breach, and huge to boot. The doctor had told her that there was no chance of a natural delivery.

He’d have to be cut out, and most likely couldn’t be carried to term. She’d grown massive, having to shimmy backward into her till at the supermarket, standing nearly two feet from the register.

She’d known even then that all that extra space wouldn’t be snapping back into place like a bungee cord once it was empty, but she hadn’t expected that over a year later she’d still look like she was wearing an old bathing suit that had lost its elasticity. She changes clothes with her back to Justin, even when she thinks he is sleeping. She won’t let him touch the limp, smiling scar that stretches across her stomach. Her nipples have become red, weeping things. She wears a bra to bed, takes quick, delicate showers.

Over a low-slung pink tube top and black stretch pants she pulls on the baby pack she’s carried Randy in since his infancy: two straps over her shoulders and a sack in front over her breasts with holes for his limbs and head. After a few minutes of tugging and muffled cursing he’s into the sling, hanging from her shoulders, his bare feet bouncing against her mid-thigh. As always, Randy folds his arms neatly over the rim of his carrier and rests his chin on the backs of his wrists. He gums his own arm contentedly. She chooses a pair of blue platform sneakers from the pile of shoes at the door and slowly descends the stairs. As he always does, Randy toes open the screen door at the base of the stairwell with his bare foot and looks up at Brandy, smiling. She locks the door and starts walking back past the three boarded storefronts, the eight blocks of convenience stores and junk shops, a snatch and grab mix of no-name electronics, cheap cigarettes and useless novelties.

The night air is slightly less gritty than the afternoon’s heavy engine-grit haze so she walks slowly, letting herself notice the shop windows, the new arrivals. She remembers that the Midnight Sun Convenience store will sometimes sell single smokes.

Through the window as she approaches, she catches the familiar grey head and broad black brows of Naveed, the owner. She’s had no luck getting him to sell her smokes. When she was pregnant he refused her and now that she’s not he will usually only sell by the pack, and begrudgingly at that. But since she has time, and

issue 51

Naveed is her only option anyway, she decides to try him. As soon as he sees her enter the store he’s on his feet.

“No!” He stumbles from behind the counter leaning one hand on the glass top.

“No, no smoking. I don’t like seeing this, these young women smoking. No respect for their offspring. No. You go elsewhere.”

For a moment she contemplates trying to guilt him by saying that she only came in for some diapers, baby aspirin. But he’s coming at her with a pack of Du Maurier, pointing like a woodpecker at the Health Canada warning with an image of a second-hand smoker’s lung inked next to it.

“You see. What you do to this little lung. No. You go elsewhere!”

So instead of guilting him she turns around and flips him the bird with both hands behind her back. This starts him yelling something, but Brandy is already out on the street where a teenaged girl in a micro-mini screaming into a cell phone drowns him out.

A few more blocks and the street opens to the huge expanse of the grocery store parking lot with its fluorescent lampposts standing storeys high and its newly painted canary lines. The brightness of it in the dark is almost painful. From the moist black Welcome mat at the entrance Brandy surveys the familiar store: the huge wooden blocks of cheese that hang from the ceiling over the dairy section, the blinking green register signs numbered one through twelve calling customers to the bored, gum-chewing teenaged night crew, their hair styled too formally for their surroundings, their eyes lined black and slathered with mascara. She takes note of Jill’s till number and hurriedly goes about filling her basket.

As she dumps necessities into the metal basket (diapers, baby wipes, maxi pads, strawberry jam, milk, apples, grapes — one of which she pops past Randy’s lips to soothe his aching gums) she feels the mop boys and stockroom clerks staring. They know her as Brandy The Day Cashier, funny and smiling and some might even say flirty.

In the cereal aisle Randy reaches for a jumbo box of Cheerios and sends an entire shelf of boxes tumbling to the floor. The clatter causes him to burst briefly into tears and Brandy leaves the mess and nearly runs for Jill’s till. Once there, she silently piles her purchases onto the conveyor belt and Jill only scans every other item into the till. They are the same age, Brandy and Jill. But Jill goes to college and works night shifts to pay tuition. She is the only co-worker who has known about Randy since the beginning, since she found Brandy in the staff washroom, breast milk inking onto her uniform.

It’s not long before the other front-line girls notice Brandy, and more importantly, Randy. They creep toward Brandy, hunched to babble gibberish to Randy and grab his feet, force his hands to hold theirs.

“Oh, my God, whose baby is this? He’s the most precious.”

Brandy smiles whenever they look at her, which is not often, and lets them tug and feel and hold the child that hangs from her shoulders. It is as if she’s brought them the world’s greatest curiosity. She is Ripley to their gawking, wonder-eyed gazes.

In the commotion Jill has to grab Brandy’s arm to get her attention.

“Hey.” Brandy looks away from the group of chattering girls and into Jill’s smiling face. Jill speaks.

“I hope you didn’t mind the till being a little short this morning.

I’m so sorry about that.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Brandy says.

“Okay, cool. I just needed a little extra for my date with Jeff. But I knew you’d be cool.”

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Jill tosses a loaf of bread into a bag and holds out her hand for Brandy’s payment. Brandy doesn’t move.

“You mean it wasn’t a mistake? You took it. Knowing I’d get the blame?”

Jill blinks her eyes six times before narrowing her brow.

“Well, yeah, but I thought you were cool.”

Suddenly Brandy is pushing toward the exit, one hand over Randy’s face, the other braced ahead of her, parting a way, plastic bags slung over both arms, swinging like frantic wings around her. As she walks through the bright sliding door, she hears the security alarm sound: “We’re sorry, apparently we failed to remove all of the security tags from your items. Please return to a cashier for assistance.”

She keeps walking, out under the fluorescent blanket of the parking lot lights and on into the true dark night of the city.

The Midnight Sun Convenience store has the only sign left flickering for as far as Brandy can see. She can also see that Naveed is gone. She pulls the door and hears the bell overhead clank against the metal. Simon hears it too and swings his head up from where he’s been hunched behind the counter. They exchange polite smiles, but Brandy makes no attempt to browse the store.

“You still sell singles?” she asks, flashing a puffing gesture with her right hand, a grocery bag sawing her wrist to red.

Simon nods and disappears below the counter again. Randy’s feet dangle just above the bank of candy bars and he giggles as he taps them against the satisfying crunch of the wrappers. Finally Simon stands to meet Brandy’s gaze. His right eye sags and opens only a slit, giving his face a rough, lop-sided appearance.

“None up here. Come on in the back and I’ll have one.”

Simon leads Brandy through a dirty white door beside the dairy case and on through a dank office with a tiny metal desk, where photos of Naveed and Simon and a woman who must be Simon’s mother are pinned to the wall. They continue through a narrow corridor lined with milk crates and decades-old wooden pop bottle cases, stopping at a tiny foyer where Simon fishes a limp knap-sack from the floor, pulls out a pack of smokes and toes the metal door to the back alley open with his foot. He lets Brandy walk through before shimmying a rock into place to keep the door open. He bites a cigarette from the package for himself and offers one to Brandy. When she tries to pass him a loonie he waves it away without a word. They sit on the concrete stoop together looking out on the rusted tetanus-trap of a fence that separates Naveed’s property from a weed-grown municipal parking lot. Two cats meander around the lot, hissing as they come too close to one another. There are no lights save the dim yellow glow from the storeroom behind them. It is a long time before either of them speak, the only sound is that of Randy’s bare feet rustling in the crab grass that borders the stoop.

“You weren’t in Prof. Rosenburg’s chemistry class last semester, were you?” Simon asks.

“Nope.”

“You look a lot like a girl in that class.”

Brandy nods and looks out over the fence.

“I think I’ve seen you around campus, though.”

“No, you haven’t. You know me from here. I’m in here all the time.”

She detects a hostility in her voice that she hadn’t intended, but she doesn’t know what to say to take it back. She notices Simon

10

blowing his smoke up and away from her, no doubt for Randy’s sake. She can’t take her eyes off his left hand—he scratches his head with it, smokes with it, twists and stretches the perfect, lean, brown muscles of it.

“You left-handed?” she asks.

“Yup.” “My husband hasn’t got one of those.”

“What? A hand?”

“Yeah. Well, at least not like that. He’s got no thumb and can’t really move the rest of it. So, yeah, no hand, basically.”

“Shitty.”

They are only halfway through their cigarettes and Brandy keeps talking. She tells Simon how Justin lost his thumb in an accident at work. How a tension bar broke when he was fixing a cardboard stamping machine.

“You know those little teeny boxes of, like, fives raisins that kids eat? Well they make those boxes with a big metal press. Tension bar came loose, ripped right up his arm.” Brandy realizes she’s lowered her voice, has turned her head away from Randy. “Then he was so stunned, you know, didn’t think to move his hand and that was it. Clean off.”

Once she’s said this she stops and turns quickly back to the patchy cats on the other side of the fence. She’s been here before, this moment when people finally see her in her true, cockeyed light. A nineteen-year-old with a baby strapped to her sagging bosom, a husband a half-cripple by the age of twenty. She doesn’t like to watch their expression turn.

“That’s pretty cool, actually. Bet he got a shit-load of money ‘cause of all that.”

“Not quite. He still works there, at the plant. Except now they make him carry this radio with him in case he gets into trouble again. Like he’s the only one who needs a radio. He’s not exactly the same since that happened. He could’ve taken not having the hand.

He used to say to me ‘I still piss one-handed, drink one-handed and sleep no-handed, so I’m good.’ But that radio’s got him all fucked up. It’s like this thing he’s got to carry around with him all the time.

This big thing to remind him of his life’s biggest screw up.”

Behind them the voices of two young customers float through the storeroom. Simon takes one last drag from his cigarette and flicks the glowing butt high into the night before it lands on the pavement in front of them in a tiny splash of red sparks. Brandy does the same. They sit for another moment before Simon stands and turns toward her.

“I better get back,” he says, more apologetically than she expects. “But I think I have to take that with me.”

He points to the ground between Brandy’s feet. There, clutched between Randy’s dirty toes is one Kit Kat bar. Brandy smiles and hands it to Simon.

“You can hang out back here for a bit if you want. I don’t care.”

She nods; he leaves.

And she finds herself alone on the back stoop of a convenience store, two blocks from home. The apartment will be empty, too hot to get Randy to sleep comfortably, and the groceries she’s carrying will keep cool for a while yet. From the pile of bags beside her she pulls an apple, rubs it clean on her pant leg and bites into it. It is crisp and sweet and Randy is calm and quiet against her chest.

That’s enough for one night. ■

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Get a Big Stink WES SMIDERLE

sixteen

Not ten minutes after Groovy Shooz leads the Douglas Coupland District Secondary School Mixed Seniors to victory over Pitt Meadows for their firstever provincial championship, the thin white man approaches and offers paste. Shooz laughs, a high-pitched roller-coaster burst of defiant youth.

“Got some cheap,” the Thin White Man insists. “Little bit’ll make you strong, smart, and pretty.”

The ground quivers semi-solid beneath her trainers. Shooz doesn’t need paste. She’s strong already. As for smartness, didn’t he see how she razzled the Pitt Meadows offence? Ripped the ball from under their noses and burned up the course: through the Junkyard, over the Light Rail Transit and skipping across the Docks. Busting records like cherries all the way to the Prose Circle where preparation paid off. Solid theme, deft characterization, vivid imagery and a healthy jolt of madlibbing. Groovy Shooz has the stuff; the Critics agree. And pretty? Pretty is for frat boys and fags. She’s already a hot fuck. Who needs pretty? Shooz wants a big stink, wants everyone on the course to smell her coming ten miles away.

TWM has more to offer, but Shooz waves him away. Post-game huddle. The mediatrics are waiting.

Seventeen

Shooz has just won her second BC Provincial Mixed Seniors championship, and she’s super pissed. She’s supposed to be at a US college by now. The deals should be rolled tight as fatties. But the mediatrics crowd around, asking, “Is it better than last year?”

Fuck, no, of course it isn’t. Last year was the first time. There can only be one first time before you really ought to move on to the other first times waiting higher up your ladder. Shooz can’t say that so she nods, eyes moist with sincerity while the word “absolutely” gushes from her lips an outlandish number of times.

issue 51

The mediatrics write it all down, soak up every syllable with cheap pens and gunmetal digi-corders. Truth? She is bored out of her fucking tree. They must see it on her face. Everyone must know.

Mum says chill’ax. “The mediatrics smell diva, they will roast you in the womb. You want to peak at 17?”

Shooz pops with defiant laughter. “Fuck, yes. And 18, 19, 20, 21 . . . ” “One year at a time, sweetie.”

Mum grew up in Huron County, Ontario. A WordPlayer all her life, she claims to have invented the hardscrabble style known as “Bush Leaguing”— killer eye for detail and always firing from the gut. Mum took the Bluevale Bombers to three consecutive Ontario WordPlay League (OWPL) championship titles. During her pro career, she landed a GG, a Trillium, and an O. Henry. Plus the Giller trophies, a pair of them. Mum knows the Game. Shooz doesn’t care about that now.

“Where’s the NC-two-A?” she asks.

Mum says be quiet already. No one is going to hand you anything with that whinging. The next rung lies within reach.

Focus on the big stink.

Big stink is one of Mum’s magic words. Stink is presence, a means of making yourself known and sweeping the area clear of opposition. Elite players have big stink. Mum pleads with Shooz every day to work up a big stink. When she manages it, Mum says great. Now make it bigger.

“You’ve gotta fulminate out there,” she says. “Get rank. Generate some nasal fortissimo. Steam paint off those walls.”

“I stink big,” Shooz insists, but without really feeling it.

She’d really expected the NC-two-A to have called by now.

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Eighteen

The answer is no, you can’t touch them.

Shooz never thought she’d share a complaint with pregnant women but there you are. People coming up and reaching like you’re a dog to be petted. Big bellies and baby dreads. Hands the fuck off.

Maybe, if someone ever actually asked, she might shrug all right, “Yeah, sure, your thrills.” But no one ever asks. They touch them, then ask. That isn’t the same. Like a non-apology apology. Shooz hates those. And she hates people touching her baby dreads. The answer is no. The answer is get the fuck back. I’m not a dog. But I bite.

Shooz is lonely. Shooz hates fucking Oakland.

Nineteen

Mum has few words in the car after the season-ending, overtime loss.

“Drove all the way to Oakland for this,” she mutters.

They park at the hotel where Shooz has been living for almost two years. Before pressing a button to pop the trunk, Mum pauses.

“I thought my children were special,” she tells the rearview mirror, “but I guess not.”

In bed, Groovy Shooz whispers into her pillow another of Mum’s magic words. Success. Success, success, success. She continues repeating it until the syllables jam up on themselves and dissolve into semiotic mush. Sux, sux, sux. Suck cess. Suck cesspool.

Sucking cesspool.

Twenty

The dream dies as the Salt Lake Syncopators suffer defeat at the hands of the Phoenix Firecats. The humiliation is spearheaded by Wall Wallaceson, thirty-eight years old and dwindling into the sunset of a career that has peaked in triple-A, the Southwest American WordPlay League (SWAWP).

Shooz is the Syncopators’ captain. She loathes Salt Lake City worse than Oakland. After three years slogging the backwaters, she thought maybe she could muster a run at regional fame, catch the eyes of a scout from the Midwest American WordPlay League.

From there, who knows? Her agent keeps saying there’s still a chance she can make the Show.

“You’re still young,” says the agent. “Sorta.”

In an instant, the Wall has made Shooz one year older while murdering all hopes of regional fame for anything other than being the choke artist who snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. Shooz is shocked and awed, a deflated Canuckistan Bush Leaguer staring into the ineffectual reek of her regulation trainers in an emptied locker room. You win as a team; you lose alone.

She reflects on Wall, who had massive stink the moment he stepped onto the course. Shooz felt it, like a creeping fear, and saw her teammates feel it. The old fuck moved smooth as cream and delivered prose fat like butter. With every second of play, Wall’s stink got bigger. By the time Shooz started taking gramps seriously, it was too late. In the second period, Wall snapped the ball from Shooz and darted ghost-like through the Junkyard, almost floated across the Docks and shot like a rocket to the Prose

12

Circle where the Critics conferred briefly before issuing the assignment—plot a comic or tragic fable in the style of James Thurber, Stephen Leacock, or Aesop using three main characters.

At least two female. Barely pausing for breath, Wall outlined the tale of a talented professional sports team who allowed obsession with commercial and personal success to cloud their focus, thereby squandering a chance to win a national title. Full points.

Shooz leaves the locker room via a narrow maintenance corridor used by players to evade harpish post-game mediatrics scrums.

She spies a bulky shadow ahead. It’s Wall. She’s too surprised to wonder why the victorious champion would want to avert attention. Feeling no anger, only the tranquility of defeat, she calls his name. He turns, eyes shocking with empathy, and she remembers once last season unleashing a cackle while screeching “Faggot!” at him across the course. Shooz now wishes she could travel back in time and slap herself.

“How’d you do it?” she begs.

“What do you think?” he says and sighs, as though responding to a child. “I took paste.”

Fourteen

Everything Shooz knows about paste she has heard in locker rooms.

They say paste will make you strong, smart, and pretty. What it mostly does is make you hard.

The paste is comprised of two ointments: the cream and the clear.

Apply the cream—or have the cream applied—in generous dollops to the limbs, torso, and face. Spread the cream across the epidermis in smooth, circular motions until the cream thins out and appears to vanish. Do not eat the cream. Drink plenty of fluids. Rest.

In two to four weeks, the cream will begin to build muscle, strengthen tendons, increase lung capacity and remove fatigue. In twenty, thirty, or forty years, the cream will erode bone density, trigger grand mal seizures and fill your body with aggressive tumorous growths.

The paste will quicken your thoughts and stir the passions of those around you.

Empty three capfuls of the clear onto your head; massage into your scalp with vigour. The tingling means it’s working. In six to twelve weeks, the clear will increase brain plasticity, boost the thalamus capacity, strengthen dendrites, and enhance the myelin sheath, speeding up the transmission of electro-chemical signals between neurons. In five to ten years, the clear will undermine your capacity for empathic connections, trigger hallucinations, and severely hamper short-term memory.

One won’t work as effectively without the other. Together, the cream and the clear are known as the paste. The paste is a highly controlled substance, illegal and guaranteed to provide success.

People will smile and see the fruition of their dreams mirrored through your success, even though both abstract concepts bear no relation whatsoever to one another.

The paste will make you successfully promiscuous.

The paste will dissolve all sense of personal obligations. It will remove all understanding of restraint.

The paste will help you find workable solutions to complex problems and bring people together under a unified framework of understanding, cooperation, and camaraderie.

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The paste will remove blemishes and wrinkles, thicken hair, and give you a healthy glow.

The paste will magnify your social anxieties. The paste will kill your parents, fuck up your relationships with your children, and leave you feeling horribly alone when lying sleepless late at night in strange hotel rooms.

The paste will increase your risk of developing brain cancer, leukemia, lung cancer and bowel obstructions.

The paste will keep things interesting.

The paste will make you win.

North Americans will not ask uncomfortable questions or dwell on small details in the face of genuine personal success.

Twenty-one

Paying the price. Risk and reward. That’s all the new coach talks about. No tactics. He doesn’t even review game tape or scouting reports. Just, “Life is about risk and reward,� and, “Are you willing to pay the price?� Then off to field questions from the mediatrics.

Shooz know she’s very, very lucky to be playing in Los Angeles. She is so fucking sick of it.

Mum, in a text message, points out that for the past six seasons the LA Dirty Realists have been last in the Western Division of the National WordPlay League (NWPL). No Western Division team has ever played in the finals and none of its five teams have managed to climb above .500 this season. Yet Mum agrees this is a precious opportunity. Just don’t waste it, she advises.

Shooz has spent most of one season with the Dirty Realists. She plays off the bench and replaces whoever’s on the D-L during any given week. She’s still being paid on triple-A scale because she hasn’t played enough games at the top yet. The talk is that when she comes close to reaching the magic number, the team will dump her and bring on someone fresh from triple-A. With her aging muscles and foggy grey matter, Shooz can’t blame them. She still feels twinges from a broken wrist suffered last season.

But it’s the Show. She’s fortunate. Everyone says so.

Shooz plays six minutes. She grabs the ball on a fumble and lunges for the course with legs of stone. Staggers through the Junkyard and endures a major soaker crossing the Docks. Somehow she reaches the Prose Circle where the triumvirate of Critics asks her to plot a fresh, interesting novella based around a tired old stereotype. Shooz mumbles something along the lines of a well-known 18th century picaresque. She earns no points and is dinged with a minor foul for plagiarizing. The coach benches her without a word.

She leaves the game through the front entrance, past the scrums.

No big stink tonight. Maybe not ever again. Brooding, she almost collides with the thin old white man, the one from Douglas Coupland Secondary. He asks would she like some paste. Two metal tubes lie cradled in his large dry hands. A synthetic odour of new trainers fresh from the box. TWM awaits an answer. Shooz reaches for a spark of youth but all she feels is weary. So she holds out her hand and says, “Hell, yeah.� Wouldn’t you?

Fucking right you would. â–

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issue 51

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WINNING ENTRY 2008 LUSH TRIUMPHANT LITE RARY AWARDS « C R E AT I V E NON-FICTION C AT E G O R Y »

Refinishing KIM SUVAN

Errol stands in front of a two-storey walk-up apartment building. He squints through the dusty plastic cover of the directory and scans handwritten names in faded pencil. Most are crossed out or erased.

Near the end, he finds it: J. Timms - 204. Errol shifts a bag of groceries to his other arm and awkwardly dials the number on the filthy keypad. No dial tone or beep. He tries the door. It resists uncertainly so he pulls harder. It snaps open.

He stomps the snow off his worn cowboy boots and treads up dirty carpeted stairs to the second floor. Passes piles of newspapers, a rusted bicycle, sagging boxes covered in water stains. Errol stops outside apartment 204 and knocks.

Shuffling feet and movement on the other side of the door. Errol knocks again, smiling to convey his warmth through the barrier.

“Hello! Jessica? How are you doing?”

More shuffling and a quivering, anxious voice. “Who is this?

What do you want?”

“It’s Errol. I saw you a few days back at the Cornerstone Hotel Bar.” No response. “You were playing guitar. George Straub was singing. I had a drink with you guys during a break.”

Errol thinks back to their meeting. How Jessica had been so quiet and how her hands shook when she tapped ashes from her homerolled cigarettes. How she damn near jumped out of her skin when the door slammed. And the strange tremor in her voice when she turned down a glass of draft from the jug Errol ordered for the table. He figured she had the shakes, the kind you get after a night of hard drinking. Yet she didn’t have the bloated face or assless chicken legs of a drunk. Jessica had substance, he could sense that. But he couldn’t understand her nerves.

The door cracks open. He smiles nervously through the slit and she hesitates before slowly opening the door. The corners of her mouth flicker upwards and she adjusts a worn terrycloth robe closer around her neck. “Errol, I’m sorry, I wasn’t expecting anyone. Please come in,” she says, dabbing her fingers over her curlers. She wears heavy make-up, inadvertently accentuating the dry skin on her cheeks. Errol stands awkwardly in the entry way, his boots wet. In the background he can hear music, but can’t make out the song.

“Uh, well, I wasn’t planning to stay,” he says, “but I was in the city

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today. Thought maybe you could use a few things.” Jessica stares at him, her heavily drawn eyebrows twitching. When she doesn’t speak, he adds, “Just a few odds and ends.”

Pulling at her robe, she stands up straight. “That’s lovely, Errol, but I just got groceries. I don’t know why you’d think I need anything.” His face drops as he repositions the bags in his arms.

She adds, in a softer tone, “Let me make you a cup of coffee. How kind of you to come out in this weather.” She motions to the open area of living room, dining room and kitchen. “Please have a seat.

I just need to put something on.” She scurries past him, disappears through a door off the living room.

Errol wipes his boots on a clean mat by the door and shakes the droplets off his cowboy hat. He heads to the kitchen and opens the fridge to unpack the eggs and milk. Stares for a moment at its spotless interior containing nothing but ketchup, mustard, and jam. Quietly closes it. Glances at the transistor radio plugged into the single kitchen outlet, and recognizes Country Carl’s voice on the afternoon show. A few seconds later, Loretta Lynn’s voice warbles through the tiny speakers.

Errol picks up the bags from the counter, places them on the entryway floor, and decides to sit and wait. Can’t get into too much trouble doing that, he figures. Plunks down on one of the two mismatched chairs at the wooden kitchen table. The oak is stained and badly scratched, yet Errol is drawn to the sturdiness of the piece. Some sanding, fresh stain and a few layers of varnish would transform it into something worth keeping. He runs his hand over the rough surface and the table bobs on an uneven leg.

Jessica appears wearing grey slacks and a shapeless black sweater. Her fine light-brown hair hangs in springy waves around her broad face, stopping at her neck. “Please make yourself at home, Errol,” she says stiffly, shuffling in heeled slippers towards

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the stove on the far wall. She fills the kettle and turns on the gas burner. “I’m afraid I only have instant. How do you take it?”

“I take it black,” Errol says, examining the table. “This is a solid piece. It looks like it’s been through a lot. Where’d you get it?”

She leans against the cupboard, “It was here when I moved in.

This place came furnished.”

“Have you thought about getting it refinished?” Errol asks, bending to check one heavily scratched area.

“Goodness, Errol,” she fusses, “you’re full of ideas.” Jessica pulls an oversized mug from the cupboard, spoons coffee crystals into the hot water, and places the steaming cup in front of him. The table bobs and a few drops of coffee spill. Jessica wipes them with a dishrag.

She sits across from Errol and clasps her fingers on the table in front of her. Errol quickly lifts his cup to prevent another spill. He notes that the tips of her thick fingers are discoloured, yet the apartment smells only faintly of cigarettes. A light pink polish coats her square fingernails.

Jessica finally speaks, “So, hello Errol. You must be new to town. Do you work around here?”

Errol sips his coffee, slow to answer.

“I’ve been down at JB’s Custom Carpentry. Mostly contracts, but keeps me busy.” He doesn’t tell her that he hasn’t worked in two weeks. “Mostly I move around though. Have a little home on wheels, let’s me head out when I get tired of a place.”

He warms his hands around his cup. “Yeah, keeps me busy.” Errol waits for Jessica to say something, taps his foot on the linoleum.

Glances surreptitiously around the apartment, looking for something to compliment her on.

Notices the lack of clutter, the worn fabric on the couch, and an absence of personal effects. The room reveals nothing.

Errol keeps one hand wrapped around his mug, the other flat on the table. “So, are you going to be playing with George again soon?”

Jessica stands and opens a kitchen drawer. Pulls out a small ashtray with a half-smoked cigarette resting in it. Sits back down and lights the stubbed butt with shaking hands. “We’re playing the Cornerstone this weekend,” she sighs. “I can’t say I like the place.”

She takes a shallow drag, then another. Butts the cigarette carefully and puts it back in the drawer. They sit in silence as Errol drinks his coffee.

Errol finishes the last few drops from his cup and clears his throat. “Well, thanks for the coffee. Hit the spot. But I’ve really got to get going.” He stands and walks to the door. “I’m looking forward to hearing you and George play again. I’ll be right up front!”

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Jessica smiles as she walks him to the door. “Thank you for dropping by Errol. It was lovely to have a visit. You’ll have to come again. If I know ahead of time I can make some fresh muffins.” She picks up a bag and hands it to Errol.

Errol shakes his head and puts the bag down on the floor. “No ma’am, I’m not hauling this stuff back out again. It’s staying here whether you like it or not.” Adds, with a glint in his eye, “Maybe you can dedicate a song to me.” Tips his hat and leaves her standing in the entryway.

As he drives away in his pick-up truck, Errol’s heart races.

Grinning and giggling, he sings full volume to an old Kenny Rogers tune warbling through his cheap speakers. Errol tries to imagine Jessica’s face when she opens the envelope he tucked next to a jar of peanut butter. He giggles again.

■

■

■

Wearing her best wool slacks and her yellow silk blouse, Jessica hops out of George’s rusted station wagon. Her low workboots fill with snow as she ploughs through the small parking lot. The truck is beside a boarded-up warehouse, just as George said it would be. A blue pick-up with a dusty Frontier camper. Holding a casserole in her gloved hands, Jessica climbs two tall steps and pounds on the camper door.

Her hands are shaking but damn her nerves for once and for all. She will thank him personally. The note was simple, “to help with rent—Errol.” What wasn’t simple was the three hundred and fifty dollars in twenties and tens. She would have come yesterday but her eyes were too red from crying. Thinking about it she begins to well up again.

The camper door flies open and newspapers swirl around her ankles. Errol’s startled face appears in the dim interior, one cheek creased from lying against something.

“Hi,” Jessica says, breathless from the cold, “maybe this is a bad time?” Her thin voice continues apologetically. “You don’t have a phone, so I didn’t know how else to reach you.” She doesn’t mention that her phone has been cut off for months.

“No, no,” Errol mutters, motioning her inside. He stumbles around the camper, reconfiguring his make-shift bed back into a table and bench seating area. Blankets and food wrappers are stuffed into the bed alcove above the cab. Errol’s movements are slow and cumbersome beneath his heavy parka.

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“It isn’t much,” Errol says with thick breath, motioning around the camper, “but it’s home.”

Jessica stands in the doorway, her gloved fingers clutching a macaroni casserole made from her mother’s recipe.

Errol picks up a half-empty vodka bottle from the floor, places it on the table. “I don’t have any clean glasses, but this stuff is the best disinfectant I know!” He sits on the far bench, slides the bottle across the table towards her. Motions for her to sit down.

“No, thank you,” Jessica says. “I don’t drink.”

She looks at her casserole. “I just wanted to thank you for your generous gift the other day. I don’t know what to…” Her voice falters and her eyes are drawn to the filthy countertop beside her. The camper sink is stacked, precariously, with crusted pots and plates. Her voice rushes, “I will pay you back as soon as I get back on my feet.” Thrusts her arms out mechanically, “Here’s something for dinner.”

He stands up and takes the casserole. “Thanks. Things are a bit of a mess right now. With the cold spell I usually just warm the

Now all he had to do was put a plastic card into a machine, which suited him just fine.

Henry headed into the kitchen to check the stew. A Clint Black song played on the radio. Potatoes, carrots, onions, barley, ground beef, peas, green beans. He loved the smell of stew as much as the taste, feeling it fill up the house with its promise of savory warmth.

He lifted the lid on the pot, checked to see if the veggies were soft enough, and put the wooden spoon down on a small plate beside the stove.

He opened the rest of the mail addressed to him while standing at the counter. He pulled up a chair for tackling the ones addressed to Errol. More stubs for supplemental funding, equipment, and services covered under disability coverage, reimbursement, and home care options. The details made his head spin, but he prided himself for keeping on top of it. He had to, no one else would.

Henry gave the floor a quick sweep, then decided it needed a

Back at her apartment, Jessica hums to a Dolly Parton tune on the radio as she washes up the dinner dishes. Errol sits on the couch with a glass of vodka and chuckles in front of a 12-inch black and white television he’s brought in from the camper. Around midnight, he agrees to stay and sleep on the couch. Not because he is drunk, of course, but because the roads are getting worse. By morning he’ll be on his way. camper up once in a while, then turn her off. Saves on propane.”

Jessica notices her breath making clouds in the cramped quarters.

Jessica weaves her gloved fingers together and realizes that her hands are not shaking. “Errol, why don’t you come back to my place for dinner tonight?” she says in an even voice. “It’s so cold today and it would be nice to have the company.”

She ignores Errol’s feeble protests and steps outside the camper to wave George away. She’ll ride back with Errol, she yells, no need to wait for her. Not that George gives a damn, but it’s the polite thing to do. She’d cleaned George’s house all morning for the ride to come see Errol.

Back at her apartment, Jessica hums to a Dolly Parton tune on the radio as she washes up the dinner dishes. Errol sits on the couch with a glass of vodka and chuckles in front of a 12-inch black and white television he’s brought in from the camper.

Around midnight, he agrees to stay and sleep on the couch. Not because he is drunk, of course, but because the roads are getting worse. By morning he’ll be on his way.

■

■

■

In the entryway Henry ripped open an envelope with his thumb, checked the stub of the pension cheque. How different it was these days, he thought, when money went right into the account.

Didn’t have to see tellers or go to the bank anymore, thank goodness. Those people were always giving him looks about his balance being too low, or telling him the account was overdrawn.

16

wash. He grabbed a mop and pail and rolled up his sleeves to reveal faded tattoos on his forearms. He rarely noticed them anymore, but he continued to wear long-sleeves out of habit. Back in his day all the new army recruits got those foolish markings; he’d been no different in that respect.

Henry rubbed his fingers over his temples and thought about taking a painkiller. Decided against it. He had never liked medicine, even aspirin seemed to make him light-headed. He needed to keep his wits sharp. Since Errol Smith had a stroke, Henry had become his full-time caregiver. He had to be responsible.

Henry walked into the living room. Errol’s skeletal frame was shrouded by an overstuffed armchair, his long legs stretched out stiffly on a cushioned footstool. A couple of years ago Henry had built a sturdy 12-inch base for the chair to help Errol get in and out. That was before he found out about those fancy electric chairs the government would buy for you. He reminded himself to follow up on the application for that chair.

“How are you doing over there?” Henry yelled, trying to get Errol’s attention over the din of the 42-inch colour television.

Errol’s blank face didn’t flinch. Henry moved in front of him, yelled closer to his ear, “Do you need to go to the bathroom Errol?”

Errol looked at him with glassy, bloodshot eyes and nodded.

Henry gently took hold of one arm, raised Errol unsteadily to his feet. Together they shuffled down the hall into the small bathroom. Henry got Errol situated on the raised toilet seat and modestly looked away. When he was finished, Henry helped him pull up his sweat pants and wash his bony hands.

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Errol hadn’t said a single word since his stroke five years ago.

Henry had kept talking to him, hoping for a breakthrough. The odd grunts and squeaks had stirred up hope in the past, but nothing ever came of it. Now he just talked to Errol out of habit, no longer expecting anything. He got used to the quiet.

At the dinner table Henry settled Errol onto a straight-backed chair. A bowl of lukewarm stew waited for him on a thick placemat. Henry draped one towel around Errol’s neck and placed another across his lap. He pushed Errol close to the table and put a spoon in his hand. “Okay, Errol, you’re going to eat this all by yourself, okay?” he said, sitting down next to him. Henry held Errol’s hand and guided it to scoop a few mushy vegetables and broth. Errol stiffly parted his lips and Henry directed the shaking spoon into Errol’s mouth. A few drips landed on the towel. “That’s good, Errol,” he said. “Now let’s do another one.”

They sat there until the bowl was empty. Henry washed Errol’s drooping face with a cloth, took him to the bathroom, then settled him in his chair in the living room. He switched on a western.

Heading back to the kitchen, Henry put the dishes in the sink and wiped around where Errol had eaten. Humming to a George Strait song, he put another thick placemat on the table, served himself a bowl of steaming stew, and sat down. Under four layers of varnish, the grain in the oak shone with a rich honey-coloured stain. He stared out the window at the stars and thought about what to cook for supper the next night.

■

■

■

“Come on Errol, it’s time for your bath.” Henry gently shook Errol’s shoulders. “We’ve got to get up, come on now, you have to help me.” Pulled him up under the arms and took him to the bathroom.

He helped Errol out of his clothes, supported him as he stepped over the side of the bathtub, and lowered him onto the plastic chair. He sprayed Errol down with the shower hose, soaped up his back and arms, and reminded Errol to wash his own private parts.

Henry rinsed him off and dried him, helped him into soft flannel pajamas. He sat him on the raised toilet seat as he massaged body lotion over Errol’s cold hands and feet. He gave Errol’s nails a quick trim, brushed his teeth with a brand designed for hot/cold sensitivity, and combed Errol’s short white hair.

Down the hall, Henry nestled Errol into his bed between a sheepskin pad and goosedown comforter. Turned him on his side to help with the sleep apnea. “Good night, Errol,” he said, patting him on the shoulder. “If you need anything, just bang on the wall.

I’ll hear you.” He closed the door three-quarters of the way to block out the hallway light.

Henry threw a load of laundry into an old washing machine at the back of the house and opened the dryer to take out some wrinkled things he’d forgotten about from earlier in the week. Mostly his own clothes, a few towels and pillowcases. He bundled them up as best he could and shuffled through the kitchen to his own bedroom down the hall from Errol’s. Dumped the clothes on the bed and began sorting. Rolled some socks, folded t-shirts, put shirts and underwear to the side. He opened the closet door and barely noticed an old guitar behind some boxes on the floor. Shuffling through clothes to find hangers, he caught a glimpse of yellow behind an old robe. Henry reached back to slide the fabric between his fingers and pulled the blouse from the closet.

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It was the only thing he’d saved.

He held the yellow blouse up to his chest and turned in the small room to watch the sheen change colours in the dim night-table light. He remembered getting that blouse. The thrill of finding something so beautiful at the bottom of a giveaway box he’d collected at the church. It had never been worn, tags still on. $49.99. Real silk. It had slid over his skin like water, skimmed his padded bra and draped straight over the tummy he’d always been so self-conscious about. Quality did that, he realized, flattered the body in ways that cheap clothes never could. He’d bought “delicates only” detergent for that blouse. Of course it was supposed to be dry-cleaned, but who could afford that?

Henry pulled off his checkered shirt and slipped into the soft fabric. The arms were tight and the front wouldn’t button closed.

His tummy roll was now a full-blown paunch and protruded through the flowing material. He didn’t look down, just closed his eyes and ran his hands over the worn silk.

He’d lived as Jessica for seven years. Almost scheduled the final operation a few times, but there was always something that stopped her from finishing. The relief in being herself, being Jessica, was clouded by an ever-growing reality. She wasn’t viable as a woman, especially as she got older. Nobody quite believed it.

It wasn’t as though anyone disputed her gender, but there was always a question in people’s faces. Something was wrong with her they suspected, but no one could understand what it was. So they stared. And they stared.

For years she’d been trying to ignore it. She figured if she waited it out and just kept trying, one day it would all come together.

She’d somehow learn to say the right things, move the right way, wear the right clothes. One day she’d be a normal woman.

On the Thursday in April that Jessica overheard a bartender laughingly refer to George’s mutt-faced lackey, she decided to get a new wig and higher quality make-up. The next week she spent two hours making herself up and choosing the right outfit before heading to the supermarket with Errol. This time, instead of averting her eyes, she watched the faces of all the people she encountered. A mother shopping with two pre-school children, a stock boy tagging cans of soup, a retired couple bickering over cuts of beef, and the tired cashier who rang in their purchases.

That night Jessica put on her workboots and kicked in the bathroom door. She threw everything—curler, wigs, make-up, perfume, clothes—into boxes and told Errol they were moving.

They dropped the boxes at the church on their way out of town.

She didn’t even say goodbye to George; that cheap son of a bitch had barely paid her half her fair share for gigs anyways.

But Henry saved the blouse.

He opened his top dresser drawer and pulled out a small ashtray with a half-smoked cigarette in it. Sat down on a stacking stool against one wall. Took a shallow drag, and then another. Henry knew he had to quit; it wasn’t good for Errol to be breathing in that crap. Especially with his apnea.

Henry continued to run his hands over the silky fabric, avoiding the cracked mirror above his dresser. He swayed slightly, his eyes widening as he recognized the Johnny Cash tune he overheard from the kitchen radio. It was the same song Jessica and Errol had sung together at the top of their lungs while driving down a deserted country road one summer in the pick-up. Having a ball, being normal. ■

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CNQ CANADIAN NOTES & QUERIES

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18

Donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t miss the next issue . . .

CNQ 75: 75th Issue / 40th Anniversary Issue Bringing together a series of essays which make note of current and likely trends in Canadian culture, and make predictions about the state of our literature, theatre, film and visual arts in 25 years.

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PHOTOGRAPHY

FOLIO CONTRIBUTORS:

The End » michael hemery | Five Percent Dilation » nick mamatas | Poem to a Teenaged Nihilistic Existentialist » tara thom | Hsün Tzu » karen green | Beat Me: My Search for the Spirituality of Self-Harm » yasuko thanh | Weight Watchers » kathryn mockler | My Jesus » dennis h. lee | Cross to Bear » allison baggio | Bride » shannon quinn

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FICTION

The End MICHAEL HEMERY

I. Tucked between a chic outdoor wine bar and an overpriced women’s clothing store, my wife Stacie and I discovered an art gallery in Sarasota that sold bugs. Hundreds of butterflies, mounted in frozen patterns of motion inside airtight, acrylic boxes, hung from an enormous, yellow wall. Although the blues, greens, and reds of the butterfly wings were enchanting, a sinister, long-bodied critter hanging at the end of the wall, away from all of the other displays, caught my attention.

The bug resembled a distended grasshopper, its six-inch green and tan exoskeleton framed by two sets of translucent pink and green wings, like those papery umbrellas gracing tropical drinks.

Attached to its armoured underside were two sets of short arms drawn into the body, while two more legs, lined with spiked black barbs, dangled from the creature’s bottom. Despite the striking hues of colour at the base of its wings, the bug was fierce, surely the inspiration for horror films and campfire tales, a sultry vampire with fangs. Removing the case from the wall and turning it over, I noticed the bug’s shell seemed nearly impenetrable, all soft spots covered by rigid plates, evolution ensuring this one would last.

Traces of glue clung to the bug’s abdomen, securing it to a plastic stake. Two minuscule, tentacle-like arms were drawn around the mouth, wide and sharp enough to nip off the tip of my pinky.

“So, you’re a bug man?” asked the white-bearded owner, a chatty middle-aged man wearing cargo shorts, a red Hawaiian shirt, sandals and a Panama hat.

“Not necessarily,” I said. “This is just a fascinating insect.”

“We don’t carry many bugs anymore,” he said. “The women want the pretty butterflies—they usually get freaked out when they see weird specimens. In fact, this is the last one of these I’m going to carry. I told the artist I can’t sell these to the rich women. They run out of the shop. No good for business.”

“I think it’s beautiful,” I said.

“This one was a rare find in this perfect condition.”

“What is it, exactly?” I asked.

20

“A Madagascar locust,” the owner said. “Can you imagine thousands of those sweeping onto your crops, darkening the sky? And the sound they must make. It’s no wonder they thought the end was near.”

“Who?” I asked, hanging the box back on the wall. “Who thought the end was near?”

“The people in the Bible,” the man said. “Oh, I forgot to mention, that’s the exact locust that historians believe was referred to in the Bible—the plagues and all.”

Without asking for a price, I hastily dug in my back pocket to retrieve my wallet.

I had to own this locust because I still longed to solve mysteries I unearthed as a child. In elementary school when I tired of hearing her read The Hardy Boys and the Chronicles of Narnia, I asked my mother to read to me from the Bible. She’d suggest the story of Noah or one of the Christmas tales, but I’d insist on the book of Revelation. Sprawling out on the hardwood floors and tightly closing my eyes, I’d listen as she read about each seal that was broken open, revealing a new layer of terror for the destruction of man.

Seas turned to blood, horses with lion heads spewing sulphur, and the plagues of locusts. I loved the part with the locusts—lion’s teeth, faces of men, the hair of women, all topped with a gold crown—ravaging humans under the leadership of Appolyon, an angel king known as “The Destroyer.”

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When I first questioned her about the book, which was introduced to me accidentally by my fifth grade public school teacher, my mother explained that Christians were being persecuted at the time, so many historians believed John wrote the passages as a message of hope in a secret code only understood

by Christians. I had no interest in the Christian redemption at the end of Revelation; I’d often ask her to stop before we reached that part. Instead I quaked with excitement as I thought of the mystery: man’s demise wrapped up in a tale of Hollywood blockbuster proportions, with its drama, gore and, most importantly for me, secrecy. I thought if I heard the story enough times I’d crack the code and understand the message of the author. But when she finished reading, I’d open my eyes and shrug. “I still don’t get it.”

She’d laugh and say, “You’re not the only one.”

I worried the bug would get tossed around in the cargo hold of our return flight to Cleveland, damaging its tissue-paper wings, so I packed the bubble-wrapped locust in my carry-on luggage with my laptop and magazines. As we approached the security checkpoint, I thought the screeners might question the cargo, assuming it served some devious purpose, like nail clippers or deodorant, but they didn’t search my bag. Slipping my shoes back on after walking through the metal detector, I said to Stacie, “They’re worried about shampoo bottles, but they just let the plague that will destroy mankind slip right through.”

The locust now hangs just to the left of my computer monitor. At first, I studied the creature each time I sat down to write, check emails, or pay bills. It had been seven years since I last opened a Bible—for an undergraduate Genesis class—and even more since I’d given up on religion. But I again found myself reading the book of Revelation, hoping the marks on my Madagascar locust’s legs or tears on its wings would provide some insight into the mystery. The story was captivating, but I wished I were terrified of the locust, the tangible form of my childhood story. It didn’t frighten me so much as fill me with wonder. Closing my eyes, I imagined thousands of locusts descending upon the earth, their pink wings chariots of sound, for one final battle.

After a few weeks, the locust became more of a decoration, coming down from the wall less frequently. Maybe once a week I noted how content it seemed in its acrylic case—angelic, even— its bent left leg giving the impression of holy ascension.

The top of the case is now covered with a dusty film, yet inside it the mystery remains, staked to my wall in silent martyrdom.

issue 51

II.

“Uncle Larry’s bees are gone,” mom said one morning when Stacie and I joined my parents for breakfast at a local bagel shop.

“What do you mean ‘gone’?” I asked, spreading cream cheese on my bagel. “Weren’t his hives full just a few weeks ago?”

My uncle owns an organic produce farm just south of Cleveland, and since he purchased the land nearly thirty years ago he’s had beehives at the back of his property to provide fresh honey and pollinate his crops. This was the first time the hives had ever been abandoned.

“He went back there a few days ago to get some honey and there were piles of wax and other debris from the hives heaped outside the stacks. When he opened the hives up, they were empty—not even a dead bee. After they emptied the hive, not leaving a single piece of dirt, they all abandoned it.”

Before I was born, my dad also tended to the beehives in the back of his suburban yard. He’d explain the complexity of the bee’s social network and tell me, “I loved just watching them interact and carry on—like a miniature and more perfect version of us.”

Now, at breakfast, my dad began explaining how he’d seen a program on PBS that investigated a massive disappearance of bees across the world.

Apparently some seventy percent of bees are gone on the West Coast, and no one has any idea what’s happening to them. “There are tons of theories,” my father said. “Some say it’s cell phones or pesticides, but no one knows for sure what’s happening.”

I didn’t want to think about the bees, because really their fate is not a mystery at all. The specifics may be murky, whether it’s chemicals or communication towers, but their disappearance shouldn’t come as a great surprise.

The real shocker is how our end won’t result in a bloody battle of good versus evil, swarms of insects the size of our open hands annihilating us. Instead, we’ll perish from abandonment.

Our gods, who owe their very existence to us, have abandoned us, cleaned house like the bees and returned to their homes. They’re calling home their creations one by one: the bees, the polar bears, the chestnut trees. Soon, all that will remain of the planet is us, with all our intelligence. If the enemy was clearly defined, we could rally to victory and attack the locusts with nukes or heatseeking lasers. But you can’t defeat departure.

We sat for the rest of the morning in relative silence, aside from the occasional exchange about work or our relatives, while I periodically stirred the honey that had settled at the bottom of my mug. ■

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Five Percent Dilation N I C K M A M ATA S

You’re the city of Newark.

I’m the DMV. The sun looks black and lambent in the sky.

I never even had an apartment here. I just lived in the basement. Lived. I spent most of my days tied to a cot that was in turn chained to a pipe three levels down. When the furnaces would thrum to life every morning at five I’d dream, smiling, that one of them exploded and sent the pipe, my cot, and me, flying up through the splintering floors of the row house and into the blue.

You know how that is, don’t you, Newark, to miss the blue over your head? Probably not. You’ve been a dying city for a long time, ever since you boiled your populace in pressure cookers of industrial concrete and federal planning, then they spilled over and burned all the white out of you. But now you’re the soul survivor, ain’t you, G? And I do mean soul. The two of us, anyway. The last two real niggaz, G! G ain’t for gangsta. Only dead niggaz think that. G is the seventh letter of the alphabet, the luckiest and holiest of numbers. It’s in the Torah, the Bible, the Koran, in the secrets of the Hare Krishna pamphlets passed out on the street corners by the museum, and near Penn Station.

Seven is G and G is God. Six is for Earth. The Asiatic Black Man and the Blackwoman are

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Gods and Earths, or were. They were the gifted five percent who mastered the Supreme Mathematics and the Supreme Alphabet, who defied the devilish ten percent—the blue-eyed devils, to save the deaf, dumb, and blind eighty-five percent. Not anymore though. There’s just you and me.

Well, you and the DMV. You and thee en-vee of the block, cuz he got with a white woman. You and me.

White people were a mutation, a spiritual accident, a cosmic joke, the revenge of Yacub. Through tricknology they brought ruin upon the masses of humanity, dividing us, conquering us. They turned our women into whores. They built Newark too, and made it great through the white man’s religion.

Here they perfected the unclean practice of tanning leather, the

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butchering of the poison animal, and the transport of chops and sausage round the country thanks to the iron binds of the rails.

I should know. I am tricknology now. There aren’t even any more white devils. It really is a Five Percent Nation out there, but it ain’t exactly worked out the way the prophet predicted. For example, I am now not under a DMV, rotting away, subsisting on the discards of unclean fast foods and the fumes of bluey-gray mimeographs, and waiting for my next beating. I am the DMV. Every molecule of it.

Here’s the really terrible thing about working at the DMV. Everything is considered to be of equal importance. That’s management philosophy. Some kids are taking their written test? Important.

Homeland Security sends a man over to comb through all the old paper files in the basement because some database in Washington, crossindexed with the AARP mailing list, turns up a name that sounds like an Americanized bastardization of the name Anton Saada, the head of Syria’s own version of the Nazi party back in the 1930s?

Just as important. Feeding the gimp in the third level sub-basement? Also important.

Of course, everything being of equal importance isn’t the same as everything being of any particular importance.

So I starve down here like a motherfucker, while the real motherfuckers take their sweet time doing whatever it is they do, nine to five and not a minute later. And you, you sweet Newark, you groan and seethe with the slow fire of a thousand chemical decompositions.

You’re a girl named Margarita. I’m a man named Antwone. You lived in the Ironbound, in the apartment in which you were born. Your father was Manny. He bubbled his consonants in his throat and looked like a fire hydrant who eats other fire hydrants.

Manny wanted to run a store some day, maybe a Carvel ice cream shop—that excited you as a kid—but never did much toward that end except sit under the yellow lights of your cramped kitchen with a half-length pencil and sheets of scrap paper. Manny didn’t even have a driver’s license, but he drove for twenty-five years.

“How do you do it, papa?” you asked one September day when the air was fresh but for the stain of pork and clams that always hovered around the dinner table. You wanted to take driver’s ed and he wouldn’t sign for you.

“Don’t get pulled over. Nobody will pull you over if you don’t do nothing wrong. You obey the laws they can see you obeying, and in your home, in your heart, you can do what you want.” That was the most he ever said to you in one breath that didn’t involve the words whore or Fatima, and that’s about as philosophical as you devils ever got anyway. But you had a round ass and wore earrings the size of satellite dishes and you had pure DSL and I knew it from the way you chewed gum all the time so I got with you and we made a baby and then I disappeared.

We had to hide, you and me, from my crew and yours. It was Romeo & Juliet all over again. All your girls told you I’d knock you up and leave you, but you must know, girl, that I’d never do that.

I’d never leave the flesh of my flesh to be raised by his mama. I was

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kidnapped. Taken. Stolen and locked down by Amerikkka itself.

But now I’m free, girl. God is a not a spook, he’s a man, but now this man—your man—is a spook. I’m watching over my son, girl, I’m watching him rise up.

Let me break it down for ya.

What’s knowledge? You gotta know the ledge.

There ain’t no limits for the original man, and that’s why I’m talking to you right now, G. The Sunni Muslim, yeah, he’s soon to be Muslim.

Television? Tell a lie, vision. It wasn’t ever the alIslam that did this to us.

Nuclear? It’s the new clarity with which to see the world. The deserts are all glass parking lots now.

New Jersey, New Jerusalem.

Universe? You and I, verse.

You and I are all that’s left. You are Newark, and I’m the DMV. You are the new work, and I am thee envy of all that remain. There ain’t no G but Allah, and Allah is Arm leg leg arm head, the original Black man from Asia.

And I have no arm or leg or leg or arm or head, but I am still a G. And you, Newark, you are still the Earth.

The devil’s tricknology did me in. I went to renew my license, and my new name, my True Name brought the wrath of the devil down upon me. Yacub discovered his tricknology in the desert as a child.

Like repels and unlike attracts he realized, when he found a magnetic rock. And then he got the idea to take from the black man the black germ, and from the black germ the weak, brown germ, and by grafting these brown germs together ’til they got lighter and lighter, he made the white man.

Magnetism was the man’s net I was gotten in. A name in a database, a coded signal, and they were all upon me, and they brought me down, down, into the bowels of Newark, deep underground in the DMV. And there I stayed, without a lawyer, without a trial, without my one phone call, with not anybody even knowing where I was except for Homeland Security—the land for homies ain’t your sex, right G?—and the lady they asked to feed me and check in on me.

I asked her to call a lawyer, call the ACLU, call the imam, call Margarita. I told her my girl’s white, Portuguese, and that old woman sneered at me and told me “Ain’t my job to make sure you get a phone call. I’m just doing what I’m told.” She was a sister, but she wasn’t ah-ssisting her God that day.

She died with the rest of them, at the hand of Yacub’s crew, the devils. But a real G knows the ledge, and so I lived. I’m living now, baby, as the DMV in the town of tombs and doom. And you, Newark, are a real G too. Magnetism was my undoing, but also did me in to the stone and steel and tiles of this building. The rest of them, dead niggaz and even Yacub’s, they all died in nuclear fire, leaving you, Newark, empty, but for me and the roaches.

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You are my son with Margarita. I am God, your father. She laughed when I said I wanted to name you Newark, after her hometown.

She laughed like a cave dweller laughs and said, “Antwone, we’re not naming our kid after this shithole.” She wanted to move, and not to Mecca—Manhattan—or Brooklyn—Medina—but to the suburbs. I shouldn’t have been with her, but I followed the law that was in my heart, and a G always has to represent.

And I followed the law of my heart too when I put your name down as Newark on your birth certificate. Margarita bitched and screamed afterwards, and she said that your name was Nathan, and I broke it down for her: nah, it ain’t a thang, but she wasn’t hearing me. It didn’t matter though. Your name was Newark where it counted: in the magnetism of the devil’s databases. You were Newark and you’ll always be Newark, as Allahu Akbar min kulli shay.

I feel you, Newark. You’re a G, like me, a baby. You instinctively know the ledge, a bright blessed angel. And when the bombs dropped, G, when you were atomized like everyone else, you didn’t die. You’re a G, you have no circumference. I’m just the DMV, but you child, you’re greater than me.

Yacub’s crew strangled the city long ago with their lies and deceit. Turned black against black and brown against brown, and they laughed from the suburbs while we killed each other over turf and territory. But now you’re alive again, and a new reign of peace can begin, my son. Newark, you are the new work, and the new ark for a new covenant.

In the Supreme Alphabet, Newark is a holy name: N is for Nation E for Equality W for Wisdom A for Allah R for Ruler K for Kingdom.

Your name, G, is an ordained one. You’re gonna rise up, I know. I can see it. I can see it like I see my ruined body smoldering in the basement under the DMV, the cuff that was on my leg limp and holding only a trace of ash and bone. There is no place here that isn’t you, G. Finally, everything is equally important, and everything is all-important, my son. The devil’s tricknology did me in, but it has set you free to rise, and rising you are. The rivers are flooding. The water table is supersaturated, my basement is growing damp, the basin of the city is swelling and rising up.

Let me tell you, Newark, you’re my son and I love you. I can feel the damp stain, wet on bone. My bone, the crown of my skull. I’m in a cell. It’s not the DMV, but it may as well be, as the cops are so languid: devils and dead niggaz all of them. I know you’re out there, Newark, my son, and you must know that you’re a G. Don’t believe your mama, the cavewoman, or her lies. You’re an Asiatic Black Man and you always will be G. Obey the laws of your heart.

Don’t let the white devils burn us down. ■

My Jesus DENNIS H. LEE I met him in college, no not really a meeting. There was a phone call on the dormitory phone and I answered. No idea what was being said from the other side. It was in a tongue so thick with accent that I couldn’t get it. But Rodriguez came across, and a list of room numbers and names posted next to the phone delivered the message.

“Jesus!” I yelled. “There’s a phone call for Jesus!” And to the three guys in sweats, “It’s for Jesus. Do you know where he is?”

“Rodriguez?” said another guy coming up from the stairway. “Yes. I just saw him on the road. His name is Hay-sus, Hay-sus Rodriguez. Don’t call him Jesus.” “Okay,” I said.

“I’ll leave a note on his door to call his mother.”

“Mary,” another guy said. “I believe his mother’s name is Mary?”

I taped a note on the outside of his door: “Jesus, call home.”

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photo: george omorean

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Poem to a Teenaged Nihilistic Existentialist TA R A T H OM

You used to be a star, a teenaged superstar.

In all your greenness, you were curious about things I wasn’t and you were never entirely sure.

Hsün Tzu1

That was when I really liked you.

KAREN GREEN Now when I see you it’s all Truth and Nietzsche you say there is more to me than sex you urge me to centre my energy deep inside some chakra I can’t even pronounce, let it bloom and revere the god within me.

I didn’t want to have to say it but your big ideas are ordinary at two in the morning.

There are more worthy things to worship than myself.

Existential this: Nineteen-year-olds have penises, they do not have all the answers.

The only deep I wanted you to be was inside me. I can think by myself.

girls giggle in the kitchen shoving more salt into their pockets; their faces are salmon: cold, moist, and pink from the Prince Rupert early spring air they run outside again; their blue and red nylon jackets flap as they rush to the damp earth under tall spruce and pine beneath tangled hair, brown and blonde, their faces turn serious as they sprinkle salt as if dusting a baby’s bum with talcum blue jeaned knees in the dirt, they watch as the fat shiny olive-green slugs melt into green goo like French Canadian pea soup straight from the can the girls are trapped, hypnotized, addicted to the gruesome dissolution, the slow-as-possible deaths

1) Hsün Tzu (born ca. 312 B.C.) set forth the most complete and well-ordered philosophical system of his day. Basically Confucian, he differed with Mencius by asserting that the nature of man is originally evil. To counteract this evil, he advocated self-improvement, the pursuit of learning, the avoidance of obsession, and constant attention to ritual in all areas of life. (Hsün Tzu: Basic Writings, translated by Burton Watson, Columbia University Press, 1963)

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Beat Me: My Search for the Spirituality of Self-Harm YA S U KO T H A N H

Does the use of pain reflect a love of endorphins, a deeper experience, or a psychological imbalance?

I’m a babbling, weeping emotional wreck. My ass is as black as an overripe plum and hard as a pit from all the accumulated swelling in the tissues. I can’t sit and can barely wipe after going to the bathroom.

“I think this stuff hits you heavier than other people,” my boyfriend says, two days after my public flogging at a local BDSM event. “I mean,” he continues, “if it was normal to have this kind of bad reaction, why would people do it?”

We’re arguing about whether BDSM is right for us. Sure, I’m a wreck. This shit hurts. But the physical damage isn’t what’s in contention: it’s my mental state. He thinks my wanting to be beaten is the physical manifestation of me wanting to be “hard on myself.”

I want to challenge him. Why not legitimize my propensity for pain in a community of established practitioners, even though part of me wonders if it is only part of a pattern in a history of selfdestructive behaviour that included drug use and abuse.

But I dismiss him instead. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. You haven’t been to that place.” It’s important that I feel tougher than him.

I’m drawn to those for whom BDSM is not only a way to fulfill sexual fantasies, but also a spiritual path. The experience of pain, submission, and dominance can put people into a deep, trancelike state. It can, I think, be spiritually therapeutic.

Spirituality within BDSM is not a modern practice. Throughout history, many cultures and races have used forms of sadomasochism to gain insight into a higher state of consciousness: religious worshippers flog or crucify themselves, sleep on spikes, hang suspended by their flesh, or walk miles through scorching deserts with bare and bloodied feet.

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I’ve been known to seek out similar experiences, although it has more to do with control than anything else. Masochists like me are characterised by our controlling natures. We control our relationships and gain what we seek from our pain-giver.

Modern medical research shows us that masochistic practices cause some big changes in human physiology, namely in levels of hormones, in brain waves, in attention and consciousness.

For centuries mystics have used physical and sexual stress to boost endorphins and engender visionary experiences. In some cases, a mystic’s ability to endure pain while in a trance serves as proof of his or her spirituality.

The night I was flogged, women walked around the club with their breasts exposed, nipples bound with string, and men walked with their cocks in leather swinging back and forth. I wore a Chinese red silk dress. I didn’t want the fabric damaged, so I asked my boyfriend if he wouldn’t mind me taking my clothes off. I undid the snaps that ran from my neck down to my chest and then opened the zipper at the side. He pulled the fabric from my body, peeling me. Standing there in my bra and corset and girdle I felt tight: tight in my body, restrained and safe.

Lights illuminated the stage. People milled in line. When my turn came I climbed the steps toward a large man with a handlebar moustache. He wore no shirt and had a beer belly over his blue

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jeans. I was told later that, besides being a flogger, he runs a workshop where he teaches people how to do take-downs, kidnap someone from a public place—with their permission, of course—throw them into a van, hold them hostage, and even how to coordinate the personnel necessary to orchestrate such an act.

I told him that, except at home, with household objects like leather belts and wooden kitchen utensils, I had never really done this kind of thing before. “I … I like it kind of hard,” I said, reddening without knowing why, and then told him about my boyfriend’s thick leather belt, including where on my ass and thighs I liked him to hit me.

The journey he took me on challenges simple expression. A sense, like low music in the orchestra pit; it swells like sound and grows bigger. It crescendos and crashes and crescendos again into something bigger. Waves and waves, like being lost, like being out of time, like being struck by the high notes of flutes and then by the deeper reverberations of an oboe.

As a young child, a girlfriend of mine read about a nun who had made a sacred vow never to allow her body to rest against the back of a chair. In pious imitation my friend followed her example and spent years sitting crookedly.

Ascetics who subscribe to the psychology of self-inflicted pain value the suffering they wreak on themselves.

Georgetown University professor, Ariel Glucklich, has explored the terrain of meaningful spiritual suffering in Sacred Pain. He examines the ways in which pain has been used to heal the human spirit: as a punishment for sin, a cure for disease, a weapon against the body and its desires, and a means by which the ego may be transcended.

The piercings performed during the Plains Indians’ Sundance is one of the better known and documented examples of religious masochism. Others include the practices of fire-walking Hindu yogis, Christian flagellants, Muslim Shi’ite self-injury, and body scarification among African tribal religions. There is also Buddhist lore on Zen students achieving enlightenment after being injured by their masters. All of them value pain as important to religious experience.

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The fifth century Arab Christian saint Simeon the Stylite is said to have tortured himself to death for love of pain. He subjected his body to ever-increasing austerities from an early age, and on one occasion was discovered unconscious, his waist bound so tightly with a girdle made of palm fronds that days of soaking were required to remove the fibres from the wound.

He later took to standing continually upright as long as his limbs would sustain him, a practice still employed by some sadhus— Hindu ascetics—in India who stand twenty-four hours a day and sleep with their heads resting on a vertical pole. In order to get

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away from all the people who came to him for prayers, Simeon found a pillar amongst some ruins and formed a small platform at the top. In 1776, Edward Gibbon in History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire describes Simeon asceticism this way: He sometimes prayed in an erect attitude, with his outstretched arms in the figure of a cross, but his most familiar practice was that of bending his meagre skeleton from the forehead to the feet; and a curious spectator, after numbering twelve hundred and forty- four repetitions, at length desisted from the endless account. The progress of an ulcer in his thigh might shorten, but it could not disturb, this celestial life; and the patient Hermit expired, without descending from his column.

I imagine that it must have been a sensation like sunshine, like summer in your skin, long and lazy as a brushstroke.

The man who flogs me on stage stops. Gently touches my shoulder blade with his finger.

“Can you feel that?” he asks, whispering in my ear.

“Yes.” Satisfied I‘m not on the verge of passing out, he continues to whip me.

Later my girlfriend told me that she approached the stage and watched me closely. She said I hadn’t even flinched.

I experience flogging—either from a professional or by my boyfriend’s belt—as sensation, not pain. I open my mind and tear down all its fixed ideas. It’s about liberation: not words, not notions, just the sensation of leather on flesh.

When it was over, I put my arm around the flogger’s neck and said, “You’re really good.” I walked off the stage. I had snapped back into myself.

Another value in pain is the relief of guilt, or pre-emptive payment for sins done. Some psychoanalysts, including Freud, share a similar perspective towards self-harm. This is often the primary motive of Christian saints and martyrs.

So punishing the physical body is a way a person can “pay” for sins committed in life, serving to both relieve guilt and anxiety towards the justice they believe they will encounter after death. To believers, this has an obvious psychological benefit.

The real danger is that some people who practice self-harm have misplaced anger and unresolved pain that they are trying to address in destructive ways. Instead of confronting their emotional pain they bring themselves physical pain as a relief from stress. The relief is usually short-lived and the need for selfdestruction quickly returns.

Sometimes I see my own indulgences as surrender, but I can’t say how much of my judgment is influenced by a stereotypical world view that wants me to label BDSM—if not as “depraved” then at least as “abnormal”. Some people pour themselves a gin and tonic when they’ve had a rough day at work. Some light a joint, some visit the spa. I like pain.

As a kid, I’d pinch my skin or punch myself in the head; I’d carve my arms with a math compass and feel calm at the sight of the pomegranate seed drops of my blood. I’d starve myself and say “I’m strong” or “I’m bad.” Looking back, I realize my behaviour was slightly pathological.

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Denying yourself ice cream when you’re ten probably has little spiritual value—nor is carving bad tattoos into your skin redemptive, especially if they look like Tasmanian Devils.

Carl Jung differentiates between these pathological neuroses and positive forms of self-sacrifice. In Sacred Pain an affirmative surrender of the ego is illustrated through the case of a Lakota man suffering from a number of problems, including depression. After his experience with chest piercings at a Sundance ceremony the man said, “I felt pain, but I also felt that closeness with the Creator.”

It’s not just the sensation of being flogged I find erotic; rather, it’s the state of mind it evokes: subdued, vulnerable, and ready to be taken advantage of. I tell myself it’s not because I’m a neurotic that I want to be beaten, or because I have low self-esteem and think I deserve it, but because I aspire to a higher plane of consciousness.

A type of spiritual catharsis, even truer for me in the etymological sense of the word—the relief of anxiety by bringing repressed feelings to consciousness.

A saying in the BDSM community is that “we have issues in our tissues.” For better or for worse, the release of these issues is something I haven’t been able to accomplish through any means but pain.

Psychology Professor Roy Baumeister notes that people sometimes confuse the fact that they feel good after BDSM with the idea that BDSM is therapeutic. “To prove that something is therapeutic,” he says, “you have to prove that it has lasting beneficial effects on mental health . . . it’s hard to prove even that therapy is therapeutic.” In mental health terms, BDSM doesn’t make you better and it doesn’t make you worse.

In the 1980s, the American Psychiatric Association removed BDSM as a category in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, and though it’s no longer technically a “pathology” I do have to wonder if my own penchant for self-harm is simply selfdestructive.

My boyfriend handed me my clothes when I walked off the stage.

“You wanna go have a smoke?” I asked.

We went out onto the stairwell. My legs were stiff and my ass excruciatingly numb. The night air was cool on my shoulders.

Cool, then cold. I started to shake. Then, midway through a sentence, I began to see stars; a blanket of grey sparkles descended on me. I sat on my numb ass and the cigarette tumbled from my fingers.

I’d never fainted before in my life.

Suddenly, life felt sped-up, flash-framed, and each scene unnaturally precious.

My boyfriend found me a corner inside, in an unoccupied stairwell, concealed by a curtain. It was somewhere to hide. I ripped off my corset, angrily tore off my shoes. Now any restraint on my body—anything against my flesh—felt like an assault.

“Stay with me,” I told him. “Don’t leave me.”

He held my hand and didn’t let go.

Now, two days later, as we argue in the kitchen, I explain, “You don’t understand what those endorphins do to you when they’re released. You have no idea the high.”

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I realize as the words come out of my mouth that I’m being dismissive. What I’m really trying to tell him is I don’t think you’ve got what it takes. You aren’t tough enough to feel so good. Why? Because I feel belittled by his assessment that the pain hits me “heavier” than it does others.

I feel like someone who’s been told she can’t handle her liquor. A sissy, a cry-baby. Worst of all, part of me thinks he’s right. Maybe— like alcohol for the alcoholic—some people just shouldn’t indulge in BDSM.

When I worked the streets I was attacked by a stranger. I imagine I felt fear when he covered my mouth with his fist. The texture of his fingers, the way my lips were forced open, I could taste him. What?

Why didn’t I bite down? Why didn’t I crush my cigarette in his face?

I watched the spire of smoke, a useless red ember glowing from the corner of my eye. I use the word “imagine” now because I can’t quite remember. Only the details.

Is my fear of him being released only now, latently, when I experience pain in a comfortable, nurturing setting?

Thus in the sixth century Saint Radegund practised selfinjurious behaviour as a way of controlling terrible childhood memories of her family’s murder. Although many saints like her would today receive a diagnosis of schizophrenia or hysteria, many of them did use masochism as an effective technology against painful pasts.

Part of me feels guilty after flogging my tension into submission,

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POETRY

like that drinker again who wonders, maybe, deep down, if she isn’t making her problems worse.

I think this is what my boyfriend is trying to point out, which is why I’m so defensive. Despite the research indicating that BDSM does no real harm, Freud’s successors continue to speak of it in the language of mental illness. Sheldon Bach, for example, a supervising analyst at the New York Freudian Society, argues that some people are BDSM addicts. They feel compelled to be “anally abused or crawl on their knees and lick a boot or a penis or who knows what else. The problem,” he says, “is that they can’t love.

They are searching for love, and BDSM is the only way they can try to find it.” Love.

I know that pain is a broad category and that within religious ritual it is a taboo subject. Despite this, rituals involving pain are universal. And yes, I wonder if both spirituality and masochism can’t be understood as flights from the self in search of love.

My daughters glimpse my bruises by accident. I explain they came from a tumble down the stairs wearing high-heeled shoes: I turn it into a cautionary tale to be heeded when they are playing dress-up at home. Three weeks later and my ass still hurts but the deep violet stains have faded away and what’s left has drained from my rear and sort of pooled in my thighs like stocking seams.

But the pain is still there, deep in my tissue, buried, like something almost invisible from the outside. ■

Weight Watchers K AT H R Y N M O C K L E R

Buddha signed up for Weight Watchers after his doctor said he was borderline diabetic.

“Nothing tastes as good as being thin feels,” chanted the Weight Watchers leader.

Buddha rolled his eyes, and the woman who had earlier said

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she was still trying to lose her pregnancy weight saw him and nudged her friend, the large-breasted woman in the red track suit.

They both gave him dirty looks.

Buddha wondered if he could get in trouble at Weight Watchers.

He wondered if he could get kicked out.

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FICTION

Cross to Bear ALLISON BAGGIO I L L U S T R AT I O N BY K A R E N J U S T L

The mahogany of the confessional booth traps him like a prison cell.

He considers ducking out, away from the priest breathing behind the lattice, through the fog of incense and out until light pokes his eyes.

But he doesn’t. His mother stands outside the door, waiting, which makes it difficult to escape.

“Lucas, tell me your sins.”

“I cheated on my school test.”

“And how did you do that?”

“I wrote the answers on a small piece of paper and hid it inside my shoe.”

“Is there anything else?”

“I spoke harshly to my three younger brothers.”

“Uh huh.”

“And my six older sisters.”

“Anything more?”

“No.” “Your penance is one Our Father and three Hail Marys.”

Redemption. But will he always be so lucky?

They have been happening more often and getting clearer. The thoughts. Like the split second of a horror film splashed across the inside of his forehead. Real enough to make his hands numb and his heart pound like a fist banging against his chest. From the inside trying to get out.

“Lucas, sit up while you say Grace,” his mother says. His fingertips kiss in front of him, elbows on the table. He sits up. She hits him on the back of the head with a baking spoon. Smack. And he sits up straighter.

“Eat your beef,” she says. “Your father works hard to give you that meat. You think all families in Rivière-du-Loup have hearty cow to eat? No. You should be thankful for that. With this economy. You should thank God.”

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Lucas sucks a string of fat under his lips, holding it there while his siblings swallow. He pinches his eyelids, trying to cut off the images.

At night, while his brothers sleep around him, Lucas lies on his back and begins his penance.

Our Father who art in heaven. Please get rid of these nasty thoughts. Hallowed be thy name, and make me stop acting out inside my head.

Thy kingdom come. I’m sorry for being a sinner.

And soon out loud.

“Mother Mary forgive me, Mother Mary forgive me, Mother Mary forgive me.” Seven syllables to each utterance, all of them fading into oblivion, chasing him into sleep, smothering that which keeps on bubbling up.

He kicks his bare legs against André’s.

“What?” André says from beside him in the bed.

“Too much milk with dinner,” he whispers through the black air.

“Let me out.”

André lifts up so Lucas can roll himself over and onto the ground. Then he creeps across the wooden floorboards and down the stairs to the kitchen.

The rosary curls itself like a snake on the windowsill.

His mother’s kitchen rosary, the one she moves through her fingers when she prepares dinner, ingesting holiness into her with each prayer she says, each bead she passes.

He takes it in his hand, wrapping the beads around his wrist and clasping the cross in his palms. He brings it to his lips.

“For Thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory.”

He kisses it again.

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“For Thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory.”

He kisses it again.

“Forgive me, Jesus.”

His hands sweat. A rock grows in his throat and thumping invades his ears. He feels the outline of a tiny Jesus on his lips, whisking him into sedation, wiping out his visions.

Two more times he comes down into the dark kitchen of their farmhouse. Each time holding his mother’s rosary, kissing the cross and saying the words. The third time he also weeps, wondering if you can ever escape a chasing dragon that never sleeps.

At school, he tries to find out how closely God keeps track of him.

He puts up his hand in class.

“Yes, Lucas?” Brother Côté clutches a Bible.

“Brother Côté, may I ask you a question?”

“Please stand, Lucas.” He does.

“Brother Côté, tell me please, can God hear my thoughts?”

“Why yes, Lucas. God is everywhere, even inside your head.”

Tears fill Lucas’s eyes as he looks towards light flooding through a window.

“Why do you ask, Lucas? Do you have impure thoughts?”

“No,” Lucas answers, knowing that it is this or a strike across his palms. “I just wanted to know.” He sits down and pretends to read his spelling workbook.

When afternoon lessons are finished, Brother Côté takes him to the corner of the classroom and asks if he needs private counsel, away from the rest of the boys.

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“Now is the time to sort things out, Lucas. Once you turn thirteen and start to work on your father’s farm, you will have less and less time with the brothers.”

Lucas hesitates but speaks: “Sometimes I don’t like what I see in my head.”

“So you do have impure thoughts?”

“I don’t know if they are impure Brother Côté. Just scary.”

“As an example, what?”

“Sometimes, I think that the shoes or jacket I am wearing were stolen from one of my classmates.”

“And were they?”

“They are my shoes, Brother.”

“And your jacket?”

“It is mine as well. I have not stolen but I’m afraid that I have. I can’t stop it.”

“I see. And what else?”

“I take the Lord’s name in vain in my head sometimes.”

“Do you do it out loud?”

“No, only in my head,” Lucas says. “And there is something else.”

“Go on,” Brother Côté wrinkles his eyebrows so they touch across his forehead.

“I see dead animals in my thoughts and I am afraid that it was me who made them like that.”

“I am sure you have seen animals slaughtered, on your farm.”

“Yes, but sometimes the animals have real faces. Sometimes they are the faces of my brothers and sisters, and my mother and father.”

“So you think you will kill your brothers and sisters? And your mother and father?”

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“I don’t want to. I am afraid to break my vow not to kill.”

Brother Côté pauses, glances at the Bible resting on his arm, and then says, “Lucas, these thoughts are clearly from the devil.”

Brother Côté then makes a suggestion. “Go directly to church on your way home from school today, sit in the pew, and pray for your soul.”

St. Patrice parish sits empty, a Wednesday afternoon. Lucas climbs the staircase leading up to the peaked door which splits in half to let him in.

The air inside, stale and thick. The ceiling tall and expansive, the holy spirit looking down at him from up in the cross beams. And far in front, candles burning, a marble altar, and the flame where Jesus lives.

A nun kneels in the sixth row, silently praying. She turns her head to nod at Lucas as he slides into the pew across from her. The black and white of her uniform makes his heart rattle against the inside of his ribs.

He pushes himself down onto his knees, scratching his skin against his burlap pants. He places the fingers of his right hand on his forehead, heart and each of his shoulders—“Father, Son and the Holy Spirit.”

And he prays for his soul.

When it comes time to leave the church, when anyone else would have felt completion, holiness, Lucas can’t make himself leave. The air suffocates and invigorates him all at once. Instead of going home, he runs to the altar and kneels down. He lowers his lips to the shiny marble and whispers the lines he learned at mass.

“Domine, non sum dignus.”

The words come out in a voice lower than his own, and he follows them up with what he knows they mean.

“Domine, non sum dignus. Lord I am not worthy.” He keeps saying the words, trying to make the feeling of wrong somehow feel right. He uses his fingers to keep track of the number of times he has spoken the words, aiming for thirty-three.

And then after time number six, he hears “Lucas, does your mother know you are here?” Father Dubois stands beside him, looking down from what seems like heaven.

“No,” he says holding his index finger as a place marker.

“I suggest that you run home, Lucas. Your dinner will no doubt be on the table by now. Your prayers can cease for this evening.”

“I can’t,” Lucas says, his words small in the air of the grand cathedral.

“Of course you can, Lucas. Get up!” Father Dubois grabs him by the shoulder of his school shirt and hauls him out of the pew.

Lucas is certain his feet leave the ground.

“Father, I can’t,” he says, but turns and walks away after he does, down the aisle, towards the door leading outside.

Before he leaves the church, he lowers his face to the cement steps to suck in the footprints of priests and nuns. Then he stands up to stick his warm lips to the hand rail, to ingest the palm prints of the holy. Frigid steel pulls at his smile when he finally leans back.

He refuses to eat dinner. None of the beef chunks in gravy, none of the corn or strawberry jam on bread. He refuses, and when his

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father threatens to put him on an iceberg and float him into the St. Lawrence, he chews the food down as small as he can, spits it into his hand and drops it under the table. He’s careful to spread the pieces so as not to create one noticeable pile, only a dirty floor. He does this all because of something his mother once told him. A brain cannot work without a good meal.

Sun sets and soon four male noses hum a symphony of snores through the house. Lucas leaves his bed before even trying to close his eyes.

He sneaks into the barn in his flannel sleeping clothes, dust and hay between his bare toes, cows breathing from their stalls. He sits down, cross-legged, on a pile of swept cow dung that has hardened. There he feels comfortable. There he feels just outside of things enough to belong, for the moment.

Light pricks him. Morning. He has fallen asleep in the dung and someone is opening the barn door.

“Lucas?” His father, looking surprised, at least the parts of his face Lucas can see under the shadows of his brimmed hat. “What are you doing out here?”

Cows are mooing and stirring. They want to be milked.

“Papa, I’m sorry,” Lucas says, still groggy, his cheek smeared with dung. “I’m sorry for sleeping out in the barn.”

His father removes his thick gloves, squats beside him in the dung and takes Lucas onto his lap. Lucas smells cooking from the kitchen and feels the warmth from the wood stove still clinging to his father’s chest.

“What is wrong with you dear boy?”

“I have thoughts.” There, he has said it. His father laughs, a laugh which sounds like crumpling paper and fades out like a bouncing rubber ball.

“Of course you have thoughts. I should hope my boy has thoughts.”

“Yes, Papa, but my thoughts are sinful.” Lucas stands then, and tears drip from the corners of his eyes. “And I can’t get them to stop.” Lucas reaches his tiny hands out to his father. His father’s face straightens out. No more laughing.

“Impure thoughts can lead you in a bad direction, Lucas.”

“I know, Papa. I know.”

“Have you not listened to the words spoken in mass?”

“I have, Papa. I have listened until my ears ached. I have listened until my head was full, until my mind was throbbing.” His father rises to his feet again.

“Lucas, you know the difference between sinful thoughts and pure thoughts. I suggest you choose to clean yourself up before you are led too far off course.” Lucas nods slowly like string is pulling his head up and down. “Now get in the house and wash your face.

And I do not want to find you sleeping in the barn again.”

“But, Papa . . .”

“Come help me with the milking once you are cleaned and fed.”

His father disappears into one of the cow stalls, leaving Lucas alone in the frosty mist of his own rapid breath.

Sunday comes again. Mass at St. Patrice. Lucas’s father, mother and nine brothers and sisters are inside the church. Lucas walked last in the line of them, but couldn’t follow them in, couldn’t pass through the arched doors. Instead, he kneels on the church steps, running his hands over the jagged concrete until his palms bleed.

They haven’t noticed he is missing. ■

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Bride SHANNON QUINN P H OTO G R A P H BY G E O R G E O M O R E A N

You pause at the lips of the church.

She does not spit you out.

A procession of past promises has brought you to this door, wearing a dress spun from fair-ground cotton candy. For one moment you stand as a gift, a present not bargained for in night prices but value bought and paid for in a gift registry.

In each tiny baby step you take down the aisle you leave behind every boy that took you behind the portables, and then took some more. With every step each boy falls away, fingers tangled in your cotton candy dress, pulling soft bits away with them.

You stop to gargle at the baptismal font, then awkwardly stretch your legs upwards to dip your feet into the holy water. As you continue your march up the aisle the puddles you leave behind multiply, as only blessed water would dare. The water starts lapping at the knees of the congregation, moving quickly towards their waists. As you pass your mother she asks in a stage whisper, “Have you started a list for Thank You cards?”

Your dress is getting wet. The sticky pink sugar is dissolving. Soon you will be naked. The water is now at your shoulders. You swim to the altar, the breaststroke, and pull yourself onto the cement slab.

The water is still rising. You look around desperately for the next highest point above the water line. It’s the cross that hangs directly above you.

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Your grandmother spots you scrambling up the Saviour and screams as she disappears under the water.

You’re momentarily jealous that Jesus at least has a loincloth to cover his dangly bits, and the irony is not lost on you . . . once again you are clinging to a man who can’t wrap his arms around you.

Hanging there you are part half-fledged ascension, part living embodiment of the Old Testament.

The water pulls the cross from the wall and you hold tight, riding it down the aisle, shouting for the survivors to join you. You are an Ark. You yell for people to grab hold, that the waters will continue to rise . . .

And then you shut up; nobody believed Noah. And Uncle Jo, at a hefty 350 pounds, lies belly-up bottlenecking the river running past the confessional. ■

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WINNING ENTRY

Gone, Gone TOM HANDFORD

2008 LUSH TRIUMPHANT LITE RARY AWARDS ÂŤ POETRY C AT E G O R Y Âť

1 I was sitting on the stairs rising From the front room, with your son, My nephew, who fished with me This past year, we caught seven salmon Off Otter Point.

I was showing him the harmonica, playing A few notes quietly, so as not to disturb Anyone in their talk.

He wanted me to play more, but it was Too sad, and your mother-in-law said I am so angry, and no one could answer; Soon after it was time to go, And that was your funeral.

I wake up remembering, and still Every death kills something of us That might have been; we must remember That something is always born.

We wake up remembering So many great mornings.

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POETRY

2 The rain on the tarmac flashes as it falls, the lights From the airfield are in line with the groove, so This pulsating rhythm of light results. (I feel so Dated saying tarmac, it’s one of those words from my Father’s war, we included it in our daily speech, without Thinking more than ‘here’s a cool word, we’re in with that that, We can be understood completely by someone’, now we only Understand each other, that has happened almost overnight, there’s That time thing, speeding up, things I did eight years ago that are the work Of a fifty-year-old man, part of history, and looking for that same thing, I do it al the time). But you could make a film out of the pulsating Light of the rain on the tarmac, the music could take that rhythm, Almost a mechanical brightness, the sheen of metal.

The lights are out now, daylight is here, that pulsation is hidden, But the rain is still falling, that would signify time passing, And the music would become muted, as the characters stand up From their chairs, and leave, as the plane takes off, birds fly, Things are like always.

3 This was the piece I was making While my brother died, it is Full of our thoughts together We believed in the straight strong things, that What is made best is simple, good, Easy to hand.

He was full of all that, I find a darkness When I look for him, and as I make these Pieces in my shop I care for what falls to the eye, Carry what comes to hand.

Here is a new one, for a young Woman, her husband asked me to make it.

My pieces are in many houses.

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4 Along this winter road, leaves have fallen, The trees are rent and woven by a hard wind, I drive fast, not sure of the brakes, but thinking You must be living one day at a time, All your meanings nearly gone.

You are the mother who has lost her son, Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow Gone and gone and gone, tu es la mere Qui a perdu son fils, demain et demain, PassĂŠ et passĂŠ.

I am afraid to disturb your solitude But your post box was down, and I Feared that darkness was beginning his Slow cold journey down your drive.

5 Did I tell you this, that I can Smell the house you made for us?

In my memory I can feel the air Around you, I can touch the skin Of your neck, as soft as a child, Under the stubble, you were the way All men should be and are not, and I Am a lonesome goose, flying Always the same airways, sure We are only missing each other by A few wing-beats a day, I watch For you, I call you, I am yours.

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Buildings Missing Like Teeth Knocked Loose KEVIN HARDCASTLE I L L U S T R AT I O N BY D E R E K V O N E S S E N

Inside the barbershop there were four men sitting in a line in five chairs, waiting for their turn. The shop had been there for fifty years, but the barber was not a very old man, only in his forties, his business inherited.

The barber cut a man’s hair and you could see the man watching his hair being cut in the mirror. The scissors moved so quickly that first-time customers cringed and shied from the blades.

But the barber’s precision was legendary. He had never cut a man’s ear or missed a depth and left a thin patch. The barber had heavy hands, and tugged your head wherever he wanted it, but this was a place with character, where real men went to have their hair cut, so no one would say anything. Around the mirror hung pictures from old newspapers of the barber cutting the hair of famous hockey players, the mayor, visiting parliamentarians. There were pictures of the barber armed and in fatigues with a squad of special police in Lebanon, from another life.

The door opened and a bell rang and in came a tall man with hair hanging ragged on his shoulders and a heavy beard, long and misshapen. The man stood there for a moment as though giving everyone in the barbershop a chance to take a good look at him and get used to his being there. He had a coat that was filthy and

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streaked in dirt. He wore old Wrangler jeans and the cuffs were frayed and hung loose over his split leather boots. He was pegged as a vagrant by all. He didn’t care. There are worse things to be.

“How long?” the vagrant said aloud.

The barber stopped, his eyes on the man.

“About thirty minutes . . . forty-five minutes buddy?”

“Oh yeah,” he said. “I’ll come back.”

The man reached for the door but the barber stopped him.

“If you go and other people come I have to give them a cut first.

First come first served, you see?”

The man let his hand drop, studied the barber for a while, then the store. Then he just walked over and sat in the empty chair. The man beside him shifted his legs and then tried to pretend that he hadn’t.

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“Are you sure you want to wait buddy? It could be a long time. If you don’t want to wait then please leave a chair for the other customers. I don’t want to lose any business.”

“I’ll wait.”

The barber looked at the vagrant as if he waited long enough he might get another answer, but the vagrant just sat and smiled under his graying beard. The barber turned back to finish the task at hand.

One by one the barber cut the men’s hair and four of the five seats emptied as the men got their coats and left, but nobody else had come in. And now as the barber finished he looked in the mirror and saw only the bearded vagrant was left, sitting on the end of four empty chairs. The barbershop was small and the barber would have been able to smell drink if the man had been drinking, but there was no scent of booze in the air and no other foul odour.

The man had not been rude and he hadn’t harassed any of the other customers, but still their faces wore old trauma from sharing the room with this man. They paid and left quickly and when the barber had swept around the empty chair and dumped the hair from his dustpan into the garbage bin he couldn’t find any other polite reason to stall. He shook out the apron that he would drape on his customer, and he looked out at the bright day and the busy city street and wondered why no one else would come in. He had no reason to blame the vagrant but he couldn’t help feeling that this man had brought bad luck into this store and though he only half-believed in such things he was born in another part of the world where superstition still existed and those old omens hung like a fog around his shop and his heart.

The vagrant didn’t seem to notice the barber’s problem. He just waited to be called.

“Buddy,” the barber said.

The vagrant looked up and smiled before he rose and crossed the store in three long strides. He sat and the barber asked him to slide down in the chair. The man slouched down and sat quietly as the barber pondered the situation for another moment before snapping to and inwardly chastising himself for being so suspicious. This man is just a man and a man has a right to have his hair cut well and to not be treated like a dog. The barber drew his scissors and over and over in his head he told himself this was a man like any other, like him, and the more he told himself the less he could see it.

The barber cut the vagrant’s long hair with the scissors, the swaths of gray-brown hair dropping to the floor like curtains unhooked, showing the barber the man’s face. He had a long scar that split through his right eyebrow, and though his left eye was dark green, this eye was nearly colourless, the pigment lost to some old damage. On such a man the barber expected to see a nose turned sideways, buckled at the bridge, but the bone stood straight. The beard was the rest of the man’s face.

The barber didn’t realize he had done it but again he had turned to look out of the window and on to the street. Prairie wind took paper up in the air and spun it on the sidewalk over broken pavestones, glass, last night’s vomit dried and stinking. Across the street stood a rundown movie theatre and an old Irish tavern, huddled together like the last fearful holdouts on a city block

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where buildings were missing like teeth knocked loose.

“Your shop’s been here a long time,” the vagrant said.

The barber came out of it and turned back to him.

“Yes.” “View used to be nicer.”

The barber couldn’t tell if the man was asking him or telling him these things.

“Perhaps,” he said. “I remember when this hotel on the corner had famous politicians and musicians staying there at one . . . well . . . that was a long time ago.”

The vagrant looked straight ahead.

“You can say it, buddy. I don’t mind.”

“Pardon me?”

“This city’s gone to shit,” the vagrant said. “You can say it. Hell, I just said it.”

In the reflection the barber watched the vagrant, but he couldn’t read his face through the beard.

“Yes,” the barber said. “It has gotten much shittier. But I think it will get better also.”

“Yeah?”

“Yes, I do.”

The vagrant smiled and this made the barber smile, and for a moment he could have been a woodsman on a rare visit to town, a man from the mountains on his way to meet a woman, or to see his son graduate college.

“That’s nice, isn’t it?” the man said. “That’s nice to think.”

The barber finished cutting the man’s hair. He had cropped the sides short with the clippers and then blended in the hair above the temples as it met with the trimmed hair on the top.

“You gave me an army haircut bud, pretty near.”

“No, it is a Caesar cut.”

“Yeah? Looks like an army hairstyle to me.”

The barber stood in front of the man, put his fingers on either side of the man’s head and tilted it this way and that, pretending to examine the haircut as one would a painting that one man claims is real and the other swears is a forgery. The barber held the man’s head still with one hand and with his other he picked up the scissors and raised them slowly, concentrating hard, and then quickly he cut a rogue strand of hair that may or may not have been there.

“It is a Caesar cut,” the barber said definitively.

Both men smiled at each other.

“Well, all right then,” the man in the chair said. “It is if you say so.”

“Okay,” the barber said, and put his scissors down. He now went to arrange his tools for the shave: the brush, the soap, a wet towel, and the straight razor itself. As he stropped the razor on a hanging strip of leather the man in the chair watched him carefully.

“There’s some skill in that, isn’t there?” he said.

“Some,” the barber said, continuing his work.

All you could hear was the sound of the blade scraping along the strop for a little while, and then the man spoke again.

“You were in the army, weren’t you? That’s why I thought you cut hair like that.”

The barber looked at the man’s image in the mirror and the man pointed up at the picture of the barber in his fatigues with his men.

“I was,” the barber said. “But I didn’t learn this trade until after that one. I was very young.”

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“In Lebanon, yeah?”

“Yes,” the barber said.

He made a point of stopping and facing the man in the chair, acknowledging the respectful gesture of only claiming to know where another man was from when you actually knew.

“How did you know?”

“I’m a pretty slick guy.”

The barber laughed.

“I was in the army too,” the man said.

“Here? In this country’s army?”

“Yessir,” he said. “We’ve had our moments.”

This might have been the man being funny again, but there was no humour in the way this was said. The barber decided not to let the silence last.

“This is a bad war I think, this war we have now. Do you think so?”

“I think they’re all about the same.”

“Oh, okay,” the barber said.

The man laughed out loud.

“Actually that’s a lot of bullshit. I just felt like hearing what it sounded like coming out of my mouth.” the man said. “Maybe I heard some other asshole say it or saw it in a movie. I don’t know . . . They’re as different as can be. Wars. As different as the places and the people who start and finish them.”

The barber nodded. Now he knew this man had fought in a war.

He just didn’t know which one.

After the barber finished shaving the man’s face he cleaned the soap away with a wet towel and put lotion on the skin. The barber could not believe the man sitting in the chair was the vagrant who had walked into his shop an hour ago. When he had cut the hair he could still see the resemblance. But then he had cut the beard. He could not believe how much it concealed. It had hidden all kinds of details. This man was no older than the barber, a handsome man, with a sharp jawline and broad neck. The man in the chair let the barber brush the loose hair from his head and pull the apron free. The ragged clothing he wore was the only thing left that proved he was the same man who had sat down in the chair before. The man looked proudly at himself in the mirror.

“You do a good job,” he said.

“Thank you.”

The man got up and stretched, massive when he stood, and walked over to the till where the barber met him. The man reached into his dirty pants pocket and pulled out a fifty dollar bill.

“Here,” he said.

“It is too much,” the barber said.

“No,” the man said, his face serious. “No, it’s not.”

Thinking that he had already insulted the man enough the barber took the bill from him and put it in his register.

“Thank you sir,” he said.

The man kept looking at him, and then that smile broke again on his face, on his new face, wide and grand and full of promise, like the sun that comes up late after a long night.

The man turned and went to the door, opened it and walked out boldly into that sunny afternoon. He closed the door behind him and the barber watched him go as he began to clean up the man’s

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hair on the floor with the broom. He bent down to sweep the hair into the dustpan, and when he rose he turned just in time to see the man walk straight out into the street, stride across the centre line, and step into the opposing lane where a city bus came storming through and ran the man under, taking all of him so violently that the barber didn’t hear the brakes squeal until the bus and man were gone from sight. In front of the window you would not think anything had happened with the sun beating down on the asphalt and the people all standing dumbstruck in some mindless tableau. This quiet did not last long.

The barber set his broom against the wall and laid the dustpan on the windowsill and left his shop, still wearing his apron. He walked out onto the avenue where people had stopped their cars and gotten out. The barber passed them by. When he came near to the lane where the man had been hit he looked east and saw the city bus parked awkwardly with its right-front wheel atop the curb, the driver sitting on the ground with his head in his hands.

The barber walked over to the place where the man’s body lay.

Sirens could be heard in the distance. The barber’s hands were steady now but he knew what would come later. There were parts of the barber that had been excised long ago with none of the precision he brought to his trade. The barber looked at the fallen man. He thought of him as he was before and saw him now as he was, broken in the roadway. Some small melancholy settled over the barber but he could not seize it. Then he turned and went back across the street toward his shop. He walked quickly and said nothing to anyone he passed and when he reached his storefront he went inside and locked the door behind him. ■

SCRAPBOOK OF MY YEARS AS A ZEALOT +E?KHA *=NGKPEÚ “A dizzying, brazen, innovative, radical take on young women’s lives in the middle of new urban conundrums.” —Robert Kroetsch

THE SLOW FIX Ivan E. Coyote “These stories are elegant and homespun, light and piercing, straightforward with a twist. Ivan Coyote unsettles and reassures with a single, skilled stroke.”

—Alison Bechdel

In bookstores now • arsenalpulp.com

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Triumvirate ELENA K AUFMAN

1. Montreal. Winter.

The snow is, as expected, up to the knees. The woman doesn’t know yet about global warming or tropical times to come. She takes careful steps along boulevard de Maisonneuve, admiring the dazzling banks of white, plowed to the sides. She could have skied to work; it crossed her mind when she watched the neighbour leave on hers.

The woman flips her collar up and the lining—a slash of red—is revealed. A woolen scarf, a recent gift, knotted around her neck, while a thinner scarf winds around her upper chest like a mummy’s wrap. The woman doesn’t feel the chill because she’s thinking of him, waiting at the café with a cigarette perched on his lips. Waiting for heaping bowls of pasta, red wine, spicy kisses and busy fingers.

As she turns the corner, a gust of wind knocks her sideways and she looks up to catch her breath. There it is, unravelled before her.

A new story. An indelible image, but not a photograph, a painting or a film; this cannot be rewound, erased or destroyed. This isn’t caused by internal mishap: seconds lost while tuning a radio, or hands off the steering wheel, or an uncontrollable sneeze. No, this is about snow and ice and Mother Nature taking a life.

He had approached her in a queue at the bank of all places. She was purchasing a GIC while he, he later confessed, was paying an overdraft. He overspent on everything: money, time, love. The man was deeply in debt.

So there it is: crushed steel, smoking engines, red-streaked snow and a rescue worker with a giant’s pliers, ripping a door off one of the cars. Using the tool like a can opener. Inside is a man dressed (prophetically) in black, with his head flung back on the seat and a line of blood traced down his chin.

That first morning she awoke with her fingers in his mouth and on her pillow, her silky black hair mixed with his salt and pepper. He was expected at a conference in Toronto that weekend, but skipped out of it. She thought of him as a man who knew his priorities.

Twisted metal parts steam in big hills of snow. Or little mountains of snow. Whichever way she looks at it, it doesn’t matter because there it is: red on black on white.

Yes, she’d noticed his ring and still accepted his invitation for coffee, which led to dinner and, later, a drink. She welcomed what came after, too. Yes, she most definitely saw the gold band, and no, she didn’t have a problem with it.

She staggers into a pharmacy and finds a chair to sit on before she falls. Red lights blink on the heart monitor machine, and she slips a narrow finger into a black plastic hood and watches the screen flash while a message appears: Unable to read heart rate. Try again.

And so on for eight months. No talk of making their routine permanent, or skipping town together, or promises of anything of the kind. It was pure, encapsulated, undisguised pleasure.

The woman fills a shopping basket with items: five bottles of water, eight boxes of aspirin, ten boxes of Kleenex, five packs of gum, five chocolate bars and three packs of cookies. She weaves

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up and down the aisles, takes another basket and piles in: hair products, nail polish, make-up remover; checks the shopping list in her hand and sees an address instead. Fornicello’s Italian Restaurant.

Outside, she lowers her head and squints at the ground to follow a blur of white, just enough definition to stay on the path. The sirens have stopped their wail and it is far too quiet. The plastic bags cut into her gloved hands. She hears the man from the red car groaning as he’s lifted onto a stretcher. But the other car, the silver one was abandoned by the rescuers. Why? Why? There it is: the license plate, the French flag on the bumper, and inside, a salt and pepper head thrown back on the seat.

He struggles to focus on her face leaning over him, but sees spinning colours and patterns around her head—like looking through a kaleidoscope. The composer feels the warm sun on his face and the weight on his eyelids. When he closes them, he hears his most recent symphony in progress and smells mulled wine and fruit.

“Monsieur? Monsieur!” the girl cries. He feels her patting hand and remembers her chocolate brown eyes and thinks about his wife whom he hasn’t seen for five long years.

Witnesses witness. The ambulance screams like a wailing wife, furiously, while a rescue worker leaps out of the vehicle and weaves through traffic. A woman with a flowered scarf wrapped around her head bends beside the girl, taps on the man’s lips and places a make-up mirror under his nose.

2. Paris. Summer.

An elderly man, dressed in a crème linen suit holds onto a lamppost at Place du 18 juin 1940. His head rests against it while his body leans away. The loose skin on his neck wobbles and his fingers strum the post, as if he’s playing an instrument. The American girl thinks he could be drunk on lunch wine. She’s heard that the French like to drink at their meals, even in the middle of the day. She watches him a little longer and notices his body change. He rises up and swells his chest as if he’s about to dance a final pirouette in a ballet, then releases the pole. Gravity calls and his body reels backwards into the street.

The pedestrian light flashes green, but her legs are too slow, and she has already missed catching him before his head hits the street. She kneels and others do the same. A man in a dark suit yells out, “Appelez la police. Vite vite!” Three people on cell phones hesitate. Then: Dial.Dial.Dial. The man comes to with glazed-over eyes. He’s had a stroke, a brain attack.

A discarded croissant lies near his head, and at his feet, an empty bottle of Evian. He looks up at the clear blue sky and is transported back to his youth, lying in a field in Toulouse, watching cloud animals pass by. He hears humming in his ears.

People hover nearby and the summer sun breaks through to land on his flaccid cheek. The ambulance’s soprano sound comes closer. The young girl leans over and smiles; her American high school French is insufficient, so she strokes his hair instead, avoiding the nearly black blood streaming out the back of his head. She takes off her thin sweater and lays it over his chest. A pigeon pecks at the croissant.

“Trop tard. C’est trop tard,” she tells the girl, squeezing her shoulder. “Pauvre lui,” she announces to the crowd, then covers her mouth with a thick hand.

The young girl waits until the rescue worker arrives, and then she moves away. The siren cuts out as the vehicle pulls up and blocks a lane of traffic. She watches as they hoist the man onto a stretcher and slot him into the back of the ambulance. On the street is a small patch of blood in the shape of a cloud. The crowd has dispersed as if?

As if.

She takes hold of the lamppost. The woman in floral picks up a paper bag of postcards and hands it back to the girl. The girl waits for the woman to leave before letting go of the bag; her messages fall away.

After a few minutes, she follows the sidewalk until it turns the corner to an outdoor café on Rue de Rennes. The girl collapses into an empty chair and grasps the sugar dispenser. The waiter brings her a café crème and the heat from the porcelain cup emanates into her skin. He brings her a glass of water, then more coffee, then more water. When she asks him for a cigarette, he leaves his own pack on the table, and she smokes until there’s nothing left. It’s only when the sun passes behind the buildings on Rue de Rennes, that she rises and leaves the café.

3. Toronto. Fall.

The others turn to one another: Did you see it? How did it happen?

Where’s the ambulance? Oh, just there look, it’s stuck in traffic. Its high-pitched whine makes people cower and she puts her hands over the stricken man’s ears.

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A Japanese man runs for the subway at King Street. The tinny announcement warning passengers to step away from the doors fades away on the nearly empty platform. The man leaps anyway and the doors, as they’re meant to, close.

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The blonde passenger sees him first, and she recoils at the sight: a face squished between rubber stoppers while a body is left behind on the platform, his briefcase swinging in his hand. The man is silent; there’s not much he can say when his mouth is forcibly closed. His eyes search like a fish looking out of its tank, or a bird out of its cage. This is what he sees: A woman with fluffy, blonde hair and raised eyebrows, who looks like Marilyn Monroe, so pretty. Beside her, a man in a striped Hugo Boss suit, the same one he owns. And a boy with a white face like a geisha, and long greasy black hair covering one eye.

The woman: studies the trapped man’s cheeks, so compressed that they meet his nose. His black hair pokes up like needles and reminds her of a blowfish. She turns away to stifle a giggle.

The geisha boy: whispers a profanity under his breath. The guys’ eyes are bulging like they’re going to pop out, like in that horror film someone posted on YouTube.

face with a wet, sucking plunger sound. The Japanese man stumbles into the car, falls into a seat but leaps up again. Thick black lines like tire tracks run down his face.

When the Marilyn asks him if he’s all right, he turns away to stagger down the aisle. Passengers look up from their books and bags, see the vertical stripes down his cheeks and look back at one another.

Marilyn, business man, and geisha boy stay at the end of the car where he left them. She adjusts her hair, the man clears his throat and the boy shuffles. No one makes a move. Why chase after a guy who doesn’t thank you for saving his life?

The man smiles at the woman. The woman looks at the boy. The boy gives a low whistle back to the man. They stand, a triumvirate, giving their silent verdict.

The business man: his mouth drops open. He once read in the Star about a man clinging to a subway car through the tunnel to rescue his dog, who had jumped on without him. This trapped man’s face turns from white to red.

The woman wonders how long it will take before the rescued man notices the evidence on his cheeks. Will it be in the bathroom at work, or in his reflection on the way in, or because of a polite colleague? How long will it take before he can’t deny that this happened and decides to find the three of them and thank them?

The business man moves first but only a split-second before his neighbours. Three of them rush the doors and it takes six arms to pry them, with much effort, open. The rubber stoppers release the

But it will be too late by then. His rescuers will have been swallowed up in the morning rush hour by the time he realizes his mistake. ■

a very small fairy tale ANNETTE LAPOINTE There was a little girl with an axe. She walked through the woods and the wolves avoided her, and when she got bored with walking, she built a fort out of skinny aspen trees and lived in it. She decorated the walls with the skeletons of animals and the skins of predators that got too close and the head of the woodsman who wouldn’t take no for an answer.

Later, she was joined by the girl with a saw and the girl with a whip. The fort expanded a little and developed interesting corners. Small, sharp animals came to live with them.

The boy who stripped naked crawled through the low fort door and stood there, ignoring the smell and thinking vaguely about blood.

When the girl with the axe and the girl with the whip backed him up to the wall, he said, “Okay,” and closed his eyes.

This wasn’t that long ago, and it happened somewhere north of Saskatoon.

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Reviews Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession

by Anne Rice Knopf, 2008; 256 pp.; $19.76 I bet more people started dressing and acting like goths after reading Anne Rice’s novel Interview with the Vampire—or watching Tom Cruise, Antonio Banderas and Brad Pitt play her vampires in Neil Jordan’s 1994 film adaptation—than became rosary-carrying Roman Catholics after reading any of her more recent spiritual books. Vampire literature has always generated sub-cultural hype and, when the novels become Hollywood screenplays, celebrity worship. Bloodsucking is voluptuous, exotic, stylish, and hot, especially when it’s penned by an author who’s also written BDSM porn; religion, or writing about spirituality and God, is not.

So why is it that when Rice stopped writing about vampires and announced her literary conversion back to the Catholicism of her youth many of her fans reacted with shock and jeered at what they saw as corny born-again proselytizing?

Why did her readers react as if the vampire world of haunting sensuousness, the walking undead, and dangling crucifixes was that different from the Catholic world of, well, haunting sensuousness, the walking undead, and dangling crucifixes?

Rice’s new book, Called Out of Darkness: a Spiritual Confession, the third installment in her Catholic genre, is just as atmospherically baroque and mysterious, bizarre and sumptuously charged as her vampire stories. It’s not the same plot, and definitely not the same line of predictably wealthy and gorgeous characters, but it’s drawn from the same storyboard: the individual’s struggles with loneliness and eternity, the consequential meditations on the possible worlds of the soul, a detailed reverence for art and the spirituality of the

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aesthetic objects, and a belief in the attractiveness and beauty of tragedy.

Called Out of Darkness is a mystical autobiography that traces Rice’s development from a naïve but spiritual youth in New Orleans through the compulsory atheism of college and her decades as a popular novelist whose vampire stories sold eighty million copies worldwide. It ends, where spiritual autobiographies tend to end, in Rice moving from a state of darkness to a state of grace where she locates the ultimate purpose in life, if not all the answers to the really big questions.

This book will not go down well with readers who assume that “religion” is a euphemism for organised oppression and joyless puritanism. But then people whose contempt for religion—especially “Christianity”—owes more to the popularity of writers like Hitchens and Dawkins rather than any serious thought they may have given matters of faith probably wouldn’t bother picking up a book like this in the first place.

And in a way that’s too bad because there is nothing conservative or puritanical about this book. There is no moral highground here, and no proselytizing either, certainly not the fire-and-brimstone kind associated with Protestant literalists. It’s not a manual on how people ought to live their lives to ensure a spot for themselves in some magical afterlife. There’s no mention of that in the book at all.

Rice’s Catholicism is an internal monologue, and reading her confession is like listening in on her thinking out loud— scattered thoughts and all. Though it involves a set of doctrines, her religion— like all Catholicism—is metaphorical not literal. Much of the book, for example, involves detailed descriptions of gothic New Orleans, the city where she grew up and a place to which she returned following her conversion. These descriptions—of

the streets, the brickwork, the gardens— seem awkward and out of place until it becomes clear that Rice’s religion has as much to do with symbols as with any supernatural concepts or entities they apparently signify.

That is what is genuinely spooky and exhilarating about this book. Like a poem or a painting, the journey is figurative.

Rice writes as if she is a voice crying out— not the proverbial voice crying out from the wilderness, but a voice crying out from among the mysterious statues and icons in a church. You’re never exactly sure what you are dealing with, but you still recognize it as something vital.

It may be unfair to criticize readers who turned away from Rice when she resigned as Queen of the Vampires and doffed her new religious habit—just as it would be wrong to blame young readers today for lining up to buy Stephanie Meyer’s new vampire books. But it is worth pointing out that people who have read more widely and understood that “religion” is where some of the deepest human emotions and yearnings—regarding matters of aging or mortality or purpose in life—are expressed may find Rice’s confession aesthetically compelling if not theologically intriguing.

—PETER BABIAK

I n t e rv i e w w i t h t h e Fo r m e r Va m p i re subTerrain : Although I’m familiar with the powerfully descriptive writing in your novels, I was struck by the vivid passages in Called Out of Darkness. The sky, trees, buildings, roads and cars, radio and film, statues, flowers—their scents: you draw out the entire sensory landscape of your past, and not just when you’re recalling your “preliterate aesthetic experiences.” Would it

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be fair to say that your faith is “an overwhelming sensuous experience”?

Anne Rice: I think everything for me is an

overwhelming sensuous experience.

I’ve written things in my novels about the importance of the senses and listening to the senses and responding to their capacity for rooting out the truth. I fear the pure idea and I feel the abstract idea. I think there has to be a root in the senses for any idea to be worthwhile.

God is rooted in this world which He created, and all its beauty reflects His majesty. That is how I see it. subTerrain : The role of icons and images has a long and divisive history in Christianity. Some—like image breaking Puritans and contemporary literalists— claim that sacred images just miss the point, but others laud the role of artistic representations as a means to express the mystery of faith. Is faith—your faith, your Catholicism—inconceivable without art?

Rice: My religious education really came

from my parents and what the nuns said in school. The nuns were always explaining things to us, talking about the catechism, teaching us through spoken words what our religion was. They prepared us for Confession and Communion. They gave us the sense, along with my parents, that God was with us, and that our lives were accountable to God. So being shut out of books didn’t hamper my religious education at all. I simply profited immensely from the spoken words, all the time, before I ever came to read Scripture for myself. We read Bible history out loud in class. We sang out the catechism. I understood deeply at a young age what it was all about. subTerrain : One of your anxieties is “our loss of sacred space and time. I dream of making,” you write, “beautiful and profound and magnificent Christian films.”

Why films? What role could film have in the expression of the sacred?

Rice: Yes, I come down on the side of icons

and on the side of representations in art of the Divine and our yearning for the Divine. I have never understood Puritanism or Iconoclasm. They seem to me to misunderstand the nature of the Incarnation in which Christ became Man. The invisible Lord who could not be represented in images by the Jewish people became a living breathing human being.

And Christian art began shortly after on the catacomb walls, including art that represented Old Testament figures who had never been represented in art. I see Christian art as an immense opportunity.

I don’t depend on it to believe in God, but I see it as a natural outpouring of love for God and a natural way to spread the word. subTerrain : You felt, early in your life,

“frustrated and shut out of books,” and “unable to penetrate the book world.” This failure to absorb words is ironic given that you became a bestselling writer, but I wonder how it relates to your education in religion? You write at one point that you learned the catechism but that you didn’t understand what you were reading; instead, you “remember it as a series of rhythmic recitations.” There is something sacred—to you—about sounds and cadences, is there not?

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Rice: Films can have a powerful

overwhelming role in giving people a sense of the sacred. Many profited by Cecil B. DeMille’s King of Kings. Film can overwhelm the viewer sensuously and verbally and the images can become indelible. I think we underestimate the importance of religious films, and what we can do with this medium. The Passion of the Christ was an outstanding example of what can happen when a dedicated believer goes all the way with his belief in Christ. The audiences flocked to it, in spite of the criticism of the press, because they wanted to experience Christ in film. I think film can reach more people than books, personally. subTerrain : When you were twelve you wanted to become a priest. But you couldn’t. If this would have been possible in your youth or young adult life, would you have done it?

Rice: I doubt I would have become a priest. I

was too restless when I was young. I think I would have moved through that period onto other things. I was very curious about the world. But who knows? If I had gone to the prep seminary, perhaps it would have happened.

subTerrain : You say that contrary views must be listened to and their advocates “loved,” but are you not concerned that the spirit of the times—judging by popularity of books like God is Not Great and The God Delusion—is now secular, perhaps even compulsorily anti-religious?

Rice: As a reader of history, I see the anti

Christian elements in all times. These times are no more secular perhaps than periods in the Middle Ages. The official church may wield power but the people may be quite secular in their outlook.

Today one no longer is executed or imprisoned for saying things “against God” but people have always said them.

I don’t see these times as terribly secular anyway. I think they are Christian, especially in the United States. Surely there has been more talk of God in this presidential election than any in my lifetime.

People are coming out of the closet as believers. But again, we have secular voices in all times. Under official churches, secular people have other ways of resisting the sacred or the authority of Christians, or belief. In our times people write books, but that does not mean the vast majority of people really believe in these books or take them seriously. They make headlines precisely because most people don’t. subTerrain : As a novelist writing supernatural books like Interview with the Vampire you “poured out the darkness and despair of an atheist struggling to establish bonds and hopes in a godless world.” You explain the exodus of your most famous vampire, Lestat, from your work when you recall the moment it occurred to you to “Write for God” and “only for Him.” But hasn’t there always been a central role—even in conservative Catholic literature—for dramatised evil and gothic sensibility?

Rice: I think it is entirely possible to write

rich Christian fantasy with gothic elements. And I am presently at work on a new Christian series that will involve different elements of the supernatural.

What I don’t want to return to is my vampire world in which vampires were a reality. I don’t want to work with those metaphors or those “realities” anymore.

I said what I had to say in that realm,

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and I would find it defeating and awkward to go back to the “world’ in which Lestat is a reality. I want to write about a different world, the world I see and feel now and know now, which is peopled with angels, and in which God exists and salvation is possible. I don’t feel comfortable returning to my Goth roots. I want to do it all in a new way.

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subTerrain : In your novel Blackwood

Farm, which you wrote during your return to your Catholic church, you say you lost “an aesthetic ... and spiritual war” because you did not succeed in creating a world where Christian values replace despair. So does the novel represent a prolonged dark night of the soul you were experiencing in the middle of your return to the church?

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Rice: Blackwood Farm is full of too much

humor and mayhem and rich wholesome characters to be described as a dark night of the soul. But the novel is divided. There is a real story there of Blackwood Farm and its inhabitants, and grafted onto it is a vampire story. The one could well have been a full rich novel without the other. I should have left the vampire element out of it. But that was inconceivable for me at the time. When I began it, it was with the vampires and I had no idea how much the real world of the south, and southern voices and images, were going to grow in it and seek to have their own life. It was a novel divided. Two worlds were battling in it in the heart of the writer. I wish Blackwood Farm and its people had won. And the Vampires had been shelved. But as it stands it is a peculiar and, I hope, compelling and interesting novel. What matters to me now are the real people in it like Aunt Queen and so many others, including Quinn himself, and even Mona. I wish I had left the vampires for another tale. But again, it grew organically. The battle in me to escape the vampires is mirrored in the novel. subTerrain : I imagine many fans of your vampire fiction may be dismayed by your turn to conservative Catholicism, and that some of your new readers may be surprised if they picked up your earlier work.

But you have no regrets now about having written what you wrote in the past?

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for more information visit www.bcwriters.com Rice: No regrets. My novels were all sincere

and complex and they all involved, on some level, “all that I knew and had to tell.” I hope now that the Vampire Chronicles are finished, that they will be valued as a body of work, and maybe there will be some serious study of them in time, as I think they are unique. I cannot regret having poured out my soul in them, and never will. And I still answer a great deal of mail about them from devoted readers, some of whom read my new Christian work, and some of whom don’t. subTerrain : One of the most spellbinding

passages in your book is in the chapter where you are recounting the miracle in 1998 at the German church of your childhood in New Orleans. “Words fail. They have to fail,” you say. “This is a mystical thing that I’m trying to analyse; it is a transcendent moment when one senses with all one’s faculties that the love of God is the air we breathe.” I have no particular question. I just like this passage and I’d like you to comment on it, if you could, please.

Rice: My point I think is that love of God,

belief in God, is inherently mystical.

That means that you can’t break it down rationally. It transcends reason and language and explanation. You can talk about it, but you don’t get the experience. People write to me and ask over and over: how did it happen? That’s because I can’t really tell them, no matter how much I write. You “feel” a belief in God, but it is more than a transient emotion. It is an immense yearning that involves intellect and emotion. In the book, I wanted to explain how “intelligent” it was to me to believe in God, but it also involves this immense sense of rightness, or correctness, of recognition of something obvious and inseparable from all that you see and know and feel.

I go round and round with it. But finally it is mystical. You can only approach and surround.

Peter Babiak interviewed Anne Rice in November 2008.

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The Reverend’s Apprentice

by David N. Odhiambo Arsenal Pulp Press, 2008; 383 pp; $17.95 The first thing that needs to be said about The Reverend’s Apprentice is that it’s a pain in the ass to read. This is because the third novel by David N. Odhiambo comes to the reader through a confusing variety of voices, points of view, and genres.

Certainly, many readers will find the disarray of Odhiambo’s novel frustrating, but through all the literary murk it willfully stirs up, The Reverend’s Apprentice gets around its own opacity by offering a harrowing and often hilarious account of contemporary North America.

The novel deals with several big ideas at once: freedom, trauma, success and loyalty among others. But if Apprentice can be reduced to a single theme, it is that of identity: specifically the identity of one Jonah Ayot—a black African graduate student living in fictional Curranvale City in the industrial heartland of America with his Latin-spouting Grandfather, Reverend Nehemiah Ayot. For Jonah, finding his identity is especially difficult, for he is constantly under pressure from certain expectations others have for him. Perhaps the strongest of these is the expectation that Jonah will follow in his Grandfather’s footsteps and become a priest. However, even the influence of Jonah’s upbringing in Africa, which comes to the reader in short, unstable, dream-like interludes hinting at some buried trauma, and can be described as strictly Christian, has been supplanted by his present secular preoccupation with sex and plenty of marijuana. Added to this are Jonah’s ambitions to be a writer.

It is with Jonah’s literary aspirations that the novel draws attention to itself as “writing”—as craft, genre, and style. The better part of Apprentice can be recognized as a “novel,” but, for example, the regular appearance of seemingly unnecessary and idiosyncratic footnotes gives it the feel, at times, of an abandoned thesis. And the appearance of hard to identify and anonymous voices running the gamut from first to third person destabilizes the story and leads to an often ungrounded reading experience.

Perhaps expecting readers’ confusion, Odhiambo offers empathy for his audience by way of Jonah’s analysis of one of fellow MFA student Eliza May’s stories:

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He hates it. Maybe… Yes the grammar is sound; she makes good use of the compound sentence. But she refuses to help her reader through the unfamiliar and unrecognizable. The tone is impersonal, and the gentle reader has no idea which situation calls for what emotional response. Characters don’t speak in completed thoughts. There are footnotes, and endnotes, and no unifying consciousness. As for the style, the figurative language performs in ways that say, Hey folks, look at me, I’m a writer.

Definitely in choosing a fractured style, Odhiambo runs the risk of alienating his audience—and for what purpose? Any aesthetic effect seems to get lost in a narrative treatment that refuses to connect the dots—in essence leaving the reader up to his or her own powers of imagination and analysis to uncover meaning. At the same time, however, this refusal to help the “reader through the unfamiliar and unrecognizable” could be taken as a gesture on Odhiambo’s behalf to “democratize” the text and consciously hand over a part of the creation of meaning to his audience.

All postmodern literary devices aside, Odhiambo shows a writing style strong in its evocative and descriptive powers— especially when he describes the passing scene of Curranvale City: Sin goes bumpbump against hedgerows, gas stations buzz with those who usher in the apocalypse by using credit cards to load up their tanks, and who knows what illicit acts are being contemplated by those leaving convenience stores blowing into hot cups of coffee. Among them, cops, tainted by the Blackout, sit in their cars, eager to bust the chops of anyone who rolls through stop signs.

Perhaps recalling his childhood in Africa—which seems to hint at the atrocities that took place in the centre of that continent over a decade ago—Jonah regards his new city through the eyes of one who has been witness to terrible acts of violence on a scale unheard of even in a country used to its share of tragedy.

Just as Jonah follows a life different from the one his grandfather has in mind for him, The Reverend’s Apprentice’s convoluted approach will thwart expectations for an easy read. Odhiambo’s

style—or styles rather—is a metaphor in itself perhaps for the fluid nature of Jonah’s identity. One just wonders if he could have been less exacting in the demands he consciously places on the reader.

— PAT M A C K E N Z I E

The Secret Lives of Saints

by Daphne Bramham Random House, 2008; 480 pp; $32.95 [Reviewed from uncorrected proofs.]

This book may be mistitled. The lives of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS) polygamists are anything but a secret. From leader Warren Jeff’s high-profile arrest and trial to last spring’s raid on his followers’ compound in Eldorado, Texas, to the popular HBO series Big Love, this breakaway Mormon sect is all over the radar.

Yet, why, when polygamists are breaking the law, right in plain sight, are we so afraid to act?

That’s the central question of Vancouver Sun reporter Daphne Bramham’s book, The Secret Lives of Saints. Swinging focus from the infamous community of Bountiful, BC, near Creston, to the twin cities of Colorado City, Arizona and Hildale, Utah, and to various other pockets of FLDS adherents in the American west, she reveals the strange cross-border flow of young girls “destined” by the prophets to be plural (or celestial) wives to men often old enough to be their fathers, or grandfathers. Even great-grandfathers—former prophet Rulon Jeffs was given two teenage brides on his ninetieth birthday to add to his nearly sixty wives.

The group’s religious beliefs dictate that each man must have at least three wives in order to enter the highest realm of heaven.

Polygamy was a tenet of the original Mormon Doctrine and Covenants; the mainstream LDS church has long rejected the principle of plural marriage.

FLDS women are told from a young age to “keep sweet” and be submissive and obedient to their fathers and husbands— their “priesthood head” who is their God on earth and ticket to salvation. These ideas and the doctrine of polygamy espoused by the founders of the Saints’ Church are at the core of the FLDS’s claim to their religious freedoms, and thus,

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immunity from prosecution. Bramham doesn’t editorialize on how wacky all this sounds or how the government should deal with the group, but rather lets the facts, and the people, speak to why the situation should not be appeased any longer.

Throughout the book, she relates stories of women who’ve grown up with polygamy—mainly the ones who have managed to leave—and takes us inside Bountiful, mainly in the context of media tours organized by FLDS leaders to demonstrate the normalcy of their big happy families. She recounts an interview with Dalmon Oler, in which the patriarch shows pictures of his many children and explains how each year they simply picked a letter and named all the children born that year starting with that letter.

Bramham doesn’t miss the chance to point out that if the Creston Hospital staff found so many children being born to these young wives unusual, they didn’t report it to authorities.

Bramham is very good at pointing out these outrages, large and small. She is especially strong at contrasting how the US and Canada are going after polygamists, especially where abuse is concerned. Canada does not come off looking well here. In the latter half of the book, while the FBI tightens its net around Warren Jeffs, putting him on the ten most wanted list beside Osama bin Laden, the Canadian courts and BC government dither about constitutional challenges over religious freedoms and the likelihood of conviction if they were to prosecute prominent polygamists like Winston Blackmore, the “Bishop of Bountiful.”

Blackmore is portrayed as a masterful manipulator of government and media, holding press conferences extolling his group’s cultural contribution to “Canada’s diverse tapestry.”

Head shaking stuff, particularly coming from a closed, insular community Bramham describes as dotted with “No Trespassing” signs. Worse, we learn its publicly funded school curriculum includes teaching hate for much of that diverse tapestry—blacks, Native Americans, and homosexuals, as well as the garden-variety hell-bound nonbelievers. In the US, the Southern Poverty Law Center considers the FLDS a hate group, right up there with the Ku Klux Klan.

At times, the book gets bogged down in

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details of the interfamilial conflicts and power skirmishes within Bountiful and Hildale/Colorado City. Yet, I had to admire Bramham’s skill at untangling the complicated family ties and delineating the players, even if I often had to flip back a couple of pages to remember who was related to whom.

Mostly, my fists shook with impotent rage as I read this book. Ironically, I was most angered at the apathy of my fellow Canadians and our endless tolerance for religious wing nuts with intolerant ideas.

Bramham’s evidence is simply too damning for the old “live and let live” excuse to be an acceptable justification for looking the other way, especially when abuses hide in the skirts of religion.

—CHRISTINE ROWLANDS

White Album

by Rishma Dunlop Inanna Publications., 2008; 76 pp; $22.95 [Reviewed from unbound galleys.]

Coordinator of the Creative Writing Program at York University, Rishma Dunlop is an acclaimed and award-winning poet. She has authored or edited several collections, including, The Body of My Garden (2003), Reading Like a Girl (2004), Metropolis (2005), and Ink: An International Anthology of Poems on Mothering (2007), among others. Her latest offering, White Album, is a unique juxtaposition of poetry and art, playing host as it does to the breathtaking and sensual work of BC artist, Suzanne Northcott, whose paintings both complement and highlight Dunlop’s verse. But the volume’s interdisciplinarity goes one step further in its inclusion of a unique treatment of music.

Set up in four sections to mimic the Beatles’ four-sided White Album, each one carries the same numbered sections as the songs on the album. In this format, Dunlop explores one young woman’s life, from her birth in India to her youth and adulthood in Canada, experienced from the 1950s onward, during a time of great cultural and political change. Dunlop works with issues at the heart of this nation’s cultural consciousness and attempts to explore how these contribute to and/or form an individual identity. For those who identify points in time with music, this

collection will be a journey of nostalgia; Dunlop capably evokes a longing for the past through her identification with the music of the era.

Dunlop opens her collection with a prefatory offering called “Driving Home with Chet” that sets the stage for the musical interludes that will be heard throughout her poetry. Chet is jazz singer and trumpeter Chet Baker, against whose songs she pits scenes of the “every day”— “slate roofs, scatter-shots of sounds,” “cry of sirens, construction cranes, kids playing at dusk” neatly juxtaposed with notes of music: “as the horn comes into languor, slow notes suffusing the groin”; “metronomed scales of piano practice, staccato of footsteps”; and, “refrigerator hum, the din of phones.” With “Chet’s last notes/long vibrato shaping pain into order,/in the last crease of light/thin as a knife,/a wish,” Dunlop achieves a rhythm in her final stanza that recalls Langston Hughes’ “The Trumpet Player” and its lines: “Upon what riff the music slops/Its hypodermic needle/To his soul.” This is a promising introduction to a collection that mostly delivers.

“Journey” chronicles the family’s migration from India after it gained independence from Britain in 1947. The poem makes reference to the many Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs who were killed in the ethnic cleansing that accompanied that migration. Dunlop emphasizes leaving the “warm palm of empire/to its furthest frost-bitten fingertips”—Canada, no doubt. From here, the subject and her family embark upon a new cultural journey that results in this collection’s infusion of music and musical references.

“Naming” focuses on the importance of family, and the subject’s father’s love of gardening. Dunlop uses rich nomenclature here—the common names of flowers as well as their more formal appellations, alongside lyrics from Jimmie Rodgers’ “English Country Garden.” This drowns the reader in velvet sounds such as heart’s ease, flox, meadowsweet, lady smocks and hollyhocks, foxgloves and snowdrops. Dunlop is expert at arresting her readers with the sensuality of sound.

But she is political, too, using verse to capture the power of current events and their broader historical and cultural significance. In “Mission Apollo,” she describes social gatherings and their “perfumed coat

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piles in master bedrooms” against the backdrop of Cold War experiments with “McNamara’s voice babbling,/the naked napalmed girl running/down the highway, skin in ribbons.” In “Libretto,” she evokes another such moment: the Ku Klux Klan bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Alabama in 1963, with the Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel, and The Who as the scrim upon which this scene is projected.

“Adagio” is written about the “Cellist of Sarajevo,” Vedran Smailovi, who, in 1992, played Albonini’s Adagio in G Minor for twenty-two days to honour the twenty-two who were killed by mortar fire in the city’s marketplace as they lined up for bread.

These poems are both stark and warm, infused with music that make their messages poignant rather than cold and harsh.

Other less political poems are equally powerful, such as “Hush” about a woman who is “slow to love” the man who fathers her child. In her everyday tasks of folding laundry, changing the baby’s diapers, feeding the cat and watching the backyard fill with snow, she discovers her passion for him, “sealed into cracked plaster with a kiss.” “What Begins Bitterly” is another example of such power, the height of feeling that can be achieved with love and anger flowing through jazz notes—“in the music playing,/our living and our dying”.

In this collection of twenty-nine poems, there were only two that didn’t fire for this reviewer: “Love Field, 1963” and “Wild Thing.” The former is the longest poem in the volume, spanning a dense four pages.

The poem explores the ritual of putting on a turban and the family’s involvement in such a ritual in an adopted home and country. Considered alongside Dunlop’s other rich work, the length of the poem

and its lack of lyrical language make it much less powerful. “Wild Thing,” with its use of song titles and plays on partial lyrics, seems forced—very little of the material is Dunlop’s original voice. With the emotion she can evoke, why should she rely on others?

— C A R O LY N E V A N D E R M E E R

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

by Stieg Larsson Viking Canada, 2008; 572 pp; $32.00 A disgraced reporter, a locked room (or rather, a locked island), a strange girl, and a dragon tattoo—all the elements of what could be either a really good or a really bad crime novel. Luckily for me, and all lovers of mystery, Stieg Larsson makes play of the elements of a classic whodunit without turning The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (the first book of his Millenium trilogy) into a schlocky, roll-your-eyes cliché.

It helps that this particular murder mystery is set not in typical America, but in Sweden and, as such, all the characters are Swedish and sometimes eat wondrous meals of “open sandwiches of pickled herring in mustard sauce with chives and egg.” This is the kind of translation I like, one that is seamless in its interpretation of language, but doesn’t leave out the nuances of the original tongue. Just ignore the hideous and shockingly bright dust jacket before you dive in.

Intrepid reporter, Mikael Blomkvist, is first seen leaving court after being tried and convicted of libel and defamation against one of the country’s largest financiers. Three items of note that let the reader know what’s to come are indicated at the beginning of Part I: the title “Incen-

tive”; the dates “December 20-January 3”; and, the quote “Eighteen percent of the women in Sweden have at one time been threatened by a man.”

Blomkvist is lured into a yearlong job that takes him to the island community of Hedeby situated along the Norrland Coast and occupied by the Vanger family. The patriarch, Henrik Vanger, wants Blomkvist, under the guise of writing his biography, to solve the forty-year old murder of his niece Harriet. A Vanger Family Tree appears helpfully on page three. The girl with the dragon tattoo, however, is more elusive and although she comes into the story quite early by herself, it’s not until three hundred pages into the book that Lisbeth Salander and Blomkvist meet.

Larsson could easily have introduced the pair sooner, as per the typical he/she pairings in murder novels (every detective needs a girl Friday), but he held off.

And by holding off, he not only created tension and anticipation, but two distinct individuals—people we get to know through their own actions and foibles and how they react to one another. Blomkvist is a bit of a ladies man and Salandar is, well, I think that would be giving too much away.

Although I had guessed at the murderer early on, Larsson put up enough red herrings (haha) along the way that I couldn’t get at the motivation until he led me on an unexpected course. It wasn’t one of those surprise endings where a completely unknown variable comes into play, but rather one in which all the little pieces along the way add up to the big picture.

Larsson provides a satisfying ending with windows left open for future exploration— pass the aquavit, I’m ready for another one.

—GERILEE MCBRIDE

accelerated paces by jim oaten Set somewhere between here and the heat-death of the universe, Jim Oaten’s debut collection serves up random samples of literal and literary truth scooped up at top speed. Whether peeking out from the backseat of Mom and Dad’s car, dodging down back alleys in bomb-torn Beirut, wheeling past God and traffic in Mombasa, or surveying the grimy wings of mental wards, Accelerated Paces hurdles that uneasy terrain between creative fact and honest fiction. i s b n : 9 7 8 - 1 - 8 9 5 6 3 6 - 9 3 - 2 » $ 1 8 c a n / u s » e s s ay / m e m o i r

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Not to be missed Dystopia

by Mike Oulton and Ed Griffin Trafford Publishing, 2007; 432 pp; $30.93 Whether or not you think there’s an afterlife, this book will make you believe in hell. But first off, here it comes, full disclosure (or should that be dysclosure): I’ve spent a few weekends with the authors of this book. I’m part of a writers’ group who go out to the Matsqui Penitentiary in the Fraser Valley to work with some of the men in Ed Griffin’s Creative Writing program. Mike Oulton is one of the many from that group who’s made his mark on me.

Although the bulk of the story is Oulton’s, Mike’s teacher and mentor Ed Griffin has written complementary sections. Griffin opens the book recounting his life as a Roman Catholic priest, and charts his growing disillusionment with the Church. After being discouraged continuously in his efforts to help people in the ghettos of Cleveland, he reaches an epiphany: “My affair with the Catholic Church was over.”

When one ministry ended, Griffin found himself another. For years Ed has been working (too much of the time as a volunteer) developing Creative Writing programs in prisons. This book serves as concrete proof that such programs can produce meaningful results.

Even though Oulton says, “There’s no such thing as a halfway crook,” it’s hard not to have some sympathy for the guy. His story is a treadmill of hard knocks. By the time he’s in his early twenties and in a Mexican jail, he’s spent half of his life away from his family, mostly in some level of institutionalized existence.

Conditions in the Mexican prison certainly seem cruel—among other outrages, Oulton must draw water and carry it to his cell to be able to flush his toilet. On the other hand, many aspects of that system seem more humane than our Canadian one. Family

visits occur regularly, with wives and even children staying overnight. When Oulton is finally transferred back to Canada to complete his term, he expects life will be better, even though he fully understands he’ll still be in prison. The shock of what greets him both in Quebec and in B.C. gives him occasional pangs of nostalgia for the time he did in Mexico.

The power of this book lies not so much in any literary aspects; the book is self-published and, frankly, it shows. But if anything, that rawness may lend something to its power, as it’s a story that incriminates those of us on the outside for allowing a broken system to remain in place.

Oulton knows and isn’t afraid to talk about the ubiquitous existence of gangs and drugs in prison life, and points out the government’s complicity in the widespread drug abuse there. He illustrates how prison bureaucracy can stymie a prisoner’s efforts at gaining parole—shows how befuddling the complex network of paperwork can be, especially to a populace with such a high rate of illiteracy.

From firsthand knowledge, I can attest that I don’t believe Matsqui is preparing men for lives that won’t lead to recidivism. As an example I cite the fact that prisoners there are not allowed Internet access, yet are expected to be prepared for life on the outside when they are granted parole back into society. How, without proficiency in what has become such a basic life skill, can these men even be expected to find work?

I’d like to see Yann Martel add this book to the list of those he sends Stephen Harper (see http://www.whatisstephenharperreading.ca/) every fortnight. Dystopia is a to-the-bone account that raises many important questions about the operation of Canadian prisons. It serves as a gritty indictment of much that is wrong in our country’s administration of so-called justice.

—HEIDI GRECO

Reviews issue 51

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HUNKAMOOGA MUSINGS ON THE LITERARY LIFE by Stuart Ross “Flash Gordon meets the long-necked stapler”

I am eighty-nine years old, lying in a hospital bed, and there are tubes coming out of my nose. Otherwise, I’m doing pretty good.

People are colonizing Neptune and creating an uncompromised socialist utopia there, but I’ve decided to stay back on Earth, because I hate moving. My newest trade book, Even Still More Goddamn Further Endless Whiny Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer, is sitting by my bedside. It’s printed on a shaved gerbil, or readable on a wrist-computer, or digestible as a fennelflavoured capsule, or whatever the technology for books is in 2049.

But I’ve got one of those food trays hovering over my belly (that’s right, they actually hover in the mid-21st century), and on it are several small stacks of paper and a long-necked stapler. It takes a lot of energy, and I sure don’t have much at this point, but I’m folding and stapling my new poetry chapbook, Skip & Biff Cling to the Radio. I did a chapbook with the exact same title back in 1984, but I’ve long forgotten. The poems in this one are different anyway. I’ve been writing for about seventy-five years and I’ve improved marginally. I’m still not quite where I want to be as a poet, but there’s a bit of time still. A bit.

I’ve just assembled the first copy of the chapbook and I’m putting a couple of staples into the spine. I tell the nurse I’m “horse-stitching” my new chapbook, but I mean “saddle-stitching.” Every word in every poem in the chapbook is a word I used instead of the word I meant. I’ve become famous for this, for Meantist Poetry, and I’ve finally won the GovernorGeneral’s Award, for my 2036 collection, Razovsky Goes Bowling with the Oddfellows, which was issued in both hard- and softcover gerbil.

The first copy of a new chapbook still excites me. I slowly flip through the pages, admiring how badly I’ve folded them. I admire the title page, the colophon, the typography of each page of poetry. I press the booklet flat on the food tray, and with one wrinkled, bony finger, I smooth out

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the spine. It makes the books easier to stack that way.

The first chapbook I ever made was called He Counted His Fingers, He Counted His Toes, back in 1979. Somehow, it permeates my foggy brain that this is the 70th anniversary of my small press, Proper Tales. I am giddy for about one-sixth of a second—that’s all the strength I have for giddiness. Twenty-three skidoo. I ask the nurse to hand me the phone and I call up David W. McFadden. He’s about 109 and he’s still never won the GG, even though he’s Canada’s greatest poet. Raymond Souster, who is in his early 300s and has recently released his 19th volume of selected poems, always makes fun of David about that. Margaret Atwood, who created a gizmo to autograph her books remotely, hasn’t even been shortlisted for the GG a single time since she created that gizmo to write her poems remotely. The gizmo keeps winding up on the GG jury and there’s some kinda big hullabaloo about conflict of interest.

David congratulates me on the Proper Tales anniversary and tells me that he’s just finished a sequence of 700 sestinas about Barnett Newman. I promise to help him get it published and we agree to meet for a celebratory pint. I’m thinking I might need a celebratory pint of blood.

No matter how long I’ve been at this game, I never get sick of chapbooks. I remember back to 2008, the year before the 30th anniversary of Proper Tales Press, celebrated in the opening months of the Great Holy Shit Depression, the one that marked the collaborative annexation of the desiccated United States by Canada and Nicaragua. Me and eight other small pressers started a collective called Meet the Presses, and we put on our first Indie Literary Market, and a couple of days before the event I figured I needed to publish something new. Time was tight, so I came up with a very simple format: a tiny chapbook, a quarter the size of a piece of letter-size paper, with a basic text-only cover. Each chapbook contained a short

story: one was called The Twelve Rabbis of, Um, of, Uh…, and the other was called So Sue Me,You Talentless Fucker.

These two were the most basic chapbooks I’d ever created, and I was thrilled with them, thrilled with the absence of ornamentation, thrilled I could sell each of these 12- to 16-pagers for just a toonie. Somehow they were even more fulfilling than any of my “real” books. And that’s still the way it is forty years later. No matter how many handsome gerbils with my name printed on their spines I have lined up on my sagging bookshelf, or how many fennel-flavoured text capsules, I still get real excited about far more ephemeral publications.

Back to my hospital bed, though.

Occasionally some of the young writers come to visit me. First, I make them buy a chapbook. This is an important discipline for them, and a nearly lost art. Then I ask them what they’re working on. Inevitably, it’s some post-post-post-post-fucking-blahblah-blah long poem, and they’re hoping to go straight to gerbil with one of the big literary presses. They will never know the joys of scoring and folding a chapbook cover. They will never horse-stitch.

I’m tired, but need to read a bit before sleeping. I buzz the nurse and ask him to hand me the licorice-flavoured capsule on the bedside table, plus a cup of water (flown in from some other goddamn solar system where they still have water). This capsule is the new poetry collection by Lisa Jarnot. She just keeps getting better.

My eyelids become heavy, and the chapbooks slide off my hovering food table, landing silently on the floor.

Stuart Ross is the author of I Cut My Finger and Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer (both from Anvil Press), Dead Cars in Managua (DC Books), and, coming soon, the short story collection Buying Cigarettes for the Dog (Freehand Books). He grew up with The Jetsons and is celebrating the 30th anniversary of his Proper Tales Press this year. To order a copy of So Sue Me, You Talentless Fucker, write him at hunkamooga@sympatico.ca.

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contributors Allison Baggio has an English degree from York University and is a graduate of the Humber School for Writers. Her fiction has appeared in the Lichen Arts & Letters Preview as well as Room Magazine. She lives in Whitby, Ontario where she works as a freelance copywriter.

Karen Green is a poet, writer, and publicist in the publishing industry. A long-time Winnipegger, she currently lives and works in Vancouver.

Tom Handford was born in Kingston, Ontario sixty years ago. At Western he studied English and Philosophy but mostly swam for the university team. He is also a working carpenter.

Kevin Hardcastle has studied writing at the University of Toronto and Cardiff University. At some point he landed in Edmonton. Despite his best efforts, he still can't get out of there. This is his first print publication. He has previously been published online at Word Riot.

Michael Hemery earned his MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. He currently resides in Cleveland, Ohio, with his wife Stacie Leatherman and son.

Katharine Jackson-Kaufman paints, draws, takes photographs, and snowboards whenever possible. She lives in Ladner, BC. Karen Justl is a designer and illustrator residing in Toronto. Justl draws from memory the characters she sees in her creepy dreams. She was born in Winnipeg, MB. where it all started.

Elena Kaufman is a writer, actor and dramaturge. Her stories appear in: 1097Mag; Women in Judaism; Pharos; New Shoots and won “Best Foreign Short Story” at Moondance Film Festival.

Monologues are in: New Monologues for Women by Women II and Audition Arsenal.

Annette Lapointe is the author of the awardwinning novel Stolen. Having been raised by hippies, completed several degrees in something or other, and wandered the world, she now lives in Winnipeg.

Dennis H. Lee is currently MIA. Nick Mamatas is the author of two novels, the satirical Under My Roof and the Lovecraftian Beat road novel Move Under Ground. His short fiction has appeared in the online edition of Mississippi Review, ChiZine, Nature and many other venues. Much of his recent work was collected in You Might Sleep... published

by Prime Books. A native New Yorker, Nick now lives in the California Bay Area.

Elaine McCluskey is the author of a novel Going Fast and a short story collection, The Watermelon Social. She has appeared in The Antigonish Review, The Fiddlehead, Room, The Dalhousie Review, and others.

Kathryn Mockler has a MFA from the University of British Columbia and a BA in Honours English and Creative Writing from Concordia University. Her writing has appeared most recently in Pilot Pocket Books, Lies With Occasional Truth, and Carousel Magazine.

As a photographer, George Omorean rarely goes anywhere without a camera, especially when he's travelling. Photos in this issue are mainly from Romania, Thailand, and Mexico. His blog is georgomorean.blogspot.com.

Shannon Quinn lives in Toronto. Some of her writing has appeared in Maisonneuve, THIS, Taddle Creek and The Globe & Mail. She has also produced numerous radio pieces for CBC. Wes Smiderle is a writer in Ottawa. His short stories have appeared here and there. He always gives 110%.

Kim Suvan has an M.A. in English Literature and takes care of her 5-year-old twins. She plays poker, drinks red wine, and plans to study journalism next year."

Yasuko Thanh thinks Crocs look terrible with handcuffs.

Tara Thom is a graduate of the Studies in Writing program at Selkirk College in Castlegar, BC and is currently pursuing a degree in social work. Thom lives and writes in the beautiful Slocan Valley.

Derek von Essen is a multi-disciplinary, self-starting, DIY type who recycles everything from objects to conversations within his creative fields of painting, photography and graphic arts.

Kelly Ward is a freelance writer living in Toronto. Her writing has appeared in magazines, newspapers and literary journals throughout Canada. By day she works in the book publishing industry as a publicist.

The Heretic “… a scary, brave and ferocious attack on Judeo-Christian religion and its doctrines … reminiscent of Lenny Bruce. But this is no simple rant. The writing is clever and sophisticated.”

—CBC

John Murphy Drama | 978-0-88922-595-4 | 64 pages $16.95 A dialogue of voices performed by a single actor, the play opens up a discourse where creation interrogates religion; atheists engage believers; secularists confront theists.

This story of a Roman Catholic man tormented by the religious anxieties of his youth, who resolves to become Jesus Murphy, an evangelical atheist, makes us all believers—in ourselves. “… so stupefyingly irreverent, we’re probably going to hell just for laughing at it. Murphy aims to be —Winnipeg Sun provocative and succeeds.”

Talonbooks www.talonbooks.com

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3 categories • 3 cash prizes • 1 deadline

fiction • poetry • creative non-fiction

subTerrain’s Annual

Triumphant wards Compet Compe tition Literary A Awards Competition FICTION:

maximum 3,000 words POETRY: a suite of 5 related poems (maximum 15 pages) (based on fact, adorned w/fiction): maximum 4,000 words

CREATIVE NON-FICTION:

Entry Fee: $25 per entry, includes subTerrain subscription! (You may submit as many entries in as many categories as you like)

Deadline for Entries:

May 15, 2008

$3,000 in cash prizes The winning entries in each category will receive a $750 cash prize (plus payment for publication) and will be published in our Winter ‘08 issue. First runner-up in each category will receive a $250 cash prize and be published in our Spring 2009 issue. All entries MUST be previously unpublished material and not currently under consideration in any other contest or competition. Entries will NOT be returned (so keep a copy for yourself ). Results of the competition will be announced in the Summer/Fall issue of subTerrain magazine.

All entrants receive a complimentary one-year subscription to subTerrain.

SEND ENTRIES TO:

Lush Triumphant, c/o subTerrain Magazine “ C L O C K S ” B Y E D WA R D S M O R R I S O N PO Box 3008, MPO, Vancouver, BC V6B 3X5 • subter@portal.ca • www.subterrain.ca