Mary's Birthday

Today at the park I saw an act of extreme cruelty (and I do not use these words lightly). A little girl was playing with her mother by the swings. This man in sports clothes walked by and just as he passed them he emptied his water bottle on the little girl's head.

The little girl was so surprised that she just stood there, absolutely still. The man had already run off at a good pace, as they do. The little girl only began to cry when her mother started to fuss and tried to take off her soaked dress.

I began to wonder: shouldn't the mother have shouted at the man, ran after him, punched him in the groin? I began the wonder: am I the type of mother who doesn't say anything when a stranger empties a bottle of water on her daughter, or am I the type of mother who runs after the man, shouts at him, punches him in the groin?

Do you know what I mean? It's an important question, when you think about it.

I walked back home and called Mary because it's her birthday. I forgot to tell her about what I'd seen in the park. So she had no idea I'd just witnessed an act of extreme cruelty.

The Walrus Waits

She is as fat as a walrus, so that's what they call her. The Walrus. Lovingly.

She is long and thick like a tube of almond paste—although to be fair her ripply skin is not Walrus coloured or even almond-coloured, but rosy pale like whipped cream into which a half-eaten strawberry has been dipped. Lovingly.

She is beautiful. They love her in the salons, at the opera. The young men carry her across the city, arms outstretched, hands softly folding into her generous flesh like bakers' hands kneading dough.

But tonight The Walrus has stayed in. She is waiting for her love. She has put on her heaviest jewelry: diamonds the size of quail eggs, pearls that spill like treasure between her breasts. You'd barely notice them.

She is waiting. She waits. She longs for the lover who will enter her room and enter her everywhere—her whole body can be penetrated, that is its beauty. She waits for the kisses like the pecking of bird beaks on her skin. She waits for the slim man she will smother. She waits for her lover.

She lies on her side; her bulk pools like a spill on the plush satin bedcover. In her hand she holds an oyster, plucked from the salt-covered dish by the bed. She is holding the oyster to her open lips; her lips are not quite yet touching the sharp ridge of the shell. A drop of sea water shimmers there like a pearl, about to fall. Perhaps her tongue—the most agile part of her body, her tongue pink and plastic and warm like molten candy—will be quick enough to catch it when it falls.

In that moment, The Walrus can almost see the oyster recoil, pulling its fleshy mantle and salty pool of juice back before it slips out of its pearly bed and falls down her throat. She will not chew it, for chewing is not a thing that ladies do. And she is a lady.

The hanging moment stretches on.

The Walrus should've waited for the young lover to come before she began to eat, but she was bored. She is about to eat an oyster out of boredom. But she is still bored, even now. An oyster is not cure for boredom. Not like a healthy young man is.

She waits. And she will wait for longer still.

The Walrus doesn't know it yet but her lover will not be able to come tonight for he has just received a bullet in the neck. It was a stray bullet from a duel he was watching a moment ago.

As he dies the lover thinks of The Walrus, her hot flesh like curtains falling over him and sweetly taking all the breath from him as his blood spills out from under his neck and pools like a pillow on the pavement. He tastes salt; blood must've splattered on his lips. The sweet breeze pulls the breath out of him. He stares up and sees the moon like a pearl shimmering faintly above the city. The light is beginning to dim.

The Walrus will never know if he forgot about their rendez vous or if he was merely running late. She will learn of his death at first light.

Home

At the place where we stop

to empty our bladders and fill up the fuel tank,

the sweet grass sings with the sound of dust.

The air is rank with gas fumes and roadkill.

We take turns to piss; urine glows golden

in the sunlight and pools at our feet

on ground parched past drinking.

Loose jeans hang on narrow hips,

looped with a rust-coloured belt.

He zips up and says, “Only the cockroaches

will be left alive when it’s all over.”

-

While one drives the other reads yellowed paperbacks:

Doris Lessing, Toni Morisson, Margaret Atwood…

There’s something about old ladies who write.

When it’s too dark to see words we play Leonard Cohen,

howl the lyrics

at the gush of breeze that flies in from the open windows

and fills our throats with lust.

Afraid that the border agents would find the weed

stashed under the CDs in the glove compartment,

we took the long way across the continent.

-

In a small town stretched thin across the road,

we pick up two cheap girls and a bottle of easy booze,

bring them back to our motel room.

The whiskey soothes our throats,

contracts our stomachs into hard fists.

“You don’t waste any time,” they say when

we abandon their bodies to reach for our glasses,

clink them over the chasm between us.

“We don’t have much of it left.”

-

We wake up late.

Don’t like driving in the morning anyway

because the sun gets in our eyes.

-

Two unfinished novels lie in the trunk,

bound to be manuscripts forever,

kindling for the fires of apocalypse.

Somewhere between Brandon and Winnipeg

we leave the trunk open, speed until the prairie wind

picks up the pages one by one, unfurls our stories

behind us like the tail of a comet. A scattering.

-

We spot the house off a lush country road in Clinton, Ontario.

The car sighs to a stop in the deserted driveway.

He asks, “Are you sure this is the right place?”

“Dead sure.” We get out and stretch our limbs—animals

after a nap. Climb up to the porch in nonchalant steps.

Bang on the door until our knuckles ache.

Nobody’s home. 

My friend Sugar and I gave each other the same prompt: write a piece in which two male characters face the end of the world by driving out to meet a famous writer. This is what I came up with. Can you guess who the famous writer is?

Bus 17

The bus loops around Vancouver General Hospital and heads downtown.

There are so many sick people sitting shoulder to shoulder
that there are no priority seats left and soon the elderly
are offering their seats to the infirm. Those who are
young and healthy are asked to step off.

To remain onboard I pretend I have several health issues.
Imagine me coughing wet mucus into my sleeve and
howling like a wolf every couple of minutes and beating
my chest with a limp hand. Only pretending to be deficient,
I swear. I make a damn good impression though.

A woman is wearing black capris: one uncovered calf
is veined flesh, the other is smooth plastic.

A man has an apparatus drilled into his skull.
like the monster in Frankenstein.
A soggy cigarette dangles from his lips.

Another has a face as colourless and flat as wax.
Perhaps he has been in a fire and they covered
his raw face muscles with paraffin.
They can do anything nowadays.

The ill, the injured, the dejected and rejected, the maimed
and crippled and handicapped of Vancouver
have been released from their hospital bed, dumped
onto the street. They have crawled aboard bus 17
and they are coming home. They are too weak
to be angry, but they are ugly. They don't wear
Lululemon or clutch Starbucks cups, but they have
canes and wheelchairs and breathing tubes and you
will see them down your street.

You can't say I didn't warn you.

Seascape

The silent, random landscape seemed
to him almost lunar: rocks,
hairy with limp seaweed, tiny shells that
shattered like dry bones as he walked,
and flat sand.
His footsteps in that place could've
been the first.

Except it wasn't dead dry. Underneath
the stillness he caught
the creeping sense of wet life and the
smell of decaying
fish flesh.

The seamud sucked at his
shoes and bubbly seaweed burst,
splattering salty juice when
he stepped on them.
He nearly tripped over a
dead octopus clamped
to the ground. It looked
up at him. Its anatomical
jelly was both soft and firm
underfoot.

On a hanging
rock formation he
saw a girl, reading,
oblivious.
He could've
imagined her there.
Perhaps she
was part of
the landscape, like
the sea,
the shells,
the octopus,
the sand.

A Little Bit Bitter, Part 1

That’s an understatement. I’ll be completely honest with you: I wrote that at the top of the page because it has a nice ring to it. The alliteration with the Ls and the Bs, and the two double Ts. I wrote that because it sounds nice. But the truth is Casey wasn’t just a little bit bitter. She was furious.

It was my fault. I’m the one who told her about Mark and Sam. Now that I think about it, it was probably a mistake to tell her. It depends on how you look at it, I guess— even from my point of view. I mean, I got what I wanted out of it initially, and at the time it seemed like a good idea, in a selfish way. Even now that all of that business has died down I can’t say I regret having told her because it helped me get to know Casey, find what kind of person she really is.

Everybody thinks they know Casey really well. Spot her, and immediately you know the type. She’s always been, and always will be, that kind of girl. Some like it, some don’t, but it’s all based on that initial judgment. You’ll see what I mean.

It all started long before that, but for me it began one night at the bar where I was working at the time. That’s when I came in, played my little part in the drama. It was a nice, quiet place, kind of shabby, corner Duluth and Saint-Denis. One of those places that’s been there for decades: once a working class taverne, now a favorite haunt for hipsters from the ghetto and the plateau looking for a gritty place to hang out and pose for faux-vintage pictures.

I’m at my best when I at work. And I say that in all humility, because most of the time I know I’m not much—or, at least, not enough to get the attention of someone like, say, Casey. But manning the bar, my crisp black shirt like a second skin, the rows of bottles behind me and the chrome taps at arm’s length, I’m an altogether different person. Cool, remarkable, I can make you whatever kind of drink you can think of, and others beside, with enough quiet authority to judge you on it, too. I know my stuff, and I know how to use it to my advantage.

I served Casey a Jack Daniel’s, straight, with a glass of ice on the side. Casey, you  should know, has an insatiable taste for hard liquor. It’s one of the things I like about her.

Another thing you should know about Casey is that she’s white trash. I mean that in the best way, but still, white trash is white trash. You hear it immediately—part of that initially judgment I mentioned. Accents don’t lie, and Casey is shameless about hers, which is Southern. Deep Southern. She says y’all, always, and pronounces her As as Es in an open-mouthed drawl. She hitchhiked her way up the US and across the border, ended up in Montreal like she could’ve ended up anywhere else: in the middle of the night, exhausted, confused, thirsty. She found a bed in a hostel, met some people, and eventually moved in with Sam and got a job as a waitress. She owns at least three different cowboy hats, and has a marked preference for short denim, and plaid on both men and women.

That evening, I told her about Mark and Sam pretty much immediately, no preamble or anything. Like, “here’s your drink Mark slept with Sam did you know?” Of course, she didn’t know. That was the point.

I was lucky to know about it myself. I’d seen Mark the day before and he dropped a hint that something had happened between Sam and him. He couldn’t hold it in, you know? Young love, that sort of thing. The truth is Mark had been in love with Sam as far as we could all remember; they used to date, when Casey lived with Sam, but then Sam went away to France for a year and that complicated things, until Mark started dating Casey.

I picked up Mark’s hint real fast and warned him: “If Casey knows she’ll murder someone.” (I was always thinking about Casey.) It turned out to be just the right thing to say to know more because it touched a nerve. “She can do whatever she wants,” he said. “I don’t care. I slept with Sam and I want to get together with her again. It’s the real deal. It’s my life and Casey has nothing to do with it.” I assumed that meant he wouldn’t mind if I told Casey.

For a second, just a second, when I did tell Casey, her face was the ugliest I’d ever seen it. “What?” she said. “What the fuck? Who tol’ ya that?”

For effect, I finished pouring a pint of Boréale Blonde and handed over to a customer before I answered. I made a show of taking the bill I was handed, getting the change at the till, counting the coins carefully before placing them on the counter.

“Mark told me,” I finally said.

“The dick.”

*

Five hours later she was sucking mine.

It was a long evening, heavy with alcohol, as you can imagine. Casey stayed at the bar until closing time, texting and fulminating. I went to chat with her between customers, feeding the fire of her anger, and made sure the glass in front of her was never empty.

What affected Casey so much is that she knew Mark and Sam made a great couple. They were from the same background, they had similar interests; if they got together again it would be for good. I didn’t even need to tell Casey what Mark had told me because she already knew that whatever there was between him and Sam was the real deal. It was nothing like what she’d had with Mark; she wasn’t deluding herself. She knew Mark had only gone out with her for the sex. Well, there was probably more to it, or else they wouldn’t have dated at all, I guess. She was a fun girl. She had a certain reputation. You were bound to impress, to get noticed, with a girl like that sitting in front of you at the restaurant and partying all over your Facebook wall. But mainly, it was obvious Mark had gone out with her mainly for the sex. Casey knew she didn’t have what Sam had. She was too authentic, too much herself. She couldn’t help it.

It was my chance, and I took it. I invited Casey over to my place for a nightcap. She accepted, of course. “I don’t wanna to be alone,” she told me sweetly. She was drunk. We cuddled on the sofa and I did nothing to hide my erection as it rose steadily between her butt cheeks.

“You wanna sleep with me, don’t cha?” She said matter-of-factly.

“Yes.”

She twisted her body around to face me and slipped her tongue, a little pasty from emotion and drink, into my mouth. We made out and she eventually emerged on top, straddling my hips, and let me watch as she undressed. Casey was famous for her tits, and they were something indeed. To finally see them uncovered was a kind of revelation, like at the synagogue when they pull aside the curtain of the ark to reveal the ornate torah inside. She unzipped my jeans and blew me half-heartedly for a while before I carried her to the bedroom—an armful of glowing flesh. We got into the cold sheets and finished there. It wasn’t much fun, to be honest. Even the slobbering fellatio had been better. She was too drunk and tired to move so she kind of lay there and moaned in…well, it was meant to sound like pleasure, but it sounded more like annoyance. As soon as it was over, she stuffed her face into the pillow and fell asleep.

The Marriage Chain (Part 2)

My grandmother did some truly great detective work, especially when you consider the resources she had: Jonathan’s old papers and the city newspaper archives. At the university library I made quick work of confirming all her findings, and delving a bit deeper into the history of her husband’s previous marriages and of Mary Bradbury Stern Price’s first marriage to Mr. Stern, whose first name was Nicholas. I made other discoveries, as well: I found out that the marriage chain my grandmother had intimated was, in fact, even longer than she had thought.

From what I can tell, now, the first link in the chain was reverend Robert Hooker, from Bath, England, who was born in 1766. He married a woman called Louise Eldridge in 1815—I don’t know if either of them was married before, although I found no evidence to suggest this so it’s safe to say this is where it started. Louise was seventeen when she married Robert. They had three children, all daughters; Robert passed away when he was eighty; Louise married again, in 1840. She became the first wife of Nicholas Stern, a thirty-one year-old Bristol businessman. Louise gave birth to twins two years later and died at the age of thirty-three. Nicholas Stern’s transport business became very successful; when his daughters were older he moved to America to profit from the economic boom that followed the Civil War. In 1867 he married again, to Mary Bradbury, the daughter of a business associate and friend. Mary, who was twenty-three years old when she married, gave Nicholas a single child, a son. In 1883 Nicholas passed away; Mary married again three years later with Jonathan Price, a twenty-six year old lawyer. In the same year, Mary contracted tuberculosis; she passed away in the spring of 1888. Jonathan remarried twice: in 1891 with Angela Lawrence, who died in childbirth in the same year, and with Jane Sommers in 1903. When Jonathan died, just after the war, Jane, who was in her late thirties, was left in a difficult financial position with three sons to take care of. She married Raymond Stand, a butcher, in 1920. They had one son, my father, who was born a few years later.

Little did Robert Hooker know, when he married the young Louise Eldridge at the beginning of the 19^th century, that his union would start a familial anomaly that would join together eight people across a century and produce over 150 descendants in four different branches of surnames. I can’t help but wonder if, other than my grandmother, any later members of the marriage chain had figured out what they were part of.

*

These are the fruits of my research. I sent my sister an email with the completed family tree, but she replied only to tell me what a strange coincidence it was. “Strange,” she wrote, which implied that it was not really interesting, or life changing. I initially wanted to track down some of the other descendants of the marriage chain—our half-cousins several times removed—and get in touch with them, but I decided otherwise after reading my sister’s response. My discovery is only interesting from a historical point of view; it’s only fascinating on paper. It has nothing to do with our lives or identities.

Still.

I opened the door to my son’s room last night after he’d fallen asleep. He is my youngest child, my only son. An image struck me: I saw him as if he was the very tip of a mighty ship’s prow, propelled by the force and bulk of what came before him. He stands, supported by the past, cutting into the future.

The Marriage Chain (Part 1)

It all started for me when my father passed away. My grandfather had been dead for a long time. That’s how it all ended, of course, with my grandfather’ death. He was the last one.

My grandfather—his name was Raymond—died some years after my grandmother, Jane. I was too young when she died to remember anything of it—I don’t even remember anything of her as a person, although I came to know her quite well afterward—but I vividly recall the evening we learned the news of my grandfather’s death.

Every night my father read to me before I went to sleep, both of us cramped together side by side in my single bed, me tucked in the blankets and he lying on them. It was our ritual. He always read books of his own choosing, and they were never children’s books. He read me things like Great Expectations, and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and the Selected Stories of Jack London. It could take us months to get through a single book, but we always finished them.

That night I had taken my bath and I was in my pajamas, ready for bed. I had the book we were currently reading open at the right page on my lap. As I waited for my father to come up I tried to remember what had happened in the book before we’d stopped the previous evening. Sometimes it was a bit blurry because if my father read for a long time I fell asleep and missed the last page or two.

I heard the phone ring. My father answered and I knew he would be a while yet. It was an unusual hour to get a phone call. I knew from the tone of his voice when he answered that something had happened, although I couldn’t make out what he was saying. He talked for a while and eventually I put the book down on my bedside table and I went downstairs to see what was going on.

My father had just hung up the phone when I walked into the kitchen. He was sitting at the table with his back to me. He let out of sigh and his shoulders rolled up and down. I thought he was crying, but then I heard him chuckle so I wasn't sure if he was sad or not. He said, to no one in particular, “so that’s where it finally ends.”

He never did tell me what had ended that night—I only figured that out much later—but oddly, it struck me at the time, after I'd sat in front of him at the table and he told me that my grandfather was dead, as something odd to say in the circumstances.

Now, of course, I understand what he was talking about better than he every did. I think my father never meant for me to know about it, though. Or perhaps he did, or else he would’ve never left the clues behind. I'm not sure because he could’ve very well told me at any time—and he was usually quite honest about that sort of thing, he liked talking about the history of the family—but he didn’t. My guess is that he thought it didn’t concern me, and that therefore it wouldn’t interest me. There’s probably some truth in that; even today I’m sure most of my cousins would care. But I can’t explain why he didn’t say anything about it by the time I was older and my own interests in history and inheritance had become clear. Maybe he had forgotten about it by then, or maybe it had never really been that important to him.

The information had come to him from his own mother, my grandmother, and he must’ve seen himself as the story’s last inheritor. With my grandfather’s death, the story ended and there was no purpose to carry it on. Whatever he thought, and whatever my grandmother thought, I can’t ignore the knowledge that was eventually passed down to me. I think all the descendants of this strange anthropological anomaly are concerned, whether they know about it and are interested in it or not. Inevitably, it’s part of who they are. But at the same time, while I am fascinated by this thing, as my grandmother clearly was, I sometimes wonder if, in the larger context, it’s inconsequential. Is a quirky family anecdote worth calling up distant cousins for? Is it worth spending evenings at the library looking through page after page of newspaper microfilms? I’m not so sure.

*

The information came to me in the form of a 7 by 4 inch notebook with lined pages, bound in tan leather. My grandmother Jane had used it as her diary sometime at the end of the 1940s; she had covered nearly all of its hundred or so pages with her cramped, no-nonsense handwriting. I found this notebook three years ago, while emptying out my father’s house after his death. When I found it, at the bottom of an old box full of bills and files, I expected it to be an accounts book to be stuffed in a garbage bag with the rest of the junk my father had accumulated during his lifetime. When I cracked open the cover and saw the name and date on the top right corner of the first page I turned to my sister and told her I’d found something that had belonged to grandma. "Keep it," she said. “I’m sure you’ll find it a lot more interesting than I ever could,” she said.

I began reading the notebook a couple of weeks later, with a glass of scotch on a quiet Friday evening when the kids were over at their mother’s. My grandmother was in her seventies when she kept the diary. It begins with a kind of long digression in which she talks about the war: who in the family was affected and how, who had gone off to fight, who had come back. She mentions a lot of names I didn’t know, cousins twice removed and brothers-in-law and so on.

After about five pages of this my grandmother mentions that she received a letter from a man claiming to be a distant grandson, who seemed to have figured out that they have some ancestor’s in common. His name was Richard Stern, and he apparently asked my grandmother to confirm some information concerning relatives they may have had in common, as he was working on a comprehensive family tree. My grandmother writes in the diary:

I wrote back to this R. Stern in order to provide him with the names and dates I remember. What I can’t figure out is how any of the people he asked about can possibly be related to his family. We aren’t related to any Sterns. The connection must have to do with Jonathan, of course, but how can this be?

I looked through his old things this morning. Angela’s given name was Lawrence.

At this point in my reading I thumbed through the notebook to make sure my grandmother hadn’t tucked Richard Stern’s letter anywhere between its pages. I found no original letter. Instead, a folded square of yellowed paper fell out of the diary. I unfolded it and discovered a sort of family tree my grandmother had traced on it. On the top right corner was my grandfather, Raymond. He was connected by a line to the left with Jane, my grandmother. Another line connected her to the left with Jonathan Price, her first husband. It was common knowledge in the family that Jane had been married once before with this man, a lawyer, who had given her three sons. My father didn’t see much of them when he was older, but he often told me about them; they were in and out of the house while he was growing up. On the paper, however, Jonathan was connected to the left with two names: Angela L. and, underneath it, in a different-colored pen, Mary Stern. So that’s where the mysterious Sterns came in. I don’t know when my grandmother put that name into the diagram, but it must’ve been later, towards the end of her research. Finding out about Mary Stern, her husband’s first wife, was the end result of her years of enquiry. I’ve since completed the top section of this same family tree with many other missing names and dates, but at the time it was quite a shock for me to realize that even my grandmother’s first husband had been married before as well—twice. Jane’s note about Angela at the beginning of the notebook made it clear that she'd known about her husband's second marriage, but not about the first until long after his death.

I poured myself another scotch and picked up my reading where I had left it. My grandmother, after having received the letter from her long-lost relative Richard Stern, began researching into the family history herself by looking through her first husband’s papers. She noted and worked out all of her discoveries and questions in the diary. Meanwhile, she received another letter from Mr. Stern, in which he thanked her for the information and promised to send her the results of his research. But my grandmother never got anything from him. She sent him another letter a few months later, to ask him how it was coming along; all she received was an answer from this man’s daughter, informing her of his unfortunate passing—no mention of Richard Stern’s research into the family history.

By searching through her first husband’s documents, my grandmother eventually came across a legal letter, dating from before his wedding to Angela, concerning his deceased wife’s testament. From then on, it was only a matter of finding out who this mysterious first wife had been. Jane began searching newspaper archives at the city library, and finally unearthed a wedding notice for Jonathan Cooper and Mary Stern (born Bradbury). This would’ve been revelation enough, but my grandmother did not stop there. She had underlined the “born Bradbury” several times; evidently, Mary had been married before as well, to a man by the name of Stern. My grandmother had drawn an arrow issuing from the name, but it pointed only to a blank space in the page; she had never figured out who this mysterious Mr. Stern was.

The diary ends with a small note, in which my grandmother muses on the meaning of marriage. She was obviously shocked by the discovery of her first husband’s first marriage—she wondered if any children had been born from it—and equally struck by the coincidence that this first wife of his had been herself married before. Coupled, as it were, with the fact that she herself had remarried after Jonathan Copper had passed away, the oddity was complete. Her husband Raymond, my grandfather, was the last link in a chain of marriages that descended back into history, all the way to this Mr. Stern. In a way, my grandmother writes, it is as if I were myself married to Stern, Mary’s first husband. I am no different than Mary, who remarried my husband, for I have remarried after this same husband died. We are all part of the same union. We are all connected.

Drawing Period

Blue first. The wax is flattened down to the paper label so when he tries to draw, pressing the crayon obliquely, there is only the faintest bluish smudge on the creamy beige of the construction paper. He scratches at the label until it rips and manages to tear away a shred of it. He pushes the crayon against the paper again—nowhere specific because he doesn’t remember where he was and so he can’t know where anything else was either—and makes a little blue spiral. He pauses and stares at the blue shape. He draws again over the spiral, trying to fill in the beige space in between the lines with more blue. He finishes his first blue circle and then makes another one, further off, and the another one. He’s almost used up all the wax above the paper. He pauses again to look at the constellation of blue swirls. He tries to remember what the lakes looked like, what they must’ve looked like from above, in between the rows and rows of houses and the spaghetti streets. He’s only drawn blue circles, all the same, so when he starts drawing again he varies the shapes and the sizes. A blue oval. A blue peanut. A blue mickey mouse. A smaller oval. A bigger circle. He rips off another shred of paper on the crayon to keep going. He’s drawing faster now. The lakes aren’t lakes anymore so much as smudges of blue. He drops the blue crayon back into the box.

He looks up and glances at what the others at his table are drawing. Suns and houses and trees.

He picks up the red crayon. The tennis court where his parents were playing was red. The tennis court is a rectangle, he knows that. He draws a red rectangle, very carefully. He draws a line that cuts the rectangle in half. That’s the net. Then he draws a few crisscrossed lines in both halves. He knows he doesn’t quite get them right, but he isn’t sure where they’re supposed to go exactly. When his parents play tennis he likes to ride his tricycle around the court. He needs to be careful when he gets close to where his parents are jumping and running around, sending the ball on the other side or else waiting for it to come back to them. First he rides outside the lines, once. The second time he rides with his left wheel on the line. The third time he rides with the line right under his middle wheels. The fourth time—

“What are you doing, Adam! Get off the court!”

He cuts right through he court and peddles away. Goes through the gate of the tall fence that surrounds the court. It’s tall enough to catch the balls that go ballooning up towards the sky and fall back down again, almost in a straight line. He Peddles onto the sidewalk of the deserted street in front of the tennis courts. Takes a right. Follows the sidewalk of the curved street. Peddles on.

He draws the houses in green. The houses are all the same. There are so many of them, all packed along the streets, around the lakes. Rows and rows of little green squares between the blue lakes.

Then he draws himself. He draws himself as far away from the red rectangle of the tennis court as he can. He draws himself with a purple crayon because he remembers that he was wearing his purple shirt the day he got lost. He draws himself in the maze of houses and lakes.

Imagine the guilt his mother will feel when she comes to pick him up at the daycare and the counselor will show her the drawing.

The Poetic Process

I wrote a poem last week.

It was too long

so I cut it

by half.

But it still seemed blurry around the edges —

metaphors missed the mark

adjectives and adverbs cluttered the images —

like stage light illuminating its subject

not quite sharply enough.

I whittled it down some more

deleted the excess

and the useless

until there were only

a handful of words left.

They weren't quite right

so I crossed them out

one by one

until there remained only

pencil scratches

and traces of erasure

on a blank page.

Wishes Don't Come True

I wish the poles

stopped melting

and the polar bears

stopped dying.

I wish Hogwarts existed

and that nobody was hungry

or sick

or sad.

I wish that everyone's wishes

came true.

I wish men would stop killing

one another.

I wish I loved you better.

A Couple of Lines that Don't Rhyme

It looks to me like your castle is built on a pile of wet sand.

I'd rather play in the sand than visit the crumbling rooms upstairs.

A Quote

{Not many people (including myself) have been commenting recently so I decided to post something short and to the point and rather self-explanatory. It's a quote by David Foster Wallace, whose birthday it would've been last week, if he hadn't hanged himself in 2008, aged 46. Wallace was a phenomenal writer and a fiercely intelligent thinker — I find his suicide sad and troubling beyond words.}

"There's something magical for me about literature and fiction. I think it can do many things that not only pop culture can't do, but that are urgent. One is that by creating a character in a piece of fiction you allow the reader to leap over the wall of self and to imagine himself being not just somewhere else, but someone else, in a way that no other form can do. Because people, I think, are essentially lonely, and alone, and frightened of being alone."

And that, my friends, is a form of heart rape we all have to deal with...

Doing the Right Thing

Fiona let herself in.

Oliver had given her a copy of the key a while ago so she could drop in if she needed a place to stay in the city — or just a place to stay. He had often come home and found his sister there, unannounced, cooking up a vegetable stir-fry and doing his laundry. “Is it okay if I stay for a night or two?” she would ask, smiling. Just until she got back on her feet, until the “friend” she was subletting an apartment from went back to Vietnam, until things calmed down with her boyfriend of the moment.

But it was none of this, now. Fiona had settled down, it seemed to Oliver. She was in grad school with a decent job. She lived in a quiet university accommodation. She wasn’t seeing anyone at the moment.

The apartment was dark; Fiona wondered if her brother was in. She could only perceive the solider shadows of the pieces of furniture in the gloom: the low table against which she lay her bag, the humps of the sofas and armchair, the large square expanse of the TV against the wall. She walked past the living room and into the kitchen. All was quiet and dark, there too, except for the hum of the refrigerator and the glow of the oven’s LED clock: 10:17. She hadn’t realized it was so late.

In the hall she saw a sharp glare of light on the floor and the wall. It peered out of the crack in the bedroom door.

“Oliver?”

She heard the sound of shifting fabric and something crash against the floor.

“Fiona?” he cried back.

She realized there might be a girl with him in there. She suddenly felt terrible, wishing she had called before coming.

Oliver appeared in the doorway in an old UBC T-shirt and sweat pants.

“Fiona? What the hell are you doing here?”

“Hey! Sorry to bother you...” She tried to peer behind him at the mess in the bedroom.

“No, it’s fine,” he said. “I was just working in bed. I, um... I had a big day. I didn’t hear you come in.” He reached for the light switch. He regretted it immediately. Fiona’s eyes were red and dry, she looked exhausted.

She brought her fingers to her face.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I must look awful.”

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“I went to see Mom today. I just got back...”

“Oh...”

“We have to talk.”

“Come sit down, I’ll make some coffee.”

Fiona sat at the kitchen counter while Oliver fussed about with his espresso machine, frothing milk and grinding coffee beans. He had been a barista as an undergrad and still made a mean cappuccino. Finally he placed two elegant cups topped with perfect islands of foam on the counter. He stood looking down at her, leaning on the other side of the counter while she took a sip of the strong, scalding drink. He seemed relaxed.

“Thanks,” Fiona said. “It’s good.”

He took a sip from his own cup. A sliver of foam stuck to his upper lip and he wiped it away quickly with the back of his hand.

“So, how is she?” he asked.

She wiped her own mouth self-consciously.

“I think she’s getting worse.”

“How much worse?”

“Well, she’s not getting better.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

“I know, Oliver. But that’s how it is. What do you want me to say? You don’t get better from these things...”

“It wasn’t so bad when I saw her last week. She was okay. I thought she was stable, at least.”

“Did you know she went almost blind last month? It lasted for an entire week.”

“No. She didn’t tell me.”

“Of course not. She didn’t tell me either. Mrs Simpson did.” She paused. “That kind of thing — it’s going to happen more often.”

“What do you mean?”

“She’s already worse. She could barely walk today. She said she didn’t sleep well last night, either. It’s the spasms.”

“But that’s just —”

“Look. Having Mrs Simpson over isn’t enough anymore.”

“No,” he shook his head, business-like. “No, Fiona. That’s out of the question.”

“She needs professional help. Somewhere where they can monitor her all the time.”

“Oh my God, I can’t believe I’m having this conversation right now.”

“Well, it was pretty clear we were going to have it soon enough, Oli!”

“But it’s not that bad! Maybe it just seems bad now but she’ll get over this phase, or whatever —”

“She won’t. You know she won’t. It doesn’t make any sense. We have to be prepared.”

“Prepared for what?” He almost shouted it.

“It’s unfair to her if we don’t give her the help she needs. She can’t live alone anymore.”

Then go live with her! He thought it — but held back from saying the words. It made sense, but he knew it was unfair. Why ask her to do something he wouldn’t do himself? Fiona’s face changed as if he had said it aloud, though. Her eyebrows arched, questioning him, and then her features softened, as if she pitied her brother. She wanted to comfort him.

“Look,” she said. “There’s this place. It’s just outside the city.”

“Oh, because you’ve done some research?”

“It’s not too expensive and it would be closer for both of us. It’s set up like an apartment so she’d still keep her autonomy, but there’s medical staff on call —”

“Stop, please.”

“I’m just saying we can look into it and put her name on the waiting list, for when she’s ready —”

“Stop. I don’t need to hear this.”

“You don’t need to hear this?”

“No. And I can’t believe you’ve been thinking about it behind Mom’s back. It’s disrespectful to her.”

“Oh, don’t be a dick! I’m just trying to find a solution —”

“By trying to place her into some home.”

“By helping her. By helping us! That’s what people do, you know.”

“You want to get rid of her!”

“Well, I’m sorry, Oliver, but I go up to visit her as often as I can and I help out as much as I can and it’s just not enough.” Her eyes were glossed over in tears, now. Oliver felt like looking away, as if he was seeing something he shouldn’t. Something private.

“It’s just not enough,” she said again, sighing deeply.

“What are you insinuating.” The words caught in his throat, he almost choked. He felt angry — at Fiona, at himself.

“I’m not insinuating anything,” she said. “I’m trying to be realistic.”

Oliver started sobbing, quite suddenly. He tried to hold back the tears, which made them look so painful Fiona started crying as well, out of sympathy. Oliver’s shoulders jerked up and down and he gripped the counter with both his hands. All his body shook with heavy, hurting hiccups. He let out a deep, anguished moan, as if all the air had been pushed out of him. It was like a cry of anguish that wanted to be let out from somewhere broken within him, muffled and awful.

“I’m sorry,” Fiona said. “I’m so sorry. I wish... I wish there was another way. Something better...”

Oliver turned his back to her and grabbed a kitchen towel to wipe his eyes. He turned around again. His face glistened, boiled raw under the skin.

“She can’t come here,” he said. His voice was unequal. He was out of breath. “I can’t take care of her. I just... I couldn’t do it.”

Fiona placed her hand on her brother’s hand on the counter.

“I know, Oli. I know.”

They stared at each other with eyes wet and burning.

“It’s the right thing to do,” said Fiona. “I really think so.”

“I know,” Oliver said. He breathed deeply, filling his entire body with air, trying to get rid of the overwhelming dread, which still made him shake with spasmodic sobs. “I just wish she could get better.”

“Is it okay if I sleep here tonight?” Fiona asked.

“Yes,” he said. “Of course it’s okay.”

A Ghost

{This was another short exercise for the creative writing course I'm taking. We had to write a story inspired by some old pictures provided by the teacher. Unfortunately, I can't find the picture I chose online, so I hope the story works on its own as well.}

Masha was certain that the hand had not been there when the picture was taken.

No one else dared give an opinion. It was hard to be sure; taking that picture had been a hectic process.

Young Alexei, the photograph’s subject, hadn’t helped. He was quite afraid and spent most of the afternoon crying and trying to rip off his miniature uniform.

The camera was a foreign, scary object to him with its ogling brass lens, its creaking bellows, and the spectacular explosions of magnesium. Without mentioning the mustachioed photographer who disappeared behind the black curtain like a bad imitation of Masha’s peek-a-boo game.

They were lucky to get one decent photograph of him — haunted or not.

How Masha shrieked when she saw the picture. They must have heard her all the way to Saint Petersburg.

“My poor boy! My poor boy!”

The count tried to calm her, but she refused to listen.

“Some ghost came for his soul! My poor boy!” she cried. “We almost lost him to the DEVIL!” And so on. She was completely hysterical. It went on for days.

Masha even had her idea about whose ghost it was:

The picture had been taken in an unused room in the South wing, where one of the count’s great aunts had hanged herself over half-a-century ago. Masha imagined the camera had managed to capture an image of the great aunt’s hand, back from the dead, trying to snatch her little boy away.

To be honest, in the photograph, it looks like that hand is trying to make sure little Alexei doesn’t fall off the table he’s standing on. Besides, it’s so pale, it could be just a trick of the light — more like the ghost of a hand than the hand of a ghost. Someone could’ve simply painted it in.

The count and his family moved out of the dacha before winter. It had become impossible for Masha to live there anymore, and she made sure everyone knew it.

Meanwhile, rumors that the house was haunted began to spread through the country.

So that’s how I managed to buy the dacha for such a low price.

But come, now, let’s continue our visit. Would you like to see the South wing?

Montréal -40c

they set off in the night

north-bound, to higher ground

treading the ice-laced, crunching streets

the lonely lit windows of skyscrapers

suspended above them

and the long beams of revolving light

from the roof of Place Ville Marie

searching the steam over the city

they tried to make it to more hospitable hills

god, it was cold

Murder

I realize what day it is as soon as I wake up. I dread it already.

My eyes are still closed shut but I feel the morning light burning white through my eyelids. I’m usually awake at this hour, but sleep has only slightly pulled its soft wings apart. I can still feel their soft load weighing down on me, holding me tight against the bed like a soft push, a second gravity.

The kids will be up soon. Maybe they are awake already. How long before they realize? Before they come crashing into my room? I’d rather they find out on their own, my surprise will be easier to fake that way. Maybe they won’t even notice.

Please, make it last a little longer. The sheets throw back my sleep-warmth at me, pack me in tight like the silken cocoon of some exotic caterpillar. Maybe I will emerge with wings, fly away to some inconsequential place.

The day ahead keeps nagging at me from the back of my brain. The long drive to their father’s new place. The kids look forward to seeing him again. I’m going to have to pretend to be mildly happy. I sense a vague stirring of nausea in the pit of my stomach.

First I’ll have to deal with the kids this morning, about what I did. I had to do it on the same day so the kids know what happened, so the excitement of seeing their father again will make them forget about it.

Finally, I hear it: the eager thump! thump! thump! of the kids running up the stairs. Both of them. I know from the irregular cadence.

“Mommy! Mommy!”

My bedroom door bursts open. My eyes open to full blinding daylight.

The split second of calm before the storm. The time it takes them to cross the space of floor between the door and my bed. How I revel in the delicate peace of that moment.

Then comes the crash. The flood of cold air rushing under the sheets, goosebumps cover my legs. Tommy hugs both my thighs with his little arms, buried in the fleeting warmth. Alice is already sitting on my stomach, staring at me wide-eyed. Is it horror or excitement?

“MOMMY!”

Either she’s about to tell me today is the day she sees her father again, or—

“The dog is dead!”

I screw up my face in an expression of concerned surprise.

“The dog is dead?!”

Couldn’t have fooled an adult, but I think she buys it.

Yes, the dog is dead. I killed it. I killed it because I was sick of having to walk it and clean it and feed it. I killed it because their father bought it for them and I had to take care of it. I poisoned its food last night so we would find it dead this morning, no questions asked. Or not too many, anyhow. I hope they’re not too traumatized.

I should’ve killed their father instead.

Seen Through a Window

{Hello all! I'm happy to announce that I'm taking an evening creative writing class in Bristol, which means I'm forced to cut back on all those long-winded ideas and write short, experimental exercises. I'm reminded of all those good times we had in our Marianopolis meetings! Our first homework assignment was "Seen Through a Window", like we did on the blog all those months ago. Here's what I wrote... N.B. I won't be tagging this as "away" because, although I wrote it away from home, it's not specifically about being abroad.}

*

I was interested in Don Miguel from a very young age, because Don Miguel was a writer, and that’s what I wanted to be. I was never good at sports, and my mother had always told me I was destined to become a famous man of letters.

Don Miguel wasn’t really renowned internationally, but he wrote sufficiently popular novels in an energetic, manly prose — reflected in titles like The Furious Commandante, Walking on Burning Suns, and Death and the Queen’s Gardener — to be something of a celebrity in the town where we lived. My father owned the town’s hotel. Don Miguel rented from him a small, one story guesthouse, which served as his studio.

One day — I was about probably 11 or 12 — as I was watering the flower bed of peonies that grew at the edge of the hotel gardens, I noticed that the guesthouse window was wide open. I approached and peeped inside, noticing that a peculiar odor, a kind of tangy sweetness, was mingling with the smell of the peonies. The window’s angle only offered a limited view inside: the opposite window with its curtains closed, a patch of tiled floor, a rickety chair in front of a wooden desk, a large black typewriter on the desk with spindly metallic strands holding the keys and a sheet of paper jutting out from the top, an ashtray with a cigarette still burning in it, spewing a thin plume of smoke that swirled and dissolved halfway to the ceiling.

Then, to my surprise, a naked woman walked into view. She was thin and inconceivably beautiful. It was the first time I ever saw a naked woman other than my mother. I made sure the hedge covered me and stared, hot blood thumping in my ears.

The naked woman went over to the typewriter. She took the lit cigarette, put it in her mouth, and bent down over the desk, giving me a marvelous view of her narrow backside.

I stood there, awestruck, frozen stiff. The hard, cold hose was still my hand, spurting water at the fat, fragrant peonies.

She started to type fast on the typewriter. I heard a man’s voice, imperious, from the other side of the room: “Make the dialogue more intense, guapa. Make it funny, like when I tell you terrible things and you answer with that sarcastic tone.” It was Don Miguel.

The girl typed away, sucking on her cigarette.

Soon, my mind became less crowded with the image of the woman’s naked beauty, and I realized that Don Miguel was not the author of his novels. This girl had written The Furious Commandate, Walking on Burning Suns, and Death and the Queen’s Gardener. Despite never having read any of these books, I felt cheated.

Then, it struck me that this woman was also Don Miguel’s lover, and that the faint, vaguely sickening odor that drifted out of the open window was the smell of sex.