The Mind's Eye: CBC Literary Awards Winners 2001-2006

The Mind’s Eye

The Mind’s Eye CBC Literary Awards Winners 2001–2006

ecw press

Copyright © Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 2008 Published by ECW Press, 2120 Queen Street East, Suite 200, Toronto, Ontario, Canada m4e 1e2 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any process — electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise — without the prior written permission of the copyright owners and ECW Press.

library and archives canada cataloguing in publication The mind’s eye: CBC literary awards winners 2001–2006. Published as part of the Canada Council’s 50th anniversary. Winning short stories, travel writing, creative non-fiction and poetry from 2001–2006. Includes 3 texts translated from French. isbn 978-1-55022-832-8 1. Canadian literature (English)—21st century. i. Canada Council ii. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation ps8251.1.c33 2008

c810.8’006

c2008-900097-8

This book is set in Sabon and Trade Gothic Cover and Text Design: Tania Craan Typesetting: Mary Bowness Production: Rachel Brooks Printing: Gauvin The publication of The Mind’s Eye has been generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada, by the Ontario Arts Council, by the OMDC Book Fund, an initiative of the Ontario Media Development Corporation, and the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (bpidp).

distribution canada: Jaguar Book Group, 100 Armstrong Ave., Georgetown, on l7g 5s4 united states: Independent Publishers Group, 814 North Franklin Street, Chicago, il 60610 Printed and bound in Canada on 100% post-consumer recycled fibre.

Table of Contents Acknowledgements

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Introduction — Kim Echlin

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2001 Poems for Carl Hruska — Erin Noteboom Poetry Between Wars — Camilla Gibb Short Story

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A Desert Romance — David Tycho Travel Writing

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2002 Once a Murderer: Poems for Three Voices — Zoë Landale Poetry The Last Shot — Leon Rooke Short Story

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63

Dents in the Laurentians — Roger Greenwald Travel Writing

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2003 Selections from Muybridge’s Horse — Rob Winger Poetry The Lost Boy — Jane Eaton Hamilton Short Story

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98

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Girl Afraid of Haystacks — Stephen Osborne Travel Writing

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2004 The Workshop — Asa Boxer Poetry

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The Point David Made Earlier — Michael Winter Short Story The Bus to Loja — Montana Jones Travel Writing

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2005 The Mind’s Eye — Alison Pick Poetry The Chorus — Erin Soros Short Story I, Witness — Kim Echlin Creative Non-Fiction

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162 170

2006 A Walker in the City — Méira Cook Poetry

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The People Who Love Her — Amy Jones Short Story

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The Occupations of Muriel Thompson — Leona Theis Creative Non-Fiction

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203

Translated from French How to See the Goldfish in the Golden Water of the Fishbowl — Kim Doré Poetry Gerard — Paul Labrèche Short Story

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Chicago to Montreal, Thirty-Threeand-a-Half Hours — Dyane Raymond Travel Writing Contributors

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Acknowledgements

This anthology celebrates the joining of CBC RadioCanada’s French- and English-language literary competitions in 2001, becoming the CBC Literary Awards / Prix littéraires Radio-Canada. These are Canada’s only awards for unpublished works in both French and English. Special thanks to our partners for their ongoing commitment to the CBC Literary Awards: The Canada Council for the Arts since 1997 and Air Canada’s enRoute magazine since 2001. This anthology also marks the 50th anniversary of the Canada Council for the Arts. Finally, special thanks to Bob Weaver, the founder of the CBC Literary Awards 30 years ago, whose influence on Canadian literature continues in the pages of this anthology. Sophie Cazenave Carolyn Warren CBC Literary Awards / Prix littéraires Radio-Canada

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Introduction

by Kim Echlin

When Robert Weaver conceived the CBC Literary Awards thirty years ago, he set out to encourage and celebrate Canadian literary talent. Over the decades, the competition has consistently discovered emerging voices in English and in French: Michael Ondaatje, Carol Shields, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Jacques Godbout, Pierre Turgeon, Monique Proulx, and many others. Writers love this competition because entries are read without the authors’ names and judged blind, on the merits of the writing alone. This unique literary competition in both languages is about writing, the beauty of the language, the interest of the subject matter. Canadian literature has changed in the last three decades from one that has often been preoccupied with what it means to be Canadian to its current explorations of how to tell stories from around the world. As I was reading the stories and poems in this anthology I thought about literary critic Northrop Frye’s deceptively simple question, “Where is here?” I was struck by the range of place names threading through the pages: Palestine, Oregon, Witchita, the Laurentians, California, Guatemala, Halifax, Calgary,

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Chicago, Phnom Penh. The writers in this anthology have created their stories out of a passionate curiosity about people and places from across time and geography. Jane Eaton Hamilton takes us into World War II Canadian Japanese internment camps; Camilla Gibb shows us a Palestinian student in New York; Erin Soros steps into the boots of British Columbia loggers in 1944; my own work witnesses to Cambodians after the genocide of the 1970s. This engagement with history and how it has shaped who we are, wherever we are, is as alive with references to bears and snow and Douglas firs as it is with references to Dante and Buddhism and Aristotle. The best writing tells the truth, and the writers in this volume absorb and imaginatively transform historical moment and far away places by listening to the stories they have found everywhere. The writer no longer sets out from home to discover stories and bring them back. The writer learns to be at home anywhere. Unforgettable characters move through these pages. Leon Rooke’s twin brother and sister trick the reader as wittily as any twins in literature and Michael Winter’s life-loving Julie gives the story’s narrator a glimpse of death. I am particularly fond of Leona Theis’ Muriel Thompson, the woman who transforms under her daughters’ gazes through incarnations of wife, typist, lace-maker, journalist, and stenographer toward a meditation on time in the miraculous ratio of her final days. The voice of the soldier in Erin Noteboom’s poetry tells memories of war and suffering in places “cold enough to crack stone.” The characters in these fictions and non-fictions are displaced by war, marriage, illness, spiritual hunger, exile, and travel. They may have been born anywhere, but their stories are reborn in what emerges as a peculiarly global, peculiarly Canadian imagination. When literary tradition is no longer confined to a single cultural or linguistic group, creative language can crack open and breathe. Zoë Landale breaks the inherent linearity of language with poetry that speaks simultaneously in three

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voices and Rob Winger creates a deeply visual language with layers of reference to light and photographic image acknowledging art’s struggle to hold an image with such lingering lines as “All across the frame, people have refused capture.” Alison Pick too leaps lightly to how language expresses truth in image describing a winter landscape where “The tongues of the trees are bare” and “Loss speaks in frost.” The writers in this anthology explore the world by finding the right word, the right rhythm, the right pause. French-language award winners are represented here by three writers, selected by the editor of this volume and translated into English. Questions of language are woven into the shimmering back stories of their texts. I love Kim Doré’s watery disappearing world in “l’eau rouge du bocal” in which the poet longs for the continuous invention of less ugly words (“il fallait sans cesse inventer des mots moins laids”). There is a humorous and melancholy longing in Paul Labrèche’s marginalized man thinking about le Grantamour d’Ariane in “Gerard.” Dyane Raymond’s travel piece, “Chicago to Montreal,” describes a human terrain of generations-old immigrants in which she says the land and language are separate: “America is not a language (English, French, Spanish, or anything else)…” If the best writing tells the truth, as I believe, then this anthology is full of truth, not the least of which is an underlying contemplation of the idea that here is where we are — in Canada, in the world — but also that here may be language itself, shifting in time and geography, finely wrought and bending its ear to the truth of arriving where we are now.

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2001

Poetry

Poems for Carl Hruska by Erin Noteboom

November 19, 1923 — January 5, 1997 Drawn from visits April—December 1996 SHE COMES TO MEET HIM

Omaha, Nebraska — April 1996 Most of a leg left on a hospital ship — the rock, the reek of ether. He learned to walk, after, but now he’s going back to bone, listing into old damage. They meet in the parlour. He sits and sets his cane to picket besides him, takes her untouched hand. The young researcher, he says — a charity. It might be the young lady, in a yellow dress, a perfume called Forest Lily, as if it were a different April and she had come to see him carried from the train. Outside, on Farnam Street, the tulips blown, the rain. 1

SNAPSHOT

Troop Transport — October 1944 He’s spent the morning below decks, practising to break a gun down blindfold — which never did come handy — but now, he’s leaning on the bow rail, him and Gawosky, who buys it early, hamming for someone with a camera — Who? I don’t remember — turning in that moment into flash and silver, into paper soft as Bible covers. Bright-edged, dapper. A decent boy.

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LETTER HOME

Troop Transport — October 1944 He’s heard that Kansas is a sea of grass, but leaning on the transport’s rail, he does not see it. The dragonfly green of wheat just up, or the baked-bread smell of fields in August — nothing like that. The Atlantic, all of it, is as he imagined whales. The great grey backs blow and break, roll down in deep dives. He was sick eleven days. But a man can get used to anything. Yesterday, the first death. The cook’s mate — a Negro, first he’s seen — who slipped and split his lamb’s wool head on the hard mess table. The kind of thing you don’t live down, or wouldn’t. They buried him pretty plain, though out here you couldn’t call it burying.

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BROWN VELVET

Wichita, Kansas — June 1943 Vivian wore brown velvet to my brother’s wedding. I liked it. Liked her in it. When I came back, she used to stroke my hair, say, soft, soft — nights when I couldn’t even shake.

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SILENT NIGHT

Ardennes — Christmas 1944 At midnight Angelus bells fall soft into the foxholes. Across the shattered field, someone is singing Stille Nacht. He takes aim at the sound. The perfect trees lean in, listen.

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NAMES

Ardennes — January 1945 The hardest thing was keeping track of names. The new ones, green, we lost so quick sometimes I never learned them, or learned two, you see, like Smith and Jones, and never straightened which was which. Checked the tags, but it didn’t fix in my mind — which was which.

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REST

Ardennes — January 1945 The hardest thing was sleep — that cold. Cold enough to crack stone. You couldn’t lie down in it — or even sit. Even the springs of the rifles slow.

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NIGHT

Ardennes — January 1945 The hardest thing was night, all white and the snow whipped up in devils. Or worse, still. That cold — you could hear everything. Trees would creak and crack like rifles. Voices, sometimes, words you couldn’t make out, or cattle, bawling to be milked.

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DREAMS

Ardennes — January 1945 In cold sleep his blood turned to velvet. He woke and couldn’t even shake, it was that thick. Once he knocked at a farmhouse where he hoped to steal some socks. No one came to the plain plank door. But then, he meant nothing by knocking, no more than a dog means, who turns three times into an ancient dream.

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MORNING

Ardennes — January 1945 You wouldn’t believe how beautiful it was. In the night the fog would freeze and in the morning everything was soft with it — ghosts of trees. We advanced into open fields the colour of apple blossom, delicate with blue shadows. Against that snow we stood out like deer. And then the shelling would start.

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WINTER WHITE

Ardennes — January 1945 Midafternoon in some nameless town a door bangs, a woman comes running, arms full of folded white. One sheet flies out behind her like a banner, and they understand. She’s giving them linens, winter camouflage. With no language, he thanks her, and she presses to him, weeping. When she runs he lifts his hands and finds a table cloth. Not lace, but that stiff stuff, cutwork. He cuts it with his bayonet. Pulls it over his head. Inside, he smells the starch, the ghost of iron.

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LETTER HOME

Ardennes — January 1945 I cannot write you where I am, besides Belgium. It is a pretty country. Our boots haven’t come, as I hoped last time I wrote. If you want to pray for something, pray for boots.

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LETTER FROM VIVIAN

February 1945 No news, really. It’s been cold. We lost a bull calf, born too early. Brought him into the kitchen, but still, he shook himself out. White star on his forehead. A wet red coat.

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NIGHT PATROL

Ardennes — February 1945 Snow sluffs off pine boughs — you got to know the sound, the kind of crust — which will creak and which will tick. Got so you’d move darn close to silence.

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EXCHANGE

Ardennes — February 1945 Once, on night patrol, they came nose to nose with German scouts. Fog curled through the thick trees. The moon shone like a newsreel. What was there to say? An exchange of cigarettes, of silence. The moon slips on. The stars take up their fixed positions.

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SPRING

Western Germany — March 1945 Melt trickles into foxholes. He wakes and bails it with his helmet, lays back down in it. Sleep drops out under him like rotten snow. When he wakes, dawn is pink and birds are singing. The air stinks of something burning. The birds are strange birds. He does not know them.

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THE NEST

Western Germany — March 1945 Sully stumbled on this nest of bumble bees and flapped like he was learning to fly. He drew them right to me — God, how we laughed, strafed by that little army.

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LIBERATION

Cologne, Germany — March 1945 Cologne was the first place we saw Germans. Civilians, I mean. The whole town twitched like a curtain. A sniper tumbled from a rooftop turned out to be a tow-head kid of maybe ten. It was Sully who got him. Can you imagine?

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WOUND

Western Germany — March 1945 It wasn’t the first, but it was the first to go so deeply into him — through the shin, between those long fine bones, their arch flying open — a sudden eye —

Stupid, to get hit so near the end. There isn’t any story to it, if that’s what you’re hoping.

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FIRST AID

Western Germany — March 1945 Black scissors swing from the medic’s wrist.

Vivian, the morphine is the colour of your hair.

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LETTER FROM VIVIAN

March 1945 The wheat’s come up, first thing through the snow. So green, darling, dreaming of you.

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LETTER HOME

Field Hospital, Germany — March 1945 Cross your fingers and I will be home soon. I am hit but it isn’t bad — a million-dollar wound, which means the leg — it isn’t bad. I’ve been moved twice and am now in field hospital, real civilization — clean sheets and morphine.

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A BIGGER LOSS

Omaha, Nebraska — June 1996 Vivian’s smell is gone from everything except her pillow. That’s a bigger loss than a leg, if you want to know.

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PURPLE HEART

Hospital Ship, English Channel — March 1945 The medal-pinners came to Dover to meet the ship. I remember, we were s’posed to lie at attention. A man could die, and they’d only say how fine his attention — Never put my name on anything, would you, Erin?

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HOMECOMING

Omaha, Nebraska — April 1945 For nine months, Vivian watched the eyes of neighbours’ houses. Saw the service stars swing on small red banners. Saw the slow draw of blinds in the broad grey weather. Now the train judders under Union Station. The boiler huffs and shushes and a machine begins to speak. She waits to see the damage.

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NEWS

Wichita, Kansas — July 1945 Vivian dashes in from thunder, newspaper soaring over her head. She stands in the kitchen, dripping, laughing. She kisses me. Her fingers are inky, her face printed with news.

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WEDDING

Wichita, Kansas — July 1945 A hot day, dusty. The boys still in their velvet haircuts, the church all shut and thick with broken colour. I remember three men fainted.

Vivian wore satin. The door behind her opened and she shone there like a parachute.

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WEDDING SNAPSHOT

Wichita, Kansas — July 1945 He’s in uniform, all dark detail: starched crease and pointed collar, medals grey with colour. She’s in satin, more white than clapboard, bright as glass, as mirror. Her hair is moving silver — the wind blows it in a spray like water. She’s twisting to save her veil, laughing, lifting a hand from which dark roses tumble. He has not yet turned with her, still looks through the camera. Their shoes dusty. His open mouth a small dark seed.

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THE DAY WE WON THE WAR

Wichita, Kansas — August 1945 It was just after my wedding. I was still learning to walk. Round the side of the house, Vivian puts out the laundry — screech of pulley, then the snick, snick of pins. I hold to the drainpipe and hoist rag and kerosene to a nest of yellow jackets. Orange slants through the oily smoke and the sheets snap. When I went to war, it was simple as handkerchiefs.

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2001

Short Story

Between Wars by Camilla Gibb

he’s given up the smell of mangoes, their sticky sweetness carried on grey clouds of diesel smoke, for an alien world of tar, cement, and heavy green weighted down with round drops of rain. He is strung taut like a washing line between two worlds, his hopes, his dreams, his fidelity and obligations all hanging limp, like wet laundry, like flags of the United Nations on a windless day. It is New York, 1967, and Amir is dipping a hard-boiled egg in Tabasco sauce. Taking bite after small bite, thinking of war, thinking of home. “Learn the law,” his mother, with her gold teeth and lame leg, had insisted. “But I need to be here to be of help,” he had protested. She’d been saying this for years. “Your brothers are here.” Amir had looked around the table at his brothers and sighed. Shakil, his elder

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brother, had lost an eye in an explosion at a ceramics factory. Anwar was too eager to fight, and Sami was only eleven years old. “For Daddy,” his mother had said, patting his hand. For Daddy, Amir left the West Bank for New York City to take up the offer of a graduate scholarship at Columbia. He arrived at jfk in the late summer of 1967 carrying a cardboard box and a briefcase and wearing his best pair of shoes. The box contained two suits his mother had sewn together under the tin roof of their makeshift home, a grey one of Egyptian cotton for summer, and a heavy brown wool suit for a winter harsher than the bounds of her imagination would permit. He hugged the briefcase that his father and his father’s brothers had presented to him with as much ceremony as a bride at a Palestinian wedding, against his chest, as if it were a child. It was black Italian leather, and had been specially ordered, his name, Amir Mahmoud, embossed in gold in italicized Latin script. It kept his passport, his visa, his maps, and photos of his family — his mother’s gold smile at the center of her world of men — safe and secure. He slept on a mildewed mattress in a hostel beside six other men who had all come to New York seeking fortune, fame, refuge or anonymity. Black, white, and Asian. First names only. He was the only Arab, the only Muslim among them, and they snickered when he bent down on all fours to pray. A man named Dave from Arkansas called him Swami, asked him what kind of shit magic lantern he’d rubbed to end up in this hell hole. Amir picked the lumps of pork byproduct from his plate of wieners and beans and prayed in the toilet, his knees sticking on dried urine, his head nearly smacking the porcelain bowl. A week after his arrival, Amir plucked a pink index card off a bulletin board outside the Columbia housing registry. “Room for good Muslim brother,” the notice read. He took photos of his family to the appointment. A gap-toothed

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Nigerian man answered the door of the top apartment in a five-story walkup in Greenwich Village. The Nigerian man was once a prince, but now, here in New York, where he lived with his two wives, he drove a taxi. Black and yellow. Pimps and diplomats and cops and ex-cons all asking the same thing: “Where you from?” “I thought they didn’t allow that in America,” said Amir, puzzled. The younger wife offered tea, the elder offered cake. “How is it you could bring them both?” “They are sisters,” the man laughed, conspiratorially. “So one has sponsored the other. You see? There are ways around every system. Even in America.” The older one had a bedroom, the younger one slept on a pullout couch in the living room that was also the kitchen. The other bedroom, with a mattress on the floor and a chair by a barred window overlooking a dark alleyway, was Amir’s to rent, if he wanted it, which he did. For ten dollars extra, he could take his dinner with them, eat okra till the end of time. “Delicious?” the younger one asked him. “Mmm,” Amir piped through gummy lips, scraping back his chair after the first seven nights of okra. He closed the door to his room, lay down on his mattress, and cracked open a shiny new American history textbook that had cost him more than six pairs of shoes would have cost at home. On his first day of classes, Amir had sat quietly in a seminar on Middle Eastern politics, sandwiched between a bookish woman who’d never left America and a young man with a yarmulke sitting on his bald head. The professor pegged the Arab and the Jew immediately, inviting them to stage a debate at the end of term. Amir would defend Zionism; Shel would argue that Zionism was racist. Amir was shocked and confused. He couldn’t possibly. Is that what they do in America? Play games? Don costumes? Make puppet shows out of wars? It seemed to be, because as

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soon as he’d dropped the course and enrolled in American political history, the professor decided they were going to stage the Civil War. Black students defending the interests of slave owners, white students fighting for emancipation. Amir, obviously more black than white in his professor’s eyes, was lumped in with the slave owners. Strange games. Bloodless wars in American classrooms. He’d make a mockery of their war, if it was required, but there was no way he could do that to his own. “They have no idea what it is to live through a war!” he said to his Nigerian friend over dinner. “They have no idea that it is not just an exercise in philosophical debate. It has its own logic, unarticulated momentum. It has fuel — fury and hate.” “We’re in America now, my man,” said the Nigerian. “We left that behind us. We came for this better life,” he shrugged. “Peace.” “For this better life,” he mutters to himself on a cold morning in November at a coffee shop near the campus, where he eats breakfast now, and sometimes dinner too, when he can’t force down any more okra. “You Italian or something?” the waitress asks him. He normally hates this kind of question, all the variations on this question that have been asked of him in the months since his arrival. But he hears something different this time. He hears a twang like a harp at the back of her throat when she speaks, he hears a voice that matters more than the words it speaks. “Greek?” she asks, trying again. “Palestinian,” he says quietly to his grilled cheese sandwich. “I’ve never heard of that.” “It’s in the Middle East.” “You gotta war going on there, right?” He nods.

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“That why you’re here? I mean in New York, not this dump specifically.” He nods again, in lieu of offering an explanation. She refills his coffee cup. He looks at the pale freckled skin of her forearm as she pours and watches as she wanders down the rest of the counter, sideways, doing the same for the other customers. She is plain, she is pretty, she has braces on her top teeth but she is not ashamed to smile. Her nametag says Marianne. He goes back to the coffee shop the following Thursday for a glimpse of the girl and the Thursday special. She greets him with a mouthful of facts about Palestine. He looks at her with surprise. “Funk and Wagnalls,” she smiles coyly. He’s still confused. “Encyclopedia,” she says. He’s touched by her curiosity. “Most people don’t know that much about Palestine,” he says. “Well, it’s all there in the book. Except the thing is, it was published in the fifties, so it’s not exactly up to date.” “But you know something about the background then.” “I was kind of hoping you could fill me in on what’s happened since.” “It’s not a very happy story.” “Who needs happy?” she says, gesturing wildly. “You think I do, just because I’m a girl?” “I didn’t mean that. . . .” “So why won’t you tell me?” “I will tell you,” he says, lowering his voice. “But not here.” “Are you asking me out then?” “Uh —” he stammers. “ok,” she says. “Name the time and place.” “I can name the time. But I don’t know any place.” “What time then?”

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“Tomorrow?” he says. “Five o’clock?” “Fine. At my place.” He swallows hard while she writes the directions down on a paper napkin. He wears his summer suit the next day, with a white shirt but no tie, like an American. He doesn’t know what to bring — an appropriate gift — so he asks the younger wife and she says, “Take some candy, take something sweet. The girls, they like sweet things,” and when he closes the door behind him, he hears the two women laughing together. They’re laughing at him. They must think him a fool, and he does feel like a fool today, but his self-consciousness abates when he enters a Lebanese bakery that he’s found in the Yellow Pages and speaks Arabic to the woman at the counter as she wraps up a paper box full of sweeter than sweet baklava trembling in honey. She wraps the box in pink paper tied with a bow. “For a girl?” the woman asks him. He nods in embarrassment. “A nice Arab girl?” she persists. “American.” The Lebanese woman tsks with disapproval. “Loose morals,” she says. “If I were your mother,” she says, wagging a crooked finger and sending him on his way. Marianne looks different out of her uniform. Her hair is loose and golden and she’s wearing a short dress covered in polka dots. He presents his gift to her and she blushes. “Come in,” she says, gesturing toward the couch. “My mother,” she says, introducing him to a woman in a wheelchair by the window. “You’ve grown,” her mother says. “Uh —” he stammers. “Just ignore her. She’s had a stroke. Gets things all mixed up.” He smiles politely, uncomfortably, and sits down on the

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sofa. He pulls at his trouser leg because he’s gained twenty pounds since the suit was made. “What pretty pastries,” Marianne exclaims from the kitchen. “I’m making tea. Or would you like something stronger?” “Tea is fine,” he nods and smiles again at the confused woman in the wheelchair. Marianne brings in a tray and sets it down on the coffee table. “Tea, Mother?” she asks, raising the teapot. Her mother sticks out her tongue and pulls a face like a child. “Vodka,” she says. “Ma, it’s too early for that. Before dinner, ok? I’ll give you a vodka before dinner.” Her mother winces and looks away. “She had a stroke two years ago,” Marianne explains. “So I brought her up here to live with me. I’m from Kansas, you know, like Dorothy. Somewhere over the rainbow.” Amir looks at her blankly. “Wow,” says Marianne. “It’s a movie. Well, anyway, I moved up here about five years ago. Long story. I wanted to be an actress, but, well, it’s my teeth,” she says, pointing at her mouth. “I only managed to get one commercial and it was for Tide and I had to play this ugly housewife who uses some inferior brand of laundry soap and my husband leaves me for this new woman on the block who uses Tide. I didn’t know they were casting me for the part of the ugly one until I got to the set and they kept saying ‘Show us your teeth.’ Nice, huh?” “But you’re not ugly at all,” says Amir. “That’s sweet of you to say, but these teeth,” she says, pointing at her mouth again. “So now I’ve got to wear these for two years and that means I can’t do any acting at all.” “That is a shame,” says Amir, amazed by America. “What do you call these?” she asks, lifting the plate off the coffee table. “Baklava.” “Pretty. Don’t you think so, Mother? Would you like to

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try one of these?” Her mother sticks her tongue out again and repeats, “Vodka.” Marianne rolls her eyes and stands up. “I want to show you something,” she says, gesturing to Amir. “Come on.” He follows her into the lavender den of her bedroom. She has a white lace bedspread over her bed and a large stuffed animal that looks part dog, part dinosaur perched upon her pillow. She’s taped a map to the wall, a large map of the Middle East. “I bought this the other day,” she says, tapping the map. “I was hoping you might show me Palestine.” He’s touched again, surprised by her openness, her curiosity. “Well,” he begins, putting his fingertips on the map. “Here is east Jerusalem, which we claim as ours. Here is Jordan, most of which we consider Palestine. The West Bank, the Golan Heights, both of which were seized by Israel in June —” “Draw the borders for me,” Marianne says, handing him a pen. “ok,” he says, hesitantly taking the pen. He draws a bold black line, a line he knows from memory, a line he knows by heart; he draws Palestine onto a map in the lavender bedroom of a girl from Kansas and it gives him more satisfaction, more relief than he has felt in months. He feels better in New York at this moment than he has felt since he arrived. “There,” he says with satisfaction. “But all these borders are contested. War here, war here, and war here.” “War,” she repeats. “What’s the worst thing that ever happened to you?” she asks him then. He lifts his shirt, shows her a belly riddled with scars. She gasps because she is a girl who loves tough men, because she is a girl who longs for a hero, she gasps and falls in love in that instant, wants to kiss his stomach and see him punch out one of the assholes who sits in the

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coffee shop after his shift and drinks until he cannot restrain himself from trying to untie her apron string, to drag her down onto his lap. Because he is a man who didn’t grow up with this American romance, Amir doesn’t know what to make of her reaction. Is she horrified? Is she sickened? Does she think he is at fault? He is embarrassed to have been so bold. But she puts her palms against his shoulders then and leans her whole body against him. He remains still while she kisses him tenderly between the sparse black hairs on his chest. He wants to laugh. He is stunned. He doesn’t understand her reaction. “What’s the worst thing that ever happened to you?” he asks her, finally recovering, the pink of her lipstick still wet at the nape of his neck. “Vodka!” her mother shouts from the other room. They both laugh and she leans back against the map where contested borders frame her like a halo. She pulls him into her polka dots. He leans into her, so close her spots are no longer black and white but one undulating field, a no man’s land of grey where the pepper and the sweet of worlds colliding invoke a sense of déjà-vu.

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2001

Travel Writing

A Desert Romance by David Tycho

“This is my spiritual center,” came a whisper from behind me at a gas station in Fields, Oregon. I released the gas pump lever to see a bearded ascetic with an eclectic sense of fashion standing a few feet from my car. “I beg your pardon?” “This is my spiritual center,” he repeated. His declaration of faith seemed premature in our seconds-old relationship, and his glazed expression suggested extended stints in the desert sun. Years later, however, the only differences between us are our wardrobes, and our expressions — mine being the unglazed one. In the days following our meeting, after I’d ventured out into the Alvord Desert near the Oregon-Nevada border, the gas station guru’s abstract confession began to take form. It wasn’t that I

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doubted his sanity — it was very simply that I hadn’t seen what he had seen. Now I know. There are places to which we must return to soothe and restore ourselves. I’d always believed that peace of mind was not contingent on place, but the sensations I experienced on my first and subsequent trips to the steppes and deserts in the rain shadow of the Cascades and Sierra Nevada have planted a new idea in my mind: place is important. And I go. I often wonder how this arid landscape seduced me, with its callused and weathered hands. It has successfully repelled most visitors with an arsenal of insects, reptiles and weather. The locals aren’t exactly bent on claiming their share of the tourist market either. There are strong arguments for avoiding this quintessential nowhere, but as Paul Theroux mused, nowhere is a place — and to this place I must go. My courtship of this ugly step-sister of the more colourful deserts of Arizona and New Mexico began quite innocently, through a period of correspondence of sorts. One sopping wet Vancouver evening in November, I was leafing through my dog-eared Rand McNally, running my hands over maps of dry places hoping for illusory relief from the rain. My finger followed a highway into an area not yet defaced by the graffiti of geographers. I was David Thompson looking at an early fur trader’s map: one on which the lines fade and disappear into expanses of yellowed paper. To Rand McNally the area possessed nothing worthy of mention. This struck me as either an embarrassing cartographic blunder, or a grave reality. Flipping to a bigger and more detailed map revealed little more than a sparse sprinkling of rather intimidating names: Crack-in-the-Ground, Devil’s Garden, Carson Sink, Stinkwater, Rattlesnake Creek and Coyote Dry Lake to name a few. The larger scale only magnified and emphasized the expanses of uninhabited space, increasing both my interest and apprehension. A trip to the library turned up brief entries in otherwise thick guidebooks, and geological and meteoro-

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logical data guaranteed to put even the most enthusiastic armchair traveler into a coma. The less I found, however, the more I wanted. So into the yellowed paper I went. Rather than drive the hypnotically uneventful and congested Interstate 5 south from Vancouver, I plotted a course east over the Cascades and into the Similkameen and Okanagan Valleys, from where I would head south through the parched coulees of central Washington, before finally penetrating the unloved expanses of my ultimate goal: the Great Basin. I would ease myself into the void. Coming over the Cascades into B.C.’s Okanagan Valley is to leave a virtual rainforest and enter a region that gets as little rain as Phoenix, Arizona, and often tops 100 degrees. But alas, technology has replaced the region’s desert benchlands with viticulture and water slides. Although charmed by this desert Cinderella, I still desired her nasty step-sister. Leaving the orchards and vineyards behind, the valleys spill out onto the Columbia-Snake River Basin, a desert-like environment in its own right. Sadly, however, damming the Columbia for power and irrigation has taken the desert out of the desert, and wheat farms, hydro lines, roads and reservoirs now compete with sagebrush and prickly pear cactus for domination of the landscape. The odds are stacked against the sagebrush. Exiting the damned Columbia Basin and heading farther south to the northern reaches of Great Basin is to sail onto a sagebrush ocean bereft of development. The counties hugging the Oregon-Nevada-Idaho borders boast the fewest residents and visitors in the lower 48 states. I go for hours on paved roads, and days on dirt ones, without seeing another vehicle. Saturated with the country and western twangs that monopolize the airwaves, I turn off the radio and sing my old favorite blues tunes until my throat is dry and my repertoire exhausted. Farther along, I resort to songs I make up as I go, a trick my four-year-old son taught me, but I stop when I

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catch a glimpse of myself in the rear-view mirror. A glazed expression tells me it’s time to pull over and set up camp amongst the greasewood. Note to self: bring a warmer sleeping bag next time. The extremes in temperature (the record being a 100degree difference on the same date in different years) keep the retirees and tourists in California and Arizona, and scant rainfall makes farming virtually impossible. So, except for the occasional rancher, hunter, recluse, new-age mystic or Bureau of Lands Management lackey, the area rebuffs humankind. But it’s the very lack of conversational opportunities that keeps me coming back year after year. A sign at the base of Steens Mountain warns, “Storm area ahead. Weather may change from clear to blizzard in a few minutes. No shelter available.” No kidding. In August I’ve awoken to frozen water while camped on the fault block mountain, followed by daytime highs in the basin of over a hundred. In mid-June, I climbed up to 8,000 feet on Steens to escape the Alvord Desert blast furnaces 4,000 feet below. A snowstorm sent me scampering back down towards the desert floor. On another spring trip, punishing winds and hailstorms snapped poles and ropes and tore my heavy tarps to shreds, forcing me to spend the night in the safety of my car. The next morning I awoke to the first of a seemingly endless number of successive days of blue skies, cute little puffy white clouds, and mollifying breezes. When fear fades to respect, and respect to complacency, the desert often administers a meteorological spanking. I humbly heed these warnings, reminding myself that outstanding opportunities for solitude are also outstanding opportunities for death. But it is out on the dry lakebeds, or “playas” to the initiated, that the Great Basin is distilled into its purest form. From the Great Salt Lake Desert of Utah, to the Black Rock in Nevada, to the Alvord in Oregon — these, the flattest

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places on earth, are where a profound silence permeated my marrow, a sensation I’ve been seeking ever since. Walking towards the center of a playa is to enter a still and reticent environment where not a single protrusion provides enough resistance for the wind to sound its presence. Stepping out onto these vast, lifeless flats has been likened to stepping onto a stage. There is a feeling of vulnerability, and after walking a hundred yards out towards the center, the tendency is to want to retreat backstage — to return to the safety of “shore,” although the lakes that once filled these basins dried up thousands of years ago. The total lack of things familiar is intimidating at first, although an hour later the void becomes almost comforting in its predictability. I’m tempted to remove a bone that mars the uniformity — a thought so absurd I break the silence with a laugh. Miles out from the last stands of greasewood and iodine bush, the playa appears so vast it equals the sky in the visual equation of the landscape. I sense the expanses of cracked clay ever so slightly sloping away from me on all sides. For the first time in my life, the spherical form of the planet is no longer represented by a basketball-sized globe in a school classroom, or by television images taken from space — I can actually see it. And far away from the material accouterments I use back home to make a statement about who I am and what I represent, this world frames and accents my insignificance in massive and silent space, and it deeply humbles me. I decide to eat lunch, but with no rock or tree to tie up to, my legs have to be told three times to stop before they obey. My luncheon on a five-hundred-square-mile billiard table is an image far more fantastic than any painted by Salvador Dali. But while Dali painted Surrealism, the ancient peoples of this land lived it. Sagebrush sandals found in a cave near an immense castle-like caldera aptly named Fort Rock date human habitation of the area at almost 10,000 years. Today, a tiny reservation contains the Paiutes near the town of Burns.

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Here, last-ditch efforts to salvage their dignity and culture provide them with challenges far greater than surviving in the desert, which they did successfully for millennia. Remarkably the Paiutes haven’t disappeared as the early homesteaders had hoped, whereas broken down irrigation flumes and abandoned farmhouses mark the legacy of naively optimistic settlers. Roads meander out into the desert, only to fade and disappear like the men who built them. Respect came too late. I cannot help but marvel at the courage of the early explorers and settlers (despite their catastrophic effects on native populations) whose will alone could not cajole a living from unsympathetic soil and weather. Burns, a town commemorating the Scottish poet (Robert), expresses an expatriate’s homesickness — his attempt to put a familiar and comforting mark on a land so unlike the misty moors and highlands of his beloved Scotland. In spite of enormous differences, however, a pervasive melancholy connects the two places, and perhaps Burns is a fitting name after all. The current residents of the Great Basin are as varied as the spring temperatures. They range from Basque shepherds with dirty fingernails and manure stuck to the soles of their boots, to transplanted, manicured Portlanders with pressed white shirts and the latest edition of GQ under their arms. The general store in the hamlet of Frenchglen had served as a watering hole for local ranch hands for decades. The owner had to build an adjoining shack to sequester the cowpokes and their drinking habits from the occasional tourist making a pit stop en route to larger centers east or west. The store was sold, and the shack transformed into a restaurant serving sauvignon blanc and coq au vin. The cowboys have been banished. Time will tell if the restaurant is an omen, or just another case of foolhardy optimism in the desert. Down in Fields again, I stopped to blow off some dust and retreat from the mid-day sun, feeling neither like a mad dog nor an Englishman. Within minutes of sitting down on a chrome and cracked burgundy vinyl stool in a sun bleached

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and smoke stained cafe, an ex-rancher gone truck driver with sunglasses that pinched his large head informed me he’d done time in a state prison. Years before he’d brought his sweetheart to a bar, and some drunk buckeroo grabbed and rubbed her crotch. “I kicked the bastard in the head until he stopped moving, and if some guys hadn’t pulled me off, I’d have kept kicking until he stopped breathing,” he explained. “I don’t regret it, and I’d sure as hell do it again, too.” Then he invited me to stay with him at his trailer on the east side of the desert. He didn’t litter, he said, and the place was pretty clean. On the west side of the desert, my next stop, I came across a pair of motionless legs sticking out from under a 1947 Willys 4x4. I stopped to investigate and, after a minute of heel-gouging and squirming, a lanky red-bearded desert rat and two golden retrievers emerged. The rat had purple skin and a silver tooth that sparkled in the sunlight, and he had on the dirtiest clothes I’d ever seen, or likely ever will. I’d woken this family from their daily siesta (and they were cranky), but after shaking off the dust and cobwebs, the rodent offered me a slug of warm tequila and a cold beer. A few hours and slugs later, my resurrected friend was driving his Willys back and forth past a beer can set on a rock, taking shots at it with an immaculately polished silver pistol. In a moment of tenderness and trust, he offered me a few cracks at it. The next morning, I spotted a rattlesnake in a pile of rocks and called my purple friend over to have a look. I watched him tease it for a few seconds, and then catch it with his bare hands. Too small for a meal, the serpent narrowly missed the frying pan. Instead the snake charmer carefully prepared a terrarium in an abandoned cooler and placed the rattler inside, a present for his young nephew. “But before I give it to him, I got an idea,” he said. “I’m gonna take this here cooler home, and invite my buddy over for a beer.” He put the tequila bottle to his lips and tipped the bottom high in the air. “There’s a couple of cold ones in

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there,” he giggled, pointing at the occupied cooler. “Help yourself!” His bloodshot eyes opened wide and stared into mine. Then he spat, laughed, and coughed uncontrollably for minutes while kicking up a cloud of dust all around him. And after three weeks in the desert, I laughed right along with him. The bizarre had become familiar, and chardonnays a distant, other-life experience. Driving out of the Great Basin and up into the cool embrace of fir forests, I always wonder how and why these slightly masochistic adventures sustain my interest. Is it a romantic Hollywood or Nashville sketch of the Wild West I crave — a macho world of hard-drinking cowpokes who work backbreaking hours out on the range and eat beans and fresh venison cooked over an open fire? That might be part of the attraction, but given a choice, I’d be hard-pressed to give up hours at a word processor followed by scallops and pinot blanc. Is it the potential for spiritual growth that can be gleaned from the stoicism of desert solitude? There are numerous stories of the faithful having revelatory experiences in the silence of barren wastelands. But for me to pretend I’m a mystic or a Paiute shaman is silly, and insulting to those on real spiritual quests. Could I simply be attempting to find a peaceful place out of the rain? There are too many more hospitable places to blow some rust off for this to be the answer. Rational thinking eliminates all arguments in favor of setting off for this void, and once there, common sense screams to leave it. Some of my family and many of my friends can’t understand why I go. They act as if I’m betraying my west coast roots — as if I’m snubbing them and what they hold so dear for something far less worthy. They think I’m odd, and they worry about me. “Why do you bother? It can’t be fun,” they frequently say, and I have no satisfactory response. I feel like a man who has made a bad choice for a wife.

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She abuses, threatens, punishes and bullies me, yet I can’t leave her. She is rude, abrasive and inflexible to all who meet her, but I always defend her. My loyalty to her is constantly being tested and challenged by smug, head-shaking skeptics. “You don’t know her like I do,” is all the faithful man of a nasty wife can say. And everyone snickers. Except men who have loved this siren. They know that she possesses an alter ego seen only by those with faith, patience and resolve. Scoffers have never seen her kiss my eyes in the morning with pink, luminescent light. They will never see her disrobe and reveal her sublime night skies, nor will they ever witness her caress my blistered flesh with tender evening breezes. They will never hear the wind of her soul, nor breathe the scent of her profound whispers. During these fleeting moments she shows her grace, and enraptures me. As my old Dodge chugs out of the Great Basin and climbs back over the Cascades and onto increasingly congested and wet highways towards my home in Vancouver, I remember the words of the enlightened gas station guru. I clearly remember his unabashed statement of faith to me, a complete stranger, and how his glazed eyes told me they had seen things. It wasn’t that I doubted his sanity — it was simply that I hadn’t seen what he’d seen. But now I have.

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2002

Poetry

Once a Murderer: Poems for Three Voices by Zoë Landale

“As members of human society, perhaps the most difficult task we face daily is that of touching one another — whether the touch is physical, oral, emotional or imaginary. Contact is crisis. As the anthropologists say, ‘Every touch is a modified blow.’ The difficulty presented by any instance of contact is that of violating a fixed boundary, transgressing a closed category where one does not belong.” Anne Carson Men in the Off Hours

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ONCE A MURDERER Once a murderer held a door open for her. It was Supreme Court; they were returning modified after a break. She glanced at him, a Vietnamese in black polyester, not wanting to touch said, Thank you, and rustled by, chewing on acknowledging the good manners of someone who’d hacked a man to death. The sound, a witness said, a knife going into watermelon physical, oral The man she was there for was guarding witnesses. Every few months, she sees him at court or over coffee with eight of them crowded into a booth, listens to him swear and make jokes that ought to be totally unacceptable. And yet, as she did with the murderer who held the door, she scoots on by. She laughs, accepts

a closed category where one does not belong

he makes her free of the door marked “Authorized Personnel Only”

his crisp shirt, his clean trimmed fingernails. His wife’s picture on his desk.

& doesn’t that bite each time?

Her own husband on a line so frayed she threatens to cut it. But they honor their snapped-tight tie and tow it everywhere:

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red, luminous, awkward as a hot air balloon. Now, on the street corner, filthy snow against the curb, the other man tells her about an arrest he’s planning tonight, a sexual predator. His face lit-up, attention honed so fine it’s almost delight, though what he knows already lacerates; wait until after the interrogation. The four-year-old with gonorrhea —

Wind from the western mountains is a thin blade. Behind his head, the glacier holds its austere white witness saying what it always says to the sky.

they come encumbered

anthropologists say, ‘Every hawk, hurtling down

in early morning hours when he can’t sleep he tells himself, serve and protect

light & open arms

He hugs the woman goodbye. If her daughter ever asked what’s between them she would tell her a door. A knife.

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against the heart open

THE HUG When she sees him unexpectedly at the tire store, green coat and shiny tie with cartoon characters on it that no male in her family would wear, but she likes anyway because it’s his, he raises his arm in a C’mere and have a hug gesture.

where one does not belong

her brother’s elegant silks

she doesn’t even think transgressing

She slips into the half-circle of warmth he makes and looks up. welcomes his smell of soap, clean shirt He smiles down. Winter stretches until they stand at the edge oral, emotional of some larger place, sun-filled, a ravine below them another step would tumble them she wants in into. She basks on the edge. He carries the weight of so many victims’ stories, there’s darkness back of his eyes; maybe that’s why she plummets into them

a fixed boundary

bleakness x warmth: his face lights the way newspaper catches flame from a match

forgets to notice if they’re blue or green. Their clinging amid the smell of rubber, concrete and December cold is discomfiting. We should break away, she thinks,

embarrassing comfort

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but she’s always savored nestling close to the chest of a good-looking man

this man with dark marks under his eyes, thinning hair

and he seemed to be memorizing her face like an Indentikit sketch he hoped he’d never need, holding her like luck. She is not over him as she believed though she remembers her husband — any instance of contact his green coat almost the same colour smell of Christmas evergreen, and soft feel — bags of free popcorn She is afraid her friend standing behind them will chastise her later when they and don’t and don’t move apart. Every touch is a modified

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EYE CONTACT Blue. His eyes as she falls into them imaginary. Contact are the colour of Johnstone Strait in a twenty knot westerly: she wonders how she forgot. So much between them is amnesia or confusion; maroon floors shine alone in her house when she asks him to demonstrate interrogation technique devious he brings his face inches from hers and she doesn’t flinch the way she’s supposed to, the way a stranger would he says quietly, We know one another now. Kissing would be more like it, only they’re playing it straight with spouses — this is what he said right at the beginning — using sincerity like a warrant to arrest since they met a year ago the most difficult task she’s been trying to give up fascination. Today is business. As usual. bastard The heart always wins, doesn’t it? he says about someone else; She looks down at her notes, says, I don’t know. The phrase, thin cloud along mountain ridges, does little to block sun on the water the way they look and look at one another, like using scissors to cut the heart right out of you eyes locked, contact is that of violating lives passing, dazzling as cruise ships against the choppy sea. Going north in Johnstone Strait,

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a fishboat bucks a westerly for hours. When he leaves with only a quick sideways hug, she’s thankful. They’re making progress, motoring on by.

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perhaps

LIGHT ON MOVING WATER Separated for weeks by a perilous expanse of air, they greet one another boisterous as travellers at an arrivals lounge. Down below, the sea glistens, pewter and malleable, scored by the changing geometries of tugboats. Wakes open into triangles fan out smooth again much the way their lives intersect and go on, empty of all but the forgiveness of water When they hug, he says, You’re looking wonderful; it’s a mantra. Walking toward his office door he presses her close, she wonders how innocent touch can ever be.

emotional or imaginary. Contact

see how high they are?

& guilt, a stone that won’t warm the touch is physical

the breast to chest thing again he talks about hoping she’d wear a raincoat to his office, nothing on underneath A joke?

On the steps, she moves upwind from his cigarette; they talk with others from work. His face so close to hers, smiling, his eyes, there’s a discontinuity — she’s in the air looking down at ocean, waiting to stop falling beside him metal handrail at her back.

violating a fixed boundary

again

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Ambiguities swim silver between them but this much she takes away, a fish: his affection is huge, a noun, and reflects.

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boil & glint shadow in the deeps Every touch light on moving water

TODAY SHE IS INVISIBLE Today she is invisible.

she doesn’t mind much; it frees her. She is starting to understand. Before court, what attracts him are Crown counsel, officers in suits who cluster by the doors. Men and women conspicuous by radiant cleanliness; if they cannot keep creation from splintering into murderers and victims, they can at least shower and get their hair cut often.

perhaps the most difficult task we face daily

herself glazed in the mirror of his eyes, object

emotional or imaginary

subject & object stars of their own shows

They smile at her, she’s the writer, familiar and well-dressed. stitches them into story, spotlights Still, witness room doors close in her face. At breaks, a phalanx goes downstairs and she’s invited to join only sometimes. police stand outside & smoke droop like hydrangeas, thirsty to be told they’ve done well on the stand; she waters them On the stand, he has bags under his eyes she never sees face to face. Something about losing her way when they’re too close it’s called violating your personal space: he’s showed her the technique

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in interrogation though she should know by now. why does he do this? There are enough jokes about him and women. He tells a story with clear plastic evidence bags. The accused’s blood-spattered checked shirt. Shoes that match footprints in blood by the body. Today, being invisible, she sees for miles all along the valley; stump ranches where people make prayers of work, the forest with its dark ripple of evergreens. She understands the warmth between them had gone beyond game; his intense recognition fierce and open as a red-winged hawk

safe distance

Every touch is a modified blow

dropping, the crisp sound of feathers against air

prey in sight. Now he has sheered off. She won’t offer more unguarded smiles. He looks weary and elegant. The hug she didn’t get today reverberates but she sees he wants only the surface flash between male and female:

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perhaps over lunch (nothing red) the blood-spatter expert from Halifax gossips about marital infidelity

boundary, transgressing give him a moment when he wasn’t distracted and he would embrace by reflex. She is a reflex with him. A woman with bright lipstick to tease, a civilian conspicuous in his world, the bleak four a.m. one where human blood pools on floors this is what his pager, going at four a.m. means: yellow intestinal fluid on the mattress & floor, red high as the ceiling where he is a hunter. She moved. Of course he’d pounced.

crisis. As the anthropologists say

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SLEEPING BEAUTY* BECOMES INDIGNANT * the unclaimed child AT JAVA JUNCTION What she sees this time is him stroking her hair, a gesture of such intimacy she couldn’t believe he’d reach out and fondle her in front of another officer, even if she was off-duty. She and her friend had been talking about how Jan was to be Watch Commander and whose ass she’d chew, being Jan: nothing personal mind you,

a closed category

where’s your discretion?

the Queen of Mean looks like she belongs on the back of a bike, another officer once said

then her friend mentioned his name and said, Oh look and it was him wearing sunglasses a different green jacket than the one he wore all winter. He was working

and wouldn’t join them but while he waited for coffee he drifted over and stood beside their table just long enough to caress her as if his hands didn’t know he was still talking and she, she leaned into his touch as if it were home.

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what are the odds?

outside, the Queen of Mean waiting for caffeine; she elicits full confessions from rapists, pats them on the arm

bonding technique used in interrogation

The difficulty presented

STEELHEAD FISHING touch Days now she has known she must give up wanting him; understanding arrived perfectly formed while she was watching a friend sing The Messiah. It broke over her the inevitable way a wave builds, green rush and roar of water on polished gravel. Now, across the table, he watches her as if he were a controlled burn eyeing first growth timber.

is physical gold light, cupping or an orgasm

transgressing she drops her gaze now no game

Across their coffee cups she sees in frame after frame, the changing angles of his arms mimic hers. touching Her hand opens the way his does, they mirror postures with shoulders: who started this? how much they want They lean forward. With December rain, steelhead fin up newly-risen rivers, tasting home. desire like a rock Water is the language of solids. you could walk on This too, lies between them, we face daily the way she eases around extended eye contact. Each winter, he curves a thread of brightness into grey sky, casting for steelhead. It’s one of those questions that has to be asked task over and over, the line drops to the river’s deep tea-brown and floats down. rainy days Catch-and-release, the long silver solidity of the fish gleaming, twisting in arcs, dull light

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as he pulls one toward the bank. Days now she has known answers rise like bubbles to some vast horizontal plane where oxygen changes form.

perhaps the most, oral

The difficulty presented by any instance of contact

Across the table, she warms herself this she believes implicitly at his eyes’ transparent fire. How grizzled his eyebrows are, white against black like quick lines of no, repeated. returning to where you can breathe This is what love means, she thinks. We break the surface, inhale, shake our heads in wonder. Always before, she’s liked to bring fish home. This business of cherish-and-release leaves her gasping.

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a closed category

2002

Short Story

The Last Shot by Leon Rooke

two children were playing in the yard, turning now and then to see what the blind man in the chair on the porch was doing. The yard was a packed dirt yard, not so much as a tuft of grass to be seen. The children had poured cans of water in the yard and scratched with sticks to make an ever-widening pool of mud. Once in a while they punched or pushed or yelled at each other. They were both six, born fifteen minutes apart, all but identical except for their clothing. Pam was the oldest and knew it. Roy was about an inch shorter and, generally, the better behaved of the two. He didn’t seem to mind that his sister pushed him around. Both had their mother’s red hair and freckles and bore her same lean frame. They had been playing in the yard all morning long, under a hot sun. Their skins were burnt leather. It was August, according to Birdsby,

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the blind man on the porch, the hottest on record. “Go and get another can of water,” the girl told her brother. “I went last time,” he said. “Two times straight won’t kill you,” the girl said. She looked at her brother with her eyes crossed, then gave him a hard shove. The boy fell down and stayed down. He let out a soft groan. Then he lay still. The girl poked him several times and he still did not move. She swatted his behind with one of their sticks, and still he did not move or make a sound. The girl called to the man on the porch, “Grandpa, are you watching us?” Birdsby snapped awake. “I sure am, honey. I’m watching you.” “You looked asleep,” Pam said. “You looked to me like you were gone to hell.” “I’m awake,” Birdsby replied. “A grown man asleep in the middle of the day isn’t worth squat.” “We want another can of water,” Pam told him. “I don’t deny it,” said Birdsby. “But how does that concern me?” The girl picked up the tin can and came on towards the porch. She moved in quick snappy steps, her red sundress sailing up and down. Her thin legs and bare feet were crusted with mud. She stopped by Grandpa Birdsby, bringing her face right up in front of his. His dark glasses were off and she could look full into his blind eyes. “I heard you coming,” he said. “You did not. You’re a big liar.” The girl’s voice became a small tight knot: “That woman told you to watch us. You’re going to be in big trouble if you don’t do what she says.” “I’m doing it,” Birdsby said. “I’m watching you children to the inch of my life. Where’s Roy?” “I don’t know any Roy,” Pam said. Her eyes were like tiny bees, they were that small and shifty, with a little red fuzz for eyebrows. “I don’t hear him,” Birdsby said.

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The girl went up on first one foot and then the other. Her eyes swept the full span of fields in the distance, the old shagtail barn, the old boarded-up well, the empty, sagging hen house, the highway off up there and the weedy lane leading to it, the dusty scrub bushes and trees and everything else around. She didn’t seem to like any of it. Finally, she let her eyes settle on the mud puddle and her brother lying dead-still beside it. “Gypsies got him,” she said. “What?” “They came through in three wagons. Roy’s been snatched.” Birdsby swatted both hands at her but she danced away. She put her crossed eyes right up in front of his face. She could see the pores in his nose, the wrinkles in his lips, and the grey whiskers coming back from this morning’s shave. He shaved in front of a mirror; Pam thought that was the funniest thing. “Go and get your water,” Birdsby told her. “You know I can’t go in the house with these feet. That woman would kill me.” “Your mother is not ‘that woman.’ You’ve got to stop calling Rose Dell that. You know how it infuriates her.” “I don’t care about any of that,” Pam said. She scratched herself on the leg and looked at her feet. “All I care about is me.” Birdsby heaved himself up from the chair, fumbled for the tin can, and went through the house to the kitchen sink where he filled the can with water. The can was caked with mud and had holes where the children had driven nails through the bottom. He hustled back through the rooms, dripping and sloshing the water, slamming the front door behind him so flies couldn’t get in. “That’s the last time,” he said. He was panting hard. The girl snatched the leaking can from his hand and hastened out to the mud puddle. She crouched down, scratching furiously in the mud with a stick as the water dribbled out.

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“You lost too much water,” the girl called. “You’re a slowpoke. Now you can just bring me another can.” “In a minute,” Birdsby said. “Lord have mercy.” He was laboring to catch his breath. “You heard me.” “You better mind how you speak to me,” he said. But he got up and tapped his way inside. From beneath the sink Birdsby pulled out a blue bucket that still had the label on it. The label showed a blue bucket just like the one he was holding. A heavy-set woman with her head tied by a blue rag was squeezing out a mop into the blue bucket. Champagne bubbles and musical notes floated up from the dripping water. Birdsby couldn’t see any of this, but his daughter Rose Dell had told him about it. Rose Dell, no housekeeper, had thought it pretty hilarious. It had been four days and nights now that Rose Dell had been gone. Rose Dell was out with that Ed guy, her new fellow. “I’m giving this my last shot,” she had told Birdsby. Birdsby knew more than he wished he did about Rose Dell’s last shots. Rose Dell specialized in last shots. Birdsby ran tap water into the bucket. He would fill it to the top. He became aware of a cry from outside, someone screeching at the top of her lungs. Pam, telling him to hurry it up. Hurry it up because her lake was drying up. It was caking into hard mud, she said. Birdsby hurried outside with the bucket, water sloshing up over his legs and into his shoes. “Where are you?” he asked. The girl watched him standing by the steps with that blind look. She didn’t say anything. “If you don’t speak up,” Birdsby said, “I’m taking this water back inside. Or I might just scatter it any old where.” Pam was trying not to breathe. She watched her grandfather spin one way and another, a hand cupped behind one ear. “You’re not fooling me,” he said. “I know precisely where you are.”

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Finally a smile lit up the girl’s face, and brightly she said, “What in the world are you doing way over there?” Birdsby tapped his way forward. The girl watched to see would he stumble over her brother. She watched to see would he walk right into the mud puddle. “That woman won’t like it, your using that pail,” she said. “She won’t like it one bit.” “Where shall I pour?” asked Birdsby. “Right here,” she said, steering his hands until he was holding the bucket directly above her brother’s immobile form. “Perfect!” she said. Birdsby unended the bucket bit by bit. A stream of water splashed down on Roy’s head. “All of it?” Birdsby asked. “Every last drop.” The boy did not stir. “Now you can go back on the porch and watch us.” “What are you playing, anyway?” “Dirt.” “That’s all you call it, dirt?” “Dirt,” the girl said more forcefully, crossing her eyes. “What would you call it? It would be stupid to call this game anything else.” “Call it what you like,” he said. “You’re the stupid one playing it. Where’s Roy?” “I don’t know any Roy. What does he look like, this Roy?” “For one thing,” Birdsby said, “he looks a lot like you.” “How would you know?” “Young lady,” said Birdsby. “Young lady, I carry a picture of you two children in my mind. At the moment, it’s not a very pretty picture, either.” Pam eyed the old man closely, her mouth set. She clearly didn’t like the idea of anyone carrying a picture of her in his mind. Birdsby turned one way and another. He was shading his

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eyes and peering off into the distance, just as though he was a seeing person. “It worries me,” he said, “where that boy has got to.” Roy lay not a foot away. His clothes had actually sizzled when the water was poured on him, and now heavy steam wafted up from his body. “I’ve got a funny feeling,” Birdsby said. “What about?” grumbled the girl. “I don’t know what about.” “I guess it’s about being blind, then. I got my own business here. You go back up on that porch. You’ll get Blind Man’s Sunstroke out here. You ought to know better than to come out in this sun without your hat.” “Roy hasn’t been playing around that old well, has he?” Pam looked up at her grandfather, holding onto the blue bucket and leaning on his walking stick. She looked as though she meant snatching both from him. “You all have talked so much about that well Roy’s scared to death of it,” she said. “He thinks a monster lives down there. It’s what’s been causing those bad dreams he has and why he wets the bed.” “He wet the bed before we ever mentioned that well.” “You’re a big liar. It’s that well did it. Don’t try shirking the responsibility.” Birdsby hobbled back to the porch. “You’ve gone and got me all sweaty,” he said. “Hottest day I ever did see.” *** The minute Birdsby was asleep the girl rushed up and got his walking stick. She put on his floppy hat and his dark glasses and went tearing up the lane to the highway. She crossed it and sat crouched on the shoulder. Pretty soon a red truck came rattling along. It shot by her, screeched its tires, zigzagged, and at last whined its way back beside her. “My gosh, Pam,” the man said. “You gave me a frightful scare. I thought you were roadkill, maybe a wild turkey. I

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don’t know what I thought.” Pam could hardly see out of her grandfather’s black glasses. His hat rode down over her ears. “Let me out at the Crossroads Store,” she said. “And how is Ms. Rose Dell Witherspoon these days?” the man asked. “Does your mother still have those dogs?” “I don’t know no Rose Dell Witherspoon,” Pam said. “What dogs?” “Well, durn!” said the man. “That’s the durndest thing! I ought to know whether she had dogs. She sick them on me often enough.” “She sold those dog.” “Sold her own dogs! I never heard of such.” “That woman will sell anything, she needs a dollar. She sold the front room sofa. She sold the kitchen table.” “Holy schmoly!” “She did buy a blue bucket.” “A blue bucket! I’ll be dogged.” Pam sat on the edge of the seat, looking out at the world through blind Birdsby’s glasses. It was really black out there. She could just vaguely make out bugs smeared all over the windshield. Then the man said, “Here you go.” He veered off the road and swerved over gravel, almost taking out the store’s gas pump. *** Pam got a Grapette out of the cooler. She drank it while standing there, then got out another and drank half of that. She picked out a third soft drink for Roy, root beer, his favorite, and put the dark glasses back over her eyes and Birdsby’s hat back on her head. At the front counter, she asked for a can of potted meat, a loaf of white bread, and a pack of salted peanuts. “Charge these items to Ms. Rose Dell Witherspoon,” she said. The woman behind the counter crossed her arms and for

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many moments did not reply. Pam drained her second Grapette and looked thistily at the root beer. “I don’t know about that, Pam,” the woman eventually said. “Your mother’s credit isn’t exactly up to snuff.” “Charge them to Mr. Charles Birdsby. My Grandpa. The famous blind rodeo rider.” The woman said, “I know who your Grandpa is, Pamela Witherspoon. I know his account is in no great shakes either.” “Grandpa Birdsby’s got scads of money. He got it, he says, from the sale of his memoirs.” “You tell him I’d like to see some of that money,” the woman said. “You tell him I better not be in those memoirs.” Pam walked back slowly along the road. The mud on her feet had long dried. It was all cracks and crevices and a lot of dead weight down there. The man in the red truck came rattling along. He was one of Rose Dell Witherspoon’s old boyfriends. Pam remembered how he used to swing her up and hold her against his fat stomach. He’d say, “How’s my Pammy-Spammie?” or something stupid like that. All he did now was ride up and down the highway. Something had happened to his mind, Grandpa Birdsby said. Pam took a short cut home through the woods. She came up behind the barn and snuck from there to the chicken shed and from there scooted up behind the old plank feeding trough for the hogs, when there had been hogs. She steered wide of the boarded-up well. There had been a corral and a riding ring here at one time; now there was no evidence of it. According to her grandpa, a Birdsby had been on this place for two hundred years. Nothing had changed in her absence. That woman still had not come home and Roy continued to play dead by the mud hole, which was drying up. Her blind grandfather sat asleep in his chair on the porch, his bald head pitched back. “Drink this,” she said to Roy, holding the cold root beer against his face.

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One eye popped open. “How long was I dead?” Roy asked. Pam looked up at the sun. “I speculate about five hours,” she said. “Hot dog!” said Roy. Birdsby felt a tug at his sleeve. He waked and rubbed his eyes. “I wasn’t sleeping,” he said. “I was watching you children every minute.” The girl climbed up into his bony lap. She looped an arm around his neck and settled her head against his chest. “Tell me about your rodeo days, grandpa,” she said. “How many bones did you break? Were you really the king?” She didn’t allow him to answer. She had a dirty hand pressed over his mouth. “Let me go get your rodeo king hat, Grandpa. I know you’ve got it in your bureau drawer, wrapped in cellophane.” Roy had come onto the porch, wedging a place for himself on the floor between Birdsby’s legs. “Yes, Grandpa,” the boy said. “Wear your rodeo king hat.” So Pam went and got the hat and they settled it on the old man’s head. “How do I look?” he asked. They turned him this way and that way and told him he looked good. Then Pam went inside and after a while returned carrying her little white playhouse. Inside the playhouse were all her play dishes, her saucers and cups and her plates and a tea pot sizable enough to brew three thimblefuls of actual tea. She did this. “It’s too hot for tea,” her grandfather said. “You drink it,” she said. “It will freshen you up.” She opened the tin of potted meat and pulled out a few slices of white bread. She spread the potted meat over the bread, next cutting these into smaller and smaller sections until they would fit onto her play plates, along with a tiny pile of salted peanuts.

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That was how they had their dinner. They were still on the porch enjoying a second thimble of tea when darkness fell. And still they stayed on. When car lights showed on the highway Pam and Roy watched to see what the car would do. They watched its twin lights come and pass by and they watched the red tail lights until they disappeared from sight. For long spells nothing at all came along the road. “This time that woman has really done it,” Pam said. “She’s left us high and dry.” Birdsby said he hoped not. Towards nine o’clock he took the rodeo hat off his head and directed Pam to put it back in its cellophane. “Twins and triplets,” Birdsby said, “they run in this family. The Birdsby women just don’t know when to stop.” A little after that all three went to bed. Roy said he would try not to wet anything. Pam told him to stay on his side of the bed on his rubber sheet. But they drifted off to sleep in a full embrace, each aware that sooner or later both would be drenched. Birdsby fell asleep last. He always did. These children were in his keep and he meant doing his job the best way a blind man could.

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2002

Travel Writing

Dents in the Laurentians by Roger Greenwald

The bus takes almost an hour to get out of Montreal. It’s a lovely city when you’re downtown, on foot, but when you’re leaving it by bus it seems only gray: concrete buildings, sidewalks, empty lots, shopping malls with their vast parking lots. The cloudy weather doesn’t help. In the middle of the city I see a line of at least fifty people waiting for a transit bus. After the city and the usual suburbs, the bus starts climbing gradually. It’s a local, makes a lot of stops, people getting on and off, going short distances. There are Francophones and Anglophones: an old professor with waxy skin, a beret, and a beat-up briefcase; couples going to their country places; students visiting their parents for the weekend; and along the way, laborers: men with boots, ski jackets, large hands and messy hair. And of course a few I

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don’t know what to make of, like the skinny, wiry guy with a kit bag, a scar on his face, and a challenging glance all around. Since January smoking’s been prohibited on these buses, but that’s only a few months, and there are always some people who figure if they’ve done it before they can still do it, or they can do it till someone protests, or just let them try. . . . After a while it’s clear that the bus route follows one main road up into the mountains. It’s spring, there’s been a thaw, but there is still lots of old snow on the hillsides, on the ground that’s visible between the trees. Not much snow on the trees. Occasionally, down an embankment from the road, I glimpse an old rail line snaking along. The scenery is grim. Gas stations, stores, fast-food places, suburban-style restaurants, used car lots, auto body shops. Two words recur on the signs: piscine and débosselage. Swimming pools for your back yard; dents banged out of your car. (Bosse is the same word as English boss — the round hump in the middle of a metal shield; embossed is a relative. But in English the boss is what sticks out, not what’s dented in.) All the towns are named for saints: St. Jérôme, St. Agathe, St. Faustin. In the last half hour of the trip the roadside clears, the mountains get higher, I can see lifts in operation at the ski runs and a few black figures zigzagging down the slopes. It’s the last weekend of the season. I get out at the Hôtel Montagnard and go in to phone Delphine. It’s all wood inside, and beyond the corridor with the cigarette machines and the cashier’s wicket there’s a large room with a curving bar, a tv tuned to sports above it, and further back, an even larger hall, with a stage. The floor has chairs that can be moved aside for dancing, and you can be sure they play accordions here on Saturday night. Delphine arrives in a jalopy driven by Leon, who rents a room in her house. Leon is a friendly guy with a big head of graying black hair, large hands, and a body I think of as the

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French waiter type, slim with no hips, the belly curving out a little as in young boys. He speaks good English, of course with a Quebec accent, which I like the sound of: the warmth of it comes through in English. Leon pronounces his name as in English (lee-on), rather than as in French (Lay-ohn). When I later ask Delphine why, she says he likes the idea that his name means Lion, thinks the English version is more leonine. The old house is being rebuilt, and it’s chilly. They took two thousand slats off the walls one by one, put in insulation, and put the slats back. Up the street is a house that belonged to Delphine’s grandmother before she sold it to a relative, Delphine’s aunt. But the grandmother still uses it. A neat little wooden house, painted gray with white trim, and with a cedar porch around three sides that Delphine’s husband, Philippe, built last year. In the corner of Delphine’s living room (which has no wall dividing it from the kitchen just now) is an old upright piano that Delphine says is quite a good one, though it needs tuning. She can play. Delphine met Leon when she was working in a lodge at one of the ski slopes a year or two ago (to make money, of course — nobody lives from writing, and she’s never even applied for a grant). Leon had worked there for nine years. Then he was fired, just like that. I think there had been a strike; this was retaliation, perhaps. After he’d been unemployed a while his wife found a lawyer she rather liked. A few months ago she moved to the lawyer’s place with her and Leon’s two kids. Leon had to sell the house to give her half its value. So he had no place to live and no job except for short stints here and there. He asked Delphine if he could rent a room; they needed the money; so here he is. A few rows of his kids’ drawings line the wall above the sink in the kitchen. Leon likes plants. He shows me his collection, which for the moment is standing in the second-floor hall. Mostly cacti.

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He asks me the names of a few in English and we talk about how often or how seldom they flower. Leon went to Mexico recently and is eager to go back. He’s begun learning Spanish. Delphine and Philippe have had another roomer too, a guy about twenty, blond, short, also slim but with the stance of a weight-lifter, the arms curving out a little, the head thrust forward on the neck, and even the features of his face elongated in front, as if his mouth and nose were taffy that someone has pulled on. Narrow head. He broke into his place of work with his girlfriend and stole some money. Spent a lot of it, got caught. It’s a long story. It’s his room I have for the weekend. He’s staying at his girlfriend’s. He got sentenced to probation and community service; had a little job on the side at a pizza place; lost it because of his temper. Delphine and Philippe are about to tell him to go elsewhere, find a job. He hasn’t been paying them rent lately, and they figure he’s not helping himself by depending on them. He just happens to drop by one night at dinner time. Shows off his new leather jacket. Turns around to show the back. Very serious about it. We go for a walk through this tiny town in the High Laurentians, Lac Ferré. A derelict railroad station they are going to turn into a library; a huge church of gray stone with a bowling alley in the basement (yes! fully automated lanes) to generate income for the church; a snow-covered lake that no one skates on — they use a rink — because who would clear it of the snow?: not one of the present mayor’s priorities. All the intrigues of a small town, pettiness, envy, xenophobia, nosiness. And a poor town at that, people often unemployed. More than one house in the long process of being rebuilt as fast or as slow as the money becomes available, the work done by the owners and by friends: pickup trucks carting supplies. Utility before aesthetics — except on some of the hillsides, where developers are beginning to build luxurious lodges to sell to city folk. When we get back I ask Delphine what it means that there

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are so many signs that say “débosselage” along the road the bus took. Surely all of Quebec can’t be coming to this one stretch of road to get their cars fixed? It means, she says, that around here you have to have a car, and that around here the people can’t afford to buy new ones. Ask, and you learn. And so I am in Lac Ferré, sitting at the kitchen table wearing two sweaters, my first night there, when suddenly I hear music from the one room on the first floor that has walls. It’s a strange and melancholy sound, with drawn-out notes that float as if through the space between the planets. It’s Leon, Delphine says. He started when he took the room here, started playing the harmonica. Then he tried the piano. After a while he went and bought himself an electric piano. After dinner he shows it to me. A black Yamaha with a round speaker beyond either end of the keyboard, facing up. There are maybe ten buttons behind the keyboard, marked Electric Piano 1, 2 and 3; Harpsichord 1 and 2; Vibraphone; Marimba, etc. And in this cassette, Leon says, slipping it into a receptacle, is the programming for 128 different instruments. Violin, organ, trumpet, drums, even a chorus that sings “Ahh” in whatever note you press, for as long as you press it. A liquid-crystal display shows which program you’re using. They’re numbered as well as labeled. The piano has two pedals, too. I like the way Leon plays. It’s great, he says. It takes you out of this world. It helps to kill the time. He looks at me. That’s the most important thing, he says: it kills the time. I understand Leon. Delphine says he’s the one who always resets the kitchen clock. A concern with time always has two faces, and one of Leon’s kids must take after him: made a paper cut-out with various openings (perhaps clouds) that hangs in the window of the back door. It’s blue on one side, dark gray on the other. Just turn it, the artist told Delphine, depending on whether you want day or night.

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The weekend passes: sleep, walks, food, talk, poems, translation, putting books onto bookshelves, taking photos, reading newspapers. The last evening, cold and tired, I answer Delphine’s questions about the English of the poorly written novel she has translated. Even the next day, as they are driving me to the bus stop, Delphine turns on an engaging tone to say, “Roger —” (Yes?) “Have you heard the expression ‘Take your pick’?” And I explain it. But there was a moment, late the night before, when Leon and Philippe were finished making a double racket on the electric piano and Delphine and I went in there and said we wanted to play. And I sat on the left side and she on the right, I had Leon set it to Electric Piano 1, and we started. I can’t play, you understand. I just did what I sometimes do at the piano in my friend Inger’s large living room in Oslo when it’s dusk and I’m alone in the apartment. Low notes held one at a time with the left hand, middle or high notes and occasional chords with the right hand, improvised as feeling dictates, to the extent my untrained fingers will permit. Delphine embellished or answered higher up the keyboard. We played for ten or fifteen minutes. I had to concentrate too much on my part to be able to engage in a dialogue, but I was aware that the two parts came together, such as they were, and that the ethereal sounds had taken us, for these moments, to some other place. That’s what remains with me. Leon, Delphine, and an electric piano in an old house in a poor village in Quebec. Tonight, back in Toronto, I have a late dinner in a Chinese restaurant after seeing a film I didn’t care for. At the end of the meal I ask for two fortune cookies (I figure I can always use a second chance). The first says “You will have a long and happy life.” The second says, “First God made gold. Then he hid it.” [I have changed the names in this piece to protect the privacy of the people portrayed. — R.G.]

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2003

Poetry

Selections from Muybridge’s Horse by Rob Winger Muybridge’s Horse the split second in walking when both of your feet are airborne the distance between a target and the knowledge of a gunshot water in your throat the space of decline when a masseuse’s finger slips from a knotted muscle the time between balance and impact with the earth my fingers submerged in water, in a dive the moment, in a train lavatory, when a sideways sway has thrown a spray of urine away from the bowl’s mouth any sporting ball suspended in the air the heat of mouths before lips contact the time between an engine and the sound of it the stretching of a knuckle before it cracks a drill changing its tonality as it contacts a sheet of maple whole snowflakes as they meet your tongue a minute hand jumping to its next hour before the clock can chime the stretched pressure of a guitar string before sound the darkness that happens before any object collides with your face the second of ease when the piano you are pushing has built up enough force to glide any form of jumping waves a bird in flight

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fixing the river his grandfather filled his pigeon’s silver chest with folded messages relied on wind, releasing wings so his dock hands down river mistook every shadow for a bird his virtuous grandmother outlives this husband with nine children teaches, stews, scrubs, orders men to fill Atlantic ships with old world minerals to float across the water each transaction stiffening her towards a certain photograph where her face droops awkwardly, unsmiling lips unwanted bolts in the steel casting of clothing she swallows them making the mouth a line she teaches Edward only thieves and rascals are afraid forces him to make mince pies for neighbours at Christmas says hold up your head and speak out1 in the picture, she is about to rise impatient with each moment when the camera operator prepared plates, framed angles this bulge in the stiff fabric that is her impatient knee, ready she dies in 1870, four years before her daughter does

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Susannah, gentler sees two of her four sons enter the earth, collapses inward washes memories of her men in acids that slowly fog their outlines she grows old in Kingston-upon-Thames with her youngest boy who fills their house with clocks daily opening their bellies to gears, switches, ticks attempting, as a minor hobby to have them all strike at exactly the same moment2 here, she grows wary of burglars leaves dozens of men’s hats at the front door a silver teapot on the front stairwell, hoping any criminal would see the hats, assume a high male population, take the teapot and run from her conspiracy of watches when she dies, on the hour, in 1874, the house explodes in bells by then, Eadweard is growing famous in California for shooting scenes and people: Harry Larkyns, Leland Stanford Flora Shallcross Stone Floredo Helios Muybridge Occident

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Seward’s Folly, Farallon Island, Guatemala, Nanaimo, Alcatraz San Francisco, Sacramento, Portland, London, New York City Yosemite Valley and environs Cathedral Rock, Mammoth Trees, Woodward’s Gardens, Mount Watkins in mist all these rivers, stopped in the camera’s liquid frames

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Flora (Larkyns) 1. as Eadweard slows, considering I enter another chaos: Harry Larkyns and every movement he makes is unpredictable I first see him at the Grand Opera House on Mission Street, sleeping in one of the gilded balcony boxes the applause, waking him, is a cue and he stands, immaculate, calculated having noted the celebrity of the dramatis personae he leads the ovation, looking all around for followers the red of his cheeks, then, the same colour as the stage curtains careful folds of his tie matching the softness of his thighs beneath the dark trousers his hands, collapsing on themselves, perform everything that Eadweard is unwilling to consider (Muybridge mixing acids in the California mountains)

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2. weeks later, in the hotel suite on Montgomery Street, I ask Harry for instructions, for dinner he laughs and swallows a triple shot of liquor slaps me on the backside and tilts his mouth open, waiting for me there

the opposite of clocks

3. Harry is the most beautiful man I’ve known, soft hair, soft speeches he circles public rooms, stitching them with stories gives speeches over putrid pot roasts, praising the perfection of chefs compliments the ugliest children, in front, of course, of well-to-do parents makes lies so real that even he believes them

but, it’s not the actor in him I love, the fraud, the well-suited histories fictions of India-France-England romance, gallantry

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all of this I accept without endearment

what I love in him is his constant self-creation the movement from empty space to full narratives not history, but historical ink flooding across paper

in bedrooms, even, clothes peeled from our backs how we move depends on his storymaking

arrow of the story less important than its details

4. once, we’re at Woodward’s Gardens Harry, Eadweard and I, and the art gallery is filled with landscapes Eadweard says it’s horrible, low class, the death of Vision holds the pictures in his squints Harry sidles up to mountains enters the oceanic blues of the Mediterranean, a ship sailing across the salon his lungs fill with prevailing winds and he seats himself at scandalous luncheons, imposes on family portraits

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transforms each scene into vaudeville my choice, then: the exact pivot of Eadweard’s lens or Harry’s tectonic arms Harry spins me by a finger, past Mexicos, into royal European meadows he rushes Paris nightlines past me and I’m laughing and can’t stop and I’m laughing and the room goes dizzy and Eadweard’s gone for his camera in a black blur and returns as I finally slow in front of a painting of pigeons by the California sea Eadweard sets up his machine exactly, hangs a shirt across its lens removes the shield from a negative holder, collodian dripping onto the carpet in the gallery’s viewing chair, he pretends to sleep, hat brim over his brow shoulders slumped in feigned boredom this will be the only time I remember him ever acting out a joke as I approach the camera to expose the photograph Harry comes in behind me rustles my skirt, breathes slowly into my neck so I laugh again hot mouth on my collarbone we remove the shirt, briefly, from the camera, then replace it, Harry’s slow circling against me while Eadweard acts at dozing with the plate exposed, we detach our middles, reluctantly, create a distance between bodies Eadweard, emerging from his stale humour as though our smiling were for him

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when Harry and I navigate the midway, later vendors mistake us for Mr. And Mrs. our fingers whispering on brief accidents of light

5. back at the gallery, Eadweard watches the squares of our backs slowly swallowed by the Saturday afternoon crowd he soaks the picture in some acidic concoction he keeps bottled in the dark image clinging to the glass as he rinses it waves fixing his sleep to permanence he might have returned to the studio to compare his sleeping performance with the salon so he stood where we did, holding his two versions of the scene deciding which reality to trust

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arriving at Vallejo 1. it’s thick midnight when the ferry docks so Eadweard leaves the water relying on memory finds edges and trusts them at the dock, he catches the last train rides breathing metal into landscape then, steps from locomotion into darkness he hires a carriage to climb the 10 miles & 1000 feet up Mount St. Helena, to the Yellow Jacket Mine where Larkyns is playing cards, counting silver bars

2. the driver relies on his fingers for light hold the reins, extending from his arm, an extra limb — I know this country, he says, don’t worry cart’s wheels released into the night’s liquid gravity the stars are silver hints of sunlight Eadweard rolls the barrel of his pistol with a thumb, clicks its machinery inside his jacket, fingering metal, shutting its lens handle fitting into his palm he fills its emptiness with the calm perfection of bullets asking about highway robbery, he expels one shot orange explosion lighting rolling hills arm, steady, remaining extended in the air as he swallows the bullet’s retort with muscle

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at the peak of the mountain, the house perched like a nest the carriage takes its payment, and slips behind geography the windows of the mining cabin paint yellow squares onto the earth a party’s music ending where Eadweard stands, framed in the entranceway

3. man raising a pistol and firing3 the cabin’s soft fire shatters triangles over the hillside Eadweard approaches the door and a man opens the wooden hinge he shrinks from its yellow hand fingering his gold pocket watch his language, from the darker air asking for Harry, please saying his business will only take a minute, just a minute, thanks. Harry excuses himself from a game of Hearts, weaves through bodies poker faces, whisky breath bringing the cards along to the doorframe, hair bouncing as he approaches colder air, cigar clenched between teeth

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he tilts his face out into the soupy stars laughs, exhaling brown smoke around Eadweard’s shoulders Who is it, friend? It’s so dark.I can’t see you. Harry lifts a palm to his forehead, cupping vision, leans out of his light with the queen of spades against his cheekbone — Good evening, Major. My name is Muybridge. Here is the answer to the message you sent my wife.

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in the Napa County jail cell the window bars are loose so Eadweard’s capture is a matter of choice his hair goes completely white fingering his quill’s calcium he dips its tip into a pool of dark ink circles the feather around his mouth, tasting dust he scratches letters over the grains of hand-made papers each small pellet of wood, mountainous across the desert of the page the hollow where his quill holds fast to its feather used to be wings, used to be a bloodline to the light heart of a gull the letters he writes from this grey square are heavy with this misdemeanour bird’s blood looped into every capital he takes his dinners in silence removes silver covers from entrées with calculated effort, placing them, cautiously, across dinner trays, over napkins avoiding sound, intentional utensils joined only in the choreography of his teeth patient grind of food a machinery he can trust

the slow decay of his body is a broken pulley

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when he emerges, for court he carries his quill, hides forks in his pockets holds his watch in a hand’s hollow, relying on its gravity three months of prison measured by the white whiskers that collapse from his mouth like water

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reading the Plaza of Antigua

1. All across the frame, people have refused capture. Their bodies, brief streaks of light across the market’s noise. Bodies arriving at the paper’s surface from the hills as though they’d dropped from the background — clothing filling the frame with contrast. Eadweard uses their blurs. Some have stood, perhaps, for hours, under a certain shadow, and (seeing Eadweard place the wet plate into the camera’s box) have jumped from permanence. Their bodies are ghosts, transparent, building’s bones seeping through grey skeletons, half-exposed on glass. This curve of colour is a woman, arguing over the price of beans. This round whirlwind of white light, a boy spinning in place. This silver banner, a man who’s just exited the frame to walk ten miles back to his village, up the side of the volcano, toward sky. Two specific legs support a burst of light, where a figure has bent to the ground in a perfect semicircle, painting the foreground with waves. The dance of a young woman in a white dress paints a halo behind a fixed, staring farmer. Angelus novus. Eadweard’s finger must’ve traced the gradual background curve of Volcano Agua against the air before framing it in the dry photograph’s top half. He must have positioned the Palace of the Captains General intentionally, so its highest corner just grazes the slope in the background, a meeting of territories. Volcanic throat against stone’s collarbone.

2. Like Eadweard, I’m attempting to fix blurs, to translate motion into language. Like Eadweard, I want permanence,

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want things named. I lean into the paper’s grain, watching, smell its dust lifting from the book, sunlight falling through the window into the centennial clouds of moving bodies there. This image, traveling the entire North American mainland, over a hundred years of distance, to find me here, in the particular light of a Canadian afternoon. Frame around the image, marking possibilities. Circles of light against the nails. In the picture, round baskets perforate the cloth geometry, balanced on heads, giant nails digging into dirt. Every stall is covered by the tilt of a square umbrella, each reflecting the sun in a white shine. The squares float like prints drifting in the development bath, edges curled from the acids’ work. Your eye can hop from one to another without dipping into the river of bodies. Or, you can circle, move from umbrella to umbrella, around the square. Slip, if you like, from the surface into liquid and lose your boundaries. (The most important time is happening between categories.)

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Returning to Guatemala City

Eadweard’s first entrance was directed by government. He toured the theatre’s façade, church belltowers, the slow, square angles of city streets, left as soon as he could, politely. Made a line toward the densest horizon and disappeared. Unlike Antigua, no ghosts enter his photographs here. Instead, he solidifies bodies. His frames are filled with construction, with grand elements of European neo-classicist statuettes. He’s careful never to allow more than a few bodies into one picture, assuring a certain abandonment, remembering the green heat of villages. He surrounds humans with columns, sculpture, stone. Puts single frames against monolithic cathedrals, legislatures. Rounds shoulders against cobblestones. The walls are armies. A single figure leans into the national theatre’s Parisian steps as though entering an execution, sentinel gateways bracketing his possibilities, grey sky dead. The Banco Nacional pins two men to its entranceway, pillars holding their frames as though the sculpted rock were muscle. The faceless shadow of a sagging figure’s expression stuck to a fountain’s steps like a white gargoyle. A body decapitated by darkness in a black entranceway to the City Prison. Slow square of a man’s back against the Economic Society’s grand hall, spine a rusted hook. The woman’s body seated in front of a Catholic courtyard, holding temples between light hands, whole frame rounded toward the tiled ground. The sadness of curves. At the public laundry, Eadweard focuses on space. The building, a giant O, with water at its centre, is roofless, contains a sequence of identically arched entranceways. Between each, set in the floor, is a round bathtub. Eadweard pours bromide

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over the glass, wanting the tubs bottomless. There’s something essential about these empty spaces. Something about the round tubs against round doorways. Something about the possibilities of liquid.

Elsewhere, Eadweard wants stone, only. Seeks out architectural victims of earthquakes and captures their entropies on film, naming pictures as though the buildings still stood in perfect order. Tree roots loop around fissures in the rock, reclaiming minerals. Leaves move across bricks. The crosses of the Church of Conception enter the earth like bodies. He places a few remaining walls against air, compares them to exploded stones spread across foregrounds. Walls jagged against broken sky. He scratches into the negatives’ lower right corners. Fallen arches, broken bones. At the cemetery, surrounded by epitaphs, Eadweard creates a new city. Tombs line the walkways like shops, grave façades. He puts two gigantic people into his dead metropolis, romanticizing. One standing, back to the lens, hands in pockets, head lifted slightly toward sky. The other, sitting to the left by the exterior wall, blending greyness into a collection of mourning. Both figures are absolutely still. Stuck. The back of the man and the shadows of the sitter. Shut doors. A plaque is centered in foreground, occupying a gravestone without a cross. Perfectly flat white stones surround it. All of its clear letters, in capital type. It’s as though the figures had walked past this language, reading, and then paused, understanding, in middle distance, what their presence meant. The standing man, frozen in knowledge, thinking. The sitting figure staring into a space between himself and tombs, solid angles of knees. Everything about this picture suggesting permanence.

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The plaque’s dark type precisely balanced against borders: CARRERA, it says.

1 Robert Bartlett Haas. Muybridge: Man in Motion. Berkeley: U of California, 1976. (3). 2 Haas (40) 3 This phrase is taken from an essay by Hollis Frampton “Eadweard Muybridge: Fragments of a Tesseract.” Circles of Confusion: film, photography, video: texts, 1968–1980. Rochester, NY: Visual Studies Workshop, 1983. p. 79.

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2003

Short Story

The Lost Boy by Jane Eaton Hamilton

i love my mother, but she does not love me, or any of us, in the way that she loves Nobby. We are all girls, and about this nothing can be done. She has had five babies without a boy, and she is soon to have another, likely, she says, another girl. Girls, she says, are her punishment. For what? I want to know. She doesn’t answer, just thins her lips, but my father told me she once lost a boy. “Lost?” I asked. “Lost how?” “You must never, ever repeat what I have told you,” he said. When I was younger I looked for my lost brother everywhere, at church, in my father’s boat, in my mother’s garden. My mother has eyes the colour of film negatives. Nobby has no mother. We didn’t even know him until the government boarded us together, but now my mother looks after his whole family, Nobby and his motherless sisters and

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his wifeless father, just as she looks after us. The government issued two blankets apiece, but it is not enough in this uninsulated shed of green shiplock through which winter stabs, so my father has given both of his to keep us warm. The room is tiny and has just the single bunk bed, a hanging cradle, and my parents’ cot. Even a child has to walk sideways to fit between the beds. Tonight the smaller children are all asleep except for the baby, who lies in the crook of my mother’s arm in the rocking chair my father built. I can hear her nursing, wet slurpy sounds my mother would be disturbed to think are audible. I lie awake watching ice crystals form on the inside of the windows. I can see the moon through gaps where the slats have shrunk. I dream about the lost boy sometimes, about seeing him as a ghost, blinking on, blinking off in the reflection of a mirror, or of watching him fly. My mother hums a lullaby to the baby. I listen to the pretty, unaccustomed sound until something melts in me; some hard place unties and floats, angelic on air. I am so in love with her. I want her to lie next to me and stroke my hair. I want her to float kisses down onto my cheek, to tickle me. I imagine her eyes lighting up at the sight of me, although in truth, the only time her eyes flicker with that kind of pleasure Nobby is certain to be near. I scoot over to steal some of my next-in-line sister’s warmth. “I don’t want to live with the Kamegayas anymore,” I tell my mother. Nobby gets me behind the outhouse and rubs bony knuckles across my scalp. His sisters pull at me. His father smells funny, like wet tar. “What are you doing awake?” “Nobby’s mean to me.” I want to ask if he looks like her lost boy. Where is her lost boy? “I hate Nobby.” My mother speaks in her voice that accuses me of not being a dutiful daughter. “Nobbysan is not your beeswax.” “I don’t like him.” My father, who was born in Canada, is teaching my mother English idiom, which she calls English idiot.

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“It’s not your business to like or not like. Girls do not have an opinion.” But I do, lots of them, opinions like flakes in a snowstorm, swirling and angry. “When’s Dad coming home?” “Nobby is wonderful boy, wonderful,” my mother says. “If I could just have a boy, I would wish him to be like Nobbysan.” She breaks the baby’s suction on her breast with a fingertip, then moves the bundle up to her shoulder for burping. She sighs hugely. “Your father is still at the meeting.” One of the little girls in the other bedroom coughs, and one of my sisters coughs in return. Everything that happens in this house happens in twos. If our father smokes at one end of the table in our shared central kitchen, making smoke rings, Mr. Kamegaya smokes at the other end. When children are sleeping, five sleep in our leftside room and three sleep in their rightside room. There are just the three rooms. A cloth separates us from the Kamegaya bedroom, and it is lowered when Mr. Kamegaya or Nobby are within. Although it is our job to pretend deafness, in reality we can hear everything — the scoldings and squabbles and laughter. “How come Nobby got to go with Dad and Mr. Kamegaya and I didn’t?” “Nobby is nearly a man and must learn. You are just an eleven-year-old girl.” What is to win talking about Nobby? She is in love with Nobby. She likes his cowlick, his brown eyes, his freckles. He is a fifteen-year-old boy, but I think she wishes Nobby was her husband instead of my father, her real husband whom she badgers incessantly. Bring more wood! Why you not start fire? Why I have to do everything? Why are you fiddling with that useless guitar again? “The meeting to write Mackenzie King? To say they want their boats back?” “Boat, house, car, truck — even wedding dishes gone,” she says. “I want to go to school,” I say. “You can’t go to school,” my mother says, pulling the baby off her shoulder and moving her to the other breast.

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“Eight children, what you think? Spend all day drawing pictures, adding numbers?” My mother is barely visible in the dark, smudged behind the coil of black oil that rises from the lantern because the wick isn’t trimmed, but I don’t need to see her to know her sour expression. I have memorized it. But still, her skin is as soft as rose petals, and her hair smells of lavender. When she lets me serve her tea, I am dizzy. I screw up my courage. “Mom, tell me the story about your lost son.” She jumps to her feet so fast the baby’s head ratches back. Her accent is thicker. “I not have lost son. What you say, speak crazy? Get out of bed.” I don’t know what’s coming. A spanking, maybe. A face slap. The floor is frigid. My mother pulls my braid and hisses into my face, “I don’t have lost boy. Okay? Okay? No lost boy. Say it.” So I do. She doesn’t have a lost boy. What is this story about? It is about the kind of love that dooms a person, love that is sick and unholy and fully crazy, like my mother’s love for Nobby, like my love for my mother. I can see it in the old photographs: I look up at my mother even though the photographer has said to look straight ahead, while she gazes into the distance, wishing me away. The next morning, Nobby has gone off somewhere; my mother frets. He arrives mid-morning blue-lipped and without his coat. My mother rubs his arms briskly. Resentfully, I chip ice from a blanket so my mother can wrap it around Nobby’s shoulders. Here is what I see out the window: Snow. Snow on a split rail fence the fathers made, like sifted flour. Snow on the outhouse roof, and Mrs. Nagahama rushing away in the squall with a newspaper over her head. I see parts of 120 houses. They look sad, I think, the icicles frozen streams of tears. My mother chops tofu for soup so he can have something warm; she tells me to stop being a lazy good-for-nothing and

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to strip the beds. It is wash day. Do I think the household will run itself? “Japs are so stupid,” says Nobby, sitting down, tilting back his chair. He pulls a Brownie camera from his bag. We are not allowed to own photographic equipment. Then he pulls postage stamps from his pocket. My mother stiffens. “I wish I wasn’t born a Jap. I’d rather be hakujin any day.” My mother lifts the camera. “Nobby, where did you get this?” Nobby snorts. “Enemy alien! I’ll show them enemy alien!” I yank sheets from the beds, listen hard. My mother’s voice is worried sick, cross. “Did you steal these things, Nobby?” Nobby tosses his head. “They stole our stuff.” I stand in the doorway. My mother turns to me. “Run and find Mr. Kamegaya. Hurry.” “Don’t,” Nobby says. “Don’t move, Martha.” “Go,” commands my mother. I stay put, piled in sheets, too fascinated to move. My mother stirs the soup, spoon clanking angrily, back rigid as a plank. “I don’t like miso soup,” Nobby says. “I want a hamburger.” Me too, me too. The little girls play underfoot, banging on pots. The baby hangs suspended beside the stove where she’ll stay warm. I miss my dolls, my roller skates. I miss ice cream, my friends, my soft pillow, having long bubble baths. In Steveston where we used to live, we went to movies on Saturday afternoon. Popcorn cost one penny. Where is my penny now? I ask my father, but he says my penny is in the same place as our fishing boat, our house, our piano, our bank account. Nobby picks up the camera and makes to take a picture of me. “Don’t you dare,” my mother says to him.

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“Bah,” says Nobby and clicks off a frame. “No more meetings for you,” my mother says. The peonies on her apron quiver. Nobby says, “You’re all liver-bellied sheep, the bunch of you. My father, your husband. Good for nothing. Baaa! Baaa!” My mother clunks down a bowl of soup. Nobby swipes it off the table so that drops fly across my mother like rows of fingerprint bruises. My mother crosses her arms. “Nobbysan, you will go to the store for me.” “Send Martha.” She squares her shoulders. “No, Nobbysan, I want you to go. You are so much the man, then you get our supplies.” “I’ll go,” I say. I want to go, suddenly. “Nobby is going for me.” Nobby juts out his chin. My mother juts out her chin. For a second, it is war, but then there’s a shift I can feel on the air. Nobby knocks over his chair as he gets up and slams outside so that the thin glass in our windows shakes. I hear the rattle of his bicycle. If the world were kind, what happens next would not happen next. Nobby would go to the store and bring back rice and insult us and bully me and life would go on. My mother would be right about spring. Summer would follow. The new baby would be a boy. But instead, Mr. Chiyo comes running, yelling about an accident, his hair and shoulders dusted with snow. Nobby’s bicycle wheel slipped on some ice right when a truck delivering produce to Pam’s Grocery turned the corner onto Ox Street. “No!” my mother yells, and crumples. She hits herself on the side of her head over and over again. Laid out on a table in the community centre, Nobby is dressed in a suit and tie two sizes too big. I didn’t realize

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Nobby had such a big Adam’s apple, but it is stuck in his throat like a stone. Now his lips are even more blue, his skin, ashen. His hip and one leg are mangled and although some of the damage is hidden in the bottom half of the coffin, some is still obvious. My mother sobs out loud. The little Kamegaya girls hide behind her skirts. That night when I dream, I am outside skating and see Nobby laid out on our kitchen table. I keep skidding, and I keep falling under wheels. I shudder awake. In a way, it’s true. In a way that I didn’t see before Nobby ran his fateful errand, I have been skating on slippery ice, and after that day I am dragged along under a truck’s tires for the rest of my childhood. My mother goes to the bedroom and refuses to move from bed. She won’t nurse the baby or consume any food. A week later, so much has happened. The ground is too frozen to dig; in the end, the fathers have to borrow a backhoe. Mr. Kamegaya moves his family into a distant cousin’s house. Our children are farmed out. My mother is still in bed; she only appears to use the outhouse. She doesn’t attend Nobby’s funeral for fear of what the community will whisper. The next morning I kneel by my mother’s feet. “Mom, please get up. I love you.” I mean that I love her too much, that she’s scaring me, that I need her to look after us. At first she doesn’t seem to have heard me, but then her eyes swing up and she meets my gaze. I have never seen eyes look like that, like unexposed film. If I had been able to fall into them, I wouldn’t have stopped. I would have tumbled down and down and down. Suddenly she’s up, so fast I lose my balance. “Why didn’t you go to store for me?” Didn’t I offer? I would have died in his stead; I would have sacrificed myself if I could have. My mother leaves the bedroom. I follow on her heels. The other bedroom yawns emptily, its cloth removed. She does not bother with boots, so neither do I. I snatch the Brownie

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camera, pull on my winter coat. We are still in pajamas. My mother strides the back way, skirting the houses and prying eyes. My feet are frozen inside five seconds. She takes the road away from town. Tears chip off my face like grains of rice. She stops at Princess Gorge. My mother weaves at the edge, arms held out. She will be an angel, I think. Wings will sprout as she flies. No one else is around; no one has followed us. I am so afraid of heights. When I see her tilt forward, I scream. She manages to right herself. I tiptoe closer meaning to wrest her away, to tackle her, but she grabs my wrist and for a minute we totter there, nearly going over, my stomach in my throat. She tugs forward as I yank back. She is very beautiful. Always, I have thought this about her. I don’t know whether I should love her at that moment or not, but I do, I love her, I drown in loving her. I am totally doomed. She takes the camera and throws it over. It clips off the rock as it falls, going from camera to speck to invisible in seconds. The gorge is lovely; softened by the snow, the walls are striated like layers of Neapolitan ice cream. At the bottom, if we could reach it safely, is a river that could carry us both away.

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2003

Travel Writing

Girl Afraid of Haystacks (A Story of Travel and Exile) by Stephen Osborne

A girl in Wisconsin who used to have nightmares about haystacks would have to crouch on the floor in the back of the car whenever the family went for a drive in the country. She was seven years old and her older sister and her younger brother would keep a lookout and tell her when the haystacks were out of sight and she could get up on the seat again. The family often drove from their home in Waukesha, through the rolling countryside of dairy farms and grain fields and frequent hay fields, to Rockford, Illinois, where her father’s older brother lived in a tiny house with his wife Eleanor. Aunt Eleanor was a large woman of whom the girl’s mother disapproved for her lowbrow habit of showing family snapshots on a projector in their tiny living room, and she kept a family tree that went back to the arrival of the Pilgrims on the Mayflower

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in 1620. The mother of the girl in this story disapproved of family trees as well as the public display of snapshots and she was unable to reconcile herself to Aunt Eleanor’s largeness, which she interpreted as a failure of character. Before driving home, they would load up the trunk of the car with packets of oleomargarine to distribute among friends back home in Wisconsin, where dairy products were protected by a law that defined oleomargarine as contraband. The town of Waukesha took its name from a fox in the language of the Potawatami nation, and shortly after the Civil War, when a Yankee colonel cured himself of diabetes by drinking from a mineral spring on a nearby farm, the town became famous for the miraculous power of its healing waters. Among early patrons of the luxury health spas that grew up in Waukesha were Ulysses S. Grant and the grieving mother of Abraham Lincoln. The classical period of Waukesha history lasted for fifty years, during which time the waters of Waukesha were promoted to the world as God’s elixir of life and the hope of the afflicted. Today history in Waukesha is an extravagant dream glimpsed in photographs of women in hoop skirts and parasols and men in top hats and frock coats promenading on the boardwalk and congregating in the elaborate lobbies and on the verandahs of grand hotels and posh sanatoriums. The girl in this story lived in a boxy new house with a picture window instead of a verandah and she could look out the picture window in her house at the picture windows in similar boxy houses across the street and wonder what the people inside were doing. Each new house had a patch of lawn in front and a dirt yard in back and a driveway of gravel and sand waiting to be paved over before the garage could be built and the backyard seeded with a mixture of Kentucky bluegrass and phosphates, and then a year or two later the neighbourhood would be filled with the sound of lawn mowers on Sundays. Her father had served in the army in France and Belgium during the war and before that he had been a statistician for

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the Chicago Cubs. In a photograph taken when he was twenty-one, he looks like T.S. Eliot in round eyeglasses and crisp suit and tie. He was an appraiser for a company in Milwaukee and after the family moved to Waukesha he drove in to work early in the morning and drove home after rush hour to beat the traffic. Eventually he became a man who drove only Ford cars and no others; her brother remembers them clearly: a pale yellow ’57 Galaxy, a creamcoloured ’61 Fairlane and a robin’s egg blue ’64 Fairlane powered by an engine 390 cubic centimetres in volume, a true land yacht in the classic age of the automobile. Her father had been divorced once and her mother had been widowed when her first husband died of diabetes in Rockford before the war. When the girl in this story was five years old, the family moved from Milwaukee out to the new housing development twenty miles away in Waukesha; in her memory of that journey she and her brother and her sister sit on the long bench seat in the back of the family Plymouth, an automobile that seemed to glow in a colour named in long syllables, perhaps maroon or burgundy, and in the front seat her mother, a woman who always loved pets, holds the goldfish in its bowl on her lap all the way out to the new house in Waukesha without spilling a drop. Once a year, on Valentine’s Day, her mother made a cinnamon cake for breakfast and set the table with special glassware that retained the green underwater glow of the shopping centre on the outskirts of Milwaukee where it had been purchased. Her father set out heart-shaped boxes filled with candy, which for years afterward retained the lingering perfume of chocolate, and he got the children out of bed before he had to drive to work, when it was still dark and cold in February, and the family sat down at the breakfast table at their usual places indicated by name cards with hearts drawn on them the night before by the girl in this story, who would become an editor and a building contractor and a comix artist later in life. The other special day for

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the family was the Fourth of July when they drove into Milwaukee to see the parade of antique circus wagons and the animal shows that reminded her father of his childhood, and to listen to the marching bands play tunes from the Civil War. Her father was a horn player and a pianist and she remembers him in the evenings at the piano in the living room playing “Rhapsody in Blue” with no sheet music in front of him. She took piano lessons from a woman who lived with a poodle and a husband who studied butterflies in a house in a distant neighbourhood filled with cases containing the corpses of butterflies pinned onto cards; when she began winning prizes for her playing she stopped the lessons to avoid having to think about the butterflies during the long walk home. Her mother was a bright, flirtatious woman whose father had been a collector of first editions until the stock market crash of 1929; her own mother, whose name was Ida, had owned an automobile called a flivver, which she drove up to Montreal on weekends to drink cocktails and play bridge with members of an organization called the Eastern Star. When she was seven years old the mother of the girl in this story had posed as the smiling girl in bonnet and clogs for the Dutch Cleanser label. She never adapted herself to housework and grew resentful of a role that seemed to have been thrust unfairly upon her. In a photograph taken when she was nineteen she is smiling eagerly in a flowery dress and tilting her head to the side with her arms open and she seems to be anticipating something wonderful about to happen. She was known to put an onion in the oven to make the house smell like there was a meal cooking and she often cleaned house in the company of the family cat, a ginger named Pokey, who relished having the nozzle of the vacuum run through her fur so that it stood right up on end. When the girl in this story was twelve years old her father’s younger brother, who was referred to mysteriously by her parents as an inner ear man at the space centre, drove

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her with her cousin at high speed through the night and the next day to Pensacola, Florida, to spend a summer away from home for the first time. In Florida she found a world in which there was nothing to fear in the heat of the lower latitudes, the huge clattering cockroaches, the stinging jellyfish, the terrific snapping beetles, the scorpions, the sharks, the snakes. Not even the alligators were to be feared in the world that she found at the home of her Florida uncle, perhaps because he allowed her to read comic books and drink soda pop and eat Fritos and bologna sandwiches made with Wonder Bread, a material that her father despised for its inability to spring back into shape after you crushed a loaf in your hand, as he once demonstrated in the aisle of the neighbourhood supermarket. About this time her father began taking treatment for cancer at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. He continued working for another eight years and driving to the Mayo Clinic for surgery and radiation, and when he came home from these visits the girl in this story would help him apply healing ointment to the burns on his chest and his back. She was nineteen years old when her father drove home for the last time in the robin’s egg blue Ford Fairlane, and he died early in the morning on Valentine’s Day, in his sixtieth year. Twenty-six years later, on the Fourth of July, her mother died in St. Mary’s hospice in Milwaukee, as people were setting up for picnics on the beach at Lake Michigan; in the afternoon a thunderstorm tore open the sky above the city and that night the girl in this story and her brother and sister sat up drinking wine and looking through the family photographs that their mother had kept in boxes and albums, and which she had only rarely brought out in the presence of guests, as the Fourth of July fireworks exploded over the lake. In 1970, in the spring, the National Guard occupied the city of Madison, which is about sixty miles west of Waukesha, with ground troops and armoured vehicles, in order to put down protests against the bombing of Cambodia and the

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shootings at Kent State University. At night the city was filled with the sound of explosions and loud cries, and the young woman who had been a girl afraid of haystacks and was now the wife of a student at the university, had to stuff towels around the door and keep the windows shut to protect her two-month-old daughter from the effects of chloracetophenome, the toxic agent in the tear gas used during that period. In August she and her husband put the baby in a basket and their possessions in a U-Haul trailer which they hooked up to the 1964 Rambler American that her husband’s parents had given them and began driving west. When they got to Montana she saw mountains in the distance for the first time in her life, and she knew she would always remember that sight: it was her birthday and she was twenty-two years old. Three days later they crossed the border into Canada and drove north through flat delta land toward more mountains in the distance. The city of Vancouver appeared before them suddenly when they reached the verge of the Oak Street bridge; they drove all the way into the city and crossed many bridges before taking a room with no screens on the windows in the Deluxe Motel on Kingsway. Early that evening enormous flying insects that looked like giant and possibly deadly mosquitoes began drifting into the room and knocking blindly into the walls and the windows; she and her husband, fearful for the safety of the baby, swatted down dozens or perhaps hundreds of them with newspapers and rolled-up magazines. Later that night they saw the same insect described on the news as a harmless source of nourishment for certain west coast birds, and since then she has been a defender of the crane fly when it appears in large numbers in Vancouver in the summer. Two months later the Prime Minister of Canada, a man of fifty-four who next spring would marry a woman who favoured bell bottom trousers and high-heeled clogs and was the same age as the woman in this story, invoked the War Measures Act and threw the nation into a state of siege. By this time the woman who had

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once been a girl afraid of haystacks and her husband had borrowed fifty dollars from a professor at the university who wore a cap and gown in the style of professors in British movies, an obligation that gave them a sense of having begun to put down roots in the strange country of their exile. Twenty-eight years later, the woman in this story told a friend about being afraid of haystacks when she was seven years old. Her friend had always admired the haystacks of that earlier time, when they were big rough heaps of hay and not the rolled-up bundles that you see today which look like bloated cinnamon rolls. And then as they talked it became evident that the girl who had been afraid of haystacks hadn’t been afraid of haystacks at all: what had frightened her were more properly named stooks — a word that city people usually have to look up in a dictionary whenever they hear it. Stooks are sheaves of hay tucked up with string and left standing in staggered rows like gangs of drunken scarecrows: the perfect material of nightmares. A few weeks later the older sister and the younger brother of the girl who had been afraid of haystacks appeared on her doorstep in Vancouver, having flown in from Beirut, Lebanon, and Madison, Wisconsin, for a surprise party on her fiftieth birthday, and were thus able to confirm or deny the details of this story of a girl in Wisconsin who was afraid of haystacks when she was seven years old. She says that her sister and her brother never laughed at her for hiding on the floor of the car during those long and often frightening journeys to Rockford, and she recalls vast fields of corn sweeping by the window of the Plymouth and then later the pale yellow Ford Galaxy, and the tops of telephone poles, which she could glimpse from where she crouched on the floor, stepping hypnotically past the window of the car. Sometimes there were lightning storms, terrific winds that buffeted the car, and the smell of ozone and freshly moistened dust rose up into her nostrils, drenching the world in a promise of what was yet to come.

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2004

Poetry

The Workshop by Asa Boxer

1. Grease and Rust

Every tool is the anointed king of its work: even as it waits and fades into the general mess, even if it sinks to the status of a handle poking from a box behind the curtain beneath the counter, a wire coiled round the grip, its head near drowned in a pool of screws . . . A coat of oil repels corruption while the handle waits. The vise is seasoned black with grease. Black grease is cleanest in the shop where rust is the enemy; clean means strongholds of metal free of rust. Everything blessed with oil, like the hair of heroes and saints, prophets and messiahs. Grease fills the surface-scratch that’ll never heal, settles deep into the score against all agents of rust.

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Each tool is patient and confident it is meant for the job it was designed to do best; it will wait if it is used for only a moment in a rock’s life or for a thousand years in the tribal life, it will wait. The workman has observed this waiting, this slouched hanging from the board, like the one square hanging in the ready with a level to get it all straight the way the other levels laid aside wait with bubbles of air, like held breaths that can tell when all is aligned and gravity agrees that the work is plumb with the heart of the world. Some say the patience of the workman is the virtue of his shop, but, truly, the virtue is motion. Rest is not how things get done. Rest is how rust creeps into the world.

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2. A Workshop Run by Rust

Erosion is the mark of love carved in chalky cliffs and left to the wind to press like an unrelenting kiss that bruises and smothers and smudges the names from the hearts that were penknifed in stone, stone having offered no heart of its own. The workshop of rust works breathlessly without compunction for the organic shapings that work miracles from its slag, and by their own devices make dirt turn on rust and work toward their own exhaustion to keep the water at bay, or make the breakwater dash the crashing of the waves. Rust shows no mercy; it takes rust centuries to bat an eye. When the workman’s reflection catches on a chrome bend, he senses an oblique adversary, backwards working the shop to grist for the other workshop where a pinch sprinkled on the seasonal wheel will run the natural migration of steel and give a grape charge to ionise rust.

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Then rust becomes food, turns flesh; angelic engineer of all endings; keeper of the red gate; whatever the finale’s sound, says rust, the end begins with a squeak.

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3. The Apron

A clean apron is a sign of illness. Like a fresh-bristled broom, a sharp pencil, an instrument kept in tune, a stainfree apron is suspect and should not be allowed to leave the room unabused. The workman’s prized apron hangs alone on a spike in a vertical beam next to a clutch of aprons that serve the craft with varied cloths for different moods of labour. The favoured apron is of leather enwrought with cracked, caked, baked-on grime, and eighty years of elbow grease. It retains a paunchy curve or two from one old man, who worked well enough to keep it clean and pliable and non-flammable, an armour against oil squirts and acid spills. It rebuffed the meteoric showers tindered by the friction of the circular saw grinding through sheets of flashing; remained unaware and undaunted by the glare of an occasional slow comet of light shooting through the dim air. The apron hasn’t time enough to speculate the hazards posed by the random arc of a brief, minuscule spark.

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The carbide teeth shrieked through wood, the whirr and thump of the jackhammer drill flicked shivers and sharp slivers at the chest. The apron deflected them all with a tisk, a sizzle, a kiss of smoke. The apron carries scars enough to keep a tribe of ears in wonder stories, enough indeed for an odyssey: at least one whole chapter devoted to how the slumbering blowtorch roared and spun to give the seasoned apron that black-eyed burn and why. Another chapter on the oblong patch that covers the spot that fizzled away when acid spilled its clawing biting frenzy of bubbles over glove and apron, invisible but for the foam at the mouth, like some rabid spirit let loose in the shop, what serendipitous sign spilled out that day, and what it hissed. Chapter upon chapter of soiling, burn, and battle-scar spanning generations of shop in a sea of work in progress for the home above the workshop, the home the workshop serves, maintains, and adorns with labour and a labourer’s rusty cicatrices, and a labourer’s oily stains.

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4. The Craftsman Whistles

With a melody so simply wrought, the tune holds tight as an old ship in which every treenail in every board is swelled to seal its augered place in the vessel’s bulge. With a watertight, navicular tune, it speaks above the words it loved, the words that clung but drowned in a sound as hollow and round as the hull of a boat that carries its note in its laps across oceans and borders. It ships words beyond themselves as if into the very genes of life; it sings its order into the chromosomes the way some say a music composes the cosmos; a sharp music, I’d add, like a bolas swung overhead. It is a song that clobbers the skull and leaves us all dull, and keeps moving through the boys and the girls in the dance halls and the pubs, at the concerts and the dinner parties, alone in small rooms, or two by two with a guitar and a songbook, and not enough tunes to keep them from making their own.

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5. At Rest in Tool Boxes

More like crypts of plastic, or painted steel, with smooth drawers and tiers that lift away on rising hinges to reveal a pick-up-sticks in a bone-yard of drop-forged spanners tangled in a jangle of allen keys and keys that look like harmless silver lizards, pliers like a bunch of washed up silver fish dried to steel by sun and sea-salt winds. Every box is full to the brim; even the portable cases are no longer for lugging, too heavy, and filled all wrong for a single job, but filled with still undreamed of tasks: in a clatter of metal, in a clunk of clamps, in a knock of wood, are worlds of work at rest, at rest, and fit for the palm of your hand to tool the plans of the drawing board.

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6. An Arrangement of Miscellany

The tiny plastic boxes ranged in a grid on the wall, though cloistered seeming and belonging to a cartesian order, provide an ambiguous even disinforming meaning to the years of collected surplus: the shavings, cut corners of the shop’s chaotic whorl, its electric and neon hummings-up of eclectic bits, random snips, redundant screws and nails cut and stashed away to achieve the requisite lightness and simplicity that make the work work breathlessly at one step ahead of the rust.

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7. How to Treat Steel

I There is a phase in the annealing process, in which the steel is so strenuously focused on the proof of its own tensility, that outwardly it appears cool, but if a pair of tongs were to extend an attentive hand, such a curious touch would flinch from the heat; and if to this touch were added the incalculable weight that falls from an affectionate gaze, like motes in sunlight ever falling, never fallen, but drifting like the pollen from a tiger lily picked in play, if such lyrical abandon were to well in one’s eyes and should light upon such steel, it would split it from within as if it were hit and jump apart with a dull thud like axe-struck wood.

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II This kind of intimate familiarity with annealing is not derived from any manual on the craft, but the craftsman, no philosopher, the craftsman understands that affection has a way of increasing the core’s internal stress and he works and he keeps from meddling with metals that have an existential mood and break with a breath, and he keeps away from a certain softness of the hands and a certain falling in the looks of certain eyes: he works, and in his workings, figures out of solitude like a figure part-formed in a fog, head, shoulder, leg but never all at once; that might well break anyone.

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8. The Pegboard

I The pegboard holds a universe of tools, though the pegboard is small in relation to the shop, and the shop is small in relation to the workman, who runs it all, the leaning wood and iron. The blades of scissors and shears adjust so that when looked at from the side, a sliver of light is salvaged from the day: Should the edges rub, the blades would dull, and, in a sense, the moon would be stuck in a phase. Two pairs of shears, one left-handed, one right-: hard, bowlegged birds with steel beaks hanging in an inanimate jungle, ready to chirp their ways through a sheet of metal if they have to; cousins to the long-nosed and the snub-nosed pliers that bite and often offend by scarring the work they were helping to mould. The wire cutters and the chain cutters sit on the counter, leaving silhouettes, reminders of their places on the board; their absence marks the arrangement, makes it feel in use, though the cutters lie by.

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II A heavy, mottled, antique funnel that’s whirlpooled at least a thousand liquids down sits on the pegboard with confident permanence: a middleman, a bender of fluids, a swiller of water and oil, acid and paint. No vessel, it cannot break or sink. And the saw hanging by its handle, its teeth turned carefully inward, because at its worst it will nick through the thick skin of the workman’s hands like a nail-toothed or staple-gunned board, lurking in the woodwork, secretly waiting to tear his fingertips, till his hands, in anger, hammer them down. He is not a careless man; he is the master of this mess: when he needs something, habit knows where to find it. He wastes no time thinking of anything other than the task at hand, because it is a work of his mindful body possessed by the mess; it is this mess that orders him; and he is blessed too at times by the curse on his breath that is balanced with pride and tinged with frustration, because he reasons that beauty is the imagined made perfectly solid.

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9. Hammers

The hammers swing their handles aslant, and seem to sit like beakless woodpeckers, the steel head fixed to the handle with a steel wedge, a steel head like a crest flashing in the swing. Which tells more about the other? The hungry persistence of the bird at the bark banging down into the homes that killed the tree? Or the tempered resilience of the inanimate head tapping out structures to an imagined plan dreamed by a mind that is not on site to say if the blueprint was interpreted right. The drop-forged hammer with a handle of leather, kept, or stolen, or lost, is one piece that will last forever and when the workman holds this loyal appendage, the workman glows with a sense of his power. There is another, light-headed hammer for when the finishing-work needs a delicate, but fine decisive knock into a balsa-soft, or pine-like spot that needs a nail to hold it up. And there’s the mallet, of course, a small, wood or rubber barrel for a bouncy head to pound wood or steel without leaving half-moons and crescent scars, no heavenly sign of the craftsman’s heavy forearm to trouble the work with its history, to texture the work with its provenance from scattered efforts and unfit pieces.

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10. The Craftsman’s Outpost

I Above the rest in shiny red, one tool-case stands its drawers always open and running smooth in gritty grease; this steel shell houses the screwdrivers for every nook that needs securing: the flexible shaft for the tight corner, or the snubbed driver for the thumb. Something infantry-like in the parade of tools: the robertson, the philips, the square; something airforce-like about the names torx and hex. A blue, a yellow, a red, a green, an orange; to each his badge in the dutiful procession. None of that five-in-one-junky-handle; none of that putting all your heads in one body, the craftsman knows each by instinct, by thumb and by forefinger, he knows their scars not because he remembers their falls, but because his fingers have numbered them, and his neurons have recorded them, the drawers are left open in mind as in shop.

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II The screwdriver heads are magnetic and charged to command by filling and twisting the heads of the screws to secure them in place or lift them surgically from out of their holes where they held down their stations by the threads of their lives, but now have surrendered and cling to the tip or fall away lost with a tinkle. Carbide heads take command in screwdriver country; they hold their edges 20 times longer than the steel tipped, turn the screws at measured intervals to batten the work from its fall, a fall back to the pieces that have constructed it all.

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III Atop the red tool-chest, atop its steel shelves where steel bodies nest, the thickest, longest screwdrivers must wait their turns to tighten or release the screw in the clamp or the forgotten screw left in the damp and locked in the rust where it fused. When these drivers are used, a final tightness clamps the flow, or lets a line sag while they drive the rusted screws to dirt, and wrest the rest from rust.

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2004

Short Story

The Point David Made Earlier by Michael Winter

I had flown home for the summer and there was a party at David Twombly’s house. A parmeham from Genoa with its pink hock in tinfoil. Bourbon and squares of chocolate in the alcove. West African music. That feeling when the lights dampen, David Twombly shouted. He was grave and flighty. Before you realize it’s the light that is giving you that feeling. David had his arm around a woman visiting from Boston. Some men walk around as if they are nude. Your wife is looking for you, the woman said to David Twombly. I’m in Toronto most of the year, I said. She was married, her name was Julie Hazel. She was in St. John’s collecting sound for a documentary on war. The groans men make dying on the battlefield. It is the same utterance in the throat during orgasm.

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She touched her chest, as if her hand held a soldier’s larynx. We talked for three hours and then the walk to her house. A bowl of oranges, a ceramic deer lamp. Above her stove that night a painting she did of her husband, Walt. Walter Petey. We laughed a lot, she said, when I painted that. It’s like an icon. A name tells you something. Are you wearing underwear. I’m wearing undies on my ovaries. Three weeks later Julie Hazel said this: It seems opinion is divided on you. Have we been seen together. David Twombly said to me, if I were single like Gabe. That’s unfair, I said. I wanted to tell him. But youre married. David Twombly was purchasing a socket wrench at Canadian Tire. David a giant masculine cub. He cast out the usual male line on desire: sexy, young, smart, funny. Those are the four things men like to snag as they let their wet flies drift past an overhanging bough. But David Twombly’s second wife, a woman who had dieted too much, so that her eyes bulged, a woman whose eyes were too big for her face, her face too big for her shoulders (the first thing I had seen of Carol Trask was her dress billowing out of a payphone booth), she was teaching second year English at the campus in Corner Brook and it was generally noted that both were open to having affairs. David: There’s something vulgar about Julie Hazel. She mentioned the condition of Albert Carter. That he vomited on his shirt and wiped it off with your drapes? Oh you know that story. She’s told it to me. I think it’s hilarious.

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Are you guys fucking each other? He bought the wrench with a fifty dollar bill. There was a fine scar in the hair above her temple. It’s surgical, Julie said. Youre familiar with sutures. I’ve had an operation or two. She described lying on a table covered with white noisy paper, the wet antiseptic, the sound of a scalpel tearing the skin, the cords of muscle. Three tense clamps prying the incision open. The carving out of a cyst. It feels, she said to the surgeon, like my skull is being scraped. I am looking at your skull right now. What colour is it. White. This thought, of a man seeing her skull, the thought was behind the very plate of bone he was scraping. Me: Jesus. I’m in remission. Julie Hazel had moved from Montreal to study at Cambridge, met Walt and then found herself near hospitals for three years. I’m ambitious, she said, to make it. Youre happy doing sound. I’m talented. And marriage. When we’re away let’s play. Thing is, I feel like I’m finding love. Whereas you feel like you could be with every thirtieth man alive. She was sprinkling icing sugar on a pound cake. Torch songs, she said, are victim songs. Well what’s the difference between us? You are without guile. The summer went by like this. One morning she called from the bath: What if I was in Toronto?

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What about your husband. Walter Petey and I are great friends. He’s okay with that. He’s encouraging it. She bought a yellow bicycle. She found tubs of kimchi, fresh tuna, a flowering hibiscus, a diorama. We toured the botanical gardens and swam in a pond on the Southside Hills. She recorded men throwing sewing machines out of a second storey window. I brought lunch as she worked with Albert Carter in an editing studio on King’s Road. We sat on the roof and ate. She was an expert in something. As long as you are disciplined in a field, you can be lazy with all else. The patience in her neck. She forgot, while she was working, that I was there. Okay, I said. Come to Toronto. But in August a lump was found on her backbone. She had gone in for a pap smear. You will be single again, she said, and in your thirties. Don’t say that. We made a date. We met at the Duckworth Lunch, beside the War Memorial. It’s called something else now, but it is hard to call things by their new names. She was sitting in a booth where she could see the door. I chose the trout. I prefer variety in plates. I want to write a children’s book, she said, and call it Big Fat and Wet. I disengaged the backbone from my pale trout. It was like an old key. You were born, I said, in 1972. All summer we’d been having dates like this, pretending we were meeting for the first time. It allowed different selves to poke up. You like women, she said, and after this summer youre going to be alone.

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Do you want me to saw my head off? Youre a man who has always had a girlfriend. Ever since I was old enough to have one. We walked up King’s Road, to the independent film office where she was working. Albert Carter, shirtless, crouched by his dog, smoking a cigarette. Okay, I said. My shoulders strained with torment. Remember when they tore that down, Albert said. He was pointing his cigarette at the government building on Duckworth Street. When they gutted it, I said. All they left were I-beams. You could stand right here, Julie, and see all the harbour and the Southside Hills. Then they went and smacked her up again. I had a little blue car. During my Toronto winters I left it in a snowbank in David Twombly’s back yard. I drove Julie down to Kingman’s Cove. Your catalytic converter is rattling. That’s a resettled community. We walked into the valley that sheltered a blue island. Plum trees grew loose around the foundations of pulleddown houses. There were gooseberries and when you walked over the old gardens you could feel with your feet the potato drills that had been planted for the last time forty years ago. We kissed on the long grass and horsed around in the sun. She was game. Julie Hazel liked that I wasn’t serious about her. I kept my serious side, the side that was blown apart, tucked into a shoulder blade. We did not have enough time for grief. What she was serious about was enjoying herself. It must have been two in the afternoon and we decided to pull off our clothes and wade in. She was like a piece of furniture that should be pushed against a wall. I was not going to fall in love with her any more. She didnt look like she was falling for me, either. We were both relieved about that. We were just enjoying ourselves. We kissed and sometimes we did not close our eyes.

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There was an operation on the nub of a vertebra which left a coarse range of sutures. She was checking herself out in the mirror. Looks like a hasty repair, she said, on a mail bag. There was another scheduled operation to explore a fatty tissue in her armpit. Go to Boston, I said. Go home. Get the fuck out of here. She was peering at me, as if I were far away. We got in bed and she told me cavalierly, as if she had told numerous people, as though it were a childhood illness and we were walking home after school — a part of a sentence had been said in the Health Sciences Centre — it was about a tumour on the aorta and when that eats through. She wasn’t gauging how I might consider this. It was selfish of her to tell it like that. But then I realized she was astute. If I’d been in love, she would not have said it like that. She was actually very kind. Motives are often different from what one assumes. She came home delirious with news. There were noisy packages of cheese and dry sausage, a crisp baguette from the new bakery. I’m refusing radiation, she said. So I’m healthy and I have ninety days my God this bread is delicious. Please go to Boston. Or fetch your parents. Let’s look at your horse calendar, she said. We peeled off three months and that marched us deep into November. I’m in Toronto then. Let’s stay here, she said. I did not say anything because I knew I’d do the same thing. The zest it took to dare the wide open closet of darkness. She made excuses for not sleeping together. I reminded her we had an understanding. She was not alarmed by this — some nights she did not come home. I heard a rumour about Albert Carter. Then one day she

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said can we go to bed. I want to tell you something in bed. The temperature and weight of her leg on mine, the scent of the dryer on the pale blue pillows. She was often pounding out heat. I tried to get interested and there must have been something of that effort in my face. She said, I know it might be hard for you to have sex with me. What I’d like you to consider is this, my one favour. She said she’d love to get pregnant. I want you to think about that. It’s a selfish thing and very wrong of me, but. She pushed me away so that she could see my face better. I have a big face. I want, she said, to know my body could have a child. She slept beside me and I thought about it. So matter of fact. Julie Hazel was a generous person. She did not get along with her parents. Her father, she said, had never grown a beard. He had once told her not to walk with her hands in her pockets. I was a man with no religion, with morals surely forged by society, yet I thought this was not a subjective position. I did not consider myself wise or a man with any solid integrity. I did not know what to do. I called David Twombly. David’s advice would not be absolute, it would be male, but I knew in talking with David Twombly he’d come to a conclusion of his own. There were worse things than being David Twombly. David pulled one tire over the wet curb to pick me up, then plunged us down Prescott Street towards the harbour. It was raining hard, the defogger on. He listened to the story and said Gabe. He yanked up the handbrake outside the India Gate — it made that clicking traction. Gabe it’s both wrong and right but in the end if ever there was goodness in a bad deed. He rubbed his face hard with his hands, as if waking up. Now let’s eat.

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The rain made our inventiveness damp. We were both comfortable with this and we had nine drinks at the Grapevine. A sick woman, he said, youre bringing a new thing to someone sick. He did not convince me. We were flat on the carpet in my rented living room. That’s all right, she said. She understood she’d never get a good deal. Being alive for twenty-nine years was the blessing and who was she to whine. She said, Do this. She was stretching her mouth open with her fingers. The mirror. Our floating bony jaws, our empty red teeth. Then her eyes, bulging with the frenzy of what death is. She left while I was playing squash with David Twombly. It was a set-up. I heard from Carol Trask that Julie was staying with David. This pushed a quart of blood into my throat. I drove past the Twombly house and saw David’s wife in one window. Carol was home from Corner Brook on a long weekend and looked insane. Their house, rich and bountiful, needed painting. For three days I heard nothing substantial. Then David phoned and said she was taken away to a cancer clinic paid for by her parents. It was in Boston, he thinks, where Walter Petey could attend her. Or perhaps technically some borough outside of Boston. She had been upset and forced him not to say anything until she’d left. She stayed with you. She was here the four nights, David said. Her stuff was here. Then added, Carol was here. Your wife arrived from Corner Brook on the Sunday morning flight. Listen, he said. It was nights, I thought. David Twombly did not say days. Okay look, I took her down to the Grapevine. His voice

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had a long piece of wood attached to the sentence, keeping it straight. I tried to find someone for her. You found someone. She found Albert Carter. I flew back to Toronto in October. It was on the plane, sitting next to an old man wearing an emphysema mask. Below us the vast bridge securing Prince Edward Island. It made my own breathing erratic. I massaged my skull. I thought about how David Twombly told me, years ago, how Albert Carter loved anal sex. Loved it. I was thirty-six thousand feet in the air thinking about Albert Carter and the back of a woman I did not know. This moan. I turned, thinking the man beside me is about to die. But he was alert and patient, the clear hose feeding gas from a steel cylinder beneath his feet. It was my own chest, I could hear a sound leaking out from my ribs. Where did that come from. Feeling comes before the event is understood. It was the point that David had made earlier. I felt ruined. I was ruined.

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2004

Travel Writing

The Bus to Loja By Montana Jones

The only plane to Loja is broken, in repair, roto. Ecuador so far, does not welcome me, and I have not warmed to it. All my Spanish knowledge lies waiting in the dictionary in my pocket. I’ve learned a grande total of twelve words, and even those acquired only since I landed at the airport, accompanied by mucho fumbling. After only a day in the high altitude of Quito, sorocho, altitude sickness, has my head wrapped in tight bands, ready to burst like a taut, overripe melon. Drinking bottled water has not helped, and even to breathe here seems unwise. Sand and grit permeate the thin city air and blanket me in a light layer of foreign dirt I cannot repel. Traffic and noise fill the only spaces left; there is no room here for me. I need to get to Loja, then to Vilcabamba. It’ll be different there. With the only flight cancelled, I buy

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a ticket for the 15-hour bus ride, which will drive through the night to deliver me to a lower elevation in the Andes. On the platform in the growing dusk, I wait to load my gear and board. My eyes flit from turquoise bag to indigo backpack, like visual butterflies testing coloured luggage flowers, watching for the thieves and pickpockets of South America to dare try and alight. I adopt the same imaginary shield of all women travelling alone. Distanced, protected, under a clear safe dome. I am strong, valiente — I looked it up. My head is pounding as I board the sooty, fuming bus and find a seat. The vehicle clatters and groans and idles diesel up my nose, choking out all air and clarity so that I must close the window. I have downed three codeine-laden Tylenol and a bottle of water to help chase away my head. Through the window, shades of grey muted city patches dotted with lights promise a colourless view this trip. At 7:15 pm, I close my eyes to the growing darkness, as the autobus finally heaves and pushes itself off and away from the platform. At only 8:00 pm I awaken, wishing it were later and more distance had been wheeled away under me from Quito. It will be a long, fitful journey. I get up and make my way to the restroom. The road I cannot see, only feel. We are catapulted and replaced and flung again in every direction, an overland carnival ride along a trail so pitted, broken and rock-filled, only in South America could it be called a road. In the tiny bathroom I am tossed about by the lurching bus. As I open the narrow metal doorway, another bounce in the cratered surface spits me out into the aisle. I find my way back to my seat. Up ahead the tv is snapped on. The bright square glowing silvery static in the darkness as a woman fumbles for a video. I am glad for at least a few hours distraction, as sleep on this churning ride looks doubtful. I can’t read in the dark, or converse. My language isolates me. The pain killer is fuzzing my parameters nicely, the thrusts

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and lurches of the bus seem suddenly normal . . . I am in its rhythm now, cradled by darkness and the undulations of a dieselly maternal mammoth shuffling its unborn cargo headlong into night. I am surprised to recognize the opening credits of a Canadian film, but the comfortable rise of familiarity vanishes when I realize it’s all been dubbed over in Spanish. With the chugging of the bus I can barely hear it anyway, and I’m left alternately staring and drifting for the next few hours. Then, I want to nestle somewhere and fall into a well of sleep. I leave my aisle seat in search for a corner, a window I can curl into and wrap around me. All are occupied it seems. Then I see one near the back of the bus and head for it. I can barely make out the outline of a man in the adjacent seat. His face in the dim light, a reflection on his dark glasses, the smooth plane of his jaw. He is a much larger build than most typical Ecuadorians. I squeeze by and ease into the corner, settle in with my back angled slightly away from him, creating my own little shell around me where I can safely drift off. He has shifted his large jeaned thighs to allow me more space. The tv monitor is black now — only the rows of tiny overhead dots of light illuminate. Most all the passengers seem to be dozing. I shut my eyes. Lean against the cold hard window. Rearrange my shirt to pad my sleepy head. My body had been tensed, ready, reined in — and the muscles finally begin to relax. My legs seem to exhale into easiness. They feel warmth and I know with closed eyes that his thigh is within a breath of mine. But we have no room to move, no room for doubt — two bodies existing in a tiny cramped span of time, protecting our selves with imaginary boundaries despite our physical proximity. So we resign into the ride, and hope for sleep to pull us away from this realm, where manners and customs and our different cultures both insist that strangers do not get this close. I think he is sleeping. He has shifted his weight, and our

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arms align. I peek sidelong to see a gentle presence — a backlit caramel cheek, a closed eye beneath his glasses, soft pinky brown full lips. Behind my closed lids I picture our shoulders, our arms, our legs side by side. I feel the light between them as a white energy alive, melding and pulling, and suddenly feel that he feels this too. That he is not really asleep. Then I realize I am still giddy with altitude sickness and my minds edges are dipped in codeine. My imagination has unfurled random thoughts like a mimosa, their delicate, sensitive fronds moved to life at the slightest touch. I shift ever so slightly away, and try to cast away my rampant mental meanderings and plunge into sleep. But I feel his arm move, almost imperceptibly back toward mine, perhaps feigning a sleepy shuffle. I respond with letting my hand go limp at my side, as if in slumber, and he in turn moves his bare arm just next to mine. The delicate whisper of hair brushing mine sends an immediate surge up my arm and through my body. So taken aback that my breath softly catches. We hold the seconds, minutes . . . unmoving, expanding the moment into an hour as the bus rattles along the black road. My leg falls beside his — if I opened my eyes I swear the connection would be painted bright fire. Minutes more pass and in the darkness his arm seeks ever so slightly — it halts just shy of my right breast. The thought of such intimacy with a faceless stranger sends another surge through. His hand moves quietly and rests next to mine. And still we both feign sleep. Protected by it, it frees us to moves we do not have to acknowledge. I leave my hand lifeless — I am at once thrilled and terrified of this dangerous game I am suddenly playing. I do not know this man. But I am pulled by an inexplicable sense. And in this world I really am asleep and not responsible for where I stretch or yawn, nor is he. So wordlessly we agree, interpreting only the energy igniting us. He pretends to expand into a more comfortable sleeping

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position, and his warm hand is now cupping mine. I remain motionless — I am, after all, asleep. I could retreat, move it, pretend to awaken and re-arrange myself. But I do not. Every cell is acutely tuned to his slightest movement, and each stir sends a lick of lust through me unlike anything I have felt before. We stay this way, trundling along, the bus rhythm rocking us, encouraging us. The rest of the passengers have long been asleep and we are alone together in this surreal sensual dream. After a long while he presses between my thumb and forefinger, but I clasp my fingers tighter. His large hand ever so slowly cradles mine, protective and warm. His finger pushes harder, seeking, asking, until I give. My fist relinquishes just enough and he thrusts his finger down into the waiting dark cave my encircled fingers have made. A little breath escapes me. I am awed and excited by the power of this simple act. His finger gently strokes my palm, and I lean into his waiting arm, my head still turned away, as if in sleep. I stretch and rest my arm there, my breast still against his arm, daring him, asking him, to touch the soft handful of this sleeping stranger, this fair skinned foreign woman next to him. And if she is truly asleep, risk arrest for your liberties with her while she dreams. I turn my head down, cuddling into my own arm, where I can watch him sideways undiscovered. In the dim between us I see his closed eye nearest me under his glasses. His breath is slow and steady, and I suddenly think maybe he really is sleeping. Or he is good at this, or may think I actually am as well. But his serene expression quiets my mind. We stay this way for miles and miles more down the road, dozing, close, comforted, still never acknowledging consciousness. An unspoken but definite trust. I feel strangely more safe and right sheltered by his presence, cradled in this night, our warm bodies murmuring to each other though we have not.

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When I awaken, out the window the earth’s edges are aglow, tinged in pinks with a spreading pale yellow wash that filters through between black mountains, light and dark in alternate jagged triangles all around us. It is strange and wonderful unfamiliar terrain. My ears gently pop as I swallow. We have been descending gradually all night, moving down and away from Quito’s 9,500 plus feet. My head is finally deflating. Still pressed into my unknown partners shoulder, I move my head a bit to see his eyes not yet open, and close mine too and take a full deep breath. His hand stirs, and seeks me under the cloak of his sweater. He is slow, gentle, deliberate. Lifting under my shirt to find my last rib, he caresses my skin with such tenderness another soft gasp escapes, in wonder of this tactile dance. We ride connected this way, his hand centred on my stomach, softly and quietly midst the sleeping bus still chugging and ferreting its way along the rock-strewn winding road. In the dawn’s light the distant rain hangs over the mountains like a spreading grey ethereal cluster, a misty curtain on a muted green canvas. Soft far away mounds textured like rumpled rich mossy velvet. The edges blur as the heavy clouds move forth and swallow up each pleated fold of mountain before them into silvery vapour. There is not a drop here yet, but the rain is coming. The outside world is coming to life. We pass an early rising lone farmer, a small man picking carefully down a steep rise toward the road, an invisible string connecting five dusty grey burros dutifully inclined behind him, dragging their first days load of sugar cane. I think of how the growing light will change everything, washing away our time like a vaguely remembered dream. Sharp quick streams ping against the bus, decorating the window in transparent aqua lines as if the sky were icing a flat clear cake. He reaches up and brushes my cheek, slides up along the bridge of my nose, the arch of brow, sweeps my forehead and pauses. We still have not looked directly at each

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other. His finger is gentle but brusque, it slides down to caress my lower lip, resting there, his hand then offering its palm to my whole face. My tongue reaches out, tastes his finger and ends with a soft kiss to his hand. He speaks no English. I know little Spanish. But we have made it this far and learned more than we could with words. I think of my cocoon of protection against being alone in this unfamiliar place, gone, and the neutral grey tones that have vanished with it. Sliding the window open I breathe in fresh air, the smells of lush new growth. The rising light plays under his glasses, highlighting his cheekbone and I reach out to touch it. He cups my face in such tenderness, and turns my face to him, and we take each other fully in for the first time. I look to his eyes, and though one is open, it is a dark, still pool. The other is half-closed, guarding a badly scarred shrunken pupil. I realize neither can see me. His hand on my face reads instead, and he smiles. On our dark journey I had not noticed the white cane on the floor at his side. Pulling my head closer, with his lips to my ear he whispers, “Alma bonita, alma bonita.” Good or pretty soul, I think it means, and I smile too. He extends his coat over me, at once claiming me and joining us together, warmly bundled as one. Only another two hours to Loja, I am tranquillo, holding onto him holding me while the bus travellers begin to rouse and stir in the morning light. After the rain, out the streaked window the grey also recedes, chased by a bold equatorial sun rising high above the Andean horizon. Pursed like luscious moist lips, huge scarlet trumpet flowers splash their glory across the verdant roadside, teasing hummingbird jewels to halt and whir, to dip and sip their brilliant mouths. I place my head on his side, put my whole arm across his wide chest and hold his shoulder tight, hold him, in a final embrace that must last long after we get off this bus.

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2005

Poetry

The Mind’s Eye by Alison Pick

“Thinking begins only when we have come to know that reason, glorified for centuries, is the stiff-necked adversary of thought.” — Martin Heidegger “Beauty is not caused. It is.” — Emily Dickinson

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WINTER LANDSCAPE

The snowshoe dreams a frozen lake in the way the mind dreams thought — pulling itself inside out, a mitten drying next to a campfire. You’ve crossed the ice like memory: turning, turning and doubling back. Finding your way, losing it again. Spruce bear witness, arms thrown up. The snowshoe dreams a quiet mind where breaking trail leaves no mark, a sharpened cold as dusk drifts in like wood-smoke over the lake. You draw your knees up to your chest, hold yourself as night holds day. The final light leaks out. It leaves its pink and gentleness on the snow you’ve come across: the broken surface thinking leaves. The endless criss-crossed tracks.

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HOW THINGS CHANGE

The day plumps up with what’s undone. It rises like dough; we punch it back down. We save our kisses in a safe that’s fat and pink but won’t say oink, so we exact a recursion to bed. We pull the blankets over our heads, which makes the darkness no more dark. The pet we don’t own nuzzles her face into our choice: move home, or don’t. Nothing moves until a shadow lifts a finger, as in thought. You think, for a minute, this may be enough, and then, in the end, it isn’t.

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HISTORY

The black sleeve of history turned up at the cuff. A flash of red silk underneath. Say it’s the red of someone’s umbrella, a woman at the bus-stop, already late. Say the rain is pocking the gutter, the gutter rushing like what’s been called fate. Empedocles visioned the start of the world as chaos with body parts floating around it. Think of pure blackness; a foot sailing past. At the far end of town a man turns his keys, backs down the driveway, craning behind him. The woman gives up and decides she will walk. The rain is still falling like what’s coming next: at some point the foot will collide with a leg. The windshield is streaming with streaks of long red. The man hits the brakes and the car hydroplanes into a version of what we expect, the smack of a male body up against female. The glue was called love, Empedocles said. We’d call it chance. The church called it fate in 1831. Say that’s the year: a man boards a ship. He’s bound for a different future entirely. Restless and bored, unmoored and drifting, his uncle has pushed him to take the job. He’s pleased with his title, repeats it to himself. Charles Darwin: captain’s companion.

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THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION WINDS DOWN

Mechanistic physics: your body a clock, your dark arms ticking down the time, as though the round white face of the moon was built by human hands. To see this clearly is to see a tiny bulb behind the brain that holds the thought of size and shape and lights up when we touch. You can be the well-oiled gear; I’ll be the stick tossed into your gleaming. I’ll be the heart behind the workbench, slowly descending to rust.

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THE METAMORPHOSES’ METAMORPHOSIS

It would be easy to say I’m the violet. To say my face follows you morning to night like vegetal Clytie’s face follows Apollo. To pluck the purple from its stem would be to revise the colour of envy. Let’s take Ovid at face value, trail his arc across the horizon, the way a harder and violent desire trails a spell of relief. Every myth wants into the next and in this wanting settles its fate: picked from the mouth and placed in a glass it soon grows green with a kind of regret. And death obscures the truth of the story like breath obscures the tongue.

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WINTER LANDSCAPE II

The words of the elms have fallen. The tongues of the trees are bare. Loss speaks in frost, that careful lace, white-gloved fingers reaching. All the selves you couldn’t hold come back to your window now, frozen children wanting in, voices loose in the dusk. Cut from the clouds, the day drifts down. Sadness, the shadow it casts. You turn away from the one who calls, her mittens pressed to the glass.

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STUDY FOR MORTALITY: Charcoal on Paper

Wood-smoke drifts across the cove like memory rising off the mind. What’s left is thought, and deeper, being, that shimmering coal in the heap of gray ash. You turn for home across the low hills. Three or four houses lie scattered behind you, a child’s toys hastily abandoned in favour of the eternal life.

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STUDY FOR AESTHETICS: Charcoal on Paper

The tide retreats, reveals the space between the mind and thought — a rotting cod, the shine of spine, the skeletal secret named in sleep, and in that other, sounder sleep that gleams like wet sand — without will — as though in wanting nothing at all the glint of nothing makes itself seen. The ocean tosses, turns in its bed, the blanket of meaning briefly thrown back: form without use, the backbone of beauty, washed up on shore and picked clean.

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OPENING

When art arrives it opens a world. It makes a space the way a bonfire melts a hole in waist-deep snow down at the shore where people are gathered, ringing the warmth, laughing a little, heads tipped back to follow the sparks that float up through the jubilant night and take their place next to stars. Tonight the art falls short of a world. It draws a crowd like a terrible accident, making you look and wish you hadn’t. People are whispering, gulping their wine the way this too-small town gulps gossip. Everyone here knows everyone else; they’ve kissed, or haven’t, not quite yet; they shift, on the verge, glancing at the door, waiting for the final guest, who never arrives.

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SEEING IS BELIEVING

The doctor fills your empty frames with different lenses: better or worse? An answer’s required, although you’ve learned that beauty is built in back of the brain. You know this in the hazy way you know about blood vessels, orbiting planets; bulbous bodies barreling past a telescope’s black eye. Like taking a photo through frost-covered glass. How did a primitive patch of tissue evolve to allow you to see this doctor? You leave his office in favour of day, blinking hard against science’s shine. The sun lights up your new kind of vision; the optic nerve plugs into the brain. It’s God who is in the beholder’s eye. Who else could push such a big ball of fire through the sky?

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DISCLOSURE

If it were only a matter of looking; if the gaze could raise its object high in the air like a player who slaps the puck in the nick of, right at the last of, into the net of Time. Things end. Things peel back to show themselves as clothing falls to show the skin, the body’s one-way glass concealing what it does not know: the guts, the words for guts; the spleen, both kinds, especially sadness. Open, I face you, watch your eyes take in my heart’s two eyes, one blind. The double edge of lust divides. You see. You see right through me.

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READING GERTRUDE STEIN

“A name is adequate or it is not. If it is adequate then why go on calling it, if it is not then calling it by its name does no good.”

Pain. Loss. Bright white words hollowed out. Cups, the steaming stream of time, how we hide in the heart’s excuse. The truth: we know the proper name but won’t admit it to ourselves, each other. We cross our legs, take small sips. Smiling, our lips pressed together. We’re nervous passengers boarding a train, pigeons above in the station’s arches, a brilliant flapping just behind our eyes. We squint, say nothing, clutch our passports against the emptiness under our ribs. What has left will go on leaving, a hand on the shoulder, there, and so we shut ourselves like doors. Farewell, farewell.

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There’s no guarantee we’ll survive. We’re traveling fast into the place where pain’s a bright white moon in the night, a cup of absence spilling over onto the speechless land.

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FULL MOON

A portal. A circular door — to eternity, maybe, where existence goes to die, to be reborn again. A hole to crawl through leaving failure behind. Call the place we land in heaven, although it’s dark: the moon does not shine without the sun. The two-faced sky sees both sides, its single eye trained on absence: words not said, the back of a mirror. The stars’ mirror-image held on the sea. We paddle through our own reflections, full moon above, that watery gate. The shape of you, the shape of me. The infinite distance to be crossed.

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LEAVING FOR THE LABRADOR, LISTENING TO MY LOVER SING THE BLUES

If it should ever happen that I lose my way and winter arrives, my heart contracting, thin and white, turning for another; if the barrens take me up like history takes an unknown year making of me a circle of rocks with nothing in the center, or if the light that fractures blue into a million rivers and ponds, in a final act of surrender, gets in my eyes and blinds me, wait for me at the piano. I will know the tips of your fingers softly on my inner thigh, your back that bends, releases, bends over what’s open before it. I will know you by your sounds — rough and sweet at the back of your throat — I will know your song, my love, and it will sing me home.

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2005

Short Story

The Chorus by Erin Soros

Stillwater, British Columbia.

The sky was bending toward the mountain. June storms steal heat and light and come on fast. A couple of men choked the last logs, and the rest of the hooking crew hurried with the rigging to get out of the clear cut before the thunder. When the rain started, it fell sharp as hail. Small rivers streaked down our faces. Water sucked cotton shirts to skin. Other than a few saplings, the left side of the ridge was plucked bare, and now water was sheeting the dirt. We were done for the day. What you did, what we’re sure you must have done, was flip the safety rap back too soon. The cable had been pulled taut from the bottom of the mountain to the top, the eye splice wrapped around a stump to keep the cable from snapping loose and pulling

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back downhill. And suddenly the eye was free. It whipped around in a circle thirty feet wide, a whir of metal, jaggers sticking out of the cable to catch your body in its arc. Charlie. We heard no scream, just the crack of the line across your chest, then the snap and crash of branches. By the time we turned to look, you were gone. We dropped our tools. The skyline finally rested. It had dragged you three-hundred feet, we’d heard the roots and stumps tearing through your body. We found your right leg spiked in the dirt as if someone had planted it there, the thigh bone split and sticking through the skin. Rain was already pooling in the gouge. Thorvald pulled the leg out of the dirt. The foot dragged like it was trying to walk. A hundred feet downhill we found your head still attached to your chest. Your face had been scratched off, the bones smashed into a fine spray so we couldn’t tell the white from the red. “Wife won’t know him.” “No.” ^^^^ The foreman pulled out his notebook. Tight black letters inside the columns: job, date, location. Then he handed over the pen so we could sign off that we’d identified the body. Charlie was no name for an Eskimo, but we’d never asked about that. You’d been a hook tender twenty years. June 28th, 1944. We all signed. ^^^^ The logging camp was bright, or at least the cookhouse was bright, even at this hour, three a.m. The generator hummed steady against the encroaching evergreens. An oil lamp on the cookhouse porch cast a pale glow. The cook was up, the bullcook was up, slicing, sweeping. Rain spat mud on the

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stairs faster than the bullcook could sweep it away. Rain on the network of wooden sidewalks that ran through the centre of the camp and branched off to link each building to the next. Together the buildings formed a horseshoe: cookhouse at one end, and bunkhouses running down in two long lines. Each building was a cedar rectangle with a low pointed roof — plank walls thrown up in a day — and small windows covered inside by drying shirts. The commissary was off to the left, behind the cookhouse. It was dark yet, shelves glinting in half-light: toothpaste, shaving cream, tobacco tins. First aid supplies were crammed in the corner, a desk in the back for the timekeeper. He was still asleep, curled in a metal cot beside the foreman’s, dreaming he was anywhere but here. Holding him in bed were the red, yellow and green stripes of Hudson Bay blankets. He’d bought the white sheets himself. And the throw rug on the floor, a stack of Western novels tidy against the whitewashed walls. Drops of rain spattered the beer bottles that lined the sidewalk by the cookhouse. In the bunkhouses the wooden bunks ran end to end with lousy heads. We slept two or three to a bed, on mattresses flattened and mottled with stains. No sheets or pillows. Mattress buttons digging into our backs. Tonight, those of us who found you, Charlie, were lying with our eyes on the rafters, head cradled in hands, or we curled on our side to watch the rise and fall of the next man’s shoulder. It felt good, the warmth of a bunkmate’s body. Breathe in, breathe out. Through the bunkhouse walls the rain released the wet pink scent of cedar. ^^^^ The next morning the skyline still lay on the ground. We walked over it the way children avoid cracks in the sidewalk. Soon the steam donkey would drag it down the hill, a thousand feet of steel cable, and we’d be done with it. We’d be

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able to walk away from this quarter, the logs gone. But the guylines and the strawlines were still rigged taut. We’d need to release those before we could get out of here, and that would be a good hour’s work. Thorvald would sub for you. A new man would arrive in a week. A hook tender was never hard to replace. The skyline we didn’t want to touch. Not that we feared it. The line couldn’t hurt a man now that it wasn’t rigged tight from the stump to the spar. It lay on the ground lazy as a snake that’s eaten its kill. We’ve all held a man’s photograph after he’s gone, sad to see his smile that we’d never see again, or the way the scar on his brow sat like an umbrella for his eye. We’ve run our fingers along his cold forehead like we never did when he was alive. And we’ve touched their shirts like we touched yours, we’ve packed shirts and canvas pants and woolen socks and thought of the days and nights that wore them, good shoes, the shoes we never saw in the camp, shoes for walking on city streets, with city girls. What man can say he hasn’t held those things? But this was different. This was no letter we found in a pocket and thought we shouldn’t read. Your body was still here though we’d done our best to remove it, bits of your skin and blood caught on the cragged rocks and stumps. A strand of hair like grass. The sun drying your blood until it turned to dirt, until the rains come down to make your blood run again. We wanted to leave this hill. Enough of the fallen trees and the fresh stumps, enough of our caulk boots poking wet earth. Leave this hill alone and let the skyline rest. ^^^^ Spruce two-hundred feet high and eighteen feet thick, the hill crowded and dark with branches and underbrush we had to fight back to reach the next quarter, no space now to be thinking about a logger who wasn’t here. It was Thorvald’s

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job to rig the spar tree. His rope belt circled the tree, the Douglas fir soaring straight into a sky that was blank but for a belt of cloud. We stepped safe away and watched him lean back against the rope, watched him ram his spurs into the wood and limb the tree on his way up, sawing off the branches so they fell and crashed, the sound of them cracking as he walked to the top. ^^^^ You were dead eighteen hours. We were back at work. ^^^^ No priest for the funeral, no write-up in the Powell River Dispatch, no mothers from the mill town making pies for the widow. You were an Eskimo and a logger. When you were alive you rode with the Indians in the listing heat of the ship’s boiler room while we sat above and played cards. You sat with the Indians in the balcony in our mill town’s proud theatre — first cinema in the dominion! — where we went on special occasions to watch Indians killed. But you died in pieces and so your eulogy would come in pieces, in the torn bits of belief and conjecture blown from camp C to camp B to camp D, floating like burnt paper in the dark. ^^^^ We were not religious men. Our woods housed no church. The only bibles we encountered were tucked in the night tables of Vancouver hotel rooms, small black witnesses to the white skin of women we paid. Each month we returned prodigal to these Doug Firs that dwarfed sin. What God was here? There was no watching presence in this thick green grave. When a man fell, the trees did not mourn. We would bury you on Monday. Today was Sunday, day

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of haircuts. Day of moonshine and poker and rubbing our yellow-stained shirts against soap-slick rocks in the creek. Day when men crouched in their bunks to ink letters — those of us who could write and who still had a lady somewhere who remembered our real names. We licked the envelopes and imagined our tongues in other places. We never wrote of the men who died or how blood made us fear for our own crushable flesh. Dawn came without you. Breakfast and lunch came without you. We were used to walking the camp on the days following a death, when a logger had been struck down by a branch or snapped in two by a rolling trunk. We were used to seeing him, the faller or bucker or boom-man, or thinking we saw him, sitting in his bunk or his chair in the cookhouse as if his body wanted its damn Sunday after its last week of work. The mind does not let go of the shapes it expects to find, so we knew that these bodies we saw were not ghosts or restless souls but our own hopeful vision, the way the brim of a hat holds the head more noticeably after the hat has fallen off. Slack-jawed, sand-eyed, we drank our coffee. There’s a sharpness to the air when a man hasn’t slept the night or has slept it poorly, nerves electric on his skin — his mind slow while his legs are ready to run. In the brittle light we startled at the blue jays darting our hands as we reached for a smoke, jumped at the clang of pots and pans in the cookhouse, pulled away from the raw stringent stink of ammonia poured into buckets to wipe the floor clean. Even if we snuck back into the bunkhouse after breakfast for a Sunday nap, you would not let us sleep. “I’m dead tired,” Jackpot said. Heads heavy we leaned forward to feel the razor carve away this week’s hair. The soap woke us. We sat on wooden chairs on the wooden sidewalk, the chair legs tilting uneven so that we had to brace ourselves to keep our necks steady against the blade. There was no barber, just the bunkmates who would want the

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same. We slumped, offered our necks. Four men sitting and four men cutting, reciprocal trust. Thumbs rough on the red tender skin. The hair fell into the sidewalk cracks. Then we stood up, sheep-shorn, our necks still wreathed in soap. We shook our bristled heads, new to the morning, and switched places. Under our feet were the rolling papers that got caught in the same storm you did. They were still wet, torn by our boots and by the chair legs we tried to keep from wobbling back and forth. We could see through the paper to the wood of the sidewalk. If we picked it up, the soggy mass would disintegrate in our hands. A bear walked through the camp, the bottom of his coat matted with dried mud. He was just a black bear, already fat on the spring’s berries. Uninterested in us. We stood beside our wooden chairs and let him pass. The musky warm breath of bear. He sniffed the door of the cookhouse, sniffed a beer bottle left on the porch. Then he sniffed the bunkhouse windows, pawing the glass, and we knew it was our rank undershirts he wanted, the smell like the stench of his fur. He moved along. His shoulders rolled as he lumbered close to the ground. And this seemed a less vulnerable way to walk, using both the front legs and the back, not standing like one of us on two caulk boots as if we needed the sharp pegs in our soles just to keep us nailed upright, our heads high, bodies waiting for a tree to strike us down. ^^^^ Charlie, on the job you spoke only when something was wrong — tight the line! Slack the sky! — and so we remembered that you had yelled out, when you died. As the skyline dragged you downhill you shouted your last command. But that was just the line. It was the line that screamed. You borrowed nothing. Drove up to camp with your own boots, your own ax, your own Swedish fiddle. Your death

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slipped through the camp without debt. The foreman ticked off your name in a book, wrote the balance of the upcoming paycheck out to your widow, and no one was sent to circle through the cookhouse calling out what you owed the company store. ^^^^ In the days after your death, it was our own bodies we feared. Scar tissue does not move as easily as the skin surrounding it. Thirst could wake us in the dark to our own stinking parched breath. We wanted to escape this flesh that needs to be washed and watered and fed. We hated the fragile openings of the eyes, the joints that ached in our boots, rubbing blistered against the leather to let us know that this tough skin we needed for our protection was not our own. Repelled by our own smell, we escaped the bunkhouse only to be caught by the reek of piss, creosote, old beer. We sat down in the cookhouse where the slab of meat on our plate was too raw. The cook dropped a sack of sugar heavy as a man’s chest. Alive, we touched our leather suspenders, our plates, the rough edge of a cookhouse bench, all the solid objects that told us we had not been torn to bits. We chewed tobacco and hucked the black splats on the sidewalks and when it was our turn on Sunday again we tipped back on our wooden chairs to feel the fresh coolness of our hair being cut. The chairs creaking under human weight. Then we took a second sandwich, more tobacco, another nap so we could fall dumb into sleep that tempted us with the sweaty grunting rutting we wanted most of all. Against death we wanted a woman’s skin to suck and rub and enter. We reached for her, and the dirty sheets caught the rush of our juice. ^^^^

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2005

Creative Non-Fiction

I, Witness by Kim Echlin

Year Zero was the dawn of an age in which, in extremis, there would be no families, no sentiment, no expression of love or grief, no medicines, no hospitals, no schools, no books, no learning, no holidays, no music: only work and death. New Internationalist

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A Man on the Road to Choeung Ek The grass has done its work. But I saw with my own eyes how they killed. The city road turns into country, through paddy and sugar palm. Children catch frogs along the ridges, run past the bones. In my work brigade not far from here, they called a big meeting. They dragged out a young couple and blindfolded them and tied them up to a tree. They ordered my brigade to come and see people who fall in love without permission from Angkor. “What should we do?” the leaders yelled. My brigade yelled back, “Kill! Kill!” I said that thing too. A young boy beside me stepped forward with a bamboo stick like onto a stage and hit the man across his head. Blood was coming out of his nose and his ears and his eyes. They took the blindfold off the woman and she looked and she did not say one word. She went pale and she closed her eyes and they beat her too. After many blows they finished her off. I did this thing too. I hit a still living human being hard on the head and the neck and back. When I tell my story to a foreigner at Choeung Ek she says, “Why did you shout, Kill, Kill?” I move my hands in circles in front of my chest, like this, and I say, “It came out. I did not know what to feel at that time. Words came out with all the other voices.” I bring my hands into an open funnel in front of my face, as if to look through a tunnel. I say to the foreigner, “I am a living dead. I have my body, I can move, I can speak, I can eat, but I am dust without words.” On the road to Choeung Ek. When samai a-Pol Pot time was over I volunteered to count the bodies in the graves. I hoped to find my family. At Choeung Ek, one of us who survived made this sign out of words that cannot tell:

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Foreigner I love the traditional proverbs here. “Tek yap’ kum niyay nin sri, don’t talk to your wife in bed at night.” Or, “If you are mean, be mean so that people respect you. If you’re stupid, be stupid so that they pity you.” Or, “When the waters rise the fish eat the ants; when the waters sink the ants eat the fish.” They loop in your head. People repeat them all the time. They have the authority of morning; from their light people set out. Imagine what it would be like. A four year slaughter. Imagine it the way I do, working at a mass grave, waist deep in mist. Imagine it in more than a television way. Imagine your street; now think of every seventh person murdered. Imagine waking up one morning and voices outside your bedroom window shouting, “Comrades, it is Year Zero.” Teenaged soldiers who can’t drive lurch down your street in tanks and trucks. They are country kids. They’ve been hiding out in the jungle. They screech brakes, pop clutches. You get dressed quickly, go outside. They scream through megaphones at you to leave your home. They fire guns and kill anyone who talks back, or asks questions, or, god forbid, refuses to go. They can’t read or write. Think of your old mother who cannot walk. She lives on the other side of the city and you cannot get to her. These hard-eyed boy-soldiers dressed in black pajamas tramp through the hospital shooting anyone who can’t get up. Think of people trying to push hospital beds along the road. Your bowels have turned to liquid. You do not know where you will sleep this night. There is no clean water. Nowhere to shit. What did you bring? Did you think of matches? Did you think of a cooking pot? A bowl? You have seen old people die on the roadside. You have seen a woman giving birth in a ditch. After only a few days you are a thirsty, crouching, filthy creature. You are so hungry your head explodes. Already you have stolen your bowl from a shot

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corpse by the side of the road. What will you do next? What are you capable of? Year Zero. Your country has a new name. The whole country works in rice paddies. Seed. Plant roots. Harvest. Cut with knives. Pound. Winnow. Bag for soldiers. Music is forbidden. Talk is forbidden. They set fire to libraries. Banks. Mail. Telephones. Radio. All contact outside the country is gone. The teenagers serve Angkor, The Organization. The leader is Brother Number One. No one knows his name is Pol Pot yet. No one knows he used to be a schoolteacher called Saloth Sar. How did this happen? You fell asleep and now nothing is what it was. Are you? Will you risk being killed to be who you are? If you do, no one will ever know. In Year Zero who are you? We are a forgetting species. We create stupas full of skulls, but already people are forgetting the detail. Young people begin to say that the stories are exaggerated. Memory is designed to forget. If we had to remember everything we would go crazy. The French called what happened in Cambodia an autogenocide. It has also been called the purist revolution in history. So pure that language almost disappeared. Young people thought in slogans. Revolutionary proverbs looped through the day: “You alive no gain; you dead no loss.” “Better to kill an innocent person than to leave an enemy alive.” We have all become genocide voyeurs. Backpackers and families visit Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Dachau, Babi Yar, Ntarama church. In Phnom Penh we go to a school that was converted into a torture and extermination centre called Tuol Sleng. We look at walls of photographs of those who died there. They have numbers pinned to their shirts. Except the babies. Except the boy who has no shirt and the number is pinned into his skin.

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A Woman at Tuol Sleng Tears of rage. The Day to Remain Tied in Anger. In those first years after the Pol Pot time, they called us together to try to remember what happened. When someone recognized a person in the photos they wrote their name on the picture. So many without a name. I went to Tuol Sleng because I thought I might find out what happened to my family but I did not. My father was a doctor. My grandfather was a professor. They used the children’s gymnastics bars to tie people up and dislocate their shoulders. There were burn marks on the walls from the electric shocks. There were bloodstains on the floors. A woman behind the microphone faces the crowd. She is dressed in white. She is thin and she holds a white handkerchief. Her nasal voice flays us. Her parents, her husband, her brothers and sisters, her children were all taken from her one by one. She chants their names, tears streaming down her face, deep lines between her brows, and when she has to pause for breath, to work past the lumps in her throat, she covers her face with her white handkerchief. It drips with tears and sweat. Behold grief. Words and weeping become one, her cloth covers her mouth, her cloth lowers again. There is a dread grace to her movement; she sways from the waist, her long and shapely fingers ripple like stalks of grain. She sings, What sorrow is there that is not mine? Country lost and husband and children. What sorrow is not mine? I study the dust. Face after face after face turns away, eyes dropping, tears falling. The monks say, Mean ruup mean tok, With a body comes suffering.

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An Expatriate from Kandal province “Man is born free and everywhere in chains.” Rousseau. All of us knew that slogan. I was studying in Paris. It was 1968, the best time of my life. I joined the progressives; we read Marx, Chomsky, books we could not get in Cambodia. We were all connected, by deep structure, revolution and music and youth. I lived with students from Mexico and Senegal and Cameroon. I chased along the streets in demonstrations. Once I was with a French student who was throwing bricks at the police and we ducked down a side street and hid in a café. I said to him, “Why are you throwing bricks?” And he started laughing and said, “I don’t even know!” I gave out pamphlets denouncing imperialism and we heard about Mao’s China, and I joined the Khmer Rouge and I went back just before Pol Pot time because I believed in the revolution. Phnom Penh filled up with students. We talked and stayed up late and listened to Ray Charles and the Beatles. I will not say how I got out. Now I live in Europe. Whoever is left alive has stayed friends. I go back once in a while to see my old friends. We still miss the ones who died. It all went too far. That is all I can say about what I lost because of the Khmer Rouge. I will not let one tear fall because if the dam bursts, I will choke in my own salt.

A Former Refugee from Aranyaprathet Camp The Thais did not want us; they wanted to push us back across. Do not let a hungry man guard rice. They took some of us in buses to another part of the border. No one was supposed to see, but peasants saw. The people were forced to walk two and a half hours to a large mountain with a steep cliff. Then the whole group was pushed over by Thai soldiers and killed. People do not believe this story but

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peasants saw. Is the word of a peasant no good? I myself was taken to Preah Vihear. They forced us to walk in a crowd to the cliffs at Preah Vihear. They gave us a cup of rice each before sending us down the mountain paths back to Cambodia. Through mine fields. No water. A few people had salt. I was one who survived. It took three days to cross the mine fields. Dead bodies were everywhere. Hurt people were moaning. Mines kept exploding. I do not know why I survived. I walked close to the dead bodies. In this way I knew the mines were already tripped. Bone creatures were crawling in the forests and mountains. Starving. I saw children sitting in a field with their skin stretched over their ribs like twigs. I got on a truck to Phnom Penh. I do not want to stay here but I have no chance to go anywhere else. To live. So I must stay. I just try to live. I still think of the twig children.

Foreigner In Phnom Penh, a woman sat down beside me in the market and said, “I lost my family during Pol Pot. I wanted to go to Canada but I got sent back from Aranyaprathet refugee camp.” She smiles. The new end of the earth is a place where a complete stranger walks up to you in a market and says, “My whole family was murdered.” Imagine you survived. You ate grubs and you hauled human bodies for fertilizer. You saw the boys in black take your friends away on a truck to the Higher Organization. One of your friends stole some sugar cane. He was fetched at night and clubbed to death. You watched children starve, old people die in the stench of dysentery from eating inedible leaves. You were strong and you planted rice. It was thirty years ago and the country is covered with mass graves and people still talk to strangers about what they lost. There’s

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never been a trial. Bones work their way to the earth’s surface each rainy season. A group of young Cambodian radio journalists from the Department of Information is learning how to do interviews with a Canadian journalist. One man tells how the Khmer Rouge killed his mother, then lured his sister out her hiding place in the ditch calling, “Come and help your mother.” As soon as the child stood up they shot her too. The young journalists start to laugh. When another woman talks about eating grass and rats, they laugh again and their teacher stops the interviews. Young people are embarrassed by these old stories. It has been the sound track of their lives. I have dreams that repeat over and over. I keep dreaming that I am in a grave and village women scream at me, “Do not dig. Our men are coming back; there’s nothing under the earth that we wish to find.” Soldiers shoot at them and force me to dig and I find their men. They wail and collapse into the graves. I say, “How do you know these are your men?” And the women appear from under the corpses with house keys.

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2006

Poetry

A Walker in the City by Méira Cook

Astringent day in early winter when all the angels have been let out of their cages. The wet blue beak of morning, sky skidding on ahead or flying — the sky — flying laundry. Shunting cirrus back and forth (sky) swerving its tracks boing-boing rubber as a ball highing the bluest bit of hush at the centre of a jaunty girl’s jaunty eye. Caloo Calay, arias she out (but soft away). Then shining all and sure vaults she the wind’s cathedral stamping booted feet lifting a hand unmittened, yes, the better to balance welterweight wind (flying fists) on a wet fingertip. Hello again, hello. It’s me (it’s only me).

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City bristlin’ gloves today, handless, cut off at the wrist. That’s supplication at best, at worst the bait ’n grab of a supple leather up-yours beneath her seat on the no. 61 uptown. As blue as that mitten flashfrozen into prayer on this morning’s path. Yes, gloves gathering in all the world’s soiled places where she’s too long stared herself down. Dear termagant, like all collectors despairing the end of the collection. Left hand to match bleating calfskin (no. 5 1/2) or missing handcombed angora in damson and plush. Brisk brisk, a walker in the city, stoops & strides, blush blush away, glove clutched jittery in hand, hand in hand.

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That girl again, ho! A walker in the city measures distance in feet defeats lengthening lamppost gaps, width of a line scrawled on a hasty page. As if walking merely to conjugate the season’s crackling yellow declensions. But winter now . . . winter and the world funnels inwards, declines, ah, elegant within cagey astrakhan, between closed lids, lips. Let’s catch her, moth-girl, against the lit page, against flying leaves herself, selving, angular & awkward. Girl with a name like a shrug, a one-handed wave, terse in the flyleaf of some book of posthumous queries. How many shoes did Dante wear out while writing the Commedia? Breathes she a prayer (a curse) cast visible in discrete indiscreet puffs before sweeping to heaven on an updraft. Meanwhile thighs she hard and trim the street to her stride, alive

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alive-o! A spasm of agape gaping open in her throat and morning swinging sideways, flaring open with her coat.

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Like the last of the summer bees, dazed, dashing for hothouse interiors bumbling the pockets of windbreakers, satchel linings. This longing for God that springs unholy water gushing to the mouth as if at the scent of meat grilling. Every year ’round this time summer tenses past, a frantic bird flying out of her mouth, flying south. Well-cut eyes, curt temples: she loses her temper more & moreish, allowing thus everyone else to keep theirs. Darkens, then, penitential violets beneath her eyes. The people in this city like strike-on-anything matches, blazing friendships on street corners, in elevators. Ready to rub heads with anyone, everyone, flaring briefly in the dusk. Ah recompose my disquiet. (Observe, watch how she licks her fingers between the pages of a book.) Look, just as well considering the darkness falls each year not all of which can extinguish the light from a single cigarette, not

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all the darkness. One day midwinters she a fist, pocketdeep. Pulls out, frail & brown, blown, the corpse of a thought lost months ago buzz buzz

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Comes the night and falls the snow. That disproportion, snow, resolved to perfect the collapsing scaffold of winter. Nothing else, not love or grief, not anger or etiquette, Lordy, so ex-ces-sive. That walker, mud-booted, her hands, her cheeks, cold as allegory as — as that which escapes comparison, ha! Yea though she walks cogitates she those honeycombed lives. Lit windows, bent heads absolving the dishes clean. Passes the old city poet in his aerie dismantled this night by lust or virtue, pacing his rooms, scribbling poems to his circling unsuitable self. (Burning the topless towers of Ilium and so forth, muttering so? I misread the past. It was, after all, a difficult book.) Come home, girl, give us a kiss, do. Her fingers wet and darkness falling in decorous arches: tumbled, sprawling.

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Hunched, hatching his little death sits he, Brother Pig. That old poet all squalorous and gone in the teeth but the pitcher in him full or half at least. A little leaking life, faith and anti-faith hoarded equally, a loose handful of words to turn the humming world on its tilted ear, yas. Searches for a word, a sentence takes off on its own, joins someone else’s poem. So: walking girl leans windward, peels nail polish in a thick rind, her long nails clicking a tangerine rosary. The old poet wonders what she looks like (ah take this cup from my lips) does not turn to belabour her points, charmed by the coupla things already he knows. As item: the unbroken citrus curl. As item: a steady devout click.

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So, you think walking solves the world? Cures what ails you? Nimbly she sidesteps his complex plaint, his inky blue lines thrown out to reel her in. The sky a soggy grey lung overhead breathing hoowah. Or no, the winter sky snapping like bunting. Either way comparisons evade the subject, hasten to miss their appointments. Lacking curves the way rivers lack angles. His baited prose, I mean, his eye tuned to the hazy blue frequencies of distance. Ago and much ago she was his once upon a much ado — about nothing gave she quarter and green grew the rushes-o!

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So? She is a walker in the city, of young & brimming age, so suffers the streets to move through her, to move her. The foot a precise approximation of length. Like poetic metre or the distance at any one radius between two radiant lovers. Ah look what you do done done to me! whistles he through the sugar cube in his teeth, that old reprobate, his currentless amblings all over this page, his mindful heart, his capital F for art (its vectoring flight). The seen frothing up at the intersection of object & gaze, the glaze, the light. The seen leaking out of his eyes in cataracts.

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Westward ho ho ho. Trudgy with weariness off the gimlet shift and longing for the vicious rounding of a little sleep. But how to get home again, homesweet east-best and wee wee wee (all the way). And she without her wings, without key or compass or ruby mittens. She lost. Alas, alack lacks she volition, verily so tired, you see. Mired in the high mucky-muck of toil & trouble, wan and wondering, by the bus stop palely loitering. Who owns this night the city? Grain merchants, oilers and bankers, cutpurses, rogues. I trow, some slithy tove or other in an office tower ’bove Portage & Main. The golden lad highballing his legislature or Worm the Conqueror? She walks to disown. The Möbius spool to spool of earth & sky, no joints showing unpremeditated snowing and then the lighting of the lamps.

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Blinks the hazy orange eye of a no. 18 cross-town in which an old party cable-knitted to a flecked rectitude faces inwards profiling his spruce coin. Above her dozy lapse the Heinz baby food baby agape with joy. Mood Gush to the Last Spoonerism! Gathers the bus and rattles them as stones into one pocket: an old man, tired girl, that beamish tot shiny as pate. Full holy at last, one family, at least for another two stops. Advertisement for Madonna & Child, St. Joseph gazing benignly on while the past tenses — perfects itself in the future’s radiant pigment. What the city offers tentatively, tenderly, late at night and far away from home: a stone in the shoe, the body’s thin metalfatigued chrome, presentiment of kin between strangers.

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Fall, season of the doppelgänger, that unhoused girl who straggles behind kicking leaves at his ankles. Wherever he goes she follows, his canny adjective. Give me a name, she begs, and I’ll leave. Leaves, autumn cut-outs peel like decals from the illustrative elms. Also, the matter of his sour mood, snarling at smokers, coughers, falterers between one step, the next. And those who mumble directions, palate banality, who knock green apples against their teeth (crisply on the bus) who fumble change in the post office line. More or less, these days and then less and less.

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A name, a name, she prods nose buried in tracts of fur forty nylons once were slaughtered to provide. Share they the wind, the sky. Share they a fumbly history of the knocks and falters a city delivers in the course of a morning, say, skittering on thin-skinned ice. Share they wind-caper, sun-spin. Like him she is a walker in the city. Advance, advance: they avoid as passersby avoid each other’s glance.

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Tis the season of packing up and digging in, tis the season of being done. Tis the day after twas, he doggerels in the margin of a notebook, foxed endpapers and vellumish pages like a Madonna with a hundred white hands folded shut. Ah, but what what to do with her, where to escort her, this walker? Wants to write until she comes home to him, his walker, mudbooted, her hands her cheeks cold as air. They share eyes, unheimlich manoeuvre, blue snap of shadow across alluvial snow. So — so: a name like an indrawn breath, cara mia. Easing her narrow shoulders into the unused day, heave and hawk, bulging to swallow a sip, a crumb. A word smooth and oval as a pill — love, say, or pain — gulped down with the morning coffee. Give me a name, she pants. Beside herself.

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Cara mia, mea culpa. My darling, my fault. (His fortunate importunate fall.) Or consider static, a well-fed refrigerator ruminating on its appetites. Think of all those buzzing words flashed down to a green asterisk centre of a blank afternoon: Mia, mine. Centering the true of noon. As in: whene’er in furs my Mia goes then wakes she stars like footnotes to the planets discord. As in: two walkers walking beneath high crackling winds. As in: one following or (to reverse the vice) one leading. Caught like socks in the hot drum of a dryer. Clinging statically, ecstatically. Flashing blue into true poetry. (And what about static poems, hmm? Words that crackle, words that cling?) Felix and Mia walking the pr-air-ie C. U. S. S. I. N. G. wind catspawed his jowl / her little cheek, pat pat

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That dawning moment when the world, framed in glass, enters the window pane. Good morrow, waking soul! Mia wakes hasty as a dreamer baulked by impossible metre. Nothing rhymes, for example, orange. On subject of which was colour named for fruit or fruit brute colour? A walker wakes, trailing two fingers through wake of sleep, aah . . . One of those sudsy dreams drains thick & slow leaves lime stains and hard water deposits on the inside of the mind. Lint, lint . . . a day (when she steps foot) one stride or breath, too wide, too small. Eventually all acorns fall, wing & root from chicken-little skies. On subject of which does left mean wrong? Can one begin an autobiography without believing the end of the story? On subject of which what ebbs & flows from grief, what wanes? And what did dreamers dream before the invention of tunnels and their trains?

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2006

Short Story

The People Who Love Her by Amy Jones

Under Sephie’s arms there are red marks where the tops of the crutches have rubbed against her armpit skin. She’ll get used to them, the nurse at the hospital told me last night, but maybe at first she’ll get a bit of a rash. Tell her to use some lotion and wear long sleeved shirts. But it is summer and Sephie only wants to wear tank tops, she is stubborn like that. Plus she has really nice shoulders, all soft and freckly and covered in fine, silky hair. Sometimes I am surprised at how easily things break. We are going to Cosy’s for breakfast because I have no food in my apartment and even if I did it would be too hot to cook. Last night Sephie slept in my bed and I slept on the couch, which is not really a couch but a loveseat and so this morning my legs are cramped up and tired, as if I spent the entire night

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crouching in a corner. I was supposed to prop Sephie’s leg up on pillows before she went to sleep but because I don’t have many pillows so I ended up propping her leg up on a stack of magazines. Now my bed smells like plaster and perfume. At Cosy’s Sephie bumps into an old man sitting at the counter when she is trying to squeeze between the tables. She is not very good at maneuvering her crutches yet, or maybe she is still a bit drunk. The old man glares at her, but secretly I think he is happy that someone has touched him, that he is sitting on that stool with his butt pushed way out just so someone will. Sephie once lived in London with a man named Jonah who loved her more than anyone has ever loved anyone. They lived together in a small, cold apartment with rats and did a lot of drugs and Jonah painted pictures of Sephie: Sephie sleeping, Sephie eating, Sephie lighting candles, Sephie in the bathtub, hundreds of pictures, on huge canvases at first, then on looseleaf when he had no money left to buy canvases, cheap copy paper, napkins. Sephie never left the apartment, and Jonah only went out to buy bread and soup. Jonah loved Sephie so much that he would cry the whole time he was apart from her, and when he came back his tears would be frozen to his face, tiny icicles dangling from his eyelashes. The last portrait of her he painted in his own blood on the classified section of the newspaper, pictures of sad-faced real estate agents peeking out from the dried-brown flakes of her eyes. By then they had only four slices of bread left, and one can of chicken noodle soup. Sephie let Jonah eat the bread and they shared the soup, sitting and staring at each other until their last candle burnt out. Jonah was beautiful, Sephie said, he had kind eyes and pale, parchment skin that cracked in the London winter. When the candle burnt out, Sephie came home. She still had a five pound note sewn into the lining of her backpack, and a return ticket to Halifax. She said she waited until it

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was dark because she wanted Jonah to remember her sitting there, in the apartment, her face lit by candlelight; she didn’t want him to think of her leaving him. She said she wanted to stay burned on the back of his eyelids. Sephie could be dramatic like that. When I asked her if she was happy in London with Jonah she told me that when someone loved you that much it was impossible to be happy. Sephie is visiting me from Calgary, where she lives with a man named Albert who owns four cars and is much older than her. Albert is an architect and they live in a brand new house that he designed himself in a brand new subdivision in Calgary, which Sephie says isn’t a big deal because most of Calgary is brand new, hard and sparkling like the edge of a knife. Two of his cars are sports cars of some type and one is a regular car and the other is a truck. Why would anyone need four cars? I asked her once. There’s only one of him. He can only drive one car. I drive the truck sometimes, Sephie said. Okay, that’s two. Sephie rolled her eyes. Jill, you have more than one pair of shoes, don’t you? From the way she says it I know it’s something Albert said to her once. Albert and Sephie have been living together for almost two years and the most I know about him is he’s the kind of man who changes cars to match his outfits. At Cosy’s Sephie orders the breakfast special and a chocolate milkshake and a side order of onion rings. Pain makes me hungry, she says, spreading peanut butter on a slice of toast which is already drowning in regular butter. I’ll probably just throw it up later. When she sees me staring at her she says for God’s sake Jill. Where’s your sense of humour? Last night at the hospital the doctor told me something about Sephie’s ankle. Sephie was playing with the controls on the

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side of her little hospital bed, raising it up and down, the slick paper sheet crinkling like old newspaper. She had one of the nurses in the room with her, a young woman with short blonde hair and rosy cheeks. The nurse took Sephie’s blood pressure and then Sephie took the nurse’s. The nurse gave Sephie a lollypop and a tongue depressor, and Sephie stuck both of them in her mouth. Josephine can take these in the morning, the doctor said. When she sobers up. He kept talking. Sephie and the nurse were laughing about something, and then there was an older man in the room, a technician of some kind, and he was laughing too, and I wanted to be in there laughing with them instead of listening to this old doctor talk about pills. I took the bottle and shoved it in my purse, but by then Sephie was up on her crutches yelling yee haw, baby, let’s go, and the nurse and the technician were gone. Before last night, the last time I was in the hospital with Sephie was in high school. She had been starving herself almost as long as we had been friends. When she starting having seizures her mother called her doctor, who sent an ambulance to take Sephie to the hospital. By then she weighed 96 pounds and had lost two of her teeth, but it still took three paramedics to strap her to the stretcher. The doctors put her on suicide watch and gave her an intravenous feeding tube, which she named Jean-Claude. Her roommate in the behavioural ward was another tiny girl named Jules with bulging eyes and short hair like straw who was an arsonist and a cutter. Sometimes, Sephie told me, she would wake up to find Jules in bed with her, trying to curl up to her like a kitten. Another time, Sephie found Jules in the bathroom with a lighter trying to burn her own nipples. When they found Sephie’s name carved into Jules’s stomach they moved them both to private rooms. Everyone assumed that Jules had done it to herself but when I went to visit Sephie the next day she told me how Jules had given her

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the blade, which she kept hidden in a shampoo bottle, how she had touched the tip of it to Jules’s belly and watched the blood bloom beneath it, how easily Jules’s flesh had yielded, how it vibrated as the razor skimmed across the surface. How Jules had stared at the ceiling, her tongue poking out between her chapped lips, her eyes bright and feverish; how afterwards she lay on top of Sephie and pressed into her bare skin, staining her in blood in the shape of her name. After we finish our breakfasts and share the onion rings Sephie divides the milkshake into two glasses and tops them both off with brandy poured from a flask she pulls out of her purse. I haven’t had a brandy-shake since Sephie and I lived together in second year university. No one sees Sephie pour the brandy except a couple at the next table who are busy getting their baby to eat some baby mush from a glass jar. The baby has orange hair and a long face and likes to spit out the food his parents try to feed him and chew on the rubber end of the spoon. Sephie props her foot on the seat next to me, and I can see that her toes are turning purple. I suddenly remember the pills in my purse so I pull them out and Sephie takes three and I take two and we wash them down with our brandyshakes. One of Sephie’s crutches clatters to the floor. I wish they had given me a wheelchair instead, Sephie says. You’d have to push me around. Think of all the fun we could have. I imagine pushing Sephie up to the top of Citadel Hill, then sitting on her lap and pushing off, rocketing to the bottom like two kids on a toboggan. My stomach drops to the floor. I might have to throw up, I say. Sephie leans back, looking at me like she’s daring me. Go for it, Jill, she says. I’m here for you. She laughs. I swallow, concentrate on the patterns on the table top. Beige Formica, flecks of green, flecks of brown. A stain that looks like

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ketchup. There’s no pattern. Just flecks of green, flecks of brown. We’re all here for you, Sephie, the doctor in the behavioural ward had told her, back in high school. You’re surrounded by all the people who love you. Sephie stretched her long, bony legs in front of her, brittle and crooked as twigs. I know that, Doc, she said. And that’s the problem. Ever since Sephie arrived from Calgary I noticed things about her. She was quieter than usual, she looked tired, and she had this new way of staring at me, like she was reminding herself why we were there together. She laughed at me when I suggested going to our old favourite Irish pub, said she’d rather go dancing. I hate all that fucking fiddle music, she said. Me too, I said. I just thought. It had only been six months since I’d seen her. There was a new club where all the Toronto kids liked to go, with two big muscular guys out front wearing tuxes and headsets over their bald, fat heads, where you couldn’t wear sneakers and had to pay ten bucks at the door. We drank a bottle of Jaeger at my apartment while we were getting ready and then stumbled into a cab. At the club we drank martinis that looked like antifreeze and then we lost each other on the dance floor. At one point I looked up and saw Sephie dancing on a speaker, sandwiched between two Asian girls wearing matching silver miniskirts. She was much taller than them, and they slid up and down her, as if they were the strippers and Sephie was the pole. When I found Sephie again she was on her knees on the wet bathroom floor, retching into a clogged toilet while the two Asian girls sat on the counter smoking cigarettes. One of her shoes was missing, and her ankle was purple and swollen. I held her hair back and since there was no toilet paper I found her some paper towel, which she wiped across

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her mouth and then tossed on the floor. I took a drag from one of the girls’ cigarettes while Sephie splashed cold water on her face. When I looked in the mirror I realized my makeup looked like a drunk person had done it. What happened to your ankle? I asked Sephie. She stared at me blankly, an open tube of lipstick shaking in her hand. Your ankle. It looks like it’s sprained. She raised the tube to her mouth. Sometimes Albert hits me, she said. The two girls giggled. Albert? I said stupidly. I never thought of Albert as a hitter. Albert was old. He designed houses. He drove four cars at once. Not Albert. Yup. That’s how crazy I make him. She stared at the lipstick for a second, her eyes out of focus. Then she bit off the tip. When she opened her mouth again, her teeth were caked with red. Gross, one of the girls said. They giggled again. Sephie looked down at her feet. My ankle really hurts, she said. Maybe I should go to the hospital. We sit in Cosy’s for three hours until the waitress tells us she’s closing. I pay the bill while Sephie struggles with her crutches. My heart is beating very fast and my mouth is dry. I cough loudly and the waitress gives me a dirty look along with my change. Once we’re outside, Sephie leans against a tree and lights a cigarette. I sit down on the grass next to her, looking up at her. I’ve just always done that. I wonder how I would know who I was without her. Are you going back to Calgary? I ask. Sephie stares at me. Yeah, of course. Why wouldn’t I? She takes one drag of her cigarette and then butts it out against the tree. When we get home we each take two more of the pills. I start to feel calmer. Sephie hops around the apartment, her stuff is everywhere. The cat follows her, batting at her foot

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bobbing in the air. Your flight’s not until Tuesday, I say. You don’t have to pack yet. I know, Sephie says, zipping up her suitcase. I was just feeling, I don’t know, scattered. I’m sinking into the couch. There is a show on tv about sharks and I watch very closely until the rest of the world fades away. Sephie sits on the couch next to me, propping her feet up on the coffee table. I pull a blanket over us, even though it is still so hot. Under the blanket I can feel Sephie’s hipbone pressing gently against mine. On a chair on the other side of the room, the cat follows something with her eyes that I can’t see. It suddenly feels as if the room is teeming with things I can’t see, thick in the air around us, and as usual, I am oblivious.

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2006

Creative Non-Fiction

The Occupations of Muriel Thompson by Leona Theis

Amanuensis

The going rate for freelance typing in the mid-sixties is ten cents a page. Required: typewriter; ribbons; bond paper. At the kitchen table, Muriel types, clickety-qwerty, into the night. It’s a soothing sound to the four girls in bunk beds down the hall. They listen, though, for the carriage rolling up to accommodate the eraser, listen for the grumble, the Damn! Dramatic, because it’s the only swear word they ever hear pass her lips. The other ones must pile up inside, crowding the pockets of her mouth. A sheep farmer from out south of town has been spending his winters in the city at the college of agriculture. Muriel types his thesis, a hundred and sixty pages to do with the breeding of sheep. She does the math: bread is 5/$1.00, on sale days, down at Lucky Dollar. 160

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pp. = 80 loaves. Muriel doesn’t bake her own; she isn’t one for household chores. Add the revisions, cutting, pasting, interleaving pages 95a, 120a and 120b, the table of contents, the acknowledgements: +9 loaves. The farmer wears sloppy, unbuckled galoshes, but he has a proper overcoat and the smile of a gentleman, and he thanks her for her work with a care for enunciation you don’t hear much in this town. In the mind of well-read Muriel, he approaches the platonic form for Decent Man. Sometimes Muriel and her husband aren’t on speaking terms with each other. Other times, they have things to say: — That’s the only thing you know how to do, Muriel, bang at the keys of a typewriter. The only thing you’re any damn good at. — Drunken old goat, your pre-eminent talent is in going broke. Over and over and over. But such bald transcription can’t be left to itself: rants are off-gases of coddled resentments; their provenance is complicated. They shouldn’t be over-simplified. He wasn’t a bad man; she wasn’t a bad woman; but they married wrong, both of them. Lacemaker People will pay $2.50 for a lace-edged hanky; it makes a lovely gift for a mother-in-law, a teacher, the retiring president of the ucw. Required: tatting shuttle; linen squares with tiny footholds all around for the lace; mercerized cotton in shades of pastel and rainbow fade. A single handkerchief takes hours, but Muriel is skilled. She can tat lace and watch Perry Mason at the same time, while reading a Mary Stewart held open on her lap with elastic bands. Once a hanky’s done, she presses the corners back in layers so the lacework shows to advantage. She expects her handiwork is destined to lie unappreciated in a drawer underneath a snake-tangle of stockings. She makes a joke of this to show her girls she isn’t deluded about the value of her effort. Her sense of humour is tough and lean like a strip of leather,

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and she pulls herself along it, knot by knot, through life. Many years later, one of Muriel’s grown daughters will be swimming with a friend in a cold northern lake, and her friend will tell the story of a man who took in a parasite while swimming. The parasite lived inside the man’s eyes; over a period of months, it made lacework back and forth over his retinas. Eventually the lacework grew so dense the man went blind. It took him years to stop asking, Why me? But because human beings are resilient, the friend will say in a matter-offact tone, eventually the man came to terms. Listening to the story, Muriel’s daughter will focus on the word lacework; she’ll hear how a benign word can turn malignant. She’ll think about lacework, and bitterness, and the capacity of human beings to come to terms with their lives. She’ll close her eyes and dive. In memory of her mother, she’ll hold her breath until it seems it will rip her chest to ribbons. Secretary to the congregation On Saturdays the minister drops off what Muriel is to type into the bulletin for the Sunday service. On top of his appreciation, she receives a token fee. Required: stencils; correction fluid; Gestetner duplicator located in the principal’s office in the big brick schoolhouse; Saturday nights free of engagements. Muriel rolls a stencil into her Smith-Corona. The keys bypass the disengaged ribbon and cut through the wax of the stencil, slicing a pattern the Gestetner ink will bleed through. Os present a problem, the danger being they will bullet-hole, and read as black dots on the finished bulletin. Ditto for as, bs, et cetera. What gets through. The correction fluid is fuchsia, so there can be no doubt where you’ve been with it. It looks like it could be nail polish, and Muriel has a joke with her daughters about the kind of woman who would wear that shade. She brushes fluid over an open-mouthed O. Watch the amount, just enough to reseal the stencil. She waves a hand to help it dry, rolls the carriage back down and types over the brightness.

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In the principal’s office, Muriel’s not above passing her eyes over papers left on the desk. She notices misspellings on examination questions, hillbilly idioms in letters to the unit office. The man’s a trained teacher! To her embarrassment, Muriel didn’t graduate from high school. No money; a father who’d left the scene. Out she went to tap a typewriter at the library, to help cover household expenses. She believes that was when it all began to go wrong: she was marked as lesser, unlucky; the worthy young men who might have noticed her had she been their classmate, didn’t. Most people in this town, now, where she’s moved with her husband, would be surprised to hear she didn’t graduate, for she sounds so knowledgeable: literature, history, accounting. She owns the only Biblical concordance in town, a library cast-off that fell her way when she would have otherwise been in school. The hymns, the announcements, the order of service — these are allowed through the stencil in Muriel’s typewriter. Years later, her grown daughter will speculate about what wasn’t allowed through. She’ll imagine Muriel in the kitchen on a Saturday night. It’s late, because she’s procrastinated again, and once she’s done typing she’ll still have to go to the caretaker’s house, wake him for the key, get to the principal’s office and run off the bulletins. She types this is a load of codswallop this is a load of hogwash this is a load of sheep dung this is a load of Two inches of expensive stencil painted with bright strips of fuchsia, and Muriel’s hand waving to dry it so she can roll the carriage back down and type, Scripture. Journalism The regional weekly pays ten cents a line for a report on the goings-on in this town. Required: telephone; envelopes; stamps; temerity. Muriel calls up folks with whom she has little in common,

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people she might envy or disdain or both, and exchanges pleasantries in the course of her efforts to gather enough goings-on to manage twenty lines or forty, to make a buck or two. She writes: Ben and Juliette Thomas enjoyed a visit this weekend from their son Matt and his wife Sheilah. The Home and School reports that the June craft sale earned $34.75, which will go toward the purchase of chemistry equipment for the senior classes. The William Blacks motored to Winnipeg last week to visit their newest grandson, William. She doesn’t write: Jack Miller is a royal ass, but his wife is a decent human being. Lance Ditchburn has had too much power for too many years on the local school board. In a show of aggregate stupidity, this town has re-elected Blaine Coachman to another term on council. If she were to write the sentences that remain unwritten, she could make more money. Clickety-qwert. Student In the city there is a secretarial school that will admit students who lack a high school credential. Required: tuition; fortitude; the generosity of relatives. For two months one summer, Muriel leaves her household in the care of her eldest daughter and bunks in her brother’s spare bedroom in the city. She stays late at the school, which occupies a second floor in south downtown, to practise on the Dictaphone machines. She waits on 20th Street, after dark, for the bus home. She slots the sharp ends of her keys so they jut between the fingers of her fisted right hand. Across the street a car slows; a man rolls down his window, says, Are you working? She knows damn well what this means. I am a student, she says. She is so much better than this. He repeats, Are you working? She looks along the block, but the bus doesn’t appear and doesn’t appear. Inside her coat pocket she hardens her grip on the keys. The man revs his motor and shouts that she’s a proud slut, isn’t she? but he drives away. Years later she’ll recount the incident to her daughters as if it makes a fine joke. She’ll tell only the

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first part, where the man rolls down his window and asks is she working. She’ll raise her eyebrows so the girls will know they’re to be amused. Then the bus came, she’ll say in this version of the story. Steno, potash mine If you can stomach being hired at the same level as women half your age, if you’re clever and qualified, you can take home $300 a month. Required: two decent skirts and four blouses; deep brown Miss Clairol to cover the grey; sense of self-worth to palliate the resentment. It’s company policy to issue safety glasses to everyone at the mine, office staff included, and so Muriel acquires the perquisite of free prescription eyeglasses (perquisite: the word is important to her, as words tend to be). They’re standard issue, heavy black frames with a silver tilde riding each side where the arm meets the front. They do not flatter, but they’re what she has, and she wears them to the post office and to church on Sundays and to her daughter’s graduation, as if their lack of style doesn’t matter. Does it? Yes, but other things matter more. For instance: that she has a real job with a steady wage; that her husband has ceased going broke over and over and has opted to work for someone else, on salary. He drinks still, yes, and smokes like a minestack, but things are looking up. Muriel keeps an inventory of incompetence: the other stenos take breaks that are longer than regulation; they don’t know how to spell; one paints her nails at her desk; they vie with each other for the simple tasks because they’re no damn good at the complicated ones, which are left to Muriel. She spends hours at the kitchen table, clicketing into the night, writing a detailed job description so her bosses will know her true worth. Her daughters, in their beds down the hall, listen as she bangs on the keys, as she mutters occasionally to herself. Her husband says, Did your bosses ask for this job description? She doesn’t answer, and he commences his own muttering. Muriel stays at the mine for seven years, drawing a salary

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no greater and no less than that of the other stenos. Despite her annoying petitions for the bosses to please just take note, they keep her on; she’s so damn good at what she does. Land titles clerk/steno/supervisor If a person has the smarts, she can haul herself a few rungs clear of the floor in the Office of Land Titles. Required: legalistic thought patterns; obsession with details; fitness to picket in cold and snow come labour disputes. Muriel’s in her element. She takes seriously the words public service. She cares about records, cares about professional thus-and-so. In the office, she finds the expected complement of no-goods and know-nothings, but the work validates her. And she appreciates the satisfying metre of a land description. She even recites the odd one to her daughters, for the cadence: township 20, range 19, west of the third meridian. This is what passes now, in Muriel’s life, for poetry. The tobacco, the poor-man’s diet and the decades of drink take her husband by the heart one Christmas Eve. An awkward pairing of relief and grief rope themselves together inside her. Over the years that follow, the bitter weight of what was, becomes the bitter weight of what might have been. Perhaps she should crawl out from under, make something radiant out of now, but guardedness has become integral to Muriel. It’s brought her this far. It keeps her sense of humour properly cured and dry. She sucks on the swearwords that crowd the pockets of her mouth. There’s no denying she enjoys a new sense of freedom. She can spend her off-hours how she pleases; she doesn’t worry so much about money; hell, she doesn’t even answer the phone if she doesn’t want to. With time, the resentment she’s carrying becomes less like a burden and more like a pet. Terminal cancer patient From diagnosis to death, Muriel manages twelve days. It isn’t a long time to come to terms; she would’ve done well to begin earlier. Required: flexibility; immediate horizon; heroic shift in perspective.

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The first requirement is difficult to achieve. Muriel clutches her pet to her heart. There is such comfort in her own rightness. Practised rants, robust as they were decades ago, burst their way into conversations about the impossibility of ever going home, about putting papers in order, about what is to be done with belongings. But as the doctor replaces the relative optimism of months to live with weeks to live, as he further substitutes with days, a quieting begins: a gift, a mysterious alchemy in head and heart and gut. Maybe Muriel had a right to those last rants; certainly she had a right to slip their traces. Her daughters witness the grace that comes as blame begins to disintegrate. They had stopped hoping for this. Day six. The transmutation of the leaden question Why me? into What of me? This is the closest they’ve ever come to understanding the word miracle. Muriel says the word love. She says, Tell me all the things you hope for. She touches, and allows touch. But, do the math. Calculate the ratio of days. The final 6 days of Muriel’s life become the numerator, the 25,200 days of her 69+ years become the denominator: 6 / 25,200 = enough? It could be. It could be enough, because during those final 6 days, the other 25,194 were, after a fashion, remade. Muriel’s daughters decide that, in the final reckoning, what matters is their mother’s peace. They don’t need to know how the transmutation came about. Their answer is yes, enough, just enough, and more than they might have hoped for.

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2003

Poetry (French)

How to See the Goldfish in the Golden Water of the Fishbowl

Syntax of Things That Fall and Sink

by Kim Doré translated by Phyllis Aronoff and Howard Scott

To the crucial memory of Roland Giguère, poet, painter and printmaker Strong stout sturdy bleeding men slender silky svelte frail women somewhat sylph but also very flame frog men limp women slack children pyramids of flour blood lost dead skin vague men smooth and frothless seaweed women stagnant water and under this agglutination of creatures a man reduced to his simplest expression an essential man dies slowly chest open lips sealed.

Roland Giguère, “Un monde mou,” L’âge de la parole

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Do you see the earth scored with little rivulets children who’ve been dead too long now have dug here to make a square grave of sand and water a great empty lake where life is still draining away we chose it the way you choose your end one hot evening to see what’s being said what remains but the mud too where words sink deep the line where they fall with knives thrown to the chance of the world.

The world I ask myself to what shores the infection is disgorged it’s there it seems to me we’ve had two and one thousand years along the same river drowner of love imagine the words and the bombs buried in the sea all the anonymous bodies rising again innocently imagine so much time and yet we haven’t changed.

It’s there we were two or one thousand sleepwalkers seeking something true in the dark to tear off our heads to keep from sinking body and goods into catastrophe and to continue to live we had to keep on inventing words less ugly

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than men are a whole language to name the monsters and the new viruses that was the age of the word before the ice and the new beginnings but we have forgotten all that at the same time as the formulas for walking on water nothing you see we learned nothing from the drowned on the surface.

I insist the damned too have their sacred river I know this because one day despite the fingerprints and the prayers someone stopped loving me the way the tide polishes stones exactly.

That morning that enormous day I came close to dying of thirst right here where the current takes us before the thaw at the hour of the hunt here where the poet at the base of a tree breathes noiselessly: I have known people who daily lost their lives like a mouldy loaf a few later found them again in the net of a fisherman in troubled waters hidden in the shadow of a wall still standing or in the sky of a bed’s canopy by chance still cloudless. They go to sleep with a gun barrel in their mouth as at their mothers’ breasts you’re right it was spring all the same

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in our stuffed animal heads.

The star itself that served as our guide lost its reflection somewhere in the sick water.

We would have needed a painter to seal all that the rain the blood the tears climbing your neck to the great void of the whitened eye with landscapes of love piled up in the dust of flea markets a painter yes to bring to life once more the tidal wave that took our words that took us.

A spider web woven to give ourselves a heart and to keep our faces from sinking.

Energy it seems resides in thunderstorms That’s why the lights of the storm the nights full of murderers why we return there once again by the same route the same

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pain in spite of the indelible love taken from us. The river must continue on, as far as the eye, even the blind eye, can see. A bed has no limits. A river knows no boundaries. to the two of us to the thousand of us who have been buried alive to allow the disorder to spread.

Our mouths are assembled by long metal cables but still the pretty words find their way out between our teeth rain in the great glass sky the flood-words on the electric chair how tell me now how to drown in so little water.

We also stride across the wounded since there is nothing else to keep us together nowhere to advance among the children blue from too much playing at immortals and the white girls abandoned amidst the water lilies there are black books as the sea alone is able to turn things black and yet it’s bizarre all the weaknesses that live within us in the middle of the night: The river majestic in defeat remakes its waves and makes love in bed as in the best days of youth you have to die at home when you have no shroud

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says the river turning over. Always in rainy weather we discover we have a fatal disease a long time ago we lost the bright colours of the vowels too long this poem has rotted in our dry throats.

Dry the ice where the new men are waiting for us to make room And everything continues. Continually.

The most modest little rivulet is a sorrow of love will we have tears enough for the two of us for the thousand of us in the golden water of the fishbowl to fill the holes we have instead of eyes? Why two thousand years if we are already old in time of birth where do the suns of fire go that the horizon swallows despite all our speeches confessions words of love?

Teach me to write for those who can see nothing

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teach me to swim and fish with hook and line among the signs buried between the pages at last we reach where I’ve forgotten all teach me the hidden language of the torrents in my face and life on the waves to get lost to die to remember: I am standing leaning on the last barrier of being eyes riveted on the small explosions that shake the galleries I remember laying mines all over inside to see the blood mixed with foreign bodies just to see. to remember I say we and already don’t know who I mean you see the undertow does its work my skull is wearing away and my neck is cracking with the first hot days along the river.

The earth appears so far you see I found your bombs in a crevice among the shadows and ghosts all the spectres of us up to the last trenches of the world imagine the sea carved into fragments and the tenderness at the bottom of a well.

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Then what then our pages washed up there with the cockleshells and the many-coloured fish the salty taste of the first tears taste of failure traced in invisible ink men and worlds love crippled foul pages.

We are here you say the word is born where no one expects it any more between rocks and brambles two thousand times covered by the snows there are so many fragile things so much lost time you say that words suffer as much as we do from that silent debris we find at evening on deserted beaches.

Pointless the promises hidden away in glass bottles and the human fossils of hate sleeping in the clay we no longer have strength to dig down in history to find only ourselves.

Too much darkness in our wings laden with oil and kerosene we are pinned

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here with the smell of petroleum spreading through our veins we were a thousand but you see words are rare and precious now that we are alone amid these suns.

Is there still enough hope and oxygen for the most loving of us to get back to land sufficient words to make a poem?

You return from the sea where the baker drowned herself with a loaf all golden and swollen eyelids sad fate we will have the stuff of life for two thousand years more I want to say the stuff of birth and death and of crossing the silence eyes open imagine now all the mothers being torn.

No doubt it is written: The massacre completed, there will remain the desire to sail with no horizon, to the four winds of the absolute.

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and so now our wounds stop at the edge of a dense wood where the poets hunt I weaken but he forces I ramble but he keeps watch.

Thus he lived two and then a thousand years with a drop in his eye then he fell asleep and became the sea.

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2002

Short Story (French)

Gerard by Paul Labrèche translated by Phyllis Aronoff and Howard Scott

I was looking out the window when she came. She’s beautiful. Like a little flower. Or a little candy all red and round. Or both. A flower because of her hair tied with ribbons. It makes petals on her head. A candy because her mouth looks sweet and I’d love to have a little piece just to taste. She walked by me and gave me a great big smile. She said, “Hello.” Her voice was as soft as a teddy bear, but I’m too big for that. She said, “You have beautiful eyes.” And I laughed very hard, because that’s the first time I’ve heard “hello” and “you have beautiful eyes” put together. Her smile is as wide as the big cars movie stars drive. And she laughs like Santa Claus’s bells. It’s a present in my ears. And then all of a sudden, her smile disappeared. Her face turned the colour of strawberries. And

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she said, “Excuse me,” and went somewhere else to look for her smile. Ariana. That’s what she’s called upstairs. She’s French from another country. Ariana smells good. She smells like the store where they sell expensive perfume. I don’t go there often enough. Only with my mom when she takes me out sometimes on Sunday. We spend a long time walking through the ladies’ cosmic department. My favourite hobby is lifting girls’ skirts. It smells so good. It makes a breeze and bird sounds when someone big like me takes them in his hands. Girls like to scream. Like little birds. Ariana doesn’t have a skirt. She has pants like a boy. I still like her a lot already. Because it makes Ariana Banana. And I like bananas too. Ariana is here to take care of us. “Draw me a sheep,” Ariana says all the time upstairs. She has paper and coloured pencils in her hands and she gives some to everyone. She looks us right in the eye and says, “Draw me a sheep.” And her smile is as big as a bridge the big stars’ big cars drive over. Owen is always laughing at her and calling her the little princess of sane exhoopery. I don’t like Owen. Owen Onion. When he washes me in the bathtub, he never takes his time. He does it quick quick like he has to put out a big fire. I look him in the eye for a very long time and he says, “Stop looking at me like that, Gerard.” Gerard is me. “You think I’m ugly.” “No. It’s not that, Gerard.” “What is it then?” “I dunno.” Owen looks down to count the ants, but there are never any because it’s clean upstairs because of Consuela, who cleans every day. “Stop counting the ants, Owen. You look like a retard.”

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And then Owen hurries to finish my bath and I yell a little because I don’t like that. I like it better when I take my bath all by myself. “I like it better when I take my bath all by myself.” “I know, but you smell bad sometimes because you forget to wash everywhere.” “I don’t forget. I don’t think of it. Owen, how old?” “Thirty.” “Am I too old for Trulove? Am I going to be a grandfather soon?” “No. Are you in love?” “None of your beeswax, Owen.” I smack the water very hard to show who’s the king of the castle. Owen laughs. “You’re not going to lift her skirt, I hope. You know women don’t like that.” “Why?” “Because they have secrets. And when you lift their skirt, it’s like you’re making them show them to you.” Owen is wrong. If it smells good, it can’t be a secret. It goes into all the ears of people’s noses. It’s like the wind, or like the dandelions when they make kitties in the park. It even makes your hair go upside-down. After my bath, Owen put expensive perfume on my neck. I smelled so good. Owen doesn’t like it when I smell bad. He told me all the girls would be running after me now. So I ran the Olympics all around my room so I would be ready for the race with the girls. I even won medals around my bed. Girls like jewellery too. “Perfume is magic sometimes. It can blow true love towards you.” I didn’t understand what Owen meant. “Is it dangerous?” And he stared at me but not for a long time, because I can stare better than him. And Owen still had an ant to count. When I walked close to Ariana, I made a breeze with my

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new perfume. But Ariana was too busy with Lynn, who’s another rezdent like me. “Ariana, don’t you think I smell very good?” Ariana looked at me for almost a long time, but not long enough, because there are strawberries growing on her face again. It’s pretty to look at. And it makes me hungry. But then her smile is small like a baby’s tricycle and shy like a boy in front of a beautiful girl when he can’t pedal fast enough to find the right words. “What’s the perfume you have on?” “Owen.” Ariana turned back to Lynn, who was crying from her mouth. Lynn always cries from her mouth when she eats. When you ask why she does it, she always answers that it’s none of your business. “You’re a retard, Lynn. You drool like a sane bernard.” Today Owen didn’t put any perfume on me. He left me all by myself before finishing my bath. I cried a little bit, because it’s not true that I don’t like Owen Onion. I like to cry in my bath. Because the tears fall in the water and I pick them up in my hands and they go back in. They go on a journey all the way to my eyes and wait there for it to be sad. “Could Ariana do my bath?” “No, Gerard, you know the rules. Guys give baths to guys, and girls to girls.” “That’s retarded. Not so fast, Owen. Why does Ariana have strawberries on her face when I look at her?” “Maybe because you have such beautiful eyes.” “She told you that?” “No. I’m telling it to you.” “And what about my face?” “It’s beautiful too. And it changes girls’ faces into fields of strawberries.” “And boys?” “Them too sometimes.”

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Owen looks down and counts ants. I count from one to ten but not farther, because it’s dangerous. Today Owen didn’t put any perfume on me. He left me by myself before finishing my bath. When the bath empties all by itself, it’s a little bit like the end of the world. I really adore parties a lot. Because there are presents. And cake. And candles, and I really like the flames of the fire. And all the rezdents sing and it’s loud. It’s so loud that even Hubert, who doesn’t hear because his ears are asleep in his head, starts singing with us. And then everyone stops and looks at him and listens, because Hubert is the loudest in our ears. Ariana makes fireworks in her eyes and I’m on the roof of happiness. I like to sing because I look like a star in my mirror and I forget that I’m a retard. And I imagine Ariana loves me the way I am. Once I sang for baths and baths. Because I don’t count sleeps. That’s babyish. Today I’m going to marry Ariana. I took out my most beautiful chemise because Ariana likes to say chemise instead of shirt. It makes her think of her country and I wish I could be her country for always. I took a bath all by myself and I was very careful to wash all of me. I asked Owen for a little perfume and I put it everywhere when he wasn’t looking because Lynn was having a fit and it took four people to control her. She’s a very difficult rezdent, but we like her because we can do bad secrets without anyone seeing when she needs attention from all the tendants who work upstairs. Once, Lynn started a fire and we had a crazy day. When Ariana was in her country, she worked in another centre like ours. In her country also, there are retards who society takes care of. But one day she moved away because she saw her Trulove taking a plane. “Tell me about your Trulove.” “I’m still looking, Gerard.” “Are you a retard too?”

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“Sometimes.” “I know what your problem is. You love an ant, but you lost it and you’re looking for it everywhere. Maybe it’s on a plane like Ariana’s Trulove.” At the centre, they have workshops to educate us even if it isn’t easy. It’s also to teach us to manage with our heads in case one day they dump us in a cheap apartment because we cost too much. We learn how to make easy recipes, and clean the house everywhere, and lock the door before going to bed, and lock the door before going out to buy bread and milk, and lock the door before doing anything, because we can get taken or we can get things taken. But we don’t learn how to ask for marriage because it’s not necessary. It’s hard to explain the workshops. I don’t want to leave even if I cost a lot. My mom could come and take me for her responsibility but she says she can’t take me any more. I wish Ariana Banana would take me to sit with her in the rocking chair in the playroom. When I think about Ariana, I get even bigger. “Ariana, do you want to rock me?” “It’s you who should be rocking me, Gerard, don’t you think? I’m so tiny. You’d crush me, you big silly.” “Is it dangerous?” Ariana started to cry when I asked her if she wanted to get married to me. Owen comforted her a little but he ran out of Kleenex and Lynn gave her her drawing of a sheep for her to wipe her nose on. “Why is he so handsome, dammit?” Ariana said “why, why, why” through her tears and the drawing and it was like a very sad song. I went back to my room because I knew our marriage would not be today. I took a bath in my sorrow for a very long time. Owen wasn’t even there either. It was really the end of the world. “If we don’t get married, we could make love.” I don’t know if it’s Ariana or the big stars who spoke. I’m repeating what I heard. All the voices mingle in a strong

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warm breath, a panting chorus. The landscape is beautiful, clear and inconstant, almost transparent, completely perfect if that can be. The shadows have fallen dead, pierced through by white light and beauty. The transfigured idiots are waltzing. A man, Gerard, me; a woman, Ariana, her. One plus one equals two equals, bodies and minds in perfect communion, talking about psychology, sociology, biology while they — we — make impossible true love. When I get up, I’m on the wrong side of the bed. Today I don’t want to take a bath. I want to stink until all the girls fall down. I’d rather have nightmares. At least when you wake up, it’s better. “Gerard, not when I’m giving you a bath. After, when I’m not here.” “Right away, Owen.” “Gerard, please stop.” “It’s Ariana’s fault. When she’s too beautiful, it makes me tickle down there.” Owen gets mad and says he’s not made of wood dammit. He leaves. He comes back right away. He says he’s sorry. He stutters. He says he has no right to get mad like that, that it’s not my fault, that I can’t understand, that he hasn’t learned how to swallow his feelings in his tendant classes. He leaves again. He comes back. And he says he’s sorry like a parrot. “Stop, Owen, stay here, I understand.” “What?” “I understand that you’re made of wood.’” “No, Gerard, it was the opposite I said.” “You are made of wood, Owen, and an ant is eating you to make its house in your head.” “Stop it, you’re talking nonsense.” “Then why do you have tears?” “I dunno.” “Come in the bathtub, we’ll cry together. We’ll do the wave, like at hockey.”

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And then I play a very big trick on Owen. I pull very hard on his arm, shouting “Ooooo” like at hockey. Owen falls into the bathtub. That makes a plop and we laugh. After, we cried “oo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo” but not loud so the other tendants wouldn’t hear us and tell the big boss of everybody. “Will Ariana want to marry me someday?” “I don’t think so, Gerard.” “If you were Ariana, would you want to marry me?” “I don’t think so.” “Because I’m a retard?” “Yes, probably.” “But if you were Ariana, would you want to make Trulove with me?” “Stop it with your questions. I’m not in the mood today.” “Owen, give me the washcloth, you forgot my tickle.” I’m going to do it with Ariana today. It’s all planned. In my workshop I’m going to pretend I have a stomachache. Julie, the monitor, always believes me. She’ll send me to the toilet to go. But I’ll go to my room because that’s what we planned and I practised in my head all night long. I didn’t sleep a wink and didn’t even turn the light off. It’s Ariana’s day off. And on her day off, she has the right to do what she wants, dammit. “Do you like that, slut?” “...” “Say it, slut, do you like that?” “...” “Why don’t you say something?” “Where did you hear that?” “I don’t know. Why are your eyes all sticking out? You’re not beautiful.” “It’s not nice to say ‘slut,’ Gerard. Ariana wouldn’t like to hear you say that.” “What do you say when you make love, Lynn?” “You don’t say anything. You just make retard sounds.” “How do you know that?”

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“My daddy, silly.” It was Owen who found us. I was on top of Ariana. We were making songs with our voices and dances with our bums. We were big waves. It wasn’t a dream and it smelled like all the flowers in the world. Owen said, “Quick, the supervisor’s coming,” and Ariana put on her skirt too late. I was beautiful completely naked — because Ariana said so. “Is the supervisor dangerous?” “Hurry up, Gerard, get dressed.” Ariana was sent away from her job on the plane to her country. They say nobody here will want her any more. Because of a bad letter of reference. Maybe Ariana shouldn’t have said “ah- ah- ah- ah- ah” all the time I was on top of her. Maybe the supervisor thinks she’s a retard and she has to learn to lock the door like us. After, Ariana just said “fool, fool, fool.” There were no more strawberries, no more candies, no more smiles. I don’t think there was even Ariana any more. I’m too beautiful. My eyes, my face, my naked. It’s in my head that it’s ugly because it’s retarded and it shows. Some people say it doesn’t show. I know that’s not true. Lynn says it would be better if I had a robot to take care of me. And to take care of her, too. That way, she wouldn’t see the faces the tendants make. And I wouldn’t see that I’m beautiful and that it will never do any good. Owen doesn’t want to wash me any more and the supervisor doesn’t know if he’s going to keep me or dump me into life. Meantime, it’s the end of the world that never ends for Gerard. Gerard the Retard

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2001

Travel Writing (French)

Chicago to Montreal, Thirty-Three-and-a-Half Hours by Dyane Raymond translated by Phyllis Aronoff and Howard Scott

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A journey in reverse, beginning with the return. Start from there. From the waiting rooms of bus stations, from one bus to another, landscapes streaming by in stale drowsiness, America in my hands, in my weary head, in my broken body. First leg: Chicago to Cleveland, departure 22:30 Sunday. All of us here are poor, packed together indiscriminately, travelling slowly. The majority of people around and inside the terminal are black. As I said, everyone here is poor. Lines at the gates, meagre baggage, a night fever in the humming of lights. I reel, slightly drunk, bound to this continent as never before. America, then, is also the United States, drowning in litres of Coca-Cola, from baby bottle to iv. They don’t talk about pride of belonging, but about will, in search of the origins of their race, in this incredible global mix. America isn’t a language

(English, French, Spanish or other), it’s a vacant lot surrounded by run-down buildings in the raging heat of the cities, a horizon that’s always familiar. Not once did I feel, as I have in Paris or Bangkok, that amazing giddiness of somewhere other (except perhaps at the Buffalo border in front of the disgusted face of the Canadian customs officer when I asked him in English if he spoke French, but that’s another story). At the Chicago bus station, like the one in Cleveland, Buffalo or Toronto, I’m one of them, an immigrant for generations, a bastard from father to daughter, among my people, America spread from ocean to ocean. We look into each other’s eyes like brothers, with no animosity, but with no particular affection either. We, in a setting of relaxed codes, basic values, loose cultures. Standing in line at gate nine, I’m waiting for signs of departure so I can settle uncomfortably into the packed, frigid air-conditioned bus. Jack will give us his suggestions as he turns towards the outskirts of the city. We’re under his protection, he’s our father, the sole master on board a ship sailing over the asphalt waves of this black America. I go to sleep rolled up in my yellow shawl, my long legs stretched in the aisle, beside a good-looking young man in a cap who’s already in dreamland, his head resting on a pillow (great idea, a pillow — in fact, lots of passengers have thought of it, and some have taken their quest for comfort as far as travelling with their quilt or blanket). The motor drones; their eyes closed, the passengers surrender to the night, curled up, trusting. We’re pursuing an American dream, leg by leg, recapturing a part of ourselves given in pledge in an unchanging city, a city where we were born one day or another; somewhere. First stop, in the middle of the night. Some people will be hungry or thirsty, and Burger King stays up for them; most barely raise an eyebrow when Jack informs us that he leaves again in fifteen minutes, adding, with or without you. I get out to stretch the kinks out of my back and breathe a little warm air. I’m weightless and belong to nothing outside that

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steel cocoon. I wait for the return of Jack, the father, my feet on the grass, eyes riveted on the bus door, and then, at the same time as Jack, I return to my seat and to a strange sleep troubled by dreams that burst like bubbles. At the second stop, no little speech, the night is unmoving, like the sleepy intimacy of the passengers. At dawn, we see a suburb emerge through our cobwebs; in the distance, buildings. A convertible races down the highway, and a woman in another car converses energetically on her phone. I’m not one of those women going to the office today. I’m on vacation. Going home to Montreal, America, across the Midwest by Greyhound. Merci beaucoup! Turning into the Cleveland bus station, Jack announces that as a result of our slight delay, we’ve missed the connection for Buffalo, and that the bus to New York will be at gate seven. And that’s how you become an orphan at six in the morning, lost in a fluorescent-lit station with two hours ahead of you to find a another father or mother who’ll take you to the next destination. I stand here with a large cup of a vaguely caffeinated substance in my hand, watching a new outpouring of arriving passengers. Two exuberant teenage girls get off the bus, one with amazing Winnie the Pooh slippers on her feet and the other with a blanket in the same colours as the gentle little creature. I’ve always admired the way black people carry themselves, haughty yet laid-back, which makes them look fabulous in the most extravagant clothes. The slender young girl in the slippers lights a cigarette and heads towards a telephone booth in the middle of the station. Among the flood of arrivals is a placid, reserved Mormon family. Once again, it’s the women who pay the price for a castrating creed, imprisoned in thick cotton dresses in dark, drab colours. Their legs are covered in black tights and they have to wear a bonnet, always black, that hides their hair and neck, at all ages without exception. On the other hand, you can’t help admiring the beautifully woven wide-brimmed straw hats of the young men. With

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their moustache-less beards and long hair, they’re characters from another age, pale-faced figures from folklore. They stand in groups around cardboard boxes tied with string and lots of suitcases, and wait silently. After downing my coffee, I take my place in the line that’s beginning to form at gate seven. An albino Texan joins the line behind me. He’s missing an incisor, he sports the regulation headgear, a huge black cowboy hat slightly turned up in front, his prick and balls, squeezed tight under the thick material of his jeans, are unsettling protrusions, and his cellphone is glued to his ear in a phantom conversation. The big white hall of the Cleveland terminal is gradually filling. A black matron with imposing breasts in her grey uniform checks our tickets. She’s Alice, and she will be our guardian angel as far as Buffalo. Her kindly eyes contrast strangely with her brusque gestures and fierce voice shouting some terrible threat to a passerby. Breakfast, leaning against the window of the bus beside a nervous young woman who’s fidgeting with her ticket and checking her schedule every five minutes. Not sufficiently worn down by my two-hour wait, I don’t allow myself to be infected by her impatience, and find it more irritating than alarming. In any case, whatever the future holds for me (and I know I’m in for it!), I feel more like napping than getting upset. My croissant eaten, I doze, trusting, lulled by the reassuring rhythm of Alice’s smooth driving. The Buffalo station is cold, long and narrow, and kind of sad. The clerk, with her little mouse eyes and threadbare checked shirt, announces to me without raising an eyebrow that the next departure for Toronto won’t be for three hours. I suddenly grasp the impact of our slight ten-minute delay in Cleveland, which will certainly make me miss my connection to Montreal. Doesn’t matter, the amiable Minnie explains indulgently, there’s another connection at 17:30. And what time do we get to Toronto? I inquire innocently. Quarter past five. Why worry? Qui sait, maybe a lucky star in the shape

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of a maple leaf will lead me to the right gate just in time to catch the next coach. Filled with blind trust, I contemplate a huge black teenage boy in front of me, a window washer bobbing up and down with the grace of a whale along the big plate glass windows of the terminal. Three times I walk around the inside and outside of the station before ordering a hot dog and a second coffee. The baggage handler, a Charlie Chaplin clone, busies himself in the luggage compartment of a newly arrived bus. The station fills and then empties almost immediately, like the ebb and flow of the tide. A lady in her sixties with blond curls, lips painted a violent orange and prominent cheekbones a bright pink comes towards me, yelling at me. Without really realizing it, I’ve been staring for quite a while at her quest for quarters forgotten in the coin return slots of the payphones. I’m not stealing from anybody, she protests in a half-aggressive, halfmocking tone, pointing a finger at me in a way that isn’t at all threatening. Surrounded by suitcases and strangers, a race in transit, a fluorescent-lit country, I’m weary now of this anonymity, this pointless waiting on hard benches. Someone asks me the time, which I’ve been trying to forget for three hours. I stand up, stretch and yawn; the seconds tick by. Where are we going in this narrow steel box? Nowhere. Welcome aboard. The Canada-U.S. border is only a few kilometres from the Buffalo exit, and going through customs is a mere formality — except if there’s an Arab on the bus who looks a bit too stereotypical, and who answered some question or other the wrong way. With search after search, it’s becoming painfully clear that, whatever compassion I may feel for this man, who seems decent enough, I’m going to miss my connection to Toronto. I delude myself with a vague, unutterable hope for nothing less than a miracle there in Toronto. I immerse myself in Generations of Winter, by Vasily Pavlovich Aksyonov, reading every single word so I don’t miss anything of this rich, dense epic. Since I’m travelling in America,

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maybe I should be reading Sam Shepard’s very beautiful Cruising Paradise or the complex, tormented writing of Raymond Carver. But paradoxically, I don’t feel there’s any contradiction in my being here in the nightmarish world of Stalinist terror. As if the horror today is in the monstrous obesity of children stuffed from head to toe, whose only alternatives may be to become wimps or crazies. This is the only time on the trip when I have a whole seat to myself, which provides me with mental space more than physical. We reach the Toronto terminal at 17:40, ten minutes too late once again, which will cost me a seven-hour wait for the next bus to Montreal. It could have been worse, sympathizes an old Jewish man, the next one might not have been leaving until tomorrow morning. Suddenly, for the first time in my life, I, who’ve always hated cars — because there are too many of them, because people use them exclusively, for everything, and especially, because of the craziness they cause — find myself dreaming of owning one. I imagine myself with a cassette of Gainsbourg from the early years playing full blast, driving along on the Trans-Canada in perilous temporary freedom but moving, with the windows down, driving towards the sunset and the rising full moon. There’s nothing that distinguishes the Toronto station from the others I’ve been through so far — but yes, one thing has changed: there are almost no blacks here. I’m back now among the white niggers of America and the speak-white Canadians. I leave my suitcase at the baggage check and go looking for a beer, a bar with a terrace, another beer and a cool drunkenness borne along by a carefree throng. I’ve taken my watch off my wrist and I blend into the downtown crowd, at this hour young and noisy around the record shops and clothing boutiques. Double drum solo on Yonge Street. There’s something imperceptibly different here, an America that perhaps is better behaved, more obedient and polite, there’s a sobriety even in the extravagance. Dundas Street. Lacquered ducks hang in the window of a Chinese restau-

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rant. The invitation is unequivocal and I don’t hesitate for an instant to spend some of the precious time I have to kill there. I’m not disappointed… the meat is tender and succulent, and the shrimp curry starter is wonderfully fiery. A couple of Tsingtaos are required. It’s after ten-thirty when I plunge back into the humid darkness of Toronto. As in many downtowns in America, the streets are increasingly deserted at this hour, and vaguely disquieting. I walk slowly, savouring the total fulfillment of the pleasure of eating before going back to the terminal the way you return home with a heavy step already numb with sleep. After retrieving my suitcase from the baggage check, I stick close to gate one. I wait for midnight like Cinderella. My Prince Charming will be called Michael, will have a paunch and a moustache, and will leave me in the middle of the night, to be replaced by a stranger until my final destination. When I turn in my narrow seat, a sharp pain tells me my back will not soon forget this trip. On the edge of Montreal, I finally see the sunrise, fiery pink and magnificent. I’m getting there. J’arrive. I’ll take a taxi on Berri that will carry me hunched and haggard to a bed with fresh sheets. But am I really coming back from somewhere other, or have I only stretched my limbs and my gaze over a vast area of sameness, a sameness that’s rooted in every particle of my brothers’ being? P.S.: Next time, I’ll take the plane and tell you about Chicago.

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Contributors

Asa Boxer’s first book of poems, The Mechanical Bird (2007), is now available. Poems from this collection have been published in enRoute, Poetry London, and Nth position.com. Others have been anthologized in The New Canon (2005), and in Montreal vue par ses poetes (2006). Boxer has published literary essays and reviews in Books in Canada, Canadian Notes & Queries, Maisonneuve, and Arc. Méira Cook’s latest book of poetry, Slovenly Love, was published by Brick Books in 2003. More recently, she selected the poems and wrote the introduction to Field Marks, a collection of poems by Don McKay (Wilfrid Laurier Press, 2006). She lives and writes in Winnipeg. Kim Doré’s first collection of poems, La dérive des méduses, was published when she was twenty years old. In 2002 and 2003 respectively, she won second and first prizes in the French-language CBC Literary Awards. Her Le rayonnement des corps noirs, which was published in 2004, was awarded the Émile Nelligan prize. A third collection of her poetry will be published in spring 2008 by Éditions Poètes de brousse, where she is the co-publisher.

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Kim Echlin is the author of Elephant Winter, Dagmar’s Daughter, and a translation from Sumerian, Inanna. She is currently completing a novel set in Cambodia exploring witness. Camilla Gibb is the author of three novels, including Sweetness in the Belly (winner of the Trillium Award and a Giller Prize nominee) and Mouthing the Words (winner of the City of Toronto Book Award). Roger Greenwald has won two CBC Literary Awards: the award for poetry in 1993 and first prize for travel writing in 2002. He has published one book of poems, Connecting Flight, and translations of both poetry and fiction, such as North in the World: Selected Poems of Rolf Jacobsen, winner of the Lewis Galantière Award (American Translators Association), and A Story about Mr. Silberstein, a novel by Erland Josephson. Jane Eaton Hamilton is the author of six books, most recently Hunger, a collection of short fiction nominated for the Ferro-Grumley Award. Her short work, published in such places as Maclean’s and the New York Times, has won a great variety of awards including, twice, first prize in the Prism International Short Fiction Awards. Jane runs the photo studio Jane Photo in Vancouver, where she delights in photographing babies and travel. For fun and entertainment, she is very keen on figure drawing. “The Lost Boy” is based on a true story recounted by Jane’s late aunt. Jane’s writing website can be found at www.janeeatonhamilton.com; her photography is located at www.janephoto.ca. Amy Jones’s short fiction has appeared in several national publications, including The New Quarterly, Grain, Prairie Fire, Event, Room of One’s Own, and The Antigonish Review. She holds a B.A. from Dalhousie University and an

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M.A. from the University of Toronto and is currently a student in the optional-residency M.F.A. program at the University of British Columbia. Amy resides in Halifax, where she is at work on a collection of short stories. Montana Jones is many kinds of women: bon vivant, raconteur, spinner of yarns, watcher of whales, saver of turtles, wayfarer, shepherd, keeper of muse, and former winner of the Sutton Agricultural Fair Spelling Bee. She’s a magazine art director, media coordinator, journalist, photographer, and raises rare heritage Shropshire sheep with the love of her life, on their 100-acre Wholearth Farmstudio in the beautiful Northumberland Hills. An organic steward of both the garden and the pen, she found that the tomatoes bloomed early and the words bloomed late — but hopes for both to grow naturally for years to come. Of only three literary pieces submitted so far, two received Ontario Arts Council awards (one published in the Canadian Woman Studies), and the third won first prize in the CBC Literary Awards. This “spinner of yarns” has decided to take the cue, and spend a tad less time sheeping, and more time weaving words. Paul Labrèche moved to Montreal in 1988 to train as an actor. In 1999, he won second prize in the short story contest of the Montreal weekly Voir. Since then, his poems and short stories have been published in Exit and Mœbius as well as Brèves littéraires, which awarded him first prize in the prose category of its literary competition in 2006. His young people’s novel, Miriam, Boudi, Mario Broche et compagnie, published by Éditions Trois, received an honourable mention when the Cécile Gagnon prize was awarded at the Salon du livre de Montréal in 2005. Zoë Landale divides her time between Pender Island, B.C., and Vancouver, where she teaches writing at Kwantlen University College. She has five books published and a sixth,

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Once a Murderer, is forthcoming in April 2008 from Wolsak & Wynn. Zoë’s work has won significant awards in poetry, fiction, and non-fiction, including a National Magazine Gold for memoir. Much of her work reflects her long-time love affair with the B.C. coast. Erin Noteboom’s first collection of poetry, Ghost Maps: Poems for Carl Hruska, was published by Wolsak and Wynn in 2003 and won the Milton Acorn award and was shortlisted for the Pat Lowther. Her second book, Seal up the Thunder, was published in 2005, also from Wolsak and Wynn. She lives in Kitchener, Ontario, with her husband and daughter. Stephen Osborne is cofounder and editor of Geist magazine, and author of Ice & Fire: Dispatches from the New World, a collection of personal essays. He lives in Vancouver. Alison Pick was the winner of the 2002 Bronwen Wallace Award for Poetry, the 2003 National Magazine Award for Poetry, and the 2005 CBC Literary Award for Poetry. Her first collection, Question & Answer, was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Award and for a Newfoundland and Labrador Book Award; her second collection, The Dream World, is due out with McClelland & Stewart in 2008. Alison’s novel, The Sweet Edge, was a Globe and Mail Top 100 Book. She currently lives in Toronto. Dyane Raymond has a monthly column in Le Cantonnier, a community newspaper in Disraéli, Quebec, and is writing a doctoral thesis on generosity in the creative process at the Université du Québec à Montréal. Leon Rooke’s latest books include the novels The Beautiful Wife and The Fall of Gravity, the story collections Painting the Dog: The Best Stories of Leon Rooke and Hitting the Charts:

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Selected Stories, and the poetry collection Hot Poppies. Shakespeare’s Dog, a play by Rich Chafe, based on Rooke’s award-winning novel of that title, premieres this winter at the Manitoba Theatre Centre and the National Art Centre. A new story collection is to appear in fall 2008, from Thomas Allen Publishers. Rooke has published over 300 short stories. Born in Vancouver, Erin Soros is the Charles Pick writer-inresidence at the University of East Anglia in England, where she is completing her first novel. She has published poetry, fiction, and non-fiction, most recently in The Indiana Review and The Iowa Review. In 2006 her fiction was produced for BBC Radio as winner of the Commonwealth Prize for the Short Story. “The Chorus” is to be included in a collection with photographs from Rufus Books. Leona Theis lives in Saskatoon. She is the author of the story collection Sightlines and the novel The Art of Salvage. Often her writing is both funny and sad, as she believes life is both funny and sad. Her favourite places to write are Stegner House, the boyhood home of novelist Wallace Stegner in Eastend, Saskatchewan, and a cabin in the boreal forest on the shore of Christopher Lake. David Tycho was born in Vancouver and attended U.B.C., where he received a B.Ed. in fine arts education. He divides his time between painting, writing, teaching, and trekking the wilds of western North America. David’s articles on art, wilderness travel, and social issues have been published in numerous magazines and newspapers in Canada and the U.S.A., and he has penned two novels and seven screenplays. His art has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in Canada, the U.S.A., Switzerland, Belgium, and the Philippines, and his paintings are collected worldwide. His work can be viewed at www.tychoart.com.

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Rob Winger’s first book, Muybridge’s Horse: a poem in three phases, was shortlisted for the 2007 Governor General’s Literary Award for poetry in English. When not helping to edit Arc poetry magazine, Rob is trying to complete a doctoral degree in Canadian literature. He lives with his family in Ottawa, where he skates to work each winter. Michael Winter is the author of The Architects Are Here. He lives in Toronto.

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