She’s about to give up when her fingers catch an edge. Something is caught in the drawer’s far corner, a tiny foil envelope which she retrieves with difficulty. Its slippery texture, its size, are familiar but she can’t say why, or what. Those raspberry candies she loved as a girl, maybe, hundreds of them individually wrapped in the bulk bin. One of those would be good right now. She can feel her mouth watering. She pulls at the partly open corner, squints as its contents drop to the floor. In the low light, she feels about on the flower-patterned rug until her fingers brush against something; it feels like a dried-up insect skin or beetle carcass or maybe an old scab. She recoils with a shiver, pulls her hand away, searches unsuccessfully for her glasses in the pocket of her bathrobe, in the items strewn about her, then reaches again, gingerly, bravely.

What is it, she wonders, holding the crispy wrinkled thing at arm’s length, squinting against the window’s glare. When she places it in her palm, its disintegrated insides all but fall away. She blows at the dust in her hand. Now she can see it. It’s—a ring. It’s her lost wedding ring. She is exultant. Norman, I’ve found it! Honey, don’t worry, I found my ring!

She turns to rest her elbows against the edge of the low chair beside her, uses them as leverage to push herself to standing, grunts with the exertion. She does what might pass for a little jig around the bedroom until her floppy pink slippers and her wheezing lungs trip her up, sending her back to the chair. Catching her breath, she slips the frayed brown-gold circumference onto the ring finger of her left hand, pushing it easily over swollen, arthritic knuckles. Gently she twirls the ring round and round, its rough edges catching on the loose skin of her finger. It doesn’t fit at all as she expected it to. It’s too large; it feels all wrong.

Suddenly she sees it for what it really is. Oh, for god’s sake, it’s a shrivelled old condom! What a stupid biddy you are, she says to herself. Where’s Norman Probably still in his workshop. Thank goodness he hasn’t seen her mistake. Angry with herself, she throws the thing. It lands on the bed, falls into a crease in a pillow.

Things have been moved around and missing ever since Richard came by last week to check on her. Everything is topsy-turvy.

Norman is so smart, so capable, always busy with some project or another. When he isn’t working, he’s tinkering away, repairing a household item or inventing some new gadget for them to try out, like an electric potato peeler or a miniature spout that lets you drain the water from a tin of tuna before opening it. He’s tall and strong; he can lift her off her feet if he wants to, just for the fun of twirling her around him, but his fingers are slender and sensitive for such a large man, and able to do precise and delicate work.

Rising slowly from the chair and tightening her robe around her, Lydia catches a brief glimpse of her face in the dresser’s dull, mottled mirror. It’s a good face, a face that launched a thousand ships. Is that right No, that isn’t her. Don’t be ridiculous. Who is it, then Someone beautiful. Ah, yes, Helen of Troy, that’s who. Or Cleopatra. Lydia knows she herself has always been a looker. Didn’t what’s his name, their neighbour, tell her so often enough Those very words—you’re a looker, he’d say. In front of everyone, his wife. Lydia thrives on the attention generated by her fine features and voluptuous figure. You’re a beautiful woman, Norman tells her. She smiles at him through the mirror and backs closer to where he stands watching her. Love me forever she asks him. Of course, he replies. His voice arouses desire in her; she wants to slip her arms around him. She leans backwards into him and loses her balance, falls against the wall. Shoulder throbbing, she turns to face him, to where she thought she saw him standing. Her throat catches with sorrow; emptiness fills her body.

The phone rings, six times before she finds it, right there in the pocket of her robe. Hello Hello Who is it Who Oh, yes, Richard. Of course I recognize your voice. I’m fine. Yes, I’ve been taking care of myself. Yes, I’ve been turning out the lights. Whose business is it, anyway I’m not about to let myself starve to death. I’m fine.

As she hangs up she hears him say, “Talk to you later, Mom.” Mom He called her Mom. Oh, it was that Richard. Her son Richard. She can see him now, as though he’s right there in front of her. A little blond-haired boy of three or four, a toddler still, cute as can be. Their only child. Always getting into trouble, the little monkey, but a sweetheart. Little button of a nose. Honey, she says to Norman’s face in the flowered wallpaper. Honey, Richard called. Then she panics. What is Richard doing, calling her Where is he Didn’t she just tuck him into bed Still holding the phone, she clutches at her robe, turning blindly around from where she is standing. Norman! Norman! She spots the clothes strewn about the bedroom, certain her little boy is in the midst of them. Her mood shifts; now she’s angry. What does Richard think he’s doing, throwing clothes and underwear around like that Young man, she scolds him. This is very naughty of you, getting into Mommy’s and Daddy’s things and making a mess. You clean this up right now, do you understand When I come back into this room I want it shipshape. With that, she heads to the kitchen, annoyance fuelling her step.

She’s had enough of this growing old, dammit. If she has to look at herself in the mirror one more time, she’ll poke her eyes out.

She places the phone in its charger, remembers her lost ring and bends to check for it beneath the oversized desk that serves as her home office. This is where she pays bills and answers email and does their yearly taxes. But now her laptop sits on it, unused. She can’t remember her password, can’t get the annoying thing to work. The way it’s tucked into the corner, the desk forms an inviting space—safe underneath, like a hideout. With effort she bends and crawls halfway in, the desktop a low roof above her. It’s nice in here. She likes it. Crawling out again, she slips her bathrobe off and drapes it over the open side to make a tent. Grunting, she manoeuvres back underneath.

It’s just like Girl Guide camp, like the summer she and her best friend, Samantha, spent an unwashed week swimming and hiking and learning to make fires. Samantha is here now, waiting for her, red pigtails sticking straight out from her head, a grin on her freckled face. The two girls lie on their backs in their secret hideaway, whispering and giggling. Lydia watches the stars until her eyelids become the night and she drifts off to sleep, her back pressing into the hard ground. When she wakes, she feels sore all over. The varicose veins in her legs ache as though someone is landing slow punches on them. Sam, quit it, she tells her friend. That hurts, smarten up. Quit it! I’m not playing anymore.

The pain continues and Lydia pushes her way up to sitting, knocking her head against the bottom of the desk. She swears loudly, moves onto her hands and knees and makes her way awkwardly past the draped robe out into the light of the kitchen. With the help of the desk she hoists herself to standing. The low-slanting sun is bright even through the dirty window; she blinks several times, reorienting herself. Naked, she shivers with cold. Where is her bathrobe Finger to her mouth, she turns round and round on the worn linoleum, her forehead creasing with frustration. She put it on when she woke up this morning, didn’t she What is happening to her memory Ah, there it is, right there on the desk. What’s it doing there Things have been moved around and missing ever since Richard came by last week to check on her. She hasn’t been able to find her pearls, or her small diamond earrings, or her wedding ring. Everything is topsy-turvy.

She goes back to the bedroom. Norman is there now, she’s sure of it. Lydia puts her hand through the gap between the buttons of his shirt. Her fingers stroke his belly and chest, dark hairs twisting softly around her fingertips. She nestles into him, can almost feel the warmth of his hands on the small of her back. She flushes, heat rising in her body. I like that, she says, softly. Don’t stop. She thinks of the striptease she performed for him, slowly taking off her sweater and then her blouse, her skirt and her pantyhose, until she was down to only her bra and panties. You like it, don’t you honey, she’d said, a bit shyly. He’d grinned and reached for her, finishing the rest himself.

Why won’t you hold me she asks Norman now. She catches herself and shakes her head. For heaven’s sake, here she is, thinking about sex. Funny, when you were getting it, it could be all-consuming, but when you weren’t—well, she could hardly remember what it was like.

She indulged in a pedicure, a rare treat, several months after Norman died. When her feet turned soft and pliable from soaking in the hot footbath, the middle-aged esthetician scraped the calluses from her heels and pushed back the cuticles on her toenails. Then she massaged Lydia’s feet and calves. The woman’s hands were warm and strong, and she seemed so comfortable using them on a stranger. Lydia found herself weeping with the unexpected pleasure of it, the loss and yearning the contact awakened in her.

Now the mirror’s reflection reveals her standing alone. Norman Fine, then. Lydia heads again for the kitchen, the ache in her loins pleasurable and frustrating. Her arousal has made her hungry. The fridge is empty but for a half-full carton of milk and a shrivelled head of cabbage. Slamming the door shut, she reaches for the cupboard instead, pulls out a jar of peanut butter and another of honey. At the counter she dips a finger into the peanut butter and licks it off. Mmmm, that’s nice, she says in a low voice. She dips her finger again and licks the tip of it slowly, gently. It tickles a little bit, feels good. She nibbles at it, scratching the tip ever so lightly with her teeth. Another dip into the jar, another languorous lick, this time sucking her finger to the first joint, pulling at it gently, her lips closing around it. Again. Now into the wide-mouthed honey jar—two fingers, three, all of them in her mouth at once, her fingers alive and throbbing, her tongue eager and strong. Hungry, lascivious, so many fingers, the taste delicious and sweet, the warm fullness of her mouth causing her to pant, a moan escaping her parted lips. She can no longer stand up and so she sinks into the chair beside the table. Enough; she is satisfied. She belches, she giggles. Pardon me, she says to the face in the wallpaper. She hasn’t felt this good since she can’t remember when.

The doorbell rings, startling her. No one ever comes to the door; no one visits her tiny apartment. Not that she can think of. She pulls her bathrobe into place and makes her way across the kitchen to the entry, a distance that feels, what with her gassy stomach, bad back and resentful hip, like plenty far enough, like too far. When she finally makes it to the door, stumbling twice and swearing, no one is there. I don’t want any, she hollers down the empty hallway.

She hopes Norman will come home soon. Summer evenings they walk together before bed, holding hands in comfortable silence, or talking about the day behind and plans for the next. She can see his profile from the corner of her eye. His nose is straight, his chin hidden by a short beard. She loves the way his eyes crinkle when he smiles or even when he frowns, which happens only rarely, when he is intent on a project and she irritates him with her interruptions.

Oh, she’s tired. She could fall asleep right here, one hand resting on the handle of the half-open door, her body leaning against the frame. She closes the door and considers making the couch her bed. No, that won’t do. She needs to brush her teeth. They are her pride and joy, straight, still all her own. In the harsh light of the bathroom she forces herself to pull out toothpaste and toothbrush. As she bends to spit, her bathrobe falls from her shoulders, cream-coloured fabric catching on her elbows and ample behind. Raising her head to the mirror, she sees her naked body reflected back at her. She can’t tell where the fabric ends and her skin begins. Dear god in heaven, who is that looking back at her What is that Thank god Norman isn’t here to see her. What does he, still so fit and handsome, see in her anyway?

She’s had enough of this growing old, dammit. If she has to look at herself in the mirror one more time, she’ll poke her eyes out with her knitting needles. That is, if she can remember where she put them. What would it be like, she wonders, to live in a world without mirrors, a cavewoman world, she supposes, where what you look like never even occurs to you?

Her hands are sticky from her feast; she runs them under the water, uses her special bar of lavender soap to take the honey from between her fingers. She barely recognizes her hands, all spotted and wrinkled. They look so bare. Where is her wedding ring Oh, god, where is it She panics, searches the countertop, knocking toothpaste and lotions to the floor. Where has she left it She steps into the darkened bedroom, her heart beating furiously, close to tears. How can she have lost her ring Norman, I can’t find it, she tells him. I’m sorry, honey, I’m sorry.

She lies down on the bed and pulls the rumpled comforter over herself. Sorrow pulls at her, wraps her in its arms. She floats on a vast wave of emptiness, uncertain what it is, exactly, that she has lost. Face buried in the pillow, she feels a touch against her cheek. A ring.
She holds its rough edges to her lips. She remembers. She forgets.

Rancher/therapist-turned-writer Patti Lott lives in the Alberta foothills. Her poetry is forthcoming in Prairie Fire and CV2.

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The post Lydia appeared first on Alberta Views.

Years later, when Josie describes Holy Ghost Ministries, she stresses that on any given Sunday in northeast Calgary someone is giving testimony in the lobby of a cinema, or in the back room of a 3D-printing shop, or in the basement of a conference centre. In a half-hour stroll through the McCall and Horizon industrial–commercial districts, you could miss 11 sacred spaces if you weren’t paying attention. Holy Ghost Ministries’s sacred space was three floors above a bowling alley. The head pastor, Uncle Wale, had been inviting the Ohuruogus to attend for years. Pa would politely decline in public (My guy, we are Catholic. Maybe another time.) and vehemently in private (Tufiakwa! So Wale wants us to go roll on the floor?).

A few months after Pa landed at Murtala Muhammed International Airport, Josie, Ma and Aunty Glo drove past St. Thomas More Catholic Church and turned left onto 36 Street. The Great Gateway Bowling Centre was nestled between a thrift store and an autobody shop.

Perhaps she would be stuck inside the hyphen between Nigerian and Canadian all her life.

The day before Josie, Ma and Aunty Glo attended their first service at Holy Ghost Ministries, they’d sat in the Ohuruogus’ living room and watched precolonial Igbo village dramas. They’d sat on the same peeling pleather couch that Josie would find Ma half-dead on 10 years later. Then, it was 2010 and Josie, Ma and Aunty Glo were indulging in their Friday tradition. Aunty Glo was providing running commentary. When a chalk-marked dibia sat before his shrine, Aunty Glo pointed out the Alusi, from Amadioha to Ekwensu, and how their carved figurines were like St. Thomas More’s sculpted Blessed Virgin Mary. When a king’s younger brother plotted for the throne, Aunty Glo invoked the earth, Ani. If the brother killed the king, the king’s blood on the earth would cry out for vengeance and Ani would rise up and mete out justice. When the mmanwu danced across the screen at harvest festivals, adorned in raffia and wooden beads, Aunty Glo told Josie that they were watching their reanimated ancestors. Aunty Glo was convinced that great-grandmother Lotachi had returned in Josie, as they shared a hexagon-shaped birthmark on their left wrists, an overappreciation of onions and a fear of dogs.

Josie had never been to Nigeria, but she felt she knew all she could because of Aunty Glo. It almost didn’t matter that, outside of her household, her lessons covered people and places that felt far removed. In social studies the class had learned about the pagan reaction, and Eleanor, her closest friend, pointed at a map of Poland in their textbook and said, “See, see That’s where my family’s from.”

In hindsight there were many potential stimuli driving Ma to take up Uncle Wale’s invitation. Money was tight and the economy was crashing, so maybe she was looking for a miracle. Pa had annoyed her, what with packing off to Lagos and leaving Ma to raise Josie, so maybe she was trying to spite him. St. Thomas More was very white and very stiff, so maybe she was searching for colour and rhythm. Whatever the reason, Josie, Ma and Aunty Glo alighted from the family car and ambled towards a door marked with a SERVICE UPSTAIRS—HOLY GHOST MINISTRIES poster. Behind the door was a damp stairwell, four flights of stairs and muffled music beckoning them upwards.

Josie thinks back to that stairwell and its promise of salvation when Eleanor kisses her for the first time. They are standing in the stairwell of Eleanor’s apartment and Josie is begging Eleanor not to join the nunhood. While Josie was dreaming about medical school acceptance letters, Eleanor was dreaming about the nunnery. The former was years in the making. The latter was revelatory. “A convent?” Josie had whisper-yelled. “You’re going to a fucking convent?”

“A monastery, Josie. It’s different.”

“Either way, you’d really become a nun?”

“I want to be happy, Jos-Jos. Church helps me be happy.”

Josie can’t argue with that. When Eleanor had stopped eating and her yellow hair began falling out in tufts, Josie wanted to believe it was her coaxing that improved things. But she knew it was Eleanor’s parish and its stained glass walls and domed ceiling. For weeks Josie skipped her bioethics seminar to accompany Eleanor at Friday vigils. Eleanor’s hair grew back. Now Eleanor is kissing her, saying goodbye.

“Our ancestors believed in different ways, and they were good people. Isn’t that all that matters?”

Josie didn’t remember much about Holy Ghost Ministries except for the venue, the music and the speaking in tongues. The venue. A low-ceilinged space starkly lit by fluorescent tubes. The pews were made up of metal folding chairs and the lectern was a music-sheet stand. Josie, Ma and Aunty Glo were on time, which meant they were early, and half the seats were empty. They sat in the third row. There were five rows. Everyone present and arriving was Black, except for one shaggy-haired man wearing a kente shirt. Josie recognized a third of the attendees from cultural events held by the local Nigerian association where she shadowed Ma and eavesdropped on wives’ stories about disrespectful children, cheating partners and racist bosses. Then, since Ma spoke to everyone, she’d listen to husbands who insisted gossip was for women yet always had supplementary, catastrophized commentary. The music. A drummer, pianist, saxophonist and three-person choir played through an opening set in the corner left of the lectern. They were definitely livelier than St. Thomas More’s choir; there were riffs, claps and solo moments. Stuff that Josie heard on the radio. Almost everyone was standing, dancing, raising their hands in the air. More and more families shuffled into the room. In the row ahead, Josie watched a girl around her age and tried to mimic her movements. The way she swayed from side to side and tossed her head back as she sang. The speaking in tongues. After a sermon, much longer than St. Thomas More’s, Uncle Wale exclaimed, “We are filled with the Holy Ghost!” and the room erupted in noises Josie could not comprehend.

She wanted so badly to comprehend. The people, the noises, her place in it all.

Josie would feel the same loneliness during her first trip to Nigeria. After that first service, Ma and Josie returned to St. Thomas More, but Aunty Glo was transmuted. She joined the choir at Holy Ghost Ministries. She began attending their bible studies. She started proselytizing at train stations. Then Aunty Glo got engaged to an associate pastor at Holy Ghost Ministries.

The Ohuruogus flew to Nnewi for the wine-carrying ceremony, where the dense shrubbery, red Anambra soil and whole cows roasting on spits were just like Josie had seen in the village dramas. Most similarities stopped there. Josie’s agemate cousins were sure to remind her that Nigerians had running water, only aunties listened to highlife music, and her attempts at Igbo were subpar. Further, Josie’s vocal fry was reminiscent of a valley girl, and Josie could not properly pronounce her own surname. As far as her cousins were concerned, Josie was an oyibo.

There she was, in her mother’s family compound with a backpack full of Chinua Achebe books, finding out that she was Canadian in Nigeria. It would hurt less if she didn’t feel Nigerian in Canada. Josie had needed that trip to feel like a return home. She had fantasized about what it could feel like to not be the odd one out. But perhaps she would be stuck inside the hyphen between Nigerian and Canadian all her life. In the parlour, Josie cried in Ma’s lap. Who could she have been if she’d grown up in Anambra Surely her tongue would have grown flexible enough to navigate sharp proverbs, to curse out her critics. Canada had softened her resolve and dampened her potential. She was just like her English teacher, who, when he heard she was visiting Nnewi, said, “Nigeria Aren’t there terrorists there Will you be safe?” She was a stranger, an interloper, a fraud.

Ma had wiped Josie’s tears and whispered, “Ozugo.”

“But Ma…” sniffled Josie.

“This is your home too.”

“Do you really believe that?”

“The same blood of our ancestors runs in your veins.”

“Like great-grandmother Lotachi?”

“Yes. And she always loved a good game.”

Slowly, dramatically, Josie wiped her tears and left to play Ludo with Obinna and cousin Azuka under a thatch canopy in the yard. Every time they passed the dice, they asked a true or false question. Azuka handed the pair of dice to Josie and said, “Only those who believe in Jesus will find heaven.” Obinna rolled his eyes. Azuka was always seeking to evangelize, even the evangelized.

“False,” said Josie, and she felt her brother’s eyes on her. Josie and Obinna were born a decade apart and rarely spoke after years of sibling squabbles. Obinna’s first memories were of Nigeria, and Josie could only imagine. To her, he was selfish and flippant, defying Ma and Pa whenever he could. She felt he thought her spoiled and goody-goody.

“Come again, little one?” said Azuka, eyeing her skeptically.

“Our ancestors believed in different ways, and they were good people,” insisted Josie, slowly shaking the dice inside her small, fisted hand. “Isn’t that all that matters?”

Later, when Josie and Obinna were sitting in the parlour and eating egusi with poundo, her brother asked, “Where did that come from?”

“Huh?”

“Doubt,” smiled Obinna.

Josie grinned back, downed her glass of water. Something inside Josie was hardening, and perhaps it was the holy ghost.

Back in Canada, Josie walked with slightly more assuredness.

In junior high, Josie’s hair was always braided, but one long weekend Ma split her ring fingernail and couldn’t plait Josie’s hair. Not for lack of trying. The two of them sat in the living room, Ma on the pleather couch and Josie on a leather pouf, her shoulders tucked between Ma’s sturdy thighs. Josie had transitioned out of relaxers by then, because of burns, breakage and Aunty Glo bombarding Ma with articles linking lye-containing products with endocrine disruption and fibroids. When Ma began to braid, Josie’s curls dug into her exposed nail bed. She would have continued had Josie not pulled away.

The next day Josie went to school with her hair both untwisted and unrelaxed for the first time. Ma had packed Josie’s hair into a tight bun but, after Ma left for work, Josie wincingly combed out her dry hair. She then patted it into the tight, perfect circle she’d seen on her parents’ highlife CD covers and in black-and-white photos of the civil rights movement. Her afro wasn’t as big as Nelly Uchendu’s on Love Nwantiti or Angela Davis’s in her trial photos, but it was close enough. At school, Josie traipsed across the courtyard, through the main doors, into her mathematics classroom, and there Eleanor was. She had nerve then, enough nerve to ask Josie, “Do you ever wish your hair was like mine?” when Josie sat beside her at their designated table.

“What?”

“You know. Straight, long, blonde.”

“Hmm.” The only times Josie thought about being a straight, long, blonde was when watching true crime television. She remembered taking solace in not having the features the serial killers and kidnappers on Forensic Files seemed obsessed over. “No, Eleanor, I’d rather my hair wasn’t pale and stringy.”

Ma had gotten a kick out of that one. Maybe Josie had said what she said because she knew it would make Ma laugh. For years, when silence settled between them in the family car, or an amusement park ride, or a cashier lineup, one of them would say, sternly, “Straight, long, blonde,” and they’d both scatter into laughter.

Another weekend, Aunty Glo invited Josie to a Holy Ghost Ministries youth group meeting. Pa was in town and hesitantly dropped Josie off. Before they pulled up to the curb, he said, “We’re Catholic, Chidalu,” seemingly nervous Josie would enter Holy Ghost Ministries and convert on the spot. Josie stifled a laugh. By then, Pa had been abroad for two years. It had been hard to stay close over long-distance phone and Skype calls.

The youth group leader, Eunice, met Josie in front of the bowling alley doors and led her up the flights of stairs. Eunice was a freckled 20-something whose ambivalence towards marriage was unconvincing. As they walked up the stairs, Eunice rambled, “You know, I used to be so angry scrolling through Instagram, seeing all my mates getting married. But God reminded me that everything comes in time. Who knows if those couples are even happy, you get They could be in abusive partnerships. They could hate each other. I’m leading this group because the youth need saving. So much insecurity, peer pressure, unhappiness.” They reached the final landing at last and Eunice looked back at Josie. “Josephine, I want God to save you.”

“Oh,” said Josie, “I’m already… saved.”

Eunice solemnly opened the door before them. Back inside the low-ceilinged space, Josie counted seven teenagers. A senior pastor arrived after they’d all grabbed stacked chairs from the corner and formed a circle, and Eunice said, “Ms. Blessing here will be providing the biblical perspective.” When everyone was seated they began. What does it mean to have faith How can God work through you Why is prayer important Eunice raised each question and a few people raised their hands, some shyly, some confidently, all hopeful. Each question was re-answered by Ms. Blessing, who always began with “Yes, but…” Josie felt the Holy Ghost Ministries youth group was anathema to the improv course she’d taken in Mills Estate with Eleanor months back.

“Can you reach heaven without accepting Jesus Christ?” asked Eunice.

Josie raised her hand, gave the same answer she’d given Azuka all those months ago, felt the same skepticism.

“Yes, but…” Ms. Blessing cleared her throat. “Our ancestors may have lived good. As in, they may have been good people, abi But they were not living to the glory of God. In fact, some of us are still paying for it. Look at Africa. Our lineages, the generational curses. You understand. And the Bible says…”

Eunice looked at her. “Josephine, I want God to save you.” “Oh,” said Josie, “I’m already… saved.”

Improv requires an improviser to adopt “Yes, and” thinking: accept your colleague’s premise and expand on it. In Mills Estate, Josie and Eleanor had improvised a scene about an astronaut who discovered his emptiness was a result of never meeting his twin sister. His mother had sent his twin away for having the wrong hair colour and ruining her tarot card alignment. The astronaut found peace by moving to Madagascar. Improv forces cooperation and flattens hierarchies. Josie was sure her God was one of parallel earth, not hierarchical heaven.

After the youth group meeting, Josie told Ma about Ms. Blessing as Igbo nwelu Eze flashed across the living room flatscreen. Aunty Glo had sworn off secular movies, but Josie and Ma had continued to watch village dramas chock full of mysterious murders, wailing concubines and poorly exe-cuted CGI. Josie had spent every minute since leaving the youth group thinking about Aunty Glo. How Aunty Glo, who’d lionized Ọdinani, who’d told her that her great-great-grandfather was a dibia, who’d insisted that great-grandmother Lotachi had returned in Josie, led her to Ms. Blessing. Ma didn’t respond for a long time, and Josie figured she was too entranced by Queen Amarachi dripping poison into a jug of palm wine.

“Ma?” asked Josie.

Ma simply pulled Josie into her chest, whispered, “Our heaven won’t be full of only oyibos. Tufiakwa.”

Eleanor kisses Josie in the stairwell, and Josie wants to ask how Eleanor could dedicate her entire life to a blatantly imperfect Church. Did Eleanor remember that the same blood that led the pagan reaction still ran inside her veins As a nun, would she get to question the catechism, or the Pope, or the sexual abuse cases Why does Josie have so many questions Maybe Josie didn’t believe enough. Maybe if she did, the universe would have told her that Ma was dying before it was too late. Ma, the sole constant in Josie’s life. Maybe Josie should have gone to all the youth group meetings, joined a monastery, made a shrine. Maybe Josie shouldn’t have kissed Eleanor back.

Now, Josie is on her knees at 5 a.m. in Nose Hill Park. Two days ago Josie found Ma curled up on the pleather couch, coughing up blood, and drove her straight to the hospital. The Bible said no weapons fashioned against the righteous shall prosper, but the virus was propagating, replicating, and Josie couldn’t even hold Ma’s hand. There are no visitors. There is no vaccine. There is no contact. The soil in Nose Hill Park is gummy underneath Josie’s fingernails. If she focuses enough, Ani will swallow her whole. This is the land of Moriah, Josie an offering. Little else matters. Aunty Glo is texting, telling her to drink blended ginger, beetroot and garlic. Obinna and Pa are flying back to Calgary. Eleanor is at St. Clare’s monastery. But, fuck, none of that really matters. Not really. Not when Josie’s thinking about Amadioha and Jesus and antivirals. She’s pouring libations on the earth and reciting pray for us sinners and meditating on medication. It doesn’t make sense.

She doesn’t care which holy ghost answers her prayer.

Mirabelle Chiderah Harris-Eze is a Canadian-Nigerian-American, and the 2022/23 national president of the Black Law Students’ Association of Canada. She won the Writers’ Union of Canada’s Short Prose Competition for Emerging Writers in 2021.

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The post Holy Ghost appeared first on Alberta Views.

I’m too hungry to give up. I unbutton my shirt, get my arms out, fling the make-believe net over one surprised fish.

“Aha. You’re one who didn’t get away.”

Beanie laughs, the first I’ve heard from her. She has a knife she stole from the dining room. Not very sharp, but I manage to slit the tender belly open below the gill like I watched my mother do before the School. I scrape the insides into the river.

“Yuck. That’s good enough.” We have to build a fire, keep it small. I climb along the riverbank and stumble on a small circle of ashes in the wall of rocks at the end of the bridge. Someone here before us.

“Beanie, look. Another runaway, you think?”

“Shush. Hush.”

I’m making too much noise. She is nervous, afraid of getting caught. She hasn’t told me what happened before she was returned to the School. She hasn’t talked about Mr. B, either. I don’t push it.

“Tonight we’ll move out.” Beanie sounds like that western story Sister read at school.

About once an hour a car rumbles over the bridge. I wait for silence after one passes, light the mini collection of dry leaves and sticks I’ve piled in the fire pit. The tiny flame catches. I thread the fish onto a stick and prop it over the fire on the rocks. Perfect, I breathe, quiet, waiting for Beanie’s approval.

Crackle, snap, splat. The stick burns through, dumping the fish into the fire. “Oh, shit.” It feels so good to swear. I scrape the fish clean on a rock, rebuild the fire.

This time the stick holds. Smoke flares, then dies. Only a little daytime exposure.

“Jeannie Squirt, you’re a genius.”

Beanie gawks at the smoky, fat slab of pink fish spread on green nettle leaves. The colours are majestic, almost like not real. Our miracle food is eaten in seconds, once we get over the shock. Beanie has called me my kid’s name—from back when.

“Tonight we’ll move out.” Beanie sounds like that western story Sister read at school. Outlaws, horses and cowboys chasing. The bad guys getting caught—or killed.

Geese are on the move. Honk, honk, honk. They fly in Vs over the bridge, one group swooping at the river, the next following. It’s that time of year. I watch their direction. South by southwest, my father always said; that’s where they go. Are we near home Somehow I feel home is very far away.

“Beanie?” She’s asleep in the middle of the day.

Resting up for tonight. I lie down next to her on the tarp. She doesn’t know I’m here until I squirm, move my legs. She pokes me in the ribs. Sleep, sleep. I’m back at the School, watching for Mr. B. He is the worst of the teachers, the most dreaded. Beanie won’t talk about him, what happens when he twists her arm and takes her away during the night. I hunch over my sketchbook, draw the dorm beds in endless rows. Miss Crosbie has taught me to use long strokes for distance and short ones for close up.

I dream about fat red pieces of fish sizzling on racks over a fire my mom is poking to stir up the heat. I want to catch another fish in the river, but Beanie is stuffing our packs, ready to leave. My shirt is crispy dry from the sun.

It’s a dark night. Clouds shadow the stars. Good cover for runaways. We walk from one farm road to the next, occasional dots of light in scattered buildings down a gravel track. Beanie says we have to get to a city before there’s a place to sleep proper. I don’t know how she knows this. Is it wishful thinking I’m too hungry to protest. Our fish feast was a long time ago.

“Shush. Listen. I think it’s a train.” Our village was on a train line. That’s how they took us to the School. Off to the right in the direction of the train sound, a light flickers low, between rows of corn. We crouch in the ditch by the road seconds before a pick-up careens past, belching black exhaust in our faces. No letup. No discovery of two runaways frozen in headlights.

We walk without making a sound towards the flickering glow on the ground, make out a smaller flame nearby. A train whooshes through, passenger cars, moving fast.

A deep voice comes from the bigger fire. “We’ll wait for the next one. It may slow for the switch coming up. If it does, put out your fire and run for the car with the open door.”

“I ain’t puttin’ out ’til I know,” says an answer from the almost invisible fire on the edge of the trampled grass where three men are squatting, smoking a hand-rolled cigarette.

“Put it out before you run,” the deep voice says. “I’ll give you a couple of matches to restart if you need them.”

“You ain’t got all the answers, big man,” says the little-fire voice. In the distance a train whistles at a level crossing, slows. I feel familiar vibrations in the ground. It’s a long freight approaching.

The three tramps douse their fires, roll their belongings in seconds and take off for the tracks. We follow just out of sight. Beanie shows no sign of fear. I haven’t discovered her bravery, where she gets it or if she cares.

There’s an open space in a boxcar, directly in front of us. I give Beanie a leg up and she pulls me in beside her. The three tramps are as stunned as we are when we discover each other in the same place at the same time. Are we all runaways from school I want to ask, but my English isn’t up to it. The deep voice holds out a bag of peanuts in their shells. Beanie and I cup our hands to receive this gift from Manito.

“Thank you,” I say in Cree.

“You’re welcome,” the big voice answers in English. “Gotta cut the Indian crap. Gives you away, and you don’t want anyone to know you’re a runaway.”

“How did you know?” I blurt out with the peanut shells.

“Where do you think we all come from?” the voice in the corner mutters. “Here, have a drink of water. Don’t mind my used canteen. Only one I grabbed on my way out. Sure good to have. G’night.” I watch him slide into his bedroll, snug and warm.

Beanie and I scoot into the opposite corner and wrap our tarp around our shoulders. Big Voice slips into the shadows away from the sliding door. There is another figure, the third one at the camp It’s a boy, maybe younger than us. I think he’s asleep already. The empty boxcar sways, jerks, stops, rolls forward. Where are we going Does anyone know?

He says no Indian. English words, yes, but not my mother’s way of talking, so much of which I can’t remember. The School has done good.

The train motion puts everyone to sleep. I dream we are going home. Slowly, more slowly, then movement stops. Brakes screech. A wall of the boxcar slides open.

“Yep, they’re in here,” a man yells.

“Up, you guys. Better hurry.” He tells us what to do as if he’s a conductor.

We jump out of the boxcar onto the ground. I feel my ankle crunch and try to rise to run.

Beanie grabs my arm; the other three are already gone. The boxcar rolls back, erasing our escape.

There’s a maze of tracks in front, on the sides, in back. I test my ankle; decide it isn’t too bad.

Beanie pulls me over rows of steel rods. Finally, a grassy field.

We walk to a road. The lights of a town. A city Beanie and I have never seen either.

We rest in a ditch. My ankle is twice its normal size. Beanie moves it around a bit.

“Don’t. That hurts.” I’m careful not to scream with pain.

“Just trying to see if it’s broken,” Beanie says. We both agree it’s probably only sprained. Sunrise outlines a jagged collection of tall buildings with lower squares spreading from the centre like blocks of wood. We walk, hobble, into a new day.

A car slows behind us. Stops. A woman’s voice asks if we have a place to walk to.

Beanie tries to sound grownup, independent. “We’re going over there.” She points to the buildings in the distance. “My sister has sprained her ankle,” she adds.

“Please let me give you a ride. I’ll take you to the Catholic church. They have a shelter. Even a guest house if you have a little money.”

“No, thank you,” Beanie says. “We’re not Catholic.”

“You don’t have to be Catholic to go there. They will be serving breakfast to everyone by the time we arrive.” The lady moves toward her car, opens the rear door for us.

At the thought of breakfast, we get in.

It’s a nice place. We use the washroom, clean our filthy hands. Sit next to three other new arrivals. I recognize Deep Voice when he reminds me, “No Indian.”

“Promise,” I answer. Someone comes over my shoulder with more pancakes. It’s the lady with the car. How can I be so lucky I was in that damn school for 10 years. I’ve been out for less than 10 days and I’m eating pancakes in a Catholic church, the same thing that kept me in the School. Then I can’t swallow. Will they take me back?

“Whatsa matter?” Big Voice asks me.

“Back. Will they take us back?”

“Nah. Too much trouble. Besides, we’ve come a long way. At least I have. Prob’ly you too. We’ll need their shelter for a while, ’til we get jobs ’n’ everything.” Beanie is listening from my other side. She’s on her fourth pancake.

“My English. Not so good,” I sputter.

“You’ll get it. Just no Indian.” He sounds so sure, so old.

I watch the brown-skin girl across the table. She looks new too. I mutter under my breath thank you in Cree and she smiles.

When we finish breakfast, the lady with the car takes us down a hallway to a dorm room with 12 cots, six on each side facing each other. “This is where you can sleep,” she says in her cheery voice. Beanie and I look at each other and turn to leave, but my ankle stops me. It’s too sore to let me go on.

“Just for tonight,” I tell Beanie. “Until the pain is better.”

“Just one night,” Beanie says. “Too much like the School.” She shivers, tightens her sweater around her arms.

“I’ll get you some ice,” the car lady offers and goes back towards the kitchen. I don’t know what she means. Ice for what?

I sit on the cot, swing my swollen ankle up to rest. The car lady appears with ice wrapped in a towel and puts it around my ankle. It’s cold but feels good.

“My name’s Claire,” she smiles in my face, pinning me in my place on the cot. I look away, over at Beanie, who is lying on her back staring at the ceiling. “Lunch is at 12; supper at 5:00.”

My sister and I sleep. Sister Jolene chases a rat around the dorm beds; a giant toad jumps out and trips her. I wake up laughing. A bell rings. Lunch time. My ankle is way better after the magic ice.

Jeanne Louise. I print my name on the name tag by my plate. Beanie writes Minnie Mouse. She looks up, past my matted hair.

“Tomorrow we go.” It’s a statement, no maybe. There’s a fresh towel on my cot when I return and I don’t know when a hot shower has felt so good, especially as most of our showers at the School were cold. Beanie’s long hair is shining black after her shampoo. Beau Noir, the girls at the School called her. She has brushed it every night since I can remember.

It’s a dark night. Clouds shadow the stars. Good cover for runaways.

We leave after breakfast. My pants and shirt and underwear I rinsed in the shower are sticky dry, good enough, like my ankle that’s still swollen and sore.

A car stops on the road, offers a ride and Beanie accepts.

“Where to, pretty ladies?” a harsh voice asks.

“Downtown,” Beanie answers. Are we really pretty ladies?

The car moves forward, swerves around a tight corner, throws Beanie against the driver.

“Stop. This is our place.” She has seen an Indian sign for tobacco at a house near the road.

“Ain’t downtown yet.” He doesn’t stop.

At a red light, Beanie leans across me and flips the door handle. Good thing I’m holding on or I would have fallen out before Beanie pushes me. In a flash we are free.

“Gotta be careful of these guys,” she mutters.

How does she know I wonder again. What has she seen with Mr. B or when she ran away?

We walk on a sidewalk along a busy street. Stores, people, mostly white faces. Almost unconsciously we follow someone that looks like Big Man from the train and church. He turns a corner, away from the busy street, disappears behind a blank wall. We walk past the building, duck into an alley with a beaten path that leads to an open doorway. We know we need a shelter. We’ve heard stories about runaways at the School. So here’s a place to sleep at night, sort of.

When my eyes adjust to the dark, I see brown faces lying on pieces of mattress or tarps like we have. Someone is cooking and I feel faint from the thought of food. Beanie discards her pack on top of our tarp, eases mine off my shoulders, guides me to the soup line on the back wall of the huge open space. I can only think Cree, Manito. No Indian out loud. I remember.

I pick up litter around a school yard and someone—a teacher?—plants some dollars in my hand. Beanie goes out at night and returns with enough money to rent a room of our own. Two flights up, two beds, dirty toilet on the landing, a wisp of heat. Beans from a can, stale bread dumped behind the corner store. No Sisters with whips, no Mr. Bs. I figure the new ones pay. Beanie brushes her hair every night before she goes out.

During the day she sleeps. I walk, learn the city. There’s a river park where walkers, mostly brown-skinned, gather, drink from paper bags. I watch as pills and needles are passed around, hidden in the bushes. There’s a tension, everyone watches everyone, and themselves.

Alize, the Indian girl from the Catholic church sleeps—passed out—on a bench. No one pays attention. I draw the river curving around a bend, park benches, low buildings in the distance. By some miracle I still have my runaway bag and my exercise book of drawings I’ve kept since I was kidnapped from my home in Grade 1. I keep the bag in hiding, even from Beanie. I don’t want her to see herself on my pages. She might tear them up. Everything’s a bigger secret with my sister.

Whoop whoop. Lights flashing. Police swarming the park, behind the bushes. I am pushed into the back of what looks like the boxcar on the train.

I end up at what they tell me is an old prison; another school, I think, only no nuns, no Father LeBlanc. I am in a room with a metal bed and blanket, no mattress. Where is Beanie?

Someone leaves a bucket of water, a pile of rags. “If you do some work, you can eat. The washrooms are all yours. Get them clean the first time. Or you’ll have to do them again.”

They aren’t too bad. It actually feels good to do some work.

Beanie doesn’t come.

They let me stay three nights, four… hoping Beanie will show up A worker—someone like Claire—tells me to get a job.

I try at 7-Eleven; they say come back the next day. I return three times, three days in a row. “Come in clean clothes and you can sweep the grounds.”

I can’t find Beanie. I check the room we rented and there’s a drunk man sprzawled on my bed. I recognize him from the river park where I got arrested for doing nothing.

“She ain’t here. Go fuck yourself. Halfbreed.”

At the jail, Alize is lying on a cot next to mine when I return from my search for Beanie. “Where you from?” she whispers in Michif.

During the day she sleeps. I walk, learn the city. There’s a tension. Everyone watches everyone, and themselves.

“Don’t know,” I answer in English. “Beanie says she knows, but she’s missing. Can’t find her nowhere—anywhere.” I’m trying to speak good. I’m learning, but I need Beanie.

A V of geese invades the horizon. Honk, honk. I follow their formation, try to draw them, like I remember from close-up at home. Flying south, free.

I have four coloured pencils left. I make miniatures. Pale sky, pillow clouds, ripples for a river—in a three-inch square free as air. A tiny Beanie, two inches tall walking a cornfield, pack on her back. The train boxcar with three sets of tracks going nowhere in another corner of the paper. I’m saving the pencils, paper too.

I’ll keep the drawings for Beanie. The pictures will talk to her, get past her secrets. I have hope.

It’s a dark night. Something jars my shoulder. Maybe a rat I jump out of bed, stare into Beanie’s eyes.

“Get your stuff. Let’s go.” Where now I grab my pack, shove the pencils and exercise book in first.

Born in Chicago in 1938, Janice Kenyon emigrated to Victoria, BC, where she worked as a nurse. She moved to High River in the early 2000s to be near her daughter and grandchildren in Calgary. As a 66-year-old she took an epic cycling trip, which inspired Bike Ride with a Twist: 8,321 km Across Canada (Kachina Press/Sandhill, 2006). Janice’s other books include the biography Any Damn Thing (Gomer Press). Her fiction won honourable mention in the WGA 2020 Pandemic Postcards Contest. Janice passed away July 29, 2023. On the day before she died, she joked this would be the year she won Alberta Views’ fiction contest. She was prescient.

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The principal commanded us to bring our own marble sets to school. At recess he would lead us like lambs to the pitches. The game introduced an embarrassing language, taught and translated by our principal. If you were serious you could play for keepsies. Marbles were called poppers, bowlers, shooters, thumpers, smashers, boulders, bonkers, coshers, mashers, plumpers, bumboozers, giants, godfathers, biggies or toebreakers. A flasher sounded like it belonged with this vocabulary. Though any one of those peculiar terms might be mistaken for something ribald or perverse. Imagine the potentially salacious uses for words like plumpers, biggies, giants, thumpers, boulders, bumboozers and bonkers.

In addition to the warning about the lands beyond the schoolyard fence, we would be sent home with a typed bulletin. It explained to our parents that one or more of our classmates had been the victims of this flasher, who was yet to be caught. I understood, vaguely, what this meant. I had been told. Not who the victims were or what, exactly, had happened to these ill-fated children. My parents would unfold and read these notices with looks of gravity and clucks of disgust. They lived apart, but my parents would get together to deliver a lecture about staying on school grounds and not going off alone. In my father’s sea-green living room, the tone of these lectures made it sound as though my sister and I were the ones who had done something wrong.

The flasher was a regular-looking white man in a beige trench coat. The thing he would do was open his coat. That’s what you had to watch out for, the trench coat opening wide, like an unlatched gate. It was what happened next—after the flashing—that remained unstated and thus unclear.

For a week or two at school, rumours spread. The rumoured victims gave off an illicit sheen, glimmering with trauma and experience. If a teacher overheard our giggled whispers, we were reprimanded with more gravity and disgust, as though we too were monsters for even thinking behaviour like flashing was funny.

Often, during what was called gym class, everyone was ordered to pick up the trash fluttering in the gravel, the grass, against the school’s concrete siding and chain-link fence. After collecting five pieces each, we were to line up at the mouth of the trashcan and open our fists before the counting eyes of the principal, who supervised us outdoors. Pierre was the only Black child at our school. He wore thick glasses and striped T-shirts, and he played the recorder better than anyone in class. In line for the trashcan, he held a condom up to the sunlight, its innards thick and milky. He looked perplexed but pleased.

The principal had been smiling benevolently, hands clasped behind his back. He reddened. His face changed. He moved swiftly toward Pierre.

I was nearby, waiting to show off my diligence with several granola bar wrappers, a Teddy Grahams box and a crusted Jell-O pudding cup. The principal grabbed Pierre’s wrist, forcefully, the way he handled the ears of bad children.

Pierre dropped what he was holding. A tremor of confused fear rippled over his brow.

The principal called everyone over. There was something ugly and righteous and angry in his manner. We gathered in a circle as Mr. Strachan pointed at the translucent thing, spread like a slug on the gravel. He placed his hand over his heart. We were to never touch anything like what Pierre had touched, he said. The janitor, Mr. Andrews, would come and take it away.

Pierre kicked sullenly at the gravel. He kept his eyes on his navy Velcro-strap sneakers and began humming the recorder notes to “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”

It was not long before I encountered a flasher in the flesh. I was not alone but with my sister and our neighbours, two cousins who lived at the end of our inner-city street. The cousins were also two girls. Each lived with only her mother. Our father, too, was a single parent. Or he was during the weeks we stayed with him. At the time, he was dating the mother of Fiona, one of the cousins. I was eight, Fiona was seven, my sister and Jody were nine years old. We liked to think of ourselves as a pack of orphans.

Most of our time we spent outdoors. There was a park nearby with two hills, a stand of swaying poplars, a wooden bridge and a merry-go-round with brightly painted animal-shaped seats: a tortoise, a dog, a snail, a horse. The following summer the city would deem the merry-go-round a hazard and bolt it down, so it no longer turned. Hearing the news, my father guessed that some child had broken a limb. With its round and slippery back, the tortoise was particularly treacherous.

While it still spun, we liked the merry-go-round. But our preferred park game was hide-and-seek. Occasionally we permitted the other two children who lived on our street to join us. I was a fat and timid child, accustomed to being the victim. But Celeste had cerebral palsy. And Lance—also fat—was the kind of boy who ran home crying to his mother. Equally bad, his mother was the kind who marched to the park and lined up everyone like criminals. Rightly or wrongly, I believed that my own parents looked with contempt upon such gross overinvolvement.

We had been repeatedly and sternly told that we were to include Celeste anytime she liked. No such decrees were issued on Lance’s behalf.

“You better smarten up,” Lance’s mother would say. “You better start being nice to my son.”

“Or what?” The bad one of the two cousins, Jody, would hold her chin high, her gaze level.

Of all the mothers I knew, I liked Jody’s mother best. Her name was Sheila. Believing it glamorous, I often whispered the name to myself—Shhheila. It sounded like waves.

Shhheila was funny and warm. Her embraces were perfume-soaked. She worked in a downtown bar. More than once I’d heard my father say that Jody’s mother spent whole nights away from their apartment. I’d heard nothing about Jody’s father. Unlike the phony brazenness my sister and I occasionally adopted—a muttered insult or stifled snort—Jody had an aura of real wildness. Her matted hair was nest-like. Her jeans had holes in the knees, and often in the crotch. Jody did not mumble apologies during a rebuke. It seemed to me she liked trouble. I might have learned something from her. But Jody was unpopular with parents and teachers. And this unpopularity, this not being thought nice, was something I ardently feared.

About once a week, my sister, the cousins and I set up a lemonade stand on the corner of the busy thoroughfare that intersected our street. We spent our earnings on five-cent candy dinosaurs at the convenience store bordering the park. In the evenings, we were sent up the hill to the video store with a note from Jody’s mother. The video store smelled of stale popcorn and cassette plastic. The clerk, who knew us by name, would sell Jody her mother’s cigarettes while the rest of us squatted and crawled on the filthy carpet to get a look under the slatted saloon-like doors of the Adult section.

At the end of our block, at the top of the hill, there was a house shaped like a golf ball. This house was somewhat famous in our city, or so it seemed to me. I would tell my classmates that I shared a street with the golf ball house. Everyone would be impressed, jealous. I often imagined what it was like to be inside the house. A place a wolf would dwell, with its cave-like ceiling and sun slanting through octagonal windows.

The golf ball house marked the boundary beyond which we were forbidden to play.

The house marked one side of the boundary beyond which we were forbidden to play. And it was there, near the golf ball house and not in the park, that it happened.

It was spring. The sun was bright. There were tight green buds on the branches. Shadows stretched over the sidewalk. I don’t remember what we were doing—playing a game or walking to the corner or video store.

The man was white. And young, I think. His black curls fell to his shoulders and looked wet. He wasn’t wearing a trench coat. He was wearing a white tank top and green basketball shorts. His arms were pink and flabby. And he didn’t unbuckle any garment with a grotesque flourish like we’d been taught to expect. I don’t remember him doing anything lewd like reaching down into the waistband of his shorts. I believe his face looked bored. He didn’t even glance over at where we stood huddled and unbreathing on the sidewalk. His thing—that’s what we would’ve called it then—just seemed to be there, hanging over the top of his shorts. Hanging there, a lolling tongue, bouncing with his gait.

He walked by and still did not look at us. He gave nothing away with his eyes or even a twitch of the mouth. We stayed frozen in place. It was as though we couldn’t quite believe what we were seeing. Or perhaps we felt sorry for him, thinking this was some embarrassing mistake, like an open fly, only worse.

He reached the corner of the street. And there, instead of turning out of sight, he spun on his heels. Head high and gaze straight, he walked in that business-like stride back up the same sidewalk from where he’d just come, with us silent and staring on the street’s other side.

He kept walking. He did not look back.

He was a half-block away when we took off running. We ran fast and laughing, like the time we’d believed, after watching Old Yeller, that we’d seen a stray rabid dog.

Something, finally, had happened to us.

I don’t remember anyone being frightened, at first. What I remember is being excited. My heart was beating in my throat. Normally, I was a slow mover—asthmatic and clumsy. But that day, as we ran toward home, my lungs were clear, my legs strong and quick. The air held a charged and ruptured feeling, like the crack of a bat.

Why did we run to Fiona’s house Ours was closer, if only by half a block. Perhaps it was because a mother was there, waiting inside. A mother would validate our story. And Fiona’s mother was outraged. She was angrier than I had ever seen her. In her living room with its chintz sofa, ferns and picture window, we sat solemnly before her, our laughter gone, as she frowned and paced among the ferns like a tiger at the city zoo. My sister and I had visited the zoo recently, with our own mother. We had seen the tiger, striped and pacing. My sister had giggled meanly. She gripped my cheek, pulled my ear to her mouth, and whispered, “Look at the tiger’s balls.”

Fiona’s mother asked for details: who, what, where, when, but not why. With careful furiousness she listened. Her face went red. Then, she did something unexpected and wondrous. She went to the kitchen and called the police. It was a much bigger affair than any of us had imagined. I was a child who spent time fantasizing about illness and imagining my own funeral. This turn of events felt almost like a daydream come true.

And it was there, in Fiona’s mother’s living room, that I felt tears on my face. Once they started, the tears seemed hard to stop. None of the others were crying. But I carried on anyway. I sat on the couch and cried and hugged Fiona’s fat, three-legged lab, Taco. Wedged between the dog and Fiona’s mother, I made ugly, hoarse wailing sounds. I reminded myself of Celeste.

Fiona’s mother rubbed my back. The others looked away. Abruptly, Fiona’s mother stood and again took up her pacing.

Later, it was Jody who suggested we climb the hill to the golf ball house. She had grown bored of hiding and seeking in the afternoon shadows. Under her matted hair, Jody’s face looked flushed. She poked the edge of a hole in her jeans.

“Maybe,” she said, “the man will return.”

Mikka Jacobsen is a writer from Calgary. Her debut essay collection, Modern Fables, was published by Freehand Books in September 2022.

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Her hair is shorter than I remember. Dyed red now, too. She leaps into the frayed passenger seat and I press hard on the gas, peeling away from Nick and Sandra’s like bank robbers fleeing the scene. For a second, I wonder what Jordan is doing right now, then make myself wonder anything else.

This morning, the city felt like a sauna. Now the sky is black and pelting rain. We have hours to fill and every idea I had involved going outside, so I toss over a grocery bag to buy time to think. A hungry Maxi is a cranky Maxi, so I bought Snickers, Swedish Fish, even a Red Bull and smokes—all the deeply unhealthy things that her foster parents would never buy in a billion years. I like coming prepared for these visits, probably to compensate for how unprepared I’ve been for everything up to now.

Am I terrible for buying cigarettes My sister’s only 15. No mom and no dad. Chunky in all the wrong places, stalked and mocked by anonymous accounts that trolls at her school create. Even nice people are secretly mean, she told me once, and I still think about that. Lung cancer is a long-term problem. Maxi is miserable now.

Virgin Radio is playing hits from the ’90s, the kind that mom used to sing in the kitchen. Thunder cracks above, but no lightning, as Maxi tears open the candy without saying thank you. Ambulance sirens scream behind us. Ahead, there’s a McDonalds with the lights turned off.

We meander through the city, cursing the clouds, until I suggest the corn maze.
“It’s raining,” she replies.
“You can do a maze in the rain.”
She chews on Swedish Fish. “Let’s just go to the mall or something.”

During our awkward pre-visit phone call, Sandra hammered a point repeatedly: West Edmonton Mall was off limits.

No malls. During our awkward pre-visit phone call, Sandra hammered that point repeatedly. West Edmonton Mall was off limits. I don’t know what you did Saturday night, but your sister passed out in the parking lot, Sandra said, as though the mall and I were in cahoots together.

Sandra and Nick are worried about binge drinking; I’m worried about who she was drinking with. Maxi is a loner. She has zero close friends. Seeing her now, with that shitty haircut, shoved into a shirt that is slightly too small even though I’ve offered to buy her clothes using my employee discount at Costco, I wonder who got Maxi so drunk that doctors had to pump her stomach. Or maybe I don’t want to know. Life is messed up. No matter how smart or ready you think you are, there is always something else waiting, something darker and scarier than you’d let yourself imagine.

We are driving in circles. She cracks the window an inch and lights a Camel, staring at her phone. As kids, people used to call us opposites. I was loud and Maxi was quiet; I was bone skinny and she was big-boned. Press us together and a pair of normal-sized, well-behaved girls would appear.

“I saw Jordan last weekend at Cinnabon,” she says. “Tell your boyfriend that his friends are assholes.”
Ex-boyfriend, I think before changing the subject.
“What’s Nick like Sandra seems alright.”

The first time I met Maxi’s foster parents, they struck me as cold. He gave a bone-crushing handshake that was surely intentional. She offered me a glass of water and a 20-minute lecture on her garden, while Jesus listened from a wooden cross above the stove. The entire house had a silent vibe, like the dated furniture and oatmeal-coloured walls sucked up all the noises inside. Not that I’d tell Maxi any of that.

“They love protein shakes.”
I glance over. “What?”
“Literally, all we have to eat in the house are protein shakes, kale salads and kombucha. I’m going to the bathroom, like, every 20 minutes.”

We merge onto the Whitemud, still heading nowhere but without traffic lights. “Heathy food is a good sign. It means they care, right?”

No response from Maxi. Just a look that tells me to stop being stupid.

“I heard something happened at the mall,” I continue, shifting into the sisterly advice portion of our trip.
“They’re liars.”
“Who Nick and Sandra?”
“All of them. That social worker doesn’t even reply when I text.”

We have to do something. We can’t just cruise around, wasting gas all night. I scan the passing streets for ideas while Maxi complains about getting ghosted by her social worker and about Nick searching her backpack like she’s a drug mule. She jokes about turning anorexic this summer.

Cracking the Red Bull, Maxi does this thing where she grins as she drinks. For a second, I see our dad.

“So you didn’t get drunk and have your stomach pumped?”

She rolls her eyes and sips the energy drink. “Are we going to the mall or what?”

Once, Maxi got lost in West Edmonton Mall. This was years ago, back when it was the biggest mall in the world, a preposterous combination of retail stores and theme park attractions. There were sea lions and submarines, roller coasters and waterslides. An ice rink. An indoor lake. To us, the mall was a circus that would never leave town.

We were waiting in line for the submarine ride when Maxi vanished. Our dad, talking on his cell phone, never noticed, but I did. One moment she was standing beside me. The next, there was no sign of her, just wave after wave of Boxing Day crowds. Dad called security, but I was like a bloodhound, racing from store to store, tracing her scent. Eventually I found Maxi hiding on the pirate ship that the mall rents out for parties, watching the sea lion show across the lake. She squeezed my chest so hard it hurt to breathe.

Dad loved telling that story. It was so central to me and Maxi, told and retold so many times that I can imagine every detail, even though I have no memory of it. Eyes closed, I picture myself searching for her. I see myself darting between gaps in the rushing crowd. What 7-year-old can track a toddler in a crowded mall What child climbs aboard a replica of the Santa Maria, sensing her sister is hidden inside

West Ed isn’t the biggest mall in the world anymore. It’s been knocked down to sixth or seventh. The stores are mostly yuppie brands, the food courts are nasty and animal rights activists keep petitioning to get the sea lions removed. They say the living conditions are inhumane.

“The rain is slowing,” I say, as though Maxi isn’t sitting right beside me, watching the same windshield wipers wave.

The corn maze is just outside the city. I haven’t been in years and have no idea how the place ever got started. Maybe some farmer was bored or maybe he figured there was more money in letting people wander through his crop than in harvesting it. A girl in my high school lost her virginity in the maze, which always struck me as tragic. Sex is enough of a maze already. Jordan kept telling me how bad I was at it.

“You just lie there,” he complained, but what else was I supposed to do?

Maxi stares out the window. Silence means her brain and heart are having a tug-of-war over her tongue.

Pulling off the highway, we drive west, gravel crunching under the tires. I stop the car. A chained gate blocks the turnoff to the grassy area where vehicles once parked. The farmhouse that sold T-shirts and crabapple jelly sits abandoned, and a crop that’s definitely not corn bursts through the field.

Maxi is not impressed. “We drove all that way for this?”

“When I was in high school, people used to hook up in the maze.” Her face wrinkles in disgust, so I add, “Don’t you remember Dad and Mom taking us here?”

Maxi stares out the window. Silence means her brain and heart are having a tug-of-war over her tongue.

“I wrote her a letter,” she says. “I just need to find Mom’s email address.”

Good luck with that. What Maxi doesn’t know is that I tracked our mom down a few months ago. A friend of mine from high school heard from his stepdad that she was living near Brampton. It took a week to find the phone number and another week to get her to answer my calls.

Our mom’s voice used to ring through the house like a smoke alarm. The woman on the other end of the phone sounded thin and scratchy. She could’ve been a stranger.

“Dad’s dead,” I said. “He was driving home late one night and got T-boned by some drunk. Well, they were both drunk.”
A beat passed.
“Nobody told me,” Mom said eventually.
“Nobody knew how to get ahold of you.”
“So, Carson’s dead.” I heard a lighter spark. “It’s like a bad dream.”
“Maxi needs a place to live. Children’s Services is putting her in foster care unless we find a place for her.”
She exhaled a drag of something. “Ask your grandparents to take her.”
“They wouldn’t even pay for the funeral.”
“My life’s a mess right now. You’re over 18, right?”
“This isn’t like losing her at the mall. I can’t save her on my own.”
“Oh, honey, has nobody told you?” Another drag washed over the line. “That story’s bullshit. Carson had you girls playing hide-and-seek in that mall so he could get pissed on Bourbon Street.”
“You’re lying.”
“I’ll send money as soon as I can,” she mumbled before I hung up.

When she and Dad used to fight, the shouting got so loud it shook the dishes. After Mom left, our house fell silent. Dad drank PC Pilsner until he passed out watching TV in the basement. Maxi started eating meals in her room. I moved in with Jordan and visited as little as possible.

Beside me, Maxi is still staring at the corn maze’s fallen glory.

“You okay over there?”
“Nick and Sandra run the house like a boot camp. They keep telling me to go to HIIT classes and keep a food journal. They hate me because I’m fat.”
“What’s an HIIT class?”
“High Intensity Interval Training. It’s stupid.”
“You’re not fat. Some people are just built bigger.”

Once again, Maxi looks at me as if I’m the dumbest person alive.

I think about things that aren’t my fault. I didn’t make Mom run off. I didn’t tell Dad to drink and drive that night, and I definitely did not choose to have Jordan dump me for some thirsty Earls waitress with a flat stomach and her daddy’s Lexus.

“Any word on us living together?”
I shake my head. “It’s not really a good time.”
Maxi nods. “No worries.”

There probably is a way to tell Maxi how messed up my life is now. How Costco hired more part-time staff, cutting my shift schedule in half. How Jordan ordered pizza last Sunday and told me he’d met someone else. I had two weeks to move out, leaving me in this strange netherworld of living in a place where I’m not wanted, with a man who is no longer mine.

“No worries,” Maxi repeats. “What are we doing now?”
“Want me to take you back?”
She shakes her head.
“Okay, let’s go see Dad.”

In the months since he died, Maxi hasn’t once visited the cemetery. I could make her, but I don’t.

Your sister needs boundaries more than a friend right now, Sandra told me, but that just means Sandra’s never needed a friend. I mean really needed it.

Besides, Maxi isn’t really a kid anymore. If I look hard enough, I can see fragments hidden beneath the hunch and silence—Mom’s nose and Dad’s eyes. They’re buried deep, and the longer I stare the more the baby inside the girl disappears, leaving only a woman-child that I can’t help fix.

We wind from street to avenue, avenue to freeway, freeway to street. Over the Walterdale Bridge. The roads are spotted with puddles. Eventually we park outside Wine and Beyond, buy a six-pack of watermelon coolers and sit on the hood of my car. I drink while she smokes, tossing chunks of Snickers to the seagulls. I watch Jordan’s best friend, Derrick, walk into the liquor store. I’d forgotten he lived around here. Derrick must spot me too, because he comes marching back out.

“This is a surprise,” he says, all smiles. “That was some crazy rain, huh?”

“Definitely. Maxi, this is Jordan’s friend, Derrick.”

Killing her cigarette, Maxi mumbles something about it getting late. She hops off the hood and gets back into the car. Derrick’s eyes linger on her a second longer than necessary.

“I’ve been meaning to text you,” he says. “I think Jordan made a huge mistake.”
“Tell me something I don’t know.”
“If you ever need a place to crash, you can always call me.”
“I’ll remember that.”

Derrick is twice my size. He steps closer and touches my forearm. “You want to grab a drink later?”

“I’m with my sister.”
A grin. “She can come too.”
The sun is setting, turning the sky into an aging bruise. “Fuck off.”

For a second, I see it—the anger that lurks inside of men. They try to hide it. The good ones might dilute it, but there is kerosene in their blood, waiting for a spark.

Suddenly the horn erupts. He flinches and I jump. Maxi is glaring daggers from the passenger seat, left hand on the steering wheel.

The horn blares again. Honestly, I’ve never loved her more.

By the time we park in front of Nick and Sandra’s place, the sky is dim. Moths dance in the headlights. My head is sloshing a little but I crack another watermelon cooler anyway. The street is silent and empty and for a moment it feels like we are the last two people alive.

“So you’re homeless now,” Maxi says.

“Not yet, but soon.”

“I could see if Nick and Sandra have a room.”

I laugh and think about ending the night right there. “Listen, I’ve got to tell you something.”

Her face is open, defenseless. In the fading light, Maxi looks nothing like Mom or Dad or me or anyone else I know.

“Remember how I saved you that day at the mall I think Dad made the whole thing up.”

She blinks. “Sounds like him all right.”

There’s country music playing on the radio. I roll down the window, smell the humid air and the engine exhaust. Maxi lights two cigarettes and passes me one.

“Sandra wanted me in by 11,” she says. “I should go.”
“I could stay parked here for a while. Just in case you need to escape for a smoke or something.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”

After she disappears inside, I watch the house lights flicker on, then back off. I recline the driver’s seat and use my jacket for a blanket, thinking that my mom is probably right. The mall story might be bullshit, but it doesn’t matter. There’s a reason we believed it.

Tom McMillan lives in Edmonton. His fiction has also been published in Grain, the Toronto Star and Dalhousie Review.

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The post The Bloodhound appeared first on Alberta Views.

Megan squeals.

Shelby quips, “Is it supposed to be that red?” They turn the corner in matching outfits, athletic leggings and coordinated sweaters: pink, teal, yellow. Jennifer shoves her phone into her bra when she spots me. “Oh, Tran!”

Jennifer asks me if I brought the stuff. I tell her to stop being so fucking weird. She pouts while I pull the makeup bag out of my backpack. Fat tubes clatter against each other in the ziplock, lipsticks and glosses and liners. I grab three: Velvet Bordeaux, Rich Girl Red and Baby’s All Right.

Jennifer takes Velvet Bordeaux out of my hands, then starts digging through the bag. Megan claims the red and pairs it with a fuchsia that doesn’t match her undertones. Shelby commits to three pinks as dull as her personality. When they pay, they’re short three dollars and they stare at Megan digging through her purse. I should tell them their foundation sits on their skin wrong. They look too old to be seventeen.

On the way home I press through a coterie of Asian grandmothers and working women on the train platform. Someone’s sleeping on a bench inside. I tug off the newspaper covering his face. Bloated red cheeks and a reek like the garbage dump my father drove me to when I was six years old.

When I get home my mom’s watching her shows. Her makeup’s still on, cracking foundation, purple eyeshadow and wine-blushed cheeks.

We both look at the screen when we talk. She asks me if I ate. A man in a suit chases the crying female lead down the street in the night. I say yes. The dining table is covered in plastic shopping bags stuffed with As Seen on TV garbage. A purse organizer, bra enhancers, a corner cutting board, plastic knives in crayon colours. They all promise to make life a little more sufferable.

I dig through my dresser until I find the jar. I add today’s take to the cache and tuck it away. Have to restock soon; Valentines is coming up. Odds and ends from the drugstore, easiest to grab and move; lipsticks for a dollar, people eat them up. The average woman consumes a pound of carnauba wax, lanolin and red-pink-purple pigment annually. My phone buzzes.

8:17: u still have refined ruby and unending kiss I wanmt to see ur stock.

I text them back, when and where In 10 minutes I’m out the door again, my backpack shaking with colour. The streets are dimmed by snow flurries and a new moon.

8:52: Where r u>
8:53: Where you wanted me to be. Grey sweater.
8:57: Sry i thought u were a girl. Be rite out

I feel Mr. McCarthy’s eyes on me as I write through the quadratic equation. I was late. I’m using a highlighter to do math.

“Time’s up, bring ’em here.”

As I hand him my test, he asks me to stick around for a minute. I nod, wait for everyone else to filter out into the hallway while the bell rings.

McCarthy shuffles the test papers in his hands. He’s a human sweater vest with a fluffy beard and decades-deep eye bags. “You haven’t been around lately. Are you alright?”

My face reflects off his oblong glasses. I wonder how many faces have reflected off them before.

I tell him I was sick.

His wrinkles furrow. “You were doing well, Tran. You can still work toward a scholarship.”

I mumble an apology and walk away. I push into the crowds in the hallway, down the stairs, past the atrium, through the front doors and onto the sidewalk and into the bus that will take me downtown, elsewhere.

The girl who greets me when I walk into the pharmacy has a name tag over her breast. Samantha. She smiles hello with a gap tooth. I brush past her to the beauty aisle, grab nail polish from a display glazed in hearts. The Girls Are Out. High Spender. Bottle Service. Lipsticks are offered up by a cardboard cutout in the shape of a model, blond hair, blue eyes and a symmetrical cupid’s bow. I make my way to the tampon aisle and pretend to look at the boxes there. The polish goes up my bulky jacket sleeve. I bend over and slip the rest into my boot. I straighten up, look around, walk away.

Have a nice day, woman pulling her bag off the checkout counter. She’s the kind who wears high heels in the winter, her footsteps click-clack on stained linoleum. Bet she writes briefs in one of the new office towers.

When the alarm goes off at the door, she halts but I don’t. Stickers on the nail polish, ones I could have edged off but didn’t. Nobody ever yells stop. Nothing ever happens.

They tried to scare us straight. Girls with names like Talia sneak lipstick into the bags of girls named Bridget, and Bridget’s parents have to drive down to the mall’s security office to pay for it, but they believe her in the end, even though they warned her that “Talia was no good!” The episode ends in a family group hug and we never see Talia again.

4:34 – can you meet up today
4:36 – Yes. NE or downtown.
4:45 – macs on 11th and 5th @ 6pm

They call this spot the Crack Macs. The stores have more signs than customers. Cashier has no more than $150 in the till. You are on camera. The trains roar past mostly on time, red and blue lines intersecting on 8th.

He’s punctual. I can tell he’s the buyer from the twin lines of contour carving out his cheeks and the grey contact lenses, better in pictures than in life. He smiles at me, slightly crooked teeth rimmed by lipstick drawn sharp around the cupid’s bow. I tell him I like the berry shade against his brown skin. His eyebrows twitch as he smiles and thanks me.

“Thanks. I’m saving up to go to beauty school.”

He picks through the bags for a long time, ooh-ing and grunting over the multitudes. He ends up with contrasting shadows, bold blushes, multidimensional lip glosses. He asks me if he can swatch some items and ends up with stripes of colour going up his wrist. When he’s done, he hands me his money in crumpled-up fives.

I tell him I always get more stock, in case he needs anything. He gives me that nervous nod people do when they’re worried about being Talia. I want to say that nobody is watching people like us.

He takes his purchases and walks toward the alleyways of downtown, instead of the train platforms that would carry him to the suburbs.

When do they realize what they’re doing Is it when they see me for the first time, pulling ziplock bags out of my backpack As they fumble for a receipt on their way home to remember what they bought When they slide their purchases into their makeup drawers, do they notice their fingerprints side-along with mine

Like my mother, they would prefer to shop in a well-lit store filled with white-toothed displays, stocked by workers of a particular hue and well-printed name tags. Instead they get their shoes covered in parking lot slush, they get me standing on the street outside their vinyl-sided townhouses, they get third-floor meetups where nobody meets eyes.

The lights are off when I get back, but incense smoke rises sharp in my nostrils. The rods burn quiet in our plastic altar, itself sitting on a shelf beside the TV. Portraits of grandma and grandpa watch me from behind the haze. I check the fridge for food; all I find is expired milk and cilantro.

I check the messages on the house phone. A pre-recorded voice tells me, “A student named…” a pause, then the receptionist with the smoker’s cough enunciates “Tran Na-Goo-En”; then the recording starts again, “has been absent for one or more periods today.”

It’s already been read but I delete it anyway.

 A nightlight in the hallway illuminates the hole I kicked in the bathroom door.

“Why are you so lazy?”

I’d told her I was still working.

She said, “I wish I had given birth to a quail egg instead of you. At least I would have been able to eat it.”

Still, she tried to drag me out of bed. Her acrylic nails bit into my wrists. There had been times I let her, or when I clung to the sheets. That day, I shoved her. We both fell into the hallway. I turned and I kicked at the closest thing I could. The door crunched under my heel to reveal the hollow inside.

She said, “Did you learn that from your father?”

All I could do was stare at her across the expanse of tobacco-soaked carpet. Eventually my mother picked herself up and left.

She no longer bangs on the thin sheets of wood pretending to separate us. She no longer bursts into this room to tear the blankets off and interrogate me. Sometimes I listen for when she comes home late at night. Her heels clunk against the floor, her jacket rustles as she walks down the hallway, her bedroom door opens and shuts with a click.

I pull the nightlight out and toss it under my bed.

I stare at myself in the bathroom mirror. Jaw too broad, cheeks too rough. I take a breath to stop my hands from shaking as I smear kohl pencil across the sliver of skin between my lid and lashes. I blink away the rush of tears but smudges of black still gather in the corner of my eye.

My hands shake when I apply the lipstick. The pink I choose flashes too icy for my warm, olive, yellow skin. I overdraw one side, so I try to compensate on the other. My aim slips and a smudge skews the corner of my mouth. I drag my palm across my face and run the water until all the pigments bleed into the sink.

I show up for biology, forged excuse note in hand. Over lunch Mrs. Laghari, limbs soft as her blowout, reads pulpy romances while I draw gene expression matrices. The phone on the wall rings. She picks it up, says “Yes, Tran is here.”

I give her my test. She returns a thin smile before telling me I have to go down to the office now. At least they didn’t call in class where I’d be able to feel everyone’s eyes as they watched me leave. Laghari doesn’t even shift in her seat.

I wait on a mint-coloured leather chair until the smoky-voiced receptionist tells me that Cathy Burrowitz will see me now. Her office is just past the tacky potted plants at the end of a short hallway. The door is already open. The woman within watches me from behind her desk.

I take a seat. A photo of her family, two sons and a nondescript husband, in a boat on some lake, sits on her desk, displayed beside the ancient monitor. The houses on the shore form a row of beige coffins.

Cathy Burrowitz extends her hand to me along with some nice-to-meet-yous. I stare at the uneven slant of her wheat-toned hair. She probably cut it herself while staring at the bathroom mirror, that can-I-speak-to-your-manager bob.

When she realizes I am not going to shake her hand, she shuffles around the papers on her desk. Charts, graphs and reports, all data and no solution. The flakes of foundation on her forehead shift when she creases her brow.

“You’ve missed 34 periods this semester.” A pause and an expectation: fill the silence. I don’t. Cathy Burrowitz raises her eyebrows just so. I study her dry cuticles.

Finally, “Can you tell me why?”

Well, I might begin, the once-white linoleum floors make me want to vomit. I hate that everyone furrows their brow at me. I feel the stares, and they’re different than the ones Jennifer and Megan and Shelby get. I do what’s asked of me. Isn’t that enough

Instead I tell her I’m tired. She taps her desk. Squared nails.

“Tran,” she sighs, confused by the shape of my name on her tongue. “Everyone gets tired. But we all show up to work. Do you work?”

Would she even believe me if I told her I tell her I work.

“What do you think your boss would do if you didn’t come to work for 34 days?”

Well, I suppose I’d get fired. She smiles. “Exactly. So, how do you think you should conduct yourself at school?”

I remind her that she can’t fire a student. Her eyes narrow, the tapping intensifies. “We can assign a supervisor, take away spare periods, deny your ceremony. Do you want that?”

These are threats and she knows it. The bell rings. Students drift back to class. Their laughter peaks as they herd past the office on their way to chemistry, home economics, social studies.

“I just want to remind you that there are consequences.”

I look past her. Outside I can see students still trudging in, takeout boxes in hand. Fries for fourth period.

“What would your parents think?”

Cathy Burrowitz has no clue. I tell her I wouldn’t know.

Her questions take on a rhythm. Is anything else going on How are things at home Do you feel like you need extra help My standard answer is no, as in negative, as in just shut up.

She neatens her papers. She has given up, and I ask if we are done here. She frowns. I have a lipstick that wouldn’t accentuate her fine lines as much.

“I don’t want to have to call for you again. Just come to school. You’re almost finished.”

I leave my backpack and jacket in my locker. The front doors are right there, so I walk from the school to downtown. Half an hour is how long it takes to get down the street, across the bridge, and through Chinatown. Here, the office towers block out the mountain range. I am surrounded by windows above and railroad tracks below. I end up in Samantha’s pharmacy.

Nobody greets me this time. I go to the beauty aisle and shove pigments, pans and tubes into my sweater pocket. Glass and plastic click together, some fall on the floor, but they don’t split open in glitter and powder as I expect them to. They just bounce. No one stops me. The churning of the air conditioner fills the silence.

I walk straight through the metal detectors. They beep no more or less loudly than before, no more or less urgently than they ever will. But this time I stop. Someone pushes open the till door, it swings on rusted hinges.

She says, “Excuse me,” and I turn and she takes a step back, ergonomic loafers squeaking against the linoleum. “Are you alright You’re crying.”

I pull the makeup out of my pockets and let it hit the mud-soaked mat on the floor. She stops for a second and calls her manager.

I don’t know what it means to be alright, but people who are alright never get asked “Are you alright?”

I tell Samantha I don’t remember choosing to be anything. 

 Kathy Pham is the winner of AV’s 2020 fiction contest. Originally from Calgary, she is currently based in Vietnam.

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The post Yellow appeared first on Alberta Views.

In his own way, David Attenborough encouraged her to go ahead with the shave. Attenborough always calmed her. His voice, gravelly yet kind, that spoke of a long lifetime of observation, wonderment, continuous gathering of knowledge of the natural world. The way he pronounced glacier glass-yer. The way he made creatures of the tundra, the desert, the circumpolar boreal forest, seem human or better as they lived out their stories of lucky flukes, sacrifices for their young, fatal mistakes.

During this period of what was supposed to be grief, but actually was limbo, marked by a numbness she didn’t mind as a temporary state, since it buffered her from unwanted intrusions, she watched an Attenborough special on oceans. King penguins waddled across her screen and plunked themselves down on hard ground, trapped in the torment of a growing itch. Amanda watched a penguin peck at itself relentlessly, until it had removed every feather in each of its four layers—the outer oily layer and the three layers of down—and in plucking off the feathers, the king penguin got rid of thousands of parasites picked up during its hunting forays at sea. This, Attenborough explained, was called the catastrophic moult.

Amanda felt an immediate affinity with the naked bird.

The king penguin stood exposed and vulnerable to predators, starving, surviving only on body fat, until every feather was replaced. Then, restored to its full capacity and power, it could again live fully.

Amanda had never before given herself a pubic shave and was unsure what instrument would be optimal. A specially designed razor All she had was a Gillette Venus, still pristine in its packaging, although she had bought it months earlier. She had intended to use the razor the next time she shaved her underarms, something she hardly had to do any more, that was how slowly the hairs grew. It was the same for her leg hairs. She had forgotten all about the Venus until this moment. Possibly, in using it, she would not be following best practices.

But it was what she had and it would have to do.

She had been shaved by a nurse 30 years before, while in labour with Sophie. Although Amanda’s hypersensitive skin had not been cut, she had developed an excoriated rash, which she attributed to the hospital’s chemically scented shaving cream.

This time she would go with aloe vera.

She decided to soak in the tub, get the area loosened up before moving in with the razor. A bath on the maternity ward would have been divine three decades back—although she had read recently that bathing slowed labour, so perhaps not. At the very least, she would have appreciated low lighting, as she had learned about in her prenatal classes, which Paul had rarely attended with her. What was the name of that French obstetrician they had taught her and her pregnant classmates about, the one who promoted gentle birthing methods Le Something. Le Corbusier No, that was an architect. Lesage Politician.

However. Back to the shave. It was not as tricky as she had anticipated. True, she did not work with the panache of the king penguin, but she was careful and thorough. She tried using a makeup mirror but could not get the angles right, abandoned it, continued by feel alone. A rinse left the skin soft, pores happy. And no nicks.

What did the shave mean Amanda was not sure. She regretted not having read Jung.

She wanted to talk to Sophie about the shave but decided against it. Since Paul’s final illness, Sophie had been extraordinarily protective of her. Maybe it was too early in Amanda’s life for this to be happening. After all, she was in fairly good condition for a woman in her sixties. She did not need to be mothered by her daughter, at least not yet. Still, she let Sophie hug her a lot, and call her every day to check in, make sure she ate. She would not thwart Sophie’s oversolicitousness for now, since it seemed to be part of what her daughter needed as she processed her father’s death. Amanda knew instinctively that if she told Sophie about the shave, her daughter would find a way to turn it into a problem, the sign of a sinister turn in her mother’s mental health.

But still, she was sorely tempted to share news of the shave with Sophie. Because Sophie had read Jung.

She had never been able to convince Paul to scale back on creature comforts. He had insisted on so-called fine dining, revelled in receiving sycophantic service, while Amanda worried that the servers were burning themselves. How could they not, with a hot platter poised gracefully over their lower arm while Paul slowly weighed the pros and cons of accepting the platter’s contents. How many times had Amanda surreptitiously left large cash tips to restaurant and hotel staff, to assuage her guilt, make her feel less entangled in Paul’s behaviour.

Now, with Paul gone, she could live as she wished. She decided to mark the end of the ostentatiously rich part of her life by indulging in a final luxury, one she had not allowed herself but had secretly desired. Despite her misgivings, her fear of being misunderstood as a vacuous woman of privilege, she booked an appointment for a full body massage.

On the day, she walked past the elevator and up the stairs to the fifth-floor spa.

The aesthetician, Raylene, was kind, taking meticulous care even before she got started. Would Amanda prefer a soft or a firm touch How firm Raylene massaged all of her, even her breasts. Amanda was afraid she would feel invaded but she did not. Instead, soothed. To her surprise, the scented oil did not irritate her skin. Maybe Raylene had gently extracted the oil from a king penguin’s uropygial gland. Surely that was non-allergenic.

She sold the house, rented a well-lit but spartan one bedroom apartment, donated all her gowns to a small theatre company. Although not a worshipper of any kind, she liked the example set by the Buddha, how he had divested of all that was not necessary to his existence on any given day. How he had even refused offers of simple food for the following day. Today was all, today was enough.

As a young woman, she had been convinced she was the reincarnation of a medieval monk, and though she no longer believed this, she was still attracted to all forms of asceticism and their various expressions.

Friends worried. They told her they understood she was getting rid of everything out of grief for Paul, but perhaps she should not be so precipitous. In reality, they understood nothing. She and Paul had only maintained a facade of closeness. The truth was, they had not connected properly for years and had finally decided to end it, but before they’d been able to set a divorce in motion, pow—the diagnosis of stage three multiple myeloma. The doctors gave Paul the stark facts.

She and Paul reconciled enough to make life less brutal for him in his final stretch, which had turned out to be just under two years. She was by his side for every treatment, every appointment, every trip to Emergency.

Now she wondered if they’d made the right decision. Maybe it would have been better to live out the truth of their situation, to separate, to have Paul rely more on paid help for the practicalities of life—and for family support, Sophie. But Sophie and her partner Elissa had been going through a rough patch as a couple at that time, and Amanda hadn’t wanted for Sophie to also be faced with meeting the day-to-day needs of her dying father.

So Amanda had seen Paul through his illness right to the end. He had appreciated her staying, or at least she thought so, although with him it was always hard to tell, which was one of the reasons she had wanted to leave him in the first place.

Throughout their marriage she had known of his infidelities—he was sloppy at covering his tracks—but she had felt that with the dubious past she herself had brought into the marriage, she did not have solid grounds to complain.

To see her way forward she felt she must first look back, right back to the days of Kevin, her on and off boyfriend for seven years. L’amour de sa vie, the French would call Kevin, the great passion of her life, who had, through his flagrant cheating, destroyed her ability to link sex with love. As a response, she cheated too. Yet they kept getting back together. The one smart thing she had done with Kevin was not marry him.

But she’d had some excellent male friends. She tried not to have sex with them, because in the few cases where she had done that, the friendship suffered. A person could not unsleep with a friend, as useful as that would have been.

Considering that she was an arts major, she’d surprised herself by socializing mainly with medical students. She thought of herself in those days as a doctor manquée. When her med student friends showed her their thick, illustrated textbooks, she was awestruck. Although she considered herself a good memorizer, she knew she could never carry that skill far enough to get through the pounding medical school program. External intercostals, tunica intima, corniculate cartilage… how did her almost-doctor friends retain those terms in their minds And remember what they meant?

One time, her friend Michael Borden, then in second-year Medicine, snuck her into the anatomy lab. Was she alone among humans in adoring the smell of formaldehyde Would this not have stood her in good stead if she’d had the brains to become, say, a coroner Michael showed her the desiccated cadavers on gurneys. And heads, yes, whole human heads, pickling in head-sized jars. Two big wooden boxes painted white. One labelled in red ARMS. The other, LEGS. She peered into the ARMS one, and there they were, a collection of dried out human arms with hands attached, all stuffed into the box willy-nilly, like toys. Yet the people who had once had those limbs attached to their bodies were, in death, teaching her friends about anterior meniscofemoral and deep transverse metacarpal ligaments. Those dead people were, through their disembodied limbs and severed heads, doing social good every day.

Michael himself now did social good every day, as a world-renowned epidemiologist. She’d see him on the television news from time to time, discussing whatever infectious disease was posing a threat in a certain region of the world that year.

 If only she had kept in touch with Michael Borden and her other university friends, if only she had followed her desire to enter politics and help transform the world, if only she had not squandered time with Kevin and even more time with Paul.

Well. At least Paul had fathered Sophie. Sophie was a treasure. 

In the days that followed she took solo hikes in the mountains, and as she walked the trails she speculated on what a relationship would be like with a new lover, someone brilliant and gentle yet spunky, someone who could make her laugh. She began to feel wistful for an era in which she had not lived, when she might have discreetly pursued a countertenor, a castrato with a sparkling soul and a generous heart. Her vaginal dryness and wall-thinning would mean nothing to him, or to her. Every night he would sing her to sleep.

But no. Escape would not do. Not anymore.

Leboyer! That was the French doctor’s name. Revolutionary ideas. Frequently misunderstood. She felt for him.

Feeling. It was back. All she’d ever wanted was to love, be loved, do social good every day. A way would present itself, and soon. She felt it.

Her pubic hair had grown back, all white. Amanda liked it.

Rona Altrows is Alberta Views’s 2019 Short Fiction Contest winner. Rona has written or co-edited six books, most recently At This Juncture (Now or Never Publishing, 2018).

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Bunny and him would sit at the table right to the left of the serving window. As soon as I rolled open the shutters and started handing out food, Kendall would start telling Bunny these bullshit stories—especially when they were on the smash together—and he always spoke loud enough so that I’d hear. Bunny went along with it. Bunny went along with anyone, anything. Bunny had injured his head years earlier, and his eyes didn’t look in the same direction anymore, probably from a beating, maybe from a fall. But who knows these things Either way, Bunny wasn’t so much full of shit as he didn’t know Kendall’s shit from the truth. Bunny was cheerful and glad to share breakfast beers with anyone who offered, and their conversations were like—

Kendall: I was in Vietnam, wasn’t I, buddy?
Bunny: Oh yeah, you were in Vietnam, buddy.
Kendall: And what happened in Vietnam?
Bunny: You killed a lot of people.
Kendall: No, I meant what happened in Vietnam?
Bunny: You saved me, buddy.
Kendall: That’s right. I saved you. Pulled you up into a helicopter when they were shooting at you, didn’t I?
Bunny: That’s right, buddy, pulled me up into a helicopter.
Kendall: That’s right.
Bunny: That’s right.

They’d tuck into one another, smiling and satisfied at the collaboration like children—drifting asleep, head leaning up against head, oblivious to the world around them, not lining up for the porridge or the toast. Then Kendall would grunt awake and harass me for a coffee at 9:30, knowing full well that coffee is served at 7:15 and 10:45. That’s it. Pre post-time wake-up coffee, he called it. At 9:45 he’d leave to cash in his cans, as the liquor stores open at 10, and he’d return a half hour later with a few full cans or a big bottle. He’d sit at that table, right in front of my serving window again. He’d put the can under the table, secret like, and crack it. I wasn’t official drop-in staff and it wasn’t my job to enforce the rules, so I didn’t say anything. Depending on his mood he’d share the beers with Bunny. More often than not his mood was good in the morning, before he started drinking, and Bunny would get some beer. They’d take turns sipping, Kendall looking around suspiciously, tucking the can into his coat like some kind of a mother animal tucking a baby into a fold of fur.

The thing about Kendall’s fictions was that they weren’t even good lies. You’d never feel like they were true enough to be true. I’d heard all the stories before—some days he fought in Korea, some days in Vietnam, once in Afghanistan, and some days he was too drunk and didn’t fight at all. On those days he’d fall from the table and spill his beer on the floor, getting real angry—”motherfuckers, all of you.” Then he’d pass out, a five-dollar bill dangling from his pocket or coins jangling out onto the floor. I’d tuck the money back into his pocket, hoping he wouldn’t get jumped for whatever he had left. There’s only so much you can do. I couldn’t exactly follow the guy around.

The next day he wouldn’t remember a damn thing, wouldn’t even remember where he’d slept the night before. He’d want to talk to me about something real important like the place of Tyvek homewrap in keeping moisture out of a house’s foundation, or he’d complain about Edmonton and the Oilers, say that he wanted to move back to Vancouver and cheer for those Sedin twins again, or at the very least find a place here in town where the drywall was the calibre of the Hotel Vancouver. He’d make outrageous claims—that he’d fought Muhammad Ali before Ali was a Muslim, or that part of Jesus Christ’s robe had been found in an empty parking lot in Chinatown, or that he’d recorded an album with Neil Young in the ’80s, the same Neil Young who had billions in his chequing account but still ate at Wendy’s, just like a normal person.

“I know enough about music to probably play on an album for Michael Bubel-ay,” he told me.

“Boo-blay,” I told him. “Boo-blay. Two syllables, not three.”

“Bubel-ay, like I said,” he said. He was so full of shit.

I’d serve him breakfast five days a week, lunch on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. He hated anything dry and loved gravy and sauces. No matter what the sauce was or what I put in it, he’d always ask for double. “You’ll be swimming in it,” I told him.

“At least I’d know it’s there,” he said.
A
Kendall died in November.

He’d make outrageous claims—he’d fought Muhammad Ali before Ali was a Muslim, or that part of Christ’s robe had been found in an empty parking lot in Chinatown.

I had been having sinus infections for a few weeks, just a throbbing above my eye, and the pain got worse as the day went on. It got pretty bad. I couldn’t get into the clinic during the day because of my lunch shift, so I went to emergency in the evening, after work. There were all kinds of people in there: an agitated guy from the drop-in in head to toe Jordan gear. He kept walking by the security guard, saying things like “I’m gonna start self-medicating right away” or “this is bullshit man, bullshit.” He’d sit down for 30 seconds, then spring up and start the pacing all over again. He asked me for a smoke at least three times, and I had to tell him that I didn’t smoke anymore, which was true. There was an old toaster in the garbage can by the intake window. A woman was passed out in the corner, a bit of her belly exposed, a tattoo of a blue butterfly on her stomach, and there was a woman who asked the security guard if they could turn on the hockey game. The guard said, “They don’t have the channel,” and the woman said, “Why don’t they got the channel That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”

When the nurse finally called me in, they led me to a cubicle and told me to take off my shirt, but not the pants, and told me to wait. The nurse turned off the lights and for an hour I was alone in that space where everything is loud and quiet. I heard the rolling wheels of a bed and loud coughing. Someone said, “Don’t you fucking touch me.” Then he said, “Sorry about the fucking fridge.”

I’d recognize those fucks anywhere: Kendall.

A thick plastic curtain was separating me from him and the medical people, but I could hear what they were saying: “He has pneumonia, both lungs.” Kendall was responding to them with words that I could no longer understand and it just sounded like blabbering. “Hook him up,” the doctor said, “I’ll be back in a bit.” I could see the reflection of their shoes on the floor as they walked away—someone turned off the light and it was quiet again.

”Kenny,” I said. “Kenny, is that you?” He didn’t respond.
“Kenny,” I said. “It’s me.” He coughed.
“Sorry,” he said, and didn’t say anything else. I heard him breathing, deep-like.

I woke and the lights were on and a tall nurse with a red face was in my cubicle.

“How are you feeling?” she said.
“That was Kendall,” I said.
“Who?” she said.
“Old guy, tattoos on his hands,” I said.
“How did you know?” she said.
“I heard him,” I said. “I heard him. Where’d they take him?”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Nurses can’t say those things. Has to do with the privacy.”
She changed the IV bag and pushed her gloved hand up against my forehead. “He’s not gonna make it,” she said.

They prescribed me a big bottle of horse-pill antibiotics, sent me for a few more tests, then sent me home. A few weeks later I saw Bunny downtown by Rogers Place, the new Oilers arena. All the folks in their Connor McDavid jerseys were shouting and jostling and walking together to the game. Some of the men in nice shoes and fancy haircuts were sharing a joint and one of the guys tugged on the beard of a man who was sleeping on the bench. He was new to the neighbourhood and I didn’t know his name. The man woke up, confused and sad. I would have liked to see those slick assholes try that on Kenny. The cops were roaming the side streets in pairs, and trying to keep the hockey crowd away from the homeless crowd, and everyone was getting all rowdy. It had just snowed, the first real snow of the year, and cars were getting stuck all over the damn place. Bunny had snow in his hair and a beer in his hand and looked at me and said, “Kenny’s dead.” Part of me had known it already for days.

I don’t miss Kendall at all, I really don’t. He used to drive me crazy. Seven years of driving me up the wall—right into the wall, more like it. I still serve lunch on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. I’ve stopped serving breakfast and serve dinner instead. It’s a lot quieter now without him. I sleep ’til six most days and have lots of time to myself. It’s good. Life is good. Time doesn’t stop for any of us but some things have even gone back to the way they used to be. There’s this large slop pail underneath the water cooler just to the right of my serving window, for instance. Every day it amazes me, like an obscene, bucket-sized Kinder Surprise, the sort of thing that Stephen King writes whole books about. I started placing the pail there a decade ago so that folks could dump out their coffee and juice dregs and put the empty cups in the bucket for pick-up and washing. It works—sort of. But it also ends up collecting used Kleenex, great gobs of multi-coloured phlegm that rise to the top and join together like the islands of ocean plastic I saw on TV. Chocolate bar wrappers and yogourt cups, half-eaten sandwiches, condom wrappers, condoms, the little orange stoppers from used needles, one time a large leather work boot. I got so used to Kendall grabbing the bucket at the end of the day and emptying it that I forgot for a few years how nasty it was. Every day—drinking or not—he’d haul it out back and strain the sloshing swamp water through the sewer grate in the alley, then bring the empty bucket back for me to rinse out. This one time he came back into the drop-in and had spilled half the thing all over his shirt. He asked if he could go into my kitchen and clean himself off. I said he could. He took his shirt off and threw it right into the damn sink and started scrubbing. As he scrubbed he told me a story about hitchhiking out of Calgary and sleeping in a farmer’s field when no one would pick him up from the side of the road. The wheat was stubble and sliced up through the soles of his runners. There was frost on his sleeping bag in the morning and the trees were white with it too. Just after sunrise God flew down and visited him as a flock of geese, he said. They swooped down and dotted the field all around his body. The geese didn’t honk at all and he felt warm, like he was sleeping next to a fire. When he woke again in the afternoon the field was empty and there was a tuna sandwich in wax paper by his head, a can of coke by his feet, a wool blanket over his body. “Must have been the geese that left it,” he said. “And the sandwich was good too.” Then he left the kitchen with his wet shirt in hand, bare-chested, and to the hoots and hollers of half the drop-in he gave a deep bow and walked out of the building and into the sunshine.

Benjamin Hertwig’s first book of poetry, Slow War, was a finalist for a 2017 Governor General’s Literary Award.

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It is quiet.

He slips out of bed, pulls on his swim trunks and tiptoes past his sleeping cousins. Downstairs in the kitchen he uses both hands to pour himself a glass of milk.

Eight large glass jars sit on the kitchen counter containing baked goods and baking supplies. On tiptoe, he takes a donut from one jar and drops it two jars over into the sugar. He flips the donut, then plucks it out, noticing crumbs layered through the sugar jar. He licks his fingers and grabs his milk. Trailing a path of sugar, he leaves the kitchen and heads back through the dining room.

No one is awake yet.

Out the back door he crosses the lawn, kicking the unicorn, to the side of the cottage where his towel, damp with dew, hangs over a clothesline. Sunlight reaches through the forest, casting long tree shadows onto the brown sides and yellow trim of the cottage. The air is cool. The sky is a cloudless blue.

A sparrow sings from the birch tree over the clothesline where the towels hang. Scottie wonders where sparrows sleep at night. Do they sleep on tree branches?

How do they not fall He would fall if he tried sleeping up on a tree branch. That high up, he’d be too afraid to sleep. Can a bird be afraid of heights That’d be terrible.

He pauses at the top of the steps, surveying the scene, then steps onto the dock.

Slinging a towel over his shoulder, he pads barefoot over root, rock and grass to the old boathouse, now just another place to sleep when more cousins come. He slides the large nail on a string out of the metal hasp that fastens the door. Inside the boathouse four small cots are jammed into the room. The boathouse has a low ceiling, exposed studs and stale, damp air. An orange, yellow and brown shag carpet covers the floor. Lake water laps against the big window at the far end of the room.

Scottie finishes his donut and wipes his fingers on his swim trunks. He scans the room: a water-basketball net, two fishing rods, a tackle box, three paddles, a yellow plastic raincoat, two winter coats, a sleeping bag, two yellowing extra pillows, a stack of old newspapers, three mohair blankets, a quilt, a stack of buckets, a football, two oars, an ancient reading lamp and, on hooks mounted to the walls, a bunch of life-jackets. Under a pillow on one of the cots he sees the bill of his baseball cap.

He hid here last night during kick the can. He would’ve won the game if Jason hadn’t found him. Scottie lost his cap ducking Jason and dashing from the boathouse to the backyard, where the empty coffee can sat on the gravel driveway. Just as he was planting his foot to kick, Michael tagged him. When the game was called, Scottie forgot to go back and get his cap. By the time he remembered, it was bedtime and he was in pajamas.

He puts the cap on and leaves the boathouse. Stepping gingerly over the wet grass to the concrete retaining wall, he gazes out at the water. The lake is calm. He takes a sip of milk and wonders which is colder, the milk or the lake He turns and places his glass on one arm of a yellow Adirondack chair, drapes his towel over the chair’s back and puts his cap on the seat.

Two cement steps lead down to the dock. He pauses at the top of the steps, surveying the scene—the water, the other cottages dotting the forest, the endless sky. He steps onto the dock.

Yesterday his older cousins—Michael and Tim and Andy and Peter and Karen—had run down the dock, leaped high into the air and plummeted down in cannonballs, jackknifes, swan dives and one almost-somersault. He sat cross-legged on the retaining wall and watched them, unsure.

“Scottie! C’mon!” Tim yelled as he sailed into the sky, twisting back to smile.

Scottie smiled back.

A little while later, his mom came over and asked, “Do you want to try?”

He shrugged her away.

Uncle Paul came over, “I could go with you?”

He shook his head.

Finally, to Scottie’s dismay, Jimmy came from inside the cottage and saw him.

Cousin Jimmy was eight, with orange curly hair, freckles and a scary twinkle in his eye. He had seven brothers and sisters, but Jimmy liked to stand out. He had left his younger sister Marcie up the tallest tree in the forest until one of the aunts noticed she was missing at dinner. He had convinced some of the younger cousins that mud was as good as snow for a fight, and that the doctor’s white Lincoln Continental made a good fort. He had found Grammy’s cigarettes, snuck one up to the kids’ fort in the forest, and then left Ryan there to get caught—Ryan who was three years younger and who Jimmy wouldn’t even let in the fort until he needed someone to blame.

“You gonna jump?” Jimmy asked with his hands on his hips.

Scottie didn’t answer.

“It’s easy! Look,” Jimmy ran off the dock and did a cannonball.

When Jimmy got out of the water he came over to Scottie and said, “See It’s fun. Kinda scary, but fun.”

Scottie looked Jimmy in the eye. Jimmy’s eyes weren’t like mom’s eyes or Uncle Paul’s—they offered no comfort.

“You can do it,” Jimmy said, but his shoulders, arms and face said otherwise.

By now, the other cousins were looking.

“Look. I’ll even go with my eyes shut!”

And he did. Jimmy ran down the dock with his eyes shut and jumped in.

Karen squatted beside him and said, “Don’t mind him. You only go if you want to.”

But Jimmy called from the water, “What’re ya, chicken?”

“Stop it!” Karen warned, but Jimmy didn’t even listen to adults.

“Scaredy cat! Nya nya! Look at the scaredy cat!” Jimmy pointed and turned to the crowd on the lawn, smirking. “Won’t even jump in the lake!”

Now the adults noticed.

“That’s enough!” Uncle Ed said.

“But he’s chicken! Bock! Bock! Deep fried!”

“I said, THAT’S ENOUGH!” Ed rose from his seat.

Jimmy knew he was in for it, but he didn’t stick around. He climbed out of the water and ran down the path beside the cottage, smiling and yelling, “Chicken pants! Scaredy cat! Too scared to jump!” He had an audience and a victim and no one fast enough to catch him.

He counts 12 steps to the water. If he runs, there are fewer—10 strides and then jump.

Scottie stands two paces from the water’s edge of the dock. A loon paddles in the middle of the lake. It is black with white markings on its back. The loon is too far away for him to see its eyes. As the loon moves across the water, Scottie calls out “Hi!” and waves. His voice echoes off the trees and around the cove. He thinks the loon stops for an instant and looks his way. Morning allies.

The water at the end of the dock is just over his head. He won’t hit bottom, but the lake has fish and clams and leeches and who knows what else Things that might swim up against him and touch him on the leg, or get inside his swim trunks or—hang on! Does anything in the lake bite?

Down through the surface of the water the dock’s supports are stuck in the sandy bottom. Uncle Paul and Robbie put in the dock at the start of the summer. He sees a piece of rope connecting one of the legs to a cinder block. Around the cinder block something is moving. Minnows. Minnows are okay. They don’t bite or touch or get caught anywhere they aren’t supposed to. Minnows scatter when you come near. They are tiny and fast and afraid.

Scottie likes minnows.

He paces off the length of the dock. He counts 12 steps to the water. If he runs, there are fewer—10 strides and then jump. If he jumps too soon, he might not clear the end of the dock. He could scrape his back or hit his head. The minnows would scatter; they wouldn’t help. He might fall into the water, bleeding. Blood in water brings sharks! Wait. Sharks are in the ocean. He takes a deep breath.

Scottie walks out and bends his toes over the edge of the dock. He imagines pushing off with his toes, grabbing one shin in a jackknife, holding his breath and then…

He walks back to the Adirondack chair and puts his cap on. He sits in the chair and finishes his milk. Pretending he is undercover, Scottie pulls the brim of his cap down over his eyes so that he can just peek out from under it to watch. If he were really undercover, he would have to write a report. He’d need a little spiral flip pad and a pencil to make notes. He’d have to swallow his notes if he got caught. That would taste bad.

A ladybug crawls up his towel toward the top of the chair. Scottie watches the ladybug on her steady climb. The towel must seem a lot bigger to the ladybug than the dock seems to him. She isn’t afraid. He decides that as soon as the ladybug makes it to the top of the chair, he will run and jump off the dock. Slowly she climbs the towel. Past an orange stripe and then a white stripe and then another orange stripe. Her legs move quickly. Could his legs move that quickly If they could, how fast would he go The ladybug stops. She is almost at the top. Come on, ladybug! Then the ladybug opens her spotted wings and flies away.

That’s not fair! She can fly. She didn’t actually get to the top—does he still have to jump?

When Jimmy had gone, the older cousins went back to jumping off the dock. The adults returned to their papers and conversations, but something had changed. Even though he tried to make himself small and quiet, he felt people not looking at him. After a while he stood and joined the line of cousins waiting to jump from the dock.

“You can do it!” Peter said quietly. He was the oldest cousin and the nicest. “The first time is the hardest. After that it’s just fun.”

Michael agreed, “We were all scared the first time, even Jimmy.”

One by one the kids launched themselves into the lake, until Scottie found himself at the front of the line. He looked at the dock. He looked at the water. His heart pounded inside his chest as he searched the yard to find his mom, who nodded and smiled.

“C’mon now! You can do it!” their neighbour Mac called.

Everyone was looking now.

Then someone clapped. One person’s clap turned into two. Two into four and soon everyone was smiling, clapping rhythmically, encouraging him on.

He stood at the front of the line, unmoving.

The clapping grew louder, then chanting began: “Scottie! Scottie! Scottie!”

He knew they were trying to help. They weren’t like Jimmy. He wanted to jump. He really did.

He looked at the dock, then looked at the water and then looked at everyone clapping and chanting around him. He saw the line he would run, the edge of the dock and the perfect jackknife. He imagined the moment, after the jackknife, when he would break through the surface of the lake, smiling, with his arms raised high.

He crouched and took a big breath.

The clapping seemed to grow louder.

He pictured his perfect jackknife and the big splash and then—

He turned, bolted inside, ran up to the loft, jumped into bed and pulled the covers over his head, hoping no one would follow.

It’s just the first one that is a bit scary. Not that he’s scared. That’s for little kids.

Scottie shivers. In just his swim trunks, he doesn’t have much protection from the morning air—even if they are Batman swim trunks. He pulls himself out of the chair and, with his arms crossed tight against his chest, tiptoes to the steps.

If Batman saw the others doing it he’d run… faster than any of them… and jump off… higher than any of them… and do a perfect cannonball into the lake. Scottie flexes his biceps in his best strongman pose, ribs and pelvic bone prominent. His swim trunks slip down his hips, so he grabs them.

He makes his way out to the middle of the dock. The minnows are still there. Hundreds of little black and silver fish. Now they’re floating just a few inches below the surface. What are they doing, anyway Eating Maybe they’re sleeping Every few seconds, one darts ahead of the group or school or whatever a bunch of minnows is called.

Do you call a bunch of minnows a school?

He’ll ask his teacher when he starts first grade in September.

“Hoooloohoohooo!”

The loon is still out there. The loon’s call sounds sad, like the loon wants someone to come and play. Cousin Peter says there is only one loon to a lake—unless they have a partner and babies. Still, not a lot of company. Scottie wouldn’t like to be a loon.

He remembers the cap on his head, turns and frisbees it onto the front lawn. He stands on the dock. He goes up on his toes three times. He bends at the waist and eyes his takeoff. He again pictures a perfect jackknife. Once he has done one, the others will be easy. It’s just the first one that is a bit scary. Not that he’s scared. Being scared is for little kids.

He will count from 10, then jump.

Behind him the window blinds go up. He turns and Grammy waves at him through the window holding a plate. Scottie waves back.

Grammy points to her plate.

Breakfast If there’s bacon, it’ll get eaten first.

He looks out at the loon. The loon probably already had his breakfast. It’s easy to swim once you’ve had breakfast.

Scottie runs to the front door.

After a good breakfast he will jump.

He knows he will.

Tim Ryan belongs to Calgary’s East Village Writers Collective.

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Ahead, people are streaming into the slaughterhouse, big-bellied men and lanky women in rubber boots. Baxter should join them but doesn’t. Deep in his brain he feels memories barking like dogs in the dark and knows that he needs to lie down, get some sleep, but the air reeks of manure and his head is pounding and he’s nearly late. Should’ve never started at Western Meatpacking, should’ve never let Donny Markesan run that line about performance bonuses and job security. Bonuses Baxter hasn’t seen a raise in years.

Outside, cows jostle in dusty pens. Necks bent, noses low. Calm for now, but once that intake gate opens, a hundred and fifty head will start banging against one another, bellowing, tails swishing, sensing danger but too dumb to stop it. Baxter never liked cattle. Popping the glove box, he chases Percocet with leftover Pepsi, then hip-checks the door. Easy, boy. You got this.

A/C is blasting inside the slaughter-house today. Baxter trails behind a couple of men he doesn’t recognize. Two hundred workers on the day shift alone now, still mainly Cambodians but more white faces show up every day since oil prices bottomed out. The party’s over in Alberta, and he can’t help hating these newbies’ clean boots and eager rush to the processing line.

“Yo, big boy,” Ricky calls from the balcony, vinegar in his eyes, “you were tripping out last night.”

Ricky’s full of shit, so Baxter flips him the finger. Even if he had a bad trip, it was probably Ricky’s rat poison that did it. For a second, Baxter thinks about stopping and asking what exactly happened last night, but security cameras watch everything so he keeps moving down the line. Even with earplugs, the kill floor is a roar of screeching pulleys, clacking hydraulics, banging compressors. Above the drop chute, a toaster-shaped machine dangles from the ceiling. He grabs it, a memory flooding in of playing cops and robbers with Cassi years ago in Miller Park.

Baxter watches the chute, waiting for the buzzer to scream, for that first cow to drop. Knocking, they call it. A funny name for killing cattle.

That memory’s too cheerful, too optimistic. Baxter grinds his boots into the metal grating. He watches the chute, waiting for the buzzer to scream, for that first cow to drop. Knocking, they call it. A funny name for killing cattle.

“Never met anyone who could handle knocking for more than a couple years,” Donny told him during the job interview.

Two decades later, Baxter’s hands tremble as the buzzer sounds and cattle start rumbling up the curling ramp. The Percocet isn’t working. Got to level off. Last night’s whisky and coke are still mangling his brain, but there’s no time now. The chute door slides open and a black Angus stumbles forward. Baxter leans in, presses the captive-bolt gun to its forehead, fires. Most cattle drop straight down, blood bubbling out the indent left from the steel bolt, but this one slams back against the door, bellowing until Baxter shoots again.

Blood’s in the air now. The other cattle start pissing themselves in fear and a bitter ammonia stench fills the kill floor. He gags a little. Each time a cow falls, two guys grab it from below, cuff a chain around the carcass and hoist it onto the line.

Knock and wait; knock and wait. The steady rhythm lulls him until last night starts coming back in trickles: drinking at the Barley Mow, snorting lines with Mason and Ricky, and, wait, banging on Cassi’s blue front door. Baxter almost drops the captive-bolt gun. Why visit his cranky daughter’s house Why now When a runty Shorthorn, 70 pounds dripping wet, limps out of the chute, Baxter steps forward and knocks it as the break siren sounds. Thank God.

Outside, the sun burns a hole in the azure sky. By the time he reaches the truck, Baxter’s dizzy with hunger and hangover. An old Skoal tin sits in the glove box beneath a bunch of takeout napkins and unpaid parking tickets, a dime bag of crystal tucked inside. He dabs a pinky into the white powder and snorts, his nose stinging, tingling.

Baxter’s up, he’s alive, and he grabs for the phone.

“Jackson residence,” Cassi’s husband answers on the third ring, sounding tired.

“Morning, Dave.”

“Jesus, save the apologies, okay You woke half the neighbourhood last night.”

“Last night.” He squints, fighting to remember. “I was just, uh, wondering—”

“You can’t come to the party. Cassi made that very clear.”

Party Glancing down, Baxter flips open the calendar on his phone. Sure enough, it’s July 13, his grandson Nick’s seventh birthday. Or maybe eighth. Baxter hasn’t seen a picture since Redford was premier.

“She won’t want you loaded around the kids.”

“Tell her I’ll come straight.”

“Impulse control isn’t your strong suit, Bax.”

“He’s my grandson, Dave.”

A long sigh ripples out. The phone scratches against the buttons of Dave’s shirt but Baxter can hear his daughter’s voice down the line, muffled but sharp.

“Call back next week,” Dave whispers a moment later. “I’ll work on her.”

“That girl’s too pigheaded to forgive.”

Dave pauses. “That’s no small thing, is it.”

The end-of-break siren cuts off Baxter’s reply. He’s got no choice but to drop the phone and stuff the Skoal tin into his pocket. It’s quarter after 10. He’s got seven hours to get invited to Nick’s birthday party. Will need to scrounge a present too. Both jobs have to wait, though, because inside, the chute door is already sliding upwards. Baxter seizes the bolt-gun, presses it against the next heifer’s temple and knocks again.

The heifer doesn’t move. Baxter slaps his legs. Video cameras monitor every section and security will spot him soon, if they haven’t already.

A lull opens up around 11:30 as the new herd gets wrangled up the ramp. He leans back, inhales cool air. Classic Baxter: show up drunk and uninvited to Cassi’s place, shouting that he’s changed while proving the opposite. For years he’s been hoping to get his shit together, drag his ass out of this drain he keeps circling.

The week before he first started knocking, Baxter found his preteen daughter sitting alone on the steps of their apartment, surrounded by all the objects Heather didn’t take to Florida. My fresh start; that’s what his ex-wife called their divorce. Better off alone; that’s what Baxter heard.

“They kicked us out,” Cassi said neutrally from the steps. “What happened?”

The stuff sitting on the sidewalk wasn’t much, but it was his: the dusty television, the fake fern, the foldout couch and plastic dinnerware.

“I mailed the cheque,” he said, catching the girl’s hard look. “It’s all a mistake.”

“You smell like beer.”

“It’s not Daddy’s fault, okay Now let’s go find some boxes.”

A week later Baxter got hired at the slaughterhouse. If he didn’t stop using, at least they never got evicted again.

The chute door opens. Baxter knocks but the stupid beast twists at the last moment. The bolt clips its neck, hot blood spraying across his apron, hairnet and facemask. A disgusting mess, and this is about the time of day that Baxter starts picturing himself driving home to that bungalow he rented in ’95. He sees Cassi wearing spotted pyjamas, wet-haired and smelling of soap, eating Cheerios. Baxter pictures it, knowing that when the siren blares he will drive home to a prefab trailer filled with busted IKEA furniture and a longhaired cat named Tex.

On Baxter’s 40th birthday, Cassi asked how anyone could stomach slaughtering helpless animals for a living. It was late in the night and the year, almost Christmas. They were driving back home from Calgary, road signs crisp and clear in the headlights.

“Steaks don’t die of natural causes,” Baxter said.

“I’m becoming a vegetarian,” the girl replied as they passed KFC. “Meat is murder.”

“My ass. Meat is meat.”

Cassi’s eyes rolled like Baxter had declared the earth was flat. “You can’t get anything right.”

A man only turns 40 once. The whole ride home Baxter had been nursing a Jack-and-Coke hidden in a travel mug. Buzzing a little, he killed the radio and veered towards McDonalds’ glowing lights. Ordered two Big Macs from the drive-thru and set them on his daughter’s lap, ordering her bony ass to eat.

“Meat put food on our table,” Baxter snapped. “It paid for your fancy school and that slutty shirt you’re wearing.”

Her jaw stiffened. Baxter expected a fight, but the girl unwrapped a burger and shoved it into her mouth. Tears salted Cassi’s face and she turned greenish, but she swallowed every bite. Heather called the next morning from Orlando, asking why, why, why. Baxter had a hundred reasons but none made any sense.

When the lunch siren erupts, he hangs up the bolt gun and races to the bathroom. Red Bull and last night’s whisky splash the toilet bowl. He wipes his goatee with scratchy paper towel and grips the counter. His body feels emptied, his head hollowed out. Lunch is Dr. Pepper and leftover KFC that someone forgot in the break-room fridge. The cold chicken tastes gritty on his tongue.

“Break’s over,” Donny shouts over the loudspeaker.

Sighing, Baxter tucks the chicken thigh into his pocket for Tex, thinking he should’ve finished high school, maybe gotten an apprenticeship at the cabinetmakers. Showed Cassi that her father was capable of quitting something, maybe not hooch, but knocking, yes, knocking. Almost on cue, a golden-red Limousin totters out of the chute. A beauty but a hundred more are marching behind, so Baxter’s finger twitches, and the last thing that heifer sees is a lonely, wrinkled face watching it die. He’s sorry he came to work today. Sooner or later he’s always sorry.

Western processes 3,500 cows on a full day. Nearly two million pounds of beef. By early afternoon, Baxter’s knees ache and his pulse jumps each time that door slides open. Dropping the bolt gun, he reaches into his pockets and feels around, already knowing what’s inside: Skoal tin in the left, chicken thigh in the right. Bits of bone and hair cover Baxter’s apron. He runs a glove over the bloody mess and, giving in to the voice inside, tears off the plastic smock. He drops it to the floor. He leaps down the platform.

In the hallway, bright fluorescent lights sting his eyes and he hears a man barking his name.

“We got some kind of problem?” asks Donny in his white supervisor coat.

“Nah, the gun jammed again.”

Donny’s eyes tighten. “Alright, hurry and grab the backup.”

Baxter’s feet race down the corridor, past the tool shop and toward the loading docks. He doesn’t know where he’s going but he savours the feeling of moving fast, heading somewhere. A siren sounds, letting the whole slaughterhouse know the line has stopped, calling an early smoke break. No point letting work stop twice.

Out back, a warm wind sprays dust across his cheeks. Storm clouds cluster above. He spits, slows. Twenty years here and he’s never before stepped into a restricted area. A handful of rejected cattle stand in narrow pens, heifers with open wounds or visible signs of disease, and it surprises Baxter that nobody’s watching, but maybe the wranglers are breaking too. On a whim he swings open the first pen. A Red Angus with pinkeye blinks back.

Baxter calls it. The heifer doesn’t move.

He waves towards the open gate. He slaps his legs.

Video cameras monitor every section and security will spot him soon, if they haven’t already. Desperate, Baxter pulls the half-eaten chicken thigh from his pocket. Cattle don’t eat meat but they’re curious as kittens. The heifer’s nostrils flare and it takes a small step in the right direction.

Baxter doesn’t think. Hand gripping the wheel, he simply drives. There is no speed limit, no cow lying in the bed of his rusted Dodge, only sweet forward motion. How long before the APB goes out Minutes, probably. Meat processing is a billion-dollar industry and this pink-eyed Angus is stolen property, but there’s nothing to do about it now except hug the yellow line straight into town.

By the time the elementary school appears, Baxter’s forehead is a sheen of sweat. Parking, he cracks the Skoal tin, hoping to level out, clear his thinking for the moment ahead, but his hands are shaking badly. The tin slips in his sweaty palm, spilling the dime bag across the rubber mat. Cursing, Baxter thinks about licking it off before yanking the booster cables from behind the seat. He wraps one around the heifer’s neck and leads it off the truck.

Already kids’ faces fill the school windows. Tiny palms smudge the glass. The cow moves slowly, lazily. Eyes twitching, Baxter plants himself in front of the school like a flag, wondering if this was a good idea. He knees the half-tonne beast in the ribs until the cow stops eating the lawn. Debbie, Baxter thinks as a bald man in a mustard-coloured tie marches outside. We’ll say your name is Debbie.

The man stops in front of Baxter and starts speaking; he loses the first words as they leave his mouth.

“…reason to be here?”

“I’m here to see my grandson, Cassi Jackson’s boy.” Baxter’s eye twitches. “It’s his birthday.”

“So you brought him a cow.”

“No, I saved it.”

The man blinks.

“I’ve killed thousands of cattle.”

Maybe it’s the ugly tie. Middle management at a rundown elementary school—this man must know all about mistakes. He’d probably understand if Baxter confessed, admitted all that he’d thrown away in exchange for a tight buzz and AAA beef. But before Baxter can say anything else, the man nods. “Wait here.”

Police sirens ring in the horizon, close and getting closer. It’s over, so Baxter closes both eyes, waiting for the RCMP to arrive. A feeling builds inside that he can’t put words to yet. Only later will he realize that life is one long, forced march, nothing but foggy days that blur together until you step forward and righteousness comes knocking. By then, there is nowhere to hide. The ramp’s too narrow and winding to turn around.

A bell clangs. Baxter hears footsteps and pictures a stampede of cops, maybe a pissed-off Donny coming to whip his thieving ass. He opens his eyes to see children filing outside, backpack straps cutting their shoulders, baby fat jiggling their cheeks. They stroke Debbie’s neck and the cow stares back with indifference as Baxter squints, hunting for a face in the crowd. There, near the back, the boy scowling in an Oilers T-shirt.

“I saved her!” he shouts at him.

The boy stares at Baxter, at Debbie, at Baxter again.

“She’ll never be hamburger meat.”

Parents trickle out from the idling SUVs and pickups. Far to the left a dark-haired woman steps from a red truck, clutching a shiny balloon. Cassi Baxter sucks in a breath. Warm delight rolls in his guts as the woman who might be Cassi moves closer. He’s too far away to make out the face and there’s no breaking through the crowd, so he waves. The woman hesitates, waves back. Baxter waves again with both hands. He waves so hard that his shoulders ache. He waves until the police snap handcuffs across his wrists, and even then Baxter kicks his boots and waves his fingers, all 10, so that Cassi knows he’s here, he’s arrived and he’s sorry it took so long.

Tom McMillan’s fiction has appeared in the Toronto Star, on CBC and in Grain.

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