Out There in the Dark There's a Beckoning Candle: Stories
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OUT THERE IN THE DARK THERE’S A BECKONING CANDLE: STORIES By © Benjamin C. Dugdale, a creative writing thesis submitted to the School of Graduate Studies in partial fulfillment for the degree of Master of Arts in English Memorial University of Newfoundland April 2021 St. John’s, Newfoundland & Labrador. Abstract (200 words) OUT THERE IN THE DARK THERE’S A BECKONING CANDLE is a collection of interrelated short stories drawing from various generic influences, chiefly ‘weird,’ ‘gothic,’ ‘queer’ and ‘rural’ fiction. The collection showcases a variety of recurring characters and settings, though from one tale to the next, discrepancies, inversions, and a whelming barrage of transforming motifs force an unhomely displacement between each story, troubling reader assumptions about the various protagonists to envision a lusher plurality of possible selves and futures (a gesture towards queer spectrality, which Carla Freccero defines as the “no longer” and the “not yet”). Utilizing genres known for their unsettling and fantastical potency, the thesis constellates the complex questions of identity politics, toxic interpersonal-relationships, the brutality of capitalism, compulsory urban migration, rituals of grief, intergenerational transmission of trauma, &c., all through a corrupted mal-refracting queer prism; for example, the simple question of what discomfort recurring character Harlanne Welch, non-binary filmmaker, sees when they look into the mirror is demonstrative, when the thing in the mirror takes on its own life with far-reaching consequences. OUT THERE IN THE DARK…is an oneiric, ludic dowsing rod in pursuit of the queer prairie gothic mode just past line of sight on the horizon. ii General Summary. (143 words) OUT THERE IN THE DARK THERE’S A BECKONING CANDLE is a collection of related short stories about rural queers struggling to find a place in a world where they are offered visibility, but at a cost, in migrating to urban centers. A catastrophic future looms over multiple generations of prairie farm-folk, from which fantasy and play seem the only refuge. Non-binary filmmaker, Harlanne Welch, and co. struggle to survive nightmarish film shoots (a la Apocalypse Now), Dungeons & Dragons games that take on overtones of fate, shitty underpaid jobs, and life-threatening romantic relationships. As the various hyper-sensitive and neurotic observers obsess over things from mundane to the fantastic, they struggle with unknowable forces just outside their line of sight. In turns dreamy, fantastic, and horrifying, OUT THERE IN THE DARK…is a dowsing rod in search of a new queer prairie gothic Canadiana spectacle. iii Acknowledgements. With inimitable thanks to: My loving Mom and Dad, siblings, nieces and nephews. The farming community, on Treaty 7 territory, which shaped me into the strange creature I am today. Lisa Moore, for drawing this book from me with a keen, almost radioactive enthusiasm, and for endless support during what was globally, and personally, a pretty bad couple fucking years. Karen Solie, for showing something about how time works (or sometimes doesn’t). Triny Finlay, Mark Jarman, and Rob Gray, for all trying to keep me on the rails at one point or another (to some degree of success). Kelly M. Hill, for filming me, unawares, singing along to Savage Garden, for a Vine. William Ping, true friend, & duck. Katie Fewster-Yan, best brain. Louise Wentworth, best heart. Josh Beierbach, down-picking fiend from hell. N. Page, my hair sibling, the reason I know a future still exists. Rebecca Salazar, dog-meme dealer, and hex-master Poet Supreme. Sam Lehman and Cherise Ragoonath, because even wretched beasts like me need to do laundry & order take-out now & then. Lauren Wilson, forever playing the binary sunset theme on horn in the front of my mind. Andreae Callanan, Clay Everest, Patrick O’Reilly, Lisa Banks, Jim Johnstone, Hugh Thomas, Ross Leckie, and every other good-hearted, open-minded, hard-working, loving poet in the world. Every good person my idiot brain keeps me from remembering here. In memory of: RM, Howie, Scott, Vink, Maxx, & truly so many joyous, unjudging dogs, a couple cats, and one chinchilla. With special note of love to: Olivia, Drake, and forthcoming untitled baby. As Yo La Tengo promises, "You can have it all." iv Table of Contents. Abstract ii General Summary iii Acknowledgments iv Table of Contents v Prologue 1 Starecase 3 Hail (Howie) 20 Summerfall 56 Depth of Field (Striking Distance) 87 Golgotha 108 Fables of the T.P.K. (The Necropolitics of Melancholy Story with Gary Gygas) or GEAS 128 Nothing Ever Bothers Juular 209 Out There In The Dark There’s A Beckoning Candle 249 POWER CREEP 261 v PROLOGUE ∞ A boy bored during harvest, too slight & young & asthmatic & interested in books to be of any use during said harvest, finds buried in the rows of peas in the mother’s backyard garden a small, corrupted square prism, its many faces refracting light in many directions but none as straightforward as they should be given its comforting rational shape, and light not functioning in the same manner from faces opposite, nor from those adjacent to one another. Curious. Suspended in its direct center by any axes’ measurement is a pebble, no, no a pearl made of pure oil. The boy holds the prism up to the midday light and admires the ways the willow’s tops sort and file the light and shape it. Those treetop-chaperoned rhythms of light that come through to him come through to him through the prism intermediary too. Catching a glint of a daydream here and there, but strangely, inside the prism, like a television, the boy looks at girls that look like boys, middle part haircuts and quoting Devon Sawa’s lines from Casper from heart, the Backstreet Boys with just the same haircuts, friar monks and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves’ particular fryer, and Christian Slater, a distant brother to Costner’s Hood, that same recurring haircut, darker on him, but apropos nonetheless; no, wait, only sometimes the same, but usually combed back, not apart. Little John is huge in that movie, but they call him little as a specific kind of humour. Was that what was going on with his sister’s friends, girls who all looked like famous actors and boy bands? A joke about what you called a person who looked different than the way language permitted them to? And what’s the deal with the boy-girls in Hanson? 1 The boy rotates the prism, wondering if there’s a way to retrieve that perfect black marble from the prism without compromising it. He wonders the wily afternoon away, dozes off, and when he wakes he’s lost the dang thing. In a frenzy to retrieve his new marvel he tears through his mother’s garden, ripping out sundry veggies prematurely, and at last he grasps it again. He kisses it, like people do in movies after they find something they thought they lost, can’t live without, and something about kissing it splits his lip. The lip blood runs into the prism through an invisible succession of faults, illuminating some hitherto unseen pulmonary diagnostic, a road map to an inhuman, arterial lung, a red ghost of a lung. Older now, the no-longer-boy, alone, visits the dead farm in the dried-up province, and retrieves the prism from a shoebox beneath its childhood bed. They gaze into it. They gaze into the long-since browned blood and the fattened black pearl that almost expands to fill the complete cube. The grown-up that used to be a boy looks into the prism’s shallow corners, seeks out those arterial threads which the glutted marble didn’t manage to swallow up in its growing up, follows those frayed threads along their conspicuous trajectories into the dark, obfuscating centerpiece, follows the stubs along to their blood- stained exits, their detours, all those other redline routes they’d long since careered away from. 2 STARECASE 1996 Mom is doing that quiet laugh that only my uncles ever seem to get from her. The twin cigarettes’ chimneys of Du Maurier haze coil into one, single, foggy thing and then that joined thing floats out of the dining room and toward me through the kitchen’s pass- through. Mom’s tin cigarette case clasps shut with the satisfying click as it always does. I can’t find what I’m looking for in the junk-drawer, but maybe a steak knife will do. Middle-Uncle’s come from the Quonset across the road to tell my Mom about some prank him and Baby-Uncle are pulling on my father. They’ve hidden something inside Dad’s combine cab. Middle-Uncle’s coffee is snow-white and his cigarette smoke is hazy and hovering now, like a stormcloud over the coffee’s perfect egg-white mirror. He bangs his spoon three times on the cup then sets it down right on the varnish of the table, just like he always does. My Mom is trying hard to suppress some emotion, covering her mouth with her hand, her eyebrows arched the way only my Mom could arch them, like a stretched elastic band waiting to snap. I think it’s laughter, but she always looks worried when she laughs, and she laughs when she’s worried sometimes too. “I don’t think he’s going to take this well, Dave. I think you should go stop him from getting out into the field before he finds out.” Middle-Uncle relates that Dad left the shop about an hour ago, as soon as they got the thresher running again, so there was no point in rushing out to rescue him now; “Damage is done.