YOU TREAT ME LIKE A FISH AND OTHER PROBLEMS

A written creative work submitted to the faculty of San Francisco State University In partial fulfillment of The Requirements for The Degree

Master of Fine Arts In Creative Writing: Fiction

by

Evelyne Aikman

San Francisco, California

May 2018 Copyright by Evelyne Aikman 2018 CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL

I certify that I have read You Treat Me Like a Fish and Other Problems by Evelyne

Aikman, and that in my opinion this work meets the criteria for approving a written creative work submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree: Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing: Fiction at San Francisco State University.

Andrew Joron Assistant Professor of Creative Writing

May-lee Chai Assistant Professor of Creative Writing YOU TREAT ME LIKE A FISH AND OTHER PROBLEMS

Evelyne Aikman San Francisco, California 2018

A woman who has recently left a failed relationship returns home to her parents' farm to find her family in upheaval. As she attempts to wrestle with her own emotional strife and get her family in order she reflects on her life in a series of connected vignettes. Each of these humorous installments are told from this narrator's point of view.

I certify that the Annotation is a correct representation of the content of this written creative work.

f Chair, Written Creative Work Committee Date TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Illustrations ...... vi

Sick Bag ...... 1

Cabin Fever ...... 18

Some Would Call This Limbo ...... 35

This Walk in the Woods ...... 38

The Mitten ...... 50

Glove ...... 63

Skunk Under the Porch ...... 66

You Treat Me Like A Fish ...... 79

Some Would Call This Limbo ...... 93

The Legion ...... 95

Cows Come Home ...... 11 0

Some Would Call This Limbo ...... 123

Shed (The Legion Continued) ...... 124

Return of the Prodigal So and So ...... 138

Some Would Call This Limbo ...... 151

Moving Day ...... 152

To the Sea In Search OfHome ...... 168

v LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Illustration 1 ...... 7

Illustration 2 ...... 34

Illustration 3 ...... 48

Illustration 4 ...... 56

Illustration 5 ...... 67

Illustration 6 ...... 83

Illustration 7 ...... 97

Illustration 8 ...... 112

Illustration 9 ...... 128

Illustration 10 .. ·...... 144

Illustration 11...... 161

Vl 1

Sick Bag

The airport was inexplicable. Strangely quiet and oddly empty. I sat almost alone next to the gate, waiting for someone to say something, anything. It didn't have to be a boarding announcement, I could wait for that, I just wanted to hear a voice and have it sound like home, be comforting, have some kind of Maritime accent, or even just a

Canadian one. I wanted the person who spoke to be wearing one of those stupid shirts that you could only get in Nova Scotia, or a hat with the logo of some crappy minor league hockey team whose players would never become professional, despite everyone in the town's best hopes. I wanted someone to call me dear or see someone else carrying a box of live lobster onto the plane. I wanted a doughnut, even though they tasted like shortening and sugar and something faintly chemically. I wanted it to feel the way it was supposed to feel going home instead of the way it actually felt. I wanted it to feel comforting instead of frightening, like something intentional instead of a panicked feint as I tried to figure out how and why I had blown up my life. I wanted it to be not wrong the way it was now, like going towards something instead of away from it. Like running to someone instead of running from you.

You remember the airport, right? You were here with me once too. More than once, but I was thinking of the last time, before I started visiting my parents alone because you were too busy and I didn't mind because it was kind of nicer to go alone 2

anyway. It was just before we'd grown weary of each other, before we found each other's explanations boring. Before we asked ourselves: why? When we could still have conversations that didn't end in us punishing each other with guilt over our respective unhappinesses. During the brief period after I'd decided that it was ok for me to love you after all and before you'd realized it was too hard.

I don't know how or why we built ourselves into such incompatible beings, or if we'd always been like that, if it was inevitable. We probably should have gone our separate ways a long time before that day, but instead we decided to be happy for a while, to have our respective lack and overabundance of enthusiasm- the former mine, the latter yours- for each other be enough, to board an airplane and be hurled through the sky together. Here we were, then, years ago, in a crowd of early morning travelers, shuffling obediently along the labyrinthine queue, looking with longing toward the point where we would finally be able to remove our shoes and present our ziplocked travel sized liquids for inspection, invisibly tied to one another. I'd felt that I could spend my whole life running away from you, or I could spend it running towards you, and the result would be the same. And it felt correct at the time, for you to be with my family, for us to be inextricable from one another. I liked the idea and possibility of our indivisibility.

You'd nudged me out of my reverie, your warm hand against my shoulder, and I noticed that a gap had opened up before me, the line had advanced, and I had missed it.

The crowd behind us grew restless. I could feel the weight of their discontent pushing against my back. It was similar to a strong gust on those days when the streets of the city 3

resembled wind tunnels. When running felt like walking and walking felt like no effort at all, but standing still was hard as soon as you noticed you were doing it.

Everything had been fine back then until things got hard. The trip had been a success, you went fishing with my father, my mother taught you to drive the tractor. We got home and adopted a cat. But then later something between us moved and changed. Or maybe the things around us moved and changed and we stayed still like I had in the airport. Moved away from or back to what had previously surrounded us.

The move had been wrong, but somehow we couldn't stop it, or maybe we hadn't tried.

Maybe we didn't notice that the apartment started to feel thick, each moment in it thicker than the moment before, like the air had become an invisible liquid. Or maybe like the whole place had been strung all over with ropes around which it was almost impossible to maneuver. The opaque, condensed atmosphere created in me an intense desire to flee, but it also kept me from moving. So I stayed in the chair by the window or on the sofa in front of the tv or maybe even in the bed. I thought about outside sometimes but then it felt as though the liquid and the ropes had migrated there as well. Or that they had always been there, and only a tiny portion of their unbearable mass and weight had seeped into our apartment. Yes, that was it, and if I went outside it would be worse. The outside around us not like other outsides, I thought. It wasn't correct. Not only because of the weight, but because of the dry rotten smell, the dirty sidewalks where there wasn't room for a single person more. 4

So I only went out when I had to, to whatever job I had- first waitressing and bartending, then an art gallery, then in a flower shop, then at a skin care company, then a non-profit- but I couldn't manage to stay anywhere for very long before becoming increasingly bored and frustrated at the sameness and the often pointlessness of what I was doing until I eventually quit, often abruptly and always earning your confusion and disapproval and concern that I would never be capable of doing anything for any amount of time. Or I went out to whatever dinners you had planned: the tiresome hours long ordeals with your friends or work associates with whom I could never figure out how to converse. The rest of the time I stayed inside and let the weight of everything sit on my head and chest.

And when you walked in and said: What's wrong?

I said: nothing.

Then you said: No really, what is it?

And then I got annoyed because it was obvious, and how did you not see the weight of it all? And said: nothing. And turned away from you standing there all confused and worried and a bit exasperated that I wasn't snapping out of it.

And you said: Cheer up! In that fake cheerful voice you used when you didn't want to talk about it anymore, and: let's go out.

And I said: Ugh. Just thinking about how hard that would be. 5

The actual move, the one we made together to that place, that other country, had been your idea. You had a career and friends waiting for you. It seemed fair at the time, since you had lived in my country for several years and anyway I thought maybe it would be exciting and I didn't really think about the long term then, or even now.

'You'll love it,' you said, with that certainty in your voice that I used to believe meant you were right about something, smiling broadly and patting my knee in the car like I was a puppy about to be crate trained.

You were wrong and I didn't like it, but you said I would change my mind and I still believed you for some reason- probably because you believed yourself- and said ok.

But then I never tried to stop hating it, Instead I waited for it to change. I didn't want to like it because I didn't like it, and why should I try when it and not me was the thing that was so annoying and wrong?

The first thing wrong had been the hills. The hills made me think that there was someplace to go, somewhere exhilarating and with a view. But there wasn't. The hills were just dirt and houses like the dirt and houses everywhere, but steeper. I couldn't go to them anyway. I didn't like walking around it because what should have been relaxing became steep and frustrating.

You found it invigorating to hike endlessly up and down and around them.

I couldn't drive anymore because what had once been easy was now a series of stalls and anxiety-inducing rollbacks. 6

'You just need to practice,' you said, grabbing the handbrake from the passenger seat before I had the chance to release the clutch.

The hills happened to me, I thought, watching you half drive for me as though I was a child as we crested one peak and came into view of the water.

'Breathe it in,' you said, dramatically gulping in the soiled and mildewed air as though it were some kind of gift, pretending that the dirty angry ocean could somehow make it breathable and good.

The hills were the city, the place, the country. You were the only thing in them for me. You were the only reason I was there. The hills were you.

The second thing wrong had been the noise, the yelling and the honking and the noise of noise that existed only for itself, as though trying to affirm some purpose within the vast grey pointlessness of the city. Nobody could hear me anymore, I wasn't loud enough for this place, but I didn't know why, couldn't seem to become louder. At work I told stories but I was the only one who laughed. What did you say? My boss said. My coworkers shot each other questioning glances then shook their heads 'no'. At dinner the couple across the table from me looked confused when I spoke, leaning in and nodding uncertainly.

'They didn't hear anything you said,' you told me later.

I stopped trying to tell stories. I didn't want to go to dinner anyway. 7 8

Now I was here in this airport alone, thinking how odd it was to have just left my husband, how baffled I felt by that action. I had a three hour layover until my next flight, and I couldn't seem to decide whether to run around or just to stop and stand, and I wasn't sure why I'd done either or how long it might last- the standing, the stopping, the leaving. Sometimes a person had to do both (stop and stand that is, the leaving had already been done, this was a layover after all and I was one full flight away from you).

Of course sometimes leaving a husband isn't actually that. Perhaps that sounds a bit too dramatic for what actually happened: a quiet conversation. A mutual agreement. Or was it really that? Nobody was exactly sure what and why, though we both had our suspicions. And then one of us was sick, the other one holding their hair and fetching a glass of cold water.

Was it you or was it me? I can't remember but I'm sorry.

Was it always like this from the moment that we met, our eyes meeting across the crowded bar- or so you say, I can't remember- all the way up until that little bird hit our window and died the morning before I left? I wrapped the bird in a dish towel, placed it in the sunlight, tried to warm it back to life, someone told me that might work, but it didn't, so I just threw it out, put it in the compost bin, but now I'm wondering if maybe I shouldn't have put it there. Were wild birds permitted in city compost? I asked myself in the airport. 9

The days got so hot, in that apartment, in that city, like a day where the rain had been promised but never come and the weight of it was just sitting in a heavy angry cloud above our heads instead, holding all of the warm damp air in. The heat and humidity that made everyone sweat like milk left out on the counter. I could feel the beads of moisture on my skin, on my shins of all places, as though my legs were tree trunks tapped during a cold March then abandoned, just before the weather had become suddenly, unexpectedly warm. Ifl were a tree and not such a sweaty thing, then maybe it would have been easier.

I touched the sweat the wet and water of myself, the saltiness of everything in then out. I tried to pickle myself in it, hoping it could change something to be preserved in the sweat of the place, that the water would make me feel at home. I'd grown up next to a river, a lake, an ocean, water always an arm' s length away, the place and thing I ran to for comfort. Being immersed in or staring at any of those fresh or salty or brackish waters was like the smell of my mother's kitchen or the feel of the worn quilt that still covered my bed there. The city had a sea but it was too far away, too cold in summer, not cold enough in winter, the sand of it was too dirty, it didn't work. It made me feel nothing. But if the sweat was the right water it might change the thought I'd had or the way I felt: the fear and uncertainty, the guilt I felt about that uncertainty when you always seemed so sure about us and everything, the thought that maybe everything I'd been doing was wrong, that I'd made all of the incorrect choices in life, had married the wrong person, was living in the wrong country, had forgotten what I liked or wanted and focused instead on erroneous interests, that everything I did was a varying degree of mistake, but now 10

that my eyes were opened I would have to do something about it and the dread of it, of knowing that, would just eat us alive, especially now that we were so salty, as though dread thrived on salt, because we had finally realized that we weren't happy. I had infected you with my misery that accepted only you as its companion. We were uncomfortable and it wasn't the heat. It wasn't really the apartment. It was just us.

Later I sat on the plane, surrounded by the version of myself that had surrounded your nameless and unbearable kindness and resignation until the resignation had turned to impatience and resentment, the little Dash Eight bobbing about on the sea ofthe sky. I sat next to the bathroom with its smell of everyone in the world having used it, mingled with antiseptic. There were only twelve other people on the flight, I asked to move closer to the front, away from the smell, but the flight attendant said no, the balance would be thrown off. So I sat in the aroma from an earlier, terrible and monstrous voyage across the province, over the causeway, where everyone's homesickness heartsickness must have all of sudden struck them in their stomachs and send them hastening down the aisles to create this olfactory catastrophe. The sickness of the odor was moving to my stomach now too and I gripped my glass of tomato juice, held it to my mouth and over my nose like an oxygen mask, gulped the tomato scented air there until the plane hit yet another spot of turbulence and the juice splashed against my face, shot up into my nostril. I coughed, choking on the tomatoes in my nose and throat. The feeling of the juice there made me gag, as though there were a real tomato lodged somewhere in me, and I reached 11

for the sick bag, even though I knew airlines no longer supplied them. But somehow it was there anyway, probably had been for years, no one using nor bothering to discard it, or maybe they did still supply sick bags and I hadn't noticed it, and I breathed into it for several long breathlessly breathable breaths.

I thought of a story you once told me, of the first trains and how so many passengers had been train sick in the beginning, unused to the strange motion, so unlike that of a horse, or maybe it was the fumes from the coal-fired engines, or maybe it was the speed. The speed of life seemed unbearable to me too, even in this slow bumpy plane.

Everything swaying or flying by or just flopping down around me. How had life happened so quickly and so sluggishly at once? It had a strange movement that I couldn't seem to understand or keep up with.

I took up the sick bag again, that gaping hollow waxed paper thing, and poured the contents of my stomach into it, the tomato juice leaping up, trying to outrun any surprise attacks by the miniature pretzels that were also trying to escape me, until I was empty and void. There are limits, I wrote and spoke into the bag, writing you a letter with my rotten tomato breath instead of the pen I didn't have. There are limits to stomachs.

There are limits to planes. To the flight paths and the number ofpassengers and the size ofthe luggage that can be brought on board as a carry on and the time by which we had to leave in order for the crew not to exceed their flying hour limit. I filled this sick bag for you. I put my whole heart into it. And the flight attendant collected it with the other 12

rubbish. Oh well. There are limits to hearts. There are limits to sick bags. There are limits to us and me and you and...

And then the flight attendant really did collect the sick bag with the other rubbish­

! would have to write it all out for you again- so I took the bag from the seatback pocket next to mine, saving it so I could put all of my sick thoughts on it to mail to you, you who knew how sick I could be, especially in moving vehicles, it would have been a joke between us if it hadn't been so uncomfortable.

You first came to know of it in your car on a winding road leading down from the small ski hill where you'd tried to teach me with modest success how not to hit any trees or people as I fell down the piste. You were driving and though it was winter I was hanging out the passenger side window, gulping the brittle cold air as though it could somehow wash out my mouth, my stomach, the motion sickness that seemed stuck there, the chili I had eaten for lunch. The car was old, smelled of wet dog though you didn't have a dog. The heater was stuck on high and the car would no longer reverse for reasons not deemed worthy of repair. You always had to be so careful where you parked to ensure that you could get out, pull forward. You could easily have bought a new car but you didn't want anyone to know that so you kept worrying it into parking lots and arraying it in air fresheners, trying to look the part of a starving student and never realizing that starving students took the bus. It was snowing and the fat wet snowflakes were splattering against my face. You kept glancing over at me with that worried, sad 13

look on your face like you had done it to me, had given me this nausea, though I kept assuring you I got carsick all the time and that it would be fine, we weren't going far.

'Stop!'

'What?' you slammed on the brakes, looked at me wide-eyed for the show of imminent distress that wasn't there then scanned the road for signs of deer or fox, black ice, an accident, a miracle, a treasure chest, anything that would have made me yell at you so urgently.

I pointed to two people standing on the shoulder ahead of us, both bundled in several layers of scarves and hats and jackets, one of them leaning heavily on crutches holding one foot aloft, the other sticking out a mittened hand which I assumed had its thumb pointing upward, though it was hard to tell beneath the snow and the thick mitten.

You looked at me, shaking your head a little, but tilting it up into a question as well. You didn't like things that might not be safe. I didn't worry about such things because I was in that blissful phase of young adulthood when it hadn't yet occurred to me that anything worse than skiing into a tree could ever happen to me.

I turned my head to mirror the angle of yours, ' We can't leave them there,' I said

'with that leg.'

You nodded, they piled in, and when I yelled 'stop!' again a few minutes later you were less hasty, you didn't slam on the brakes, mindful of the broken leg in the back that would have pitched forward into your seat as we screeched to a halt. Instead you slowed to stop, but it was too gradual and I was afraid there wasn't time and even though 14

your car was old and terrible I was loathe to make it worse by coating it with the contents of my stomach so I opened my door and jumped out, rolled into the icy snow bank, hit it hard with my hip my face. I knew I was meant to roll, but the snow was not as soft as it looked, the car not as slow as I'd thought.

The first time I jumped out of a moving vehicle, it was just an experiment. Or maybe not even an experiment, maybe I just did it without thinking. I was in the back of my father's truck, standing behind him with my hands placed flat on the roof of the cab.

There wasn't anyone else in the truck, but I liked to stand in the bed and get tossed around as he drove over the rutted gravel road. It felt better to be outside breathing fresh air then stuck in a tiny moving cabin. That was when my father and I still did things together like go on drives. He was driving slowly- he always drove slowly- but this was even slower than usual because the dirt track was in bad shape from the spring thaw.

Maybe we were going into the woods to pick up a pile of firewood he had chopped earlier that week, or maybe we were just going up the hill and from there we would walk somewhere: the brook to see if there were trout or further back towards the waterfall where he had seen a moose a few days earlier. Maybe we wanted to see the moose again or maybe we were hoping it had moved on, I couldn't remember. But I could remember that feeling of wanting to jump, of thinking that maybe I would just jog along beside the truck because it would be faster or maybe that I would abort the mission altogether and walk back to the house and watch tv or curl up in the windowsill and read because it was around the time I stopped doing things with my parents and started losing interest in 15

chopped fire wood and moose and walks in the woods and wanted only to hide with myself in a corner. In any case I hadn't expected it to hurt. I hadn't thought that I would fall, that my inertia would throw me forward into the gravel and I would scrape my knees my palms and even my chin a little bit.

This time I thought I was ready, that you had slowed enough for it to be fine, that the snow would cushion me, that it didn't matter anyway because I just had to get out of the car before the chili came up and ruined everything. But I was wrong. Perhaps I would never learn how to properly jump out of a moving car and be sick or not be sick- the shock of impact knocked the nausea away- and though my mittens saved my palms and my hip wasn't too sore, the sandy ice scraped my chin where later that evening a bruise resembling a goatee bloomed purple green just below the skin. You spent the week it took the bruise to heal apologizing and I let you feel guilty even though I was the one who had cried wolf with the broken-legged hitchhiker and I was the one who had jumped out of the car.

The flight attendant took the now empty glass of tomato juice, and we were leaning sharply into the descent towards: what? like a gull diving for a scrap of codfish guts thrown from the wharf, but still towards: what? I wondered. The past or more or so much more or less? What are we circling, and where do we land? How did I circle you?

And why did I land? And the thought was interrupted by the landing like a toothache on a bumpy bike ride, my heart and stomach sinking then rising all at once. My tongue tucked 16

tightly against the roof of my mouth, preventing anything more from getting in or out or just from moving around too much: teeth or tomatoes and tonsils. And even though we were landed and safe I wanted to cry almost uncontrollably like I'd cried on the plane the first time I'd left you just after college, when I decided to travel, to be on my own:. The flight attendants felt sorry for me, kept bringing me snacks and drinks, they must have known I'd left someone behind, maybe you, or someone like you, and that was why I was so sad. But that wasn't really it at all. I was crying over a painting- that was when I still made those things, still pretended I might be an artist, before I forgot why I liked making art, before I ran out of ideas or just stopped bothering to try and think of any because I couldn't sell them anyway and I was always so tired from running around at whatever job

I had. I wanted to carry it on board, had the canvas rolled up around the dismantled stretcher, but at the gate they wouldn't let me take it, said it was too long to fit in the overhead. And when I got on the plane I saw it leaned up against the wall of the terminal, alone on the asphalt, nowhere near any of the other luggage, and was sure they would forget it. It didn't have my name on it, and I knew I would never see it again. I had worked for months on that painting, a portrait of you lying on a rock as though dead, the ground beneath and behind the rock melting into the raw canvas, the best thing I'd ever done, the most realistic. You hadn't wanted me to paint you that way, said it was creepy, but I insisted.

I wept and wept. 17

When I got where I was going the painting had made it safely after all. It was the first thing on the carousel, and I laughed in relief. I'd left you behind of course, but didn't cry over that. I knew you'd be waiting when I got back, or maybe I wasn't worried about it either way.

This time I didn't know what I wanted to cry about: knowing that you were waiting, or knowing that you were not waiting, knowing that I would go back, or knowing that I wouldn't, or not knowing anything, never having known anything, or maybe I just wanted to cry about the bird that had died against our window, that would have lived if only I'd ever gotten around to admitting that I lived there in that country with you, that we weren't on the verge ofleaving but were home, and bought window shades.

But at least, I thought, walking down the stairs and onto the tarmac, thinking of the bird I hadn't saved; here in the middle of nowhere I could just throw it into the trees, so I wouldn't have to worry about the compost, or any of the city' s complex machinations. And it would weigh so little it wouldn't even feel like I'd done anything, it would be like standing in the wind and having a feather blow out of my hand. 18

Cabin Fever

I leaned my forehead against the cool of the car's window, pretending to be asleep in the back seat, so that we wouldn't have to talk and I wouldn't have to complain about the cigarettes the mustached driver was incessantly smoking, one after the other until I couldn't help but wonder how and why and where and and and, cigarettes? But I kept my eyes open, slightly, a crack into my brain, only just enough to see the familiar strange landmarks of towns, bridges, coffee shops dotting the landscape like trees, like ponds slaking so many thirsts for caffeine and driving over rivers and living in a place where others lived. The ferries, the forests, the mountains that were only hills. The pane of glass was like a sheet of ice, turning my head to ice as well, somehow melting the skin of my forehead into itself while at once freezing it. What a strange freeze, I thought, thinking about frostbite, about ice cream headaches, about falling into the river in January between the chunks of ice that had taken over its motion, about every cold thing my body had ever felt, and this was different. My skull was the brittle warm opposite ice sheet holding up the frozen paper of my skin to the dark night beyond the window which wasn't even actually that cold. And the stars! I'd forgotten how many there were, how bright they could be against the black backdrop of nothing illuminated, was so dazed and dizzy from looking up at them that when I stumbled sleepily out of the car, into the thick mud and rich grey green black grass ofhome, carelessly throwing all of my dollars to the driver, who took them without counting, neither one of us knowing if there was enough or more 19

or less than the price we 'd agreed upon, all I could see were the stars, as though they had never been seen, as though they had never been unveiled before anyone else's frozen head that would bask in their millions/billions of light years of faint light. As far away as

I knew them to be, how vast the sky looked, I could also imagine the blanket of sky to be just above my head, barely out of reach, the stars just tiny pearls shucked from the sea of the atmosphere. What a night, and how right it all seemed in that moment to be home, even if my suitcase was deposited (however accidentally) in a pile of cow manure that seemed threatening, in that poor light, to overtake the driveway.

I stood under the maple that had always stood, would always stand, next to the driveway. The tree that seemed to contain all of my childhood like a time capsule that had grown with, then overtaken me, and now loomed ominously above, threatening something, maybe nothing. Its bark was the thick course stuff of natural hand and foot holds. The trunk that I could no longer, and had never been able to, wrap my arms around. Past lost to the future, or present, or maybe present overtaken by the past or maybe, maybe the future melding them both together like a forehead and a cold window, and looming so large as a result. The tree meant something, but how would that ever fit into whatever meaning I wanted to concoct for it? Impossible to say, said the stars, ten billion years ago, winking at me again and again in their aggravatingly knowing way.

Twelve years earlier I had sat beneath the tree in the car of my brief high school boyfriend, our tongues, with all of their tongue hearts, trying to reach each other's 20

intestines. We'll never get there, wailed the struggling, exhausted tongues. Inside the

house, unbeknownst to us, though fairly obvious to anyone who thought about it, my

parents waited fretfully for the headlights of the seemingly indefinitely parked car to

finally recede back into the dark and endless hollow of the night, from which it had come.

But the tongues kept going. They were just pawns really, playing parts in a pointless

tragi-comedy; and as much as they would have liked to stop and rest, they were doomed

to keep endlessly reprising their roles. What poor parts those tongues had, fated to an

existence of never ending contortions over and under and around each other, each trying

to outwit its opponent, find an opening in order to fling itself, almost suicidally, past the

. other's defenses and down as far as it could go, past tonsils, larynx, searching for it knew

not what. Sad figures, to be sure, and predestined to fail. Until, fmally bored, or maybe

the unbearable opposite of bored, the tongues' owners gave up the game, said goodnight.

And as I was ejected from the car into the thick mud, the rich grey green black grass of

home, my parents breathed a sigh of relief and watched the car's lights finally and firmly

disappear into the night. Leaving only those stars as witnesses to whatever had or had not

happened. And what had that meant to the tree, I wondered? To the present or future?

Something, maybe nothing. I could barely even remember what the high school boyfriend

looked like.

'Never mind.' I said to the sky, the night like a locket, the stars at once clear and

blurred. Small or far away, ifl couldn't see something, what was the difference really?

Then I grabbed the shit covered suitcase and lugged it toward the house. 21

The morning sun washed over me until I couldn't bear to stay in bed under its warmth. It was washing out the dust of my brain and the other brain that was the rest of me. This was nothing like other home, the pretend home I'd had with you in that erstwhile country, where a separate part of my brain- another operating system- belonged, where morning was like a fogged-in punishment, where your very waking was like a reprimand to my sleepiness. You didn't have to say anything, you just got up, and then my guilt at staying there, at having nothing for which to get up, at being yet again between jobs or not but hating it either way and the feeling like I had been lying in a cloud of that guilt at being unhappy, at making you unhappy when you were otherwise to pleased with your life, made me get up. Then the whir, the abrasive metal sound of the coffee machine, the mechanical groan of it ... ! It was intolerable. Like a torture device. It didn't matter that I could never sleep through the night, that I woke from three to six like malfunctioning clockwork, that the loud city night of garbage trucks and shouting pedestrians and car alarms was my nemesis, that I wormed my way away from you and to the living room to read, the only way to pass those hours in peace, before skulking back to bed, no, no it was no excuse, I had to get up and be tormented by the loudest coffee machine in the world, as it ground the beans, and my brain, to bits.

But now this, and my body confused, sleeping through the night, a benediction, and tea. I didn't even like coffee. Why was I always drinking it? It tasted like how I thought mud tasted, the sediment of it left too strong an impression. My other life was 22

already shrinking away and deflating as quickly as balloons sacrificing themselves upon hearing that the world was running out of helium, like tires realizing they were going to have to cross several miles of desert sand.

'What are you doing here?' The sharp crack of my mother's question hit the kitchen, bounced around the deep windowsills, the wide softwood planks of the floor the great bulk of the heavy wooden table. And I, as I poured tea, explained the importance of the element of surprise, ignoring the real, the obvious question and answer, and then a hug and etc etc. almost like an afterthought, both embarrassed that we hadn't thought of it sooner. And then the hug continued for too long, and neither of us had ever been huggers so we both must have been crying and all parties trying to hide their tears as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened until, and I thought that she must have known but still I couldn't say the obvious so I just said: "well.." the separation, the end of the hug, and my mother took the tea from the table as though nothing had occurred, and maybe it hadn't, who' s to say? We'd never been much for telling each other anything.

"Where's dad?" I noticed his missing morning pot of oatmeal and looked at her.

She seemed almost younger than the last time I had seen her, already tanned even though it was only spring, hair without a trace of grey in its unrelenting wave ofjet blackness, now cut into a short bob. I touched my own head where I knew several white hairs had appeared, as though trying to make them dissolve, as though they were unworthy to be in her hair' s superior presence. She was wearing a checked button down of my father's, a 23

heavy green wool sweater that I'd never seen before so could assume she had knitted that winter, and new thick black framed bifocals in place of the old gold wire glasses that she'd worn for years.

She frowned, waved vaguely towards the door, implying he had gone out, maybe to town or to the boat, and then launched into a lengthy explanation of the potato bugs she was anticipating in her garden that year and her plan to combat them, something to do with dish soap that I didn't quite understand. And I smiled and nodded, relieved she wasn't asking about you, but unable to rid myself of the uncomfortable concern over my father's whereabouts. He who was and had always been home, who always ate oatmeal in the morning, for whose absence there was always a very clear and obvious answer.

Maybe, I thought, they were having their annual fight. I remembered as a child dreading that rare moment when both of their patiences were simultaneously exhausted, and hiding when it came because I couldn't bear to hear them argue.

How different we had seemed, how little patience I had had for you, and yet how guilty I felt about it, thinking it was wrong for a couple to disagree more than once per annum, and instead hiding how I felt as you begged me to open up. You said it was okay to fight, that it was healthy even, but I didn't believe you, so I just pretended everything was fine until I couldn't. Until you lost patience. And then when we fought it felt good, a release, so maybe I got carried away, stopped feeling guilty about wounding you while 24

letting every one of your barbs sink into me permanently so that I could hold them against you forever.

'Here we are in the middle of nowhere,' I said to the opaque and frantic cloud of black flies encircling my head. The feeling of being surrounded was familiar, but instead of the grey dirt and the houses, apartments, stores, sidewalks, streets, buses, cars, people of which the nothing of nowhere was usually formed, here the nothing was flies. The nothing wanted something tangible: my blood. The color of the hills around the house and of the trees in the yard, of the garden and the flowers and the barn that was falling down, the color of the road, cracked and drifting off into the ditch, trying to escape itself, to hide underground, and of the river, the rusty color of the water still too cold to swim in, was dulled by the flickering mass of bugs that hung between it and me. It was mid afternoon and my father had still not appeared. I dipped my toes into the river and watched them turn pale sickly white through the lens of slow moving water, the iciness traveling up to become the lower body version of the dull ache of my frozen forehead from the night before. I knelt, leaned over, tucked the top of my head under the protective surface of the river, let the water pour into my eyes and nose, let it warm everything to a lesser ice, still too bound to the enormity or smallness of my decision to think of anything. But the flies were at least dispersing, and I could think of the river, and the stones that were digging sharply into my knees where I was perched, though still really thinking of nothing but the thing of which I wasn't thinking. The you of whom I was 25

trying not to think. I flipped my hair back, sending droplets of water flying in an arc over my head where the flies had once been.

My mother hammering something upstairs, each strike of the hammer reverberating throughout the house. The faded worn planks of the ceiling seemed to sag between the beams like a piece of fabric. Every heavy thud from the hammer felt like it would be enough to send the cloth of that ceiling sailing down onto my head, enough to crack the many small wooded panes of the kitchen windows, enough to set all of the dishes in the cupboards jumping, banging against each other until the shelves held nothing more than piles of ceramic shards. I walked up the stairs. She was framing a wall dividing my parent's room in two.

'Why are you building this wall?'

My mother waved her hammer towards the bed, spitting nails out of her mouth.

'This side will be my room' she said, 'if... well, nevermind. You're in your room now I guess, so that's out.'

"What? Why?" I looked towards the comer on the new almost empty side of the room where my father's belongings had been hastily thrown into garbage bags to protect them from the dust of the construction. 'What are you talking about? Why do you need separate rooms?'

'Bah. . ' my mother waved her arm dismissively, her lip curling, almost hitting her sewing machine with the hammer in the process. I ran across the room to her, put my 26

hand over the hammer to still it. Fearful of the look of not just anger but resignation on my mother's face, the thought that my parents could be broken too. And how could they be broken? I wondered, they who had always- for decades- been unbroken? It was normal for you and me to be broken, for me to break things, because I was like a child who always made the wrong decisions or didn't make them at all and just let life happen to me until things fell apart. But my parents knew how to live, knew how to deal with being alive. Didn't they? Hadn't they always? But then how could this tired anger exist in my mother's eyes, how could she pull the hammer back towards herself and say: 'After this

I'm building a shed,' as though nothing had happened, 'you can help if you're still here.'

My mother had for years been asking my father to build her a gardening shed.

Every spring she asked him and every spring he said he was definitely going to do it that summer, but every fall there was still no shed. One June he had poured the concrete pilings and we'd all felt that it was at last going to happen, but in the end he got no further than that.

'Do you know how to do that?' I said, wondering if it was because of the shed. If it would fix them to have it finally exist, ifl could help repair them as I couldn't help myself. But I couldn't imagine any object that could ever fix us, and all of the thoughts seemed too absurd to be real.

'I'll figure it out.'

I nodded. 27

I could hear the echoes of angry hammering as I walked downstairs to the fridge and started counting the eggs there. Counting eggs made me feel better when I was anxious though I wasn't sure why. I'd done it for as long as I could remember. Maybe it was comforting to know that whatever happened, I could make an omelet or maybe just a hard-boiled egg. Or that if there weren't any, it was something important to do: go out and get eggs. It made me panic to be caught eggless. It had become a sort of joke between you and me and sometimes we'd just be watching a movie or lying in bed and you'd turn to me and ask how many eggs we had and I said three or eight or twelve and you laughed.

But sometimes I couldn't remember, wasn't sure and I'd get up and go to the fridge, come back, relieved, reporting 'it's ok, there are still two', and you smiled but your eyebrows would push together, your forehead wrinkling and then you'd say 'I'm sorry' and wrap your arms around me because you weren't sure if that was part of the joke or if

I really was worried about the eggs and I wasn't sure either and wondered was it so sad a thing about which to be uneasy?

There was a whole shelf of cartons, filed under pieces of masking tape with oldest, old, fresh, freshest written on them in red marker. I opened each carton and counted them. There were 43 eggs. I counted them again to be sure. There were always a lot of eggs here, so I never really had to worry. My parents always had more chickens than they needed and they ended up giving the eggs to an older couple who ran a bed and breakfast in town and whose names I could never remember so I just called them the Egg 28

People. I wondered how many eggs the Egg People had. How many you had. There had been five when I left, but sometimes you liked to fry one for your breakfast or for a snack, so it was possible that you were down to three or four. I hoped you remembered to buy more before it was too late.

The following day my father and his porridge were still missing and my mother and I were still pointedly not asking each other what was going on in our respective lives, pretending everything was fine but knowing it was not, dying to know what was happening with the other, but afraid to ask and have to answer to anything ourselves. We weren't always like this. My mother typically had no qualms about demanding information from me, and her not doing so made me suspicious that she too was hiding something.

I got in the car and drove. I wasn't sure where I was going until I got to the ferry landing and then I understood myself: the boat. Of course he would be on the boat. The boat was the sanctuary, safe harbor, it was even literally in a safe harbor so that it wouldn't get blown around too much during storms or even just windy nights.

When I was a kid, I loved the boat until I didn't. At some point, my body decided that it no longer wanted to go on the boat. I started getting seasick, like my mother, who had long ago given up on sailing. But my father loved it, which is why we had a boat even though we couldn't really afford one. He couldn't live without a boat. He had 29

inherited the sea from his father, grandfather, great grandfather, and so on. They'd all been sea captains at some point, until they weren't, until being a sea captain stopped being a job for people, especially on sailboats. But the love of boats and boating and the sea, the ocean, even lakes or rivers if that's all that was available, remained. Every spring summer fall he would go to the boat as often as he could, sometimes for days at a time. I was often dragged along despite my protestations, and I spent my hours of captivity sleeping in the sun on deck, chewing ginger and tightening my acupressure bracelets. I had and had not inherited the sea. The sea was in me but it was the roiling stormy version of itself, not the vast and peaceful still one. I wanted to feel less divorced from my inheritance, less like the sea's enemy. The sea was my home but it also made me sick. I needed it, yearned for it, but also dreaded its cruelty, its desire to keep me at a arm's length when I wanted nothing more than to throw myself into it and feel its soothing slowness, its stinging weight, over and around me.

He was sitting on the deck eating a sandwich and I waved and waved to him until he finally spotted me and rowed out to pick me up. One of the heavy wooden oars was missing so he paddled the rowboat with the other one which was slow and not that effective a way to propel the dinghy though he said it worked fme. The boat looked mostly the same, compact, clean, the portholes greening and the sail cover with more spots of mildew than I remembered. The trim had all been sanded down but not yet varnished and I ran my fingers over the soft wood around the hatch as though it were a 30

puppy or a piece of velvet. He looked thinner than I remembered, his thick hair still intact but whiter than before. His trousers and worn grey sweater were stained with paint and oil and anything else they may have ever touched that wouldn't wash out.

'What are you doing?' I asked and handed him a tupperware container full of hard boiled eggs, making a point to tell myself that there were still forty eggs at home after that morning's collection.

He pointed to his sandwich and I shook my head, 'that's not what I meant.' I sat on the edge of the cabin, breathing in the salt and the diesel scent that was so familiar, pleasant yet unpleasant. 'What's going on,' I continued, 'with you and mum? She's building a wall.'

It was safer to question my father about things because he never really asked me too much about myself. I think he was afraid to learn anything about the me that in early adolescence had sullenly replaced the child with whom he had once been so close. The child that no longer existed, but who he perhaps hoped might reappear.

He sighed and sat down, put the half-eaten sandwich down next to him.

'Where?'

'Your room.'

'That doesn't even make sense! ' He slapped his hand against his thigh. 'I could just sleep in your room or on the couch.'

I didn't mention that I was now living in my room. 31

I glanced at him, raised my eyebrow for him to continue. He looked kind of sheepish after the outburst then stared down at the deck between his feet, seemed to be kind of deflating, slumping towards it.

'It's that goddarnn shed.' He said. 'Your mother said she's had enough. I promised to build it this summer, but she said it was too late. That she won't forgive me for it.'

'She kicked you out?' I said, my voice rising, my eyes widening. Though it had been my first thought, I was incredulous when confronted by the reality of more than three decades of harmonious co-existence being undone by a silly thing like a shed.

'Well not exactly, she said we could still live in the house together, since it was both of ours, but that she wasn't going to speak to me anymore. And well, I figured it'd be easier to just stay here for a bit.'

We sat in silence for a moment, then I turned to him. 'And that's it? You didn't try to argue or just finally build the stupid shed?'

I realized the hypocrisy of my statement, knew how hard I had fought to not fight for you.

'Now, now, calm down.' He shifted, uncomfortable. 'Of course I tried to smooth things over, like I said, I promised to build the shed, I even baked her a cake. But it was no good. Your mother is stubborn. And her mind is set on not speaking to me. But I think it's just a bit of cabin fever from being cooped up all winter. It was a terrible cold winter, you know.' 32

I tried to imagine my father baking my mother a cake, wondered why he had hit on that as a solution to their relationship problems, but I could neither conjure the image nor fathom why he had done it, so I just sat next to him, shaking my head, thinking what a fraud I was. At least he wasn't asking about you or why I was home. He probably assumed my mother had called me and that I'd flown out to try and fix things. I was like him, wanted only to avoid confrontation, had just run away instead, hoping my life would sort itself out in my absence, especially the important stuff.

'Don't you worry about it,' he said, patting my knee, 'this'll all blow over eventually, she just needs a little time.'

I hoped it was true but then I wondered if it weren't inevitable. If falling out of relationships, if letting them fall apart, if running away, weren't something genetic that I had inherited from my parents. Some little thing that had been hiding in them the whole time, something they had given me that had, by dint of evolutionary principles, intensified, crystallized, become a more dominant trait so that it had only taken me seven years to collapse my marriage instead of thirty-five.

I slept in my 'room' on the boat that night, the bunk furthest aft that could be separated from the rest of the cabin if you left the door to the head open, my head leaning against a boathook handle, and woke in the predawn, crept outside where everything was so still we could have been on land. The mist was still heavy and grey and cool, hanging over the water that looked like an oil slick in that light, unfathomably dark and deep. The 33

boat was anchored close to land, the trees rising up feet from the shore. Perched in one of them, completely motionless, was a huge bald eagle.

We almost hit a bald eagle once, on that first visit home. I was driving, which was rare- you always insisted on driving- on the highway where it swooped down in front of us, its wingspan wider than the windshield, and I screamed, swerved, narrowly missed the truck next to us as the eagle had flown up over the car, inches short of it. I'd never seen one so close before; its white feathers were dirtier than they seemed from a distance, and there was blood on its face.

I sat staring at the eagle in the tree until the sun began to come up in earnest, the mist began to dissolve, and it flew away. Off to hunt or fish, or maybe just to be off. I remembered that my mother and I had always baked cakes for friends or neighbors when anything bad happened. It was always the same chocolate cake recipe that we made in the pressure cooker. For a while I'd asked my mother every day ifl could bake a cake, and she said 'just wait', unless someone had gotten ill or died, or lost their job, and then she said 'ok'. It felt like helping, making those cakes, and even if I couldn't eat them I at least got to lick the bowl. I wondered if anyone ever ate them, if that was a thing you'd want if you'd just been diagnosed with cancer or your spouse had died or you'd lost your job.

I got up and woke my father to row me to shore, Maybe I had cabin fever too. ------~------

34 35

Some Would Call This Limbo

And oh god, the phone. There it was, ringing away as it always did, so I ignored it, knowing it was always my mother's friend saying 'come to tea' or 'do you have any ground beef or 'would you like to volunteer at the community hall this week, we're playing cards or maybe it's darts or maybe it's square dancing, no one actually knows what is happening but it's definitely going to be boring and hardly anyone will come.'

Maybe it was something else entirely like bowling or paragliding or bungee jumping.

But then for some reason I did decide to answer and it was you and- this I couldn't quite understand- I was so happy to hear your voice, it was like- oh never mind.

And I thought about cutting my hair off but that seemed too cliche, some kind of stand in for sadness that I could wear on the outside instead of feel, so I just put my hair in a bit of a lump or pile or knot instead, then I ran out and fucked every person I could, or maybe I didn't, well I obviously couldn't because there wasn't anyone around. Maybe I just let you say things like 'hi' and said things like 'hi' in return and we were very nice and civilized but nothing terribly interesting happened, neither of us said anything about anything thought-provoking and no one would ever even know that we'd ever thought of anything remarkable, if in fact we had.

And you were so sad but then angry, and you said: 'how could you?'

And I said: 'I don't know, I'm sorry'

And you said: ' You don't even care do you?' 36

And I said: 'I do, I do care.'

And you said: 'No one would ever know it.'

And I said: 'I'm sorry.'

And you said: 'I thought I knew you.'

And I didn't know how to respond to that because I didn't think that I necessarily knew much about myself except that I probably seemed or was sort of icy, unaffectionate, if no one ever knew that I cared, as you said. So I said. 'I'm sorry' again. And I was sorry.

And you knew it so you said. 'No I'm sorry.'

And then we just glared at each other over the phone. I could picture you on the other end, scowling into the black plastic.

'Arrrrrrggghhhhhhh'

And then we hung up and I felt this thing for you that I hadn't felt in a while like a sort of urge or I don't know.

'NO!' I said or you said or maybe we both said it at the exact same time. And then we were yelling, but only in hindsight in our minds, because actually we had already hung up and that was it.

Was I standing naked in the middle of some room? I imagined myself as

Boticelli's Venus but instead of a clamshell I stood on cow, and you flew over me, also on a cow, but this one was winged, and behind us was an orchard and a wood and then a whole world, a city, a country, a continent, but you couldn't see it from where you were 37

sitting on the cow. Life was complicated but also simple in my vision. You thought that everything was ok, that things were great there on the back of the cow, but the cow was really uncomfortable, she wanted to get away, go to a pasture, I could see it but you couldn't and then you could see it but I couldn't so I punched you in the face in my mind because I just wanted to stop the vicious cycle of blindness, and we were happy for a moment. Until the bruise appeared, and I was sorry in the vision then, so we stopped yelling and worrying about the cows. We both just lay on our backs in the orchard so that we couldn't see each other anymore and looked up at the sky. 38

This Walk in the Woods

One day I went for a walk. It wasn't meant to be any kind of special walk, just in the woods, first on the gravel road named after my grandmother that led up the hill through the pastures, dodging the cow pies and skipping over the rutted tractor tracks until I reached the shelter of the forest, its budding bright green birch and maple trees and soft dark green firs folding me into the quiet that I must have been seeking in order to end up there. I was looking for something but I wasn't sure what it was. Everything looked at once familiar- in the way that any forest containing more or less the same trees that I had always known would look familiar- and different, in the way that the wood had grown, metamorphosed into an older, less recognizable version of itself.

I had my father's old rubber boots on and they were sinking into the piles of soft winter-rotted leaves which occasionally gave way to the muddy ground that would soon sprout even more and newer trees, that perhaps, I thought, would not be strangers to me, depending on how long I stayed, how many times I walked over and around them. The wet spring earth squelched around the thick soles of the boots which were too big for me, put on without a thought as I'd wandered outside with no clear plan for the walk- or the foreseeable future for that matter- and with every step I took the tops banged against my shins just below the knees in an uncomfortable way. I was trying to walk fast and the boots were just thwacking away against my legs. THWACK THWACK THWACK. I liked the sound but the feeling was unpleasant and for some reason, instead of trying to 39

correct the problem, I kept walking faster and faster, trying to outpace the uncomfortable thwacking, and in fact making each thwack slightly more forceful by increasing my pace.

But somehow I couldn't figure this out, so I just kept striding along at top speed, my steps becoming more and more painful. The skin of my shins getting incrementally more raw until its stinging became part of the thwacking sound, of the crisp air, of the feeling that because I was in pain something was being accomplished.

One thing about motion is that it tends to confuse me, so that I don't realize what the motion may or may not be causing, what is being lost and what is being gained by it. I had this epiphany in the airport that day that I left you. I was wearing normal shoes then, and I stopped for a moment because I didn't know where I was going. A gate probably, definitely, but which one? I had a three hour layover, and still I felt panicked. I was walking, then walked faster and faster through the airport- too fast to read any of the monitors displaying the information that I needed- and then I stopped for that moment, because I was having trouble knowing what to do with myself, my body, and walking began to feel like a compulsion, like over-eating a favorite meal, my mother' s lasagna, let's say. It's really quite special, with her homemade pasta from the eggs the chickens have produced, the chickens she has raised, not to mention the sauce- the tomatoes she has grown and canned, the meat ground from one of the cows in the pasture, the cheese made from the cow she or my father has milked, the celery and pepper she has grown and frozen, the onions and garlic braided and hanging from a nail in the kitchen' s rafter, the herbs salted or maybe dried, depending on when they were harvested, how much time 40

and salt were on hand- but of course the flour and salt and pepper she has bought, she can't do everything for goodness' sake! Anyway, so I remembered eating this lasagna­ and that my mother always made a huge amount so that it would last, it was something she made only rarely, because of all the work it entailed- and that I always grew panicked, worried about the next time that I would have it, how long that could be, how many months I might have to wait. I would start eating faster and faster, even though, as I said, there was always plenty of it and there was really nothing to worry about, there would be lots of leftovers, and we all knew it. We would all have leftovers. Maybe for two days we would eat them. But still I couldn't help myself. The more I worried about not having leftovers, the more I made it a reality by eating and eating, beyond the point of fullness, beyond the point of uncomfortable fullness, painful fullness. I was destroying my prospects of leftovers as surely as if I had invited several hungry athletes to join in our dinner, just as I was increasing my chances of missing my flight by walking frantically and aimlessly around the airport without ever learning where my gate was, and so possibly getting further and further away from it.

There wasn't anything to eat in the airport. That's not true, there was lots of food, but all of it looked terrible, but I wasn't hungry in any case, which is why I was walking, that and the panic that was setting in about leaving, about missing my next flight and being stuck in an airport for the rest of my life, so I just stopped and tried to breathe. To think about what I was doing for once instead of charging recklessly forward. It worked, 41

for a moment. I found a monitor. I breathed. I walked to the gate and sat down. I breathed. I thought about breathing, and why it was so nice.

But no, I thought, this motion wasn't like that motion, and anyway one epiphany in an airport hadn't corrected anything. This walking was different, this walking was the opposite of that walking, because my mother had made her lasagna last night, and even though it wasn't quite how I remembered it- maybe she was putting less cheese in it, she'd been on about cholesterol recently- and there had only been the two of us, I had done the same thing I always did, I never changed: I had eaten too much- but there hadn't been anything to worry about because she'd barely eaten any of it, there were lots of leftovers- and even now, this morning, I was still full. So full I hadn't yet touched the remains, instead I'd gone for a walk, trying to work off the uncomfortable heaviness that was pulling at my body. And the thwacking was nice, now that I thought about it, like little whips being cracked against my legs reminding me that I was here, stopping my brain from wandering away, from going back, feeling sorry for itself or for me, maybe wondering if we'd made a mistake. The thwacking made me think of nothing, only my presence in myself, in the frail flesh dress of my body that was now fraying around the hemline at my shins.

I came to a stop, had found the thing I'd been looking for beyond the small maze of wild raspberry brambles in which I was briefly entangled, that pulled and clawed at my 42

old flannel shirt, soft, almost worn to nothing, a relic from my entire life, left in the closet and worn on every trip home.

The thing about clothes is, they really only get good right before they are destroyed, when they are at their most soft, when they are stretched out and comfortably pulled almost to the point of breaking, of falling to pieces, of becoming a vague, gauzy weave of faded thread. Brambles don't know this, didn't know how close the flannel shirt was to nonexistence, or maybe they just didn't care, so they pulled and pulled at it until I heard a faint tearing noise, and that's when they gave it up, and I, the shirt and I, were free of them, out of the raspberry patch with the foundation looming out of a tangle of brush and tree and ferns in front of us.

The foundation was my special place. Once it had almost been a home. Was the beginnings of a new house we had once intended to build until that intent eroded, or maybe the money bearing up the intent eroded, and now the cement was eroding too, was broken, falling away. There were beams that had rotted and fallen as well. I remembered the plans my father drew up, how excited we were. A kitchen with large windows, three bathrooms, a playroom and closets! closets for everyone.

No matter, the foundation became my playroom, and I remembered thinking it was not too late, that maybe we could still build it even as the rebar that hadn't been trimmed rusted and the concrete swelled and cracked and the forest started encroaching on the whole thing, leafy tendrils appearing as if from nowhere across the cool grey surface of the cement. We could fix it, I thought for some time as the wood slowly 43

claimed it, and then I just took it for what it was, and pretended it was what it wasn't.

And that was enough to play in and around.

I sat down at its center where the living room would have been, the damp earth seeping through my jeans, cold against my skin. I shivered. Of course there hadn't been time to build it, I thought; look how long it took just to make a lasagna, how much effort, it was no wonder there wasn't enough energy left over to make a house! I was almost angry at the seeming impossibility of it all. I felt weary for my parents and for myself.

For everything they had done and for everything I had not done yet in life that made me tired anyway.

Past the foundation the squelching increased, my boots sinking lower and lower until the muddy ground became waterlogged moss sucking me in like quicksand, slowing my steps so that the thwacking all but subsided. I was in a clearing, the weak sunlight poured down on me unfiltered by an obstructive branches or leaves, and I thought I remembered this place too, though I couldn't be sure. I tried to imagine it full of snow, more of a glade than swamp, and it seemed to be the place where the sugar shack was to have been built. There was a boiler still in the barn, even now waiting for its construction.

The maples rising up out of the hills surrounding the clearing still ready to supply it with sap. I couldn't remember what happened to the sugar shack, if it was from the same era as the foundation, if it had also been forgotten, or abandoned when the bottom fell out of the cattle market. I thought of the boiler, sitting in the upstairs of the barn next to bags of 44

fish food that the cats had eaten when there had been cats. There never were any fish. Of course there were some in the river, but none to feed, so it's unclear for what the fish food had been stockpiled. The floor in the upstairs of the bam had holes, it was dangerous to walk there, unless you knew what you were doing. The cats had known it well, but I avoided it altogether. The sap buckets and taps were downstairs, next to the piles of baling twine that might still someday come in handy, you never knew, they'd come in handy in the past when we'd had to tie things up or together, though there certainly was a lot of bailing twine.

Anyway, the sugar shack wasn't meant to be anything big or anything, just a shelter for the boiler really, not like the sugar shacks everyone went to in the spring to eat and drink syrup. They were quite another story. I wasn't that into them, there was too much pork fat for my taste but you'd always loved sugar shacks, and I thought of the second year we'd been together, my last year in university, when I'd gone to one with my aunts, uncles, grandparents- an annual family pilgrimage, the only time I saw most of my innumerable cousins- and not invited you; how hurt you had been.

'No one speaks English.' I said. 'Anyway, it's not much fun, you'll feel sick after.'

And it was true I always was sick following a trip to the sugar shack, all the syrup drenched foodstuffs did it. But the English part was a lie, everyone but my grandmother spoke English and you knew it, or kind ofknew it. You'd lived in Quebec long enough­ the four years of your university career- to know how well French Canadians spoke 45

English, and my mother's family seemed unlikely to be so glaring an exception to the rule. You wouldn't look at me, just turned your face into your book, pushed your fingers into the skin of your temples, and I left remembering that you asked me to fly home with you to meet your family and I only shook my head no no no no. Your face looked the same then, falling closed like a shade placed over a light. I came back to your apartment that night and you weren't there. I threw up, afraid I'd really pushed you away, afraid I hadn't- not understanding what to do or want from you- then wrapped myself in blankets and sat in the melting snow on the balcony, tracing my fingers over it then stuffing it into my mouth to try and freeze out the bad taste, fallen asleep, awoken with mild frostbite.

That was long before you learned to be as cruel to me as I must have been to you, so I had to do it myself by exposing my skin to the elements of late winter in the eastern townships.

The frostbite made me feel better, like the boots did, as though a debt had been paid, something squared between us even without your participation. And it was comforting too, familiar.

The first time I got frostbite I was eighteen and walked home from a party. It was winter and the party was for New Years Eve. The party was at someone' s parents' house, in the basement, as such parties often were. In the comer a pile of firewood was stacked against the wall. I touched the wood, tried to smell the wildness of it, but all I could smell was cigarette smoke and beer and the stale cold smell of any basement in January. Except 46

our basement, which was more of a root cellar and smelled like dirt and root vegetables.

It was January because it was past midnight, the New Year had happened and the Eve was over. The basement was emptier than it had been but there were still people in it. The people were mostly people with whom I had gone to high school. A lot of them had been unkind back then, and I had been too. I walked around trying to imagine what I was supposed to do. We knew but didn't know each other, were new to each other after going our separate ways for several months. University was the great equalizer it seemed, especially if it was far away, and all ofthe unkindnesses were falling away. It was a relief to stop being hated and hating in return, but it was awkward too. We would need to be away from home for a few more years before we could all pretend that nothing had passed between us, that the cruelties and shame of adolescence were just figments of our shared imaginations. I was tired of feeling not quite comfortable and looked around for the person who'd promised me a ride, but they were missing. I walked around and around the room, waited in case they'd gone to the bathroom, giving them plenty of time, but they never appeared. I scanned the room for any other potential drives but everyone was too drunk. According to the law, one sip was too drunk. I couldn't drive myself because

I'd let my beginner's license expire two years earlier without even trying to learn, and also I was drunk. I thought about having to sleep and subsequently wake up on one of the faded floral couches in the basement of a person who had once called me a bitch right after he'd copied my math homework. I looked outside and it was snowing. I put on mittens and pulled my hood up. The kitchen clock read three. It was seventeen miles 47

home, so even ifl had to walk the whole way I'd still be there by eight. The wind was cold, and I pulled the hood tighter so that its opening was little more than a breathing hole. I stuck out my thumb whenever a car passed, except there weren't any cars because it was New Years Eve. Eventually a police car came by and stopped. The RCMP officer told me to get in but then he got a call on his radio and had to leave. I told him I was almost home anyway. Are you sure he said. I nodded yes yes yes. The road hadn't been plowed. My sneakers kept slipping on it. I got frostbite on my thighs where the wind made my jeans like ice against my skin and on the tip of my nose where it stuck out through the breathing hole. It was a fair exchange, I thought as packed my suitcase, still shivering, for the awkwardness and for having too many beers. When I came back home for the summer everyone wanted to know about the walk, as though they'd been waiting all winter and spring to ask about it. Why they said. I shrugged, it seemed so obvious and not worth mentioning. I'd wanted to go home.

And now I was home, tired again of feeling not quite comfortable, yet comforted by it too, my father's boots still slapping me across the front of my legs as I continued through the woods, on towards I knew not what and away from what I knew not what.

And it wasn't too late really, the boiler was still fine, we could still build the sugar shack and sell syrup at the Co-op, or even have a little stand. I could do it myself, I thought. But then again, maybe I couldn't. I thought I should walk until something was decided for me. Until I walked into a moose, and maybe it would be angry, see its calf somewhere 48 49

behind me, think I was threat, and charge, bearing down on me with its thousand pounds of rage or inertia, not able to stop itself even if it wanted to. Or maybe I would back slowly away and everything would be fine, there was no calf, just the one moose wandering through the woods like me, minding it's own business, just moving. 50

The Mitten

When my mother cut her fingers off, I was having a nap. I heard her calling my name, her high quick shout slanting in through the fog of my dream, but couldn't at first understand that it was an urgent request for help. As my brain stumbled towards some kind of functional, waking state, I could only register the shrill and ragged edge ofher voice, which I interpreted as anger, impatience. I assumed she just wanted a hand building her ridiculous wall, and I turned away from her cry, back into the couch, my nap, the unrelenting drowsiness that had overtaken me since I'd come home. Her voice came closer and I swiveled back towards it, saw her standing over me, looming but also swaying like a sunflower whose head had grown too heavy for its stalk. She had an old blue towel wrapped around her hand and her face was pale, almost grey.

I cried as I drove to the clinic because I had never seen her hurt before; in thirty years I had not seen more than a mild cut or an allergic reaction to a bee sting that had swollen a bit, but not so much as to be alarming.

'Calm down', she told me evenly, her eyes dry, making my own reaction seem ridiculous in comparison, though that of course didn't stop me from panicking. The car swerved across the road as I wiped tears from my eyes. I think she was at that moment more concerned about my driving than her hand, which wasn't unreasonable, and I steadied my grip on the wheel, focused on the broken grey ribbon of the road that was unfurling in erratic winding turns through the dense green forest. 51

'It's just a bad cut, and not worth crashing the car over.' My mother said, almost to herself, as she looked down at the bunched towel in her lap.

But when we finally got to town one of the nurses asked me why I hadn't looked for the piece.

'What piece?' I said, at first confused but becoming increasingly horrified, my eyes opening wide, turning towards my mother, mouth dropping open, palm covering mouth, as I realized what she meant. I stared at my mother's hand, now wrapped in a big mitten of gauze. She just looked at me, kind of loopy from the painkillers they'd given her and said it was only a little bit of one finger. That there was nothing left to save, she said, because she'd cut it on the planer.

I'd taken shop class in junior high and knew about planers, their feed rollers, cutter head, so I just nodded and started crying again, but then I wondered if I shouldn't go back and look for it. The nurse must have known what I was thinking or seen me look at the door because she shook her head, set her mouth in a firm line, and said it was too late anyway, they had to take her to a real hospital with a surgeon, the tiny village clinic not having anyone equipped to deal with the problem.

Before they poured her into the mouth of the ambulance that would take her to the city, my mother motioned me over. I wanted to go with her but she insisted I go home and feed the cows despite my protestations that the cows could wait, that we would only be gone for a few hours, or so I had calculated- one hour drive to the hospital, one to two hours there while they fixed her up, one hour drive home. 52

'Don't tell your father about this.'

'What?' I said, incredulous, 'I have to tell him. Why wouldn't I tell him? He'd want to know.'

She just shook her head. 'Promise you won't.'

'He loves you,' I said, crying like a baby again, regressing to, or perhaps revealing, my adolescent emotional maturity.

'Promise.' Her head was bobbling a little from side to side but her gaze was steady, her eyes locked on mine. I had never been able to withstand her look for very long, had always caved when confronted with her superior strength of will.

I nodded mutely, tears still dribbling down into my mouth, over my chin.

As I drove home I thought about what the nurse had asked: why hadn't I looked for the piece? Why hadn't I even inquired about, or considered the possibility of a missing piece? But now that I thought about it had she said piece or had she, I asked myself with increasing dread, said pieces? All of a sudden I could only imagine the worst and I shook my head to dispel the image of a finger, fingers, lying in the pile of sawdust.

I pictured it or them being found by the many mice that lived in the workshop and being ferried away, the mice taking the piece or pieces for themselves, into their nests where they would perhaps eat or adopt them.

Once thought, I could not unthink the pieces back into one piece. Could not unimagine the mice that were probably right now stealing them, dragging them, with some difficulty, because the mice were quite small, they were just country mice after all, 53

through the sawdust and across the floor of the woodshop, beneath the table saw and into the comer under the shelves where all of the thousands or millions of variously sized nails were stored in innumerable empty peanut butter jars and used milk cartons that had been cut in half.

I went straight to the shop, stood uncertainly at the door deciding whether or not to go in. Regardless of it's being too late to reattach the piece/s or not, I couldn't just leave it/them there for the mice or for the next person who wanted to use the planer to find. I preemptively threw up into the large thistle that was growing against the wall, then pushed open the door, half expecting to be attacked by the mice defending their spoils, but everything was quiet and still. I cringed as I walked to the planer, gritted my teeth and pulled the comers of my mouth back, half closed my eyes as though that might somehow lessen the impact of whatever I was going to see. Filter or buffer it. But there was nothing. Everything looked perfectly normal save a few drops of blood standing out against the rough wooden floor. I inspected the planer more carefully, and still found nothing. I looked at the heap of sawdust drifting up against it and saw only fragrant pale blonde shavings, then dug through them, expecting at any moment to be attacked by one or more severed fingers or rabid mice, but found only more fluffy piles of wood flakes.

Now I was perplexed, but hopeful. Perhaps I had misheard and there were no pieces at all. Maybe the finger or fingers really was or were just badly cut as my mother had said.

I looked around again, head bent, eyes fully open and scanning the floor, walking around and around the planer, examining the boards my mother had been thinning. I 54

searched further afield, in case the piece had been flung, shot out by the rotating cutter of the machine, inspected the entire workshop, the shelves, the table saw, the workbench, the drill press, even the walls for signs of contact, but it was as if nothing had happened.

There was no piece to be found anywhere. I smiled, relieved.

But then I thought of the time I'd fallen on my face as a child, and started to worry that finding nothing was only giving me a false sense of security. I had dropped to the floor from my bunk bed, my arms and legs, hands and feet tucked into the body of my nightgown so that there was nothing to break my fall but my face, and cut my lip open.

The lip was bleeding profusely, but I didn't want to go to the hospital, so I tried to convince my parents that it was fine, just a small cut, barely a scratch, holding my hand over my face as I spoke so they wouldn't see the blood pooling in my mouth. For some reason I was afraid of the hospital then and I supposed I still was now that I thought about it as I never could bring myself to get an annual check up or seek medical advice about anything my body was doing that seemed in any way incorrect or alarming. My father was inclined to agree with me as he had a somewhat cavalier approach to first aid, but finally my mother said, no, I needed stitches.

That was the end of the argument.

The cut was deep, had gone all the way through the top lip in a horseshoe shape and almost severed the middle part of it, but we never could figure out on what I'd cut it.

It couldn't have been my top teeth because the cut was wider on the outside than the 55

inside, and it couldn't have been my bottom teeth because the shape didn't match. I'd landed on a rug and we later crawled over it on hands and knees searching for the culprit, never to find anything sharp there. In fact we'd never found anything all, sharp or no. It was as though the lip had tried to come apart of its own accord, splitting as soon as it came into contact with the soft and plush wool of the rug.

Now I touched the scar with the tips of tongue and finger. It was faint but still there, bigger than it had been, having grown with me, warped my lip slightly.

My mother's hand when I picked her up was a giant paw of clean white bandages that hid any trace of whatever violence had been wrought beneath it. Judging from how big the medical mitten was, she probably hadn't really lost anything at all. The nurse must have been confused, couldn't see clearly because of the blood, was at the end of a long shift, just tired, seeing things or not seeing things as a result. But then I wondered why the whole hand was bandaged and not just the one finger. And why she'd had to stay overnight.

She cradled the white boxing glove of gauze during the long ride home, wincing every time the car hit a bump.

'Okay,' she finally said, perhaps tired of pretending she hadn't noticed me glancing at it every few minutes, 'it's a little worse than I said, the cut was on more than one finger, but it' s going to be fine. ' 56 57

She dozed off after that, or at least affected to, so I just concentrated on navigating the wet roads and left her alone.

After that she spent most of the week in bed, or sleeping on the sofa, only getting up for me to drive her into town and have her dressing changed. Every time she got a new bandage it seemed to get smaller and smaller, the outsized portion of gauze in the mitten's first iteration shrinking away until I began to think the whole hand had disappeared.

'Why is the bandage getting so small?' I whispered to the nurse, worried.

She looked at me with narrowed eyes, shaking her head. 'It's always the same,' she said 'It's not getting smaller.'

I watched her, was she joking? The bandage was barely even there, the size of a baby's fist, but her gaze did not waver, the stem line of her mouth did not crack.

I pretended to be reassured, there was nothing for it but to play along, and sometimes it did look like the bandage was the same as it had ever been. But then it would shrink again, and I couldn't help but think that the finger, fingers, hand, were flickering, deciding whether or not to vanish like the piece or pieces had vanished from the workshop.

I went again to the planer, to see if anything might have sputtered back into existence, sifted through the sawdust, but still there were no pieces, no mice. Though of 58

course the mice had nothing to do with anything, I thought, unless they did. But most likely not. There were just a lot of mice that year. It happened, I told myself.

I checked the shop every few hours, every time the size of the mitten seemed different, but nothing ever appeared. One night I couldn't sleep and got out of bed, started crawling around on the rug that was still in my room, groping in the dark. Several minutes later my hand closed on a small hard object. I turned on the light, turned over my palm and peered down at the black plastic ring that sat there. I took it to the bathroom, held the sharp edge of the flat band against the scar of my lip. It was a little smaller than the scar but the shape was right. I wondered if it could have been there all this time, for over twenty years, somehow escaping our notice, or if it had just crackled back into existence. Or if it was only a random thing that had been dropped on the floor recently. I couldn't see what it might be, what its function was. Then a mouse ran across the bathroom floor.

My mother didn't want to eat anything, she just sat or lay on the couch holding her tiny or large mitten, depending on how it was at the time, and I started cooking increasingly complicated and therefore hopefully more appetizing meals, but they didn't tempt her either. I was alarmed to see her so lethargic, I had never having seen her that way before and it scared me. She was usually constantly busy, cooking or sewing or canning or gardening or knitting or crocheting, her hands never still. Was it just the painkillers? I tried to talk to her but seemed incapable of broaching the subject of her 59

hand. On the few occasions that I tried to ask her about it she just said it was fine and waved me away.

I broke my unspoken promise. My father would know what to do, what to feed her, how to make her feel better. I drove to the boat while she was sleeping, walked down the dirt road to the little dock on the point near which it was moored, pushing aside the overgrown branches, but there was nothing there, only the bright pink buoy, bobbing slowly on the slightly choppy waters. I waited for an hour but he didn't come back. He was probably out sailing around, that's what you were supposed to do on a boat.

The next day I went first thing in the morning but the boat was still missing. He must have stayed somewhere else I thought, gone for an overnight trip as he often did, anchored in one of his favorite coves. Every day I came to check and every day he was gone. He'd always refused to get a cell phone. I fretted over his absence, convinced he was the only one of us who could help my mother.

'Dad's gone.'

My mother's eyes were a question, then they turned angry upon me. 'I told you not to tell him.'

'I'm sorry ... ' I held my hands up then let them drop against my legs with a thump.

She turned her head away. 60

'No I'm sorry,' she said, 'that you have to stay.'

'It's ok,' I replied, 'it's fine.' I couldn't tell her that I had nowhere to go- that I'd been planning to stay- but it felt wrong to let her think I was doing her a favor and the guilt of the lie sat in the pit of my stomach, lurching every time I looked at her hand.

'Doesn't your husband mind?' She always called you my husband instead of saying your name. I thought perhaps it was some kind of jab at our having gotten married so young, something of which she did not approve, but maybe she'd just liked the novelty or sound of it. She and my father had never gotten married. Not that they were against marriage per se, they just didn't really care, couldn't be bothered to file the paperwork, have my mother change her name, all that stuff. It's true it was a pain, I thought, especially if it didn't end well and you had to go through it all again but in reverse. Part of me thought that maybe she called you that because she'd interpreted our marriage as some kind of critique of her and my father, some kind of deliberate act to assert my independence from them, when in fact I'd hardly put any thought into it all beforehand, though of course I couldn't admit that to her.

I waved my hand in the air above me in a gesture that was meant to imply that of course it was no problem, you understood etc, but I couldn't form the right words in either my brain or my mouth so I said nothing.

My mother narrowed her eyes and looked at me as I had looked at her the week before.

'He' s always wanted to do a long trip,' she said at last. 61

I stitched my eyebrows together, confused.

' Your father, I mean. He's always wanted to sail to the Magdalen Islands or

Newfoundland or both. He's been talking about it for years, decades. Maybe he's finally doing it. ' She smiled a little for a second then frowned.

At the end of the week she was less tired and when she came out of the nurse's clinic she had a new kind of bandage. This one was shaped more like a glove than a mitten and looked almost like normal hand size again, but though it was still thick I could see right away that all of the fingers were too short. I looked at her in shock that my worst imaginings had been correct and she just shrugged like it was no big deal, but she was crying a little bit for the first time since she'd hurt it too and I wondered if it was because of the lost fingers or because of the look on my face.

When I'd gotten my stitches I hadn't cried at the hospital, even when the doctor was sewing me up, but when I arrived home and saw my mother see my lip starting to swell so that I could no longer open my mouth, when I saw the look on her face that was concern and sadness, that's when I wept, convinced that I would be forever disfigured in whatever way I was in her eyes in that moment.

My swelling had gone down of course, but her fingers would never grow back.

When the bandages came off completely I was afraid to see how much was gone, what 62

damage done behind the curtain of gauze. Each finger was two thirds its original size, missing one joint, one bone, one nail. But somehow the pads of her fingertips had all survived, as though the blades of the planer hadn't quite reached them as they whisked away the rest of the thirds from above. The leftover skin had been pulled over the top of each newly shortened finger to protect the gap of what was missing, folded over what had been lost.

My mother watched me as I stared at her hand.

'It's kind of cute,' I said, 'that your fingerprints are on top now. '

She traced the bumps on top of the second joint of each finger, where the prints were now upside down.

'He wasn't a plastic surgeon,' she held the hand out in front of her, gingerly fanning the fingers out a little bit, 'but he did what he could.'

I nodded. 'It looks pretty good.'

'Ifthere'd been a plastic surgeon it would look better. But they'll work fine. '

We both nodded again. 63

Glove

At the bottom of an old pink plastic milk crate, in the comer of the closet, under several other old pink and blue plastic milk crates containing various lengths of fabric and scraps, and under a pile of old sewing patterns was a vintage Vogue glove pattern.

There were four options illustrated on the pattern's envelope: short glove, full length glove, fingerless glove or 'sleeve', and mitten. I pulled out the thin brown tissue paper and cut out the short glove pattern, careful not to tear the delicate old paper.

The problem with making gloves was that the comers were too tight, the pieces were too small to sew together neatly, there was almost no seam allowance. I kept ruining what I was making, racking up a pile of mangled scraps of fabrics barely clinging to each other or inextricably bound by lumps of tangled knotted thread. I tried several thicknesses of fabric until I finally found a floral lace. It looked like something from a dress my mother had made me when I was very young, but according to the geological record of the crates- it was sandwiched between quilting fabrics, something my mother had taken up after I'd left home- it was much more recent. The lace was perfect because it already had holes in it, and masked the holes that were a result of my imperfect construction methods.

I had never been very good at sewing. I tried to learn, had loved to design outfits, but never had the patience to follow the instructions in the pattern, adjust the measurements, so when I made my dolls clothing designed for them, it was usually glued 64

or stapled together. My mother, on the other hand, had made her own clothes since she was in high school, had taken sewing classes- not the kind of sewing classes like my eight grade home economics classes where we'd learned to make an apron and a gym bag, both of which had quickly fallen apart- but a real sewing class where they learned to do bound buttonholes and welt pockets and blind stitches and rolled hems and many other finicky, complicated things that my brain and hands would never understand.

I presented the pair of lace gloves to my mother. The left glove had shorter fingers than the right; she looked at it with narrowing eyes, and finally put them on. She held her hands up to me. Some of the seams were lumpy. The comers of her mouth pulled down towards her chin.

'Where am I supposed to wear these?'

I hadn't really thought of it, now that I thought of it.

'Tea?' I answered like an idiot, knowing that was a stupid response when that entailed her going to a neighbor's house in whatever clothes she was wearing and reheating the kettle in which tea had probably been sitting all day, strong as tar, or the most tar version of tea it could be, and talking about her garden and maybe bringing some plants over, maybe she'd still have soil on her hands from being out in the garden. Or if it was winter maybe she'd been out cross-country skiing and just stopped in as she passed through the woods, the fields. But it certainly wasn't the kind of tea for which anyone dressed up and put on gloves and ate petit fours and cucumber sandwiches. 65

She just raised an eyebrow, then took the gloves off, placed them carefully on the kitchen table next to three onions that sat there as cool as could be.

'I don't need to hide my hand.' She said as she walked away and I realized how thoughtless it was to think that she would or should want to do that, so I took the short glove and put it in the woodstove where things to be burned like eggshells and scraps of paper and onion skins had been building up that day and were threatening to spill out when the door was opened. I took the other glove and pulled it over the longest point of a deer antler that I'd found in the woods on one my walks. It had been hidden under a blanket of damp rotting leaves, probably from the previous autumn. The antler wasn't very big so the deer must have been young, just a couple of years old.

I put the antler with the glove on it on the desk in my room as a reminder to not be an idiot but also as a reminder to remake the other glove, finish the pair so that my efforts wouldn't have been completely wasted, then maybe just donate them to the school drama department or something in case they ever came in handy, but I never did remake the other glove so the antler just stayed there on the desk wearing one half of the pair. 66

Skunk Under the Porch

It had been a cool early summer so far and I fired up the wood stove most evenings. This was mostly for the sake of my mother who always seemed cold since her accident, probably because she hadn't been eating much as the painkillers made her feel nauseated and lethargic. Actually we had two wood stoves, one in the kitchen and one in the living room and I usually used the one in the living room so she could sit there and watch the fire, but that stove wasn't as efficient as the kitchen one and I found myself having to constantly refill the firewood box from the stacks in the barn. I always tried to carry as much wood as possible in order to reduce the number of trips that I would have to make, but this usually turned out to be more than I could actually hold, so I often dropped at least a piece if not more along the path that ran between the barn and the porch door. On this evening I had made it almost all the way to the house before fatally dropping a large chunk of wood next to the door as I tried to open it. This of course set off a series of frantic and awkward movements that led to my dropping all of the wood in short order on the front step. As I bent down to pick it up I heard a kind of pathetic­ sounding mewling coming from somewhere under the porch and when I shone I flashlight under there, I could see two tiny kittens squirming around.

We often had cats around the farm; they lived in the bam and frequently disappeared for long stretches of time to go hunting. Sometimes they never came back, as had been the case in recent years because of an unusually large coyote- the coyotes were 67 68

actually a coyote-wolf hybrid and larger and more lethal to cats than average- population in the hills, so I was surprised to find new kittens. I brought them some warm milk to tide them over until their mother came back then went in to start my fire. It was somehow comforting to have cats living under the porch. It made things seem a little less lonely.

When I was in university we had a skunk living under our porch. It stayed there for several weeks, putting the fear of god and getting sprayed into my roommate and me until it was replaced by a professor from the geography department. The skunk was really a pain, because we never knew when it was at home or if it would get nervous and spray us, so we tried to run out of the house as quickly as possible, hoping that it would either not notice our passing or that it wouldn't have enough time to react. Maybe this worked, or maybe the skunk just didn't care about us, got used to our routine, didn't view us as a threat, because it never did spray us. At some point, it left. Maybe it found a better porch or maybe it was run over by a car on one of its peregrinations around the neighborhood, looking for food or something to shower, but it took us a while to notice. After a few days without having seen a hint of black and white fur, my roommate remarked that it no longer smelled badly outside our house. We didn't want to congratulate ourselves too early, but after another week without a sighting, we decided to celebrate our good fortune. Actually I should say that I decided to celebrate our good fortune, because my roommate had already planned a departmental wine and cheese at our house, and I 69

resolved to attend despite having previously declined the invitation, and share in the

Geography Department's revelry.

You can probably see where this is going: a geography professor under the porch.

The wine and cheese started out fine. And by fine, I should say kind of boring with mediocre cheese and very bad wine. The kind of wine that can only be purchased at the grocery store on sale or at a depanneur for more than it's worth after ten pm because everything else is closed. But after about an hour the fourth years showed up (fashionably late of course), with bottles of Canadian Club and Canada Dry and that's when things really started to happen. Firstly, it was decided that everyone should do shots, as a way of breaking the ice and getting the first years (who were huddled in a comer of the living room) talking, or at least out of the comer. Then a geography drinking game was initiated. I'm not really sure of the rules because being a non-geography major, I quickly had to do several shots and lost track of the nature of the game itself. I think it had something to do with world capitals, but it could have had to do with mountain ranges.

But I do remember that of the three professors in attendance, all three did very poorly in the game as well. The next thing I recalled was the game being rudely interrupted by several interlopers- attendees of the history wine and cheese concurrently held next door­ who attempted to steal our drinks because they had run through theirs. There was a tussle in the kitchen between the first years, who had been deployed to protect their department, and the would-be historians, also likely first year lackeys, and then the attackers were gone. Geography triumphed, and the first years were treated as heroes, that is to say, they 70

were given shots of rye. Everything seemed to return to normal then, except no one could seem to remember what the game had been, but there was so much to discuss that it didn't matter and nobody noticed that anyone or thing was missing until someone got up to get a drink and found all of the bottles missing.

I stood in the kitchen, drunk and dumbfounded. The battle had been won but all of the spoils of war were gone: the rye, the ginger, even the cheap depanneur wine that we'd been saving for the waning hours of the party when no one would care what they were drinking. Had the history wine and cheese, dry and desperate, staged a sneak attack while we celebrated our victory? I looked over at the first years, who were now inexplicably standing on the dining room table and signing their names on the ceiling with some expired chocolate pudding they'd found in the fridge.

Then I heard a 'psst, psssst' from the direction of the door. I looked over and as my eyes focused, the shape of my roommate's professor coalesced in the doorway. I looked at him for a moment, squinting and furrowing my brow to ensure that what I was seeing was correct. His greying light brown hair was disheveled, and there was something panicked in his pale blue eyes that were wide open and darting around as though to ensure we weren't being watched.

'What?' I said with impatience, annoyed at having been distracted from the puzzle of the missing wine and whisky. He put his right index finger to his lips.

Don't worry'. He said.

About what? I wondered. 71

'About what?' I said.

He looked around furtively, first to the left, then the right, to ensure we weren't being watched, then waved his hand towards himself, leading me forward. I took a step outside, looking myself to the left and right for any hidden thieves that might be lurking in the lawn or maple trees. He turned and gestured for me to follow, his right hand waving onward, onward, and like a puppet I followed him onto the porch, and then down the steps where he pointed underneath it.

Later in the evening I began to worry that the cats under the porch might actually be baby skunks. It used to be that there weren't any skunks on the island. It was a point of pride, in fact, that no skunks or porcupines had ever managed the swim across the strait and that we therefore lived in relative peace and security, or at least our dogs did. But some niggling news story about a skunk that had recently crossed the causeway was pulling at the back of my mind and I raced back outside with a more powerful flashlight to check on them. I could see right away that they were grey and not black so I inhaled a breath of relief. But then I wondered where they had come from because our bam cats were always black. These cats looked fluffy and soft, nothing like the sleek hunters to which we were accustomed, but more like pets. I wondered about their mother, about how long she had been gone, and if she would be coming back for them. 72

The morning after the party I wandered around the house, picking up glasses and bottles and trying to clean the pudding off the ceiling. I went outside to see if there was anything left under the porch. After the geography professor had hidden everything and taken it upon himself to guard it, the porch had become the de facto bar area. There were more glasses and bottles and pudding containers, strewn all over the place. I looked into the dark area under the steps. There were no bottles but I was surprised to discover that the professor was still there, huddled in one comer. I could see the whites of his eyes gleaming despite the dim lighting and I jumped back in shock.

'Hey,' I said, moving closer to see if he was injured, 'are you ok?'

He quickly turned his head towards me and hissed, baring his bright white and perfectly aligned teeth. As I backed away I wondered if the teeth were real, they looked too perfect, and seemed at odds with his feral behavior.

I shook my roommate awake. 'Hey, hey.'

'What?' she mumbled through purple wine stained teeth, her breath how I'd imagined a flame thrower might smell if it weren't ignited.

'Your professor is still here, you have to help me get rid of him.'

Her eyes didn't exactly fly open but they did sort of crack a bit. I explained to her the situation, and she just sighed and closed her eyes again.

'He's fucking crazy,' she said, 'just leave him.'

'No.' I shook my head emphatically. 'We can't have a man under our porch, it's worse than the skunk.' 73

'Whatever.' She mumbled as she rolled away from me and back to sleep.

I crossed my arms in frustration. It seemed I would have to take the situation into my own hands. I went to the kitchen and made two pieces of toast (using my roommates bread because he was her professor) and the strongest coffee that I could imagine was ingestible. I left the mug and plate next to the steps outside and continued cleaning. When

I went back outside an hour later the food and coffee were gone but the professor was still hissing. I decided to leave him for a little while to see if he would calm down, but by late afternoon when the situation hadn't improved I found the school directory and called the phone number listed next to his name. A woman answered.

'Are you his wife?' I asked.

'Yes.' She answered, but her voice quavered, as though she was unsure.

I explained to her the situation.

'Oh for fuck's sake,' she said, 'not again! These fucking wine and cheeses. I knew it would happen. I knew it.'

I could hear her mumbling under her breath and couldn't think of anything to say as I pondered how often this had possibly happened before. 'Will you come get him?' I asked eventually.

'No. I'm sorry.' She replied, her voice now firm, having lost all of its previous trembling uncertainty. 'I'm frankly done with this shit. '

'Well what should I do then?'

'Dunno.' She said and hung up. 74

I threw my hands down and slammed the phone back into its cradle.

The next day when the mother cat still had not returned I crawled under the porch, my elbows and shirt front turning a muddy brown as I scraped along the dirt, and pulled the squeaky grey fluffballs out into the morning sun. Their little sharp claws pulled at my shirt as I brought them into the house and placed them in a basket lined with old towels that for some reason had always smelled like mothballs. My mother didn't approve of cats in the house but since she was mostly still pretty out of it I thought she mightn't notice, or better yet, that their presence would jolt and irritate her out of lethargy.

For the next week I fed the geography professor, who still refused to come out from under the porch. My roommate was no help at all, claiming that since he had failed her once in first year she owed him nothing. I argued that as a geography major she was inextricably bound to him but she shrugged off this line of reasoning. I started to worry about all of the classes he was missing but apparently no students had complained. I thought about contacting the administration but worried about exposing him. I didn't want him to lose his job. The following weekend I knew things had become desperate so

I decided to employ a more drastic tactic. I thought that if I could get him back to the drunken state from which he had spiraled into this skunk-like existence, perhaps he would revert back to his usual self, so that day I served him only rye and gingers and bad red wine. By the evening I could see signs of improvement: he uttered a few words and, 75

encouraged, I brought him another glass of wine, after which he even agreed to crawl out from under the porch and come into the house. Pleased, imagining the ordeal to be over, I left him asleep on the couch in the living room. However in the morning I was dismayed to see him exactly where I had left him, curled up in the fetal position. I'd assumed he would leave on his own and approached him warily. He was quiet and seemed calm, watching me with the wide eyes of a child wondering what was going on, so I got even closer. It was then he lunged forward and grabbed my breast.

'No!' I said, slapping his hand away. He receded back into the cushions, his body curling in on itself.

The kittens were also grabbing at me, clinging to my clothes and skin, their claws little barbs like burrs. As soon as I freed one paw another would attach itself. I'd never particularly wanted a pet, had had enough of that growing up on a farm, couldn't fathom intentionally procuring a being for which I would have to care, especially a cat; they were so cold and aloof and scratchy, but you'd talked me into it. And now that I'd left you and the cat behind I was starting to miss her. She had been mine too inevitably, though never as much as yours and I wondered: what did it mean: to be a cat owner? To be a wife and cat-owner in nothing but name. When I forgot everything but what I named, or didn't name myself, my cat? What did that mean? When all that was left was the (not) wife

(not) husband together/apartness of me and you and the apartment we'd shared, your cat, my cat, your rug, my paintings, your armchair, your dining room table set, the photos a 76

mix of mine and yours and the eat's. And I admitted that, yes, I probably was going to miss it. Not that I'd ever actually admit to that. But who was left to admit anything to anyway? And while I was admitting things: maybe I had been trying to run away from something when I ran towards you. From this small place, this farm-ness that coated me like a sticky film. But the clean break that marriage, and therefore adulthood had pretended to offer (or at least imply) was not exactly what expected.

Ok it wasn't that complicated, I could still visit the cat. Or maybe I could just focus on these kittens instead, have them be my cats now. Be my own cat owner.

What did it mean to be a wife a cat-owner, in nothing but a few years of habit and the eyes of the law? How did one unlaw oneself from such a complicated, such a simple, impossible position?

I held the little grey creatures to my chest, feeling their quick and fragile heartbeats under my palms. Though I knew they were technically banned from the house, that I should just keep them in the kitchen where she wouldn't see them, I carried them to my mother anyway. Placed them in her lap from where they crawled up into the crook of her good arm. She didn't argue really, just gave me a stem look that I knew meant something between 'what is this?' and 'No! ' but was also tinged with interest despite herself, then closed her eyes and fell back asleep. 77

The professor remained in that state on the couch for another week. Whenever I fed him, he tried to grope me, but I just slapped his hand away and that would be the end of it. He still wasn't talking but he wasn't hissing anymore either. One day my roommate confronted me.

'Listen,' she said, ' it can't go on like this. We have to do something.'

I admitted she was right, he needed help, and it was gross having a groper living on our couch, not to mention the cost of his upkeep; he ate more than both of us combined.

'I'm going to call an ambulance,' she said, 'they'll know what to do. '

I nodded, wondered why we hadn't done it sooner now that I thought about it.

Perhaps it was just inertia that had prevented me from acting, or maybe just the naivete of thinking everything eventually worked itself out on its own if you just gave it enough food and time and chances to sleep it off. We went outside so he wouldn't have to hear us describe his condition, behavior, to the dispatcher and when we went back in he was gone. We searched the entire house but he was nowhere to be seen.

'What the fuck ... ?' said my roommate, and then we just looked at each other, shrugged, let our bodies fall back against the wall and lean there in relief. When the ambulance arrived we didn't know what to tell them and they left perplexed, suspicious.

The following week my roommate reported that the geography professor was back in class, teaching as though nothing had ever happened. 78

'I wonder ifhis wife took him back.' I said looking out at the porch, and she shrugged as she walked by me, passing under the chocolate pudding graffiti that I'd never managed to clean properly.

When I went back to check on the kittens one of them had thrown up. I cleaned up the mess as my mother observed them rolling around on the floor at her feet.

'I think it' s allergic to milk. ' She said finally.

I'd never heard of cats being allergic to milk.

'So what do we do?' I asked.

She shrugged. And we stared at them for a while. Then I took the kittens downstairs and opened the fridge. There were thirty-eight eggs. Maybe they liked eggs. 79

You Treat Me Like A Fish

The river was cold, the clear water roiling past me and over the stones of the riverbed with a steady gurgling hum or whisper or light roar. It was difficult to walk through, the stones were uneven, some were covered with slippery green or brown slime. I moved carefully towards the pool, casting the line of the old fishing pole that I'd found in the barn that held the hook, the impaled worm dug from the dirt next to the chicken house.

I'd gone into the chicken house to look for eggs before I'd found the worm. There had only been two.

'You lazy things.' I looked around at each ofthe six rusty brown chickens but they were unfazed by my disapproval and jerked their heads and perpetually startled looking eyes away from me, continued to cluck as though they had nothing with which to reproach themselves. We didn't need more eggs, already had too many, forty-two to be exact, but the chickens' inefficiency kind of rankled with me. Maybe the chickens were getting old. I had no idea when my parents had gotten them.

'How long have you been here?' I asked them. They looked around at each other but didn't say anything. 'Well it doesn't matter I guess.' I stepped out ofthe caged coop, cradling the two warm brown eggs in my hand. Forty-four.

I couldn't remember if trout liked to hide in the pools or in the shallow fast moving water. I hadn't fished in a long time because I didn't like fish. I couldn't stand 80

the taste or smell of it in any of its forms and had no wish to torture the poor things if I wasn't going to eat them. Everyone else in my family loved fish, especially my mother. I wanted to cheer her up but fishing was a messy business and I was dreading it.

'You treat me like a fish,' I'd declared to you during our first fight. The fight was about whether I should leave, go away, see the world after I graduated, or whether I should stay, move in and perhaps away with you, since you had, after all, stayed with me the entire year after you'd finished your degree and it was only fair. The fight was: let's take a break vs let's not take a break. The fight had been going on for days, maybe weeks. We were exhausted, barely even arguing anymore, it was too tiring. We had both collapsed on your couch, just saying 'yes' and 'no' and 'I'm going' and 'don't' back and forth, our voices low and hoarse from days of screaming.

'I'll come with you,' you said at first, but I shook my head no. It wasn't the same ifyou came. You had already traveled so much as a child, teenager, adult, on your own and with your family who took endless annual vacations. I'd never been anywhere other than barely across the border into Vermont, and even then it was only a driving shortcut. I had to do it for myself. It would be cheating to have a guide. Especially one who likely wouldn't want to stay in all of the cheap hostels that were all I would be able to afford, who would not have to stop and work along the way, who hated skipping meals and wouldn't have to choose between groceries and a bed, between museums or train tickets.

And part of me also wanted to know what it was like to be away from you for a while, to 81

be myself again, in case I had forgotten what that was after two years with you, by far my longest relationship.

You were silent. 'What does that even mean?' You said after a moment.

I wasn't actually sure, in fact it was something I'd gleaned from a song whose lyrics I'd misheard but kept singing anyway and it surprised me to have said it. 'You treat me like a fish, you always hurt my feelings,' I sang to you.

'Like I catch and release you?' you said, cocking one eyebrow, the tension of our fight dissolving into thoughts of fishing. 'I think that's actually what you are trying to do to me.'

'No, more like catch and destroy.' I said it without thinking but then I realized I thought it was true, that your affection was stifling, was too much. That you were too nice to me and I would never be able to leave you as a result, even if I wanted to, even if I didn't love you back.

Maybe you realized it too, or maybe you just didn't want to talk about fish, because you didn't say anything and the fight was over and we just lay there in a heap on the couch.

I walked careful and close to the pool, recasting my worm, the small sharp stones painful under my toes. The river was for the most part wide and quick and shallow but here it got fast and strong then slow and deep. The pool was almost twelve feet in the center, nestled up against a large shale overhang in one comer that was perfect for diving 82

or jumping if you could stand the cuts on your feet that were inevitably incurred while climbing it. I'd often swum and bathed here in the summer when I couldn't be bothered to plug in the fuses for the hot water heater and wait an hour for it to warm. The water of the river was never exactly comfortable but by July it would be at least cool. For a while there had been a beaver in the pool but its dam must have been broken up in some spring thaw or other because I hadn't see it for a couple of years. The first time I'd encountered it I'd been shampooing my hair on the bank, had taken one step back into the current to rinse out the lather when I came face to face with it, swimming back and forth on the other side of the pool, slapping its broad flat tail against the surface of the water. We stared at each other, or perhaps it hadn't even seen me and it was only my eyes that were locked on it, waiting for it to make some move, to leave or attack me, but it just kept swimming back and forth, back and forth, never tiring of its route. I slowly walked into the water and it stopped, turned towards me. I jumped out again, stubbed my toe against a large rock.

'Fuck,' I said to myself, standing on one foot and cradling the hurt toe in my hand. And then my hurt turning to loud anger, I looked at the beaver: ' fuck off! '

I shooed it away, waving towards the opposite bank. But it only resumed its endless laps. I stood there for awhile longer, waiting for it to leave, do anything, and finally deciding that I had to eventually wash the soap out of my hair, took a step back into the water. Once again it stopped, turned to face me. I took another step and then 83 84

another. And then it started to swim towards me and I ran out of the river and went home with my hair full of foamy lather that I rinsed out with the garden hose next to the house.

Who's to know that the beaver was aggressive, I now wondered as I looked around for any trace of it or any other beaver, finding nothing in the swift expanse of water moving past and around and ahead of me. Why did I think everything had such ill intent, a desire to hurt me? Maybe I'd actually treated you like that beaver I thought, trying to stay equidistant from you with something like water between us, expecting you to eventually wound me, to treat me like a fish, so that every time you got close, I fled.

Yet you'd never given me any reason to doubt your motives.

Over the years we often told each other that we were treating each other like fish, it was like a mantra between us. At first it was a joke that recalled our first fight and defused any arguments, and then it sort of turned into a real accusation, we stopped laughing when we said it, when we heard it. I started leaving you drawings of fish when I was upset instead of talking to you. You started passive aggressively bringing home whole fish for me to prepare for dinner and I would have to scale and debone, fillet them.

You knew I didn't like fish but you said it was healthier, we should eat more. I said what about all the mercury? and you pretended not to hear.

I'd read somewhere that mercury made people go crazy, that milliners had used mercury to make hats which had led to the expression 'mad as a hatter' , so I started 85

blaming you for feeling crazy too. I started thinking that we were like skydivers hurtling towards the earth, holding on to each other for dear life so that neither one of us was capable of pulling our own or the other's parachute open, of pulling off the mercury soaked hats that had fallen over our eyes, that had maybe always been there since the beginning of our increasingly ill-fated relationship.

When we met you'd been the only person outside of the studio or lecture hall I knew who was interested in art. You looked at my paintings and always said something nice about them, even the ones I'd painted with my left hand and the disastrous still life of the inadvertently erotic potato. When I had an assignment to do a portrait you agreed to sit for me, though the painting didn't tum out very well. I wanted to paint from a perspective above you and have you tilt your head back but after awhile you said your neck hurt too much and broke the pose and then I couldn't remember exactly how it had been. For my part I couldn't get the colors quite right and you ended up looking sort of grey. You were supposed to be shirtless but said it was too cold so I filled in the chest based on some sketches of a model from drawing class which looked weird because the model had a completely different physique than you, so I said 'oh forget it,' and then since we didn't have anything else to do, one thing led to another. You were my roommate's ex-boyfriend then and she was still in love with you, but I didn't feel that badly because she and I weren't very good friends at that point. Not that anything had happened between me and my roommate, we'd just grown apart or maybe we'd never 86

really been friends after all. That's not why I did it of course, I should never have let one thing lead to another I thought later, guilty, but it made me feel slightly better about myself afterwards to think that she and I weren't actually close. I'd known you before that, you thought we'd locked eyes across the bar and came to talk to me and I didn't tell you that I always stared at people without realizing it, because you seemed so pleased to think I'd been gazing at you. It was a bad and awkward habit, and I was trying to break it.

For a long time I didn't even know I was doing it but then one night as we waited in line outside of a show my roommate asked me to stop, said it was embarrassing, and I was surprised. 'I was staring at people?' I asked, and she nodded and looked at me with her face scrunched up in that way that was like: yeah, obviously.

But I was dating someone else then who was funnier and meaner and a better cook than you or me and who'd tried to carry me on his shoulders but dropped me on my head instead and then forgot to watch over me and make sure that I didn't fall asleep in case I had a concussion. That was when you were with my roommate but it didn't really work because you got so angry about my being dropped on my head that you threatened to beat up that boyfriend even though you never would or could have done it and he wasn't exactly my boyfriend anyway, it wasn't that serious, but especially not after that, and then you brought me flowers in case I had a concussion which I didn't after all and my roommate was like: never mind. And we ended up spending a lot of time together though I insisted we were just friends. 87

That winter you helped me water the skating rink that I'd made in our backyard, there was a very strict watering schedule posted on the fridge that had to be followed but my roommate wasn't into skating and also thought maybe we should check with the landlord before making a rink, what if there were water lines or something running through the yard that could somehow be affected? I didn't think it would be a problem so

I just went ahead with it anyway. We had to build up the ice's thickness with cold water, then flood it with hot water to smooth everything out. For this last part we had to attach the hose to the kitchen faucet and it didn't quite reach the furthest comers of the rink, so you carried the hot water in a bucket and spilled a good amount of it on yourself and it froze your coat into a stiff icy cage.

I wanted to take some pictures of the rink for my photography class and pretended that was why I had built it and not so that I could skate around on it most days, which seemed childish to me in some way then, even though lots of adults like to skate, there was nothing of which to be ashamed. When it was done we skated around it at night holding flashlights and I did some long exposures. The project was sort of lame but you weren't a good skater which kind of saved it because all ofthe falls looked quite interesting on film, though you had a lot of bruises the next day and I felt badly about it.

You said you didn't mind and I tried to smooth out the rough parts ofthe ice so that you wouldn't fall so much if you ever tried it again. I thought it odd you couldn't skate since your family could have sent you to lessons but then I realized rich people didn't have to skate or play hockey, they had other sports that were more elegant or civilized like tennis 88

and golf and show jumping and polo. Your wealth at once fascinated and annoyed me. It felt as though we were living in parallel universes and I didn't like to think that I didn't understand yours, but neither did I really want to understand it. So I just pretended I knew things that I didn't and never asked any questions.

One day after the failed portrait incident you called me from your parents' house, which I imagined looked like some kind of manor, where you'd flown for a long weekend, but I panicked and gave my roommate, your ex-girlfriend, the phone; it seemed wrong for you to call me, too serious and intimate an act, a confirmation of my betrayal.

For some reason I thought she would know what had happened with the painting, but that if you just talked to her on the phone, if we pretended the call had been for her, maybe the whole uncomfortable situation would go away. You'd get back together with her and

I wouldn't have to examine anything that may have existed or not existed between us. I could meet someone else who may or may not accidentally drop me on my head. I tried to listen to your brief conversation from a room away but didn't catch any of it. You called back a few minutes later and said, 'why did you do that?'

The night of the failed portrait we watched a fire that my pyromaniac neighbor had started in our backyard fueled by the furniture that had previously sat on our front porch. The neighbor was an amateur expert pyromaniac. She funneled most of her creative energy into burning things and her dream was to set the town's sewers on fire.

She'd been working up to it by torching various old sheds and port-a-potties around town. It was becoming a bit of a problem and I was glad you were there in case she tried 89

to burn the whole house down, but I didn't want to admit that to you or myself, so I pretended not to care about the fire.

You had just given me a magazine with an article on some trendy artist of whom I had never heard and were telling me about the show you'd seen at the Guggenheim over

Christmas break but then you said you were concerned about the growing flames reaching the electric string lights that were draped around the skating rink, clothesline to tree to tree to house, and said we should call the fire department. I was thinking about the fire melting the ice of the skating rink, but it was almost minus thirty that night, so there was no reason to fret. Except that my roommate had been right: there were water lines running underneath the yard and they weren't very deep. Or so our landlord told us angrily when he saw the ice, though at that point it was too late and if the pipes were going to freeze they would have already done so.

That was no way to begin a relationship, I thought now, ankle deep in the cold water: so frantically and so strained, and I was thinking of it frantically now too, trying to replay it all in my mind as quickly as possible and have it over with, explain it to myself in brief unflinching memories, but I also thought how fun it had all been, even when we were being dropped on our heads or almost burning our houses down and when had we gotten so boring and mired in the details of existing? What had been real: the strain or the fun? How had we really been? Maybe the failed portrait had been a sign, one that we 90

ignored when we shouldn't have. But then I'd done a better portrait later, so what did that mean?

I spied a small speckled trout out of the corner of my eye. I reeled in my worm and swung it in the direction of the trout, trying to be as still and make as little noise as possible. A moment later, I felt something pulling on the line and yanked it back. No! I thought as soon as I had done it. The trick was to pull it in slowly wasn't it? I looked for the end of the line, for the fish that maybe was or wasn't there, and as it swung back in front of me I could see the poor worm that was still hanging there but was now only half its original size.

Maybe you had been right, I shouldn't have gone away. Even though we never talked about it we both know that I cheated on you, that I didn't care about anything and wanted to experience as much as possible, meet as many people as possible, the side effect of having lived in small places all my life before being let loose in the wide world, and that probably set a bad behavioral pattern. Or maybe we both knew I hadn't cheated on you at all but that was easier to explain than having gotten too used to my independence and resenting coming home to you, being reliant on you and your steady employment and higher salary while I worked crap jobs and kept trying to paint, as we became more and more stuck in and confined by the things we didn't need but somehow kept acquiring. Or maybe I just changed, started thinking about things more or less than I 91

previously had and I wasn't the same person for you anymore when I got back, and maybe you didn't even notice at first but then after a few years of it wearing away at us, you realized you were tired and I wasn't what you'd signed up for in the first place anymore. It was very hard to say and anyway I was busy fishing so I couldn't really think about it properly.

And then I finally had a real bite. I could feel the fish pulling erratically on the line, trying to escape the hook, escape me. I started to pull it in slow slow slow, little half turns of the reel, but when it reached me, I didn't know what to do with it, a ten inch slimy flailing brown thing, its gills desperately sucking away as I pulled it free of the water. I was afraid to touch it while it yet moved, fought for its life. I looked around and found some large leafy plant on the bank and wrapping the fish in it, pulled the hook from its mouth and brained it against a rock.

'I'm sorry,' I said, then brought it home, cut off its head and sliced open its belly, pulled out its guts as I'd seen my father do when I was a child, trying to get it over with as quickly as possible. Now that I had already done the worst I had better finish the job.

What was the expression about things like that, in for a penny in for a pound? Or something about being hung as a sheep instead of a lamb? That didn't even make any sense, I thought as I put the entrails aside for the kittens- though I wasn't sure if they were old enough to eat fish- a sheep was a lamb. I washed the little fish then dredged it in flour and fried it in my mother's heavy cast iron pan until it was golden brown, they way 92

I'd always watched her do in disgust as a child complaining all the while about having to eat fish.

My mother smiled when I brought her the trout, but didn't touch it. Normally she ate it all in just a few bites, bones and all, but she still wasn't hungry. She just held the plate with her right hand, her left one cradled underneath it, carried on watching whatever documentary was on CBC. Maybe it was about fish. But most likely it was about something else. I didn't know what else I could do or say to help so I took the plate back and threw the trout into the trees. Maybe something outside would eat it: a coyote or a fox or a raccoon or an eagle. 93

Some Would Call This Limbo

I called you on the phone one day acting like you were just someone or a sandwich or something else like the someone from before as it rang, then folded in on myself like a broken wing when you answered, speaking low and quiet and scared. But, it wasn't really you. It was your voice to be sure, but a recording. And I spoke into the phone to the future you who would maybe listen or maybe not listen to my past and hollow, mechanical echo of a voice, going on and on, telling you everything or nothing, talking about motion and fingers and boats and mice and being sick and sorry sorry sorry.

And thought: how odd that we should meet here again, your past voice and my present one that would be past soon too, as though nothing had happened, wait, did something happen? Sometimes I wondered. Did I mean it? Did you mean it?

The message was too long and I kept having to call back to clarify things that I had said or redact them, expand on them until I had left you more messages than was dignified and I ran upstairs and hid in my room with a bottle of my mother' s homemade wine that she stored in the bench in the kitchen next to the door afraid that the phone would ring, that you might actually listen to the messages, not ignore me, and then of course it did, you didn't, and I held the phone in my hand like a grenade wondering do I? do I?

'Oh my god.' You said. ' Is your mother ok? I'm so sorry sorry sorry.' 94

We were both so sorry now I thought and I wondered what came first: constant apologizing or the persistent feeling of non-specific guilt? Chicken or egg? But you didn't have to be sorry, it wasn't your fault. You would have looked for the pieces wouldn't you? I didn't even have to ask. I knew you would have done it.

'Should I come?' you said and I thought yes come please come I need you but then I wondered if that wasn't the bench wine talking so I said 'No we're fine, you're so busy.'

And you said: 'I think I should come.'

And I said: 'But what ifyou stayed. And I also stayed.' Then we would be back to square one. An endless cycle of sentient indecision.

And you were quiet and so was I, thinking about whether or not we wanted to stay or move, have the other stay or move, the possibility of which had not been heretofore raised outside of the mangled and imagined conversations I had with you in the darkest comers of my mind.

'Goddamn' you said, as if it were a jewel rolling around your mouth and mind and mine and that's how I took it too, put it in my mouth; goddamn over my tongue, put it like a jewel where it wasn't meant to be, dug from the dirt of our uncertainty.

And then your voice was gone and the phone was sitting quiet in one hand, the bench wine bottle screaming in the other. 95

The Legion

There was almost no traffic on our road, only neighbors ever went by, so I wasn't expecting to get a ride until I reached the highway, but a few hundred yards from our driveway I heard the distant buzzing buildup of an engine and spun around to stick out my thumb. The gesture seemed absurd, since the driver would undoubtedly be someone I knew who probably would've stopped to ask me how I was anyway, but I did it nonetheless, in case they'd only planned on waving cheerfully at me as they drove by.

I hadn't hitchhiked in eight or nine years, the last time through the rain in Ireland or Bulgaria, I couldn't remember. I lost a contact lens and was wearing the glasses I'd broken and taped back together the week before but the water was loosening the tape so I held the bridge together with one hand and stuck my thumb out with the other. I'd been trying to go somewhere but there was no bus and after a few miles of getting soaked and not picked up I crossed over to the other side of the road hoping to fare better in that direction and sure enough someone had stopped right away. I asked if they were going towards town and they shook their head no but waved towards the passenger seat, pushed the door open. I got in, not really caring where we went as long as I was out of the rain and the driver wasn't a murderer, wondered where we were headed until I remembered­ and now I knew of course it had been Bulgaria, it was just the rain that made think of

Ireland- that shaking your head meant yes and nodding meant no, and they took me straight to the bus station. Afterwards I thought how stupid it was to get into a car with 96

someone when I had no idea where they were even headed, but I guessed I didn't really care about my personal safety or maybe I was just too naive from growing up in the woods to think about that kind of thing.

An old maroon K-car slowed to a stop and I jumped in. It belonged to a neighbor from down the road whom I'd sort of known all my life. When I was a teenager everyone had a K-car because the only business in the community was a large Chrysler dealership that had mysteriously been thriving for years despite the fact that even if every person in the community bought one car per year it probably wouldn't be enough to keep them afloat. After awhile the Dodge minivan came out and everyone traded in their K-cars but this neighbor had held on to hers. I was surprised it was still running, but apparently they hadn't called it a Reliant for nothing. She wore her hair in the same tight short white perm she'd always had and was wearing a purple sequined jacket over her floral print blouse.

'Are you going to town? she asked.

I nodded.

'Having some car trouble are you?'

I nodded again, though the car was fine. The truth was that I was going to get drunk, and I wouldn't be able to drive afterwards. I wasn't exactly sure how I would get home, but at worst I could walk again. It wasn't even cold this time of year so I wouldn't have to worry about frostbite. 97 98

'How's your mother?' She asked, and I narrowed my eyes, wondering if she was asking in the general sense or if she knew about the hand. But then I saw her worried look and realized that of course she knew about the hand, everyone always knew everything about everyone else in this stupid tiny town! and I felt suddenly angry with her. Then I thought about the nurse who'd probably leaked the story, imagined her repeating 'she didn't even look for the pieces' to everyone she told, and I sank down into the seat of the small car, trying to hide from the words that kept turning up in my thoughts.

' She's ok.' I said, my cheeks burning red with shame.

' Oh she' s a tough one your mother,' the neighbor nodded emphatically, leaning forward into the steering wheel. 'I remember when you were born; she just drove herself to the hospital. Your dad was haying I think, and she didn't want to bother him because the rain was coming, just left him a note on the kitchen table saying where she was. ' She shook her head. 'A tough one all right. ' She repeated.

I'd heard the story a million times, but it seemed different coming from her, from someone outside the family, as though my mother was famous, and I was proud but then I was kind of nervous because something had changed in her. She'd been so depressed since the accident. At first I'd attributed her fatigue and lethargy to shock, to painkillers, but she was no longer taking anything and still she barely left the house. She sat watching documentaries or the fire, barely eating or talking. She scarcely looked at me when I 99

came into the room. It was making me anxious and I wished that I could find my father who would know what to do, but he was still nowhere to be found.

'And how's that handsome husband of yours,' the neighbor's voice cut through my apprehensive thoughts, 'is he here too?'

I shook my head, annoyed that she thought you handsome even though it was probably just one those things she said about everyone. I couldn't remember ifl found you handsome myself. Sometimes I did and sometimes I didn't. At first I thought you were, with your even features, bright green eyes, dirty blond hair, firm but not aggressive chin, straight nose; but then I changed my mind, decided no, your looks were too bland and boring to be handsome, too conventional, like a perfectly formed potato. But then I'd changed my mind again at some point, thought there was no reason to arbitrarily condemn something beautiful because it wasn't unusual enough; and now I was just confused, had stood too close to your face too often to make an objective or even subjective judgment on the matter.

I went to the Legion, the only bar in an otherwise dry town, after pretending to head to the pharmacy. The neighbor offered to drive me home when she was done at the grocery store but I feigned having several errands that would take an inordinate amount of time to run.

'I can wait. ' She said, smiling so I could see where she had gold fillings on her 100

back teeth and I felt a twinge of something, maybe guilt, maybe pity at seeing her so kind and vulnerable at once. I thanked her but said no and walked briskly away, not wanting to tell her the truth, taint her goodness with my low and shabby motives.

The bar was empty, and I sat there in the cavernous, blond wood paneled place hearing the beep of the video lottery terminals in the back and acting like I didn't recognize the bartender with whom I had gone to high school, drinking rye and gingers until it got dark out and people started coming in and the bartender turned some music on to drown out the beeping and I realized I had been there too long, I had to go home, but it was too late. The rye was already wreaking its havoc on my system, everything was pleasantly, nauseatingly slowed down, swimming around a little bit, and kind of fuzzy around the edges. So I stayed there at the bar and smiled or maybe frowned, I couldn't tell what my mouth was doing.

I woke in the dark with a raging headache. My mouth was dry, and it felt as though my eyelids might be stuck together. When I finally pried my eyes open, I looked at my watch and it was only midnight. My eyes adjusted slowly to the low light as I lay back against the pillow and stared at the ceiling. It looked like how I felt: drab, dirty, cracked, crumbling in places. But it wasn't my ceiling. I was in a strange room. I reached for the bedside lamp, switched it on, and saw with horror that I had never seen this place before. I looked around for my shoes, bag, something familiar but there was nothing I knew. I could see a crack of light coming from under the door and I stood next to it 101

uncertainly for a few moments before slowly pulling it open.

The space was small but cozy, a kitchen and living room at once. It must have been a cabin, the wood roughly hewn, the sort that would give you a splinter if you ran your hand along it. There was a fire burning chirpily in a wood stove at the center of the room, the flames so crisp through the glass they seemed to singe the fuzzy and frazzled tips of my brain. Across the room on the other side of the stove a familiar looking man was reading in an armchair. It took me a second to place him because I hadn't seen him in over ten years and he was all hunched over the book, but when he looked up and grinned I recognized my ex high school boyfriend's crooked, almost goofy smile, which reassured me for a moment and then made me angry.

'What the fuck happened?' I yelled, then lowered my voice as I saw him start, his smile abruptly fade. He looked kind of alarmed, like I had frightened him. I hated using foullanguge.

'I'm sorry' I took a breath, collected myself, 'I mean, what happened?'

'Nothing, nothing.' He said, holding his hands out in front ofhim as though I was pointing a gun. 'Nothing bad. You fell asleep at the bar. I offered to drive you home.

Then you fell asleep in the car and I couldn't wake you.' He chuckled at this and it annoyed me but I wasn't sure why.

We had dated- if you could call it dating in a town where there nowhere to actually go on a date,-the summer before college. It hadn't ended well; he disappeared for a week in August and upon his return asked if we could take a break. Which seemed like 102

a coward's faint-hearted attempt to end things and I laughed at him, angry, hurt. More angry maybe. Or maybe more hurt.

'A break from what? That's so stupid. We're both leaving. We were just passing the time until then, let's just forget it. ' And walked away, even though it wasn't true, my hard heartedness completely feigned, and I cried when I knew he could no longer see me.

Back then we had both fervently pledged to leave this place and never come back. How odd to find ourselves here now. He was different, his face more lean, his hair darker and shorter, and there were lines around his eyes as though he'd spent more than a few of those years away squinting into the sun or the distance or maybe the abyss.

' Yeah, that sounds familiar.' I mumbled, embarrassed now. 'How are you?' I asked after a pause.

He shrugged. 'I'm here.'

I nodded. 'Same I guess. '

We drove in silence, or something like it, the garbage bag of dirty clothes at my feet rustling slightly at every sharp turn or bump.

'I heard you got married.' He said.

I nodded even though he couldn't see me. 'Kind of.'

' What does that mean?'

I shrugged. 'I got married.' It seemed exhausting to try and explain the kind ofso 103

I didn't.

It wasn't that it hadn't been a real marriage, but for some reason it hadn't felt like it because it had been so rushed, rash. And of course we didn't have a wedding which made our marriage seem less official than most. But it did make sense at the time, when we thought about it, or didn't think about it, which we did and didn't, mostly didn't. But how else could I have lived in this other country with you, this place in which I did not want to live? And it was so easy to walk to city hall one day, one week after getting the license, to just put on my best dress, the one I'd made for someone else's wedding that

I'd not actually attended because I got the dates mixed up- I never wrote things down, didn't keep a calendar even though you kept asking me to do so, erroneously believed that I would remember, well there was the proof, I was wrong, I'd missed the wedding­ but I wasn't really sorry because I didn't like weddings, there was too much contrived conversation and forced dancing.

The dress was made from an old pattern of my mother's, and was the only thing

I'd sewn without losing interest, the only thing I'd ever finished properly. I'm not sure where I got the motivation, maybe I didn't want to spend the money on a dress or maybe

I really thought I would start sewing in earnest, but it wasn't completely finished because

I didn't quite know how to follow the instructions and the hem turned out all crooked. I told myself that I would redo it the right way but then since I'd missed the wedding anyway there wasn't really any rush, until it was the day of our city hall appointment and 104

I didn't have time or a sewing machine, so I just left it as it was, and that's when I noticed my tights had a run in them as well, but if I pulled them up constantly it was mostly hidden, and you brought me long stemmed flowers that I let droop down in front of the bunched hem. You wore a suit that was probably worth more than everything I owned and I cried a little though the whole thing only took a few minutes and I wasn't sure if I was crying from being married and happy or married and confused or married and frightened, or if I really was married because how could it only take five minutes or less in city hall to be so bound to another person, another country? I threw up outside after then we asked someone wearing a big white fluffy wedding dress to take our picture and my eyes were still red from crying and being sick, so later that day we asked someone else to take another picture of us because we hadn't changed out of our wedding clothes and we looked a lot less nervous and unwell and a lot more happy in the second photo so we just pretended the first one didn't exist, and anyway the lighting had been bad in city hall so it wouldn't have been great in any case. When we got back to our apartment I counted the eggs in the fridge and there were six which seemed like a good number and I thought, well now I'm married so I can't fret about being here or not being here. I'm stuck. Whether I like it or not. And it was a relief for awhile until I started thinking about it again and then I was thinking about it too much, always thinking about it until the thought of being stuck became a problem that was constantly worming around in my mind and ruining every other thought that tried to exist there. And it was like you didn't 105

exist because it was just me and that worm in our loneliness and I wasn't sure if that loneliness was madness or if that particular madness was just the loneliest one.

The car was twisting up over the hills towards my parents' house, and I asked if he was living here, I thought he'd gone out west.

'Yeah,' he said, 'yeah I did. I do. Live here.'

Then we were silent again and the house was looming up out of the moonlit whatever and we were in the driveway as he we had been so many times before and we both seemed to become aware of this strange thing at the same moment and looked at, then quickly away from each other.

Nobody mentioned all of the times we'd made out here as only adolescents can make out because it had been so long ago and neither of us knew each other any more and probably we never had.

'Thanks.' I said

'No problem.'

But I didn't move and he didn't say anything more. We just stayed there as though by mutual agreement or mutual lethargy or mutual paralysis. It felt like maybe my bones were pushing up against skin that was trying to drag me back against the car seat and pin me in place, skin that dreaded going back into the house where my mother was still broken and I couldn't help her. So we sat there. Staring at the front door and the single light burning above it. I wondered if my mother had turned it on for me, if she'd 106

noticed I was gone or ifl' d left it on the night before and forgotten it.

'Is this still your house?' he finally broke the silence, and I said yes ofcourse , sorry sorry and got out and walked to the front door and into the kitchen where my mother had left a pot of soup for me on the stove. She made soup! I thought and cried a little thinking about her cutting the onions with one hand and I was still a bit drunk so I sat alone at the table and ate three bowls of it.

The next morning my mother was up before me drinking tea, sitting at the kitchen table looking completely normal as I hadn't seen her do since the planing incident and I looked at her left hand and though it was a bit hidden I couldn't be sure that it wasn't intact, that maybe I had found a wormhole and gone back to the morning I'd arrived, and

I should probably relive that moment properly this time.

'I left him.' I told her, looking up slowly as though afraid to see her reaction but need too, and there was no surprise on her face.

'I know.' She poured me a cup of tea. 'He called. Told me everything.'

I was still, astonished, letting her revelation sink in, wondering what he had said, what she had thought. Had she expected it?

'Why didn't you say anything?'

'I thought you were going to tell me too, and then you didn't and it seemed a bit late to mention that I knew and I assumed you' d have to do it eventually and I'd just wait you out.' 107

I laughed remembering that I thought I'd get away with not saying anything, that she would just think I was here for some random surprise visit and not ask me anything, and then she laughed too, one of those deep laughs that toes the line between laughter and crying and lasts too long so that when it's over you're not sure what happened and if it was good or bad. And we sat there for a minute in the aftermath of the laugh to collect ourselves and try and sort out what had been funny and what had been sad.

'I don't really know what happened,' I said after a moment, 'Maybe something, maybe nothing. I'm just not sure we know each other, I'm not sure we like each other. '

'That happens, to everyone I think at some point. Was it really so bad?'

'I don't know. I think it wasn't so bad, but it felt wrong or something. Is that what happened with dad?'

'No. Not anymore. We know each oth~r too well perhaps. But we're never going to change. I'll never want to go sailing, and he'll never build that shed.'

'But that was ok for so long. Why can't it still be fine?'

'I could say the same to you.'

I didn't feel qualified or emotionally stable enough to respond to that so we were quiet again drinking our tea and then my mother just said 'I was tired,' and I wondered what would ever be enough, knowing or not knowing that you were happy or unhappy or just tired? Liking or not liking your life? Changing or not changing? Being in fact tired but not doing anything about it because you were used to it? Maybe we were all fated to be unhappy no matter what because nothing could ever be perfect, and no matter how 108

minute, infinitesimal the imperfection, it held the potential to grow and grow in our minds until it seemed to contain or not contain everything. Why did I think it was so important for my parents to stay together but not important for us to do the same? Why could I let them be unhappy but not accept that for myself? Or not let myself accept that they could be unhappy? And why had I not let myself admit that about us for so long?

'Thanks for the soup.' I said at last.

'I thought you might be hungry when you got home.' I looked at her out ofthe comer of my eye, wondering if and how she knew where I had been.

'The neighbor called last night, asked ifl needed help with the car, then said she'd driven you into town but not to expect you home because you were probably going to the Legion.' She looked at me and I was angry with her and the neighbor for seeing through me so easily, with myself for being so lame and obvious in everything I did, but then I told myself to shut up because what was the difference anyway. What I really needed to do was something, anything, so that I could stop worrying everything to death and ruination in my mind.

'Let's build the shed.' I declared, jumping out ofmy chair. 'You already have everything right? Plans and lumber? Just tell me what to do. '

Of course that all sounded good but several hours later I found myself confounded before a stack of wood next to the cement piles my father had poured a few years before.

'How do you attach the wood to the cement?' I asked my mother, handing the sketch of the shed to her and examining the piles. 109

She was studying some of the screws but didn't say anything and I had my hands on my hips staring at everything as though the supplies might spontaneously decide to help us out, tell us how to assemble them if I just looked at them sternly and for long enough. And then the kittens started climbing up onto the stacks of boards and two by fours so we watched them for a time instead. 110

Cows Come Home

Every few days the neighbor called to report that the cows were in her field. There was a hole in the fence somewhere but I wasn't sure where and sometimes they ended up in the road too and then a car- usually a minivan- would pull into the driveway to say

COWS! But most often they went directly to this neighbor's place because she had a nice big grassy meadow that never got mowed which they liked. Whenever we got this call I grabbed my favorite stick, a nice staff-like branch I found under the big maple tree and stripped off its bark until it was smooth, then I hopped on my old bike from high school that was a bit wobbly and creaky and pedaled over to the neighbor's and she was always standing in the doorway smiling, wearing a different colored sequined sweater than the one in which I'd seen her last, she must have had a dozen of them, her white hair tightly curled as though she got a weekly perm, waving hello then pointing to the meadow. I leaned my bike on one of the birch trees that lined her driveway and ran towards the cows, holding my stick aloft.

There weren't very many cows, only ten, plus three calves from that year, and as soon as they saw me they jerked their heads up out of the grass in unison and turned tail, running towards home. They knew the way so I didn't have to do much, just jogged along behind them at an easy pace, and it felt good to have my legs working like that against the uneven ground, my feet calves knees pushing me up and away from it, my heels cushioning the blow when I fell back against it. I liked the smooth cycling of the motions, 111

as though all the parts of me were connected to each other for once instead of working against one another as the parts of my mind so often did, as though I were a machine or a more evolved animal than usual or a satellite endlessly orbiting a larger body.

I had been a runner once. Not as much for the exercise as for the peace of mind it afforded me. Running was like meditation, or maybe I was just trying to exhaust the troublesome parts of myself away, tire myself into thinking or feeling that I need not worry over anything or everything. As soon as I began attending the big school in town I ran, going for longer and longer stretches so that by the time I graduated I was sometimes loping around the countryside for two or three hours.

You never liked running but one day soon after we'd been married and out of the blue you asked to come with me and I said sure because I thought it would only be the once, that you wouldn't like it. But then you started doing it on your own too, and when we ran together I struggled to keep up, was always a step behind you and I said slow down, we 're just jogging, and you'd turn and grin and sprint ahead. And later you signed us up for a race and I said I didn't want to race, I just wanted to run everyday, always the same route, always the same pace.

And you said 'what is the point of running if not to improve and get faster?'

And I said the point of running was running and you just grinned and sprinted ahead, and when we ran the race you sprinted again and I tried to keep up and got a foot cramp and had to stop and you were waiting at the finish line and said 'what happened to you?' and I scowled, threw my participation medal in the garbage. 112

.I

/ 113

But this wasn't like that, this was running behind cows and it was the nice easy pace I enjoyed. When we got to the gate leading to our pasture sometimes my mother had already opened it, or sometimes I ran ahead of the cows and opened it myself and they went right back in as though it had all been a lark, a good joke, but now they'd had their fun and were going to behave.

After they were safely in I drove the car back to the neighbor's and picked up the bike and she was always standing in the doorway again, still smiling, and I said 'I'm so sorry.'

And she would say to 'go on' and not to worry about it and then she always invited me in for tea and cake and I would say that I should be making her a cake but I usually did go in because she was very good at baking and her house was so calm and homey, there were crocheted blankets on all of the furniture and potted plants in every comer, and even her cats were very friendly and came to curl themselves in my lap. This was very unlike the behavior of our kittens who were growing quickly despite being lactose intolerant but were not very sociable and spent much of their time indoors mewling next to the door to be let outside, and much of their time outdoors hanging from the screen door that they climbed in failed attempts to get back inside.

The baked goods always made me feel bette and I concluded that all the condolence cakes I'd baked with my mother as a child had not been in vain.

When I got home from the neighbor's house I usually walked along the fence line looking for the breach, beside the road and around behind the house then up into the 114

woods, but no matter how many times I walked it, I just couldn't find a hole. And I thought, I must be missing something, but what? Were the cows jumping over the fence?

I didn't think the little ones could do it, and even the big ones ... well, cows hadn't gotten famous for their jumping abilities, that was for sure. But there was no other explanation for their continued success in escaping.

One day when they were due to flee I staked out the field and watched them from behind some bushes with my father's bird watching binoculars, waiting for one of them to make a move, but maybe they could sense my presence because they didn't try a thing that day or the next. Just stood around the brook that ran next to the orchard all day, eating grass and drinking water and relaxing under the trees.

The next day after I'd given up my watch the phone rang again and it was the usual: I got my stick and jumped on my bike and the sequins were lime green and we had a nice jog home and the gate was closed so I went around the cows who were just standing politely next to it, waiting to be let in, and opened it, and walked through the pasture towards the house. But I was stopped in my tracks halfway across the field in front of a large brown lump.

It was the milk cow lying on her back, but to the side, swollen to twice her original proportions, as though she had been inflated. It seemed that at any moment a breeze would pick her up and blow her away like a tumbleweed. Her legs were sticking straight out from her balloon-like torso, stiffly and almost comically. Her body was resting in a pool of her own excrement. I couldn't believe that so much shit had come out of her and I knew right 115

away that she was dead. It was pretty obvious that nothing came back from swelling and shirting like that.

The first time you came home with me we'd been walking up to the road through the pasture when the entire (small, it was slightly bigger back then but still no more than twenty) herd of cows had suddenly started running towards us. My father must have started that tractor, which for them was like a heavy diesel fueled siren call announcing food and they charged across the field towards it.

'Run!' I yelled and we both took offup the hill and out oftheir way. When we reached the trees we stopped, doubled over, breathing hard.

'I thought you said they weren't dangerous.' You said between breaths.

'They're not.' I said, looking down the slope towards the place where my father was doling out hay and the cows were calmly, placidly chewing. 'But I didn't want to be in the way. I mean I don't really know though to be honest, what they do when someone' s in the way.

'How don't you know? You grew up with them.'

'I didn't live in the pasture.' I snapped. And the truth was I'd really liked the cows as a small child, had helped my father feed them. But then something had changed and I ignored them, had avoided farm chores in favor of house ones, and I didn't know much about them at all. We had become strangers to each other, the cows and I, though I often pretended to know quite a lot about farming to you, since you didn't know anything, and 116

it seemed a sort of accomplishment to have grown up in the country though I'd had nothing to do with the decision.

When you told my parents the story they both laughed at me for being afraid.

'They wouldn't hurt a fly. ' My father said and there certainly often were many unhurt flies circling the cattle in the summer so he must have been correct.

But the one cow of whom I'd never been afraid was the milk cow because she was always around people and so calm and quiet and gentle. She hadn't been milked or had a calf in several years, and must have been pretty old, though I couldn't remember how long we'd had her, she seemed almost timeless. I wondered if she'djust died of old age but my mother said she probably ate a poisonous plant or maybe choked on something to be so inflated.

What could she have choked on, I wondered: grass? Leaves?

'Maybe an apple?' My mother said.

It was too early for apples, but something had to be done with the body in any case, so I didn't worry the question. I didn't know anything about disposing of bodies and my mother said when it had happened before, when a cow had died from betting her hom stuck in the ground somehow, under a root, off in the woods where she'd gone to be alone so she hadn't found her for a long time, there was a man my father called to come take care of things but she couldn't remember his name and we flipped through her rolodex but nothing rang a bell so we drove into the field and my mother showed me how to scoop the cow up onto the prongs that we'd attached to the bucket because the 117

vibrations from the tractor hurt her hand and she couldn't do it herself and I said 'I'm fine, don't worry.' And shooed her back towards the house.

I drove the milk cow up the gravel road named after my grandmother but then didn't know what to do because I wanted to dig a grave even though my mother said: just to leave her in the woods. But it didn't seem like digging a grave for such a large animal was something I could reasonably do by myself in a few hours, so I just kept going further and further up the road, trying to get as deep into the forest as possible, as though it could somehow bury her within itself. And when the road ended I sat there for awhile, turned the engine off, the cow's head and tail lolling down from the tractor's forks on which her poor stretched distended body was perched like a dome tent on the edge of a cliff.

It was quiet, I could only hear the breeze in the treetops and a bird here and there, and it seemed like a nice place to be put if you died but then I thought I heard a coyote and all of a sudden it seemed like a very dark foreboding place to be put after all. Could I leave the cow to be eaten by coyotes? How quickly would they do it? How much would they take?

I heard the caw of a crow and I remembered the stillborn calf that had been born one winter day when my parents had been gone, and how I'd gone with my toboggan to collect it, take it away from the grieving cow who just stood in the same spot next to the spindly little body and lowed and lowed, refusing to leave. I couldn't get the calf because the cow was protecting it, would start towards me shaking her long horns like 'Get Out!', 118

but I could see that at some point during the day- maybe the mother had looked away for a moment, maybe something had caught her attention and just for a second she'd let down her guard and stared off into the distant hills- crows had pecked out the calfs eyes.

And that was why I could never eat veal or have a baby.

You didn't mind about the veal as you weren't that keen on it yourself and at first you didn't mind about the baby either. But then your friends all started having babies and you stopped laughing when I said how exhausting that must be and wasn't it nice we could do whatever we wanted instead of changing diapers all day, and you said maybe it wouldn't be so bad, said it like a question to see what I would say, but I didn't say anything, just let your words hang loudly in the room like a tetrahedral kite inexplicably taking the place of a chandelier.

Later you said you wouldn't really mind now that you'd thought about it some more and you guessed you had changed your mind from when you'd been young, and I realized maybe you thought the baby ban had been temporary, that I would grow out of it too or change my mind as soon as I was confronted with an adorable live baby. And I did think that babies were pretty cute and I liked them very much but I still didn't want one of my own, not really because of the stillborn calfbut for many other reasons that mainly boiled down to my just not wanting one and why force the issue when the world was already so critically overpopulated? 119

I never had wanted one, had pretended my dolls were adults when I was small and had them tell me what to do. The thought of physically carrying a human on the inside of myself was terrifying, as was the fact of its having to come out and live with me for almost twenty years. I was still afraid.

And I told you that again, and then you said 'but maybe you'll still change your mind.'

And I said 'I don't think I will.'

And you said 'maybe.'

And I said 'probably not.'

And we were at an impasse.

And the impasse before us grew so that it was kind of between us instead of in front of us, and we were facing each other now and going nowhere instead of forward, instead of climbing over the impasse or trying to get around it we just let it get bigger because even if we'd gone through it, now that we were facing each other we'd have to go through each other too in order to move forward, or maybe over or around each other, but either way it was a very destructive trajectory.

And then one day you said, 'ok, we can adopt.'

And I said, 'that's the same thing as having a baby.'

I never had been able to explain to you my need to be alone sometimes. You couldn't understand my dread of social engagements, even when they were my idea. As 120

soon as the plans were set I started to fret about them, about whom I would talk to and what I would say and how long the thing would last. So I always tried to get out of them at the last minute. What I liked was going to something where no one knew each other, because then everything was equal, and anything could happen and nobody cared if you ended up standing in the corner alone the whole night because they didn't even know who you were and they didn't even want to know. Nobody cared. It was perfect.

What you liked was going to something where you knew everyone from before you were born, maybe your mothers had all been best friends when they were pregnant, so you'd kind of been in the womb together. And then you could talk about anything that had ever happened in any of your lives and every one would know exactly what it was you were discussing. Of course such a long history wasn't necessarily required because every single person you'd ever met was also your friend and you kept in touch with everyone forever. Each week you had at least one dinner planned with some person I'd never heard of and I'd say 'who is that?'

And you'd say 'my friend' with this look on your face like you were kind of hurt that I somehow forgot this person whom I'd never met.

For a long time you talked me into going with you to these dinners and parties and

I had pointless conversations with the wives of the friends while you talked about whatever you had done since you'd last seen each other or everything you had once done together when you were two years old. And when we got home you said 'that was fun wasn't it?' 121

And ifl'd had enough wine I said it was, but then I got tired of drinking so much wine, or maybe I realized I could have had the wine at home and it would have been an even nicer time because I could have avoided all that strained conversation before the alcohol kicked in and I said, 'I can't. I can't keep going to all of these things. I just don't like it.'

Then you were all hurt for awhile but you decided to just go on your own, and you were traveling more for work too, almost every week, so when I said I just didn't think I could have a constant companion, ie a child- even though I knew it wasn't going to be like going to the dinners and parties that felt like the first day of junior high when everyone knew each other and I was the outside weirdo who did not know what to say or do to not seem weird- that even though I would love the hypothetical child I would still get tired of it, you put your hand on my shoulder like 'relax' and said it would be like how you and I never got tired of each other. And I knew it was a false equivalence because by then I barely ever saw you at all and I wasn't sure that I wasn't tired of you anyway or that you weren't tired of me because why else did you never come home?

I restarted the tractor and drove a little off the road and into the woods, tilted the forks down until the milk cow's body began to slide towards the dirt. When she hit the ground there was a heavy thud that surprised me because she'd seemed so light and airy all blown up like a helium balloon. I walked around the woods collecting ferns and branches to put over her body, even though I knew it would not stop the coyotes or the 122

crows, but it seemed like the respectful thing to do. And I thought about all of the milk she'd produced for us and was sorry this was all I was doing for her in return. But at least she would feed the forest floor eventually, meld down into it and perhaps a tree would grow there, up and around her bones. Maybe in fifty years there would be a trunk here with the face of cow, a skull embedded in its bark.

I drove down the hill into the setting sun that was gilding the landscape and turning green things greener as well as gold, making each color more intense as though the pigments of every outside thing were rising up towards the sun, asking it to stay, and I saw out of the comer of my eye along the tree line a gap in the wire fencing. I jumped out and ran towards it, afraid that it would disappear. I had walked along this section of fence a dozen times and never noticed it. I twisted the wire back into place. The next day I would fix it properly, add an extra post to reinforce it, make sure the electric tape was working too. I thought I saw a mouse running into the trees, but I couldn't be sure.

The cows stopped escaping and I forgot about the bike I'd left at the neighbor's house for almost two weeks. 123

Some Would Call This Limbo

I called again to offer you something: one unhappiness. You answered to propose me one thing in return: the next misery, and I wished that we could hasten something slightly more interesting and perhaps meet in somewhere else, somewhere where our voices would not sound too high or too low, our tones not defensive, offensive, offended.

There we would eat our thumbs to quiet angry tongues and mouths and suggest novel liberties, like polite conversation.

But I knew inevitably we would oppose them, implicating the worst of ourselves, as we oppose our thumbs in games of thumb wars and we or you or I oppose any other business that offends natural law, like not having children, or global warming.

How can we insult the gods that don't exist, in whom we don't believe, I wondered, if not through human hate and rage and hurt feelings?

But we wouldn't smile or plead with them or each other. Because the blood drenched impulses didn't take them, or us, anymore, as they took those around us. As they still took our words, those meaningless dribs and drabs, across phone lines and many many, far too many, miles. 124

Shed (The Legion continued)

How to anchor a wood frame to cement pilings (actually it' s not that hard): purchase a masonry drill bit, pierce the wood and concrete, make sure to get as much of the dust out of the hole as possible (use a turkey baster as blowing into the hole will get a lot of concrete dust into the face and respiratory system), screw in a cement screw (drill a quarter of an inch deeper than the screw so it will be deep enough to be flush with the wood). The end.

That was it! It was so easy really, all I had to do was go to the building supply store in town and ask the guy working there how to do it and then buy the bit and the screws. After that it was just a matter of following my mother's plan. Apart from the wood/concrete problem it turned out she absolutely did know how to build a shed after all and expertly answered any questions that arose as I hammered the floor, then wall frames together.

She spent much of the day in a lawn chair next to the building site, issuing work orders and dispensing advice. Holding boards in place when an extra hand was required, and reading out loud from the selected works of her library. She was at present reading A

Complicated Kindness so that sometimes I couldn't work from laughing or crying, depending on the poignancy of the section being narrated, but progress was being made nonetheless. 125

It had been a long time since we were close. When I was a kid I spent all of my time with her or my father, following them around and trying to help with whatever they were doing, only leaving to play Barbies by myself. I was kind of a solitary child, I didn't have any friends because there were only three other people in my grade at the two room school I attended- all boys, somewhat of an obstacle to friendship it had appeared at the time- who were best friends with each other. So I spent most of my time watching her sew and cook and garden, or walking in the pastures or woods with my father, observing, though I'd not managed to learn much about anything for myself, something that became clear as I tried to manage her garden and greenhouse during the early days of her injury.

Not that it was a complete loss, under her direction the garden still existed at least, but it was a messy business: rows planted crookedly, radishes too close together, tomatoes too far apart, and weeds poking up everywhere.

But then I'd started junior high where there were several more people in my class and I'd managed to befriend a few of them despite my fumbling awkwardness and shyness, and my mother, worried about my stunted social maturity, had encouraged me to attend as many sleepovers, parties etc that I could, so I went, holding on for dear life, terrified that if I did the wrong thing my nascent friendships would dissolve like sugar in water and leave me a pariah once more. I was always on guard, afraid to make a wrong move that might leave me once again in a humiliated friendless state. I knew that I did everything wrong, was clumsy, my clothes weren't cool, I didn't know anything about hair or makeup and it was just by the grace of god that some of my peers had allowed me 126

to exist amongst them, but that ifl ever messed up, I'd be out. I could feel the near misses sometimes, the coldness of being shunned or mocked for a day or two for reasons I could not understand much less explain. Was it my outfit? The tomato sandwich in my lunch bag? The way I had answered too many questions in math class? Was it that I had talked to the wrong person, was it that I hadn't talked to the right one? I tried to become the perfect sidekick, never in the way, funny but not too funny, interested but not too interesting, always ready to help with homework but not showy about having good grades. I kept as much of myself hidden as possible, lest anyone find it distasteful. I holed up in the bathroom during lunch so that I wouldn't have to go or not go into town, or have somewhere or nowhere to sit in the cafeteria. My skin crawled over my body at the awkwardness of having to exist and my body crawled under my skin at the same. I was there but wasn't there.

When I was home I stayed in my room alone, exhausted.

And after high school things became somewhat incomprehensible between my mother and me. I wanted to run away, get as far from my home town as possible, start fresh where I would hopefully no longer feel the weight of expected of social expulsion sitting on my chest. Somewhere that I could just exist without having to explain myself or worry that I was doing everything wrong, where no one would know about my sordid friendless past and my country bumpkin roots, my terrible cultural ignorance. She had been horrified when I proposed going all the way across the country and we settled on somewhere in the middle, somewhere close to my extended family- her family- who 127

could keep an eye on me or help should I ever need anything. And then I ran off to travel and then I married you, and that was that. There hadn't been time to go home, and phone calls had been expensive once, so we got out of the habit. But now we were spending so much time together and it was new and nice and a little awkward too, like we didn't quite know how to be. And I was sorry I'd been angry with her for disapproving of my marrying you, though perhaps she hadn't, maybe I'd just thought that, especially since she'd been right (at least in my mind).

One day as we were reading/building a car pulled into the driveway, a rare occurrence. I put down my hammer and my mother put down her book and we both peered towards the driveway but we both had pretty bad eyesight, even when wearing corrective lenses and anyway the maple tree was blocking everything, the car was parked right behind its massive trunk, so we couldn't see that it was you until you walked past and around it. Of course it wasn't actually you, I just thought it was going to be, maybe hoped or dreaded or assumed that you would come; but you didn't. In fact it was my ex high school boyfriend who came around the tree, slouching in the way that tall people do when they don't necessarily want to be seen and don't know what to do with their bodies.

I knew because I was tall too and I never knew what to do with my body except throw it into dangerous situations or place it in lifelong legal holds with another body that it may or may not have known or liked or understood or have it sleep and cook and eat and walk and run and paint and cry and build a shed. As the ex high school boyfriend walked 128 129

towards us my mother kind of squinted in that way she did that either meant she couldn't see who was coming or she didn't approve or both. Of course I'd never introduced her to him back in the summer after graduation when we were trying to kill each other via tongue battle to the death, but she still somehow learned of his existence, managed to casually drop into the gas station where he worked as a summer job even though gas was five cents more expensive and no one ever filled up there except gullible tourists.

I took off my safety goggles, hooked my hammer into the side of overalls (who would have thought they'd come in so handy fifteen years after they' d been a fashion statement?)

'An odd one.' My mother said almost under her breath as he walked across the field.

'What?'

'Nothing. I don't know.' She shook her head as though to erase her words like an etch a sketch. 'He seems a bit broken in a way. I'm not sure why.'

I guessed she probably did know something, the place and gossip being what they were but there wasn't time to ask because he'd almost reached us.

He didn't say anything, just handed my mother a twelve inch board, about an inch thick and sanded within another inch of its life so that it was as soft as silk. She held it, turned it over, examined the numerous holes drilled into its pearlescent, bird's eye maple pocked face.

'It's a crib board.' 130

'Thank you.' She smiled at him.

' She doesn't play cribbage.' I said, grabbing a cordless drill.

My mother shook her head, like, shut up. 'I'd love to learn.' She said but I knew she didn't really like games, she never had time to play them.

'I can teach you.' He said, then nodded in my direction. 'I'm a good teacher. '

He'd taught me when we were in the back of his cousin' s van, on the way to the beach. I'd thrown up of course, but I'd never forgotten how to play, and I taught you too.

Though you were so aggravating to play against, always counting incorrectly, a master at pegging yet incapable of reliably tallying up the fifteens and pairs and straights, as though expecting me to do it for you, which I always did. I never had the heart to steal your points and you knew it.

He looked at her left hand, reached down and took it, held it. ' That's cool,' he smiled as he rested her fingers in the palm of his hand, 'you still have fingerprints. '

My mother smiled too, thanked him for the crib board then walked towards the house, for once not holding her left hand in her right one, but letting it hang beside her on its own.

'Is she ok?'

'She' s fine.' I resented that he had said the right thing, that he had held her hand as I hadn't yet been able to do, afraid to touch it because I was a cold person who didn't know how to connect with people, and turned back towards my work. ' Why are you here?' 131

'I was just driving by. ' He examined my framing, floor.

'Nobody drives by here, there's nothing around. It' s not on the way to anything.' I frowned at his back as he leaned over my pile of lumber. Not sure what to make of his presence.

'Is this pressure treated?' He replied.

'Of course it is.' It bothered me that he would question my ability to build a shed even though I didn't really know what I was doing. 'What do you know anyway?'

He stood up, took a step back, apologizing. 'I didn't mean to offend you.' He put his hands behind his back. 'I heard you were building this thing, I thought maybe I could help, if you want.' I didn't ask how he'd heard, I already knew: those big mouths at the building supply, they were probably laughing about selling me expensive cement screws even though I now knew I could've done the same thing by driving two nails into the hole at once. If only I had been less reckless, done my research more thoroughly before and not after I did something. This had always been a problem. I did things, made impulsive decisions based on how I felt or just because I wanted something to be over with, dreaded how complicated it could be, couldn't stand the thought of it being undone and hanging over my head. Then when it was done, after I'd made my decision and it was too late, I started fretting that I'd done it all wrong, that I'd been wasteful or reckless or stupid.

I wondered if he did know anything about it though. His father was a carpenter, but he was a hopeless apprentice when I knew him. He had no interest in wood working 132

though his father tried to teach him. I remembered when he'd tried to build a doghouse. It was a mess. The walls were all crooked and he forgot to cut an opening for a door.

'No problem.' He said, grabbing a jigsaw as I held the dog house steady, horrified that he might be on the brink of severing a limb, mine or his. The jigsaw kicked back when it hit the planked wall ofthe structure and we'd both screamed, let the powe rtool fall into the grass beside us, put it away after that and cut the door out with a handsaw, a lengthy process that provided a sloppy result, with which we, but not the dog- who never deigned to use the doghouse- had been satisfied.

'I'm sorry, I'm sorry, for being rude.' I said, 'That's nice of you to want to help.'

'It'sok.'

'Are you ok?'

'I guess. Why?'

'I don't know. I'm sorry.' I said again pointlessly.

He shrugged, then grabbed a two by four and helped me frame out one of he walls.

He left but came back a few days later, every once in a while he stopped by and helped or sometimes he just played crib with my mother.

'Don't you have a job?' I asked.

'Kind of.' He replied.

'What does that mean?' 133

He shrugged 'I work sometimes, I get jobs making things with wood, furniture and stuff, but sometimes I don't have anything to do or I just don't feel like it and it's never really pressing, you know how things move pretty slow here. And I don't need much money to exist.'

I nodded, but I couldn't not wonder what had happened in the twelve years that I hadn't seen him, why he wasn't a writer or professor as he had planned to be, why he was living here where he'd sworn he never would, what had made him so quiet- or had he always been quiet and I was just misremembering things?

The day we mostly finished the shed, put the tar paper on the roof and hooked the light hanging in the middle of the space up to the house power supply via several extension cords my mother brought out her bench wine and we toasted its completion.

'It's not really done.' I said looking around at the bare interior.

'It needs shelves.' She replied.

And I nodded but I had been thinking that what it actually needed was to be painted. It looked so raw and vulnerable and exposed.

But the ex high school boyfriend said it was close enough anyway and I rolled my eyes because I thought maybe, like with the doghouse, he was satisfied with an incomplete result, an imperfect product, and I found that aggravating in another person even though I often left things unfinished as well. 134

We lit a fire outside and burned some of the wood scraps that were lying around on the ground. The fire got so big that I started to worry it might reach the shed so we brought buckets of water over in case which reminded me of you and the skating rink and we just sat there staring into the fire, me and the ex high school boyfriend, my mother had gone to bed and we were just sitting in lawn chairs staring and staring as though this might solve every problem in the world if only we kept doing it and didn't break our respective concentrations.

'What happened?' I asked, when I at last snapped out of it.

'We had a fire.' My ex high school boyfriend said low and slow, like he was in trance, and dragged his eyes reluctantly from the flames.

'I mean to you. In the past twelve years.'

'Oh,' he said, 'Not much really.'

I just stayed silent and we were both staring at the fire again and eventually he started talking.

'Remember that summer before we went away to school?'

I nodded.

'I went camping for a few days, on the beach, this isolated beach I'd never been to before in the park, off the trail. I just wanted to be alone and think, I guess, I was worried there wouldn't be time to do that again for a while or, I dunno. I was only going for a night but then I couldn't leave, I just couldn't bring myself to come back, so I stayed instead. I hiked out to get more food and stayed and then one night I got really drunk and 135

threw my tent and sleeping bag in the ocean and then I was sorry so I swam out after them but I couldn't find them, they must have sank and it was so dark, so I just kept swimming until I was tired and then I thought maybe that was it and maybe that's what

I'd wanted but then I got scared and started going back, and actually I'm not that good a swimmer and I hadn't gone very far after all and the tide took me right in. So I lay there on the beach shivering and realized that I was really scared of something, but I wasn't sure what, was it being alive or being dead, or was it going to university and being an idiot or was it leaving home or was it staying home? I couldn't decide, but in the end I thought maybe I didn't like myself very much ifl couldn't figure out such simple basic things about my own life. So I just went out west and got a crappy job and then I liked myself even less but it felt like the right sort of punishment for a while, even though I wasn't sure what I was being punished for. Maybe not being happy or not wanting anything. But the air there, god, it was so big and dirty and people just aren't as nice and then I thought, oh shit I really fucked things up hey? So I came home and started working with my dad and that was flawed too but ok and tolerable in the end I think. '

It sounded strange to have someone explain everything like that, just in one go and for it all to be so complicated but simple, to have it be my same thoughts of confusion, indecision, uncertainty told to me twelve years after they'd been thought and felt by someone that I'd thought I'd known. I stared at the ex high school boyfriend, wondering now if everyone thought this and we were all, or mostly, only pretending to be fine and normal while this ragged chaos roared inside of us. Whether existence was just a 136

matter of volume, of turning down the roar or drowning it out. Or if we were both incorrect, and that was why my mother thought he seemed odd, and maybe she thought I was odd too.

'Remember how we said we couldn't wait to leave, that we'd never come back here?' He laughed, threw another piece of wood on the fire that had worked its way down to a pile of embers and it caught immediately, flames bursting up around it like it had been waiting all night to finally burn, be burned.

'I'm not just here taking care of my mom.' I said, and it was a relief to form the words, another step closer to feeling that I might not have to be in hiding.

The ex high school boyfriend turned towards me and laughed again. 'No shit.

Your mother' s fine, and you've been here for over two months.'

'You knew?'

'Everyone knows. I mean they don't know, but they know.'

I glared at him. 'How?'

Then he took my hand and pointed to my ring finger. 'No ring.'

I looked at my hand that was all callused tanned. I'd never worn a ring, I hated rings. They felt like an unpleasant intrusion, something obstructive to the natural motion of finger joints. It comforted me to know that though the correct conclusion had been reached, it had been via incorrect route, a wrong equation that had still arrived at the right answer. 137

We put a few more scraps of the wood on the fire and then the ex high school boyfriend eventually walked to his car and drove away. I wondered if his help had all been leading up to this, ifhe'djust wanted to tell me that he was confused and alone all of the time, if he knew I was too. 138

Return ofthe Prodigal So and So

I was painting the inside of the shed. I'd had this idea that it would be nice for the garden shed to look like a garden inside, so I was reproducing the trees and plants from outside onto the interior walls. I had been inspired by the kittens and their desire to always be inside or outside but only when it was the opposite of where they actually were. The birch trees were easy, they were practically screaming to being painted, especially if I had knife on hand in order to cut little rips into the paint and wood of the wall and mimic the real tears of the delicate bark. But then I was painting some peonies, one of my favorites from my mother's flower garden, and they just looked so absurd, so flamboyant, so over painted, even though they looked like the real thing. I had a photo on the floor in front of me, and it looked fine for the peonies to be like that in reality, so much larger than life and so much more than everything else that seemed richly green on its own but then paled in comparison to the lush pinkness of the flowers, but it was too much in reproduction. I'd never thought of the peonies that way before, never considered them a problem as they were typically in their own corner of the garden, away from the other plants and flowers where there was no interference or conflict of interest. And I just couldn't seem to get it right, couldn't strike the right balance, couldn't get the light reflecting on the petals to be less garish and it was making me feel a bit nauseated, but in the back of my throat and not my stomach, so I decided to set it aside for a little while, and consider some other flowers, because it really bothered me that something went so 139

terribly wrong when I tried to translate a real thing into the idea of that thing so that it became inexplicably deformed.

But of course I went and chose the tiger lilies, which was a huge mistake! If I'd thought the pink peonies were tricky, well ... these were obviously orange, so you get the picture. And I felt something akin to despair and reproached myself for not just building the shelves as my mother had wanted, when I heard a car and thought at first: cows! Even though it had been some time since their last escape from the property. And then I thought: oh it' s my ex high school boyfriend, maybe he thought I was building shelves and came to help. So of course that made me feel guilty about not building the shelves, which I'd already been, so really it just compounded the guilt, and I was sort of folding under the guilt, drooping to the floor like a two-day old green onion that someone was trying to stand on its end- though I didn't think anyone really tried to stand up old green onions- and then I heard a voice that wasn't that of a neighbor' s car or a high school ex boyfriend but was certainly familiar.

My father was walking up the path to the house and his face was all sunburned and his hair looked even whiter than the last time I'd seen him and it was kind of long too, and I'd never ever seen him with such long hair, and that made me feel a bit weird like that moment when I was ten and he told me he'd been married once before and I felt sick thinking I did not know him at all but then later turned that sickness into a realization that he was his own human being and I really didn't know him at all because I was just a kid and he was an adult and actually he was the one who knew me even though I'd 140

always thought of myself as so secretive. And he seemed thin too, even thinner than before and combined with the relatively wild hair he looked like how I'd imagined he'd look if he ever went a little crazy, and I wondered why I would even think about how he'd look if he went a little crazy. And then I remembered that my mother always cut his hair so there was no way for him to have gotten a trim while he was away, and that made me worry less about him being mad.

And then my mother came out of the house and stood in front of the door, crossed her arms in front of her, and I thought: Oh shit.

So I just stayed in the corner of the shed where I could see them but tried not to move or make any noise or just generally make a nuisance of myself.

It was like the time we'd broken into the apartment of the ex-boyfriend who'd dropped me on my head in order to get back my favorite sweatshirt that I'd left there, though it wasn't technically breaking in because the front door wasn't locked or anything, it was more like walking in uninvited while no one was home. And we found the sweatshirt, in a pile of dirty laundry on the floor even though it had been over a month since I'd been there and that was plenty of time to wash and fold it. But of course as we were walking out the ex-boyfriend who'd dropped me on my head came in, and he was with a girl and we sort of ducked and crouched behind an armchair that smelled really bad, like urine and over cooked broccoli- how had I never noticed that, I thought, knowing I had sat in it on more than one occasion- and they were in the living room too. 141

The ex-boyfriend who'd dropped me on my head and the girl started making out and that went on for some time and we were just kneeling there behind the chair breathing in the urine broccoli air and getting cramps in our legs and listening to their stupid saliva noises, but then they started taking off their clothes and moving towards the couch that was next to the armchair and you must have had enough, worried about what we'd see or hear next, because you jumped out from behind the chair and said: ' Stop! He might give you a concussion.'

And I didn't know what to do, I just stood up next to you, and the ex-boyfriend who'd dropped me on my head and the girl looked very confused, and I saw that her sweater was all pilled along the sides of her breasts and the inside of her arms which made me really sad, like she didn't even know you could use a razor to fix that, why hadn't her mother ever told her?

I looked her straight in the eye and said, 'It's true, he almost gave me a concussion. And he did not make sure that I didn't fall asleep after.'

And she looked at me like I was crazy, but then she looked at him like he was pretty awful too, pulling down on the sweater that he had pushed up.

And then the ex-boyfriend who'd dropped me on my head and was an English major said 'that's a double negative. It's very confusing' in his aggravating, condescending way as though that explained everything and the girl should just ignore me. And I gave him the finger as we ran out and I was so relieved because it really was my favorite sweatshirt, the softest thing I owned, my parents had given it to me for 142

Christmas and their gifts were not extravagant but my mother took notes throughout the year of things I said I liked and they always got me exactly what I wanted.

You were also a good gifter, you didn't even need a list, but I was really awful. I never could understand why people wanted so many things, or successfully gauge what those things might be, and when Christmas or your birthday rolled around I sheepishly handed you the same thing year after year: a book, a hat, a flannel shirt. I kept trying to think of other things for you but you often bought yourself items as soon as you realized you wanted them, or even before that, and I was usually one or many more steps behind, still stuck in the book shop or the milliners or the fake lumberjack store.

And I loved you so much in that moment that we ran out of the ex-boyfriend who'd dropped me on my head' s apartment, even though we were just friends then and I knew you actually loved me way more than I could ever love you. Until of course I realized that wasn't true and that maybe I'd loved you more than you loved me after all, and perhaps all along, in my own selfish way.

My father was smiling, I could see, waving his arms and talking excitedly, I couldn't' quite hear what he was saying, but he appeared to be telling her about his trip, and he held his arms out wide, stretched them as far as they would go, and I imagined that he was telling her about a fish that he had caught or maybe just seen, but it could also 143

have been a story about a piece of driftwood or scrape along the hull of the boat from docking somewhere incorrectly, or maybe even about a sandwich as far as I knew.

My mother was smiling too, which surprised me and encouraged him, and then his arms were making a sort of rolling motion, like a wave, and I thought, he must be talking about a wave, that much was pretty obvious. And she was nodding along, but not saying anything, and then she reached around and took one of the kittens off the screen door where it was hanging on by its little claws at about waist height. She held the kitten and was petting it and that's when my father stopped his story and noticed her hand. And he reached out and grabbed it, and the kitten may have scratched him because he pulled his hand back right away. It looked like he was asking her what happened and she was just shrugging. And then he got down on his knees and pulled her hand to his lips and kissed it, and the hand was far enough away from the cat that it couldn't scratch him again, so he held onto it and it kind of looked like he was crying and I had never in my life seen my father cry and it felt too terribly intimate a thing for me to be witnessing so I pulled myself slowly back into the shed and leaned my head against the wall, remembering too late that I'd just painted there and getting my hair all pink and green and orange and smudging the peonies and the tiger lilies.

It was sad to destroy them because I hadn't painted anything in so very long and even though I'd had my troubles with the flowers it had been satisfying too. It had felt correct in the way that the paintbrush felt in my hand and the paint unfurled itself across the wooden surface ofthe wall so smoothly and thickly. 144 145

I wasn't exactly sure why I had ever stopped painting, but for some reason my paintings started to seem more and more silly and trite until the idea of creating them had become too absurd to bear. It was embarrassing to think I'd imagined them interesting or good, and I wanted to hide under them or bum them whenever someone made a condescending remark about them, one of your friends trying to be nice and feigning interest in stilllifes of potatoes, or images of people lying around looking dead. I didn't know how anyone could do anything without thinking it was stupid, except for people who did serious things like being a doctor or teacher or electrician. How did anyone have the courage to make anything that would be judged subjectively? How did someone make a sandwich and try to sell it? How did they get over the fear of being ridiculed? What if someone said their ingredients were tasteless or someone else said the bread didn't make any sense or someone else said the mustard wasn't creative enough? I just couldn't handle even the possibility of that kind of sandwich critique. It kind of seemed like only a sociopath would be able to do something like that with confidence.

Once I dated an artist, before I'd dated the boyfriend who'd dropped me on my head, but he didn't seem to have the same philosophical problems with painting that I did. He was a painter and older than me but we never really talked about art, and I thought maybe it was because he was an adult in the real world and not a student like me.

But really I think it was because he said nothing I said made any sense, and also it was that I rarely saw him. This was because he had another girlfriend, with whom he spent much more time. He must have liked her more than me. She was also an artist. I assumed 146

she was a better artist than him (and me) but I couldn't be sure because I wasn't allowed to go to any of her shows. She did installations and I would have liked to talk to ask her how she managed it. Once I saw her on the street but I panicked and ducked into a

Portuguese bakery to hide. While I was there I bought some egg tarts and gave them to the artist boyfriend later that day. The next week, I saw his girlfriend again on the same block, which was odd, because she lived across town. She went into the Portuguese bakery in which I had hidden from her. I watched through the window as she ordered a dozen egg tarts. Suddenly everything between the three of us seemed sordid and eggy. It reminded me of the time I had painted eggs for Easter without cooking them first then accidentally knocked one behind my mother' s piano and left it there because I couldn't move the piano and I didn't want to get in trouble. I could almost smell the egg rotting into the carpet as I peered into the bakery. This is what my life has become, I thought, and I never saw the artist again.

I leaned forward and peeked out through the door and I saw my mother pointing to the shed and my father looking right at me and I pulled my head back into the wet paint, and it thumped against the wall, and it wasn't very hard, but it sounded quite loud to me, and that made sense because it had hit the peonies which were very noisy visually.

' She won't speak to me. ' Said my father after we had greeted each other and hugged awkwardly because we weren't really a hugging family and he told me there was 147

paint in my hair and then look around as if he was just noticing the shed my mother had been asking him about for years now existed in real life. His eyes opened wide and asked if I had built it and I nodded but told him that my mother had directed everything and then he said 'is it anchored to the piles?'

And I rolled my eyes as if I had always known how to do that and it was so obvious and told him of course it was.

He nodded. And that's when he asked about her hand, and said he was sorry he hadn't been there, but said again she wasn't speaking to him so maybe she wouldn't have wanted him there, and I furrowed my brow, the shed was built now so that wasn't the problem, why wouldn't she speak to him, but it's true she'd said she wouldn't speak to him and she was a woman of her word, and leaving for over two months probably hadn't helped with that.

'Hmmmm.' I said. 'She doesn't look angry.'

'She's not.' He looked puzzled. 'At least, I don't think she is. I don't' think she's mad at all.'

And then we were quiet for a while and I said. 'I think you have to build her a shed.'

'But it's already built.' He rapped his knuckles against the wall as though to prove to me that it existed.

'That's true.' I conceded. 'But I think it has to come from you.'

'But we don't need another shed.' 148

'You can never have too many sheds can you? Anyway this one doesn't have any shelves and she really wants shelves.'

'You can, you can have too many sheds.' He stroked his stubbledjaw. 'Perhaps you're right though. '

It would have taken my father much less time than it had taken me to build his shed, since he actually knew how to build things, but he decided to cut and mill his own lumber and then I thought, oh no, he's never going to finish it now, because it will become this really long, labor intensive process, and something will happen, the saw mill will stop working, require a new part that can not be easily obtained, or the wood won't be dry enough and everything will warp. It would end up again on the list of unbuilt things with the foundation and the sugar shack. I could already picture it because that was the sort of thing that always happened and because I'd had some trouble with warped wood myself when I tried to make a stretcher with some tamarack my father had sawed.

He'd assured me it was dry but it wasn't dry and it warped so much that after a few weeks the canvas was no longer taut. The wood was beautiful though, dense and a smooth cool brown. I took the painting off the twisted stretcher and rolled it up and put it somewhere, perhaps under my bed, it was probably still there. And sure enough it was right there under the bed next to a shoebox of photos and I took it out and unrolled it, not quite remembering what it had been, but cringing a little in anticipation, waiting to be embarrassed before myself about it. It was a painting of a person, a guy or something 149

with no shirt on lying on a pile of dead fish. And the guy or something was you, I'd painted it over Christmas break that last year of school from a photo I'd taken of you while you were asleep the night of the failed portrait. The backyard furniture fire had indeed spread a little to the porch just as you'd feared and while I called the fire department you took off your shirt and beat the flames that were licking at the railing with it because we didn't have a fire extinguisher or maybe it was expired. And you ruined the shirt and it was your favorite flannel one, and then the fire department put the whole thing out and after that my neighbor stopped lighting things on fire because I was very angry with her and maybe she felt sorry about it. You fell asleep on the floor in the living room and you must have been cold without your shirt so I put a quilt over you but I took the picture first.

And I looked at the painting and realized that I actually really liked it. I didn't want to roll it right back up or burn it or anything. But it was also irrefutable proof that it had been me treating you like a fish all along.

I needn't have worried about the sawmill because everything was going fine, and when my mother saw that the new shed start to take shape she started letting my father come in for meals even though they weren't yet talking, instead of having me bring him peanut butter sandwiches to his work site. And then she told me I could tell him he could sleep on the couch instead of driving back to the boat every night and we would all play 150

crib together after dinner, but I had to explain all the rules of the game to him since she still couldn't speak to him. 151

Some Would Call This Limbo

This time the phone call was made out of paper and it moved through the post office, the mailman's car, the mailbox, rather than across phone lines. Your voice had become so cold and official, it gave me a thousand paper cuts. I was trying to cover them with band aids but the cuts were coming too quick and the band aids weren't sticking properly or maybe they were sticking too well and they were all over my clothes, the kitchen, the paper phone call.

Maybe it was better this way, for your paper voice to cut me, I could always burn it if it became unbearable. I liked the idea of our words being so flammable, not because of the fire but because they could disappear into ash and smoke. I'd always wanted to disappear in some way, to own less, become less. It wouldn't have been fair to start wanting anything now. The only thing I needed was the box of band aids.

Would that be enough?

I didn't have the answer, neither of us did, or maybe we both did, because that was how we were going to exist from now on. So I signed the divorce papers and drove to the post office and mailed them back to your lawyer. 152

Moving Day

It was moving again. Recently it had often been moving day lately. I was getting used to the motion, and I found it pleasant not to stay in the same spot for too long.

It reminded me of college, of the annual moving day on July first, when everyone packed up their belongings and played musical apartments. In hindsight it seemed as though we'd all had to move whether we liked it or not, why else had we done it?

Wouldn't it have been easier just to stay put?

Moving was a kind of essential ritual then, but a pain really if anyone owned too much stuff, which is why it was best to stay light, and not grow too attached to wherever one was living, as leaving it was inevitable. Every Canada Day, when we should have been out celebrating and wearing red and watching parades and fireworks we instead packed up our belongings into the boxes saved from the previous July if we were smart, and moved. It was a nuisance finding a new place in June, when everyone was looking.

There was never anything nice to choose from amongst the array of student housing. But it was best to start the search early and avoid getting stuck too far out of town or in a real dump- the kind of place with no washer/dryer or dishwasher, or one bathroom that had to be shared with several other people, or insufficient insulation for the cold winter.

Another part of the bother was sorting out roommates. Some people liked keep the same flatmates for each stint, just to keep things simple. But sometimes after a year they realized they couldn't live with one or more of the persons with whom they'd spent 153

the previous twelve months, and new arrangements had to be made. Good roommates were like good apartments, and had to be reserved early before someone else got them. A first-rate one would help carry other people's stuff in the next move, wouldn't make too much noise or have a lot of people over. But it was important not to get too boring or nice a one either, someone who couldn't handle the slightest noise and never did anything interesting.

And it was best to think about food in advance. Would everyone make meals together or eat separately, and what if a roommate ate someone else's cereal, or someone else ate theirs, would anyone mind? Did I? Did you?

I stayed with the same roommate through a few moves but then we started to drift away from each other, as though our acquaintanceship was happening in reverse and we were turning into strangers, and then you became my roommate and we became pretty stuck together for awhile so I didn't have to think about it anymore, moving no longer seemed necessary.

But this was a different kind of a moving day, I didn't have to think about roommates because they were my parents, they wouldn't eat my cereal but they didn't mind ifl ate theirs, and the move wasn't mandated, but self-imposed. It wasn't our first one.

The first moving day had been when my father moved back into the house from the boat. It was more convenient for him since he had to be on the farm cutting and 154

milling wood every day, and the drive from the boat took at least thirty minutes, sometimes more depending on the ferry. So indeed it was only the logical thing for him to move back in, even if my mother didn't converse with him. He wasn't technically kicked out after all, and he slept on the sofa in the living room, the old green floral print one with two plain green cushions that my mother had reupholstered when the previous fabric had frayed all the way through to the foam.

My father had a bad back, he'd thrown it out one day feeding the cows and crawled home from the pasture, his hands and knees all muddy and worse. And though the couch had been partially reupholstered, the new fabric hadn't done anything for its hard lumpiness, so the second moving day was more of a swap really, in the interests of his chiropractic health. I went to the couch and my father proceeded to my room. That arrangement worked fine for awhile, but then I noticed that though my mother wasn't technically addressing my father, they seemed to be getting along better and better. In fact the silence seemed to be helping their relationship and they spent many pleasant evenings reading alongside one another. I had been trying to keep up conversation during our nightly games of cribbage but then I noticed they both seemed to prefer when we were all silent. It was as though the silence contained oxygen at its edges, and we all breathed a little easier because of it, so we started holding up our fingers to count our points instead of saying the numbers out loud. Sometimes one of us told a story but we always made it brief because our voices sounded too loud and harsh against the soft rosy stain of quiet. My stories weren't as funny as I thought, I realized as I told them, and I felt 155

absurd for having wanted to divulge them for so long. They were better on the inside where they bloomed into some kind of internal entertainment system that only I could or needed to understand.

The quiet reminded me of childhood before I'd started worrying about what was the right or wrong way to be, before my parents started worrying about what was the right or wrong way for me to be- about my having friends or going to the best university or not doing anything crazy like getting married too young and moving to another country that I didn't like- after I'd retreated or advanced into the world of other humans outside of them, away from them, and they'd tried to bring me back with words, the imagined conversations of a family that wasn't really us, replacing our previously comfortable silences, when we'd just done things and spoken or not spoken, mostly not spoken, letting the words fell away. It was as though we were reverting back to our natural states from a more simple time.

Maybe it was too much talking that had been the problem for my parents, maybe they were naturally quiet and all of those spoken words put a strain on them. Or maybe they just needed to try something new, a different way to live, and see how that worked.

When I was five my parents had packed all of their belongings into their beat up old van and moved here, to this province, this tiny place, this farm, sight unseen. They bought a bunch of cows and decided to be farmers. They spent all of their money on livestock so they had to grow much of their own food, cut their own firewood to keep 156

costs down while they figured out what they were doing. People thought they were kind of weird, maybe hippies or something, nobody wanted to be a farmer anymore, to make of that work for yourself on purpose. They eventually learned the ropes but it never got easy. Some years were good and some years were bad, and they never really knew how it would go. Sometimes the potato bugs were plentiful and sometimes my mother's efforts to eradicate them bore fruit, but eventually they always came back. Sometimes people wanted to buy cows and sometimes no one wanted to buy cows and then my father had to get another job for awhile to make ends meet. Sometimes it rained too much for the hay to dry, but some summers were sunny and beautiful and the bales quickly piled up in the bar like giant golden sugar cubes.

'Why did we move?' I asked them once. 'Did you not like it where you were?'

'We liked it.' My mother said.

'We just wanted to try something else.' My father explained.

'Do you think you'll want to try something else again?' I said.

'Maybe.' My mother looked past me as though trying to see into the future.

'I don't think so,' my father looked at my mother, surprised, like it had never occurred to him, 'but you never know.'

'Well probably not though.' My mother said and they smiled at each other.

'Let's play scrabble.' I whispered one night over the cards and my parents looked at each other and then they both nodded, which was unexpected because my mother had 157

never liked games and I thought maybe crib had been the exception and assumed she'd not be keen on anything else, and we cleared the table and put the board down. I began to suspect that they were sending each other secret messages through the game because they would play words like 'beet' or 'cairn' or 'fluoride' that seemed completely innocuous and then smile knowingly at each other. I looked between them, waiting for someone to explain the significance of beet or cairn or fluoride, but they never did, just kept smiling, and that's when I decided to make the third move out to the shed, because I was starting to feel like maybe I was in the way, a kind of third wheel.

In the end I decided the only solution to the problem of how to paint peonies without having them look too loud was to paint into the garishness, so I ended up covering most of the inside walls of the shed with overly bright pink peonies. It was kind of painful to look at but since I hadn't put a window in to light them, the flowers were tolerable. Of course the lack of window wasn't great for living in a small enclosed space that had been recently painted, so though I enjoyed the privacy, I was having trouble with headaches and nausea and started thinking about my next move almost as soon as I'd settled in. I knew that I couldn't stay at my parents house forever, nor could I live in a shed for very long, but I wasn't either in any rush to move since I wasn't sure where I wanted to go. But then again, motion was inevitable, and I couldn't stay where I was living for very long. I started doing long laps of the woods, the pastures. Sometimes I would just sit by the river with my sketchbook and let my pencils vomit whatever they 158

would across the clear blank paper. These drawings often turned into a person standing alone in a forest, and I knew what I had to do so I found my parents old tent jammed in the deepest recesses of the closet and struck out for the woods.

This fourth move was the biggest adjustment. I decided to settle in the glade where the sugar shack was meant to have been built, now that the ground had dried from the mud of spring. Most days I went back for food or to take a shower or to watch a movie or to play scrabble, but sometimes ifthere weren't too many flies, I just stayed in the glade all day. I brought my paints, found my old easel and set it up next to the tent because the smell of turpentine seemed to repel the clouds of black flies. I had a box of old photos that I'd found in the closet to use for source material. They were mostly of my parents before or just after I was born.

I'd always painted people, but when I was in university I started worrying about making everything somehow innovative and stopped paying attention to what I was painting, thinking only of the idea instead, trying to make it more and more interesting while losing interest in it myself.

The first real paints I'd had were watercolors given to me for Christmas along with brushes and a palette that my father made. I'd been afraid to use the paints in the beginning, to waste them or mar the beautiful thick paper that had come with them, to ruin the brushes by wearing them down. Then I started painting faces, one after the other, any face from a magazine or family photo or a textbook until not a day would go by that I hadn't painted a face and I needed more paints and more paper. But at some point the 159

result had become more important than the process, the images stale, the failed pieces unbearable, and then painting had become a chore, every square inch of canvas a task to be completed as quickly and precisely as possible in service of ideas that made less and less sense to me.

I was painting from of a photo of my mother sitting in a meadow, recreating the past's happiness as best I could, when my father drove up in the tractor. My mother smiled at him through the thick oil paint, and the bits of grass background that were filled in pointed towards a pile of wood in the bucket of the tractor.

I put my brushes down and that was the day we started building the sugar shack.

The second shed had finally been completed, but no one really said anything about it in the end that had happened. My mother just moved all of her gardening tools and supplies into it. I wasn't sure ifthey were talking when they were alone or if we were all being silent forever, but either way, things seemed to be good between them and I was happy.

Relieved that we weren't all genetically predisposed to failed relationships and and a string ofunbuilt things after all. My shed was still empty because I hadn't moved out that long ago, and maybe because there wasn't anything to put in it since they really didn't need two sheds. Maybe my father had been right about that.

Most days after that both of my parents came to the glade and we all worked together in silence. My mother' s hand was well enough to help with some of the lighter jobs and she directed us via a series of gestures that we understood easily with all been 160

building we'd done lately. They always brought me food and I stopped going home very often, there was a brook nearby where I could bathe and there weren't any big pools in it so I didn't worry about beavers taking up residence there. The water was colder than the river, icy, even now in the hottest part of summer, so warm that I slept outside most nights unless it was raining or there were mosquitos. I made myself a kind of nest from a lot of small fir branches and though I often read there by the light of my parents' ancient kerosene lantern, the piney scent of the needles usually put me to sleep. I would read a page, doze, wake up, read another page, fall asleep, wake up, read a page and so on until the naps became more prolonged and I put out the lamp for fear of knocking it over as I slept and starting a forest fire. Sometimes I heard deer or other animals and it always startled me awake no matter how often it happened. I couldn't get used to it and even though I knew it was some harmless creature, I would jolt upright in my branches, my heart pounding, my eyes scanning the dark woods around the glade for something I couldn't see.

I was early in the dozing cycle time when I heard a noise and sat up, so the lantern was still on and I couldn't make out anything beyond the circle of its glow that pooled around me like an iridescent wash. A beam of light filtered in high and sharp through the trees and I thought it must be you, remembering all of the camping trips we'd taken in the first year after we' d moved. 161 162

I'd never gone camping before, not for real, but you seemed to have a passion for it, you must have been a boy scout or something. You had everything: water filters, camping stove, towels that packed down to nothing, the most aerodynamic of backpacks, things for waterproofing other things, matches that would last for thousands of years, a knife with hundreds of functions, emergency things and lights and whistles and sprays, boots that could walk on water if there were any rivers to be forded, dehydrated foods that turned into plated five course meals including wine and a server by just adding hot water.

I thought it was all a bit over the top, said we didn't need to filter the water or have a plated five course meal, we were in the mountains after all and it must be clean because I'd grown up drinking out of the river if I happened to be next to it and thirsty, and you shook your head all disapproval as I stuck my face into a stream while you pumped water through the charcoal, and that night when I lay curled sick on a rock next to the fire, you didn't say you' d told me so even though you could have, maybe because you knew I knew or maybe because you knew that I would say it had nothing to do with the water. And I didn't know which thing you knew was right because even though I often let others make decisions for me, or deferred to their judgement, I had always had this strange urge to thwart and deny you as though I wanted to take something out on you. Punish you for offences unknown. Maybe for being too nice, or maybe for being too normal. 163

The light coming through the trees was getting closer and I could see that it was too high for you, it was slicing over the tops of the little spruce trees that ringed the clearing and the ex high school boyfriend's face appeared beneath it, all ominously lit and harsh looking where the shadows leapt up beneath bones.

'You scared the crap out of me.' I said, hugging myself.

'Sorry' he shrugged.

'What are you doing here? It's kind oflate to help,' I waved in the direction of the beginnings of the sugar shack standing in near pitch black, its wood frame grasping only the gauzy edge of the lamplight.

'I don't know. I was bored.' He paused, looked me straight in the eye, narrowed his as though he'd just had an epiphany. 'I guess I don't have any friends.'

Silence as we absorbed the statement.

'Yeah, I guess I don't have any either.' And as I said it I realized it was true, had always been true. I was forever trying to be alone, but failing, dating or marrying people instead- the exact opposite of being alone- which took up so much time and space that I couldn't fit anyone else into the margins between my relationship and my desire for solitude. It was like you and my roommate, how I'd pushed her away from me or myself away from her because I didn't think there was room for all three of us to exist. Or like your friends who I could never make mine because I kept you between me and them, or like the girlfriend of my artist ex boyfriend with whom I obviously could have been 164

friends, we both loved art and egg tarts after all, if only he hadn't been there, crowding in on everything. Crowding everything out.

I had indeed been doing life wrong. What I should have done was have one or more friends, and only once that person or persons was safely arranged, let life stretch out to make room for a you or a someone like you, and it wouldn't feel like too much because it would be a gradual enlargement of self that could accommodate everyone.

I looked at the ex high school boyfriend. 'But we're kind of friends aren't we?'

The light of his head lamp was pointed on a birch tree, bobbing slowly up and down so that I could see the silver trunk and then the branches then the leaves. 'Yeah, I think so.'

We sat there not moving, or worrying about moving, just being still.

But then we got bored of doing nothing and he didn't have a book and it was too warm to start a fire so one thing led to another.

'Let's not do that again,' I said after, teasing long pine needles out of my hair, 'it will ruin our friendship. '

The ex high school boyfriend agreed but he didn't want to walk back to his car in the dark so we fell asleep in a crumpled pile like two sheets of discarded newspaper.

The following week the air started getting crisp in the evenings and I thought 'oh

I should go back to school' before remembering that I was too old for that and not in any 165

rush to do anything so then I thought about the leaves changing and how beautiful they would be in a few short weeks and then there would be snow and in the spring I could make syrup and sell it somewhere ifl didn't have a job which I wouldn't because there were never any jobs in the winter with all of the tourists gone and I found a toque in a garbage bag of my things that had been moved from my room to my shed, and it seemed like that was a smart thing to do with the shed as well as my things. I put the toque on at night and during the day started painting with watercolors because the paint dried faster and there was something so beautiful about the clean white paper shining through the wash of the paint, the simplicity and spontaneity of the process and the way the paint was not worried or tortured, was only immediately itself. It surprised and pleased me. I slept in the tent and couldn't bring myself to bathe in the brook quite as often as I previously had. Some nights I had a fire too and the ex high school boyfriend dropped by and even though he brought books those evenings and there was the fire to stare into and think complicated thoughts that we may or may not have vocalized about how confusing and terrible but also sometimes nice things frequently were, one thing often led to another and

I kept saying, oh we can't do that again. I hadn't left one husband, one convoluted domestic mess, just to land in another. This wasn't that kind of story. But then I stopped bothering to protest and instead insisted on a separation between home and one thing leading to another, so that on the evenings when I went to his house to play cribbage or watch a movie or have dinner, things were strictly platonic because we were just friends. 166

But when we were in the woods one thing leading to another was fine. A house was off limits but if it was too cold to stay outside a tent was allowed. Of course the sugar shack was by then almost finished, the boiler was inside even, but that couldn't do, because it was made of wood and had a real floor, which more than a roof seemed to have become the defining characteristic of being a home or even just indoors, and was therefore off limits. Those were the rules.

One morning we woke up and there was frost on everything, as though the whole glade, the whole mess of trees, the entire world, had been dipped in sugar, and we could see our breaths in front of us like puffs of smoke that dissolved too quickly, eager to disappear from the suddenly frigid air. The wisps or air were mixing up where they met above us as though disappearing into each other and the ex high school boyfriend said,

'So are you married?'

And I shrugged because I really didn't know. How long did this kind of paperwork take? I had no idea, and it didn't actually matter, it seemed kind of late to be worried, friend or no. It was just a legal tangle that would resolve itself eventually and I felt so sorry for you then, imagining you as a knotted bit of string, and then I imagined myself as the same for you because you were really not tangled at all, you were a very good and tidy length of string, if I really had to think of you as string, and I was the snarled and jumbled one. I was the impossibly snagged bit of twine, like the piles and piles of baling twine in the bam that would never disentangle themselves from each other, but then I thought that maybe I could live like that- like a mess of thread at the 167

bottom of a drawer- if I just stopped worrying about it. If I didn't think about other rope that was neatly coiled or spooled or laid out in a long straight line.

And then the ex high school boyfriend said 'What will you do in the winter?'

'I'll have to move.' I replied. Because it was inevitable and very obvious that I couldn't live in a tent year round. But less obvious where I would go, and to what degree it would be categorized as indoors.

We would both have to not fret about that. 168

To the Sea In Search OfHome

So home was the port now. The ship. My sea, and the sail under which I once collapsed in grief. Home was the port, tossed on the waves of the hills that were homes unto themselves though tarnished from their use as though come from or through the war.

Home was home from the battle.

My father was right. He'd gone to his sea, which happened to be the sea, to fix himself, and it had worked.

But what was my sea? Was it also the sea? Was it the tornado that spanned the width of a continent whose eye pointed to and away from us, one end on you and one on me? Or was it this quilted countryside whose soft grey green brown breast blunted the sharp thing, the unhappiness, pointed at my breast?

Maybe my sea was away from whomever had prepared the shot: the version of me that was destroying itself by trying to be something it was not- normal, not confused, satisfied with its lot.

I had run away from here, I had run to you, I had run away from you, I had run back, I had run away from one home, I had run to this one. And always something was missing, something to make me leave, but something must have existed too, to make me stay, to keep returning, moving back and forth between the things that were familiar, caught in an endless loop to which there was no end as long as I kept not knowing how to live. 169

I claimed to want to be alone yet I always ran to people. I never tried to be alone.

I had wanted to be an artist but then I stopped making any art. It didn't make any sense.

My logic was flawed.

' What tragedy have you lived' you asked me once in anger, 'to be so tragic?'

But there was no tragedy. Did I need one to be confused and not perfectly happy?

Did I have to either be the victim of tragedy or be content? Were those the only two options for how life worked, a simple formula for happiness that I missed? If only someone had told me sooner, perhaps I would be with you now, holding our child, permanently smiling, living like a puppy whose only concern was which treat it should eat first.

But no one told me, so I was doomed to move under the cloud of my untragic but somehow incorrect existence, going from one home to another, back and forth forever, hoping each time that home would suddenly work, that maybe it would stick.

Maybe it didn't matter, maybe the concept of home, of us, didn't translate into reality the way I thought it would. And maybe it was ok for us not to function in real life, even if the idea had been good, and for me to be back here, just as unsure about life as I had been a decade ago. Neither of us were monsters in the end. We just hadn't worked.

There was no reason to torture ourselves about it anymore.

Maybe motion was my home, my sea, the movement to and away from something that kept me going like a self-winding watch. The resulting motion sickness had disappeared at some point without my noticing so that I could just keep going back and 170

forth, pitching forward then falling back, going through a series of false starts or tracing circular paths around places or things or people until my steps had smoothed the ground on which I walked or ran to a smooth polish. Or maybe I was just standing in the ocean and getting battered by the waves so that it felt like I was fighting against something, making some kind of progress, and when the waves died down it was a sort of accomplishment, even though I hadn't moved.

I could live in this wood, I could float down the river, I could find another shed in which to sleep, I could run away again to anywhere, I could start a maple syrup stand, I could do some more sewing, I could finally stop counting eggs because there were none in the woods and maybe I'd never needed them anyway. I could do any of those things for a while then change my mind and do something else, go somewhere else. I could have a friend but not marry them, I could paint but not have it be my whole life, I could bake a cake for myself and eat it, I could be an animal like every other animal here, I could hide,

I could be wounded, or I could do nothing. I didn't matter. I could stop writing to you, talking to you, thinking to you as though you were my home. You were not. You were my ex-husband or almost and from now on I did not need the filter of his imagined audience sifting through my every thought and deed and word. My story did not need to be told to him or anyone, I could just tell it to myself over my internal entertainment system and it could be not funny or interesting to anyone but me.

The wind was blowing in the trees and it was lulling me to sleep and I felt so calm not caring that I didn't worry about anything else in that moment, knowing the feeling 171

wouldn't last, but still not minding for once, just being quiet in my brain, letting it listen to the branches too, letting it feel at home in the sound as though it were listening to the wind or the sea or the motion between two places or thoughts or a bird winging away from the brush or a deer whispering past or a river skipping smoothly over all of the little stones in its usual path as though they were nothing or nothing over which to get worked up about anyway.