Table of Contents

Introduction Rebecca Lee

Woman In a Drawer Rachel Ball

East One Jill Talbot

Right, Right, Right Liz Windhorst Harmer

Copyright

2 Little Bird Stories Volume IV Selected by Rebecca Lee

If, as Nabokov said, literature is a river alongside our lives, following, interpreting, flashing, even threatening it at times, then I have lived for a few weeks very happily on the shoreline, reading some of the most lively, interesting, warm-hearted, intelligent prose possible.

From a diversity of prompts, some beguilingly simple and some complicated, all generative: write a recipe, write 100 sentences that do not connect, write about rage, close your eyes and write, write about a flower, a heartache, a song, write in the voice of someone you dislike, write a list of things that give off light… come these voices, a reminder for me that there is a self that exists on the page that isn't present anywhere else in the writer or reader's life.

One of the guiding principles for me as a reader (an unconscious principle, I believe, when I'm reading for pleasure, and a more conscious one when reading these works) is to note what this prose is doing that can't be done in any other art form. There are so many things that the movies can do better, and dance, and painting (I always have other art form envy when I'm writing: part of me wants to break loose into song, or dance, rather than that quieter, more stubborn negotiation with words). But there is something in a written sentence that can sustain a true reader longer— some road into the inner life, or an explanation of the contours of a relationship, a careful tracking of time, a grasp of feeling, a certain type of wordy humour that is getting at the strangeness of having an experience and thinking about it at the same time. These are the deep pleasures of literature; reading these entries in abundance has brought them all flooding back into my life.

It was impossible to compare them, of course, and I kept coming up against my own limitations as a reader. For instance, I have a love of sadness in literature and though there is plenty of literature that speaks to this, it seems unfair to ignore that warmer, cheerier, happier, funnier side of the road. So one follows one's taste, but also judges it as well, while reading. But I would like to thank each writer, and join in solidarity with them, as we all keep, word by word, finding our way.

Some notes on the three winning stories:

First Prize

Woman In a Drawer The sentences in this story are so mature, they have beginnings and middles and endings themselves. But they are inconspicuous as well, and straight-forward. The thinking is warm and thoughtful and conversational. It's a voice you could read forever; you'd follow every turn of phrase. You also, reading it, feel in the hands of a genuine storyteller; she is walking and thinking and taking you somewhere important. Trust that

3 something is afoot, something ahead. I loved every moment.

Runners up

East One This story is about difficulty, and the most difficult of difficulties, a mind on the outs with itself. And yet as it unflinchingly goes into this territory, the language is so buoyant and relentlessly powerful that the story also, at the same time, is a bit of a joyride. It's fun, even as it takes you inside sorrow. What could be better than that? It heals and makes jokes and the people in it become real the moment they step onstage and materialize.

Right, Right, Right "A person married to a stone became a river." This is the sort of gem that lies strewn throughout this story, which is about marriage, and time, and disillusionment. It's funny, and deep, and kind. And the characters are real. I don't mean they must have counter- parts in real life, just that they themselves have presence and weight and have ineluctable things to say to any reader.

- Rebecca Lee

4

Write a scene in which a character teaches someone how to do something.

5 Woman In a Drawer Rachel Ball

When I arrived, the girls were somewhere deep in the house, so Mrs. Fielding called them out to meet me. Harriet and Gracie looked like miniature versions of their mother, but with delicate, sharply defined chins, and roving, bright eyes. They stared at me for a while without saying anything, until Mrs. Fielding asked where their manners were, and would they please show me around, and then she herself disappeared into another room. The girls—Gracie, the younger one, taking me by the hand—began the tour. Their home was larger than ours, but its layout was oddly linear: there seemed to be no central heart of the home, only rooms that led into other rooms, or a hallway that criss-crossed with another hallway. Pop music pulsed in the distance. Gracie pointed out her sister’s bedroom, then her own, then a little study in which “daddy doesn’t like to be bothered,” and another room with toys spread over the carpet and a big poster of a blue solar system on the wall. They showed me the kitchen, then the half bath intended for guests, both startlingly white and sweetly aromatic. When they finished—struck by listlessness, a large portion of the house still left a mystery—they asked why my hair looked the way it did. “It’s called a pixie cut,” I said, and then, a little desperately, “It’s in style.” What I didn’t mention was that my haircut was the solution to a bob I’d tried giving myself using the tri-fold mirror at home. Gracie asked, “Can you cut mine like that, too?” and smiled for the first time. She had long, sun-lightened hair, the sort I envied. I was tempted to say yes. I suggested we play a game instead. “She only knows how to play hide-and-seek,” said Harriet. “So?” asked Gracie. “I can teach you a new game,” I offered. “No,” said Gracie. “I don’t like any other games.”

My mother knew Mrs. Fielding from her volunteer work at the hospital. Both of them had been assigned to distribute ice and blankets and library books to the patients—the sort of things that didn’t require much on the hospital’s part but translated to appreciable comforts for the patients. One slow afternoon, they got to talking in the stock room, and it didn’t take very long after that for my mother to start inserting Mrs. Fielding’s name (Susan, or sometimes Sue, when she was in a chirpy mood) into conversations as if my father and I knew her, too. But she did not invite the Fieldings over to our home, nor were we invited to theirs. It was not until much later, after I had navigated the politics of friendships myself, that I understood why: my mother and Mrs. Fielding wanted to keep their friendship to themselves. To introduce husbands and children into the mix would open it up too much, would dilute their intimacy; even one dinner together, out of politeness, would generate the inevitable pressure to include the rest of us from then on. Maybe, then, it was just a slip of the tongue when my babysitting services were offered. Or it may have been that their friendship was beginning to feel less precious—they did drift apart, eventually. Whatever the case, on that Friday evening, I found myself driving across town into an unfamiliar neighborhood, passing the hospital, looking up at the looming silver windows as I slowed at a stoplight. A noiseless ambulance pulled into the intersection. Further on, bare elms rose on either side of the street, the dormant branches brushing the power lines. “Goodness,” Mrs. Fielding had said when I first arrived. “You look just like your mother.” She laughed. Ushering me in, she clarified that she meant that in the best way possible.

The girls and I returned to the front hallway, where Mrs. Fielding was fastening a watch around her wrist. She had changed into a navy dress and a dark cardigan and her lips were berry red. “Give me a kiss, sweethearts,” she said to her daughters, and then to me she said, “We’ll be back by ten, Laurel,” and opened the front door. Mr. Fielding had already gone out to warm up

6 the car. I’d seen a note left on the kitchen countertop with emergency contacts and a p.s. the girls go to bed at eight—don’t let them convince you otherwise! and I wanted to acknowledge that I’d read it, that they could trust me. But she was already out the door and rushing to the car. They were off. “Hide-and-seek,” Gracie reminded me. “I don’t know how to play that,” I said, because I didn’t particularly want to. “You don’t?” she said, dismayed. Gracie looked at her sister in disbelief, then back to me. “Here,” she said. “I’ll show you. It’s easy.” “I’m going to my room,” said Harriet. “I want to finish reading my book.” I said that was fine. I turned back to Gracie and her pleading expression. “Alright,” I said. “Show me.” She rapidly explained the rules: the counting aloud, the hiding, the way to surrender if it came to that. I said I would hide first. She covered her eyes, and as she counted down, I sunk into the nearest chair and picked up a magazine off the side table, pretending to read it. When she uncovered her face, she looked over at me and moaned in protest. “You can’t hide there,” she said. “Why not?” I asked, with as confused an expression as I could muster. “You’re not hiding is why not. You don’t get it.” “Okay,” I said, laughing. “Okay, okay. I’ll do it right.” She huffed, turned and covered her eyes, and started to count again. Then she interrupted herself to say, “I’m going to count from thirty this time. I better not see you when I’m done.” I crept down the hallway and passed Harriet’s room, where she lay on her stomach on her bed, reading a book. When she glanced up, I put a finger to my lips and she went back to her book without a reaction. There was Gracie’s room next, and then their father’s study; I stepped in, and considered hiding in the closet, but when I slid the door open it was completely filled with boxes. I turned; across the room stood his desk. I curled up underneath it and pulled the chair back in after me. Down the hall, Gracie yelled, “Here I come!” But her footsteps went in the opposite direction. After ten or fifteen minutes, there was still no sign of her. The leg I’d awkwardly folded under myself was starting to cramp, and I tried to change positions, but there was hardly any room to do so. In the process, one of my hands ran against the underside of the desk, over the smooth wood grain, and then hit a notch in the surface. I remembered there was a miniature flashlight attached to the car keys in my pocket. With some more wriggling around, I worked them out and clicked the light on. The notch, centered in a rectangular cut-out in the wood, appeared to be the handle of a hidden compartment. It wouldn’t budge until, by accident, I pressed up before pulling back, and then it slid open with ease. Inside the drawer was a nondescript envelope, and inside that were photographs of a woman— photos of her plump stockinged legs, a blurry close-up of her eager smile, her rosy skin sheathed in lace, and one photo of her standing at a window, not facing the camera, her hair lying over her bare shoulders in long, dark curls. I shoved it all back and turned the flashlight off. Out in the hallway, Gracie’s footsteps were approaching. She came into the room and pulled back the chair, crying out triumphantly, having finally found me, smushed, in the last place she expected to.

Many years later, I ran into Gracie when coming home for my mother’s birthday, having driven up the winding highway early in the morning as fog lifted off the foothills. A week before, I’d called in an order for a coconut cream cake from Fran’s, the bakery in town my mother had always bought our desserts from but rarely patronized anymore on doctor’s orders. The bakery was in a pocket of businesses on the edge of town—along with a supermarket, a hair salon, a Cuppa Café—and it was in the parking lot that I spotted my old hide-and-seek companion getting out of her car two spots down from mine. “Gracie?” I said.

7 She looked up, but her face was blank. “Yes?” she said. “Do I know you?” Even when I told her my name, it didn’t click—it wasn’t until I mentioned the babysitting, somewhat sheepishly, that she remembered. I wouldn’t have recognized her, either, if it hadn’t been for the newspaper clipping my mother had mailed me the year before; by chance, Gracie had been front and center in a candid graduation photo under the headline, Optimistic About the Future . That would’ve made her eighteen or nineteen when I saw her, but she looked like she was in her twenties; her hair was pulled back into a bun and she wore a white blouse buttoned up to her neck. Later, I realized, those were probably just her work clothes. “Right. Hi, Laurel,” she said. “How are you?” I said I was well. That I was just in town for the day. When I asked how her family was, her expression tightened. “Not the best, actually,” she said. “My mother passed away last week.” She went on to tell me about her mother’s heart condition—how she’d had surgery, but in the end, it’d been too hard on her. It all happened very fast, she said. It was a shock that still hadn’t fully sunken in. “Oh, Gracie,” I said. “Our mothers were friends, weren’t they?” she said. “Oh,” I said. “Yes, they were close, for a while.” Gracie paused a moment. A car coming down the row slowed, seeing the empty spot between our cars. I was about to step out of the way, but Gracie did not, and the car went on. “They were close,” she repeated. “Could I get her phone number from you? I’d like to ask her something. If you wouldn’t mind writing it down.” “Of course,” I said. I rifled through the mess in my passenger seat to find a pen and paper. Eventually I tore off the corner of a piece of junk mail and wrote down the number, seven digits I hadn't given out for ages.

My mother already knew about Mrs. Fielding, of course. Though they had lost touch, she’d still heard, thanks to town gossip, about Mrs. Fielding’s heart condition, and she’d gone to the funeral, expressing condolences to Gracie and Harriet and their father. I told her about running into Gracie. “She didn’t say anything about seeing you,” I said. “Well, you know how it is,” my mother said. “There were so many people there. Everybody cared about Susan. I’d be lucky if I had a quarter as many at my funeral!” It startled me, her acknowledging her own inevitable course. I cleared away our dinner plates and told her to cover her eyes for a moment, then I pulled out the cake I’d hidden away in the refrigerator, slid it out of its box, and jabbed a handful of candles into the thick frosting. “Alright,” I said, “You can look now.” I carried the lit cake over to the dining table, humming the song to her, watching her face brighten with pleasure.

“What did Gracie want?” I asked her, a few days later, reminded by the missing corner on the piece of mail. “It was very strange, actually,” my mother said. “She said a letter arrived a few days before, from a man who claimed to be Susan's brother. He wasn’t asking for money or anything like that. He just wanted to come see them. But Gracie and Harriet had never heard of any brother of hers. Anyway, Gracie wanted to know if her mother had ever hinted at anything. The whole thing’s absurd, if you ask me. ” “Oh,” I said. “Well, did she?” “Laurel ,” my mother said, taken aback. “What? I’m just asking.” Suddenly she was in a rush to get off the phone. She said she had wet clothes to move into the dryer, though I knew she was making that up; she never did laundry in the middle of the week. A minute later, the phone rang again. “She didn’t have any long lost brother,” my mother said, her voice precise and solemn. “And she wasn’t the type of person to lie about it, if she did.”

8

Still, even now, I do not think it was such an unreasonable question. There were always things people kept hidden from each other—if Mr. Fielding kept mementos of a woman tucked away in a hidden drawer, why was it so unbelievable that Mrs. Fielding might have a brother she’d disowned? For God’s sake, I had my own secrets; I would not put anything past anyone. That day, hiding under the desk, I worried what would happen if Gracie made the same discovery. And I worried, too, that Mr. Fielding would be able to tell I’d stuck my nose where it didn’t belong, that he’d somehow expose me for it; that because of me, everything would come unraveled. All that happened, though, was that Gracie found me under her father’s desk, and I exaggerated my surprise at being discovered, and raced her to the kitchen where I boiled pasta for her and her sister. They went to bed at their bedtime; the Fieldings came home at ten; I drove home in the dark and handed the car keys back over to my mother. I babysat the Fielding girls twice after that, but that was all—Harriet had practically been old enough to look after her sister that first time I had showed up, and she finally managed to convince their mother that they didn’t need some strange girl coming into their house. After the trip home for my mother’s birthday, I found Mrs. Fielding’s obituary in the online edition of the Herald. Survived by her husband and two daughters, it read, and they requested that donations be made to the hospital she’d volunteered at in lieu of flowers. There was a small black and white photograph of Mrs. Fielding that must have been taken sometime in the years I had briefly known her. She wore the cardigan I remembered, and her smile was tender, and kind, and well-practiced.

9

Describe what it feels like to hold your breath for too long. Don't use clichés — describe it like you've never heard before.

10 East One Jill Talbot

“One flew east, one flew west, One flew over the cuckoo’s nest” — Children’s Folk Rhyme

“How on earth are you ever going to explain in terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological phenomenon as first love?" — Einstein

Shelly

Somehow everything is clearer when you’re not really alive. I hold my breath hard and fast like holding onto an ice cube. The voices stop this way. The air gets fuzzy, like watching an electric heater smoke a turkey. The hospital appears more like a video game, a first person shooter, something like half-life. Everything is soft baby blue concrete. I wonder if I could make myself pass out.

We used to play this game as kids. I’ve heard a few died that way. I never had the guts to strangle someone else but would gladly volunteer to be the victim. There was something intimate about the encounter, sitting on the floor with my back against the wall, a friend’s hands firmly around my neck, looking in each other’s eyes as if knowing we were going on a trip together from which we would not come back the same.

Of course I did come back and everything was more or less the same, but that didn’t take away the intimacy of the moment—the hands—the wall—the eyes—the knowing—and the flash of lightness.

But my instincts don’t let me pass out on my own. I can get a little lightness—enough for brief silence—and the part that insists I live kicks in, as if to wake to an electric shock.

I’m not sure which side I’d rather be on.

Erin

There is a new girl. I think she has information that will help me. I think she knows something. I can’t tell you what I know—it’s too risky, I’ve told them too much already. This isn’t my first hospitalization but it’s my first at Vancouver General. I don’t recommend it, as far as psych wards go.

When I told the new girl about my conversations with God she asked me if I was in contact with the devil, said she could use some help and God wasn’t answering. I told her about the time God failed me on a math test and she laughed. We shared our little hospital dishes, which remind me of airplane food. They don’t even give out salt anymore; this change was announced in little papers with our meals.

11

Shelly saves these.

Shelly

This boy keeps following me. I call him my psych ward stalker. He’s cute in a weird ‘only in rehab’ sort of way. I let him follow me because he’s delusional and scared, but I don’t let him kiss me.

He wears the hospital pajamas well. I like the pajamas, in a way; it starts to feel like its own world, a world away from all of the crap that got me here. At one point I figured the only things left to do were to go to jail or to sell myself to reality TV. Here everything is predictable. Safe. Sanitized. Everything is just. Secluded.

Erin

I hate this place.

You must be dying to know how I ended up here. I would like to quote Einstein, “Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a persistent one.”

That is all you will get on the matter for now.

Shelly

Hemingway said to write drunk and edit sober. Artists go so far to promote insanity and destruction. Which is why I love this world—so far from self-destruction we can’t even change the temperature of the shower. Everything is lukewarm.

Something on the wall says, “You are not a writer. You are not an artist. You are not even crazy. You are a tourist with a psych ward stalker. You are a fly.”

I resist the desire to argue that surely talking to the wall IS crazy. And then I go back to not breathing. There is a sort of hum to it.

Erin

This all started six months back. The teacher called the school counselor who called my parents who called a psychiatrist. We played tic-tac-toe and he had me feed his dog, Muffy, one of those rat-dogs that belong in purses or dumpsters. Muffy and the child psychiatrist and the ‘Psychosis Sucks!’ initiative. I wonder how many tries it took them to get a kid-friendly name. It’s all over busses and on brochures in every youth place— “Psychosis Sucks!”

“It’s ok if you’re nuts, we are too!”

Give me a break.

12 Shelly says it should be called “Sex, drugs and plastic cutlery.”

I saw her sleeping and it was as if God had given me the answer.

Shelly

When they brought me in and put me in restraints—spread eagle—I told the nurse that I have PTSD—that she HAD to let me out. She took blood, pretended to acknowledge my complaints and left.

More tests. Then they put me in PAU—Psychiatric Assessment Unit. It is a small ward with the beds on the outside and in the center the nurse’s station, plastic chairs and a small TV area. Everything is plastic. The pictures on the wall are of far away places like Australia and Paris; they look like they were taken from a travel brochure. My room does have a nice view of the mountains but I tend to keep the curtains closed because we are street level, and I don’t want to have any peeping toms checking out the nutters. My roommate occasionally yells, “Fuck off!” to no one, it seems.

The curtains seem to fit Mrs. Dalloway, especially with the tulips sent by the Mood Disorders Association and I wonder, what would have happened had Mrs. Dalloway not bought the flowers herself?

No one sends a psych patient flowers.

Erin

I don’t know what I am doing here. I am not defiant—I take my meds—but then being defiant doesn’t go anywhere. The nurses will say “We have other ways of giving this to you,” meaning they can get security guards to hold you down and stick a needle in your ass. Then they’ll leave you in the quiet room until you give up being defiant, either via sedation or will.

I don’t see what sets me apart from normal people, other than knowledge. I have a unique knowledge on the current situation. When I ask my psychiatrist what reality is, he sort of rolls his eyes at me, “Not this again, Erin.”

But if my disease is a break from reality, don’t I deserve to know what reality is? At least, in their image.

Shelly

Today I got up for a smoke, remembered that I can’t smoke, and then went back to bed. They don’t let you smoke in the psych ward anymore, it is not legal to smoke on hospital grounds, even outside, not that we are allowed outside—obviously. Erin watches me and copies me with his nicotine inhaler. I’m not even sure he smokes.

The most conversation we’ve had has been—

13 “Why do you follow me?” “There is nothing else to do.” “You could follow someone else.” “That’s true.”

I tried to get rid of him today and he returned five minutes later with a muffin as a gift. I explained to him that my side of the ward also gets muffins. He nodded and I pretended that he wasn’t there. His muffin trick worked.

Erin

I can’t figure this place out. It looks like a baby prison. Such an odd assortment of people. I don’t know who I can trust. I don’t know if God can hear me. I’ve been here a week and they wont give me my clothes. No one gets their clothes in PAU. There is nothing to do. The meds make me less than myself. I wrote a letter to Einstein, I thought that he might have some useful advice. There are clues, I just can’t figure out which ones to trust. God, why are you doing this? I’m sorry I failed your test.

Shelly

There is a kid here who broke both legs—in hospital—tried to jump, thought he could fly, which is why he’s back in PAU, possibly for good. Also fancies himself a prophet and wheels around reading ‘riddles’ such as, “Why is mother Teresa so great? She is always kind.”

I always had this illusion of madness as something magnificent—as being part of the intellectual and artistic superior—Van Gogh, Einstein, Wittgenstein, Woolf, Plath—one does not need to go far to find tales of madness and genius.

Two days in here will prove otherwise. The truth is we are more or less the same as everyone else. With a few exceptions, we think the same dull thoughts, do the same dull things and lead the same dull lives. We are not all Rainmen. Maybe we are just chemically imbalanced. How boring.

And maybe certain situations make everyone a little crazy but if it happens to be common enough, no one will replace your clothes with pajamas. Religion, love and politics—to name a few—as well as the absence of such. We’ve just been magnified. The hospital‘s job is to shrink us back to size.

Sometimes I wish someone would just tell me that it’ll all be okay, but if they did, I would probably ask them who their damn source is. Erin would say that his source is God or Einstein and who can argue with that?

14 Erin

They have moved us out of PAU. Either they needed the beds or they wanted to separate us or who knows what game they’re playing here? Shelly is in West One and I am in East One, bigger wards, and some people get to have clothing privileges and go on smoke breaks. It is a step up. West One and East One share a games room and front foyer. We can also go upstairs for Creative Workshop a few times a week. There is space and many patients are out on passes, it isn’t like watching a sedated parade of patients wearing pajamas pace the small fish tank that was PAU. But Shelly is farther away and sometimes has other things to do. I am not sure what.

Shelly

We had to come through an underground tunnel to get here. I mean, separately. They sent nurse’s aides. Hospital policy is that we travel in wheelchairs but I had too many belongings so we pushed my belongings in the wheelchair, like the homeless woman downtown who carries her stuff in a shopping cart with a duck she will let you pet for $1.

Vancouver is terminal city; it is where everyone goes to escape. It is the mildest climate in Canada; it is where one goes to be homeless or mad, last stop before the Pacific swallows you whole. It is where all of the psych wards are full. It is where you can pet a duck for a buck. It is beautiful. It has the poorest postal code in Canada and the most expensive real estate in the world. It is where one can be lost as a living. It is where movies are filmed and crack and heroin overdoses fill the street.

Erin’s parents keep visiting. They keep fighting. They want to fix him. We’re so broken I’m afraid we’re stuck that way; it’s the only way we know how to be. I want to fix his belief that he needs fixing. I want all of this to be a play—someone else’s play—someone else’s memoir. I want to stay here forever. I want to run.

I want it all to be fixed.

Erin

Einstein said, “A question that sometimes drives me hazy; am I or the others crazy?”

I think I’m going to escape. This place is a prison where the guards tuck you in at night. The addicts run around like little raccoons with beady eyes. I’ve never trusted raccoons, not a trustworthy animal. In Creative Workshop people make beaded bracelets and mandalas, keeping positive… I go just because Shelly goes.

I thought that they were going to let me leave but apparently not. I am not certified but if I choose to leave I will be certified, so, basically, I’m certified with the illusion of free will. Shelly said this could be good training to be a youth worker but I still haven’t finished high school.

I no longer have access to God.

15 Shelly

I made a cartoon of a rock and hard place in Creative Workshop that said, “People keep coming between us.”

I overheard some meth addicts talk about whether or not they would fuck the new girl— me. I’m grateful that Erin isn’t like that. Though I’m pretty sure he would sleep with me if he could, still, that isn’t the point…

Erin thinks he has access to God. He thinks there’s a purpose to all of this. I used to pray when I was a little kid. I would apologize for not really believing in Him but would then tell Him everything that made me feel empty and sad and scared and ask Him to take it from me.

Soon I was too angry for this activity. That and I found dope, a God I could rely on.

I’m afraid I love Erin’s madness. I want to curl up with it. The day I met him he stared at me from outside my door. I wanted to be more creeped out than I was. There was something alluring about his glare. He was like a puppy that was so adorable you let it piss all over you. And he was safe. So I let him follow me. When he spoke I wanted more. I wanted to be in his world where he was fighting a noble fight. Where God failed him on a math test and he laughed. Where he saw messages in fluorescent lights. I wanted the world to mean something.

Or maybe I just wanted to be the sane one.

Emergency

“Is this Shelly?” “Yes.” “Hi, it’s VGH calling, we need your help with something. Erin is in emerg; he has overdosed on something and says he won’t tell us what unless he gets to talk to you. Can you?” “Ok.” “Ok, here he is.” “Hey Shell, it’s Erin.” “Erin, what the fuck did you do?” “Shell—I did it, I found him.” “Huh?” “We can go on our trip now.”

Two weeks prior

“What are you going to do after this?” “No clue. You?” “Same.” “We are such a goddamn cliché; sometimes I even forget how to breathe.” “We should take a trip. Get away from here. From everything.”

16 “Only if you stop talking to God.” “Oh, right, devil girl!” “Not what I meant. I’m serious, Er, you scare me.” “I know but I love you.” “That’s what scares me.”

17

Write about a character who has trouble distinguishing his/her left from the right.

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Right, Right, Right Liz Windhorst Harmer

After everything that happened with the dog, Nicole wanted to run as fast and as far away as she could. Matthew suggested the cottage, so they packed everything up, tied on the bikes, and now she sat in the passenger seat tearing at her cuticles with her teeth. The only thing they couldn’t talk about was Bubba, his face, his innocent dog-face cocked at her through the cage. “Did you pack the toothpaste?” “Did you bring any snacks?” “Weather looks decent.” It didn’t really matter who said what. They were filling the air. They’d been married three years, and still Matthew couldn’t tell his left hand from his right. Like many of his oddities, this was the sort of thing that had once been endearing and might end up their undoing. He left spoons lying around, for instance. He’d clean up the yogurt cup or the cereal bowl and leave the spoon sitting on the table to congeal with the remaining dairy goo. He had better hygiene than most men she knew, however: never left blue toothpaste droppings in the sink, never left the black fibrous evidence of his shaving routine on the ceramic. The spoons bothered her, though. Her friends told her to tell him, but what she did was attempt to circle around the issue by suggesting that they give up dairy, and then by leaving the spoons around so that he’d notice them himself, and then just giving up entirely. “Marriage is about compromise,” she told her friends. “You can’t expect your spouse to do everything your way.” And, still, whenever he was following driving directions he had to pull out his index finger and thumb to make an L or a J. “L means left,” he told her, exactly like one of her kindergartners. She had to hold it all in all day, the desire to snap at five-year ‐olds: “Oh, you can’t pull your own fucking pants down?” or “Can’t you stop picking your nose for five fucking seconds?” The constant work all winter of getting children in and out of snow pants, and their wet ‐dog, salt ‐soaked smell. Moms in line with their kids were always asking her how she did it. How she could stand it. Sometimes she felt that if the moms could just shut up for one second she might not lose it after all. Of course she never, never snapped. This was partly thanks to Matthew, who took whatever badness was inside her and rolled it into a hard little ball which he then flicked from his palm with his finger. “I should change careers.” “What would you do?” Matthew was a road worker: sunshine, money, and silence if you wanted it. Nicole thought that there must be something therapeutic in how you could manipulate asphalt, to flatten it and shape it and then move on. Like Play-Doh. In her life, now, there were too many innocent faces. Bubba the mastiff with his flopped ears, his unknowing expression. The children, too, all big eyes and lisps and skinned knees and confusion. Matthew. “I have no idea. How hard is it to become a sculptor? Or an arborist?” “You want to cut down trees? You’re scared of chainsaws.”

19 She knew he meant it affectionately, but she bit her lip, angry. She couldn’t think of a single good thing about herself. “Nic?” “Can you tell me something?” “What?” “Just anything. Tell me anything.” So he told her about these two guys on his crew yesterday. Miguel the passionate Christian and Rod the passionate atheist. Rod was claiming that the Bible was just words, and Miguel was arguing that there was a difference between any book that anybody could just write and one that’s existed for thousands of years. Their voices got loud and were amplified by the open back of the truck that was bent backwards toward them. Finally Rod shut up when he had to get into the roller, but he was even rolling angrily. Thing was that Miguel was so much more likable that you almost wanted to be a Christian, just because being an atheist would put you on the same side as Rod, the goateed asshole. She laughed. “I thought all you guys talked about was sex.” “You know it’s not like that.” The car rattled over bumps and into potholes, and this seemed in some grave way to punctuate Matthew’s story. Their previous drives to this cottage, owned by his parents, were distant memories; their previous appearances along this route like long-faded lines of light drawn by sparklers. What had they talked about then? About marriage, about theirs and everybody else’s. About luck and its many mysteries. They talked woefully about the climate, windows down to let in summer air, which surely had never been this muggy. Would their children know winter? Would they have children? As the car spewed black fumes, forever tunneling the pollution away from them. Marriage now seemed a matter of hitching one’s life to someone else’s and hoping that they were going in the right direction. Once, on their honeymoon and out of cell phone range, they’d stopped at a diner to ask for directions. Nicole realized, as the waitress said “the first left” and “right at the intersection, there”, that Matthew had no mental picture as correspondence. “How can you not know this?” she said, now, as they sat at that same diner eating breakfast for dinner. Matthew looked at her from beneath his heavy brow. “I don’t need it. Like I don’t need long division. I’ve never needed it.” “Of course you need it! All day long you are either going one way or another.” “But why do I need to know the name for the way I’m going?” “But how can you not know?” “You’re fixated.” There was no denying that. “You used to think my poor sense of direction was cute.”

I used to think it was cute? She stared at her plate, at the bacon plasticizing in its cooling fat, at the neat blonde triangles of toast, and, with her right hand, picked up a spoon to stir her coffee. He then picked up his spoon with his left, creating a mirror image. “What hand is holding the spoon?” she said. All she needed now was flashcards. “I’m left ‐handed,” he said. “If you think about it, that’s probably why. In French left means gauche which means awkward and right means droit like as in adroit.” His French pronunciations were utterly Anglicized, but he didn’t often display such

20 impressive linguistic skills, and she felt her gone‐tight insides momentarily ooze like the half-done yolk of her egg. “A left ‐handed person could be easily confused.” He took a sip of his coffee with his right hand, leaving beige droplets on his trimmed “summer” beard. She wished he would wipe them away. “The left ‐handed person is confused because it is their right—a droit—which is the awkward one?” “Precisely.” She eased the side of her fork into the white flesh of her egg, slicing it into a dainty portion. The more boorishly he behaved, the more dainty she would be, as though it were a matter of relative righteousness. His plate was empty of all but a dab of ketchup and an empty jam cup, and he licked his knife. She could feel his legs moving under the table. Agitation. She ate as slowly as she could, daring him to tell her to hurry up. Say it, she willed. But he only watched her and bounced his knee. After they arrived, lulled into false calm by the familiar pine ‐sap smell, she tried to detach from him with the excuse of wanting to go for a walk into town. Matthew insisted on coming along, as though he might by losing sight of her lose her forever. She walked so quickly along the cracked-up road that she lost breath. He panted next to her. Suddenly she stopped. “What?” She shushed him. There was a gold light coming through the trees just there; it must have been the sun setting. But something in the arrangement of light, the sharp smell of the pines and cedars, the buzz of mosquitoes plus his labored breathing reminded her of another place, a childhood place. Bessie, a dog she’d had as a child. She began to sob. “What is it? Nicole?” She knew he would put his arms around her, and she let him as she had once let that dog lick her face. “I had this dog once,” she blubbered. That golden light was flickering away to be replaced by something bluer. “We had to put her down,” she said, an attempt to explain her crying. But this was not its source: she had not actually loved the dog. As the light faded so did the feeling, the sorrow like the fading of an orgasm almost achieved. There was no sex that night. She was becoming a cliché, sport of wedding jokes and toasts. There goes the end of your sex life, buddy! It would always be some asshole holding a beer. But at their wedding Matthew enforced a strict no ‐sexist-jokes rule, and so there had been no speeches in which an uncle or a brother ‐in-law had joked about men and how they—wink, wink—were always wrong. She lay awake in the darkness and silence you could only find out here, feeling, again, that urge to cry. Or it was an urge to have an urge to cry. She sat up and knocked the blanket off and tried to understand it. He knew about Greg, who’d left her after six common-law years for a hippie he’d been fucking so that they could drive cross ‐country in an RV. He knew about Trevor, before that, her high school sweetheart who’d turned out to be gay. He knew not only all this but the constellations of her best friends’ love ‐lives and where they intersected and overlapped with her own. People were territories, and marriage had just mapped them. “I keep finding myself wishing that we still had him,” she told him in the morning at the big farm table he’d built himself.

21 He looked at her carefully, measuring something within against something without. His own mind against her face. “We could get him back. They might give us another chance.” “I don’t want to be this sort of person. I want to be a decent person. What a decent person would have done is kept Bubba no matter what, suffered through the barking and the poop and the drool and just adapted, you know. A decent person would have adapted.” At the word suffer, she felt her face wind up into a cringe. “It’s just, our lives would have changed. They would have revolved around him.” “You weren’t really attached to him.” Nicole thought of Matthew holding Bubba’s leash when she told him she couldn’t handle it, that she didn’t want to be a dog owner, that he had to take the dog back. “It’s not like you were cruel to him.” It was somewhere close to cruelty, though, she thought, to be unable to love a perfectly amiable dog. He set the cup of coffee in front of her. “Do you really not care?” “I care.” It did sound as though he were measuring each word before saying it. There was perpetual black under his squat nails. “Do you want to go for a swim?” “Sure.” Matthew did various strange things: there were the spoons, there was the word ‘sure’ which he used infuriatingly often, which seemed to her entirely noncommittal—did he want to or didn’t he?—there was the left/right issue, strange for a man so measured in other ways. The water was calm and cold. She liked to go in slowly, despite the pain as her body numbed itself, first calf, then thigh, then abdomen. Treading water, swimming backwards and then forwards and then treading again, she said, “I think we’ve entered a new stage in our marriage.” He nodded. She had wanted out. She had been itchy, even bored. “Bubba made me jealous or something. I saw that he loved you.” Another man would have scolded her. Another man would have kept Bubba— forced her to—and maybe that would have been better. “Dogs are better than people,” she said. “And I don’t even like dogs.”

He waded slowly to her through the neck ‐high water and put his arms around her. He was so tall that he could stand where she was treading. “What kind of person doesn’t like dogs?” “You don’t have to love dogs to be decent.” “But what does it mean?” She wanted the truth out where they could see it: she was terrible, she was wrong. It was so painfully tame and boring, this grief and guilt. They hadn’t lost a baby; they hadn’t had an abortion. The first thrill of love faded, and you were only yourselves. Just two people hitched together, mapped and known. And what kind of person can’t sort out left from right? She thought about her kindergartners: some would be scared of dogs and some would adore them, but none would be indifferent. Many of them couldn’t sort out left from right, but you could teach that, the way you taught them to tell time. You could probably even teach that to a dog. “Do you know what side of the car you’re on when you’re driving?” He frowned.

22 “Like, without thinking about it, could you remember?” She couldn’t stop herself. A person married to a stone became a river—rushing, pushing, unable to stop. He hugged her closer and put his chin on her shoulder. “Do you know what side you’re on?” This wasn’t even left vs. right. It was just basic memory. You knew the name for your dominant hand, you knew without thinking which hand was dominant: an easy, unthinking chain. Or maybe it was a real linguistic deficiency, a selective misunderstanding of the relationship between a word and its referent. Stop, she thought. You’re sick. “I’m just trying to understand you,” she said. She could feel his grip change again. He was checking to see which fingers made an L.

23 Copyright © 2014 Sarah Selecky International, Inc.

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