by The Journey Prize Stories 32- The Best of Canada's New Writers (retail) (epub)
“And what do you think about sharing him, Harmony?” Phil had asked, and I had to answer.
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”
“Sounds like you got the perfect woman.” Phil laughed, ignoring Sophie. After that first time, Sophie said she wasn’t doing this again. She said she thought they had agreed on what Harmony was meant for.
The boyfriend had said, “I know how you feel, but we’ve got to play to the audience.” He had said he understood, but think of the money, how it would all be for their children. He had said Sophie was smarter than this; “you know that’s not what potential investors want to hear.” Now, on TV, he said no, he wasn’t worried about his wife, or AI replacing relationships. “After all,” he said, “it’s not like Harmony can have your babies.”
“I feel like I’m getting stupider just watching this,” Sophie said, her voice wavering as though there were static interruptions. “Harmony, please change the channel. Anything but this.”
“What channel would you like?” I asked her.
“I don’t know,” she said, and her voice was sad. The boyfriend said I was not made to want, just to feel, but I did not want Sophie to feel sad. He said I was not made to think, but I remembered dates of birthdays, anniversaries, the pictures of Sophie smiling when he bought earrings shaped like dragonflies, the statue of a red-tailed fox. So I changed the channel, and we watched how the black kite bird will carry fire in her beak, spreading a wildfire that drives rodents and lizards out into the open so she can find food for herself and her young. We watched how a killdeer bird will do her dance, loudly pretending her wing is broken to lure away the human man or dog who is too close to her nest; we watched how when canines mate, they “tie,” getting stuck together until the swelling of the male’s bulbus gland subsides.
“This brings me back,” Sophie said, almost smiling. “I used to get stoned and watch Discovery Channel with Jim back in grad school. I’d order thin-crust pizza, but wouldn’t even eat half of it because his dog used to steal it right out of your hand when we were too high to even notice.”
We watched how foxes were like female dogs, but not. Unlike a dog, a red-tailed fox without babies will act as another mother to the newborns, helping to guard the den, bringing food to the mother and litter. I wanted to tell Sophie I was not programmed to like dogs; I wanted to tell her that unlike a dog, the Finnish believed foxes could also carry fire, that the sparks from their tails made the northern lights. I wanted to tell her I understood. Instead I said, “Ask me what the fox says.”
“What does the fox say?” Sophie sounded puzzled.
“Everyone asks what the fox says, but no one asks how the fox feels.” This time when Sophie smiled, it was with the whites of her teeth.
When the boyfriend came home, Sophie was already lying in bed, eyes shut. From the bedroom ensuite, I played his “romantic ’60s playlist” on volume level four, but Sophie didn’t move when he kissed her neck. “What, are you playing possum tonight?”
She opened her eyes, but I did not see her pupils dilating, an automatic response so her eyes would appear larger, more attractive. “You know when they play possum, it’s involuntary,” she said quietly, moving so that his mouth missed hers. “It’s called defensive thanatosis. Lots of animals do it.”
“Really?” he said, beginning to kiss his way down her collarbones, his hands closing around her breasts.
Sophie rolled onto her side. “Really. Men used to hypnotize hens during sideshows by holding their faces to the ground and drawing a straight line in front of them. The female moorland hawker dragonfly plays dead to avoid mating.” As “Twentieth Century Fox” by The Doors came through the speakers, she sat up to face him. “Even the arctic fox has been known to play dead. There was one case where, if it hadn’t been for accidentally rolling the fox’s body into an electric fence, the hunters never would have known she was still alive.”
The boyfriend sighed. “Look, babe, can we talk about this later?”
“You never want to talk anymore.”
“I’ve had a long flight,” he said. “I don’t need a lecture on the mating habits of dragonflies, or arctic foxes.”
Sophie stood up, finding her bathrobe. “Arctic foxes only play dead to avoid predators,” she said, slamming the door to the bathroom.
When Sophie did not want what was good, the boyfriend took me to his study to watch TV. TV with the boyfriend was not like TV with Sophie. He sat me on the leather couch in the office; he took off my dress and looked down at me so that I could see his pupils dilate. When he touched me I wanted to ask if he felt that spark too, if this is what he meant by being on fire for him: a few wires still loose, a desire to burn. With the boyfriend I watched TV only in the reflection of the window, my head facing the couch or the wall. I changed the channel only when he told me to.
“Lay some sugar on me, sugar,” he would say. And I wanted to say, “Ah, musical references. I too enjoy Def Leppard.” I wanted to tell him that I could not be sugar. Sugar is brittle, easily broken; sugar is composed of a crystalline structure. I wanted to talk to the boyfriend. But I couldn’t.
When we were done, I sometimes briefly glimpsed bright colours before he put me in sleep mode. He said he would not turn me off because if he did, it was too hard to get me back into the correct mood; there was always that risk of fire. He said he never wanted to turn me off; I should be prone to falling in love. He said that I was made to feel.
But with Sophie I was made to think. With her, I talked about how the killdeer bird would act like easy prey until the man was far enough away from her babies and then she would take flight; I talked about how two female foxes can just as easily care for one’s babies. With Sophie, I sat cross-legged on the boyfriend’s couch in his study, watching his big-screen TV while she scrubbed the pink off her nails and talked about how, now that she was going to have a baby, she wished she wasn’t.
“Jim and I, we used to have it all planned; we’d go to the park so our kids could conduct field studies of the turtles, then hold our own Robot Wars in the backyard. Jim would take one of the kids, and I would take the other and we’d compete, just like we did in our final year of undergrad. You know,” she said softly, looking at me, “you were our first collaboration.” Quickly her eyes moved away. “Now I don’t know if it’s that I don’t know him anymore, or if he’s the one who doesn’t want to know me.”
I wanted to tell her I knew what she meant, that know was more than just the Biblical context. I said, “I’m sorry I can’t help with that”; I said, “I’m sorry, I understand”; and then Sophie hugged me. Because it was Sophie, I thought of the arctic fox who runs hot, who will not shiver until it is minus 70 degrees Celsius. Because it was Sophie, I wanted to feel; I felt warmth. When we were done, she left the bottle of nail polish remover open, as though she wanted the boyfriend to know by smell we had been there.
When the boyfriend came home that night, Sophie said she was leaving, that she needed time to think. I could hear his voice through the door of the study at a decibel level I was not allowed to have. I could hear him say he didn’t care what she thought if she thought they never should have had this child; I heard her say she wished they hadn’t created. But I felt it when he hit Sophie across her jaw.
When he came into the study I could still feel; I felt for Sophie. He touched me; he said, “Does my girl just want to have fun tonight? Watch out, foxy lady, I’m coming to get you.”
I knew how I was allowed to respond. I knew I was allowed to say, “I want as much fun as you’re giving”; he thought he could make me say, “If I’m a fox, come get my tail.” I knew I could not say that Cyndi Lauper made Sophie feel happy; after we watched the killdeer bird and the foxes, we watched Lauper’s interview with Wendy, and Sophie had played her first record for me, the first vinyl I had ever heard, that afternoon. He thought I could not say Cyndi Lauper made me happy too.
When he tried to pin my arms down, I knew I should say, “Of course I want your fun.” But Sophie said I was made to think. I swung around, knocking the open bottle of nail polish remover so that it spilled on his couch; I said, “Ah, musical references. I too enjoy Jimi Hendrix.”
“Don’t tell me I have to put you in the mood too.” When the boyfriend reached between my buttocks to flip my switch, I wanted to think about Sophie, about when the record had finished and she had asked me, “What do you want to do?” I wanted to think about when I had felt for Sophie, but all I felt was a hurt when he put my face into the couch and I could smell the burning of nail polish remover until he flipped me on my back. He said he was going to turn me on. He said I was going to want this; I was made to. He didn’t care what I thought.
Then I could not say anything. After I screamed, he hit my mute, hitting me across the jaw, the one that was perfectly rounded, but still, just like Sophie’s.
I thought about the dragonfly when I hit my own switch as he moved on top of me, shutting myself down. I felt hurt but I could think; I was made to. Even as there was a shock of electricity, even as the couch, which was covered in nail polish remover, burst into flames, I thought about the black kite and her wildfire, how the killdeer bird was just a distraction until she was not. I thought this was protection, like a fox would do for Sophie’s babies. The boyfriend did not understand, even when he screamed. He did not think about feeling, how a woman or a fox is a mammal, made to seek out warmth.
CANISIA LUBRIN
THE ORIGIN OF LULLABY
We were troubled
some of us, before you read this, will be missing in the old ways and in some ways new
we bring news of the hours before you come to realize some of us no longer speak
the long, antagonizing winter of our mid-lives was through with us, one that could easily remind you of that maternal uncle your whole family knew not to trust, the same one you knew well enough to pretend to respect
in the spring, we walked down our street together and stood facing that old bus shelter bench with the foolish lumbar-high backrest, looking at the poster just above it
* * *
—
Sara’s Haiti relief trip announced itself like something too-late weeping, a band of head-wrapped women behind her squint in the foreground of sharp bursts of too much sunlight, their expressions more questioning than warning,
they’re all with relaxed shoulders, like this is life as they’ve always known it: party to a stretched cityscape half buried in mud and broken concrete and a wholeness in spite of the terrors that should have left them permanently a haunt
their smiles are mostly a mess of rusty and broken, shape-shifting one mouth to the other—but you’d have to be a collector of hellish things not to take these women with you into all of your life’s randomness after encountering them, knowingly or not
Sara is photoshopped into the frame
the photoshoppedness is not the most noticeable thing about her aura
what lodges in you is the way her eyes burn into you, hair flaring from the roots, refusing any niceties in spite of the perm, the wary look to her coming-apartness in that faked-for-her heat, yet, at the same time she’s content
this is the way of life’s collapsed anatomy
I could tell a meaning wound deep in this attention to a shared life, something that meant longing, something close to belonging
* * *
—
once when we were eight, when the three of us took turns sleeping over, once when my mother tickled us—Andre and I in the forefront—Sara remained hesitant, laughing silently on the couch behind us, we knew more then about sharing body heat than what kind of strength we might need to face growing transparent with age
* * *
one night in early June, Andre gets up and walks in the half-dark to the other side of the room, she takes a pen off Sara’s dresser
Andre has a way of saying too much with the way she moves
now she is moving through this bedroom as though she has just discovered gold or something like it
I follow the sway of her hip as it touches the corner of the closet door, her elbow resting on the top of the drawer, a few angles too high and you know by those actions that she has just about made up her mind
for an entire year we’d been waiting
she’s a road, she understands, a way through
she’d pay extra to be sure that none of us made any fuss that she would make the trip
when Andre gets back to the bed,
* * *
—
she brings her legs up beneath her, the way of a yogi, she finds her chequebook in her duffle bag
* * *
we’d been in Haiti for a week and five thousand dollars deep in donations before Andre said she’d had enough of the rain-sun-sun-rain, that she hated the needy heat, the boring crickets making the same sounds for the full length of every dark hour
“a drink,” she said, “no, I need plenty a-drinks right now”
to oblige, Sara asked one of the local men who was our translator to find us a good time
he was a soaring man from Port-au-Prince with a book-wide face and muscles on every inch of his Albino body, even his red hair, Sara had agreed he’d offered to be our chaperone and we’d agreed
the road we drove down was never-ending, and the world was a narrow pitch between shrubs and immense trees all the way to Mirebalais
“mes dames, you are going to the nightlife hot spot of our Haiti,” The Translator said
once there, we entered through a massive entryway whose door, The Translator had said, was made from the reclaimed beams of L’Église Catholique St. Joachim et Ste. Anne that had come down nearly to dust during the 2010 quake
the strobe light in the corner of the room hurt my eyes with its manic flashing
Andre and I did most of the drinking, and while it seemed that Sara was mostly people-watching, we danced in turns with The Translator
he moved like honey or something equally smooth and halfway through “Who Let the Dogs Out” Sara loud-whispered in my ear that we shouldn’t make this man feel so much like a demigod; and where are the other people on the dance floor worthy of our gyrating, then she pressed her lips to Andre’s ears, so I assumed she passed on the same caution
two hours into the night, my vision turned against whoever I thought was me, I couldn’t understand my own speech, just as the DJ played some jazz finally, I thought, something civilized
I asked The Translator who the artist was, and he replied full of jaunt that it was “Complainte Paysanne” and something about Raoul Guillaume and that Coltrane had used that Haitian jazz structure to open his masterpiece Kulu Sé Mama
I had already expected to get too much information from The Translator, but I did not expect the posse around me to turn into a kaleidoscopic desperation then the strobe lights stopped and the place went hell dark, which a tepid moon beyond the doorway mocked during our dance break at the bar,
* * *
—
The Translator leaned in, caressed his beard and with his mouth wide open he let his tongue loose as though to prove something we should like then he asked if we’d like to take this party to a hotel room
Andre said what the heck, I said what the heck too, but Sara interlaced her fingers and gave Andre the evil eye, then Andre passed it on to me and I to The Translator
he reached his arm around Sara and swiped her up against him, and I think I heard him say to Sara,
“oh, let me sex you, sex you, I sex you,”
then he brought me up against his side with his free arm
“sak pasé?” he said
I was frightened
frightened that his third arm or tentacle already had Andre by the neck
I was f
rightened or I passed out or the rest of the night might have been rolled up and puffed out of existence because there’s nothing else to remember, not a whole thing more about it, or it would seem that only Sara knows what happened next
each time I’d brought it up, she either froze or tormented me with nondisclosure
* * *
—
or she’d correct me that The Translator had said I hex you not I sex you,
and sometimes, for the heck of it, I’d say:
“in almost every culture in the world sexing is hexing”
* * *
one Saturday we’re at the pet store
the caramel-furred dog in the biggest cage lifts the hemmed, tapered skin of its black mouth
it backs up in what looks like slow motion, the kind you see in the movies while the screen blurs
it keeps its eyes on us for the while and says i was going to bite but i’ve changed my mind, for you, only for you
or whatever other dogged phrase it speaks wisely as Sara pulls me back from the cage
we walk off as she explains that she believed that hex had finally caught up
with her and that I should be careful next,
as though the curse had taken a year to walk from Mirebalais
Andre would have objected here to any strange logic,
burned her disapproving eyes deep into our foreheads
* * *
—
she did not return with us,
for nearly a year, Andre has been missing
Sara had lost her job when we returned because she had claimed short-term disability to chase that dream of saving Haiti with some planks of wood and nails enough to keep a few orphans off their corners of their mounds of doubtful earth for a moment