The Journey Prize Stories 32
Page 9
After our shift, I tell Arjun I want to spend some extra time with Joan Wayne and will catch a ride with one of the staff. When his car is out of sight, I skirt the compound and head for the shed where they keep the sawdust and firewood. There’s no reason for anyone to be here this late in the day, and they won’t find me before locking up.
The centre has its evening rhythms, the thunk of plastic basins as people wash up, the clang of cage doors opening and closing. I sit on a pile of wood and wait for the sound of departing engines to fade. The air is several degrees colder now, and eventually I hear only forest noises. I don’t want to risk turning on the lights, but even in the dark I know I can find the keys. There is some cage-rattling—inmates hopeful for a surprise night snack—but I’m in and out of the building quickly and standing before a familiar wire fence.
I’ve never been inside her enclosure, not even to clean it. To turn the key and push my way in feels like trespass.
Joan Wayne turns her head. The door is open, but I’m not sure if she sees that—the anticipation in the air is all mine. Her form is cloaked in the blue hues of evening, her eyes dark inside her silhouette. Do red-tailed hawks understand the concept of pointing? I’ve read that dogs do, but cats do not, and I’m not convinced that Joan is smarter than a cat. I gesture at the open door and beyond. She turns her head.
Her beak. They decided against releasing Joan because she’d grown too used to humans. Neither of us is safe with the other.
Time passes. Time stands still.
A breeze moves across my face, and she is gone. I fancy that I make out a dark shape climbing, but all I know for sure is that I’m the only one left. Something white and small and soft drifts out of the sky, but snow wasn’t on the forecast. Bird fluff, then, tumbling off my face and down my jacket to be lost again.
“Jules, they know it was you.”
I open the door for Arjun, then retreat inside. Morning is in the windows, and the snow globes look milky in the light. I go back to wiping down their outsides, sending up little swirls and eddies.
“They couldn’t reach you, so they called me. And your phone was off, so…”
I thought I saw a scratch on Dorothy’s globe, but it buffed out with some attention.
“Jules, she came back. Joan Wayne came back. They saw the door, and people were yelling, and we checked the woods and…They set out some food in her usual spot and she came back. It sometimes takes a few days, but they come back, Jules.”
Dorothy in her blue dress infuriates me. A new world and a wish to be granted. Of all things to choose.
Why do you want to go back? I ask the porcelain figure. What about your new life?
I should have bought a Magic 8-Ball instead, at least there’d be hope of a different outcome.
Be brave, Dorothy, be brave. Why can’t you be brave?
I shake her, I reason with her, I send her flying across the room.
In one version of the story, the globe hits the floor with a crack like the end of the world. I half expect there to be water and glass everywhere, but the ball just rolls over and trickles weakly, like a small wounded animal.
Arjun knows it was never meant to hit him. But he’s said what he had to, and he’s gone.
The last snow globe repairman in the world is in Northfield, Minnesota, a three-hour drive from the town where I live. In this version of the story, I make the journey in a blizzard, two hundred miles to knock on an old man’s door. He is surprised, but kind, and lets me in.
“What can I do for you?” he asks in a voice that sounds like musique.
The entire way, the globe was leaking into my clothes as it sat on my lap. I clutch it to my chest as the dark stain spreads, and I say to him: “Please, fix this. Fix this.”
In one version of the story, we are eating pizza on the couch. Arjun’s boots are leaving puddles on my wooden floor. Inside the Taj Mahal snow globe on the window ledge, a banner proclaims “Indian Summer” in gold and glitter. Outside, a couple struggles with what looks like a month’s worth of groceries and eight gallons of bottled water.
It’s all over the radio: Snowmageddon, Snowpocalypse, the coming of a new ice age.
Getting up, Arjun and I touch our noses to the pane, palms against the glass.
The first time I saw snow, I had just moved to the Midwest. I was eighteen and still going to parties—we were in a freshman dorm, all of us had eaten a cautious but sufficient number of the pills the boy with the green eyeshadow had been giving out, and were off in our separate but connected realities. One of the boys was convinced he was a cat.
“I’m a cat! Meow, meow, meow!”
“Meow!” I replied. “Meow, meow!”
We held this conversation for an indeterminate amount of time. Then he said, “I’m a doll!” He froze for a moment into an attitude of stiffness, then crumpled onto the floor. I could no longer talk to him, so I fell asleep.
We didn’t all get up at once, but when we did, we didn’t speak, didn’t go anywhere, so eventually we were all sitting up and staring outside the window, and it was snowing. Then someone said, “It’s snowing!” And so the spell broke, or rather, one spell ended and another began. How shall I put it—the world had turned on its side as we were sleeping, and the air was full of tiny fugitives, trying to find their place.
CARA MARKS
AURORA BOREALIS
1. You pour me another drink
I love the sound of liquid falling—a river splashing on stone, that pitter-patter of rain on the skylight, the mellifluous comfort of more wine in my cup. To let go of something impossible to hold on your own, with bare hands. To fill yourself up.
We sit on a wooden swing in the garden with swirly blue and yellow mugs that remind me of Greece, though I’ve never been. They’re filled with Okanagan Pink Pinot Gris and freshly picked mint and raspberries. You’re tipsy and want me to join you. You’re sad. You’re a mature man of new masculinity, think you’re tougher if you show your feelings. But still you don’t want to cry in front of me, your youngest child and only daughter. The boys have already gone home.
“The garden is beautiful,” I say, because it is. It is barely edible—filled with Mama’s flowers: clematis, chrysanthemums, zinnias, dahlias, a million ferns. Plum, pear, apple trees with fruit not yet ripe. A corkscrew willow by a dory-sized pond. No lawn or lawnmower.
You wear a bathrobe without shirt or trousers. Socked feet slipped into flip-flops, legs crossed, your hair a thinning white side-parted mop. You wear Mama’s glasses because yours are broken. The lenses are smudged. In your lap, you hold a pink carnation and your cup. Are we going to get drunk? There are two jugs full of wine and a bucket of berries. You sip and sip, roll a raspberry on your tongue.
The swing sits three and lazily sways, and I wonder how to approach the space between us. You are too far away to lean into, and I don’t know how to give you comfort, if that is what you need. The sunlight staggers out of blushing clouds. The pond’s edges stitched with apple blossoms, its musty smell intertwined with the flowers’ sweetness.
I check my watch and say, “Soon we’ll have cake.”
Odd, to be surrounded by lush foliage not yet decaying, all these things we didn’t plant.
2. Mama sings a Spanish ballad
A month ago, a week before she died, Mama stood in the garage with a paintbrush and an enormous canvas where a car could be. She was sixty-three and I was about to be thirty. Her hair all grey curls tucked under a teal scarf, tied above her forehead. She wore a denim smock over bare legs, naked feet splattered with paint. I sat on the floor, tiptoeing onto the canvas when I stretched out my legs. She painted Frida Kahlo flowers and snow-capped mountains and the northern lights. Her song delicate, her voice a coloratura contralto, and I didn’t understand the words, only bella bella bella, which she sang over and over and twirled, pink paint from her brush Poll
ocking the canvas and the walls.
“Do you like it?” she said, and stood in a dizzy sway. “It’s not done yet.”
She dropped into child’s pose and leaned into the canvas, her knees and forearms freshly painted. She had always painted but wanted to be a poet. In cursive at the bottom corner of the canvas she wrote in baby blue with a skinny brush:
my bella— sweetness
you are an O’Keeffe landscape,
Rothko in the summer,
Matisse in the morning
you are the great and wild
unknown known and
I love you
But how to say it, she would say, how to write love into poetry without using the word. Love, the word, weighs down a poem, she’d been told. How to tell me she loved me. And yet I always knew.
“You can have it for your birthday,” she said.
“Where will I put it?”
She stretched out her arms, a crucifix covered in pink.
“Has he called?” I asked.
She crooked her head, tugged off the teal. She rose again with her feet at her insignia. “You can use it as a rug.”
3. I pour you another as well and you yodel and we remember
We are drunk now. You are doing that thing with your hands where you twist the tip of each finger as if a cork you wish to unscrew, where really you just want a cigarette but you haven’t smoked since 1983.
The sky bleeds off its colour and the swing rocks swifter now. You have removed your glasses and I wonder, Can you still see me?
You guzzle the new wine in your mug and totter to the pond’s edge.
I leave you there, for a moment, and meander to the kitchen to find the cake. I’m distracted by flowers along the way. I pick an enormous pale pink dahlia. The flower’s twirled petals are soft and it’s the size of my face. You’ve left your suitcase on the dining-room table and a pile of your clothes on the floor. I ease open the oven and am engulfed in its warmth and the smell of ginger and cinnamon. The cake has burnt because we are drunk and when I return to the garden you have jumped into the pond. You’re up to your waist in milky green water and you splash and splash.
“Yodelayheehoo,” you sing. “Yodelayheehooooooo.”
I tell you to get out, you’ll drown, but I know you will not drown because the water is at your waist and I say you’ll get hypothermia but it is September and it is a hot September and you are warm with wine and death is not your concern, not yours.
You say, “You have never loved.”
“The cake is burnt,” I say, and again you say You have never loved.
“Yodelayheeeehooohoohoooooo-ooo-ooo-oo.”
The cake is burnt but I hold it, I carry it on Grandma’s bright orange plate with a bowl of whisky-spiced whipped cream, to cover the burn. It’s Mama’s recipe, and your favourite at Christmas, and the only thing I can bake and yet I can’t, couldn’t quite. It is ginger cake and there was not enough ginger. I cracked one too many eggs and I did not wait for the butter to rest at room temperature. And yet I baked it.
I stand, unsteady, amid zinnias. Their gold and red blossoms at my knees. I place the cake and the cream in the middle of the swing with two forks.
“The cake is burnt but there is cake,” I say, “and I loved her.”
“But why loved,” you say. “Why love-duh.”
“Dad, you’re going to catch a cold.”
“It was so easy for you.”
“Please would you get out of there? You are so wet.”
“It’s raining,” you say, and it has just begun to.
4.Can you hear the northern lights?
In August, Mama visited me in Squamish and we drove her pickup truck to Whitehorse to see you, to see if you would come home. We drove for two days straight because she could not wait.
She wanted to see the sun, how many hours it would stay in the sky, and when it fell she hoped for the aurora borealis. She said it was bioluminescence in the sky, but I’d always thought bioluminescence looked like stars. She told me this at 3 a.m., parked on the side of the road an hour past Kitwanga, when we were both too tired to drive. I staggered almost into a dream and when I woke the engine rumbled and it was barely 5 a.m., Mama in her fuchsia coat with her hood on, humming quietly.
We arrived at Uncle F.’s and found you on the front porch. The cabin surrounded by pines, its foundation tipping toward the slow river. You played guitar, barefoot in a black suit and a bomber hat.
Mama tripped out of the truck to kiss you, but you said, “What are you doing here?”
Mama said she loved you and you asked again, Why are you here.
Uncle F. swung open the screen door and gave Mama and me kisses on the cheek. He smacked your head like he’d have done when you were kids and told you to get up.
You went there to hunt, to stay with Uncle F. and eat fresh moose, fresh fish. You killed a bison and packed its meat—we no longer called it a body—in brown paper in the freezer. Mama said, “What will you do with all this meat?” She’d been a vegetarian for forty years.
That night we listened to Bruce Springsteen and you and Uncle F. shotgunned cheap beer. Mama and I drank honeyed tea. Uncle F. smoked a cigarillo and called himself sophisticated. Mama held Jackal, the grey tabby cat, in her lap. We sat there, on the porch, waiting to see the light show—emerald, mauve, red ribbons shimmering by the stars. We wondered if it would come, if it would be enough. Mama fell asleep and you carried her to the sofa in the early morning. Uncle F. fell asleep too, but we left him there. We lay with our backs on the oak floor of the porch, Jackal on your belly, rising and falling with your breath.
You said, “I’m not ready,” and I let it linger.
I tried to find constellations, decipher abstract patterns and find their ancient myths and truths. Orion, Ursa Major, but that’s all I found. Hazy green shone in the sky like headlights in fog and I asked was this it, should I wake up Mama? You said these were barely them, it wasn’t worth it to wake her up.
I fell asleep there too and woke to you and Mama whispering in the kitchen, Mama’s hushed tears, a caw of a crow, and the quiet rush of the river. You held each other, her face tucked into the lapels of your suit.
On the way home we stopped in Stewart again and Mama asked me to wait for a minute. She wanted to hike to the glacier, to touch it. It looked so close but took her hours to get there and back. The glacier stretched out between mountains and looked like the sky. I sat in the truck and waited. She shrunk, became a little pink bird flying away and away to touch the clouds.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and I said it was fine, we have days to get home, and she said sorry for being hard to love. She said, “I think your dad finds me too hard to love.”
I wondered what you’d say, why you stayed in Whitehorse, and what you both meant by love.
FAWN PARKER
FEED MACHINE
I was impatient because my therapist, whose name was Melba, asked me to arrive at her home office at 11:45 and when I arrived at 11:44, she was around back throwing seed at two ducks floating in her above-ground pool. The ducks floated still like buoys and did not react to the seed. Melba shouted, “You know you want it,” and threw another handful at the ducks. The seed was tossed back at her by the wind.
I normally saw Melba on Thursdays, but this was a Saturday. She’d asked me to join her and another patient with a similar problem to mine on an excursion in lieu of my usual weekly appointment. The excursion was a trip to the science centre, where we would view an exhibit called The Living Body.
The other patient’s name was Nevaeh, like Heaven backward, and she was nine. Nevaeh was a patient of Melba’s, but she was also Melba’s granddaughter. Nevaeh’s mother had terminal brain cancer and was scheduled to die.
On the way to The Living Body exhibit Nevaeh and I sat in the back of Melba’s J
eep and didn’t look at each other. Melba let us take turns choosing songs on her MP3 player, which she transmitted through an FM adapter in her cigarette lighter receptacle. I chose “Season of the Witch” by Donovan and Nevaeh chose “Hurdy Gurdy Man,” also by Donovan, because I guess she didn’t know any of the artists in Melba’s music library. The songs came through very weakly and with a lot of static.
“Good choice,” I said to Nevaeh, and she said nothing.
Melba paid for Nevaeh’s ticket to The Living Body exhibit and I paid for my own. Nevaeh followed us around the circuit of displays with her hands cupped around her eyes like blinders so she would not see anything she did not want to see. She communicated to Melba by whispering and mostly ignored me. Nevaeh had a small black agenda she carried with her. In the agenda Melba made Nevaeh write a small letter B each time she binged and a small letter P each time she purged. Before we entered the exhibition room, Nevaeh opened her agenda and drew a small circle or perhaps a letter O or perhaps a numeral zero under that current day’s date. There was other, neater, writing in the agenda that said things like Chicken breast, Hotdog, and Gatorade. It was adult cursive, but not like Melba’s, which I knew from my tax receipts. I wondered if Nevaeh’s terminal mother kept track of Nevaeh’s food diary for her, and how all of that would go moving forward, and I felt depressed. I wondered what Nevaeh talked about in her sessions with Melba.
Once in a session, Melba asked me if I was uncomfortable with my sexuality and I said yes. She asked me what sorts of things made me uncomfortable, and I said, “Certain phrases,” and she said, “Like what?” and I hesitated and she said, “Go on,” and I said, “When somebody says let me see that…” and she said, “Let me see that what?” and I said, “I don’t want to say,” and she said, “Let me see that…?” and I said, “That…” and she said, “That…?” and I said, “Pussy.”
Melba said that sexual avoidance and preoccupation with weight are related for some people and that I was one of those people. She said that it was important to pay attention to what did and didn’t make me uncomfortable. Then we watched Goodbye to Love, the movie about Karen Carpenter and how she died from being anorexic, and I thought about how my voice had cracked earlier when I’d said “pussy” and how that had made me uncomfortable. Melba asked me at the end of the session to say “Let me see that pussy” out loud, and I did it. “Let me see that pussy,” I said to Melba, and she said, “Good.”