Seeds and Other Stories

by Ursula Pflug

  I remember the night Karen and I traded journals, read our way through one another’s lives and minds by lamplight. It was the next morning we decided we could buy land together.

  sss

  By early October, Azalea still wasn’t home, although she’d called twice more from the village, so Enzo knew at least she was alive. He worried alone now over the list of possible calamities as they usually did together at the beginning of each cold season: chimney fires, power failures, frozen pipes. So much for calling themselves suburban; they were still technically in the country, at the edge of the little town north of Toronto. The faceless minivan shame of living in suburbia, without even the town services that made it worthwhile. Continuing with his snooping, he read an entry near the end of Azalea’s first year’s diary:

  Reading back through the whole year on New Year’s Day it strikes me this journal literally saved my life. Must remember to tell that to the next suicidal person I talk to. For, sigh, there will be one as surely as there will be another winter. And Karen? I hope she’s well. I haven’t seen her in months. She didn’t seem well when we saw her last.

  Karen again.

  Enzo felt terribly guilty for reading, but couldn’t stop. Reading her journals was like eating soup made out of Azalea.

  sss

  I remember fifteen years ago a squatter friend telling Karen she was bourgeois to want a house. She said: “I want to rest. I want to retreat from this life. It’s too harsh. I want my son to have a roof.”

  I can hear her saying it, clear as day, just as I can hear his scornful reply: “Cop-out.”

  And Karen never got her house, least not when I still knew her.

  Our Toronto apartment had a working fireplace. I remember one winter night I went to Alexandra Park and collected deadfall. It felt peaceful, a country thing, akin to our old life on the islands, gathering rosehips. I remember a passing man stopped, stared at me with pity and scorn, thought I was so poor I couldn’t afford twelve-ninety-eight for a fire-log, wrapped in plastic, printed in four toxic colours, from the corner store. Leave the deadfall to rot until the parks department guys came in their green trucks to clear it away. I was so offended. Yet it couldn’t have been the first time I suffered the disapproving stranger’s gaze: surely, before, I just didn’t notice, too scornful myself, a reverse contempt that suddenly, that snowy night, was no longer there to protect me. A fallen shield.

  I’ll go home next week. But who is home?

  sss

  They lost touch with Karen. Azalea was busy with the baby, with part-time classes, with starting a daycare centre in their village. Karen frightened them, each year poorer and more unkempt, skidding from restaurant work to welfare. But they didn’t say it, even to themselves: we are walking away from her, hand in hand. Not looking back.

  Enzo fantasized he’d find Karen. A coming-home present for Azalea, so she’d stay. He knew real life didn’t work that way. And saw it then: he’d find Karen, give her the spare room, and still Azalea wouldn’t come. A shuddering laughing thought.

  sss

  Thanksgiving morning.

  Coasting in a borrowed kayak I found the cabin last night; my memory hadn’t failed me. It is still here, not fallen down. Someone has come, one year or another to make repairs. More importantly there’s kerosene in the lamps, stacked wood outside.

  Someone has been here recently: strings of wild rosehips hang in the window, drying. Yet they’ve gone again: the ocean-facing windows are shuttered.

  There’s a journal lying open on the table—I wonder whose it is? I’m writing in it but haven’t read it yet. If overly secretive, they wouldn’t have left it here lying open. I will read it tomorrow, a Thanksgiving present to myself.

  I look out the window, see a witch’s moon, a crescent horned moon. My mother would have liked it, in the years before. It reminds me of the moons on that skirt her friend gave her. Stole it out of the household money Enzo gave her for groceries: fifteen dollars a week until there was enough; she didn’t dare tell him she wanted to buy a hundred-dollar skirt for my mother. She told me, though; I think I was twelve. She wasn’t working then; new motherhood had already burned through all her savings. Funny how I remember these details; surely these people have forgotten me entirely, and yet when I was a child they were so important.

  I lived here when I was very small, when my mother was still happy. Used to watch her chop kindling while I strung rosehips for a useful game. Her friend took care of me when it was my mother’s turn in the kayak. What was her name? Oddly I remember her husband’s name but not hers.

  A flowering bush.

  Rhododendron?

  My mother was happy here. Here she had a friend.

  It is only here that the moon is my namesake. Writing helps.

  sss

  In a boxcar in the decommissioned railway lands south of Richmond Street a woman sat wrapped in blankets. Reflexively she rummaged through her belongings for the little packet to see how much was left. Promised herself again that tomorrow she would find a detox program, check in.

  She wore three layers of skirts, the bottom skirt a hippie treasure, an expensive item given her years before by a friend: midnight blue silk with stars and crescent moons printed in gold. The stars and moons were nearly washed away.

  The woman never wore this skirt on the outside, but only as the bottom layer, next to her skin. She felt that as long as she never wore it on the outside, the street layer, she wouldn’t be murdered. Never reveal your true name.

  What was the woman’s name, her friend who gave her the skirt? She didn’t remember.

  A fat orange moon rising in the southern sky, through the open door of the boxcar.

  Years ago, she lived in a place so different from this. They had a kayak, she and her friend. They took turns paddling the ocean waters, looking for whales.

  Once she had a friend.

  Once she had a son.

  She remembered the son’s name.

  My Mother’s Skeleton

  MY DAUGHTER AND I SIT in the shade of wild apples, watching tiny garden snails. They are so small one feels a giant watching them, or perhaps as though one has microscopes for eyes. These tiny snails are lost in the vastness of a plank laid across the purple-stemmed cacophony of rhubarb.

  I gently put the snails back under the rhubarb. “Snails need to be moist and slimy,” I tell my little daughter, “or they’ll dry out.” Rhubarb Hollow is our magic shady place beneath the wild apples. Sometimes I bring a notebook when we come out here to play even though I hardly ever write in longhand anymore, but on the first of June I am still too surprised by green’s return to sit in the dark computer room upstairs, even just for half an hour. I treasure this moment because next month or next year Annie won’t like this game anymore and because soon I must go inside and resume preparations for our party.

  It is our annual Victoria Day weekend camping party. The hours blur by until, just after midnight, I sit with my sister Alice and our friend Sandra at a fire in a fieldstone pit, perhaps a hundred years old. We discuss the unknown purpose for this carefully made pit—a large bread oven perhaps, but why so far from the house? Or maybe it’s the foundations of a ruined grain silo. The hills are decorated with tents, some glowing like luminous mushrooms. The folks in the tents are late night readers or they’re afraid of the dark and think a flashlight left on will keep them safe from wild animals, which there indeed are, especially this far from the house. My black mutt Asteroid sits between us, keeping guard.

  While other children went to church on Sundays we were marched to the art gallery, having required an equal amount of scrubbing as the churchgoers. We were expected to be very quiet, clean, and respectful, as if in the presence of the sublime. My father still has this religious hush when looking at large expensive art books, full of costly reproductions. I feel I know what it was to be raised religiously
, yet art didn’t become my religion. That was something I was still in the process of discovering, or maybe rediscovering.

  At twelve, Leni and I spent a summer on a farm near Sudbury. The land was rented by family friend Kerry McFarlane and his brothers, all working in the mines so they could buy land. Often that summer we built bonfires on huge outcroppings of shield rock, and sat around them half the night. We walked endlessly in woods and fields, canoed in rivers that seemed so miraculously different from Toronto as to participate in an alien landscape, one that would require a new language, a new metaphor, to divine. For instance, we saw moose.

  My father sometimes mocks my choice to live in rural eastern Ontario, a place that after all isn’t important. Not the way Europe is allegedly important. It is true the towns are full of empty storefronts and video stores and submarine franchises, and lack four-hundred-year-old churches and art museums. At least our own: yet there is a four-hundred-year-old church and art museum nearby, the Anishinaabeg Teaching Rocks. One cannot visit them and not feel taught. And in spite of his mockery, my father comes and looks at my perennial gardens in disbelief each June. I never let him go home without greens or squash.

  My mother is not here; we mourn her still. This is one thing I have learned: to mourn properly is a lifelong task. From time to time I try on her beautiful velvet shoes. I’ve been saving her nicest size elevens; they don’t fit me yet and my feet aren’t growing anymore. A human’s growth isn’t indeterminate, stretching through a whole life like the beaver’s. Up north, farther north in Ontario, she used to sit under the birch trees, doing drawings in such miniscule detail, of deadfall, ferns. She must’ve had microscopes for eyes.

  Later this summer we will go back north, take the Polar Bear Express to Moosonee, my father, my husband, and all our children, his and mine. I should like my children to ride a train before all the passenger trains are gone. Like we did, coming home from that Sudbury farm, with my aunt Prunella, the year before my mother died. Eating snack bar food and playing crazy eights all night long while the train rattled and clacked through the forests and swamps of Ontario. My sister and I had never stayed awake all night before, but were brave and persevering, helped by card games and sweetened snack bar coffee. Staying awake through the half-numbed navigation of Toronto’s cavernous Union Station, the walk along impossibly bright King Street to eat bananas and cream in a greasy spoon. Greasy spoons don’t serve bananas and cream anymore—only upscale breakfast bistros for the urban trendy do that. Another thing lost.

  When it is still night Alice, Sandra, and I hear coyotes. What seems like hours but is perhaps only a few moments later, we watch the last of the luminous tent mushrooms wink out. Now that dawn is coming our campers feel safe enough to turn their lights off. My sisters and I stand on the hills, the lonely fields far from the house cloaked in pockets of mist—the sky striped lavender and pink. Time collapses and I think of all the years when we were young travellers, staying up around fires, surrounded by forests that stretched farther than the eye could see. We did it in many countries, sometimes together, sometimes separately and for a brief moment all those other dawns, other fires, other journeys collapse into one. What are these, I wonder: fire, night conversation, dawn? They exist to remind us how unknowable and mysterious life really is. The next day you see each other and feel: this one I will call friend forever.

  I have been living inside my mother’s skeleton for twenty years. It’s quite roomy and comfortable so most of the time I don’t even realize my confinement. As though it had grown, her huge ribcage spread out on these hills like the skeleton of a whale. I remember turning fourteen east of here, listening to spring runoff under two feet of snow on a farm in Lanark County. Our friend Ben sat in shirtsleeves, his jacket beneath him on a melting snow bank, playing the double bass while snowmelt also sang in underground rivulets. A series of phone calls at dusk; Kerry driving a blue pickup to the city; premonition soaking through me like darkening twilight.

  sss

  My mother was born in Europe, where she learned to live for art. But she died here, in a still forested land, sitting for hours under birch trees on Kerry’s farm, drawing with a botanical exactness, but also an awe: what is this landscape, what does it say, what are its secrets? My mother came across the sea, all the pain of Europe’s war in her pocket. In her other pocket, two seeds: two children. Beneath the truly weird, almost fluorescent green of the forest canopy, up north in Ontario, she planted us, so that we might live.

  Decades later we still live in the shelter of her ribcage. The rain comes through, but we don’t mind: at night we can see the trails of shooting stars, and the smoke from our cook fires wafts through the slatted bones. I may never find another place to live now.

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks to the Ontario Arts Council, the Canada Council for the Arts, Doug Back, and the editors of the publications in which these stories first appeared, including: Jo-Ellen Brydon, Julie Rouse and George Kirkpatrick, Lorraine Filyer, Candas J. Dorsey, Sally Tomasevic and Marcel Gagne, Keith Brooke, Darrell Lum and Eric Chock, Karen Correia da Silva, Sharon Hamilton, Bruce Kauffman, Rose Lemberg and Shweta Narayan, Bruce Boston, Claude Lalumiere, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Hal Niedzviecki, Joe Pulver Sr., Rich Dana, Rhonda Parrish and Greg Bechtel, Justin Isis, Brendan Connell, and Michael Callaghan. Thank you also to my faithful beta readers including Jan Thornhill, Kate Story, Anita Buerhle and Tapanga Koe. Thanks to Luciana Ricciutelli, Val Fullard, and Renée Knapp, my amazing team at Inanna Publications.

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&nbs
p; “Bus Owls.” The Link. Ed. Sharon Hamilton. Campbellford, ON, March/April 2010, No. 152.

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  “No Woman Is an Island.” Gulch Anthology, Steel Bananas. Eds. Karen Correia da Silva et al. Toronto: Tightrope Books, 2009.

  “My Mother’s Skeleton.” That Not Forgotten. Ed. Bruce Kauffman. Brighton, ON: Hidden Brook Press, 2012.

  Photo: Andy Carroll

  Ursula Pflug is author or editor of ten books including novels, novellas and story collections. Her fiction has appeared in Canada, the U.S. and the UK, in award-winning genre and literary publications including Lightspeed, Fantasy, Strange Horizons, Postscripts, Leviathan, LCRW, Now Magazine and Bamboo Ridge. Her short stories have been taught in universities in Canada and India, and she has collaborated extensively with filmmakers, playwrights, choreographers, and installation artists. Her fiction has won small press awards abroad and been a finalist for the Aurora, ReLit and KM Hunter Awards as well as the 3 Day Novel and Descant Novella Contests at home. She lives in rural Peterborough County, Ontario.