by Emily Brewes
THE DOOMSDAY
BOOK OF FAIRY TALES
EMILY BREWES
THE DOOMSDAY
BOOK OF FAIRY TALES
a novel
Copyright © Emily Brewes, 2021
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purpose of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.
All characters in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Publisher: Scott Fraser | Acquiring editor: Rachel Spence | Editor: Julie Mannell
Cover designer: Laura Boyle
Cover composite: Man: istock.com/ilbusca; Dog: shutterstock.com/Morphart
Creation; Border: comprised of elements from istock.com/Extezy
Printer: Marquis Book Printing Inc.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Title: The doomsday book of fairy tales : a novel / Emily Brewes.
Names: Brewes, Emily, 1982- author.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200300229 | Canadiana (ebook) 20200300237 | ISBN 9781459747005 (softcover) | ISBN 9781459747012 (PDF) | ISBN 9781459747029 (EPUB)
Classification: LCC PS8603.R484 D66 2021 | DDC C813/.6—dc23
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Ontario, through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and Ontario Creates, and the Government of Canada.
Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credits in subsequent editions.
The publisher is not responsible for websites or their content unless they are owned by the publisher.
Dundurn Press
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Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4L 1C9
dundurn.com, @dundurnpress
This book is dedicated to my mum, my dad, and my brother.
CONTENTS
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, JESSE VANDERCHUCK!
PAYING THE TICKTOCK MAN
RABBIT, RUN!
GETTING DOWN
FRIENDS LIKE THESE
THE TIPPING POINT
ENEMY MINE
DODGING JOHNNY LAW
WHAT IS THE LAW?
The Girl and the Tiger
THICKER THAN WATER, THINNER THAN MILK
The Wishing Fish
IN SICKNESS, UNTIL DEATH
By the Mane of BardyJin
WITH A LIFE LIKE THIS, WHO NEEDS A BOAT?
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, JESSE VANDERCHUCK! (REPRISE)
RISE OF THE LIVING DEAD
Be Just and Fear Not
WINNER, WINNER
The Girl Who Followed a Cat
TO SAVE, PRESS NINE
ON THE ROAD AGAIN
PITSTOP
HOME FOR A REST
WRESTLING WITH KING NUTKIN
DEAR DIARY
Cold Hands and Warm Heart
FAMILY TIES
WATCH OUT FOR THE ICY PATCH
ANOTHER FINE MESS
CALL ME MUAD’DIB
Another Crack at King Nutkin
BRIEF REFLECTION
POST-APOCALYPTIC DRINKING GAME
The Curse of Forgiveness
ONWARD AND UPWARD
SLAPSTICK
OR LONESOME NO MORE
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, JESSE VANDERCHUCK!
IT’S BEEN FORTY YEARS since I’ve seen the ocean. I mark that moment, the one when I first witnessed that infamous vastness, as one of rebirth. Standing on a wet beach, as near the break of day as makes no difference, I felt no larger than a mote. And hanging there, weightless, waiting for the sea to speak, I knew that one day I was going to die.
We were on a rare cross-country trip to visit my mother’s family. A three-hour drive down to Toronto, followed by a four-hour flight to B.C. From our little patch outside of Trout Creek to a commuter town east of Vancouver. My sister, Olivia, having just turned one, spent much of the journey letting us all know her displeasure, her volume turned to eleven.
I remember a lot of tension: my father constantly cracking his loud farmer’s knuckles. My mother’s company laugh — the one she did reflexively when burdened with keeping the peace. It was less like fakery and more like camouflage.
There were unfamiliar foods I was expected to try and, more importantly, to like. Big Hungarian-style dishes like cabbage rolls and sour cream and sweet pierogies. I mean, who’d ever heard of a sweet pierogi? I heard a litany of cajoling that trip. There was the try it, you’ll like it; the just a bite, for Grandma; and the final concession, you don’t know what you’re missing. Perhaps I didn’t, but that was for me to decide, wasn’t it?
I did my best — less out of familial obligation and more out of my understanding of social rules. Not to mention the certainty that I’d bear the brunt of my dad’s frustrations should I be too resistant. My father was not a violent man. I don’t want to give that impression. He was a man easily irritated, and he was known to lack discretion when it came to venting his ire. I found it best to keep my head down and avoid catching friendly fire.
Anyway, the trip to the ocean. Dad had bundled us all into the car before sunrise, groggy and confused. Our soundtrack was the warm drone of CBC morning radio, the perfectly smooth diction of trained voices punctuated by interludes of indie rock or Inuit throat singing.
Dad was beaming with excitement, rare enough to begin with and historically fragile. As sleepy as I was, I had a tingle at the back of my mind that signalled caution. Not enthusiastic enough and he’d be disappointed. Too over the top and he’d suss I was faking. Whatever we were up for, I needed to craft an appropriate response, lest the ornament of his enthusiasm be carelessly crushed.
My mother, in many ways, was too honest for my kind of calculated behaviour. As much as she loathed conflict, she just as frequently waded into it as avoided it. Brave faces only took her so far. In any pantomime, she inevitably hit some kind of wall, beyond which there was no room for dishonesty. She was especially vulnerable at times when her guard was naturally low. Like then, as dawn broke wide against the horizon, at the very crack of creation.
When we left the main road to take a rutted dirt track between a pair of high grassy dunes, she muttered something like, “Where are we?”
Innocent enough. Reasonable, certainly. Perhaps her tone was slightly too sharp, or maybe the words hit some particular structural defect in Dad’s buoyant mood. An underlying pessimism kept him expecting negativity, so he might’ve reacted the same way regardless of what was said or by whom. The air in the car seemed to seize up like stricken oobleck. I knew that the calm was over. Time for the storm.
I was in the back seat on the driver’s side. In the rear-view mirror, I could see Dad’s mild smile wrench into a deep frown. From the top of his plaid-flannel collar, a line of sunrise-red crept up the nape of his neck. He bounced his palm off the top of the steering wheel before replying.
“I thought,” he said, voice drawn taut with careful control, “we would all enjoy going for a little drive to the ocean.”
On the radio, DNTO signed off, thanking its producers and contributors. Mum squinted at the dashboard clock. “We’re on vacation. Why so early?”
Now the steering wheel was squeezed, thick fingers squeaking as they
rotated over the leatherette. Dad’s habit of intermittently clicking from halfway down his throat intensified, a sure signal he was about to boil over.
“Well, we’re here now, but if you want, we can just turn around and go home.”
Mum sighed, resigning herself to the familiar situation. We passed a sign that told us we were Now Entering Porteau Cove Provincial Park, and that swimming in the ocean was forbidden here. Barely glimpsed small print specified acidification, plastic pollution, and hordes of Humboldt squid as reasons to stay out of the water. As I breathed relief that I wasn’t the one who had set Dad off this time, I wondered if the squid mentioned were the ones that had developed venom sacs filled with liquefied PVC.
“Don’t be like that,” Mum said. “It’s a bad example for the children.”
No, I begged silently. Don’t drag me into this!
I watched Dad’s eyes flash up in the rear-view, their distinct blue hue gone hard and icy, and felt a pang of sorrow. As much as I was in for self-preservation, I felt bad for him. It’s hard for a kid to see a parent unhappy, and my father was rarely happy. The only place that kept him pleased for any length of time was his woodshop. For him, the meticulous tuning of tools, the cleaning and maintaining of machines, were akin to raking a Zen garden. If only he could’ve found that meditative calm at times like this. Maybe I should have carried around a set of oily socket wrenches as a preventative measure, dosing them out as needed.
The car stopped. Outside the sky was a shade paler than the smoked salmon frequently splayed across a long white plate on Grandma’s breakfast table. Gulls wheeled like shreds of paper being juggled on competing breezes, their gurgling laughter bouncing between sea and sky.
Back home, beside the creek formerly laden with trout, early mornings were nearly silent. Silvered snakes of mist coiled out from between trees along the face of the distant forest. Ghosts of blue jay and chickadee calls drifted across hushed fields, and the whole world felt painted onto the inside of a blown-glass bulb: frail and ready to shatter at the first loud sound.
Here there was no shortage of noise. Instead the swelling roar of what turned out to be the ocean itself permeated the stillness of the car. There were the gulls calling down to the fleets of sandpipers, and the sandpipers chirping amongst themselves as they ran stiff-legged, weaving in and out of the surf.
The instant the engine went still, I was out the door, so glad to be free of the stifling tension that I nearly leapt into the sky. The sand was wet and dense underfoot, more like semi-set concrete than the gravelly lake beaches I was used to. It slapped beneath my sneakers as I ran toward the great shifting roar, away from what was almost certainly now a full-blown argument between my parents. I imagined I could hear Olivia’s rising cry from her car seat, as much from being woken up as from any situational distress. Given her status as the beloved baby, her upset might well have quelled my parents’ ire, redirecting their energies to sooth her. I couldn’t know, because I was close enough to the waves that their noise was all-consuming.
And the winds — one blew out from across the land, the great bellowing breath of the rising sun, flattening the fields of sea grasses and thrusting fists of warm air into my lower back. Another gust crashed boisterously from the water itself, its clammy, salt-crusted arms wide and sweeping, forcing me to brace against being knocked over.
It really was too bad that Dad didn’t get to see my reaction when I first set eyes on the ocean. He’d have been so pleased to see my ten-year-old mouth gaped in utter wonder. My instinct was to head directly for the water’s edge, to place my feet along the shifting join where it met the land, the way I did at Wolf Lake. Thankfully, I had enough sense to hang back. Even so, about every fifth wave came in so hard I was misted by spray. The smell was overwhelming and alien — fishy and salty and ancient. It assaulted the senses until, just as suddenly, it disappeared. Deep in the oldest part of my brain, it was understood as familiar. Beyond familiar even, if such a thing exists. It was huge and terrifying and unmistakably vital.
For some time, I stood there mesmerized, in a state of profound oneness beneath the paling pink sky of the rising day. The fact of my own mortality appeared before me like a reflection made of solid shadow. I closed my eyes and leaned forward. The shadow must’ve done the same, because we met in the middle, nose to nose. A sensation not quite like cold — not quite like anything, really — suffused the skin where we touched. It spread across my face and down my scalp. Without fear, I understood that should that not-feeling reach my heart, I would drop dead.
Then my dad yelled from the car window, “Get in! We’re leaving!”
Just like that, it was over. The shadow disappeared like a popped soap bubble. My senses were roused by an overwhelming stink. I was standing on a dead fish. I did my best to rub it off on the sand as I returned to the car. Despite my efforts, my mother’s nose crinkled the moment after I closed the door.
“What’s that smell?”
“Stepped on a dead fish,” I mumbled.
As a result, the first fifteen minutes of the return trip focused on this error in my judgment. I should’ve looked where I was going. I shouldn’t have gotten out of the car, gone out alone. Didn’t I know how terribly dangerous the ocean was? And so on. We travelled with the windows cracked, which was uncomfortably chilly in the early autumn morning. Both of my parents complained about it ceaselessly. I was impressed they had enough remaining energy to give me heck, as much as I was annoyed by getting it. Sinking sullenly in my seat, I glanced over at Olivia. Her cheeks were red and blotchy from crying, though at that moment she was peacefully gnawing on a plastic maraca as she watched the scenery pass by the window.
Maybe their voices got tired, or maybe just for a change, Dad turned the radio back on. Over the chattering of my teeth, I heard the top-of-the-hour national news bulletin.
“Today we are hearing more reports out of Winnipeg, where nearby communities are being evacuated due to severe flooding of the Red River. The mayor of the city, as well as several MLAs from the surrounding region, claim they don’t know how many more refugees they can support. Seasonal droughts and a severe blight that wiped out two-thirds of last year’s crops have left the area short on supplies. They are asking the premiers of neighbouring provinces for assistance in taking in those affected by the rising waters, but the leaders are dealing with crises of their own. New outbreaks of rabies-B are being reported throughout Northern Ontario, with seven fatalities at the Central Algoma Health Centre in the past month. Wildfires continue to burn much of the farmland across the prairies. From Regina, Saskatchewan’s premier said there is little help they can offer …”
Dad reached over to the radio and pushed the seek button. The first sound to break the static was a fuzzy oldies rock station. They were playing a song I recognized from the rare times Mum drove and therefore selected what we listened to. It was something about raising hell.
Dad’s eyes glanced up to check the mirror before locking back onto the highway. Mum’s cheeks were wet, a pair of clear streams running into the laugh-line channels bracketing her mouth. Some degree of awareness dawned on me, that perhaps this visit was more than simple courtesy. I couldn’t know then that it was a farewell trip, saying goodbye to family we were unlikely to see again.
When we got back to my grandparents’ place, they were just getting up. Grandma was wearing a faded pink terrycloth robe. Grandpa was settling into his armchair in the living room, sporting his uniform of tan slacks and a white undershirt. Later on, if we went out, he would deign to cover up with a short-sleeved button-up in some variation of a checkered pattern.
Barely glancing from the TV screen, he offered me a terse nod. On catching sight of Olivia, finally back to sleep, he reached out his arms to receive her. She woke, but it only took a few bounces on his knee for her to settle into goggling baby silence, one fist most of the way in her mouth.
“Where were you off to so early?” asked Grandma, stirring her first tea of the day.
Nobody answered.
I crossed the kitchen and hugged her, then excused myself back to bed.
“What’s gotten into Jesse?” I heard her query as I pulled the chenille bedspread up to my chin.
There was a brief silence that was broken by the opening and closing of drawers and cupboards.
“It’s nothing, Mum. We took a drive to the shore. Go sit down. I’ll make some pancakes.”
“Oh, I can help …”
The troubles we had heard about on the radio weren’t new. My life until that point had been liberally peppered by news of similar tragedies. What worried me was that they were getting more frequent and growing in number. It was getting to the point that environmental collapse was the only thing being reported on at all.
I was hollered at to come to the table. I ate everything put in front of me in silence.
It was about that time that I started to make more of an effort. You know, like pitching in without being asked to. If I had to put a finger on why, I can only say what I see in hindsight: that I was utterly terrified of being alone. My tiny ten-year-old brain must’ve cranked itself into high gear to make sure I was indispensable to my family. I had no reason to think that they’d abandon me. In fact, the possible dissolution of our nuclear unit never even crossed my mind.
Until my mother took us away to live Underground — and left my father behind.
PAYING THE TICKTOCK MAN
MORE THAN THIRTY YEARS of being buried alive in the Underground, there’s a routine that has become second nature. On waking, make your bleary way to the water pump by the sink. Count fifty pumps; unless it’s a wash day, then count one hundred pumps. If it’s wash day, light a few scraps in the tray beneath the tank so it won’t be icy to the touch. Any other day, don’t waste the fuel.
Open the bathroom cupboard and do your business. Experience the same moment of panic every damn day when you think you’ve accidentally peed in the poop hole, or vice versa. It happened once shortly after the reclamation system was installed more than twenty years ago, but you still have nightmares about it. Check you’ve done it right about seven times before activating the vacuum lever that sucks it away.