by H. B. Hogan
Dan was clearly furious with her, and she couldn’t blame him. They were late, on this day that was so important for Alison. He plowed ahead, carrying Trevor in one arm and holding Alison’s hand in the other. Susan lagged behind, carrying Alison’s gym bag. She was used this—feeling like she’d let them down. She was the weak link in the family chain. Susan huffed as she tried to keep up.
Dan barked something over his shoulder at her, something about the address, and as Susan rummaged through her purse for her phone, she hit a patch of ice and her shoes slipped out from beneath her. She cried out, flung her arms wide, and then crashed down on her back. She struggled to catch the breath that had shot from her lungs as she hit the concrete.
Dan and Alison glanced back at the sound of her impact. Susan raised her head, seeking Dan’s help, but what she saw in his eyes crushed her.
Alison started giggling. “Mommy get up, you silly!”
“Susan, get up,” echoed Dan.
Susan rocked side to side, trying to right herself. But her jacket was too tight and her breath wouldn’t come. She waved her arms up towards Dan, but he made no move to help her.
“My hands are full. Get up.”
Now Trevor and Alison were both giggling.
“Get up, silly Mommy,” Trevor mimicked Alison, with glee.
Susan’s head fell back against the pavement and her arms dropped still at her sides. Rivulets of mascara ran across her temples and into her hair. She tilted her head back, her mouth open, and tried again to catch her breath.
Alison was now fully in the grips of a giggle fit.
“Mommy, you silly moose!” she crowed with delight.
A wave of shame tore through Susan with such ferocity that her breath filled her lungs in a series of spasms. She exhaled in a long, plaintive sob that reverberated off the buildings surrounding them.
Trevor stopped giggling, and Alison gasped and looked up at Dan, who was staring stone-faced at Susan.
“What’s wong with Mommy?” asked Alison in a small voice.
Dan swore under his breath, turned on his heel, and pulled impatiently at Alison’s hand. Alison allowed herself to be lead away, but continued to look back over her shoulder at her mother, who lay weeping on the sidewalk, the contents of her purse strewn across the grimy asphalt, twinkling like stardust in the early glow of the street lights.
THE MOUTHS OF BABES
In the summer between first and second grade, I dared Becky Morton to eat the dog turd we’d found on the Griffins’ front lawn.
It was late afternoon. Summer. The sun shone warm and sleepy on the nutty sausage at our feet. I sat down opposite Becky. My little sister and another kid from up the street flanked us. We stared with quiet intensity at the textured coil between us, as though waiting for it to speak up and object to my reckless dare on Becky’s behalf.
I’d lodged the dare in the spirit of carefree abandon, but it hung heavy in the air, loaded with the weight of its implications. My words seemed suspended just beyond my lips. Their lingering evoked in Becky the kind of resignation she needed to pull off this stunt like the seasoned meeter-of-dares she claimed to be. Sadly, that was the only card Becky had to play in the complex social labyrinth of our youth: self-destruction. Her Kool-Aid-ringed mouth, stringy hair, and the sour milk smell that clung to her clothes rendered her different, unlikable. But she was brave, and she usually did what we told her to do. We liked that.
Becky bought herself some time by pointing out the logistical flaw of my dare. In my excitement, I had not included any terms that required Becky to actually touch the turd, which she was loath to do, as its surface looked “icky.” I, feeling defensive of my oversight and not wanting my dare to lose momentum, quickly handed Becky a serving twig and went back to holding my breath.
Becky then pointed out that the stick had been on the ground and so was not hygienic enough to employ as an eating utensil.
My sister and I took the twig from Becky’s grimy hand and carefully peeled back the bark. We explained as we did so that the tender green surface beneath the bark had long been known to bushmen and schoolchildren alike as a perfectly hygienic utensil, primarily used for roasting marshmallows, but easily adapted for other cuisines. I handed the peeled switch back to Becky. Her silence indicated she’d reached the end of her stalling. We leaned forward, four sunburnt heads nearly touching, as the cicadas filled the air with shrill notes of caution.
Becky licked her lips and gave the coil an exploratory pat with the end of her switch. It cut the turd easily in two, rounding the edges like a dull butter knife would cleave a bran muffin. “You’re lucky, Becky,” I whispered. “Looks like you won’t have to chew.”
Becky drew the twig towards her and peered suspiciously at the matter clinging to its tip. It was now or never. She held the stick so close that I feared her next breath would draw her attention to the stink, breaking the tenuous spell of my influence.
“You said you’d do it, Becky. We’re all waiting.”
She moved like lightning. In less than a second, Becky had stuck out her tongue and run it up the business end of her stick, and then flung the stick to the ground. We all began to scream in revulsion and disbelief.
She was stuck—her tongue hanging out, dog shit sliding down its moist, pebbled surface to pool at its tip. She began to scream with the rest of us, no doubt just as horrified by her actions as we were. But with her tongue out of her mouth, screaming proved difficult, and at best she could only manage a nasal “Euu…” sound, which did nothing to assuage her mortification. Thwarted, Becky bolted to her feet and fled across the sun-dappled lawn into the quiet sanctity of her neighbouring home, where she was safe from the frenzied shrieks of her former friends—us.
I’ve often wondered about the sequence of events that took place after she’d entered the house. Was her mother there? Of course she was. I remember her always staring, trance-like, out the kitchen window at nothing in particular while she idly stirred a pitcher of Kool-Aid. Did she know then that the Kool-Aid was the only reason we let Becky play with us?
Had Becky’s mother seen what happened? Or had Becky simply grabbed the first thing she saw when she ran into the kitchen—a dishtowel—and rubbed her tongue raw with it? Would her mother have even noticed?
What transpired later, when Becky’s mother discovered the offending dishtowel folded neat as a pin over the handle of the oven, inexplicably smeared with feces? Would she have demanded an explanation? Maybe Becky’s mother knew that feces on a neatly folded dishtowel could only mean a fall from grace, and that maintaining one’s dignity in such circumstances required a bit of mystery. Maybe Becky’s mother, without saying a word, hid the dishtowel under the potato peels in the garbage bin and returned to the task before her: stirring yet another lurid pitcher of Kool-Aid for Becky and her friends.
THIS KEEPS HAPPENING
Karla is drifting off to sleep. She lets her body melt into the mattress and ignores the drool fanning out beneath the corner of her mouth. A long, low rumble begins to spill from her sinuses when two words jolt her awake: You’re dying!
This keeps happening. Each time she’s startled and lies there, bug-eyed and rigid in her bed, mentally scanning her body for signs of terminal illness—aches or cramps that she might have otherwise dismissed. Each time she finds nothing.
Karla is not sure whether she is actually dying; at least, no more so than anyone else. But she read somewhere that death is preceded by premonition. If that’s the case, Karla figures this is about as clear as premonitions get.
Karla is young—thirty-five—so she shouldn’t be dying yet, even if her life is pretty dull. But because she’s so certain that her time is up, she has decided to try and embrace the reality of imminent death. She tells herself that there is freedom in it, and she tries to enjoy the windfall of her shifting priorities.
She sits up on the edge of the mattress, resolving to ignore the sight of her clothes strewn across the bedroom floor, as though drag
ged there by receding floodwaters. She shuffles to the bathroom, squinting at the light and lifting her toes off the cold tiles. From the toilet, she eyes the black footprints in the tub and the orange ribbon of rust that runs down its lip from the stopper’s chain. She finishes up in the bathroom and wades through the unopened mail that litters the hallway to the kitchen. She excavates a space among the dirty dishes in the sink so she can fill the kettle, and turns on the stove’s back burner.
“People will think that I’ve always lived like this,” she muses, watching the stovetop filament turn from dark red to bright orange.
To address this very concern about her domestic reputation, Karla has prepared a note for Edward, the superintendent—she knows he’s the one most likely to find her bloated remains slumped over on the couch beneath a pizza box or, more likely, moldering in her bed beneath the duvet. The note, typed up on her computer and printed in triplicate, reads Please be advised: Whereas ordinarily, I’m immaculate, whereas I suspected I was dying, let it be known that I chose not to go out cleaning.
She’s taped the note to the mirror in the front hall. It’s in a Ziploc bag, because she read about a body that went undiscovered in an un-air-conditioned apartment like hers for several days during a heat wave, until the body exploded, soiling everything within spattering range. The Ziploc bag also holds her emergency contacts and an urgent plea: should she be found face down on the bathroom floor with a fistful of toilet paper, Karla does not wish to be resuscitated.
“How long do premonitions continue before they come true?” Karla wonders as the stovetop element bursts into flame and the crumbs from yesterday’s toast go up in smoke. “I can’t avoid cleaning forever.”
She blows out the fire, fans the smoke away from the smoke detector with a crusty tea towel, and despairs at the state of her kitchen. The recycling she’s stopped putting to the curb has begun to collect in the corners like brittle snowdrifts. Her fridge is barren but for a squat, economy-sized jar of Maille Dijon—a smug yellow idol in a shrine of frosted white light.
“They’ll think I really liked mustard.” She considers revising her letter to the superintendent. Whereas the mustard was there when I moved in.
She waits for the kettle to boil and distracts herself from the urge to clean by contemplating the ramifications of her impending death. There aren’t any, aside from the tragic loss, sure to be felt on a global scale, of the novel Karla has contemplating for the past ten years. She has yet to commit a single word of her masterpiece to paper and is therefore confident of its brilliance. Karla also knows that all the instructors in all the creative writing classes in the world can’t teach brilliance.
“You either get it,” as Karla has so often chanted to her reflection, “or you don’t.” Luckily, Karla gets it—comes by it quite naturally, in fact—and is therefore not remotely interested in bettering herself or her latent talent through personal or professional development.
So sure had she been of her latent literary brilliance that she had not pursued a degree or any other path to stable employment. Instead, while she waited for someone to discover her talent, she spent her twenties moving from one job to the next, nurturing certain eccentricities that she believed would endear her to her future fans, and make her portrayal in her posthumous biopic an especially rewarding challenge for Meryl Streep. A side effect of all these eccentricities is her alienation her from her family, friends, and colleagues. She stares intently at people from under her brow, which she carefully arranges each morning into deep furrows. It helps that she needs glasses but can’t afford them. She pretends to be enormously disappointed in everything, all the time, which frankly is not much of a stretch. She is vocal and strident in her views, no matter how inconsequential the issue. She owns a pashmina. More recently, she had been practicing theatrical temper tantrums in her apartment. She had a mental list of customer service providers she could lay into in public if the spirit so moved her. She knows for example that she is free to degrade secretaries, personal support workers, chambermaids, house cleaners, and people who hand out the free Daily Dispatch at the city’s main intersections and subway stations. Those people are hired to be thrown to the wolves; Karla knows this because she has held—and been fired from—each of those jobs over the course of the last year. She is still smarting over the most recent incident in which she was fired by the Daily Dispatch for simply holding her ground.
That morning in December, the morning she’d been fired, she’d been stationed outside of Sheppard–Yonge station where she handed out Dispatches to office workers who either snatched the paper out of her hand, ignored her, or told her to go fuck herself. Karla felt like she’d go mad from biting her tongue. At a quarter to ten, as she waited for someone to take the last paper of her shift, an old man trundled right up to her like a tank and started yelling at her about asset swaps.
She did not take the bait.
“Tell it to the Competition Bureau, sir,” Karla said. She dropped the paper at his feet, turned on her heel, and walked into the subway station, cold and exhausted. Her face was chapped from the wind. As she was about to drop her token into the box at the ticket collector’s booth, she tensed at an announcement: delay at Sheppard–Yonge station due to police investigation onboard a train. Northbound service suspended. Everyone around her groaned, but Karla felt like she’d won the TTC lottery. She was heading south. She dropped her token into the box and headed towards the stairs.
As she walked down the stairs to the subway platform, Karla hit a wall of people coming her way. She stood on her toes, craned her neck and saw a TTC guy clearing the southbound platform. She was immediately filled with rage. The announcement had been misleading! She’d already paid to get in! They’d have to reimburse her! She imagined unleashing one of her well-practiced tantrums on the ticket collector upstairs.
The TTC guy on the platform wouldn’t answer when people asked him what was going on. Karla pressed forward against the crowd, thinking that if she could get within earshot, she could make him give her an answer, but the crowd was too thick. She was eventually pushed back up the stairs, where she latched onto the handrail and defiantly stood her ground as weary commuters trudged past her.
“I am not taking a shuttle bus all the way down to Bloor!” she yelled at no one in particular. “Are you kidding me?” She stood on her toes. “Those things are a nightmare!” she yelled over top of the crowd. “I’ll wait right here, thanks!”
She looked around for solidarity. People seemed to be avoiding eye contact.
Suddenly, police officers were running past her and down the stairs to the now-empty platform. A lady behind Karla said in a weary voice, “Musta been somebody jumped, so’s there’s blood all over the platform.”
Karla was distracted by the contrast between the crudeness of the woman’s grammar and the cinematic quality of her imagination. This could be start of a story, she thought. Karla allowed her focus to drift away from the calamity in the subway station and into the process of bringing this woman’s interior world onto the page—a world in which the human body has the structural integrity of ripe cantaloupe. A world in which a subway train would pull into a station at the speed of light such that a body on the tracks would erupt and spray blood across the subway platform like slop thrown from a bucket.
No, thought Karla. Scratch that. Karla didn’t do magical realism, or whatever that was. Besides, erupting cantaloupe bodies would not play well on Canada Reads. Karla turned around to correct the woman’s grammar and inform her that the blood would not, in fact, be “all over the platform,” when another police officer—gun drawn—ran through the ticket turnstile and headed down the stairs.
The woman said, “Musta been a bomb scare.”
Karla felt her own incredulity. She stared deep into the woman’s makeup-smeared eyes, which were impenetrable, like those of a dumb animal.
“You’re imagining that the officer will shoot his gun at the bomb?” Karla asked. “Have you literally no ca
pacity for logical thought?”
“MOVE!” Karla looked up. A sweaty, red-faced officer with a bulletproof vest and an automatic rifle was running right at her. It was like a scene out of a movie. Karla mentally sketched out the stage directions: sweaty armed man runs past protagonist and down the stairs, subway passengers scream and scatter towards the exits while our protagonist remains resolute in her pursuit of accountability for public funds.
“Is this some kind of drill?” Karla yelled over one shoulder at the man in the ticket booth. The dumb woman behind her had disappeared. The Korean ladies who ran the accessory shop inside the subway station were wailing and trying to lower the security grate over their plate glass display window, but it wouldn’t budge. One of them gave up and fled, crying as she ran towards the exit. The other lady curled up in a ball on the floor.
“Don’t worry,” Karla shouted. “The ticket collector is still sitting in the booth. You think he’d just be sitting there like that if his life was in danger? And listen, there’s no noise coming up from the platform.”
The lady seemed to consider this before she decided to bolt, too.
“There’s nobody yelling on the platform!” Karla shouted at the woman’s fleeing back. “They yell at people before they shoot them! This a false alarm! Or a training exercise! Which by the way,” Karla turned back around to yell down the stairs, “is bullshit if you ask me, because they could do this at night when the subway isn’t full of tired people who are just trying to LIVE THEIR LIVES!”
Karla was yelling so loud that her throat felt ragged and she was out of breath. The station was now completely empty except for Karla and the ticket collector, who was watching her from inside his booth. He slowly picked up a phone and spoke into it without taking his eyes off of her.
“Go ahead and call your goons!” Karla shouted at him. “I’m not leaving unless you reimburse me for my fare!”