by Julie Paul
And goddammit, there’s a dead dog at the back fence and the deer keep crapping on the lawn furniture. Yes, Cedric is gone from this world. How long he’ll remain resting against our hedges like a flipped-over cement truck is anyone’s guess. I’ve got more important things to dwell upon.
Other than lamenting my lack of quinoa and fresh arugula, I’m spending all my time hatching a plan to leave. We do not want to be criminals, but we can’t stay here like this. I’ve heard of some sort of night kayaking service that’s started up, and a swimmer who made it to the mainland, and even a kite surfer who kept on sailing south. It seems it will have to be by water that we leave this prison.
When I am nearly asleep in a mid-afternoon semi-silence, the most phenomenal idea drifts in: we can escape in a Flintstones-type boat made out of a hollow log, something we can lay in and kick our way across the strait to the USA.
Forget the nap. My mind’s suddenly busy making plans. Tomorrow, we’ll head to the beach and find the ideal specimen.
Except I can’t leave the house. Shit! Fuck! This is stupid!
But then, I hear it. A voice, coming in from the cosmos, telling me that there must be a way. How else have we made everything else come true?
I engage in a serious debate with this voice for a few minutes until I’m slapped back into truth.
We’re trapped, but we’re okay. We’re still breathing. We have so much to be thankful for. Something will come to us. It always has.
Sleep, come sweetly, please. I will chemically assist you and think only about rescue. Even as the giant cats howl and the rodents chew on my tulip bulbs and the last blades of lawn, I force myself to repeat a new affirmation: help must be on its way.
But if I should die before I wake, that wouldn’t be so terrible today.
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On Day Seven, I wake to a silence so deep it feels like I’m still sleeping. Even Holly, asleep beside me, seems to barely be breathing. I run to the windows and twist open the blinds.
It’s happened. They’re dead. All the animals are flat-out where they took their last breaths. There are so many, it’s like they all came out of hiding to die in the open air. Oh, it’s horrendous wreckage—fur and turds and twisted bodies everywhere.
I just stand there, staring into the backyard, counting the animals. Five raccoons, three cats, two dogs, a bunch of rodents, a whack of sparrows, seven deer, and a bald eagle the size of a glider. This yard used to be filled with birds—normal-sized, alive. Once I even saw a peregrine falcon in the pear tree, a small rabbit in its grasp. Last year, right after we moved in, that one tree gave us five hundred pounds of fruit. Now it’s empty, other than that one giant pear near the fence.
Wait a second. Out there, amid the carnage, the decimation, there’s still a beautiful pear? How the hell did the animals miss it? How did we miss it? It won’t be pear season for months.
My mouth begins to water. I have to have it. I have to taste it. I should wake Holly, but no.
I’ll bring it to her in bed.
I will.
Quickly, I get into my faux hazmat suit. The animals don’t pose a threat of attack any longer, but who knows what’s growing on those carcasses? I don’t even want to imagine the size of the maggots that will come.
It feels like I’m going out trick-or-treating: the scary landscape, the get-up, the sweet prize at the end of it. Sweetness!
I step around the dead animals in the yard and make my way toward the tree. The air smells like wet dog and old pillows and BBQ smoke, alongside the usual crappish odour—some people have begun cremation, it seems. Thank God for the boots. The destroyed lawn is slick with excrement.
Once I get within a metre of the pear tree, my old salivary glands really start pumping out the juice. I can practically taste that glorious fruit!
Then, on a high branch, I see something else. Not the pear.
A nest made of rags and bones.
Out of it, poking above the ragged edge, there’s a head.
It’s the smallest living thing I’ve seen in days, and it’s looking at me with clear, blue eyes.
It’s a baby. Good God. A human baby. Saying something in babble, to me.
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It’s worked.
My God, it’s worked.
The Law of Attraction has truly outdone all of its other efforts today. It had to circumvent our outward resolve of not wanting children, of becoming fine with that, being turned down by various adoption agencies because of our media history, and my little white lies about saving the planet and our equanimity. It had to deke around our reasoning to get to the raw hunger inside of both of us.
We really do want to be parents and couldn’t imagine life with only the two of us, forever and ever in this big, perfect nest of a house. Although the timing’s a little off, Universe, we thank you. Thank you!
Also, a shout-out to C*C*C*™, in case this is also a part of our package!
We’re calling her Apple, even though she was found in a pear tree, because of her sweet rosy little face. A little irony—or a Bible reference—never hurt anyone. Thank you, Jesus!
When Don climbed up on that ladder in his wetsuit, helmet, and hip waders to get her this morning, I just fell in love with him even more than the day we met at the swim-up bar, when he asked me if I wanted a massage. Here was a man who had to work at tenderness, who still ate Twinkies in supposed secrecy, who punched a heavy bag for hours before he could even talk to me in the mornings, reaching out to remove our baby from that tree.
“Lift your visor,” I called out. “She might be afraid if she can’t see your face.”
He did it, even though we still didn’t know what might be in the air. I’d stopped caring at that point because, suddenly, there were more important things in life. I had a little girl to take care of! Damn the flight attendant mantra of putting your oxygen mask on first before assisting your child—when it comes down to it, something in the blood just kicks in, and you have no problem sacrificing yourself for the good of your babies.
Because I’d watched so much birthing footage over the past few years, I just did what came naturally: I took off my shirt. When Don passed her down to me, we were skin-to-skin at first contact. I didn’t even care that she was covered in filth, and peeing, as he handed her over.
She’s my baby. I made this happen.
All we needed, after all, was just a little faith.
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Apple is a beautiful child.
We’re watching her sleep in the centre of our bed while we discuss our plans to escape. Holly’s got this hollow log idea, which just might work. It’s only a few kilometres to the next island, where there are animals of normal size, trees with leaves, lawns still grassed over. I’ve heard of wolves swimming to islands. Why not us, in a magical boat?
“Isn’t she peaceful?” Holly asks.
“Sleeping like a baby,” I say.
I give Holly a hug, smell her aromatherapy shampoo, feel her breasts against my bare chest, before she starts to scream.
“Oh my God! Don!” She’s pointing down at her own feet.
Suddenly, they’re Ronald McDonald feet. Two feet long.
Then her legs start.
Before I can say a thing, it begins to happen to me. My skin begins to tingle and burn. My bones creak, my joints pop, and my muscles start to bulge.
Holly shrieks, grabs Apple, and runs outside, smashing her own head on the doorframe as she goes.
My head is at ceiling height. I crouch down just before my torso expands, get onto my belly and crawl out of the room, squeezing through the door as if I’m being born.
I find my family on the front deck, my wife naked like me—clothing doesn’t grow, apparently—and my baby in a sweet little sle
eper covered in purple sequins.
The baby has not grown. Apple is as small as, well, an apple, in Holly’s branch-sized arms. She’s bawling.
“She must be scared,” I say, and my voice booms out like an air horn, which only makes her cry harder.
From our new vantage point, we can see the whole neighbourhood. Decimation, dead animals, dirt, all the giant homes stuck in a wasteland. We used to have a view of broadleaf maples, western cedar, arbutus. Now we can see the ocean, the calmly rolling blue.
Then I remember the pear. It’s still there! I lumber over to the tree, reach down and pick the fruit, which is no bigger than an almond in my gigantic fingers, and hand it over to Holly. Maybe Apple’s hungry. I’m starving, but the crying baby comes first.
As we try to mash up a little fruit with our big mitts, over Apple’s wailing, we hear someone yelling at us from the backyard. “Don! Holly!”
It’s Linda, big, like us. Stark naked too. When I wave, it feels like I’m moving an umbrella through the air.
I look over as Linda tries to cover herself up with leafless branches. But that’s not where my mind goes first; my enormous stomach roars louder than anything else. She’s been home alone for days—surely, she’s got extra food.
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Dear Any Kind of God, C*C*C*™ or otherwise: it’s Holly here.
You know that I’ve always relied on lists as a tool for getting to the heart of desires. So, here is my list. (Please hear me!)
Please let us shrink back to our normal size again.
If this isn’t possible, please let Apple grow big, to be just like us. She’s going to be so sad to look at us and not see her kind.
Please don’t let the Death come like it did to the creatures around us.
Please punish whoever brought this upon our island. We thought this island was filled with wonderful people with pure hearts, but there must be someone here who’s got some wickedness or serious karma needing to get worked off. Sometimes I just want to be able to send those people off in a giant boat, a prison ship adrift in the Arctic Ocean. Please make this happen. If it’s Linda, well, so be it. Who are we to get in the way of fate? And by the way, it just isn’t fair to the rest of us who are really trying to be better people.
Please let there be a tailor in this mess of a community, preferably with European training.
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We may be naked, giant, hungry, and cold, but we’re still alive. Still a family, with Linda on board, all of us big ones wrapped in bedsheets, just staring into Apple’s sweet little face.
I can’t fit into the house to check my stocks, let alone press tiny buttons on tiny machines, and I’m probably losing thousands. The bigger worry is what else might be in store for us. From our vantage point, we can see other heads poking up in the neighbourhood. We can see what kind of situation we’re dealing with, and who might be coming to call.
We’ve got to start cooking these chickens before anyone else gets their hands on them—maybe the squirrels too. Definitely before nightfall, when we’ll have to figure out some kind of shelter.
C*C*C*™, you’ve really outdone yourself this time. Making dreams come true, aren’t you, at just a little cost? Whether or not you created this expansion, I know that Apple was planted by you. Why would you do this? To test us, see what we really want? In the midst of chaos and uncertainty, our true natures win out, and you give us a child.
What I’m not sure of is whether the baby is meant as reward or punishment. Did we pass or fail?
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I want to go home. I can see American soil—it’s just one island over. To hell with the pioneering spirit, manifesting our destiny, our American birthright! Forget about clearing spiritual debt. All I want to do is calm this darned baby down and go home.
What did my mother do to make us stop crying? A little brandy on the soother, maybe. Ha! If I had any brandy left, it wouldn’t be Apple drinking it.
Lullabies. She sang to us, although I’ll be damned if I can remember any of them. Through my tears I start singing the first song I can think of.
“I’m bringing home my baby bumblebee. Won’t my mama be so proud of me?”
It sounds like pure poetry. I just want to go home and see my mama in Ohio and introduce her to Apple. Having kids does that to you, makes you want to reconnect with those who’ve shunned you, those who swore they’d never say your name again.
But who am I kidding? She’d be scared as hell of me. Everything is different. I don’t know what any of this means, or where home is, or if we’ll ever get out of this mess.
Wait. Apple’s stopped crying now! She’s smiling at me! Oh, what am I whining about? I’m such a lucky duck. This is home, isn’t it? Me and Don and this tiny little girl.
Oh say, can you see? She’s small, but you can still see that beautiful smile. The Lord is good to me . . .
Johnny Appleseed, amen!
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Day One of Creation, Take Two.
Or is this Take Three we’re on now? Even God gets a restart, I guess. But if C*C*C*™ is behind all of this, there are going to be some serious suits against them if any of us survive it.
And yet, Holly’s singing. I should be more like her. See the good in all of this.
She’s handing me Apple now, a baby transformed by a mother’s love.
“Take her,” she says, beaming.
There’s a look in Holly’s eye that I don’t recognize. A purity to her gaze. Angelic, even.
“She’s going to make all of this better.”
I’ve heard this promise before, I know it. I’ve felt my heart lift with the possibility. I ask the baby, “Now where have I heard this before?” but of course, she doesn’t know the answer.
But when I look into my miniature daughter’s eyes, even from way up high, I can see something there—something I hadn’t noticed before. A movement, from deep within them, like a shutter, as if her pupil has a mechanical centre, adjusting for light, as if all her being is focusing on her new-found daddy, recording this historic moment for evermore.
//// Accidental
Today, a dark afternoon in February, on the way home from her job as a hotel housekeeper, Catherine goes into the 7-Eleven and buys her brother John’s favourite candy: Junior Mints. She checks her hands for obvious grime before reaching into the box for five mints. That’s the rule, five per serving. She isn’t counting calories or points or carbs. Five at a time means she can leave the box alone for the rest of her walk home, which means she is free to watch for waxwings.
The waxwings always appear in February on the coast, when the berries of the holly trees glow red against the daily gloom. But Catherine hasn’t seen one this year, and it’s nearly March. She’s always thought of March as martyr, when it’s shortened to MAR., on account of Lent and the way she used to feel giving up the things she loved. She never understood how it worked: if you offered your suffering up to Jesus, did it really make Him happy? As she walks along, she can hear the Junior Mints jumping in their box, safe in her purse. God doesn’t get her candy anymore. But she still believes in some things the Bible talks about, like the Golden Rule and miracles.
Because of this, Catherine looks in open windows—mostly at dusk—in case John’s inside one of the houses she passes. She rescued a stray dog once, brought him into her suite where he sat on the couch, staring out the window, while she called animal control. Five minutes later, a man on a bicycle spotted the dog from the road and came knocking. It turned out that the spaniel lived three houses down; Catherine had thought he was lost when he’d only been on a little walkabout. Still, the man was happy to have him back. He still says hello to her when they pass on the sidewalk.
Maybe John, her missing brother, has lost his memory, or has just g
one out for a wander. Maybe he’s in a kitchen nearby, washing dishes, and she will see him from the street.
Catherine knows she is well-loved at work even though people might think she’s a bit naïve. She carries her water in a glass honey jar and wears suede boots in the winter. She buys lottery tickets, picking numbers based on ages she’s loved most, years she had the best times of her life, which leaves out, naturally, thirteen and twenty-one, as well as all the numbers beyond twenty-six, because she isn’t there yet. At thirteen, she had terrible acne and the largest breasts of anyone in school, and even friends she’d known since preschool stopped hanging out with her. She spent that whole year helping the librarian at lunch and the kindergarten teacher after school; she was particularly good at cutting out hearts, freehand, no fold down the middle to ruin them. And snowflakes, too, and letters that look like balloons.
At twenty-one, she lost John, the person who had loved her despite, and because of, and anyway . . . He used to play around with her name, calling her Cattail and Catkin, Catapult or Catbird, and it was as if he gave off oxygen, like a tree, because any time she spent near him made her feel more alive. With no parents left, except the kind they visited in the cemetery, now and then, they’d been alone together against the world.
The police gave up on the search for him years ago. John went missing when he was her age, twenty-six, and now he would be thirty-one, and every day, she sends her thoughts out to him with a coating of light attached so he can see them and follow their beacon home.
Where are the waxwings this year? The hummingbirds are plentiful, making the air buzz, and robins with their cocky attitude, and sparrows everywhere. All of the regular birds are abundant and, therefore, boring. She wants exotic, rare; she is a speciesist when it comes to birds.
Once, when she’d needed it, she’d lived in a hospital at the edge of the Fraser Estuary, and the only birds that had caught her attention were the visitors, the fancy accidentals that should not have been there. A whooper swan. A Steller’s sea eagle. An American avocet. A prothonotary warbler. Oh yeah, she’s all about the bling, she thinks, which is a laugh. Her boots are leaking, her umbrella sags on one side, and her scarfless neck is cold and bare. Fancy, indeed.