Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club

by Megan Gail Coles

  No one even asked Dot if she was afraid to go to jail. If they had, Dot would have said yes without hesitation. She was definitely without a doubt afraid of the other women. Nothing about jail was ordinary to Dot and therefore it was all in contrast with her perception of herself. She was very concerned about the sleeping arrangements. Her lower back is very delicate.

  And she had worried endlessly about what kind of food they would serve.

  Dot’s digestion was constantly plaguing her and she feared her irritable bowel would start up again. Where would she poo? In stalls? Next to criminals? Would the other women listen to her poo? Dot was overcome. She was very scared of the young women she passed in the halls of the courthouse. They gave her dirty looks. She suspected they would give her more than dirty looks when they got her alone in the basement. That’s what Dot found on the google. Assaults happened in basements and hallways where the blind spots lived. How did everyone know about these blind spots? Trial and error. The irony was not lost on Dot.

  If the Telegram reporter had asked her outright or even hinted at it, Dot would have said she felt there was a very real need for adult undergarments because she felt confident that she would wet herself if a skinny twenty-something from the blocks offered at her. But the Telegram reporter did not ask her because the Telegram reporter hadn’t the time or word count to get into it. Long-form journalism was on its way out, her new boss said. Get it in the headline, he said.

  All Dot gets: one line.

  The paywall, while merely a dollar for the first month, priced a lot of people out. They hadn’t the credit to afford the card to get the news about why they were so very poorly.

  Access to everything denied, b’y.

  The people in charge, having allowed most, many, okay, more than before, the privilege of literacy, had now deemed having an educated citizenship a right hassle so were marking it up in a hurry, man. If motivation could overcome the hesitation and apathy long enough to scale that wall, people still would know that Dot was scared and full of remorse. Her sorry was not noteworthy enough, though, so the media, all media, mentioned repeatedly the bits about addiction. Behind the deadlines and hashtags, every tarp marked “pressure,” the reporters knew there was something called context, but thinking on it just illuminated dissatisfaction.

  So they presented bare and basic facts when they could get the space for that and those facts.

  Dot was a slot jockey riding the games at hotel bars with a highball glass of cranberry and tonic bought with money “re-appropriated” from work, which was an alternative way of saying stolen, which would be closer to the truth.

  Ah, yes, truth. Yee-fucking-haw.

  Dot didn’t drink. She wasn’t a drinker. Tony’s new wife was, and Dot was super careful to be everything she wasn’t. They could share nothing. Except of course a bit of DNA in their respective four children. So Dot put a lot of space between them. She was the antithesis to her husband’s wife. In her mind he would always be her husband. Or at least until she got a new husband which was increasingly unlikely given Dot’s current lodgings. She stopped saying husband publicly though to suit her children, who said it made her sound crazy and desperate.

  Dot wants to scream that she feels crazy and desperate.

  Her Majesty’s was not built with ladies in mind.

  The powder rooms were virtually spotless of powder spare the meth snuck in by guards in need of a rim job on the side. Not all of the guards brought in drugs and not all of the drugs were brought in by guards, but the job certainly took its toll on one’s moral compass.

  The inmates were going to get it somewhere anyway was the reasoning and so they took turns augmenting their take-home pay with a take-in powder. The jig required all to act vocally insulted if searches were requested and so there was a quiet complicit nature to the little drug deals that led to pool sticks across the face and shanks in a thigh.

  The stone-walled structure was never intended to house humans humanely.

  The idea nearly two hundred years back was pure punishment.

  It is a hard, purposeful word representing an even harsher, more intentional concept. Dot thought on it a lot while she tidied her cell. It was the prisoners’ responsibility to maintain their personal living quarters. This was the freedom permitted them to a degree.

  Attempting to communicate to her neighbour how unneighbourly it was to live in squalor was generally frowned upon, though Dot could easily smell the young woman in the cell alongside. Dot was taught as a girl to never mind what your neighbour got but Dot did not think that applied if your neighbour was right full of the head lice.

  It was a miserable existence over there. The smelly one spent all day lying in the bunk scratching herself. She rarely spoke full sentences even when questioned by the guards whom she seemed to despise equally. Though not as much as she hated the shower. Getting undressed undid her. She would cry the whole day after.

  Dot could make little sense of it. She did not think misses was in danger of being assaulted. Not with the size of her. She was so large and foul that Dot never feared for the smelly one’s safety. The sobbing would surely warn off anyone, Dot thought. She tried to talk to her about it but the smelly one called Dot a bad name so she ceased trying to be friends, even though she was sure a hot shower would make her feel better.

  The smelly one died in the shower so Dot opted to be moved to the men’s prison in town.

  Nowhere was safe, but Dot thought being closer to home would make her feel better. Make the time passing less tiresome. She thought people would visit her there. Dot had not received many visitors in Clarenville. Melanie had come once but refused to bring her daughter.

  Babies don’t belong in jail, Mel had said.

  Dot had attempted to voice an objection. Her retort circled babies having no concept of place, but Mel had returned it with a hard and fast quip about trying to be a good mother so Dot had backed off. She later ruminated on this in her cell for days and concluded her daughter cold for having thrown such a barb when Dot was in no position to defend herself. She said nothing, though, because she needed the contact. Damian had visited a number of times in the fall, bringing Tom.

  Or rather Tom had visited a number of times in the fall, bringing Damian.

  And Dot was grateful despite thinking Tom disrespectful and full of himself. Tom was always telling her she wasn’t supposed to speak to her children the way she did. Stressing a need for boundaries. Tom thought he was too good for them. But Dot still said nothing because she needed the contact. When the opportunity to shift back into town presented itself, Dot lunged at it. Sure, it was a men’s prison, but Dot reassured herself they would not put women somewhere that was unsafe. More unsafe.

  Dot was operating under the misguided notion that she was still a white woman.

  And while she was indeed that, she had recently become other things that trumped that.

  Now, she was a criminal. She was a prisoner. She was unemployed. Homeless. Poor.

  Though none of these things had made themselves readily apparent while she served time in Clarenville. Dot was just serving a little time. Just a wee bit of time. A pinch. Nothing to get worked up about. She had planned to use it wisely. Made reading lists and outlined a workout regimen.

  She would read Jane Austen novels and strengthen her core while getting rehabilitated.

  Dot hoped she might be able to hear the races from her cell but she could not.

  * * *

  Damian’s mother made it easy for Tom to play righteous.

  He grew up on a sandy beach island with a warm coastline
suited for shorts and castle building in the sunshine. Their great claim to fame was a ginger-haired orphan who just happened to be adored by her foster parents and the town hunk. It was quaint and hardly ever rained. Their great exports were potatoes and holiday memories.

  Tom had supportive parents who were actually still married to each other on purpose.

  Not because they lacked self-esteem or money to divorce. Not even because they were religious or felt particularly attuned to societal pressures. No. Nope. Not even because they fucking loved each other which, of course, they did in a totally sweet and mature way.

  No, Tom’s parents still voluntarily lived in the same rural Prince Edward Island farmhouse passed down through generations because they preferred each other’s company over the television. Cooked favourite meals that were not their own favourite meals. Painted rooms preferred colours that were not their own preferred colours. Travelled to cities that interested the other rather than travelling to the city that interested them.

  And this formula was a decent working formula because they both got what they wanted without having to place demands or meet demands for themselves. Tom inherited these traits naturally and behaved in kind toward Damian. This easy manner of loving was fostered over a hundred years of gentle summer winds and evenings spent walking along the coast in one’s naked feet.

  The nerve of some people.

  Damian had once tried to explain to Tom that he had none of these effortless instincts. The winds on his island had been murderous and naked feet would end in bloody amputation.

  He just did not have the same tools, he just did not have them.

  Damian confessed his useless nature and declared Tom could do better regularly.

  He proved this every time he did not do the thing Tom would have him do. Damian did not casually purchase Tom’s favourite cut flowers and place them in a green glass vase on the windowsill or think to paint the kitchen cabinets a glossy buttercream yellow. Damian never once in his whole life thought to bake cherry pound cakes for their friends or grow spider plants for their elderly neighbours.

  Damian did not do the right things because he did not know the right things to do.

  It was like resenting him for not speaking a second language. No one taught him fucking French. Like punishing a raccoon for pissing in the house when really it was raccooning the only way it knew how to raccoon. Tom found this argument amusing. At first. And then disturbing. Because Damian was not an mid-sized urban rodent. Tom did not think of him as a pest, and it worried Tom that Damian thought this of himself.

  And as with all new love, the red flags flapped overhead but Tom refused to look up.

  Until he could not refuse it because the overhead noise was thunderous and unavoidable.

  Obviously, Tom now found it fast and easy to judge Damian poorly for not having helped Olive. It was a despicable way to fully fail them both, fail them all. Tom finally recognized his complicity in choosing not to acknowledge who Damian was these past three years.

  Tom had ignored all the fabric flying just above him.

  He had made excuses to excuse and covered up things in need of covering. But not this time. This time Tom hauled those red flags down from poles and strung Damian up in them and left. Said he was leaving and left. Allowed Damian just enough time to beseech him knowing that it was useless, though also knowing that Damian prostrating himself in such a pitiful way would help dissolve the last relationship bonds. Damian’s wild proclamations and cascade of tears from the passenger seat did nothing to dilute Tom’s will to escape to safety.

  Please don’t leave me. Please don’t give up on me.

  Leaving comes fast when nice people finally recognize they’ve been tricked.

  Tom’s desire to flee was large and overwhelming. It consumed the course as each step further from the fraud was more space to wonder what he was well and truly capable of. Tom found a sublet and ruminated on alternative endings that were even worse than the actual end. Tom’s imagination ran away with him now that he had decided his decision.

  And then they were all awful. The whole family. Tony was a bad guy. Deadbeat dad, cheating husband, cliché. Dot was miserably unsound. Emotionally manipulative, thieving mother. Melanie, it was a sin about Melanie, with her abusive boyfriend who would never marry her or help her with their daughter ever. No, my goodness, Tom could see his mistake with space and time. He had thought Damian different from his tortured clan but that was the blinders placed on his face upon glimpsing Damian’s beautiful backside covered in tattoos.

  Good head is really very distracting.

  Tom vowed never to let Damian anywhere near his belt buckle again.

  And so it was that Tom quit Damian just as Damian forecasted he would, which was of little comfort though Damian reminded anyone who would listen because it was as near to being right about Tom as he could get. And being near to being right about Tom was still in some sense being near to Tom. Being a wreck continued to explore the central conflict at Damian’s core. He listened to Sufjan Stevens while sitting in the hallway coat closet weeping all over himself and into a bottle of old Pimm’s Tom’s brother had bought over the holidays.

  Broken hearts know not of dignified breaking.

  He resigned to being undignified now that lovely Tom had left him. How Damian referred to Tom was a clean and clear marker of intoxication. Tom became less lovely as the liquor levels fluctuated. The bottle measure is down but Damian is shot up until it is fuck Tom, that entitled Anne of Green Gables fucker.

  Tom has never known what it is like to live in constant fear that you won’t make it through the winter. Tom expects to make it through every winter. Knows that spring will return. Plans for the summer. This is the great difference in the two of them. Tom plans for the future because he never doubts that there will be one, while Damian feels he has robbed each day like an unworthy street thief. And though he understood well why Tom was so angry and disappointed, he still bawled accusations at his ex-boyfriend who would never fucking understand what it was like to be gay here.

  But I am gay here!

  But you’re not made here!

  Which was why Damian had been attracted to Tom in the first place. Tommy was sunny. Tommy was new. He talked to his siblings regularly and had not fucked all the same men Damian had fucked. Damian wanted to pat him on the head like a large-breed puppy. What a goofball. Damian loved him to bits.

  Tom made him want to stay on the planet.

  So Damian watered the houseplants and put money into an RRSP. He had googled trade schools and visited a mortgage broker cause he would need a real job and somewhere to live now that he had met Tom.

  Damian started noticing children at the park. He looked into their little faces and then the faces of their parents, searching for resemblance. He had never done that before because he was a strange gay man in a public place. He was sure of his strangeness and gayness as much as he was sure that they would not want him looking at their youngsters. But not Tom. Everyone liked Tom. A PEI Popsicle. Refreshing and welcome at the party.

  It was the hideous way Damian lashed about that made Tom leave.

  That’s what Tom said. He could have gotten over what happened. They could have addressed it. Sure, Damian had walked out of his job like it was nothing and never went back, but Tom could excuse that because of trauma. He was clearly in shock. And when Damian confessed that the reason he did not intervene was out of fear, well, Tom would have eventually forgiven that, too.

  Or so he thought. They could never know now. Because Damian had spun out all over the apartment saying
vicious things about Tom’s privilege showing. Or his ignorance showing. Or naivety. Damian said Tom was gullible enough to believe everyone was good and nice because it had always been that way for him. But it wasn’t like that for all of us, Damian yelled through snot and a little fit of barfing brought on by hysterical sobbing.

  It wasn’t fucking like that for Damian.

  And maybe Tom should have gone to Damian. Comforted him. Helped him.

  Maybe. But he could not out of horror. Damian was way more afflicted than Tom had known, and his survival instincts kicked in before Damian had the chance to hide himself away again.

  Tom was ordering things for his departure because this human that he loved needed a lot more support than Tom was able to give. Tom had thought this whole time that Damian was shedding the last vestige of his party boy ways. He thought this because that was what he was told and Tom, like others handy about the place, believed what he was told. He had been taught that was how language worked. You asked a question. The other person answered.

  Damian had said he wasn’t quite ready to give it all up just yet. He was just having one last good time, blowing off residual steam, sowing oats and the lot of clichés relied upon when presenting the alternative to truth. Tom had believed it though because he was in love and it was something to believe that allowed him to stay. Damian would grow out of it. Everyone was wild in their twenties.

  But they’re not in their twenties anymore and Damian is still wild.

  Though the concept of being wild is not the sharp edge Tom ultimately nicked himself on.

  No, it was the concept of coping that drew blood as he watched Damian weep uncontrollably against the side of the tub. This is how Damian coped with everything. Everything was an excuse to initiate a bender. It hardly mattered the occasion.