John has broken her heart for a woman without the sense to wear socks in winter.
And John is there with her real coat. He is pulling the wrong one off. He is wrapping his shattered wife in her real coat. Bundling her hands in tea towels that she hates. They’re neon green and synthetic shammy material.
I hate these tea towels.
I know.
Why do you do things I hate?
And John has no answer to that.
John, where are you going?
I have to take my wife to the hospital.
But John —
She’s hurt.
But I’m hurt too!
You can take care of yourself.
But John —
Stop saying my fucking name. Never say my fucking name again. We’re done here. I’m done. I have no animosity toward you but I am done it is over.
You have no animosity toward me?
No. I have no ill will toward you —
John, there’s blood —
It’s not your fucking ill will to have toward me, you fucking maniac!
John, I’m bleeding on the floor.
Iris —
John! Stop talking to that woman!
Yes, I’m sorry, Georgina, I’m sorry. Let’s go.
I’m your wife. Your wife is bleeding.
I know, I know, let’s go.
Do you love her? Is that it? Do you love her, John?
No, no, of course not. She means nothing to me.
There it is. Finally.
She means nothing. Meant nothing. Means nothing. Is nothing to me. It was nothing. Iris means nothing to me!
And if Iris means nothing, then he hurt George for nothing. And if she means something, then he is hurting himself, too.
Hard to say who is the most or worst hurt when you treat people like nothing.
The fallout is catastrophic.
* * *
Iris waits until she hears the front door close.
Then she waits a little longer. Then she stands.
Tiny pieces of glass fall from her. She thinks all the linens will have to be laundered. And then she thinks, that’s not my job anymore. And her life is different. Everything has changed again. She walks over to the corner picture windows and looks out toward the harbour.
There is some new feeling swimming inside Iris.
Not a feeling she can grasp with any certainty. It is still too squishy slick, slipping free like a codfish onto the haul of a boat after being jigged up by its same own tail. The tail-jigging part being another betrayal as this groundfish had not even sincerely chosen to take the bait. Properly and definitively caught up, it was.
This fishy feeling of Iris’s has been captured and thrown down at her feet.
Iris is relieved and horrified to be alone now with it as it slowly suffocates, the laboured gills pulling up and down for possible contact with the measly store of damp salt she dribbles along its once-shiny backside. She needs to keep it alive long enough to identify it.
She sits aboard herself and plays witness to the struggle. Pays it respect deserving of its heroic determination. The will to survive in this dry dock surrounded by the bodies of feelings long silenced: there was hope, optimism, pride, even love.
But they are gone wretched now. Dead and rank. Too strong-smelling to have any help in their removal. Iris is left to wash this mess down on her own. And she wants to, really, she will scrub the last of the guts clear, scrape off every small scale stuck to the side with her very own chipped fingernails, as soon as she can get this final wily fish feeling up.
Iris puts her heel down over the skull of it. She knows this means waste, but she is too tormented. Killing this feeling is the only way, and Iris feels murderous.
And what is worse is she understands her mother now.
This: another gutting that awaits her ashore if she is ever capable of steering this dory inland. She grabs hold the rudder and decides her decision.
Iris walks to the bar phone, takes a whisky bottle from off the shelving and places her cellphone face up. She has clung to it for nearly two years. She had grown wholly convinced that her survival depended on this small shiny slip of a thing. It would be her defence against whatever else came, but she sees now it had been a shackle. She was handcuffed to bad decisions, the worst ones, the accidents, her hateful, desperate pleas, it was all housed inside this singular device so that she might have evidence later when accused of some great sin. But what of it now?
Those who could pretend it all away could pretend away anything.
It did not matter in the least whether or not Iris could prove she had been misled. They cared not a speck for her. They wanted the Johns and they would believe anything to have them. And so let them have him, Iris thinks as she brings the back end of the whisky bottle down over the phone face. She does so repeatedly until it is mere shards before walking to the hostess phone and dialling a landline number she can remember because it used to be her landline, too. When she lived there with them. She leaves her message after the beep. She imagines her voice echoing through the dark kitchen.
I’m drunk and have no money. So am walking over. Please let me in, okay?
And then . . . click.
Jo hears it. And gets up. Pulls on her snow pants over her Scottie pyjama pants. Chris tells her she’s crazy. He begs her not to go because she is three months pregnant. But Jo goes anyway. She will get Iris and bring her home.
Iris puts the phone down on the bar. She doesn’t need to worry that it is not on the cradle as John likes. Because he is done with her now, he said so. He is finished with her now. No hard feelings, he said.
Actually, John, all the hard feelings.
And who is John to think he can dictate what feelings Iris has, believing he’s a self-appointed party DJ spinning her feelings for entertainment, turning them up and down and off however he pleases like some tune on the radio. And the playlist hits the tail end of the album. Leave your home. Change your name.
Some day all the songs that play will be songs they have never heard together.
And Iris already can’t fucking wait for that day.
She will walk to Jo’s. She will make Jo forgive her. She will take Harry to the park. She will not lose him. She will call her mother. She will tell her she loves her. She will find Olive. She will apologize for never being there. She will move out of that shit apartment. She will paint. She will only date nice men. She will never lie again. She will not let this ruin her life. She will never ever let this happen again. She will move on. Move forward. She will forgive herself for doing this. For letting this happen. For not being genuine. For putting him first. She will get over this. She will be new. She will not die. Because she does not want to die not even a little bit not even at all.
Iris wants to live.
She steps off the sidewalk into the street because it is easier to walk there and her feet are already wet and freezing in the ballet flats. She is so caught up in the promises she is promising herself that she doesn’t see the figure walking toward her also on the street. Waving. Olive sees Iris a ways off. She sees her moving through the intersection. She can see her coming across the steep slap of hill. And she sees the truck lights come up through the blowing snow. Olive sees the lights fall on Iris. And she hurries toward her screaming her name. Iris has her head down. Iris cannot see the truck. Calv does not see her until he has already struck her. Roger is bleeding all over the seat. Calv was looking at Roger bleeding all over the seat.
Iris’s shoes come free as she is dragged through the intersection by her
coat before coming clear of the truck. She looks up as she falls, sees the brake lights move away, then nothing.
Then Olive.
Olive did not recognize the truck. But she recognized the driver.
Olive takes off the snow boots and places them gently on Iris’s feet before sitting down next to her in the road. She takes Iris’s hand in her smaller hand and blows warm air into Iris like her grandmother did when she was a girl. Olive thinks this is love and Iris needs love now. Olive blows more love into Iris. Each breath is like hope. Iris is holding what little hope Olive has left in her cupped right hand. Olive gives her more. Olive gives all she has, rocking back and forth, chanting, it’s okay, Iris, you’re okay. Olive wants to believe that’s true. Just like she has always wanted to believe in happy endings. Ever since she was a girl. Ever since forever.
Olive, like Iris, is a kind of forever girl just like all of girls who had their girlhood trampled.
Olive looks toward the truck. It is still braked in the road. The red lights are lit just long enough for Olive to think perhaps he will help them. But the truck drives off.
The snow is heavy with moisture.
It clings to them as Olive pushes Iris’s hair from her wet face and wipes the snowflakes from around her shiny mouth. Her own hands are growing cold but she doesn’t feel her own hands. Or feet. Knelt down in the slush. It is all texture void of temperature. Olive doesn’t feel the snow drifting in around them. She cannot hear the swooping wind. The world has been robbed of external sight and sound.
There is just still-beating hearts once thought broken.
Not broken though.
Still beating.
And Olive wills for something good to happen because Iris deserves to be shown some kindness having had nothing but hurt for herself. She deserves better than the cold road. And Olive wants to howl out but soft-cries over Iris’s buckled body, knowing her ancient anger in this moment would cause fright when she means to comfort. So she leans in close, as close as she can be to battered Iris, and through the white noise, wafting and wavering, she assures and reassures in cobbled-together confidence that someone will come, someone will help.
Iris says, I hurt myself. Like a deer in the road. But we don’t have those.
Olive offers, I saw a pink caribou once.
And Iris nods and says, I want to be like that. After. I want to be a whole new animal.
And then she says, I’m sorry, Olive.
And she is sorry because Olive’s germs are her germs. Iris and Olive have half the same germs. Iris had been only young and always scared and mostly angry when Olive told her. It had been hard to look into a little face and find her father’s face staring back.
The knowledge that they would always share his fixed features stung Iris through and her jealousy left her too sore to overcome. So Olive did not get a big sister. And Iris did not get a little sister. They were hairline fractured this way and lonely for it their whole young lives.
Olive knows Iris is sorry. Has always known it. Olive is sorry too. But that’s not the apology they have been yearning for. Perhaps now, they will stop waiting for some man to make it right.
Iris imagines her and Olive together travelling concrete along the backs of optimistic towns built to house former baymen, taking the second right-handed turn before swinging round the bend, a tight ushering westward, cutting through the thin rocky ridge, an otherworldly scape.
Fully forging inland and over interior, this stolen ghost land, fog, mesmerizing silver birches, an ancient scenic green bay, lakes, rivers, bodies of water to cross, quick and continuous, finally rearing from the stress of living, a great wave of relief crashing north beyond the mountains atop a road called for visitors rather than kin, norse, men.
Everyone kept moving through the thickness of the centre by a need to be further out of reach, that welcome release upon the first sighting, an awakening, freedom felt when finally reaching the shoreline’s windy break to emerge from the trees and breathe again, make up for all that shallow gasping, salt in your lungs and along the lines of your face, fullness.
There stretching out, shimmering lean and fierce, their razored coastline, windswept and weather-beaten, a Strait of Belle Isle, bountiful and hardened, this the place that made them, all the good bits plaited broadside the bad, unknowingly mixed, indivisible, a savage braid surviving the ragged shore, stronger still, a threat, a comfort, a forgiveness, always.
I want to go home.
And Olive shakes her head in agreement. She too wants more than riches to be off this city’s winter road and out of harm’s way for once. It is written all about her person. They share the sense of it passing between them, a true longing to be some elsewhere.
Please don’t leave me here, Ollie.
The nickname, a hug sealing the pair, is a precious incantation, making them, suddenly in a word, belong to each other. Sisters. Olive holds Iris’s pale hand between her same but darker hands and she doesn’t let go and she doesn’t leave. Olive stays.
Acknowledgements
I would like to extend my sincere gratitude to Sarah MacLachlan for believing in an idea not yet fully formed. Perhaps that idea was me. I would also like to thank my editor, Jane Warren, as well as managing editor Maria Golikova and all of the team at House of Anansi for their patience and generosity. Wela’lin to Stacey Howse and miigwech to Michelle Porter for your sensitive, necessary and thoughtful comments.
Much appreciation to everyone at Riddle Fence Publishing and Eastern Edge Gallery for their understanding and support. Thank you to my UBC classmates for their feedback and to my thesis advisor, Maureen Medved, for her ready ear and unflinching encouragement. My tireless agent, Samantha Haywood, regularly entertains my raging about art and capitalism long distance, and for this I am always appreciative.
A special thank you to my big Newfoundland family: aunts, uncles and cousins. Always to Melissa, Chelsie and Alicia; sister is my favourite word because of you! To my mom and dad, Della and Nelson Coles, wild horses the pair of them.
Also, to my pop, Stephen Dredge, for his gentle and constant care. And to my nan, Susan, who tries desperately to protect us from the world’s worst bits in her devoted and strong-willed way. I am so lucky to be your dollie. When I am driving home, I am driving home to you, constantly stopped steady by your affection whenever I speak of Nan, which is every day and all the time, such is your overwhelming impact and influence on my life.
All my love and loyalty to my friends for their kindness with shout-outs to Emma, Robert and Elisabeth. As is the way in adulthood, some people were accidentally lost during the writing of this hurt monster. Some new humans appeared then purposefully to fill me in and help me up in the misplaced’s stead. Regardless of our current relationship status, though, I am grateful to all for the time and attention you paid my soft and savage heart. It did not go unnoticed, even if sometimes it went unsaid. And that’s on me.
Thank you especially to my Katie Lauras for always answering the phone. And to Maria, who hangs on to me for our dear lives through every heartbreak and retelling and draft and hunger-strike. I would not know how to be in the world without you.
To all the people who have kept me alive these thirty-seven years: thank you and I love you.
ArtsNL and the City of St. John’s financially supported the writing of this novel through project grants to professional artists. Sadly, Canada Council did not. I was very poor.
Oh, and #metoo. Obviously.

MEGAN GAIL COLES is a graduate of Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labr
ador and the National Theatre School of Canada. She has an M.F.A. from the University of British Columbia and has written and produced numerous plays. Her first collection of short fiction, Eating Habits of the Chronically Lonesome, won the BMO Winterset Award and the Margaret and John Savage First Book Award, and earned her the one-time Writers’ Trust 5×5 Prize. Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club is her first novel. Originally from Savage Cove on the Great Northern Peninsula of Newfoundland, Megan now lives and works in St. John’s. She is of English, Irish, and Mi’kmaq ancestry.
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