Each bulge split open, and an animal or two stepped, slithered or flew out. I saw a hippopotamus, and a lynx, and I think a cassowary. A colourful butterfly clung to the alligator’s brow, like a bow-ribbon. A human being came out of one ship, leaning on a goat for support. She was old—the human, I mean—and her features were African, and she was smiling. They all came out, and behind them, their ships sealed, like those cool bandages. They all started talking to us, though no one’s lips moved.
The ship in front of my house had disgorged some kind of cow, or antelope, or deer. No, too chesty for a deer, and too graceful for a cow. It had close, tawny fur, with deep brown stripes on its face and sides. Two long, thin horns stuck out from the top of its head. On its shoulder was a bird. The bird was smallish and plump, almost round. Its feathers were a deep grey with whitish flecks. It had a yellow beak with a reddish bit around its nostrils.
The beast picked its way carefully towards us through the snow. The bird on its shoulders wobbled, but hung on. They got close to us, stopped, looked us over. We looked back.
“So,” said the antelope thing, “anybody wanna ride?”
“In that?” asked the bear. It got down on all fours, sniffed at the rotten orange ship.
“Yeah,” said the bird. “You can come if you want to. It’s a hoot.”
An owl on a telephone pole above us hooted. The pigeons laughed.
“Where does it go?” asked the raccoon.
The antelope thing looked thoughtful. “Best I can describe it is, next door. You can visit, and if you like it, you can stay. Or you can come back here. Whaddya say?”
“Can we think about it?” asked the man who’d crashed into my front stairs.
“No. No time.” The bird was addressing us over its shoulder. The antelope thing was already heading back to the ship. “Now or never. One-time offer only.”
“Wait!” yelled a cat, turning in fretful circles at my feet.
The beast stopped and turned around. “We’ve discovered,” it said, “that there are two kinds of creatures. The ones who come with us, we call them the Adventurers.”
“And the others?” hissed the cat.
“We call them the Beautiful Losers. Because this Earth is beautiful and fearful, and it’s a brave choice to stay, to never see anywhere but it. Just touch the skin of the ship, and it’ll open for you.” They disappeared back inside.
“Oryx and crake created He them,” whispered the young woman.
“What?” I said.
“That was a spotted crake, and the thing it was sitting on was an oryx.”
Birds were streaming into the ship. Granny Nichol was making her way to it as quickly as she could go. Her parrot, however, had clambered down to the porch and was headed determinedly back inside the house.
“Honey,” said the man, “I really want to go. You coming?”
The young woman smiled at her father. “You go, Dad,” she said. “I like being rockbound.”
He hugged her tightly.
“But you have to come back, okay?” she said. “So you can tell me all about it.” She stood and waved while he disappeared into the ship’s side. “Aren’t you going?” she asked me.
Nearly every creature had made its choice. I saw smaller rotten-orange pods flying out of windows and doors. The tropical fish, I thought. And the shut-ins and the babies. I guessed that some of the ships had gone into the rivers, lakes, and seas. I looked at the snow shovel in my hands. Stay and shovel snow, or go and see what lay next door to this world?
The young woman gave my shoulder a gentle shove. “Go on,” she said.
THE FIVE TITLES:
Beautiful Losers by Leonard Cohen
No Crystal Stair by Mairuth Sarsfield
Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
Rockbound by Frank Parker Day
Volkswagen Blues by Jacques Poulin
Oh, hell yeah. I used “oryx and crake” in a sentence.
Flying Lessons
The first time I heard Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s novel The Little Prince in the original French was in Jamaica, in my high school French class. The reading was from an actual 33 1/3 rpm vinyl record, being played on a portable record player that our French teacher had brought into class. I believe the reading was by de Saint-Exupéry himself. I remember my initial astonishment because I, an A student in French, couldn’t understand a word of it. Neither could any of my classmates. We’d been studying French for years, but we’d never heard whole blocks of text spoken at anything like normal speed by a native speaker.
It was Mister Gonsalves who taught Carol how to fly, when she was nine. Come, he’d said, I’ll show you my little cat.
Afterwards, in her junior school carved into the red dirt of a Diego Martin hillside, she’d practise her flying during lunch break. Would stand on the part of the schoolyard below the tuck shop: the wide, paved part that sloped down to the high gate at the entrance. The other children would be playing and zooming around on the level dirt playground that had been carved out further up the hill, not on this steep leaning bit that rolled all balls out into the street. Sometimes you could find quartz crystals on that rough playground, marvellously faceted under God’s loupe. Carol bet that the jewels Ali Baba had found in the story didn’t look like the sharp, shiny ones in Daddy’s jewellery shop, but all soft and white and gleamy inside, like the quartz you could find in the playground dirt.
But when Carol wanted to feel herself flying—when school lessons had been too hard and she had got all her sums wrong and Miss had called her up to the front of the class and told her in front of everybody that she must stop daydreaming—Carol had no time at break for digging for magic jewels in red dirt, or for Red Rover, Red Rover, send Carol right over, or for skipping Double Dutch. She would stand at the very top of the steep paved part of the school grounds and close her eyes, raise her arms out to her sides, and lean forward until if she leaned any further, she’d tip and fall. She would close her eyes and wait. You had to trust that the feeling would come. Do you like my cat? Mister Gonsalves had said. Would you stroke him for me, Carol?
When she flew, it was quiet up in the air, it was like Peter Pan. The breeze flowed under her eyelashes and trickled out the corners, making them feel cool and wet. She could go away, wherever she wanted: to a magical island where there were only children, and they played right through the day and night, as late as they wanted, and had toolum sweeties for breakfast and plantain tarts for dinner; or up high in the jamoon tree outside Mister Gonsalves’s bedroom window, to crouch in the branches, eating sour jamoon berries till her hands and mouth turned purple from their juice. From the treetop you could see everything: the silly bald top of Mister Gonsalves’s head where he lay with somebody on his bed. And across the road was her house with its red flagstone porch, where Mummy and Daddy wouldn’t be home from work until six o’clock.
When the school bell rang and she had to go back inside, it would be time for English class. She was good at English, so Miss wouldn’t have to tell her to concentrate. They were reading about the Little Prince. Carol figured that the pilot in the story was going to help the little boy to fly home to his asteroid where his friend the rose lived.
Mister Gonsalves’s cat had been warm and brown and hairless. It had raised its blunt head up for kisses. Carol didn’t remember what else; she was flying. It was nice that she had learned how. Because now, whenever she could get everything to work just right, it would come, the feeling of lifting off, of leaving her body and floating gently away; up, up, up into the warm Trinidadian sun.
Whose Upward Flight I Love
When I moved to Toronto from the Caribbean as a teenager, the winters were among the hardest things to get used to. More than three decades later, I still haven’t quite managed it.
That fall, a storm hailed down unseasonable screaming winds and fists of pounding rain. The temperature plummeted through a wet ululating night that blew in early winter. Morning saw all edges laced with frost.
In the city’s grove, the only place where live things, captured, still grew from earth, the trees thrashed, roots heaving at the soil.
City parks department always got the leavings. Their vans were prison surplus, blocky, painted happy green. The growing things weren’t fooled.
Parks crew arrived, started throwing tethers around the lower branches, hammering the other ends of twisted metal cables into the fast-freezing ground to secure the trees. Star-shaped leaves flickered and flashed in butterfly-winged panic. Branches tossed.
One tree escaped before they could reach it; yanked its roots clear of the gelid soil and flapping its leafy limbs, leapt frantically for the sky. A woman of the crew shouted and jumped for it. Caught at a long, trailing root as the tree rose above her. For a second she hung on. Then the root tore away in her hand and the tree flew free. Its beating branches soughed at the air.
The woman landed heavily, knees bowing and thighs flexing at the impact. She groaned, straightened; stared at the length of root she was clutching in her garden glove. Liver-red, it wriggled, like a worm. Its clawed tip scratched feebly. A dark liquid welled from its broken end. “We always lose a few when this happens,” she said. The man with her just stared at the thing in her hand.
The tree was gaining altitude, purple leaves catching the light as it winged its way to its warmer-weathered homeland. She dropped the root. He tried to kick dirt over it, his boot leaving dull indentations in the earth. Then he gave a shout, not of surprise exactly, rushed to another tree that had worked most of its roots whipping out of the soil. She ran to help. Cursing, they dodged flailing foliage, battened down the would-be escapee.
He panted at her, “So, you and Derek still fighting?”
Her heart tossed briefly. She hogtied the faint, familiar dismay. “No, we worked it out again.”
And Derek would stay, again. They would soldier on. And quarrel again, neither sure whether they battled to leave each other or to remain together.
A burgundy gleam on the powder-dusted ground caught her eye. The severed root was crawling jerkily, trying to follow in the direction its tree had gone.
Blushing
Does the blushing bride have the first idea what’s in store for her?
“All the keys to my house are yours,” he said. The rowdy sounds from the bar kitty-corner across Bellevue Park were muffled by the brick walls of the house. In here, it was quiet as breath.
He touched my cheek. His fingers pressed softly in, the way a chef tests a steak for doneness. He was as flushed as I knew I must be. My husband of three hours. My pale, precise love. Anything that excited him made his skin blossom shell-pink. I took the hand that held the large brass ring bristling with keys, and kissed his palm. We were at the top of the spiral staircase. The slippery satin train of my wedding gown spilled in a cascade down the stairs. It pulled at me. It was trying to slither downwards. I put a firm foot on the material. Heard the soft, explosive pop as the heel of my pump went through it. That’d hold it still.
I cupped the weight of the ring of keys in my hands the way I’d cradle the back of a baby’s head. “All of these,” I whispered, “mine?”
He smiled. “Except this one.” He plucked a small key from the bundle and held it up for me to see.
It was brass, ornate. Its handle was a plain ceramic egg shape, like an eyeball, ending in a gold band. I touched the egg. It warmed under my fingers like skin.
“Another eye joke?” I asked with a teasing smile. “You optometrists.”
That earned me a frown. “Be serious,” he said. “You know which room I mean?”
I did. After the fire, after I’d accepted his proposal, he’d had the house gutted and remade to prepare it for me: the exterior sandblasted to bring out the Victorian façade’s plummy pink Credit River sandstone and rich red brick; the burnt couch replaced with a vintage settee in dark, knurled wood. In some precious import store in the market he’d found antique locks and keys taken from India, their greasy brass mottled blue-green with verdigris. He’d had the workmen install them in all the doors. I would visit every weekend to inspect the work with him. He’d given me my engagement ring under the lead-crystal-paned dome of the sun room, had playfully nipped blood from my earlobe on the Canadian Shield granite of the kitchen counter. Over the weeks, we had entered every room in his house one by one, wet some surface in each room with our fluids. Made them jointly ours. Except one.
I chuckled and put my arm through his. “C’mon,” I said. “Show me your secret room.” I still thought we were playing a game, that this would be the final deflowering of the last room of the house.
He shook his head. “I’m not kidding. Don’t go in there. I’ll need to have somewhere in our home that’s just for me. You have your studio, after all.”
I pulled out of his arms, let chill air whisper through the space between us. “Don’t you trust me?”
“It’s only healthy, you know. You don’t want to become like those boring couples who might as well be the same person?”
I pouted, but said nothing.
He pinkened, smiled. He waved the little key in front of my face. “Atta girl. Promise me you will never use this key?”
I shrugged.
He hugged me, nibbled at the soft skin of my upper lip. “I knew I could trust you,” he said.
But the day he returned to work, the key was gone from the ring. I tested the lock on the forbidden door. It was secure. I returned to bed. The smothering grandeur of the house made me want to lie cradled in Egyptian cotton forever. That, or run screaming into heavy traffic, cackling into car windows and gouging my eyes out. I chose to doze and dream, must have fallen asleep. I woke a few hours later, groggy, with a muddy headache. I couldn’t figure out the coffee maker. My wedding gown had fallen off its shelf and was pooled on the bedroom floor. I stepped on a tube of Cadmium yellow in my studio, squeezing a long worm of it out onto the new oak flooring. It was late afternoon when I finally managed to leave the house. The sky was already beginning to darken into a still winter evening. The market air smelled like a meat locker. My tummy rumbled.
The Jamaican patty shop on one corner and the shop that sold used leather wear arm-wrestled for musical supremacy, dance hall vying with hard rock through tinny speakers that blared out over the heads of the passers-by.
A health food shop had a hand-lettered sign in its window, advertising a sale on dried mountain berries that I knew I could buy for a tenth of that price in the Chinese market over on the main road. The telephone poles were spackled with the motley of old posters: band appearances; dog-walking services; grainy, nth-generation photocopies of the faces of missing women.
At the precious little import store a perky Goth girl with bouncy Pollyanna braids told me that they’d sold the last of the antique locks. A job lot. To make room for new stock. “Old wooden teeth,” she said. “With hinges. Masses of them. Gross.”
“Who’d you sell the locks to?”
She lifted the coin tray out of the till, rummaged around some pieces of paper beneath. From one of them she wrote me an address on a piece of receipt paper she tore from the credit card charger. She reached into a fish bowl on the counter that was full of small, slim cylinders. She handed one to me. “Mace,” she said. “No charge. It’s getting dark.”
The used office furniture warehouse on Spadina Avenue only had three of the locks left that they’d bought from the import store. A man with a receipt book and a worried look said, “I can give you a deal on those.” I bought them, just in case. He tried to sell me a backless kneeler chair, too. “Great for your core strength,” he said, patting the soft little tummy spreading above the waistband of his jeans. I wished him a good evening as I left.
“You be careful out there,” he replied. He flopped into a padded steno chair with a sigh.
I wandered back through the market. The incense store was shutting the scent of sandalwood away for the night. The blinds on the big fish market snapped down like eyelid
s. In the bakery, bread was half price. I bought a loaf of something a rich chestnut brown. I tore pieces off it and chewed as I went. How could he call it total love if he kept any part of himself hidden from me?
The butcher shop was closed. A knob of bone rolled in the gutter outside it. I kicked it across the street and sulked along, thinking of lamb chops.
I passed the window of a bar, its black-painted storefront garish with commissioned graffiti. A man in a bulky hand-knit sweater was lugging a mannequin into the window. The mannequin was nude except for a chastity belt, complete with lock and key. The key jutted rudely from its crotch. The handle of the key was ivory, egg-shaped.
I rapped on the door until the man in the sweater opened it. “We don’t open till six.” His teeth were long and yellow.
“How much for the chastity belt?”
I twisted the ovoid handle. The key turned in the lock to the secret room like a knife scraping against bone. I pushed the door open. It resisted me, this last secret. It was very heavy, and padded. I stepped inside.
The coppery smell prickled the flesh of my arms.
The sight dropped me to my knees. It was all red in that room; red as blood. My slippers slushed in red. Red painted the walls and dripped in clotted gouts to the floor. The missing women had been given an extra throat apiece, and surplus orifices. As payment, the giver had taken an organ or two: a womb here; a tongue there. The women’s eyes. Oh, their eyes.
I dropped the key. I had to dabble knuckle-deep in blood to retrieve it. I rubbed it against my dress to clean it, but that only spread more of the stain onto me. Trembling, I slid my hand across the congealing mess. Raised my palm to my nose.
The door creaked further open. There he stood, his colour high. “I didn’t promise,” I said.
He grabbed my hair, cranked my head back to a painful angle. “I told you not to come in here.”
Falling in Love With Hominids Page 19