It was fucking gross.
Pillow shrugged and threw the bar in the garbage can, heard the hollow sound it made when it hit the bottom.
Pillow walked all the way around the empty giraffe enclosure, looking up at the trees, accidentally soaking his pants by falling in the fake river and throwing one of the giant red balls around for a while before he noticed the after-hours pen. Of course they wouldn’t keep them outside. Pillow moved over to the pen at a leisurely pace, enjoying the night air and the sound of exotic animals sleeping far away. He casually smashed a window with his elbow and stepped through, trailing blood.
There were four of them sleeping in a loose circle. They slept lying down, with their necks coiled all the away around resting on their hinds. Pillow had never seen a giraffe sleep before. For a second he thought maybe this would be the last new thing he saw. But he realized quickly that the least likely thing in the world was not seeing something new. Because each second was actually a new thing, if you thought about it. No matter how hard you pulled at its saddest threads, life could never unravel into something worthless. Pillow remembered how tired he was. He climbed the stairs down to the giraffe pen, opened the door and walked in.
He approached the largest sleeping giraffe and rubbed the giraffe’s flank, which felt firm, almost leathery. The giraffe kept sleeping, looking peaceful. There was a little opening below where the giraffe’s neck was looped around, just by the torso. Pillow lay down and curled into it. Even though it’s not really a spoon unless the person holds you with their arms and hands, Pillow thought it was close enough. The giraffe was the big spoon. They slept.
Sources
This book owes a large debt to the work and thinking of Surrealist writers of the 1920s to ’50s. Particular thanks are owed to: Elsa Triolet, Phillipe Soupault (in particular ‘The Silent House’), Paul Éluard, Man Ray, Vladimir Kush (who is actually much younger/still alive), Georges Bataille (in particular ‘The Big Toe’), Georges Franju (in particular Les Sangs des Bêtes), Guillaume Apollinaire (in particular Alcools), Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel (in particular Un Chien Andalou), Dieudonné Costes, Arthur Cravan, Louis Aragon and, of course, Antonin Artaud and André Breton. Two later works concerned with Surrealist literature and culture were also very helpful to the completion of this work: Life Among the Surrealists: A Memoir by Matthew Josephson, and ‘Come to the Edge’ by Christopher Logue, a poem commonly misattributed to Guillaume Apollinaire.
Also, thanks to Dr. James Cahill for telling me who any of those people were/are and what on earth they were even talking about (and from whom I also stole a story about getting a pimple on an eyelid for use in this book).
Also, I would like to acknowledge the influence that the craft, style and careers of Pernell Whitaker, Willie Pep and Paulie Malignaggi, and the shit-talking of James Toney and Ingemar Johansson, all had on this book and my outlook on art in general.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Pasha Malla, who facilitated pretty much every aspect of this book, from listening to the germ of an idea that began it and saying ‘It sounds like you have energy with that, why don’t you do that?’ to reading several plotless half-drafts to putting me in touch with Alana and Coach House.
Thanks to Coach House Books as a whole beautiful thing and to Alana, Heidi, Taylor, Stan, Evan, Shannon, Ingrid and Veronica for putting their work into this book and thus making it into a thing I can like and be happy with.
Thanks to the Ontario Arts Council’s Writers’ Reserve Program for its generous support of this project.
Thanks to Rick, Rosemary, Jess, Cheryl, Nadia and Sofs for the learning and fun times.
Thanks to Jeremy and Andrew (Sullivan) for the reading and advice and chuckles.
Thanks to all my Dragnet friends, mostly for the dancing.
Thanks to Terence for showing me all the tricks.
Thanks to Peter (Dad), Kelly (Mum) and Claire (big sis!) for the support and love and genuine, in all senses of the word, family.
And, of course, thanks to Zani for the happiness.
Andrew Battershill is a writer and teacher currently living in Columbus, Ohio. A graduate of the University of Toronto’s MA in English in the Field of Creative Writing, he was the fiction editor and co-founder of Dragnet magazine.
Typeset in Aragon and Emily Lime Pro
Printed at the old Coach House on bpNichol Lane in Toronto, Ontario, on Zephyr Antique Laid paper, which was manufactured, acid-free, in Saint-Jérôme, Quebec, from second-growth forests. This book was printed with vegetable-based ink on a 1965 Heidelberg KORD offset litho press. Its pages were folded on a Baumfolder, gathered by hand, bound on a Sulby Auto-Minabinda and trimmed on a Polar single-knife cutter.
Edited and designed by Alana Wilcox
Cover design by Ingrid Paulson
Author photo by Suzannah Showler
Coach House Books
80 bpNichol Lane
Toronto ON M5S 3J4
Canada
416 979 2217
800 367 6360
[email protected]
www.chbooks.com
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