The World Afloat

by M. A. C. Farrant

  There were a few tall women still seated, outcasts at last. One in particular was crying, hunched over on her chair trying to look small. I thought I’d walk over and console her; after all it’s hard to lose top billing.

  Country Life

  We’re plain in our SUVs and track shoes. Plain driving by all those trees, a couple of which are ours. Plain, too, at the rural mailbox where there’s a gathering of keys and cars. Where there’s a flyer from the local butcher. Frozen bangers on sale, buy one get one free! Frozen bangers like a little British story.

  Then it’s home to weed the driveway and after that, our tea. And wind in the rose bush of which ownership is ours. And next door, banging on his roof but otherwise invisible, the retired pilot bored with staying put.

  Overhead, a hobby plane is chewing up the sky. There are tiny clouds, too, scurrying by like maids off to polish the silver.

  Canary

  A fluttering in my stomach caused me to realize I was pregnant. I didn’t question how this could happen at my age but immediately went shopping. There were things to buy for the new life.

  Jane, accompanying me, pointed out a yellow electric blanket that would help with the incubation. I bought the blanket, wrapped myself in it, and lay on my bed. The new life was now inside a womb inside a womb.

  What would this new life be? Later that day I had my answer. A canary erupted from beneath the covers and began singing. Then it hurried off. Its early-warning services were needed elsewhere, at the thin line separating where there is no life from where there is.

  Pause and Repeat

  We look forward to the comatose reverence that comes with Christmas.

  The season begins in early November when time starts giving off a creaking sound. It’s going through its annual process of hardening. Our shoulders roll inward then and our heads collapse onto our chests as if in avoidance or prayer. Some of us make slow, grimacing smiles, stretching our mouths as wide as we can, repeating this motion several times, and then pausing.

  During the lead-up to Christmas we no longer suffer from lost English reserve and everyone tries to be quiet. Once achieved, we bring our lips together and forward as though kissing a baby and flutter our eyelashes as fast as we can. This signals the arrival of the cart filled with tinsel. It’s drawn by Lula the Malamute wearing a hat of reindeer horns.

  Her arrival completes the seasonal outline, the one that is meant to endure. And Jimmy in the red suit on the roof blowing his nose.

  Jackie’s Little Town

  In the hinterlands of single motherhood Jackie’s fantasies range from perplexing encounters to daydreams about practically everyone and their dirty, great secrets. She is chock full of great secrets and round the clock she mothers two teenage daughters who are like cats with out-of-control hormones.

  At night Jackie wears earplugs to bed to muffle her daughters’ acts of self-gratification. Someone once told her that whatever falls from heaven is yours. So far this has only consisted of her daughters’ extravagant phone-sex bills.

  Otherwise Jackie’s little town is insufferably boring.

  This Was Not Supposed to Happen

  Wearing a lab coat is like wearing Superman’s cape. Once people see you in it, they believe you’re very capable. They believe you have skills.

  Especially when you’re a person who is forty-two years old and trying to hit the reset button on his life. And you’re living with your mom where it’s challenging to have her riding shotgun, definitely a lot more difficult.

  But this person only has to work for Lorne for five more years before he pays him back for the time he totalled his truck. Likewise, there are only five more years of living with his mom while he saves the money to do this. He’s in her kitchen now, heating up tomato soup in the microwave. One day she’s going to put up some shelves and start displaying some of her stuff, he thinks.

  “I totally respect you,” his mom shouts from the TV room. She’s loving the lab coat. “You’re the best guy! An absolute legend! The choir of my life!”

  Out of Order

  The choir was officially deconsecrated. The biblical narrative was in lawyers’ hands. The many angels who had sought bankruptcy protection there had either disappeared or died. Every stained glass window and pew, every cross was auctioned off to the public for their personal use. The church became home to damage and mice. A sign on its door read Out of Order.

  For a while the laid-off reverend played the tuba in the gutted interior, the oratorio of Elijah, but no one came to listen. The lit candles left in hope and remembrance melted to nothing.

  After that the building became a curiosity. Tours drove by. People scoffed. “Were they out of their minds?”

  Now we hear someone is writing a three-part mystery about these events in which everything will be explained in the end.

  In Vain

  They are speaking to each other in Vain, an old, old language. He said, she said, neither one of them listening.

  In Vain the streets are paved with mirrors and the mirrors reflect the sky. Instead of walking, people float like clouds.

  Waterfalls in Vain are brooks that refuse to fly. High opinions are mountaintops with exalted names, mainly his and hers.

  This morning they were up there with the clouds and the mountains in a Vain attempt at escape ...

  Nobody’s Going to Sleep Tonight

  The Muses have gone mad and are living as lady golfers in Palm Springs, California. They could care less about me. I’ve become like an amnesiac lost on the overpass. What’s an overpass? What am I? If you want to see the Muses they’ll be pushing golf carts around the courses of Palm Springs, or walking through town, dragging their fat dogs behind them. But don’t expect them to deliver inspiration. Come twilight they gather in bars where the drinks are half-price and the peanuts are free. Their only conversation concerns pars and birdies and they aren’t even close to the mythical kind.

  In Palm Springs the clouds are invisible and the sky is like a sheet of blank paper. Thrift stores sell ratty scrolls, harps, and masks that once belonged to the Muses, but demand is low, though a pet store bought a tragedy mask and hung it in the window. Inside, a tragedy of kittens in cages.

  About all this the mad Muses are of no help to me. Just now a busload of Japanese schoolgirls has arrived and I have to arrange them in the Zen garden, one schoolgirl to every ten thousand pebbles. It’s all too much. I once saw a dog dive underwater like a dolphin. But even this event is failing to point the way.

  Today’s Forecast

  Nature will be impressed with you now. This can be a pleasant day for cameras, oil, gas, cosmetics, glamour industries, fishing, shoes, and the genius of others. Your feeling thing is strongly aroused.

  In fact, today, you stand to gain some kind of marvellous beauty. Someone might be wonderful to you! Several sniffs of outside air could turn into a love song or a poem!

  Today you will manage the common madness in your own good way. This might sound corny, but the afternoon is one for pharmaceuticals in the garden!

  Part Three

  Did anybody hear me sing today?

  – Charles Simic

  Chickens and Us

  They sing in a foreign language like opera, I’m told. A squawk is a kind of aria fugata.

  Mostly they’re like old men gathering in the meal replacement aisle at Safeway. That’s why Emily Dickinson crossed the road, to speak with them about death.

  Kurt Vonnegut thought the chicken’s chemical makeup was hilarious. It reacts as if it was some kind of puritanical harbinger of death, he said, and that’s why it keeps crossing the road. Kurt Vonnegut did a drawing of a chicken’s asshole that has since delighted many.

  Chickens will peck each other to death. They can’t help themselves once there’s a wound. They’re like us that way. They love the smell of blood.

  Although shaped differently, the chicken’s beak works similar to a human’s mouth, ingesting one small truth at a time.

  Chi
cken Little syndrome is the condition of hysteria that results in paralysis. This happens when the sky falls on a chicken, another way in which chickens are like us.

  At a chicken funeral sad music is played while a chicken relative carries the dead chicken wrapped in tinfoil towards a brightly lit fast-food restaurant where a rotisserie awaits.

  A chicken brain is about the size of a man’s thumbnail. Like ours, it’s not big but sufficient for their needs.

  Unlike us, a chicken is without a love interest or a dog.

  In my day, my father said, we didn’t ask why the chicken crossed the road. Someone told us the chicken crossed the road, and that was good enough for us.

  Ernest Hemingway said the chicken crossed the road to die. In the rain, he added, while writing several novels about this.

  I cross the road because even though I am a boiling fowl I am still able to cross the road.

  There are twenty-four billion chickens in the world and only one billion roads. What will happen next?

  I found this question in a magazine: How do you know if you’re a birder? The answer: You are a birder if you have ever faked your own death to attract vultures.

  Someone must know about Hugh and me.

  Last Amphibian Flees Calgary Airport

  Mother died of pneumonia one week after her spare oxygen tank was taken away during our flight to Toronto. An attendant said the tank didn’t have a regulator. Mother was sixty-seven years old, had emphysema and cardiopulmonary disease, and had been on oxygen for ten years.

  Our boy, Alvin, who is huge, got nasty. There’s a hole in Alvin’s nature big enough for a truck to pass through. He convulsed with a violent aversion to the flight attendant. “You just don’t take away a person’s spare oxygen tank!” They put us off the flight in Calgary.

  So we were all worked up about that. It took everything out of us and we were just about dying from hunting down hope, and trust, and gleaming promise, not to mention another oxygen tank. So there was failure.

  Then Charlie took off after the Last Amphibian, which is what he calls Alvin on account of his turning from a sweet baby into a twelve-year-old canister of woe. Alvin was heading for God knows where. My stepfather, Lance, went with them.

  I could not go on. I could not continue these explorations. A local man gave Mother and me cherries and a few roasted almonds while we waited for them to return, which they eventually did, Alvin with two double cheeseburgers, his usual reward for compliance.

  I could not know then that I would contribute to Mother’s death. I should have known about the airline’s regulator rule but didn’t. Mother’s tank ran out and we had no spare. I was too worried about Alvin to worry about Mother. She seemed happy enough sucking on cherry pits.

  It was next day in Emergency when I got another tank. By then Mother had pneumonia. Morbidly, some other time, I will go into detail about that.

  Smooth

  During the night I burst out of my fur. Before this I’d been covered in it head to toe. It came off in an explosion; chunks of brown fur lay on the sheets, the bedroom floor, the dog’s crate in the corner of the room. The force of the explosion woke me up. I was sweating but quickly realized the significance of what had occurred. Losing the fur was an enormous thrill. It was beyond a thrill; I have never known such happiness. I had to tell someone. It was three fifteen in the morning. I woke up my husband.

  “Feel my arm!” I cried. He didn’t stir. “Wake up! Feel my arm! It’s smooth!”

  He rolled over. “What the hell?”

  “Feel my arm! Feel my skin!” I was hysterical with joy. “There’s no fur. I’m free of it at last!”

  He threw an arm my way and mumbled, “Yes, yes.”

  “Now feel my neck!” I urged. “There’s no fur there either!” This was so amazing!

  He pawed my neck. “Do you realize what this means?” I cried. “I am now a completely smooth woman!”

  He touched my head. “Your head is bald, Olivia,” he said. “Bald as an egg. Better check your pubes.”

  “This is just like you to spoil my happiness,” I cried. “I finally achieve something of real importance in life and you don’t even congratulate me.”

  “Congratulations,” he said. “But you’re still bald.”

  “Do you realize how long I’ve waited to lose my fur? How important it’s been to me? How hard I’ve worked? All the books I’ve read? All the visualizations I’ve done?”

  “Was that what you were doing Saturday mornings?” he said.

  “You know what I was doing Saturday mornings! I was attending my Shedding Your Fur workshop. Susan down the road lost her fur ages ago. And Lorna, and Mary, and Lynn, none of them have fur anymore. How do you think it’s been for me, the only one of my friends still walking around fully furred? Can you even begin to imagine the pitying that’s been going on behind my back? Can you?”

  He was completely awake now, as was the dog that had come out of her crate and was sniffing the fur on the floor. “I’ve always liked you covered in fur,” he said, raising himself on one elbow to look at me. “That’s the woman I married. I’m too old for change. Did you check your pubes?”

  “Raymond!”

  “Well, did you?” he said.

  “Here, on the most profound night of my life, when I have at last reached the furless state of being, all you can think about is my pubes?”

  “I’m going to miss your fur,” he said.

  “You’ll get used to it.”

  He got out of bed, picked up several patches of fur, and together with those lying on the sheets, arranged them on his pillow. “I think I’ll go back to sleep now, Olivia,” he said, nuzzling the fur sadly.

  Too excited for sleep I lay in bed for the rest of the night thinking about tomorrow. Oh the world is mine now!

  Along the Way

  I got a job working in a burial park. In administration, doing payroll, ordering coffins, urns. On the day I was hired, the owner gave me a tour. The grounds were exactly like a park: rolling hills, a meadow, oak trees, benches for sitting; the buildings were low and painted green.

  The one where the embalming took place had finished corpses sitting in rocking chairs along one wall; others were laid out on tables and being worked on by three old men. The men wore grey smocks and didn’t look up. The floor was sawdust, the windows open. It was a warm fall day.

  The owner lay on a divan and asked me if I could tell the difference between her and the cadavers. I couldn’t. The embalmers were that good.

  At lunch we ate in another building – roast pork, cherry pie. Besides the embalmers, equipment operators, salesmen, and groundskeepers were there. Everyone was jolly. I was to start the next day.

  I could bring my dog. It was full-time work. I thought, I’ll do this over the winter; there’ll be stories; I can write them up in the spring.

  On my way out, I met the caretaker who lived in a cottage on the grounds. There was something odd about her – what we used to call slow-witted. I thought this because she moved and spoke so slowly. She showed me her garden. In spite of or because of her slowness, she’d made a beautiful display. Every flower was either blue or white, the grass in front bright green. She had a slow-witted dog as well – slow-witted or old.

  I began appreciating everything.

  Overhead there was sky and light and clouds sliding by. There were squirrels, falling leaves, the dead in their final rocking chairs.

  I thought, Maybe it’s time to slow down.

  Our Spiritual Lives

  We’ve seen stains on tea towels that look like Jesus Christ’s face so we know he exists. And we know that dried seaweed can save the Douglas fir from extinction so we hang dried seaweed from the tree’s branches.

  And the story about the woman estranged from the banking industry is true. She lost all her money to fiscal fraud and now her days are long and cold. So we pray to the banking industry not to do the same thing to us.

  But some people don’t pray at all, bel
ieving the practice to be old-fashioned. My friend Warren is like that. He says he’d rather trust the presence of hamburgers in his life to render it benign. He told me this at a party.

  Most people, though, believe that the greatest prayer we will ever say for ourselves and our children is that none of us falls from the sky or falls into a grave too soon.

  Children, of course, pray to shells brought back from the beach for unexpected joy to visit. A woman I know named Andrea Sumner does this, too. She arranges shells along with rocks, feathers, and pieces of dried kelp in a circle on her living-room rug and claims good results.

  Then there are people believing there are giants everywhere. And there are. You and I are just not one of them.

  And in case you’re wondering about all those composite pictures tacked onto telephone poles in recent weeks? It’s Jesus Christ again. The pictures are meant to show what he’d look like if he were alive today and sixty-nine years old and lost. Like practically everyone we know.

  Once Again

  I was having a makeover. Hair, face, clothes, personality.

  The consultant, a man, said, “You are arrogant, self-righteous, and take up too much space.”

  I objected. “But I’m trying so hard to be small!”

  “It’s not working,” he said.

  I cried, like, five times over that. Like a four-hundred-foot-tall baby stomping around making a big mess.

  The Favoured Form