by Russel Smith
Finishing my own piece of cake, I became aware of my parents talking in the kitchen. I was not really sure of the topic of conversation, but sifting into my vicinity was the sense that Something Complicated was ongoing, and overheard in my mother’s side of the conversation were phrases such as “heart flutter” and “shock of the water” and “the whole thing is unthinkable.” This last phrase was delivered as she stared out the window at a favourite tree, a Japanese maple always first to turn in autumn, and the phrase acted on Cyrus’s imagination with great force and meaning. The boy, even as kids go, was tremendously suggestible and in another moment he’d wandered out of the breakfast nook. “The whole thing is unthinkable,” repeated Cyrus, touching at his pajama pocket and his potion of many ingredients. “But if you can’t think it—how can you say it? How do you even know it?” My mother came over to warmly smile at Cyrus, explaining that she was glad he’d had some birthday cake, he was welcome to another piece, perhaps some ice cream, and he shouldn’t worry because arrangements had been made to get him safely away. She sent a look to me to show she was happy with my own performance and then joined my father—who in quiet tones was speaking into the black rotary telephone in the dining room.
“There really is a lot going on in your house,” said Cyrus, following my mother into the hallway. There seemed to be too many ideas fizzing at the brim of the moment, mostly beyond a kid’s immediate ability to sort or commit to understanding, and Cyrus, standing now in front of the telephone desk in the hall, was choosing simply to register the details of the desk’s sundry contents—a white wooden golf tee, the Halifax-Dartmouth Yellow Pages, a school stapler, a hardcover copy of Tom Swift and The Visitor from Planet X, as well as a box of envelopes provided by St. Matthew’s Church for the Sunday offering. He studied the cover of the Tom Swift book and said, to no one in particular, “Every book is the same book. That’s why you read them. Unless it’s a mystery book. And then it’s eponymous.” Holding the eyedropper bottle as if it were a wand, Cyrus passed it over the desk’s paraphernalia. “This could be a church,” he said. “And these bits its candles. But you have to be careful because people will turn you into a bob.” He looked at me with real purpose. “People will turn you into a fact.”
The front doorbell rang. After a furtive look into the hallway, Cyrus turned to me. “I’m getting curious again. I can feel it. And when I get curious, I’m supposed to breathe and count to twelve. But I can’t because I’m feeling—shroptered.” The word seemed to make perfect sense to him now and I nodded to show I understood. The doorbell rang again and I stepped into the hallway to see what kind of oddity would be ringing and ringing at a front doorbell. There on the porch, framed through the doorway, was a giant of a man. He wore a heavy black raincoat and a brimmed, flat-topped hat. He was, I would learn later, a driver from Regal Taxi. But in form and demeanour he reminded me terrifyingly of Bill Sikes from the movie Oliver! seen by me a few weeks before. So frightened was I of Bill Sikes, and so scared to see this fellow staring into our house, that a cold shiver spread across my shoulders. I felt as if I were in the presence of something perfidious and to know such men were in the world was to consider possibilities far beyond sponge cake and birthday presents. While I was perturbed to see this man, Cyrus was absolutely horror-struck. Whether he recognized him as an actual enemy or simply guessed at worsening possibilities, I wasn’t sure, but Cyrus’s nervousness quickened toward an almost epileptic intensity. As he backed against the wall, scanning the rooms for alternate exits, I felt something weird was happening to the ground floor of the house. Cyrus’s jumpiness was making me triply aware of my surroundings and items within his awareness began to resonate with newfound, probable energies, and so the stapler on the telephone desk seemed to vibrate, the wicker chair at the telephone desk, a few seconds before so upright and static, seemed to teeter and slide to one side, and my very thoughts seemed to variously spin, as if the merry-go-round of my mind had been pushed in new directions. “Just after my best greatest escape,” whispered Cyrus, his eyes leaky with anxiety. “That’s when he starts staring all over me?” He tucked his pajama top into his jodhpurs and readied himself for a getaway. But I could tell he was worried. He had that skeleton-inside-you sort of look again. “But if I’m not even here,” he said. “And if it’s unthinkable, how could anyone find me?” His questions were frightening for me to consider and as I thought over the scenes of the afternoon I felt I couldn’t be sure if I hadn’t dreamt all the days before this, the small world where I had my own life and times, my Boy Detective games and Batman figurines. The moment was oddly emotional for me. For some reason, I picked up and pressed into his hand the gift of the page-a-day pocket diary, explaining that my sister Bonnie had three other diaries, she preferred pink diaries anyway, and he should take this diary for his own inventions.
Cyrus turned to me, touched to be given such a souvenir. There was a glisten of perspiration on his forehead and he blotted this moisture with a swath of pajama sleeve. “But I don’t have anything in return because—wait a minute.” He gazed at me. “Say! I don’t know your name.”
I told him.
“Aubrey McKee,” he repeated. “I don’t have anything. Except perhaps—” From his pajama pocket he took out his potion of many ingredients. “Except this.” He leaned closer. “There’s enough for one sip. Would you like to make a trade?”
The progression of events that follow, I still have trouble sequencing. I remember opening the eyedropper bottle, squeezing the bulb pipette, and stealing a swallow of the potion—and tasting the ferrous bitterness of the key through the liquid—just as the late-afternoon light was streaming through the stained glass of our front door, creating a gleam of rainbow on the hardwood floor, and the Regal Taxi driver moving inside our house, my mother turning to greet him with perfect charm when little Alice Gruber, kicking at a sagging scarlet balloon, ran to my mother to ask, if Cyrus Mair had to escape again, could she at least keep his shoes? Whether it was my mother’s murmur or Cyrus’s shriek that came next, I’m not sure, but I recall Cyrus sprinting barefoot into the front hallway, clutching the blue diary, aiming for the still-opened front door but in his panic running smack into the newel post of the staircase. Then I was in the hallway, watching him bounce backwards through the air and rear-end my sister Carolyn, and Cyrus was sprawling on the floor, his right leg twitching, only to spring up straightaway and dash under the sweeping arms of the taxi driver and outside toward the puddles of the sidewalk. I was appalled. Shouldn’t this kid have told me when he was going, how he was going, where he was going? It seemed to me then that everyone was deliberately betraying their promises to me, and with a sense of berserk purpose, I put my head down and made for the front door, planning to catch up with Cyrus Mair. The door was swinging shut, and I saw I would soon crash into its stained-glass window, but I chose to persevere—my upper lip hitting first, my nose squishing, the door-glass shattering, my loose front tooth detonating out of my mouth, and as my tongue touched at the gap in my mouth where once my tooth had been, a trickle of warm blood mixed with the residue of the potion’s bitterness and I saw through the smithereening glass Cyrus Mair escaping down the sidewalk, blue pajama top blousing out of his jodhpurs, and I closed my eyes, swallowing a drop of the completed potion, but finally knowing what I wanted—for I wanted to be Cyrus Mair.
Shashi Bhat’s stories have appeared in The Malahat Review, PRISM international, The New Quarterly, Grain, The Dalhousie Review, and other journals. She was a 2018 National Magazine Finalist for fiction, has twice been longlisted for the Journey Prize, and was a finalist for the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award. Her debut novel, The Family Took Shape (Cormorant, 2013), was a finalist for the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award. She is Editor in Chief of EVENT Magazine and teaches creative writing at Douglas College.
Tom Thor Buchanan is from Dryden, Ontario, and now lives in Toronto. His work has previously appeared in Cosmonaut Avenue, Metatron, and Joy
land. He was also an artist-in-residence at the Robert Street Social Centre in Halifax, NS.
Lynn Coady is an award-winning novelist who has published six books of fiction, including the short story collection Hellgoing, which won the 2013 Scotiabank Giller Prize, and The Antagonist, which was shortlisted for the Giller in 2011. She lives in Toronto where she writes for television.
Originally from New York, Deirdre Simon Dore received a BA in Boston, an MFA in Vancouver and currently lives with her husband, dogs, and livestock on a small farm near a large lake in British Columbia. A former woodlot owner, she is a writer, a painter, and a volunteer with hospice, homeless shelters, and theatre. The Malahat Review, Geist, and The Fiddlehead have published her fiction. Awards include: Western Magazines Award for fiction and The Journey Prize. She is currently compiling collections of short fiction and poetry for publication.
Alicia Elliott is a Tuscarora writer from Six Nations of the Grand River living in Brantford, Ontario. Her writing has been published by The Malahat Review, Grain, The New Quarterly, CBC, Globe and Mail, and Hazlitt, among others. She won a National Magazine Awards in 2017 and was chosen by Tanya Talaga to receive the RBC Taylor Emerging Writer Prize in 2018. Her short story “Unearth” has been selected by Roxane Gay to appear in Best American Short Stories 2018. A Mind Spread Out on the Ground, her debut book of essays, is forthcoming from Doubleday Canada in March 2019.
Bill Gaston’s stories have appeared in Granta, Tin House, and numerous times in Best Canadian Stories. His fiction collections have been nominated for the Giller Prize and twice for the Governor General’s Award. “Kiint” appears in his seventh and most recent collection, A Mariner’s Guide to Self Sabotage. He lives on Gabriola Island, BC.
Liz Harmer was born and raised in Hamilton, Ontario, and currently lives in Southern California. Her essays and stories have appeared in The New Quarterly, The Malahat Review, Hazlitt, Literary Hub, Grain, PRISM, This Magazine, and elsewhere. Her essay “Blip” won the Constance Rooke Creative Nonfiction Award in 2013 and a National Magazine Award for Personal Journalism in 2014; her unpublished story collection was a finalist for the Flannery O’Connor Short Fiction Award in 2014. Her first novel, The Amateurs,was published with Knopf Canada in 2018.
Brad Hartle’s fiction has appeared in The Malahat Review, The Fiddlehead, The Dalhousie Review, and The Windsor Review. Originally from Winnipeg, he lives in Edmonton where he works as a speechwriter for the Premier of Alberta.
David Huebert’s fiction has won the CBC Short Story Prize, the Sheldon Currie Fiction Prize, and The Dalhousie Review’s short story contest. His work has been published in magazines such as The New Quarterly, The Fiddlehead, enRoute, and Canadian Notes & Queries. David’s short fiction debut, Peninsula Sinking, won the Jim Connors Dartmouth Book Award, was shortlisted for the Alistair MacLeod Prize for Short Fiction, and was a runner-up for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award.
Reg Johanson is a writer, teacher, and editor living in Vancouver on Coast Salish territory. He is the editor of a collection of Annharte’s critical prose, AKA Inendagosekwe (CUE, 2013), and the author of Courage, My Love (LINEbooks, 2006), N 49 19. 47–W 123 8. 11 (Pacific Institute of Language and Literacy Studies, 2008, with Roger Farr and Aaron Vidaver), Escraches (Lefthand Press, 2010), Band of Gypsies (Heavy Industries, 2011), and Mortify (Standard Ink and Copy Press, 2012). His writing has appeared in The Capilano Review, Fifth Estate, West Coast Line, the Open Text anthology series (CUE Books), and elsewhere.
Amy Jones is the author of the short fiction collection What Boys Like (Bibiloasis, 2009), which won the Metcalf-Rooke Award and was shortlisted for the ReLit Award, and the novel We’re All in This Together (M&S, 2016), which won the Northern Lit Award and was a finalist for the 2017 Leacock Award. She is a past winner of the CBC Short Story Prize and finalist for the Bronwen Wallace Award, and her short fiction has been anthologized in Best Canadian Stories and The Journey Prize Stories.
Michael LaPointe is a writer in Toronto. He has written for The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and The Paris Review.
Stephen Marche is a Toronto writer. His most recent book is The Unmade Bed: The Truth About Men and Women in the Twenty-First Century.
Lisa Moore has written three novels, Alligator, February, and Caught, as well as a stage play, based on her novel February. Her young adult novel is called Flannery. She is also the author of three collections of short stories, Degrees of Nakedness, Open, and Something for Everyone. Lisa teaches creative writing at Memorial University.
Kathy Page’s fabulist short fiction collection, Paradise & Elsewhere (2014), and her subsequent collection, The Two of Us (2016), were both nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. She is also the author of eight novels, including The Story of My Face, nominated for the Women’s Prize, The Find, a ReLit finalist, and Alphabet, a Governor General’s Award finalist in 2005, reissued in 2014 to become a Shelf Awareness Pick, an Indie Next Great Read, and a Kirkus Best Book. “Inches” is from Dear Evelyn, 2018, a novel in stories. Visit www.kathypage.info.
Alex Pugsley is a writer and filmmaker originally from Nova Scotia. He won the 2012 Writers’ Trust McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize. His story “Shimmer” was included in Best Canadian Stories in 2017. “A Day with Cyrus Mair” is taken from the third chapter of the novel Aubrey McKee.
Russell Smith was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, and grew up in Halifax, Canada. His most recent book is the short story collection Confidence. He writes a weekly column on the arts in the Globe and Mail and teaches fiction in the MFA in Creative Writing program at the University of Guelph. He lives in Toronto.
“Food for Nought” by Sashi Bhat first appeared in The Malahat Review
“A Dozen Stomachs” by Tom Thor Buchanan first appeared in Joyland
“Someone Is Recording” by Lynn Coady first appeared in Electric Literature
“Your Own Lucky Stars” by Deirdre Simon Dore first appeared in The Fiddlehead
“Tracks” by Alicia Elliott first appeared in The New Quarterly
“Kiint” by Bill Gaston first appeared in The New Quarterly
“Never Prosper” by Liz Harmer first appeared in The New Quarterly
“For What You’re About to Do” by Brad Hartle first appeared in The Malahat Review
“a titan bearing many a legitimate grievance” by Reg Johanson first appeared in The Capilano Review
“Candidate” by Michael LaPointe first appeared in The Walrus
“Twinkle Twinkle” by Stephen Marche first appeared in Wired
“Visitation” by Lisa Moore first appeared in Taddle Creek
The following magazines were consulted: The Antigonish Review, Canadian Notes & Queries, Capilano Review, Electric Literature, EVENT, Exile, The Fiddlehead, Geist, Grain, Joyland, The Malahat Review, Matrix, The New Quarterly, Numéro Cinq, Prairie Fire, PRISM international, The Puritan, SubTerrain, Taddle Creek, The Walrus, and Wired.