It was almost midnight by the time she pulled into her driveway. Sam’s truck was parked at the curb. The living room light burned. She saw figures in silhouette through the drapes: one on the couch, another in a chair.
She sat on the stoop. The sterile scent of late autumn, haloes of misty yellow light making a nimbus around each streetlight. To the west, a few miles distant, a thin column of smoke rose into the sky. It came from her brother’s part of town; she wondered if he’d lit that poor tree on fire. She hoped he had, and willed an errant ember to settle on the roof of his house and burn it to the ground, too. There was an inclination in her family to hide away from the world, crawl into dark places and vanish. If they weren’t flushed from hiding and forced into daylight, there was a possibility they’d disappear forever.
Leaves skated across the street, pushed by a swirling wind. She stared into the sky, each star a bright pinprick, each realizing a precise clarity. The past is but the beginning of a beginning, and all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn.
Jess thought of the uniform hanging in the hall closet. Tomorrow she would take it off its hook and make a decision: burn it or put it on. Either way was a beginning. She was ready for a beginning.
Booming laughter from inside. One silhouette threw its head back, the other slapped its knee. Ted and Sam, and, across town, Herbert razing his front yard.
The men in her life.
Jess scuffed her boots on the welcome mat and stepped inside.
Know this: there is such a thing as magic. It exists. My intent is not to teach you the art of true magic, but rather to awaken you to its presence in the world and in our lives. Magic is in the water and air and sky; it is all around us, in objects of beauty and ugliness alike. Perhaps this all sounds quite mad; perhaps you think me a fool. All I can say is, I know what is real. My convictions are unshakable. My only hope is that, even if you never accomplish real magic or see it with your own eyes, you still believe in it, or at the very least its possibility.
I am convinced the world is a much brighter place for those who believe.
—Excerpted from The Apprentice’s Guide to Modern Magic, by Herbert T. Mallory, Jr.
Acknowledgments
MY DEEPEST THANKS to the following people for their input, compassion, care, dedication, and support:
Don and Jill Davidson
Erin Tigchelaar
David Davidar
Greg Bechtel
Sarah Heller
Mark Anthony Jarman
Starling Lawrence
John C. Ball
Francis Geffard
Alan Burke
Andrew Kidd
Tony Antoniades
Helen Reeves
Dave Hickey
Tracy Bordian
Sean Johnston
Edward O’Connor
Dave Barnett
Bob Strauss
Kathy and Randy Blondeau
Brett Savory
Shane Ryan Staley
Colleen Hymers
GRATEFUL ACKNOWLEDGMENT is also made to the following journalswhere some of these stories were first published. My thanks to theirfine editors:
“Rust and Bone” first published as “28 Bones” in The Fiddlehead.
“Rocket Ride” and “Life in the Flesh” in Event.
“On Sleepless Roads” in Prairie Fire.
“Craig Davidson is a wickedly good storyteller who weaves worlds out of blood and magic and humanity. Our Great Northern Hope.”—Joseph Boyden, author of Three Day Road
“Like a gleeful bull in the china shop of staid and worthy CanLit, Davidson is defining his own literary identity by shattering conventions.”—National Post
The Fighter will take you to the deepest places in the human heart where violence breeds and every veneer of civilization disappears.
Rust and Bone Page 24