Peninsula Sinking

  The first thing Denise says when she arrives at 10:15 is that I look like a vampire. She gnaws a piece of stale Friday cake and says I look vampirish. “Not a sexy vampire either—sorry hon but you’re no Buffy. Are you sleeping?” I tell her no I’m not sleeping too well and she says “welcome to the third trimester” and I realize that all of this was set-up to a scripted story about her pregnancy—how she didn’t sleep for four months and if I think I’ll catch up after baby comes I’m in for a real rutabaga.

  She sits down at the corner of my desk and puts a hand on my belly, looks genuinely concerned as she tells me I’ve dropped. “You were carrying so high and now”—she cups her breasts hard, lets them collapse—“it’s all sinking. Oh, the erosion that is my life.”

  I can’t tell if she’s joking so I try a sympathetic half-laugh and turn back to the horse passports. But Denise stays perched on my desk, doing email on her phone which why doesn’t she just go to her computer? “Mommy brain,” Denise says. She takes her last bite of cake and then says while sucking on a finger that the mommy brain explains why I hit “reply” instead of “reply all” on that innocuous email. I do not tell her not to say “mommy brain” loud enough that the men can hear it. I conjure a sisterly smile and tell her yeah she’s probably right. Then she stands, dusts a colony of crumbs towards my cubicle, and heads for her office.

  At eleven fifteen a man walks into the office holding a metal wand and saying his name is Ernesto from Barbados and where is Chawed? A full-mouthed man with flared jeans and designer sunglasses. He speaks in a warped British accent, saying he came all the way from Barbados to get violent with Chawed. I’m softly bouncing on my yoga ball and clenching my thighs as I watch this man swing his metal rod around and it takes me a while to realize it’s a putter. It takes until he holds it with two hands over my computer and says he will begin to break things, he will drive this putter into someone’s eye socket if I do not tell him where Chawed that little puto is hiding. Things do not clarify until I receive an email alert from Chad Tucker and the subject line reads “REMAIN CLAM AUTHORITIES ALTERED.”

  For some reason I acquiesce. For some reason I remain calm as I scan the office and see that I am the only one still at my desk. Perhaps I assume nobody would assault a pregnant lady but in any case I remain calm as I turn to the conference room and see a dozen eyes peering back through the slits in the blinds. Eyes that belong to Denise and the Manager of Jumping among others. I tell this caustic golfer that Chad is out of the office and the authorities have been called and it’s up to him if he would prefer to leave of his own accord or wait for the police.

  He broils closer with a gust of hate. Then he pulls the putter back fast and I cover my face as the club cuts down and digs into my computer monitor, sends a scuttle of broken glass across my desk. I stand up feeling a shard dig into my heel-flesh as Ernesto swings again, this time denting the wall of my cubicle. Fibreboard mists around me and the world seems to wobble and tilt and something hefty flubs out of the ceiling. At first I think the building is collapsing but then I see the white-streaked tail and the horrid jagged teeth of a squirrel.

  Ernesto drops to his knees and leans over the stiff little rodent, cursing quietly. This is when I see that the squirrel is covered in a slick travesty of feces and that it is female, nipples oozing chalk-white loam.

  Something about this dead and dripping squirrel placates Ernesto. He kneels in front of it almost religiously, his curses becoming gentler, almost tender as he stares into its white-streaked tail, its milk-caked nipples, the total blackness of its dead, dead eyes. Eventually he scoops the squirrel up like an offering, walks away without a glance or a word.

  The Manager of Jumping orders pizza and we eat it in complete silence. Nobody thanks me for confronting Ernesto or filling out the police report but it doesn’t matter because I am not here. I am driving with Shelly on a secondary highway outside Pictou, watching a chestnut Arabian named Chamomile spill out from the back doors of the trailer as we drive away from a cavernous pothole. I am sitting with Shelly listening to Shania and watching in the side mirror as the trailer gate shudders and snaps open and Chamomile drifts out dreamlike, scrabbling for purchase on the yellow line. She seems to be flying, soaring backward over the tarmac and Shelly is braking but still getting farther and farther away until the horse is a tiny helpless speck in the shifting light of dusk.

  We went back that day. We did a youie and drove back down the desolate salt-wracked road and found Chamomile basically unharmed. We got her into the trailer and roped it shut and got her home fine except for a few scuffs and some shock but what has always fascinated me is that glimpse of her in the rear-view, all the stability she’d taken for granted suddenly wrenched away. I think of her standing there in the trailer one moment and then inexplicably lost to the open, soaring highway. And what is that but the way all of us live—the trailer seeming stable until it is not, until we are released to fly fast and off-balance with no purchase or handhold.

  By one thirty there are baby squirrels dropping from the roof. Four baby squirrels fall in succession from the still-displaced ceiling panels and land on the carpet writhing and shuddering. At first I think they’re twitching from the impact but then I remember the mother squirrel with the loam of milk on her swollen teats and I realize they are starving. The Manager of Jumping approaches gleefully announcing that the ex-lax worked. Then he raises a shoe and stomps, crushing the head of a twitching baby. Trust me: I am no squirrel lover. Back home squirrels are cute and russet and fearful as they scamper about the woods. Here they are tar-black and beastly, a stoned belligerence in their disease-reddened eyes. But imagine. Imagine there is a little writhing cluster of starving infant squirrels. Imagine they are hideous, like tiny red-eyed wingless bats. Then imagine your superior raises his Rockport and brings the heel down while Denise cackles behind him, her canines dark with lipstick smear. What compassionate person would not tell Chad that he is filth, that he is a cold sore on the mouth of the human species? What caring and sane individual would not stare fiercely at the Manager of Jumping as he stammers something about having her fired, would not calmly pronounce that she would gladly choose a squirrel’s life over his? What decent person would do anything other than pick up the three shuddering and barely conscious squirrels and cradle them into her purse while walking away, not answering the Manager of Jumping as he shouts down the hall about “protocol” and “accountability”?

  At home I hand Pierce the squirrels and he takes them without question, starts setting up a little den in his underwear drawer. I tell him I might have quit my job and he says really and I say no, I don’t know. He hugs me and says that’s great either way and then rushes to the pet store and comes back with formula and a syringe and we spend the evening siphoning pseudo-milk into squirrel mouths and asking the internet about how to care for baby rodents. Gradually they stop twitching. They lie there stuporish for a while and then seem to recover to relative infant squirrel normality. We put them back in the underwear drawer, cracking it a little for oxygen. They peep for a while then go quiet and I lie there in the darkness feeling the baby turning and hiccupping, hoping the squirrels aren’t dead.

  It’s late when Pierce wakes me up. There’s lightning twitching across the skylight and I’m thinking really then thinking yes and it’s like it used to be four years ago when we started dating. Hands warm no hot and there is a tongue and more lightning and Pierce is whispering something about entering the isthmus and gently licking my damaged ear. It is never intentional or really arousing but sometimes while I’m having sex I think about the first time I galloped. Sometimes I have a visceral involuntary memory of looking down past the barn to the blueberry fields where that skulking abused German Shepherd snarled at passersby. I sense my own two legs disappearing into the four legs beneath them, feel myself and Genesis thudding along right there in the bed and all the trees and the fenceposts and the clouds are speeding by faster than
life and love, faster than hope and loss and possibility. The air is bright and full and everything is brilliant so fast too fast and brilliant and beneath me the hooves thundering thundering hooves and I am flying racing zooming not just over the landscape but along the very brink of control, away from control and steering and the need to ever think about slowing down.

  Everyone says sex is okay when you’re pregnant. The experts insist that sex while pregnant is okay, even beneficial, and then it turns out it’s not. It turns out there is more blood than I’ve ever seen before, blood like The Shining. Blood that is dark and true and the fierce fetid smell of it and what it smells like is bodies, flesh, wet dredged earth.

  Pierce was working faster and faster but still tender, still gentle, which was when I felt something wrong. I felt a strange unpleasant heat and I told Pierce to get out and then yelled at him to turn on the lights and I knew already but still was not prepared for the absurdity of red that bloomed across the bed, a catastrophe of red beneath the stark electric light.

  It is a strange thing lying here in the hospital bed with the toothpaste-green shower curtain, nurses and doctors drifting through to look up my gown into a mangled genital hinterland. It is a strange thing being sure I am giving birth and knowing it’s going badly but also being in Shelley’s barn with the rusted Toyota and the inbred cats and signed poster of Ian Millar. It is strange that even as I am looking at a body diagram on the wall and noticing that there is something called the “isthmus” of the fallopian tube I am also in the stall where Luna gave birth and she is there as well, even though she died four months after she birthed the stillborn foal. I’m labouring as horses do, lying on my side, and what I feel is not pain but an enormous need, an enormous gift blooming out of me. I’m pushing and pushing and wondering where the pain is, when is the pain going to come and somewhere I hear Pierce whispering isthmus, saying don’t worry the squirrels are safe and nourished, telling me I’m the join between him and the baby so I’m going to be alright, I need to be alright. I mutter something about the bourbon and he says he knows, has always known. He says it’s okay, maybe don’t do it again but just this once he’s sure it’s fine. Then he’s whispering isthmus my beautiful isthmus you are going to be such a good mother but his voice is small and cartoony, far away from the barn where Luna comes closer, wearing mom jeans and a floral blouse, a black suede jacket with a tan dangle of fringe. The jeans are up above her waist and her pubic roll is formidable and lovely and she is reaching out her hand, her hand which is somehow both hooved and fingered and the hoof-hand is holding a scalpel and taking my hand gently and I am pushing, pushing huge and painless and breathing hard and Luna is grinning and nuzzling me and saying look, look. So I sit up and stare down between my legs and watch as something red pours out of me. Something livid and red and it is liquid then it is a rose. An insanity of redness between my legs and the redness begins to flap, rises as the rose turns bird, flutters up, up, flails about to face me. Hovers there becoming visage and it’s a face I recognize, a face I have always known and I am thinking yes, yes, it’s you. Of course it is you. It has always been you and you are perfect and you are mine, perfectly mine.

  PENINSULA SINKING

  BELLYFLOP

  What if it had been you, that day at the pool with Drew and Theo, and you’d bumped into Jen Hamilton and Tessa Brown? What if you’d never met Jen and Tessa before that day because they went to Cornwallis but you’d heard about Jen getting Eric Doan to finger her under the blanket at Drew’s house last Halloween while everyone was watching Scream 2? What if Drew hugged her by the waterslide and then introduced you and you were showing off your backflips for a while before Tessa and Jen started giggling and pointing at your crotch. What if the words “baby carrot” were used? What if Jen’s voice had that weird pool echo and you suspected that everyone—the lithe blond lifeguard and the little girls wearing water wings and the Aquafit ladies with their swimming caps—were now peering at your peen? What if you were already super self-conscious, being thirteen and not growing fast enough and having seen the other guys in the dressing room at the hockey rink? What if you regularly measured yourself with a ruler? What if part of you deeply hated Jen but she looked so Neve Campbell from Wild Things that a larger part wanted her to laugh at your jokes and pat you on the chest the way she laughed-and-patted Drew after they hugged by the waterslide? What if you tried to adjust your trunks but you could see it was obvious and useless and you cursed your mother for buying this white and blue striped bathing suit and you could feel your cheeks going thermo-nuclear? What if you couldn’t leave because Theo’s mum was picking you up at five and you had no money or bus tickets and you didn’t know the route home from Clayton Park anyway? Wouldn’t you climb to the top of the five metre, thinking you’d do something megarad? Wouldn’t you look down to make sure Jen and Tessa were watching and then half-run to the end of the platform, thinking swan dive, then thinking cannonball, then deciding on jackknife when it was already too late? What if you weren’t totally sure what happened but you thought you slipped a bit and then you were in free-fall, totally crooked, arms churning air-butter? What if your side-shin hit first and then your ribs connected and all you could think of was those science class videos of sperm whales smacking their tales against the water? What if you stayed under as long as possible, just feeling that gigantic pain, worshipping it? What if when you came up you felt surprisingly not-that-bad and Jen and Tessa and the guys were all standing around laughing but this time they were laughing in a less mean way and when you hauled yourself onto the deck you stretched your arms towards the slanted pool roof, exposing a streak of purple-red water-rash down your whole right side, everyone started to cheer? What if Theo told you that was the gnarliest bellyflop of all time and Tessa chuckled and said “hilarious” and you decided right then that although her looks were subtler she was actually prettier than Jen?

  This was how Gavin learned to cope. At some point in grade seven he realized he was never going to be the tallest or the handsomest or the most athletic. But the pool incident of the following December helped him to figure out that he could still be cool, still be liked.

  How? Antics. What antics? Kid stuff. Funny stuff. Like enormous bellyflops. Like pushing over mailboxes. Like egging teachers’ houses. Like writing “Tessa is Magnificent” in enormous letters on the gazebo at Ardmore Park. Like dropping an entire case of stink bombs through the window Mr. Aucoin the chain-smoking vice-principal left cracked in his Saturn. Like dry-humping mannequins in full public view at Sears. Like vandalizing the “Deaf Child” sign at the end of Theo’s street so it read “Shush: Deaf Child.” Like sack-mooning Theo’s loserish former best friend Ted Clarke as he walked by Theo’s window on the way home from his Warhammer league.

  Gavin knew it was cheap and fragile. He knew he was a clown. But what else could he do? The world was rapidly splitting into those who laughed and those who were laughed at. He had to pick a side.

  “Stand back!” Gavin shouted. “Big one. We’re talking atomic.”

  He was on the couch at Theo’s house, legs pitched in the air, lighter in hand. Theo’s parents were split up and his mother, Nancy, was a navy engineer who spent her summer vacation reading thrillers in the backyard. Nancy wasn’t around much on school days, so they went to Theo’s place during lunch and after class.

  Gavin sparked the flame and Drew and Theo jumped back, a gaseous blue stripe pealing through the room. Fart-sound turned into butane-hiss and the boys went manic, shouting and snorting, their eyes welling up. Gavin rolled off the couch, plopping onto the floor and cackling as he clutched his butt: “I’ve been cauterized!”

  Howling, Gavin headed to the upstairs bathroom. Checking himself in the mirror, he found that he was all right down there. On his way back downstairs, he passed Nancy’s room.

  What compelled him, that day, to look in? Clownish as he was, there were certain lines he usually wouldn’t cross. Such as
entering the bedroom of your friend’s single mother, the one who is pretty with frazzled black hair and who compliments your sense of humour and encourages your song-writing even though Theo isn’t supposed to show your lyrics to anyone. Such as glancing around the strange-smelling female space and honing in on the top dresser drawer, thinking whatever Nancy had in there might provide some code of entry into Tessa’s heart. Such as opening that drawer and seeing a blue, tubular device and not knowing what it was at first and then thinking no, it can’t be. Such as grabbing that device and racing downstairs and charging into the TV room waving it overhead.

  “Dude.” Drew said, squinting. “What the shit is that?”

  Theo’s face went parental. “What the hell, man?”

  “I got it from Nancy’s bedroom.” Gavin held it up to his nose and sniffed hard. Then he pushed a button, made something whiz. “I call it Blue Velvet.”

  Drew laughed. “No way! Sick!”

  “Gavin,” Theo droned. “Put. That. Back.”

  Gavin spun, tube flailing in the air, its robotic head gyrating.

  “Put it back or I will hurt you.”

  Gavin danced over to Theo and shoved the whirring machine into his face. Theo sprung up but Gavin was already out of the room, feet thumping hardwood. A few grunts and thuds and he was out the front door, Theo close behind him.