Peninsula Sinking

  Gavin is basking in this primal rhythm, the yoked locomotion of human and dog, when they run into her. He doesn’t realize it’s Nancy until she bends down to pet Ezra.

  He is thirteen and stealing her personal sex toy and parading it around the neighbourhood. He is thirteen and unable to forgive himself and climbing an electrical tower and shooting deathbound across the night. He is thirteen and seeking Nancy in each rung, finding her in the brilliant wattage that sends him soaring through the cloudless black. Finding her in the tree that catches him, its leaves lush and soft as velvet. He is recovering in the hospital from six broken bones and third-degree burns across his torso and limbs and feeling all of his pain, all the lifelong scars on his back and thighs as penance. A penance he craves.

  Nancy finishes petting Ezra and looks up, looks straight into Gavin’s face. He can tell she recognizes him, but distantly. For a moment he inhabits her and sees himself as blur, as echo.

  He wants to say hello, wants to tell her it’s him, Gavin. Gavin whom she’s known for twenty years. Gavin who accosted her and professed his rabid, lifelong desire two years ago at her son’s wedding. Gavin who charmed her with a lobster claw and saw her pale breasts swaying in the patchy Hubbards light.

  She is gone, loping casually down the path, before he can say any of this.

  How could he know, then, that after taking Ezra to a beach strewn with six-pack rings and cigarette butts he would walk down to the parking lot and see Nancy drifting ghastly from car to car, her white hair streaked with a memory of black. That she would turn shrunken and ancient, old as the Sibyl of Cumae. That she would hold a set of car keys in her hands and glide about, pressing the button over and over but hearing no welcoming beep. That when she saw him approaching she would turn to Gavin and, still unable to conjure his name, ask if he had seen her car, a red Toyota, and he would see the exhausted frenzy in her eyes and almost hear the frantic pant of her thoughts. The car is Red. No. Yellow. The car is red no yellow or was that the last one the car is definitely yellow or red no yellow and where has it gone someone must have taken it, stolen it. The car is a Toyota. A little yellow Toyota Yaris and I bought it yellow for precisely this reason and now I cannot find it in this parking lot. This horrible parking lot and I’ve been here before been lost here before and why can’t somebody help? Of course they can’t help because the help I need is not someone asking what kind of car and are you alright but someone crawling into my brain, burrowing through the cavities of my aged and rotting psyche and whispering gentle music, lathering my mind with tea leaves and eucalyptus and mint. The car is red no yellow maybe blue and how I wish I could howl, how I long to wail into the ocean wind and all I want is my car who has taken it someone must have stolen my car.The vehicles like liquid, like gelatine oozing through the lot and none of them mine. A slur of greys and blacks, Nissans and Fords spinning crookedly together in this cackling concrete funhouse and now this boy, this strange familiar awful boy and has he stolen the red no yellow Toyota?

  Gavin makes all this from a twitch of her eye and he says let me help you, maybe you’re in the upper lot, let me call your son. Her eyes flit about and she shakes her head in vigorous refusal but when her mouth finally open she is saying yes, saying okay, sure, thank you.

  How could Gavin have known that a full third of his lifespan would seem to burn and wither, that his entire life thus far would seem to melt as he phoned his friend Theo, found out that the car was a blue Kia, took Nancy’s hand with its colony of liver spots. How could he have known that as she drove out of the parking lot he would glimpse her face through the driver’sside window and wonder once more how someone so lovely could possibly decay. He would realize, then, that he would one day have to tell Zara the whole story. But how could he possibly explain this cosmic beacon, this wounded siren, this disintegrating god?

  Gavin would always carry two parallel versions of the experience. He knew what happened and what didn’t happen. What didn’t happen was he didn’t float endlessly underwater, not needing to breathe. What didn’t happen was he didn’t meet Nancy and watch her sprout a mermaid’s tail and beckon him towards a rhapsodic unknown.

  What did happen was three kids on a freakishly hot day in early June doing mushrooms and traipsing through Point Pleasant, thinking it was a fun idea to go swimming in the harbour. What did happen was a poor choice. What did happen was Gavin lost Drew and Theo and wound up crawling ashore in Dartmouth and the night got a little colder than expected and he walked alone and soaked in just boxers across the McDonald Bridge. What did happen was he did not shower that night and when he woke up he knew instantly. Even before he looked down and saw the red sores and the slugs of plasma he knew it was bad. Cindy made him eat some cereal and take a shower and she didn’t say anything because she didn’t need to. She drove with all the windows down to mute the reek of his flesh. The doctor was a kind old grandmother until he said about the harbour. At which point she made him repeat that he’d swam in the harbour and asked what had he been on and as he admitted about the mushrooms he felt as if all the water had fled his body. What did happen, as the matronly doctor explained in arduous detail, was that every miniscule laceration on Gavin’s body—every paper cut and bug bite and shin nick from his walk through Point Pleasant—had become infected. What did happen was the doctor took a semi-permanent marker and drew circles around every one of those infected wounds and said if the red reaches this line then come back for antibiotics. What did happen was Gavin spending two plus weeks at school wearing long sleeves every day to try to hide the strange new nipples blooming all over his body and the doctor-drawn circles framing them. What did happen was shame and agony and even less interest than usual from girls and constant ridicule from Drew and Theo.

  But what did happen remained much less important to Gavin than what did not happen. What did not happen—Nancy, the mine, the mermaid’s tail—was a companion that would always travel with him, a beloved phantasm that would shape and sustain him more than the bland and barren real.

  Gavin and Ezra walk home along the waterfront and there are men fishing in the harbour and somehow this has never signified as it does now. Ten or twelve men standing along the wharf and two of them pulling up small wriggling mackerel or cod and the harbour does not reek as it used to. Men out with their sons and daughters fishing and possibly even eating what they fish, which means there is life blooming in the water Gavin knew as an embarrassment of sepsis. There are fish living and thriving and the colour of the water has changed. The water is blue-grey and swaying with seaweed where Gavin remembers a childhood of looking down to see nothing but the spectral orb of a jellyfish, a tampon applicator drifting like an orphaned pinkie.

  Gavin walks into their apartment and loves it—loves the clusters of cobwebs and the peeling paint, loves that warped and finicky back door, loves this place that has become a cradle for him and Zara and Ezra. He drops the dog’s leash on the floor and holds Zara. Holds her as if his squeezing could weld them into permanence. Ezra scurries about their feet and Gavin delights in this dog and this woman and the things that he now clearly knows. He knows that he has never resented Zara. Knows he has never begrudged this strange-eyed person blending cashew butter in the apartment they share. He squeezes her and tells her he has confused freedom with desire. He has invested far, far too much in a satchel of fluid and hormone. He has seen Nancy lost and confused in a parking lot and she has whispered in her oracle way that what he wants is to take care of others, these others. That she, Zara, is a lovelyconfusing slash of colours and scents and all he wants is to keep discovering her, to brew her French-pressed coarse-grind coffee, to make her mango salad and coconut curry and vegan chocolate torte, to trace letters on the back of her hands as she lilts into sleep, to watch the streaks of white bloom like sun-bleached seaweed in her black, black hair. He tells her that he has agonized over this decision but now he knows it is not a decision, it’s a feeling. That there are differen
t ways to care and he can only do it the way that feels honest and real.

  He says all this to Zara and she does not need to ask about Ezra because she has always known his decision. She says they will be alright, that things will change and things will stay the same but life is astonishing. She tells him life will churn on and there’s no way to know what will happen, let alone control it. She tells him there were palm trees on Antarctica once, tells him this peninsula is just the blunt crown of a weary mountain, a drawling collision of Gondwana, Avolonia, Laurentia. She tells him things will flourish and things will melt. That nothing will be the same but she will protect him. She will hold him against the tidal drone and the vanishing whales and the waters rising to subsume them. Guard him from the acid ocean gnawing the soft sandstone of this peninsula. She vows to keep him safe from the glaciers, melting awake from their long sleep. Safe to listen to the lullaby—chirps and bellows of humpbacks pealing through the oceanic vast. Safe while the restless currents of mind and memory carry forth into the wavering beyond.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Some of these stories, in earlier forms, have appeared in the following journals and anthologies: The Puritan, The Fiddlehead, EVENT, enRoute, The Dalhousie Review, The Antigonish Review, Canadian Notes & Queries, and Best Canadian Stories 2017. Thanks very much to the editors and volunteers.

  “Enigma” won the 2016 CBC Short Story Prize. “Silicone Giddy” was shortlisted for the 2015 Peter Hinchcliffe Fiction Award. An early version of “Drift” was longlisted for The Fiddlehead’s 2017 Short Fiction Prize. Thanks to the readers and judges.

  Thanks to: my editor, John Metcalf, for seeing something of value, for pushing me to take it further, and for being a mentor, an advocate, and a friend. My agent, Stephanie Sinclair, for her professionalism, integrity, and enduring support. Dan Wells, Natalie Hamilton, Chris Andrechek, Casey Plett, and everyone at Biblioasis. Aaron Kreuter for careful and generative readings of many of these stories and for ongoing friendship and inspiration. David Layton for helping me turn a tangle of stories into something approaching a book. Helen Walsh and Diaspora Dialogues for providing a vital mentorship community. Daphné Santos-Vieira and everyone involved with the 2016 CBC Short Story Prize. Tyler Willis for being an insightful, rigorous, and creative editor. Old allies Kate Millar, Ian Colford, and Anne Marie Todkill. Joshua Schuster for nourishing me intellectually. Alex Zellner for submerging. Dave Janzen for Sitzpinkling. Tom Cull and Blair Trewartha for farming. Steph Korn for friendship, hospitality, and laughs. The wardroomers: Rohit, Andrei, Brad. Peninsula dwellers: Tim Sullivan, Stu Hayward, Ross Higgins, Iain Sutherland, Simon Fraser, Jake Thurgood, Mike Dolphin, Rob Fris, Jason Phillips. Diana Samu-Visser and Mike Gyssels for neighbouring. London writer friends Andy Verboom, Kevin Shaw, Madeline Bassnett, Karen Schindler, Kate Lawless, and Kailee Wakeman.

  Les Bastien: Isabelle, Richard, Michelle, Daniel, Debbie, Leïla.

  Rachel Huebert and her family, Jochen and Marie.

  My firmament: Ron Huebert and Elizabeth Edwards.

  My ocean: Natasha. My garden: Rose.

  David Huebert grew up in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and lives in London, Ontario. His stories have appeared in magazines such as enRoute, EVENT, The Puritan, The Fiddlehead, and Canadian Notes & Queries, and received awards such as the Sheldon Currie Fiction Prize and the CBC Short Story Prize. David is also the winner of The Walrus’ 2016 Poetry Prize and the author of the poetry collection We Are No Longer the Smart Kids in Class.