Dead North: Canadian Zombie Fiction

by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

  “Of course. And equally many, or almost equally many, don’t know that’s what they’re actually doing when they create. I just can’t ask her, because she’s dead, and wherever she is now is a place I don’t know how to get to and ask things.”

  “How do you know your mother could, then?”

  “For starters, she had another name for it. She called it exploring portals. It’s why my grandparents bought the place next door. My mother said there was a particularly powerful portal in the well.”

  “Well, that explains a lot,” Siena said.

  “Agreed,” I said.

  “If it’s true. Maybe she’s been dead all this time and you’re just telling yourself otherwise.”

  I laughed at Siena’s joke and said goodbye so I could go home and plant. I expanded the gardens so much I didn’t know what to do with all the food I grew. It was an earwiggy summer because of the damp but the insects left my crops alone. This seemed a boon from nature I had to repay and so I hugged trees on a daily basis, whispered to them to tell Ms. O’Keeffe to stop raiding our gardens. I can speak tree but not deer, but you gotta figure a tree and a deer could likely converse.

  Lovely as Georgia was, I was worried come November deer season someone upriver would kill her in revenge for eating all their succulent young beans, which would make her flesh so very tasty and tender. Maybe the trees told her this advice of mine for she did eat all my beet tops, but my beet tops only, and I was able to push the dark red globes back into the ground where they simply grew new leaves, palest green streaked with crimson. She also ate my beet tops in a pattern, leaving interesting designs in my rows. At first I thought my eyes were fooling me but after the third time I realized she was mimicking her famous namesake, leaving art behind everywhere she went.

  It was because of this succession of events that I felt closer than ever before to raising my mother. It wasn’t just retrieving a stone tablet and reading its self-evident yet powerful message, or my special relationship with Georgia O’Keeffe that gave me hope, but the fact that sometimes now when I called down the well my mother answered back, a cool burbling cry that let me know she was submerged but employing some method she knew for breathing underwater.

  My aunt’s and grandmother’s necklaces were beautiful, green jade and red carnelian respectively, but my mother’s was the nicest, opulently beaded from coral and amber and finely wrought silver filigree. I knew that once she emerged from the well I would have to give it back. I didn’t mind because I was looking forward to the conversations we would have.

  “Have you ever noticed how people may be called Blue or Red, but rarely Green or Purple and certainly never Orange?” I imagined asking her. “Why is that?”

  “What did you think the tablets were for?” I imagined her asking back, while putting on the necklace I’d been so careful not to lose.

  The only time she ever spoke aloud was twenty years ago. She said, “Magic is a skill that can take generations to learn, and many incarnations.”

  Dave and I had turned thirty and thirty-one that year. We stared at the speaker we had set up beside the well, astonished, waiting for more. Then Dave proposed that maybe someone had hacked the transmitter and interposed a recording of a woman’s voice uttering these cryptic words, just to embitter us. After all, we didn’t know what her voice actually sounded like, did we? I felt more likely that it indeed was our mother, and that she was trying to explain how she had abandoned us in favour of the study of magic, so compelling a task she couldn’t give it up, not even for us.

  Dave nodded when I told him my opinion, but still he was gone west before Easter and only returned three Christmases out of ten. He’s invited me to Vancouver Island but I’ve always used the excuse that it’s too hard to find someone reliable to look after the livestock. Of course the last cow has been sold for some years now, so I wonder what is still holding me back?

  I think maybe my mother didn’t throw herself in the well; I think maybe she jumped. Everyone knows there is an interdimensional portal down there. Before he died, my grandfather even told me it was a selling point. Perennial gardens, good barn, older farmhouse with new 200-amp service; steel roof; wood/oil furnace; portal.

  “What’s this?” my mother apparently asked. She was just a young unmarried lady back then.

  “I don’t know,” the real estate rep said. “It must be a typo. I’ve never heard of a portal before. I’ll go home and check the master listing.”

  “I know what a portal is,” my eighteen-year-old mother allegedly said. “Magic, of course, is not at heart either wand waving or spell weaving or the gathering by moonlight of certain types of nuts, berries and owl innards but a form of thought,” she apparently continued. “The other things in the aforementioned or any other list are just supports, but without mastering the type of thinking that is called magical, all your crystals and ceremonies may be worse than useless.”

  My grandmother fished a pen out of her purse and wrote it down right away. This speech was the first, and almost the last clue that there was anything different about my mother. Whether Grandma got my mother’s words right or not we have no way of knowing, because our grandfather didn’t also copy down this strange proclamation. And my mother certainly didn’t write down her channeled wisdom. Maybe if she had, she’d have had the strength of will to stay out of wells. She might’ve written books and inspirational tracts she could’ve sold and bought me and Dave new school clothes come September, instead of the church sale and Value Village rags Pa was able to provide.

  And so they bought the place. Sometimes people assume we’ve been living here for generations, beneficiaries of a land grant. It is true that during the Irish Famine the local government gave away lots of hundred-acre tracts of swamp and brush and bush to starving farmers from Ireland. That was what the Williams Treaty was all about, swindling the local Mississauga out of what they had left, so it could be given away for free to white folk. Blue and his cousins still complain about it and why wouldn’t they?

  Mainly, the only people who think we’re a land grant family are newcomers, for the old timers around here still know exactly who is who and some of them are old enough to find it a point of scorn that my best friend is indigenous. I figure that along with a lot of other things that is their problem more than it is mine.

  My mother jumped down the well the day after her wedding to a local settler boy. Everyone thought her young husband must just have been awful until a beautiful baby girl floated to the surface nine months later. That would’ve been me. Dave followed a year later, although how Pa impregnated Ma once she was living down the well I was too shy to ever ask.

  Pa did a fine job raising us. I think he missed my mother a lot and wished he had been able to provide whatever it was she got suckling at the portal down the well, but of course he could not. Special as he may have been, he couldn’t provide her with whatever other dimensional flavour it was she loved best, for it simply doesn’t exist here on Earth, not now and probably never. Ma never did tell me what it was either.

  ∆ ∆ ∆

  This year’s harvest was a bumper crop in everything the earwigs didn’t eat, although I’ve had better-tasting tomatoes; they prefer things on the dry side. Siena and I bottled for weeks. Come November, Blue went hunting; he said it was how he gardened. Successful on the second day, he brought me half a deer for my freezer once they’d done cutting and wrapping it at the organic abattoir. I thanked him and he asked whether he could tan the hide in my barnyard. He lives in a little apartment in town, so there is nowhere to tan a hide unless he does it in the parking lot of his building, which wouldn’t work for a number of reasons.

  I said okay. Once he was done with the hide he nailed it up in my barn and said I was welcome to it. This seemed puzzling to me but I figured he had his own reasons for doing things, as well as his own ways. When I went and checked I saw the hide had a telltale slit in its ear. This made me sad. Would I be able to eat this beautiful wild creature we had fed
all summer? Had Georgia been easy to kill because she was half tame from snacking on our carrots while we stood by and watched? Had my whispered warnings to the trees gone unheard after all? I didn’t know whether to tell Blue the story or not. I didn’t want to make him feel bad, for the food and the skin were beautiful gifts and he would not have shot her had he known she was our pet. As to the mother-raising operation, he suggested we try sinking rare earth magnets into the well.

  ∆ ∆ ∆

  We worked most of the morning and half the afternoon with a complicated assemblage of pulleys and ropes, magnets, delicious snacks, and photographs of my brother and me when we were babies. The snacks were for us, not for my mother. Like a baby in amniotic fluid, we figured she had been nourished by the earth herself while she was sunk. When we finally got her up we stood discussing how to get her back to the farmhouse. It was because she was too heavy to carry. Blue is a really big and really strong man but he couldn’t lift her, not even a few inches off the ground. We finally got her into the wheelbarrow, but it took the two of us. I am as shrimpy as they come but was still able to help with the leverage. It all seemed like a rerun of our tablets adventure except so much more important. Would she split in half if I dumped her accidentally? And what would her insides look like if that happened?

  We trundled her up to the house. Blue kept saying he’d never seen anything like it, and he’d gotten a few women up out of wells.

  “Anything like what?” I asked.

  “The amount of water,” he said. “The wheelbarrow keeps filling. We’ve had to empty it four times between the well and the house.”

  “True. It’s as much water each time as a king-size duvet you’ve just removed from a machine where the spinner doesn’t work,” I said.

  “It’s got to be magic on that count,” Blue pointed out.

  “How so?” I asked.

  “More water than the body of one small woman can contain,” he said.

  “It must be some portal down there.”

  “That’s what they’ve always said,” he agreed.

  Artificial respiration. They used to teach it to all the children at swimming class. Maybe it was so that should their mothers throw themselves down wells, the children could perform this trick once they were fished out. And once they were able to breathe by themselves again, their mothers’ eyes would open. That was my hope anyway.

  We got her up onto the table in the farmhouse, an old varnished job, slightly better than the one you use for slaughtering chickens on. Then I pinched her nose shut tight and pushed air into her lungs, over and over and over. You are supposed to give up after three minutes, or is it twenty? When do you make that decision, and how? Blue said I should just keep going, since magic was involved. I said I didn’t believe in magic.

  “Portals then,” he said. “Call it portals.”

  Those I believe in.

  I kept going, breathing into her mouth, and then the moment came when her chest started to rise and fall, rise and fall.

  Rise and fall, rise and fall.

  “Well, that’ll be that then,” Blue said, making for the door.

  “Stay for soup and tea?”

  “Dinner date, Clarissa.”

  I meant to thank him profusely but he was already gone.

  I sat and looked at my mother whom I had never seen before, even though she had carried me for nine months and given birth to me from inside the bottom of a well. It was the original water birth.

  Her eyes were open and she was breathing. I put pillows under her but left her on the table as she was still too heavy to move. The pillows soaked through immediately. She was dribbling big puddles all the time as if she were an unending source of water.

  “For the last fifty years I have been sure my life would have been different if I had only had a normal mother like other folks, and not a drowned one,” I told her. “Waterlogged, silent, unmoving. Your hands waving feebly, not that Dave and I could even see them except when we attached waterproof video cameras to poles and stuck them down the well.”

  I think that is what sent my little brother to Vic in the end. He couldn’t stand Christmas after first our grandparents and then Pa died. Just me and Dave left, sending cameras and mics down the well, hoping Ma would wave and offer Christmas wishes.

  “Why are people never called Orange?” I asked, after trying to help her sit up for the fourth time.

  “Give me back my necklace,” she gurgled.

  I went and got it from the bathroom and clasped it around her neck, gently as I could. She didn’t thank me. She fingered the necklace as if she knew each bead from memory but didn’t look down at it. She didn’t speak again either. Mainly she dripped and dribbled.

  After a couple of days I got tired of all the mopping. I put her back in the wheelbarrow and took her to the barn. She had drained so much water I could push her on my own now. Even in the barn she was still spitting water. Finally I hung her up, thinking it might help. Thin rivulets streamed out of her fingers and her feet. I began to realize she had probably been drowned all this time, after all. While our resuscitative methods seemed to have worked, her breathing and even her speech probably weren’t breathing and speech per se, so much as some kind of enteric nervous system response.

  ∆ ∆ ∆

  Blue has been scarce. Maybe getting mothers out of wells is more exhausting than he makes it look. No one calls anymore except the telemarketers. I keep making lists and forgetting them. I make tea and forget to drink it. I stay up late worrying about my brother. I wear my grandmother’s and my aunt’s necklaces, but I don’t think they’re helping.

  When I go down to check on Ma she blinks at me, or maybe I just think she does. She fingers her own necklace almost constantly, wearing away the filigree. Georgia O’Keeffe’s skin is nailed to the wall beside her. I think one day I will use it to make a coat for my mother. She would like a deerskin coat I think, after having spent decades down a well. The damp must have seeped into her bones something fierce.

  RAT PATROL

  Kevin Cockle

  “Well, that oughta do it,” Arthur Low said, arching his stiff back after placing the last of the warfarin-laced rolled-oat squares in Travis McGuinn’s massive bale stacks. Could have used barium carbonate or zinc phosphide out here, but Travis had grandchildren and warfarin would be safer if there were any mishaps. The bait squares were also obviously marked – little pieces of brightly coloured confetti woven into the oats. Most kids knew that meant rat poison, kept their hands to themselves.

  “Yep,” said Travis, squinting up at the bright blue sky, measuring the chance of precipitation through force of habit. “Well, thought I’d better have you check. Could’a sworn I saw a rat among the bales, day before last.”

  Probably a hedgehog, thought Arthur. Or a ground squirrel. “Did the right thing,” Low said as he removed his ball cap, revealing an almost entirely bald head – a thin grey line held its ground from ear to ear at the back. False sightings were common, but keeping Alberta rat-free was no joke and even though Arthur Low was the pest control officer in these parts, it was up to everyone to be vigilant. Arthur didn’t mind the false alarms. He’d have to check these farms and ranches anyway – every building, every structure at least once a year – but coming out when people called made things more social.

  “Looks like a sprinkle on the way, prob’ly around 5:00 or 6:00 or so. Good to…” Travis prattled on as Arthur nodded, shifting his gaze and attention back to the truck. Jake Saunders was toeing dirt, looking restless. Low felt the twinge of a smile on his lips, fought it down. Kid was itching for mischief right about now – have to give him something to do.

  “…you know?” Travis said, waiting for a response. Arthur double-clutched, opened his mouth to say something, when Jake hollered from the truck, “Hey, Arthur – phone’s ringing.”

  “Excuse me, Trav,” Arthur said, big hand reassuring on the smaller man’s arm: saved by the bell. Low ate up the distance with bow-legged stride
s, getting to the cab and taking the big hand-held unit from the boy.

  “Ya-lo – this is Arthur.” John Lockey’s brassy voice scraped loud over the cell – even Jake could hear it. “Calm down, son,” Arthur said, dropping his voice to instill some order. He listened as Lockey screeched, Jake staring up with an interested frown. Arthur’s face had gone rigid, blue eyes steeling up as he nodded, taking in the info.

  “Sit tight, Johnny, okay?” Arthur said when the voice finally stopped squawking. “I’m over at McGuinn’s right now, but I’m on my way. You get Agnes and Jean back in the house and tell ’em to stay there. And you stand up to Jean if you have to, John, you hear me? You tell her to stay clear of Hank until I get there. You understand me?” There was throttled agreement – as though the prospect of standing up to Jean Dolan was only slightly less daunting than facing down the minions of Hell.

  Arthur switched the phone off and made eye contact with Jake long enough for the kid to say, “What?”

  Arthur didn’t know what to say right off the bat. He went with, “Get in the truck,” and promptly followed his own advice.

  They pulled out of McGuinn’s with a tornado trail of dust beneath the Ford’s back wheels, Arthur driving fast, the wind rushing in through Jake’s open window.

  Jake Saunders. Arthur Low was sixty years old, had never had kids, his first and only wife having died in the attempt some forty years ago. Never remarried, and as the years went by he’d forgotten about wanting certain things – got so he didn’t need them. He was friendly enough, not what you’d call cold, but he kept his distance from folks, until eventually things just got smooth and even and easy. What people knew of him, they tended to like, and Arthur stopped them right there. So when Todd Evers had asked him to take Jake on for the summer, Arthur had said the only thing that made sense: “No bloody way!”

  “Come on, Artie.” Todd had grown up not so far away in Brooks, knew Low through family connections. Evers had fought his way up Tory ranks to Minister of Agriculture under the McCullough administration, and the old “Mr. Low” of Todd’s youth had been replaced by “Artie” in lockstep with the rise. Arthur didn’t much care for politicians, but as he was the “rat patrol” for the southeastern edge of the province, he dealt with the Department of Agriculture on a regular basis. Evers wasn’t bad, as the breed went.