When she is a grown-up or maybe twelve she is going to go live in the forest. She will have a pointy blue house in the forest. She has drawn this house lots of times, so she knows exactly what it will be like. In the forest the food grows on the bushes and in the stream and you cook it outside with a campfire. (Yes it does, Mariah. You don’t know everything.) Blackberries and salmonberries and chanterelles and salmon and bannock on a stick.
She will have a wildcat called Sophie and it will be her best friend. Her best animal friend. Claire will be her best person friend. And Mariah too, but only if she stops being so bossy.
She has to get another piece of paper for the blackberries and chanterelles. The teacher is Miss Doucey. She says, a fresh sheet, Olivia? But she is smiling.
They are drawing their summer holidays. Mariah is drawing lots of tall houses with rows of windows. She makes the lines very straight and careful. It looks like Mummy’s work drawing. Mariah has made the row of houses march across the page, and it hardly slants at all, but she’s sniffing because there was not enough paper and she has to make the last house too skinny. Olivia says, you could tape on a new piece of paper. Or you could make half a house. Like it’s a picture in a camera.
Claire is drawing people very carefully on her paper. She won’t run out of room. She won’t even use up most of her paper. The people are very small and very real. Olivia can tell who they are, exactly: Claire’s mom and dad and her granny and her little brother. Olivia can even tell what clothes they have on: her granny’s skirt with the zig zags, and her mom’s red shorts, Claire’s polka-dot dress. She knows Claire is going to draw a ferry next. That’s why she has left so much room. She, Olivia, could have drawn a ferry too but the forest was better.
Mariah is drawing Paris. She did not get to go on a ferry on the holidays.
Olivia makes the chanterelles. She can taste them while she’s drawing them, the taste like the forest, and butter, and a flute playing. The chanterelles look perfect on her paper, their hats and stems yellow like eggs yolks. And blue for the crispy bits. But then the teacher is talking, five minutes before centre time, and she can’t taste the blackberries she is trying to draw, and they get all messed up.
You don’t have to cry, Mariah says. You can just try another day. But Claire hugs her.
At centres she and Claire and Mariah get the house, and it is her turn to be the mom, but Mariah says she has to go to work and Mariah will be the stay-at-home dad. So Mariah gets to be the boss and that is very sneaky and mean. A boy called Oliver wants to play too and they let him, but he has to be a kid. She doesn’t like Oliver because his name is too much like hers.
When she is grown up she is going to change her name to Crystal. That’s her secret plan. She won’t answer if people call her Olivia. Not even her dad.
Well, maybe her dad. She will send emails to her dad. She will have her own computer and she will send emails to her dad and her grandma Crystal. And she’ll play video games. She is only allowed to play Reader Rabbit now on her mom’s computer but she will get some games like Mariah’s brother has.
Her dad said: When you’re a teenager everyone will have a computer. They’ll be so small you’ll take yours to school in your backpack. And her mom said: Yeah, and a flying car. But that was silly.
She will send emails to her uncle Cliff and her new uncle Ben, and to her auntie Mandalay. She will invite them to visit. She will tell them what presents to bring her. She will tell them how to get to her pointy blue house, because it will be hard to find, in the forest.
She will make them come inside, and she will tell them her new name, and they had better remember to call her that, or she will not invite them anymore.
Don’t call me Olivia, she will say. I am somebody different now.
She will show them her paintings, and she’ll teach them how to paint, too, if they like. She will let them stay up late and see the comets. She’ll bring them blankets and popcorn. She will make sure they go to sleep, and she will give them blueberry pancakes, as many as they can eat.
And then she will show them how to get home.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks to family and friends, who forgive my disappearances into the manuscript.
To my tireless editor, Anne Nothof; to Matt Bowes and Claire Kelly and the NeWest team.
To Thompson Rivers University, for time and financial support.
To Susie Safford for brilliant early feedback; to Susan Dumbrell for two decades of walks and conversations; to Sue Buis for mindfulness and poems.
To Sharon Nash for the seed.
KAREN HOFMANN lives in Kamloops, B.C. She has been published in Arc, Prairie Fire, The Malahat Review, and The Fiddlehead. She has been shortlisted for the 2012 CBC Short Fiction Contest, and won the Okanagan Short Fiction Contest three times. Her book Water Strider was shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay Prize at the 2009 BC Book Awards, and “The Burgess Shale” was shortlisted at the 2012 CBC Short Fiction Contest. Her first novel After Alice was published by NeWest Press in 2014.
What is Going to Happen Next Page 31