by Jim Hanas
On the evening before Christmas hailstones began to pelt the buildings. The bunker where the caribou slept resisted the balls of ice, but the glass ceilings of the greenhouses shattered and cold rushed in to kill the flowers, butterflies, moths and gentle ferns. The caribou woke to see cages of birds and frogs lining her prison. Bright eyes looked back at her and for the first time in weeks soft voices called all around her.
“I’ve been so lonely,” she said.
“This is a fine opportunity,” said one voice.
The caribou looked down to see a meadowfrog freely hopping back and forth across the room.
“Yes, yes, this is fine!” called the bright green beast.
“Yes, yes?” said the caribou.
“Look at the door!”
True enough, the door at the back of the enclosure, which was usually bolted shut, lay slightly ajar, the corridor behind it lit and empty. The caribou looked down at the excited frog. Her eyes were large and dark, glittering with some plan. The frog’s pale little throat bulged. The dark spots on her back seemed suddenly cheetah-like, less innocent.
“Lie down,” the frog said.
The caribou lay down in the pointy straw one last time and the frog jumped up on her shoulder.
“You’ll be too cold,” the caribou said.
“Your coat is thick around your neck. I’ll hide in here. Go into the corridor. Go out into the night. Follow the paved road to the entrance. The parking lot will be empty. There is a field beside an orchard and beyond the orchard there is a valley. Let’s go.”
The caribou and the frog exited the zoo. It was a very starry night and the hail had broken branches, which lay across their path. The ground beneath the caribou’s hooves was lovely and uneven. She watched her own breath crystallize as she stepped and stepped and stepped away from the sled, from the bells, from the burned candy apples and the smoky oil smell of the cafeteria. She let the cold blow out her senses and she found the river and followed it. On her shoulder the little frog sang.
(Readers, I ask you for the moral of the story.)
The Caribou and the Lynx
A CARIBOU WOKE IN THE land of dreams beside her friend, the lynx. They walked together beside an ocean, at the base of mountains and then over the sharp apex of peaks, through a deep wood, around a carnival. They rode on a carousel with children on their backs. They danced on the bow of a ship. They walked together around the Earth’s waist and as they walked they spoke.
“That is a line from Strindberg,” said the lynx.
“No, it isn’t. Isn’t it strange that we should meet here when we could have met anywhere?” said the caribou.
“Do you mean on Earth? I like to think we met because we could be friends. I am your friend.”
“You are my friend because we both know that the Greek for lynx is lunx, which means light, brightness, and it refers to your eyes.”
“I think I am your friend because I don’t eat red meat.”
“And I am your friend because I do not judge you.”
“I am your friend because you love to walk.”
They wondered as they wandered about the circumstances of their lives and if the tundra would melt and if the mice would all be eaten and if the sorrows of humans could ever be forgotten even by the frozen grass. At Liding Bridge they paused and said at once, “We’ve been here before, but then we were married.” They looked at the bridge, at its brown arc under snow, and wondered in silence, how could that be? Perhaps we were other people. Were we ever other people?
Night rolled out and the lynx hummed to hide the sound of her stomach rumbling.
“It’s all right,” the caribou said softly. “I will always be your friend.”
The Lark Burying Her Father
IF TIME HAS A DISCRETE shape and that shape echoes the shape of this Earth in that it is circular, and if the lark in her organic loveliness does predate this shape, time and the Earth itself, as one fable suggests, then what was she to do when called upon to bury her dead except to bury them in her own mind? Not only her father, as the story goes, but the history of larks inasmuch as it had begun. And so, as that legend says, the lark’s crest is her father, every moment of him that she knew, but the crest becomes the symbol of her larkness, written in her genes. The legend was meant to describe biology as the way time buries each of us in the bodies of our others. If the peak of each feather is a quality of him that she retains then, so too, the peak of hair on my mother’s brow is her mother, settled there.
And the lines of my hand, which are so similar to the lines of my father’s, are so because one day he will lie in my hand as I will lie in the hands of my children: a simian crease to be worried over, smoothed and pressed. Someone will give the greenness of my eyes to someone I will never meet. In this way we exist in the past and the future. We paint upon each other all day long, knowing and unknowing, growing into one relative and growing out of another, reading and unreading where we came from, what we might become.
We never disappear.
Acknowledgments
“Liars in the Land of Crows” is for Jonathan Ball.
“Pinhole” is for Dianne Bos.
“The Traveler Is Lost” is for Patricia Caple.
“The Lark Burying Her Father” is for Russell Caple.
“The Caribou and the Leopard Frog” is for Jowita Bydlowska.
“The Caribou and the Lynx” is for Nikki Sheppy.
“This Is the Story of a Good Mother. This is Her Picture” is for Suzanne Caple Hicks and Marc Hicks.
"How I Came to Haunt My Parents" is for Andrew, Heidi, Maude and Ford Pyper.
I would like to thank Emily Schultz and Brian Joseph Davis for their talent and enthusiasm as writers and publishers and especially for bringing this book into being. I would like to thank the members of my short story club Jonathan Ball, Cathy Ostlere, Chris Blaise, and W. Mark Giles for writing stories with me except for Jonathan who was a (oops) fine competitor. I would like to thank my family (the one I was born into and the one I married into) as always for their love and support and for providing me with material. I would like to thank my beloved husband Jeremy who is perfectly fantastic. I would like to thank my children Imogen and Cassius for making me laugh all day long.
I owe thanks to Michelle Berry, Jonathan Bennett, Stu Baird, Wendy Morgan, Nikki Sheppy, Natalie Zina-Walschots, Susan Swan, Patrick Crean, Hilary McMahon, Nick Kazamia, Ann Shin, Diana Fitzgerald Bryden, Priscila Uppal, Julia Creet, Ailsa Kay, and Derek Beaulieu for kindnesses and assistance in difficult times.
The Canada Council for the Arts, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, and the Calgary Distinguished Writers Program supplied much needed financial assistance for this project.
Individual stories were published in the following journals: filling station, Alberta Views, Rampike, and The New Quarterly, and in the following anthologies: She Writes: Love, Spaghetti and Other Stories by Youngish Women, Exhibitions: Tales of Sex in the City, and The Common Sky.