“You irritating thing!” she said, lifting him up and slamming him into the ground.
Now, the fireflies said. Go.
They sent a single firefly down and when it touched him, he dissolved into golden threads. He listened to Georgina screaming curses at him. The thing from his bedroom wall spun like a dervish on the ground, furious that he was leaving it behind, alone, alone, all alone.
The world shimmered and was replaced by an empty basement, a damp concrete room with moving boxes piled to the ceiling. Jared lay naked on the cold floor, breathing in the sweet, sweet air. Sunlight beamed through the windows. His old bedroom in Kitimat. His childhood house. The one his mother had apparently sold, because two movers in coveralls swore when they saw him. One of them discreetly covered him up with a moving blanket. They asked him who he was, but he couldn’t even squeak because his throat was bruised.
“Buddy,” one of them said, “are you stoned or drunk?”
“I told you it was a party palace,” the other one said. “Poor suckers who bought it didn’t do their research.”
Jared felt fear surging through him, fear of himself, of what he could do, of messing up any more than he had, and that fear paralyzed him so he couldn’t answer even when the movers asked him how he’d got there. And he couldn’t get up.
Crap, he thought.
Thank you to my redoubtable editor, Anne Collins, for going boldly through the looking glass and guiding us both back. Thank you to everyone at Knopf Canada, and the larger company, Penguin Random House Canada, especially Emma Ingram and Sharon Klein. Thank you to my bionic-kneed agent, Denise Bukowski, and her lovelies, Stacy Small and Alex Keys, for keeping my career on track through the continual challenge that was 2017.
Thank you to the Writers’ Trust of Canada, the Canada Council for the Arts and the Hnatyshyn Foundation for their generous financial support.
Thank you to Carla Robinson, Leenah Robinson, Sam Robinson, Blair Grant and Keith Freeman. Thank you to Jennifer Savard at the Kiuna Institution and her students, Tewashontake White, Kateri-Marie LeBlanc and Shawerin Coocoo Weizineau.
As always, thank you to the good people of Ci’mot’sa and Waglisla for being you. I appreciate the support, cousins! Much love, many hugs.
EDEN ROBINSON has matriarchal tendencies. Doesn’t have a pressure cooker, but knows how to jar salmon. Her smoked salmon will not likely kill you. Hobbies: Shopping for the Apocalypse, using vocabulary as a weapon, nominating cousins to council while they’re out of town, chair yoga, looking up possible diseases or syndromes on the interwebs, perfecting gluten-free bannock and playing Mah-jong. Be warned, she writes novels and tends to be cranky when interrupted.
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