—
The white collars clear out. Then it’s the guys driving and unpacking the cube vans. Then Barney. That leaves me and Simms. He’s whipping the last of those sandy mats through the machines, and I’m working the folding table. I wait a good fifteen minutes after Barney leaves, then walk across the Pit, right up to Simms. “What the fuck are you doing, faggot? If we wanna be outta here by next week, get the fuck back over there,” he says, pointing to the backlog of bloated carts beside the dryers. “I’m gay, Simms,” I say.
“I know. Why don’t you unplug your fucking ears?”
“You’re not hearing me,” I say.
I’d planned on Simms going wild. But after skipping a beat. Trying to understand what I’d told him. It was in this confused moment that I’d hoof him between the legs. Watch him drop to the concrete. Squirm there like a beetle. I’d roll him onto his back, press my foot into his sternum.
“Look at me,” I’d say, but he’d wince.
“And this one’s for Adam,” I’d say, belting him a second time in the nuts. And one last shot—a bent-over haymaker—to the nose. Just to see him bleed. My wallet and keys and cigarettes would be in my pockets, but I’d leave everything else behind. Jacket, street clothes, backpack. Scrunched at the bottom of my locker. He’d be worming around like burning Jonathan Skidmore. And I’d book it to the car and twist the key in the ignition. Blaze home. “Come with me,” I’d tell Adam. “Just shut up and come with me.” He’d say yes, and we’d drive the gas out of the tank. Hole ourselves in a motel for the night, then keep driving. He’d find another job. And so would I.
Simms looks like a boy lost in the rain. I even give him a chance to rage, to justify messing him up. But he just stands there. This boy. So I walk out the door and drive home. Go back to work the next day, because who am I kidding? I say nothing and Simms says nothing. He never does. Only pussy and fuck-o. But no more faggot. What kind of logic is that?
RICHARD KELLY KEMICK
THE UNITARIAN CHURCH’S ANNUAL YOUNG WRITER’S SHORT STORY COMPETITION
The dogs are in the field, circling the trough, their legs long and thin. Michelle walks out in her rubber boots with a cloth bag of pig bones slung over her shoulder. The bones rattle into the metal trough and the nine hounds gaze at Michelle, their heavy eyes drooping, waiting for her to nod. When she does, they set in. As the dogs gorge, Michelle glides her hand across their massive heads, the straps of muscles in their skulls flexing while they chew. And amongst the snapping of pig bones, she blesses them.
—
The deadline is next week and I’ve left it until the last minute. The Unitarian Church’s Annual Young Writer’s Short Story Competition, with a grand prize of fifteen hundred dollars. There are only three rules: 1) Stories must deal with issues of faith, 2) No foul or off-putting language, 3) Writers must be seventeen or under and enrolled in high school.
Like the woman in my story, I’m having a bit of a difficult time in my own life right now. Mother passed away two weeks ago and I’m two months away from my due date. Living alone in our house, not knowing how I’m going to make rent, I was expecting somebody to come and get me—a friend’s parent or some government agency with the words child or family in its name. But nobody has. And day after day, I have waited.
I wanted to write something I’m passionate about. At first, it was going to be bears—grizzlies to be exact—but then I thought I was too close to them and when you love something so much it’s hard to talk about it. So instead I’m writing about a dog breeder. I named her Michelle, which is a Hebrew name that means “Who is like God,” but I’m not sure if that translates into a statement or a question.
Michelle breeds a type of dog that’s a Great Dane crossed with some sort of Himalayan hound. They stand as tall as young horses and have sagging jowls, their paws are large and round as a human skull. But Michelle also breeds rumours. She lives a few kilometres outside the town’s southern limits and nobody has ever seen her in the flesh.
Before she moved in, the house had been on the market for months. An all-female cult had been headquartered there. A grandmother of eight preached the coming doomsday and demanded her followers forsake all their worldly goods, sign over their land, and drain their bank accounts. Once everything of value had been given, the grandmother declared that it was mere hours before Armageddon. Making their suicide pact in the field, they were each given a handgun. After everyone had one, the grandmother pressed hers against her temple and said that she was going to count down from five, and all twenty-six of them had to pull the trigger. She said she knew it was scary but they had to trust her. Five, four, three, two. One. After the gunshot had finished echoing, twenty-five women were standing in the field, trying not to look at the grandmother’s body crumpled and oozing in the grass, red cobwebs draping between the blades. Eventually the women started milling around, packing up the few articles of clothing they still owned, and organized rides home.
Michelle had moved in at night. The house is at the top of a long driveway so when people drive past, her home is too far away to see if she’s there and they use that as an excuse for never stopping by. They only know she’s alive because of the dogs. Once in a while, they’ll see them charging alongside their cars, galloping on the other side of the chain-link fence, their great grey bodies in full motion, muscles rippling and mouths frothing. The dogs will stay alongside the passing cars, keeping pace, until Michelle’s property ends and they collide into the fence. Each time the thin metal takes them by surprise. Some say that she’s got a buyer, a tycoon in southwestern Texas, who takes a couple dogs each year and she lives off that. Others say that she inherited a lot of money from a father who used to run an energy company in Louisiana. Nobody even ventures a guess as to how she got started with the dogs.
There’s a story about how a black bear once came down from its winter den, desperate with hunger, and wandered onto her property. Michelle’s dogs set upon it with such madness that when it was all over, the only evidence that remained was a few tufts of black fur and a deep red that slowly seeped into the snow.
—
I used to be quite religious. Right up until a few months ago, actually. And you’d think that my fault of faith had something to do with Mother, the grand injustice of it all, but it doesn’t really. Shortly after she had been discharged for the final time, she was lying in bed and called to me from the kitchen. I had been blending some carrots for her. She asked me to go down to the basement and get her scuba goggles. Mother had never been scuba diving. The only reason she’d had the goggles was because she’d bought them at a garage sale when she’d been told that it was a mask one of the divers had used when they were searching for the Stimson girl.
I brought them up and, to my surprise, she asked for me to help her put them on. She was in a lot of pain and she said that the goggles’ pressure felt good against her face, in the same way she’d press her eyeballs whenever she had a headache. And so there she was, lying in bed and wearing her goggles, her carrots in the blender. The speed bump of her body barely visible beneath the comforter, breathing through her mouth, her top lip puckered by the goggles’ plastic. I stood in the doorframe as she breathed so heavily that it sounded like the ocean—or, at least, how I imagine the ocean to sound.
It occurred to me that she must’ve known that the goggles’ pressure would feel good. It meant that she, at one time or another, had tried them on. I pictured her waiting until I was at school, creeping into the basement to get them and then retreating into the bathroom, locking the door. She would’ve stood before the mirror, holding them in place with one hand as she dragged the headband behind her skull, careful not to catch her hair. And I pictured her looking into her reflection and realizing that she’d never get the chance to wear them in the water, to see that other world.
It was that image of her in the bathroom that swept the last bits of faith out of me. Not because it was sad or pathetic, but because it was so genuinely funny. An
d after I’d stopped believing in God, everything just got so much easier.
—
The Michelle in my story has a secret. Last week, a boy—a teenager, really—snuck onto her property. The moon was full and cast silver shadows across the brush. He eventually lost track of which way he’d come. As he turned to look for the highway, he heard heavy breathing from behind him. He spun to see what it was but wasn’t quick enough, hearing it fade into the distance. His heartbeat began to pulse in his skull. He heard growling off to his side so he picked up a rock and hurled it toward the sound. In the spill of moonlight, he saw a hulking shadow recoil. The shadow sunk low into the grass but then rose and stood up tall, swelling like a thundercloud.
In the morning, Michelle found his body in the centre of the field, mangled and shredded but uneaten, the bent grass forming a halo around him.
I want my story to be about guilt, who’s at fault and who’s to blame. I guess, if Michelle had just reported the death, it would’ve been the boy’s fault. But she didn’t. She buried the boy in the same grave as the dog that killed him. She didn’t know for sure which dog it was but just took her best guess.
Over the next few days, the police began looking for the boy. Nobody suspected Michelle because nobody had ever really met her. But she, along with everyone else in their postal code, got the flyer. On it, the word MISSING was in large bold letters above a picture of the boy at his high school graduation. His hair gelled and parted, his tie in a knot so perfect it must have been a clip-on.
—
Mother had been sick for a few years. In and out of the hospital and then out one last time. Nothing about it was a surprise. She died in her bed with her goggles still on and the ambulance came to pick up her body, keeping its sirens off. The paramedics asked me if I had grandparents or anything and I said I did, because—technically—I do. At least I think I do. The paramedics must’ve assumed that my grandparents were coming to take care of me, but I’ve never even met them. They’re somewhere in Saskatchewan. I want to say Bethune but it might be Bethson. The paramedics didn’t say anything about the goggles (maybe they’d seen it before) but just lifted Mother onto the stretcher, her body like one of those large, stringy birds.
As they were rolling her out the front door, one of them put his hand on my shoulder and said something stupid about pain and how it will never get easier but one day it’ll stop getting harder. I nodded like I understood.
He then pointed at my stomach and asked how close I was. I told him a couple months and he said that he was sorry that the baby would never get to meet its grandmother. But he said it like he actually was sorry, like he shared some blame in this.
When the three of them had left, I didn’t know what to do. I packed a small duffle, just a few shirts and some socks and underwear. I wasn’t sure where I was going but I assumed that I’d be able to return if needed. I went to my bookshelf and took Moby-Dick to zip into the bag’s side pocket. It’s not that I wanted to read Moby-Dick at that time, but it was the longest book I had and, wherever I was going, I couldn’t count on there being a library.
Once I was done packing, I placed the duffle by the front door. Not sure how long I’d be waiting, I clicked on the TV, catching the last half of Jeopardy.
What is body building?
Correct.
I looked around at the empty house. The television flickered shadows across the drywall.
What is a body snatcher?
Correct again.
The house isn’t even ours. We rent it from the Cohens. First place in the short story contest would buy me another couple months. I closed my eyes and listened to the show.
What is habeas corpus?
No.
There was a pause while the timer ran out and the buzzer sounded. I felt the baby kick.
What is corpus delicti. ‘The body of the crime.’ Corpus delicti.
The next morning, I woke up in the chair and felt the urgent need to vomit. Running to the washroom, I tripped over the duffle still waiting by the door like an obedient dog. Afterwards, I washed my face in the bathroom sink and went to the kitchen to start working on my story.
I wanted to give Michelle some background, something to explain why she is the way she is. But it’s hard to write deep enough to get to the root. Like, there’s something you should know about Jay D’Angelo, the boy the dogs killed. But it’s impossible to talk about Jay without talking about his mother, Chloe. And it’s impossible to talk about Chloe without talking about her prescription drug problem. And it’s impossible to talk about that without talking about the long nights her doctor spends alone, driving up and down the highway, listening to Radio-Canada and trying to learn French. Everything bleeds into everything else.
It’s easier for me to just keep a static image of Michelle in mind: she is on her back porch, Sunday morning, watching her pack circle a frozen pond, their loose-limb trot. The night prior, a coyote was scampering across the ice and had fallen through. And even though the water is shallow, it was unable to pull itself out. The pond froze again, and now its hind legs are held solid beneath the ice as it scratches uselessly against the surface. Michelle watches the coyote snarl at the dogs in its desperate bluff of violence. The dogs begin to pick up speed and soon they are galloping around the pond, long vines of drool dragging off their lips. The ice glimmers like silver. One dog finally makes a move and they all descend together. And there is Michelle, on her back porch, listening to the cracking of ice and bone, the coyote’s yelps and whines, while she fingers the beads of her rosary and makes up the prayers to go along with them.
—
I’ve tried to think of a set image of Mother, but everything I think of are moments that I wasn’t there for. Like the goggles in the bathroom. I’ve tried to remember how she reacted when I told her I was pregnant, but I keep seeping back into when she told her parents that she was. She is alone in the kitchen, sitting at the table and drinking grape soda out the bottle, picking at her thumbnail. In comes her mother, holding up her hands like she’s a surgeon who has just washed them. But instead of being clean, they are gloved in blood. She had just gutted the pig. Using her elbow, she turns on the tap and begins to scrub. Behind her, Mother’s father enters, his hands just as bloody. As he waits behind his wife, Mother announces what she has done. “I’m pregnant,” she says.
Her mother stops washing and the three of them just listen to the running water. Then, her father turns around and sits in the chair across from her and, his hands still soaked in blood, roots around his pocket for his cigarettes. He fishes one out, lights it with a match, and begins to smoke. His fingers covering the white paper in red prints. “I assume,” Mother says to them, “that you’ll be telling me to leave.”
Her father inhales sharply. “I guess,” he says, letting the smoke stream out his nostrils, “you finally did it. You’ve finally gotten out of here.” Her mother begins to scrub her hands again, with such force that her skin deepens to red. But Mother’s father just sits at the table calmly, smoking, and the cigarette smoulders until the room is rancid with the smell of burning blood. Not that I know what blood smells like when it burns, but I imagine it reeks like something between rust and vinegar.
—
Michelle peered through her blinds. She didn’t usually close them but earlier that night, on the local radio, the announcer had said that Chloe, the boy’s mother, had come forward claiming that the last thing her son had said to her was that he was going to steal one of Michelle’s dogs. He was going to sell it so he could settle a debt that his mother owed to her boyfriend.
Not long after the radio announcement, there was a knock at the front door. It was two RCMP officers. Behind the pair, Michelle saw their idling car, still spinning blue and red, the high beams casting long light into her squinting eyes. The pale light from her kitchen couldn’t reach the front door and since her porch light had burnt out Michelle couldn’t see either of their faces, just their silhouettes. One of the office
rs shifted his weight and rested his hand on his holster. The other one asked her if she knew anything about the disappearance of Jay D’Angelo.
Michelle knew that once she said this lie, there was no going back. So she hedged her bets. “I’ve never met anyone by that name,” she told them.
She saw something move in front of the headlights. She couldn’t tell what it was, or even what shape it was, but she saw something shift in the darkness. An officer asked her if they could look around her property but she refused. He asked if that was because she was hiding anything, to which she replied, “Plenty of things. Plenty of things that have nothing to do with a dead boy.”
The cops said that they’d be back in the morning with a warrant and she should have her dogs chained up. “For their own safety,” one of them said.
She watched them get into their vehicle, flash the siren once, do a U-turn, and drive off. Michelle saw what had moved in front of the car. There was a group of ten or twelve people, standing like statues in the darkness. The officers must have seen them but had drove past regardless. She assumed that they’d just wanted to catch a glimpse of the woman they’d never seen before. But after Michelle closed and bolted the front door, the crowd stayed.
The Journey Prize Stories 29 Page 5