The High-Rise in Fort Fierce

by Paul Carlucci

  VI

  It’s Sunday afternoon. On Ice is closed. I just fucked Marly in the kitchen of my trailer. Eggs are burning in a frying pan. Marly’s tits ploughed into the sink piled with dishes, and a coffee cup fell to the ground and broke neatly in two. I stagger away from the counter, press my back into the fridge, and strive to clear my mind of polka dots and torn fingernails. Marly bends over to pick up the broken cup, and I close my eyes against her dappled, larded hips, burn with shame at my shriveled cock as it retracts beneath the awning of my gut.

  “So,” Marly says, standing up to kiss my cheek. “Can I read your tarot cards?”

  The reason I know Marly isn’t clairvoyant is because she has no idea how much I despise her company, how incarcerated I feel in her presence, how deeply I wish I could bankroll my way into a new life far away from this awful place, from all these suicides and disappearances, murders and bar brawls and drugs and drunks and bullshit bullshit bullshit.

  “You know I’m not into that junk,” I say harshly, pushing past her and slogging into the bathroom, where I close the door and fire up a hot shower, steam soaking the mirror and floating around in clouds. On the ceiling above the showerhead, little spots of black water mould are forming for the first time. Stuff is ancient, you know. Mould. I looked it up. Shit’s been spreading across the millennia. Just won’t fuck off.

  I draw back the curtain when I’m finished, and I guess Marly came into the bathroom while I was under the water, because the steamy mirror is smudged with finger-writing, fat streaks swooping through the fog and dripping at their edges, and I clamber out of the tub, stare into the glass, and read the words she left there for me:

  DON’T FORGET TO BE HAPPY

  I wipe it away with the palm of my hand, and there’s my face blinking back at me, cheeks flush from hot water, rosy, but overall still a rind of bitterness and fury. I try on a smile, an awkward and almost fetid performance, and very slowly, because the air is cooling, the mirror fogs over and the writing is gone.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Thanks to my editor, Bethany Gibson, and to my publisher, Goose Lane Editions, for seeing something in this book, which first came to them in the form of a very old and often sloppy manuscript. It was a privilege to dust it off and drag it into better shape.

  Thanks also to my friend Larry Frolick, a fine writer and mentor who passed away while I was finishing my revisions. Larry actually lived in the real-world version of Franklin Place, and his last published book was called Crow Never Dies. It’s an anthropological examination of the north, told in Larry’s inimitable rhythms and brimming with his many insights.

  The story Norman’s mother tells him about Iroquois Falls was adapted from a legend told to Ella Elizabeth Clark and attributed to a member of a Cree nation. The version Clark recorded can be found in her 1960 book Indian Legends of Canada. The attribution in the book is vague, and there’s little trace of the story online, so I’m not sure if it actually comes from that community, if it was told to Clark by an elder, or if it’s even an authentic First Nations tale, as opposed to a settler story dressed up as such. In any event, I altered both its structure and its message.

  Thanks to Little Fiction, Carousel, and Fiddlehead, publications that ran early versions of a few of these stories. Thanks to the Ontario Arts Council for their financial support.

  Thanks also to a cast of good friends, colleagues, and others who’ve supported me in this and other writing endeavours: Ryan Quinn, Sandro Marcon, Angele Cano, Eric Bassett, Troy Keller and Tina Borat, Matt Hill and Samantha Scott, Bert Archer, Zsuzsi Gartner, Troy Palmer, Jason Paradiso, Mark Laliberte, and Mark Anthony Jarman. A thousand thanks to my fierce agent, Stephanie Sinclair.

  Profound love and gratitude to my (sometimes amusingly) supportive family, and a million breathless I-love-yous to Jessica Murphy and our angry (but very soft) little dog, Hank. Thanks as well to her family for their warmth and generosity, in particular her father for enduring my heavy metal T-shirts.

  Paul Carlucci’s first collection of short fiction, The Secret Life of Fission, won the 2013 Danuta Gleed Literary Award. His second collection, A Plea for Constant Motion, was published to critical acclaim in 2017. His stories have also been published in numerous magazines and journals, including Malahat Review, subTerrain, Fiddlehead, and New Quarterly.

  A former journalist, Carlucci has lived across Canada—including eighteen months in Hay River, NWT, while writing The High-Rise in Fort Fierce—as well Ghana and Zambia. He now resides in Ottawa.