Humber Literary Review: vol. 9, issue 1

$7.95

VOLUME 9 ISSUE 1 spring + summer 2021

JAEL RICHARDSON // interview FR ANCINE CUNNINGHAM & SHELLY K AWAJA // fiction L AUR A COK & KL AR A DU PLESSIS // poetry GLORIA BLIZZ ARD & KELLY S . THOMPSON // essays EL AINE WHIT TAKER // art COLE PAUL S // comic

PROFESSIONAL WRITING AND COMMUNICATIONS POSTGRADUATE CERTIFICATE

Featuring a third semester, industry-connected internship

VOLUME 9 ISSUE 1 spring + summer 2021

CONTENTS

FROM THE EDITORS

// FICTION

FRANCINE CUNNINGHAM

4 VANESSA REID 14 PHOEBE TSANG 26 SHELLY KAWAJA 46 CARA NELISSEN 56

LAURA COK

8 [Three Poems] KLARA DU PLESSIS 19 Birdie BEN ROBINSON 30 [Two Poems] JOHN PENDER 52 [Three Poems] // ESSAYS

KELLY S. THOMPSON

God Isn’t Here The Egg Vintage Chanel and a Paper Fan The Homeless Garden Project Everything Is Enough

// POETRY

3

10 20 EUNICE CU 31 SARA PATTERSON 38 LOGAN BROECKAERT 53 GLORIA BLIZZARD

Recordings of Truths and Facts Black Cake Buddhism Blueberry Imprints I’ve Been Fucking Dinosaurs…

Like Father Like Son

// COMICS COLE PAULS

34 Punks Pizza Party

INTERVIEWS // REVIEWS JAEL RICHARDSON

61 [Interview] REVIEWS 65 BURNING PROVINCE SAGA BOY ERASE AND REWIND AUTOTHEORY AS FEMINIST PRACTICE IN ART, WRITING, AND CRITICISM MEMPHIS MAYHEM

CONTRIBUTORS

ELAINE WHITTAKER

70 72 [Featured Artist]

MASTHEAD PUBLISHERS John Stilla EDITORS Eufemia Fantetti D.D. Miller FICTION EDITORS Sarah Feldbloom Kelly Harness Matthew Harris Alyson Renaldo ESSAYS EDITOR Leanne Milech POETRY EDITOR Bardia Sinaee INTERVIEWS EDITOR Meaghan Strimas REVIEWS EDITOR Angelo Muredda ART/ILLUSTRATIONS EDITOR Cole Swanson COMICS EDITOR Christian Leveille COPY EDITORS Tanya d’Anger Alireza Jafari Rebecca Mangra Jorge Toro Kristin Valois Suzanne Zelazo PROOFREADERS Kathy Friedman Stuart Ross

The Humber Literary Review, Volume 9 Issue 1 Copyright © May 2021 The Humber Literary Review All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without prior written permission.

All copyright for the material included in The Humber Literary Review remains with the contributors, and any requests for permission to reprint their work should be referred to them.

The Humber Literary Review c/o The Department of English Humber College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning 205 Humber College Blvd.

Toronto, ON M9W 5L7 humberliteraryreview.com Literary Magazine.

ISSN 2292-7271 Layout and Design by Kilby Smith-McGregor Cover Image and Portfolio by Elaine Whittaker In Partnership with Humber Press The Humber Literary Review is a product of the Humber College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning’s Department of English Printed and bound in Canada

by Paper Sparrow Printing on FSC-certified paper Opinions and statements in the publication attributed to named authors do not necessarily reflect the policy of the Humber College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning or its Department of English.

DESIGNER Kilby Smith-McGregor

ADVISORY Vera Beletzan Senior Dean, Faculty of Liberal Arts & Sciences and Innovative Learning, Humber College Bronwyn Drainie Former Editor-in-Chief of the Literary Review of Canada; author Alison Jones Publisher, Quill & Quire Joe Kertes Dean Emeritus, Humber School of Creative and Performing Arts; author Antanas Sileika Former Director, Humber School for Writers; author Nathan Whitlock Program Coordinator, Creative Book Publishing Program; author

FRONT COVER

| ELAINE WHITTAKER

SCREENED FOR, 16” x 16” EACH, DIGITAL IMAGES, 2015

FROM THE EDITORS IT SEEMS HARD TO BELIEVE that this is the third issue we’ve produced during the COVID-19 pandemic. As many have said, time is hard to track in the midst of on-again, off-again lockdowns, but putting together this issue makes for a strange reminder.

It’s difficult not to think of these three issues within the frame of this global pandemic: the first, which we’d already begun production on as the global outbreak was announced, featured the winners of our biennial fiction contest: it was celebratory, hopeful. Routine. There was a certain innocence about what was to come. In this very space in the last issue, we wrote about how we’d struggled to find themes, associations between the pieces, mirroring the separateness we were all feeling in our respective states of lockdown.

And now, in this issue, the pieces appear to be reaching out to one another: themes of loss and longing intermingle and are dealt with in vastly different ways. But there feels like a connection again, a cohesiveness in expression that appeared briefly lost.

Not to say that this is an issue in which you’ll find definitive answers; what you’ll find are questions. Characters and writers glimpsing into the unknown and sometimes finding a response, but sometimes being left to stare through it and accept the unknowable. Perhaps unsurprising given the vulnerability and instability we all currently face, parenthood is explored in various ways across the fiction, creative non-fiction, and poetry: it is desired, feared, unwanted.

Self-understanding is sought in ways both dull and dangerous; a quiet intensity pervades many of

these works. Stories that seem potentially light or abstract—like when a woman wakes up to find that she has possibly laid an egg overnight—involve revealing introspection. A non-fiction piece with the title “I’ve Been Fucking Dinosaurs in an Effort to Reclaim My Ability to Transform into a Velociraptor” draws us in with an absurd premise, only to reveal itself as an affecting, detailed, and heartbreaking portrait. A story of a father who’s become a “prepper,” which may have seemed absurd only a year ago, now has a more understandable context. Yet, as with the other works, this story ends up being about so much more than surviving a global crisis. It always comes back to our relationships.

There is also a comic about a bunch of punks having a pizza party. Because sometimes you just need to have a pizza party with a bunch of punks.

HLR is also reaching out to community groups, and in this volume we are spotlighting a writer from InkWell Workshops in celebration of InkWell's anthology launching this summer with Dundurn Press.

Finally, there’s a wonderful conversation between Interviews Editor Meaghan Strimas and Jael Richardson that, while dealing with the difficult subject matter of Richardson's extraordinary novel Gutter Child, also manages to be a cautiously hopeful, forward-thinking conversation where she reminds us to find joy and celebration in the midst of so much struggle, that it’s “important to recognize that it’s not all suffering. It’s about finding the balance in the suffering.”

There is so much on offer in this issue. There is beauty and ugliness, hope and fear. Humour and sadness. There is everything we need to get through the final days of this pandemic.

Best wishes, The HLR Collective

FRANCINE CUNNINGHAM

FRANCINE CUNNINGHAM // 4

GOD ISN’T HERE T

he note was posted on the door, scratched out in ink that faded near the end, like the pen had just decided to give out at that moment. You could see the swirling lines where a heavy hand had tried to force more ink out, but that hand had finally given up in an indented trail that petered off the edge of the page. The note itself was taped up in a tilted line, as if the taper had done it in a hurry—and only as a last-second precaution in the unlikely event that a person, like me, bothered to show up at the door.

I gently peeled the note off the white wood, bringing the paper up to my face, resting the tip of my nose against it, studying the words of God closer. The letters were shaky, as if written by a hand that trembled.

The ERE all blended together in a mess of lines. The Y was longer than all the other letters, stretching halfway down the page. I knew there was a branch of science that analyzed printing and could let you know if someone was a serial killer, a mom, a firefighter. But since God is all of these things, I guess the handwriting meant nothing more than God isn’t here today.

The note didn’t say anything about tomorrow. That could mean God would be in. Or it could mean God wouldn’t. There was a vague feeling like maybe God would come back someday but not in the near future.

But again, God could have written the note years ago and just never bothered to come back. It could also just mean the today was actually the day that I was standing in front of the door. The only day I had ever bothered to go down to God’s office. The only day I had ever really needed God. And what did God need to step out for, anyway?

Couldn’t God just create anything they needed? Or did God crave what we all do: some peace and quiet.

Were they just stressed out from a constant barrage of people with enough time to catch the No. 2 bus and head all the way downtown? Or maybe God was bored, maybe nobody came anymore, so they thought they could just fuck off and no one would even notice?

Maybe.

For the first time in my young life, I LONGED to hear the voice of God. I’d heard that said once during a radio drama. One of the characters had expressed it; they LONGED to hear the voice of God, and I’d always wanted to want that. I guess you could say I longed for the feeling of longing. But maybe that’s just too confusing. Maybe it really means that I needed help and no one was home. My best friend John was gone on summer holidays, probably spending the time meticulously writing down his dreams. He was intense about them these days. They were so gory I never bothered to really listen. And my other best friend, Jude, was who knows where. I thought I saw him from the bus window on my way down here today, hanging out with the stoner kids who dressed all in black with silver studs and stuff. I’m not sure. It may have been a mirage: it was really hot out. The point is, I needed help. So I decided to try the knob. Maybe God wasn’t all the way out. Maybe he was just sleeping on the couch under a newspaper, like my mom is sometimes.

I pushed on the door; the hinges squeaked as it scraped against the floor. It got stuck about halfway.

I crept in through the opening. My feet got caught on something soft and I tripped. I balanced myself before I fell all the way forward and hit the ground. The room was still, except for a small breeze being produced by the whirring of a ceiling fan. Midday light poured in through the large windows. God had a corner office.

Small though. And dusty. I looked down to see what I had tripped on—my feet were standing in a mess of letters. Stamped on the front of some were angry red marks. I picked one up. OVERDUE. It looked like God had forgotten to pay his rent. There were tread marks on the envelopes, so it was impossible to tell if God had been stepping on and over them for months, or if it was just other wanderers like me.

I walked over to the closest window and looked out.

The street below was full of small vehicles—the sun reflecting off their metal surfaces in blinks as they moved through the spaces between green and red lights. Sweat

“Hello?” The hushed voice, with a note of reverence, came out of the mouth of a small woman. Deep wrinkles ran from the side of her mouth into her greying hairline. “God?” she whispered when she saw me.

I could feel the heat in my cheeks, “No.” I looked around the room. “I mean, I’m like you.”

She put her weight into a last shove of the door. It opened all the way as she pushed herself into the room.

“I’ve been waiting for you,” she whispered as she shuffled toward me.

“I’m not who you’re looking for. I’m not them.”

“I just need to ask you for one thing.”

“I can’t help you,” I said, exasperated.

“You must.” As she took a seat in the chair in front of the desk, it groaned.

I was standing awkwardly between the couch and the desk. My backpack was on the floor beside the couch and I started to inch toward it, but then she started to cry. Not a wail or anything. More like a small leaking of tears. Her bony shoulders shook. Not a lot, but enough that I stopped shuffling. I glanced toward the door. And then at the hallway on the other side, which was dark and empty. But then I looked at the woman in the chair, and she was so small. She reminded me of my grandma. Dead two years. And I thought that if my grandma was in this room, and there was another boy in here, that I would want him to wait with her. So I walked to the desk and sat behind it. I figured I could stay till God showed up, or until she had to leave, or someone else came.

Deep wrinkles ran from the side of her mouth into her greying hairline.

“God?” she whispered when she saw me.

I didn’t quite know what to do, so I pushed forward a box of Kleenex. It looked full, at least. She took one with trembling fingers as she continued to weep. I was embarrassed at how bad I was with others’ emotions, so instead of staring at her I looked out of the large window, past the smudges on the glass, and into the blue sky. It was one of those perfect deep blue skies with white edges, a cloudless summer day that always seems to happen when I have to be inside. I wiped my forehead on the sleeve of my T-shirt in an awkward

FRANCINE CUNNINGHAM // 5

was starting to build up on my upper lip and hairline.

Even with the fan, the room was hot. I gripped the hot metal of the window’s edge and pulled. The window came undone with a thwack and proceeded to screech as I pulled it open enough for the faint sound of soft honking to filter in. The breeze also helped with the stuffy smell of dust, books, and what I realized, after peeking into the wastebasket, was an old sandwich, left to grow a thick layer of green mould.

I was curious to see what God read, so I wandered over to the sagging bookcase. Lining the shelves were important-looking titles in languages I didn’t know. I pulled one off and opened it; out fell an old Archie comic that must have been wedged between the pages. I put the boring book back down on the shelf and picked the well-worn and obviously reread comic up off the floor.

The paper was soft with hundreds of turnings. Looking around, I realized the only truly comfortable place to read and wait for God would be the threadbare brown couch set against the farthest wall. Above it was a series of photographs depicting the harsh light of the desert, with mountains of sand sifting themselves in the wind. Reforming. That, I guess, was kinda a good way to think about God. But something like a real painting would have been nicer. Presumably, God knew all the greatest painters who have ever lived.

I set my backpack on the ground beside the couch and sat down. The seat sagged a little, but otherwise it was a really comfortable couch. Like really, really comfortable. The back shifted to conform to my shape, and the material was old but breathable. I leaned in and took a sniff; there a was faint scent of lavender and lemons. At least God knew what was important.

I flipped through the pages and tried not to look at my watch. I knew my dad would be finishing work soon in the wood shop and would want my help with something around the house. He always did. He hated when I was idle. My mom would be outside, tanning herself brown in this heat, probably all day with the sun like it was this summer. But me, I just needed God to show up so I could ask them a question. And not even that big a question. Something they could probably figure out in a second. I was rehearsing how I would ask it in my head when I heard a timid knock on the partially open door.

I had forgotten to tape the note back to the wood; instead, I had shoved it into my front pocket. I stayed completely still. Maybe they would just go away. They knocked again. And again. And then the door started to move. I decided I had to do something. There was a big desk in the corner—big enough for me to hide under. I put down the comic and was about to flee when a face peeked around the door frame.

FRANCINE CUNNINGHAM // 6

movement. The lady didn’t seem to notice. She was staring down at her fingers, twisting the Kleenex between them.

“I should have come earlier—I know,” she whispered.

“You don’t have to say anything,” I whispered back.

“I should have come earlier—I should have said I was sorry then, instead of waiting till now, until I was an old woman, until everyone was dead and gone and left me alone.”

My feet twitched as my eyes flicked from the doorway to my backpack. I nervously picked up a pen and started to click the end of it. The woman looked up, and through her blurry eyes I saw something flash. Anger.

Or maybe something else. I put the pen down.

“I’m sure they forgave you.” I didn’t know what else to say. This woman was older than me by tens of years stacked on top of each other. What could I ever help her with?

“They never did.”

“How do you know?”

“I saw it in their eyes. Both of them. They never forgave. They never forgot.”

I didn’t want to, but the words just blurted out.

“What happened?”

She looked down at her fingers again. “I killed their baby.”

I gasped. I didn’t want to do that either, but I wasn’t expecting it. Maybe that she kissed someone she wasn’t supposed to. Or maybe that she stole something. But killing a baby?

“You what?”

And I did still need an answer to my question. And God wasn’t here, but she was.

“Not on purpose. Not wholly at least. Or maybe by omission. Time can be so messy when you’re looking at it in a straight line. But the result was the same.” She looked up into my eyes, as if challenging me. “I killed my sister’s baby.”

What could I do? I pushed the chair back from the desk. I was about to rise and leave. To grab my bag, forget about God, forget about my question, forget about the bus ride, the sun, the mouldy sandwich, and

just go home. But she grabbed my hand, faster than I would have imagined possible for someone her age. She reached out and gripped it. Hurt it even.

“You have to forgive me. Or burn me. Or something. You need to end it. I’m begging you.”

And she was. I could see it in her eyes. But I wasn’t God. “I can’t do anything for you.”

She dropped back, deflated, her hand releasing mine. “Why not?” Her voice was weak again, soft.

I stood up; the chair swiveled behind me and hit the wall. She stood then too, came towards me and fell at my feet.

“You have to.” She gripped my jeans. Held the fraying knees. Looked down at my red Converse sneakers.

“You have to.”

I reached down to try to loosen her fingers from around my knees. “No one can forgive you; only you can forgive you or it won’t count.”

And it was true. I guess. I think so, anyway.

She let go then. I couldn’t get around her body though, so I crouched down and patted her back; it felt like something God might have done. She felt mushy.

And sweaty. But I kept patting her back. When my legs got sore, I fell into a lumpy folded mess beside her— one of my legs splayed under the desk, the other tucked beneath me. She kept her face turned away from me. I kept my hand on her slick back, the black damp material of her shirt clinging to my hand.

“I need an answer too.” I spoke into the underside of the desk. My eyes trailed along lines of dusty cobwebs. I didn’t want to look at her. She didn’t move. She just kept breathing into the carpet.

“I don’t know what to do.” I wiped my forehead on my T-shirt again. The room was warmer when the two of us were breathing so close. “I don’t think my parents are really my parents.”

I peeked over at her. She was still breathing into the carpet. I couldn’t tell if she even heard me. I untucked my one leg in a gangly movement and leaned against the wall, the whole time I kept my sweaty hand on her sweaty back. I didn’t want to keep talking, but there was something about being under the desk. About this lady. About knowing that whatever I said it would be okay because she had killed a baby. And I did still need an answer to my question. And God wasn’t here, but she was.

“I think I’ve always had this feeling. Of being apart from them. Of being an other. It was little moments, you know? Like them looking at each other over my head. Of them falling quiet when I said something.

Of something awkward. Unspoken. But last week—” I paused. I could feel her eyes on me, at least one of

The woman was sitting up now. Her breathing had calmed down, and she was holding my hand. “That doesn’t mean they’re not your parents. All parents are shitty, even if they don’t want to be. All people are, really, when you get down to it.”

“Maybe.”

“Well”—she let go of my hand and hauled herself up off the floor—“I’m going to go now. I’ll be back tomorrow. Are you going to be in?”

“Maybe.”

She nodded her head and headed toward the doorway. “I don’t think I can forgive myself.”

“I don’t think I can forgive my parents.”

She sighed a little before turning around and disappearing into the hallway.

I sat there for a while, staring under the desk, until the sky turned dark and the only light in the office was from the street lamps. I thought about what she had said. Maybe that was enough. Maybe I didn’t actually need to hear the voice of God for this one.

As I stood up, I replaced the chair into its position behind the desk and put the pen into the spot where I had found it. I slipped the comic back in the book and set it on the shelf, not wanting God to have to search for it when they came back. Once in the hallway, I closed the door behind me and slipped my hand into my front pocket. The note was crumpled and a bit damp. The ink had smudged a little, but you could still read the message. I wedged it into the door frame, the letters still legible: God isn’t here today. ///

FRANCINE CUNNINGHAM // 7

them, peeking out from behind a bent arm. “Something happened. I was so angry that day. I could feel it inside of me from the moment I woke up. This pulsing anger. This anger that flared in me whenever someone tried to speak to me. I knew it was irrational. I knew I should just stay alone, locked in my room, under the blankets, but my parents forced me out of the house.

My dad hates it when I’m not doing anything. You gotta work hard to have a good life. You need purpose to have a good life. You need skills to have a good life. On and on, he just never lets up with this "good life" bullshit.

My mom, she just nods along, but I can tell she doesn’t really care; she just loves my dad. So they forced me out of the house.

“We went to this outside market that’s run by a few volunteer groups and a church by my house. We were walking around, looking at the stalls, and I was being pushed by so many people, because it was so busy, that I just felt my body vibrating with rage. I was consumed with anger. I couldn’t help myself.

“And then there was a woman, with this highpitched voice that wove its way through the crowd and was drilling into my brain. She was yelling at this homeless man who was just resting under a tree. He had a bike with a ton of shit strapped on. And it was attached to a shopping cart that was piled high with junk, but it was his junk, and he had it tied down with bungee cords. She was yelling at him to leave, to take his junk and leave because he was disturbing the peace. I flipped. I don’t know what really happened, but I pushed my way through the crowd, and I just started screaming at her. I wasn’t even fully speaking English, I don’t think. And I started to grab the tent poles surrounding her booth. I was just so angry because here she was, this volunteer woman, at an event with other good volunteers, church-loving people, and she was yelling at a homeless dude with everything he owned literally strapped to him, telling him to leave because he was ruining their shitty, hot, loud, crowded event. It was so hypocritical. I started to tear down all the other booths too, because fuck them. They were all fake good people. And there was a moment, when I was in the middle of that rage, when I saw my parents out of the corner of my eye, and they were looking at me like they didn’t know me. Like they didn’t want to know me.

And I heard, I swear I did, even through the chaos, my dad say to my mom, Well, he’s not my kid, that’s for darn sure. And my mom clung to his sleeve and I could see her crying, but she never said anything.

“I ran away after that, just for a night, but they didn’t come looking for me. When I got home in the morning, they were hanging out on the back patio.

They looked surprised to see me.”

LAURA COK

THREE POEMS

EBOLA GRAPH (DETAIL), 20” x 20”, WIRE WITH GROWN SALT CRYSTALLIZATIONS, 2015 | ELAINE WHITTAKER

Image courtesy of the artist.

JUDGMENT DAY New millennium, trumpet call, waiting for the skies to split and rain redemption, Jesus Christ bigger than an elephant but just as gentle, open arms for little sinner heads like mine

And don’t forget the farmer’s cull, the goats and sheep (but which is which?) the quarters I kept back from church— if only I’d had time to grow since grown-ups didn’t get in fights or grow their homemade, petty sins that piled up heavy on my back— they ate their dinners, went to bed what could be left, then, to confess and why do they look so afraid?

HIGH PARK My friend believed she heard their squeak and rustle, somewhere gentle underfoot by stream and tree roots. Not too close to where the dogs run, barking at the fence that keeps the wild out and wild in; nor to stage and glamour, spotlight through the leaves. She crept along the whisper waterways, her inner ear attuned to things the rest of us were deaf to: the capybaras’ call, the cosmic power slinking through her blood.

How lucky to be certain: to be of consequential use, even if, as days go by, the animals slip further out as she slips further in.

WEEKS LATER Sick of other people’s children everywhere amok in the grocery store running into the backs of my legs and mistaking me for mama.

Screeching in the playground at eight on a Saturday when I’m trying to walk my dog in peace and keep my face averted from the sun and his mother, talking him down the slide: You can do it! You did it!

All asinine, tiny fools everywhere, smiling at me from their grocery-cart seats and pointing from the stroller: Goggie! Goggie!

Yes, a good doggie! They can’t even talk right, can’t get lost on their little human leashes attached to a backpack in the shape of a monkey that only loves a washcloth and a wireframe mother, going every which way: are you my— Are you my— I’m sorry, there’s been a mistake and I’m not yours, nor anyone’s. ///

LAURA COK // 9

the whiners who ignored their chores and told their brothers go away

KELLY S. THOMPSON // 10

KELLY S. THOMPSON

RECORDINGS OF TRUTHS AND FACTS M

y sister Meghan is already dead when I find the recordings on her phone, her voice quietly defiant against her husband’s. She sounds exhausted, as you’d expect from a terminal cancer patient, but there is something else too—an undercurrent of devastation mixed with a tangible longing.

I replay the M4A files endlessly, my eyes welling as I squeeze them shut—some desperate plea to keep the noise out, despite needing to witness every syllable pulsing like a battle cry.

1. RECORDING: He’ll be lucky if he remembers you existed, Bernard says of their son.

BERNARD:

2012 “I don’t like him,” I lament to Mom as I scrub stuckon turkey skin from the Christmas roasting pan. My husband is silently drying the dishes that I pass to him, while Meghan’s boyfriend, Bernard, snores on the recliner and Meghan takes a baby wipe to clean gravy from their son, Sam. Bernard had occupied himself during gift exchange by scanning Facebook on his phone, even while his and Meghan’s son opened presents with the clumsy hands of a toddler. “He’s pushy.

Doesn’t even talk to Meg kindly, much less his kid.”

“You barely know him,” Mom replies. “You barely see them together.” But she watches from the corner of her eye as Meghan picks up discarded wrapping paper, stuffing remnants into a bag while Bernard’s throat chortles in sleep. Meghan looks happy, I think, or something bordering on contentedness or acceptance, perhaps. “You’re too judgmental, Kelly. Bernard has a job.

Owns his own house.” Mom whips the cloth she’s been using to scrub at the counters, shaking it in his direction.

“Whoop-de-doo, Ma. He’s an adult.”

“It’s an improvement on her other boyfriends.”

I snort-laugh as I sip from a glass of wine, dishpan hands wrinkling so that my fingertips are numb against the crystal where the alcohol blessedly dulls my other senses. “Her previous boyfriends? That’s the standard we’re setting?”

Mom wipes at the glass table with Windex, the squeak of towel and liquid-like nails on a chalkboard.

“Kelly, just drop it, okay?”

Later, I help Meghan gather the gifts, the stockings, the remnants of the holiday, and we shuttle into the foyer, careful to avoid slops of melting snow on the tiles. She won’t make eye contact with me.

“He’s an introvert,” she whispers, rationalizing as she tucks Sam into his snowsuit, although I’ve said nothing. Bernard is already in the car, having not bothered to say goodbye, engine running and eyes on the snow-covered road ahead. The introvert excuse isn’t a new one, with my sister bordering on professional in her ability to weave explanations for him.

Even after he throws a knife across the room with my nephew toddling nearby.

Or shatters a glass against the wall in anger.

Or when he tells my sister that her body is disgusting after the birth of their son.

When he threatens to kill her.

All the countless assaults on her humanity force me to choke down my anger as half-chewed turkey rises up my esophagus.

I nod, give her the permission she seems to need, then wordlessly help Meghan wiggle Sam’s arm into a padded sleeve. I kiss the tip of his nose while nestling a hat onto his head. He grins at us, glances back and forth between his mother and me from his position on Meghan’s hip.

“Auntie loves you, Piglet.” He reaches a hand for my finger and squeezes tight, and the ball in my throat grows into an anvil, heavy and metallic on my palate.

The weight of this silence is crushing all of us.

“Be careful,” I whisper to the door as Meghan tucks Sam into his seat, then climbs into the rumbling truck.

My words are lost in the night air, disappearing with my breath in the cold.

2. RECORDING: MEGHAN: It’s not nice knowing I only have a few months

2018 I arrive at her home to take Meghan to her first chemotherapy session. Chemo that we know is relatively moot.

I wouldn’t expect you’ll see Labour Day, her oncologist said, a young man sporting an unironic pocket protector in his button-up, eyes squinting behind thick lenses.

I’m the only family member seemingly unshocked by her illness, rearing its ugly head from her childhood battle with kidney cancer and diagnosed the day after giving birth to her daughter. Part of me, I think, has expected this, and guilt spreads in my chest until I can barely breathe as I lumber up the steps to her front entrance.

I open the door to a view of the entire tiny house.

My niece, just six months old, is cradled between pillows on the couch while Bernard lounges on the opposite end, eyes half open and trained on the television, video-game controller in hand. Sam runs into my arms for a squeeze, and I make him a snack while Meghan rushes to burp the baby after feeding, eyes on the clock for her appointment time. Bernard doesn’t speak, even to say goodbye.

Once in the car, Meghan tunes up the radio, hums along off tune. “You don’t want your husband with you?” I ask as I drive. “I can stay with the kids, if you’d rather have Bernard.” I am stirring the pot. Know it.

Don’t like it, because the dying should get whatever they want, and what Meghan wants is silent acceptance I cannot give. Not with the stakes literally growing by the day.

“I want to go with my sister,” she says, staring at the road ahead, reaching for my arm. A gesture meant to assure me I am first choice, not a comforting and reliable replacement.

So I don’t argue. I watch as the liquid therapy drains into her arm and shuttle her home once it's finished. Hours after her treatment, I pull the sheets up to Meghan’s chin, unable to close the curtains since

3. RECORDING: BERNARD: Every conversation we have is, “You’re not do-

ing enough. I’m not getting enough help,” his voice says in a singsong mock. What the fuck?

2018 Meghan was insistent this morning. No cards. No presents. Who wants to celebrate another year passed when presence in hospice indicates no hope of a next one? But my niece and nephew toddle in with Bernard’s mom, who didn’t get the family memo. She and the kids launch into a round of birthday wishes, Bernard noticeably absent, although Meghan peeks behind them, leaning to the left and right, angling her vision toward the exit, where she waits for his silhouette to fill the doorway. I want to remind her that it is not Friday, and he won’t bother altering his once-a-week routine.

I bite my tongue to keep from pointing out that he has not attended any of her chemo, bloodwork, or oncology appointments. I refrain from discussing his absence that permeates everything.

KELLY S. THOMPSON // 11

left and you’re saying such mean things to me. Bernard’s silence fills the room.

there aren’t any in the cramped, dank space. Bernard is gone, having left the moment we arrived. He didn’t take the kids with him, and the baby coos from her crib while Sam smashes together Lego pieces in the living room.

Meghan’s skin borders on green as she leans into the pillow and fights off nausea. I’m on the lookout for jaundice and other worrying concerns the nurses told me to watch for, but what does it mean when the skin turns to death before one’s expiration date and common features become marred by illness and pain? My sister used to be a mass of brown freckles on rounded cheeks, giving way to soft layers of chocolatey hair she’s never gotten the knack of styling. She’s always been feisty, refusing to put up with anyone’s shit, protecting me from schoolground bullies even as the bully down the street was swirling Meghan’s head in the school toilets. No, this person I am tucking into bed is a stranger.

Meghan motions at the plastic bags in my hand, double-lined, and I hold them out to her. “I can’t believe I’m putting Bernard through all this,” Meghan says, her voice full of compassion for his suffering, and then she heaves and heaves, ridding herself of all of it.

I bring washcloths and water, along with the prescribed antiemetic, watch as she swallows it down, her face decorated with a sheen of sweat. I kiss her forehead, taste her salty skin on my lips, then leave the room to catch my breath just as hers slips heavily toward sleep.

KELLY S. THOMPSON // 12

A nurse peeks into the room with a Dairy Queen log cake in hand, the start of “Happy Birthday” echoing until the children catch on. Mom, Dad, and I sing obligingly and smile while feeling none of the emotions, watch as Meghan blows out the lone candle, Sam clamouring up her hospital bed to help with a slobbery puff of air. As the flame dies and a curl of smoke trails up Meghan’s nose, bitterness floods my taste buds. The nurse slices the dessert, leaving streaks of pink icing on the serrated knife.

Later, melted dairy coagulating on paper plates, Meghan is draped in blankets despite the July heat wave, her eyes only half open as I chase Sam through the sunlight of the hospice garden. He dekes to the left and as I run toward him, his laugh wild and unknowing. He stops, frozen in time amongst the grass and hostas.

“Auntie, my truck has cancer like Mommy.” He holds a dinky car up to me as evidence, appearing stoic about this uncomprehensive diagnosis. A few weeks ago, he came inside from playing with his father outdoors, sullen. Auntie, Bernard isn’t being nice to me, he said. I’d never heard him call his father by his first name and I had swallowed down anger as Meghan called him over to her bed to allay his sadness. Now Sam looks up at me, his blond towhead so like my own, the smile that is all his mom. I scoop him into my arms and hold him upside down, marvel at his face that is a perfect reflection of my sister when she was four, the same age he is now. He will remember, I believe. I hope for it, even. Other parts of me hope he’ll forget.

4. RECORDING: Are you that dense? Do I have to get you a fucking dictionary? MEGHAN: I can’t have the kids watching their dad treat their mother like this when she’s dying.

HIM:

Meghan and I lie awake watching something mindless, the glow of the television lighting the room. We can’t hear it over the sound of the air conditioner, which runs constantly to temper the heat her tumour gives off. I imagine the illness devouring her from the inside, big spoonfuls of Meghan on a silver platter.

It’s late, but time means nothing these last two months. We eat mindlessly and unwillingly, choking down casseroles and smoothies made by smiling volunteers, sleep in short stints under the glare of fluorescent lighting. All of it so we can be there when Meghan wakes from her drug-fuelled dreams and panic takes root. Each time it blooms across her face with the realization that death still inches closer, inevitable and hungry. Lately, she’s taken to begging for Mom, Dad, or

me to lie next to her in the bed, as if we can ward off the reaper. Being alone has always been her greatest fear.

So I’m here, in the new electric hospital bed, a quilt shared across my curvy legs and Meghan’s spindly appendages.

“Thank you. For all that you’ve done for me,” Meghan says. She squeezes my hand as tightly as she can. The pulse of her flesh against mine barely registers.

I tilt my neck until our heads touch. “Ideally, you’d stop this whole dying business so I can really show off my Florence Nightingale skills and nurse you back to health.”

“That’s me, always messing with your plans.”

“The nature of having a big sister.”

I rub my thumb back and forth on her palm and kiss her hand. I’m painfully uncomfortable, edged in like a sardine against the bed rails and the thin frame of my sister.

And then the words come and I cannot stop them.

“Meg, why didn’t you ever leave?” My voice is soft, devoid of judgment. Why am I talking? Why make her live this and question that? But if I don’t ask now, there will be this truth about my sister that I can never know.

And the kids. What about the kids?

Meghan and I had a big fight right before she went into hospice—only two months ago, but it might as well have been a decade. Have you ever thought that as the person who wanted to be married her whole life, just wanted a family, that maybe I’m jealous of your marriage? Your life? Her voice was at a fever pitch, hands clenched into fists. It wasn’t the dying that she was mad about: it was the shitty marriage, the arena of life in which she so badly wanted to succeed and yet hers was a relationship of countless bad choices, words, actions.

Meghan wanted storybooks and romance. Meghan always wanted things she didn’t allow herself to have.

When I turn over to Meghan in the hospice bed, she is asleep, eyebrows knitted into medication-infused dream. I let her rest, my unanswerable question dissipating into the air-conditioned void.

5. RECORDING: HIM: You’re such a stupid fucking idiot.

Meghan chooses palliative sedation, all matter-of-fact and efficient. She is resigned about the decision, not peaceful, knowing it means she will no longer be able to speak, drink, eat—will die within days. I’m grateful she doesn’t ask to see the kids because how would we stand the one last time when there have been so many other last times? She is nearly devoid of hair, smells of rotting flesh, vomits spontaneously and constantly.

6. RECORDING: SAM: Mommy? Play-Doh?

Headphones are tucked into my ears. and I listen to the recordings over and over, having found them once I started my executor tasks. I listen in the bathtub on speakerphone, in the living room on the surround sound, through my tinny headphones while running errands. The hunger for confirmation of my suspicions makes me feel dirty and deceitful. All those years of lies to cover his behaviour made it so that separating her personal truths from facts was like straining onions from soup. The flavour already tainted everything.

I listen to the worst of the recordings now, standing in line at Canada Post, moving ahead a customer at a time. Sun pours in from the old aluminum-framed windows, glinting off the displays of Royal Canadian Mint coins. I turn up the volume, close my eyes to Sam’s words, Meghan’s tears. It is this section of the recording that does me in, my nephew’s innocent voice. I imagine him holding up the plastic tubs of multicoloured clay,

his eyebrows raised and questioning, trying to make sense of the constant anger and bitterness between his parents. I grit my teeth, rage swelling like proofed dough. And there are emails too, written a month after they were married, in which Meghan asks Bernard why he would hit her with a closed fist, followed by empty promises to leave. Did she know I would find her bread-crumb trail? Hope for it, even?

I move ahead in line, step toward the counter, and lay my documents out like a fan of efficiency. To get her mail forwarded to me, I have to bring in a copy of the will, her death certificate, my identification. Being executor is a sweet pain I crave, because it is checklists and facts, paperwork and financials. It is decisions that can distract me, aimless without a patient to care for, a sister to share with.

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” says the employee, scanning the will. “How old was your sister?”

“Thirty-seven.” I swallow once. Twice.

The clerk shakes her head. “Too young to die.”

There are so many injustices. This death, this suffering, is just one of many.

“Well,” the clerk says with a thwack of stamp on paper. “She knew you’d look after her and her estate.

I’m sure that gave her comfort.”

I nod at the woman, clench my fists as she pats the forms into an envelope and hands me a receipt. I collect my papers and shuffle toward the door, rushing past an elderly man and not bothering to hold the door as I zap my key fob at my car and slump into the front seat.

Then the tears come, as they do often, without reprieve. I have spilled my salty pain all over town. In the grocery store. At the hairdresser. While picking up prescriptions meant to keep my mood in check. I make no apologies for the crying, don’t bother working to make others comfortable with my grief. I watched that effort eat my sister alive faster than the cancer. My grief is a fact, verifiable.

I mop my face with my sleeve and take a few deep breaths, ignoring the looks of concern from people who walk past, then drop the paperwork into the passenger seat, nodding at my ability to complete one task today. One thing, and then another, and then another.

All I could do was give comfort. It is one more truth that I mentally record for later, when I know I will need it most. ///

KELLY S. THOMPSON // 13

And then there is the pain. Morphine drip and fentanyl patches—nothing touches the agony, so she is always screaming, wincing, aching. The sound follows me in sleep, in the car—wherever I find myself.

“Here, take this,” Meghan says to me, thrusting the phone that hasn’t left her hand in months because her marriage is one of texting, of words that mean nothing.

“So you can shut down my accounts and get my emails and stuff. As executor.” She waggles the device at me and gives me the password, tells me to write it down.

The nurse approaches, eyes full of compassion, and slips another IV into Meghan’s withered body, starting the sedation. I hold the phone’s weight, turn from my sister, and lean against the wall to catch my breath. I tell her over and over that I love her until she no longer answers and I am dizzy because my sister is dying, and I can do nothing but rub lavender oil into her feet and bring blankets fresh from the warmer to lay on her necrotic legs.

Meghan’s eyes fold shut, and the nurse and I tiptoe out of the room, leaving Mom and Dad with their daughter.

“I have never, ever seen anyone suffer like this,” says the nurse, tears in her eyes as she folds me into a hug. During Meghan’s two months in hospice, I have witnessed my sister’s skin gone gangrenous around her exposed tailbone, washed her thin foreign body, held buckets of her hot bile. I am relieved, oddly, to know that this is as bad as it gets. And yet part of me knows it can be, has been, so much worse. This is the life truth that I wish was a fallacy.

VANESSA REID // 14

VANESSA REID

THE EGG

T

to stand and wait. They were only good if you liked paying triple for a drink on a random Thursday and genuinely enjoyed small talk with strangers in long lines for washrooms. She didn’t. Not anymore. Still, Liz wore the shirts and appreciated the memories, her hearing much more valuable now that she was in her forties.

Liz wore nothing but these oversized T-shirts to bed: a vestige of her old self. Her mother’s many pronouncements about vaginal health meant that Liz and her sister grew up sleeping without underwear, to “let it all breathe.” A week later, Mom changed her mind. “Maybe the lady parts are too exposed,” she suggested. Liz was confused. ​Did it need air or not? ​For a week, she selected from her chest of drawers, each night pulling up a fresh cotton pair with elastic at the legs and waist, stamped with indeterminate geometric shapes. She groaned as the elastic bit her sides. In another week, her mother retracted all of this and insisted they doff the underpants again. Since then, all Liz slept in was a shirt.

Liz stretched her arms and spine. She had watched a program about a ninety-year-old Buddhist monk in South Korea who, with her bald head, looked and acted youthful. She watched this monk, in her traditional robe, use a pink Bic razor to shave right down to the shiny scalp. Liz took her lead and stretched immediately upon waking, just as the happy monk had done.

She didn’t yet pray for hours, or avoid alcohol, men, and meat, but the stretching was a start.

Sliding her arms down her side, she felt a large, hard lump under the sheets. She felt again for what

Her mother’s many pronouncements about vaginal health meant that Liz and her sister grew up sleeping without underwear, to “let it all breathe.” seemed the size of an acorn squash. The object startled her fully awake. She threw back the covers to discover a large white egg.

“What the fuck?”

True to its nature, the egg did not reply.

Liz sat upright and stared down at the egg. H ​ ow was this possible? ​She ran through the events of the evening before, of what had been a pretty typical Monday. She’d had dinner and watched TV in bed, before finishing off the Ben & Jerry’s. There was the

OPPOSITE: CC ME – EMERGE (DETAIL), 22” x 72”, FAX CARBON ON MYLAR, PETRI DISHES WITH LIVE HALOBACTERIA AND AGAR, 2012 | ELAINE WHITTAKER

Image courtesy of the artist.

VANESSA REID // 15

he curtains, which were supposed to block the morning light, had not been pulled tight the night before. A slit of sun sliced through the panels, shining directly into Liz’s eyeballs. She was certain her eyelids were more transparent than other people’s. She’d read somewhere that pigeons have a third clear eyelid that slid from the bottom up, like a child pulling a blanket to their neck, and that these were a remnant of their descent from raptors. Her eyelids felt like that, like a thin, transparent membrane. Even a small ray of sunlight could slip through the curtain and go straight into the part of the brain that told her to wake up. She noticed small flecks penetrating the panels from where the blackout lamination had worn thin.

“Time for new curtains,” Liz mumbled.

Liz had been divorced for three years but still enjoyed the morning silence and the sheer vastness of sleeping alone in a king-size bed. Aloneness was indulgent. No one to forcefully roll over, startling you from your slumber. No more other-people farts muffled under duvets. No hot, fetid breath in your face first thing in the morning. Th ​ is​, she thought, as she stretched her arms above her head, t​ his is living.

As Liz reached her arms above her head, she could feel the wood of the headboard and the gap that allowed her pillow to fall through. She moved her arms down, across the mattress, like a snow angel. A sheet angel. She stretched and flexed her feet, made a gripping motion with her toes. The sheets were soft, almost satiny. These were the most expensive sheets she had ever owned. When she was first married, when they were young and broke, any polyester sheets would do.

She ran her hand across the coolness of the sheets, purchased ceremoniously as part of the demarcation between married life and single life. Her marriage sheets obviously had to go—bad juju to keep them. So she washed them in the hottest water possible, adding borax and baking soda for good measure. She dried, folded, and packaged them, dropping them off at a local women’s shelter. You never know who might need purple king-size sheets.

All her adult life, Liz wore a sleeping shirt to bed— one of those old rock-band tops collected from concerts in her twenties. This one was a faded black Mötley Crüe, the band’s name written in blue cursive. An American flag rippled behind the large hair and bandanas.

The umlauts over the o and u were barely visible after many washes. A large hole emerged where the collar had pulled away, leaving it hanging awkwardly. Liz had given up on concerts years before, realizing the con of live music. Concerts, she believed, were basically paying

VANESSA REID // 16

tub, still on her nightstand, spoon balanced carefully on the lid.

She looked around the room. Nothing seemed out of place.

Was this some kind of a joke?​Liz ran through the people in her life. Sure, some were funny. Several liked pranks. But this was something else entirely. Someone would need a key and intimate knowledge of her schedule. And a very large egg.

“No.” Liz shook her head. None of her friends were that funny. Certainly, no one even had much energy anymore. In university, maybe, but now they were busy working or chauffeuring their children to cheer practice or to the doctor when they complained about “feeling hot” when really, they just didn’t want to go to school.

No. This egg business was no prank. This was serious.

She reached down and picked up the egg. Its smoothness and weight surprised her. It looked identical to any you might find in a carton at the supermarket, except it was larger. Liz studied the shell, holding it with two hands. Looking closely, she could see small bumps and speckles. The shell appeared like paint layered over and over, but not entirely smooth or even in application. There was no stamp, no pink lettering to indicate when or where the egg was from, just a large white ellipsoid.

Liz scrutinized her bedroom. The dresser stood in the same place it had the night before. Various cosmetic products were still lined neatly across the top. A box of Kleenex sat beside the Q-tips that Liz used exclusively for

Too bad she hadn’t paid attention in biology. Most of what she’d learned in high school was pretty useless.

scratching the inner part of her ears. She knew this was wrong and that any medical professional would advise against it, but the satisfaction was too much for Liz. The box suggested they be used for cosmetic applications or gently wiping crust from sleepy baby eyes, but why pretend? Liz was sure the manufacturer knew people were all secretly toeing the line of eardrum perforation.

Above the dressing table was a large square mirror. Liz caught her reflection as she sat up in bed. She

looked fine. Nothing appeared to be wrong. She had the same face she’d fallen asleep with.

There was nobody else to ask, so she stared at the egg for answers. If no one had broken into her house, where had the egg come from? And what was she to do with it now? Obviously it was her egg, in her possession. But what next? What did she owe this egg?

She had to assume she’d laid it—it was near her midsection, under the blankets. No irritating panties to trap it while she tossed and turned. What was inside was more concerning. Was it fertilized? Could you tell just from looking at an egg? She held it up to one of the beams of light, hoping to catch a glimpse or indication of what might be inside.

Too bad she hadn’t paid attention in biology. Most of what she’d learned in high school was pretty useless.

All she remembered were those Punnett squares used to determine dominant and recessive genes. She knew that blue eyes plus brown eyes mostly got brown eyes.

Or in her case, something muddy. They never taught anything valuable, like whether or not you’d develop the Parkinson’s that stole your grandfather, or the alcoholism every aunt brought to family dinners. Certainly, they never specified how eggs were fertilized. She did know that frogs laid eggs in water and then the male came by and crop-dusted the area with sperm, hoping for the best. But what about eggs i​n ​shells? Could anything get through?

Of Liz’s many concerns about public education, this was unacceptable. How did they get through and not r​eally ​k now how the birds or the bees worked?

Grade 8 health was the last time she received any direct instruction on the matter. The gym teacher, Mr. Connell, an intense man with dark curly hair, took his job seriously. He tried his best to keep the boys from exploding into laughter when he covered masturbation or the proper terms for genitalia.

“What,” he asked the class, “is the only 100 per cent effective method of birth control?”

A stifled laugh erupted in a corner of the classroom.

Connell was projecting an overhead of birth-control failure statistics. It was a warm day, just before the arrival of summer. Liz studied these numbers, noticing stark differences between the possibilities for protection and the reality of human use. ​People are not very careful, Liz thought. She ran down the list, considering the question. Intrauterine devices, implants, condoms, female condoms, sponges, diaphragms, and birth control pills—they all were pretty good. But not perfect.

Liz raised her hand.

“Yes, Elizabeth?”

She ate in the silence of her kitchen, considering her next move.

“Well,” she announced finally, “this is some sort of twisted Schrödinger scenario. You exist now that I have observed you. And to know for sure what’s inside will definitely kill you.” She was certain a cat was not inside this egg. A monster, perhaps?​She wanted to be very sure, but cracking it open was not an option. She would have to wait. H ​ ow long would it take to cook?

Gestate. Did it have to be kept warm? Liz certainly did not intend to sit on this egg. She had deadlines and responsibilities. An upcoming trip to Miami.

Children were the reason that Liz had divorced.

When she and Rick met in their twenties, they were on track for well-established careers. Neither wanted kids.

They bonded under the premise that children were wonderful but just not for them. Kids were something best enjoyed from afar, like volcanoes or carnivores.

One day, Rick changed his mind.

“I’m sorry,” he said one bleak winter night after telling his truth. It was a Friday; they had ordered pizza, drunk a bottle of Barolo.

“For which part?” Liz couldn’t look at him. Instead she traced a red ring of wine on the counter with her finger.

She felt betrayed on the one hand but felt even more strongly that she didn’t want children. She wanted eight hours of uninterrupted sleep. She wanted clothes without stains. She saw what motherhood did to her friends. Even if the birth went well, and often it did not, they could barely hold a conversation. These moms, so exhausted and focused on their child, could think of nothing else. And it wasn’t his body that would stretch and tear and change. There was little risk for men. She couldn’t do it for Rick. For them. He knew this. He also knew it was the end.

“For changing my mind,” he said finally.

So, Rick did what men do. He found a newer, younger wife.

Liz watched it unfold over Facebook. She found Rick’s new wife, then checked periodically for any changes. No status updates, so Liz had to infer by scrutinizing the profile picture. First, there was one picture of her and Rick: a candid-looking shot. Then an engagement picture, her hand placed gingerly over Rick’s chest to show the sizable ring. Larger than Liz’s had been, no doubt to prove the solidity of this second marriage. Then the wedding photo—she made a lovely bride, it was undeniable. Now her picture was of a large round belly, Rick’s hand placed strategically on top of hers. It was a lovely narrative, only Liz couldn’t tell if Rick was happy. You never really can tell, but his smile

VANESSA REID // 17

“Abstinence. Abstinence is the only 100 per cent method of preventing pregnancy.”

Someone squealed. Three boys laughed so hard one fell off his chair. Liz felt her stomach pitch. She immediately regretted volunteering this answer. Now she was the prude who yelled “abstinence” in class.

“Correct,” Connell confirmed, before beginning his sermon on the dangers of sex.

Now that Liz was in her forties, she realized that getting pregnant was not nearly as easy as Mr. Connell had implied. Unwanted pregnancies were not hiding behind every sexual encounter. Nearly all of her friends had struggled. Several had miscarriages and misshapen uteri. Most spent their thirties tracking their basal body temperature and stretching mucus between their fingers, looking for egg-white consistency.

Mr. Connell, it turns out, was wrong.

Liz blistered at the egg, annoyed. Lying on her back, she held it between her legs in the gap between the thighs, measuring the width of her pelvis. “Possible,” she muttered. It seemed unlikely, but then snakes unhinge their jaws to swallow bird’s eggs whole.

Maybe her vagina could do the same? Its limits had not been tested with birth, but perhaps an egg could roll out undetected.

Liz rose, dressed, and took the egg downstairs. She placed a dishtowel on the counter and rested the egg on top. She sat it up so that it could watch her make breakfast but also so the egg wouldn’t roll off and smash on the floor before she figured out what to do next.

What to have for breakfast? Certainly not eggs, not now.​She settled on oatmeal, added some to a pot, and stirred in water. The mixture warmed slowly over the element, just starting to bubble. W ​ hat does it mean?​ she wondered, watching bubbles break the surface tension. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know. Knowing would force her into some sort of obligation. ​But what if there’s a tiny human inside? ​Was Liz being forced into becoming a mother? She’d spent her life avoiding that possibility. But now that she had the egg, now that it existed whole, outside her body, she felt a sense of duty.

“But,” she said to her companion, “we don’t know what’s inside you.”

The egg volunteered no answers. Liz stared at it, propped up on the counter. Logically, she rested it with the small end facing up, like Humpty Dumpty. She thought for a long time, before smelling the oatmeal scorch. “Fuck.” She scooped what remained of the edible mush into a bowl and slid onto a stool at the kitchen island. “Sorry for the language,” she apologized quietly to the egg.

VANESSA REID // 18

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never quite reached his eyes. So Liz kept the condo, and Rick became the bad guy who left his wife to start up with a younger woman. Liz cared but also didn’t.

Scooping the egg up, she carried it to the leather sofa, a comfortable place for the egg to wait while she was at work. The egg couldn’t come to the office.​ That would be insane. She turned on the TV and found cartoons. “Television, the world’s best babysitter,” she muttered, tucking the egg in with some blankets.

Liz performed all her duties at work that day, but only superficially. No matter what task occupied her, her mind was all egg. ​She was constantly deep in thought, distracted.

When she arrived home that night, the egg was where she’d left it, the TV playing something with two rabbit siblings enacting various cruelties on one another.

Liz watched their interactions for some time, appalled.

The egg, she decided, didn’t need this kind of influence.

Liz started skipping her commitments: her midweek volunteering, yoga. She missed important emails and lunchtime walks with colleagues. People noticed.

She worried about the egg constantly. This is what responsibility feels like. ​Like a wet blanket over your face while you suck air. After three days, she started to wonder if this egg was some sort of punishment. Her thoughts darkened, and a rotten feeling settled in her stomach. This was too much like​Eraserhead.​She’d seen the movie years ago and never forgot. A small chill ran down her back, all the way to her toes. It wasn’t right.

“No,” she said finally. But the “no” slipped out like a moan, like an animal ensnared.

When she returned home that day, the city trucks were still groaning by, collecting food scraps and recyclables. She had set her bins out the night before, as always, even though pickup was late in the day. She watched the automated arm grab a compost bin across the street with a large, three-fingered metal hand. It swung the bin quickly, dumping the contents into an opening in the truck’s back before setting it down. The movement was quick, efficient.

Scooping up the egg from the dishcloth, she took it outside. She stood in her driveway, waiting for the exact moment the truck would pass by. The hot diesel and rotten smell were making her nauseous. She dropped the egg into the green bin just as the truck approached, then slammed the lid shut without looking, without ever knowing what was inside. The claw arm of the garbage truck reached out and snatched the bin. It was repetition. It was mechanical. It was doom. ///

KLARA DU PLESSIS

BIRDIE “HUNTING RAZORBILLS,” WORK-IN-PROGRESS

Splayed Spreadeagled not like a leg and a leg or a limb and limb but a body and a body doubling in a slow horizontal slip Cliffhanger image Nailing a hand Stopping the frame for a predatory tracking of sound Residual Gratification frottage The lingo that is birds Dead still to the sounds emitted in the past Warble Thrilling Fall asleep So much movement it is stillness Stand up for the agency of black rocks towering the portrait to blankness ///

KLARA DU PLESSIS // 19

from OpoboLOOSELY BASED ON KADIE SALMON’S

GLORIA BLIZZARD // 20

GLORIA BLIZZARD

BLACK CAKE BUDDHISM T

he package weighed about fifteen pounds. I staggered with it from the concierge’s desk to the elevator, noting the brownish liquid seeping through the brown kraft paper and grey electrical tape. My mother had been sending such packages to me by mail twice a year since I’d moved out on my own. The first would arrive a few days before my birthday. The second delivery note from the post office would arrive a few days before Christmas. Since both occasions were in December, I would then have pounds of Trinidadian black cake in my possession. They were the envy of my friends who had either an acquired or inherited taste. A minority, like my daughter, hated the alcohol-infused, densely fruited mass. Others would bite into the blackened warmth and roll their eyes in ecstasy and communion with All Things Bright and Beautiful.

Then one year, it all stopped.

With an understanding that our time on earth is limited, knowing that the deliveries would not continue forever, many years earlier I’d asked my mother for the recipe. She’d written it out for me with a blue ballpoint pen. I’d tucked the sheet into a cookbook and carried it through all my homes along Toronto’s Bloor subway line: the artist-filled condemned Victorian on Sherbourne Street with a secret worm farm in the basement; another second-storey apartment on Bloor Street at Christie; a shared house on Milverton Boulevard, a tree-lined street just north of Coxwell and Danforth; Bloor and Keele Street, a few blocks away from the slaughterhouses, whose existence was revealed by the invisible stench of death that made its way south on the early morning breeze; a giant five-bedroom brick home on Colbeck Street in Ukrainian Bloor West Village; and a bit farther north on Annette Street, an apartment above a dog grooming salon. I generally moved every two years or so, a habit entrenched in my system by the multiple moves endured during my military-base-brat childhood.

“A son is yours until he finds himself a wife. A daughter is yours forever,” my mum had once claimed when I was about fourteen years old. The words sounded like a trap. And I’d run from them and Caribbean girl-child prescribed roles ever since. I’d peek around the corner into the kitchen, where my mother slammed together brilliant meals while my father sat drinking with their guests. Her face was shut as she chopped, mixed, and stirred. She’d stop, wipe her hands on a red-and-white dishcloth, and exit the kitchen to sit with everyone, counting the minutes before heading back into the shadows to stir a pot or remove the dish from the oven. I’d quietly withdraw from my observation posts, climb the stairs to my room, shut the door, and pick up my classical guitar, losing myself in the works of Felix Mendelssohn and Bach. I later imagined that my mother’s resentment, love, and frustration slammed into each dripping package of cake that arrived from that same kitchen.

In this formerly enslaved culture of Trinidad, it would have been Black/Creole women and girls forced to cook and bake for the Spanish, French, and, finally, English enslavers. Creating the delicacy of black cake required the extensive labour of women and girls, part of a social hierarchy based on gender and race. No ingredient in Trinidadian black cake is indigenous to the island. After emancipation, I imagine that some might have revelled in benefiting from their own labour and, at Christmastime, created the delicious treat for their own families at whatever cost.

“W

ouldn’t it have been too expensive for people to make?” I once asked my mother. I knew that my grandmother had been a twenty-six-year-old widow with three small children in the 1940s whose husband, my grandfather, had died years earlier.

“Oh, everyone just made it happen,” she said.

“They just did it.”

GLORIA BLIZZARD // 21

MURKY BODIES (CORPUS HALITE DETAIL), 8’ x 3’, SALT, ARDUINO, PERISTALTIC PUMP, 3-D PRINTED PLASTIC KIDNEY MODELS, MEDICAL TUBING CONTAINING DANDELION STEMS THAT HAVE BEEN DECELLULARIZED (PLANT CELLS REMOVED) AND THEN CULTURED WITH HUMAN ENDOTHELIAL CELLS (HUVEC) AND MOUSE SMOOTH MUSCLE CELLS (D12), 2020 | ELAINE WHITTAKER PHOTO CREDIT: DAVID WILLIAMS

Image courtesy of the artist.

GLORIA BLIZZARD // 22

I felt the strings of patriarchy reach through the eons into my era and into my mother’s statement, seeking to pull me into appropriate obedience and service, expectations that were not hoisted onto my brothers. I watched carefully which household chores, if any, they were asked to do and compared them with my own.

“She feel we discriminating,” my dad laughed one day, as I scowled at yet another request to “make me a little bite,” something he never asked of my brothers.

I made simple dishes, the occasional batch of cookies; however, when it came to more complicated endeavours like black cake, souse, and callaloo, I’d managed to avoid taking up the spatula or the steel bowl or the wooden spoon. Until now.

I

t is August. I am in the living room of my parents’ Ottawa home. My mother holds a giant kitchen knife.

Parang, traditional Trinidadian Christmas music, is emanating from my father’s computer and making my mother crazy. Her hymns are playing on a separate device. A noisy battle of wills. I turn off the hymns and turn down the parang.

“I can’t do both,” I tell them.

My mother has decades of practice with knives and, unlike me, has not cut off the tip of her own finger. Mind you, I didn’t do that with a knife. I’d been using a pair of scissors to open a clear plastic one-litre bag of milk. I’ve also managed to drop a weighted kitchen knife on my foot, which required plastic surgery to rejoin the ends of a ligament that controlled the big toe of my left foot. This was followed by months with my leg in a cast.

So many reasons to be afraid of the kitchen. Patriarchy, racism, slavery, sharp knives.

Sitting at a pullout table covered with a red plastic tablecloth, my mother and I chop the dried fruit into small bits on a wooden cutting board: 1 lb of currants 1 lb sultanas 1 lb Thompson raisins 1 lb prunes ¼ lb mixed peel 1 lb cherries (glazed) 2 bottles of rum (or any alcohol) The boyfriend takes pictures of this historic event. He is encouraging. He likes eating food, any food, often cake, and figures this can’t be a bad development on my part. We’d searched for almond sherry, my mother’s alcohol of choice for her fruitcake, at every LCBO in the west, suburban Ottawa borough of Nepean. It is in the

database, said an employee, but we have not carried it here in years. We’d bought “just sherry.”

My mother and I stuff the fruit into two glass jars, pour half a bottle of regular sherry into each one, twist the lids airtight, and place them “to soak” in the back of the cupboard above the fridge of my parents’ kitchen. I learn that the soaking of the fruit would normally last for one year, beginning immediately after Christmas, just before attentions turned to preparations for Carnival. My mother assures me that this shortened four-month period of alcohol infusion, from August to the baking event in December, will be “just fine.”

THE BODY — RUPA When the body is standing, know that the body is standing.

F

or years, the trip “home” had been infused with discomfort and anxiety. One time, I sat on the smokefilled Greyhound bus. A small boy across the aisle from me ate his way through a bag of Crunchits, a Turkish delight, and a Twix bar. At some point on the five-anda-half hours of imposed intimacy of intercity buses, he began vomiting into a plastic bag held by his mother. I tried not to smell the acrid contents of his stomach. I looked out the window at the passing landscape of trees and more trees and swore that this time I would be able to do things differently.

I pulled out The Eight Steps to Happiness by Geshe Kelsang Gyatso, from the Kadampa Buddhist tradition. I was reading it in French. Striving was a deeply ingrained paternal message that as a Black person I must “work ten times as hard as everyone else.” And so, I sought to enlighten and keep up my second official language skills at the same time. I scanned the book for something that would help on my trip back to Ottawa, a city I hated due to my suburban high school experience: I’d been a carless teen, enduring long waits at bus stops, freezing in the winter, sweltering in the summer, as I tried to engage in what I perceived as the limp, tepid culture that the city had on offer.

I’d moved to Toronto after university, learning a life outside of my parents’ scope of awareness and existence. The clippings that I mailed “home”—publications in small chapbooks, performances in cafés, invitations to play my songs in new cities, where I performed both with and without shoes—were incomprehensible to them. My older brother had had his own run-ins with the arts. However, it was different for a boy to stretch his wings. I felt freak-like. Unprofessioned. Uncoupled.

Not quite the girl-child they had hoped for. Each trip back to the household of origin was fraught, as I

The year of the vomit-ridden bus ride, I made it back to the parental home, emotionally prepared, I thought. The table was laid with the traditional Christmas day brunch: buljol—salt fish boiled to remove some of the salt, sprinkled with oil, and garnished with tomatoes, onions, and sliced eggs. My brothers and parents were excited about digging into the delicacy.

Slave food, I thought petulantly, recalling the link between Newfoundland and the Caribbean—cheap salted cod to feed enslaved people traded for cheap rum from the islands that became a Newfoundland pride called screech. Some Canadians ate the salted cod too. In every culture, the innovations of the lowliest and poorest and hungriest become a cultural specialty dish: buljol in Trinidad; fish n brewis in Goose Bay, Labrador, where we’d lived for one year during my early teens.

I took a piece of bake—the only part of the meal not covered in fish-soaked oil—and layered it with butter. It was the only part of the meal that I could eat. A tear leaked from the corner of my left eye. Head down, I left the table. I trudged upstairs to my childhood bedroom. I shut the door. I sat cross-legged on the floor, next to my Buddhist books, and tried out my new meditation practice. It did not help.

EL DORADO Gold. A mineral. A body. An emotional weight.

T

he fruit has soaked for four months; I’ve returned to finish the cake. I can’t find a grater, a measuring spoon, a bowl for the nuts. “Shit,” I say. Someone else’s kitchen always involves relentlessly opening and closing cupboard doors. My mother points to the second cupboard from the left, top shelf, where I find a giant silver bowl.

“We didn’t have metal bowls in my time. They were enamel. Red earthenware, maybe,” she says.

I take it down. I’ve made some sorrel and am diluting the tart red liquid with water and sugar for us to enjoy as we undertake this final stage of baking the black cake. Sorrel is another tradition that I’ve picked up this year. I give her a teaspoon periodically to taste.

“More sugar,” she says. “Just a bit more. Some more.”

My father takes two heaping teaspoons with each cup of tea. He is diabetic. He is ninety-two years old. He sits in front of the computer, his only view out into the world except for the occasional medical appointment, an ordeal involving special taxis booked weeks ahead by his eighty-eight-year-old wife. He used to dominate

GLORIA BLIZZARD // 23

intuited their wish for someone more familiar in temperament and ways.

When I shaved my hair off one fall: “Looks nice, G. When are you growing it back?” they’d said. When I grew it into long dreads: “Looks nice, G,” they’d said.

“When are you cutting it off?” My younger brother teased me good-naturedly by singing “She’s Strange”

by Cameo. A high school counsellor had once reported the results of her multiple-choice test booklet that was to help me decide who to be. Upon seeing that my results in both arts and science were exactly the same, she said, “Sorry, I can’t help you.” I’d spent most of my early adult life fluctuating between these two sides of myself, gaining along the way a degree in science and a diploma in fashion design, unaware of how it might be okay to be both or more.

But perhaps in Cameo’s view, there was something redeeming in my way of being. The other half of the lyric is “But I like it!” My parents rarely actively discouraged me. They just seemed resigned to wait for these artistic impulses to go away.

At each return to the parental household, I hoped that this time, I could be present and adult-like and not be pulled back into resentful, silent roles that usually kicked in as the bus rolled past the turn-off to Smith Falls. Now I found a short meditation on compassion in The Eight Steps to Happiness—breathe in all the negativity and transform it and breathe it out again.

I imagined a return where I was confident, no longer cowed by my mother’s strong beliefs so different from my relentless spiritual and philosophical searches: Egyptology, Gurdjieff, bell hooks, Jan Cox, Shamanism, Daoism, Buddhism. One time, I revisited a church, wondering, after all these years, if my mother must have been onto something. Her religion seemed to provide her with some kind of sustenance through racism, patriarchy, sexism, overwhelm, life’s blows and highs.

The Sunday of my visit to St. Joan of Arc on Bloor Street West, the priest called all the children present to the front of the church. As he sprinkled holy water on the awed and wiggling gaggle before him, he asked, “Do you know what this means?”

“No!” responded the chorus of voices.

“It means that you belong to Jesus Christ.”

That made no sense. I left.

I continued with my meditations, readings, spells, incense, and oils. One year, I added to my own strangeness and what felt like exile from my family of origin. After an initial foray into vegetarianism at age five, and now in light of my limited understandings of Buddhist teachings, I once again stopped eating meat.

every room he entered. Now he is fading in plain sight.

He sips what seem like pounds of the white gold that had led circuitously to the existence of my mixed-race Caribbean family and to his current physical state.

My mother places yet another cup before my father in response to his occasional spirited demand for more “Tea!” “The golden age is not golden,” she will tell me when out of his auditory range. “I’m so tired. I’m ready for this to stop.”

GLORIA BLIZZARD // 24

VEDANA An awareness of mental, emotional, and physical states.

A

t a very young age, I became aware of my mother’s suffering. She was doing too much: running a medical office, managing a household with three children. Like all kids, I tracked her moods; my survival depended on it. She drove, she organized, she cooked.

At least she did not wash. Gwendolyn the washerwoman did the weekly washing in a concrete sink out back and hung it on a line between the shaddock and orange trees.

Like monk and writer Thomas Merton, she’d become Catholic by choice. She and her siblings lived with their grandmother after the death of both parents. Every Sunday, a neighbouring family, the Dominics, would invite her to join them on the walk down the hill to Eastern Main Road to attend mass at the St. Elizabeth Church. Something about the ceremony and teachings struck her profoundly and she took the training to formally join the Church at the age of fifteen.

She had provided me with perfectly good culture, traditions, and religion. Perhaps she experienced my drifting away as a deep affront, and the meals where I was not fully welcome were an expression of this. After all, I had been named for the Church. After vetoing the names Noel and Carol as my first name, my mother heard “Gloria in Excelsis Deo” on the radio as she lay in her birthing bed. “That’s it! Gloria!” she remembers exclaiming. I am also the namesake of a motherly nun who took care of her during her hospital stay. My middle name is Anne—with an e.

THE MIND-CITTA See that the mind went out to think.

M

y return to complete the cake has been my first return for Christmas holidays in years. This time I do not cling to my books and meditation techniques, my oils and incense. This time, I feel brave and secure with my

boyfriend at the wheel of a crumbling green Honda CRV. I do not sink into insecurities as we roll past Smith Falls.

My father is in a world parallel to the cake preparations. He sits in his wheelchair in front of his computer watching YouTube videos from Trinidad. Parang fills the room. He calls us over to look at a group from the Carib village of Lopino, playing cuatros, shakshaks, singing about the Virgin Mary in Spanish. My mother moves from her armchair to a straight-backed chair and places herself at the head of the folding table covered with bowls, spoons, a bag of flour, sugar, butter, a cardboard container of twelve eggs, a handful of almonds, a tin of baking soda, a small bottle of pure vanilla essence. I pull the two jars of sherry-infused fruit from the back of the cupboard over the fridge.

I tell her that I am nervous about burning the sugar and setting off all the smoke alarms.

“Oh, you don’t have to burn sugar anymore. You just use browning.” She hands me a small jar that her friend Cynthia left for me.

I am both relieved and disappointed. I wanted the drama of thick grey smoke permeating the home and the acrid smell that hinted at the slightly bitter taste that lingered in the cakes of my childhood. Browning sounds suspicious, like an MSG-laced, food-like substance far away from my sensory memories of childhood.

“Cream the butter until you can’t hear the sugar anymore,” she says. Her role is only to direct, yet she can’t stop herself from reaching for a spoon to help stir.

“How much browning?” I ask my mother as I mix the flour into the creamed sugar and butter.

“Until it’s brown,” she says.

I sigh. She sighs. She is upset with my father. She is tired of caring for him and yet cannot accept the help that I try to provide. I tell her of a Buddhist belief that at the moment of death, one must be in a good mood, as that determines where you go next. She smiles. She orders the greasing of the two round pans with Crisco and the lining of them with parchment paper. I pour the batter, filling each pan to just over halfway.

“The cake is baking. You said a long, slow cook.

How long?”

“Until the cake pulls away from the sides of the pan,” she says.

“How long is that?”

“No idea.”

The parang surrounding us is getting louder.

Hymns emanate from the CD player next to the couch.

This time I go to my father at his station and turn off the parang. I leave my mother’s hymns on low.

DHAMMA How things actually are.

M

THE EUCHARIST The body and blood of Christ. Usually ingested on a Sunday morning.

T

he Christmas package arrives by mail to my most recent home in Parkdale, where the neighbourhood’s public library housed the rise of Toronto’s Black and Caribbean literati in the 1960s and 1970s.

“Monk’s cake. It’s good! You buy it from the Cistercian monks,” my mother says. She has replaced the heavy packages of homemade black cake with small parcels containing tiny fruit-laden loaves made by men of her religious tradition—as far as I know, no female labour is involved.

“Pour rum over it and let it soak for a few days,” she advises.

I now know that it is possible to make a vegetarian version of many traditional Trinidadian dishes, and I make buljol using canned jackfruit instead of dried salted cod. My daughter is grown and has her own household, where she bakes expertly and cooks almost exclusively tortellini and baked root vegetables.

In response to my wandering life, a difficult marriage, and other dramas, several empathetic healers have asked me, “How did you manage?” Or more bluntly, “Why are you not crazy?” Reiki. Meditation.

Dance. Music. Buddhism. I pick an answer, depending on who is asking.

The truth might be that I was sustained by cake.

Through all the distance and misunderstanding, my mother mailed pounds of black cake twice a year, until I didn’t need to receive it anymore and she no longer needed to send it. Maybe the process of feeding each other kindness, compassion, love, tenderness, dinner, and cake is both a Buddhist temple and a Catholic church.

My mother also mailed annual Advent cards.

“Why does Grandma keep sending these when we are not Christian?” my daughter asked one year as she opened up the first of thirty cardboard windows, one to be opened each day in the countdown to the day of Christ’s birth. She pulled out the sugary chocolate treat and popped it in her mouth.

“I don’t know,” I remember saying. “Good chocolate?”

“Mm-hmm,” she nodded, and chewed. ///

GLORIA BLIZZARD // 25

y mother was twelve years old when her mother died suddenly. My mother had two younger siblings. She found the pieces of skirts, pinafores, pants, and shorts for new school uniforms that their mother had cut and laid aside. She pinned the pieces together and ran them under the presser foot of the black Singer sewing machine, her thin brown feet powering it by pushing the foot pedal back and forth. She taught me to sew when I was twelve.

She did not, however, teach me (or my brothers) how to cook. She threw brilliant meals together, working too fast to involve us in her preparations. She made curries and pelau and what I perceived as the miracle meal, feeding a family of five with one five-ounce can of tuna. She’d cut it with stewed tomatoes, greens, and spices to make a sauce that was placed over a bed of white rice. When, years later, I once saw a university roommate eat a full can of tuna herself, I was astounded. I did not know that was possible or even desirable. I suspect that my mother had had the benefit of her grandmother’s coaching and had not figured this cooking business out all on her own. It took me years of sorting through cookbooks to figure out the basics.

I also chose men who cooked exceedingly well, and I studied their ease in the kitchen with awe. I had an odd ability to create imaginative and delicious meals that occurred only over an open fire while camping in oldgrowth Ontario forests.

“You know you can’t live on just cake, right?” I told my twelve-year-old daughter one day. She only liked baking. I looked at the cake recipe book covered in hardened splatters of yellow batter. We’d tried out pies, white cakes, yellow cakes, chocolate and vanilla icings.

My mother hadn’t had the time to bake and cook with a child. She was under different pressures, without the freedom to take the extra hours to guide small hands to measure, pour, and stir.

“You have to know how to feed yourself. I need to ensure that you can make at least two meals. Let’s do this together. Cut,” I remember saying as I handed her a knife, a block of tofu, some garlic. We made a stir-fry.

She scowled through it all. Resentment is a good emotion. Resentment leads to dinner.

Sometimes I crave the foods of my childhood.

I chop up an onion, crush some garlic, add thyme, cumin, curry, coconut milk, add the garlic after, and then open a can of red beans instead of pigeon peas.

I slice a plump, rich yellow zaboca, add a knife-full

of kuchila to the side of the plate. Sometimes I fry up some bake. Wheat, flour, and oil. Bake, like bannock, fills bellies with fried starches.

PHOEBE TSANG

VINTAGE CHANEL AND A PAPER FAN

NATURE UPENDED (3609), 8” x 8”, DIGITAL IMAGE, 2017 | ELAINE WHITTAKER

Image courtesy of the artist.

T

I should have brought mine, says Mary.

My goodness, says Gordon, peering at the tiny, stylized brush strokes. Is that a Wang Wei poem?

The fan had belonged to Connie’s grandmother. The old woman would sit all day on her balcony in a wicker chair surrounded by potted plants. Their lush leaves and engorged blooms feasted on the tropical humidity.

After school, before her parents came home for dinner, Connie fanned her grandmother while she napped. If the fanning stopped, the old woman’s eyelids snapped open, and the clouded eyes grew piercing.

Good-for-nothing girl, are you sleeping on the job?

No, Grandmother.

Connie would resume her task hurriedly, before the fan could be snatched away.

A folded fan left a different kind of bruise than the feather duster, the leather belt, or the ruler. The last two were reserved for Connie’s older brothers. But their skin was thicker.

I wish I could read Chinese, Mary is saying. She turns to Gordon: How long did it take you to learn?

I thought you didn’t know much Cantonese, Connie says.

Gordon’s fluent in Mandarin, says Mary. He used to teach at Yangcheng University.

Luckily, the written forms of both languages are almost identical, Gordon says. He is still squinting at the fan.

It belonged to my grandmother, Connie says.

It looks like an antique, says Gordon. May I? He takes the fan with both hands and a slight bow.

She considers pointing out that no one bows in Hong Kong—she’d been struck by the difference in etiquette when accompanying her husband on business trips to Japan and South Korea—but Mary is beaming, so she bites her tongue.

Gordon studies the fan so closely that she half expects him to pull out a magnifying glass at any moment.

All those exiled poets of the Tang dynasty, he says.

They were foreshadowing the Cultural Revolution by thirteen hundred years.

Why don’t you read the poem out loud to us? says Connie. We wouldn’t know if you were faking it.

Oh, I’m sure you would, says Gordon.

Connie’s just being modest, says Mary, and darts her a warning look as the waitress arrives with their order.

Three is the perfect number for sharing dim sum.

Most items are bite-sized and arrive in groups of three.

Three char siu buns. Three spring rolls. Three bird’s nest fried taro dumplings.

Gordon says he’s never tasted better Chinese food outside China.

PHOEBE TSANG // 27

oronto in July, and the air is as thick and soupy as Hong Kong in August. Connie’s been outdoors for ten minutes, in her Gucci sunglasses and straw fedora, and already she can feel sweat soaking the underarms of her linen tunic with the mandarin collar.

Every Saturday, since her husband died two years ago, Connie has a dim sum lunch with her best friend Mary at their favourite Chinatown restaurant. Today, Mary is bringing a friend she’d like to introduce Connie to. Gordon is a professor of anthropology, specializing in East Asian studies. Perhaps Connie could help Gordon with his research?

After living in Canada for thirty years, Connie’s sure that Gordon knows more about East Asia than she does. But Mary’s having none of it. Connie speaks the language, she says, it’s in her blood.

Mary was born in Canada. Connie has repeatedly assured her that her Cantonese is at least as good as Connie’s English, but Mary’s too embarrassed to practise speaking it. In any case, Mary demurs, she can’t read Chinese characters.

When Connie arrives at the restaurant, she looks for her friend at their usual table for two, but of course she’s not there. Mary’s seated at a larger table, beside a white-haired, English-looking man. She waves Connie over, and the man rises and places his hands together at his heart.

Lei hou, he says to Connie, with a bow. Unfortunately, that’s about the extent of my Cantonese.

Nice to meet you, Connie says in English.

There are two empty chairs at the table. Connie parks her purse on the chair beside Gordon.

I love your purse, says Mary. Is it vintage Chanel?

This old thing? says Connie. I’ve had it forever.

Time was when Connie would buy a new model every season. Before they immigrated to Canada, her husband had been a high-flying executive, which pitted Connie in direct competition with the other executives’ wives. Over five-course business dinners, they brandished logo-emblazoned accessories. The gaudier, the better. Chanel’s classic caviar leather-quilted bag with the gold chain strap and double-C clasp was Connie’s pièce de résistance.

Inside the purse: red lai-seeh envelopes, packets of Kleenex, a Gucci wallet almost as big as the purse, chrysanthemum cough drops, and a folded paper fan. Painted on the fan: a Chinese watercolour landscape and a few lines of calligraphy. Connie rummages through her purse for the fan, then produces it triumphantly. She flicks it open in one swift, practised motion.

What a great idea, says Gordon.

PHOEBE TSANG // 28

What about food in Hong Kong? says Connie.

Gordon looks confused.

Connie doesn’t consider Hong Kong to be part of China, Mary explains.

Love for one’s homeland, says Gordon, and nods.

Very Chinese.

Then four shrimp dumplings arrive in a bamboo steamer. By the end of the meal, the fourth dumpling is still untouched.

Do you want the last one? says Mary.

You can have it, says Connie.

Gordon?

I’m staying out of this, says Gordon.

For God’s sake, says Connie.

She waves the waitress over, and asks her to cut the dumpling into three equal portions. The girl stares at Connie as if this might be a practical joke.

It’s already tiny, says Mary. You’re crazy.

It makes perfect sense, says Connie. Since we’re all too polite.

The girl gets to work with a pair of stainless-steel scissors. Twice, the shrimp inside the rice-flour wrapper escapes the snapping blades, but it is finally severed. The miniature portions are too small to be eaten with chopsticks, so Connie impales them on wooden toothpicks.

Excuse my fingers, says Gordon.

It’s a traditional Hong Kong custom, says Connie, straight-faced. We don’t believe in wasting even the last grain of rice.

How egalitarian, says Gordon. He folds his napkin carefully and excuses himself for the washroom.

What is wrong with you? says Mary, once Gordon is out of sight.

What’s wrong with me? Connie says. Don’t you think he’s a little pretentious?

He’s a professor, says Mary, and he loves Chinese culture.

His version of Chinese culture, says Connie. Not mine.

I know you’re a Hong Konger, Mary sighs. But Hong Kong was part of China way before it was a British colony.

I’m Canadian, says Connie. I don’t even have a Hong Kong identity card anymore.

Connie thinks of Grandmother beating her grandchildren solemnly, one after another. Always for their own good.

One day you’ll thank me, Grandmother had said.

The day Connie and her husband left Hong Kong, there were at least two dozen relatives at the airport to see them off. The smell of Tiger Balm. Flash bulbs going off.

Fistfuls of Kleenex.

I have something for you, said Grandmother.

Connie flinched when the fan was placed in her hand.

May it bring you good luck in Canada.

Connie can’t remember if she said thank you for the gift. Never mind the blessing.

From across the crowded dining hall, Gordon approaches, weaving his way carefully between the closely packed tables. His progress is impeded by his insistence on stepping politely aside for each waiter and pushcart that crosses his path.

Every year I feel less and less Chinese, says Connie.

Especially since Eddie died.

That’s why I thought you’d like to meet Gordon, says Mary.

Why don’t you date him, since you like him so much?

His ex-wife was from Fujian, Mary begins, then falls quiet as Gordon arrives at their table.

Connie knows what Mary was about to say: I couldn’t compete with a real Chinese.

When the bill arrives, Mary reaches for it. Connie slaps her hand away.

Let me pay, says Mary. Lunch was my idea.

What are you talking about? says Connie. We do this every weekend.

If you’ll allow me, says Gordon, it would be my pleasure.

You’re the guest, says Mary.

Please, says Gordon, I insist.

Thank you, Gordon, says Mary. You’ll have to let us return the favour sometime.

Connie slides the fan across the table to Gordon.

A gift for our honoured guest, she says. Mary must be crazy if she thinks that she’ll consent to another meeting with Gordon.

Oh, I couldn’t, says Gordon. It’s a family heirloom.

Mary smirks and says, You could return it to Connie next time.

Well now, says Gordon. That’s an idea.

I don’t need it back, Connie says quickly. I have several at home.

You don’t know what this means to me, says Gordon. I’m a huge Wang Wei fan.

He opens the fan and reads in Mandarin: “All alone in a foreign land / I am twice as homesick on this day.”

Wow, says Mary. That was beautiful. What does it mean?

Those Tang dynasty poets certainly knew how to write about loneliness, says Gordon.

The poet thinks he’d be less homesick if he wasn’t alone, says Connie. But homesickness isn’t something you can cure. These days, most of us can get on a plane and go home whenever we want—but what if home doesn’t feel like home anymore? Maybe it’s better to feel

T

he following Saturday, Mary waits for Connie at their usual table.

No Gordon today? says Connie, and clutches her heart in mock despair.

I don’t know why you have to be so mean, says Mary. He’s nice. And he likes you.

I don’t want a man; no thank you, says Connie. I like my freedom.

Why can’t you give him a chance?

I gave him my fan, says Connie. Do you know how hot my bus ride home was?

I can’t believe you gave away your grandmother’s fan.

Are you serious? says Connie. Do you really think I would give away a priceless antique to someone I just met?

You mean it’s not your grandmother’s fan?

Of course not! The original is almost a hundred years old.

But it looked so…authentic.

It’s meant to. It’s a replica.

You had an exact copy made?

Connie nods. Two, in fact.

Why? Mary looks truly baffled.

Before last week, Connie might have said that, while she’d never been one for sitting around and moping, some things were worth hanging on to. But how does

she explain her selectiveness in curating a past she can live with? She couldn’t say she feels much fondness for her long-dead grandmother. Yet every time she looks at that fan, she can’t deny it has a certain magic. The smarting red weal across her thin, girlish palm is continually erased by the pleasure of cool air rippling across her face. She remembers her grandmother’s balcony, the drowsy heat, the crimson rhododendrons. And her heart swells a little, in spite of herself.

Nostalgia’s a funny thing, she says out loud.

Mary sighs. I wonder when Gordon will realize he’s been given a fake.

That reminds me, says Connie. She reaches under her chair and places a large Holt Renfrew gift bag on the table between them.

What’s this? says Mary.

Look inside.

Mary’s face becomes even more incredulous. You’re giving this to me?

No need to get too excited, says Connie. It’s not like I went out and bought it.

But it’s yours, says Mary. Are you sure you don’t want it?

She reaches into the gift bag and pulls out the quilted Chanel purse. Its scuffed corners have been smoothed and polished, and apart from a few creases in the leather, it looks almost new.

I took it to this shoe repair place, says Connie. I think they did a good job.

It’s gorgeous, says Mary. If you ever want it back, just let me know.

I don’t need it, says Connie. I got a new one—from Roots. She holds up a brand-new crossbody, in orangehued leather.

Ooh, very fashionable, says Mary absently. She’s still mesmerized by the Chanel purse.

What if it’s not a real Chanel? Connie teases. Do you still want it?

That’s not the point, says Mary. It’s special because it’s yours.

That’s why I wanted you to have it.

Oh Connie, says Mary. She looks like she might cry.

How many years have we known each other? Connie asks.

Mary thinks for a minute. What year did you come to Canada?

It doesn’t matter, says Connie. Let’s just say it’s been forever. That’s how it feels, anyway. ///

PHOEBE TSANG // 29

homesick than to find out that the place where you came from no longer exists.

Perhaps, says Gordon, the poet is saying he’d rather be homesick than alone.

Connie is silent. She’s had thirty years to reflect on the meaning of that stanza, and she’s never read it as a love poem.

Coming to Canada taught her that the past only has power over you as far as you look back. She’s applied the same principle to Eddie, donating his belongings and renovating the condo within two weeks after his funeral. They never used to talk much, anyway. He had his golf buddies and she had her luncheons. So why are tears springing to her eyes now, for the first time in two years?

Are you all right? says Mary.

I’m fine, says Connie.

Thank heavens Gordon hasn’t noticed. He’s smiling at the waitress who has just returned with the credit card machine and waving his American Express vaguely above it as if he’s never seen one of these contraptions before.

To him, the world of the poem is a tapestry of ideas—subtle, intricate, intoxicating, even, worthy of a lifetime’s study—but ultimately foreign.

How was everything? the waitress asks.

It was wonderful, says Gordon. Poetry and fine dining with two lovely ladies; what more could I ask for?

BEN ROBINSON

BEN ROBINSON // 30

TWO POEMS AS IS 4:32 a.m. and a smoke alarm is dying on the far side of a locked white fire door I do not have a key for.

Not so regular as to become rhythmic just distant enough to jolt me back each time.

I step out onto the porch find a note on the mat addressed to no one asking if I’m looking for some cash in my pocket.

My neighbour bellows on the sidewalk PRECIOUS! PRECIOUS, NO! as his dog strains against her leash.

On the far side of the street, the rain sets off the motion sensor above the garage light spraying out over the puddled driveway.

ESTABLISH A PERIMETER The man the landlady pays to cut our lawn keeps mulching Allison’s dahlias with the mower.

As part of his contract, he will not move anything that’s on the grass— cuts right around the kiddie pool, my son’s bike.

Now each night before he comes, Allison goes out into the yard and constructs little barricades—lines up lawn chairs all along the edge of the bed. ///

COMMUNITY FEATURE

EUNICE CU

ONE. After three months of taking my basal body

temperature at the ass-crack of dawn, it finally stays up.

The temperature rise tells me that something has shifted in my body. It’s a promising sign. A few days later, after an almost-blackout at the Sunday farmers’ market, I lie down to recover in the back seat of my car. My brain makes comparisons to the time I had the flu when I was eight. Not some nasty head cold, but full-blown influenza. The feeling-faint-shiver-for-a-week-lying-ina-puddle-of-your-own-sweat-and-projectile-vomitinguntil-exhaustion-makes-eternal-sleep-seem-like-aninviting-option kind of influenza. Then I remember the raised temperatures. Was I actually pregnant? Holy shit. What have I done?

TWO. Yep. Pregnant. The stick is the first to tell me.

Part of me is excited. Another part, shit-scared. Some other part is just freaking the hell out. I tell my husband. Years later, I will still be able to see his face: a faint smile, his nostrils lightly flaring, before promptly shutting down as he begins to drink his own cocktail of messed-up emotions.

THREE. A positive blood test from my GP, and a week later we’re at a nice restaurant celebrating the pregnancy and the end of my semester at uni. They have Bluff oysters on the menu and I can’t resist, so we order half a dozen. Slippery, with a nice bite, they go down easy, leaving a salty sweetness and an aftertaste of metal and lemon in their wake. Oh, fuck. I wasn’t supposed to have those. Nor those stolen sips of Riesling. Have I just killed this baby? Maybe it’s for the best if I have. I clearly don’t know what I’m doing. How the hell do I go without eating sushi for nine months? Shit.

What else can’t I eat? It begins to dawn on me how clueless and unprepared I really am.

FOUR.

Amazon delivers The Mayo Clinic Guide to Pregnancy to my house a week later. I start reading. It has a whole section on pre-conception preparation and prenatal vitamins. This baby’s only been brewing for a month, and already I feel like I’m behind on parenthood. Why didn’t I think of reading this book before I got pregnant? I need to step up. I can’t raise this kid the same clueless way my parents raised me. I won’t. I need to do better. We both need to do better.

EUNICE CU // 31

BLUEBERRY IMPRINTS

“Blueberry Imprints” is reprinted from BRILLIANCE IS THE CLOTHING I WEAR (Dundurn Press, 2021). This compelling anthology features poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction from twenty-eight talented Mad and disabled writers who are part of InkWell Workshops.

Led by accomplished professional writers with “unruly minds,” InkWell is a liberatory community project that offers creative opportunities to people with mental health and addiction issues.

EUNICE CU // 32

FIVE.

My boobs hurt and they don’t fit into the underwire bras anymore. I haven’t gained weight exactly, but it feels like I have permanent period bloat and my clothes have shrunk in the dryer. I’m eating almonds like they’re going extinct. I figure if I keep a constant flow in and down, it might dissuade my gut from hurling up and out. Plus, almonds are supposed to be good for the baby’s brain, right? I walk uphill like an end-stage heart-failure patient, which might’ve been okay if this city didn’t have So. Many. Fucking. Hills.

I’m off my favourite foods. I’ve got the nose of a bloodhound. And I’m always tired. I’m not even showing yet, but I feel like an alien’s taken over my body. This kid better be worth the damn trouble. You can bet I’ll be telling them all about their fucking prenatal antics too.

SIX. I’m struggling to stay awake long enough to concentrate on my university coursework. My doctor tells me I need to take it easy. Unenrolling-from-university level of easy. I’m in the middle of my postgrad. If I stop now, when am I going to finish it? My inner feminist rages. Why does this thing have to grow in my body?

Why the hell is it me that needs to give up what I’m doing to incubate an alien for nine months? Why is it so damn hard to withdraw from university courses once

you’ve enrolled? The world is unfair. Human biology is unfair. Fuck the world. Fuck bureaucracy. And fuck the institutions that support the patriarchy. I go home and ask my husband if he’s read the baby book yet. I’m growing another human—your human—and you can’t be bothered to read a damn book? Fuck men. Fuck you.

SEVEN. The book and the Internet tell me my baby

alien is the size of a blueberry. We’ve nicknamed it ET. I think it’s probably a girl but I’m not sure. I’m lying in bed with my head in the pit of my husband’s arm.

I tell him it’s starting to feel like this is all on me. Isn’t he scared we might screw up a human being if we don’t get our act together? Does he think he’s outgrown his childhood emotional neglect enough to avoid messing up our kid? Silence. His body tenses. Look, I get that he’s always been on the quiet side and prone to acting childlike. But right now, that shit is making this joint and very adult undertaking seem extremely one-sided and lonely. Oh man, have I made a huge mistake? Who did I marry? What have I gotten myself into?

EIGHT. I sit in the driver’s seat of my car. I’ve pulled over to a lookout to eat my Mediterranean eggplant sandwich. I look down at the straining elastic waistband of my blue skirt. I give it a pat. “Hey, kid, I’ve got you.” I take a bite. My sandwich tastes good.

NINE.

Since 2016, InkWell has been running free weekly writing workshops in partnership with CMHA (Canadian Mental Health Association) Toronto and has also worked in partnership with the ROM, the 519, CAMH, SKETCH, Across Boundaries, and other organizations. The collective has published annual anthologies of writing by Mad, disabled, and/or Indigenous writers through its in-house imprint, InkWell Books.

Please visit inkwellworkshops.com to learn more.

I’m at the radiology clinic. Today I get to meet my alien. Cold ultrasound jelly. The sonographer makes some chit-chat. Asks me if I’m excited to finally get some photos of my baby. Then her face changes.

“I’m having trouble picking up a heartbeat. I can see your bladder is full. The fluid might be obscuring the image. Could you try emptying it?” I’m sure it’ll be fine. This’ll all be okay. Baby, today’s not the time to play hide-and-seek. I go back to the sonographer. She takes measurements and pictures. I ask her about the heartbeat. Her face communicates pity without her permission. I run out of the radiology clinic. Desperate. Foggy. Confused. ///

My mind dissects all the different ways this could go down. It ruminates. I’m booked in to see my GP later that day. I call my friend Martha and ask if she will wait out the hours with me. I’m worried about the places my imagination will wander if I’m left on my own. We go to the city wildlife sanctuary. I breathe in the dappled sunlight, rustling leaves, and evening birdsong.

Then I look over at Martha. She looks like a possum

reassures me that I will get through mine too. She asks me if it’s okay to tell others close to us. I’m tempted to hurl my phone through a window. Better yet, I imagine smashing it on her face.

It turns out that my community, the one I had envisioned as my child-rearing village, aren’t who I thought they were.

My community.

Some of these people I’ve known my whole life.

Not everyone is like this. Susan flies down and cooks my meals for a weekend to make sure I’m okay.

Amy offers to take me out for coffee and share the story of her miscarriage. They are the exceptions—most of the support I find comes unexpectedly, from complete strangers. Women who, during random tear-stained outbursts, offer a pat on the back or silent solidarity—a stark contrast to the sharp, intrusive counsel peddled by those presuming to know and care about me. ///

You helped me see the dumb shit that I was either too naive or too deep in denial to see. I haven’t been able to look at many of these people in the same way. I clearly chose badly. Many of them I’m not even sure I want in my life anymore. You helped me realize how urgently I need a new community.

I bury you under a kōwhai tree in the children’s section of the cemetery. When I fill in the forms for the burial, I have to call you a “placenta,” otherwise the city council insists they will charge me the same amount for burying you as a fully grown adult. You didn’t survive the first trimester; you are a nonentity to them.

Around that time, it occurs to me that, apart from a few medical letters, blood tests, and a patient wristband from my hospital admission, I have very little proof you ever existed.

And then I remember.

I get in my car.

I drive like a nutter and sprint into the radiology clinic. Sweaty. Breathless. Impatient.

For a picture of you. ///

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Martha, Melissa, Susan, and Amy are

composite characters who have been given pseudonyms.

The author would like to thank Kathy Friedman and Sheniz Janmohamed for their mentoring and guidance in shaping this piece, as well as Maggie Brown and Barb Machina for their support while writing it.

EUNICE CU // 33

in headlights. My messy feelings are junked in lieu of prattling on about the validity of old wives’ tales.

I’m now taking care of her. How did it come to this?

I’m annoyed that the only people I’ve told about this pregnancy are like Martha—either single or don’t have kids. Fucking clueless, the lot of them.

The GP tells me the fetus has died due to “incompatibility with life.” Describing it here in this way makes him sound like a heartless fuck. He wasn’t. He was actually really nice about it. I just wasn’t in the mood to be consoled. He arranges an appointment at the hospital for a consult.

Another ultrasound. It’s my luck that the doctor I get is extremely pregnant. The nurses at least ask me if I’m okay with that. I roll with it.

The doctor gives me some pills and a little over a week to see if the fetus will trigger a spontaneous abortion before they go in and surgically remove the “products of conception.” My mind knows that my baby is dead, but my body still thinks it’s alive—and the hormones it’s pumping, they’re messing with me. I decide to use this time to say goodbye.

“Stars” by Grace Potter & the Nocturnals plays.

Your dad and I lie on our backs and look up at the Southern Cross through the sloping rear window of the station wagon. You and I have demolished our favourite burger and now he’s showing you the constellations of the southern sky. We’ve been at it a few days now. Yesterday I taught you about the different kinds of birds at the wildlife sanctuary, and the day before, the three of us watched the planes try to stick gale-force landings at the airport. At home, we read you stories of Hairy Maclary and Badjelly the Witch. We want to leave you with as many childhood memories as we can.

I wake in the middle of the night to cramps in my belly. It feels like the kind of period pain that refuses to go until my uterus takes a crap—but much more intense. Much more than the mild analgesics can handle.

Multiple rounds. A bathtub and a bucket. A sleepless night for all three of us. There is no ceremony in childbirth—not even for a blueberry-sized baby.

I’m grateful that my husband is at least there when we say goodbye. I don’t think the marriage would’ve survived otherwise. But I’m bitter that he still hasn’t read the damn book. Angry and betrayed when he says nothing while his mother tells me that getting pregnant again will help me feel less sad. Hurt, because it seems like he’s moved on.

Melissa calls to ask how I am. She’s heard about my miscarriage through Martha. I feel cheap. I listen to her recount all her friends’ miscarriages in great detail and all the different ways they got through theirs. She

COMICS

COLE PAULS // 34

COLE PAULS // 35

COLE PAULS

COMICS

COLE PAULS // 36

COLE PAULS // 37

COLE PAULS

SARA PATTERSON // 38

SARA PATTERSON

I’VE BEEN FUCKING DINOSAURS

IN AN EFFORT TO RECLAIM MY ABILITY TO TRANSFORM INTO A VELOCIRAPTOR

A

velociraptor lived under my bed. His name was Claw and I could turn into him if I jumped three times. Or he became me. ///

The art of dinosaur transformation is agreed upon between me and my cousin and no one else. We stand by a canal full of still water, mosquito eggs, and tadpoles. We shake on it. Spit in palm colliding with spit in palm.

There’s a ritual to it, because ritual makes things real more than words or potions or other parts of the magic and art of transforming. Jump three times, say: one two three, then—poof. You have it. Dino transformation.

We choose raptors for raptors become us and we become them. Small pack hunters that watch from undergrowth of palm fronds and ferns, pine needles sticking into bare feet covered in ant bites, mosquito bites, a slight rash swelling from poison oak. We run wild, make a home in the nest of canal-side mangroves. ///

With light-up Jurassic Park shoes I’m invincible and beat up all the boys who tell me dinosaurs aren’t for girls. Velociraptors never saw the extinction, so it’s a travesty of history when a boy steals my velociraptor toy. He says he never took it, never even saw it, doesn’t know what I’m talking about, makes it seem like the toy is dead and gone. Extinct.

I CAUGHT IT AT THE MOVIES (INFECTION DETAIL), 6” x 6”, DIGITAL MOVIE STILL WITH LIVE HALOBACTERIA AND AGAR, 2013 | ELAINE WHITTAKER

Image courtesy of the artist.

SARA PATTERSON // 39

I twist the soft inside skin of his wrist between nails until he confesses. Twin marks well up, red as the lights in my shoes.

SARA PATTERSON // 40

///

Gallimimus is a crush who draws hyenas and velociraptors. We create vicious scenes of hyenas eating antelopes, hyenas drowning in bogs, hyenas fighting lions. Velociraptors come in packs, and though he be a gallimimus, we decide we are a pack.

I tell him our art needs more dinosaurs, so it fills with velociraptors attacking hadrosaurs, T. Rex stomping on a brachiosaurus, oviraptors clutching armfuls of eggs, eggs breaking on the ground, in air, falling from their grasps.

We’re friends until second grade when he decides he isn’t interested in velociraptors anymore and all I want to talk about is Jurassic Park, which makes me boring. Velociraptors don’t take betrayal kindly. I steal a girl’s notebook and write out Fucking Bitch in big letters and then blame the vandalism on Gallimimus.

Gallimimus are not carnivores the way raptors are carnivorous; they flee and do not fight. I’d have eaten him up.

Watching Jurassic Park, when T. Rex breaks down the electric fence and then tries to eat Timmy and Lex, I voiceover the scene. Make an alternate reality where he’s being friendly, he doesn’t mean to hurt the car or try to eat the kids. He’s not acting on sixty-five million years of gut instinct. A child of a storyteller-carpenter, I engineer his actions by realigning his intent. I think intent matters when you’re eating someone. ///

A Rendition of: THE AUTHOR, AS CHILD, RECREATING T. REX-TRYING-TO-EAT-PEOPLE

[T. Rex emerges from paddock.]

ME AS T. REX: Don’t worry, I’m just curious. I want to be

friends. Like a cat. Or very large dog.

[T. Rex nudges car with Tim and Lex.] ME AS T. REX: Let’s play!

[T. Rex shoves snout through glass roof into car.

Lex and Tim scream.]

///

Don’t worry, he doesn’t know what he’s doing. He just wants to play. It’ll be okay. You’ll be fine. Just gotta be brave.

ME, NARRATING, NO LONGER T. REX:

I steal a girl’s notebook and write out Fucking Bitch in big letters and then blame the vandalism on Gallimimus.

Carnivores do not frighten easily unless sick or hurt.

Therefore, as a velociraptor, I can’t be scared when we move to a new city, a new house, no more canals or cousins or mangrove nests. I can’t be scared when a stepmom appears and Dad vanishes beneath her presence. She is all 1985-Bonnie-Tyler-hair and sequined jumpsuits and shiny purple heels and sweet baby Jesus.

I can’t be scared when she and my mom fight in our driveway. When she says my mom doesn’t know how to raise a child right. When she says: I don’t like preteen girls, teen girls. They’re full of attitude and have no respect.

[T. Rex eating Gennaro on toilet seat.]

ME: When you gotta go, you gotta go. ///

During one of these rewrites, I forget how to be a raptor.

Or the raptor forgets how to be me. Claw no longer lives beneath my bed and I’m adrift in a mammal’s skin. ///

Velociraptors show no fear but I am no longer able to be a velociraptor.

Which is all I ever wanted. ///

T. Rex was the king of dinosaurs and died in one of Earth’s many great extinction events. One that wiped

///

There’s a version of this story where I become a lawyer, move across the ocean, marry T. Rex, and have little T. Rex-(secret)-raptor hybrid babies. What creatures they would be!

T. Rex resents his mother because she wasn’t what he needed her to be. Though T. Rexes were probably attentive parents, even the most well-meaning animal can suffer from exhaustion. T- Rex tells me what a good mother I’d make whenever my doubt cascades over his plans. Don’t worry, you don’t want kids now but you will. You’ll be a good mother. I can see it.

I apply to law programs. I get into a few. But the prospect of fossilization terrifies.

T. Rex prowls off for someone else when I’m not constantly in front of him. He says things aren’t sexy enough to keep him interested but we can still be friends. Desperate for him, I write letters, send pictures. I’m hurting to make it work, cannot bear the thought of him tearing off into someone else.

T. Rexes are scavengers, which means their visual acuity isn’t actually based on movement, unlike in Jurassic Park. The truth is, when I’m in front of him but frozen, he can still see me. Though he says he can’t.

T. Rex likes to feed on the dead. I can’t tell him that, in truth, I’m a velociraptor, and will face no apocalyptic extinction cycle the way he will. I will gently evolve and fade.

G-chatting, T. Rex’s tiny forearms pound away on keys, his oversized skull swaying. He writes, Last week me and that girl messed around and she really got off on it saying it was the most fulfilling sexual experience of her life thus far. She wasn’t just flattering me. And now she says no, we’re not going to date and she has finally got her head sorted out.

He thinks I should be mature enough to talk with him about this. He thinks I should be able to hold him while he mourns the person he left me for, but, try as I might, I can’t jump three times to transform when there’s a T. Rex taking up all the space breaking down all those electric fences and wrecking that skeleton of him and me. The one where I’m clawing at his neck. ///

There is another version of this where T. Rex moves across the ocean for me. When he visits, he says my city isn’t “city enough” for him. He likes skyscrapers, glass, tall buildings that block out sun, and the sight of asteroids coming for him. The low-rise buildings of the west end are uninteresting; working-class neighbourhoods unappealing. He wants this city to be New York. He wants me to be a T. Rex. I want to be a T. Rex. I want to be anything he wants me to be so long as we’re together. ///

///

See, T. Rex shouldn’t be the king of dinosaurs because T. Rex has the tiniest hands. Two little limbs scrabbling at air, impotent and useless.

I try to forget the velociraptor to be the T. Rex. Maybe this is the transformation I’m supposed to make. He’s never been required to change so doesn’t know how such things work.

///

///

SARA PATTERSON // 41

out almost 90 per cent of life; humans were born of what survived.

Because he was king, I decide that he might be the solution to my problem. Maybe he can help me remember how to transform. Kings are supposed to have that gifted touch, that sacred magic. The hands of kings are said to heal. Lay them on the dying and they are recast as the living.

Anyway, I’m fucking T. Rex and he’s really into my ass, telling me how we should do it in front of mirrors or maybe with ropes. Tireless, he’s campaigning to have me watch all the porn he watches out of hope it’ll transform me into those other girls he’s fucked or wants to fuck.

T. Rex loves self-deprecating comedians and irreverent humour. I tell him I have disordered eating as we watch a comedian making bulimia jokes. T. Rex says, Don’t worry. You don’t look like someone with a food problem. He likes this sort of humour, believes it a high point of mammalian civilization and so uses it to impress me. Because he thinks I’m a mammal. I have not told him that I am secretly a velociraptor.

Unable to see himself, because he is a T. Rex and cannot look in a mirror as he is too tall, he sees himself in balding men onstage who joke about girls eating salads and getting roofied.

Deinonychus are in the same family as velociraptors, Dromaeosauridae, so we’re alike, which makes him dangerous. He’s wearing a dead man’s uniform from the War of 1812 as I fuck him on cold grass, or he fucks me, it’s hard to tell. At one point it’s too much cold and I want him to get off—that is off of me, not off like come—but he won’t. He says being frozen’s part of the deal, so I say I’ve got to piss and Deinonychus leaves because he doesn’t like fluids of mammalian conquest.

SARA PATTERSON // 42

///

A test given when I was little and could still transform.

Stepmom: What came first, the chicken or the egg?

The egg. Because of evolution.

Wrong. The chicken. Because of God. ///

Deinonychus means “great claw” and utahraptor means “Utah’s predator,” or “Utah’s thief.” Gallimimus means “chicken mimic” and when you google it, the first page on offer is a Christian website explaining how dinosaurs are God’s test for the faithful. ///

Deinonychus falls asleep taking up the entire bed, so I squeeze out and throw rocks at my friend’s window until she lets me in. She’s a raccoon; mammals and dinosaurs coexisted at different junctures in time, but as I can’t manage raptorhood at the moment, we can cohabitate: human and raccoon.

Raccoon’s room is haunted, so we stay up past midnight listening for ghosts of claws tap-tapping on floorboards like Morse code of reptilian language. She asks, Was it good, and I say, Yeah, he held my hand when we walked to the field.

Showering that night, I see ripples beneath skin that might be feathers but also may be figments of imagination. I do not trust myself. I do not know how I feel. I do not know what to call myself. I feel very mammalian, which means I feel very dirty. ///

Utahraptor is a close cousin to velociraptor, so I let him take me on dates to small taquerias where we look at bad prints of Frida Kahlo’s paintings. He points to Frida’s eyebrows and then to his own, saying they’re the same. But they’re not. He clearly doesn’t understand Frida’s eyebrows and how important they are; his are

just eyebrows. I laugh instead of explaining Frida’s eyebrows because I’m not going to argue hair politics with someone who should be able to connect with me instantly since we’re such close relatives on the taxonomy scale of relation; though, temporally, utahraptors and velociraptors never met.

Drinking coffee with cinnamon, he promises to buy me chocolates for Christmas. And he does. Only, he eats them before he can give them to me. That said, he’s a good utahraptor, a family man who keeps pictures of his son on his phone, which he lets me flip through. He points to the baby utahraptor in a football jersey: I’m a good father, you see. A good dad. ///

One story is me remaining in Utahraptor’s country, the Cedar Mountain Formation. I teach world geography and wish for extinction—a most un-velociraptorish thought. Instead of twisting inner wrists of boys, I twist my own but still can’t transform. I’m unable to find space and velociraptors are so small it shouldn’t be hard but I can’t manage it; I can’t manage being in the Cedar Mountain Formation.

If I try harder, I’m sure I could make it with Utahraptor, I’m sure I’d make it work. I’m not one of those lazy millennial dinosaurs you read about in clickbait articles.

If I make it another year, another two, maybe I’ll remember how to velociraptor instead of playing pretend.

That’s part of the trick, you count: one two three, let’s pretend— But at some point, as a child, I wasn’t pretending and I was a raptor. My skin feathered, legs inverted, I was small and attacked the underbelly of prey. ///

When I transformed into Claw as a child, it was painless. Three jumps you’re in, three jumps you’re out. I’d prowl around ditches and backwoods trails spying on neighbours.

I transformed a lot as a child. I’d be the most vicious characters—Scar from The Lion King, Cassius from Julius Caesar, Lucius Malfoy from Harry Potter, any and all villains. In their skin I was fearless and could not be hurt. They were intelligent and quick-witted. Thick-skinned and cunning, like the velociraptors from Jurassic Park, which is what I was beneath it all.

Someone once wrote, If you want to know someone, you have to look at what they wear beneath their clothes. ///

plumage of adulthood. Velociraptor likes to undo my clothes in public without asking permission. Maybe she thinks it’s sexy, I don’t know. Maybe she doesn’t understand, or maybe I say it’s all right while trying to say that it isn’t all right. It’s hard, because she’s a raptor and I’m a raptor beneath it all, so we’re meant to be, and maybe if I jump up and down enough times, I’ll transform into someone who will like her.

I want to like her.

Velociraptor texts repeatedly. She buys me roses before dinner, then says, I’d best hold them since you’re forgetful. I’m not forgetful. In Jurassic Park, raptors are the most intelligent dinosaur, you can see them working things out. It’s only when raptors are bred do people worry.

But Velociraptor loves to read things into me: how I’m unable to spell the Canadian way (it was autocorrect that removed the u from neighbour), how I’m forgetful, how I like desert heat more than humidity, what I’m like to be with, though she is not with-me with-me since we’re taking it slow despite the fact that, on the third date, I’m invited to her dad’s book launch and to meet her cousins.

I feel my claws shrinking back into nails. I want to be as complacent as I was with T. Rex if it will make her happy.

I am nothing like her, and if she is a velociraptor, what am I? ///

///

Though I have claw hands now, I think that’s all I’ll ever manage. The rest of it—the raptor body, the ability to hunt—remains unknown.

There was a magic trick for turning into Claw and I’m all out of magic. ///

Velociraptor means “swift thief.” Raptor comes from the Latin rapere, which means “to seize or take away”; it’s also where the word rape is from because it is a theft.

I never narrated the velociraptors in Jurassic Park.

I watched in mute fixation as they mauled men to death. ///

When I’m with Velociraptor I wear a Jurassic Park T-shirt stolen from a former friend since I’ve grown out of light-up shoes. Dinosaurs have feathers. Presumably they shed their down of egg-birth and gain full

Utahraptor is not good about condoms or boundaries and so one night he attempts to claw down my door with love…

The problem when electricity fails is that electric fences go down and if there are no electric fences how can a dinosaur know any better? They do things because they can without stopping to think if they should, and in the end that can breed raptors out of us all. ///

SARA PATTERSON // 43

What big claws Utahraptor has, what great height he has, what great resemblance to Edward Scissorhands he has.

Utahraptor is not good about condoms or boundaries and so one night he attempts to claw down my door with love; he hasn’t figured out how handles work.

He’s Utah’s predator but I’m just a human wishing for quill knobs in bones, which are a sign of feathers found in the remains of velociraptors.

Utahraptor weeps; he wants to explain what happened and why he did what he did, and I worry maybe I reacted too swiftly and everything’s fine, or maybe, since he’s a kind of raptor, he reacted too greedily and who can blame a raptor for being hungry? If only I’d open my door to him, he could give me his love, he could make me jump three times to be more like him, which is what we both want, right?

I try for him, but also for our friends who want this to work. At least this time, there is some room to jump since Utahraptor doesn’t suck up air or space like rampaging T. Rex. I’m no longer as small as I was then.

I find I can manage claw hands and the gloss of down feathers. So I push him from the nest, then piss blood for the next six months.

Deciding this is probably not a good sign, I go to a doctor who does tests, asking, Do you know who gave you this? You should tell them so they can do something about it. I can’t translate it into Utahraptor’s language so I don’t.

A problem with transformation happens when you look at your feathers and claws and wish they were someone else’s feathers and claws. Transformation can be a dangerous thing; sometimes you get lost along the way. Your legs become raptor, arms T. Rex, head gallimimus. A chimera of dinosaurs. I exist uncertain.

SARA PATTERSON // 44

///

With shapely claws, Velociraptor texts me every day.

She doesn’t understand monosyllabic answers or [read 13:05], but no reply for twelve hours.

Velociraptor says, You’re always hungry. I marvel at how you’re always hungry. When we spend nights together she doesn’t eat so I don’t either, but I drink.

This occurs to me: she has no hunger, and what is raptor but the act of wanting? Sometimes wanting is a sad thing but mostly it’s powerful. There is fight in carnivores. If she has no hunger, she cannot be a velociraptor.

Velociraptor texts, I lash out/get destructive if I feel backed into a corner. I cheated on my ex and didn’t tell her.

Velociraptor texts, You’re a no-bullshit kind of person. It’s our dynamic.

Velociraptor texts an entire poem she wrote about me while on the subway after our first date.

Velociraptor keeps texting. A deluge. Like asteroids and volcanos that cause extinctions.

Velociraptors do not narrate other velociraptors.

Her inability to be a raptor continues, so I gather up these facts and put them in my pocket. I tell myself she must be an oviraptor in disguise, or a dromaeosaurus that looks like a velociraptor but isn’t.

Velociraptor claws do not bleed when polished, no matter how many bellies they’ve ripped into.

///

In one version of Jurassic Park, I am Claw and Claw is the Large Raptor they introduce to the pack at the beginning of the film. The one who eats the worker as

Muldoon yells, Shoot her. I am the raptor and the raptor is me and we’re both Claw and he is us. In this version of Jurassic Park, I escape the paddock with the two other raptors and we kill almost everyone (excepting Alan Grant, Ellie Sattler, Ian Malcom, Muldoon, and the kids. Mostly because I want to both marry and be Dr. Alan Grant).

We live happily ever after, crunching through the skulls of those who put us in captivity. ///

Allosaurus starts out a crooner bringing flowers, fresh meat, a found body. She likes to collect the dead, wants me to send her pictures of roadkill and deceased insects.

I catalogue what I find and send the images in batches.

Unable to look me in the eye, Allosaurus wants to connect through text, through objects. She says, I could never let a bi woman touch me. I know what’s been in them.

We travel up and down rail corridors for each other, caught in the temporal limitations of how fast trains can go. When we fuck, it’s after smoking half a joint and watching Lord of the Rings. She plays music loud so her roommate can’t hear through the walls, which are feather thin, an old seventies building that hasn’t seen repairs.

One night I’m getting fucked and I can see this entire world collapsing in on itself. It’s just the two of us, me taking her home, her taking me home, me learning to cha-cha real smooth, learning to bend in half for the limbo stick, learning to be cool and chill with non-monogamy and open to being a radical queer because if you’re radical and you’re queer you should be into non-monogamy because fuck the Man. Not literally, of course.

Allosaurus says, I’m going on a date with someone else this week. I hope that’s cool.

I say, Sure, yeah, of course. ///

Hungering can be desolate when what you hunger for you cannot eat. I want to eat myself because I hunger for myself. Human flesh tastes like pork, human flesh and hair burning is a terrible smell. Those who witnessed bonfires of humans had that aroma smelted into their skin. It doesn’t leave even if you wash with lye soap. Human blood remains on swords so when you polish one it will bleed. Blood rust smells like cooked steak. Velociraptor claws do not bleed when polished, no matter how many bellies they’ve ripped into.

Allosaurus wants to be together; Allosaurus wants something casual; Allosaurus wants an open relationship; Allosaurus wants something more closed; Allosaurus wants— ///

When I jumped three times as a child to transform, it was because I wanted to be Claw because Claw is me. I am nothing more and nothing less than a velociraptor. ///

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///

This is what transformation looks like: a snake shedding, a candle melting. Skin falls off, thick and waxy.

Beneath are red scales—what luscious feeling to be burgundy and burnt umber— those forgotten feathers sprout a mantel of green-gold plumage. Nails become claws. There is such a hunger within the pit of my stomach, I had forgotten that I harbour such ferocity.

Transformations are things of awe. They are not gentle or refined. There is no pretty way to shift bones into new positions, no pretty way to contort limbs to their true form, no pretty way to remove parts of bodies that do not belong. There’s no grace in resuscitating the dead and inverting extinction. ///

The reason raptors are feared is because you are alive when we start to eat you. ///

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SARA PATTERSON // 45

Allosaurus is ravenous and doesn’t know what she hungers for. She’s holding my arm and saying that she really likes me, but also, we should take it slow. She messages for a week straight, then nothing at all.

She texts, Come over, I’ve made homemade pasta.

I miss you.

I pack up, put good clothes on, brush those big white teeth. I stare in the mirror, and looking back is the shadow of a raptor that does not want to be an allosaurus, or a T. Rex, or a deinonychus, or whatever fake raptor velociraptor was, or a utahraptor.

With great care I pick up my phone and text, I’m not coming.

SHELLY KAWAJA // 46

SHELLY KAWAJA

THE HOMELESS GARDEN PROJECT

PANDEMIC RESPONSE: CONVERGENCE 1, 9” x 12”, INK & ACRYLIC ON PAPER, 2020 | ELAINE WHITTAKER

Image courtesy of the artist.

A

Rol showed me how to slit logs for mushroom spores.

September’s a bit late but if it doesn’t work we’ll be ready for next year. —Dad And the next morning: We have a pregnant goat!!!! Looks like there will be a kid or two for you to meet when you get back to Maddox Cove. —Dad Back home, her dad taught Economics 1010 at Memorial University in tie-dyed T-shirts and jeans, with his grey hair knotted back in a bun, wire-rimmed glasses pushed up high against the bridge of his nose.

Students loved him for looking like a stoner from the

sixties. Faculty loved him for his willingness to teach first-year courses and serve as department head while still churning out publications.

Geraldine studied arts. She retreated further away from her father’s department until she majored in folklore and minored in creative writing. Still, his reputation loomed. Her professors expected the same kind of eccentricity, the same kind of work ethic, and the same kind of brilliance. They handed back papers marked Bwith notes in the margins like “You can do better. J” What they didn’t know was that since his retirement, her father had been preparing for the end of the world. It started with turning their entire backyard into a grid of raised beds. He planted everything: potatoes, turnips, carrots, kale, spinach, beets, radishes, squashes. The garden spilled over to the front, where he planted herbs and strawberries, haskap and cherry trees. Her mother spent her days working alongside him, ever the staunch supporter.

In his second year of retirement, her father purchased Old Man Jim’s property next door, a small sixty-year-old house that sat on an acre of land. While the house still looked the same from the street, sections of the roof had been removed and replaced with corrugated plastic, and the back walls were now row upon row of windows. By early May, her parents were planting peppers, eggplants, tomatoes, fennel, and grapes.

Before going overseas in September, Geraldine spent the summer at home with her parents. She never realized how little she had visited that year until she went back in June. She heaved her overstuffed suitcases onto her old bed, but when she opened her closet, she found it stocked full of bottled preserves.

“There’s no room for my clothes!”

Her mother came in and waved at the mason jars.

“We can move all that. I’ll find a box. You can help me carry it next door.”

“You know Dad’s blowing your savings on a hobby farm, right?”

“Don’t worry about us. We don’t need the money for anything else.”

“What about me?” She felt light-headed with shame, but the truth was, she was twenty-two years old with a BA in folklore, and the only job she could find was on the other side of the world.

“Oh, honey, who do you think he’s doing all this for?”

T

he next morning, in her old bedroom, Geraldine woke up to a goat chewing on the edge of her quilt.

Its teeth scraped back and forth, working the fabric, not more than a foot from her face. She bolted upright and its eyes rolled slowly after her, jaws still grinding.

SHELLY KAWAJA // 47

nother message from home: the video file expands to fill the screen on her smartphone and buffers.

They’re at their favourite hole-in-the-wall on Tianping Road, what they call Madam Zhou’s because the woman frying scallion pancakes over the orange gas flame says to call her Zhou and the sign over the door is in Mandarin with no English translation—unreadable to both Geraldine and Benny. They like it like that, and they like calling it Madam Zhou’s. There are six tables in the restaurant; theirs is the only one occupied, but the place is busy with the steady rhythm of take-away orders.

“Wei?” Madam Zhou calls as a customer, another student from Jiaotong University, advances to the counter.

She bangs her metal tongs on the fry pan, wipes one hand on her pants, and uses it to pick up a neatly tied bag of Styrofoam containers. The bag hovers between her and the young man as he counts his change.

The cash register opens with a whack of her palm. She deposits the money, slams the register closed, and turns back to the fry pan, flipping her savoury rounds before they start to burn.

Still buffering. Geraldine drops the phone on the table.

Benny licks grease off his wrist from the thick pancake of scallions and pork fat. “What’s the Daily Cus?” “It’s a video.”

He drags her phone across the table with his pinky and taps Play. Even Benny is infatuated with her father, the infamous Dr. Cus Boyle, and he knows the man only from Geraldine’s emails. He leans forward, studies the white spinning wheel, and sits back again, defeated.

When she arrived in China five months ago, Geraldine thought her mom would be the one to email all the time. Instead, it’s her dad. The first morning she woke up in Shanghai—on the opposite side of the globe from her microscopic town in Newfoundland (population: 961)—it was to this:

SHELLY KAWAJA // 48

Geraldine yanked the bedspread and shouted for her mother. The goat clamped down and pulled back, as if roused to a game of tug-of-war.

Her mother rushed in, pulling a rubber glove from her hand. “Rosa, shoo,” she said with a flick. “Go on.

Shoo!” Rosa let go of the blanket and trotted to the doorway. “Don’t mind her. She knows this is where I keep the bottled peaches, her favourite snack.” Her mother pushed the animal out of the room ahead of her.

There was another goat next door and a henhouse full of chickens. Cus had started calling the entire operation the Homeless Garden Project. Its mission was to provide food for the family and anyone else in the community who wanted to get involved, especially the homeless. He told her all this one night over a roast chicken he had butchered and plucked himself—and mashed potatoes.

“Nobody’s homeless in Maddox Cove.”

Her father reached across the table for a chicken leg and worked the joint back and forth until it let go with a crack. “Not yet.” He bit into the drumstick, closing his eyes as he ripped meat and skin from bone. A slippery piece of sinew hung from his lip.

Geraldine continued to inspect the slices of chicken breast on her plate for traces of pink.

“It’s already started, you know. Crop failures in East Africa, forest fires in the Amazon, epic floods leaving islands of people displaced. If the entire world declared all-out war on climate change right now, the most we could do is slow it down. A few more years, a few more months, it all helps. We can keep pretending that someone, somewhere, will find some magical way to stop it…” He waggled his fingers. “Or”—he spread his hands in a gesture of surrender—“we prepare.”

“Prepare for what, Dad?” The drumstick paused en route to his mouth and he gave her a look, the one usually reserved for students who showed up to class with a stupid question after a month’s absence. “The climate apocalypse.” He chewed the soft end of the bone. “Obviously.”

B

enny taps Play on Geraldine’s phone again. The video comes to life with the crackling sound of recorded wind, and images lope along to her dad’s footsteps. She can tell it’s him because the camera is pointing down at his dark green gaiters tramping through snow. Lifting at an angle, the camera offers a lopsided view of the backyard garden grid, at least sixteen squares of half-buried two-by-four. Benny chuckles and Geraldine wonders if it’s just how he pictured it, or if Benny, born and raised in downtown Toronto, can visualize anything so rural.

The screen jolts up to the open door of the shed.

“Ha—” Her dad’s voice cuts off. The image freezes.

“Forget it.” Geraldine takes the phone back, closes the screen, then clicks her browser. It opens to the same page she viewed last time, and the time before that: Your session has expired. Click here to log in. The deadline to accept her offer of admission to grad school is tomorrow. She applied to four different schools and the only offer she received was from Memorial University, twenty minutes from where she grew up, complete with a mediocre funding package. One more day to accept, defer, or flat-out decline.

“Why don’t you just move in with me?” Benny asks.

Why don’t you just. As if that had been an option sitting there on the table between them all along. As if he wasn’t just her boss, but something more. Did he want something more? Her shoulders tense as she forces her expression to remain unchanged, but she can’t help the accent that escapes when she opens her mouth. And not just her Newfoundland accent, not the monotone not-quite-townie accent she had perfected during her years at MUN, but the one from the bay, from Maddox Cove.

“Oh yes now, you knows.” It’s sarcastic and evasive and the only non-committal reply her brain-in-theheadlights can latch on to within a socially acceptable time span. Non-committal because…what if he’s actually serious? Why don’t you just.

He grins, points a finger. “Now there’s…the Newfie accent!”

Benny’s from Ontario, and somehow that makes her feel like she should be offended by his use of the word. Geraldine rolls her eyes. It’s Benny. The only thing she feels is disappointed. “We should get back.”

“All right, but I offered. The student dorms are shit.” He drains the last of the water from his plastic cup and follows Geraldine to the door.

“Bái bái!” Madam Zhou calls. Her metal tongs clack on the fry pan.

W

ang Jin arrives at 1:00 p.m. wearing a new pair of glasses with thick white oval frames. Since he found their office tucked away on the second floor of the Academic Exchange Centre he comes to see them every week, in a new pair of glasses each time. Wang Jin is an engineering student doing a two-plus-two program: two years at Jiaotong University and the final two years at McGill University in Montreal. Sometimes his dad comes with him and Wang Jin translates back and forth. Will he be able to work off campus in Montreal? How many hours? How much should he budget for food? Are tomatoes really that expensive? But he is alone this time, standing in the small office between

something wrong. Maybe the file is too big to transfer. She closes the video and taps her browser. Your session has expired. Click here to log in. Geraldine drops her phone on the desk, leans back, and closes her eyes. Tries to imagine spending two full years in Shanghai. With Benny.

he floor in their house is the same throughout: Newfoundland birch. A light-coloured softwood that looks like maple, only more affordable and more prone to scratching. Her parents were always particular about their flooring, telling Geraldine to take off her boots in case she trekked in a rock, or to pick up the chair, don’t slide it across the floor like that. Standing in the kitchen, sun angling through the windows, she saw dents everywhere. She bent down and traced one with a fingertip.

“You can’t let that goat in anymore. The floor’s all banged up.”

At the stove, spooning peaches from a boiling pot into a bowl of ice water, her mother giggled. “It’s a bit late to worry about that.”

“It’s not completely destroyed.”

“Oh, I don’t mean the floor. Rosa’s made herself at home in this house. Here, start peeling these.” She indicated the peaches floating in the ice bath.

Geraldine ignored her, poured up a second cup of coffee, snatched her laptop off the table, and carted it back to her bedroom. She had just managed to get perfectly situated in bed—head propped up on a pile of pillows, computer propped on another pillow, coffee in hand—when the back door smacked closed, likely her mom heading out for another hard day at the garden.

A moment later, Rosa bumped the bedroom door open with her head.

The animal parked herself in the middle of the room, blinking at Geraldine with her weird, slitty goat-pupils.

“You’re kidding.”

The goat moved closer and dropped her head on the mattress like a dog looking for a good scratch, breathing through her oversized nose holes, high-pitched and wheezy. Geraldine rolled over. She repositioned herself, her coffee, her computer, and hit the volume key to max. Still, she could smell goat. Grass and dirt and breath, and then something else—a warm fruity smell, reminiscent of an overripe peach.

She slammed the laptop shut, spilling coffee on her mother’s freshly washed sheets. A few firm whacks on the ass and she had Rosa out of the room and across the kitchen floor. In the porch, Rosa resisted and Geraldine had to go outside in order to haul the animal out of the house by the neck.

T

SHELLY KAWAJA // 49

Geraldine and Benny’s adjacent desks.

“Soo…” Benny swivels to face him. “What do we call you this week?”

Wang Jin ducks his head and waves his hand. “No, no. No change.” He is determined to pick a new name before going to Montreal but changes his mind as often as he changes his glasses. He says he wants something different. Not “Lee,” like so many other Chinese students in Canada. So far, every name he has chosen is a major sports brand: Fila, Umbro, Spalding, Champion, and most recently, Le Coq. “Le Coq? Dude, seriously? That’s what you’re sticking with?”

Grinning, he nods. There are two empty chairs in front of him, but he remains standing, one hand on the strap of his backpack.

“Can’t you pick some kind of sensible human name?”

“I like Le Coq.” Benny drops his face into his hands. “You like… that’s…that’s perfect.”

“You know,” Geraldine says, “everyone can just call you Wang Jin.” Wang Jin is serious as he says, “No. My dad thinks this is important. Chinese names are difficult to say.

An English name is better for teachers and getting jobs.

My brother says this too.”

“Maybe you can ask your brother what he thinks of Le Coq,” Benny suggests.

“Oh, he likes Le Coq.” In another few weeks Wang Jin will travel across the world to Canada, and not for six months like Geraldine’s little internship, but for two full years, possibly longer. Whenever his father visits, he asks about work opportunities and Canadian work visas post-graduation. In all probability, Wang Jin is about to spend a significant chunk of his young-adult life in a foreign country, answering to a French name brand.

“I have to go.” He gives them a nod. “Class.”

“Bái bái, Le Coq,” Benny says, and swivels back to his computer. “You’re not really going to leave me here by myself to deal with all this, are you?” He stares at Geraldine as if trying to read her, as if trying to figure out exactly what makes her tick. She holds still, trying not to shift or fidget or make any kind of face.

“Naaah,” he says, shaking his head as he looks away. He stretches out his legs, crosses his feet on top of his desk, and leans back. “You couldn’t possibly go home now that you’ve discovered the art of the Chinese siesta.”

Geraldine’s chair squeaks a little as she pivots back and forth. She picks up her phone and opens her dad’s video. It immediately buffers. He must have done

SHELLY KAWAJA // 50

“Hi, honey!” her mom called from Old Man Jim’s.

Her mother was standing with Lynn, a roll of white fabric unspooling between them. Lynn, from just down the street, was the mother of one of Geraldine’s classmates in high school. Oh God, Geraldine could only imagine what people were saying about the Boyles these days. “Come here for a sec.”

Rosa was already trotting over to the two women.

There was no choice but to follow.

“I hear you’re going to China,” Lynn said. “That’ll be quite the adventure.”

Geraldine forced a smile.

“There’s a frost warning tonight.” Her mother looked around at the expanse of raised beds. “We could use a hand getting everything covered.”

Still smiling, Geraldine sucked air in through the corner of her mouth and nodded.

The women worked quietly as they spread the thin garden fabric over the beds and weighted the edges down with rocks. Finding enough rocks in the cleared land was a struggle that slowed the process. Geraldine was hacking into the ground with a shovel when the woods behind her revved to life with the mechanical wail of a chainsaw. It was hard to picture her father behind that racket, but he was most definitely the source.

Sweating, Geraldine dropped the shovel. “Dad still got all those bricks in the shed?”

By late afternoon, everything was covered and Geraldine actually felt charged up by the outdoor work. When the two older women started into the backwoods, toward the bone-jarring roar of the chainsaw, she went too. They found Cus at the far reaches of the property in a yellow hard hat, earmuffs, and plastic wraparound visor. His grey ponytail hung over one shoulder as he cut into a stump. He grinned when he saw them and killed the engine.

Geraldine inhaled gas fumes and sawdust. “Dad! You’re going to give Lester Farms a run for their money.”

Cus pulled his earmuffs from his head and grinned wider. He removed the visor, wiped his brow, then rested his hands on his skinny hips and relaxed into an energetic sigh. “We might sell a few things.” He paused to catch his breath. “But this is about a neighbourhood economy. It’s about working together. Helping each other out.”

An important skill for the upcoming apocalypse, for sure. “People are really into organic produce these days.”

Cus surveyed the mess of wood in the cleared patch of land. “Might get some pigs.”

“Pigs?”

“They’d make short work of these stumps.”

“You’re going to slaughter pigs now too?”

“Not me. Harold.”

Harold was a retired fisherman who lived in a shack down by the water. He had a hand-painted sign in his window that said BUTCHER. “So we’re going to own pigs. Breed pigs. Butcher pigs. And sell pigs?”

“No. You’re not listening Ger. Not selling—” It was, very possibly, her last summer home. The last time she would live with her parents. And here was her dad talking about pigs. Every time he spoke, it was the environment, the community, the farm, goats and chickens, and now stupid goddamn pigs. Couldn’t he take an interest in her trip? In what she was about to do? In her.

“Holy shit, Dad, you’re insane! This is completely insane.” Geraldine spun around, but her mom stepped in front of her.

“Why?” she asked. “Why is this so insane?”

Geraldine stared at her mother’s face. At the lines forming around her eyes, the deepening folds of her cheeks, and suddenly wished her mother would force her into a hug. A straitjacket mom hug, and hold her there until the rage in her chest loosened and untangled.

“No wonder I’m going all the way to China!” Geraldine brushed past her mom and marched back to the house.

T

he Bund is quiet at 5:00 a.m. The only movement is an occasional drift of birds, eager for today’s crowd of tourists and art vendors. A lone man practising tai chi in a distant corner of the promenade is a fluid silhouette, dwarfed by the bulbous tower and twisting skyscrapers that light up the other side of the Huangpu River. The river barely moves, languid as it reflects every shade of blue and green and red and gold, under an expanse of pre-dawn sky.

Geraldine sits on a concrete bench. She is drawn to the Bund often, as if she is no better than any other camera-wielding tourist, but at this hour, the place is stretched open in welcome just for her. She pulls her phone from her pocket, taps the camera icon, and holds it out in front of her, wanting to capture the empty waterfront, the river, and Shanghai’s financial district at that moment when the sun starts to rise and the LEDs of the towers are still on. Her dad will appreciate the shot. If his economics professor side doesn’t get it, his new hippie self will at least see the irony. Only thirty years ago, the financial district was entirely farmland.

A bit of a haze, and not a natural early morning mist, makes the colourful lights dim and smudgy on

A tall, thin man like her father, but where her dad is gangly bones, the vendor is smooth lines. He arranges small white trinkets on a plastic tabletop and uses a wide strip of tape to dangle a sign: 手工雕刻牛骨 Handicraft Carvings Ox Bone. He glances up and catches her watching, then goes back to organizing his pieces: knobby bits strung into bracelets, pendants shaped like fish hooks, tiny white turtles.

Geraldine closes the video and taps her browser.

Your session has expired. Click here to log in. It’s Saturday morning in China, Friday evening in Newfoundland.

Only hours until her offer for grad school expires. She imagines her and Benny living together, cooking supper together in his tiny kitchen, going to work together every morning. It feels wrong and weird and impossible.

Her finger hovers over the X in the top-right corner of the screen. Maybe she’ll stay in China. Maybe she’ll visit another country, and then another, until she’s swept up into some brightly lit international vortex that hauls her roots right out of the ground in Maddox Cove. Maybe, just for a while, she can be homeless.

Geraldine hits the X and closes the screen. She wipes at her eyes, opens the phone icon, and under Recent, taps Mom and Dad. A long pause before distant tin-can rings go through.

“Hello? Ger?” “Hi, Dad.” The nearby vendor picks up a bonecarved spin top. Its hexagonal sides are inked with little black dots like a game dice. He flicks a finger and sets it spinning in an uncluttered corner of the table. Black dots a grey blur.

“Did you see Django?”

The top whirls close to the edge. It teeters, about to fall, but the vendor raises a hand above his head in a flourish and lines the other, palm-up, against the table’s edge. The little top wobbles but makes the transition from tabletop to palm. The vendor lifts his hand expertly, and the top gains momentum in a cradle of knuckles.

“Ger?” “I saw him.”

The vendor flashes her a toothy grin before closing his fingers over the spinning toy. ///

SHELLY KAWAJA // 51

her screen. She turns off the flash, sets the phone on the bench, and props it in the crook of the arm. She starts the timer and waits five seconds. Click. Still hazy.

The smog is fine yellow sand from the Gobi Desert.

High winds whip up dust clouds and, without enough trees left in the country to collect it, carry the dust all the way to Korea and Japan and sometimes as far as North America, gathering industrial pollutants along the way. Swiping through the images, she deletes every shot. Another win for Dr. Cus Boyle.

Geraldine sits back down, ready to watch the sunrise without capturing any evidence of her visit. As the immensity of the Bund fills her chest, guilt pools in the pit of her stomach. She should have spent more time with her parents that summer. Should have taken an interest in their new hobby. Who cares if they want to start a farm in their retirement, or if a goat has moved into her old bedroom? What they’re doing—bringing the neighbourhood closer together—is nice, even if the world isn’t about to end. She remembers being in the airport at the security checkpoint, heaving her suitcase into a plastic bin and looking back at her parents. They were huddled together at the entrance and her mother gave a small wave. Geraldine gave an exaggerated wave back: you can go now.

Her phone vibrates in her hand. It’s an email from her dad with the same video he sent yesterday. Geraldine taps and it begins to play her father’s loping steps through the snow. The crackling wind. The open door of the shed.

“Ha—hi, Rosa!” The camera moves inside and shows the goat lying on the shed floor. Next to her, a kid, the smallest little goat Geraldine has ever seen, wobbles on four legs. “She’s one proud mama. And this here’s Django. I think Django’s a male. Rosa did an amazing job. Didn’t you, Rosa? You’d be proud of her, Ger. You’d be proud of Mom too. She helped with the birth. You wouldn’t believe what she had to do. But I’ll let her tell you about that another time.”

Geraldine covers her mouth to contain her laugh.

It’s only half a laugh, half a sob. She suddenly wants to see that goat more than anything else in the world.

Then the camera turns around to her dad’s face, and she has to widen her eyes to see through the wet. “One more month, my girl. Your mom and I are counting down.” The video ends and Geraldine hits Play to watch it again.

The lights across the river are out when Geraldine looks up. The lone man practising tai chi has been joined by about twenty others, and they move together in tandem. A vendor sets up near Geraldine’s bench.

JOHN PENDER

JOHN PENDER // 52

THREE POEMS SAINTE-ANNE-DES-PINS

FUNERAL CHORUS

The loggers hewed a clearing in the bush.

Jesuits came and chastened their daughters.

They were French, tall: cold wind and wool and red raw skin. They called it Sainte-Anne-des-Pins.

Essentially, it’s Euripides: A huddle of shattered relations, Domestic fragments Prostrate at the altar Of a made-up god.

It’s my first lead role, And demands blood. Turn Your blighted face toward The rising applause.

This ritual can’t alter fate.

St. Anne of David’s house was Christ’s mémère: most blessèd mother of our Most Blessèd Mother.

She lived among the pines.

The English dug the mines.

REFLECTION OF A SHOE The sap has drained out, mostly.

I assume a voice. I can’t keep it consistent.

It veers between archly mannered doggerel And limp sincerity.

God damn the personal poem.

And the relatable character, too, can go straight to hell.

What could be more relatable, anyway, Than that odd shoe abandoned in the street?

It can only cast some other Sacrificial goat to blame, Who chokes out one last Garbled utterance: Useless petition, Prayer for the Snuck-up-upon, dumbstruck, Obsolete ghost, howling Even now her message To the vacant sky.

It holds up a mirror and you recognize yourself instantly: The bemused expression, tongue hanging out.

Whatever kept it together has been unlaced.

How did such a thing ever stumble, astonished, into the world?

///

LOGAN BROECKAERT

T

he last time I saw my dad was in the parking lot of the SAQ in Bedford. I was home to visit my mom for Easter. For years, I avoided him when I came home.

I was quick going to the caisse populaire, getting a poutine, picking up tampons at the pharmacy. This time I walked right up to the driver’s side door of his blue Dodge Caravan. I wanted to see how he was doing. My interest confused me. Maybe I didn’t want to be the kind of person who avoids an old man in the last few years of his miserable life. Maybe I wanted to be kinder than he had ever been.

I hadn’t seen my dad in a year, even though he lived a five-minute drive from my mom’s house. My parents divorced quietly in 1993, so quietly that I didn’t find out until 1996, when I was thirteen and my mom was filling out a form and had to check a marital status box. “You got divorced? Why didn’t you tell me?” I was feigning distress.

“It hasn’t changed anything for you, has it?” she asked. “It’s over. History, dusty, gone.” My mom said “history, dusty, gone” when she wanted to let us know that something was over and there was nothing to do to change it. She was right. It hadn’t changed anything for me. My dad had never been much interested in us.

My mom told me once that the year they separated, my dad told her that she should have known he didn’t want kids by the way he’d left my half-brother to be raised by our grandparents.

When we were still little, my dad sometimes picked up Jaimi, Tyler, and me on Sundays and took us to Montreal to watch the dog races or an Expos game or to eat Chalet Bar-B-Q chicken. Twice when I was seven and eight, he drove us to Florida to stay in a rundown trailer he owned outside Orlando. He was pretty good at taking us places during the day—Kennedy Space Center, Disney World, Daytona Beach. He was more fun than my

mom, but in hindsight, he was just less strict, probably because he didn’t care. He let us sit with the van door open and drag our feet in Daytona’s sand as he drove along the beach. He let us put whatever we wanted in the cart at the Piggly Wiggly, then let us eat as much of it as we wanted. At night he mostly left us alone. One night, he stumbled in drunk early enough that we were awake.

He held out a plush caveman with a long beard. “Tyler, pull up the beard,” he said, and when Tyler did, all we saw were the caveman’s dick and balls.

I

waited at the driver’s side door until he noticed me standing so close to the van’s window my breath could have fogged it up and erased him. He moved the shifter into Park and with a sharp snap of his wrist turned the ignition off. Only then did he look up at me through the window. He adjusted the cap on his head and opened the door. “I wouldn’t of recognized you,” he said. I wasn’t offended. I never assumed I was top of mind.

“Tyler said you lost your licence.”

He put his nicotine-stained finger to his mouth.

He mouthed the words I did. “I wouldn’t of recognized you,” my dad said again. “When do you go back to the city?” He didn’t know which city, only that I lived in one. I didn’t clarify.

“Friday.”

Across the lot, a couple got out of their car and stared. They looked long enough that I thought they might be pulling together the strands of a story from what they had seen: a young person in a striped sweater approaches a blue van. An old man gets out slowly, looking at his feet until they hit the ground. They speak in English. The young person speaks up so the old man can hear. The old man touches the young person’s hair. The young person doesn’t smile. They have the same jawline.

LOGAN BROECKAERT // 53

LIKE FATHER LIKE SON

LOGAN BROECKAERT // 54

If they looked closer, they’d see we also have the same green eyes, the same casual arrogance. One of the many women my dad kept around when I was a teenager once told me that my dad always thought that, of his four children, I was the most like him. She thought it was a compliment but I knew it wasn’t. I took her seriously and for years was terrified she was right. I told myself I was a different kind of person when I was in my twenties, even as I treated women the way he did.

I thought I loved them, but for the most part, I didn’t.

I expected them to adapt to me, without considering whether I might need to change. I cheated on some of them and lied about it.

In the months after my mom found out that my dad had been sleeping with Connie, a bartender at the bar he owned, my dad spent hours sitting at our kitchen table while we slept upstairs talking about how their marriage could still work, how he could keep a mistress and a wife and have everything he wanted. My mom used to laugh when she told the story, like what idiots they both were—Dad for believing it and her for considering it seriously. “Your father almost always convinced me that it could work, right until I asked myself, who is this good for?”

I don’t know if my mom thought about which one of her children would be most like my dad. Whether I knew it or not, I had taken these stories as both a cautionary tale and a road map.

I told myself I was a different kind of person when I was in my twenties, even as I treated women the way he did.

I

n the parking lot, I asked my dad how he’d been. He looked me in the eye, squinting like he did when he was about to say something he thought was profound.

Once when I was fifteen and painting the back porch at the bar, I went into his apartment, which was upstairs, for a Coke. I was standing at the sink drinking it and looking out the window when he came into the kitchen. I don’t remember how we got to a point in the conversation where he told me that sometimes women force you to hit them, but he did get there and I never forgot it.

He squinted and said, “You don’t want to, but they push you too far.” I didn’t understand what he meant but I knew he was wrong. In university, when I lived with a girlfriend, I smashed glasses on the floor when I was mad. I once piled all her clothes at the front door and told her to leave as she begged me to calm down. I never hit her, and I used to tell myself I wasn’t like my dad because I didn’t.

In the parking lot, he shifted his reusable bags from one hand to the other, ready to enlighten me. “I don’t have long left, but I take it each day at a time.” I swatted at a fly that landed on my arm. “I have friends—lowclass friends—but friends who check in on me.”

My dad had lived in the same town for most of his life and owned the bar for thirty years. Everyone hated him because he was cheap and he was crooked, and when he drank, which was every day, he was mean. He didn’t know how to make funny jokes, only cruel ones.

They called him an asshole, a dickhead, a cocksucker, a coward, a midget. I heard it all on Friday nights when I worked the bar and my dad was bobbing and weaving through the tables, drunk by the end of happy hour but too stubborn to go upstairs to bed.

A drug dealer named Nipper with Coke-bottle lenses asked me if I was like my dad once as I stood beside him at the bar. “Do you bend over to pick up a nickel like your old man?” I didn’t understand the question. “Or do you bend over to pick up your pants like your sister?”

My dad never cared what other people thought about him as long as they spent their money at the bar. I never could brush it off like he did. Frozen in my spot, I looked at Nipper and his drinking buddy as they leaned into each other to talk about something else. I turned around and walked out. As a queer kid, I didn’t think I could be like my sister, and I couldn’t figure out if, by default, that meant I was going to be like my dad.

Were there only two kinds of Broeckaert? I didn’t know.

A

s we stood together in the parking lot, I remembered him teaching me to do a crossword puzzle at the bar one afternoon when I was about ten. I had to sit on my knees on the stool to be able to see the puzzle on the counter. I had a bowl of Cheezies in front of me, and the bar was sticky where I had spilled some orange juice. As I read over the clues, my dad gave me some tips. “When you don’t know how to start, read through all the clues and find the ones that you know will end in s and put those letters in.” I read the clues and put a few in tentatively, but still felt stuck. “Okay, lemme

LOGAN BROECKAERT // 55

start you off.” He glanced through the clues and offered me the answers to a few throughout the grid. I wrote the answers in. “I’ll come back in a bit to check in to see how you’re doing.” He didn’t come back; my dad never followed through. The trick stayed with me though. I still use it when I’m stuck.

In the parking lot, my dad touched my cheek. “You get prettier every day.” He used to say this to me when I was a kid. He always thought he knew what daughters needed to hear from their fathers. His voice was hoarse, a whisper, like he had burned it all the way down to his lungs and this was all that came back up when he spoke. I nodded my chin at him, told him to take care of himself, and waved behind me as I walked away.

M

y dad died alone in his apartment a few months later. I came home for the memorial. One morning, I sat hunched over a plate of poached eggs my mom had made for me and listened to her walk through her grief.

“The anger wakes me up at night,” she said. I thought about her up at four in the morning leaning against the patio doors of the house she lived in alone, smoking her cigarettes and looking out on the black night.

“You won, Ma,” I said. “Dad died alone. You have us.” Since he’d died, I kept thinking about how little my dad knew me. Over and over again, I came back to the question of what a person is worth if their father doesn’t care to know who they grew up to be. “You just gotta let it go,” I said, even though I had no idea what I was talking about.

“But I can’t forgive him for what he did.”

“What do you mean, what he did?”

“He told me once that on the night Tyler was born, he took Connie out to celebrate the birth of his son.”

Tyler was a grown man when our father died, with kids of his own, but thirty-five years later my mom was still thinking about my dad and Connie, and how on the night Tyler was born, she was alone in the hospital while he took his mistress to Blue Bonnets. “Why did he tell me that?”

In the 1980s, when I was a chubby, surly brat who didn’t brush her hair or her teeth and who did not reflect well on him, my dad used to tell anyone who would listen that he wasn’t my father. He would accuse my mother of having slept with every drunk in the bar.

Even after I heard this story as an adult, there was never any doubt in my mind that he was my dad. It wasn’t because I so physically resembled him, though I do. It was how well I finally understood what made him tick.

Once in my late twenties, when my partner Frances and I were arguing, one of those arguments that can last for hours, my mind cleared briefly and I remembered what

my dad had said about how sometimes women force you to hit them. I felt what he must have felt before he hit my mother: provoked, uncontrolled, and justified.

I finally understood what he’d meant and it disgusted me. I stood up and walked out of our apartment to calm myself down.

I looked at my mom. I knew why he told her he’d taken Connie to Blue Bonnets on the night Tyler was born. I had confessed an infidelity once too. I pushed my eggs away. I wasn’t hungry anymore. He told her because he was proud of himself for getting away with the deception so long and it felt good to show someone how clever he had been all those years before. “I don’t know why he told you that,” I lied. I took my plate to the sink and turned back to her. “It’s over, Ma. History, dusty, gone.” ///

CARA NELISSEN // 56

CARA NELISSEN

EVERYTHING IS ENOUGH G

race never wanted a baby, until one day she did.

The feeling first came when she was at the supermarket with Imogen. They’d been circling the aisles for over an hour. Grocery shopping took a long time because Imogen wanted to read the labels on everything to make sure they weren’t being poisoned by the big corporations.

“No one’s looking out for the consumer,” Imogen said under her breath as she looked up different food additives on her phone. Grace wasn’t very worried about the poison in the food. Her mother’s idea of health food had been to add frozen peas to her Kraft Dinner, and she had managed to live her way into adulthood just the same. They were shuffling down the cereal aisle when Grace noticed the baby. Tufts of curly brown hair peeked out from under his fuzzy hood, and he looked at her with big, curious eyes.

“Oh my God,” Grace said, grabbing Imogen’s elbow. “Look at that.”

Imogen glanced up from her phone. “What?”

“That baby,” Grace squealed. “He’s wearing a bunny suit.”

“Oh,” Imogen said, her eyes drifting back to her phone. “I thought you saw a dog.”

The baby’s mother briefly left her position in front of the stroller to look for something on the other side of the aisle, and Grace made a funny face at the baby. He giggled at her, his face dimply and chubby.

Grace felt her heart leap, her entire body tingling with something she couldn’t place. It felt a little bit like when Imogen finally agreed to move in with her, but much more all-consuming. For most of her life, Grace had thought babies were ugly and annoying and that women who were obsessed with them had a special kind of maternal wiring she clearly lacked. She told herself to be rational, that it was just a cute baby that had smiled at her. It didn’t mean anything, least of all

her own mother being right. Still, by the time she and Imogen had packed their poison-free groceries into canvas tote bags, Grace felt sure she wanted a baby. It was both the most mundane and the most outlandish thing she had ever wanted.

W

hen Grace was a child, her mother, Janet, liked to show her the old wedding dress she had stashed away in the farthest corner of her closet.

“Wash your hands before you touch it,” Janet said before unzipping the heavy garment bag. “This is the most precious thing you’ll ever own.”

Janet’s own mother had been an unsentimental woman who married in a dress she originally bought to attend someone else’s wedding. Janet had always been determined to save her wedding dress for her own daughter and start a tradition. She liked to tell Grace how, after having three boys, she had worried she might never have the daughter she longed for.

Grace loved having these private moments with her mother. Each time the dress was taken out of the bag, the fantasies about Grace’s hypothetical wedding become more and more elaborate. Sometimes, the wedding would take place on a tropical beach, sometimes in a mountain resort on a crisp autumn day.

“Marriage may not always be rainbows and sunshine,” Janet said, as she carefully put the dress back into the large zippered bag, “but at least your father and I have always stuck together, which doesn’t seem to be the norm anymore. My wedding day was the most important day of my life. I want the same for you.”

Grace didn’t say so, but even as a child she didn’t like that thought. It wasn’t the idea of marriage or a wedding that upset her, but she couldn’t imagine having to live with the knowledge that the best day of your life had already passed.

CARA NELISSEN // 57 UNTITLED: HALOBACTERIA, 36” x 36”, 2010 | ELAINE WHITTAKER

Image courtesy of the artist.

CARA NELISSEN // 58

“I

’m a Sagittarius,” Imogen said on their fourth date, when Grace asked how she felt about monogamy. In those first few months, Imogen often made her cute handmade gifts—pottery, mittens, a drawing of a seagull because Grace mentioned she thought they were a misunderstood animal. In return, Grace took her to an art show where someone made a village out of repurposed garbage, because she thought it seemed like the kind of thing Imogen would like. Grace had started to learn about all the issues Imogen had spent years thinking about. There was so much she had never considered. Sometimes she felt guilty about her lack of knowledge, but most of the time she felt excited about the prospect of doing better now that she knew more about the world.

They hadn’t really planned to live together, but it soon become clear that the price of rent made refusing to share a one-bedroom a form of self-sabotage. Grace had been happy when this happened—she had liked the idea of living with Imogen and had been trying to think of a way to bring it up. After living together for three years, they still said they were polyamorous, though neither of them had the time to date anyone else. They agreed it was more of a mindset, anyway.

Every now and then Imogen made obscure references to a guy named Brad and she posted suggestive Instagram pictures of herself with a red-haired woman with tattoos when she went on work trips to Toronto, but Grace knew Imogen would not be able to sleep with someone else without feeling the need to divulge every little detail.

Until recently, Grace never felt she needed more than Imogen was willing to give. She had been happy with the way they were. She liked the feeling of unrealized potential, the sense that there was room for something better to happen. Being with Imogen felt like reaching for her summer clothes on the top shelf of her closet. She knew it was there: it was just difficult to grab a firm hold of it.

T

he day after seeing the baby at the supermarket, Grace saw another baby on her way to work. The baby was wearing little Converse sneakers, and Grace wished she could grab their leg and squeeze it. She was still thinking about it as she made her way into the office. Grace worked as a social media coordinator for a company that designed cruelty-free clothing and accessories. The brand had taken off after a YouTube star wore one of their tank tops as she filmed her yoga practice. Her deck overlooked the Pacific Ocean. Unfortunately, this new-found popularity came with its own set of challenges. A few weeks earlier,

the entire office had been in crisis mode because someone wrote an article pointing out that the cotton they used in their clothing wasn’t certified organic. Grace had received several death threats to her personal Twitter account. It was the most excitement she’d ever felt at her job.

Without a fresh crisis to tend to, Grace spent most of her workday reading her friends’ Facebook rants about late-stage capitalism while scouring Amazon for good deals. She used to feel guilty about this until someone on Twitter said that whatever you needed to do to survive under the yoke of the system was justified. Grace loved buying things, securing free shipping, the thrill of applying a promotional code she had found on another website. The clearly defined parameters of the task made her feel grounded. The confirmation email she received at the end felt like an accomplishment.

Grace had everything shipped to her office so Imogen didn’t see the shameful remnants of her shopping sprees. Most of the things she accumulated she gave away as gifts, which she believed evened things out from an ethical point of view. When she did bring things home, she always made sure they were unboxed.

If Imogen asked where the inflatable pizza slice or dogshaped pillow came from, Grace said they were freebies from work.

G

race spent most of the morning scrolling through social media because she was too distracted to do anything else. When it was time for her lunch break, she sat in the littered parkette behind her office building and sipped an iced coffee from the reusable coffee cup Imogen had bought her for her birthday. She decided to call her mother. As much as she hated the idea of proving her mother right, she needed to talk to someone about her feelings Whenever Grace said she didn’t want kids, Janet had always assured her she would one day suddenly feel differently. Grace and her mother had gotten into multiple arguments over this because Grace thought this was sexist and ridiculous. Grace and her mother had stopped talking about her future wedding since Grace came out to her in the summer after her first year of university. Janet had asked about the wedding dress after Grace told her. Grace said she might still get married, but she could tell her mother didn’t think it would be the same. Like Grace, Janet found it difficult to change course once she’d become attached to the idea of something. Janet was the kind of person who didn’t think she had anything against gay people, but every now and then she still sometimes made comments that

T

he city was shrouded in a thick layer of smoke that had drifted in from the wildfires, and the sun glowed an eerie red. Despite Imogen’s warnings about the air quality, Grace was determined to go for a run, as she always did on Saturdays. After one lap on the track, she felt dizzy and had to admit defeat, though she would tell Imogen she got in a decent run before she cut it short. As she caught her breath, Grace stared directly into the weird sun for too long and spent the rest of the day worrying she’d permanently damaged her eyesight.

“It’s only going to get worse,” Imogen said when Grace got home. “I bet some asshole will find a way to market air filters and make a buck.”

After dinner, they watched a cooking show that Grace loved and Imogen tolerated because it made Grace happy. They had pulled the fans in front of the couch to get some relief from the heat that refused to break and drank white wine from coffee mugs because they’d broken the only two wineglasses they owned.

Grace didn’t tell Imogen about the phone conversation she’d had with her mother. Imogen always got very upset on her behalf when her mom was being homophobic, and as much as she wanted sympathy, what Grace really wanted right now was to relax.

“I read this article today,” Imogen said. “How climate change is causing people to use up more energy for their fans and ACs, which in turn makes climate change worse, which will cause people to use their ACs more, and so forth. It’s a vicious cycle.”

“Oh,” Grace said. “That sucks.”

Imogen reached for the bottle of wine on the coffee table and filled up their mugs. Her phone bleeped and she reached over to check it.

“Want to do acid tomorrow?” she said. “Jaime can get us some. We could go to their cabin.”

“Nah,” Grace said. “Don’t think so.”

“Hey,” Imogen said. She tossed her phone into the couch cushions and reached for Grace’s knee. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay,” Imogen said. “What’s wrong? You’ve been so grumpy lately.”

Grace held her mug and sipped from the wine.

She’d intertwined her leg with Imogen’s on the coffee table. She leaned her head against Imogen’s shoulder and Imogen played with her hair, which she didn’t normally do. Grace held still because she wanted it to last longer. She wanted to be stroked like a pet, loved in an uncomplicated way. She wanted Imogen to stop talking about how the world was going to shit. It was hard

CARA NELISSEN // 59

made it clear she had not given up hope that Grace would change her mind.

“Aren’t you supposed to be at work?” Janet said. “Is everything okay?”

“Everything is okay,” Grace said. “I just wanted to say hi.” During the week, Janet often babysat her grandchildren. Grace could hear the sound of the toy car she had given them for Christmas in the background.

“Uhm, I kind of wanted to ask you something,” she said. “How did you decide to have kids?”

Janet laughed. “Well,” she said. “I just always wanted them. I didn’t really think about it.”

“You never had any doubts?”

“No,” Janet said. “I didn’t. What is this about? Are you thinking about having kids?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Grace said. “I’m thinking about it, I guess. I’m not sure. I don’t think Imogen wants kids.”

“Well…” Janet said, and her voice rose a little.

Grace regretted talking to her mother. She began forming potential responses to Janet: There were many ways to have relationships and raise children. She didn’t have to live the way her mother envisioned.

“We’ve been together for a long time, Mom.” “I’m just saying, if it’s really what you want, it’s not the kind of thing you can compromise on.”

“Stop. I don’t even know it’s what I want,” Grace said. “I’m just wondering.”

After hanging up, Grace went back to her computer.

She ventured into the baby section of Amazon for the first time. There was so much to consider. There were toys and clothes and stuffed animals and mobiles and playpens. All of it beautiful, all of it right there. Even if she managed to convince Imogen to have a baby, Grace was sure her girlfriend would be the kind of parent who thought a baby needed nothing more than a few pairs of plain cotton onesies. Grace imagined a beautiful bright room. She wanted something educational on the wall, like an old-school blackboard with an alphabet in cursive, even though the baby wouldn’t be able to read for many more years. As she went through the baby section, Grace collected colour schemes and wallpaper patterns that matched what she had in mind. She found a stuffed unicorn that went perfectly with the curtains. The unicorn would look amazing sitting in a wicker chair next to the crib, standing guard over her baby sleeping soundly in a crisp white crib. Grace felt like she was soaring out of her body as she clicked all these things, marvelling at how it all fell together so perfectly. Before she knew it, there was a message in her inbox saying that her order of socks, onesies, and a stuffed unicorn were guaranteed to be delivered within the next two business days.

CARA NELISSEN // 60

enough to be happy these days without constantly being reminded of all the reasons that you shouldn’t be.

Grace was sick of people making her feel like there was always something wrong with the way she wanted to live her life.

“Nothing’s wrong.”

“Come on.”

“Okay, well, I’ve been thinking I would maybe like to have a baby,” Grace said. She could feel Imogen’s leg shifting away.

“What?” Imogen said. “We already talked about this. We decided it would be a bad idea.”

“Don’t do that,” Grace said. “We’ve literally never talked about this. Not seriously.”

Imogen filled her mug up again and held the bottle out to Grace, who shook her hand.

“Gracie,” Imogen said, running her fingers up and down Grace’s back. “We can’t have a kid. No way.”

“Why not?”

“I thought you didn’t want them,” Imogen said. “I thought we agreed.”

“Well, I didn’t used to,” Grace said. “But I’ve been thinking about it more lately. Like I feel like I could actually do it, you know, be a parent.”

“What kind of world would this kid grow up in?”

Imogen said. “They would probably never forgive us for knowingly making them live through all that.”

“I don’t know,” Grace said. “I just think it would be nice.”

“And we’re not even talking about making a baby. It’s not like we just stop being careful and see what happens.

It would be thousands of dollars, tons of medical stuff, just trying to replicate some nuclear family bullshit.”

“Okay, I’m…I’m not saying you’re wrong, but this is not the debate team, okay?” Grace said. “I can’t change how I feel.”

Imogen rubbed the back of Grace’s hand with her thumb. “I know. I’m sorry,” she said. “There are just so many things that can go wrong. I feel like things have been so good between us.”

Imogen moved closer and bit her lip. She always did this when she wanted Grace to forget about something, and most of the time it worked.

“I’m not saying things are bad,” Grace said. She kissed Imogen, and Imogen slipped her hands under her shirt and pulled her closer.

“Hey, babe,” Grace whispered. “I didn’t feel like we were done talking.”

“I thought we were done,” Imogen said, and kissed her again.

“No, really,” Grace said. “Besides, I’m kind of too hot, anyway.”

“Sure, whatever you want,” Imogen said, and Grace could tell she’d done her best to sound neutral.

Grace sat up, but left her leg draped over Imogen’s.

“So, I read somewhere that people are having less sex because of climate change,” Imogen said. “With the heat waves and everything.”

“Can you stop talking about the fucking weather?”

Grace said. “Seriously.”

“I know it’s a bit of a mood killer,” Imogen said.

“But I really did read that.”

“You know, maybe if we had a child I would actually give a shit about the world ending or not,” Grace said.

“Oh, really?” Imogen laughed and leaned over Grace to grab her wine mug. “Don’t you care about what happens to anyone outside your own little bubble?”

“Of course I do,” Grace said, but she didn’t.

“M

orning,” Nora, who worked at the reception desk, said when Grace walked into the office on Monday morning. Nora was extremely nosy and Grace tried to avoid her when she could, which wasn’t often, since Grace was always getting deliveries.

“How was your weekend?” Nora said.

“Great,” Grace said, though it hadn’t been. She and Imogen hadn’t discussed the baby question again, but instead fought about the crumbs on the kitchen counter and whether the amounts they were each contributing to the utility bill were fair, considering Grace took much longer showers, which Imogen said was something she should be working on, anyway, if she cared about the future of the planet.

“This giant box was just delivered for you,” Nora said, pointing at the cardboard box that was roughly the same height as her desk. “I wonder what it could be.”

“Baby shower gift,” Grace said. “For a friend.”

“Lucky friend,” Nora said.

“Yup.” Grace pushed the box into the copy room, away from Nora. She stabbed at the tape with a blunt pencil and folded open the flaps. The stuffed unicorn had shiny glass eyes. It was a beautiful pastel purple colour and its horn was threaded with silver. Grace carefully lifted the unicorn from the box and cradled it against her chest. She buried her face in the soft polyester fur, inhaling the brand-new factory smell. It was so much bigger than she’d thought it would be. ///

[INTERVIEW]

[WITH HLR INTERVIEWS EDITOR MEAGHAN STRIMAS]

JAEL RICHARDSON’S GUTTER CHILD WAS PUBLISHED EARLIER THIS YEAR. IT’S A RIVETING, OFTEN HARROWING COMING-OF-AGE NOVEL “ABOUT A GIRL WHO CAN MOVE THROUGH DARKNESS WITH HER LIGHT.” THE BOOK PLACES READERS IN A DYSTOPIA THAT CLOSELY MIRRORS THE HISTORY AND LEGACY OF ANTI-BLACK RACISM IN NORTH AMERICA.

PHOTO CREDIT: SIMON REMARK

[INTERVIEW] // 61

STORIES ARE LIFE

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JAEL RICHARDSON:

the shelves—just as biased and unbiased, just as truthful. So I thought Ida was the perfect character to reveal that, because Ida has a very particular space in the story: she’s the only one who has moved through the whole system. She has a really interesting perspective that nobody else really has in the story and I think that’s why she can say such brilliant things and I also think that’s why people love her so much.

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HLR: Ida May offers so much love and guidance to the young people she embraces. Did you model Ida after anyone in particular?

JR: I remember the Black women I met at the age Elimina was at and I didn’t realize it at the time, but each one was so profound. To be in proximity to them, especially ones who weren’t family.

Ida is definitely based most distinctly, in terms of how I picture her, on my grandmother, my dad’s mother. She had a Grade 8 education and she was the first woman who I remember really being drawn to in a way I couldn’t explain. I remember always wanting to be around her. I can still feel her hugs.

HLR: In Gutter Child, the importance of storytelling, and its life-sustaining properties, are central. The character Ida May tells the novel’s protagonist Elimina that “stories are life.” Can you speak to these words?

JR: When I was writing the book, I was thinking about systems and how systems are set up to harm us, harm particular communities. The question for me was: How do you get out of those systems? How do you break through? How do you overcome? What kinds of decisions do you make within those systems? So, as I was working through this in my own head—because I didn’t have answers; I was searching for answers—the question became: Where do I find my identity?

I recognized that poetry and stories and community are the big places.

And I wanted to remind people that books are not the only places in which we gain information or where we gain community. That’s often what’s sold to us, and that’s a very colonized approach, right? Indigenous folks from around the world have demonstrated that the stories that get passed down from our elders are just as reliable as the books that we have on

HLR: Your character Violet—who has endured so many injustices—loses faith in the power of her own value. At one point she says, “My stories aren’t worth telling.” What happens to a person when they are taught to believe that their story is insignificant?

JR: Violet is struggling with the thing that a lot of people who are marginalized struggle with, which is: why would you tell stories that are so sad and so difficult? What’s the point of sharing a story in which so many bad things happen when nothing’s going to change? You think that if you’re going to share a story, and it goes to the gut of your pain, people are going to care and they’re going to do something about it? The hardest thing for Violet, and I know this is true of a lot of marginalized folks, is when you bleed on the page, when you share these sad stories that have happened to you and people just continue to go about their day, that’s worse than never sharing the story because you can’t pretend that people don’t know.

HLR: There are many scenes in the novel that must have been painful to write. I am thinking, in

particular, of a scene where a beloved newborn baby is branded with two Xs on the backs of his tiny hands.

HLR: Elimina’s arrival at the Livingstone Academy marks a period of loneliness that asks her to rethink her concept of family. She quickly discovers that “Alone is the hardest way of all” and “Love that is taken is the worst.” What can we, as readers, learn about family from Gutter Child?

JR: One of the most tragic things about the history of Black folks in America, for sure, but even across the diaspora, is the ways in which family and community have been robbed and taken from us. One of the most difficult parts in writing this book was thinking about the backstory behind how this whole system came about and realizing that if I knew where I was from, where my family was from, which African country we originated from, I would have likely gone to those traditions. There are fifty-four countries in Africa. I have no idea where my family is from, and I’ll never really know where my ancestors are from. When writing the book, there was a real sense, almost like a new robbery that I came across. I’d always been told my history as it relates to slavery and the Emancipation Proclamation and all the things that happened in the States and I’d never really thought about the fact that I’m actually the descendant of kings and queens and farmers and political leaders and elders and all these people who had significant roles in their community. I also think, all my life, I was surrounded by a lot of white people; to be honest, I wasn’t around a lot of Black folks, so I actually grew to be kind of afraid or unsure

HLR: This next question begins with a gush… You are brilliant and multi-talented, revered and respected. You are also one of the hardest working people in your field. As a visionary, successful entrepreneur and festival director, cultural commentator, activist, mother, and, not least of all, writer, how do you stay energized and focused? And how do you continue to prioritize writing amidst so many competing passions?

I’d never really thought about the fact that I’m actually the descendant of kings and queens and farmers and political leaders and elders…

JR: I think part of it is recognizing that I come from a great amount of privilege. Knowing that most of my life has been full of comfort and ease in a way that makes me capable of doing this work at this time in my life. That empowers me to do more work: I feel like if I’ve been given more room financially, then I will make more room financially for others.

That’s my mission, that’s probably my driving force—recognizing that when people have opportunities, when they’re given exposure, they can change their circumstances, they can change their world, they can change their lives, and that’s the big goal behind what I do. It’s been really important for me to stay true to the things that I’m deeply passionate about so that I’m never exhausted.

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JR: I felt bad about giving people this book, to be honest—especially at the time that it came out [during the pandemic]. I would have loved to have written a romance at this time and give people things that would have made them smile and laugh and relax. I know that that’s not the book I was meant to write, so all I could do was kind of prepare people. The other thing I think is really important is that suffering and struggle have been a part of my life and my family’s legacy, and we have learned to find joy and celebration, so I think it’s also important to recognize that it’s not all suffering. It’s about finding the balance in the suffering.

about my own community, and that’s, I think, what Elimina comes across at the start of the book. She’s been apart from her people for so long, she’s heard stories that aren’t true or that have been twisted and now she’s at a point, as a young woman, where she’s afraid of her own skin. This is the saddest and most difficult part of life and it’s why I wrote Gutter Child. I wanted young people, at an early age, to be able to come across a story that made them realize that family is everything and it’s not just the family that are blood-related.

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HLR: What have you learned from the authors and storytellers who’ve shared their work on the FOLD’s stages?

JR: When you look at the FOLD [Festival of Literary Diversity], you might think that the people who work behind it, myself included, are these people who’ve arrived and who know all about diversity and inclusion. The truth is, when I first started, I didn’t know all these things about diversity and inclusion. For me, it was more about paying attention to people who’ve always been there but who just didn’t get the kind of attention they deserved. I knew this reality from experiencing it myself, but I definitely learned much more about it by seeing all the different layers and intersections that are being impacted by a system that favours one particular kind of storyteller, one particular version of “Canadian.”

Working on the festival, I’ve learned about the challenges that trans writers face, that disabled writers face. It’s made me a better writer because I’m thinking more about other people’s experiences and I’m more aware. I say this all the time: it’s not something that’s ever done, it’s not a process that’s complete. It’s a process that’s ongoing.

And I change with every book that I read, with every author we bring to the festival, with every panel that I sit in on, I’m changed and I’m growing. And it’s a cyclical process that impacts my writing. It just keeps going and it’s a real blessing.

HLR: Last spring, without missing a beat, the FOLD seamlessly transitioned to an online platform. I am interested in hearing about some of the benefits, perhaps some unexpected, the virtual space has offered to the festival’s artists and audiences.

JR: What was interesting for us in making the FOLD go virtual is that we really didn’t feel like we had an option. There were three options: we could cancel, postpone, or continue. Cancelling or postponing seemed like a disaster because, for marginalized communities, it seemed like the worst of times to cancel or postpone. I don’t even think we were really thinking about whether it would be successful. I think it was just whether it was possible. What I learned through the success of the events is that an online space, virtual spaces, are critical, and I think they’re going to be critical going forward. Anyone who is like, “Well

as soon as all this is over, I’m never doing another Zoom event,” is confused, because I think the truth of the matter is virtual festivals have increased the concept of accessibility in an entirely important and new way. It’s great to be able to watch an event in my pyjamas in my home. It is great, if you’re not physically able to be in a space or you don’t physically want to be in a space, to have the option to participate from a distance.

HLR: I’ve been doing a lot of thinking around the shift to online in the realm of education because it really has opened things up for people who want to attend post-secondary, but may have a family to care for at home, or maybe they’re a few hours away from campus.

JR: I was talking to someone recently about book launches and was saying, you know, we have spent years building up the concept of a book launch that’s physical and, yes, there are things like book sales that work way better in person than they do virtually right now. But that doesn’t mean that the virtual space is a bad idea; it just means we have to build up the capacity for it. I feel like when people are like, “I wish it had been in person,” we’re forgetting the reality of in-person events. When I had a book launch in January, I remember logging in and seeing my cousins from Bermuda log in and I just thought, right away, like this, this is special. ///

JAEL RICHARDSON

IS THE AUTHOR OF THE STONE THROWER: A DAUGHTER’S LESSON, A FATHER’S LIFE, A MEMOIR BASED ON HER RELATIONSHIP WITH HER FATHER, CFL QUARTERBACK CHUCK EALEY. THE STONE THROWER WAS ADAPTED INTO A CHILDREN’S BOOK IN 2016 AND WAS SHORTLISTED FOR A CANADIAN PICTURE BOOK AWARD. RICHARDSON IS A BOOK COLUMNIST AND GUEST HOST ON CBC’S Q. SHE HOLDS AN MFA IN CREATIVE WRITING FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF GUELPH AND LIVES IN BRAMPTON, ONTARIO, WHERE SHE FOUNDED AND SERVES AS THE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR FOR THE FESTIVAL OF LITERARY DIVERSITY (FOLD). HER DEBUT NOVEL, GUTTER CHILD, IS PUBLISHED BY HARPERCOLLINS CANADA, AND HAS BEEN SHORTLISTED FOR THE AMAZON FIRST NOVEL AWARD.

REVIEWS

In his debut collection, Model Disciple, Michael Prior dealt with family history and summative wisdom. His second collection, Burning Province, explores the roots of trauma, intergenerational memory, transformation, and significant words keenly linked to these subjects empirically or historically. A twofold elegy, Burning Province signals a home aflame, referring to the wildfires that ravaged B.C. in 2015 and 2017. It also confronts familial loss encompassing the traumatic ignominy of Japanese-Canadian internment during World War II. The first poem, “A Hundred and Fifty Pounds,” opens with a metaphor that encapsulates the pain of an afflicted, shrinking humanity: “In some, the luggage lies open / like a mouth mid-sentence. / In others, closed zippers grimace.” Contextualizing his grandparents’ abrupt displacement, loss of home, and brutal internment, Prior’s language shrinks in lines such as “the pained mind to the space / inside a suitcase,” and “a tiny, uninsulated shack,” where meagre belongings are relics of valid fears. Many poems form a constellation on a similar theme, their imagery rife with images of things broken, unstitched, rotting, burnt, ashen. His grandparents recall the “midnight funerals” during wartime imprisonment and the “black hole of a body unbodied by heat,” which is another way of crystallizing the inhospitableness of place or landscape. The interweaving is reinforced with recurring images of heat, flame, and ash. This brilliant biracial poet depicts “fires metastasizing through the Interior,” and sometimes, in twisting pastoral tropes, he attempts to deal with family history, self, and the world in a poetic conjugation of past and present. In “Georgic” (which recalls Virgil), he asserts “the landscape [he] was made for” and tells a story in which his great-grandfather tended a strawberry farm; and in “Pastoral,” he marks

an erasure of ancestral dignity and identity that remains in his psyche. This is the sort of modification of mood, person, and tense practised by poets of different temperaments and ethnicity, such as Derek Walcott, Dionne Brand, Ocean Vuong, Natalie Diaz, Jericho Brown, and Billy-Ray Belcourt, all of whom are able to fold time upon itself, recognizing that personal histories move in curves rather than straight lines.

In literary nods to Virgil, Katherine Anne Porter, Robert Lowell, Annie Dillard, Joan Didion, James Schuyler, and others, Prior practises more than ekphrases as either vivid description of an art object or a rhetorical exercise in the voice of a person or object, as manifested by poets such as John Ashbery’s recalling the art of Parmigianino in Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror or Anne Carson’s “Hopper: Confessions,” where she conflates the art of Edward Hopper and the philosophy and theology of St. Augustine. He moves between past and present, interior and exterior, the real and imagined, in order to uncover and engage with vexations of cultural memory. And his expert repertoire of internal rhyme, assonance, and emblem enhances and embellishes his craft. So do his allusions to contemporary technological fads or media touchstones (Hollywood fantasies of war and the defeat of evil), his quasi-metaphysical sophistication conjoined to a skilful application of folding one image into another (learned, of course, from Japanese origami) in an act of implicit transformation and complexity (“In Cloud Country”), and his virtuoso use of metaphor: fire, for example, acts amorphously, bursting into flame, the speaker’s sorrow over loss flaring up in unexpected ways and places.

The collection uses various journeys into memory as vital markers of deterioration and inheritance, a process that can be noted in lines such as “What matters is not what you bring, / but what you keep”; “Of how what’s outside / fades what’s within”; “wait by the fire for an obsidian mask / to fill with ash—to unbecome its pain.” Each of the two sections of this collection ends with a poem that marks a difference in the poet’s

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BURNING PROVINCE

By Michael Prior (McClelland & Stewart) Reviewed by Keith Garebian

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psychic direction. The first section is more heavily concentrated on family suffering, loss, inheritance (good and bad), so it leans inward while covering the past. The second section ends with “Wakeful Things,” which gestures outward—where the image of fire (as something destructive) changes into sunlight (“each morning’s / patchwork blur of light”)—thereby pointing to a more hopeful psychological and cognitive state, where hope is implicit even in the open-ended question “what do they hold?” Michael Prior’s dexterous genius is substantiated in this aesthetically well-wrought collection.

SAGA BOY

By Antonio Michael Downing (Viking) Reviewed by Neil Price Deciding what to include or exclude in a memoir is often a great challenge for a writer. There are so many competing events, so many layers of experience to pack into one volume. It’s even more difficult to write a memoir when the author presents many different selves that require explanation, as is the case with Antonio Michael Downing’s second book, Saga Boy. Downing was born in southern Trinidad and Tobago, or simply “south” as locals call the region. In the first section of his book, he recounts a childhood guided by the loving care of his grandmother, Ms. Excelly, who, in classic Caribbean fashion, raises Downing in place of parents who have absconded for lives overseas. Downing makes it clear that his values and ways of knowing are informed by his grandmother’s deep religious faith and fortitude: “I grew up understanding that Caribbean women were deep wells of resilience from which all around them drew water.”

Downing’s formative years are shaped by his awe and gratitude for the lush hills and gullies of rural Trinidad. The “bush,” where Downing encounters the beauty of the land and its people, is “really a rainforest, and it spread its wings everywhere. It was an ocean of thick bristling green.” In elegant and controlled prose,

the author describes an isolated community in which folklore and mystery abound. His mesmerizing environment teems with subtropical fauna and flora.

While there isn’t much money to go around, the people of Monkeytown have a sense of living amid abundance.

We’ve grown accustomed to books featuring life in Trinidad’s vibrant capital, Port of Spain, but rarely are we invited into an engrossing story about life in the countryside, which, as Downing puts it, was “full of monsters but it was also full of miracles.”

There is also the centrality of pain and dislocation in Downing’s story, where he writes about being sexually abused as a child and subjected to brutal punishments that cause him to go in search of safety and understanding. With his parents absent for most of his life, the author recounts how he never felt settled or assured. Despite his grandmother’s immense love and guidance, he’s unable to answer fundamental questions about himself or his immediate family. It’s this desire to bring together what has been left asunder that drives the book’s narrative.

At the age of eleven, Downing and his brother move to Canada. He arrives in Wabigoon, Ontario, where he is daunted by his new community and its climate: “When a nor’wester brings a blizzard, it howls at the world like a demented animal. A faceless animal the size of God.” In a mostly white town surrounded by dense forests, Downing becomes keenly aware of his Blackness. He feels estranged and distrustful of those around him and longs to return to Trinidad. Soon there is strife and tension at home borne out of his aunt’s religious strictures and her efforts to keep an increasingly wayward nephew on the narrow path.

Moving into his teens, Downing reconnects with his parents and meets other siblings. These are momentous events that usher both joy and struggle into his life. After years of shuttling around between homes and dealing with a steady stream of personal and family problems, Downing falls into substance abuse and gets entangled with the criminal justice system. It is to free himself from constant turmoil that Downing seeks

ERASE AND REWIND

By Meghan Bell (Book*hug Press) Reviewed by Shazia Hafiz Ramji Meghan Bell’s debut collection of short stories, Erase and Rewind, borrows its title from the Cardigans’ song of the same name, released in 1998. “Hey, what did you hear me say?” sings the frontwoman, Nina Persson.

“You know the difference it makes… I said it’s fine before, but I don’t think so no more.” Like the song, the stories in Bell’s collection are about women changing their minds and learning to assert themselves as they navigate coming-of-age, desire, and baby-making through ice hockey, Netflix, and mandrakes.

In the title story that opens the collection, a stoned math student discovers she can reverse time shortly after leaving the house of a guy whom she has reluctantly accepted as a boyfriend of sorts. As the story unfolds in reverse chronological order in the span of twelve days, Louisa questions the reality of what happened between

them, detailing the looming question of consent during a night of intoxication. The unnamed omniscient narrator interrupts the descending chronology to tell us Three Things to Know about Louisa, revealing her conflicted emotions after learning about feminism, her self-described “prudishness,” and 423 photographs chronicling her experimentation with alcohol, cannabis, and ecstasy, eleven of which were taken within the last four hours on Day Eleven of the chronology. The vulnerability of Louisa coupled with Bell’s minimalist, snappy dialogue, characterizes the daring stakes of the collection as a whole, which touches on topics such as assault, without being didactic.

In the second story, “Faking It,” a group of young girls in an elite ice hockey league are on a plane that catches fire.

One of them posits that the opposing team of Albertans won because they had a ton of lesbians, and that “lesbians are better athletes. Because they have more testosterone.

Like men.” This glimpse of teenage malice shatters into a hierarchy among the girls, who form cliques and drink in secret during their trip. The socially awkward protagonist, Annie, admits: “the more I pretended to connect, the more I was convinced that everyone could see that I was faking it.” The voice of Annie, simultaneously self-aware and earnest, is typical of the tensions of belonging and alienation that simmer throughout.

In “Lighthouse Park,” a popular queer woman, Jenny, befriends her late best friend Courtney’s sister, Christine. They go to a party together and Jenny drunkenly kisses Christine. A boy tries to poke fun at Jenny’s attempt to get the “next best thing,” but quiet Christine lashes out and knocks him down. A surprising tenderness emerges later in the story, when Jenny and Christine watch Netflix together, speaking. Their connection speaks volumes about the way grief moves through the characters as only they can understand.

Erase and Rewind is a bold and nuanced collection of stories, where women lose and find themselves through depression, desire, and friendship, only to become more wholly themselves, on their own terms—a distinctive, feminist book.

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solace in adopting different personas and guises that offer creative outlets for self-experimentation. On his way to becoming a touring punk-band musician, he is sometimes referred to as Tony, while at other times he’s Mic Dainjah, or John, each name bringing the possibility of transformation and security. “All I wanted was a home,” writes Downing. “For the ground to stop shifting beneath my feet. For something, anything, to stay the same long enough for me to feel rooted.”

Downing’s story conveys a young man’s quest to assemble his fragments of origin in order to shape a life of meaning and purpose. What makes Saga Boy an achingly compelling account concerning the search for identity and belonging is how Downing manages to keep together what—in the hands of a less skilful writer—could have become an unwieldy and overwrought narrative. The coming-of-age memoir may be well-trodden territory, but Downing brings to it a fresh and daring perspective that both bewilders and delights.

REVIEWS // 68

AUTOTHEORY AS FEMINIST PRACTICE IN ART, WRITING, AND CRITICISM

By Lauren Fournier (MIT Press) Reviewed by Suzanne Zelazo Lauren Fournier’s capacious study, Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism, is the first comprehensive genealogical exploration of autotheory as a genre. Although indebted to much earlier feminist artistic practices, Fournier situates autotheory within third and fourth wave feminism, specifically as a post1960s artistic practice foregrounding an intersectionality that expands the ethics and aesthetics of thinking and being. Emerging as a response to hegemonic modes (and thinkers) that exclude, invalidate, silence, or erase subjects, autotheory is theory as performance and embodiment. More specifically, it is the theory of the lived experiences of women, including nonbinary and gender-nonconforming folks who, as Fournier explains, “integrate the personal and the critical, the theoretical and the autobiographical, the creative and the critical, in ways attuned to interdisciplinary feminist histories.”

Thus, autotheory insists not simply that who and what we are, and how we think and engage with the world, is valid, but also that it is inseparable from our creative and intellectual enterprise.

The term autotheory gained currency in 2015 with the publication of Maggie Nelson’s genre-defining memoir-as-theory, The Argonauts. As Fournier points out, a number of socio-cultural shifts within intellectual institutions accompanied a growing engagement with autotheory, including the systematic transition of many art colleges into universities and the resulting graduate-degree programs in studio practice.

As a writer, curator, filmmaker, and current postdoctoral fellow in visual studies at the University of Toronto, Fournier herself integrates the academic and creative with an embodied cognition that merges her own sensing, artmaking, and curatorial practice into her consideration of feminist histories. In so doing, her text

enacts its content. There is a multi-dimensionality to the materiality of the MIT Press edition. Rather than being a dense theoretical tome, the text is populated with a number of sensuous, defiant, provocative film stills and photographs of multivalent artworks.

Among the most evocative aspects of the text is a general aim at decentring.. Fournier gives considerable attention to inverting margins, both structurally and conceptually, primarily through Nelson’s The Argonauts, Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick, and Adrian Piper’s 1971 body art performance Food for the Spirit, which she recasts as a precursor to autotheory. As heavily citational works, all three nudge the margins inward.

Fournier explains: “Autotheory has an interesting relationship with margins, and writers and artists who work autotheoretically often extend the conceit of writing, annotating, and scribbling in the margins in conceptual ways.” Nelson, for example, weaves summaries and excerpts of theory into her memoir, placing the theorist’s name in the margin rather than demarcating a separateness in the text, thereby enfolding those citations. Kraus’s metacharacter also engages with the simultaneity of marginal voices, marking up her husband’s copy of Heidegger’s La question de la technique, for example, with thoughts about her love for Dick. “[T]he woman’s act of marking in the margins becomes a way of writing with it and beside it, possibly subverting it along the way,” writes Fournier. Considered alongside Piper’s body art interpolation of Immanuel Kant, Fournier highlights how autotheorists question what constitutes the/a body-text.

Even as the citational is used to liberating effect, Fournier is not afraid to address where it threatens to cannibalize. She concedes there is such a thing as bad autotheory—the accessibility, openness, and possibility of the genre put it at risk of being co-opted by facile enactments or of sliding down the slippery slope of narcissism that the genre is, in many ways, a response to.

Despite the “aporias of autotheory” though, Fournier insists on its outward aim: “While autotheory is predicated on the self, it is by no means solipsistic.”

MEMPHIS MAYHEM: A STORY OF THE MUSIC THAT SHOOK UP THE WORLD

By David Less (ECW Press) Reviewed by Andrew Scott There is an often repeated historical narrative that when the Beatles landed in America in February 1964 for their debut performance on The Ed Sullivan Show—apocryphally known as “the night that not a hubcap was stolen in America”—that not only did the Fab Four galvanize the American listening public, they “saved” American music from its nadir of predigested pabulum of assembly-line Brill Building composers and the commensurate rise of “teen idols,” many of whom had filled the rock ’n’ roll listening void left by the deaths of Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens. The Beatles were great, of course, and perhaps never more so than during those early performances. Yet this hegemonic historical trope serves largely to erase Black music from the historical narrative (other than singling out individual progenitors or British Invasion antecedents as inspirational: Ike Turner, Louis Jordan, Jackie Brenston), while systemically ignoring

community movements, territorial bands, regional sounds, vernacular musical styles, and, simply put, the multiplicity of rich traditions of Black soul, gospel, rhythm and blues, and jazz that could, most certainly, be found in the United States pre-Beatles.

I thought about this confounding historical practice while reading David A. Less’s comprehensive and well-written Memphis Mayhem, a book that aims to celebrate a music that, prior to the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King at that city’s Lorraine Motel, transcended race and genre. If Less’s authorial mission is to tackle the subject matter and history on their own terms—a goal more gleaned than stated outright (particularly so in the hilarious story about an initial jam and meeting between drummer Blair Cunningham and Paul McCartney, where the Memphis-born Cunningham told McCartney, then jamming on guitar, that the two of them could really go places if they could only find a decent bass player)— then Less succeeds. Just as the Beatles did not need Leonard Bernstein to “legitimate” their music by “classicizing” and buttressing their “genius,” stating that they were “our age’s Schubert” (not that the Beatles did not accrue significant cultural capital from this endorsement), Less is successful in stickhandling around the familiar trap of this sort of historical writing where, for example, the voices of British Invasion musicians are used to explain “why” Memphis music or other Black American musical styles are historically important. Thankfully, instead, Memphis Mayhem is framed twofold around the author’s research and primary-source interviews with many of the principals of this city’s music, and through the lens of his own recollections, memories, and anecdotes amassed as a historian and third-generation “Memphian.”

While the result perhaps lacks the scholarly rigour of, say, Rob Bowman’s definitive Soulsville, U.S.A.: The Story of Stax Records, a book that mines a similar history and musical theme, Memphis Mayhem benefits from the author’s engaging first-person participatory journalistic tone, which adds narratives to the history and to the ever-growing corpus of information on Memphis music. ///

REVIEWS // 69

Although driven by art history, the book is also future-oriented, as Fournier examines the impact of autotheory within activism and the post-internet context.

From Stacey Young to Montreal-based Latinx artist @ gotshakira, Fournier demonstrates the reach, impact, and possibilities of autotheory to process the body-mind of self as a valuable and generative lens through which to engage in meaning-making, while harnessing the political power of doing so to resist and revolutionize forms of oppression. Autotheory, by its nature, has the power to cultivate empathy. The book, then, is also a call to arms, poignant in the wake of #MeToo and Black Lives Matter—not simply showcasing marginalized perspectives, but also underscoring the ways that doing so allows for the rich reciprocity of self and other. “The singular can be a gateway to the multiple,” Fournier insists. “And in theorizing together we may, after all, hear ourselves.”

CONTRIBUTORS // 70

CONTRIBUTORS GLORIA BLIZZARD is a Black Canadian woman of mixed heritage, with links to the middle passage, surrounded by European culture, living on the Indigenous lands of the Americas. With deep interests in music, dance, science, race, culture, language, and spirituality, she brings these perspectives to essays, poetry, and reviews. Gloria has a Master of Fine Arts from the University of King’s College and is working on her first full-length book of essays.

LOGAN BROECKAERT is a graduate of the University of Toronto’s Creative Writing Program. Logan’s essay collection, Boyish, was a finalist for the 2019 Marina Nemat Award for Creative Writing. Logan’s work has appeared in Room and on the Invisiblog and is forthcoming in Tongues: An Anthology on Longing and Belonging through Language.

Originally from northern California, LARA COK spent time in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and Waterloo, Ontario, before settling in Toronto, where she now lives.

She has an MA in English literature from the University of Toronto, where she won the E.J. Pratt Poetry Medal and the University of Toronto Magazine alumni poetry contest. Her work has been published widely across Canada, including in Arc, CV2, the Dalhousie Review, and Prairie Fire, as well as work in corporate communications. Her first book, Doubter’s Hymnal, was published by Mansfield Press in 2019.

EUNICE CU is launching a second career as a writer and freelance editor after practising as a clinical pharmacist in her homeland of New Zealand. When it comes to life, she has more questions than answers, but finds that writing and surrounding herself with people in the same boat helps her figure it out.

FRANCINE CUNNINGHAM is an award-winning Indigenous writer, artist, and educator, and a graduate of the UBC Creative Writing MFA program. Cunningham’s work was long-listed for the 2018 Edna Staebler Personal Essay Contest, won the 2019 Indigenous Voices Award for unpublished prose, and won the 2018 Short Grain Writing Contest. Her fiction has also appeared

on the Malahat Review’s Far Horizon’s prose shortlist, in Joyland, the Puritan, and more. On/Me is her first book and has been nominated for the inaugural B.C. and Yukon Book Award Jim Deva Prize for Writing that Provokes and the 2020 Indigenous Voices Award in Poetry.

KEITH GAREBIAN has published twenty-seven books to date, eight of which are poetry collections, such as Frida: Paint Me as a Volcano (2004), Blue: The Derek Jarman Poems (2008), Children of Ararat (2010), Poetry Is Blood (2018), and Against Forgetting (2019). Several of his poems have been anthologized in Canada and the U.S., and one of his Jarman poems was set to music for choir and instruments by Gregory Spears, in the company of a poem each by Thomas Merton and Denise Levertov. Garebian has been shortlisted for the gritLIT, Freefall magazine, and the Gwendolyn MacEwen/Exile poetry awards, and his poems have been translated widely.

SHELLY KAWAJA is a current MFA student in creative writing at UBC and her work has previously appeared in The Dalhousie Review, WORD Magazine, Postcolonial Text, and CBC online, and she is the winner of the 2020 gritLIT short story contest. She is a cultural historian and fiction writer living in the small coastal community of Norris Point on the northern peninsula of Newfoundland.

CARA NELISSEN is a queer writer currently living on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples (Vancouver, B.C.). She’s the author of the chapbook Pray for Us Girls (Rahila’s Ghost Press, 2019) and her work has been published in Plenitude, CV2, Vallum, untethered, and Grain.

COLE PAULS is a Tahltan comic artist, illustrator, and printmaker hailing from Haines Junction (Yukon Territory), with a BFA in illustration from Emily Carr University. Residing in Vancouver, Pauls focuses on his two comic series, Pizza Punks, a self-contained comic strip about punks eating pizza, and Dakwäkãda Warriors. In 2017, Pauls won Broken Pencil’s Best Comic and Best Zine of the Year Award for Dakwäkãda Warriors II. In 2020,

SARA PATTERSON is a Toronto-based writer. Their work has appeared in publications such as South Florida Poetry Journal (forthcoming), YES Poetry, Minola Review, Plenitude Magazine, and Sinking City Review. In 2020 they were long-listed for the PRISM Jacob Zilber short fiction prize. Find more at saralpatterson.com.

JOHN PENDER is a musician and freelance writer and holds an MA in English from the University of Waterloo. He lives in Kitchener.

KLARA DU PLESSIS is a South African-Canadian poet who writes in both English and Afrikaans. Her debut poetry collection, Ekke, won the 2019 Pat Lowther Award and was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Award. Her second collection, Hell Light Flesh, was released in 2020.

NEIL PRICE is a writer and educator. His writing has appeared in NOW Magazine, the Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, Hazlitt, Canadian Art, and THIS Magazine.

SHAZIA HAFIZ RAMJI is the author of Port of Being (Invisible Publishing), a finalist for the 2019 B.C. Book Prizes (Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize). It was named by CBC as a best Canadian poetry book of 2018 and received the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry. Shazia’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry Northwest, Best Canadian Poetry 2019, carte blanche, and Quill & Quire. She is at work on a novel.

VANESSA REID is a mother to three dogs and an admirer of the secret interior worlds of people. She teaches English in Tkaronto and loves it.

BEN ROBINSON is a poet, musician, and librarian living in Hamilton. His poetry has appeared in a number of literary journals, including Literary Review of Canada, Riddle Fence, and the Puritan; his chapbooks include Without Form, Keeps on Running, and Dept. of Continuous Improvement.

ANDREW SCOTT lives in Toronto in a house amongst children, antiquated technology of yesteryear, and many, many instruments. From this location, he makes music, writes letters, narrates radio dramas, composes poems, and submits journalistic pieces. He is a professor and the program coordinator of Humber’s Bachelor of Music program.

KELLY S. THOMPSON is a writer and retired military officer with a Master’s in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia and is a PhD candidate at the University of Gloucestershire. Kelly won the House of Anansi Press Golden Anniversary Award, the 2014 and 2017 Barbara Novak Award for Personal Essay, and was shortlisted for Room’s 2013, 2014, and 2019 Creative Nonfiction awards. Her work has appeared in the Globe and Mail, Carte Blanche, Chatelaine, Maclean’s, and Maisonneuve, and her military memoir, Girls Need Not Apply (McClelland & Stewart), was an instant Globe and Mail National Bestseller. Her second memoir, Still, I Cannot Save You, will release with M&S in spring 2022.

PHOEBE TSANG is a Hong Kong–born Chinese, British, and Canadian poet, author, librettist, and playwright, and the author of Contents of a Mermaid’s Purse (Tightrope Books). Her fiction has appeared in Asia Literary Review, the Bombay Review, Rivet Journal, Geist, and Litro Magazine. Her libretti have been premiered by orchestras and ensembles including the Canadian Sinfonietta, Hamilton Philharmonic, and Tapestry Opera. www.phoebetsang.com.

SUZANNE ZELAZO is a writer, editor, and educator.

She holds a PhD in English with a specialty in female modernism and avant-garde poetry and performance.

Her projects seek to integrate creative expression and the body. She is the author of two collections of poetry, Lances All Alike and Parlance from Coach House Books, and is editor or co-editor of several books on female artists. ///

CONTRIBUTORS // 71

Dakwäkãda Warriors won Best Work in an Indigenous Language from the Indigenous Voices Awards and was nominated in two Doug Wright Award categories.

[FEATURED ARTIST]

ELAINE WHITTAKER ELAINE WHITTAKER // 72

ELAINEWHITTAKER.CA

ELAINE WHITTAKER’S TRANSDISCIPLINARY ART practice considers biology as contemporary art practice.

This practice is based principally in installation, sculpture, painting, and photo-based digital imagery. Her artworks incorporate a range of materials—from the traditional, such as paint, pigment, and wax, to the unconventional, such as mosquitoes, grown salt crystals, live microorganisms, and human, animal, and plant cells.

Whittaker explores the forces that make us human, from the foundational processes and materials needed to form an organism, to the microscopic world of cellular ecologies. Within these worlds she investigates how culture expresses its fear of microbes. With globalization and climate change, our environment has become fragile and vulnerable. In this unsettling time of epidemics and pandemics, our bodies are even more permeable to emerging and re-emerging viruses and contagions. Recent artworks centre on the body as a site of infection, reflecting on narratives of hope and anxiety that are equally found in popular culture, scientific research, and personal experience.

Whittaker has exhibited in art and science galleries and museums in Canada, France, Italy, U.K., Ireland, Latvia, China, South Korea, Australia, Mexico, and the

U.S. As artist-in-residence at the Pelling Laboratory for Augmented Biology, University of Ottawa, since 2016, she has collaborated with scientists creating hybrid artworks of plant and human cells, exhibiting one in the exhibition La Fabrique du Vivant at Le Centre Pompidou, Paris (2019). She has exhibited regularly at the Red Head Gallery in Toronto; her installation I Caught It at the Movies, movie stills incorporating live Halobacteria, was also shown in the exhibition Toxicity by Video Pool at the Plug In Institute for Contemporary Art, Winnipeg (2013). Screened For, her series of digital self-portraits wearing masks painted with infectious diseases (2015), has been exhibited extensively, both nationally and internationally, and highlighted in art, literary, and medical journals. Her artworks are also featured in William Myers’s book Bio Art: Altered Realities (Thames & Hudson, 2015) and in On Media, On Technology, On Life: Interviews with Innovators (River Publishers, 2021) by Arthur Clay and Timothy J. Senior. She has been a recipient of grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Toronto Arts Council. She is an active member in the artist collective of the Red Head Gallery in Toronto since 2004. ///

AVAILABLE JUNE 1 A diverse anthology of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction from writers in the mental health and addiction communities.

The authors of the pieces collected in this anthology are clad in brilliance… Through their collective vulnerabilities and sensitivities, they seek to guide and welcome us into a community of bravery and battered hearts.

—ROXANNA BENNET T, winner of the Trillium Award for Poetry

JAEL RICHARDSON // KELLY S. THOMPSON // LAURA COK // ELAINE WHITTAKER // EUNICE CU // PHOEBE TSANG // BEN ROBINSON // GLORIA BLIZZARD // VANESSA REID // SARA PATTERSON // SHELLY KAWAJA // COLE PAULS // JOHN PENDER // LOGAN BROECKAERT // CARA NELISSEN // KLARA DU PLESSIS // FRANCINE CUNNINGHAM //

Hu m ber L iter a ryR ev i ew.com