NorthWord Literary Magazine - Volume 1, Issue 1

.ORTH7ORD volume 1 | number 1 | june 2009 | $9.50

A LITERARY JOURNAL OF CANADA´S NORTH

Northern Canada Collective Society for Writers’ Statement of Purpose: To publish and support the work of writers in northern Canada. call for submissions: Calling All Writers

Issue number 2 of NorthWord will be published in Fall of 2009. We are looking for short stories or excerpts from current projects, fiction or nonfiction (3000 words maximum), verse of no more than 50 lines, along with anything surprising, original, evocative or inventive. If it can be published, we’re interested.

Your work does not necessarily have to be about the north, but preference will be given to those that are.

Please submit to The Editors, northerncanadacollective@gmail.com

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northword: A Literary Journal of Canada’s North

the northern canada collective for supporting writers president Jennifer Hemstock treasurer Suzanne McGladdery secretary Linda Black managing editor Blair Hemstock members Elizabeth Abel, Douglas Abel, Patricia Budd, Dawn Farrell, Jane Jacques, Kiran Malik-Khan, Kevin Thornton. e-mail northerncanadacollective@gmail.com web page http://northerncanadacollective.shawwebspace.ca/

cover & art Trevor Michael design, logo, colophon & layout Kathleen Jacques artistic support Robin Smith-Peck

Those of us living farther into the winter margin of Canada need to work harder for our literary moments. Cable television and internet connections provide umbilical cords to popular entertainment, but there are fewer opportunities for rare and uncommon delights. NorthWord is intended to provide such opportunities.

editors Blair & Jennifer Hemstock

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Winter comes to Kangirslugaarjuk, 1910

Ken Haigh

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The English Gentleman

Gordon McEachern

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My Cup of Tea

The Making of Linen — novel excerpt Six Haikus Reflecting the Rain The Changes of the Moon Ain’t Gonna Happen

reinalie jorolan

Jennifer Hemstock Douglas Abel Douglas Abel Jane Jacques

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Staring Over

Kevin Thornton

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Bloodless

Kiran Malik-Khan

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The Northern Sun Snow

Marginalia — a column

NorthWord is published by the Northern Canada Collective for Supporting Writers (NCCSW) as a venue for supporting Northern writers and literature about the North. Based in Fort McMurray, Alberta, the NCCSW will publish NorthWord twice yearly, rotating editors and themes from issue to issue. We encourage you to join with us as a reader, contributor and patron.

Northrop Frye once noted that most Canadians live within one hundred miles of the United States border. Those who do, tend to look eastward, westward and southward more often than northward to the Bush Country that largely defines us. They also find literary experiences easier to come by.

This Issue: Volume 1, Number 1, June 2009

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elcome to the first issue of NorthWord, a literary magazine for Canadians far from the 49th parallel.

Kiran Malik-Khan

Reading this issue, we hope you will enjoy a collection of stories, poems and ideas that provides a new perspective. From haiku to historical fiction, from mythic parables to precision realism, our inaugural group of writers has provided some wonderful and worthwhile reading.

Please begin.

Blair Hemstock first issue editor

Suzanne McGladdery Douglas Abel

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Winter comes to Kangirslugaarjuk, 1910

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Ken Haigh

ummer was over and for a brief season the tundra blazed with colour.

Geese began their long migrations south and the sky was full of the song of their passing. A pod of narwhal was seen in the bay, and hunters sought them with skin boats and bone harpoons. Two whales were taken and towed to the beach where the entire community joyfully gutted them, feasting on the blubber, rendering oil for their lamps, making maktaaq, and caching what they couldn’t eat under stone cairns. Polar bears paced the shore, gaunt and moth-eaten, waiting for the sea to freeze, for the fat time of seal hunting and mating. Bears became a nuisance, wandering into the huddle of tents in search of dogs and unguarded children. Ross gained stature by killing another bear, and though the skin was not the best, Arnaq made him a pair of trousers, promising a better pair if he could get her a winter pelt.

Then the first of the winter storms struck the settlement. This was the time of heavy snowfall.

For the rest of the year, the snow that accumulated now would blow hither and yon, growing hard, compacting into drifts, filling in the deep draws in the gravel benches along the shore. Fog hovered over the water in the bay—called qitsuktoq, or “smoke,” in Inuktitut, a sure sign of winter.

The salt water began to freeze; the swells became elastic, composed of tightly packed pencils of ice that tinkled like a gamelan orchestra. Then one day they awoke, after a two-day blizzard, and it was winter. The sky was white, without definition, and the horizon vanished. The land was frozen hard in bands of snowdrift and gravel.

The sea was also solid but with its own geology.

The sea ice was never silent, never truly still. As it froze harder and deeper, it heaved, split; ice mountain ranges were thrown up; ice earth2

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quakes sundered the frozen sea in pistol shots of protest.

The time had come for Ashevak and his band to leave as well, to move out onto the sea ice and live in snow houses. They cached their summer clothing under heavy stones in the permafrost to protect them from foxes and mice. Sealskin was replaced with two layers of caribou. They would split into smaller family groups and search for the faults in the ice where the seals made their aglu, or breathing holes. Ross watched as they headed out onto the sea ice, qamutiqs laden with supplies, with dogs fanned out in front, straining against their harnesses of bearded seal skin. The hunters jogged alongside, trailing their whips.

They cheerfully waved goodbye. Once again, Ross was alone.

When the last of the tiny figures had disappeared around the dogtooth mountain at the mouth of the bay, Ross took a great breath and held it. The world had grown silent. Gone the chattering children, the barking dogs, the wind on the tent walls, the sharpening of tools, the breaking of marrowbones. Gone, all of it. Gone, all sound. In its place—nothing, a vacuum. It was unnerving.

He looked around. There was no movement, no life. He was alone in a frozen desert. He might have been the last man alive on earth, the last thing alive on earth. He shuddered and turned into his little hut. He stoked up the stove and vowed to give himself a little celebration. After weeks of raw meat, he opened a can of stew and baked some scones on an upturned plate nestled inside a cast iron pot. He cranked up the gramophone and rescued a bottle of single malt he had hidden in a trunk. As the shadows grew long outside his window, he brought the hurricane lamp to his table. He perused his small library.

Until now, he had been too busy to read, but now he relished the thought of escape. He selected The Scarlet Pimpernel, a sensation when he had left

home, and found the adjustment rather jarring.

The world described in the novel was so alien to the one he inhabited now; but the story exercised its magic, and soon he was snug in its grip. Outside, the wind picked up, the stars came out, but what was that to him? What had he to do on the morrow, besides replenish his coal scuttle?

Weeks passed by and winter tightened its grip.

The nights grew longer, as did the blue shadows in the folds of the mountains. Ross’s only companion was a raven who picked through the scraps around the tent site and who would cackle insanely to himself when he discovered a bit of frozen fish or a discarded bone. Occasionally, Ross would walk out on the ice. At the end of bay, where it joined the fjord, pressure cracks threw up great rafts of ice, and here, where the ice was thinner, Ross found breathing holes left by harp seals. Ross would crouch over a likely looking hole, harpoon balanced across his knees, waiting in silence for the gurgle of water and the soft whistle of the seal’s exhalation before driving his harpoon through the ice. Ross hunted more for diversion than necessity, but more often than not he found the endless waiting unbearable.

The sky weighed down on him; the utter silence was oppressive. Every crack in the ice made his heart leap in his chest. He felt so utterly small and alone, and he would head back to his cabin, stoke up the fire, turn on The Merry Widow, light his pipe, and start The Prisoner of Zenda or The Count of Monte Cristo for the fourth or fifth time.

By mid-November the sun had disappeared below the horizon. At midday each day, a false dawn appeared to the south, but it was always twilight, never sunrise. The aurora borealis crackled and rippled overhead. The wind picked up. Storm after storm moved in out of the north, and the wind roared down the long valleys and over the rolling tundra, gathering speed and fury as it progressed. There was nothing to stop it. The wind slammed into the house, rocked it, pummeled it with mallet-like fists. Ross heard voices in the wind, mad voices, voices imploring him to open his door. “Let us in,” hissed the wind.

“Oh, let us enter.” The sound of the wind was not a roar, but an almost human moaning, like an intake of breath, as if all of the wind in the world was being sucked through a very small hole. Ross slept late, though his sleep was anything but restful. His mind grew numb. He would sit for long hours in his wicker armchair, wrapped in a blanket, just staring at the fire in the grate, doing nothing. Then one day, just before Christmas, the last of the storms blew itself out.

Ross was awakened from his reverie by the sound of dogs barking. His numbness slowly faded.

Someone was coming.

Ross pulled on his skin clothing and rushed outside. Out on the white ice of the fjord, he could see four black dots approaching. He leapt in the air and waved his arms. “Hulloo! Hulloo!” The black dots became four sleds. The sleds drew closer. Ross could still not make out who was driving them, but he did not care. Company was company, and for two months he had not seen another human being.

The first sled slid up the shore, over the gravel beach, with a sharp hiss. The driver leapt from his sled, walrus hide whip in hand, and dove into the middle of the mêlée of snarling huskies. He pulled them apart, striking the recalcitrant across the nose, if they turned on him, with the butt end of his whip. Ross leapt in to help, pulling back the traces, separating the dogs. The driver threw back his caribou skin hood and gave Ross a wide gap-toothed grin.

“Rosh, I have come.” It was Ashevak.

Ross laughed aloud. “Yes, Ashevak, you have come.” He looked to the sled and nodded as Kooyoo rose stiffly to her feet, grinning. Ross looked about for Arnaq. His heart fell.

He looked to Ashevak. “Arnaq?”

Ashevak pointed to the second sled. Arnaq sat lightly atop the cargo that was lashed to the second sled and smiled demurely at Ross. Loping along behind the sled with long easy strides was a familiar slope-shouldered figure. Ah, thought

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Ross, so it’s come to this. He supposed he should not have been surprised. She wasn’t a child anymore.

The other two sleds brought strangers, friends of Ashevak’s from farther north, who wished to meet the new trader at Kangirslugaarjuk and to trade their furs. Ross invited them all into his home.

“Tomorrow, I will open the store,” he said. “Tonight, we will feast and tell stories.”

Ross ushered his visitors into the front room of his house. Some settled on the benches, others on the floor. The coal fire beyond the partition caused them to instantly shed clothes. Ross began brewing up large amounts of tea, doctored with copious dollops of condensed milk. His visitors grunted in appreciation, wiping the greasy sweat from their brows. Saittuq entered the room with a frozen seal carcass over his shoulder. He dropped it in the center of the room, where it fell to the floorboards with a clunk like a block of wood. The Inuit leaned forward and began carving shavings off the frozen seal with knives and ulus.

“Thank you,” said Ross.

“It is nothing,” shrugged Saittuq.

When they were sated with meat, Ross brought forward a peach pie he’d just baked. Hesitantly at first, the Inuit dipped their fingers through the crust and popped them in their mouths, licking off the syrup. Eyes grew round with appreciation.

The pie disappeared in an instant, and the empty pie plate clattered to the floor, licked clean.

“I will have to make more of that,” laughed Ross.

“In the meantime, let me get some jars of jam.”

Ross kept the tea coming as he quizzed Ashevak and the others about their hunt. Jars of jam made the rounds, as each person dipped their fingers in the jar and passed it round the circle. By now, the heat had grown to the point where the men and women had stripped down to bare chests. Eyes wrinkled with laughter. Children sat in their parents’ laps and listened wide-eyed to the stories.

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Ross looked around the circle and was glad he had come to the north. His eyes rested on Arnaq.

She curled herself into Saittuq’s thick shoulder as she listened to the talk. Even Saittuq seemed happy, his beetle-brow relaxed and expansive.

Arnaq’s eyes met Ross’s, and she wrinkled her nose mischievously. Saittuq noted the exchange and scowled.

“And what of your hunt, Qallunaat?” he asked.

“A few seals, Saittuq, but I do not have your skill,” acknowledged Ross, waving to the diminished carcass in the centre of the floor.

“Ungh,” grunted Saittuq, “It is well known that the white men have no skill in hunting. They are not true men.”

The room grew silent. While most of the people in the room agreed with Saittuq, not one would have had the bad manners to say such a thing.

Ashevak broke the silence.

“When Kooyoo and I first were married, it was a time of great hunger. Few are alive today who remember that terrible time. Hunger gnawed at our bellies like a fox. The old ones and the children suffered greatly. We had begun to eat the dogs.

I knew that if we did not find meat soon our people would die.

“Kooyoo and I set out to find seals. For two days we traveled by qamutiq over the ice, and, on the third day, we at last spotted a pattern of aglu on the ice. I crouched by the best h ole, waiting with my harpoon. I directed Kooyoo to take the dogs some distance away and drive in circles, hoping to force the seal to come to my breathing hole. I waited.” Ashevak paused dramatically and rose to his feet. He crouched, as if he were waiting for a seal, and tipped his head to one side.

“Then…I heard the seal’s breath, like this, pfft,” Ashevak puffed out his cheeks and the children’s eyes grew wide. “I plunged my harpoon deep into the seal’s neck. The point came off, and I held tight to the lanyard, as the seal struggled beneath the ice to escape. I yelled to Kooyoo to

come help. With the butt end of the harpoon shaft I broke the ice around the hole and hauled back on the lanyard. I began to drag the seal out onto the ice, but a terrible thing happened. The toggle came free, and the seal began to slide back under the ice. I tried to hold the seal in my hands, but it was too slippery. I was desperate. I did not want to lose this seal.” Ashevak turned to Ross, his face a serious mask. “Do you know what I did, Rosh?”

The others looked expectantly at Ross, a hint of a smile on their faces. Ross shook his head.

“I bit it, right on the end of the nose!” A roar of laughter went up. “But it was so heavy. It dragged me down the hole after it. When Kooyoo arrived with the qamutiq, I was kneeling on the ice with my head down the hole.”

Ashevak fell to his knees and rested his forehead on the floor. Now he began playing two parts, himself and Kooyoo, mimicking her higher voice.

acclaim. The audience was laughing helplessly, Ross included. Kooyoo was giggling hysterically, though she had heard the story many times before. Ross looked around the circle at his neighbours, at their greasy hair and caribou skins, their bad teeth and the Mongolian cast to their eyes, and he felt a great affection for them. At last, he thought, I’ve arrived. This is the somewhere I‘ve always wanted to be. Ashevak came over and sat beside Ross, a little winded from his performance, and slapped Ross on the shoulder.

“My jaw was so sore; I could not talk for five days.”

The Inuit stayed for three days. They traded their furs for cartridges, sugar, condensed milk, tea, calico cloth, and glass beads. Each evening was a repeat of the first, with feasting, dancing to the drum, and stories. On the third day, they broke camp, promising to be back when the sun returned. To Ross’s surprise, Arnaq stayed behind.

“Husband, what are you doing?”

Ashevak stuffed a sealskin mitten in his mouth and grunted loudly, “Mmm, Mmm, Mmm.” “Can I help you? Do you need something?”

“Mm! Mm!” “Mittens?”

“Ah-hmm!”

“A rope?”

“Um...arh!”

Finally, after many ridiculous suggestions—like a sewing kit, a stone lamp, dried fish, and rifle cartridges—his wife offers him a knife. Ashevak gropes for it blindly. He reaches down the hole and stabs the seal and drags it to the surface.

“That is why, to this day, I never travel without a knife on my person,” concluded Ashevak to great

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My Cup of Tea reinalie jorolan

My lips parted in surreal anticipation for a hot honeyed tea, As its steam's little hands pushed my eager breath away- quite scornfully from that implacable hot china cup.

Yet a force from within trudged my heart to take one sip after another; defying the gravity of surrendering, carefully, as these thoughts unfold

gently like a lily in the spring, spiralling towards a muted corner where you are...

Yes towards where you are... (my dear...my very own cup of tea) My own thoughts after thoughts, my very sip of enigma after another My own implacable china cup of fear whose honeyed steam can grapple me In a soft unmindful surrendering...

As my thoughts circle around this reverie, My hands are clasped in this hot cup of tea While my heart is warming you, tenderly, in me.

The English Gentleman

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Gordon McEachern

he English gentleman stepped lightly, delicately across the wet moss and the mud, moving those fatally polished black dress shoes with the carefulness of a soldier creeping through a minefield.

He raised his left shoe, held it aloft, made a decision, set it down, then raised his right shoe and repeated the process. The English gentleman walked the way a Grandmaster moved his chesspieces. The thwup of the helicopter died in the vast Alberta sky.

Four men stood in the clearing, surrounded by muskeg and a forest of tough twisted larch whose spidery roots could survive in the waterlogged soil, and anorexic black spruce, their trunks thin and sharp like Zulu assegais, striking silently toward the clouds.

“Marvelous country,” the English gentleman said. “Quite breathtaking. I can understand why my great-grandfather chose to come here.”

The second man, named Nigel, was the English gentleman’s attendant and as he passed his employer a leather case containing rubbers for his shoes he sniffed—he was always sniffing— and mumbled something through cropped orange hair about allergies and petroleum. Nigel reminded too many people of a character from Harry Potter. He wore expensive cologne into the forest and so the mosquitoes loved him best.

The third man was Ridley Cook, a photo-journalist for the Guardian. Ridley was very lean and very white, his clothes seemed, in a way, to sit on him, and he roamed around the periphery of

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the clearing fiddling with his Nikon, stepping on peavine, seeing the boundless boreal as one more boring backdrop for a photo opportunity.

The guide watched all of them, sunk against the boughs and the sedge as if part of it; conceived of the land’s chromosomes. He blinked, waved at a dragonfly, felt the heat rise from the field, smelled the berries. The guide’s braided ponytail hung down his shoulder and over his denim chest.

“Is that for show?” Nigel asked, pointing at the two pale feathers in the guide’s black hair.

The guide shrugged. “Sure.”

Ridley Cook snapped a picture—an imposing little snip.

The English gentleman breathed deep. He stood for an elongated moment, observing this and inspecting that, acting as if he and his cufflinks and his London Fog were all alone.

The guide believed it was how all incalculably wealthy men behaved—as if they were all alone.

“What do I call you again, old chap?” the English gentleman asked.

“Silas Mercredi,” the guide answered.

The photographer and the orange attendant laughed.

“Mercredi?” the English gentleman grinned (his teeth sparkled like pearls). “I’m not a fan of the French. I shall call you Mr. Wednesday.”

Silas shrugged again. He needed a smoke— bad. His pockets, however, were empty. The emergency cigarette usually perched behind his ear had also packed its bags and headed south. Silas beat the tobacco monster eleven months, twelve days and four hours ago—cold turkey at that—and buried its body beside the whiskey-smelling corpse of the alcohol monster

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he’d buried the year before. Those battles had been tougher than anything he’d ever tackled in his life. And that was the way it should be, Silas believed. The punishment must always suit the crime.

The guide waved at another dragonfly and wondered if his guests had ever won such wars.

Or lost such wars—both could be equally influential to a man; to a man’s psyche. He found the idea doubtful.

Nigel and Cook were globe-trotting expense account pilferers who went into the Birch Mountains wearing trousers bought at Harrods. What was the word? Milquetoast. Silas enjoyed that word. It sat in his mouth like warm soggy crackers. And the English gentleman? Well, Silas didn’t think he was the type of guy who strolled around humming ‘I get off on ’57 Chevys’.

But still, he had come. In a Sikorsky. In loafers.

But he had come. Come to pay homage to an ancestor. That, at least, was something Silas could understand. Something he appreciated.

A mysterious depth sank into the English gentleman’s eyes, then. The way it happened reminded Silas of a fishing trip he’d taken to one of the region’s myriad pothole lakes in the summer of 2001, just before those goddam screwballs flew perfectly good airplanes full of perfectly good people into perfectly good skyscrapers.

The pothole lake was small, deep and nameless.

There was walleye in the lake and they survived winterkill year after year because the heavy snow upon the ice acted as insulation. It was overcast, the water grey, as though clouded by cataracts.

And then the sun came out, burst out, in fact, the way Silas imagined Frank Sinatra or Elvis Pressley must have burst onto the stage in Las Vegas. Its brilliant yellow rays pierced the lake, transformed it, and in seconds Silas was looking not at a milky surface but at a bowl of water as transparent and deep as liquid crystal.

The English gentleman pierced him with those pothole-lake eyes and smiled very kindly.

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“Show me where it is, Mr. Wednesday, will you please? Show me the albino buffalo’s grave.”

Silas nodded, and entered the soggy woods, and the three visitors followed.

The forest on this patch of the map consisted of aspen and paper birch, feather moss underfoot, orange-capped mushrooms (Lactarius speciosus) , staring at them through the perpetual semidarkness like reptilian eyes. The Birch Mountains were quiet, serene. They did not have far to go.

And as they walked, Silas saw himself as out-ofplace among the Brits as the Brits were out-ofplace in Wood Buffalo National Park—the largest park in the country. Yet here they were all together and that, to Silas, was the secret lustre of the Athabaska, always had been, the way it could bring together disparate humans, either bucolic or vagabonds, in this case spoiled men from a distant, misshapen island and a deeply-bronzed Chipewyan man who had suffered head-lice when he was five and who made a killer lasagna (to this day Silas would tell you it’s how he caught a wife) and who loved math. A teacher once told him all good riflemen loved math and Silas Mercredi was one of the best.

Out of nowhere, a soppy clearing. Spongy muskeg. Bearberries. Canopy of tamarack. The deep odour of loam, as if the earth was a form of rising dough. The grave.

The English gentleman was mesmerized. “Mr. Wednesday, how did you find it?”

“My people have always known it was here?”

The attendant, Nigel, hung close—a syrupy shadow. The photographer retreated to the edge.

“It’s amazing,” said the English gentleman.

“More brilliant than I’d ever imagined.”

Silas hooked his dirty thumbs into the belt loops of his jeans and nodded, mildly surprised that two men on the opposite poles of life could agree.

“Did it take you long to excavate, Mr. Wednesday?”

“Not long.”

In fact, it had taken him a week, and he had unearthed the grave with the meticulous care of a world-class Egyptologist.

Inside the four-by-six trench lay the mummified body of an albino buffalo. To the others it appeared discarded but to Silas and, he guessed, the English gentleman, it was an artifact, a relic as beautiful as the Uruk Vase.

The English gentleman reached down and stroked the matted white fur, with time and nature now a battleship grey. There was no odour. Surprisingly, there were no flies, either.

A perfectly round, perfectly centered bullet hole occupied a position of prominence on the buffalo’s forehead and the English gentleman slipped his pinky inside.

“My great-grandfather put this here. With a Martini-Henry, no less. He took its life and was so shaken, so guilt-ridden by what he had done he buried it immediately and called this plot sacred ground. My great-grandfather had even drawn a map, which has since passed unto me. A time machine, Mr. Wednesday. After the Athabaska my great-grandfather never hunted again. Do you appreciate the magnitude of that?” The goldenrod rustled. In the trees a woodpecker played jazz. “Can you imagine a Cordon Bleu chef never cooking again? Or a political leader never campaigning again?”

The attendant sniffed. Another camera click.

“Who was your great-grandfather?” Silas asked.

The English gentleman continued to stroke the exhumed fur of the last albino buffalo.

“My great-grandfather was a man of the world. A Freemason. A soldier. A hunter. A sport hunter. Mr. Wednesday, have you ever heard of a silent film produced in Nineteen Twenty-Two called The Great White Hunter?”

Silas shook his head.

“It followed an Englishman and his shot-

gun around the globe, to exotic locales such as Borneo, the Galapagos, the Congo, Brazil. There is one scene, now since relegated to stereotype, of the hunter relaxing in an enormous chair before a roaring fire in a mahogany hall on the walls of which are hung the preserved heads of all his cruel prizes. Gazelle. Rhino. Siberian tiger. Polar bear. Crocodile. Dragon. Wolf. That room…that scene…was based upon my greatgrandfather, whom at one time shared a few casual investments with the film’s producer.”

Another soft click. A grouse tittered underbrush. The attendant searched his knapsack.

“My great-grandfather discovered the popularity of the Athabaska among big-game hunters in Eighteen Ninety-Three. There was a rare prize here. The plains buffalo were extinct.

Only the wood buffalo remained, lumbering and elusive amongst all these trees, and in his diaries he wrote of one in particular, a white buffalo, and that aging hunter with his polished shotgun, so past his prime, came here on an expedition. And here I am,” he brushed the fur again, “in his footsteps.”

“You are also in my footsteps,” spoke Silas.

“It was my great-grandfather who guided him.

It was my great-grandfather who laid the curse on yours for killing that magic animal.”

Tears leaked down the clean skin of the English gentleman’s cheeks. He clutched the dead fur of the buffalo in a white-knuckled apology for something he could never take back.

“No more pictures please.”

The attendant stepped forward, produced two blue pills and slipped them into the English gentleman’s mouth carefully, almost— thought Silas—with love.

“I’d like to be alone awhile,” the man said.

Nigel and Ridley Cook glanced at one another then silently retreated. Silas bent to his haunches and did something he had never done before in his entire life. He lit a tuft of sweetgrass for a white man. The smoke rippled volume 1, issue 1

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upwards, over the English gentleman’s head, over the grave. The man’s lips were moving and Silas thought even agnostics could pray.

Back at the clearing, the afternoon was hotter than ever. Insects buzzed like children at recess.

“You don’t know who that is, do you?” the photographer asked.

Silas shrugged.

“That’s the Earl of Mellstock. His great-grandfather was a Duke. I’ve been following him all over hell an’ gone snapping photos.”

Silas stared blankly.

“Don’t you read the Guardian online?” he asked.

Silas gave no reply and so the photographer moved away, checking his Blackberry. The

distant beat of the helicopter re-emerged somewhere beyond the veil of spruce.

The red attendant stepped forward. “The Earl has cancer. A very aggressive form of cancer. He only has a few weeks to live.” Then he moved away, too, as if that revelation could explain everything. A large winged beetle sat ignorantly on the back of the attendant’s neck, waving its antennae at the sun.

Silas dug the toe of his boot into the ground.

It would take only half-an-hour to return to Fort McMurray but right now the Birch Mountains felt like the ends of the earth. Maybe that was why he had come.

The smell of the sweetgrass was strong and pleasant. The helicopter blades were a drumbeat.

The quiet chanting of the English gentleman turned into prayers.

The Making of Linen — novel excerpt

J

Jennifer Hemstock

udith is smiling at Nayda.

“There are many things to do here.

You’ll find your days filled.”

Nayda is not smiling back.

“Every afternoon there is an activity in the recreation centre. Today is memory time.”

“What do you mean?”

“On Wednesdays, they do an exercise that helps keep your memory strong. It might be a game that exercises your memory, like Hearts or Battleship. Today, I believe, it’s storytelling. I think everyone’s going to tell a story from their childhood.”

Nayda is reluctant but she goes along. She sets aside the wrap she has over her legs and eases herself out of the chair. She doesn’t remember going to this room before but as she walks beside Judith down the hall, it begins to look familiar.

“Everyone,” says Judith, “this is Nayda.” Judith is standing partially behind Nayda. She touches Nayda’s arm and indicates with the other hand that Nayda should sit down.

All eyes are on Nayda. They watch as she sits.

Each person is introduced. Some stare straight ahead. Some laugh out loud. Some appear to be asleep.

The lady who is younger, more Nayda’s own age, appears to be in charge. She stands up and looks around the table at them. She smiles at them. She speaks: “Today, we are telling stories. Everyone gets a chance to tell a story from their childhood.

It could be a story that they learned or it could be something that really happened. Since you’re new here, maybe you’d like to begin.” She looks at Nayda. “Do you have a story from your childhood that you can tell us, Nayda?”

Nayda’s not sure about being first at anything, but that old story comes to her, the one that her

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mother used to tell. The one about the crow and the chicks. She always liked that one. At least, she learned to like it. She treasures it now.

Everyone is looking at her. They seem to want a story. It woudn’t hurt, she thinks.

“My mother used to tell this story,” Nayda begins.

“It is a very old story, I think. It is an old Russian story.”

“Tell it to us. Please, tell us.”

Nayda looks around at the eager old faces. She remembers Baba Luka, all of a sudden, and how the old ones were always eager for a story. How they would sit like expectant children, inching forward on chairs, leaning onto canes, turning heads so the ear with better hearing could hear.

And now here are these old ones. Just the same, she thinks. Old ones never change.

She sees herself as a young person in this group.

She sees herself as she was twenty, thirty years ago. She was the one to plump the pillow, to get up and find a stool and help to lift a leg to the stool, to make cups of tea and coffee, to bring water and sugar and take away spoons.

She sees herself this way, comfortable with the old ones, but not one of them, happy to receive their gratitude for her younger and more able solicitude. She isn’t sure how she got here or what she’s doing here with them. And she does not recognize them, not even one of them, but they seem to want a story. And so, she begins.

“There once was a crow who built her nest in the top of a big oak tree that stood tall at the edge of a river. There she laid her eggs and waited for the happy day when the eggs would break open and the little chicks would appear. She had a loving, motherly heart and waiting was hard because, even though she had not even seen the chicks yet, she was already filled with love for them.” Nayda paused here and looked around the room again. volume 1, issue 1

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They were all waiting, hushed, for the next line of the story.

“The day finally came when a little click, click noise could be heard coming from inside one of the shells. The mother crow’s heart was beating fast with anticipation and then she heard all around her in the nest the sounds of little beaks tapping at their shells. They were awakened.

They were breaking out of their shells.

And then, suddenly, a shell broke open enough for a little beak and two little eyes to poke out and to begin to cry for mother.

‘There you are,’ the mother crow cried out. ‘At last, I have seen the face of one of my babies.’

She flitted from one egg to the next throughout that happy day, seeing little faces and then shoulders and then whole little crow bodies appear among the shattered eggs. She flew to the ground to get big juicy worms and then back to the nest to feed her little chicks with the worms so that they could grow big and strong.

All of her good motherly feelings were brought out by the baby crows as their struggles to be born and their cries for food touched her and stirred inside her.

The weather was still cool, though the winter had passed, and the mother crow swooped away from the nest to bring bits of things to build into the nest to keep the babies warm. When she wasn’t warming the nest, she swooped away to find food and to bring it to her babies who were always hungry, always opening their mouths for food.

It was a happy, joyous time. The mother was made for this. Nothing would stand in the way of her caring for her chicks. And she loved to watch them grow and change. Their skinny bare little bodies fluffed out into the softest and the sweetest round balls of feathers.

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The weather was getting warmer all of the time and the rivers and lakes were shedding their winter coverings of ice. And then the rain came.

It was all mother crow could do to keep the nest warm and dry. She had been clever where she had built in the first place, but with the wind blowing the rain around she had to put up barriers to keep the wetness out of the nest.

She was not worried about the blowing rain. She knew she could keep it out. But she was troubled.

When she flew out to find things to shelter the nest, she noticed that the river was beginning to rise.

All of that day and all of the next, the rain came down. She was kept busy between finding food and finding dry bits to add to the nest.

But she found time to fly over the river and to see what was going on.

Far down the river, she saw the trouble. Broken chunks of ice from the river had jammed and the flow of water was blocked. This was serious trouble. She flew back to her nest tree and marked the line of the rising water.

Now, she did not rest at all. Every hour or so she rose out of her nest to see where the water was.

Early in the morning, before the sun came up, she knew that danger was at their door.

‘You must wake up,’ she called to her chicks. ‘We must cross the river to get to safety.’

‘But we cannot fly,’ the little chicks called back to their mother. ‘We are afraid. We will die.’

‘I will carry you across the water,’ the mother crow said. ‘But we must hurry. I can only carry you one at a time and the water rises quickly.

There is no time to spare.’

The chicks were very frightened and they all called at once to be the first to be carried, just as they always called all at once to be the first to be fed.

The mother crow could not choose one or the other to be first, since she loved all of her chicks

just the same, so she simply reached into the nest with her eyes closed and took the first chick that she reached with her beak.

They rose out of the nest into the streaming cold rain and the mother crow flew bravely over the dark water of the river and there, through the corner of her mouth, she said to the little chick, “Will you ever leave me?”

‘No, of course not, mother. I will always stay by your side.’

At this, the mother opened her beak and let go of the chick, and he fell crying into the deep black below.

The mother turned and flew as quickly as she could to the nest and there, with eyes closed, she reached with her beak to find another chick. She flew out across the water again.

‘Will you ever leave me?’ she asked of the chick.

‘Never, mother. I will never leave you.’

The mother crow opened her beak again and the little chick fell out and tumbled to the churning water below.

Back to the nest. So little time left, the mother swooped in and out again with a chick in her beak.

As they crossed the dark rising water, the mother asked, ‘Will you ever leave me?’

This little chick had seen the other chicks fall from their mother’s mouth and she was afraid to answer. She had not heard the answer of the other chicks and thought they must have said the wrong thing, and so this little chick thought the only thing to be done was to say what she thought her mother wanted to hear.

‘I will always stay with you, mother. You know I will.’

At that, the little chick was dropped, to be lost forever in the water below.

The river was rising quickly. The dark tumbling water was nearly at the nest. One little chick remained and the mother crow flew as quickly as her wings could beat and snatched the little chick

from the nest just before the water surged over the nest and carried the nest away in the torrent.

The mother was tired now and filled with grief, and her heart did not want to ask the question again, but she knew that she must to be fair and to honour the chicks that went before.

‘Will you ever leave me?’ she asked, the rain beating hard and cold on her back.

The chick had seen what had happened to the previous chicks and this chick thought that he should probably answer ‘no’ if he wanted to be carried safely to the other side. But he had not thought to live. He had watched the water rising steadily and did not think his mother could arrive in time to save him. He knew that if the other chicks had not been dropped and the mother had flown all the way to safety with them, then she would never have been able to get back to him in time.

Suddenly, where he thought he was afraid, he knew he was not. And it seemed more important to him now to tell the truth since he was not afraid, now, to die.

‘I will leave you, mother,’ he said. ‘I am sad to say so, but I know that I will. One day I will want my own family and one day death will part us. So, yes, mother. I will leave you.’

The mother crow held tight to the little chick and beat her wings hard against the slats of rain and wind. They crossed the river and found a dry cup of ground under a rocky outcropping. There they stayed, high above the water, until the rain stopped and the ice melted upriver and the water drained away.

The mother crow found food and dry bits to build a new nest. Eventually, the little chick learned to fly and the mother, full of pride, flew with him for a while.”

Nayda stops here and looks around at the others.

Their expressions have not changed from when she started, but where there had been laughing, now there is crying. Who are these people and why is she here with them? volume 1, issue 1

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Six Haikus Reflecting the Rain

The Changes of the Moon

An old city square.

A girl in bright hues looks for Other histories,

Her pink umbrella Isolated in a flock Of white and yellow.

Why has she come here To stand saturated in Colour and dampness?

Dark, wet stones below And behind her. Does she seek Escape from the rain?

Girl on the cobbles, Defiant in her colours, Mocking the grayness,

Lost in this city Of cold, drizzled stone, with a Beacon umbrella.

I will learn the changes of the moon, The names of trees, The identities of flowers, The songs of birds, So that I will no longer Be strangers to them, And them to me.

So that I will move in the world And not simply Through it, Like a current of air that Does not perceive What it disturbs.

So that I will see and hear The beauty in it Now and here And not, as now and here, Hear and see it as Just passed by, Like the half-blurred view From a moving window.

So that at the moment of death I will not sink into regret Of having not seen and not heard So much That was there and then To be beautiful To me.

Douglas Abel

Douglas Abel

Ain’t Gonna Happen

B

Jane Jacques

urton was in the frozen food aisle at ten to ten on a Tuesday night in early November, a little high and searching for egg rolls, when he glanced up and saw the panther.

The panther was one of a dozen gigantic stuffed animals – gorilla, tiger, lion, Shetland pony – ranged across the top of the freezer cabinets. Burton remembered when giant toys like these had started appearing at the old HandiMart after Halloween, twenty years ago. He must have been Kyle’s age when he’d seen the ride-on tank, big enough for two kids. God, he’d never prayed for anything like he prayed for that tank.

Begged his dad for weeks, and yet at the same time, deep down, he hadn’t really expected it for Christmas. “Ain’t gonna happen, Bud,” Maurice, his dad, had told him in his quiet, patient voice, and Burton knew that. Nobody really got those giant toys, not in the Handi-Mart neighbourhood.

When the store lights flashed and the recorded voice reminded Burton that the store was closing in five minutes, thank you for shopping, he snapped to attention and looked for a clerk.

He wasn’t high, not really; Tonya had left only a small stash when she moved out, and he was making it last as long as possible. The only effect of the toke after work had been this craving for egg rolls. But now he felt an equal urgency for one of those animals. Kyle and Zack needed one, for sure. They could – what? – ride it, that’s what,

sit on it while they watched videos, haul it to school. The mental image of their two little faces contorted in astonishment was more than Burton could resist. For a second, he considered buying one for each boy, and then he spotted the price

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tag dangling from the lion’s ear. Ninety-nine ninety-nine. He would have to be a helluva lot higher before he spent two freaking hundred on stuffed toys. Cindy would have a bird as it was.

“I want one of them,” Burton told a stockboy, pointing. The boy rolled a ladder over to the freezers.

“Which one?”

They were all great, that was the thing. The gorilla stood taller than Zack, he figured. Maybe it would scare him. Burton stared at the pony and decided it had a wild eye. The lion had a dirty spot on the muzzle, and the orange tint of the tiger made him think of his father’s jaundiced face.

He pointed at the velvety black panther. “Him.”

At the checkout, the girl had to lean across the counter with the scanning wand to reach the tag on its ear.

“You get many of these guys going through?”

Burton asked, fishing a hundred from his wallet.

Oh, Cindy would have a bird for sure. The girl barely glanced up.

“One a shift,” she said. “Usually. Sometimes more on the weekend. You want it wrapped?”

Her tone was not encouraging. Already the last shoppers were being escorted out the doors.

Coins clinked at other tills as the cashiers tallied the day’s receipts.

“No, it’s okay, I’ll eat it here.” If the girl thought he was funny, or even if she’d heard, she gave no sign. She flicked off her till light and began cashing out.

Burton hoisted the panther under one arm and headed to the parking lot. It was surprisingly heavy, as if it were filled with lead shot. Damn, the egg rolls. Maybe he would phone for Chinese when he got back to the apartment.

But first, he was taking this baby over to

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the boys. He checked his watch under a pool of parking lot light, brushing away a light breeze of snow. Ten past ten. The guys would be in bed, but Cindy should still be up. He pictured her hunched over her accounting books at the dinette table, her face screwed into that intense expression he used to love. Since the divorce two years ago, she was determined to make something of herself, she said. Burton thought she was something already.

He tried to wrestle the panther into the rear seat of the pickup, then propped it on the passenger seat. In every position it blocked his view.

Finally he gave up and tossed it into the box. Too late, he realized that the slight dusting of snow had melted in the truck box, so the panther now lay in a thin dirty puddle. He yanked it upright and shoved a garbage bag underneath, then searched for a tarp to cover it.

“Hey, dude!” Some drunk crossing the parking lot offered him a thumbs-up. “Great horse!”

“Thanks, man,” Burton called back. There was no tarp, so he stripped off his work jacket and draped it over the panther’s head. The dusting of snow had turned into big silvery flakes now. Shivering, he slid behind the wheel.

For a moment, he thought of waiting until the weekend or even Kyle’s birthday to give the boys the cat. How old would Kyle be, anyway?

Burton felt annoyed with himself for not knowing at once, the way Cindy would. He despised guys like Lyle in the machine shop who claimed not to know his own kids’ names. Burton wasn’t like that. He wanted to be like Maurice, the greatest dad. This was just Tonya’s lousy weed messing up his memory. He concentrated, shifting down at Cindy’s corner. Zack had turned four in August, the week after Burton’s dad died, and Kyle would be six in December. Burton wasn’t stupid, or not as stupid as Cindy thought, anyway.

The snow was falling steadily when Burton pulled up in front of the townhouse. All of the units looked alike. He peered into the darkness to find Cindy’s frilled lace curtains at the door.

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After the divorce, Cindy and the boys had moved here to be nearer her folks. Burton had to admit that it was a better district than the one where the boys were born. And her folks had been good, you had to give them that. Hell, they had even shown up with Cindy at the funeral, which was pretty damn decent of them. Especially considering that Burton’s own mother had not bothered to come.

He sat in the truck for a moment, staring at the row of townhouses, watching the blue glow of a neighbor’s television. Burton’s parents, Irene and Maurice, had divorced when Burton was in second grade, but it wasn’t as though Maurice had ever beaten her, or run around, or any crap.

Big quiet Maurice didn’t even drink, which was ironic when you thought about the liver getting him in the end. No, Irene had just walked out to find herself, and at fifty-three she was still looking. Had she even gone up to the hospital to see Maurice? Not while Burton was there, that was for damn sure, and he had been there for weeks.

“I can’t see this being a positive thing for me,” Irene said when he called her about the funeral.

Burton heaved the heavy velvet panther out of the truck box. He lost his grip on the jacket and swore as the big cat hit the wet gravel driveway.

Fuck, a real panther couldn’t be more trouble.

He brushed the wet rocks off its black side and manhandled it to the door. After all he’d gone through, Cindy had better be up. He punched the bell.

A pause, then a light upstairs and movement inside. After another pause, the entry light flashed on and the frilled curtain at the door shifted slightly. He saw Cindy’s small blonde head behind the lace, then the door opened slowly on its chain. Cindy was wearing her old mauve terrycloth housecoat, the one he’d given her the Christmas Kyle was born. Without makeup, she looked as innocent as Zack.

“Burton!” Cindy’s whisper sounded urgent, even frightened. “What’s the matter? Why are you here so late?”

“It’s only ten-thirty,” Burton said loudly. “I brought the boys something.”

“Have you been drinking?” Cindy unlatched the door and saw the panther for the first time.

“Oh, my God. Where did you get that thing?

Don’t bring it in here, it’s filthy.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Cindy, I just bought it.

It’s brand new.” Burton hauled it inside, surreptitiously brushing off a few flecks of clinging gravel. “Look, it’s still got the tags on it. Where are the boys?”

“Where do you think? They’re not getting up in the middle of the night, I can tell you that.”

But Cindy had always been hard-assed about the kids, insisting on bed at seven and no snacks between meals. She’d had to be tough with him, too. Growing up alone with Maurice in the big old house, he had never learned about things like place mats and serving spoons and ironing boards, all that shit that Cindy seemed to think was so important. Lace curtains on a little brass rod on the window at the front door. With Cindy, everything had to be just so. “They’re fast asleep,” Cindy whispered, not unkindly. “I’ll tell them you were here.”

But already there was a noise above them, and two small blond boys in Wrestlemania pajamas came padding to the top of the stairs. The smaller one looked confused, but the older one tugged him by the hand.

“Look, Zack, it’s Dad! See, I told you it was Dad! I heard your voice in my dream, Dad, I knew it was you!” Kyle started running downstairs, then halted, retreating a step upwards. “Zack, stop, don’t come down. What’s that thing, Dad?” He pointed at the panther.

“Hey, it’s for you guys! Look, it’s a – it’s like a big cat, see? It’s cool.” Burton stroked the damp velvet back. “It wants to live here.”

Zack spoke for the first time, his voice husky with sleep.

“I don’t like cats. I only like dogs.”

“It’s not a real cat,” Burton said. “It’s a big toy,

guys. You’re not scared, right, K-man?”

“Only a baby would be scared of that,” said Kyle, the anxiety in his voice shifting into contempt. He ventured down the stairs and stood beside the panther. “It doesn’t even look real.

Look, Zack, it’s just fake. It’s just a big old fake cat.” He touched it briefly and recoiled. “It’s wet, Dad. How come it’s all wet?”

“It was in the back of my truck.”

“You should have put it inside,” said Kyle.

“Now it’s all wrecked, right, Mom? Like you said with our bikes, Dad put them in the truck that time, remember?”

Cindy glanced at Burton’s face.

“Your Dad brought you guys something real nice,” she said. “What do you say?”

“Thank you,” Kyle said mechanically, and Zach echoed from the top of the stairs, “Thank you, Daddy.”

“Now off to bed, both of you. There’s school tomorrow.” Kyle hugged his father quickly around the legs, carefully avoiding the damp panther. Then he and his brother disappeared into the dark of the upstairs hallway.

“Well,” said Burton. The high had worn off completely now. “So that was a bust.”

Cindy said nothing. She was examining the price tag stapled to the panther’s ear.

“I know, it was stupid,” said Burton. “You don’t have to say it. I just wanted to – I was just –“ He thought of his father’s big yellow face against the white pillowcase on the hospital bed.

Near the end, he’d pleaded with Maurice to get better, and his father, barely able to speak, had whispered, “Ain’t gonna happen, Bud.”

“It wasn’t stupid,” said Cindy. “It was kind of sweet, actually.” She touched his arm. “I think you miss the boys. They talk about you all the time, you know?”

“They do?”

“Sure. You’re their daddy.” volume 1, issue 1

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“I’m gonna be here more, I swear it. I mean, sure, I see them every weekend –”

back by ten-thirty, eleven. This guy at work asked me to a play.”

“Most weekends.”

“Okay, most weekends, but sometimes I’m working, right? And I took Kyle to that swim camp, or whatever.” He paused, reviewing his recent contributions to fatherhood. “Okay, no shit, from now on I’m going to be there for my boys, one hundred per cent.” Cindy shifted from one slippered foot to the other, and Burton had the uneasy sense that he had spoken these words before. “No shit this time. Tonya’s gone, you know that –“

“You told me.”

“Yeah, well, she never liked having the boys around. But that’s finished. I’ll see them all the time now, I promise.” Cindy tilted her little heartshaped face toward him, squinting in the light, and he felt a familiar rush of --what was it, love?

Lust? Loneliness, on a Tuesday night in November when his high was gone? God, she was a beautiful woman. Why had he ever messed with Nathalie or Krissy or Tonya, when he had a smart and beautiful woman like Cindy at his side? Recalling her hand on his arm a moment earlier, he risked a light touch on her wrist. “Maybe I could come for supper sometime. Take you guys out for pizza, maybe?”

“You know what?” Cindy brightened suddenly. “Saturday would be good, if you could take the boys Saturday. I was trying to find a sitter.

Are you off Saturday?”

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“Yeah.” His good mood melted.

“Perfect. I’ll drop them around five. We’ll be

“A play.”

“If we go for coffee after, it might be midnight. Is midnight too late?”

Outside, the snow had turned into heavy porridge. Burton swept his sleeve across the truck window, dislodging a thick wedge, then climbed in and sat in the dark cold truck. He watched the lights flicker off in the townhouse: first the entry, then the hall, then the bedroom light upstairs. Would the boys remember his visit in the morning, or would they race downstairs and be startled again by the panther? One night when he was small, before Irene had left them, Maurice had brought home a pumpkin from the warehouse and left it on the kitchen table for Burton to find in the morning. Burton tried to remember whether they had carved it for Halloween, but all he could think of was that big face, Maurice’s big patient face on the pillowcase, as yellow as a wheel of cheese.

Funny that Cindy, who always insisted on everything being just so, still clung to that frayed old mauve housecoat. He looked at the upstairs window and imagined her hanging up the housecoat and slipping between the clean, pressed sheets in her tidy bedroom. Ain’t gonna happen, he told himself, but he knew that already.

Starting Over Kevin Thornton

“

”

You’re entering what? said Septimus.

They strolled along the cliff-top of the bluffs.

Ezekiel often came here to resolve his problems.

“A short story competition; actually, a postcard competition. Very short, maximum two hundred and fifty words.” “ I know what it is. I am your agent, also one of the pre-eminent Editors in Canada and ergo, North America.”

Ezekiel sighed. He had chosen Septimus Crane as his editor because he had sounded like an editor, a mistake he had until now been unable to undo.

“Why, Ezekiel?” said Crane.

“It has a five hundred dollar prize.”

“Money! Money!! Your last opus was nominated for the Eastern Labrador literary prize.”

“And,” said Ezekiel, “it sold fifty four copies.”

“What about ‘Candles in the wind’,” said Crane. “We were nominated twice for that.”

“Septimus,” said Ezekiel. “It only sold five hundred copies because it came out on the same day they buried the Princess of Wales. Once they discovered it was actually a story about growing up on the Prairies without electricity, it was remaindered. And it came second in the Acton Fiction Forum to a tale about a bunny.

I need money, and...” he sighed, turning to face his imbecilic agent, “I need a new representative.”

Septimus looked up at him. “You can’t fire me. We have a contract.”

Ezekiel smiled. “I know,” he said, and pushed him over the cliff.

“It will be about you,” he said to the distant scream and thud, “titled Justifiable Homicide.”

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The Northern Sun Kiran Malik-Khan They say that sunlight reaches the Earth in a little over eight minutes or 499 seconds to be precise Out here no such miracle happens for days The sky a pale grey and indigo starves for the golden light Like icicles frozen into numbness The clouds wear a pashmina of frost and chill quivering within Winter is an insatiable cannibal Swallowing our sun – whole!

Bloodless Kiran Malik-Khan

An ocean of shards – as far as the eye can see carcases of broken promises the putrid smell of failure I walk chiding the woman who lost the girl within I walk looking for my words lost herein Nothing gives – I return – unscathed and numb Knowing full well masochism hurts the heart only!

Snow

W

Suzanne McGladdery

inter is a living entity in Fort McMurray, Alberta.

You love and hate it. The first flakes of snow in October (or September, or August) are greeted with dread and excitement. You can’t wait to toboggan, snowmobile, ski, skate. You grumble about the road salt rusting out your vehicle. You can’t wait for Christmas. This year, for sure, you are getting a snowblower for the damned driveway, or a remote starter for your car. One day, though, Christmas and New Year are over, and there’s nothing about winter left to look forward to.

January and February are the coldest months.

The air becomes weak and brittle, with hard, sharp edges that cut at your lungs and freeze the breath in your nostrils. The only thing you can smell is the oil-gas mix that runs the snowmobiles, snowblowers, chainsaws. The air inside your home is warm, but stale, and the scents from old meals and the neighbour’s cigarettes linger for days. Your sinuses dry up and you can’t smell anything at all, and you’re grateful.

The streets are increasingly narrow, with huge berms of salted snow heaped up beside the sidewalks, and parked cars and trucks edging further and further in to what used to be two lanes for traffic. Parking lots shrink in capacity as the yellow stall markings are buried under snow, and you simply take up the space you feel you need.

Pedestrians become less recognizable as outerwear takes on larger, puffier proportions. Your arms and legs tighten up, to conserve body heat, to avoid the blasts of frigid air coming in through openings in your coat. You walk like a penguin, not daring to take either foot completely off the treacherous ground, in case you slip.

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Traffic transforms from the merely tedious quantity of summer drivers to the terrifying quality of winter drivers. Fort McMurray is structured by its landscape; there are several beads of individual subdivisions strung together by Highway 63. The city is booming with the high price of oil, and there is no time of day when the vehicles stop running. Individuals in trucks, SUVs, and sports cars jockey for space among the transport trucks bringing in the endless supplies that fuel our economy and the traveling coaches that ferry the thousands of workers from the city to the oilsand plants, and back again. Between entering the city from the south, at the turnoff to the airport, and leaving the city in the north, after the lumberyard and cement plants, are several poorly-designed, over-used intersections that, during winter, are paved in black ice, polished by the tires unable to stop for the red lights. Traffic court gets busier, you get grouchier.

You’re tired of the cold, tired of sweeping and scraping the snow off your vehicle windows and sidewalks and driveways, tired of bundling up in layers to take the garbage out. You eat too much comfort food, because it’s the only kind that warms you up. You’re depressed from the darkness, and seeing daylight only on the weekends.

Your bones ache, and the skin of your hands dries out and cracks. Your nose is dry and rough from continuous sniffing, from breathing below-freezing air. ❄ ❄

By the end of February, it has been winter forever, and you can’t wait for spring. The hours of anemic sunlight are stretching out further, and you remark excitedly to co-workers that there was still some twilight as you left work last night.

The sky was not as completely black as tar as you came in this morning. Spring, you feel confident, will come soon. Only two months left.

It usually starts in March. The air becomes a little softer, the days are longer, and the snow volume 1, issue 1

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takes on a surface shine, instead of its icy, sparkly, matte finish. (You laugh, watching movies that pretend to be set in an Arctic January, when the snow’s sheen was obviously filmed in April.

“Hollywood!” you tell your friends, experienced northerners all. “They don’t know anything!”)

Along the sides of the roads, where the snow has been shoveled and stacked for months, striations and layers appear, like geological formations. The edges soften, then become brittle in thin layers of ice as the snow melts and refreezes with the intermittent attention of the sun.

The hard-packed trails to the back gate, along the highway, across the schoolyards, which all winter had been lower than the surrounding drifts, are suddenly higher, slower to melt away than the looser snow around them. The sharp scent of water begins to taint the air, with the accompanying, constant trickle of hidden streams of runoff. You quench your thirst merely by breathing.

Other scents re-emerge, along with forgotten deposits exposed by the retreating snow. A battered orange Frisbee not put away last fall lies sadly on the wet, dead grass. The dog logs that had been safely frozen and hidden for months are now revealed in all their melting, reeking glory.

More pleasant aromas drift in as the air becomes substantial enough to carry them, and as the sap begins to run in the trees, throwing heady balsam perfumes from the endless forest around the city.

Mud is everywhere. Even the snow is dirty; the remaining lumps are black, squatting around the yard. You become adept at stepping out of muddy boots, through the doorway, and into slippers in one awkward motion. The clay-enriched, slimey mud sticks to everything. Lines form at the car washes, rivaling in length the lines at Tim Horton’s, which are long all year round, at all times of the day.

You shed your winter layers, delighted by the warm temperatures that are really not warm enough to lose all your layers. You catch colds and risk hypothermia, reveling in temperatures that 22

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are only ten degrees below zero, Celsius. You open doors and windows to let the fresh air in, and shiver in your living room.

The streets become wide plains bordered by rivers, rather than deep canyons. Voices echo as more people come outside to play, or wash cars, or prepare for planting. The trails winding through the trees along the edges of the city are abandoned by skiers. Walkers, joggers, and mountain bikers take them over. You drive with your car windows down at last, catching glimpses between the trees of your more athletic neighbours, and smile in vicarious exhilaration.

You can’t wait for the river to break. People who live on the ridges around the valley look forward to the Athabasca breaking up as a rite of spring. People living in the valley check the progress daily; if the Clearwater goes first it may flood your home. Signs are posted all along the Grant MacEwan Bridge, forbidding drivers to park. Break-up watchers must park somewhere else, usually along the dam across the Snye, and walk to the river. The city sets the timing device, and you buy tickets in the break-up raffle.

The ice finally goes. Every once in a while, there is sound and fury, a dramatic force of nature putting us mortals in our puny place. Most years, though, are anticlimactic. A slow-moving crush of ice heads northward steadily, occasionally jamming up in sharp curves in the Athabasca.

Huge chunks are thrown up on the banks, to melt slowly as the summer heats up. Valley dwellers relax, the flood having been averted for another year. ❄ ❄

Suddenly, in May (or April or June), the last of the river ice has melted away, the hills are a lush, sensual green, and it’s summer. It’s easy to walk and breathe outdoors, and a quick errand really is quick now that you need only to step into sandals and go. Your joints are looser, and movement is pleasurable. You complain about the heat. Winter has been put away, forgotten until the countdown of remaining summer days begins again in August, and you start to think, again, about the snow.

Marginalia

T

Douglas Abel

he Northern Canada Collective Society for Writers is a group of people who have come together because of an overwhelming passion for the written word.

We love good writing, whether we are reading it, doing it (or trying!), publishing it or promoting it. We believe that well-chosen, well-combined words have immense power and incredible beauty. They make magic spells that conjure up images, ideas, experiences and emotions.

I still remember vividly an example of such magical word power from over three decades ago.

It was 3 a.m. on a Tuesday in September, and I was in a single room in an eight-story men’s residence, Molson Hall, at McGill University, in the usually noisy, always sophisticated downtown heart of Montreal. The immediate environment

was undeniably urban and macho; testosterone readings in the residence hallways would probably have gone off any normal scale. There was no place, and no logical reason, for fearful fantasies.

Yet there I was, crouched in my bed, all the lights in the small room on, too terrified to put a foot on the floor lest the monsters seize it, almost too terrified to breathe . . . but not too terrified to read on.

The words casting this horror-inducing spell were from J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. My body was in that safe, institutionally bland room in downtown Montreal, but my mind and emotions were in the dark, dreaded pass of Cirith Ungol, waiting with Sam and Frodo for the next attack, from the cavernous dark and stench, of the monster Shelob. I could cast my eyes around my real room, look for reassurance at the cinder-block walls painted commercial beige, seek for safety outside, in the sounds of ambulance sirens approaching the Royal Victoria Hospital a few blocks away, or the honking of late-night/early-morning taxis. Yet the words held me rapt, trembling, unable to

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make any motion . . . except to turn the page and go deeper, and darker, into the imaginative terror.

It is still amazing to me that a writer can cast such a spell, merely by placing some arbitrary printed symbols for spoken sounds in a certain order. And it is profoundly disturbing to me that fewer and fewer people seem either to understand or to appreciate the power of well-chosen words. In our electronically texted and twittered era the message is “minimal message.” Say what you have to say with as few keystrokes or thumb movements as possible. Forget detail, colour, nuance or subtlety; send the bare bones of meaning, and fill in the rest later, if at all.

Yet consider how much is lost when we wilfully choose to restrict our written communication to acronyms, emoticons and 140-character tweets. Take, for example, the well-known, universally used abbreviation LOL, “laughing out loud.” LOL informs us that the sender was sufficiently amused to make some kind of vocalized sound; but how much does it neglect to tell us?

What kind of laugh was it? A chortle, a guffaw, a roar? Was there one short, sharp explosion of

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amusement, or repeated peals of delight? What was the tone, resonance or quality of the laughter, features as unique to the individual amused as that person’s particular voice or specific body?

LOL strips the laughing event of almost all its human relevance, because it tells us nothing about the laugher, the laughter, or the specific comic experience. Compare this arid minimalism with Charles Dickens’ description of his nephew Fred’s laughter in A Christmas Carol. Dickens manipulates words to create an experience of sound and emotion which is delightfully infectious.

We cannot help but laugh along with Fred and rejoice in the communal bond that true laughter creates. Dickens’ well-crafted words say, “Here is a gift of pleasure. Celebrate being human with Fred and me.” LOL says, by default, “Too busy to be bothered.”

Good writing is a gift. Making it requires time, effort, dedication, talent, and an overwhelming desire to communicate fully, to share human experience in all its complexity and subtlety. It is never easy to write well. It is always worth it.

Authors douglas abel is an actor, director, writer, drama instructor with a keen eye on the world around him and an appreciation of the needs and feelings of the people he comes in contact with. ken haigh’s memoir of life as a teacher in eastern Bhutan, Under the Holy Lake, was published by the University of Alberta Press in 2008. He worked as a teacher in the eastern Arctic in 199192 and his story is the second chapter in a novel under construction called Ultima Thule. jennifer hemstock has published fiction and non-fiction. She was nominated for the Mystery Writers of Canada’s Unhanged Arthur award and her short story, “Chicken Coop” was performed on CBC radio. jane jacques has lived in Fort McMurray for twenty years. She teaches English at Keyano College, and she is passionate about words. reinalie jorolan was born and raised in Ozamiz City, Philippines and started writing English poems at age 15. She came straight to Fort McMurray on June 26, 2004 and enjoys getting frozen and thawed year after year. The Snye Park is where she usually writes her poems and gets inspiration for her paintings.

kiran malik-khan has been publishing poetry for about 16 years now, starting in high school; she wants to thank her Mom, Nasreen Malik, for always encouraging her and her sister, Kanwal Malik Saba, for always being there to listen and offer a kind word as she struggled and stumbled through her poetic endeavours. gordon mceachern has published short stories in several periodicals and spent the 90s working in the field of comic-books and graphic novels.

Currently, Gordon is completing a full-length novel of historical fiction set in northern Alberta. suzanne mcgladdery likes words, especially when they’re strung together in a pleasing arrangement in order to convey information or relate ideas that speak to human emotions. She thinks that the ability to record words on paper, so that people who will never meet can communicate with each other, is just about magical. kevin thorton writes a column in the Fort McMurray Today newspaper and is an intrepid yet mostly unsuccessful writer of suspense fiction, poetry and short stories. He hopes this will change.

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