THE PEARLS Andrew Kovacic Andrew Kovacic
She cut dandelion heads and left them on the doorsteps of her friends’ houses. They found the flowers waiting for them at dawn. It was as if they were left there by some wandering spirit, granting children a magical wake-up call; a full-bloom morning glory. I think about that girl, who was once my friend. Her dandelion has withered at the bottom of my tea-cup vase. I think about her. I think and know that I wish that I was that kind of girl so long ago. Living in Tingstova is living in a clam shell. A clam shell where the inside is dark, and cold, and the outside is a body of water so deep that the light is way up there in the distance. Stay inside and you suffocate. Go outside and you drown. Sanctuary and prison. That’s what Tingstova is like. A long way off you can hear the whales; a long, long way off from here. From here, sometimes I walk wide and far and wide. I take the trails up the slopes that surround the town. Along the way, I walk past all the artefacts that have been dumped on the side of the trail. Over there is someone’s junky roulette table, over here is a rust-eaten fridge missing a door, over the hill is about a dozen more. They’ve become great, sunken altars over the years. Kids often leave shells and odd rocks piled around them. They are odd things to worship. The relics of Tingstova are things that have been thrown away. Passing each one feels like passing through some unseen wall, like there are innumerable barriers set up to keep you from straying too far from the town’s centre. Either that or it’s the altitude. The top of the small mount has been worn into a natural ledge. I sit on it and look down over my clam town. Buildings are the colour of muddy snow. All of the trees left leafless from the harsh scrub of salty winds; shaping this cove into a clay-world tundra. Those winds pulse in from the nearby sea in sharp, billowy drafts. You see, Tingstova is on the lip of the ocean. But it isn’t a beautiful blue, the water is the same dirty grey as the buildings. The horizon is the same unending cloud that stretches out above my head. On my walk back home, I think about her. She lived in the house beside mine. It is the same squat home as all the rest but somehow her one always seemed nicer, seemed beautiful even. At night, I would see her dancing on her front porch with all the lights on in her house. Lit up like a bonfire in snow. Her parents weren’t home, they never were, and in fact I’m not sure that I ever even saw them. It wouldn’t surprise me if she was living alone, without anyone and without need for anyone. She was ferociously wild. You wouldn’t know it from looking at her. She looked like any average kid, plain and mild. Sure, she was popular, everyone in town was her friend. But no one could actually pinpoint why she was so devastatingly attractive. It wasn’t her looks, they’d say. It wasn’t her humour. But I knew all along what made that girl the brightest pearl Tingstova had ever had and lost. She was born in bloom. She was born with eyes that looked ever onwards. Onwards she looked and onwards she went. It wasn’t surprising to me that she left that day. There was never any other thing that could have happened. She had already left long ago. My morning routine is an hour of gutting fish. My Pa owned this letterbox fish deli for years before he finally handed the keys over to me. Well, I should add: it wasn’t like my hand was open and waiting for the keys to the fishy business. My hand was pried open, it has been since birth. Now, I spend my mornings gutting fish. This job used to make me squirm, but now it just makes me tired. Sometimes I look into the dull, jelly eyes of a trout and see myself reflected within them. I look like I’m melting in those eyes. Melting into deep, deep, deepening waters. If I could spread my fins, be brave enough to wade into the inkiness, perhaps I’d feel something close to what that girl felt on the day she left us behind.
