Villamere: The Lowbrow Magazine of High-End CanLit

Villamere JUNOS: WHY SO CHEESE? + Russell Smith Gets Turned Down

THE SPRINGTIME OF YOUR MIDDLE AGE 2016 VOLUME 1 ISSUE 2 $6.95

THE LOWBROW MAGAZINE OF HIGH-END CANLIT

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SUBMISSIONS

Yes, you. We want your work. Send it to us.

Villamere wants work that is Canadian, by Canadians, or about Canadians and/or Canada. (The general theme here, folks, is: CANADA.) We publish poetry, short fiction, creative nonfiction, essays, reviews, photography and illustration by extraordinarily talented people just like you.

Email only. We don’t open weird things we receive in the mail. Just kidding, we totally do. But seriously, please send it via email because it’s 2016 and that’s how things are done. Don't send anything that's already appeared in print or online. If your piece is selected for publication, you'll hear from us within a month(-ish). You won't be contacted if it has not been chosen. Hang your head in shame for we have rejected you, silently. Villamere assumes first-print rights and electronic rights, you retain copyright. Send your work in the body of your email or as an attachment to submissions@villamere.com.

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CONTRIBUTORS Keith Burgoyne studies creative writing at UPEI in Charlottetown and serves on the PEI Writers' Guild's board of directors. He is currently learning to unicycle. “If falling off and bleeding is the point of it, then I'm doing very well.”

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Villamere PUBLISHER/EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Jennifer Villamere MANAGING EDITOR

Chris Bailey

HOW TO REACH US

Cara-Lyn Morgan is a GTAbased writer whose poetry collection, Cartograph, is due in 2017. It follows her 2014 debut, What Became My Grieving Ceremony. Her work is included in Tightrope Books' 2015’s Best Canadian Poetry.

EMAIL info@villamere.com TEXT 289 439 9973 WEB villamere.com

a.m. kozak warps between Ottawa and the west coast with two wise rabbits and wonders when to wear white.

Other poems appear in Arc Poetry Magazine.

Tom McMillan’s fiction has appeared in the Toronto Star, Grain, Housefire, Pithead Chapel, Spork Press and more. He has a Master’s degree in journalism and his non-fiction work has appeared in newspapers across Canada.

Jacob McArthur Mooney's second collection, Folk (M&S, 2011) was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Intl Prize and the Trillium Book Award in Poetry. His next collection is Don't Be Interesting (M&S, 2016). personally cutting you a cheque for $25 and I’m paying $16.78 to ship you a hard copy of the magazine.) Plus we’re looking at ways we can offer you non-financial compensation because your work is good and important and you deserve nice things. You will see in this issue and online that we have designed and run very handsome pro-bono ads for some of our contributors. This is one way we offer non-financial compensation. We are flexible and eager to work with you to help you any way we can.

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SUBSCRIBE: Basic subscription rate: One year (four issues) $25 CAD. International subscription rate: One year (four issues) $45 CAD. Visit villamere.ca to order your subscription or email subscriptions@ villamere.com for information. © 2015 by Villamere. All Rights Reserved.

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your exclusive guide to what things Here is

are on which page:

Bee Sounds (buzz.)

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From Us to You

Your editors JENNIFER VILLAMERE and CHRIS BAILEY show you just how low lowbrow can go.

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Peeps

Funny things you said on Twitter and stuff.

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Why the JUNOS suck

#JunosSoMale is but one of their many problems.

BY JENNIFER VILLAMERE

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Your Grocery List

Tape it to your fridge and check these items off as you collect them.

BY JENNIFER VILLAMERE

Can Stanzas

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She, the darkened joy

BY CARA-LYN MORGAN

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Mother

Laurel, Therese, Alanna, Jacqueline

BY CARA-LYN MORGAN

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Father

BY CARA-LYN MORGAN

RUSSELL SMITH GETS TURNED DOWN: PAGE 13

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Ali Kills Liston

A Happy Unhappy Life

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Longreads

BY JACOB MCARTHUR MOONEY

Ottawa BY a.m. kozak

The Harvest

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Things That Turn

BY KEITH BURGOYNE

BY TOM MCMILLAN

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Russell Smith Gets Turned Down

To Canadians who read newspapers or practically anything else, Russell Smith is a big deal. So why would his own publisher turn him down?

BY JENNIFER VILLAMERE

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From Us to You By far the strangest advice I’ve ever heard my father give is this: “Never trust a good fart.”

Using that as my cold open can be considered lowbrow because it appeals broadly. You don’t need no papers from any highfalutin institute of fancy book-learnin’ to find the humour. It’s disarming and it’s a gateway. It grabs your attention and now you’re here with me, at the beginning of issue two of Villamere magazine.

Being lowbrow gives us paths to things we otherwise couldn’t touch and expands our vocabulary to include vulgarities you wouldn’t see in other publications.

There’s an intimacy in this, the language we use. More conversational than academic, more how you’d speak to a family member or a friend than a boss or superior. We can refer to you as a dummy or a jerk, use these as terms of endearment. It’s a better economy like that. We can take you to Cape Breton, like Keith Burgoyne does in his creative nonfiction piece on page 8, and welcome you to our family with open arms, like we’re Creed or something.

And I can let you in.

I can let you in on the intricacies of my father’s advice, which, taken as presented at the start of this letter, is absurd. But, if he’s telling that to his sick 10-year-old grandson, then it’s polite advice on how to manage illness without shitting yourself.

In this light, his warning goes well with his most useful bit of advice: “You’ve got to take care of number one because no one else will do that for you.”

Just because something is lowbrow doesn’t mean it is without charm or wit, or insight.

To think otherwise is at best stupid and at worst dangerous.

So watch out when you fart. It’s that time of year.

Postea sui toucher,

CHRIS BAILEY Managing Editor

Twitter: @thischrisbailey Email: chris@villamere.com

Your editors went to the very, very high-end Giller Prize Gala and all they brought you was this lousy selfie and a crippling inferiority complex. Nov. 10, 2015. PHOTO BY JEN VILLAMERE

How low is lowbrow?

Fart jokes? Not per se, more like wise words re: farts and also some manure talk.

What is the difference between a literary critic and an editor?

A literary critic can break it down, the writing, but they can also break it full stop. Critics can’t help but impose themselves on the work, to bring their own biases to it, against it, upon it.

I am an editor. The editor prunes the writing so that it can achieve its best health. Ideally. I bring my biases and all the rest to it but not to break it, poke holes in it, but to bring it so it can best bloom and reach.

In this metaphor, the writing is organic matter, like a tree.

Or manure.

Which brings me to the matter of issue number two. The deuce you hold in your hands. Enjoy its fresh warmth and ripeness. It is fertile. So are you.

JENNIFER VILLAMERE Editor-in-Chief

Twitter: @jenvillamere Email: jen@villamere.com

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Peeps

O

ur fave booky tweets and messages. Get busy and write to us and/or for us. Email: letters@villamere, tweet: @jenvillamere.

Coach House Books @coachhousebooks 'Come for the dogs, stay for the gods' - AndrĂŠ Alexis on #fifteendogs at @torontolibrary

Michael Winter @michaelwinter34 in bath & just applied ďŹ rst facial scrub exfoliant & its true my skin is now free of crops, bushes, leaves.

Grant Tanaka @GrantTanaka

get the word "ta oo" ta ooed on your body cause you're ironic as fuck Matt Cahill @m_cahill

You are appreciating second-person voice in fiction.

Dan MacRae @danmacrae I'm at No Frills on a Saturday night because I felt like doing the opposite of whatever The Secret is.

Sir Real Visions @PajamaStew

Harold sipped tea.

His wife smiled. They touched hands over an embroidered pillow which read "Someday I'll murder you with this pillow".

Justin McElroy @JustinMcElroy

Critics who haven't seen Room agree: "It's amazing ... uplifting" -- Sydnee McElroy, The Couch ....................................................................................................................................................................................................

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THE JUNO AWARDS

IN 2003, NICKELBACK'S CHAD KROEGER BEAT RON SEXSMITH TO WIN THE JUNO AWARD FOR SONGWRITER OF THE YEAR. #NEVERFORGET Text and graphic by JENNIFER VILLAMERE

Watching the JUNOS is frustrating and humiliating, like cheering for a beloved team that always falls short.

Through the low lights, faux fog and thumbing bass, we can all sense the elephant in the room: Cheese. No matter how progressive the work of the nominees, the JUNOS are a cornball production.

The music is good. The show is bad. There is no tension, no snark, no glamour, no Grimes, no beefs, no drama, no made up tiffs, no love triangles, no divas, no one poised to bite the head off a chicken or rip up a photo of the pope or even slip a nip.

The JUNOS are not coarse or rude. They’re worse. The JUNOS are vulgar. They’re vulgar in the sense that they’re tinselly, cheap, inauthentic, schmaltzy and filled with the crass commercialism that regularly dumps praise on hasbeen, major label acts.

Many of the award recipients, and likely the host, will resemble the fictional third-rate Melonville television celebs sent up on SCTV. You will wish it were a parody.

Naturalness is everything on TV and when it’s not there, its absence is amplified. To be not relaxed, to be not natural, it is the antithesis of what it is to be Canadian.

They’re also pretentious. No one will go to work the day after the JUNOS and say, “Holy frig, did you watch the JUNOS last night?” And it’s not because of the fragmentation of the media landscape. You can still anticipate water-cooler talk the morning after the Oscars: who won, who lost, who wore what, who threw shade at Zendaya’s hair.

The Oscars matter because they mean something. They have proven themselves to be a reliable (if imperfect) gauge of quality in film. How poor of a measure are the JUNOS for Canadian musical talent? Nickelback has had 12 wins in 32 nominations over their 20-year career.

This is a band who wrote one good song about getting drunk, high and laid, then proceeded to record it under 35 different titles on eight albums.

In contrast, Neil Young’s solo career started 48 years ago and he didn’t win a JUNO until 1994. He’s only won

eight since then and that meagre tally includes a tick in the column for his induction into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame, the Allan Waters Humanitarian Award, and an award given to the producer of 'Prairie Wind.'

But the JUNOS worst sin is that it panders. It expresses the taste of the majority in an attempt to draw ratings. It aims to catch everyone. But the hunter who chases two rabbits catches neither one.

The JUNOS are not coarse or rude.

They're worse.

The JUNOS assert that all our music is good and worth celebrating. If we just acknowledged that some of these nominees are total piles of crap and then we pitted them against the talent, we’d really have something exciting worth watching. We are a nation that riots at children’s hockey games. Surely we can muster some excitement for our would-be stars.

We have to allow ourselves to trash talk the team — I mean artists — that we want to lose. We need the courage to bellow “I HATE BRYAN ADAMS!” without fear that your mom will shake her head at you and say, “Aw, but look at all he’s done for our country abroad. And despite his complexion!”

You might say that knocking down the JUNOS is the most un-Canadian thing I could do. I don’t want to be mean to the JUNOS. I want it to succeed. It shines a light on great Canadian talent. But let’s take the JUNOS into the corners and rough it up a little bit, teach it to keep its head up. I want the JUNOS to reflect the Canadian ethos and not be a cheap Grammy copycat. I want it to hunt the rabbit. I want it to fucking rock. Right now, it’s clingy and annoying in its sappy quest to be loved.

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Things That Turn

NEW CREATIVE NON-FICTION BY KEITH BURGOYNE

There's some sort of primal satisfaction watching the speedometer shake past 140 with the windows down. Keeping the old car on the straight and narrow is a delicate balance, one I'm used to with our frequent trips to Pam’s family in Cape Breton.

She’s beside me, edgy, on her phone, anything to distract from what lies ahead. The teary smiles and long, mournful hugs. Whispered condolences and runny noses.

Her uncle had a heart attack. He's gone now. She says it doesn't feel real yet, that she doesn't feel much at all. That changes, the closer we get. Flying through Pictou and Antigonish, creeping toward the Canso Causeway so slowly that we have time to stand under a waterfall just past the train tracks before running back and moving the car ahead another metre or two. Her wet skin and hair cover sadness that grows with each town we pass.

I let up on the gas and drive more sensibly. There's something about going to see a man who's passed

that wisens you. Reminds you of your finity.

“People are 21 ounces lighter after they die,” Pam reads aloud to me from her phone. “They think that's how much the soul weighs once it leaves the body.”

“Yeah?” “They conducted the experiment ages ago.

Haven't done it since.”

I don't expect an afterlife once I'm gone. I hope I'm wrong. Not just for me, but for everyone gone ahead. For Pam's uncle, who was 77. Doesn't seem that old, not from where I'm sitting.

I think this as I lean against my in-laws' kitchen counter in Glace Bay, eating cold pizza. It's the family viewing tonight.

The giant windmill across the lake isn't turning. I've been waiting for that moment when the blades begin their lazy rotation but it hasn't budged.

We get in the car again and pull out of the driveway. I turn the wheel and the front creaks. I press the gas.

Clunk. Metal strikes metal and every notch we roll over makes the same noise. I look at Pam. We both sigh.

We make it to the funeral home and park in a space far from the rest, like we're giving the old car

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some breathing room.

We're late, but others are later. Pam hesitates at the entrance, and a few people file by with wet eyes and a few whispered words of support. We don't move. I watch Pam and wait for some cue to continue, but there's none, just that crippling reluctance to see the casket, the person in it. They're alive until you look at them.

She finally pulls me forward, in. The lights are dim.

People file slowly past the casket. Gracie, Pam's nine-year-old cousin, greets us.

“The mints are free,” she says, handing me one. Her parents have her in a green summer dress. Her hair is wild, her curls almost too strong for the elastic.

Her hands are filled with mints. The bowls around the room are empty.

“Thanks,” I say, pulling one from its wrapper and popping it in my mouth.

She shrugs. Mints spill from between her fingers.

So many handshakes, hugs, and how-are-yous then we’re there, standing next to him. His pale skin, his peaceful face. It looks like he fell asleep.

And then there's Gracie, reaching in and—oh Jesus —she's straightening his tie, his lapel. Brushing his hair away from his forehead then kissing her fingers and touching them against his cheek. My eyes burn as I watch.

“He's cold,” she says.

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The day of the

wonderful job.

“He knew Norm,” David says between chews.

“Didn't ever meet him, but he took the time. Spoke to everyone, you know. After that he knew Norm as well as he knew anyone else.”

He was a grocer, the minister said, and that surprised me. From the piles of lumber in his barn I'd have guessed him a carpenter or a craftsman. I can't imagine his large, age- spotted hands holding anything but a hammer.

The windmill still isn't moving. I watch it through the picture window, its white blades resolute against the gentle sway of the treetops behind.

I walk into the backyard and the children of Pam’s family are there, some of them tossing a ball around, laughing.

Pam's out here too. I sit next to her on the overgrown lawn. I pluck a thick blade of grass and twirl it in my fingers. It's better out here, I say, and Pam nods.

I place the grass between my thumbs and blow through them, and the whistle reverberates through the dense, vinylsided neighbourhood.

Then the kids, they're all around us with their own bits of grass, each of them shouting “How'd you do that?” I show them. Hold it tight but not too tight.

I pluck a thick blade Finlayson said 10:30 on of grass and twirl it the phone, but I get the feeling he tells everyone that. I'm waiting to hand in my fingers. It's him my keys, but the line up for the service desk goes out the door. better out here.

Finlayson mans the desk,

funeral I'm under the car, laying on the dirt driveway staring at a pair of worn-out sway bar linkages. The source of the problem. I’m not sure over how I'll fix it before we leave.

I climb out and pull off the work gloves and return them to the pile of lumber I found them on, one of many projects Norm won't get to finish.

“Finlayson's,” Pam's Uncle David says over

potato salad. “Get there first thing in the morning and he'll have you fixed up by the end of the day.”

A dozen voices in the next room. What a lovely service, they're saying. The minister did a

the repair bays, everything. He's grey,

lined with grease, has a phone to his ear while he hunts out keys on a dusty computer. His Reserve Mines accent is thick.

He shakes his head. “I was heartbroke, just heartbroke when I heard,” he says into the phone.

“He was a good man.”

Then he turns to me. “I'll give you a call when she's done,” he says.

We go to the mall and then for lunch. The garage is on the way back to Catalone, and we're about to

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pass by but I notice my car's been moved. We stop in. There's no one around, so I wait at the desk.

Finlayson walks in from the vehicle bay and stops.

He looks at me through squinted eyes and it feels like he's sizing me.

“Did the two linkages,” he says, approaching.

“Fifty bucks.”

I open my wallet and shake my head. He's not charging me labour, and I'll be damned if you find linkages for less than $25 a piece. I hand him three $20s.

He pulls cash from the pocket of his coveralls, finds a $10 bill and tosses it my way. He doesn't look me in the eye, just nods and wishes us a decent ride back. I thank him and I head for the door. The car drives perfectly.

Everything's packed in our car. Promises to call

as soon as we get home.

And there's motion through the trees. It catches my eye. I stare closely and realize it's the blades of the windmill off in the distance, turning at last in whatever faint breeze moves through the fog.

And then we're off, the Mira River disappearing in the rear view, the highway stretching ahead and over the horizon. The needle hits 110, 120, 130.

We pass the exit to North Sydney. 140. And then, bang. Like a gunshot, maybe louder. The car pulls hard to the left. There's a steady whomp whomp whomp coming from the front driver's side wheel.

I haul the wheel to the right and hit the brakes, but the car disagrees but I'm more determined than it.

We reach the side of the road. I bring it to a stop.

Outside I find a hole in the centre of the tire. It's a wonder the whole thing didn't just rip right off.

We'll never make the ferry now.

Pam's standing beside me as I get the car on the jack.

I forget to set the brake and off it rolls. Vehicles whip by us. The wind throws me off balance.

I make it to Canadian Tire, the parts desk. The store is old and dim. I'm picking at an up- turned corner of the raggedy desk blotter while the manager types on a yellowed computer.

“I can sell you some tires,” he says. “But we can't get them on rims today. Service bays are closed Sundays.”

A piece of the blotter comes off between my fingers.

“Guess I won't be getting any then,” I say. “I don't have a place to put them.”

The manager nods, chews on the end of a pen. “Wait here a second,” he says and walks out the front.

He comes back a minute or two later, chuckling.

“There's a woman up there,” he says, tapping his pen against the blotter I'm slowly damaging. “She's

got the same problem as you. Listen. We got a guy coming in.” He leans in close. “He'll do your tires too, but you gotta pay cash, okay? He's not really working today.”

I bring the car around to the bay. A 20-ish kid comes up to the garage door. He checks the left and then the right, like he's about to deal me contraband. He throws the door up and motions me through. Soon as I'm in, he slams it back down.

He doesn't say much. Changes the tires and I thank him for coming in on a Sunday. “Wasn't doin' nothin’ anyway,” he says.

“What do I owe you?” I ask.

He shrugs. “Whatever you think.” “Will $65 do it?”

“Holy Jesus, yes.” I hand him $10s and $5s.

The highway. I'm sticking to the speed limit this

time. I look at the clock. There’s plenty of time to make the evening ferry from Caribou to Wood Islands. We approach the enormous Seal Island Bridge.

Everything is still, not another car in sight. I slow us down until it feels like we're barely moving.

She, the darkened joy

by CARA-LYN MORGAN

of fireworks. A body against the shower of spark palms out, singed.

Mimicry of mushroom. Of course

these once were the things of war.

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Mother Laurel, Therese, Alanna, Jacqueline

by CARA-LYN MORGAN

1. octopus her dark and sleepless vigil brushing, brushing algae from a thousand mirrored eggs curling in oxygen.

Months later, the hatchlings breech and she lets go her stoney grip starved lifeless she settles into the ocean floor.

2.

The delicate tree frog, scaling root and branch, her tadpoles on her back, one

by tiny one. She finds the dewy centres of flowers, nests them in then descends

for the next. One tadpole, one flower, so they never will thirst.

3.

The pebble toad, muscles tight frightened on delicate bone, amphibious rock.

It was never the fall that would finish her.

4.

The pygmy gecko hydrophobic scales she walks on water to save herself

from drowning in a single drop of rain

Father

by CARA-LYN MORGAN

It is years since I have crept in here at night to sit in the cold leather of your office chair, pressed my feet against the polished desk, mausolean, the door always closed.

As a girl, I dreaded to be called here. You, framed darkly against the bay window, empty street. Your heavy tenor so rarely engaged with my teenaged self, growling the dagger of my name first, middle, last. A crow

to sit across the interminable desk, recall all the ways I have failed. Always horrified to be here, in the dark, surrounded

by photos of inflamed colons, slick intestines. Here I learned to navigate the coiled GI tract, unreadable scrawl. Often I crept in here to touch the strict frames of your diplomas. To shake the delicate vials of ink, touch buttons on the phone.

There are no pictures of me here. I am not solemn nor cerebral enough for such a dark and heady space. So male and leather. Yet tonight, I have crept here to leave the print of these small toes in your clean and careful rug.

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FROM THE TURNT AFFAIRS DEPT.

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Russell Smith gets turned down Text and graphic by JENNIFER VILLAMERE Photograph by JOWITA BYDLOWSKA

When Jian Ghomeshi’s shitarsed actions became public last year and the press went bananas covering every aspect, one story that came to light was how much of a mensch fellow CBC personality George Stroumboulopoulos is. Not by comparison to Ghomeshi — an osprey eating its own chicks still looks awesome next to him — but just of his own accord. By all

accounts, folks love The Strombo.

Reader’s Digest determined him to be one of the most trusted Canadians. He calls himself ‘the nation’s boyfriend,’ and you know what? He’s probably the boyfriend a polite, erudite nation would be happy to wear on their arm to Mom’s house.

But what about a boyfriend this nation can fucking lust over?

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Canada, please spread your legs for Russell Smith.

By way of introduction, I offer this listicle: 1. Middle name is Claude, a common French name but still it’s rarer that Pierre. Rarity is desirable.

2. Born in Johannesburg, that city you learned about in Grade 10 when you had to read Cry, the Beloved Country.

3. Grew up in Halifax, home of good things like Sloan and Steph McGrath.

4. Learned the ukulele before it was cool.

5. Studied French literature at Queen’s. Can probably recite poetry en français. #swoon 6. Wrote a full-blown porno novel, Diana: A Diary in the Second Person, which I am totally going to read when I grow up.

7. Can dress himself and the rest of the country as witnessed by his long-running men’s style column in the Globe and Mail.

8. His arms look strong.

He has written four novels, two books of short stories, an illustrated fantasy novella, plus the aforementioned pornographic novel. He’s been nominated for the Governor General’s Award, longlisted for the 2015 Scotiabank Giller Prize, shortlisted for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, and won the Canadian National Magazine Award for fiction. He teaches in the MFA programme at the University of Guelph. His stories are dark, filthy, knowing, ripe and wet.

All this is to say that in Canadian literary circles and among people in this country who read newspapers or practically anything else, Russell Smith is kind of a big deal. So it was a shock when I talked to him about his latest book, Confidence, and he told me he’d been shafted. Recently.

“This book was turned down by my previous publisher, HarperCollins, who published my novel, Girl Crazy, because they said, ‘We just can’t publish a book of short stories. No one’s going to buy them.’

It’s still not clear whether anyone will buy them, but that has nothing to do with the critical response, which has been good.”

Indeed, Confidence was longlisted for the Giller Prize. But this episode raises the question: Who do you have to be in Canadian literature to be secure in your projects when even Russell Smith can get shot down?

“It was a shock,” Smith said. “I remember when I moved from DoubleDay — I had published three books with DoubleDay and I was sort of at the top of the world there. It was kind of the top of Canadian publishing. HarperCollins was very, very pleased to take me from DoubleDay and I remember when I went into the office for the first meeting with the editor there they had set up a surprise party for me, my name was on a big screen, there was champagne, the CEO came out of his

office to welcome me and I remember all these speeches (stating) ‘We’re not in the business of publishing books, we’re in the business of publishing authors.’ Well, it turns out that wasn’t quite true. As soon as I gave them a book of short stories they’re no longer interested in the author.”

But why pick on short stories? Look at the success Heather O’Neill has found. Smith concurs. “It was just around the time that Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize for her short stories, it was also around that time that Lynn Coady won the Giller Prize for Hellgoing, a book of short stories, and this year all the prize lists have had books of short stories on them.”

When HarperCollins turned Confidence down, Smith went straight to his old mentor and former editor John Metcalf at the now mythically influential small press, Biblioasis. The Windsorbased publisher is now considered the most prestigious small press in Canada, neck-in-neck with Coach House Books.

“They’re just being intellectual in a way the big presses are afraid to do and it’s paying off for them.”

Oh that swagger. The balls to call the shop that takes a chance on you “intellectual,” the cocksuredness to show the Goliath that turned your book down what a critical juggernaut they passed up. And yet, a hint of humility: “I'm still quite sure that HarperCollins made the right decision in economic terms. The numbers are just dismal.

Even for these prize-nominated books. I would be very, very pleased to sell 2,000 copies of this book,” he says.

Don’t you want to please him, Nation? We made Ghomeshi's squishy and lacking memoir, 1982, debut at No. 1 on the bestseller lists. And, sure, George Stroumboulopoulos has a lovely rapport with Margaret Atwood. But Russell Smith? He has Confidence.

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14

BY TOM MCMILLAN

GRAPHICS BY JENNIFER VILLAMERE

J

asmine swigs the raspberry vodka before killing the engine.

One sip, two. Fine, three, but then twists the cap and stuffs the plastic bottle back behind the maps in the glove compartment.

The door hinges squeal. She exhales, fruit flavour on her breath.

“This is my house,” Jasmine says aloud, a growing habit, one of many. “It’s my life. I chose it.”

The house is a brick, three-storey, with a wrap-around deck. Jasmine had made a lifetime of good choices: bought a good home in a

pre-gentrified neighbourhood, dated many men to learn what she liked, tested many jobs to find a real passion. She picked the kind, interesting guy and nurtured a well-paying marketing career. She did yoga, ate kale. She travelled, invested hard when the markets dipped. Learned how to quilt. Ran the Calgary Marathon.

And now she’s drinking in her driveway.

The car door’s slam makes Jasmine flinch. Ahead, the living room lights burn. She knows she will find Hafeez

slumped in his leather recliner, feet up, television glowing, lost in a documentary on coral reefs, whitecollar crime, female circumcision.

“What should we be ashamed of now?” she'll ask over supper, their game, and he’ll tell her another way that the planet should be behaving better. They’ll talk about what he learned. The conversation will be interesting and stimulating and meaningful.

Or it used to be. Now it is sawdust, tasteless. A laxative running through her.

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15

Truthfully, Jasmine likes the world the way it is.

T

he leather chair sits empty. The house feels warm and Jasmine lets her shoulder bag clunk to the floor.

“I’m home,” she calls, waiting for a response, fearing that moan that tells her he’s suffered a stroke, fearing being chained to a drooling invalid for the rest of her shortening life.

No reply. Now Jasmine imagines her husband on the floor, throat cut, linoleum shiny with blood. She imagines a burglar in a ski mask leaping out of a closet. Feels the sharp knife pressed to her wrinkling throat. A nightmare flashes inside: being shoved against the kitchen table, the tear of her pencil skirt, pain. It would be hell to be raped. She shivers at the thought, but likes thinking that all outcomes are possible, that her world is still full of open doors.

“Hafeez?”

Her hand is at her throat now.

Impossible to swallow. Where is he? He should be here. She opens her mouth to call again, then registers the sound for the first time. A faint but steady pounding below, every three or four seconds, from the basement.

The stairs creak. Old hardwood.

Hafeez is sitting against the furnace, topless in his running shorts, gently banging the back of his skull against the plumbing drainpipe. All of Jasmine’s friends say that she married well. Every other husband ballooned but Hafeez stayed thin, kept most his hair. Sensitive yet also man enough to fix the washer and regrout the shower.

He’d made good money, taken her to Africa, retired early.

She chose well. Who could ever imagine that would be a bad thing?

“You’re sick of me,” he’d slurred last New Year’s, salty-eyed, drunk on the Chang’s god-awful punch.

“You’re too good,” Jasmine had replied, aiming for a joke but both catching the jagged way the words came out. “I’ve spent my life being the bad guy.”

He’d blinked. Paused. His wrinkles deepened and, for a beat, she’d thought they were going to have a fight. A real platesmashing, heart-scarring brawl.

How glorious. But then Hafeez cocked his head, smiled with infinite patience, and asked if she’d care for a tonic water.

“Y

ou’ve been crying.”

Even in the dim basement, she can see his eyes look shiny.

Hafeez doesn’t react. Jasmine steps closer. Her husband’s hands are working the lip of his stomach, kneading his belly fat like bread dough, and she is unsettled. Her first thought is: I don’t recognize those hands. She wants to find Hafeez’s shirt, put it on him. She wants to get in the car, drive to New York.

“I found her on the beach,” he says eventually, face sinking back into the shadows. “I came down to replace the filter and, bam, there it was. It’s been decades since I remembered her.”

“Remembered who?”

“I was ten. I’d never seen one before.”

Exhaling, Jasmine wonders if he’d remembered to put the Sauvignon Blanc in the fridge. She wonders what it’d feel like to get divorced.

Excitingly painful. Shelia, the new head of digital marketing, has been married three times and now lives with that golf pro, what’s his name, the one with a beer belly and fake tan. Mr. City-Sized Ego. She doubts they discuss documentaries over supper.

“You’re not making sense. Let’s go upstairs and have a drink.”

“She was already dead when I found her,” Hafeez says. His hands rise, gesturing her closer. He needs her. Still, after all this time. It’s wonderful. It’s sickening. “It was on the gulf, by my grandma’s house. My mom was reading, and Dad was somewhere, probably working. I wandered off.”

Jasmine sits down, leaning against the washing machine, letting him talk. He is good at telling stories.

Always building to a point, adding a well-placed curse.

“I walked and walked until the cottage was a speck. I remembered my heels got blistered but I kept going, restless in that way kids get, you know? The sandbar ended and all of a sudden I saw a cave, its mouth dark and small. The kind of place that little boys suspect would be perfect for pirates to hide treasure.”

The boy who would be her husband tightened his sandals and mustered his courage. He crawled through the hole in the rock.

Across the basement, Hafeez moves his arms to show her how he did it.

The cave was dark, musty, with a sloping ceiling. Faded graffiti tags dotted the front walls, GRAD 68 and KS+TH FOREVER. It got dark further inside. The waves murmured behind him. And then he saw her, slumped in the back of the cave. Her body was curled like a snail, her milky eyes staring at the ocean. She was old, wearing a blue hospital gown with stains across the front. It looked worn.

“Her hair was kind of dusted by sand,” Hafeez says now, the furnace at his back. “It took me forever to brush it out.”

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16

C

hester Tamozki changed her life. Her trajectory was tantalizingly unclear until they met in fall ’82, and if she wasn’t necessarily on a path to greatness then at least she was considering it. Fragile, sure, but what woman isn’t? Jasmine envied these men who walked around the world, 100 percent confident that people needed to hear what they had to say.

Jasmine knew what Chester wanted before they’d even spoken.

Friday night at a dull grad school party hosted by some associate professor, the kind of wine-andcheese affair that always got too drunk or too boring way too fast.

He was facing the living room. She could only see the muscles of his

neck and upper back, but it was enough. Hafeez was all slender hips and sinewy biceps; Chester’s pecs strained the fabric of his shirt. His face was imperfect, the nose too large for the mouth, and he seemed unsophisticated in that way that even smart men often do.

She wanted him despite this, because of this.

He crossed the room like they were alone.

“You spilled.” Chester’s voice was gravel, all mumble.

Jasmine glanced down, saw nothing. Looked back up to find him grinning.

That was the moment she decided to kiss him. Not later, alone in the dark, in the safety of a night without stars, but there in front of her supervisors and classmates.

One or two of them had met

Hafeez, thought him darling.

Chester kissed her back, gently at first, but then jamming their mouths together, hands swooping across the small of her back. When he pulled away, Jasmine smiled.

Then stopped. She was surprised to find him looking startled.

Chester’s eyes darted the room. He blushed like he’d just spilled salsa on his shirt. Which made the kiss the mistake, and her the salsa.

By the time she got home, outrunning her shame, it already felt like ancient history. Like the beginning of a story where she learns how to be a grown-up, how to succeed. She’d already decided to tell Hafeez. Looking back, that was probably even when Jasmine decided to marry him, if he’d stay, the good guy who would make a good husband for her good life.

Continued on page 18 >>

Ali Kills Liston

BY JACOB MCARTHUR MOONEY

You no longer belong to Louisville. Or Louis. You are Lewiston’s.

By this well-spoken phantom hand your name has been commanded out of Kinshasa, your chains of feather boas boiled into sugar drink to be sold at border outlets to impatient local kids. It gets worse than this in shantytowns. In untested rural Georgia a farmer fires off his rifle. Your effigy rope-a-dopes a moment, then explodes.

Three thousand witnesses walk the chalk perimeter, make untelevised appeals to the harvest gods of Maine. Nothing becomes of Nathan Hare.

Nixon’s list drains of enemies. Humphrey beats Nixon. Cale kills Allison. Mondale kills the rapist. It surprises us with snow for all of ’88. Harding kills Kerrigan. McSorley kills Brashear.

The cell they move you to is flooded, so you hang from the ceiling.

Tyson kills Holyfield. You are approached by no biographers.

America goes metric. Orderlies arrive to find you burning fight cards. ....................................................................................................................................................................................................

17

Handsome, smart. Never embarrassed by her. The kind of man who could listen patiently when she bitched about her friends, but also open a Corona with his teeth. Who could spill salsa on his shirt and laugh about it.

“You’re selfish,” he said when she finished explaining.

“I wasn’t thinking. It was a mistake.”

“You’re selfish, but we’ll get through this,” he continued, voice even and measured. Mature.

“I want to be a better person.”

“You can be. You already almost are.”

For nearly three decades, Jasmine had worked hard to deserve his trust and understanding. She read Harpers, limited her drinking, acted like the mature grown-up Hafeez was and always would be.

And, when he spent too much time play fantasy football with his friends or insisted on buying the new Mercedes SX, she re-paid him by being patient and measured in return. Or at least trying to be.

“I’ve got a great wife,” he told the boys one poker night, drunker than usual, voice rising through the floorboards. “Best decision I ever made.”

A few years ago, Jasmine hunted Chester down on Facebook. Didn’t send a message, but studied his photo albums. He’d gained weight, mainly in the belly and jowls. His wife was a blonde tart with a rose tattoo stamped on her left breast.

In one picture they were bowling with friends but neither one faced the camera. He eyed the lane, she stared off to the left, and if you cropped that photo in half you could imagine them as strangers.

“A

t that age, the only woman you know, really, is your mother,” Hafeez says now, sipping the Diet Coke she’d got him from upstairs. “So, when her hair was clean, I thought I should take her

to my parents. But her body was too heavy, and her skin felt too gross. So I used my left sandal to bury her in sand.”

He pulls off his sock and mimes using it like a shovel, scooping the air of their basement. She watches, stomach gargling. He shows her how he buried the woman’s feet.

Her legs. Her chest and patted the sand down. Not the head. He left that open.

“For a while, yeah. I didn’t know why I did it. Took me years to figure that out.”

When the spooning was done, Hafeez says, he realized should do something nice for the woman, so he knelt and mumbled made-up prayers. He wasn’t religious, the man she married. Jasmine didn’t know this boy that Hafeez was describing.

“The following summer, we returned to the beach but the body was gone. I dug for her to be sure but all I found was an earring in the sand. I swallowed it and walked back. I don’t think I’ve thought about her in twenty years.”

“Did you give her a name?” Jasmine asks when the story is done.

He looks up. “Why would you ask that?”

She shrugs.

“I did,” Hafeez says after a moment. “But I can’t remember.”

J “Then, when I was done, I took off my shirt and curled up beside her.”

She looks up at him. Had she heard that right?

“Why?” “I was a kid, Jas.” His voice cuts sharp. “Even through the sand, she had a terrible smell, rotten and dank. I had to breath in gulps.”

“But you stayed there, spooning a buried corpse?”

asmine hears him in the shower, humming, a distant trill.

The Sauvignon Blanc is still in the wine rack, but she cracks it anyway. Swigs straight from the lukewarm bottle. The motions settle her nerves more than the wine. Setting down the bottle, she climbs the stairs and knocks on the bathroom door, shouting above running water.

“Why did you spoon her?”

“What?” he shouts back.

“You said it took you years to figure out why you did it.”

The water dies, though lonely drips tinkle against the tile.

“Yeah, it did.”

“So why?”

The door opens. He is flushed, pink-chested from the heat.

Grabbing his towel, Hafeez covers his face, not his genitals. He talks into the towel.

“I think I was lonely. My parents were so distant.”

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18

“So it was what, therapeutic?”

“When I saw her, dead or not, she was the first person I could do anything I wanted to.”

Jasmine wants to ask why he remembers now, what the hell happened today, but her hips are already turning.

In their home office, she finds his laptop, his coffee mug, her degrees hanging on the wall. She pulls down the master’s and looks at it. Her name is written on it, but it feels like the work of a younger sister, a former friend.

Her degree but Jasmine wants to smash it. She feels lied to, betrayed. Where had this freak flag been for the last thirty years?

What else had he kept secret?

She’d worked hard to become better, to match his goodness and here Hafeez was, faking it all along.

The stairs creak from his steps.

Old hardwood.

Chester’s Facebook profile’s been updated today. He and the blonde bimbo are standing outside a Las Vegas casino. The caption reads, GONNA MAKE MY $$. Jasmine closes the laptop. She’s never wanted to see Vegas.

From the kitchen Hafeez calls, asking about dinner. She knows he will come hunting for her. He is not the kind of man to march straight to the TV. He will need to look her in the eye, smile, see that she is still here in the centre of their house, their shared existence. She pries her lips open a crack. When he enters the office, Jasmine does not know what she will say. Divorce? Tears? Raging or laughter or sharing? She sees multiple futures rippling out at once. Them talking all night and swapping secrets. Her packing her bags and driving to Washington, to Phoenix, to San Diego. Getting drunk on white wine and watching a Ken Burns documentary in silence.

She sucks in a hot breath, her pulse racing, intensely alive.

OTTAWA BY a.m. kozak

Ottawa blasts lee ann womack invisibly from rolled down minivan windows cruising suburbs of a sparse metropolis on a sunny summer solstice that evaporates to humid midnight

Ottawa is a smoke-break bureaucrat who parks in kanata & buses to a series of mid-rise buildings tired & tightly piled like a living room ornament that becomes 3-D wallpaper a week after move-in

Ottawa is a hip uncle who listens to jazz & smokes marijuana time to time but wld be out of place at a trendy restaurant & doesn't get the appeal of primetime vampire shows

Ottawa is a bully victim who elevates montreal & toronto to Superior Destination Status for cool kids who chuckle on rooftop patios past one a.m. & toss martinis off the side not stirred enuf

Ottawa is standing not jumping at a concert w/ inquisitive grin dreading early alarm churn to a cubicle near the transitway in centretown to develop further expertise on weather & unilingual job loss

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On the cover: Detail from Spring & Summer 1930 Eaton’s Catalogue courtesy of Irene Villamere.