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Saturday, August 25, 2012

Fiction #38

New fiction! Issue #38 ...
Submissions now open for #39.

Special thanks to all who have been submitting.

Fiction #38: Hailey Wendling

How Ya Faren, Karen?

Lucky’s girlfriend left him this morning with a broken heart and a hair straightener. I light a pan flute of cigarettes as I roll into his driveway. Lucky’s an Irish artist studying history at McGill. Infertile Chinese surgeons adopted him from Ireland and their other adopted kids started calling him “Lucky” after the cereal instead of his real first name, Kelly. Lucky doesn’t care, because he says Kelly’s a chicks name and Lucky is a great pickup line. “Girls are always after me lucky charms,” he says. “They can’t wait to get lucky, if you know what I’m saying.”

This was before Karen, the now ex love-of-his-life. Karen’s a real natural disaster. Karen, the hot mess express. Heroin Karoin. How-ya-faren-Karen. Karen ballerina-pointe toed the line between junkie and glamour. She had scar where Marilyn Munro’s birthmark would be from when she burnt herself with a cigarette. She had to get a nose job from doing too much coke. She was vain to the point where it was almost a physical handicap. She would spend hours straightening her hair so long and golden it looked as if it was spun by Rumpletsiltskein himself, and then she’d go make soup and forget she left the stove on. She was almost always dying. Lucky and I would find her in the bath after doing angel dust, looking like a mermaid in polluted waters. She’d get stoned and watch movies; trying to hold her breath the whole time characters were underwater. She almost suffocated during Finding Nemo.

Lucky and Léo are in the kitchen. Léo’s the kind of guy to call in situations like this. He was named after the guy who wrote War & Peace, so he knows his shit. Léo’s a certified drug lord with connections to the Montréal mafia, using his drug lordship to finance law school. He’s a human vending machine for recreational narcotics and what Michael Jackson would describe as a smooth criminal. He’s using the hair straightener Karen left behind to make bacon.

“Karen ran off with some med school wanker,” Lucky says, burning his cigarette right into the table.

“Fuck no,” I mumble. I realize I’m still wearing my t-shirt from the night before, a present from Karen that reads It’s my Duty to Please that Booty. Léo shakes his head, peeling the bacon off the grill.  I sit down at the table beside him. 

Lucky puts his head in his hands. “All the signs were right there and I just ignored them. I kept making excuses for her, you know?” I nod even though I can’t see him and I don’t know. “She did a ‘juice cleanse’. And then she kept buying shit from Ikea. Like, flowerpots and bathmats and shit. Like, married people shit. She started taking up yoga.”

“Isn’t yoga a character from Star Wars?” I ask.

“That’s Yoda,” says Léo. “Lucky, you couldn’t have seen this coming. Some people just throw their lives away. You two had a really good thing going.” Lucky pours himself a glass of whiskey and he pours me one too. All Lucky’s glasses have been stolen from bars. Léo drinks red wine because he’s a man of class.

“I’m sure it’s just a phase,” I say. “Everyone goes through that rebellious shit, right?”

“What am I going to do without her?” Lucky moans. “I’ve got her name tattooed on my arse, bro. I can’t believe she’d just leave me like this. What we had was so real.” Lucky finishes his whiskey and pours himself another glass.

Karen’s dad is a tattoo artist with rumoured Hells Angels connections. He walked in on Lucky and Karen fucking once. He famously said, ‘You like my daughter enough to fuck her? Do you like her enough to get her name tattooed on your ass?’ Normal guy would’ve backed off but Lucky was batshit crazy for Karen. ‘I’m gonna ask him to let me marry her one day,’ he said. ‘How can he turn down the guy who’s got her name tattooed on his ass?’

“Now she’s dating some guy who plays golf and is a med intern at a children’s hospital. She’s moving to Ottawa. Karen! In Ottawa! Can you imagine?” Léo and I shake our heads. “She’s not even using anymore. She started taking vitamin supplements and stopped taking prescription pills. And those are good for you!” During exams you could always find Karen chewing Ritalin like gum. She would be doing lines of Adderall off her laptop in the library. She would put her notes in a crack pipe and smoke them. She would be hooked up to an IV drip of coffee, redbull and vodka.

Karen wanted to be a musician, but she was in English. I wanted to be a writer, but I was in physics. I haven’t enjoyed writing for school since I got in trouble for writing a book report on Steven King’s Pet Cemetery in the fifth grade. Karen and I would sit on my teeny tiny balcony and call out walks of shame with a megaphone until Lucky would come in and scream at us to shut the hell up, we were making a racket. I can’t believe Karen would just pack up and leave.

“What’s her dad going to say?” I can picture Becky, Karen’s mom, purring with happiness. She’s a business exec who always has traces of purple lipstick on her teeth. Karen’s dad is in jail, but I can picture him discussing the scandal with his drug dealer and everyone assuring him it’s “just a phase.”

“She called her dad, apparently,” Lucky says. “She left me a note. Two years together and all I get is a fucking note.”

“This festering isn’t healthy,” Léo says. Léo is the kind of guy who can say words like “festering” outside of essays without getting shot.

“Do you want to go to the strip club?” I ask. “I think Kimono’s working tonight.” Strippers belong in medical journals as a cure for broken hearted depression.

“It’s Wednesday, so it’s Mercedes,” says Lucky. “Remember that time Karen and Mercedes made out? I don’t. Got a picture of it tough. It was the background on my computer for awhile.”

Karen and I had sex once. It was after Lucky and her finished their final exam. Lucky drank too much and passed out before we even left for the bar, so Karen and I stayed out all night blowing our trust funds on champagne and doing coke in adjacent stalls in the women’s washroom. I ate a tube of her lipstick before I drunk drove us home. That isn’t a trick, or anything. It was just the kind of logic we had: if the cops pulled us over the breathalyser would just pick up lipstick. Then we were still too psyched up to go to bed so we danced around my apartment drinking rosé before we had sex. She was mad at me the next day for eating a thirty-dollar lipstick. Who pays thirty dollars for a fancy crayon for your face? I completely forgot about my calculus exam that morning so I slept through it. But I emailed my professor and told him I mixed up the dates so he let me write it on Monday instead. I was too hopped up on meth amphetamines to really care.

Lucky wipes his face with the back of his hand. “Fuck it. Let’s go. I think Steve and Tyler want to go out tonight anyway. Or whatever.”

I stand up. “Bathroom break, bro.” I don’t really have go to the bathroom. But I do have a couple pills to take that I don’t want to share and maybe try to grab a pair of Karen’s panties. I go to the bathroom and take my pills before I see a piece of paper with water splatter patterns on it. Like a crime scene where Karen metaphorically slashed Lucky’s heart open and you can see where all the metaphorical blood landed, but it’s tears. Wow, you’re high as fick. I say. You’re talking to yourself again, I add in a chiding voice.

I glance at Karen’s note. A lot of stuff about how its “what she wants” and how its “best they don’t talk.” This is the kind of bullshit Lucky should roll up and smoke. I can’t believe Karen doesn’t want this life. This is the good life. We study and plagiarize essays during the day and imbibe narcotics at night to obliterate the damning shame of our overwhelming guilt, waking up too hung over to care. We have fun. We are the result of the nuclear family exploding. We are the result of those who struck gold. We are the future.

*

Hailey Wendling is a writer, rock star and scholar living hard in downtown Montreal, where she studies English Literature and performs stand up comedy.

Fiction #38: Philip Quinn

Dog Years

Maybe you should be taking me to the vet too Ralph had joke that morning while trying to swallow the quarter-sized pills. One shot and it’d all be over.

She told him to keep his voice down that their son Joseph might hear.

Growth and decay. Only 14 in dog years but their golden retriever Alice Munroe had turned into a centenarian with her inability to stand up and even walk a few steps.

Now Ralph’s been dead for more than a year. She tries not to picture what he’d look like. Too much darkness, too much moisture. For her son Joseph, just the opposite, too much sun, too much dangerous light, his pale complexion soaking up the cancerous UV rays. She wouldn’t allow him to go anywhere without a hat and layers of sun screen.

The seasons were mixed up too with temperatures fluctuating wildly; spring-like days in the middle of winter, below freezing temperatures in late summer. Her calendar seemed off so she tried the Farmers’ Almanac, other indicators. Nothing quite predicted the rapid changes. And always the sun, no matter how cold, and her son, no matter how tired she felt.

One night she dreamt that Ralph chewed on one of Alice Munroe’s legs to feed his stomach cancer while the dog licked his face, blood everywhere. When she woke up she had twisted the blankets around so it felt like she’d been engulfed in a body, a twisted, maimed body.

Her psychiatrist told her to write down her dreams. So she did and would dutifully bring in the small notebook once a week and they’d talk about them. He didn’t comment on the dreams about Ralph. Instead, he paid the most attention to when she’d dream about buying new lingerie or a red party dress or having her hair done as a blonde.

So it didn’t really surprise her when he stopped setting up appointments with her and instead asked her out. He didn’t drive so she’d drive them to restaurants and movies and back to her place where he’d stay the night and sometimes the entire weekend.

It felt strange to have him sit beside her in the car because when Ralph was alive he did all the driving and when it was just her and Joseph, he liked to sit in the back and play his Nintendo games. Only Alice Munroe had sat there in the front with her when she drove and so he seemed like a dog next to her in his brown walking shorts, his small hairy legs trembling like Alice Munroe’s had in her final years and his hand sometimes aggressively in between her legs, feeling the smoothness of the silk stockings he insisted she buy.

Soon after she began dating the psychiatrist, Joseph began to have nightmares and wet his bed. The entire house seemed to smell of urine as if he was marking his territory. She tried everything to get rid of the odour, bleaching the floors, burning incense and even in the middle of winter, leaving the windows open.

She remembered how once in late October there’d been a snow storm and she looked out the kitchen window and her son and her husband had built a small wet snowman meant to look like her, a big empty hole in its side where its wooden heart had fallen out.

*

Philip Quinn's published books:
  • Dis Location, Stories After the Flood
  • The Double, a novel
  • The SubWay, poetry
  • The Skeleton Dance, a novel

Fiction #38: Tim Conley

Saving the World

There were two shifts at the clinic, a day shift and a night shift.

On the day shift were Grace and Reggie and Olympia. Grace had worked there the longest but never made mention of the fact; she was known for never having a hard word for anybody. She was always asking after the patients’ families, always remembered the name of every child and grandchild, and Reggie often joked about her perfect memory in that way of his. Olympia was the quietest of the three but she had the most energy, had to be told when to take a break.

On the night shift was an amorphous, gelatinous-looking blob that could raise itself to the ceiling or slink through the lowest crevice. It did not have a name.

Word came down, not altogether directly, from the City Health Office: in recognizing the surplus of clinics within the municipality, and in the interests of tightening the fiscal belts (just like everybody else had to), the clinic would be closing in three months. “I’ve been coming here for my pills for twenty-six, no, twenty-seven years,” said Mrs. Underwood in a voice neither exactly angry nor exactly sad, and had a quiet but fatal coronary right in front of a horrified Reggie, who had to be sent home for a few days.

I was the only one who consoled the blob, if consolation it may be called. Some years ago (though not nearly as long as Mrs. Underwood had been coming for her pills), it had enslaved my mind and I was utterly at its bidding on any night it chose. The phone would ring, I would answer, there would be no one on the other line, and I would know.

With two months to go before the closure, Olympia had a breakdown. At first she fell into an even deeper silence than usual, to the point that even recalcitrant folks tried cajoling her, but ultimately she exploded with a low howling. For over an hour she sat shaking in a chair dragged into the broom closet for the purpose, and the sound of her shook everyone. “Poor girl, this job may be all she has,” said Grace.

The doors to the Director’s house were locked but the windows weren’t. It is hard to say which one of us found the other first. “Are you sure that’s a real gun?” he asked. “There’s a sure way to make sure,” I answered, precisely as the nocturnal blob had instructed.

After the news broke the next day, it was all Reggie could talk about. He tried to insinuate that Grace was probably the kidnapper: it was obvious that she was a criminal mastermind, nobody ought to cross her, only the first step in a scheme. The investigating officers both told him not to make light of the matter.

The motel room in which the trussed Director of the City Health Office spent the next six days and nights was dingy enough to set a definite mood. I only left him to get food or, a couple of times, to meet up with the blob at the clinic. I noticed the usually translucent pink surface of my mind’s master was clouding, greying, perhaps the result of stress. The Director declined to negotiate. “Just say you’ve reconsidered the distribution of health services, or recalculated the budget,” I soothingly suggested. “Never,” he answered.

There was less than a week left before the clinic’s last day. Olympia emitted sudden but short howls from time to time and avoided extended discussions of any kind. When Grace inquired how Olympia’s mother was doing, shrieking laughter came as the reply. “There’s nothing funny about your mother,” Reggie remarked, and altogether accidentally admitted that he had been having a semi-torrid affair with Olympia’s mother for nearly a year. Grace slapped him, aiming for the face but hitting his left ear with her wedding ring, drawing blood.

The Director said he was getting tired of fast food. “I have a delicately poised digestive system,” he said. “Everybody says so.” Because I had no holidays owed me, I figured by now my job at the air control tower was probably gone. There was this game we used to play with newbies: we’d all talk about this plane that wasn’t there, we’d have worked out its ID and flight plan beforehand and of course totally freak out the newbie. “But one time,” I told the Director, “there was this new guy in the tower named Zachary, and when we pulled this one on Zachary, he didn’t freak out at all but instead called out that he had it, meaning he had it on his system and was going to guide this nonexistent plane from Bolivia or Madagascar or somewhere. Zachary was certainly one of the strangest guys I’ve ever met.” After a few bites of hours-old burrito, the Director asked me what happened. I didn’t understand. “What happened to Zachary?” the Director wanted to know.

Grace did not return to the clinic. She and her husband put up their house for sale the day before the clinic was to close, the same day that Reggie told Olympia that he had broken off with her mother and sincerely hoped that they might remain friends. A man dressed in pyjamas and a raincoat spoiled the moment by trying to shoplift thirty bottles of cough syrup.

The blob summoned me just before midnight. It was grey and mottled, stiffer in its movements. I began to cry, perhaps fearful of freedom, but was rebuffed: I was to build an exact replica of the clinic, as quickly as possible but without skimping a jot on accuracy, on the far outskirts of the city, behind the dump. The fruitlessness of the endeavour obvious to me, I agreed, and I think I would have agreed even if I could have resisted.

*

Tim Conley’s short fiction, poetry, essays, reviews, and translations have appeared in journals in eight countries. His most recent books are the poetry collection One False Move (Quattro Books, 2012) and the anthology Burning City: Poems of Metropolitan Modernity (co-edited with Jed Rasula; Action Books, 2012). He teaches English and Comparative Literature at Brock University.

Fiction #38: Mallory Tater

Ash Wednesday
   
When I got the news my Grandpa Hank died, I was pissing on a pregnancy stick.

It was my fifth test in the past six months; Emry was a good fuck but he never knew when to pull out.  The morning-after pill had been my saving grace, but this time I wasn’t so sure.  I’d spent the past week in my apartment by the Byward Market puking cheerios and calling in sick at work; an outsider in my own body.  Emry thought I was just sick from stress, mentioned that he thought my “family issues” were making me a wreck. I hated that degree of honesty.

We started fucking in grade twelve after being partnered for a chem project. (I fell in love with him around two years later, but I’ve never told him that.)  He was a hard worker – lived up on the Native Reserve by Pembroke; came to see me on weekends after my shifts clearing tables at Carmello’s, the ritzy Italian bistro on Sparks Street.  He was tanned and sexy and quiet and all he wanted was my body and the free wine and eggplant parm I brought home with me. We were comfortable. Mornings after, sometimes we’d sit up in bed and have coffee before he left. “Nonnie,” he’d say staring back at me in my bed through the dresser mirror. “Have a good day Kid.”  Maybe it was weird he stilled called me Kid; he started that because I was only five-foot one in high school. But the way he said my name, “Nonnie,” was an ‘I love you’ in itself in my ears. And I knew more about him than anyone.  He had a birthmark under his left ass cheek, he took his coffee black and he had a scar under his left eye from a bar brawl last year. I knew he didn’t keep in touch with anyone from high school except me, and we were old friends having sex– that’s all. I knew I didn’t want to have his baby but still, the idea of a little boy or girl with his almond eyes and raspy voice, asking me questions like mommy where does snow come from? Or why is the sky blue? didn’t seem so awful.

 It’s what family’s do; shrink and grow.

My Grandpa Hank was eighty-nine, in his last stage of chemo, smoked for over half his life.  Mom was living at his bedside at Queensway hospital.  We all knew this was the end.  My Grandma Moses was already dead before Maude and I were born and Mom was an only child, so it was my duty to drive Princess, my beat up 2003 Grand Caravan, to pick up my sister, Maude, and go to Grandpa Hank’s lake house outside Killarney to bring back what my mom vaguely referred to as “the box” as carefully instructed in Grandpa Hank’s will. My Grandpa Hank had been living in a full care retirement home in Ottawa since they put in his pacemaker, hooked him up to an oxygen tank.  It had been years since he’d truly been home. Mom didn’t want us around to him all withered and sick and dying. I never visited much. I’d wait outside the door for my mom to come out weepy and sick, her toned yoga body sallow. I had always greeted her with lemon tea and the most pathetic smile was all I could muster up. I hadn’t said bye to her before I left – I had been too pissed, too scared.  I hadn’t showered; I just locked up my place and drove along the ice-trimmed freeway wishing Emry had called me back.

The lake house was a 4-hour drive from St Angela’s Prep in North Bay, Maude’s snotty-ass all-girls boarding school. It had taken me 68 litres of gas, 4 litres of Schweppes ginger-ale and 4 flip-over’s of my Fleetwood Mac tape to get there. It would be the most time Maude and I had spent together since she came home last Christmas.  When I pulled into St. Angela’s roundabout driveway, dozens of angst-ridden gangly teenage girls in uniforms looked me up and down, mostly fixated on the pile of blonde dreadlocks on top of my head, tied up by a bandana that said “muck fundays” between the folds. Eyes darted when they were in gaze of my eyes, which where buried by dark circles. I was so fucking tired. I got out and greeted my little sister. Maude was a clone of the rest of her friends – knee-high stockings, plaid skirt with the hem up as high as possible, heavy eye make-up. She’d dyed her blonde hair auburn, which seemed to make her hazel eyes louder somehow and her freckles darker. No small talk, just awkward close-mouthed smiles and a leaning one-armed hug. It took eight trips to get out of her dorm, including lugging the personalized logo luggage (MA – Maude Andrews) on the handles. Her dorm-mother, a fat woman with whiskers, waited at the bottom of the spiralled fire-escape stairs while her friends all stood outside in an army of plaid; kissing her goodbye, saying sorry about your grandpa and love you Maudey-bear and text me sweetie.

My sister was skeletal in appearance, a half-ass recovery from an eating disorder last summer. But she had fluctuated weight ever since we were little and our parents split up.  Her anxious months left her a dead autumn tree, wilted naked and ready to cave in on itself.  Her good months she would pay more attention, eat her meals, get outside for fresh air – a Maude in full bloom.  I liked comparing Maude to a tree because no matter how many changes a tree underwent on the outside, its insides were still full of sweetness.  There was always life inside.  Well that’s the Maude I remember, before we both grew up.

Maude got in the van and sat in the back with all her suitcases, lying sideways, headphones on, eyes closed.  Hours passed in silence. She was either in shock we were together, or she was sleeping - maybe she even died back there and I was staring at her skinny corpse. The leaves were all tinted silver by the sun and they were bright; leaves red as blood.  It felt morbid while we drove, beautiful but so stale. Every so often I glanced down at my big-ass Nokia phone, which was wedged between my thighs so I could keep both hands on the wheel. 

Grandpa Hank was dying. It was Wednesday November 14th and I was 9 days late. 

I called Emry.  No answer. 

We drove west for two hours before I pulled over at a Chilli’s bar and grill outside Lake Nippissing and lied to Maude that I was starving.  She woke up confused for a moment, a look of indifference plastered on her face.  “That’s fine, I really have to pee.”  She ran into the restaurant. 

Those were the first words she’d spoken to me all afternoon. I rifled through my shit in the trunk until I found that stupid pregnancy test.  Better late than never, and I shoved it in my bag. Chilli’s was a classy place, it had elevator jazz playing, “first date platters” on the menu and obnoxiously dim lighting because that was scientifically proven to make you hungrier. Test that theory on Maude motherfuckers.  There were tons of obese mothers feeding their obese children, plates and plates of golden brown, oily food. There were 14-year-old waitresses, braces glinting in the cheap fluorescents tripping over each other in the narrow hallways.  We got a booth, ordered, went to the bathroom.

Maude tightened her neck muscles and veins popped out of her like skinny snakes in some kind of sick migration. She fiddled with the straps on her Levi overalls that she had changed into sometime in between naps.  She wore them tucked into high lace-trim socks and a high-neckline blouse underneath. That girl was way before her time.  She had her oversized Hugo Boss glasses resting on her forehead even though they were prescription and helped her read.

My phone vibrated.

“God, why is my Mom calling me right now?”  I said dropping my Nokia with disgust, sliding it under the bathroom stall.

Stone-face Maude was shaking in her boots on the other side of the stall securing the door for me.  (What kind of people spent time busting off the locks of public washrooms?) I pulled my sweatpants down, fruit of the loom underwear inside them. Through the crack of the stall, I could see Maude press her tiny figure against it, I looked down and I saw her ankles and then one hand scoop up my neon orange Nokia.  Reliable shit, those brick phones.

Maude told mom we’re both fine, grabbing lunch.

More like, I was grabbing lunch. Picking apart the carrots in a salad that had the least amount of dressing on them and three refills of diet coke was not a meal. My sister was a crumbivore and she nibbled her food like it was poison. Maude made a few “mmhm” murmurs and I could see her shifting the weight of her feet in her brown uggs under the door.

Something about having Evelyn Andrews, my ex-pageant queen mother, the delicate little mouse she was, on the other line was so, so, so sick as I tore open the First Response box. Nonnie, this is the place you’ll find out if you’re a mom. This is what you’ll remember. And your mom is at her sick dad’s bedside on the other line. Yeah, Nonnie, go fuck yourself.

I peed.

Then I heard Maude crying.

 I waited, said nothing. 

She cried harder. 

Still, I waited, shook out the stick.

Not pregnant.

“Nonnie,” Maude said, “Mom says Grandpa’s gone.”

We didn’t finish our food, paid, drove.  I glued my eyes to the yellow lines of pavement ahead and tried not to think of Grandpa Hank exhaling for the last time, monitor resounding into a sharp harmonic frenzy. I needed air. We got out somewhere outside Killarney Lake and the leaves were so tinted by fall air; we could have been in candy land. It wasn’t the usual yellow, orange, and red, there were pinks and violets and mahoganies.  The sky cast my skin grey, matching Maude, through the car windows with pools of light bringing out flecks of freckles on our skin. The water was mirror-glass, still and perfect.  We took turns monitoring for hikers or wild animals, pulling down our pants behind a thick-trunk maple with golden leaves. We were like dogs marking our territory.  More like lone wolves.  The final stretch was a series of winding roads, gravel. Even Princess stalled over the hills with bad nerves. Maude sat in the front this time and gnawed at her nails; playing “Bleeding Love” on repeat the whole way there.  Her grieving process needed work.

The lake house was different than I remembered it.  I knew it was partially because the entire drive had been spent in silence and I had been trying too hard to picture every inch of the property the exact way we had left it. Last time Maude and I went up here to visit Grandpa Hank was when I was thirteen. When we rolled up to the green picket fence that I always remembered being blue, I learned the difference six years could make. The house itself sat crooked, the entire patchwork roof slanting to the right. Like how a sunflower bends to the sun, it bowed toward the water. The grey paint was greyer somehow and the porch was all buried in leaves, no wood in sight. Branches flooded the lawn.  There must have been a storm not too long ago. 

“Where’s the bird-feeder?” Maude’s voice cracked as she searched the perimeter of rosemary bushes lining the property. 

We lived here an entire summer with Grandpa Hank when my dad left my mom and all she could do was slave away in her real estate office during the day and drink chardonnay in bed at night.  We’d built Grandpa a feeder for hummingbirds because when he told us their wings flapped 90 times a second we hadn’t believed him.

“It’s long gone Maude.” 

But I could still see Grandpa Hank slamming the porch door and walking down to us girls, in our one piece bathing suits and denim shorts giggling as the tiny birds buzzed like bugs and circled around the wad of honey on the round red disk we hung off of Maude’s skipping rope. He said I told you so. I remember how tall and wise he looked in his overalls and white beard and circular clip-on sunglasses. But I started missing my Grandpa a long time ago.  He’d been senile, shrivelled and deaf since he moved to Ottawa, and I made a pact to myself to preserve his memory as he was; a man who read Hemingway for fun and smoked a pack of camels a day and even let me have a puff of one when I was seven and curious.  I choked and dove into the lake and gratefully swallowed the freshwater.  Turn me off of tobacco for life.  Emry smoked.  But sometimes I liked how his mouth tasted ashy, kind of like bark and salt.

I tried him on his cell.  No answer. My stomach suddenly flipped. I ran to the edge of the dock and vomited french fries into the water, watching the starchy clumps disappear in the black water.  I felt Maude’s eyes on me as my stomach tightened and wretched and gurgled.

“Nonnie,” her voice wavered and I figured it wasn’t from the minus-five weather. “I’m going to get us some rakes from the shed.”

I didn’t look up to see if she ran off but I heard the sound of leaves crunch.
   
We raked Grandpa Hank’s property, the whole half-acre. My fingers turned white it was so cold and I felt like such a dumbass for not bringing any mitts. My denim jacket wasn’t cutting it either and it was five years old and from the Gap so it wasn’t like I could use the “sacrifice fashion for comfort” excuse. Maude raked with a vengeance for those leaves in tiny angry strokes that left treads in the fresh mud. When both our cheeks were nearly purple, and every leaf was stowed away in the forest perimeter, I convinced Maude to come inside and make tea with me. We kept our duffel bags inside Princess; neither of us felt at home without Grandpa Hank’s Santa Clause chuckle and even the smell of peppermint aftershave no longer wafted through the house.  Mom had been up just after Thanksgiving to turn off the water for the wintertime, so we had to use water bottles from the car to fill the stovetop kettle. There was still the same stock of Tazo Awake tea Grandpa had gotten as a gift from Mom and he’d laughed and called it “trendy.”  Maude’s hands were twitching with cold and her lips were blue.  She sipped her clear tea.

“So did you get the box yet?” she said her eyes wondering upwards to the open loft framed by wooden railings.  It was a one bedroom. The box had to be up there.

“No, I'll go take a look.”  I didn’t realize the stairs were warning me with their shrill creaks. Most of Grandpa’s stuff - his clothes and bedding and picture frames and retro car figurines were moved to the care-home with him.  Only one cardboard box remained by the windowsill. This must be it. Inside saw a jar the shade of old pennies, bay leaves engraved up and down the sides.  I yelled fuck at the top of my lungs. It was an urn.

“Nonnie?” Maude ran upstairs, and I jumped when I felt her icy hand on my shoulder.

The urn had Elizabeth Moses engraved around the rim of the copper lid.

I called my mom, barely waiting for her to pick up.

“She was here this whole time??” I was screaming.

Grandpa Hank’s funeral was on Friday and mom sounded like she hadn’t slept at all.

“I’m sorry; I should’ve told you girls. I just thought, maybe you wouldn’t go if you knew about Grandma being there, and it’s what he wanted.  He wanted them to be celebrated together.  I had no idea he’d had her there with him until a couple of weeks ago. He said he’d scattered her in the lake years ago. Guess he never could part with her.”

“Over a decade after? That’s the most –“

“-Nonnie, it’s what they both wanted. My parents loved each other more than –“

I hung up.  Maude had the urn at the kitchen table in her lap.  Her nostalgia sickened me a little.  We hadn’t even known her. It was a false nostalgia; a lament for the stories about her that other people, especially Grandpa Hank, had told us.

“Can we at least put Grandma back in the box Maude, please?”

Maude had been crying; her make-up smudged all down her chin.

“She’s been here this whole time. This is like The Notebook or something.” She petted the urn as if it were a housecat. I couldn’t help but laugh a little at her, this hormonal schoolgirl.

“Are you pmsing? How is this anything like that?”

“Remember all the pictures he used to show us of her? The one where her and Grandpa are shovelling the foundation of their first house? They looked so happy. Or the ones of her in the 50s in the hula contest on their honeymoon, in the grass skirt and she has her hair pinned up?” 

    I did remember.

Maude bit her lip. “Good genes.”

I smiled. Maude never joked.

We sat in the wicker chairs on the porch in silence and watched as Orion’s belt sparkled and echoed itself along the clear glass of the lake. 

I walked down to the shore.  Maude followed me with Grandma still in her arms, a wool blanket that was a map of the USA draped around her shoulders. We sat down on the sand by the fire pit that already had kindling left in it. I lit a match from the book in my pocket. We tossed the elephant issue and the Bermuda Triangle issue of my Grandpa’s many National Geographic’s on the flames, watched the shiny pages blacken and fold in on themselves.  It was freezing but we let the smoke and flames soak into our pores; numb us out.  The breeze made little waves of water lap up toward our feet. Maude placed the urn in the sand, cocooned herself in the blanket until LA folded over Miami.

I pulled my phone out of my pocket.  No service down here.  I hope Emry didn’t have another girl in his bed tonight.

“Hey Nonnie?” Maude’s voiced cracked, barely audible over the rustling leaves. “I saw you put - never mind.” I turned my gaze from the stars to Maude’s wide, deer-in-the-headlight eyes.

“What?”

“In your bag…at Chilli’s, before mom called. Were you? Are you?”

I felt my face redden. “No, no I'm not.”
   
“Are you still sleeping with…sorry I forgot his name…Emmitt?”

“Emry. Sometimes.  Why?”

“I don’t know.” She reached for the urn and placed in between her knobbly knees.
   
“You love him?” she asked. She looked like a grown girl back to infancy. I’ve never seen her try so hard before.

“I didn’t want to be –“I stared at my stomach, “If that’s what you’re asking.”

The wind’s whistle grew louder and I re-tied my hair because the loose locks started swinging around like wind-chimes framing my face. We both turned away from the water; staring back at the lake house and all the leaves that began to swirl themselves from the forest back to the yard. We waited til the wind died; and I stoked the fire with a long walking stick.

“No I know. Why would you want a kid? You’re nineteen.” Maude seemed embarrassed for asking and I felt guilty she did. She was my sister; she was allowed to ask these things.

I sucked in icy air that was slightly mixed with the fire’s heat.

“Maude, are you a virgin?”

“No.”

She traced over Grandma’s name with her thumb. “I did it with Tommy Fullerton, Regina’s cousin, at her house Thanksgiving weekend. In a cot in her basement.”

“And so you love Tommy Fullerton?” I wished my tone had come across a little less devil’s advocate.

“No.” She finally looked back up at me, smirked with her eyes creased up like half-moons. “He’s from Cornwall and records jingles for TV ads. Flaming red hair, and flaming red-“ Maude blushed, then her face hardened.  “But for five minutes there, I think I did love him.”

“I miss coming here,” I said.  She reached out her hand, laced it with mine. It felt weird at first, and then it felt right.

I stared out across the lake toward the opposite shore that Grandpa Hank used to take us to in the paddleboat.  The valleys over there seemed so far away; the farmland, grass and trees sewed up into a patchwork quilt pattern.

Maude pursed her lips. She didn’t want to talk about Grandpa.

I stoked the fire, yawned.

 “Nonnie I would've come home, you know, if you really were –“

I felt a lump form in my throat, let a couple tears brew and pour down my face. The fire crackled sparks on my runners. I watched them turn vibrant orange to a cool coal black.  I placed my hand over Grandma Moses’ urn, felt the cool metal distil my hand. I was in the company of strangers, but I never felt more at home.

*

Mallory Tater is a third-year writing student at the University of Victoria. She has works published in Bywords journal and Ascent Aspirations. She writes both poetry and short fiction.