Fall/Winter 2020

Chapter 3

After that, the drive is quiet.

            I lean my forehead against the window, watching the trees appear in the dark, then fade to black in my side mirror. As he picks the car through the woods, each tree trunk shows up, suddenly, like pillars supporting the sky, promising me that it won’t fall down around us.

            I blow a sigh through my lips. Tonight, I wish I could believe them.

            He glances over at me, but doesn’t say anything.

            I slump lower in my seat, and tug the sleeves of my sweater over my hands. Tonight, I wish I could close my eyes and wake up when it’s over. When I’m better.

            He slows the car to a stop at the edge of the trees, and I catch glimpses of a lake glinting in the moonlight between the skeleton branches. I’m sure the Porsche, hidden in the woods like this, makes for a strange picture although I know there’s no one watching.

            “Come on,” he says, opening his door.

            The night air wraps around us, and I shake my head. “It’s cold.”

            He looks at me for a moment, then rummages around the back seats for something. He tosses me a ski cap, black like a pool of blood. “Sorry. It’s all I’ve got.”

            I tug it low over my ears, smashing my curls beneath the knitted fabric. I clamber out of the car, following him down to the water. I reach for his hand and this time, he doesn’t pull away.

            The beach is fine, sandy and pale, littered with seashells and cigarette butts. The stars shine bright and cold, a million miles away from me and my problems, and this thought is reassuring. I glance out at the lake, endless and dark, and my eyes fill with tears.

            “What do you see?” He lets go of my hand to wrap his arm around my shoulder, and I lean into his chest, blocking my face from the cold, the wind.

            “I see a universe that continues,” I say. I close my eyes and I can feel a tear trace down my cheek. “It keeps going, no matter how shitty my life is right now. It makes me want to believe that it won’t always be like this. That this entire mess will straighten out, that Carson will get better, that I’ll stop hurting like this—” my voice catches, and I look up at him. “I want to believe it, I really do. But honestly, I don’t think I’ll ever be okay again.”

            His eyes soften and he presses a kiss to my forehead. I feel the weight of it through the borrowed ski cap, and I sniffle.

            “Oh my darling.” He shifts his other hand, grasping for something under his coat. His arm around me tightens. “I think you might be right.” His hand emerges, clasping a pistol, shining under the stars.

            I gasp, trying to pull away, but his other arm holds me tight.

            “Meg wouldn’t have wanted this,” he tells me, his voice sad. “If she was here, she would say she’s sorry.” He waves the gun back towards the trees. “Let’s go.”

            “Go?” My voice is a squeak. I keep my gaze locked on the gun, feeling the blood rushing in my ears. “Go where?”

            He doesn’t respond.

The gun looks fake, like a prop from a play, but when he presses the barrel against my ribs it feels very real, and I let out a cry. He leads me back to the car and locks the doors behind us.

            I wipe at my face with the sleeves of my sweater, watching the world whisk by outside, feeling the hollow of the gun still pressed into my side as we drive into the night.

+

Chapter 3

After that, the drive is quiet.

            I lean my forehead against the window, watching the trees appear in the dark, then fade to black in my side mirror. When I die, I think, perhaps I’ll fade to black too.

            I close my eyes, wondering what it would be like to be dead, to be done with this mess. I  hear him shifting beside me, like he’s uncomfortable in the driver’s seat of my Mustang. I wonder, again, why he insisted on bringing me out here.

            I tug the sleeves of my sweater over my hands. The cold air leaks in through the corners of the car, colder since the heat stopped working.

            He slows the car to a stop at the edge of the trees, and I catch glimpses of a lake glimmering in the moonlight between the skeleton branches.

            “We’re here,” he says, not moving.

            I look at him.

He drops his hands from the steering wheel. “Come on,” he says, finally opening his door.

            I cross my arms. “It’s cold.”

            He glances at me, then reaches in the back, rummaging through his backpack. He tosses me a ski cap, black like the barrel of a gun. “Sorry. It’s all I’ve got.”

            I tug it low over my ears, smashing my curls beneath the knitted fabric. I slip out of the car, following him down to the water. I feel an ache in my body, a familiar shiver of wanting. I watch his back in front of me, but I don’t reach out to touch him.

            The beach is light, glowing like snow under the moon. The stars shine bright and cold, and tonight, I want to join them. I want to be bright and cold and above this entire mess, but maybe I’d only be crushed under the weight of them. I glance out at the lake, endless and dark, and my eyes fill with tears.

            “What do you see?” He stuffs his hands in his pockets, keeping his own gaze trained on the horizon.

            I force myself to look away from him. “I see possibility, like we’re right on the edge of this,” I say. “Like even though this is really shitty, maybe things will get better. And then again, maybe they won’t.” I swallow back a sudden rush of tears. “Maybe I’ll get better.” The universe is suddenly too much, and my voice cracks. “Or maybe I’ll never be okay again.”

            His shoulders drop, like my words hurt him too, and I want to forget everything. I want to forget the pain and I want to forget anything that might come next.

And so I will. To hell with consequences and futures and possibilities. I reach a hand up to his face, press a kiss into his lips.

He starts for a moment, but then his eyes are closed and he deepens the kiss. He pulls away, looks at me, and the smell of my breath on his mouth is intoxicating. “Are you sure?”

I shake my head and kiss him again, kissing away everything around me, kissing away Carson, kissing away Meg, kissing away every scar on my aching heart.

His hand snakes down to the small of my back, pulling me closer. Doubt flickers up my spine, but I push past it, reaching for him like he is the answer to every single question I will ever have.

We stumble back to the car and I don’t let myself think as we lose ourselves into the night.

+

Chapter 3

After that, the drive is quiet.

            I lean my forehead against the window, watching the trees appear in the dark, then fade to black in my side mirror. They look like they’re dancing, and I wish I could be dancing with him instead of driving through the night.

            I slump my head against my arm.

            “You okay?” He glances over at me, but quickly returns his gaze to the road.

            “Yeah.” I tug the sleeve of my sweater over my other hand. “Just tired.”

            “We’re almost there.”

            In a moment, he slows the car to a stop at the edge of the trees, and I catch glimpses of a lake glittering in the moonlight between the skeleton branches.

            “See? I told you we were close. Come on.” He opens his door, and a blast of cold air rushes inside.

            I shiver.

            He glances my way, then reaches across me, rummaging in the glove box. He tosses me a ski cap, black like a kiss. “Sorry. It’s all I’ve got.

            I tug it low over my ears, smashing my curls beneath the knitted fabric. I drop down from my side of the pickup truck, following him down to the water. I trail behind, wishing I could curl into myself and sleep for an eternity.

            The beach is pebbly, and each step we take sends small stones rolling away, plinking over the other rocks.

            The stars shine bright and cold and I turn my face away from them. I glance out at the lake, endless and dark, and my eyes fill with tears.

            “What do you see?” He sets a hand on my shoulder, watching me from the corner of his gaze.

I know the answers he wants to hear, but tonight, I’m too tired to find any of them. “I see the same thing I’ve seen before,” I say. “The sky. The moon. A lake.”

My mind flips through a thousand thoughts, asking the questions I’ve asked myself a thousand times before. Why would Meg leave me? Why couldn’t I be better? Why couldn’t Carson get his shit together?

My shoulders sink, like I am Atlas holding up the sky, and he gives me a squeeze through my sweater.

“Hey, hey. You okay?”

I press my eyes closed. “No, not really. Honestly, I don’t think I’ll ever be okay again.”

I feel his sigh, rippling through his arm and hand and into me.

“Oh baby.” He rubs my back. “I promise you, someday, you’ll be okay.”

I don’t answer.

“Come on.” He leads me away from the water. “Let’s go home.”

He guides me back into the truck, makes sure I buckle in. I keep my gaze on my hands, unseeing, not wanting to watch the world around us as we disappear into the night.

+

Chapter 3

After that, the drive is quiet.

            I lean my forehead against the window, watching the trees appear in the dark, then fade to black in my side mirror. They seem to hurl themselves into our path as we drive, as if they’re daring us to hit them. If I were the one driving, I would take them up on the challenge, drive straight through each one, leave clouds of sawdust in my wake.

            I grip my knee as tightly as I can, until my nails bite into my skin.

            He glances over at me, glances down at my lap. He reaches across the seat, taking my fingers in his, but I pull my hand away.

            I tug the sleeves of my sweater over my hands and cross my arms.

            He slows the station wagon to a stop at the edge of the trees, and I catch glimpses of a lake glowering in the moonlight between the skeleton branches.

            “Look,” he says, “I know you don’t really want to be here, but I think it’ll help. Come on.” He opens his door and jumps outside.

            I keep my arms folded. “It’s cold.”

            He sighs, then opens the trunk, rummaging inside for something. He appears next to me and opens my door. He tosses me a ski cap, black like a long drive home. “Sorry. It’s all I’ve got.”

            I tug it low over my ears, smashing my curls beneath the knitted fabric. I stalk out of the car, following him down to the water. I don’t uncross my arms.

            The beach glitters black under the moon, and I kick out tufts of it as I walk. The stars shine bright and cold, but I swear I can feel their fire, flickering through the universe and singeing all that they touch. I glance out at the lake, endless and dark, and my eyes fill with tears.

            “What do you see?” He stands in front of me, watching me closely.

            “I see a lake,” I snap back, “deep enough to drown the whole entire world. What do you want me to say? Honestly,” I wave a hand at the water. I can hear my own voice in my ears, but I don’t stop. “Honestly, I see a lake deep enough to drown both Carson and Meg, and tonight I really want to. Tonight I want to kill them both for being shitty people and leaving me in a shitty situation.”

            “Hey,” he reaches out to catch my hand and folds my fingers into his. “You know this isn’t Carson’s fault.”

            “I don’t care.” I pull my hand away again like he is fire, or maybe I am. “Stop touching me! Do you hear me? I don’t care that it’s not his fault. I don’t care about any of it, because I don’t think I’ll ever be okay again.”

            “Things will get better,” he starts, “you’ll-”

            “I. Don’t. Care.” I punctuate each word by stabbing my finger into his chest.

            “Stop that.” His eyes shine with hurt, but I turn away. “Stop,” he says again, reaching around me. “We can sit here together, like we used to. We can watch the sunrise together. Please, let me stay with you.”

            I spin in the black sand and tear the ski cap off my head. I toss it at his feet, jam my hands in my pockets, and walk off into the night.

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Chapter 3

After that, the drive is quiet.

            I lean my forehead against the window, watching the trees appear in the dark, then fade to black in my side mirror. I wish I could feel in the same way, like my emotions could flicker in and out of sight too, ghostly and fleeting and forgetful. But tonight the Ford Focus seems to be closing in on me, tighter and tighter until I can’t breathe.

            I let out a gasp, and curl my knees closer to me.

            He doesn’t hear me, or maybe he can’t. Maybe he’s too far away, even though he’s sitting right next to me, maybe the car is a million miles wide and he’s on the other side of the world driving through a strange woods with a strange woman or maybe I am the other side of the world and the strange woman is me.

            I tug the sleeves of my sweater over my hands, wishing the earth would swallow me whole, wishing my sweater were wings so I could fly higher than the problems bruising me.

            He slows the car to a stop at the edge of the trees, and I can catch glimpses of a lake glistening in the moonlight between the skeleton branches.

            He looks at me, and suddenly he is too close too close, his skin almost swallowing mine. “Come on.”

            He starts to open his door, but I bolt mine open first, letting the cold air swallow me instead. I gulp it down too until we are equal parts night and woman.

            I feel his gaze on my neck, hear him shifting rummaging around for something. He tosses me a ski cap, black like anger swollen swelling ready to swell inside a fist. “Sorry. It’s all I’ve got.”

            I tug it low over my ears, smashing my curls beneath the knitted fabric. I jump out of the car, following him down to the water. He reaches for my hand and I cling to it, needing something real in the shifty world around us.

            The beach is dark, like someone has opened vial after vial after vial of blood, spilling it across the sand until the color is soaked too deeply to be washed away. I wonder, wildly, if I dig down far enough I’ll find tide pools of blood blistered beneath the surface.

The stars shine bright and cold, a million million miles away one moment, chokingly close the next. I glance out at the lake, endless and dark, and my eyes fill with tears.

            “What do you see?” He lets go of my hand and my fingers close around open air cold and hollow.

            “I see everything.” I bury my face in my hands, not wanting to look anymore, not wanting to see anything else not wanting not wanting— “It’s all too much.”

            “It’s okay,” he says and his voice sounds lightyears away. “Come on. Follow me.” He takes me by the elbow electric and gentle and suddenly we are climbing climbing climbing.

            The world drops away from our feet as we crest the cliff, and I think I can hear the wind laughing at us when we stand at the top, slipping in between my lips and stealing the breath right from my own lungs leaving them pink and wilted like crumpled carnations like baby’s blood.

            “I just can’t do this.” I hear my voice stringing out across the water, and the waves lurch up at us, as if they want to grab us by our ankles drag us down drown us tangled in seaweed and moonlight. “I can’t do any of this. I can’t believe Carson, I can’t believe Meg, I can’t believe you, I can’t believe myself.” My breath is too quick in my ears, and I look up at him, needing answers in the stars of his two eyes. “I just want to be okay. Please tell me I’ll be okay. I don’t think I’ll ever be okay again.”

            “I know.” His eyes fill and spill and stars fall down his cheeks leaving comet-streaks in their wake leaving galaxies glinting glimmering glittering glowering glistening. “My love, I’m sorry.”

            I look around us, see the car nestled into the trees, a safe place from the grasping, tugging, demanding world tearing at my bones. “Please, please.” I catch a star from his face, hold it between my finger and thumb. The heat bites my skin bright and cold and cold and cold and cold. “Please, can we go home?”

            “Don’t you know?” He smiles at me and his mouth stretches into iron bars into stripes of sunlight and I want to smile back want to stretch my body into a grimace into a grin.

He presses a kiss into my forehead and memories of a thousand lifetimes flicker through my brain. “We’re already there.”

            He swallows my hand in his and the star drops out of my grasp to the cliff and sinks beneath the red sand into the blistery blood-pools below and he tugs me up to the edge and squeezes my fingers and together we jump and for a moment, for just a moment, we fly fly fly into the night.

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                                    Galatians 6:11

Look how I sit on my Fitdesk bike in this bleak
corner of our yellow room typing this line!

Knees alternately rising and falling on pedals,
I spin the wool of my words,

make my inarticulate thoughts a long shapely
yarn that piles at my feet.

Your distant eyes open in the half dark.
Do you see me rising up through a fog of words?

Do you notice my lips moving as I sound this one,
and the next, and the next,

in the persistent glow of my screen? Repeating the sounds
can make the muddle feel measured.

Now see me pedal backwards,
revising a line.

Do I look like Superman circling the earth
in reverse to turn back time?

You turn over but the dog still lays on the floor just close
enough for my toes to brush her belly

on the apogee of each orbit,
as if I am a machine for her pleasure.

Your alarm sings and I lean my head
forward, arch my back like I’m in the mountains of France,

racing not against my fellow cyclists ahead or behind
but against the anguish of time itself.

You rise, and I feel like the poem will carry me to you as if from high on a hill,
and I can stop this pedaling business because all

I need do to reach you again is hold on and ride the rush of words
breaking beneath me as long as gravity will last.

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Lac Maskinongé is a pool hardly more than two kilometres wide at the foot of Mont Tremblant in the heart of the Laurentians. This is where, as a small immigrant child in 1960, I had my first taste of the Canadian wilderness. We went raspberry picking, my mother and aunt, their four children in tow carrying sand buckets and kitchen colanders, the bushes along the dirt road around the lake so dense with fat, dusty berries we filled the pails and our tummies to boot, still leaving plenty for bears. What my mother and aunt, artists of Hungarian-Viennese cuisine, produced of those berries in the primitive kitchens of our cabins was never to be replicated: an elixir of fruit and frothy cream, a quintessence of raspberry whisked by a lowly fork in my mother’s hand and a manual egg beater in my aunt’s, the quarts and quarts of which we were ordered to consume before they spoiled, the slope-shouldered cottage fridges being too small to hold them. Not a drop were we to waste given the elbow grease expended!

            At this time, both families rented their cottages, and I believe we might have returned to them one more summer before my aunt and uncle built their first holiday home. My aunt’s cottage was on the north side of the lake; ours, smaller and less expensive like everything we were to accrue over the years, more or less faced them from the opposite shore. Their cottage came with a row boat, and my cousins would paddle straight across to see us. My mother and aunt liked to walk briskly around the lake for the exercise. My uncle never walked anywhere. During the week he was in the city managing their three east end ladies’ wear shops. My father, with us for the full single week of holiday to which he was entitled, strolled in the evenings after dinner, probably not all the way to my aunt’s, but back and forth over a moderate length of dusty track. He spent the days reading the Hungarian novels of Hans Habe and Magda Szabo, or, more laboriously in English, Chaim Potok and Bernard Malamud, kept company by my sister, six years my senior, who after acquiring her second language would not pry her nose out of a book, our mother’s scorn-laden voice proclaimed.. My father helped my mother in the kitchen peeling potatoes and carrots and setting the table as an indulgence to his daughters, also to his wife’s disapproval. On a particularly hot afternoon he might go so far as to immerse himself in the lake, never deeper than his rounded middle, simply to cool off before retiring once more to the deck chair on the sparse, weed-spiked lawn. I cannot recall my father in bathing trunks. He must have taken his dip in Bermuda shorts, after first peeling off the knee socks he wore in all seasons.

            Being in the country gave me almost unlimited access to my cousin Pauline whose availability in the city was carefully rationed by my uncle. We were the same age, but went to different schools. Her brother, two years our senior, loved nothing more than to disrupt our play by turning over the Snakes and Ladders board, or barging in while we played dress-up, mocking each word we said by repeating it at top volume and preempting further amusement. I wish I could say he was lonely and jealous, but he was forever thus, with or without friends (which he never lacked) at his side. He was a spoiler by temperament, selfish and willful.

            Pauline didn't judge his behaviour any more than she did her father’s whose rules were arbitrary, and whose vague objections to our getting together required bribery by way of a hundred kisses each to buy off. The transaction rankled only me, especially since my uncle seemed no more to enjoy my remittance than I did in paying up. I submitted for Pauline’s sake. She was a golden child, as sweet as her brother was spiteful.

            My cousins had been invited for lunch. My mother had promised potato pancakes. In our home we called these latkes, but at my aunt’s they were the Hungarian for potato pancakes. Not that my cousins understood the difference because they didn’t speak either Hungarian or Yiddish, rather English and French. But the taint of anything Jewish was not to enter their home, though my aunt and uncle were as much Holocaust survivors as my parents. Potato pancakes being on offer, the afternoon was to have been spent on our side of the dividing waters. I can’t imagine my uncle would have offered to drive them, regardless of the weather, because he stood on principle about protecting his children from our religio-contagion. Although he may have chosen not to actively stand in the way of the luncheon appointment, he would not have gone so far as to help it along. My father could forgive my kindly aunt all. In any case he would have said a woman might be excused because women were weak, despite daily reminders to the contrary by way of my mother’s steely drive and lacerating tongue. Nonetheless he would have leapt to absolve my aunt of poor judgement because of her womanly giving-ness, in this case giving-in-ness. A man had to have known better.

            My older cousin having set his mind on potato pancakes, would not be dissuaded. He dragged Pauline with him on his favourite form of transport. We watched them, four of us glued to the window. Their image, water-warped by the downpour, rocked in and out. We focused hard, as if only our concerted gaze would keep them afloat. The size of the waves seemed out of all proportion to the small lake, its waters black and foaming. Two tiny figures pulled hard, two arms to each oar, Pauline’s rain-hatted head a step lower than her brother’s. She would have been seven years old maybe, her brother nine. As we watched, my father cursed. My mother had a tendency to screech foul language and hit high anxiety on the turn of a dime, but my father was slow to burn. That she now railed against her her sister’s bird-brained compliance to everyone’s will but her own was of no surprise. My father’s anger, so different from his typical grandfatherly forbearance, was the more disturbing. He muttered in Hungarian, fists clenched. Those hands, always available when a dog loped towards me on the street, had retracted along with any attention to me the cherished child. Surely my cousins couldn’t be in actual danger if my aunt and uncle had let them go. Already I knew to second guess my parents regarding risk. They never opened the front door without peaking out through the safety chain even if the oil truck or bakery van had just pulled up. At my Canadian friends’ homes, only the screen doors swung shut. We’d call out our names and waltz right in. If a friend’s dad gave me a lift to swim lessons, my father held me back from running out to the car. He’d step forward first to formally introduce himself and to appraise the driver, making it plain that I was a monitored child.

            He stood transfixed at  the streaming window glass. When the row boat pulled ashore, he pounced into the welter, grabbed each cousin by the arm, yanking them under our roof. They shook themselves like dogs in the small kitchen, laughing off the adventure. I think now perhaps this was the reason we didn’t holiday again with my aunt’s family. I would spend many summers on my own at the country house they’d build in St. Sauveur, and my mother and sister would occasionally go up for a few days at a time. My father found some excuse not to until much later, after he retired, and perhaps not coincidentally only once my uncle had died. I don’t think my father ever forgave his brother-in-law for playing fast and loose with his children’s lives. My uncle, whatever deprivations he had suffered, had not like his brother-in-law, lost a child to Auschwitz.

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The only other country place my parents rented was after we gave up joining my aunt’s family in St. Jovite. We came to it through Mrs. Reed, my school’s librarian. She and my mother the kindergarten teacher were lunchroom friends. The Reeds owned the cottage on the Ouareau River in Rawdon, and because we didn’t own a car, Mr. Reed offered to drive us up to Rawdon for our holiday week. On the way up, he said he knew an elderly lady who lived near Rawdon. We might be interested in stopping by to meet her.

            We were a verbal, not an artistic family. My father was an engaging raconteur; I a motor mouth; my mother a shrieker; my sister a born pundit on all subjects, those in her command or otherwise. We had a tendency to all speak at once, each of us raising the volume to be heard above the rest until one solitary peal was left declaiming to a disbanded audience..

            Before we opened the car doors, we were told that what we were about to see was unique and of great value. My mother’s skeptical brows rose eloquently. The house looked hardly more than a shack in the middle of nowhere. Inside, the ceilings hung low over even my short head. The tiny lady, gracious in her smile and visibly proud of the effect on us her cottage would produce, invited us to wander around. To me, the rooms of the higgledy-piggledy house and its tiny resident belonged in a fairytale. Above table-height, not a square inch of wall in the four or five small chambers was left uncovered. Painting upon painting, none more than a foot wide and eight or so inches high clamoured in vibrant palette and textured topography around the confined space of what might have been the home of Snow White’s seven dwarfs. How I wanted us to hurry on so I could take a swim at the public beach in Rawdon before the heat of the day wore off, but I couldn’t resist the charm of the place or the draw of the bold strokes on the walls, or the plate of sandwiches the kindly hostess put out on the gingham cloth of her Hobbit’s table. I understood nothing about the paintings or even the person we were introduced to as the sister of a Canadian painter. But I did understand what it was Mr. Reed wanted us, the little family of immigrants to take away. Something native to the place, to this place alone in all the world, that we would in time have a right to call ours. I could hear my mother thinking, “As if. . .”  As if anything as valuable as the paintings of a famous artist could be patched around a shack of a cottage, unsecured by glass or alarm, open to the breeze wafting from the windows and to the dusty country air. But we saw what we saw, and eventually as a college student I understood the extent of it. All those sketches dashed off in the bush onto small, rectangular wooden panels that everyone can see now at the McMichael and the Art Gallery of Ontario and the National Gallery in Ottawa. “Thank you, Miss Jackson,” we each pressed her hand as we left, even me the littlest one, the urban child born in Budapest to be raised in Montreal. I had glimpsed a distillation of landscape that spelled Country. The houses and schools and shopping centres of my world seemed suddenly toylike, almost shoddy in a false prophet way. I had fallen hard for the ‘fundament’ in fundamentals.

            My parents didn’t drive, so we used to get around the city by way of the public trolley, bus, and later the subway. The only cars I rode in were those of my uncle and the parents of my friends. Their fathers drove us to lessons at the East End Boys and Girls Cub on Hochelaga Street, a twenty-minute drive out of suburban Ville d’Anjou, and the mothers would rescue us from downpours at lunch time or after school. The rain brought with it a carnival atmosphere of disrupted routine when we’d break outside in our plaid raincoats to scan the cars pulling in at a diagonal, wipers beating excitedly. I’d hold back a second hoping one of my friends would not forget me in the tumult but call out at the last moment: “Judy, my mom says do you want a ride?”

My uncle had a new car it seemed each year I drove up with him along the Laurentian Autoroute to the fashionable country house in Saint Sauveur built to resemble a Swiss chalet. Usually just the two of us rode up in companionable silence as my aunt and cousins had been ensconced there since the start of the summer. My uncle and I were never as comfortable together as when we didn’t have to speak to each other, and without the others around there was no pretence to keep up. We lapsed into our separate mental preoccupations, so much so that often our arrival felt premature to me however I’d looked forward to seeing Pauline. I overindulged in a rich inner life, fantasies of glorified achievements and romantic conquests that were so compelling, I clung to consciousness at bedtime, just to run the scenarios over and over, reluctant to let them blend into the more pedestrian musings of dream. The drive to the country was another gateway to reverie. My uncle would think his thoughts and I mine as I stared out the window at the flat suburban terrain that held on doggedly until just a few exit ramps before our turn off. Then, as one was just about to give up on the landscape, the mountains burst around a bend, thickly furred in cedar and maple, pine and birch. The ancient hills rolled, one into the next, and I knew, achingly reluctant to leave my private world, and achingly glad to be here at last, that we were close.

One of the great pleasures of my childhood was sitting facing Pauline on a padded lounge chair, a Chinese checkers board or pack of cards between us. No one was permitted into the lake for at least an hour after lunch. We settled into a corner of the balcony that girded the house, a good distance from where my aunt had pulled her lounge chair for her postprandial nap. We whisper-bickered good-naturedly over our games. Glancing up from the cards, we’d look out over the light-pocked lake where the occasional paddle boat nodded under the midday sun. Blinding spots erased our hands momentarily when we looked back down. Doing handstands in the water, jumping off the floating dock, and water-skiing over the wakes of the motor boat my older cousin steered expertly but without care to our safety or comfort at the end of the tow-rope, were our favourite pastimes. The aim of each day was to be in the water optimally: before lunch; afternoons; and one last dip after dinner, Get Smart, and Batman, by which time the hour of prohibition would have passed. Yet, when I look back on my summers at their country house, the idyllic moments that come back to me are the hours of playing Parcheesi on the wrap-around-balcony, or out in the row boat under the blazing sun, languidly, sun-sapped of energy, laying out the cards in endless lines of “War.”

The last time I stayed at my aunt’s country house, I was a new mother of a seven-month-old baby. Pauline and I had drifted apart in our teens, and so I had never even seen the most recent house they’d had built on a much grander scale than the first. I was thirty, my mother and aunt in their mid-sixties, my father within a couple of years of eighty. He and my mother had been visiting in St. Sauveur when he suffered a stroke. The distance between the village of St. Sauveur and the town of St. Jerome where the nearest hospital is located is only about thirty kilometres, but the house was another twenty minutes from the village by small, hilly roads. My aunt, even on a serene day, was never calm behind the wheel. Moreover, the two women were not capable of lifting a paralyzed man into my aunt’s car. An ambulance had to be dispatched. All this took some time while time was of the essence. Had my father anticipated, somewhere in his country-rooted bones all that long time ago on Lac Maskinongé after which he refused to holiday with them again, that hanging out with my aunt in the country would not be good for his health? I drove from Toronto to Montreal with my baby, my late husband Craig having had to stay back to field a crisis at work. In Montreal, we picked up my sister and her two young daughters. En route to St. Jerome, the heavens unleashed a storm. Rain pelted down, instantly flooding the highway and turning it, as Lac Maskinongé was once turned, a-roil. All visibility washed out. Our car of females and an infant crept to an overpass. We listened to the rain pound overhead. No one spoke. It felt apocalyptic. My father would take another six years to die, but it was clear this was it, the paterfamilias felled.

My infant son had a gluttonous appetite, capable of nursing for hours. At my aunt’s, exhausted after the strain of the drive and the shock of seeing of my father stripped of speech, I kept the baby in bed with me so I might at least try to sleep through his feeds. A thin early light seeped through the blinds as I startled awake. There were shouts. Panicked footsteps raced around the too many large rooms. My aunt started to scream. In French she invoked death upon something or other. In Hungarian, she keened, “Eaten. He’s been eaten!” My door burst open. I had never seen my mother this wild, not even when she had recounted the death of one of her sisters during a bombardment, to a relative who had come to visit us for the first time. I was ten years-old, frozen to the spot as her voice lurched to a pitiful pitch. Now, though, she had completely lost anchor. “Where is the baby?” she shrieked in Hungarian. “The baby. The baby! The dog ate the baby!” My aunt had a German shepherd called Brutus, whom she pampered and adored. Having survived Auschwitz and Buchenwald, she had taken in a German shepherd rescue dog. The bigness of my aunt’s heart, so big, so generous, so nuts. Hearing the horror articulated, she too filled my doorway, her face all expression, no sound. I pulled back the covers to reveal my son, latched on as always, not the least disturbed by the commotion nor distracted from his purpose. I was to learn that when my mother had woken, she’d poked her head into my room. I can’t really say why except she has always had a penchant for breaching personal space. Not seeing the baby, she’d leapt to the obvious conclusion.

 +

I won’t say I married my husband Craig because his family had been here for generations, or because on his mother’s side they’d held rural property. “Correction,” Craig would have said, “a farm.” Not a prosperous one given that it turned a stone-pocked soil, the stone fences of cleared fields reminders more of an originally mineral than forested profusion. The fact of land in the country appealed where reason left off, and was hard for me to let go of once the farm was sold to pay for a retirement bungalow. Craig hadn’t felt the call to look it up on any of our vacations to the beach in its vicinity. As a boy he had holidayed at the farm each summer. It was the beach he had loved, and the beach to which we returned as a young couple and then with our children. The fact that his own parents, like us, rented a different cottage at this beach every year, perpetually nomadic in our quest for the one with the best location, least mould, and most tolerable mattresses—weighing these odds to come up with the annual lacklustre compromise—was plainly wrong. Craig’s maternal ancestors had lived here for generations, owned land here, cleared it of the dolomite and sandstone and shale that stood in the way of accessing the necessities of life. This, only to arrive in our generation landless, sans tenure, supplicant in this very place for a roof over our heads. Craig accepted the twist of fortune without resentment, but I felt cheated of the claim to land that had called to me in the form of a generous-spirited, large-boned young man of country stock.

            During our first months under one roof, my second husband, John, took me to Budapest to reintroduce me to the city of my birth. He had worked in Budapest in a consulting capacity for a number of years. There is a photo of me standing under the sign that reads Obstetrics in the hospital where my mother had given birth fifty years before. We’d walked the same blocks she had in the middle of a January squall, from my family’s flat on Rona Utça. Just a half hour earlier, John had passed me his cellphone to dial her in Montreal. I said, “Mummy, I’m looking up at our flat on the second floor. The daughter-in-law of the lady below, the same lady who’s lived here all these years but is in hospital now, the daughter-in-law won’t buzz us in to let us look around. I’m standing here on the outside of the fence, Ma.” An ocean between us, I start to blubber. My mother, over the same impossible distance arrives as by Star Trek transporter, her disembodied self fully manifest in a slurry of Hungarian maledictions. Her wicked tongue is a balm. Though my words, “here, on the outside of the fence” opened an old wound of displacement, she understands them on another plane: that she, as in through one of hers, has been denied. She would give that dirty so-and-so of a daughter-in-law a piece of her mind if we put the cellphone to the intercom. Instead, she settled for instructing John. “I walked to the hospital on my own feet, leaning on our cleaning lady, because Judy’s father was outside the city at his job with the state farms. I had the pains. The snow was coming at us sideways it was so windy. Where would we get a taxi? You take her now. She will walk like I did to the place she was born. But she will have you.”

            John also took me into the region of the Hungarian countryside dotted with the erstwhile agricultural estates of my father’s large, dispossessed family. He showed me where he thought my grandparents’ house would have stood, by some bricks half-buried in a plausible depression. I dug one out. With my bare hands I scraped up a fistful of earth which I poured into a baggy that  held my daily dose of vitamin supplements. The elderly cousin of my father who had accompanied us as a guide pointed out the pine trees my murdered grandmother had planted as a young bride just before the turn of the twentieth century. They were now over a hundred years in that ground. I peeled a piece of bark from one of them, and picked three pine cones to stash in my purse. These bits and shards of a broken past sit on my bookshelf today. Sometimes I look at the dirt preserved in a spice jar, or pick up the old brick. I’m afraid the bark or the pine cones might crumble at touch. I may dream all I want of owning a cottage in the country, but no piece of Canadian wilderness however artfully presented could replace what history gutted.

Judith Kalman is a Toronto writer whose collection of linked short stories, The County of Birches, was published by Douglas & McIntyre in 1998 and St. Martin’s Press in the U.S. in 1999. It was a co-winner of the Danuta Gleed Award and a finalist for the U.S. National Jewish Book Award. Several stories in the collection received individual awards. “Not for Me a Crown of Thorns” appeared in the 1998 Journey Prize Anthology. “Flight” won the Tilden Canadian Literary Award, a National Magazine Award and the President’s Medal for overall best magazine publication and was broadcast on CBC’s Between the Covers. Other stories from the collection have been anthologized in The Oxford Book of Stories by Canadian Women and Contemporary Jewish Writing in Canada, as well as in other anthologies.

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In dreams, dreaming, I am slowly and methodically beating a man
senseless. Or trying to. We all are, all the time. I write the best
love poems to the sound
of bird calls. Only when I’m far away
can I imagine you, breathing quietly
and dreaming. Moving your body a bit. You told me your father
would like me with a firm handshake, our mighty paws woven together
like men. At the last moment meeting him my palm maneuvered
like a plane into a building. But this is not the end
of the world. I will walk further into the music of a few birds and their mating
calls to one another before the morning storm. I will forever jog
towards that boy on the park path jumping into puddles
and out of them as if traversing hundreds of feet of oceans reentering the sky
and earth. I will always lose, become suddenly
like a bullet fired underwater. The wind will work hard
at my spine. The joy will make my throat burn with the taste
of metal. Of my mother’s throat. Only then will I raise my arms
the way runners do at the end of a marathon. The way dancers do at the end
of dances. My lips working silently. To let go
a memory of my father. The sole time his hand rose and fell
he struck me. I was four. Through all this, I’ve learned only that distance
is impossible. At the end of the world, my hands and my body
will become limp and feverish. My fist languid
as a flower. It will brush against the other man’s chin. At the end of the world,
I will always be saving somebody. And how wonderful
that the first time I met your father, my fingers rested on the tops of his like a lady’s
at a ball asking politely for a dance.

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Working primarily as a painter, I’m interested in both the history of the medium and how this material can be translated to a contemporary context, seeking to create a dialogue with painting and the intersection between this traditional media and our current digital culture. My work is inspired by historical images and compositional devices, the language of portraiture and figuration, and explores art tropes and archetypes in a pointedly experimental and sometimes surrealist fashion.

Nicole Trimble is Assistant Professor of Electronic Media Communications at the University of Cincinnati Blue Ash College as well as co-founder of Bright Wall Collective, a mural and design studio based out of Southwest Ohio. Her studio practice is grounded in painting and observation of the human figure while exploring ways this traditional medium can intersect with digital media. Her work has been exhibited in galleries throughout the United States and in publications such as Movers & Makers, AEQAI, Studio Visit and Professional Artist Magazine. She holds a BFA in painting and printmaking from Miami University, and an MFA from the University of Cincinnati's College of DAAP. She currently lives and works in Cincinnati, OH.

Further examples of her work can be found at nicoletrimble.com.

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1.   SHIFT

I’m not trying to act like being me is a great job. But it’s a job. Would you rather be unemployed? I mean, right? Like count your blessings. For example, this new guy. He’s supposed to be here to be me at 8:30. And when does this beefcake show up? 8:40, 8:45, around there. Waltzes in, like he hasn’t a care. Like whatever I’ve got on my list of concerns, it makes no difference to him. I like your pants, I go, because they are bright pants, definitely not a pair I’d even consider wearing as me. He says, Anyway, as if we are already through with the talking, as if he is glad. I actually hate him. I feel it: hate sings in my bones. How can he think, as he obviously does, that being me is such a breeze? You think this job won’t wear you down? Good luck, motherfucker.

2.   NEBRASKA

She’s posted seven pictures since her family moved to Oregon and her mom was diagnosed. The pictures are selfies. They don’t really show that much of her life as it is in this place. Green hair. Orange hair. A glitter experiment, ha. Just pictures. Of her, of her face. Her old friends like them. She feels each heart in her heart. They come from a kind of fantasy place, where nothing bad has happened to her, where nothing ever will.

3.   EXPIRED

He saw a parent in the street, with child and jogging stroller. The parent was young, much younger than he was, which, though trivial, was a surprise. He saw that he’d never relinquished the thought of himself as a first-time parent, harried, aware—of sudden riches of love, sudden responsibility. He’d never stopped seeing himself as he sensed other people were seeing him then. Other people were seeing him then, he supposed. He waved off the thought. Useless. Still, he felt its touch in him as he entered the dusk of the subway.

4.   BLIZZARD

No one was leaving the neighborhood. That much was clear. And so, the next afternoon, I spidered through drifts to your house. I didn’t ask after your drug-addict friends. You didn’t demand bites of my honor roll. We fooled around. Made snow folks. Ate off our gloves, ice powder. Nothing was really the shape it should be out there, in that cover of snow.

5.   QUESTIONS

A man in the back raises his hand. Would you say, he begins, that your plot embodies praxis for the novelist himself? Would you say that your plot, in its magnitude, its manifold wanderings and crossings, serves as a mirror for the novelist himself as he tries to balance his receptivity with the obvious strictures of form? She stands at the podium. She leans to reach her glass, takes a drink of water. Would I say that? she asks. That is the question? No. I can’t think that I would.

6.   TRAGEDY

For a long time afterwards, we couldn’t eat anything. For hours, days. Our bodies renegade, our bodies eating themselves. Then in an empty second I peeled an orange, a clementine, and it was so small, but sections multiplied and moved from hand to hand. We waited. It had to be done all at once. Wild shock of juice in each of our mouths. Terrible, good.

7.  JUNK

I’d like to think my father feels the weakness of the line he gives about why he’s set aside a stack of junk mail addressed to my dead name. You might need it, he says. I don’t know what’s in there. I might need a father also, I don’t say. Because pointlessness. In truth, the father in him has been pledged to a social security number, to an idea of a person whose interests would seem to include flooring and discount garden supplies. Competitive cable providers. I neaten the stack. I can feel its loose edge in my palm. Congratulations! one envelope says.

8.   PASSENGER

He knows they don’t feel right about wherever they’re taking him now. He knows they feel they’re betraying the man who’s given them help and counsel. He offers no comfort. We are, each one of us, alone. In the world. In the car, which rocks, which banks with the curl and slope of the road, past bare winter branches in daylight. Stream. That light. And if you fall asleep? Strong arms will scoop you out of the seat, float you back into the house.

9.   TIME MACHINE

First jump we made was in place. Like straight up, then float down: it’s ten years later. Not a smart choice. A safe choice, we had been thinking. But no: we saw our mistake. We gaped at our babies. Since they weren’t ours, or not yet, they seemed like tiny aliens, filled with alien habits and drives not suited to the house we’d recently bought, or bought, I guess, ten years before. We gaped at our ourselves: rushing everywhere, passing without even touching. No, you said then. The real you, or the earlier you. Now wait, I managed to say. We need to break up, you said. Now wait, I repeated. Right now, you said twice in a row. I had to think fast. We can’t intervene, I said, or the world might—right? Implode. Stop being manipulative, you said to me. I said, Right. I said, I confess to that. Let’s go back and talk more, I said. We need to go slow on this.

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We got used to it so quickly:  fish gills opening and closing under our living rooms, whales coming up in cornfields, dolphins sliding under highway medians, people a hundred miles from the sea digging up starfish beside their tomato plants.

              At first the novelty gripped us—scary, thrilling, so many questions—but before long we just continued on.  Like a workplace affair that becomes a relationship, gossip fades and everyone becomes bored.  Breaching whales overturned a few doublewide trailers, a few backyard sheds, but mostly the creatures moved inland without burdening us, swimming under the roots of our crops even though the rocks must scrape them raw.

Most people adjusted to the changes, but my father-in-law, Sam, is still pissed, still talks about it like it only started yesterday.

             “In my day, fish stayed where they belonged,” he says, “and left us the fun of fishing for them.”

For Sam, every generation brings something newfangled and foreign: women in pants, computers in pockets, gorillas that work their fat fingers into sign language, privatized space travel, people who wear hiking clothes to church.             

+

We live on the Pacific, so we were among the first to witness it, walking along Canon Beach one afternoon.  Or ambling, really, Sam plugging his cane and shuffling his leather sandals to meet it. He shook off my arm. Early spring air rushed into his unzipped jacket, ballooning him. He wanted me to match his slogging pace. “You, you, always on the verge of running,” he often says.

              I handed Sam a large white shell, bruise-colored where something living once gripped.  He fit his fist into it and smiled, decay rimming his teeth like black licorice. 

              We heard a steamy rush of air just beyond the breakers.  Sam stopped and turned toward the sound. He is glaucoma-blinded and sees only vague shapes.

              “Whale?” he asked.

              “I’m not sure yet,” I said, waiting.

              “Pretty close to shore for a whale,” Sam said.

              Then the bus-sized hump of a whale’s back crested the water, so close I could see the moldy crust of green barnacles on its skin.

              “Oh shit. It’s a whale,” I said. “It’s right here. I think it's beached. Or is about to be.”

              The creature let out a sound, then. Sam took a startled step backward. It was a dream sound, a subterranean bellow that landed in my own chest as a feeling: something like homesickness.

              “Let's move out of here,” Sam said.

              We tried our best to hustle-hike up the dunes, my arms outstretched and ready to catch him as we climbed.         

              When we reached the top, out of the way, I pulled out my phone and stared at it.

              I asked, “Who do I call about a beached whale?” I looked toward the beach, but The whale had disappeared.       

              “Just let nature do its thing, Darla,” Sam said.  He’s probably sick."

              My husband Dave—Sam’s son—is dead. He was in commercial construction and a bulldozer tipped on top of him during a mild earthquake.  From there, Sam and I ended up here—part father and daughter, part late-marriage husband and wife, each of us armed with biting insults collected over many years.

              The whale came up even closer to shore, gaping mouth first.  The white underside of its belly rose out of the water like a hump of snow.

              “This is really bad,” I said.

              Sam said, “Good thing we moved, then.”

              I held my breath as the whale tipped toward the shallows.  With nothing to cushion it, I expected a thunderous shock, the sharp crack of tree-trunk bones under a terrible weight.

              Instead, a sucking sound, and the sand swallowed the whale whole. The tail last to go under.  It gave the ground a cheerful slap and sank, wet sand bubbling up behind it like lava. Then it was like no whale had been there at all. 

              Sam tugged my sleeve. “I can’t quite… what’s happening?”

              “It’s just gone,” I said, my mouth working out the words. “It disappeared under the sand. Like the sand was water.”

               Sam chuckled at me until the whale humped out of the ground twenty yards from the shoreline, right where the dunes began.  Its blowhole erupted wet sand.  Sam reached up to wipe a streak from his forehead with his jacket sleeve.  Then, the whale swam beneath the dunes where we stood, tectonic movement under our feet.  Sam put a hand on my shoulder as we witnessed reality rip open.

+

Our cottage stinks of fish now.  Dave and I bought it when we first married, and back then it was perfect:  white fence twined with hibiscus and a small deck in the salty air, where Dave and I drank coffee.  Twelve years later, the cottage’s cedar shake siding flaps in strong winds, and the blue window boxes droop under the weight of weeds and sea grasses.

              The smell reminds me of the summer I was nine, when ten thousand mackerel washed ashore and the Department of Wildlife and Fisheries was called to clean it up and run tests.  After a few days of rot, they decided the fish had died of some undetermined natural cause and vacuumed the remains into a giant Shop-Vac, like dustbunnies.

              After dinner, Sam and I sit in the backyard.  We don’t walk the beach anymore.  The water rolls in and out, same as always, but it’s like an abandoned amusement park with all the rides running empty.

              “Hear that?” Sam asks, cupping his ear.

              “What? No.”

              “Wait.”

              Then I see a group of rubbery gray triangles breaking through the grass of our backyard.  With a peal of chirps, the dolphins surface in our grass.  One leaps high and dives under, sending soil flying.

              “Silly little fuckers.” Sam chuckles, and wipes dirt from his lap.

              This was our routine, after Sam went nearly blind and moved in: Dave would cook us dinner, do the dishes, then scoop out bowls of ice cream for us to eat while watching Jeopardy. He made sure Sam put the pills on his tongue, bathed every day, changed his sheets, kept him limber with walks on the beach.    

The dolphins come closer--they pop out of the grass, nod, smile.  Then they dive under our house and move on.  

+

A few months later, the first casualties come and change everything all over again. A killer whale snatches a little girl off a swing set in Vancouver, right in front of her father.  The whale, or one convincingly similar, is machine-gunned.  No one can keep a nice yard anymore; crops are uprooted; turtles creep onto the highway. And what is happening in the sea? We cannot imagine.

              Sam and I listen to a farmer on the radio telling the story of his livestock wandering off after a whale herd bumped the fence out of the ground.  He found two cows plodding out into the ocean ten miles away—the rest just gone, drowned.  The cows had escaped their enclosures and ambled straight to sea, as if hypnotized.

              Sam says, “This just isn’t natural.”

              “But it’s nature that’s doing it,” I say.

I've been thinking all day of the beach.  Now I have a reason to go, alone, and see what’s happening there. As I get closer, I hear a symphony of panic: barks, squaws, human cries.  And then I see it: hundreds of animals going into the ocean.  Dogs, cats, cows.  They wade in with intention and disappear.  People run after them, grasping at tails and hindquarters, but they just break free and dive in again.  People rush past me, their arms full of beloved pets thrashing against their hugs.

              When I get home, Sam knows all about it, watching the news from his armchair.

              He says, “Would you believe land animals can breathe underwater now?”

              Breathe underwater. This strikes me in a visceral way, my head tingling—like deja vu, something familiar and important I’d forgotten.

              I lean down and kiss Sam’s forehead, run a hand over the white hair he has left, sparse and soft as a baby’s.  He puts his hand on top of mine, his smoggy blue eyes rolling around.

+

Dave and his mom, Sam’s wife, are down there with all of those creatures.  Sharks, jellyfish, stingrays, giant squids. Bumping their coffins, perhaps knocking them open.

              Finally, full of dread, I go to the cemetery to check. But everything looks the same. The rows of headstones are orderly and undisturbed. A breeze from the ocean rustles the fake floral arrangements and the real sea grasses.  Here, among the dead, the world seems normal and still, unchanged.

              Dave is buried beside his mom, and there’s an empty space on her other side for Sam.  She died before I met her.

              “Hey, Dave,” I say.  “Hope all is well under there.”

              I answer back for him, his voice in my head. Hi, babe. Everything is fine.

              “The animals don’t bother you?”

              Every once in a while I feel a little bump. But mostly they leave me alone. They get it, somehow.

              The voice I conjure for him is the one from early in the morning, just as we woke up—froggy, and a little vulnerable. Happy.

              “That’s good,” I say.  “And your Mom?”

              She’s doing well. Sometimes she sticks out a hand out when a starfish goes by, lets it curl around her palm.

               “That sounds nice.  Tell her I said hi, okay?”

              Here he would smile, his voice would soften. How about you, Buttercup?

              “Oh, I’m doing okay, considering. I go to the beach three or four times a day now. A decade living beside the ocean, and it’s like suddenly I can't get enough. It calms me. Oh, and Sam is in good health.  Still stubborn as hell.”

              Surprise.

              “We fight every day.  But his health is good.”

              Where are you going next?

              “What do you mean? I'm not going anywhere.”

              Everything is changed, Darla. You don't have to stay.

              I feel bad making Dave say this, but also, I’m pretty sure it’s what he would say.

+

I run a bath and climb in.  I set my smartphone stopwatch and sink under.  Instinctively, I know I can’t breathe underwater, but I test myself to see how long I can hold my breath.  I open my eyes and see the wavy world Sam sees, the blurred bathroom ceiling. When my lungs begin to burn, I come out of the water and look at the stopwatch.  Six minutes.

               I dry off, dress, go back out to the living room.  The news loops the same footage of animals wading into the water, leaping off piers.

              “I went in to get my dog,” a guy says, blinking against the salt water that drips from his hair.  “And realized I was staying underwater a long time.  Ten minutes, maybe, but it felt like five seconds.  It felt, well. It felt good.”

              “Come here again,” Sam says to me.  I sit on the arm of his chair, my own sopping hair dripping onto him.  He puts a hand on the small of my back and I want to cry. He is the only man who has touched me in years.

              The reporter asks the man if he got his dog back.

              “Oh,” the guy says.  “No.  No, I didn’t get him. But I think, somehow, it’s meant to be that way. It’s okay.”

+

The neighborhood begins to empty into the sea. The youngest families go first, then the middle-aged, the women who married wealthy and once or twice invited me over for cards and little puff pastries on tiered platters.  Most of the holdouts are Sam’s age.

              For me, the pull of the ocean is biological, hormonal, like the pull of motherhood felt for a little while after Dave died.  I can hold my breath and stay underwater for thirty minutes—as long as a dolphin. Some can stay under much longer, some can even breathe. When I’m not in the water, my skin itches, the relentless firing of thirsty nerve endings.

              I’ve heard they’re building cities already, in shallower parts of the sea. There are many logistics to work out. But it is a new start, a free pass—the damage we did on land is no longer our problem. Meanwhile the sea creatures are making a mess of things on land, taking full ownership. Our back yard has long soil scars rising from end to end.  In a world that’s seventy percent water, there’s just not enough room. Some say the sea creatures have sacrificed themselves for us.

              I’ve let the house go, too.  Dirty dishes crowd the sink, the coffee table, the floor.  The carpet, once a ripe pink, is tracked with gray footprints.  I imagine what it will be like if I leave. Sam in his armchair, a tide of dishes and laundry and fish bones rising around him.

+

I start limiting my trips to the beach, in fear that I won't come back. Instead, every day I take a bath.  Every day adds another ten seconds to the time I can stay underwater. More and more, I don’t want to get out of the bathwater at all.  My baths last an hour, two hours, until the water is gray and cold.

              One night, Sam knocks loud on the door while I’m in the tub.

              “Darla,” he calls.  “I need to use the toilet.”

              “Not now, Sam.  I’m relaxing.”

              “Let me in there, Darla.”

              I tell him no.

              He opens the door and I hurry to cover myself.

              “Sam!”

              “Get off it, Darla.  I can’t see anything.”

              I let my arms drop.  “Will you just give me a minute?”

              “I know what this is all about,” he says.

              “What? I’m just taking a bath."

              He looks at me impatiently. “A three-hour bath?”

              This startled me. I thought it had been an hour, at most. I start to stammer out an explanation, but words don't cut it.

              “You’re going to go into the ocean," Sam says. He doesn't seem upset, just stating a fact.

              I sigh.  “I don’t know what I’m going to do, Sam.”

              He steps closer.

              “Well I’m here to tell you to get on with it, already. I have money, you know. I have options.”

              “Come on, Sam,” I say.

              He kneels on the bathmat. “You want me to need you, but I don’t.”

              I slap the water with my palms. “I take care of you because you don’t have anyone else, you stubborn old goat.”

              “Now, now,” he says.

               “Bullshit,” I yell, and then I start to cry. We are both silent, and I’m not sure if Sam knows I’m crying and is letting me, or if he has nothing left to say.

              “Sam,” I say, finally. “Can you breathe underwater?”

              Sam shakes his head. “Well, I haven’t tried.  I’m not going.”

              “Maybe everything is better there,” I say. “Maybe we could both go.”

              “My life is on land,” he says, his knee joints popping as he lifts himself from the bathmat.  “I never asked for any of this.”

+

Every day I am fighting myself, but I’m up to an hour in my underwater time trials.  The internet says soon I will be able to breathe underwater. I long for somewhere like Nebraska, where I don't have to smell the sea, hear it tumbling, calling out to me at all times. To make matters worse, I’m starting to think of the men living out there, building cities, thriving at the leading edge of humanity's adaptation. Maybe one of those men is waiting for me.

              Meanwhile, Same seems somehow more self-reliant. We haven’t spoken much since that night in the bathroom.  He’s been taking long walks and I’ve let him go, with no cars on the streets to run him down. He’s made new friends in the neighborhood, all in their eighties or nineties, and they make jokes about geriatrics taking the joint over.

One day I’m surprised to hear water running, dishes bumping against each other in the kitchen sink. How odd to see Sam standing there, his back to me.

              “Bet you wouldn’t have guessed I did the dishes all the time when Rose was alive,” he says, rolling a sponge inside a glass.  “She cooked, I washed.”

              Water sloshes against the sides of the sink. I start to go a little crazy. I rub my papery hands together and my skin peels away in horrifying Parmesan flakes.

              Still, I laugh. “Why didn’t we have a deal like that?”

              Sam’s back is still to me, but I hear the smile in his voice.  “You never asked to make a deal.”

              I walk up behind him, put my arms around his sagging middle.  I plunge my hands into the dishwater and sigh with pleasure.

              “Tell me,” he says, “how will you eat?”

              “Sam.”

              “Will you eat nothing but seaweed, or what?  How does one get all their nutrients from seaweed?”

              “I think people will probably come ashore sometimes, for a little while.  Some farmers will stay and harvest. Not everyone is leaving.”

              I consider for the first time underwater slaughterhouses, and imagine cows lassoed as they move their fat bodies through the water like manatees, the blood from the slaughter rising to the surface in inky plumes.  Do they regret plodding into the sea? Did they have a choice? I imagine how lonely it will be, how dark. I put my chin on his shoulder.

              “I don’t know, Sam.  I don’t know if I’m going, either, so don’t assume I am.”

              He puts his hands over mine in the dishwater.  Together we soap a plate.         

              “Don’t you feel it?” I croak out. “How dry it is out here on land?  It’s maddening.”

              “Always has been dry on land, Darla.”

He coughs. I feel the vibration of phlegm in his throat.

               “Whatever pull you feel, I don’t.  I just don’t.  Most of the old fogies on this block don’t.”

              Sam moves out of my arms.  My arms are so itchy, it’s all I can think about. I cup the cooling water and splash it over them.

“There are boats,” I say.  “You could come visit me.”

              “I tell you one thing,” Sam says.  “I’ve seen a lot.  But I never thought I’d see the earth and sea trade places.  I never thought I’d see a woman with scales.  Times are getting stranger, changing faster every year. I just can’t do it anymore.”

              The itch moves to my neck and when I scratch it, a pocket-sized flap of skin peels easily away.  It’s slippery underneath.  I want to ask Sam what it looks like, if I’m silver and shiny under my skin.

“But you can’t see my scales,” I whisper.

              And then biology, something, takes me over. I gently push Sam aside, lean down and plunge my head into the water, speckled with food, bubbling with soap. My hair reaches out like tentacles.  Dishwater fills my ears.  I breathe. 

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Today, I folded the white comforter while the breeze lifted
that baby-bent window shade you wrestle with every time
you close it, and I thought: Science says we are never more than
three feet away from a spider, and I have tested this on our
curtain rods in a long-term study. A whistling kettle can call me
down the long labyrinth, because water and heat are best of all things.
But what prepares a woman to care about dust on the tines
of a ceiling fan, when only the silvered goddess can fully remove it?
Something keeps clanking on its chain, tangling my yarn, behind me.

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[17] And, behold, I, even I, do bring a flood of waters upon the earth, to destroy all flesh, wherein is the breath of life, from under heaven; and every thing that is in the earth shall die.

I confess, it's always been the animals that got me.  Like in the movies, where they can kill eight or nine or a dozen people through variously inventive means, but it's always the dog that evokes a reaction:  "Oh, not the dog" someone always whispers (it might even be me) and then the gun barrel is leveled or the truck bears down — and we all know we can tell if this movie will end happily by if the dog lives or dies. 

            They almost never die, though.  They didn’t in Independence Day, despite the destruction of most of the world’s major cities. They didn’t in Armageddon, although the Chrysler Building, millions of people, and all of Paris did.  I suppose one could assume at least a few dogs died with their owners — and perhaps even a cat or two though they were probably smart enough, and disloyal enough, to have left town at the first scent of trouble — but we never see it happen.  A meteor’s direct hit on a dog smaller than a gallon of milk does nothing but leave him looking only slightly worse for wear.  Not so the poor guy standing in the same spot, upon whose corpse one has to assume the dog must be standing in order to scrabble out of the crater into his owner’s stunned arms.  Though why he’d be surprised I’m not sure — doesn’t he go to the movies?

            In Independence Day we watch with nary a cringe as hundreds of people are incinerated in the Holland Tunnel, but when a single dog is about to be overtaken by the same wall of flame we grip the armrest beside us and don’t let go until he escapes by bounding into a side-tunnel.  Nobody in the audience cares the humans didn’t make it; it was the dog that got them.

            Well, it's the dog that gets me with Noah’s ark.  And the lion.  And the zebra.  And all the other “beast after his kind.” Man I can understand.  After all, if there's a weak link on the food chain, we all know who he is.  So we got ours.  I’m OK with that.

But I’ve never understood the others.  If it were just the human race that had angered him, you'd think God might have been a bit more selective, a bit more “surgical” to use modern military lingo.  Hard to believe he couldn’t do better than one of our smart bombs (Pentagon claims to the contrary).  Why not a nice species-specific plague instead?  It’s just as quick, a whole lot quieter and neater, and since it only wipes out the bad guys it has the added distinction of being fair.

I don’t know.  Maybe it was just too much work. Maybe he was saving them up for the Egyptians; he is omniscient after all — he must have known he was going to have to come up with a whole slew of them to break Pharaoh.  Though having plagues of flies, gnats, and locusts seems a bit — dare I say it about the Creator of the Universe and All It Holds — unimaginative.  That’s going to the “winged pest” well a bit too often if you ask me.  Flies and gnats?  What did the panting messengers say to Pharaoh — “it’s just like that plague two disasters ago—but now the wee flying beasties are even tinier!”

OK, so maybe not another plague.  But did he really have to choose indiscriminate erasure?  I mean, sure that killer comet at the end of the Cretaceous must have had, sticking to military-speak, “collateral damage” — a plant family here, a mammal genus there — but overall it did a pretty good job of knocking mostly just the dinosaurs off the playing board.  He couldn’t find another big clump of interstellar dirt floating around?  Did he look under the Milky Way?

And didn’t the animals get any say? My peers in second grade religion class wanted to know the physical details of how Noah and his family rounded up all the animals — how did they get to them, how did they transport them? I was less pragmatic, less concrete. I wanted the emotional details.  What did they do when they came across a pride of lions?  Or a bear and its cubs?  How did they separate the children from the parents, the brothers from the sisters?   Raised on the talking animals of Aesop’s fables and the Jungle Book, not to mention the all-too-human menagerie presented once a week on The Wonderful World of Disney, I couldn’t imagine the animals as simply dumb beasts to be rounded up, culled from the herd and trundled along with a stick to the back of the line.  There must have been some kind of argument, some protest:

“Let’s get this straight, God’s angry at you humans and wants to start all over by wiping you all out? OK, we can see that; we’ve all thought you were a bad idea for some time now.  But tell us again how we figure into it.  What did we do?  And what about the fish?  After forty days and forty nights, is He gonna boil the water too, or do they just get off completely?”  Meanwhile I imagined the birds surreptitiously limbering up their wings, exchanging knowing looks as they slowly and quietly migrated to the back of the line.

            And what a line that must have been.  I’ve always imagined it as it was first presented to me in the only Bible I would know for quite some time — the Children's Illustrated version in my dentist’s office, its spine cracked and broken from having been laid down open on its pages too many times so that thick white strings hung like free samples of dental floss from its binding.  In the illustration I recall, the day before the rain started, the animals were already dutifully lined up. Just . . waiting.  And smiling.  All of them.  Even at that age I found it odd, considering what they were waiting for was the end of the world.  Granted, they were the lucky ones, but even then I liked to think I would not have been quite so smugly satisfied at my own survival.

            For my fellow second graders, the most obvious question was how did all those smiling animals fit?  Where did they all go, two by two, into so small a ship?  It never occurred to me to ask.  Not because I believed in God and miracles but because I believed in humanity.  I just figured Noah got sick of the whole thing well before the ark filled up.  I could imagine the conversations that began to take place toward the end of the line:

            "Big deal you can't fly, we already got ostriches and emus.  And you too? On a boat I need horses with pointy horns in the middle of their heads?  Get outta here."

            After all, this is the man who when they landed got drunk and naked and then told Ham to "pull my finger."  I was betting he didn't bother getting them all, no matter what God had told him.

No, it wasn’t where they were going to fit that bothered me.  It was how they were acting.  No sense of panic.  No one out of line.  No sign of tension between prey and predator, even though to some of the large cats the queue had to look like one big buffet.  No one had their heads stretched back, curious as to the way the sky looked overhead. It made me wonder if the drowning thing had perhaps not been mentioned at all.  Maybe they were told it would just be “a three-hour cruise,” like that song on TV.  It would be just like humans, I thought.

I was unnerved by this precise and willing movement, animals lined up like second-graders waiting for recess.  Frighteningly obedient second-graders at that — after all, Peter Halter and I had gotten into a fistfight over something as minor as who was going to get on the bus first on the way to second grade; there’s no way we would have lined up so dociley for the end of the world.  Even now, recalling that image, it still gives me a chill.

            As a child, I wanted to reach into that book and shake them, ask them if they knew what was happening, tell them to bellow to the sky, to outroar the thunder, or even to wreck the ark in protest.  The elephants could have done some damage.  The termites too, if not so quickly or flashily.  Yes, it would have been their own undoing.  Even as a child I understood it would be, as my mother liked to say, “cutting off your nose to spite your face.”

But as I’ve learned since, as perhaps I sensed then, never underestimate the power of spite. I wanted them to make God face his unfairness.  The end of the world should be a messy thing, filled with yammering fear and a large helping of panic, followed quickly by indignation and a committed unwillingness to go with grace and honor.  This clipboarded and checklisted column of smiling piety and tame placidity at first confused, then sickened, and finally angered me. 

It was a child’s anger, directed not just at the cruelly capricious God of the story but the dumbly accepting victims — an anger I carried only briefly, since religion had only the most fleeting of interactions with me.  Unlike everyone in my class and almost all of our neighbors, we did not go to church.  Religion class was one of those things I assume I went to because everyone else on our street did, much as I attended swim lessons at a neighbor’s pool, joined a pack of Cub Scouts led by the den mother across the street, and took piano lessons from yet another of my friend’s mothers in the house next door to the swimming lessons.  These were the regular rites of the suburban kids on my street, and I bowed to their ritualized activities, though never, it turned out, for very long.

It took only a few weeks, possibly a month of piano before it was “suggested” that I lacked both the talent and the inclination; a half summer at most of swim lessons before it was decided that I wouldn’t drown (probably) if I fell into one of the many pools dotting our neighborhood and “suggested” this was about all that could be hoped for; maybe two months of Cub Scouts before it was “suggested” that perhaps the highly structured format of meetings and activities “didn’t quite suit my personality,” and only a handful of religious classes before I got the jump on the inevitable “suggestion” and announced myself that I wanted to quit.  My parents agreed with scarcely a ripple, and I wonder now if it was because they were not all that religious or if they were relieved at not having to face the embarrassment of yet another neighbor hinting at my incompatibility or incompetence.

So I moved on from class and God.  Two and half years later when my father left, I had already settled into my current attitude toward religion, not simply not believing in a God but not caring enough to disbelieve. My anger, therefore, was not directed at a capricious God but at my father for leaving and my mother for not stopping him from doing so.  And a year later, when he died of a heart attack, I wanted to know if he had fought, I wanted to know what he looked like when he felt that first pang, I wanted to know if he meekly got in line or raged as strongly as I’d seen him do at my mother, refusing to disappear from our lives like a stone slipping into water.

I know my mother raged when her turn came.  I heard her.  From the time I was twelve to the time she died, I heard her snarl and spit at the cancer gathering like storm clouds across the plains of her body.  I saw her poison it with chemistry, aim beams of radiation at it like the square-jawed scientists in the Saturday monster movies taking out whatever giant creature was marauding through the city streets, I heard her call it “bastard” and “son of a bitch,” refusing to give it the honor of speakign its name.  Even at the end, when they took her from the house the last time, I heard her yelling she wanted to stay home, knowing it was the last time, wanting its final victory to be on her terms, on her ground.

When I think of the story of Noah’s Ark now, when I see those cute little models with smiling toy animals in the children’s catalogs that come to our home, I no longer get angry at God or the animals. Now I reserve my anger for the storytellers. Because they know better.

Extinction is not a flood of pure rainwater that washes away the bad to make way for the good.  And salvation is not a just-in-time boat bobbing merrily along in time with trilling birdsong and gentle lowing from belowdecks. 

Extinction is ugly.  It’s blood and sweat and piss and shit and screaming and despair and swearing and flailing.  It’s tubes and metal and flashing lights and pokes and prods. It’s grinding down the ones you love in the process. It’s dying far away from home, and it’s getting dragged kicking and screaming from home.  It’s forgetting and remembering and forgetting to remember.  It’s receding, not like a boat on the tide that pulls away and then back in, but like a meteor across a night sky:  a momentary flash, a going away, then black, and then, if the meteor is big enough, the destruction.

You don’t line up to be saved from extinction.  You don’t smile at the prospect of being chosen or cheerily anticipate a world more empty. You rave at the rain.  And you don’t build a boat out of sugar.

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