Punctuating the Glory
Three in the bed the next morning, my husband turns to the right and then to the left and says he thinks we should show our guest a good time. It was my idea. I agree.
The Future
What is the future like? How will we know when we get there?
In the future, the digital becomes so ubiquitous that it points back to the real world—the real world encompassing the virtual and the material, the spiritual and the corporeal, the rational and the emotional, the human and the rest of us.
Let’s call the real world utopia.
In the future, the thing and its representation trade places, and trade places again. The animated river is coded to imitate the incarnate river; the incarnate river, looked at through polarizing sunglasses, perhaps, reminds us of an animated river.
Mushroom Girl
Mushroom Girl, like her namesake, was largely subterranean, invisible, and enmeshed in the roots of everything. In fact, until today, I never saw her—her self proper—but only her fruiting bodies, which appeared three times, in the spring of my thirtieth year, on my kitchen counter in a plain white box.
Wings of Desire
Yes, it is mayonnaise. I remember it from my first day, the construction worker and his lunch, impossible to forget. His wife put the mayonnaise, the cheese, and the salami into a blender. My orientation had covered the institution of marriage and the institution of the American sandwich, but on that morning I knew I knew nothing.
Wintering in the Bubble
The only NDP bar in the province, maybe the country, is one block away from our apartment. On election night, it’s snowing, and the floor under the tables is crowded with fat boots and purses and parkas, and I’m drinking beside two women in their forties. One of them is a bartender off-shift, my former boss. The other is an anthropology professor, an unashamed alcoholic who has six Trads and two shots of Jack every night before walking the three blocks home to a man she refers to as Husband and two elderly cats. Two years ago, we published books at the same time. Mine, a novella about my mother. Hers, a scholarly treatise on Indigenous childbirth and postpartum practices. Night after night, she sits here with her phone, waging war against conservatives on Twitter. She remembers a time when ‘union’ wasn’t a dirty word in Alberta. She’s part of every faculty labour dispute at MacEwan. Her work is thankless and it drives her here,
where the whole room is suddenly thumping on tables, yelling and cheering.
The Murder House
Why we felt guilty for finding the murder house is difficult to say. It’s not as if we killed anyone. But there was something so sordid and inexplicable about what we found there that it would have been better never to have discovered it at all. What we saw only raised questions about life in Colinton that I believe are fundamentally impossible to answer. Knowing that such questions, such houses, exist is only to draw attention to a grown man’s habit of picking and eating his scabs. He would do it if he were alone, but the shame is multiplied because of your presence. Your shame is multiplied too.
Goose Egg
It is three o’clock in the morning on the longest day of the year.
In your dream, you are singing Schubert and you and I are still the same person, elastic, joyful, and promising. It is your graduation recital from the Victoria Conservatory. You are twenty-three.
Ella
I want to write a short story about my husband’s new girlfriend. I want to write it in the style of Richard Brautigan, because he’s the author she told me about the first night she came over for supper. I touched her ankle for the first time and then kissed her for the first time. She felt wonderful! The three of us were all together in bed even though she didn’t take off her underwear because she was still on her period. I wouldn’t have cared about her being on her period. I’ve gone down on lots of women on their periods and it didn’t need to be anything for her or me to be ashamed of.