A Column of The Miramichi Reader
You’re sitting on your stoop thinking how much you hate the stoop, the building you live in with six side-by-side apartments (now called townhouses) and the neighborhood. You hate the neighborhood because all of the stoops in all of the buildings and all of the wire fenced-in tiny yards smaller than a jail cell look …
The day is slowing to a shiver now, slowing and blacking into night and that’s when your father comes home, hole in his soul, and says things like supper and bitch, and your mother slams back you’re late, you’re late. And you, you are standing there, not knowing which way to turn, and the anger …
Tonight I am in the park alone. Ma has been slamming cupboards, sweeping, scrubbing the small fridge, muttering. She used to work six days in Friesen’s Bake-o-Rama, and was never around. But when she did come home, she’d open a beer, give me a sip, and tell stories about Lin and Manuela and Crazy Carmen …
When I reach the bus stop, my mother’s gone. Is she lying in that puddle outside the Opera House? Or did I lose her in the lobby, distracted by the man wearing one red glove and clutching a bible? Retracing my steps, I find her under the twinkling chandelier, crooning a childhood lullaby. I approach, …
Long Distance Lover was happy I finally agreed to spend time at his dead mother’s cottage in the middle of nowhere. I already lived in the middle of nowhere. After making the 850-mile drive to spend a week or two with him at his house in a real town, with real things to do, I …
At the dinner table, his mother’s flesh spreads like warm, pale jelly over her chair. His father sits at the head of the table; he is simmering and sour. Tom covers his ears to drown out the fat, wet noises erupting from the mouths of his parents as they eat. He looks at the grey …
I dream my brother sold me a shack by a river that ran too quick to the sea, but he’s been dead all my life. They say I carry what’s left of him. A ball of DNA in my abdomen where he fused into me long before we were born. My brother is angry he …
I notice before he does. My husband of fifteen years has turned bearish. His nails are suddenly hard, black and sharp. His arm hair is darker. Coarse tufts have sprouted on his back. When I met him, I immediately noticed his strong back as he hoisted himself up on the side of our local pool. …
When a riptide comes, mother says to swim crosswise against it. But I am already thinking of the whales. Of all the heavy millennia before they went back to the sea—a dwindle of limb, a lengthening of spine and fingerbone steering them out, deeper and deeper, into such softness and hush, it would carry their …
After I built my time machine, I collected lovers across millennia – women with mechanical arms and regenerating cells, thick-bearded men perfumed with cave damp. One by one I carried them home with me. We threw parties, traded knowledge, made love in unthinkable configurations. A Sumerian prostitute soon fell pregnant with the child of a …
The sea breeze whips at my bathrobe and whistles beneath the floorboards of the front porch. Something seems off again, but I can’t put my finger on it. Millie says the isolation will do that to you. Behind me, the glass dome of Hak Island Lighthouse glints in the autumn haze. The dome is called …
1 You’ll meet your Uncle Dubois for dinner. He’ll order for you in excess, he always does, peering through perched spectacles at le menu while stroking the salted tail of his lamp black beard. He’ll want to discuss finances. Your future. The muscles in your legs will tense until you remember he’s no Auntie Jeanne; …