A Column of The Miramichi Reader
“Everything in this house is edible,” the real estate agent said. “I mean everything, the foundation, the brickwork, the plaster, the windows. That is to say, in the event of a famine, a family of three would be able to survive for approximately ten years eating the house.” I studied the dark-hued foyer. A …
The front door slams. Walls shake. A vase of tasseled wheat slides through my hands onto the kitchen floor. Glass shards lie among stalks as late afternoon sun spills gold through gold and I hear his boots in the hall. A shock of hot wind rattles the screen of the open back door. I glance …
Nine years old, with parents distracted, a boy falls into the lion enclosure. It looked more like a jump, his sister says. The boy lands safely, in the artificial lake beneath him. He swims to the shoreline, to his new home. Murals of the savanna and non-native plant life. Background noise played through speakers. The …
Midsummer heat carries his musk up the screw of the staircase, so I know he is coming. I curtsy low averting my eyes, but I need no eyes to see him: that left wrist three threads smaller than the right; privy parts dressing leftward; waist a thumbs-width wider since he wed my lady. His poulaine …
My parents are throwing a party. It’s for my fake brother, Johnny. He’s the son they should have had. You may think I’m exaggerating but no, they say it, we should have had a son. Every year they whip out the good china. They light candles and get the scrapbook and there he is. It’s …
My dad lifted himself into the parked wheelchair. “The day I can’t do this anymore you’ll be pushing me out on a gurney straight into the stove.” “Oh come on, Dad, you had a great checkup this year.” “Thank you, Margaret, you look lovely in that saucy sweater. Cashmere?” I’m not Margaret, but lately he …
The line of wash crackles in the freezing salt wind. “Stiff as boards,” Ma says as she unpins the ice encrusted flannel shirts, letting them fall like cedar planks into the old tin bath she uses as a laundry basket. How her fingers don’t freeze as she hauls it back across the frozen waste that …
In the wet slap of the haar, the lassies slit the herring mouth to tail and pack them into briny barrels. I see her head move among the rest, brown curls escaping from her shawl. She has the juice of silver fishes in her veins – it’s in the raised blue of her wrists, her …
She had a photographic memory, so she could recall conversations, the expressions on people’s faces, the tone of their voices, the setting, the weather, the colours, the smells. If she needed a detail in the telling of a tale all she had to do was rewind the film in her head. What she wasn’t good …
At first she had liked the bird, when it was just a gentle chirping sound wafting into her open window as she woke up in the morning. But now, it is hanging out on the balcony at all hours of the day. And where birds go, bird poop follows. From the corner of her eye, …
I thought my job in life was to be in the service of quasi-famous people. Keep their house calm, quiet, keep my room clean, clear the way for my mother so she could walk through the house practicing her violin, too many scales and repeating of passages and not enough music for me. I wanted …
She said to me: “Since I turned fifty I have become invisible to men.” It sounded like a complaint. I said “Well, for the first forty-nine how many men were invisible to you?” It was a rhetorical question. She said something, but I didn’t catch it. The news was on, something about a man inventing …