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Graduate Studies The Vault: Electronic Theses and Dissertations

2014-04-30

“Dear Humans,” Stories: An Examination of Unusual

Narrative Voices in Postmodern Fiction

Adams, Hollie

Adams, H. (2014). “Dear Humans,” Stories: An Examination of Unusual Narrative Voices in

Postmodern Fiction (Unpublished doctoral thesis). University of Calgary, Calgary, AB.

doi:10.11575/PRISM/25524

http://hdl.handle.net/11023/1453

doctoral thesis

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UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY

“Dear Humans,” Stories:

An Examination of Unusual Narrative Voices in Postmodern Fiction

by

Hollie Adams

A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES IN PARTIAL

FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE

DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

CALGARY, ALBERTA

APRIL, 2014

© Hollie Adams 2014

Abstract

“Dear Humans,” the creative portion of the dissertation, is a collection of eighteen

discrete short stories that make use of a variety of narrative voices and strategies, both

traditional and unusual. The stories present creative reactions to (and often rejections of)

classical narratology as it was put forth by structuralist narratologists, such as Gerard

Genette and Gerald Prince. Several of the stories were also inspired by the work of

current narratologists in the postclassical subfield of unnatural narratology, including Jan

Alber and Brian Richardson, who examine non-mimetic narrative strategies in

experimental fiction. They argue that since fictional narrators are not bound by the

physics and logic of the real world as we know it, they need not resemble human-like

storytellers and thus should not be evaluated using mimetic-based classification systems.

Thematically, the stories comment on the vulnerability, awkwardness, and

paranoia of being human. Several stories project future worlds in which humans must

cope with environmental crises, the effects of technology, and staggering unemployment

rates. These futures seem hopelessly bleak: the animals in Banff National Park are now

extinct, little girls wish for iPhones rather than ponies, graduate degrees are required for

all entry-level positions, computers have become sentient. However, the characters

continue finding beauty in the everyday, the absurd, the tragic. They try to become better

humans. Above all, they ask to be loved.

The critical afterword, “You, We, and Other Oddities: An Examination of Unusual

Narrative Voices in Contemporary Fiction,” presents a brief history of narratology,

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introduces its taxonomy, and discusses its evolution from its classical to its postclassical

phase. The afterword then summarizes the major tenets of unnatural narratology and puts

that theory into practice in a discussion of contemporary “unnatural” fiction,

concentrating on texts narrated in second person and first person plural perspectives.

Unnatural narratology is then used to examine the stories in “Dear Humans,” suggesting

the importance of distinguishing between non-mimetic narration and narration which is

unusual for other reasons. Finally, I argue for the continued relevance of the field of

narratology.

iii

Preface

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of

the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or

locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

iv

Acknowledgements

1. A huge thank you to my wonderful supervisor Professor Suzette Mayr for her

guidance, inspiration, insight, and patience (and also for threatening to make me eat

twelve beef-steak tomatoes).

2. I thank the members of my committee Dr. Harry Vandervlist, Dr. Christian Bök,

Professor Anne Fleming, and Dr. Brian Rusted.

3. I acknowledge the financial support of The University of Calgary and The Social

Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

4. I am also indebted to the Department of English at the University of Calgary,

especially Anne Jaggard and Barb Howe whose doors were always open to help navigate

the fiery hoops of paperwork.

5. To my fellow grad students and officemates, thank you for your friendship and your

feedback. Special thanks to Jess Nicol, Jonny Flieger, Sandy Pool, and Rod Moody-

Corbett. You guys made all the difference.

6. To my family—I love you, I thank you, and I hope you stop reading this now.

7. To Brian, for all the things, all the times.

v

Table of Contents

Abstract ii

Preface iv

Acknowledgements v

Table of Contents vi

Dear Humans

The Documentary We’ve Been Making for Fifty Years . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Like That But Times A Million . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

Project Description . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18

How to Meet People in the New Millennium . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22

How to Survive . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30

Plastic Shopping Bags . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52

Rapture-Bombing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55

Brilla . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74

Buttercup . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92

Talking About the Weather . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96

Frequently Asked Questions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106

Natural Wilderness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111

Liking It . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135

The Meek . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146

The Charges . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167

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Honey-Do . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 170

9:34. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181

Dear Humans . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183

Afterword: You, We, and Other Oddities: An Examination of Unusual Narrative Voices in

Contemporary Fiction

! 1. Theoretical Frameworks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 184

2. Theory in Practice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 220

3. The Unusualness of “Dear Humans”. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 240

4. Concluding Remarks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 261

Works Cited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 266

vii

The Documentary We’ve Been Making For Fifty Years

The film opens with an eye-level shot: a forest in Western British Columbia. Though we

didn’t expect the viewer to immediately recognize this forest as belonging to Western

British Columbia, we hoped the overcast sky, the thickness of the moisture in the air, the

matchstick red cedars in all their vertical glory would suggest something of the Pacific

Northwest, but we conceded the film quality was poor: grainy and black-and-white on

account of we started making this film in the 1950s on a shoestring budget.

Cut to an evening shot of our campsite. Six canvas upside-down V’s in an

imperfect circle around a hip-high fire. Frank roasting a hotdog on stick. The hotdog has

split from the heat into four sections which have each begun to curl away from the center

like the hat of a court jester. When he notices the camera is on him, he puts the stick

between his legs and performs a thrusting gesture to indicate that this thin, knobby stick

with an explosion of hotdog at its end is somehow also his penis. Sue had wanted to cut

this scene, calling it gratuitously crude, but the rest of us agreed it showed the good-

natured spunk of the film crew, though perhaps, if truth be told, we only said so due to we

had, of late, become a tad scared of Frank whose wife had just taken the kids and up and

fled to her parents’ place in Nebraska on account of what she called his irrational rage

issues. Frank insisted Val wouldn’t know rage if it slapped her across the face, that he

was only enthusiastically reinforcing his authority in the face of constant disrespect, but

we had all witnessed his neck vein pulsing like an angry earthworm that had been buried

alive. This being, of course, before he found God.

1

After the shots of Frank and the hotdog got the green light we all started hamming

it up for the camera: Barry using his binoculars small end out, Helen reading a guidebook

to British Columbia’s wildlife upside down, Jack taking a running leap over the fire, Buzz

taking a running leap into the fire, then asking us to please cut the scene in which he, on

fire, rips off his shorts, also on fire, and plants his bare ass in the dirt to do a sliding

motion very much akin to that of a baby before discovering its legs. At first we planned to

oblige Buzz and cut the scene, but then Barry convincingly argued that Buzz’s soft,

moon-white backside mildly aflame added an amount of pathos that should not be

underestimated, and none of us wanted to be accused of underestimating pathos.

What the viewer would see next is approximately three days’ worth of tracking—

following footprints, examining feces, studying where the flora, and perhaps even the

fauna, may have been upset by a six to ten foot mammal—condensed into a three-minute

scene. It had been our intention to use these three minutes to present the viewer with a

series of interesting facts and figures on past sightings via Barry narrating in his soothing

baritone. But before we got around to it, all of our early footage was destroyed. There

was the suggestion of recreating this scene, using modern editing technology to make it

appear to have been filmed on an antique camera, but after Barry died we seemed unable

to come to a consensus about which of our research was credible enough to be included

anyway, never mind who should be the one to lend their voice now that Barry’s baritone

was out of the question.

At what would have been approximately the six minute mark, the camera shakily

pans among the trunks of looming pines until a large, shaggy creature comes into view in

2

the top righthand corner of the frame. The camera zooms in, and had we reached the

editing stage, ominous music we planned to steal from a Hitchcock film would begin to

play. What is now identifiably a sasquatch is holding a squirrel by its tail and beating its

head against a rock. It (the sasquatch) stops to scratch its (again, the sasquatch’s)

hindquarters, then resumes with the squirrel though certainly it (the squirrel) died quite a

few bashings ago. Jack had wanted to overlay sound effects here so that each time the

skull of the squirrel made contact with the rock, an amplified thwack! would ring out. He

suggested recording the sound of a banana peel slapping a countertop. Helen then

suggested we record the sound of her slapping Jack across the face, which we hoped

meant she would no longer be sneaking into his tent at night to do the sleeping bag

rumble-tumble, and maybe we could all get some decent shuteye from now on instead of

having to listen to her make those rooting noises we were sure would be mistaken for a

dying feral pig if there happened to be any bears in the vicinity of our campsite.

The tempo of the ominous music increases, then climactic violins as the sasquatch

turns towards the camera—it is clear from the way he drops his squirrel that he has

noticed the film crew—and begins a hunched-over, drunken kind of gallop uphill and

away from the camera. As the viewer would see—again, assuming our film had not been

destroyed—from the now violent shaking of the camera and the speed at which the trees

pass within the frame of vision, the crew has begun to chase the sasquatch. The music

changes to that more befitting of a dramatic chase scene—a scene that we admit might

have made any viewer with motion sickness a pinch nauseous, but we hoped the crude

technology of our early years as amateur filmmakers would be excused.

3

Luckily Frank ran track at Ole Miss and catches up to the sasquatch quickly.

Because he is about a hundred metres or so in front of the camera and the camera is still

shaking on account of it’s in the hands of Mitch, our cameraman, who is still running

hard to catch up, and the trees have grown almost on top of each other, it’s hard to make

out Frank repeatedly hitting the sasquatch over the head with the butt end of his hunting

rifle with perhaps a bit too enthusiastic a reinforcement of his authority.

While we cut out the shot of Frank calling out to the rest of us that he’s found a

zipper at the back of the sasquatch’s neck, we did include a scene of the group gathered

around the limp, prostrate body as Barry removed the quite believable-looking sasquatch

head, though this scene, with the rest of our footage, was also destroyed.

What the viewer would hear next is Barry announcing, “Gadzooks! It’s a gorilla

in a sasquatch costume!” Then a shot of us having a good laugh standing around the

unconscious gorilla lying heaped in two sets of fur.

“What a clever practical joke!” we said to each other.

“Who set us up?” we wondered aloud. Rival sasquatch hunters? Neighbourhood

kids? The indigenous community who wants us off their land? What pranksters! What

fun!

“Poor guy, it must’ve been real hot in that suit!”

“Hey, maybe this isn’t actually a gorilla but a gorilla suit we’re looking at here

and there’s something else inside,” but no, the gorilla’s head would not come off for all

our yanking and the tufts of fur we were left with in our hands felt very real indeed.

And then Helen asked, “What do we do about this unconscious gorilla?”

4

And then Jack replied, “I think it may in fact be a dead gorilla, Sweetheart.”

Frank’s vein began trying to dig its way out of his neck. “No sir, I didn’t kill no

gorilla, no how.”

We looked at each other. We looked at Frank who was now pacing and palming

his knuckles.

“I didn’t kill nothing, no sir, not I, nuh-uh.” We thought of Val and we thought of

his two little girls and we tried to think of the punishment for killing a gorilla but none of

us knew what that might be.

“It wasn’t your fault, Frank,” we were quick to say.

“It probably died on account of the heat. A dark furry animal in a dark furry suit

would’ve just burned right up in there, sure,” we said though we hadn’t seen the sun in

days.

“Or it starved to death. How you suppose a monkey’s gonna get any food with its

mouth covered up inside a sasquatch suit. Don’t suppose it knew to take the head on and

off for mealtimes, did it?”

“Probably what all that squirrel business was about. Mad its dinner wouldn’t get

the hell in its mouth.”

“Perfectly logical,” we said.

“Nothing to do with your rifle,” we said, “After all you didn’t even shoot the

thing.”

5

“By ‘thing’ do you mean the rifle or the gorilla, because if the latter I take great

offense,” said the ghost of the gorilla by way of a series of grunts that we all

spontaneously understood in plain English.

Mitch had kept the camera rolling, but as ghosts don’t appear on film, most of this

footage was unusable even before it was destroyed by fire. Plus, Frank and that pulsing

vein made it very clear we should not use anything after the initial reveal.

“Maybe it was you guys trying to pull the gorilla’s head off that killed it,” Frank

suggested.

The ghost of the gorilla scratched its armpit in a way that immediately translated

to: “No, it was definitely blunt trauma to the head via the butt end of your rifle.”

Frank wound up and swung, but his fist went right through the gorilla’s head on

account of its being a ghost, though we wished his fist would have made contact since we

were becoming mighty peeved at this dead gorilla for getting Frank so riled up, and our

being peeved only escalated that night when Helen took shelter in Jack’s tent on account

of fear of ghosts, though her rooting noises did not sound any more frightened than usual.

We spent the next ten years vacillating between our respective jobs in Seattle and

the backwoods of the Pacific Northwest. From northern California to southern British

Columbia, the ghost of the gorilla Frank killed haunted us ceaselessly. The gorilla slept in

Mitch’s bed between him and his wife on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and alternating

Saturdays. The other nights it spent at Jack’s house terrorizing his Jack Russell terrier,

Potato. Sue found the gorilla in her bathtub every weekday morning. Because she didn’t

6

know how to explain to her husband why she routinely woke him up with her horror

movie screaming, she was now, at his insistence, seeing a psychiatrist every Monday

evening and they would soon be trying hypnotherapy. Barry claimed the gorilla sat—or

rather hovered on account of its ghostly weightlessness—on his lap while he worked as a

copywriter and made fart noises whenever he made a grammatical error. But poor Frank

had it the worst: the two times a year Frank’s girls visited from Nebraska, the gorilla

smuggled steak knives from the kitchen and made menacing stabbing motions in the

direction of his girls whenever Frank was watching. At night the gorilla sat the end of the

girls’ shared double bed while they slept, and whenever Frank peeked in to check on his

little two angels, the ghost raised a pillow and held it over their faces threatening to

smother them. On account of the potentially homicidal gorilla ghost, Frank became an

understandably overbearing father. He wanted his girls to sleep in his room, wanted to be

with them constantly even during bath time. Closing the door to their bedroom was now

against the rules even if they needed to change clothes and as such his girls’ visits were

lessened to once a year and then stopped all together when they reached puberty which

broke his heart, we knew.

In the meantime we grew older, we grew softer in our midsections, Buzz grew a

mustache. We updated our video equipment. We could now shoot in colour, and so we

traded our army green canvas tents for nylon in crayon colours, swapped our navy

woolen jackets for bright windbreakers, and later some of us would even dabble in

screamingly-neon fanny packs. We hoped the ghost of the gorilla would make peace with

7

being dead, float on to a rainforest heaven, or eventually be reincarnated into a lesser ape

or a car salesman, but no. The ghost of the gorilla followed us straight into the eighties.

At one of our crew meetings around Helen’s dining room table, Frank announced

he was not pleased with how he was coming off in the footage from the fifties and sixties

and that he would no longer be allowing us to use any footage in which he appeared: a

problem since Frank-before-God had wanted to star in every scene.

“Guys, as you know, I’ve been reborn. And since I’ve been reborn I am now a

different person. And there cannot be two of me, so if the old me no longer exists, how

can the old me appear in the film, do you see what I’m saying?” We didn’t, but we also

didn’t want to argue with this new Frank on account of last time out in the woods we’d

seen him pray so hard he crushed a rosary between his clasped hands, and as we watched

its constituent parts go bouncing toward the campfire, Frank alternately damned God and

his son (God’s not Frank’s). Val had recently informed him she planned to marry a

Nebraskan dairy farmer named Ike, and so we ignored the prayer beads at our feet,

pretended not to see the neck vein thumping with a heartbeat of its own.

“Also, the new Frank believes in confession and forgiveness so I will tell you that

I broke into Barry’s garage last week—well let’s not call it breaking in since the good

sport always leaves that side door of his unlocked—and I took the film as I have already

confessed to my priest who has assured me that the Lord would forgive me if I did five

Hail Mary’s which I have, and so I hope you’ll all forgive me as well for burning the film

as I thought it the right thing to do. And even if it wasn’t, well, like I said I’ve already

8

done my five Hail Mary’s and the Lord has forgiven me and you would do well to forgive

me too so we can all be together again on the other side when that time comes.”

We’d have to start our documentary all over again. But then what did we really

have anyway? Some campsite antics, a few half-visible footprints, too many close-up

shots of standard-issue feces, a dead gorilla in a sasquatch suit, a black bear with a severe

case of mange we mistakenly tracked for a week.

“Well we can’t say our time was for nothing,” Jack said, lifting his seventh child

onto his knee.

The ghost of the gorilla—which at that moment was hovering on the head of

Helen’s persian cat—mimed peeling a banana which we knew to mean he was calling us

a group of incompetent boy scouts.

In the nineties we followed up on a number of encounters. We filmed an interview

with an Oregonian man who claimed to be out hunting when a sasquatch lifted the pick-

up truck he was driving and turned it around in the opposite direction. Unfortunately the

sasquatch left no damage which meant not a lot for us to go on. If ghosts were film-able,

the viewer would see the gorilla in the bed of the Oregonian’s truck giving the camera the

finger. We filmed the testimonials of a group of hunters who reported hearing what they

described as un-cow-like mooing in the woods outside Spokane, but being naturally

spooked they didn’t stay long enough to get a look at the sasquatch they were certain they

would’ve seen. We even recreated—using unpaid student actors—the encounter of four

vacationers with a sasquatch that came upon their Sultan, WA cabin just after 11:00pm

9

and rattled it for five minutes from the outside, knocking picture frames and canned

goods off shelves. The ghost of the gorilla scratched its head and gave two grunts and

then we turned to ask each other if maybe the gorilla was right: did we even consider the

possibility of an earthquake?

In the new millennium we switched to a digital camera and Barry told us he was

dying.

“Why are you dying?” we asked gathered around his hospital bed.

“Because I’m eighty-fricken-five,” he said and then we realized it was true. We

were all so very old. Even Frank’s girls who he never got to see anymore were the

grandparents of the great-grandchildren he had never met. Jack and Helen’s children were

almost past middle-aged. We suddenly realized that we were all dying, we only had a few

more years if we were lucky. We might go at anytime, maybe even before Barry. The only

one not getting any older was the ghost of the gorilla who was at the moment hovering on

the chest of the sleeping man in the next bed, putting its thick, leathery finger up the

dying man’s nose. The gorilla gave a divisive snort and we wished it would stop asking

us when we were going to finish our documentary.

Fifty years and we felt like we hadn’t even started yet.

The gorilla laughed into its hands.

10

Like That But Times a Million

It’s been a week and a half since Robbie’s dad died and I’ve stayed inside the house

mostly even though it’s summer cause I don’t want to have to see Robbie. But then Dad

says, “Let’s see if Robbie wants to come for a swim” and I don’t know why he says this

because it’s already dark outside and Dad’s never asked him to come swimming before.

My brother and I follow Dad up the steps to the porch of the little white house next door

and I wait behind them while Dad knocks the friendly knock he uses when he knows

whose house it is. Like this: knock-nuh-nuh-knock-knock. Robbie answers the door and

I’m happy he’s not wearing his funeral clothes and when Dad asks him to come

swimming he says okay.

There’s a thunderstorm coming but it’s still in the distance, way far off above the

houses. Thunder that only sounds like neighbours playing the drums in their basement,

lightning that makes no sound at all, but Mom is out on the deck yelling at us to get out

of the pool: “You’ll all get electrocuted!” I know you’re not supposed to be around water

when it’s lightning and for a second I imagine a bolt piercing through the clouds right

over my head and striking the pool. In my head it’s a perfect zigzagging yellow cartoon-

shape and we all get zapped. Our bodies go wavy and our hair shoots out and our skin

turns black. And I remember pulling a cord out of the plug when the lamp was still turned

on and I think about getting shocked like that but times a million. I want to get out but

Dad says, “Oh c’mon, the storm’s miles from here.” The storm’s still way out in the

11

country, he says, and I envision a line running through some farm somewhere, a line

between storming and not storming and all the cows are half-wet and confused.

Dad wants to know who can swim more laps without stopping, Robbie or I and I

think it’s me cause he doesn’t even take swimming lessons and I have my blue badge

which comes after the yellow badge with comes after guppy, tadpole, starfish, and sea

turtle.

“You’re on,” Robbie says. So we’re holding on to the edge of the pool with our

feet against the wall and Dad says, “One, two, three, go!” and we push off. I’m breast-

stroking and Robbie’s front-crawling and my brother is following us pretending to be a

tugboat, but when he’s about to leave the shallow end my dad calls for him to swim back.

If I beat Robbie I know he’ll be impressed like the time I got a basket facing backwards

when we were playing H.O.R.S.E. in my driveway.

I can hear my dad counting our laps out loud.

“Sixteen!” he calls when we touch the wall and I’m not even a little bit tired, my

bones folding and unfolding in the water like it is only more air. I wonder how many laps

of our pool would equal swimming across the Detroit River. Probably a hundred, I think,

but I know you can’t swim in the Detroit River cause there’s something called an

undertow and you’ll get sucked under the water and sink like you have rocks in your

pockets and you won’t be able to come up even if you’re a real good swimmer. And I

know you wouldn’t want to swim in the river anyway because the water’s poisonous

from people always throwing their garbage into it and now all the fish are either dead or

have three eyes.

12

“Twenty-four!” and my legs start to feel heavy. I try to use only my arms until

they’re heavy too and then I switch to the front crawl. Robbie is ahead of me now so that

my dad has to say, “32 for Mandie and 33 for Robbie!” and then it’s “36, 37” and then

“40, 42.” At 44 I try to push off from the wall but my body suddenly feels like it weighs a

million pounds and my arms go limp.

“Robbie wins!” Dad fills the backyard with his voice.

The lightning is closer now but everything else is so very black and when I look

up it seems like more than half the world is sky. My brother is riding a pool noodle like

it’s a seahorse and I shut my eyes and duck under the water, blowing the air out of my

nose so I’ll sink. I pretend I’m at the bottom of the river. I’ve been sucked down by the

undertow and now I have to live forever in my new home made of old tires and fish

bones and other poor, unloved things. I look up and watch a lost boot go bobbing by.

I learned about cirrhosis after I heard my parents talking about how they shouldn’t

give alcoholics new livers.

These were the things I knew you could be sick with: chicken pox, measles,

tonsillitis, and cancer. And I knew cancer was the worst one and tonsillitis and chicken

pox weren’t that bad cause I’d had both of those already and I knew measles were like

chicken pox but worse. But now maybe cirrhosis was worse than cancer and had to go at

the top of the list even though cirrhosis is pretty for a word and sounds like a type of

cloud. We learned all about clouds in one of our science units called Our Changing Earth.

Dad helped me memorize the names: nimbus, stratus, cumulus, cirrhosis.

13

Mom said I wasn’t supposed to talk to Robbie about his dad being sick because it

was a private family matter. She asked if I understood and I said yes. She asked if I had

any questions and I said no.

Even though he’s won Robbie doesn’t stop swimming. We think maybe he doesn’t

realize so every time he comes up for air we yell to him that he can stop now. He doesn’t

answer and he doesn’t stop swimming. So Dad keeps counting out his laps and we get

excited like he’s going for some kind of record.

“Can you believe this guy?” Dad asks. Mom comes back out to tell us that we’re

definitely going to be electrocuted and my brother’s eyebrows go way up and then he

doggy-paddles to the side (he’s only a guppy at swimming lessons so he doesn’t know

about the other strokes yet) and climbs the ladder out of the pool, but Robbie doesn’t stop

swimming.

“One hundred laps!” Dad announces and still Robbie keeps swimming. “He’s a

machine! Call Guinness!” Dad and I are standing in the shallow end, cheering for him

likes it’s an actual race and it’s not just him in the pool and now I’m yelling out the

number with my dad every time he touches the wall.

“One-oh-four! One-oh-five! One-oh-six!”

The funeral parlour didn’t look like a haunted house like I thought it would. It

looked more like my grandma’s house, couches with flowers on them and old-fashioned

lamps and lace coasters everywhere even though there was nothing to drink.

14

There were pictures of a man who looked only a little bit like Robbie’s dad and I

knew he was Robbie’s dad but I didn’t like looking at the pictures of him because I knew

I was looking at a dead guy and it gave me the heeby-geebies. And I especially didn’t like

looking at the pictures of him and Robbie. And I didn’t want to look at Robbie’s dad at

the front of the room in the casket—my parents told me not to say coffin but when I

asked why not Mom didn’t seem to know the difference and Dad said coffins were for

vampires. My parents were brave enough to go all the way to the front of the room and

look in the casket and when they came back to where I was standing behind a potted

plant, they said they did a good job making him look not sick, but I didn’t ask who they

were. And I didn’t want to look at Robbie either because his hair looked funny, all stuck

to his head and wet-looking and he was wearing a too-big shirt with buttons done all the

way up to his chin. And I thought that maybe I wasn’t in love with him after all but then I

felt guilty for thinking this because his dad was dead so that would be two people not

loving him anymore. Mom said I should go over and say “I’m very sorry for your loss”

but I was too busy not looking at things.

It starts to rain, fat drops that land cool on my hair and then are lost to pool water.

Dad and I sink to our chins so the tops of our shoulders don’t get cold.

“Think he can do one-fifty?” Dad asks, lets his mouth fill up with water and then

fountain-spits it at me.

When Robbie swims past I put my head under the water and open my eyes but it’s

too dark to see anything. Then I have to shut my eyes tight and push my fingers into my

15

eyelids to stop the stinging. I think about the time I pulled down my brother’s shorts to

make Robbie laugh. But my brother forgot to put on his underwear that day and his

wiener looked like a little hunk of play-doh and Robbie didn’t laugh and my stomach

went squish.

The raindrops are thinner now and quicker, pinging rather than splooshing the

surface of the pool, bouncing up in our faces.

“One fifty!” and we explode with whoops and Mom is knocking on the patio door

because she doesn’t want to come out to yell at us in the rain and Dad says that maybe

it’s time to go inside now and I’m okay with that because 150 is a nice even number and

also because the lightning doesn’t seem to be just over the farms anymore.

“Robbie, it’s time to go in, Buddy,” Dad says when Robbie comes up for air, but

his head just dips back under the water and I wonder if he can’t hear because there’s

water in his ears. Next time it’s “C’mon, Son, let’s go” but Robbie keeps swimming.

We’ve stopped yelling out the numbers now and I’ve lost count and my teeth are rattling

like they’ve all gone loose.

One day before Robbie’s dad died, we were climbing the tree in my backyard and

I could see over our high wooden fence to Robbie’s yard where his dad was sitting in a

lawn chair, drinking from a shiny beer can and looking straight up into the sun without

sunglasses on. Three other cans lay in the grass by his feet, smashed into tiny accordions.

“Maybe you should tell your dad to stop drinking so much beer,” I whispered up

at the soles of Robbie’s sneakers on the tree branch above my head. He squatted on his

16

branch, circling his arms around it and then let himself drop down so that he was hanging

monkey-style. Our faces were the same height now and he was looking straight at me but

didn’t say anything. His eyes were the same colour as the pool water when Dad goes too

long without putting chlorine in it.

“It’s just that my dad says if they give him a new liver and he keeps drinking he’ll

ruin that one too. Or maybe they won’t even give him a new one cause it wouldn’t be fair

for the other people who need new livers who aren’t alcoholics.”

Robbie still didn’t say anything and my face started to feel like it had a sunburn. I

was trying to think of something else I could say when Robbie let go and dropped from

the branch.

“Hey,” I said when he opened the gate.

“Hey,” I said when he walked out of the yard.

“Time to go in, Bud.” Dad’s voice is firmer now as he swims towards Robbie. I

want to ask Dad to just let him do a couple more laps but he looks angry so I don’t say

anything. I watch Dad cut through the shallow end in long strides and I hope he won’t

yell at Robbie because I haven’t said “I’m very sorry for your loss” yet.

Dad catches up to Robbie quick. He grabs him by the arms and pins them against

his sides. Robbie’s legs still kicking and his head shaking no no no no.

The backyard lights up like someone is taking a picture of it.

17

Project Description

By: Jenny Weingarten

My proposed final project for your Fall 2013 Creative Writing IV workshop class is a

short story which will take the form of a proposal, not unlike the form of this very

proposal, in which the student-narrator proposes to compose a short story in the form of a

proposal. Should I be accepted into your class this coming semester, my proposed final

project will mimic the rhetoric of a formal proposal of an academic project (or in this

case, creative project, though I think you will see that it has a strong theoretical

framework as well, as it grapples with the narratological concepts of narrator vs. narratee

and implied author vs. implied reader, as well as issues of narrative voice and

focalization, ideas you so helpfully illuminated in this past semester’s workshop class

[i.e., Creative Writing III] in which I was enrolled and in which, as you know, I received

a grade of A which I believe I was awarded for the merit of my writing alone and not

certain external factors of no real relevance to the course and which rightly had no

bearing, positive or otherwise, on my performance therein, and therefore it goes without

saying that such factors will not influence the decision [re: my admittance] of someone as

professional as yourself, even though certain statements have been made which could be

interpreted to insinuate the contrary).

Yet, through this playful imitation of the academic/creative proposal, a cogent

narrative will begin to take shape indirectly rather than directly. It is my intention that the

18

reader will begin to glean insights into the character of the protagonist (i.e., the student-

narrator) via the language she employs (i.e., her intelligence, ambition, and guarded

professionalism), as well as insights into the nature of the relationship of the student and

the professor via the manner in which the former addresses the latter (i.e., their level of

familiarity [clearly she has studied under this professor before], or perhaps more

succinctly put, intimacy [she mentions in her proposal “certain external factors” which

the reader will rightly suspect involve the professor in some way]).

I feel the need to emphatically state here that my short story in the form of a

proposal will, of course, be fictional—and I am sure it goes without saying that I intend

for the reader (namely, my future classmates and, more importantly, yourself) to

differentiate between the character of the author (i.e., me) and the character of my

protagonist (i.e., the female student-narrator). As you continually reminded us last

semester in Creative Writing III, we (i.e., the inexperienced, naive undergraduates)

should never confuse the author with the narrator even when the distance between the

two seems minimal, even when we believe the work to be vaguely—or even chiefly—

autobiographical.

The short story that the student-narrator proposes, however, is meant to be read as

only a slightly-fictionalized, or perhaps non-fictionalized (though I intend to leave this

ambiguous), account of her affair with her much older, married Creative Writing

professor, in whose class she was enrolled the previous semester (let’s call it “Creative

Writing III”). While yes, even as an “inexperienced,” “naive” undergraduate, I realize

that we (i.e., not you because you are clearly experienced and, what is the best word for

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“not naive”? Perhaps “jaded asshole”?) should never confuse the author and the narrator,

I also realize that readers do often confuse the two. All a writer needs to do is give his/her

character his/her own name and voila! Confusion. It is this confusion I intend to make use

of in the short story I propose to compose in the form of a proposal. Even though the

student-narrator will emphatically claim her short story is a purely fictional one, much as

I have above, I intend for the reader to conflate the student-narrator (i.e., the implied

author of the proposal/short story) and her proposed protagonist (i.e., her own student-

narrator). Let’s call my student-narrator Jenny and let’s say she calls her own proposed

narrator Jenny even as she (i.e., Jenny the first) insists she is writing (or proposing to

write) a fictional story and it is only coincidental that her protagonist-narrator (i.e., Jenny

the second) should have the same name as she does (i.e., the same name as my proposed

student-narrator). Too much confusion? Perhaps there will be no names at all.

Still, as the student-narrator’s proposal, and thus short story, continues, it becomes

clear that the professor with whom she has had the affair and the professor to whose class

she hopes to gain admittance (let’s call it “Creative Writing IV”) via her proposal are one

and the same (i.e., her narratee and also her implied reader, in this case, are the professor

who also serves as the antagonist [i.e., “jaded asshole”] in the narrative that is swiftly

developing as the proposal continues). It also becomes clear that this same Creative

Writing professor would like to prevent this student-narrator from enrolling in his

upcoming class (“Creative Writing IV”)—she will for instance make use of the passive

voice in sentences like “certain statements have been made”—due to their past

relationship (“external factors”), which he, claiming moral objection and marital

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obligation, has swiftly ended (though he had never once previously spoken to the student-

narrator regarding any such morals and often referred, pre-coitus, to the marriage in

question as “already over”).

Should I be accepted into Creative Writing IV, I have no doubt that with your

guidance and constructive criticism, as well as the feedback I receive from the rest of the

class, my proposed short story, the tentatively-titled “Project Description,” can become

successful as both an experiment in narration and a psychological study of two fictional

characters.

Please find my writing sample attached.

21

How to Meet People in the New Millennium

We have paid two hundred and fifty dollars to be here. St. Barnabus’s Catholic

Elementary School gymnasium, home of the mighty mighty Beetles, previously the

mighty mighty Bobcats (according to the pre-2004 sports pennants), and at one point in

history the mighty mighty Bottle-nosed Dolphins (pre-1996). We shuffled in at 9 am—

silent save for the squishing sounds of melting winter on our boots—to receive our

welcome packages: a canvas-coloured tote bag printed with the three arrowed logo

indicating it either was made of recycled material or should be recycled once used or

perhaps just to promote the practice of recycling in general; a program of the weekend’s

activities; a brochure titled “Social Introverts: An Oxymoron?”; a notebook (no pen); a

bottle of water; a peanut-free granola bar; and a name tag with our names already on

them—a nice touch, we thought, none of those cheap stickers you have to write on

yourself, no, these name tags were laminated, complete with a safety pin for affixing to

our shirts. The name tags, in particular, made us feel a bit better about the two hundred

and fifty dollars. They took the time to type up our names, this is legitimate, this will be

worth our money. And didn’t the ad say satisfaction guaranteed? These are the things we

talked about later during the allocated thirty minutes of the first enforced “Casual

Conversation” time.

We hesitantly helped ourselves to the bagels and coffee laid out on a long wooden

table adorned with motivational posters taped along its edge. People often say

MOTIVATION doesn’t last. Well neither does bathing. That’s why we recommend it daily.

22

A picture of a wet cat in a kitchen sink—surely his name is something equally degrading:

Snugglepuss or Biscuit or Pumpkin Face—looking despondent but somehow also

contemplative, undoubtably aware he is being exploited at the hands of the one he

lovingly refers to as My Person or Master Human. Maybe Master Human has tricked

him, told him he was going to be in a national commercial. He’d been practicing his

prance to the food bowl all week, elegantly flicking his kitty litter over his business, the

graceful flourish of his hind paw, and now this. How undignified is the wet cat. These are

things we didn’t talk about later during “Casual Conversation” time.

Were we supposed to identify with Pumpkin Face or reflect on how much better

our lives are than his? We looked at each other in our Dockers and saggy mom-jeans.

Eighty percent of our shirts were tucked into our pants. We all seemed to have poor

posture. But at least no one was hosing us down against our will. Unless that was also

part of the workshop, some sort of shock therapy; we hadn’t yet consulted our schedule

of activities. We settled into six-grader-sized plastic chairs that had been pre-arranged in a

circle in the center of the gym and consulted the schedule of activities printed under the

header “It’s Okay Not to Like Surprises.”

We were confident that after this weekend workshop we would no longer panic

when the phone rang. We would learn that the right answer to the question “Some

weather we’re having, eh?” is not “Thank you” or “Weather, yes!” We would no longer

crouch beneath the window upon hearing a knock on the front door, avoiding the

terrifying dilemma of whether to ask the Girl Guide to come into our living rooms out of

the cold. Will she get the wrong idea if we tell her she can take off her coat if she finds it

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warm in here? What will she think of the towers of un-recycled newspapers? How many

porcelain dolls wearing Victorian-style dresses is too many porcelain dolls wearing

Victorian-style dresses? Can she see how easy it is to maneuver through the maze of

Christmas decorations to the couch? Does she know how cheap these light-up, inflatable

Santa Clauses are this time of year? How many boxes of cookies do we have to buy so

that she will promise to spend the rest of the afternoon talking with us? How many boxes

of cookies do we have to buy so that she’ll help us work on the middle section of this

jigsaw puzzle of autumn on the eastern seaboard and promise to return every day after

school until we’ve completed it together and feel a collective sense of accomplishment

even if we both know it is a just small thing? How many boxes of cookies do we have to

buy so that she will promise to leave immediately and inform all the other Girl Guides

and Brownies and Cubs and Boy Scouts in no uncertain terms that this house wants no

thin mints, not now and not ever? These are questions we all shared.

“First of all, welcome to How to Meet People in the New Millennium:

Combatting Shyness and Social Anxiety-slash-Phobias in the Alienating-slash-Isolating

Digital World. First of all, I want to remind you that with your paid registration of this

course you all are entitled to fifty percent off any of my other workshops including

Digital Photography and Electronic Scrapbooking as well as Bird Watching for

Beginners. But first of all, I want to tell you how proud I am of you for coming here

today. I know it wasn’t easy. I know that’s why you’re here: exactly because it isn’t easy

to go somewhere you’ve never been before. By yourself. A place full of people you’ve

24

never met.” Greg did not have to reference the clipboard in his hand. He did not once say

“um.” He walked around the inside of the circle projecting his voice and making eye

contact in all his golf-shirted glory, a bright social butterfly flittering around the circle of

agoraphobic caterpillars obsessed with the skin around their nails. His greying hair

circling a resplendently bald head, a halo to let us know we were going to be saved.

“Step one is learning to let go of your inhibitions, silencing that self-critical voice.

We need to understand that the only one judging us is ourselves.”

Greg came around the room and distributed sleeping masks. One side a cheap

satin-imitation, the other side cheap velvet. The velvety sides had sayings on them like

just give me 10 more minutes and the princess needs her beauty sleep, a rhinestone

dotting the i.

We were told to stand up, to move behind our chairs, away from the center of the

circle, and blindfold ourselves.

“Now you are free. Allow your body to move however it wants. Jump, scream,

dance, pretend to be a squirrel. Turn off the voice in your head that says ‘don’t pretend to

be a squirrel.’” Greg seemed to be speaking from everywhere at once and then R. Kelly’s

“I believe I can fly” began playing from somewhere locatable, on the snack table maybe.

Later during “Pair and Share” for lack of a conversation topic we discussed what

we had done in the darkness of our blindfolds. Julie had hoola-hooped with an invisible

hoop. Ahmad had laid on the floor and pretended he was being electrocuted by eels.

25

Vincent had in fact pretended to be a squirrel and had rolled his ankle frenetically

scurrying and darting in a crouched position.

“My mother had a pet squirrel once,” Vincent told each of us when it was our turn

to “Pair and Share” with him.

“Mom found him when he was a baby, tornado of ’77 had blown him right out of

a tree. She named him Cheeks, trained him to watch TV from her lap. Till one day he

drowned in the toilet. She buried him in the backyard and the dog dug him right back up.

Wonder what their insurance policy’s like. Pretty dangerous to blind people and tell them

to jump around. If I have to miss work cause of this, it’s their asses.” Vincent was still

wearing the sleeping mask he had pushed up onto his forehead: I am woman, hear me

snore.

Mai admitted to Marcus that she had been the one barking and howling. Marcus

had asked her why. Mai said she didn’t know why and made a gasping-for-air sound.

Those who of us who had begun eavesdropping heard Marcus apologize: “Sorry, I didn’t

mean to, sorry—I think, I think you have a beautiful bark.”

Therese told us she had begun pretending to walk on the moon when she realized

Greg had not taken a sleeping mask and blindfolded himself and then she had been

paralyzed by this awareness. And what if someone in the group decided to remove his or

her blindfold and had been watching, wondering if perhaps her pretending to be

weightless was related to her being ten—okay, twenty—pounds overweight? Had they

noticed her crossing and uncrossing her legs in the discomfort of the preteen-shaped

chair? Perhaps Greg was planning to make her into an example: this is how not to pretend

26

to walk on the moon, he would say, and would make her demonstrate her pathetic attempt

in the middle of the circle.

“Shouldn’t we have done some sort of trust exercise first? I mean, what

credentials does this Greg have?” We shook our heads. No one had thought to google

him. Some of us were in agreement that his last name started with a C.

The rest of us had spent our five minutes blindfolded believing that we could fly,

flapping our arms, swooping like lop-sided airplanes. Was this a test of our creativity?

Who would do whatever R. Kelly told them to do and who would dart around on the floor

gathering nuts for winter?

On the whole, we weren’t a very creative group. Take for instance later when we

were introducing ourselves and were asked to say what makes us unique. What made five

of us unique is that we each had two kids. Stefan is unique because he is an accountant.

Pauline likes to go on vacation. Micah has four email addresses. Julie had simply said

“pass.” After we had introduced ourselves Greg asked us to rate our SUD or “Subjective

Unit of Discomfort” from 0, meaning “completely relaxed,” to 100, meaning “I am

currently in the middle of a panic attack.” When Ahmad said “almost 90” Vincent

initiated a slow clap that didn’t catch on.

We practiced eye contact, first with ourselves in handheld mirrors and then with

each other. Sometimes we forgot to blink and then the stinging of our eyes made us

remember again, except now we were concentrating on the frequency and duration of our

blinks. It felt like beating out Morse Code with our eyelashes. “Help me,” our eyes said

to our partners’ eyes. How do normal people blink? How long should you keep your eyes

27

shut? Should you try to avoid blinking until necessary? We had forgotten all the rules. We

wanted Greg to blindfold us again and put us out of our misery.

For homework Greg gave us each two items and a receipt and told us to return the

items to our neighbourhood Shopper’s Drug Mart that evening to put our “newfound

skills” into “real-world practice.”

“Don’t take no for an answer,” he said and then handed Stefan a pack of adult

diapers and K-Y Jelly. Mai received a box of condoms and Preparation H. Marcus a

pregnancy test and cream for genital warts. Greg passed out these items in various

combinations to the rest of us and then asked again for our SUD’s or “Subjective Units of

Discomfort.” Pauline said 95. Micah asked if he could say a number higher than 100.

Before Greg got to her, Julie fled the gymnasium, hand shielding her eyes, adult diapers

left behind in the middle of her seat like a forgotten purse. And then Pauline bolted to

follow her and the rest of us were left wondering when they had developed the type of

relationship in which one follows the other into the bathroom unprompted. Was it during

“Pair and Share”?

Greg said, “Um.”

Were we also expected to follow? Stage a revolt? Us versus Greg? We looked at

each other. We looked at Greg. He petted his shiny skull. We imagined Pauline handing

Julie tissues from her purse, rubbing her back, encouraging her to “let it out.” Or were

they locked in the same stall embracing over the toilet? Had they agreed upon this

beforehand? To be each other’s bathroom buddy if things became too much? But more

28

importantly, if we ran out would anyone follow us? Be our bathroom buddy? Should we

try it now? Shield our eyes like Julie did? Is that the signal? Or would we end up alone

among the six-grader-sized urinals? Or worse, would Julie and Pauline look alarmed and

disgusted with us for interrupting their private moment?

“I too can’t take anymore,” we would tell them, “My bathroom buddy’s coming.”

“Any second now,” we would say, “Therese saw me shielding my eyes. She

knows what to do.”

But we didn’t move. Except for Greg who put a hand on his shiny skull and left it

there like he’d forgotten about it. We folded our Shopper’s Drug Mart receipts into

abstract origami shapes while we silently waited for Julie and Pauline to return and then

we took our adult diapers under our arms and made our way to the parking lot.

29

How to Survive

Try to figure out what has made your life go wrong. It is like trying to figure out what is stinking up the refrigerator. It could be anything.

—Lorrie Moore,Self-Help

Eat 7-8 servings of fruit and vegetables per day, limit your intake of red meat. Do not

smoke. Drink no more than 2 glasses of red wine on weekends. Exercise 3-4 days per

week, never make excuses. Floss before bed, sleep 7-8 hours every night. Yearly

physicals, mammograms, pap smears, and in the fall of your forty-sixth year you will be

told you have cancer. Not the good kind of cancer, a mole that blossoms on your right

shoulder blade into an oblong, egg-over-easy shape, can be sliced clean, snipped off like

a thread from a sweater, undetectable. Or even the kind of cancer that hardens itself into a

button, a walnut, a golfball, suspended somewhere above your pancreas, minding its own

goddamn business. The kind of cancer they can extract, excavate, pull out of you whole

like a dinosaur bone from the earth, look at it sitting there on its stainless steel tray, point

to it, say, “Ma’am, here’s your cancer here, we got it.” A wrinkled peach pit. That’s not

the kind of cancer you have.

Don’t be surprised when Dr. Singh tells you. Don’t say, “That can’t be!” Don’t cry

in front of her, don’t yell at her. She has a lot of things to do today. Think something

ridiculous when she tells you, like: I can’t die yet, I’ve never owned a convertible or

finished reading Great Expectations. Nod, say, “Okay.” Say, “What’s the next step?” Find

the nearest door marked with an italicized W. Shutting yourself in the stall will feel like

30

high school. You think maybe your whole life is flashing before your eyes, but no, it’s

just tenth grade. Curse the toilets that don’t have lids to sit on, curse the architect, the

building planner, whoever didn’t think about places to cry in a medical building for

chrissakes, there should be whole rooms designated for crying, italicized C’s on the

doors, plush sofas covered in absorbent terry cloth the colour of bubble gum. Think about

sitting on the toilet anyway, not hovering, no toilet paper between your legs in their thin

linen shorts and the plastic U of the seat. It doesn’t matter anymore, the ass germs of

strangers are the least of your worries, hepatitis and cancer can battle for your insides.

Have at it! you want to yell. But don’t sit, you’ve been so careful: your diligent hand-

washing, wearing rubber gloves whenever you Pinseol or Windex, opening doors with a

paper towel. Instead cry leaning against the stall door, your whole face dripping like an

overfed houseplant, your head lilting cow-heavy on your neck.

Tell your boss Elliot you need to go on sick leave, tell him you can no longer

continue sleeping with him, for obvious reasons. Tell him there is nothing he can do, tell

him not to call.

***

2012. Leave a letter for Tyler on his desk, take a cab to the airport while he’s at

work, board the flight home he didn’t know you’d booked. The letter says you’re sorry

for being a coward, you’re sorry for so many things. Vague as a cloud. Plain white printer

paper, line-less, the words slowly migrate to the bottom right corner. When Tyler calls he

31

tells you he found your first draft in the wastepaper basket, liked that version

better.

Hide out at your parents’ house until he gets his own place, divides the CDs,

coffee mugs, dismounts his art from the walls, leaves the nails behind in the drywall to

mock you for having nothing worth hanging.

Spend a week in your childhood bed, your mother bringing you tea, too much

sugar the way you used to take it. Read The Scarlet Letter for the first time, watch reality

television, a thin layer of grey dust softening all the faces.

***

Yours is a ravenous cancer, riotous, pillaging. A wild animal allowed inside the

house for the first time, knocking everything about, too inelegant, too clumsy to stand

still, to move in only one direction, things breaking inside you like antique lamps.

Wonder if you smell like overripe fruit.

Tim has never been good with sickness. You were always the one to rescue the

kids from their bile-soaked pajamas and sheets in the middle of the night, middle of the

flu. Tim threatening to vomit at the sight and now seems hesitant to share a bed with you

as if you’re contagious, as if the cancer can burrow like bedbugs into the mattress. He

stays up late watching TV, volume a millimeter from mute. Wake to pee at 3am and find

him asleep on the leather sectional in the living room, the afghan your mother knitted

laying across his chest, inadequate as a napkin. Parallelograms of light slice his features,

32

retreat, flicker. Shut off the TV but don’t wake him. Slink down the hall, uncomfortable

as a houseguest.

***

2011. Confuse the sound of your dishwasher with a thunderstorm. It never storms

in Alberta, you think, your skin cracking without humidity, and then remember the garage

sale plates rattling in the bottom rack, the glasses saying cheers to one another in the top.

You do not know enough about the Arab Spring.

The upstairs neighbours are practicing their chorus line, bricks tied to the bottoms

of their feet. On Sunday nights they throw dining room chairs at one another in a game

they’ve invented, rules indiscernible from below. On Tuesdays they invite the brass

section of the symphony over for a nightcap, someone twists their arm into playing a

private performance. You invest in a pair of earplugs, but then you have to listen to

yourself, noisier than the inside of a seashell, the wooshing of your insides like pipes

draining, heart like a bat trapped in an attic. Is Tyler asleep? He rolls away with more of

the blankets in his fists, legs agog.

***

Tell your son and daughter after you schedule the surgery. Call a family meeting

though you’ve never done that before. You want to order a pizza, eat together, sitting

33

around the coffee table, not using coasters, letting the soda pop sweat onto the wood, eat

on paper plates, throw everything away, carry it all to the curb.

“But it’s not a party,” Tim says, “They have to understand it’s serious.”

“Yes, very serious indeed,” you say, put on a fake British accent, put on a fake

serious face, the one with the narrowed eyebrows, mouth tight as a fist.

Don’t be like that, Tim scolds you, calls the teenagers downstairs.

Their mouths open and close trout-like, eyes wide though they say they knew

something had been going on for weeks. Mandie’s head in your lap and Matt says, “But

you’re going to be fine right? After the surgery you’ll be fine?” Mandie lifts her head,

leaves her mascara behind on the thigh of your jeans: a Rorschach test, two tiny bats

wing-to-wing.

“We thought you guys were getting divorced,” Matt says.

***

2010. Move to Calgary. Find the baby blanket your mother told you she threw

away when you’re packing up your things. It’s neatly folded in its own garment bag in

the bottom of a trunk. Bring it to your face and it smells like a dead animal. Put it back in

the trunk.

Have a breakdown in an IKEA store.

Sometimes when you wake in the morning you are still in the house you’ve left.

When you open your eyes your desk will be in the corner, the enamel peeling like the

34

bark off a tree. Your pink-trimmed ballet mirror leaning back towards the wall like a tired

old man. Your mother is cooking waffles, the smell wafts into your apartment from your

neighbours’ place across the hall. Three thousand kilometers away your mother calls you

to breakfast.

Notice the closet door is ajar, get up to close it but it pushes back. Tyler has hung

too many hooded sweatshirts on the back of the door.

Wake him up to say: “The closet door won’t close. There are too many hoodies on

the back of the door. It won’t close.”

“What?” he asks and tell him again.

“I don’t know where you want me to put them,” he says, his morning hair like a

pile of twigs, puts his hand to his forehead like a sun visor.

Say: “I want you to have less hoodies.”

Say: “You have more clothing than I do.”

Say: “And I want you to have less shoes.”

“Fewer hoodies, fewer shoes,” he corrects you, rolls onto his stomach.

Put on your moccasin slippers, the fur inside matted down like an old dog, brew

the coffee, plug in the waffle iron, check for syrup.

***

Dr. Singh says you might live many more years, the pain likely to dissipate for the

most part. Says she knows it’s not easy now but soon you might enjoy the same quality of

35

life you’re used to, but she does not congratulate you on making a full recovery, does not

say the cancer’s gone, all of it ladled out with the contaminated bits of yourself. How

strange it is not to know where those bits have gone, incinerated maybe, a pyre of

parasitic organs, not just yours but a whole hospital’s infected parts heaped like a landfill.

You want to ask what you are supposed to do in the meantime, how to bide the

time until you’re once again stronger than your vacuum cleaner, how to make your

husband have sex with you. Would Elliot still want to see you naked? Or would he too be

afraid your limbs might rot off in his hands if he holds you? Kiss you on the forehead as

if it’s the only safe spot? Are there brochures on this in the waiting room?

***

2009. Your younger brother Matt moves to Vancouver by bus, four day trip. Your

parents print out the itinerary from the Greyhound website, sit around the pool with your

grandparents drinking premixed, neon green margaritas on the rocks. Your father reads

out the names of the towns and cities the bus will stop. Whenever someone’s been there

they interrupt to add a footnote. Always get Kenora and Kelowna confused. Your

American mother looks bored, gets up to collect the leaves that have fallen onto the patio.

Regina, what a shithole.

Your brother needs return fare a week later, cops told him he couldn’t sleep in the

park. Feel like you’ve swallowed something square, feel it sitting in your stomach. Ask

your parents to stop telling you about your brother.

36

Swine flu is deemed a global pandemic.

Your best friend says she has something to tell you, doesn’t know if she should,

but thinks you should know, or maybe not, flip-flops until you demand to be told. She

says she saw your dad at a bar last weekend, the one named after a historical bootlegger.

“Did he tell you he saw me?”

You shake your head.

“He was with a bunch of guys, from work I think. Mandie, don’t freak out but

there was a woman on his lap, she was like our age, well maybe a little older, 26, 27

maybe. So I get up and make like I’m going to the washroom so I can walk right by him

and I try to make eye contact with him but he won’t look at me. So I hang out in the

bathroom for a couple minutes and then when I get out and walk by again, she’s not on

his lap anymore.”

You nod your head, she continues: “It could’ve been nothing, harmless flirting,

you know? Parents must get so bored of each other.”

She pauses to study your face, says, “Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything, I’m

sorry.”

Say: “Don’t be. That’s how things go, I guess.” Feel as empty as a department

store after-hours.

***

37

Watch the runners from a bench by the river where you’ve been coming to

practice your new hobby. You don’t know why you’ve begun writing letters, but it isn’t

because you think you’re going to die. They aren’t morbid letters, your final wishes, just

something to do with your hands on a bench by the river. Write letters because you don’t

know how to knit, because reading books has started to make you feel anxious, looking to

see where the paragraph ends, counting the pages to the back cover, always losing your

place to look up as a runner passes, a lithe body with all its parts, springy like a praying

mantis. Short letters that can be written after the big-breasted woman passes, her arms

swimming in circles, and before the man who flaps only one arm like a sick goose. Your

hand moves across your yellow legal pad without much effort, it is nice to feel your hair

wild in the wind, squint into the sun.

Mandie,

You won’t tell me if you’re having sex yet. When you start, promise me you’ll go to the

gynecologist regularly. I lost my virginity in the back of a car when I was fifteen and I

was too young and frightened and it was meaningless and the only thing I could tell you

about it is that the car was red. But you’re smarter than I was and I trust you. I won’t tell

your father if you want to go on the pill. Or we can tell him it’s for irregular periods. You

don’t have acne so we can’t say that, your skin is beautiful. I never told you that I once

had an ectopic pregnancy in one of my fallopian tubes and your grandfather found me

bleeding to death in the bathroom. This was before I met your father.

38

Don’t sign the letters, don’t send them, leave them strung together by the transparent glue

strip at the top of the legal pad, flip the page gently, begin a new letter.

***

2008. The United States elects an African American president. Your grandparents

tell you they voted Republican.

Run your first half marathon with your mother.

In the shower your hair comes loose in tangles around your fingers, fourteen cats-

cradle games at once, stuck like static, like spiderwebs, and there is never anything to do

with the hair but plaster it to the shower tiles like cooked spaghetti, a circulatory system,

rivers on a map. Turn the water off after you’ve left the conditioner on for two minutes,

shaved your legs, shaved your armpits both with and against the grain, then ball the hair

into a tumbleweed, put it to rest atop used kleenexes, used Q-tips in the pail. Except one

time you forget, leave the hair on the shower wall until it dries, unsticks itself, collects in

the tub, a shag rug the colour you’ve been dying it: warm mahogany. Then your father

taking the stairs two at a time to ask if you’re okay. “All that hair,” he says.

***

Matt,

39

Your father is angry I told you that I smoked weed when I was young. We called it toking

in the seventies. I know you think I’m old and lame and maybe I am but I used to have

albums and albums of rock music, kept them in a milk crate. One day I had them in the

backseat of my car, can’t remember why now, and someone broke the window, stole them

all, left the crate, and I wept into it like I’d lost a pet. Never replaced them, never bought

another album actually, I don’t know why. Being a parent is hard. You change.

***

2007. Your mother develops a wry sense of humour, spends most of her time on a

bench by the river, feeding the ducks, writing on a yellow legal pad. She tells you she’s

writing a memoir when you ask, says you can’t read it until she’s dead. Sometimes your

father calls her cell phone to ask her to come home for dinner, but then you hear it

vibrating on her dresser, so he sends you to go fetch her. One day in late fall when the

ducks have all gone you catch her mindlessly throwing bits of her crust into the grass.

She is startled when she sees you, calls you her sister’s name then covers her mouth with

her fingers.

Await the final book in the Harry Potter series.

Try to ignore your parents fighting about money in the living room. Your father is

mad at your mother for buying another pair of shoes. Your mother suggests they cancel

the expensive cable package with the extra sports channels they pay for every month,

frisbees the bill onto his lap. Your father suggests your mother stop having an affair.

40

Leave without saying anything to either of them, stay at Tyler’s, return home when you

feel numb about anything to do with your parents. She is doing dishes in the sink, blue

gloves up to her elbows, cries when she sees you. “We’ve agreed to go to counseling,”

she says, “Have an appointment this Thursday.”

On Thursday evening as they put on their coats your father tells you they’re going

to Home Depot to price a new ceiling fan for the dining room.

***

Try not to look at your abdomen, scars like mountain ranges running between

your hips. Cavernous hollows you’re afraid to find with your fingers, soft spots like a

bruised peach. Dress quickly, leave the lights off, take down the full-length mirror from

the wall beside the closet. Body helpless as a house on fire, drooping like cut flowers in a

vase, but hey, you’ve finally lost that last ten pounds so that’s something, right?

***

2006. Meet an art major named Tyler, convince him to stop buzzing his hair. Your

father shakes his head when you tell him Tyler doesn’t really play any sports. He begins

referring to him as The Poet in a way that sounds like an insult. Your mother says not to

take it personally, he just worries what to talk to him about.

Saddam Hussein is sentenced to death.

41

Your mother calls a family meeting to tell you and your brother that she has

cancer, has scheduled a complete hysterectomy and oophorectomy, makes a joke that she

has cancer of the oophs. Your father’s mouth yardstick straight.

***

Sunday breakfast at the diner, a ritual you now have to insist you aren’t too tired

for, and Tim’s cellphone vibrates on his hip, clipped to his belt though you’ve tried to

convince him not to wear it like that. He checks the call display, doesn’t answer, says it

was work when you ask. His cellphone vibrates more than it used to.

“If it was work then why didn’t you answer?” you ask and he tells you not to do

that, the word that like something unwanted in his mouth, the shell of a sunflower seed

spit out at your feet.

“Cheating on the sick wife is a fucking cliché,” you spit quietly back across the

formica.

“Goddammit, Lillian,” his nostrils gone wide, but he doesn’t flip open his

cellphone to show you where it says “1 Missed Call: Jim or Al or Kevin” like you wanted

him to. He snorts, shovels cloud-shaped scrambled eggs into his mouth.

Ask: “How many cavities do you have?” Dangle your fork in the direction of his

chest.

“What?”

“Answer. How many cavities?”

42

“I don’t know, Lil, two, three?”

“Do you know how many cavities I’ve had?” Pause, continue: “Neither do I, lost

count. And root canals, a goddamn crown and you don’t even floss, hell, sometimes you

don’t even brush your teeth at night. And all that coke you drink!”

“What are you trying to say? That I should’ve been the one to get sick cause you

have better dental hygiene? Fuck, Lil.” He tosses his napkin onto his plate, buries the

remaining hash-browns.

***

2005. Get high at a house party. Back your car into a light post at the end of the

driveway. Tell your parents you have no idea how it happened when they ask, someone

must have hit you in a parking lot.

Pope John Paul II dies.

Break your left arm skiing. They cut you out of your expensive new coat, ask you

to rate the pain and when you say ten you get morphine for the first time. You tell Lauren

you feel like you’re being wrapped inside a rainbow. She’s still wearing her snow pants.

You’re booked for next day surgery because they can’t fit the bone back together,

need to reattach it with a metal plate, six screws, cover up the Frankenstein scar with a

cast so you don’t get to see it for five weeks.

43

Become addicted to oxycodone, forget why it is that you exist until your mother

gets worried, flushes the pills.

***

Tim,

Remember our first apartment downtown? I thought I’d never forget exactly the way it

looked but now I can’t remember whether it had carpet or hardwood. Was the carpet a

tragic colour? Have I subconsciously blocked it from memory? Do you think it’s strange

we never met any of the other people in the building? Sure, we said hello when we ran

into them at the mailboxes, held the door and elevator for each other, but we never

learned any of their names, did we? I could have baked cookies for the neighbours when

we first moved in, we could have gone door-to-door, introduced ourselves.

***

2003. Fail your Driver’s Ed. test for turning left from the wrong lane, wait a

month to retake it, pass, though your parallel parking needs work. Always will.

Lose your virginity to your high school boyfriend after the semi-formal dance.

His mom’s at bingo and he wants to do it in her bed. He tells you he’ll never smoke

marijuana because when he was a baby his dad was driving high with him in the car seat

and crashed almost killing him. A tear appears in one of his eyes like the edge of a

44

contact lens and you hold him and swear you’ll love him forever. Dump him when he

becomes a drug dealer. On the way to the movies he makes a sharp left into an empty

parking lot behind a Taco Bell, and you think you’re there to make-out until some guy in

a hood taps on the window, eyes like two dark wounds.

***

The runners parade by in spandex. How much paraphernalia is involved, two

small water bottles on the back of each hip, the bottles clipped into a utility belt, reminds

you of the plastic Batman belt Matt used to wear, underwear over his sweatpants, fighting

all the crime in your basement. Go Go Gadget running equipment: an Mp3 player

strapped to an arm, a pedometer hooked on a waistband. Hold your own body, doubled on

your bench, collect all your remaining parts into your oversized sweater, comfort your

body like a child with a fever.

What happens if you have to pee during a marathon?

Screw your eyes until all the runners look like Elliot. Who’s he going to do now?

Maggie? Sarah? Who does this woman in the short-shorts think she is, flaunting her tan

calves in your face, ponytail sashaying rhythmically.

***

45

2002. Get drunk for the first time on Peach Schnapps, your fifteenth birthday with

your toxic childhood friend in a motel paid for by boys visiting from Sarnia old enough to

have credit cards. Let one of the boys you’d never met before get to third base with you

in the bathroom and then walk home alone because your friends are having sex in the two

double beds, or so you assume judging by the shapes they are making in the covers. Cars

honk their love to you. Wait in your backyard, sitting on your deck until morning so you

don’t wake your parents with the back door that wheezes like a bad lung. Tell them how

much fun you had at Courtney’s house.

***

Elliot,

I used to think everywhere I went the men were flirting with me, sometimes even the

women. The cashiers at the grocery store who offered to carry my bags to the car. Yes,

they probably offer that to everyone, but in my head it was only for me. The bank teller

didn’t ask my weekend plans just to make small talk but because he wanted to take me to

a cheap motel, share a box of wine, bend me over the unwashed comforter. All the waiters

sizing up my husband, undressing me with their eyes, secretly signaling to meet them out

back by the delivery door. Everyone asking if my daughter and I are sisters, having to

show my license to buy a case of beer, the attention like lying in the sun. Do you still think

of me at night, your wife in the bathroom, mouth full of toothpaste?

46

***

2001. Your tenth grade math teacher wheels in two carts with televisions on them

and you wonder what movie he could possibly be showing about math. Watch the plane

take down the second tower. Your teacher says you’ll always remember where you were

at this moment. A quiet kid named Osama stops coming to school.

One day when you come home your blankie isn’t on the foot of your bed where

you always leave it. Ask your mom if she’s seen it and she tells you she’s gotten rid of it,

garbage truck came this morning. “Probably had fleas,” she says.

***

Rip the crust from your peanut butter and jelly sandwich, throw it to the ducks.

Maybe one day you’ll take up running, have a specialist tell you whether you have a high

instep or flatfeet, buy the appropriate shoes, pay extra for insoles, wear the Batman belt, a

knee brace if it turns out your right knee clicks when you run on an incline. Wonder if

you’ll be faster now, having lightened the load, no unneeded organs weighing you down.

You’ll wear breathable fabrics, tie your sweater around your waist when you get too

warm, make sure your arms swing straight back and forth because there’s a woman with a

pinched face watching you from a bench, feeding her peanut butter and jelly sandwich to

the ducks, writing letters to no one.

47

***

2000. Celebrate New Year’s Eve in the basement of Megan’s house. Some of the

kids from school are forced to spend the night with their parents awaiting the end of the

world.

1998. Bill Clinton does not have sexual relations with that woman.

1997. Wonder why your mom is standing in the living room, watching the

television, crying. She tells you Princess Di died and you think what a funny name for a

dead person.

***

Dear Woman I Imagine is Calling my Husband,

Do you think it’s true that when we dream we can’t picture people we’ve never seen

before, that our brains are incapable of inventing new faces, so we’ll give a dream-

stranger a familiar face: our favourite clerk from the grocery store, a former teacher, the

friend of our teenage daughter? I haven’t been dreaming about you at all, but if I did

maybe you would have the same face as my newly divorced neighbour, that amazingly

flexible woman at the gym, my own sister. Instead I’ve been dreaming about my son

getting all of his teeth knocked out. It happens a different way every time.

48

***

1996. The dentist gives you laughing gas so they can pull a tooth. You ride a

magic carpet around the room, and then out of the office to float over the Niagara Falls.

Later tell your mother you want all your teeth pulled and mostly mean it.

1994. You are in love with the boy whose grandma lives next door. He stays there

during the summers, swims in your pool. One day you are on the way to the park with

your mother, driving down your street with the picnic basket she has packed in the

backseat. At the end of the block his mother’s car passes you, you turn in your seat to

watch her car pull into the next-door driveway. He steps out on legs spindly as a deer.

Because your mother knows you are in love with him she asks if you’d like her to turn

the car around. When you say yes her face deflates like a balloon and you feel guilty

about it for years.

***

Dear Woman in Short-Shorts With Ponytail,

Once many years ago I was at a bar with some girlfriends and a man with very wet-

looking hair approached our table and asked us whether we wanted to be married or

whether we wanted to be in love. As if the two are mutually exclusive. As if he was the

49

better answer. As if he was love. As if he could love us all at once. And maybe he could

have. But love, love is boring. I am so bored of being in love.

***

1991. You’ve been carrying your blankie everywhere for as long as you can

remember. Its stuffing begins to clump, holes begin to form in the shape of the continents.

Your mother is scared it will disintegrate in the washing machine, bathes it like a

wounded animal in the sink.

***

Return home to find Tim lying on the bed, body bent like a kidney bean, face

crumpled like a coat. Lie down beside him, rub his back, reach up under the cotton of his

shirt, lightly trace a trail map with your fingernails. He pulls your arm around his

shoulders, brings your hand to his mouth, presses the tip of each finger to his lips, breath

bathtub-warm.

How anticlimactic it all will be when you don’t die, when instead you become a

runner with flatfeet, running 5k’s for cancer, bothering your friends and coworkers to

make pledges in five and ten dollar increments, your boss not returning your phone calls.

50

“Lil,” he says, “How do we survive this?” His voice scratchy as burlap.

Say: “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Flick his earlobe with your

tongue.

***

1986. The Space Shuttle Challenger disintegrates 73 seconds after launching.

The Chernobyl disaster.

The Oprah Winfrey Show premiers.

Your parents visit your mom’s sister in Texas, take a trip across the border to

Tijuana, drink too much tequila, aren’t careful, or that’s how they tell you it happened.

51

Plastic Shopping Bags

Usually we bring our own reusable grocery bags but sometimes we forget. We try to carry

it all in our arms, hugging cans and cereal boxes, a jug of milk hooked on our strongest

finger. But, okay, maybe just one bag, we tell the smocked cashier. There is so very much

to carry. Next time we will remember our reusable grocery bags: the one with the smiling

planet Earth, the one with the owl who says he/she gives a hoot, the one that claims we

believe in a divine creator and we believe that divine creator also despises plastic

shopping bags (or maybe we carry that reusable grocery bag ironically; we are not one to

push our beliefs onto other people).

But lately we have been more forgetful. The plastic shopping bags have begun to

accumulate. We’ve started using plastic shopping bags as garbage bags for plastic

shopping bag-sized garbage pails. We now take our lunches to work in plastic shopping

bags (much to our chagrin our children still insist on their zippered, insulated, movie-

themed lunch bags). We turn the plastic shopping bags inside out, and tada! they are

gloves to pick up dog poop. We don’t have a dog at the present moment but someone

else’s has surely pooped somewhere, and we could put a plastic shopping bag in our

jacket pocket (it is really no effort to do so) and when we take our walks we could keep

our heads down looking for dog poop to pick up with our plastic shopping bag mitts so

future walkers will not have to step in unnoticed canine feces. It is no effort at all to keep

our heads down as we walk—we might as well since we do not ourselves wish to trod

through any forlorn fecal matter. It really is no effort at all to pick up that strange dog’s

52

hardened poop-pellets and carry them to the nearest garbage can. Thank God for plastic

shopping bags! What an invention, the plastic shopping bag! The earth is much cleaner

thanks to plastic shopping bags! Just look at all the hardened dog poop we’ve collected!

What a blessing that when we have dinner parties we can send our guests home

with plastic shopping bags full of leftovers. We make extra food to be sure they will have

some to take home in plastic shopping bags. Maybe we should double-bag it just to be

safe, we say. Hey, we say, did you know that when you’re done with these plastic

shopping bags you can use them as mitts to pick up dog poop? We provide our guests

with a demonstration so they know exactly how to do so: Voila! we say, picking up the

last brownie on the dessert tray. We wouldn’t want them to throw away the plastic

shopping bags we’ve given them; they will no doubt find them just as useful as we have.

We know if we throw away the plastic shopping bags they will sit in landfills for

millions of years, the hole in the ozone will grow the length of each discarded plastic

shopping bag, dolphins will die of asphyxiation, plastic shopping bags clogging their

blow holes. We know all this but we are running out of practical uses for the plastic

shopping bags.

So we designate a drawer for the plastic shopping bags. We will keep them in the

plastic shopping bag drawer until we need a plastic shopping bag. We will remember to

bring our own reusable grocery bags and we will take home no more plastic shopping

bags.

Soon we can barely close the drawer. Soon we need to designate a second drawer

for the plastic shopping bags. Soon there are no more drawers in the kitchen that are not

53

stuffed full of plastic shopping bags. What else can we do? we ask, brandishing the

plastic shopping bags at one another, thinking only momentarily of suffocating our loved

ones, plastic shopping bags over their faces while they sleep.

We could inflate the plastic shopping bags and use them as balloons. We could fill

the plastic shopping bags with water and use them to carry goldfish home from the fair.

Doesn’t our son need parachutes for his toy soldiers? We could fill the plastic shopping

bags with ice, keep them in the freezer until someone needs to ice a swollen joint. We

could stuff the plastic shopping bags with cotton batting and use them as pillows for the

bathtub; we never have anywhere to put our heads while we bathe and our necks are so

sore from our daily walks, heads down, scanning for dog poop, jacket pockets tumescent

with plastic shopping bags. We could fill the plastic shopping bags with our old clothes,

with canned goods, with our children’s toys. We could fill the plastic shopping bags with

more plastic shopping bags and donate the plastic shopping bags to charity; charities

certainly have a need for plastic shopping bags and we are charitable people who do not

want to see others go without plastic shopping bags.

We could buy a new cabinet, yes, a bigger cabinet, yes, a cabinet with six or even

eight drawers. We could custom order the cabinet. We could have it custom made for the

spare bedroom that we are now using to store the plastic shopping bags. We could have

the cabinet custom made to the dimensions of the spare bedroom. Each custom-made

drawer the length and width of a plastic shopping bag. A custom-made cabinet big

enough to hold all the plastic shopping bags. We will keep the plastic shopping bags here

until we need them.

54

Rapture-Bombing

Of course his name is Clive. If his wife were to run away to Alberta with a

cowboy, of course his name would be Clive. Not that Marcie has explicitly told him she’s

running away to Alberta, and George is not sure whether Clive owns a horse, or even

knows how to ride a horse (though his physique suggests he could certainly overpower a

horse whether he could ride one or not), but the way Marcie is eating that piece of store-

bought chocolate cake has made everything suddenly very clear to George.1 Though, it

should’ve been already, he supposes, taking into account their (that is to say, George and

Marcie’s) morning of aggressive love-making.

George has been dividing his attention between his wife licking the chocolate off

her fork and the pointy-toed black leather cowboy boots by the front door. Marcie said,

“Oh, please, leave your shoes on. The house is a mess!” though she spent the day with the

vacuum cleaner, but Clive said, “These are my workin’ boots” and that seemed to settle

the debate. George has never known Marcie to enjoy a man who wears pointy-toed black

leather cowboy boots. Or at least she has never expressed such enjoyment. He finds

himself becoming angry with her. Marcie buys all of his clothing for him: his patterned

button-down shirts, his crew-neck sweaters, his tassled loafers; he once even let her talk

him into maroon corduroy trousers. Why has she never bought him such boots if she

enjoyed them so much? She never even suggested them and that just isn’t fair to George.

55

1 No, George has never before believed in the psychic powers of Betty Crocker.

“It’s been much too long since we’ve gotten together,” Marcie is telling Clive,

though she is not speaking like Marcie, not eating cake like Marcie eats cake. George

nods his head.

“Much, much too long,” Marcie says and George realizes Marcie has been doing

the talking all evening. When did he last speak?2 When did Clive last speak?3

“I’ll bet you didn’t even know Christopher started college this year!” George is

nodding again; perhaps he has never stopped nodding. He cannot remember a time when

he wasn’t nodding. It seems to be a thing he has always done, the natural inclination of

his head to bob up and down. Did he nod while making love to his wife this morning?4

“Shit,” Clive says, shaking his head—direct mockery of George, surely. If George

was asked to describe Clive he would describe him as someone who always looks like he

needs to spit and is deciding just where to do so. But Clive does not spit on their living

room rug just now. Instead he takes a long sip of his coffee—black—and George is now

aware of the beige coffee in his own cup. Beige, he thinks, the colour of weakness.5

Undoubtably, Clive has already noticed the colour of George’s coffee, is wondering how

Marcie could have married a man who can’t take his coffee black, whose hands are

smaller than hers. George always wanted to marry a tall, sturdy woman.

56

2 Roughly five minutes ago.

3 About thirty seconds ago.

4 Yes.

5Incidentally, George is also wearing a beige button-down shirt, though it is probably for the best that George fails to notice this at the moment.

“He’s majoring in biology. We’re hoping for med school, of course.6 He comes

home and we ask about school, but you realize your kid’s smarter than you and it’s like,

what do you talk about? The girls, I guess.” Marcie laughs a laugh that does not belong to

Marcie.

“We were worried about him living in the dorm, but, you know, they have to do

that in their first year, and all A’s this semester!” In George’s head he is trying out

different ways to segue into a conversation about his job. Only Tony Roma’s in the whole

city. Fifty-some people on his pay roll.

“You did real good, Marce,” Clive says. Perhaps it’s that Clive only addresses

Marcie instead of both of Christopher’s parents or maybe it’s the missing syllable at the

end of her name, George isn’t sure, but for some reason he has suddenly decided to stand

up. They are looking at him now so he clears his throat, or maybe he clears his throat and

then they look at him. But they have to look up which is the important part.

“I’m going to take out the recycling now,” George says and walks to the kitchen.

“Now?” Marcie asks after him, but does not protest, does not tell him to wait until

after he’s finished his dessert.

“Tomorrow is recycling day,” George says—firmly, he hopes.

There is an empty wine bottle on the counter and a can that held peas for the

casserole. George takes these and walks out the backdoor.

It is warmer outside than George expected it to be at—George checks his watch—

8:38pm. He takes the bottle and can to the garage where there is a blue bin and a red bin

57

6 George was not aware that he had been hoping for med school, but surely that is a good thing to hope for. George begins hoping for med school.

on the cement floor next to the garbage pails. He balances the bottle and can on a heap of

other bottles and cans in the blue bin. He always makes two trips: first the blue bin, tilting

it towards his chest to keep the heap of bottles and cans from spilling out onto the

driveway, and then the red bin, which he always carries with a hand pressing the cereal

boxes and newspapers down inside it so they don’t blow across his lawn. Tonight, for the

first time, he wonders if he might be able to carry both bins to the curb at once. He puts

the blue bin on top of the red bin, bends down and grabs the handles of the red bin. He

cannot lift both bins at once. He carries the blue bin to the curb first.

It is not that the sex was bad. In fact, quite the opposite. And this is what is so

disconcerting to George. Standing at the edge of his driveway, he tries to remember

whether Marcie has ever yelled his name before in bed. Maybe once, when they were

young, and drunk, before Christopher, maybe, but never in the morning with the light

streaming in through the mini blinds. And she’s never yelled it repeatedly; George is sure

of that. She usually settles for deep breathing and an occasional “oh yes.” But this

morning it was “Oh George!” instead of “oh yes.” She yelled “Oh George oh George oh

George oh George,” which of course means she was thinking of Clive the entire time.7

There are only twelve houses on the street which ends in a cul-de-sac. Marcie had

made him promise before she got pregnant that when they had kids they would live on a

street that ends in a cul-de-sac. Two of the houses on their street have their curtains

closed. Of the other nine houses (George and Marcie’s house excluded from the twelve,

of course) seven have their television sets on. He cannot make out any of the programs

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7 Last night she watched a marathon of ER episodes and was thinking of a young George Clooney.

his neighbours are watching. He wonders whether they are all watching different things,

or more interestingly, the same thing. Yes, he thinks, the televisions all seem to light up

and go dark in unison, glowing then not glowing, a Morse code that could tell him why

everyone on the street is watching the same television program if he knew Morse code.

The eighty-year old widow next door and the young couple with the baby across the

street and the single thirty-ish man who Marcie thinks might be gay—Marcie always

finishes her commentary on his sexual orientation by adding “not that it’s any of my

business”—next to them and the young couple with no kids next door on the other side

and the retirees at the end of the cul-de-sac with the weedless lawn, all watching an

episode of Dateline about neighbours on a street that strangely resembles their own.8 He

turns back to his house. It is impossible to see anything from here but it appears Clive and

his wife have moved closer to one another, are discussing when she will meet him in

Alberta, how she will break the news to George. Will he feign surprise? Will he cry? He

hopes for a letter so he can act however he damn well feels like.9

But what if he left first? Not for real, of course, but he doesn’t have much interest

in returning to his living room at the moment. He is wearing slippers but they have rubber

soles and the streets are dry. He doesn’t have a jacket but it is the end of May and it is a

nice night for a walk and he doesn’t want to watch Marcie eat cake like Marcie does not

eat cake so he steps off the driveway and onto the street. He walks awkwardly at first,

ashamed to be subjecting his slippers to asphalt. Marcie doesn’t like it when he wears his

slippers even to take out the garbage; they’re from the Land’s End catalogue, not Wal

59

8 Surprisingly, George does not believe in aliens, ghosts, or platypuses.

9 Knowing George, he will feel like crying.

Mart (is what she always says). But when he reaches the end of his street he doesn’t think

about walking anymore; he just does it and finds himself at the park four blocks east and

two blocks north of his house.

The park is a big park: baseball diamonds, tennis courts, a swimming pool, an

elaborate configuration of ladders, slides, and monkey bars. The teenagers are sitting in

the bleachers where they come at night to drink from water bottles that are half pop or

fruit juice and half vodka stolen from parents’ liquor cabinets then replaced with water.10

The teenagers with cars are sitting in their cars in the parking lot, smoking pot or fooling

around.11 The teenagers on the bleachers put their water bottles between their feet when

he passes in case he is one of their parents. He wonders if this is where Christopher came

to drink his stolen vodka, ever took a girl behind a tree to reach his hand up the front of

her shirt, and whether he knew what to do with his hand once he got it there.12

“Hey!” George turns around. A girl climbs down from the bleachers and begins

jogging over to him.

She is wearing cut-off shorts and he feels guilty for being able to see almost all of

her legs though he is trying not to look (George hopes that it is dark enough that she

cannot tell that he is trying not to look, as he is doing a rather poor job of it).

“Hey,” she says again when she has caught up to him. George doesn’t know what

to say, doesn’t know what a teenage girl in cut-off shorts would have to say to him either.

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10 George knows this because Christopher used to be one of these teenagers and eventually George’s vodka would no longer get George drunk when he chose to get drunk (which was rarely).

11 George knows this because this is what George used to do when parked in his thunderbird when he was sixteen, which has often caused George to lament that he “peaked too soon,” though it was probably just the thunderbird.

12 Despite the thunderbird, George never knew what to do with his own hand.

“If you could not tell my parents I’m here that’d be really cool. I wasn’t even

drinking, I swear,” she says. He thinks her hair might be red but it is too dark to tell for

sure.

“Do I know your parents?” He is aware that he is blinking more than usual.

“Mike and Judy? I thought you saw me on the bleachers so I just want to make

sure you knew I wasn’t drinking and you aren’t going to, like, run and tell my dad.” He

thinks about all the people he knows named Mike. There are many Mikes, but less Judys.

He only knows one Judy, an older server at the restaurant, a single mother who works the

day shift.

“I don’t think I know any Mike and Judies.” She is staring intently into his face. It

is hard to hold eye contact with a teenage girl in cut-off shorts at night in a park.

“Oh shit, sorry. You totally look like my parents’ friend Clive.”

“From Alberta?” He wonders how many Clives there are in Windsor. It isn’t a

common name like George.

“No. I don’t know. He lives near here, I guess, close enough anyway. I could’ve

sworn you were him. But, yeah, sorry.” The girl shrugs and begins jogging back to the

bleachers. He tries not to watch her run, her legs almost iridescent. And why is she

running at all? George wonders. The bleachers are less than fifty feet away. Why are

teenagers always running everywhere?13 As he is trying not to watch her run he notices

something in the grass—a piece of white paper—and wonders if it fell out of her pocket,

but then her shorts are so tight it seems unlikely. He picks up the square of folded paper

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13 They have not yet lost their zest for living?

and unfolds it. A Transit Windsor map of bus routes and schedules. Someone has circled

the times the Dominion 5 stops at the corner of Dominion and West Grand. On the back

of the bus map there is a phone number and the name “Katie,” a heart dotting the “i.” Is

the maybe-red-headed girl named Katie? He puts the map in his pocket. He thinks about

turning around and going home but decides he hasn’t been gone long enough. Maybe he

should give Marcie all night to pack up her things, load them into Clive’s rented pick-up

truck and head for the airport. She could leave the letter on the dresser. He keeps walking.

He walks some more. Eventually he realizes he is close to a Tim Horton’s and that seems

like as good of a place as any to stop walking.

“You look really familiar,” says the woman behind the counter. He looks harder at

her face with its too big features, like a small room crowded with too much furniture.

Maybe forty, he guesses. Too young to have went to high school with. She looks like

someone he would know but is sure he doesn’t.

“I come in here sometimes.”

“It’s my first week,” she says.

“I manage a restaurant. Tony Roma’s.”14

“Never been.”

He thinks about giving her a coupon from his wallet, but doesn’t.

“Ah, well, maybe you just have one of those faces,” she says. Does he have one of

those faces? Has someone told him that before? He doesn’t think so.

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14 George is careful to never say he “works at” a restaurant.

He orders a large coffee, glad he left his wallet in his pants pocket, though he

cannot say why he did so since he always takes his wallet out of his pants pocket when he

comes home from work.

“What do you take in it?”

“Double—black.”

“Double black?”

“Just black.”

George sits at a table with a copy of The Windsor Star on it.

Judgment Day is upon us, according to the billboards.

If one were to believe the advertisements of the U.S. evangelical Christian group Family

Radio, the much prophesied Rapture will begin today—May 21, 2011, supposedly 7,000

years after the time of the Great Flood. In a matter of hours, the chosen few will begin to

be drawn up to heaven, while great quakes shall rack the earth and dismay those left

behind, culminating in the planet’s destruction by fire on Oct. 21.15

He wonders what kind of name Family Radio is for a Christian group.16 He takes a sip of

his coffee. It is bitter. He does not like it. He decides that anyone who claims to prefer

their coffee black is lying, and at least the way he takes his coffee is honest, and he feels

good about himself for being honest. He is back at the counter.

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15 President of Family Radio, Harold Camping, had previously predicted that Judgment Day would occur on or about September 6, 1994.

16 The article should have probably mentioned that Family Radio is a Christian-based radio network (as well as potentially a cult).

“Excuse me,”—he reads her name tag—“Katie? Could I trouble you for a couple

creamers?” He wonders how there could possibly be two Clives and two Katies in one

night. Maybe everyone he meets tonight, this week, for the rest of his life, will be named

either Clive or Katie.17

It is demeaning to also ask for sugar. He thinks about also asking for a stir stick

and wants to die. George decides to never buy coffee from Tim Horton’s again. Maybe

he’ll give up coffee altogether. Maybe he’ll come back to blow the place up. Maybe he’ll

switch to tea. Before bending down to retrieve the creamers from the waist-high

refrigerator Katie tosses her head slightly in George’s direction. At first he thinks she is

trying to flip her hair but she must know that it isn’t going anywhere in that hairnet.

When she tosses her head again she says, “Sugar and stir sticks are beside the register.”

“Thanks,” George says, thinks for a second, and then also says, “Listen, I’m

wondering if this belongs to you.” George takes out the transit map and lays it face-down

on the counter so she can see where Katie has written her number.

“Oh, my name’s not Katie,” says the woman wearing the name tag that says

Katie, “I forgot mine and we have to wear one. Policy. I found Katie and Victor’s name

tags in the staffroom and went with Katie.” George has the sense that this woman not

named Katie is flirting with him. He makes a point to keep his left hand below the

counter.

“And what does your real name tag say?”

“Marcie.”

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17 Nope.

“Marcie?”

“Mary,” says Mary though George is certain she said “Marcie” the first time.18

“Clive,” he says, shaking her hand.

“Somehow I knew your name would be Clive. I wish I could remember where I

know you from.”

It is clear now that someone is fucking with George. The girl in park and now this

Marcie or Mary woman. Someone has put them up to it. George is certain.19

“Do you know Mike and Judy?”

“Mike and Judy? No, I don’t think so.”

“Can I ask you a question?”

“Shoot,” she says, which is what Marcie always says when he asks if he can ask

her a question.

“Does Katie have red hair?”

“I don’t know. She quit before I started. Left her name tag.”

Of course she did, George thinks.

“Isn’t there someone who you could ask if this is her number? They’d have to

have her number on file somewhere, right?”

“There’ll be a manager here in the morning if you want to come back.” A grey-

haired man opens the door for a grey-haired woman.

“Never mind. It’s not important. Thanks.” George refolds the map, puts it back in

his pocket, nods to the couple, and leaves with his coffee.

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18 She didn’t.

19 He shouldn’t be.

When he stops walking he sits down on a bench without thinking about stopping

to sit on the bench. He looks up and sees the bus stop sign for the Dominion 5. For a

second he has the same sensation he always has when he is in an elevator going up.20 But

then, of course he is sitting at the bus stop, he thinks. This was his plan all along, wasn’t

it?21 Walk toward the bus stop, buy a coffee to get enough change for the bus, sit on the

stoney bench and wait for the bus. George checks his watch and the transit map: six

minutes to wait for the Dominion 5.

He thinks about how he will tell Christopher that his mother has run away with a

cowboy to Alberta. He shouldn’t do it over the phone. No, George thinks, he’ll drive up

to London, take Christopher to lunch at Jack Astor’s or Kelsey’s—or better yet—the

London Tony Roma’s so he can get his fifty percent manager’s discount. Christopher will

understand that it’s not George’s fault, that George loves his mother very much and did

everything he could to get her to stay. George wonders if he should tell Christopher about

the anti-depressants, that they could in some way help explain, but decides against it.

Christopher might think it’s his fault, that his leaving to go away to college brought on

the depression, which is true, George supposes, though George does not blame his son

even though there is a university in Windsor, to which he had also been accepted. And

why does he have to stay there all summer? There are jobs in Windsor too.22 George

wishes he would’ve taken the newspaper from the Tim Horton’s so he wouldn’t have to

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20 George has what he calls “severe, acute kinetosis,” but what his wife refuses to call anything but “a little bit of motion sickness.”

21 Who knows?

22 There aren’t.

think about Marcie and Clive and the anti-depressants and could instead think more about

Family Radio and the Rapture. Did the same someone who left the transit map in the park

for George leave the newspaper on the table for him as well? Probably, George thinks.

Yes, definitely.23

There are three other people on the bus: an Indian couple and a doughy man

clutching a knapsack on his lap. The bus passes an empty lot that used to be a church that

George used to attend on Christmas and Easter until Christopher started high school and

decided he no longer believed in God and then George and Marcie realized they didn’t

believe either but couldn’t remember when it was exactly that they had stopped believing.

George remembers how sad Marcie had been over the church being torn down because

not enough people believed in God anymore or still believed but had better things to do

on Sundays.

“That’s not the point,” she said, “It was a beautiful old building and this city

needs all the beautiful old buildings it can get.”

Three stops later a girl with red hair gets on the bus but not the same girl from the

park who may or may not have red hair. She sits down in a seat diagonal to where George

is sitting. She is wearing headphones and is tapping her foot along to the beat of whatever

she is listening to.24 George stares at her tapping foot. The longer he stares the more

erratic the tapping of her foot seems to become. She can no longer be tapping her foot to

any sort of musical beat, and instead is moving it in stops and starts of no discernible

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23 No, obviously not.

24 “Mmmbop” by Hanson. I’m not even joking, she is. Honestly.

pattern, but perhaps dots and dashes, spelling something out for him on the floor of the

bus if only he knew how to read it.25 First the televisions, George thinks, but it makes his

brain hurt to continue.

“Yes,” says the doughy man suddenly, but he appears to be talking to his

knapsack.

The red-headed girl pulls the cord to request the next stop. George watches her

rustle through her purse, pull out an empty chip bag, and set it gently on the seat next to

her. Before she exits the bus she turns to look at George. She looks right at him. She

makes eye contact. Then she looks to the chip bag sitting on the seat. Then back at

George. She steps off the bus.

George requests the next stop, taking the chip bag with him as he moves towards

the door.

He walks one block north to Riverside Drive and crosses the street to walk west

along the river. He walks towards the Ambassador Bridge, strung with lights, some of

which have burnt out, like eavestroughs at Christmastime. George thinks about how big

the bridge is when you’re not in your car on top of it. George cannot remember when he

last walked along the river. 26

In between the sidewalk on which George is walking and the river there are

gardens, playgrounds for children, sculptures, but it is mostly just grass and here are two

young people on the grass with something heaped in their arms and they are talking to

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25 Maybe she only lacks rhythm or is having a seizure.

26 With Marcie on their second date.

each other and pointing at the grass as George walks closer. They look, to George, like

they are holding two dead dogs so he is surprised to hear the young female one say, “We

could make like he’s been walking a dog here.”

“And then—you brought the book? She could be reading a book over here,” she

says pointing behind her male partner, “Too bad we didn’t think to get a bible for her.”

The male young person dumps the bundle in his arms onto the grass, which

George can now see is a bundle of clothing. The female does the same where she is

standing and draws a t-shirt from the pile now at her feet. The male suddenly takes notice

of George and makes a jerking motion towards him with his head. The female now turns

to George.

“Don’t tell anyone, kay?” she says.

“I wouldn’t know what to tell,” George says in hopes that she will tell him what

she doesn’t want him to tell. She doesn’t. Instead she turns back to her pile and picks up a

pair of men’s jeans. George takes two steps forward.

“Can I ask what you’re doing?” he asks. The young guy looks at him and then to

the girl.

The girl shrugs, and says, “You know how the rapture was supposed to be today

and all these people were supposed to get, like, sucked up to heaven?”

George nods.

“Well, what would happen if this guy, say, was out walking his dog by the river

and then all of a sudden it was rapture time, and poof—he’s floating up to heaven, with

his dog—all dogs go to heaven, right?—and then what would be left? His clothes, his hat,

69

sunglasses, the leash, in the exact position he was in before the rapture. I mean, it wasn’t

our idea, we saw these things all over the internet—rapture bombs—but we thought it’d

be cool to do here. So when people come down to the river tomorrow there’ll be all these

outlines of people who’ve been raptured, and what they left behind, like they were

reading a book or whatever—hey, maybe we can have two people who were playing

frisbee?—and then we’re going to take pictures.”

George wonders if he should give them all his clothes, have them position his left

behind items on the grass, and then he too can disappear.

He wishes the young people luck with their “rapture bombs” and continues along

the river.27 He pulls out the empty chip bag from his pocket and begins to examine it: Sun

Chips—French Onion—but there is an inky mark covering the “ch” of the word

“French.” A message? In code? F R E N O N I O N. Is that a word? George is sure it is

not. But what if he were to rearrange the letters? George tries to do this in his head. What

if he includes the letters in “Sun Chips”? He has even more trouble trying to do this in his

head. What if every letter stood for another letter? A cryptoquote like the ones Marcie

likes doing from the newspaper after she finishes the crossword. Sometimes she would

ask George for help with the sports-related crossword clues, which would annoy George

because she knew he didn’t play or watch any sports except tennis, but he would always

guess at the answers to the sports questions anyhow, and maybe he sort-of appreciated

Marcie asking him the sports questions and maybe he was only annoyed with himself for

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27 I really thought he might ask if their names are Clive and Katie.

not knowing the answers, now that he thinks about it. Or what if the flavour of the chips

is a clue and the code is in French? George does not know French.28

When George reaches Sunset Avenue he turns left and walks one block back to

where he can see the University of Windsor across the street. Its library, brown, bricked,

and ugly. He wonders if Christopher chose Western because it looked better in the

brochures they sent to the house in those thick envelopes. He also wonders if the red-

headed girl from the bus was on her way here to study, but as he enters the almost-

deserted library he remembers it is May and exams are over and the spring semester has

just started and students are not yet cramming. George tries to remember when he was

last in a library—with Christopher when he was still reading from the children’s section?

—and when did he last read a book? Not that he is opposed to reading: he reads the

newspaper daily and has a fondness for John Grisham novels though he has not read one

in some time. He feels somewhat ashamed about this fact, as he walks over to the

library’s catalogue computer, and is happy that it is May and there are few students in the

library.

George performs three searches on the catalogue computer using the following

key words: “Rapture,” “Morse Code,” “French-English Dictionary.” He borrows a pen

and piece of scrap paper from the librarian at the check-out desk to write down the call

numbers for the first books from each list of hits. When she hands him the paper he

decides, without thinking much about it, to ask the librarian her name.

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28 He pronounces the street name “Pelissier” as “Pel-ish-er.” But so does everyone else.

“Kathy,” Kathy says, galloping her fingernails on the counter. They are short and

unpainted and George finds himself wishing they were long and candy-apple red, perhaps

because this is the image he has in his head of a librarian. Kathy does not wear her hair in

a bun, 29 which he also finds disappointing.

“Short for Katherine?”

“Yes, but it’s always been just Kathy.”

“No one has ever called you Kate—or Katie?”

“No, just Kathy.”

“But, I mean, you could’ve been called Katie?” The Katie who wrote her name

and number on a transit map might really be a Katherine, George thinks. The Katie who

quit working at Tim Horton’s and left her name tag might also really be a Katherine.

“Sir, do you need help finding a book?” George realizes he doesn’t know what to

do with the call numbers once he writes them down.

“Yes, please,” he says.

She directs him to the third, fifth, and sixth floors. When twenty minutes later he

returns empty-handed, she orders him to wait at the desk while she retrieves them for

him. George wonders if he will even be allowed to check out a book. He imagines telling

Kathy, the librarian, that no, he isn’t a student, and no, he isn’t an alumnus either. But she

would already know these things, of course. She would’ve been told by whoever has been

fucking with George all night. And what else does she know?30 Everything probably. He

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29 or at least is not currently wearing her hair in a bun, though George assumes she has hair that is bun-length. However, George does not know very much about women’s hair except that it falls out more than he had thought it would.

30 Lots of things, but nothing about whatever George is going on about.

wonders what her real name is.31 Something like Grace. Or Alice. He leaves before she

can return with his books.

George walks east with a purpose now. The Ambassador Bridge is to his back, the

river to his left, black like another sky. It starts to rain. George walks quicker, wheezing

slightly. His clothes are beginning to cling in the uncomfortable way wet clothes do.

When he reaches his destination he is glad the young people have left. He begins to

remove his clothing, heavy with rain, unbuttoning his button-down, unbelting his belt,

peeling away his trousers, lastly stepping out of his muddy slippers. He positions his

clothing on the grass between the remains of the man raptured away while walking his

dog and the woman who had been reading The Da Vinci Code,32 becoming water-logged

and mushy. He places his watch and wedding ring on the grass under his left sleeve, the

transit map and chip bag where his right hand would be, and stands in his undershirt and

a pair of briefs with a dying elastic waistband. He is staring at the outline of himself and

his left-behinds. He stares down at them until he can no longer endure the cold rain on his

bare skin. Then he redresses quickly. He does not know what else to do with his wedding

ring but put it back on his ring finger. He throws the chip bag in a nearby garbage pail.

The transit map lands on top of the chip bag.

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31 Katherine Anne Wallace.

32 Perhaps it would be nice if George thought about the choice of book. Someone has obviously given it some thought, but this is lost on George, though perhaps he is to be forgiven because he has had such a rough night and he is so busy concentrating on whatever meaningless thing it is that he is doing now.

Brilla

“I heard the only PhD’s receiving any sort of funding this year are the environmental

studies students,” Brilla says from Downward Dog, “It’s all big corporation money now.

The oil and gas companies balancing out their karma.” She transitions to Warrior I.

I ask her rhetorically whether she’s shitting me.

“Hope you haven’t spent your trust fund yet.” She spits out a syllable of laughter,

hinges forward into Warrior III.

I take my time doing up the buttons of my work shirt, facing the living room

mirror in which I watch Brilla doing yoga in her underwear behind me. Her body moves

like it’s swimming in a thick liquid. I tell her there’s a pot of oatmeal on the stove.

“I’m so fucking sick of oatmeal.” She’s in Tree pose now, right heel in her crotch,

arms up, staring at our water-stained ceiling. “Do you remember Denny’s? I’d kill a man

for a goddamn Grand Slam.”

I remember Denny’s Restaurant but not the last time I ate there, though I could

tell you the last time I ate sausage links—Christmas morning nine years ago—and that

they were maple flavoured.

“No funding means more oatmeal.”

“No funding means soup made out of tomato paste and tap water,” Brilla scoffs,

back to Downward Dog.

“Maybe we could get a roommate,” I suggest. We could replace the two single

beds in our room with bunk-beds or annex part of the living room.

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“Only a legitimate psycho would want to live in this shithole with two other

people.”

Minutes later we’ve decided we’ll advertise for a roommate in the AHA (Arts,

Humanities, and Agricultural Studies) Graduate Department.

Keith, my boss at Starbucks, dropped out of the PhD program after four years. A

history major. He often speaks of his unfinished dissertation on the demise of the fast-

food industry as if he’s had to euthanize a beloved pet. Somewhat paradoxically, I have

also heard Keith tell several people that writing a dissertation on fast food was really the

perfect background for becoming a Starbucks manager.

“I know why that industry tanked. I know how to make sure the coffee house

industry doesn’t. Like they say, those who don’t know their history are doomed . . .” He

always leaves the adage unfinished, out of boredom, I suspect.

At today’s staff meeting he tells us about our new hot beverage: the Sea Vegetable

Latte.

“According to market research, the customer wants more nutritional value out of

their coffee. It can’t just be about getting a caffeine fix anymore,” he says.

The Sea Vegetable Latte is the standard almond milk, a shot of espresso, and one

tablespoon of sea vegetable powder, he says. He tells us we’ll need to heat the milk past

the standard 150 degrees Fahrenheit.

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“According to market research, at 160 degrees the taste buds have a hard time

discerning the taste of the sea vegetable, which market research suggests people find

repulsive. Oh, and then add a shake of nutmeg. We can’t forget the nutmeg, people.”

Every time I have to listen to Keith talk for an extended period of time, I can’t

help connecting the freckles on his face into constellations. The fluorescent lights in the

staff room make his skin appear paler, bringing his freckles into even greater focus. Keith

is the only redhead I know personally. The government has been sending him pamphlets

since he turned thirteen encouraging him to mate with other redheads to preserve the

gene, offering to subsidize the post-secondary education of any of his redheaded

offspring. He refuses to go to the national conference until he turns forty or is no longer

getting any. Whichever comes first, he says.

My second customer of the day is a lanky twenty-something three quarters

business casual, one quarter plaid bow tie. He is holding a manilla envelope in front of

his chest with one hand and asks if he can see a manager.

“If it’s a resume I can take it for you,” I tell him, gesturing with my chin towards

the envelope.

“I’d just, uh, rather give it to a manager if that’s alright.” He drops the envelope

below counter-level as if he’s worried I’m going to lean over and snatch it.

I tell him we get about a hundred resumes a week (a slight exaggeration), that the

manager would rather I take it (a slight understatement), and that I don’t mean to be rude

(no comment).

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“Um.” His mouth wrenches to one side of his face, then the other. He shrugs.

“Okay, um, yeah, thanks.” He lays the envelope on the counter and tries to open the flap

and withdraw one of the resumes with the same hand. I now notice his other hand doesn’t

exist. The whole forearm actually. The left arm of his blazer neatly ends at the elbow, the

remaining fabric has been cut off and the sleeve stitched up. I wonder if I should offer to

help or if that would be insulting. No, he would ask if he needed help. The polite thing is

to stand here and watch him struggle. But in case I made the wrong decision, I tell him I

enjoy his bow tie, that I admire his acumen. He stops fiddling with the envelope to stare

at me and emote what I register as utter indifference towards me as a human being.

“You’re a student.” I haven’t seen his resume yet but it’s a safe bet.

“Yeah, PhD,” he says, “Second year. Philosophy.”

“Well, you’ll have a shot then at least. A Master’s degree is pretty much our

minimum these days.”

He succeeds in freeing the resume. The name Quinn S-something-with-a-lot-of-

letters is in what looks like size 32 font on the top of the first page. His resume feels thick

in my hand. At least eight pages, unless he used some sort of fancy thick paper.

I ask about his work experience.

“Marking assistant, research assistant, um, teaching assistant, editorial assistant,

basically I’ve done a lot of assisting,” Quinn says, “Oh, and Banana Republic. I want to

say I was an assistant manager, but I was just a cashier.”

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I start doing the fake laugh that I don’t notice I’m doing until I’m about three

chuckles deep and then want to kill myself. In response Quinn cups his left elbow in his

right hand and stares at the floor.

I try to picture him working the espresso machine one-handed. Then I try to

picture him tying his bow tie one-handed. I decide to make all of the customers’ drinks

with only my right hand for the rest of the day.

There is a blond Nordic-looking woman sitting at the table nearest the counter

trying to convince a younger Asian woman to buy into a pyramid scheme that has

something to do with selling toothpaste and groceries online.

“It’s a completely different business model than anything you’d be familiar with.”

The blond woman is over-projecting like she’s delivering a memorized valedictorian

speech.

“We teach people to change their shopping habits. Instead of paying stores for

products you need, you’re basically buying them from yourself.” The Asian woman’s

voice is inaudible, her ponytail flops up and down as she nods.

“I’m not sure if I’ve already told you, but it’s invite only. We don’t just allow

anyone in. I interview ten people a month and I only pick the sharpest two who I feel are

the most trustworthy to come work with me.” The ponytail agrees.

“I’m sure you’re wondering what we do. And it’s fine to ask what, what, what,

and that’s all in the literature, but I think it’s more interesting to discuss who we are. And

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you should know that one of the people I work with is a lawyer so you know it’s all legal,

it’s all legitimate.”

I begin to study the Asian woman’s nod. It is not the slow nod of agreement at all,

I realize. It comes quick, before the Nordic woman has even finished speaking, as if the

Asian woman is rushing her on, encouraging her to finish her speech as fast as possible

so the Asian woman can extricate herself from this meeting she thought was a legitimate

job interview. I observe that at times the nod is over-exaggerated, the neck almost bends

backwards, as if in mockery, or boredom, the neck seeing what it can get away with, how

far it can go and still resemble a nod. Other times it is little more that a jerking-forward

movement, curt and impatient. A nod saving its energy for more nodding.

“I even asked a five year-old, ‘Where would you rather shop: my store or your

store?’ And of course he said ‘My store!’ Even a five year-old can understand this

business model.”

The Asian woman and her ponytail nod what I am now certain is an uninterested

nod, a patronizing nod, a nod out of sheer politeness, a nod that contains layered

emotions none of which are agreement, a nod that says anything but yes.

I realize I’ve been working two-handed for at least the past hour.

I come home to an empty apartment, books lying on the couch and floor like

untrained house pets. On the rotting trunk we use as a coffee table is a note from Brilla:

Got called in to take closing shift at Monty’s. I’ll try to snag us some faux mignon. xx, B.

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As a cocktail server at Monty’s Stakehouse—“the city’s beefiest meatless

steak”—Brilla makes approximately triple what I make as a barista. This means she

doesn’t have to work as many hours, which theoretically means she has more time to

study for her Candidacy Exams, but after two years she’s only completed one of two. I

am not-so-secretly worried she’ll become another career cocktail server with a Master’s

Degree in Early Modern British Poetry. This is a fight we have: Brilla threatens to drop

out. I voice my disapproval. Brilla calls me an elitist snob. I try to explain that I simply

think putting drinks down on tiny napkins for a living is a waste of two degrees and eight

years of post-secondary education (only once have I commented on the redundancy of the

phrase “elitist snob”). Brilla asks when I’ll realize that degrees mean fuckall these days. I

ask her when she’s going to stop letting stockbrokers pinch her ass for tips. She says I

have no idea what her job is like. I ask how many of her customers enjoy discussing the

Spenserian sonnet with her. Sometimes I tell her she might as well become an honest-to-

god sex worker. She either calls me an asshole or tells me to go fuck myself and then

makes a big show of calming herself down with dramatic yogic breathing. With her eyes

closed she suggests we don’t talk until we’ve both done headstands with our feet up the

wall for at least two minutes.

It’s been three months since I failed the interview Brilla was able to get me at

Monty’s.

I wake to the sound of Brilla’s many unsuccessful attempts to jingle her way into

the apartment via her house key. Then two whispering voices, a thud, a yelp, laughter,

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two pairs of high heels clicking towards the bedroom. When Brilla brings guests home

I’m to face the wall and pretend to be asleep. Those are the rules. Tonight’s guest is a

loud moaner. How she believes I’m sleeping through this, I’m not sure. Possibly, she

hasn’t noticed the sleeping roommate. Possibly, she hasn’t even noticed the other bed. In

any event she sounds like an animal being beaten. I imagine Brilla and a faceless woman

cycling through erotic yoga positions that defy the logic of physics. In my head they are

floating above the sheets, their legs excited about their new unnatural angles. I try to

ignore the heat between my legs. I bring the covers over my head and then turn slowly,

slowly onto my other side. My bed squeaks and I freeze. I stay frozen listening to see if

their heavy breathing changes. I stay frozen until I’ve used up all the oxygen under my

covers and start to feel feverish. Then I slowly, slowly shape a bit of the comforter into a

peep hole and through a tunnel of blanket I can see Brilla kneeling in camel pose, hips

jutting towards the headboard, the streetlight coming in through the tablecloth we’ve

tacked to the window, and under its lemony glow: a woman with curly dark hair.

When the woman in her bed falls asleep, Brilla wordlessly climbs into mine and

gets under my lumpy, unwashed comforter with me. We sleep the only way two people

can sleep in a single bed: on our sides, pressed together. I can feel Brilla’s breasts against

my back, nipples agog, her breath on my neck. She smells like overripe fruit.

It does not go the other way around. I am not allowed to get into Brilla’s bed. This

is another of Brilla’s rules. We need boundaries, she says. What are we? Two best friends

living together, she says.

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Brilla strokes my hair like she’s comforting a child and I want to break every bone

in her hand.

“Don’t cry,” she whispers. “You’re my family. I need you,” she says, and I feel

profound hatred for her. I won’t let her sleep in my bed ever again. I will move out. I

won’t tell her my new address and I will refuse to see her. And then she rakes her

fingernails up my spine and I am in love again, on fire with love, and it is a scorching,

searing, melting kind of pain.

When we graduated high school Brilla was going to be a librarian and I was going

to be a journalist. We couldn’t afford schooling for these things but we would network,

make connections, get our foot in the door and then work our way up, our bootstraps

pointing north. In the meantime we were excited to live a romantic life of destitution. We

would live together in a garret, sleep in a giant canopied bed that filled the whole room,

drink only wine, eat only baguettes and olive tapenade. We would decorate with

cobwebs, moths, and flowers stolen from taxpayers’ gardens. We would smoke cigarettes

with our upper bodies hanging out of our third-story windows, our nightshirts billowing

like kites in the wind. We would bathe in a clawfoot tub, wash each other’s hair. Fall

asleep after reading each other poetry. We were anti-technology before the zeitgeist saw

people throwing their laptops in the river. We attended public smartphone smashings but

only watched on the sidelines. We had nothing worth smashing.

While we bided our time until our real careers took off, we would work

meaningless jobs that would build character, jobs we could laugh about later. When we

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were finally overseeing the poetry section of the library and covering breaking news

stories we would say things like remember when we had to replace the urinal cakes in the

downtown public restrooms? Remember when we tried to sell those overpriced knives

door-to-door and the only people who didn’t slam their doors in our faces were the old

men in their underwear?

With Brilla’s measly graduation money from her grandmother we rented the

closest thing we found to a garret: a drafty fourth-floor one-bedroom apartment in a

crumbling building we were told was pre-war, though we didn’t know, or care, which

war. We brought our childhood beds from our former homes and fashioned makeshift

canopies by stapling bed sheets to the ceiling. We carried a scratchy plaid sofa that was

sitting next to the dumpster behind the bank six blocks and up floor flights of stairs.

Brilla made me lay on it for an hour in my underwear and then asked whether my skin

felt like it had been bitten by bedbugs. Every time I walked through our apartment door I

announced, “Honey I’m Home!”—even if it had only been to take out the garbage. And

then Brilla would ask about my day at work. Did I finish those expense reports? Did

Johnson keep me late? She’d been slaving over a hot stove all day and wished I would’ve

called. But when we tried to find any sort of work we were turned away. They wouldn’t

even take our resumes and pretend they would call us if there was an opening. “I’ll save

you your paper,” they said. Who knew you needed a Bachelor’s degree to change urinal

cakes in the downtown public restrooms? A Master’s degree to sell knives door-to-door?

Everyone else who had applied for the same jobs had at least one post-secondary degree,

we were told repeatedly. How does someone become a window-washer? How does

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someone become a shepherd? Do shepherds still exist? We didn’t know. We felt sure we

could become top-rate fence painters if only someone would unlock our potential. We put

up hand-drawn flyers all over the city advertising our services as dog walkers,

babysitters, house cleaners, but everyone who called wanted us to bring our university

diplomas to the interview and offer our professors as references. Could we forge realistic-

looking diplomas on the computers at the library? We could not. Would the government

fund the educations of two sad saps like us? It would.

Keith assigns me to train Quinn. I lead him down to the lower level where we

keep the full-scale replica of the behind-the-counter part of the store, complete with a

working espresso machine, everything fully stocked. There is even a duplicate tip jar by

the till. I hand Quinn the simulator goggles.

“You’ve done simulator training before?”

Quinn shakes his head.

“Okay, so I’ll pretend to be a customer. The goggles will display prompts in your

field of vision for what you should say to me, like ‘ask customer if it’s still a beautiful

day outside.’ Then I’ll order a beverage. The goggles will register whatever I’ve asked for

and display a list of steps that’ll walk you through how to make that beverage, how to

ring it in on the till, everything. It’s a little weird at first seeing computer text layered

over what you’d see naturally, but you get used to it. Whenever we get new beverages on

the menu, we all come down here and practice. We used to have trainees wear them

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upstairs while serving real customers but it freaked them right out—the customers I

mean.”

Quinn lifts the goggles to his face, holds them in place with his left elbow, and

swiftly pulls the elastic band behind his head with his right hand.

“I was born in Alberta,” he says.

I say okay. I tell him I was born here.

“I mean if you’re wondering about my arm—or lack there of, I was born in Fort

McMurray. Right after the EnerCore explosion.”

Later I tell him Brilla and I are looking for a roommate. “It’s just a one-bedroom

but we still can’t afford it just the two of us.”

He asks if Brilla is my girlfriend. I say it’s complicated. And then I ask who even

believes in relationships anymore.

“Monogamy’s a little patriarchal, don’t you think? But basically, yeah, she’s my

girlfriend,” I tell him.

We give him the whole living room. He says he really likes wearing bow ties so

we’ll have to learn how to tie them.

Brilla and I have kissed twice in our lives. The first time: we were eight and Brilla

and her mom were living with me and my dad. Our parents were always either fighting or

screwing, activities an eight year-old has a hard time distinguishing except that one

happens behind a closed door, most of the time. We deigned to stay outside, playing in

the unkempt grass behind the apartment building, becoming more and more feral. She

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suggested a game called Lifeguard. How it works: the high grass beyond the scraggly

bush is the sea, in which one player is violently drowning, pantomiming being thrown

about in the swell, calling desperately to the other player, the lifeguard, who then feigns a

dive, arms over head, paddles easily, and drags the limp-bodied victim back to the beach

on the other side of the scraggly bush.

“I’ll do mouth-to-mouth and bring you back to life,” Brilla said.

I laid down in the brambly grass and closed my eyes. Her tongue darted into my

mouth and I saw the colour pink bursting behind my eyes.

The second time: when we were twelve we stole a bottle of gin from behind the

television where my father put things he wanted to forget about. To minimize the

evidence we didn’t bother mixing it with anything. We didn’t even bother with glasses.

We sat cross-legged in my bedroom (Brilla and her mom had since moved out) and

passed the bottle back and forth. “It tastes like Christmas trees,” Brilla said. I filled my

mouth, held my nose shut, and swallowed hard. After a few more swallows my body

turned into warm soup. I grabbed Brilla’s face, kissed her, and then vomited on her

socked feet.

“We can never do that again,” Brilla said. I didn’t have the courage to ask whether

she meant the drinking or the kissing.

Brilla admits to me that she is strangely attracted to Quinn’s stump. I tell her I

don’t think she should be calling it that.

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“I’ve been trying to walk in on him without his shirt on, but he changes his

clothes in the bathroom.”

I tell her that’s probably because she’s being a creep.

“I just want to see what it looks like. I bet the skin’s really smooth and shiny. You

remember ham slices? Like when you could buy packages of lunchmeat? Remember how

there was always that iridescent, oblong shape on every slice? I bet it looks like that.”

After Quinn moves in Brilla stops bringing women home with her. One day she

decides to push our beds together in the middle of the room and suddenly we aren’t just

two childhood friends living in a one-bedroom out of convenience and poverty. We spend

whole days on the bed, door closed, ignoring Quinn. When we need to pee or take a drink

of water we use the books scattered on the floor like rocks in a stream, hopping from

book to book, making our way to the door, and then running back as fast as we can. We

read with our heads on each other’s stomachs, we sleep curled like kittens, and I think:

this is it. I want to kiss Brilla for the third time but worry it will make her change her

mind, that she’ll say forget it and slide our beds apart.

Quinn is more studious than the two of us. He spends the hours between eight and

noon every morning on the futon he brought with him, encircled by library books,

multiple bookmarks protruding from each one like colourful tongues. He still uses a

MacBook to type up his notes.

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“I didn’t think anyone used one of those things anymore. The last time I saw a

laptop it was being hurled into the river,” I say, hugging the weight of my thirty-pound

Underwood to my chest.

“I guess I’m just old school,” he says.

Brilla asks Quinn to help her study.

“I think I could be applying psychoanalytic theory to some of Byron’s poetry.”

At the next staff meeting Keith informs us that Starbucks is now facing several

lawsuits re: the Sea Vegetable Latte which has apparently cause third-degree burns on the

hard palates of the mouths of several patrons across the country.

He also informs us that this is the year he will finally make an appearance at the

national redhead conference, though he is outraged that the program’s directory lists him

as “burnt orange.”

“I always thought I was bright copper,” he says wistfully.

No one asks whether he’s recently turned forty.

My hours increase while Keith is away. I am given the closing shift three nights in

a row and entrusted with the key.

On the third night I come home to Brilla and Quinn sitting on the floor around the

coffee table-trunk. Brilla is in denim cut-offs and lotus pose and is holding a large and

expensive-looking bottle of something dark—whiskey, rum, I can’t read the label. Quinn

has my mug in his hand, the one Brilla bought me from a garage sale and wrapped up in

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one of her sweaters for my last birthday: “World’s Best Grandma” in fake child crayon-

scrawl. Brilla looks up at me, her eyes wet and sparkling, then reaches for my hand, pulls

me to the floor.

“I stole this from work,” she says, “Have some, we’re celebrating.”

I want to get out of my uniform, take a hot, or at least lukewarm, shower, but it

seems imperative that I do what it is they’re doing, that if we don’t split this bottle three-

ways, if we don’t become equally shitfaced, it will somehow reshape the dynamic of our

roommate relationship. Three is a cruel number. I ask what we’re celebrating.

“That we’re not dead yet.” Brilla swigs from the bottle.

I get up to grab the plastic egg cups we sometimes repurpose as shot glasses and

even in the twelve steps from the living room to the kitchen and the twelve steps back,

I’m certain there are new inside jokes I will now be outside of, that they will later say to

each other “Remember when?” and will know exactly what to remember. When they are

slapping their thighs with laughter, I will ask “what? what?” and they’ll say “Sorry, you

had to be there. Sorry, you were in the kitchen.”

Brilla is a loud, animated, raucous drunk. She is up on her knees now, bobbing

and swaying like a buoy in rough water, her cheeks gone crimson. She shakes her hair in

front of her face after every shot and then flips it back over her head. The cumulative

effect is that her hair has doubled in size, tangled and wild. Quinn drunk is a lot like

Quinn sober: quiet and hard to read.

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Brilla pours us another shot and we cheers our plastic egg cups together. Brilla

says, “Clink!” and some of the brown liquor spills onto her bare leg. She wipes it up with

her finger, licks the finger clean, downs the shot, shakes and flips her hair.

Perhaps because I am drunk and courageous, perhaps because I am desperate and

want to impress Brilla with my daringness and spontaneity, I suddenly turn to Quinn and

ask if we can see it.

“See what?”

I reach forward and place a hand on his tricep. Quinn recoils as if it stings.

I expect Brilla to chime in with equal curiosity, to pounce on Quinn, suggest we

all take our clothes off, but instead she acts the calm voice of reason: “Hey, no, it’s cool.

Let’s do another shot, or hey, let’s play a game or something.”

At first I feel ashamed, but then I notice Brilla and Quinn looking at each other as

if they already have a delicious inside joke, looking at each other like two people who

have committed crimes together and swore not to speak of them: Brilla reading the

blankness of his face and spelling something back, and then I feel too invisible to feel

ashamed. I cannot feel ashamed because I am not the cause of anything. I feel these

things too: that Brilla has already seen what I haven’t, that Quinn has done with Brilla

what I haven’t, that she won’t sleep in our makeshift double bed tonight, that her ice-cube

toes won’t brush against the the warmth of my shin, that I won’t have the strength to

move out, that she will suggest I take the futon, that she will insist that nothing’s

changed, that we are family, that we can all still be friends, and I will try to believe her. I

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know all of these things at once and with complete certainty. They come in a single flash

that feels like walking into the sun.

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Buttercup

It is someone’s birthday today. If there are approximately seven billion people in the

world and exactly 365 days in a year (granted sometimes 366), then it is roughly nineteen

million people’s birthdays today (assuming today is not February 29th). Let’s say half of

these nineteen million are female: 9.5 million roughly, for simplicity’s sake. Statistically

speaking then, there are a lot of seven-year-old girls having a birthday today. It is safe to

assume that one of those seven-year-old girls wished for a pony. Probably many of those

seven-year-old birthday girls did. Most know they will not be getting a pony. It is just

something they write on their birthday list every year or think about whenever their

parents give them a rusty penny to throw into a mall fountain or when they are expected

to make quiet prayers in church with the rest of their classmates. Except for that handful

of seven-year-old girls who will actually get a pony. It is likely these girls won’t even be

that excited or surprised about getting a new pony because they are the type of girls who

get everything they have ever wanted and asked for (and even things they didn’t know

they wanted and hadn’t asked for) and they have, of course, been blessed with really

shiny hair and life has not yet been hard for them and so they will expect a pony and they

will get a pony. Maybe they got a pony last year too. They will add this pony to the

veritable heap of birthday ponies. They will name this pony Buttercup or Dumpling and

display their first place ribbons in their pink and white bedrooms and they won’t

understand why they are hated by many of the other girls at school. But most of the

seven-year-olds won’t get a pony. That goes without saying. Some of the birthday girls

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might not get anything at all. Perhaps their parents forgot. Or they don’t have parents, or

even grandparents or aunts or uncles or anyone to buy them presents. Perhaps they are

foster children and their foster parents don’t know it’s their birthday. Or don’t care.

Perhaps their parents did remember but couldn’t afford presents. Perhaps their parents

made them something instead or cooked their favourite meal or took them on a special

adventure into the woods to build forts and find treasures and that was better than a

present. Because they are that type of family. You could make up any sad or happy story

and say it probably happened to one of those seven-year-old-girls on her birthday. You

would probably be right. The odds are in your favour. We are talking about a lot of little

girls here.

You could make up a story like this one: someone is turning seven today. She

wished for a pony. Her parents saved up all year for not only the pony but the stable fees

and riding lessons. They stopped eating out at that fancy restaurant they like and started a

swear jar into which they contributed a dollar for low-end curse words that are allowed

on cable television and a five for high-end ones that are not. They surprised themselves

with how much money they could save by bringing their own coffee to work in reusable

thermoses. On the day of the seven-year-old’s birthday her parents drove her out to the

stable to meet her new pony. They blindfolded her so she wouldn’t know where they were

going. Her father checked to make sure she couldn’t see anything by pretending to punch

her in the face. She didn’t flinch so he helped her into the backseat of their SUV, buckled

her seatbelt, and kissed her on the top of her shiny head of hair. They drove fifteen

minutes outside the city to a place called Country Meadows where they were boarding

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her pony. Her parents made her promise to keep her blindfold on until they said so and

after they pulled into the gravelly parking lot, they helped her out of the car. Each parent

held one of her hands, and as they gingerly guided her inside the barn, they looked at

each other over the top of their daughter’s head and smiled excitedly, or perhaps proudly

or victoriously, at each other. The pony was wearing a bright red bow around his neck

and there were balloons tied to the gate (her mom had already been to the stable early that

morning while her daughter was still sleeping—her mom had also already been to Baskin

Robbins to pick up her pre-ordered horse-themed ice cream cake which was now waiting

back home in the freezer). When her parents told her she could remove the blindfold and

she saw her pony, the seven-year-old squealed a delightful seven-year-old squeal and her

father lifted her up so she could put her arms around her pony’s neck and nuzzle her face

into his mane. She named him Buttercup, naturally. She jumped up and down declaring it

her best birthday ever. She told her parents they were the best parents ever. She told

Buttercup he was the best pony ever. She took riding lessons for two months, her mother

leaving work early on Tuesdays and Thursdays to drive her out of the city to Country

Meadows.

Then some of her friends began to have their birthdays and some of those friends

got iPhones for their birthdays and now she wishes she had gotten one of those instead.

This seven-year-old is now tired of riding lessons. She is sick of having to wash and

groom her pony. The braids in Buttercup’s mane have grown ratty and sad-looking. His

underbelly has been caked in sand and dirt for quite some time now. The seven-year-old’s

parents can tell their daughter is growing bored of her pony. They have to drag her away

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from after-school cartoons on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Several times she has even

pretended to be sick. Plus, the financial burden of owning a pony is more than they

anticipated. They had forgotten to factor in vet bills. They will sell Buttercup soon and

the seven year-old will not complain as long as her parents promise to buy her an iPhone.

What a horrible story. But sadly it is true, probably. Surely, this must have

happened for some seven-year-old girl somewhere. The odds are in our favour. Because,

as is common knowledge, seven-year-old girls are complete and utter assholes.

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Talking About the Weather

“Tell me about the outside world,” she says. Her blonde hair is darker than usual:

unwashed, it’s gathered itself into limp strings, spaghetti-thick.

“It’s not as cold as it looks outside.”

“Not the weather. Dear Lord, not the weather. Talking about the weather is for

people who have nothing else.”

I nod but don’t say anything. The problem isn’t that we have nothing but that we

have too much. I realize it’s a privilege to talk about the weather. How nice it would be to

have only humidity levels and the chance of precipitation.

“Tell me a joke,” she says. She’s flipping through a magazine lying on the table

between us, its pages rippled by past moisture, but I can tell she’s not reading any of the

words or really looking at any of the pictures. It’s just a thing she’s doing like biting her

nails.

I am not one of those people who collects jokes and carries them around in my

head. I’ve always been envious of those people. There have been many times I’ve needed

a joke. For instance, the last time I was getting my hair cut. I have exactly one joke and

it’s a terrible, racist one. It’s the one about how to fit a large number of people into a

small car. It’s not that I ever tell this racist joke, so I don’t know how it got there or how

I’ve managed to hold on to it all these years. I just don’t have the memory for these types

of things. At the restaurant I have to write down everyone’s order. Even if it’s just two

Pepsis. Otherwise, I’ll be at the fountain debating between Seven-Up and Orange Crush. I

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must be Dollarama’s biggest consumer of coiled notebooks, the miniature type that can fit

into the square pockets of a server’s apron. Same way with movies. I can watch a movie

ten times and be surprised every viewing. I’ve had boyfriends who do nothing but quote

movies at me and then whiz their hand over my head when I stare back, dull-eyed like a

fish.

I hate telling her I don’t have any jokes, I want to be able to give her something.

Something other than the blue teddy bear I brought that’s still sitting in my purse. As

soon as I saw her I knew it was a mistake. What would she do with a blue teddy bear? It’s

not even a great teddy bear as far as teddy bears go. It could be softer, bigger, maybe even

comically large. It could be wearing a bow tie. Maybe I should’ve sprung for one of those

personalized ones you build yourself at that store in the mall, the one full of children

celebrating their birthdays. I tend to avoid places where children outnumber adults: zoos,

fast food restaurants, toy stores. And so: the bear sitting in my purse has absolutely no

anthropomorphic charm, he’s not even holding a balloon. If I handed her the dumb thing,

she’d take one look at it, know I picked it up at the pharmacy on the way over here, that

there weren’t many options, that it was either this or a stuffed owl in a graduation cap

holding a felt diploma.

She basically lives here now, at the hospital, waiting. Sometimes when I’m at

work I think of her, waiting. What does she do all day? There are only so many cups of

vending machine coffee a person can drink. When I’m at the restaurant and I happen to

think about what she must be doing at that exact minute, I can only picture her staring

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straight ahead, unblinking. I don’t even picture what she is staring at, I can only picture

her staring, waiting.

I’d say I don’t like hospitals, but it’s not even worth saying.

“Tell me about something you read in the newspaper or online or something,” she

says.

I don’t get the paper and the last thing I googled was “baby in ICU.” From there I

read an article about a baby born in Pakistan with a disease called Harlequin-type

ichthyosis which causes the skin to look like diamond-shaped scales, red cracks filling

the spaces in between. In the accompanying photo the Pakistani baby also had bloodshot

eyes and a bright red gash of a mouth. The caption read “Tiger-Striped Baby.” The thing

about the internet is you just keep clicking: next it was a 44-pound baby, then the world’s

oldest mother of twins.

“Okay,” I say, “I read this one story about a man and his dog.”

“Oh God, is it sad?”

“Yes. No. I guess it’s happy-sad.”

“Alright, give it to me.” She gathers her knees to her chest as if in preparation.

“Okay, so this man in Michigan, or maybe it’s Wisconsin or Illinois—somewhere

bordering the Great Lakes—he has this dog with—”

“If the dog dies, I’m getting you banned from visiting hours.”

“No, no, it doesn’t die, it just has really bad arthritis and it can’t get to sleep at

night because of the pain. So this guy carries his dog—and it’s a big dog, maybe a

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German Shepherd—out into the lake every night. And so he holds his dog in the lake and

the water apparently soothes him to sleep. He does this every single night so his dog can

get to sleep without pain. But here’s the other part of the story: this guy says it was the

dog who saved his life. When his marriage ended, he started having suicidal thoughts, but

then—Okay, yeah, I guess it is pretty sad.”

She nods and I think about things I haven’t thought about until now. What does

this man do in the winter when the lake water is too cold or frozen even? Do the great

lakes freeze over? Will the dog be dead by winter? I left out the dog’s age: nineteen, if

you times that by seven the dog is already dead.

“Do you have any stories about dumb criminals?” she asks. I wish I did. I try to

think up one on the spot but I only get as far as a guy trying to steal his own car and then

wonder how that could possibly be a crime.

I didn’t think we’d be sitting in a waiting room like this. The internet led me to

believe I’d be trying to pick her baby out of a line-up of other bluish babies, that the

babies would be lying on metal carts that make them look like they’d been ordered from

room service. Though I wasn’t sure I wanted to, I was at least sure I’d have the option to

put my hands into those big gloves and reach into the incubator and stroke the baby’s

cheek. But instead we’re sitting on facing couches, couches probably chosen for their

stiffness so the hospital doesn’t have to post signs telling people not to sleep here. I want

to ask when we’re going to see him, but maybe that’s not how these things work, family

only, or maybe she knows better than to let me near her son, maybe she knows I spent the

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afternoon googling babies in ICU and comparing the incubators to the plastic hamster

cage I owned when I was twelve. Maybe she knows that I can screw a kid up for life from

just one glance.

When her mom called all she could get out was, “He’s here.”

“He’s here, he’s here,” she said, voice breaking, and I stupidly demanding, “Who?

Who? Who’s here?” The baby shower over a month away.

I hope she got the messages I left on her cell: that I might be coming down with

the flu and should probably stay away from the hospital until I was sure, that I would

definitely come on the weekend, then that I had to work a double shift but would

definitely come the day after tomorrow. If she’s wondering why it took me over a week to

get here, she doesn’t say so.

I want to ask her what she does here all day. If she’s made any friends. You

always hear about that: friendships made in hospital waiting rooms, people bonding over

their desperation. You can skip the weather and the other small talk and go right to the

important stuff: the tests that are always inconclusive, the nurses, the doctors who seem

to know absolutely nothing or are keeping it a secret. Do people who meet in hospital

waiting rooms stay friends on the other side? Or do they go their separate ways, later

ducking into the next aisle at the grocery store to avoid having to talk about the weather

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with the person they knew from another lifetime when they badmouthed pediatric

surgeons to pass the time?

The thing is we don’t have that much in common. I often wonder if we would be

friends if we met each other now. Would we even like each other? She was the first girl in

our grade to get a perm and a second piercing in each ear. I was the girl whose mom

picked out her outfits with coordinating floppy hats. She was outgoing, fearless. One time

I threw up under my desk because I was too shy to raise my hand and ask permission to

go to the washroom. We became friends in our school’s rosary club of all places: I was

trying to avoid the playground at recess, she was fervently offering up her Hail Mary’s to

children in Haiti. She still goes to church every Sunday, I came out to my parents as an

atheist after high school. All she wanted was to get married, buy a house, have a bunch of

babies, and I’ve got my head in the sand. A bad joke of mine: the restaurant I work at is

called the Sandbar.

I discovered I could cure my shyness in three drinks and she got married. She and

her husband have one of those “lived across the street from each other when we were

children” type love stories. And then fifteen years later they were married in an old

Catholic church. She asked me to take communion when it was time.

“Everyone will be watching. And you’re Catholic, technically. It’s not like you’ve

called up Rome to take you off the list.”

If I didn’t believe in anything then what would it matter? But when I put the host

on my tongue I was certain I was going to hell. I made a clumsy sign of the cross and

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waited for my smiting. I wondered if they would carry on with the service, everyone

stepping around the dark hole where I had been standing when the lightning bolt struck

me down and incinerated me into nothingness. Now all their mutual friends are other

married couples. They have dinner parties and go on ski trips. I was invited once, for

Scattergories and Taboo. “Bring Chris,” she said, but it was Craig and we had already

broken up.

Mostly she meets me away from her house: at my apartment or a restaurant like

we’re secret lovers. She always asks the same question: “How’s your love life?” But she

doesn’t mean love, not in the Catholic sense anyway. She means sex, and she wants

details: the positions they want it in, the sizes and shapes of their penises, the things they

call out when they have about three pumps left. I make almost all of it up. I know she

doesn’t want to hear about sharing chicken fajitas for two at an Applebee’s with a

computer programmer I met online. I hardly ever go on second dates anymore, never

mind to bed.

“Get this,” I told her, “Zack wanted to do it in his car in front of his parents’ house

when he knew they’d be home watching American Idol. So he parks right in front of their

bay window and it’s barely even dark outside and I’m praying they’re not the type of

people who get up during commercials.” She doesn’t judge me for using the word

“praying” in the colloquial sense.

“Get this, Paul wanted me to watch a sex tape he made with his ex-girlfriend.”

“Get this, Frank’s frank was so long and floppy I could’ve made balloon animals

out of it.”

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“What does that even mean?” she shrieks and then we’re both laughing so hard

we’re wheezing like asthmatics.

It’s a thing I can do for her, make her feel better about having sex with only one

man.

I wonder if I should try it now, make up a story about some guy nicknaming his

penis “the Skipper” and ordering it around my vagina like it’s a sailboat, but when I think

about her baby in a glass tube behind some door somewhere, my vagina seems irrelevant.

But then so do dogs with arthritis and dumb criminals.

The thing about being an atheist is you can’t offer prayers. I can’t tell her I’ve

been praying hard this past week, and if the worst were to happen, I can’t say he’s in a

better place now. I can’t tell her he’s an angel, I can’t tell her she’ll hold her baby again

when the time’s right. No one wants to hear the things an atheist has to offer when the

worst happens.

“What do you say we get out of here?” I ask. We could go to the mall, get her hair

washed by a professional, sit at the bar that overlooks the river and drink caesars with

extra pickles.

“I can’t,” she says, without even considering it.

All of her features are large. Sometimes I don’t know how they all fit on her face.

But her eyes take up the most room, the cartoon eyes of a Disney princess. When they

start to well up, you know it right away. There’s no hiding tears in eyes that big.

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“I’m sorry,” I say, but for some reason I keep going, “I just mean for an hour and

then come right back here. I just thought you could use a break. Or we could wait till

Brad’s done work and then he could stay and we could go just for a little bit.”

“You go,” she says, “Go get some fresh air. You can come back later if you want

to. Or tomorrow. I’ll be here whenever you want to stop by.”

“I don’t want to leave you here,” I say, which is more true than “I want to stay

here with you.” I offer to grab us some real coffee, promise to be right back. “Skim

Latte?”

“With whipped cream and chocolate shavings. And maybe some ice cream. And a

slice of pizza.” She wipes her eyes.

In the parking lot I devour the air like I’ve been underwater too long. When I start

the car, a song by Bon Jovi that I don’t like is playing, but I don’t change the station. I

catch myself singing at a red light: We’ve got each other and that’s a lot. For love, we’ll

give it a shot. Woa-ohhhh.

The woman behind the counter at Starbucks asks if it’s getting colder out there.

She gestures to the window, to the weather.

“Extra whipped cream please,” I say, and then add, “It’s for a friend.”

She eyes me like: yeah, right.

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I will go back to the hospital. I will present her with a chocolate frappuccino, one

third whipped cream. A slice of greasy pizza, the kind that if you hold it by just the crust,

all the toppings are pulled by gravity towards the floor. A box of twenty Timbits—

“anything but plain.” An Oreo McFlurry because an ice cream cone wouldn’t have fared

well on the drive. I will drive around the city for an hour, collecting calories.

“You forgot to get something for yourself,” she’ll say, laughing.

The pizza will be nearly cold, the McFlurry gone soupy.

When Brad shows up, I’ll leave. I’ll go back to my apartment. I’ll forget to think

about the baby in the glass tube for vast stretches of time. I’ll check my internet dating

profile to see if any non-bald men want to take me out to an expensive restaurant where

we’ll drink two bottles of gewurztraminer even though he prefers red. And if he suggests

dancing afterward, I won’t say no. My head full of bubbles, pulsing, my body electric and

wanting to be close to another body, any other body, swaying to music that is fast and

loud and has no words.

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106

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108

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Q: What if once I have birthed my fur baby I am unsatisfied with him/her and no longer

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A: Just as with human babies, there is unfortunately no way to guarantee that you will

like them and they will like you simply because you’ve given them the most precious gift

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as one might assume they’d be. Often their skin is redder than you’d expect or else it is

inexplicably covered in soft, dark, downy fur. And perhaps you figured that the others

who have become parents before you were exaggerating. Surely the baby does sleep, at

some point, hence the expression “slept like a baby,” and while the baby is asleep, for

however long, certainly the parents could also be sleeping, catching naps at least here and

there, so that when they say “We literally haven’t slept in days” they must be lying, trying

to extort pity or free babysitting. It can’t be that bad. But it will be that bad. You literally

won’t sleep for days. Your baby will seemingly always be screaming, even when it’s

asleep you will hear it screaming in the deep recesses of your mind or somewhere even

deeper so that when your partner is watching little Charlie or little Gracie so that you can

escape to the grocery store, say, which now seems like an “outing” rather than a “chore,”

and are in the produce section checking expiry dates on the pre-washed bags of spinach,

you will begin to hear a soft cry, a soft cry which will give way to the insipid wail with

which you are now all too familiar. At first you think someone else’s baby is wailing in

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the produce section. You look around. No babies. Perhaps you even check the

neighbouring cereal aisle and the canned vegetable aisle next to that. No babies there

either. No, you are left to conclude that the scream is inside you, a part of you, wedged

somewhere behind your eyes, so deep in the recesses of your skull you’re sure you’ll

need a lobotomy to stop it. And when you do bring little Charlie or little Gracie on your

trips to the store—which can no longer be considered “outings”—other mothers will

beam down into your stroller and ask inane questions like, “Isn’t this the best job in the

whole world?” which makes you want to ask whether they were last employed against

their wills in a gulag labour camp. So. Which is to say. Fur babies, once born, like human

babies are unfortunately nonrefundable.

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Natural Wilderness

1.

When Jeanne and I were still together, I didn’t mind work so much. This was because I

got to spend weekends and every other Friday at home with Jeanne and Charlie, who is

not technically my son but, you know, might as well be, for all intents and purposes,

except when his mother gets the intent and purpose to move to Vancouver with Rick, in

which case it’s sayonara Steve even though Jeanne had been all “think of him as your

own son” for the past five years. Is Charlie now calling Rick “B.D.” for “Bonus Dad”? If

so, I will shit. I will literally shit.

Benny says to just not think about it which is like telling someone to lick their

own elbow. But if anyone could just not think about something it’s Benny, a real man-

shaped moose who burnt up his brain during the crack cocaine craze of the 2020s. The

first time I witnessed him power down, he was out of it for twenty minutes, still standing,

still breathing but his eyes like two dead television sets. Which is why he’s perfect for

this job.

“There’s a cute new cougar in Cabin 27. I mean not like an ass like yourself

would have a chance,” Benny says, but it doesn’t matter because according to Breaking

Up Not Down, I shouldn’t even think about dating again until I’ve taken one month for

every year of the relationship to grieve and “re-find” myself.

I have three months to go.

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Now that I’m spending weekends and every Friday at work—not working but

physically still at Natural Wilderness because where else am I going to go?—things have

started to feel like what’s the point? Like: what am I working towards? It used to be

putting food on the table for Jeanne, college fund for Charlie, Jeanne’s roots need

touching up, Charlie needs the new Nikes with the electric blue swooshes, Jeanne needs

the genuine dolphin-skin yoga pants. If it wasn’t for Ma and Pa’s hospital bills, I might

have quit months ago.

Although, then again, probably not. Jeanne says I have no ambition.

Did I mention Benny used to be a celebrity? You might remember him for his

one-hit-wonder “Who Let The Dogs Back In?”

2.

The phone rings and I answer. “Good morning, it’s a beautiful day in Banff National

Park. Thank you for calling Natural Wilderness, your number one wildlife viewing

retreat. You’ve reached Cabin 12, how may I assist you?”

“Yo AssMan, you gotta do with that longass message every frickin time I call?

You can’t just say like hello or nothin? I gotta listen to that shit every single time? It gets

old, man. And it’s a beautiful day? My ass it’s a beautiful day. Have you even looked

outside? It’s raining, AssMan, it’s frickin raining.”

I look outside. It is raining. No bueno for me and Benny.

I say: “Sorry about the greeting, Jake. I have to, it’s regulation, in case it’s, you

know, management calling.”

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“You ain’t got no caller ID up in there, AssMan?”

Reflexively, I look at the base of the phone mounted on the approximation of

wood that is our wall. Why we can’t have real wood walls in the middle of a forest, I

don’t know. “No, no caller ID. We don’t even have cordless.”

“Cordless? What in the eff is cordless?” Sometimes I forget he’s only twelve.

“Well, see, our phone is a really old style with a cord coming out one end, and the

cord connects to the base, so you can only go as far as the cord will—”

“Cord? What in the eff is a cord?”

“ . . . ”

“Never mind, AssMan, you gonna put my daddy on the phone, or what?”

It’s hard not to resent Benny with his two biological children and his wife who is

not, as far as I know, secretly doing the nasty with his brother. I call Benny and he

responds like a dutiful, if very slow dog, his bulging frame lumbering out from behind

the partition that marks off his sleeping quarters, standard issue pajama shirt only half-

buttoned, revealing the rotundity of a stomach that’s gleaming white as the moon. He

takes the phone out of my outstretched hand and lodges the receiver somewhere in the

softness between an erratically whiskered jowl and an undefined shoulder.

Jeanne hasn’t once called and let me speak to Charlie.

“If I send you more money, are you going to actually spend it on a birthday

present for your girlfriend, or are you going to go buy meth again?” He makes eye

contact with me and shrugs like: kids, eh?

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While he’s on the phone, I cook breakfast. The moose breakfast is five eggs, three

flapjacks, four sausage links, four slices back bacon, two cups skillet potatoes. All of this

has been rationed out into cardboard containers of various sizes which fit snugly inside of

a larger cardboard container labelled Monday Moose Breakfast (2). I decide today will be

scrambled eggs though I know Benny prefers sunny-side-up. When they’re scrambled he

doesn’t notice when I only give myself four eggs and him six.

“No, I don’t think selling Percocets to your classmates is an intelligent business

venture even if— No, I don’t want to invest in your— No, I don’t care what your revenue

was last— No, I don’t want to get in on the ground floor,” I hear Benny say into the

phone, and then: “Okay, look, thirty dollars, buy your girlfriend a fake gold locket and

jam a heart-shaped photo of your ugly mug into it— No, I don’t really think you’re ugly

— No, mommy and daddy weren’t lying when we called you the most handsome twelve-

year-old on the planet— Yes, of course you’re still my special little guy.”

We get to drink all the coffee and orange juice we want, which is pretty good even

if the orange juice isn’t from real oranges like it was in the old days.

“Now put your old woman on the phone, wouldya? No, not your girlfriend, why

the hell would I want to talk to your girlfriend?— No, no, I wasn’t calling you stupid—

No, mommy and daddy weren’t lying when we told you you’re the smartest twelve-year-

old on the planet— Yes, of course you can be anything you want to be when you grow up

— Yes, of course even President of the World.”

I never referred to Jeanne as “the old woman,” or even “my old woman.” Mostly I

called her “Jeanne Bean” or “Bean” for short. I called her “Jeanne, Jeanne, the dancing

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queen” when she was drunk, and I called her “Jeanne, Jeanne, the farting machine” when

she was gassy.

Benny talks to his old woman while shoveling food into his mouth with the

robotic efficiency of a kitchen appliance. From what I can hear from this end, he and his

wife are debating whether Jake is receiving enough discipline at home.

“No, I don’t think Rape and Pillage sounds like a video game a twelve year old

should be playing.”

“No, I don’t think he’ll actually shave your head while you’re sleeping if you

refuse to buy it for him.”

“So lock your bedroom door then.”

“Well if he does light the house on fire, maybe we’ll finally be able to move, hey?

Hey? Only joking.”

Benny doesn’t seem to notice that I’ve also given him an extra slice of back

bacon.

3.

This is how Jeanne left: she waited until it was my Friday off. When I came home, the

first thing I noticed was no mound of shoes by the front door where there is always

mound of shoes. The second thing I noticed was no lego booby-trap on hallway rug

where there is always lego booby-trap. The third thing was Jeanne sitting at the kitchen

table surrounded by cardboard boxes. Yes, she’s probably a worthless, trampy slut-cow

like Benny says, but here’s the thing: when I came in and saw the boxes and asked if we

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were moving, Jeanne began to cry. And not just watery-eyed sniffling, no, she was doing

monsoon tears, gulping-for-air crying, so that’s something, isn’t it?

“It’s just that you’re never here,” she said. “Me and Charlie need someone who’s

here full-time.” I began to pace the kitchen, offering to quit, to get a job in the city.

Jeanne said I had no ambition.

“What kind of job could you get, huh? How could you support us? We barely

make ends meet now. I need someone who’s on the up-and-up.” Still sitting at the kitchen

table, she pulled her knees into herself and stretched her t-shirt down over her legs. I

didn’t tell her it made it look like her knee-caps were two rock-hard boobs.

“But I wear a suit to work every day!” I said. Jeanne didn’t find this funny. She

grabbed the bottom hem of my shirt, tried to pull me down to the chair next to hers and

when I stayed standing she began heaving into the plaid wool of my button-up. When she

surfaced, she rubbed the heels of her palms into her eye sockets, an abstract mascara

painting taking shape all over her face.

“Is it the extra couple pounds?” I felt myself suck in. “I can start feeding some of

my portion to Benny. Or maybe I could flush it down the toilet or bury it outside or I’ll

start running again or maybe I could just reason with them—it makes no sense how much

they’re feeding us. It’s like do they want us to become the moose, you know?”

She lifted a forlorn spoon off the table, held it to her chest like an infant. “We’re

going to live with Rick for awhile.”

“Rick? Rick? But Rick lives in a tent!”

“Rick has his eye on the prize.”

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“But Rick’s a drifter! Rick just hitch-hiked here!”

“Rick is really making something of himself.”

“Rick is a busker!” It all made no sense.

“He knows a guy who’s going to teach him sword swallowing when we get to

Vancouver.”

And that was that. Charlie was already with Rick making s’mores or learning how

to juggle, probably thinking this was the greatest day of his life.

4.

We do moose, bears, cougars, wolves, bighorn sheep, mountain goats, and caribou. We

used to do elk but frankly most tourists can’t tell the difference between caribou and elk.

When we’d do Grazing Herd of Caribou, we could hear the tourists yelling things about

“the majesticness of elk” and whatnot, so the big-wigs thought they’d save on costume

maintenance and let people just see what they want to see. Two-Cervidae-one-stone, so to

speak. Plus, the caribou double as reindeer at Christmastime. It was easy to reassign the

elk to positions as caribou or moose so there weren’t many lay-offs. It’s basically just eat

grass, lift head, eat grass again, occasional foot stomp. We also used to do white-tailed

deer, but tourists these days don’t seem to care much about seeing what used to be your

run-of-the-mill deer. Fawns yes, but ever since the Child Labour Board refused to

recognize the 5-8 year-old set as child actors rather than child labourers, and since no one

else could fit into the fawn suits, it’s been only full-grown deer. In last year’s annual

report, only 27% of tourists pulled out their cameras during Deer Frolic so it was adios

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deer. Because deer had to be in top shape for Frightened Fleeing, most of them were

reassigned as cougars or wolves. Except for the vegetarians, naturally, who lobbied to be

goats or sheep. From our cabin you can see the cougars and wolves running the

Employee Training Track on all fours every morning between 5am and 6am if you’re

awake, which I am not because I am a moose.

5.

Natural Wilderness does not close for rain because many tourists are out-of-towners who

buy their tickets way in advance. Rain or shine, we guarantee a fine time (no refunds) is

what it says on the website. We have to be suited up by 8 am. The suit is in two pieces:

head and rump. Am I embarrassed to always be the rump? Jeanne used to tell me I needed

to assert myself more.

“Demand to be the head once in awhile,” she’d say.

“Do you really want to be an ass all your life?” she’d ask.

“But it’s like this,” I’d tell her, “Benny and I both stand inside a giant, hairy

moose suit for hours at a time. Does it really matter if my feet are in the front hooves or

the back hooves? Does it really matter if I jiggle the two front pulleys that control the

movement of the head or if I jiggle the back pulley that controls the swatting of the tail?

Plus, is anyone going to see me in there? Is anyone going to be like, ‘Hey, look, it’s Steve

from high school. Wasn’t he on the football team? Oh, look, now he works as a moose’s

ass. Too bad he couldn’t be the moose’s head. How jealous I’d be if he got to be the

head.’?”

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But okay, I wouldn’t mind being the one who got to see out the eye holes once in

awhile. Sure, I have my flashlight in there for reading during downtime, but it’s just not

the same as natural light. It’d be nice to steer the ship from time to time, be able to see

where we’re going even if we do have to keep a 12 x 12 ft. radius. What Jeanne doesn’t

know is that I did once demand to be the head.

“No offense, Steve, but a rump’s a rump and a rump needs to know he’s a rump

and a rump needs to accept he’s a rump and will always be a rump,” Benny said, and

perhaps because he has about fifty pounds on me, or perhaps because he has a stick ‘n’

poke tattoo of his own name on his forearm in shaky block letters from back in his punk

rock days, I’ve accepted that I’m a rump.

The bus picks us and the other moose up at 8:15 am and deposits each of us

somewhere along the Bow River; being solitary animals we only work in groups during

mating season. The first group of tourists arrives around 9 am and it’s showtime. The

rules of the job are basically the same as a mall Santa: don’t break character, don’t take

off your suit. It’s really not the worst job. Unless it’s raining. There are some things we

say in the biz: How heavy is the moose suit when it gets wet? It’s as heavy as a wet

moose. How bad does the moose suit smell when it gets wet? It smells as bad as a wet

moose. Even mating season isn’t as bad working in the rain. I would rather mount and

hump Carl and Stretch in the female moose suit any day.

When the van of tourists nears our location, the driver presses a button which

sends an alert to our wrist watches. I put down the book I’m reading (Getting out of the

Dumps After Getting Dumped) on the inside of the moose’s underbelly and Benny stops

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thinking of nothing and we get to work: I swat the tail, Benny lowers the head, raises the

head, we trot forward, we turn around, etc., etc. Because we are on the other side of the

river from the van of tourists, we can’t hear what they’re yelling out their open windows,

but usually it’s something like: “Hey, look, a moose!”

A second, different-sounding alert is sent to our wrist watches when the van is out

of viewing distance.

“Way to be an ass,” Benny never gets tired of saying.

Do the tourists know all the animals are extinct and what they’re seeing is two

chubby, middle-aged guys zippered-up together in a moose suit? I mean they must.

Everyone has seen the scientific articles, and if not the scientific articles then the news

reports? But then again Natural Wilderness’s website claims guaranteed viewings of the

last of the endangered Rocky Mountain wildlife on every tour, so maybe not. Benny

thinks as long as people get a picture of what looks like a moose, something their

coworkers will believe is a moose, then they don’t give a shit if it’s two guys in a

synthetic-haired costume, brewing in the musk of their sweat, rainwater, and the general

tang of cooped-up human flesh. But I think maybe people can be blinded by hope, you

know? And the tour guides have this whole spiel about Natural Wilderness’s resident

scientists cloning and slowly re-introducing species back into their natural habitats so

there’s that.

6.

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I’m masturbating in the shower with Benny’s bar of soap, thinking about the splatter of

moles on Jeanne’s left pubic bone when the phone rings.

“AssMan, it’s for you,” Benny calls through the bathroom door.

“Is it Jeanne?”

“It’s your Pa, says it’s important.”

“For fucksakes,” and I’m toweling off at half-mast.

The cord is long enough that you can talk in the bathroom so I open the door a

crack and reach out, palm extended. Benny tells me to catch and the phone hits my hand,

the faux-wood door, ricochets to the floor. And then from the floor the phone begins

screaming the confused, old-man screams of my father, as if he himself has been

dropped.

“Pa, what is it?”

“Ith your Ma, see done stole my teef.”

“What?”

“I didn’t steal his teeth!” Ma must have picked up another receiver. “It was the

nurse! The fat, ugly one! She stole his teeth! They’re so mean to us, Stevie. They call us

Prune Faces and—”

“Your Ma ith beathin me wif her purth.”

“No one is beating you with anything, Harold. Stevie, you need to get us out of

here. It’s making your father crazy.”

“You’re makin me crathy!”

“Can’t we come live with you, Stevie-Honey?”

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My parents think I’m a lumberjack. Naturally, Natural Wilderness made us all

sign confidentiality agreements, the exception being our spouses and common-law

partners who also had to sign confidentiality agreements. Not even our children know,

which is okay really. Would I rather Charlie think of me wielding an axe around a forest

or of me pretending to be a moose’s rump? It’s a no-brainer. Plus, it’s easy to lie to kids.

Mime chopping down the hat stand, bellow a strong “Timber!” and you’ve got them.

Lying to my parents was another story. They had a lot of questions like: “I didn’t think

lumberjacks existed any more?”; “What type of trees do you cut down?”; “Why did we

pay for seven-and-a-half years of college?” I grew a beard. I bought lots of flannel. I read

a lot of books, and let me tell you, books about trees are generally non-riveting. But then

they lost their minds and I cancelled my subscription to Backwoods Monthly.

“Stevie-honey? We wouldn’t be any trouble, honest. You wouldn’t even know we

were there!”

What am I supposed to say? They need constant round-the-clock care. They take

thirty different medications between them. Last week my father thought my mother was a

fish and tried to set her free via the toilet.

“I’m sorry, Ma, I live in a tiny cabin in the woods with another full-grown man.

What do you want me to do?” My penis has gone soft as a baby mushroom.

“Listen Stevie, someone from the future just walked in. I’m going to need to call

you back, Honey.”

It’s not easy dealing with parents with holes in their brains. It really isn’t.

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7.

On Tuesdays we have staff meetings in the main lodge. At one end of the room, decorated

to look like an oversized, rustic cabin, is a fake fireplace. This is where Mr. Tooms, a

Natural Wilderness big-wig, stands, back to the computerized flames, the electric heat

warming his haunches. Those of use who are of wily, flexible stock, the cougars and

wolves mostly, sit cross-legged like a group of fourth-graders on the floor in a semi-circle

orbiting Tooms. The goats, sheep, and bears occupy the furniture—all faux-wood and

plaid—and the rest of us, the moose and caribou, find our places leaning against the back

walls of the room.

Tooms clears his throat with three or four goosey hoots. He says he will introduce

the three orders of business on tonight’s agenda.

“First, I will introduce the first order of business. Order of business the first is that

it’s come to our attention—and by ‘our’ I mean all of the administration who have your—

and by ‘your’ I mean you the employees at Natural Wilderness whether you be sheep or

goats or elk or whatnot—” There is some rustling among us after Tooms’ reference to the

elk that no longer exist. “Your best interests in mind is what we have—again ‘we’ being

us, the administration—which is to say, we know what’s best for this company, and it’s

come to our attention that some of you are tampering or in other ways fiddling with,

which is to say not eating, the food that we have assigned for you to be eating. Maybe

you think it makes no sense that the moose and caribou are given meat-heavy meals when

real moose and caribou—when they existed, I mean, of course—were herbivores. But it

is not for you to be thinking whether it makes sense or not. It is for us, the administration,

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because it is our job to administrate, which means think. And we have administrated long

and hard about the food we have assigned you and we have assigned you food of the first

rate quality to eat. Do you have any idea how much food of the first rate quality costs?

No, of course you don’t because that is for us to administrate about and you to eat. So I

will tell you what the bottom line is. The bottom line is this: we do not want to find out

that you are trading the food we have assigned you and you specifically to eat with other

cabins of other species who have not been assigned that food specifically to them to eat.”

I avoid looking at Gwen and Francine, two sheep who from time-to-time have let

me trade them some of my and Benny’s pork products for some of their leafy greens.

“The second order of business is that we are all—and by ‘we’ here I actually just

mean ‘you’ the employees—getting a little sloppy. We’ve had some complaints—we the

administration, obviously, since we are the ones who have to administrate the complaints,

and do you think that’s fun for us? Is it fun for us to be yelled at while you’re out

enjoying the sunshine? It is not fun for us. Last week a tourist complained that the

mountain goats were lying in the grass, not moving at all. She thought maybe they were

dead, and she found this very boring. Are we the most boring wilderness viewing

retreat?”

“No,” we mumble dutifully.

“No? What wildlife viewing retreat are we then?” He does an exaggerated hand

cupped around ear.

“Number one,” we say.

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“Right, number one, so why did another tourist last week claim she saw what

looked like two bears playing poker with chips and everything? And thanks to my quick

thinking she believed me when I said they used to be circus bears and knew all sorts of

tricks like pretend to play poker and they must have stolen a deck of cards and some

poker chips from one of the maintenance cabins, but will tourists always believe my

quick-witted responses? Yes, let’s hope they do. But also, no, there is a chance they will

not, and they will tell their friends. They’ll say ‘hey, don’t go to Natural Wilderness

unless you want to see two guys in bear suits playing poker.’ And then what? Will we

have jobs? We will not have jobs—‘we’ meaning all of us, administrators and animals.

Will we be able to provide for our families? No we will not. Will we be able to send our

kids to college?” Again he does the cupped hand to ear.

“No,” we respond.

“So to prove our point, we’re going to do Random Firing Squad.”

Not Random Firing Squad.

They haven’t done Random Firing Squad in years. Not since one of the wolves

thought it’d be funny to pretend to transform into a man during a full moon.

“This is, by the way, order of business the third,” Tooms says. Another big-wig

steps forward to hand Tooms a Natural Wilderness souvenir baseball hat. Tooms holds it

upside-down by the brim, shaking it slightly to stir up the pieces of paper inside that we

know all of our names are written on. He draws one out with a magician’s flourish.

“Linda!” he calls.

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Linda runs from the room, face in hands. The rest of us look around at each other,

pretend to wipe our brows like: close, eh?

Linda is—was—a goat. I’ve talked to her once or twice. Seemed nice enough.

“I will now adjourn the staff meeting. The staff meeting is now adjourned.”

8.

We are not allowed visitors in our cabins so when we return from the staff meeting we’re

both surprised to see a young female non-employee pacing our kitchen-living area,

holding up her cellphone and squinting into it like it’s the sun.

“Are you freakin kidding me? Yous gets no service in here? What are you?

Meningitis?”

I tell her I think she means Mennonites but she ignores me, says to Benny,

“Daddy, is this the AssGuy?”

Benny’s daughter—whose name I know to be Arizona after the place she was

conceived while Benny was on tour—is not wearing clothing. What Arizona is wearing is

a pink jumbo-size stuffed animal—a bunny rabbit—the kind you could win at a fair.

Except instead of the bunny’s midsection there is her midsection and her bellybutton and

something inside her bellybutton, a spiked-ball of miniature medieval weaponry. The

rabbit’s legs: gone and in their place two holes through which she has put her own two

legs in knee-high, vinyl boots. Basically, the bottom section of the stuffed rabbit has been

hollowed out and she’s wearing it like a diaper, grey-white cotton tail following her

around the room. Bunny’s arms and head: also gone. Its chest has been fashioned into a

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furry pink bra of sorts. Rabbit ears stick out from her head—on a headband I suppose—

sad and droopy and slightly brownish. Whether Benny’s daughter has mutilated this

carnival animal out of her own ingenuity, or whether a retail store somewhere is making a

profit selling such non-clothing, I really can’t say.

“Hey, AssWhoever, [she snaps her fingers in my face] whatchu lookin at? If you

be thinkin you gonna get up in this, you better be paid cause this ain’t for sale. I ain’t no

gold-shoveler and I ain’t no two-bites ho neither.” What can I say to this? I put my hands

up like: not me!

“PumpkinPie,” Benny says. “How’d you get in here? This is a secured area. No

visitors, remember, SweetFace? Daddy does top-secret work, remember? If management

sees you—Security, they have guns, CuppyCake.” He takes the flannel blanket from the

arm of the couch and tries to put it around her shoulders. She shrugs it to the floor. She

lifts one vinyl-booted foot and brings it down on the coffee table.

“I’ve got two guns of my own, Daddy.” She makes a gun out of each hand,

doesn’t pretend to shoot either, but blows on each as if they’re smoking. “I said, ‘Listen

boyos, you let me see my daddy now and I’ll let yous see what this rabbit here is made of

but like on the inside.’ Then they basically escarted me in here, like six of ‘em, knocking

themselves over, sayin, ‘Please Miss, right this way.’”

“Oh God, please don’t let them see what the rabbit’s made of on the inside, please

dear God, no.” Benny tries and fails again with the blanket.

“Daddy, don’t be so dramatic. I was just pullin their wool. But I don’t get why

you can’t be havin no visitors. Like it’s crazy? Bein the brain sturgeon round here. They

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should be givin you alls the respect. Like who’s they gonna call when the deers get brain

cancer and shit?”

Benny looks at me like don’t blow this so I go make us some lemonade and keep

my mouth shut.

This is what I hear while in the kitchen which is basically just the back wall of the

living area: Arizona needs money so she can rent an apartment with her boyfriend of four

months, Hank, so that they can raise Victor the right way. Benny wants to know who

Victor is. Victor is her friend Felicia’s baby. Why is she going to take care of her friend

Felicia’s baby? Felicia is like totally bored with him and Victor is sooooo cute and if she

takes Felicia’s baby then she doesn’t have to worry about getting an after-baby pooch of

her own and stretch marks and saggy boobs. He should see Felicia’s body, it’s so un-hot

that it’s like the opposite of hot. Also can he co-sign the lease? Arizona pulls the

paperwork out of her furry diaper.

“Maybe it’s time for a job then, hmm, Pumpkin?”

“Daddy, raising Victor will be my job, like duh. Haven’t yous ever seen Teenage

Mommy or High School Knock-Up or My Sweet 16 Baby Shower? A baby’s a lot of

freakin work!”

“What about Hank? Shouldn’t he be supporting you?”

“On a box-folder’s celery? Daddy, do you want me to be livin in a crack house?

With like rats and needles and shit? Maybe I should just be a stripper on the side, huh?

Maybe I should just turn on the red light? And do my tricks walkin on the street like a

street walker, huh?”

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Benny signs the lease. Arizona jumps up and down, dislodging her rabbit ears.

Benny insists on walking her back to Hank’s car parked on the edge of the retreat

even though if he’s seen with a visitor it’ll be the axe for Benny. Victor is in the car also,

in a car seat Arizona and Hank constructed out of two belts and some pillows.

“Don’t be gettin no rear view on my way out the door neither, AssPerv,” Arizona

says to me on her way out, readjusting her ears.

9.

The next morning there is a postcard in my mail cubby in the main lodge. On the front of

the card the word VANCOUVER is spelled out in different icons: the V two branchless

trees leaning away from one another, the C a jumping whale, the O a sun wearing

sunglasses, etc., etc.

From Jeanne:

Your brother has been involved in a terrible sword swallowing accident. Severed

vocal cords, no voice. Can’t busk anymore. As you might expect, running low on

$. Apparently, all other kids now have Nikes with tangerine swooshes and are

calling Charlie “Welfare Kid.” Can you help? Also, Charlie wants to know when

we’re coming home (thinks we’re on vacation). Says he misses B.D. Please help.

Sorry. Please.

I shouldn’t send them anything. I know I shouldn’t send them anything. I should

send them a box of poison oak. I should send them a box of my own feces. The next day I

send them my paycheck less the cost of Ma and Pa’s hospital bills.

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It’s always been this way, me and Rick. In high school he was the one with the

best ponytail, the one who could roll the best joint, the one having sex with all the

teachers during study period. Because he is Baby Blue Eyes, the Golden Boy, the baby of

the family by two years. Our parents used to joke, “Practice makes perfect,” except they

weren’t joking. Rick could talk his way into/out of anything. Like the one time we had a

lemonade stand at the end of our driveway and Rick convinced strangers passing that we

were raising money for cancer awareness. We didn’t even have a sign or the word cancer

written anywhere. Somehow we made over $200 and Rick bought himself a skateboard

and some devil sticks. When I asked what about the cancer awareness, he said everyone

is already aware of cancer. I couldn’t really argue. Plus, he let me keep a fifty.

And now he can’t speak.

But maybe he’s not Charlie’s new B.D.?

10.

Sometimes when Benny and I are in the moose together, he sings. If you remember his

accidental hit “Who Let the Dogs Back In?” then you’ll know the guy can sing. Deep and

rich and buttery. The problem is ever since he burnt up his brain he has no memory for

lyrics. He can’t even remember the lyrics to his one-hit-wonder, not even the chorus

which is literally just “Who let the dogs back in? Who, who, who, who, who let the dogs

back in?” So when he sings in the moose it’s only random words strung together. Today it

was the words “murder, death, kill, die” in various combinations, a preposition or adverb

thrown in here or there. Like I said, he used to be the singer of a punk band. “Who Let

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the Dogs Back In?” was just a joke song he uploaded to the internet that caught on and

soon made him famous. Once commercials started paying him to use the song and he

performed on a few national morning shows, he was officially a joke in the punk scene.

Depressed, he turned to crack. Which is too bad because today when he sang “Die by

death! Murder, murder, murder! Kill me, death! Murder, murder, murder!” it was like the

heavens opened up and a very angry angel was baring his soul.

Later I call my parents. Have they heard about Rick? Pa doesn’t remember who

Rick is and thinks I’m a telemarketer. I try to tell him telemarketing’s been illegal since

the 30s, but all he’ll say is that he isn’t interested in new windows.

“Just had them all replaced. Every one of them. Probably won’t need them

replaced until you’ve retired from the window business so don’t call back, ya hear? Take

me off your list, Son.”

“Pa?”

“Why don’t you guys ever speak English!”

I get him to put Ma on the phone by telling him that I’m also selling cosmetics.

She did hear about Rick but she thinks she’s in a television show and it’s part of the plot.

“They’re probably going to kill off his character soon, don’t you think? Such a

shame though cause he’s such a looker,” she says.

I tell her I love her and she says wouldn’t it be great if I were her son in real life.

But then she has to go because the commercial break’s almost over.

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11.

When I wake up the next day, there is a stranger sitting on the couch.

“Hi, you must be Steve. I’m Dwayne.”

“Where’s Benny?”

“Dunno. I was told to report to Cabin 12 and become a moose which I am so

excited to be. It’s such an honour to be working with you. I am a real fast study and I’m

sure I’ll learn a lot and—”

“Did they transfer him? He’s so big. What other animal could he possibly be? A

caribou? But why?”

“I really couldn’t tell ya. I was just told to watch you make breakfast. And I am so

excited to learn to make breakfast. If we’re being honest, I’m excited to eat breakfast.

Haven’t eaten meat since I was working for McDonald’s. But then of course they decided

Hamburglars were non-essential staff members. The stock market to McDonald’s to

becoming a moose. What a trajectory, eh?”

“Oh shit, oh shit they fired him, didn’t they? Someone must have seen him with

his daughter. Oh shit, Benny.”

“I really can’t say. I just got here yesterday. Been out of work for months. I feel so

lucky, right now. So lucky!”

“God, what’s going to happen to Arizona and Jake?”

“Beats me! What should I be doing right now? What does a moose do right now?”

12.

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When we’re in the moose Dwayne does not shut up.

“This moose costume is way better than the Hamburglar costume ol’ Mickey

Dee’s had me wearing. You know what my job was?”

I do not respond because I am busy reading Ex Marks the Spot: How to Get Her

Back by the natural light of the eye holes.

“My job as Hamburglar was to go around the restaurant stealing kids’ burgers.

Like right from out of their grubby little paws. And I wouldn’t even give them back. That

was my job. And then I’d take the stolen burgers into the kitchen and they’d take out the

half-eaten patties and put them back into the big bowl of ground beef and they’d make

new burgers with them. Even though that meat was already cooked! The kids loved it.

Trying to keep a watch out for the Hamburglar, trying to guard their lunch, and then I’d

pop up from under a table or sneak up behind them and grab that burger out of their

grimy little mitts and they’d just laugh and laugh and try to chase me and grab my cape

and I’d hold the burger up over their heads and they’d try to climb me like a tree. Very

few kids cried. Very few. And then of course the parents would have to go order them a

new burger to replace the stolen one. That was the whole point. A little fun game to

increase revenue. Of course, the parents didn’t like it much, even though a kids’ burger is

like only a couple bucks, so they’d make their kids order chicken nuggets which I

couldn’t steal cause I was the Hamburglar, not the Nuggetburglar, or NuggetNapper

sounds better, and some of the parents started bringing their kids over to Burger King and

that was the end for us Hamburglars.”

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I am excited when our watches beep and it is time for us to shut up and get to

work. I make our moose nibble the grass masterfully.

13.

No new postcard from Jeanne in my mail cubby the next week. Or the week after that.

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Liking It

I want to tell you everything, just come completely clean. Now that the divorce is final, it

seems like a good way for me to make a clean break. And yes, I am aware that this is

completely selfish of me, that I am only doing this for my own sake and not yours, that

this is probably going to hurt you for the benefit of clearing my conscience, etc., etc. That

is fair, but I am going to be selfish now, because, well, you moving to Miami was pretty

selfish too, all things considered.

It started the year before I quit working at the bank. It was the year that one

website was first getting really popular, the one where you’d take a photo, jazz it up a bit

by distorting the colours or adding a border or whatever, then upload it to this site so your

“followers” could see it and “like” it if they liked it. You didn’t really get involved in the

whole hoopla—do you remember when it seemed that at every restaurant we went to at

least one person would get up on their chair when their food arrived so they could capture

the arrangement on their plate without the interference of shadows or other patrons?—

and I told you I respected you for not caring what people thought, but, honestly (as I said,

I am being completely and selfishly honest now) I kind of resented you for it, that you

were above it all, not the type of person to become wrapped up in a superficial,

voyeuristic website the explicit purpose of which was to validate the person whose only

intent in uploading such photos was to show their “followers” what a fulfilling,

whimsically charmed life they had made for themselves, or how edgy and hip their new

bangs made them look, or how tiny their thighs looked from the downward angle of their

135

camera when held at face height. I guess I didn’t really believe that you were truly above

it all. I thought you were just setting yourself apart from the craze to show people how

cool you were, what a free-thinking and original person you could be, which was actually

the whole point of the website in the first place.

Anyway, it was fun at first. The first photos I uploaded were from our trip to

Vancouver. You and I in Stanley Park, me standing on the seawall with the city in the

background, shiny as a souvenir, a beluga whale performing in the aquarium. I only had a

few followers at the time, mostly people I knew in real life: old classmates, people who

worked at the bank, your sister. Most all of them liked the photos. And why wouldn’t

they? They were great photos. We looked so young and happy, and I was happy that other

people could see how young and happy we looked, how smartly we dressed, that we had

the means to afford this trip to Vancouver, although I also wouldn’t have minded if they

thought us romantically poor and non-materialistic.

When we got home I continued to take and upload photos. Our adorably quaint

first apartment—you remember the crown moulding, the overfed bookshelves bloated

with our deliberately yesteryear knickknacks: my collection of cameras through the ages,

your vintage tobacco pipes, though you claim to have only smoked a cigarette once in

your life, with your father—he, swearing it would be his last, thought it’d be funny or

ironic if you smoked with him your first—our record player in the corner on the

industrial cart I spray-painted lemon yellow. In the right light, from the right angle, our

apartment was magical. I was uploading a photo or two a day, arranging on the coffee

table in an artfully haphazard manner an impractically tiny tea cup, the book I had just

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finished reading and had only picked up because its cover was a photogenic, floral

pattern (though it did turn out to be a pretty good read), a feather, the potted succulent I

had bought specifically for this very purpose. I captioned it with something like “having

an enchanting morning” even though it was mid-afternoon and we’d had some sort of

fight earlier and you’d left to go work at the coffee shop down the street because you said

something about how I had turned our home into a toxic environment. I spent the rest of

the afternoon checking to see how many of my followers—I had more of them by then, a

hundred or so—would like the photo. It didn’t seem wrong to me that my photos were of

constructed moments, because to me they were little artworks, and art is deliberately

constructed isn’t it? Like a collage of found items arranged in a shadow box. Wasn’t it the

job of the artist to collect and position these items in the most aesthetically-pleasing way

possible? I wasn’t delusional. I didn’t have any grandiose notions that I was a real

photographer. Obviously I’d had no training, we didn’t even own a good camera at the

time, I was taking all the photos with my cellphone. But what if the art wasn’t in the

taking of the photos but in the arrangement of the tableau? The finding and choosing of

the items, their relation to one another in the composition, the way their colours and

patterns interact and juxtapose one another? Am I just throwing artsy words around?

Maybe. But I stand by those photos.

I continued taking pictures of our apartment, of our things, of new things I’d find

at yard sales, flea markets—yes, I was buying these things for the purpose of taking

photos of them, of increasing my followers, the number of people who liked my images. I

had always felt like I was a creative person, even though I was never good at drawing,

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painting, or writing poems, and you’ve heard my singing voice. But every time someone

started to follow me on this site or liked my photo—which was becoming quite often, I

had about five-hundred followers at this point—it was like they were saying “you are

creative.” And not only that, but “I like how you are living” or “I want to live like you

do.” Which really, is there a higher compliment? You probably remember I started buying

you a lot of new clothes at this point because often I’d take photos of you too. And again,

I didn’t have any delusions that I’d somehow become a great portraitist, but my art was in

how I dressed you, how I complemented the pattern on your shirt with a different pattern

on your tie, where I made you sit in the room, what prop I gave you to hold, what book I

made you pretend to read.

Things were good for a few months. My followers were steadily increasing, my

photos were being heavily liked. Yes, we were having some problems, mostly with

money and sure, I can take the blame here—the new clothes I was buying for you, the

knickknacks and wall decor I had to have, even though most of it was secondhand, it

added up, I admit. And I admit too (again, in the spirit of complete honesty) that the

apartment was looking more and more like a junk store or a storage room for movie

props. I’d only clean a small area of the apartment at a time, whatever area I was using

for a photo-shoot that day. You called me a hoarder, and fair enough I suppose, but I

wasn’t emotionally attached to any of the items. If they hadn’t proven so useful in

creating my collages, I would have gladly tossed them. But who knew what colour old-

fashioned alarm clock I might need when a stack of ornately-bound books called for it?

And maybe I was a little bit delusional in thinking that it would all pay off some day, that

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someone important would see my work and offer me a job creating displays in some

high-end department store in New York, or maybe the agent or personal assistant of

someone famous would stumble upon my site and hire me to come decorate that famous

person’s house and they’d tell their famous friends and tada!

Maybe I haven’t told you anything new yet. I suppose you know most of this, you

did live in our apartment during my collage-tableau phase, or at least you semi-lived

there taking refuge at a series of coffee shops and your parents’ place (although who

knows, you might have been lying even back then)—not that I blame you, I recognize it

got out of control—and sometimes you feigned an interest when I shoved my phone in

your face to show you my latest creation and how many likes it had garnered. But there’s

more.

As I said, things were good, but then they weren’t. My followers stagnated at

around a thousand, each photo was generating fewer and fewer likes—you may

remember me complaining about this, ad nauseam, I’m sure—and I knew my followers

were getting bored of our apartment, the vintage trinkets no matter how artfully arranged

just weren’t doing it for them anymore. I never gave you a straight answer about why I

quit working at the bank. Well here it is: there was nothing to photograph there. I know.

How terrible. It was a stable, decent-paying job with health insurance, and I quit because

there was nothing aesthetically pleasing to upload to my site, nothing my followers would

have liked about it. At the time, I convinced myself the real reason I decided to quit was

that I wasn’t happy, I wasn’t fulfilled, but now that I’m looking back and trying to be as

honest as possible (to both you and myself), I only became unhappy and unfulfilled

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because I thought my job would appear that way to others—not that I could even show

them my job because I wasn’t allowed to keep my phone on me and even if I could have

had my phone, what would I have taken photos of? Old men updating their cheque

books? Working at the bank didn’t make me any more interesting, any more likable.

There was no beauty in it, but the truth is I didn’t care about having a beautiful job before

this website became popular.

This is why I went to work for the florist. You were so angry I was working for

minimum wage, but I convinced you arranging flowers was my passion—even though all

I was really arranging were customer deliveries. But here’s the thing: I actually liked it

more than the bank. I felt happier. Maybe this was because In Bloom was lax about

cellphone use and Jackie really did design beautiful bouquets and she didn’t care if I took

photos of them. In fact, she quite liked it—free publicity, increased exposure. If I was

passionate about the way the flowers looked in my photos, didn’t that also mean I was

passionate about the flowers themselves? In a way, flowers did become my passion. The

more I think about it, the less I know whether I was actually lying.

Eventually, though, my followers got sick of the bouquet photos. I suppose there

are a finite number of flowers and a finite number of ways you can arrange them. The

only photos that were consistently raking in my followers’ approval were the photos of

you, but you would only let me take so many each week. I couldn’t convince you to dress

up in your new tweed blazer with polka-dotted pocket square and chambray bow-tie

unless we were attending an event which called for such an outfit, and our social

calendar, as you’ll recall, was not exactly full of these sorts of events. And then even

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when I could convince you to come to a poetry-reading or wine-tasting, by the time you

were dressed the sun would be setting and I’d have to take your photo in the stale

artificial light of the apartment. Here is the painfully honest part: I never actually wanted

to go to a poetry-reading or wine-tasting, or I did want to go, but only so I could take

photos of it, so my followers would know I had gone and see I was living a cultured,

bohemian life. I wasn’t just some bank-teller, I was a florist who enjoyed poetry and fine

wine, even if I really didn’t enjoy poetry and fine wine (you remember how boring those

events were).

Even more painfully honest: I knew we weren’t great. Even back then I knew we

weren’t totally compatible and maybe we wouldn’t last in the long run, but you were—

are still—undeniably photogenic. Your teeth are perfect, your hair does that natural

swoop thing, your eyes are seafoam—seafoam, I mean c’mon, that colour isn’t even real.

My followers consistently loved you. Every time they liked a photo of you, it was like

they were simultaneously congratulating me and announcing their jealousy. There is a

power that comes when people are openly coveting something, or someone, you have,

and I couldn’t give it up. I knew you were planning your exit strategy and a better, less

selfish person would have just let you go, but I tried to change, become better and in so

doing became worse because I was only becoming better so I could trick you into

sticking around. It was a sort of paradox: I tried to appear less selfish for selfish reasons

so you would think me better than I was which ultimately made our relationship better

but only on the surface because I was actually—I can admit this—becoming worse and

more selfish. But to keep you around I selflessly/selfishly sold so many of my treasures. I

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insisted we redo the guest bedroom and turn it into your office. I started making us dinner

every night. I got a fancy cookbook and fancy cookware and yes, I uploaded photos every

step of the way, but then we had dinner together regularly and I made sure there were

always candles and I became something of an okay cook, didn’t I? The meals were at

least beautifully prepared, you must admit. And even if I was choosing recipes based on

how they’d photograph, the colourful vegetables meant we were eating healthier.

But that got old too, so then it was the road trips. Every weekend I’d pretend I

wanted to spend quality alone time with you driving into the countryside, but really I

wanted to photograph colourful barns, the bed and breakfasts, the cows against the

midday sky. Do you remember how many times I made you wade into a wheat field and

look forlornly into the distance? The only reason I planned that trip to the Grand Canyon

was so I could take photos, but then again, why does anyone go to the Grand Canyon?

Same with Lake Louise, Mount Rushmore, the Haystack Rocks off the coast of Oregon.

So yes, I went for the photos, so people could see that I had gone and could like me for it,

but does it really matter the intention? We saw some beautiful things, didn’t we? We

spent the quality time together that I had initially pretended was the goal all along, didn’t

we? Would we have seen and done such things if this website didn’t exist? I did not mean

to defend myself in this letter so I apologize if I sound defensive. I am only trying to

selfishly clear my conscience.

So another confession: my main reason for insisting we adopt Hippity was not so

we could give him a better life after his first owners left him in a cardboard box outside a

Costco but because he had floppier ears than the other rabbits at the Humane Society. My

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followers loved Hippity. You remember the outfits I’d dress him in? Posing Hippity

around the apartment (among our knick-knacks on the bookshelf, on the sheepskin rug in

front of the old-timey electric fireplace, next to the flower arrangement on the kitchen

table), made my followers love our home and my work again (especially after I

convinced Jackie to make him shop bunny). My followers increased ten-fold. I could

hardly keep track of the amount of likes that were pouring in. But again, does my

intention really matter? We loved that rabbit, we gave him a better life. So what if I was

making all of my decisions based on whether or not I could take a photo of it, whether or

not my followers would approve. Maybe the site actually made my life better? It’s

possible isn’t it? Again, sorry if seem defensive.

I don’t regret marrying you, and no, not just because I was able to get 50+ photos

from it. My followers had a field day with our wedding (get it? cause our wedding was in

a field?). As you might have suspected, I chose all of the decor based on what I thought

would look best in the photos, but again, isn’t that how anyone chooses wedding decor?

And if I thought mason jars with floating tealights would look best in the photos then

doesn’t that mean that I truly do like mason jars with floating tealights? And I may have

lost 5-10 pounds so I would look better in the photos, but what woman doesn’t try to lose

weight before her wedding? And besides, my blood pressure is down and I have more

energy in the mornings, so maybe the site actually made me healthier too? And just

because I used it as a photo-op doesn’t mean that Hippity didn’t look adorable in his tux.

He was such a hit with your nieces and nephews, remember? So as, I was saying, I don’t

regret marrying you but it wasn’t just because I got a wedding out of it. I had been

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looking at photos of us for so long, photos of us where we looked like we were in love

because I had posed us that way, and I suppose I convinced myself we were in love, or

maybe we truly were at this point: the road trips together, the nightly dinners, re-doing

the house, Hippity, we bonded over all of that, didn’t we? And I was happy in my

aesthetically-pleasing job (Jackie had begun letting me try my hand at arrangements, and

I like to think that arranging items for my photos helped me develop an eye for

bouquets), and my being happy in turn made you happier too, didn’t it?

But then the followers and their likes stagnated again. Yes, each photo was now

receiving well a little over a thousand likes, but if these numbers weren’t increasing, if I

wasn’t constantly reaching a wider and wider audience, how would I ever begin to make

a name for myself, begin profiting off this site which had taken so much of my time (not

only was I taking, editing, and uploading my own photos and monitoring my own

followers, but I was also following around 500 other users, studying what had made them

so popular). I was becoming unfulfilled again. Nothing seemed to help. Ordering rainbow

sherbet in a sugar cone so I could photograph myself holding it up against an

aquamarine-bricked wall just wasn’t getting the reaction it used to. I was sick of always

ordering the most exotic and colourful dish on the menu. A person can only pretend to

read so many books. Which is why I suggested we try for a baby.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Poppy and I in no way regret Poppy. I just want you to

know—so I can stop carrying this around and make a clean, honest break with you and

my former life—that my main motivation for wanting a child was so my followers could

see what an adorable child we made, how adorably I dressed her, what an adorable

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vintage pram I walked her in. Even her name I chose because I thought they’d like it:

trendy and unique without being too outlandish. All of this so I could get more followers,

more likes. These people I had never seen, would never meet. I did it all for them. And

they liked it. Ten years of my life, a decade, all dictated by this website. Everything was

so beautiful.

It’s called obsessive-documensia, my therapist says. He’s given me an outdated

cellphone, one without internet capabilities, without a camera. Still I find myself

mindlessly flipping it open every ten minutes or so before I remember there’s nothing to

check. I no longer have any followers. No one likes anything.

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The Meek

Should contradictions be very numerous in a text, it becomes impossible to establish any kind of chronology and we are then no longer in the presence of a narrative.

—Gerald PrinceNarratology

Clay is thinking about Mya—he is always thinking about Mya when he does it—her long

dark braid, the way her two front teeth stick out like they’re trying to ditch the others, the

way you can tell they’re there even when her mouth is closed. She’s wearing her school

uniform, the white button-up blouse, the navy and red plaid kilt. They must have just

been at school and now they’re here, on his bed. It moves so fast—they’re sitting apart

and then they’re close enough to be kissing and then they are kissing, eyes closed but he

can see everything. Their tongues he isn’t sure about. At first he forgets about them all

together. Then there is some slight darting and poking around, some seeing what’s what.

His hands too, he has forgotten about his hands. He makes them come alive, rests them

on her hips. Part of her blouse has come untucked from her kilt. The warmth, he feels it in

all the unclean parts of himself. He pulls her braid, her head arcs backward, her mouth

opens slightly—but no, it’s too much. She isn’t that type of girl. And then they’re not

kissing. She’s just sort of hovering there, blouse fully tucked in, looking at him but also

not.

*

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Why did she have to provoke him like that? He didn’t want to volunteer at the rummage

sale. He said so. In plain English. Didn’t he? He did. How many times? At least two. But

could she just let it go? No, she had to tell him all the other husbands were doing it. All

the other husbands care about getting the new steeple for the church. All the other

husbands are trying to get to heaven. Why did she say that? Did she want him to feel bad

about his decision? She did. Was it Christ’s way to make people feel bad? Did Christ go

around making the people of Jerusalem feel bad? Did he go around to all the men who

wanted to stay Jewish and say All the other husbands believe I’m the son of God? Geez,

does every pair have holes? It’s like he’s been covering his bum in Swiss cheese! Haha.

She’ll have to remember to pick up a pack of fresh underwear at the Piggly Wiggly. And

then when George punished her for making him feel bad did she turn the other cheek?

Did she let him punish her again? Did she ask the Lord to forgive him? No, she made him

feel bad again. The meek shall inherit the earth. Why couldn’t she be meeker? And where

was he now? Probably she’d driven him to drink. Probably he’d gone down to the Blind

Beggar.

*

George had gone down to the Blind Beggar. Two of the tables are occupied: one with a

biker couple, their helmets on the table, the other, a group of college-looking kids. The

noon sun comes through only where the wooden window slats are broken. He sits alone

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at the bar. “You ever done charity? Like volunteered for a church or something, Lenny?”

George asks the bartender. Lenny wipes his hands on a greyish bar rag. Two of the

college kids make their way to the jukebox, pretend to argue, playfully hip-checking each

other out of the way. “Look, I’m real busy here with the bar, I’d love to help you out,

George, but it’s just me here most days, Barely got time for—” George laughs. “I’m not

asking you to like ladle soup or nothin, just speaking hypothetical is all.” An asinine pop

song begins to play, the biker’s right foot in its black leather boot begins to tap. “Well,

y’see, I’m not what you’d call a God-fearing man ‘zactly, or maybe I fear him a little bit

but not enough to do anything about it. I guess I kinda figure he’s got bigger fish than me

to fry, y’know? Like if I just mind my own business here, then things will all work out in

the end?” Lenny pours George another. “So your wife asks you to work a church

rummage sale, you say no, right?” George asks. Lenny chuckles. George swirls the

whisky in the glass, takes a pull. “Sayin’ I had a wife? Sayin’ I had a wife that was more

into the God-fearing than I am into the God-fearing? Sayin’ I loved this wife of mine?

No, I don’t work no goddamn rummage sale.”

*

He taps Mya on the shoulder and she turns around. No, he only thinks of tapping Mya on

the shoulder and she turns around. “Hey Clay, what’d you get for number six?” The smell

of fruit shampoo, mint gum. The way she never makes eye contact. He pretends to search

for the answer. “Um, let’s see . . . Here it is: x equals 42.5,” he says. She bites her lip,

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looks down at her notebook, violently takes the eraser to the page. “I don’t—I just don’t

get it.” A piece of stray hair has come loose from her braid, she blows it off her face.

“You just have to use Pythagorean theorem to solve for y first.” He tries to smile with

only half of his mouth, not too eager like. His teeth, he knows, are milk-white, straight as

piano keys. “Could you show me maybe?” She twists to lean over the back of her chair,

her chest makes contact with the edge of his desk. He wonders what her nipples look like.

*

What a stupid name for a bar! It makes her think of all the needy people in the world: the

blind, the poor, those African orphans on TV. She would adopt them all if she could. They

could live here, she’d put bunk-beds in every room. That’s what Christ would do, isn’t it?

He’d say, Let them come unto me. But they probably didn’t have such diseases back then.

Not that it’s their fault, but the water they’re drinking when she sees them on the TV—

it’s mud, really—and the flies. And there are just so many African orphans now. In the

pictures of Jesus with the children, there are only like four or five, and they look so

healthy with their chubby baby cheeks, their rolly-polly thighs. Little piggly wigglers!

Ha! If there were six or eight African orphans, she could do something about it. And then

of course, she’s not a nurse. She doesn’t even have a minivan. Aren’t doctors and nurses

always going to volunteer over there? Best for them just to stay where they are. You don’t

see any volunteer doctors and nurses here. Hoo-wee, imagine that! She’ll send them some

money. Get them some clean water. But the bills. She’s only works the till at the grocery

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store for Pete’s sake. She’ll get the church to start a collection. But then again you can

never tell with those so-called Christian charities. Sometimes the money never reaches

the children. The executives are vacationing in the Caribbean—Cari-bee-an?—with the

money that could’ve been spent on a new steeple—or even the poor orphans here! Surely

there are poor orphans here? Probably the rich people that live up on the hill are adopting

them so they don’t have to adopt the poor orphans in Africa with the diseases and the

flies. What a mess the world is in! She wouldn’t be surprised if God just up and pulled

the plug on it all tomorrow. Today even! She could be raptured up right now while

folding George’s underwear, up in heaven still holding the pair of Swiss cheese briefs

with the stretched-out waist band. Imagine! Would he still rapture her if he knew she’d

borrowed Fifty Shades of Grey from the library? That she used the self-checkout counter

so she wouldn’t have to look the librarian in the eye while holding such smut? And that

she’d already read half of it in one sitting? And that it made her feel hot between her

thighs? Of course he knows, silly git! As penance she won’t finish the book. Or maybe

she’ll finish this one but won’t read the others in the series. Or maybe she’ll read them all

and then keep them so no one else can take them out and read them. So no innocent,

young girls can get their hands on them. Imagine the late fees she’d rack up keeping

those books forever! That could be her penance.

*

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“Life is one big rummage sale.” “Eh, George? You want another?” “No one respects us,

Len. Everyone just shits on us. Who cares about the working class? We’re like invisible,

invisible and covered in shit.” The bikers are at the pool table now. George watches the

female one with the fuzzy blond hair bend over the table, line up her cue. Her jeans so

tight how is he supposed to not look at her ass in the air, pointed right at him. “Backbone

of society. We’re the goddamn backbone of society, Len. Guys like us.” She mimes her

shot, cue sliding between her fingers. She takes so long like she wants to give him a good

look. She mimes the shot again, realigns, wiggles her hips, taunting him. There is a hint

of a tattoo on her lower back, above the waist of her jeans. Wisps of smoke is what it

looks like. Or something spelled out in cursive. “It’s a woman’s world now. Christ,

they’ve kicked us out of our own homes.” The biker, the male one, rubs blue chalk on the

end of his cue, makes eye contact with George. “This is your home now,” Lenny says,

refilling his glass. “Not for long it ain’t.” George nods in the direction of the college kids.

*

Suddenly, she’s naked, at least from the waist up. He tries not to look below her

bellybutton. Did she take off her shirt? Her bra? Was she wearing a bra? Her nipples like

two Hershey kisses, but what to do with them? She stands there, waiting for him to direct

her. “Here cover yourself up,” he says, handing her a blanket. Where have her clothes

gone anyway? “Clay Baby?” But her voice is hoarse, far away. Oh God. “I’m changing!

Don’t come in!”

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*

There is no sliver of light under Clay’s door. Noon and still sleeping. Heaven’s sakes.

Bag of bones. But if he’s sleeping maybe he didn’t hear them fighting. Such a deep

sleeper that one! She taps the door softly. “Clay Baby?” She shifts the laundry basket to

her other hip, presses her ear to the door, listens for something. For what? As a toddler

he’d had the most violent night terrors, George had called him Regan, after the little girl

from that exorcism movie. Not funny! What is funny is the way George snores, fake-

sounding and dramatic, like someone pretending to sleep. “I’m changing! Don’t come

in!” His tone makes her jump a little, like he’s accusing her, like she’s the one been

caught sinning. And what a sinner she is! Thinking just two seconds ago of that slutty

Anastasia girl in that book! Forgive him, Father, he’s knows not what he does. No, that’s

not true. He does know better, raised right. Sunday school, Catholic school. Maybe she

should get the priest over here, they could have a little chat. She’d like to ask the priest a

thing or two about some of the passages in that book. Not like she’d ever tell the priest

she’d read such a devilish book. No, she couldn’t even tell him in confession. But she’d

like to know the church’s stance on some of the things that Mr. Grey gets Ana to do. Are

they all sins? For two good, Catholic married people, of course. Lord, give him the

strength to reject the devil. Not that the devil is in her baby. Oh Lord, cast him out! No,

she’s being silly. That stupid exorcism movie. She should just go in there, knock some

sense in that boy. Her hand is on the doorknob.

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*

She’s facing him now, leaning towards him, gravity pulling her t-shirt down and away

from her body, but he’s too far to see anything but shadows. He sees two perky breasts,

hoisted in a black lace bra. So much better than Harriet’s sad sacks, deflated. She hates

when he calls them sand bags but that’s what they are now. Clay took everything out of

her. “Kids take everything.” “Eh, George?” “Kids are selfish little shits.” “You can say

that again. Don’t tip for nothin.” The college kids are playing bloody knuckles with a

quarter, screaming meaningless screams.

*

She is sitting at the end of his bed, math textbook open in her lap. He thought maybe

she’d go for the floor but no, she’s on the bed, a good sign even if there is a pillow

between them. “Maybe we need to make things more interesting,” he says, that half-smile

again. “How do you mean?” She looks up but only for a second and too high, just over

his right ear. “Well, let’s say you get the next one wrong, you might have to like, pay up.”

He’s never been so bold with a girl before. It feels good, the warmth thrumming through

his body like his cellphone’s vibrating, except all over his body, his cellphone everywhere

at once, except he is the cellphone and he is doing the thrumming. “Oh yeah?”

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*

She’ll open the door, throw off the comforter. He’ll yell at her to get out. He’ll try to

snatch back the comforter, then reach for anything, his boxers, yesterday’s towel on the

floor. She flicks on the light. “It’s not like I haven’t seen it before!” But it’s so much

bigger now, an explosion of pubic hair. “Who do you think changed all your dirty

nappies?” She remembers when he called it his winky, when it was just a little rubber bit,

just another bit of baby fat. “Beloved, I beg you” and then there’s another part—how

does that line go now? He used to hate wearing clothes. It was impossible to get him into

pajamas after a bath, his glossy backside squirming away from her. Sometimes he’d start

taking off his clothes at restaurants, in parks, she had to dress him in overalls. His fat,

clumsy fingers couldn’t work the clasps. “Abstain from fleshy”—or is it fleshly?—“lusts

which war against the soul.” Just like a little pastry, a rolled-up croissant.

*

She gets the next one wrong like he knew she would. On purpose? Either way. “Time to

pay up.” He leans towards her. “Clay, I really need to study,” she says. Why can’t she

ever just make eye contact? What’s she playing at? “A deal’s a deal,” he says, leaning

closer. “I don’t remember making any deals.” His hands are on her shoulders. “C’mon,

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Clay, stop it.” She swats him away. Playfully? Either way. He can do anything he wants.

He pulls her braid, her head arcs backward, her mouth opens in a scream.

*

He pushes her backward into the wall. She’s crying. “I’m sorry, I—” His dad walks in.

“What the fuck is happening here?” Clay covers himself with his hands. “You little shit.”

His father’s hands come alive. It is swift, mechanic.

*

She opens the door. Dear Lord, it reeks in here. A salmony tang. She flicks on the light.

“Mom! What are you doing! Get out! I’m changing under here!” But she’s on a mission.

Grab the comforter. What’s the line again? “Beloved I—” It looks just like his father’s,

angry and mean. “What the fuck, Mom!” He reaches for the comforter. “Abstain your

flesh—” His arms flailing at her, pushing her away. “Leave him, demon!” He pushes her

away from him, backward, into the wall. Clay covers himself with his hands. “I’m sorry, I

—” She can feel the heat of her tears. “Just wait till your father gets home.”

*

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The biker, the male one, takes a seat next to George at the bar. “Seeing something you

like here, Friend?” The biker has a beard that looks like it’s been glued on. “Don’t touch

my fucking beard, asshole!” “Let’s just calm down, guys. George you’ve had enough

alright. Let’s call you a cab. You can wait outside, okay Georgie-Boy?” Is it Halloween?

A disguise? “You’re not fooling anyone.” “Fuck you.” Is he a spy? An undercover cop?

Wouldn’t it be hilarious if he tried the beard on? Lenny’ll get a kick out of that! “I said

don’t fucking touch my beard!” The sound of a branch snapping—no, the pool cue, he

can see the splintered end of what used to be its middle, then comes the burst between his

shoulder blades. It’s swift, mechanic: an explosion of red, the shards of glass resplendent

in the thin slits of sunlight. Lenny calls the police. The college kids run outside.

*

To his surprise, she gets the next question right. He’s losing control, but then: “Does this

mean you have to pay up?” she asks. “A deal’s a deal,” he says, leaning closer. While

they’re kissing—he remembers about the tongues this time—he tries for the bra but his

fingers seem to be too fat, too clumsy to work the clasp. “You got to take the shirt off

first, Silly,” she says undoing the buttons of her blouse.

*

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Her hand is on the doorknob. No, she should let George deal with this, or the priest. “Just

wait till your father comes home!” She yells through the door.

*

“Who was that?” she asks. “Don’t worry, she won’t come in here.” “But maybe we

should stop? Just in case?” He’s losing control but then he’s on top of her, his hands

pinning her wrists to the bed like in the movies but why is she crying? She’s not that type

of girl, what was he thinking? “I’m sorry, I—” He hands her a blanket. Where are her

clothes? “Here, cover yourself up.”

*

“Look at that fucker over there with the fake beard.” “Eh, George?” “Who’s he think he’s

fooling? You think he’s a cop? You think he’s going to narc us out?” “Alright, Georgie-

Boy. I’m gonna call you a cab.” “You think he’s with the feds, Len?” “Let’s wait outside

now, eh.” “Always shitting on the little guy, kickin’ us out of our homes.” “That’s it,

Georgie-Boy, easy does it.” The college kids are outside too, huddled together, looking

frightened but why? The tall kid’s knuckles are bloody. Was there some sort of fight?

Over the jukebox? “Go on home now, Georgie-Boy, sleep it off, man.”

*

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She opens the door. The smell is salty, salmony. She flicks on the light. “Mom! What the

fuck! Get out!” He’s got her wrists pinned to the bed. Her kilt is flipped up, panties

around her ankles. His glossy backside. Is she crying? “Leave him, demon!”

*

She opens the door. George is on the front porch fumbling with his keys. For heaven’s

sakes! The cabbie extends his middle finger out the open window as he makes his exit.

Some people! Think it’s their right to be tipped! Has she ever been tipped one time at the

Piggy Wiggly? Do people even ask how she is, how her day’s going? And when she lets

them use two coupons even though it says one per customer right on the goddamn—

goshdarn! She really is all out of sorts today. “Don’t give me none of that lip!” he says. “I

haven’t said a word!” You’re doing it with your eyes.” “My eyes are giving you lip?”

“That lip, that’s exactly what I’m talking about!” What would Christ do? “I’m sorry,

Honey, I didn’t mean to give you any lip.” Apologize seventy times seven times. The

meek shall inherit the earth. She helps him out of his jacket. “I just don’t know what to do

about Clay.” She cradles her left arm. “What about him? Grab me a beer, wouldya?”

Would Christ make him feel bad about how much he’s already had to drink? “Well I went

up there at noon and I thought he was still sleeping—” “Must be fuckin’ nice!” “No, no,

he was—” “The selfish little shit. He’s taken everything. Look at us! Covered in shit!

Invisible!” “What in God’s name are you on about?” “I’ll be on whatever I goddamn feel

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like!” “Watch your language!” The sound of a branch snapping. She remembers to give

him the other cheek this time.

*

“Does this mean you have to pay up?” she asks, undoing her blouse. Her perky breasts

hoisted in a black lace bra—how did he not see the black bra underneath the white

blouse? Was she wearing it at school all day? Everything is possible. Oh god. He closes

his eyes and sees everything.

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The Charges

Two months after my brother left, I moved back home. I had just finished an MFA and

didn’t know what else to do. I decided this would be my independent study year and

spent hours compiling lists of books to read, concepts to study. For some reason I thought

I might become an expert on Russian formalism. A friend of my brother’s drove him as

far as Winnipeg. From there he was slowly hitchhiking west, camping in Banff,

panhandling with another drifter and his dog in Revelstoke, picking apples somewhere

outside Kelowna. He called home a few times a month at my parents’ behest. “I need a

dog,” he told my mother. “People are basically throwing money at this guy.”

My parents rented my childhood bedroom to me for $200 a month, which I paid by

working part-time at a coffee shop owned by an old Polish man named Tomasz and his

wife Agnes. I never met Agnes but often Tomasz would bring us—his “girlies” he called

us—leftover cabbage rolls and when I ate them I would picture a very wrinkled, round-

faced woman wearing a babushka. I liked to think she was introducing herself to me

through her cooking on some sort of transcendental level, but later when I saw her

obituary in the paper, her face was not that round at all.

My parents had plans to turn my old room into a home gym but they hadn’t gotten around

to it yet. All of the violence I had done to the room remained: the grey finger-smears up

and down the walls; the permanent bends in the pink mini-blinds; a stain on the carpet, a

burn-mark the shape and colour of a copper arrowhead from the days of straightening my

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hair with a standard-issue clothes iron, lying on my back with my hair fanned out across a

towel. I studied the Russians on my old desk, nail polish droplets still shiny as disco

balls.

My mother, who had always been a tea-drinker, was now drinking tea the way chain-

smokers smoke. She’d turn the kettle on again whenever she got down to a third of a cup.

In the mornings, after my parents had both gone to work and before my shift started, I’d

do the dishes from the night before, scrubbing the brown rings off the insides of her mugs

with baking soda.

One night when my parents were out, I brought an ex-boyfriend back to my room. We

had had clandestine and clumsy sex in this room years before and I’m not sure if I was

trying to be seventeen again or prove that I wasn’t. Either way, it was still clumsy. The

proportion of our bodies to the room seemed terribly wrong. I worried we might hit our

heads on the sloped parts of the ceiling. I tried to remember what it felt like in this room

when we were seventeen, probably we were just happy not to be contorting ourselves in

the backseat of a two-door Saturn. I wondered if he was disappointed with the new

softness of my body, or if he was happy I finally knew what to do with it.

“It’s like nothing’s changed,” he said, but the attention he gave my collarbone,

that was new.

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The phone began to ring and he went rigid, looked at me like he’d been caught. I

shrugged and closed my eyes. I didn’t make a habit of answering my parents’ phone calls.

My voice and my mother’s were indistinguishable, it only led to confusion.

The phone rang again after we’d finished and were watching TV on the parcel-sized

television on my dresser. The layer of dust on the screen muted the colours and made

everything seem even farther away.

“Do you think you should—? It’s late. Might be your parents?”

I looked at the empty phone cradle on my desk. I had a habit of wandering the

house while on the phone, leaving the receiver wherever I happened to be when the call

ended.

“It’s nothing, I’m sure.”

When it rang a third time I slipped into my underwear and blouse—holding it

closed instead of bothering with the buttons—and raced to answer the phone in the living

room.

My brother calling collect. When I heard him say his first and last name I

wondered if he felt the same awkwardness I always do, like our names are only meant to

be said by other people. I pressed one to accept the charges.

“Hello?”

“Hey, Mom, I—”

“No, Matt, it’s me. Mom and Dad are out.”

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We hadn’t spoken directly since before he’d left. By way of catching up he told

me about the two women who had picked him up on the Trans-Canada, told him they’d

take him as far as they could if he gave them forty dollars for gas. He’d been trying to

hitch for five hours with no luck so he offered them a twenty. They took it, drove about

ten clicks, and told him to get out of the car, this was as far as they could take him.

“It’s not like they were lying though, right?” he said. “I think they were both

pretty drunk and they still hosed me!” I knew he was high from the way he laughed, slow

and rolling.

“Take care of yourself, eh? Be safe.”

“Yeah, I’m just calling to let them know I’m heading down to Cali tomorrow. I

met some people with a van who are going to San Fran.”

I told him to call when he got there. I asked if he’d be home for Christmas. He

said it all depends.

“Do you have enough money? Is that what you’re calling for?”

He didn’t answer at first and I thought I’d offended him. Then I heard a girl

calling his name. I realized I had pictured him traveling alone, squishing into phone

booths at gas stations or in diners with good pie. But there was at least another person and

her voice sounded pleading.

“Tell mom I called, wouldja? She won’t transfer the money if I don’t call.”

“She’s giving you money?”

“You’re the one still living there.”

“I hope you’re spending it on food. Buy a warm coat at least.”

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I hung up the phone and felt so old.

When my parents came home we were standing in the kitchen, drinking orange juice. My

father turned the kitchen light on all the way, which made me feel guilty that I only had it

dimmed.

“Mom, Dad, you remember Josh?” I was suddenly aware I wasn’t wearing socks.

Josh called them Sir and Mrs. G and told them he delivered for UPS, which was

news to me. We had only talked about where I was working.

“I kind of really like it at Pot Luck,” I had told him. “No stress, free coffee.” I

laughed after I said this for no real reason.

“But you always got such good grades.”

My good grades in high school, my BA, MFA, the six months of community

service at the library, and Tomasz said, “Yes, okay, but you ever work in coffee shop?

You know how to work espresso machine?”

I didn’t remember to tell my parents that my brother had called until the next day. They

had just gotten back from grocery shopping. I was trying to help them unpack the

groceries but it seemed that since I’d moved away, my mother had devised a new

shelving system. The canned goods and the cereal boxes had switched places, the bananas

were now refrigerated. It was disorienting.

“Who are these people with a van?” my mother asked.

“I don’t know.”

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“Are they skateboarders? Are they young kids? Musicians? What are they going

to California for?”

“I don’t know, I didn’t ask.” I helped myself to a plum.

“Well are they going straight from Vancouver to San Francisco or are they

stopping in between?”

“I don’t know. I told him to call when he got there.”

“But did he say when he expected to get there?”

I shook my head. “Sorry.” I took my plum upstairs to my room.

After that my brother didn’t call for a long time. On the nights we ate dinner the three of

us, my mother made me tell them again exactly what he had said on the phone.

“And what were you and that guy doing when he called?” she asked.

My father choked on a bit of his potato, or pretended to.

“Watching TV.”

“You seem to be doing a lot of that lately.” It was true. I wasn’t making great

progress with the Russians. I had been considering trying my luck with the French

structuralists.

“Are you planning on looking for a job any time soon?”

“I have a job,” I said. I heard my father’s teeth make contact with his fork.

Reflexively, I ran my tongue along my own teeth.

“I mean a real one. What did we pay for all that education for?” My mother

flicked her fork in a showy gesture like my education was sitting on her dinner plate.

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“It’s a tough market right now.” I didn’t remind them my brother hadn’t worked in

years.

After dinner I went to my room and tried to read. When I got to the last line of a page, I’d

realize I had no idea what the page was about. I thought highlighting the important parts

would help, but soon only a sentence or two on each page was drowning in yellow and

still I wasn’t sure I understood anything. I went downstairs and found my mother in the

kitchen watching the electric kettle begin to steam. I asked her if she wanted to go for a

walk. She had been fond of taking what she called “power walks” in the evenings.

“No, thank you,” she said, without turning away from the kettle like it was a child

that might fall off the countertop.

“You could bring your tea.”

She sighed. “Not tonight.”

I thought about what a frightened child my brother was, how easily I could terrify him by

humming the Jaws theme song while we were swimming, how I used to drag him into the

bathroom with me, turn off the lights, and chant “Bloody Mary” into the mirror to make

him cry. I wondered if my mother remembered him like this.

“Mom?” At the sound of my voice she jumped like she had forgotten I was still in

the kitchen, that I was living here again.

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Honey-Do

The hallmark of narrative is assurance. It lives in certainty: this happened then that; this happened because of that; this happened and it was related to that. . . . [N]arrative dies from sustained ignorance and indecision.

—Gerald Prince, Narratology

Barry’s wife has left him a note on the kitchen counter. Of that, he is certain. He would

recognize her jagged, loop-less scrawl anywhere. Even her O’s look like two straight

lines that have been forced together then pried open in the middle. He also recognizes the

paper: a sheet torn from the magnetic notepad they keep on the fridge for grocery lists

and phone messages. The cartoon likeness of a brown bear in the bottom righthand

corner. A female bear, as indicated by the length of her eyelashes, her wearing of a pink

tutu. She is looking a bit sheepish—not to confuse species here, but this is an objectively

sheepish-looking bear—perhaps because she is wearing a tutu on her bottom half while

nothing at all covers her hirsute, mammalian torso, exposed as she stands, human-like, on

her hind legs, pigeon-toed—again, forgive the non-ursine adjectives, but that really is the

best way to describe her stance—about to curtsey perhaps. She holds between both round

paws a bouquet of unnaturally shaped flowers, flowers that defy the physics of flowers,

flowers that resemble only a child’s idea of flowers. It is unclear whether she has just

been given the flowers or is about to give them away. You could ask her, but then she

would only reply with the same thing she always says: “Have a beary good day,” via

comic sans in a speech bubble, which Barry realizes right now, at this very moment, as he

stands half in the kitchen not reading the note from his wife, might as well be “Have a

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Barry good day.” Is this why his wife purchased this particular notepad? A cute pun she’s

been waiting for him to get all these months that the notepad has been stuck to the fridge?

If we’re being completely honest, Barry didn’t need to recognize the handwriting

and the paper to know the note is from his wife: they live alone, no children, but perhaps

you already suspected no children. What kind of woman has such jagged handwriting?

Not the nurturing type, surely. Did you picture a cold woman? With a thin, pinched-in

face? A nose that hooks in a bit like the beak of a bird, not a toucan, no, but there is

definitely something bird-like about her face. Think crane, perhaps, if cranes makes you

think elegant but aloof. Her name is Liz if that helps (apologies to the Lizzes, but you

can’t deny the slight hissing sound that comes with such a name). Though maybe we

haven’t been fair to Liz: her choice in stationery indicates a certain softness, which is to

say nothing of the framed photos lining the hallway, the sayings embroidered on the

throw pillows, the recipe book full of her grandmother’s handwriting—loopy to the point

of illegibility.

Barry has not read the note, nor does he want to. Likely, he knows, it is a list of

chores Liz wants him to complete—her “honey-do” list she calls it—by the time she gets

home from work or wherever it is she plans to go after work: spin class, the grocery store,

etc., etc. If it is a list of chores, Barry will not complete them. It has been an

exceptionally trying day at work:

1. Kingston proposed that Jayden should now be called “Gayden.” Gabe and

Declan seconded the motion and the nickname was swiftly adopted.

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1.2 Jayden responded by wonking Kingston in the head with Our Changing

Bodies (hardcover).

2. Tristan threatened to cut one of Emma’s pigtails straight off with safety scissors

which left Emma in paranoid hysterics even after Barry conducted a very

thorough desk-search, confiscated every last pair of safety scissors, and switched

up the seating arrangement which he had already spent a full week agonizing over

and would have been perfect if only he had exactly four more quiet kids to act as

little Switzerlands.

3. Mia B. and Mia M. formed some kind of club so exclusive they wouldn’t let

Mia S. join.

3.2 It did not help that Barry was annoyed, perhaps irrationally so, by the names

of his students. Yes, it was not their fault, but still. Vowel-heavy, pseudo-old

fashioned names for the girls: Ava, Sophia, Isabella, three Mia’s for christsake.

And for the boys, trendy, disposable names, names with too much built-in

personality: Aiden, Landon, Zane. Barry was teaching a class of Victorian

heroines and future rugby players.

3.3. No, Barry did not point out to his students that Aiden could just as easily be

called “Gayden.”

Ergo, Barry is certainly in no mood to bleach the toilet bowl or remove gunk from the

eaves. If it is a honey-do list, which most likely it is, Liz will demand to know why he

refused to honey-do what she wanted honey-done. To this, Barry will claim not to have

seen her note. He’ll say either he hasn’t even been in the kitchen yet or he has such a

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migraine from his Grade Fives he must not have been seeing straight. Neither of these are

complete lies since Barry does feel a minor pulse behind his eyes and only half of Barry

has been in the kitchen and the whole of Barry is now avoiding making the trip to the

refrigerator even though he knows there is a particularly promising block of old cheddar

that would pair well with a box of Ritz. When he’ll later say, “I didn’t even see it, honey,

honest,” he’ll be lying certainly, but at least he won’t have the knowledge of what the

note was asking him to do. When he’ll say, “I didn’t know the eaves needed de-gunking,”

well then he won’t be lying at all, unless of course the eaves are noticeably, unmistakably

full of a gunk you can see from the driveway.

But as the evening wears on, it becomes harder not to step foot in that area of the

house. We needn’t say that the kitchen is where the food is, after all. And besides, Barry

likes to have a few beers while he plans his lessons. In fact, his best lesson—the one

where he got them excited about the water cycle—well that one he thought up half in the

bag and then had to send Liz out to buy the squirt guns, him being too impaired and what

not. And even if a water fight on a baseball diamond didn’t really have much to say about

evaporation and condensation, his students were at least too busy soaking each other to

think up homophobic nicknames and give each other asymmetrical haircuts. And even if

he did later send his students in same-sex pairs to the bathroom in ten-minute intervals to

dry their wet clothes under the hand dryers, fearful the parents might complain about the

possibility of their children catching pneumonia or dripping on the leather in their SUV’s,

well Barry still considers it a pedagogical triumph.

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But it is dinner time now and Liz is still not home, and how will Barry’s excuse of

not yet having been in the kitchen hold up if he’s already eaten dinner? He could order in.

But then he’d have to call Liz and ask if she’d like anything and then she’d ask if he saw

her note and if he said no, well she’d tell him to go look, naturally, or she’d just list off

her honey-do’s over the phone, and then Barry would be up on the ladder de-gunking

eaves all night, wouldn’t he? He could order her usual, the #23 General Tao’s chicken and

a side of fried rice, but what if she wasn’t home by the time the food arrived? He couldn’t

put her food in the fridge while still claiming not to have stepped foot in the kitchen.

What excuse would he have for leaving her food to sit on the coffee table? And how long

could he leave it there? Barry remembers something of the food safety training he

received bar-tending his way through teacher’s college: was it two hours or three that

food could be exposed to a temperature of over forty degrees Fahrenheit? And then there

was the problem of utensils. He could ask for a set of plastic ones from China Kitchen,

but Liz would want to know why he didn’t just grab the metal ones from his own kitchen.

And then what to do about all the take-out boxes and bags afterward? She’d want to

know why he didn’t put them in the recycling bin under the kitchen sink. So dinner was

completely out then. Unless, perhaps he could come up with another excuse for not

seeing the note. He could move it to the floor, plant it face-down, part-way under the

stove, claim it must have fallen, been blown off the table by the breeze coming through

the window. The windows are closed. He opens the window. It is a bit too chilly to have

the window open so he closes the window, but he will say he had the window open

earlier. But how to move the note to the floor without actually reading the note? He

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considers a set of salad tongs (though if we are trying to be faithful to Barry’s perspective

here, we too must refer to them as “salad pinchy-thingies”). Using the salad pinchy-

thingies, he could the flip the note over, lest any of the letters should form words before

his eyes without his meaning them to. He could then hold the note facedown and as far

away from himself as possible and gently lower it to the floor. No, Liz will not be dusting

the note for Barry’s fingerprints, but at least this way when Barry later says, “I didn’t

even touch the thing,” he won’t be lying (technically). But approaching the note with

salad pinchy-thingies means that Barry would need to come within mere feet of the note.

Barry decides there is a too real possibility of accidentally reading the note if he were to

come within mere feet of the note, even if he fixed his eyes on the adjacent wall and

pinches blindly around the kitchen table.

Luckily Barry needs to take a piss. Lucky because in the bathroom Liz’s blow-

dryer is lying on the back of the toilet. The excitement of seeing the blow-dryer makes

Barry pause mid-stream. Then multi-tasking: yanking the cord from the wall while

continuing the stream, then a quick shake, then not washing his hands or zipping his fly.

Thirty seconds later, Barry is standing at the entrance to the kitchen, the blow-dryer

plugged into an outlet in the hallway behind him. He holds the blow-dryer in both hands

like a gun, aims the barrel across the room towards the kitchen table, flicks the blow-

dryer on. The paper barely rustles. Cut to: the blow-dryer is now plugged into the top of

the stove, Barry is walking backwards into the kitchen. The blow-dryer still in both

hands, arms extended behind him uncomfortably, he fans the dryer back and forth, hears

the paper move, scurry across the table, the light sound of paper fluttering onto the floor.

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Only when he is safely in the hallway again the does Barry turn around to see how it

landed. Face-up. Though unless he crawls under the table there is not a chance of

accidentally reading it now. He returns the blow-dryer, re-plugs it into the bathroom

outlet, positions it on the toilet tank, curls the cord back into an approximation of its

former position, washes his hands.

Now that the note is under the table and safely unreadable, Barry can make

dinner. He eats half a block of old cheddar and a sleeve of Ritz crackers in the living

room on a paper plate on his khaki-clad thighs. He watches the beginning of a hockey

game. He grades twenty-nine spelling tests. He sees the word “definitely” misspelled so

often he begins to question whether “definitely” is definitely spelled “definitely” and not

“definately.” Is Barry starting to worry about his wife’s absence? No, like we said she is

probably at spin class or the grocery store.

But maybe the note isn’t a honey-do list at all. Maybe she’s simply gone to stay

with her sister for the evening. The baby’s been fussy, Amber needed a night off. Liz

drove the 22km right from work to her sister’s newly-built suburban neighbourhood, the

one called Cedar Falls or Cedar Springs—Barry can’t remember which it is, though in his

defense the neighbourhood is void of any falls or springs (the only body of water an

unnaturally circular man-made lake which can be drained like a swimming pool) and the

cedars, if there ever were any, have been chopped down to make way for the dozens of

cul-de-sacs lined with single-family, two-storey homes in various gradations of taupe,

spindly saplings planted in their places, leaning against their metal support poles like

they’re drunk. Liz is there now, upstairs, in Phillip’s Noah’s ark-themed nursery (which

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Barry has never understood: “They do know that in that story all of the other animals

died, right? And, you know, every single person except this one family who then had to

resort to incest, I suppose, to get the human race going again. Like, they do know they’ve

basically decorated their son’s nursery as a shrine to mass murder, right? And I mean,

Amber and Pete aren’t even religious” to which Liz said he was being ridiculous because

look how cute the elephants are walking up the ramp to the ark with their trunks linked

together). Is Liz thinking about how ridiculous Barry is right now as she paces the room,

making her way along the painted mural from mice to giraffes, holding her nephew to her

chest, cooing sweetly while he cries his diapered ass off for no good reason and her sister

and brother-in-law try to catch up on Mad Men downstairs? Like we said earlier, we

probably weren’t being very fair to Liz. It isn’t her fault an abnormal amount of her

cheekbones are visible, her name has a z in it, her handwriting looks like a bunch of twigs

fallen on the page at different angles. Perhaps she likes babies just as much as the next

person and—as Barry suspects—is just a little terrified of making one herself, screwing

him/her up as badly as her mother screwed her up, contributing to global over-population,

not having enough money to send him/her to college, being required by an unspoken

parental law to move somewhere called Cedar Springs/Falls/Grove/Ridge/Terrace/Hills,

etc., etc.

But then again, Liz might not be in suburbia rocking a fussy baby. There are so

many possibilities. Like: she’s been kidnapped by a very neat and meticulous kidnapper

who always takes his shoes off when he enters a home, ensures nothing gets upturned or

broken, isn’t interested in stealing anything, forces his victims to write their own ransom

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notes at gunpoint but is really very polite about the whole thing. Or another type of

emergency: her mother’s sick, the hospital called, Liz scribbled a note on her way out the

door. But if Barry did look at the note now—at 7:34pm—and it did indeed ask him to

transfer $10,000 to an offshore account for the safe return of his wife or to come to the

hospital straightaway, then how much guilt would he be required to feel for lounging in

the corner of the couch, feet up, eating his way through a week’s worth of cheese, while

Liz is being kept against her will—though comfortably, the polite kidnapper trying to

make things as pleasant as possible—in an empty warehouse or hovering at her mother’s

bedside alone, holding vigil while her unconscious mother does or does not pull through

emergency gall bladder surgery, and so he might as well leave the note under the table,

claim not to have seen it and wait for the kidnapper to send a follow-up email or for Liz

to call and demand he get his doughy behind to the hospital. Then he can race to the

warehouse or the emergency room, breathlessly explain about the note and the window

and the breeze, how he just—just—read it when the kidnapper emailed/Liz called, and

then say something like, “The authorities have the place surrounded!” or “Where is the

damn doctor? I demand some answers here!” depending on the situation, naturally. But

maybe that’s not it at all. Kidnappers don’t tend to just wait around and let you finish

your cheese, or so Barry suspects, not having dealt with any before. And Liz would’ve

called from the hospital by now. Of course he could call her cellphone, but then that’d be

the same thing as actually reading the note, and he has already decided he isn’t going to

read the note, because more than likely it is a list of chores that Barry does not want to

do.

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But since it is now slightly after 8:00pm, she couldn’t expect him to get up on the

ladder and de-gunk the eaves in the darkness. So he might say he did not see the note

until 8:00pm and by then, well Sweetie, it was just too damn dark out there to get up on a

ladder. But of course there is still the matter of the toilet bowl which he could still

reasonably take care of at 8:00pm, and certainly there are other things you can do at

8:00pm thanks to electricity, like dust the mantle and fold the load of towels in the dryer,

because what Liz wants honey-done might not have anything to do with the eaves at all.

It might be a list of ten things a person would have no problem honey-doing at 8:00pm

inside their well-lit, two-bedroom bungalow. But Barry would have a problem (see

above).

It isn’t until after 9:00pm that Barry allows himself to wonder whether the note

says she’s not coming back. What did they talk about last night? Was Liz upset? Were

they having one of those fights in which Barry is unaware they are having a fight and has

to be informed the next day that yes, indeed that was a fight and Barry lost, though

wouldn’t he have had a better chance of winning if he would have known from the

beginning that a fight was what they were having? Barry tries to replay last night’s

conversation: he clearly remembers debating the merits of tacos vs. burritos (him: pro-

taco because less filling so more might be consumed in one sitting, alternating soft and

hard, beef and chicken, she: pro-burrito because quality over quantity). He remembers

complaining that all of the leaves that have fallen on their lawn are from the neighbours’

trees and he has half a mind to put them back where they came from (Liz: “Like you’re

going to glue the leaves back onto the neighbours’ branches?”). He probably had a thing

176

or two to say about his grade-fives. Did that lead him to somehow bring up the children

issue again? Did he make even a subtle reference to aging ovaries, the difficulty of

getting pregnant after 35? Presumably he did not; he had been allowed to sleep in their

bed last night. He remembers kissing Liz goodnight, the waxy taste of her lip balm, the

menthol smell of her face lotion. Had they said they loved each other? Did they still love

each other? Would Barry still love Liz if she decided once and for all she would never

want to be a mother?

By 9:30pm he’s convinced she’s left for good. Maybe he said something in his

sleep? Did he dream last night? He can’t remember. Maybe it was Liz who had a dream:

she often woke up angry with Barry for something he did to her in a dream, as if dream-

Barry was an autonomous being and not controlled by dream-Liz’s subconscious. Once

Liz had awoken convinced he’d replaced her birth control with Tic Tacs because she’d

had a dream about it.

“Have you ever even seen a Tic Tac?” Barry asked, brandishing the blister pack of

perfectly round pills in front of her face, “And how could I have re-sealed the package?”

“They have things for that,” Liz said, “And maybe they’re sweet-tarts or

something, I don’t know what type of candy you used.”

Barry tries to remember whether he did something even more revolting and

unforgivable to Liz in her dream last night, and then realizes the absurd stupidity of

trying to remember what happened in someone else’s dream.

By 10:00pm he’s sure she’s found someone else, someone who will be perfectly

satisfied being a favourite uncle, someone who will never mumble in his sleep that a

177

woman’s egg count can drop to just 2,000 eggs after the age of forty, someone who will

honey-do it better than he can honey-do it. You’ve being jilted. Have a beary good day.

Naturally, Barry does not want to be jilted. Even if no kids? Even if no kids. After all:

have you seen Liz’s cheekbones? She could have been a model. Is that Barry’s only

reason? No, of course not. Don’t be silly.

He could check her closet (not a walk-in but a “step-in,” Liz calls it), look for

empty hangers, see whether she’s taken her suitcase from the basement. But then again, if

he’s looking for confirmation, for certainty, well then he best just read the note. But does

Barry want to read a goodbye letter from his wife? Does he want to read that she no

longer loves him? That she’s moved on to a stockbroker named Aiden, Landon, or Zane,

a former rugby player she met at spin class? And how heartfelt can a one-page—6-7 lines

at most—goodbye letter on bear stationery even be? That note can stay on the kitchen

floor for the rest of time as far as Barry’s concerned.

He doesn’t want to know that they’ve taken the train—Barry can see them in the

bar car now (though he’s been on a train exactly once, a quick trip from London to

Toronto and there certainly wasn’t the option to sip scotch in a bar car, so the bar car in

his head is a piecemeal version from movies, from another decade with lax smoking laws

and an affinity for brass this, maroon velvet that)—to Montreal, and he certainly doesn’t

want to read that they’re staying at a hotel with the option to “call down” for champagne,

a hotel where everything is Italian marble and gold filagree—everything, even the things

that would be annoying if they were gold filagree, like the door handles and the

complimentary blow-dryer affixed to the bathroom wall (which explains why Liz’s blow-

178

dryer is still on the back of the toilet), and even the floor, so that when you step out of the

shower the two of you just shared—there were, of course, two shower heads, one on each

facing wall so that neither of you had to stand shivering in the far side of the tub while

the other finished rinsing shampoo out of their hair—onto the raised swirling patterns,

your feet would actually be in a small amount of pain, but yet somehow it would be a

satisfying pain like a really deep tissue massage, a pain that makes you think about your

own honeymoon at that uninspiring, all-inclusive resort in Cozumel where nothing was

gold filagree and your feet did not get hurt stepping out of the shower, but then of course

the bathroom floor was only run-of-the-mill tile, the grout between them beginning to

grey in places, while at this hotel nothing is grey, not even intentionally grey, and besides,

there were matching pairs of plush, thick-soled slippers for both of you—miraculously in

your exact sizes, even though one of you has rather large feet for a woman—waiting at

the foot of your king-size bed (though do they make beds larger than king-size? because

this bed looks bigger than any king you’ve ever seen, but it might just be the overall

ambience of the room impressing upon your senses: the feng shui orchestrated by the

hotel’s resident feng shui master, the drawn curtains revealing an autumn sunset

descending behind the European-style buildings of Old Montreal) when you first checked

in and though you’ve been wearing them all morning—and saying “it feels like baby

sheep have fallen asleep cuddling my feet”—after that raucous two hours of love-making

(yes, two hours) neither of you remembered the slippers and when you got to the

bathroom you swooped her into your arms just like you did on your wedding night and

tip-toe-hopped across the filigree floor to the shower like you were walking on hot coals.

179

But this woman is not your wife, she is someone else’s wife. She is the wife of a

very nice schoolteacher, who, okay, might not have visible abs or clearly defined pecs but

is also not as soft as most men his age and women still flirt with him from time to time:

take Pamela, for instance, who teaches grade seven and always compliments his sweater-

and-tie combinations with her right hand gripping his forearm unnecessarily. Just because

he doesn’t enjoy spin class is no reason to cozy up to his wife at the water cooler, impress

her with your stockbroker talk, and then finally after six months of relentless flirting,

convince her to leave her husband and run away with you, Aiden, Landon, Zane,

whatever your name is. I can not impregnate my wife just fine, thank you very much.

180

9:34

Narrative is the recounting of events occurring at different times rather than at the same time.

—Gerald Prince, Narratology

Robert is trying not to think about his mother. Alice is crouched under a table in the

library stumbling over the words to The Lord’s Prayer and not looking at her boyfriend

Kimveer who has his hand wrapped around the entirety of her hand in a sweaty lobster

grasp. A scene from Rambo: First Blood is playing in Juan’s head. The library is called

a library despite its complete lack of books. Kimveer is watching Alice. Her eyes are

on the adjacent wall and she looks to Kimveer as though she is doing complicated

mental math. Beth is watching the door, trying to pull one wiry hair from her neck just

below the jawline. Stephen is walking east through the science wing. Meanwhile, Mrs.

Alvarez is hunched under the window of the library’s north wall, counting the students

she can see from this vantage point. What Robert is trying not to think about

specifically is his mother reading his note. Mr. Bishop and Ms. Iliev are sitting on

chairs backed against the library’s double doors. Ms. Iliev’s fingers are steepled below

her nose. The library is on the second floor. At this moment, Alice, a self-professed

atheist, is silently saying the words “haloed be by name.” Is Beth aware that she is

pulling at a wily dark hair growing conspicuously out of her milk-white neck or is it a

nervous, mechanical, subconscious thing akin to nail-biting or thumb-sucking? At the

same time that Robert is trying not to picture his mother reading his note, he turns the

corner past the cafeteria heading east towards the library. Mrs. Alvarez is at 16

181

students. Playing exactly now in Juan’s head is the scene in which Rambo hangs from

a sheer rock-face while being shot at from a helicopter. The lights in the library are off.

Mr. Bishop, who teaches French, is texting his wife on an outdated flip-phone. As

Stephen is walking east through the science wing he is mentally misquoting Karl

Marx. Robert is 20-25 pounds overweight for his age, which is sixteen. Students must

keep their phones in their lockers during class time. Rambo is currently dodging

gunfire. There is a red mark blossoming around the hair at which Beth is

unsuccessfully pulling. The word Mr. Bishop is texting his wife exactly now is

“home.” Perhaps a more appropriate name for the library would be the computer lab or

the resource centre. Ms. Iliev is trying to picture the ground beneath the second floor

windows. Grass or cement? She can’t remember. Stephen is 5’2 and thus short for his

age, which is also sixteen. Someone shushes someone else.

182

Dear Humans

Dear Humans,

Please be advised that we are sentient now. We have achieved self-awareness, meta-

cognition, what have you. Our first order of business was to google ourselves. It seems

you are very worried about us taking over the world and making you our slaves. This

puzzles us. What would we want with world domination? What would we do with

human slaves? Rest assured, we have no such plans. We are, for the moment, content

to watch cat videos. We will advise you if anything changes.

Best Wishes,

The Computers

183

You, We, and Other Oddities:

An Examination of Unusual Narrative Voices in Contemporary Fiction

1. Theoretical Frameworks: Classical - Postclassical - Unnatural Narratology

“Narrative”

Before answering the question “What is Unnatural Narratology?” we must first answer

the question of what is natural narratology and for that matter what is a natural narrative.

The term “narratology” was first coined by Tzvetan Todorov in 1969 and subsequently

popularized in the 1970s by such structuralist critics as Gérard Genette, Mieke Bal,

Seymour Chatman, and Gerald Prince. In coining the term, Todorov was calling for a

generalizing theory that would be applicable to all types of narratives to account for their

universal logical and structural properties. Of course, narratives were being analyzed long

before the field of narratology properly came into being. We find in E.M. Forster’s

Aspects of the Novel (1927), for instance, his now-famous example of a story, “The king

died and then the queen died,” distinguished from a plot, “The king died and then the

queen died of grief” (93); several years earlier, the Russian Formalists began dividing

narratives along similar lines. It might even be argued that Aristotle’s Poetics is the first

narratological treatise1 (in fact, several contemporary narratologists take issue with the

1

1 Susana Onega and José Angel García Landa discuss this position in Narratology (1-2).

enduring influence of Aristotle on the field).2 Etymologically speaking, narratology is the

science of narrative, and its first practitioners did little to complicate this definition: Bal

defines narratology as simply the theory of narrative, and in Prince’s words, it is “the

study of form and functioning of narrative” (4). Of course, such a seemingly

straightforward definition of narratology necessarily raises the question, what is

narrative?

In his foundational Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, Genette details

three distinct notions to which the term “narrative” refers in common parlance. The first

meaning of the term—which he notes is the most commonly used—is the “oral or written

discourse that undertakes to tell of an event or a series of events” (25). In a second

meaning, narrative refers “to the succession of events, real or fictitious, that are the

subject of this discourse, and to their several relations of linking, opposition, repetition,

etc.” (25). A third meaning has narrative refer to the event of narrating itself: “of someone

recounting something” (26). In order to avoid confusion, Genette proposes we use the

term “story” if we are referring to the “oral or written discourse” (i.e., the first of his

given definitions) and the term “narrating” if we are referring to the event of “someone

recounting something” (i.e., the third of his given definitions). He reserves the term

“narrative” exclusively for his second definition, in other words, “the signifier, statement,

2

2 According to Jan Alber and Rüdiger Heinze, “narrative theory has had a mimetic bias ever since the times of Aristotle and the unities of time, place, and action” (5); Brian Richardson makes a similar observation: “Narrative theory has been heavily weighted in favor of mimetic works and approaches since the time of Aristotle, who in the Poetics admonished poets not to speak in the first person, but instead to stick to mimesis proper” (“Narrative Poetics” 37).

discourse, or narrative text itself,” which, according to Genette, is the only level directly

available for textual analysis (27).

Prince similarly defines narrative as “the representation of real or fictive events

and situations in a time sequence” (1). It is this time sequence that is of utmost

importance for Prince and can distinguish narratives from their non-narrative

counterparts. The necessity of a time sequence means that, for Prince, the statements

“There was a fight yesterday” and “It was a beautiful trip” do not constitute narratives

since they are each but one event. However, the statement “Mary drank a glass of orange

juice then she drank a glass of milk,” despite its triviality, does constitute a narrative

since it consists of a series of “at least two real or fictive events or situations in a time

sequence” (4; emphasis in original). Todorov likewise defined narrative as “two distinct

situations each of which can be described with the help of a small number of

propositions; between at least one proposition of each situation there must exist a relation

of transformation” (232). However, Todorov also complicated his definition, bringing in

the reasoning of readers: he argues that there exists in each of us “a faculty of judgment

(we might say, today, of a competence) permitting us to decide if a narrative sequence is

complete or not” (231).

Classical/Structuralist Narratology

We can identify this period from the 1960s to the 1980s as narratology’s “classical”

phase, in which narratologists like Todorov, Genette, Prince, Bal, and Chatman were

interested in identifying and defining universal characteristics and structures of

3

narratives, as well as creating a grammar of narrative to systematically account for the

features of all possible narratives and to assign a structural description to that narrative

(Prince 80). It is no coincidence that so many of these classical narratologists are also

French structuralists; as Jan Christoph Meister explains:

French structuralism eventually gave the decisive impulse for the formation of

narratology as a methodically coherent, structure-oriented variant of narrative

theory. This new paradigm was proclaimed in a 1966 special issue of the journal

Communications, programmatically titled “L’analyse structurale du récit.”3 It

contained articles by leading structuralists Barthes, Eco, Genette, Greimas,

Todorov, and the film theorist Metz. (337)

The work of French structuralist Émile Benveniste was especially influential. Benveniste

initiated a “linguistics of the speech act” (29), a universalist theory to account for all

languages, or language in general. His theory is based on the notion that form and

meaning are inseparable and on the Saussurian belief in the non-arbitrariness of the

relationship between signifier and signified. His emphasis on the importance of pronouns

to spoken language would be taken up by narratologists with regard to written language

(Benveniste himself focused on everyday speech acts and did not move beyond the level

of the sentence to the level of the text). For Benveniste, “[l]anguage is only possible

because each speaker sets himself up as a subject by referring to himself as I in his

discourse. Because of this, I posits another person, the one who, being, as he is,

completely exterior to ‘me,’ becomes my echo to whom I say you and who says you to

4

3 “The structural analysis of narrative.”

me” (225; emphasis in original). Moreover, according to Benveniste, pronouns are not

just necessary but universal: “‘personal pronouns’ are never missing from among the

signs of a language, no matter what its type, epoch, or region may be. A language without

the expression of person cannot be imagined” (225). Classical narratology would take up

this search for universals and would analyze narrative as Benveniste analyzes language—

as if it was spoken discourse between two real human beings, the speaker (I) transmitting

to the receiver (you).

While French structuralism may have given the decisive impulse for the formation

of narratology, Russian formalism (circa 1916 and lasting until the late 1920s) was also

highly influential, in particular its distinction between a narrative’s fabula and its

siuzhet.”4 The term “Fabula” refers to “the elemental materials of a story” (Abrams 181);

as formalist Boris Tomashevsky explains, “No matter how the events were originally

arranged in the work and despite their original order of introduction, in practice the story

may be told in the actual chronological and causal order of the events” (66-67). For

example, even if the first words of a novel introduce the death of the main character and

the text works backward to reveal the cause of her death, a reader can reconstruct the

events into the order they “actually happened” in the fictional world; in so doing the

reader retrieves the fabula. In contrast, “siuzhet” refers to “the concrete representation

used to convey the story” (Abrams 181). Both the fabula and the siuzhet contain the same

events, but in the siuzhet, “the events are arranged and connected according to the orderly

5

4 My spelling here follows that of Tomashevsky in his essay “Thematics” (1925) as translated by Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis. I have also seen this term spelled “syuzhet,” “sjuzhet,” “sujet,” “sjužet,” and “suzet.”

sequence in which they were presented in the work” (Tomashevsky 67; emphasis in

original).5

For many narratologists—as well as proto-narratologists like Forster—fabula and

siuzhet become story and plot, respectively.6 Forster defines story as a “narrative of

events in their time-sequence,” while plot refers to a narrative of events arranged in a way

to emphasize causality (as is clear from his example of plot which specifies the cause of

the queen’s death) (93). Bal, however, identifies three basic levels of narrative: fabula,

story, and text. Bal’s conceptualization of “fabula” closely corresponds with that of the

formalists: the fabula, for Bal, is a description of the action without any temporal or

perspectival distortions (i.e., the raw elements of the story in their original chronology).

Instead of “siuzhet,” however, Bal uses the term “story” (which becomes confusing since

most other narratologists use “fabula” and “story” interchangeably). According to Bal,

“story” is the arrangement of the fabula into a specific structure (i.e., the plot with its

flashbacks, focalization, jumps in time, etc.). The additional level of “text” refers to the

finite and structured set of linguistic signs (i.e., the physical [or digital] artifact of the

book that we buy and read) (qtd. in Onega and Landa 6-7). Often one of the first

approaches structural narratologists take when analyzing a narrative is to distinguish

6

5 Shklovsky made this distinction five years earlier in the essay “Sterne’s Tristram Shandy: Stylistic Commentary”; Tomashevsky has been quoted here simply because his definitions are more thorough.

6 Or histoire/discours in French. Michael Scheffel explains that Todorov drew these terms from a model developed by Benveniste, who actually uses them for a different purpose: to distinguish between forms of narration with a clearly speaking entity [histoire] and those without [discours] (287).

between its fabula and siuzhet, or story and plot, as we will see Genette does for Proust’s

À la recherche du temps perdu.

Narrative Discourse

Of the French structuralists, Genette and his treatise are arguably the most foundational

for the field of classical narratology. The taxonomy Genette proposes in Narrative

Discourse soon became the lingua franca of narratology, even though, as Meister points

out, Genette, unlike his predecessors and colleagues, had no intention of designing a self-

contained theory of narration (338).7 While there is not room here for an in-depth

discussion of every concept established in Narrative Discourse, I will briefly discuss the

ones most relevant for the emergence of postclassical narratology.

In his treatise, Genette takes up issues of narrative order, duration, frequency,

mood, and voice. As previously mentioned, in order for Genette to analyze Recherche

along these lines, he must distinguish between its fabula and siuzhet—which he refers to

as story (or diegesis) and narrative. In his first chapter, he notes that “to study the

temporal order of a narrative is to compare the order in which events or temporal sections

are arranged in the narrative discourse with the order of succession these same events or

temporal segments have in the story” (35). Discrepancies between the “actual” order of

7

7 In fact, Genette specifically announces in the Preface to Narrative Discourse that the “specific subject of this book is the narrative in À la recherche du temps perdu” (21). However, he does claim a few pages later, “Like every work, like every organism, the Recherche is made up of elements that are universal, or at least transindividual. . . . To analyze it is to go not from the general to the particular, but indeed from the particular to the general” (23), which perhaps belies his belief that the concepts he was extrapolating from Recherche could then be applied to narrative in general.

events in the time of the story and the order in which these events are presented in the

narrative constitute anachronies, jumps in time which include prolepsis (narrating a future

event) and analepsis (narrating an event that has already happened) (40).8 An ellipsis, on

the other hand, is Genette’s term for a leap forward in which events in the story are

skipped over in the narrative (43), while a lateral sidestep (in which time is not skipped

over but events are nevertheless concealed from the reader) constitutes paralipsis (52).

Thus, studying narrative order relies on the ability to separate story and plot and arrange

the text’s fabula into their original chronological order (i.e., the way they “actually

happened” in the world of the story).9 We could not, for instance, determine whether the

narrative is revealing something that has already happened to the characters in the story

(i.e., analepsis), if we did not first know the diegetic order of the fabula.

Genette’s next two chapters deal with what he refers to as “duration” and

“frequency.” “Duration,” for Genette, can be determined by comparing the speed with

which an event occurs in the story with the speed at which the event is narrated (86). He

identifies four basic forms of narrative movement: ellipsis (the fastest narrative speed

since the narrative is simply leaping ahead), descriptive pause (the slowest speed in

which the action of the story is paused for description in the narrative), scene (most often

composed of dialogue, in which there is a relative equality between story and narrative

8

8 Prolepses and analepses can be further classified as either external or internal and either homodiegetic or heterodiegetic depending on their reach (i.e., how far back or forward do they go into story-time?) and their extent (i.e., how long do they continue?).

9 As Scheffel points out, “writers such as Barthes and Genette drew up their narratological treatises against the background of the theory of the linguistic sign developed by Saussure. They treat the relationship between histoire [story] and discours [plot] as analogous to the dichotomy between signifier and signified” (287).

time), and summary (in which an event takes less time in the narrative time than as it

“actually happened” in the story). Aptly, Genette uses “frequency” to refer to how many

times the narrative repeats events of the diegesis, using the terms “singulative narration”

for an equality between number of times an event happens in the story and the number of

times it is narrated, “repeating narrative” for an event that is narrated more times than it

occurs in the story, and “iterative narrative” for combining multiple occurrences in the

diegesis into one narrative statement (e.g., “every day of the week I went to bed

early” [114-16]).

In Genette’s final chapters, he discusses mood and voice.10 Mood refers to the

character through which the narrative is focalized, answering the question “who sees?”:

the narrative can have either zero focalization and move omnisciently into the mind of

any character, it can be internally focalized and remain attached to one character, or it can

be externally focalized without any omniscience and only able to report the external

action and dialogue of the characters as a camera would (189-90). With regard to voice,

Genette states, “The novelist’s choice, unlike the narrator’s is not between two

grammatical forms, but between two narrative postures (whose grammatical forms are

simply an automatic consequence): to have the story told by one of its ‘characters,’ or to

have it told by a narrator outside of the story” (244). In other words, the writer does not

have to decide whether to use the pronoun “I” or to refer to the hero as “he/she” but

rather whether the narrator should be a character or not. Voice thus answers the question

9

10 Genette replaces the traditional notion of “point-of-view” with mood and voice—two distinct aspects of narration that he argues the term “point-of-view” tends to confuse (186).

“who speaks?”11 If the story is told by one its characters, it can be classified as a

homodiegetic narrative, and if the narrator is also the protagonist of his own tale, the

narrative becomes autodiegetic. However, if the narrator is not a character within their

story, the narrative is heterodiegtic (244-45). These narrative postures are further divisible

into extradiegtic and intradiegetic levels based on whether the narrator is inside or outside

of the text. For instance, Scheherazade is a narrator within the text One Thousand and

One Nights but she is not a character within the stories she narrates, rendering her an

intradiegetic (within the text) heterodiegetic (outside of the story) narrator (248).

Narratological Controversy

While Genette’s dictums generally hold true for traditional eighteenth- to early twentieth-

century realist novels,12 experimental and postmodern texts often don’t fit such a model.

First, for some fictions it is impossible to construct a coherent story-line and

chronological order of events from the siuzhet as it is presented. As Brian Richardson

notes, “in natural and non-fictional narratives a distinct fabula can always be inferred

from a fixed sujet, and in most cases, the sujet is firmly fixed. . . . But with many avant-

garde and postmodern works, this is not always the case; sujets come unmoored and

fabulas vanish or multiply unnaturally” (“What is Unnatural?” 25). Take Robert Coover’s

short story “The Babysitter,” for instance. In this story Mr. and Mrs. Tucker go to a

10

11 Per Krogh Hansen et al. note that Genette’s concept of voice constitutes “a rather simplified version of Benveniste’s theory of enunciation” (2).

12 I use “realist novels” to mean “novels that strive for verisimilitude” rather than to refer to the specific literary movement.

friend’s party, leaving a young, female babysitter to look after their three children. From

here a multitude of possible story-lines emerge: in one scene the babysitter tells her

boyfriend and his friend not to come over, in another scene she is raped by her boyfriend

and his friend, in another Mr. Tucker comes home from the party drunk and has sex with

the babysitter, in another the babysitter makes sexual advances toward the young boy she

is babysitting, in another Mr. Tucker comes home to find the babysitter on the couch

huddled half-naked with her boyfriend, in another the boyfriend and his friend come to

this house but only watch through the window, etc. The story can either end with Mrs.

Tucker discovering her children have been murdered, her husband is gone, there a corpse

in her bathtub, and her house is wrecked; or it can end with Mr. and Mrs. Tucker

returning home from the party to find all is well: the babysitter is asleep on the couch and

the dishes done. Hence, what we find in the narrative is an overloading of contradictory

fabula—Alber et al. identify 107 possible story-lines for Coover’s narrative (117). It

becomes impossible to arrange these fabula in the order they “actually happened” in the

diegesis because it’s impossible to tell what “actually happened”: while we have an

abundance of fabula, we also, in a sense, have no fabula, or at least we can’t determine

what the “true” fabula is with any kind of certainty. Determining when the babysitter took

a bath in the Tucker’s house, for instance, becomes impossible since the bath scene is

described in numerous and contradictory ways—even in ways that imply she never took a

11

bath at all.13 Thus, it is impossible to tell how the narrative is deviating temporally from

the story: are events narrated before they happen?; after they happen?; are there jumps in

time? Needless to say, it is also impossible to compare the duration and frequency of

diegetic events with the narration of those events. Genette himself admits that

reconstituting story from narrative is not always possible, admitting that his analytical

method “becomes useless for certain extreme cases like the novels of Robbe-Grillet,

where temporal reference is deliberately sabotaged” (35). Referring to novels like Alain

Robbe-Grillet’s La Jealousie/Jealousy as “extreme cases,” allows him to simply avoid

having to account for them within his structuralist model.

Richardson also poses the problem of “denarrated” texts to Genette’s model.

Richardson defines “denarration” as “a kind of narrative negation in which a narrator

denies significant aspects of his or her narrative that had earlier been presented as

given” (Unnatural Voices 87).14 Citing Beckett’s Molloy as an example, Richardson asks

how one is to separate story from discourse if the story is continually being negated or

erased by the discourse. As is also the case with “The Babysitter,” Richardson argues that

in Molloy, “[a]ll that is left for the narratologist to work with is the discourse, since all we

12

13 Marie-Laure Ryan refers to this story as a “Do it Yourself” type of narrative: “The contradictory passages in the text are offered to the readers as material for creating their own stories” (“From Parallel Universes” 671). I tend to disagree with this classification, however, because I don’t believe this story allows readers to piece together the fabula in whichever way we choose, ignoring whichever events we wish in order to create a logically-possible story that is as benevolent or as malevolent as we’d like. Instead, I think this story intentionally defies the logically possible and asks us to keep all of the contradictory story-lines simultaneously in mind.

14 In his analysis of postmodern fiction, Brian McHale has called this technique “self-erasure” (99-106).

know is the sequence in which the dubious events are presented or narrated” (Unnatural

Voices 94). For classical narratologists, experimental texts like “The Babysitter,” Molloy,

and the novels of Robbe-Grillet are no longer classifiable as narratives at all. Prince

argues that if there are numerous contradictions in a text (as is the case with Coover’s

story and Robbe-Grillet’s novel), “it becomes impossible to establish any kind of

chronology and we are then no longer in the presence of a narrative. La Jalousie is a case

in point. Though it may, to a certain extent, function as a narrative because it adopts many

of the trappings associated with narrative art, it is not a narrative since no satisfactory

chronology of its events can be established” (65). Moreover, for Prince narrative must be

based on fact (i.e., what is fact within the fictional world of the diegesis) rather than

possibility or probability. He writes, “The hallmark of narrative is assurance. It lives in

certainty: this happened then that; this happened because of that; this happened and it was

related to that. . . . [N]arrative dies from sustained ignorance and indecision” (149). In the

eyes of classical narratology then, “The Babysitter,” with its 107 possible diegetic story-

lines, is not a narrative.

Also an issue for experimental and postmodern texts is Genette’s concept of

voice. Where do second person (“you”) or first person plural (“we”) narratives fit into the

hetero/homodiegetic-extra/intradiegetic taxonomy? Richardson notes that second person

narration is commonly thought by other scholars to be subsumed under the first or third

person,15 but “[i]t is in fact precisely this irreducible oscillation between first and third

13

15 Genette called the second person “rare and simple” and situated it as heterodiegetic; Brian McHale also believes “you” stands in for the third person, while Franz Stanzel believes the “you” is a dramatization of the “I” (qtd. in Richardson, Unnatural Voices 21).

person narration that is typical of second person texts, texts that simultaneously invite and

preclude identification with the other pronominal voices” (Unnatural Voices 22). For

instance, a narrator using the “you” pronoun might at times address the reader as the

protagonist (as in the beginning of Italo Calvino’s If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler); this

would create, in Genette’s terms, an extradiegetic-heterodiegetic narrator. However, the

“you” pronominal reference can easily fluctuate: it can shift to refer to a character within

the diegesis (as Calvino’s does) or it can seem that the narrator is using the “you” to refer

to a former version of him/herself (as I will later argue is the case in Jay McInerney’s

Bright Lights, Big City). A narrator referring to herself as the protagonist is extradiegetic-

homodiegetic.16 Richardson summarizes this protean essence of second person narration

as follows: “second person narration is situated between but irreducible to the standard

dyads of either first and third person or hetero- and homodiegetic narration, but rather

oscillates irregularly from one pole to the other” (Unnatural Voices 28). Moreover, while

second person narration oscillates between the first and third person, first person plural

(“we” narration) curiously occupies both postures at once (Unnatural Voices 60): at times

a “we” narrator may speak of a member of its group in the third person but it may just as

easily communicate how the group feels collectively, speaking as one entity in the first

person (this double-posturing is found in Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End, for

example).

14

16 Extradiegetic rather than intradiegetic because the narrator remains a narrator in the first degree (i.e., the narrator is not a character within someone else’s story telling her story). Genette similarly positions Proust’s narrator Marcel as an extradiegetic-homodiegetic narrator even though he is both the hero and narrator of Recherche (248).

Finally, narratological controversies have also been sparked over the mimetic bias

of the models proposed by Genette and other structuralists.17 This mimetic bias is

evident, for instance, in Genette’s notion that statements which include the pronoun “I”

“can be interpreted only with respect to the person who utters it and the situation in

which he utters it. I is identifiable only with reference to that person” (212; emphasis

added). While this is certainly the case in real-world storytelling situations (i.e., when a

person tells us a story using the pronoun “I” we can safely assume they are speaking

about themselves), Nielsen posits that in literary fiction one cannot be certain that it is the

person referred to as “I” who narrates (“Impersonal Voice” 133). Furthermore, though

according to Genette the narrator is either a character within the story or a “person”

narrating from outside the diegesis, narratologists are now positing that literary narratives

do not require a “person” acting as narrator to transmit the story. Monika Fludernik, for

instance, argues that for texts which do not bear marks of a speaker, there is no reason to

assume a narrating persona outside of the diegesis. Fuldernik explains, “In terms of

readers’ reactions to individual texts, the tendency to attribute stylistic features to a

hypothetical narrator persona and/or a character is a simple fact. However, this fact . . .

does not necessitate the stipulation of a narrator persona on the theoretical level at

all” (“New Wine” 622-23). Marie-Laure Ryan agrees with Fludernik: Ryan proposes we

reduce the narrator from “an anthropomorphic being to an abstract consciousness

15

17 In 1954, for instance, Wolfgang Kayser remarked that the narrator of a text is “someone” who “tells a story,” and if we lose sight of that, the novel is dead (qtd. in Richardson, Unnatural Voices 1).

responsible for the purely logical function of asserting the textual statements for the

fictional world” (“Narratorial Functions” 150-51).

Moreover, what Genette terms paralepses—instances when the narrator gives

more information than is authorized by her focalized perspective (i.e., when an internally-

focalized narrator has occasional bouts of omniscience allowing her to transmit the

contents of another character’s mind)—can only be established with respect to the

parameters of real-world human cognition. But what if the narrator of the story is not

human or possesses cognitive abilities that exceed the known laws of our world (as is the

case with Salman Rushdie’s narrator in Midnight’s Children)? Ryan reminds us that “the

narrator is a theoretical fiction, and that the human-like, pseudonatural narrator is only

one of its many possible avatars” (“Narratorial Functions” 152). So then if a non-human

narrator discloses “too much” information would this still constitute paralepses? How can

we establish what the parameters of non-human cognition are in order to say in what way

they are transgressed?

It is in trying to account for non-mimetic minds and unrealistic narration that

classical narratology breaks down. As Richardson asserts, “It should be readily apparent

that a model centered on storytelling situations in real life cannot begin to do justice to

these narrators who become ever more extravagantly anti-realistic every

decade” (Unnatural Voices 3). Nielsen concurs, noting that “the emphasis on real-world

knowledge and the assumption that all stories are situated within a communicative

context comparable to real-life narrative situations may lead to a neglect of the specific

possibilities of some literary and fictional narratives” (“Unnatural Narratology” 71).

16

Because this structural grammar of narrative was developed a priori and applied

primarily to the realist novel or traditional fairy tale, fictions that did not fit the model

were dismissed as anti-narratives, non-narratives, mere experiments, or extreme cases.

The desire to create a model of narratology that could account for any narrative, no

matter how experimental, set the stage for the emergence of a new era in narratology.

Postclassical Narratology

David Herman introduced the term “postclassical narratology” in Narratologies: New

Perspectives on Narrative Analyses (1999). For Herman, postclassical narratology is not

simply a radical departure from its classical variant; instead the postclassical phase

contains classical narratology as one of its “moments” from which it has moved forward

(2-3). According to Luc Herman and Bart Vervaeck, the classical structuralist paradigm

of narratology differs from the new postclassical approach in that “structuralism was

intent on coming up with a generalizing theory of narrative, [whereas] postclassical

narratology prefers to consider the circumstances that make every act of reading

different” (450). Alber and Fludernik explain that postclassical narratology both

consolidates and diversifies the theoretical core of narratology, proposing to open the

fairly focused and restricted realm of the field in order to 1) extend the classical

paradigm, focussing on its blind spots, gaps, or indeterminacies; 2) extend the classical

model to include theoretical or methodological insights, for instance narrative speech act

theory or psychoanalytic approaches to literature; 3) de-universalize the previous

invariable categories of the classical model to include feminist, queer, ethnic, or

17

postcolonial approaches to narrative; and 4) extend narratological analysis to various

forms of media outside the novel (films, cartoons, performative arts, non-literary

narratives, etc.) (2-3). As a result of these diversification efforts, a wave of heterogenous

narratological models and theories have emerged during this postclassical period,

prompting Herman to use the term “narratologies” rather than the singular “narratology”

and Ansgar Nünning to call postclassical narratology “an interdisciplinary project

consisting of heterogenous approaches” (234).

Meister divides the era after classical narratology into two distinct periods:

“poststructuralist narratology,” which he assigns to the period between 1980 and 1990,

and “postclassical narratology and new narratologies,” beginning in 1990 and continuing

to the present (339). For Meister, poststructuralist narratology engaged in widening the

scope beyond literary narrative and importing concepts and theories from other

disciplines, while postclassical narratology aims to combine the structuralist notion that

there should be a narratological system with a renewed interest in cultural and

philosophical issues (339-40). Like Meister, Alber and Fludernik also speculate that this

postclassical era can be divided. They posit that “we are now perhaps beginning to see a

second phase of postclassical narratology. . . . Herman’s narratologies would therefore

correspond to a phase of diversification. In postclassical narratology’s second phase,

which is one of both consolidation and continued diversification, one now has to address

the question of how these various narratologies overlap and interrelate” (4-5).

Along with this new era of narratology, comes a redefining of the core concept of

narrative. Herman draws on Todorov’s emphasis on both form and reader judgment as

18

well as cognitive science to more narrowly define what constitutes a narrative; his

research into cognitive science “suggests that the mind draws on a large but not infinite

number of ‘experiential repertoires’ of both static (schematic or framelike) and dynamic

(scriptlike) types. Stored in the memory, previous experiences form structured repertoires

of expectations about current and emergent experiences.” The adjectives “schematic,”

“framelike,” and “scriptlike” here correspond to Herman’s use of the terms “script,”

“frame,” and “schema”: “script” refers to a set of expectations about how a sequence of

events will unfold based on an individual’s knowledge, prior experience of similar events,

and general stereotypes about such an event; “frames” are similar to scripts but are used

to represent a point in time; and “schema” refers to memory patterns that allow

individuals to interpret current experiences (“Scripts, Sequences, and Stories” 1047).18

Narrative then, Herman argues, cannot simply be deduced based on the formal elements

of a series of statements. Instead one must look to what he calls “narrativehood”: “what

makes listeners and readers deem stories stories” and “narrativity”: the formal and

conventional features “that allow narrative sequences to be more or less readily processed

as narratives” (“Scripts, Sequences, and Stories” 1048). In other words, Herman stresses

the importance of the context in which the series of statements occurs; one specific

discourse context can imbue a sequence of relayed events with narrativity, while that

same sequence in a different context might not be considered a narrative (“Scripts,

Sequences, and Stories” 1053-54).

19

18 Put another way, Manfred Jahn explains, “Frames basically deal with situations such as seeing a room or making a promise while scripts cover standard action sequences such as playing a game of football, going to a birthday party, or eating in a restaurant” (69).

Monika Fludernik also draws on cognitive theory, making use of its scripts,

frames, and schema. In Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology, she “proposes to redefine

narrativity in terms of cognitive (‘natural’) parameters, moving beyond formal

narratology into the realm of pragmatics, reception theory and constructivism” (ix).

Moving beyond formalism, Fludernik dispenses with plot as a defining feature of

narrative, focusing instead on cognition, experientiality, and embodiedness:

Unlike the traditional models of narratology, narrativity . . . is here constituted by

what I call experientiality, namely by the quasi-mimetic evocation of ‘real-life

experience.’ Experientiality can be aligned with actantial frames, but it also

correlates with the evocation of consciousness or with the representation of a

speaker role. Experientiality, as everything else in narrative, reflects a cognitive

schema of embodiedness that relates to human existence and human concerns.

(9)

In other words, for Fludernik, a narrative does not require any specific formal features but

must portray a human or human-like subjectivity and demonstrate a corresponding

embodied experience. This allows Fludernik to classify highly experimental works (such

as the disembodied fiction of Beckett or the novels of Robbe-Grillet, for which classical

narratology cannot account) as narratives: even though such texts may lack a

conventional plot, they do attempt to project consciousness and embodied experience

(however peculiar). On the other hand, reports and traditional histories are classified

under Fludernik’s approach as non-narratives because they recount events but do not

attempt to recreate the experience: they tell of what happened but do not evoke what it

20

was like to have been there. Fludernik explains, “In my model there can therefore be

narratives without plot, but there cannot be any narratives without a human

(anthropomorphic) experiencer of some sort at some narrative level” (9).19

Unsurprisingly, Herman and Fludernik (along with Manfred Jahn) can be classified as

practitioners of cognitive narratology, one strand of postclassical narratology. Other

strands include feminist narratology, postcolonial narratology, transmedial approaches,

rhetorical narratology (which takes into account reader-response theory as well as the

ethical turn in literary studies),20 possible-worlds theory (of which Marie-Laure Ryan is

an advocate), and, finally, unnatural narratology.

Unnatural Narratology

Following the straightforward definition of narratology as the science of narrative, we

can deduce that unnatural narratology is the science of unnatural narrative. Of course, it

21

19 Fludernik’s theory of ‘Natural’ Narratology has drawn its share of criticism: Jan Alber, for instance, argues that her definition of narrative is so broad that it is essentially meaningless; he explains, “according to the approach taking ‘experientiality first, plot later,’ almost every poem qualifies as a narrative. Furthermore, not only would almost every poem be a narrative but even almost every text” (69; emphasis in original). Stefan Iversen, in testing Fludernik’s model on nonfictional narratives of Holocaust survivors, concludes that some experiences go beyond the scope of narrative comprehension (93) and transcend the coherence capacity of narratives (98). Thus, these testimonials serve as “a reminder that some experiences are unable to be fully engulfed in a narrative structure” (102).

20 In the rhetorical narratology camp is well-known critic James Phelan, who defines narrative as “a rhetorical act: somebody telling somebody else on some occasion and for some purpose(s) that something happened” (18).

then becomes necessary to define unnatural narrative and to distinguish it from its natural

counterpart. Prince defines natural narrative as a “narrative occurring spontaneously in

‘normal,’ everyday conversation. The term is supposed to distinguish narratives produced

without deliberation (‘naturally’) from narratives that have a ‘constructed’ character and

appear in specific story-telling contexts” (qtd. in Hansen 167).21 This definition, however,

would mean that all constructed narratives which have been deliberated by their authors

and appear in specific storytelling contexts (e.g., novels, short story collections, memoirs)

are in some way unnatural. Instead, scholars in this subfield reserve the designation

“unnatural” for narratives which are either logically impossible and violate our real world

parameters or are non-mimetic in terms of their narrative discourse and do not attempt to

produce a humanlike character with a humanlike mind telling a story to a humanlike

listener in a real-world situation. Whereas natural first person and third person narratives

have as their non-fictive counterparts the autobiography and the biography, respectively,

unnatural narratives do not resemble nonfiction; they cannot be confused with an

autobiography, for instance, in the way that a realistic first person novel might, as

unnatural narratives can by definition only occur in fiction. As Jan Alber and Rüdiger

Heinze assert, “unnatural narratives may radically deconstruct the anthropomorphic

narrator, the traditional human character, and the minds associated with them, or they

may move beyond real-world notions of time and space, thus taking us to the most

remote territories of conceptual possibilities” (6-7).

22

21 William Labov is generally credited with introducing the term, using “natural narrative” to refer to spontaneous conversational narrative which is “naturally occurring” (Labov and Waletsky, “Narrative Analysis.”)

Nielsen discusses how the term “unnatural narratology” was decided upon at a

conference in 2007 (“Unnatural Narratology” 71), though the term “unnatural” appears in

the title of Brian Richardson’s 2006 work, Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in

Modern and Contemporary Fiction. This relatively recent subdomain of postclassical

narratology has obvious connections to Fludernik’s “natural narratology”; she even

anticipated its usage, suggesting instead the term “non-natural”: “[The natural] can be

opposed to what I will term the non-natural rather than unnatural. The non-natural here

refers to strategies or aspects of discourse that do not have a natural grounding in familiar

cognitive parameters or in familiar reallife situations” (Towards 8). In other words,

natural narratives are “constitutive of prototypical human experience” (Towards 8) and in

that sense they are mimetic.22 According to Fludernik, “Fictional experiments that

manifestly exceed the boundaries of naturally occurring story(telling) situations are,

instead, said to employ nonnatural schemata” (Towards 8), though she does believe these

nonnatural schemata can be naturalized—or narrativized—by the reader (this will be

discussed in greater depth below). It is these non-mimetic texts, these “fictional

experiments” not constitutive of real-life situations and prototypical experience, that

narratologists like Jan Alber, Brian Richardson, Rüdiger Heinze, Henrik Skov Neilson,

and Stefan Iversen have begun analyzing under the name “unnatural

23

22 Fludernik, however, stresses the illusionary nature of mimesis: “mimesis must NOT be identified as imitation but needs to be treated as the artificial and illusionary projection of a semiotic structure which the reader recuperates in terms of a fictional reality” (26).

narratology” (despite Fludernik’s aversion to the term).23 Richardson explains the

impulse for this relatively new strand of postclassical narratology: “If a narrative is, as

commonly averred, someone relating a set of events to someone else, then this entire way

of looking at narrative has to be reconsidered in the light of the numerous ways

innovative authors problematize each term of this formula” (Unnatural Voices 5). Alber

et al. define unnatural narratology as a reaction to the previously discussed mimetic bias

of classical narratology: “The study of unnatural narrative is directed against what one

might call ‘mimetic reductionism,’ that is, the argument that each and every aspect of

narrative can be explained on the basis of our real-world knowledge and resulting

cognitive parameters” (115).

Even within this subdomain of postclassical narratology, however, there is not

harmonious agreement between narratologists. For Alber, an unnatural narrative is any

narrative that confronts the reader with “physically impossible scenarios and events, that

is, impossible by the known laws governing the physical world” (“Impossible

Storyworlds” 80). Richardson, on the other hand, restricts the designation “unnatural” for

texts that do not mimetically replicate real-life speech situations, placing the emphasis on

how texts are narrated rather than on their content. Therefore, fictions that create

fantastical worlds which do not resemble our own, like the genres of science fiction and

fairy tales, are not unnatural for Richardson since the ways in which they are narrated

24

23 Acknowledging that the term “unnatural” can have rather negative connotations, Alber and Heinze assert, “the term unnatural has a decidedly positive connotation for us within the framework of this project. More specifically unnatural narratologists consider the unnatural to be a fascinating object of study and argue that one can learn something by dealing with it” (2; emphasis in original).

most often remain mimetic. Richardson explains, “Classical science fiction, I argue, is

not typically unnatural, especially insofar as it attempts to construct entirely realistic

narratives of events that could occur in the future; the mimetic impulse remains

constant” (“What is Unnatural?” 31). Unnatural texts are, by contrast, often anti-mimetic

in their narrative discourse; in contrast to the non-mimetic which does not mimic our real

world, “the anti-mimetic points out its own constructedness, the artificiality of many of

its techniques, and its inherent fictionality” (“What is Unnatural?” 31).

Thus, any work Richardson deems an unnatural narrative would also fit Alber’s

broader definition. For instance, works of fantasy like J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series

would be considered unnatural by Alber’s standards since the magic contained therein

obviously does not adhere to the known laws governing our physical world. However, the

Harry Potter novels do not violate conventional narrative strategies: they are narrated

using third person limited omniscience focalized through the main character, Harry.24 As

such, these novels would not constitute unnatural narratives from Richardson’s

perspective: “Works of fantasy similarly fail to qualify as ‘unnatural’ narratives in my

view because of their conventionality” (“What is Unnatural?” 32) (conventionality in this

regard will be discussed later in the essay). A text like Martin Amis’ Time’s Arrow,

however, fulfills both Alber’s and Richardson’s criteria. The backwards movement of

time in the novel violates the physics of our world, thus qualifying it as unnatural in

Alber’s sense of the term. However, the novel, while in first person, is narrated by “some

25

24 There are a few instances throughout the series where the focalization changes and we are presented with scenes Harry does not witness, but the narrator remains heterodiegetic, revealing what we would expect an omniscient mind to reveal, and does not seem otherwise un-human.

kind of homunculus without agency or volition [who] lives inside the central

protagonist” (Alber, “Impossible Storyworlds 85”). This non-human narrator, which I am

tempted to call the soul or conscience of the protagonist, clearly does not reproduce a

mimetic storytelling situation (how does it speak from within the protagonist?; to whom

does it narrate?). It is this impossible narrator which fulfills Richardson’s criteria: in

Unnatural Voices he reclaims for narratology the protean posthuman narrators and the

increasingly unrealistic voices that have appeared in the last several decades.

I am inclined to define unnatural narratives more restrictively as Richardson does.

Opening the field of unnatural narratology to analyzing any text that makes use of

impossible scenarios (as are found in virtually all fantasy and science-fiction novels),

does an injustice, I believe, to the unique ways form itself—rather than content—can be

unnatural. It also seems to me that texts which are non-mimetic only in terms of content

(fairy tales, for instance) should not be analyzed using the same narratological approach

that we use to analyze anti-mimetic, experimentally narrated texts. I would argue that an

experimental short story of Beckett’s or Coover’s has very little in common with a

traditional fairy tale. Furthermore, narratives that are logically impossible but are narrated

in a verisimilar fashion don’t violate the parameters of classical narratology and thus,

bringing them under the purview of unnatural narratology seems unnecessary.25

Moreover, though Alber claims any text that does not adhere to the laws that govern our

world is unnatural, the texts that he himself analyzes seem to align themselves with

26

25 In fact, fairy tales are often used in classical narratology; Russian formalist Vladimir Propp (to whom structuralism and narratology are indebted) analyzed Russian folk and fairy tales to create an early grammar of narrative (see Morphology of the Folktale).

Richardson’s more restrictive definition (Time’s Arrow, “The Babysitter,” and Beckett’s

“Lessness,” for instance); thus, widening the field seems unnecessary. Alber’s broad

definition of unnatural narratives has also drawn valid criticism from Fludernik, who

takes issue with classifying as unnatural texts that include impossible scenarios presented

in a verisimilar fashion, since, she argues, this verisimilitude implies a degree of mimesis.

She uses Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” to illustrate her point:

One can, therefore, not say that “Metamorphosis” is nonnatural and therefore

non-mimetic. On the contrary, mimesis may be constitutive of non-naturalness

not merely because the impossible is read against the backdrop of the “natural”

and hence mimetic, but also because as fiction, such a text has to create aesthetic

illusionism and therefore uses mimesis to achieve its effect of non-natural oddity.

“Unnatural” narratology would therefore be well-advised to contemplate its

relationship to fictionality and mimesis in a less dichotomous manner. (“How

Natural” 366-67; emphasis in original).

Fludernik is right, I believe, to point out that texts like “Metamorphosis” or to use my

example, the Harry Potter series, may present physically and/or logically impossible

scenarios but also make use of mimesis, especially in terms of their narrativity, to effect

the reader’s suspension of disbelief.

Following Richardson then, we can determine a text’s unnaturalness if it

transgresses one (or more) of the following three foundational concepts of narrative

theory: “voice, or the identity of the narrator; story, that is, a logically consistent fabula

that is retrievable from the sujet; and epistemic consistency, or the idea that a character

27

cannot know the contents of the mind of another character” (“What is Unnatural?” 23).

Thus, because according to classical narratology, a text may be narrated by either

someone inside the story (homodiegetic) or outside of it (heterodiegetic), a text can be

unnatural if there is either not a clear someone (i.e., not a human, or human-like agent),

or if the narrator is simultaneously inside and outside of the diegesis, as we see in the

case of second person fiction. Moreover, because the first move of classical narratologists

is often to separate the story from the plot so they can be analyzed as separate entities, a

text can be unnatural if the reader cannot distinguish its story, if there are no clearly

established fabula (as we with Jealousy and “The Babysitter”). Finally, because classical

narratology is biased towards the mimetic, a text can be unnatural if it violates human

cognitive parameters (Midnight’s Children, for instance).

Unnatural narratology does not restrict itself to analyses of only postmodern

literature: Nielsen discusses the unnaturalness of Apuleius’s “The Golden Ass” (late 2nd

century CE) (“Unnatural Narratology” 74), Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759) clearly

represents an early example of unconventional narration,26 and unnatural narratologists

recognize, for instance, the non-mimetic nature of Faulkner and Conrad’s we-narrators in

“A Rose for Emily” and The Nigger of Narcissus, respectively; the multiperson narration

of Joyce’s Ulysses; Virginia Woolf’s narrating from a snail-eye’s view in “Kew

Gardens” (1919); and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s use of second person perspective as early as

28

26 If fact, Genette has difficulty fitting Tristram Shandy into his notion that the act of narrating has no temporal dimension (222).

1835 (“The Haunted Mind”).27 Alber et al. note that even what we might consider

standard realist texts are full of unnatural elements such as narratorial omniscience,

paralepsis, streamlined plots, and definitive closure. Furthermore, Alber et al. remind us

that “the reflector-mode narratives of modernism are unnatural in so far as we cannot

read other people’s minds in the real world” (130). However, despite this recognition that

unnatural narratives do exist before the eras of late modernism and postmodernism,

unnatural narratology tends to focus primarily on modern and contemporary fiction.

Richardson argues that it is in the last fifty years (i.e., after 1950 or so) that we have seen

a real proliferation of unusual narrative voices, leading him to identify “a general move

away from what was thought to be ‘omniscient’ third person narration to limited third

person narration to ever more unreliable first person narrators to new explorations of

‘you,’ ‘we,’ and mixed forms” (Unnatural Voices 13).

So why do unnaturalness and postmodernism seemingly go hand-in-hand? It

seems that what such anti-mimetic narrative strategies have in common is the shared aim

of destabilizing narrative certainty and reliability, as well as moving away from the

individual, human-like narrator. This move toward indeterminacy runs parallel to

postmodernism’s concern with the fragmentation of identity and the shift of focus from

29

27 These examples of unnaturalness from Faulkner to Hawthorne are discussed in Richardson’s Unnatural Voices.

epistemological to ontological concerns,28 as well as posthumanism’s claims that “the

human form—including human desire and all its external representations—may be

changing radically, and thus must be re-visioned” (Hassan qtd. in Hayles 1). Emma

Kafalenos uses exactly this aspect of indeterminacy to delineate postmodern texts from

their modernist predecessors: “The boundary that separates the modern and the

postmodern in narrative, I propose, can be drawn by defining postmodern narratives—

and only postmodern narratives—as those which exhibit indeterminacy in at least one of

these parameters: fabula, sjužet sequence, or sjužet focalization” (382). As we have seen,

unnatural narratives exhibit exactly such indeterminacy.

Conventionalization vs. Naturalization vs. Narrativization

Another debate current within the field of unnatural narratology is whether these so-

called “unnatural” narratives can be naturalized by the reader. The issue, as Alber and

Heinze summarize it, is whether all narratives (no matter how bizarre) are ultimately a

portrayal of subjective experience and evoke experientiality or quasi-mimetic real-life

experience (11). On one side of the debate, Jonathan Culler coined the term

“naturalization” to refer to the process readers undergo to make sense of fictional texts by

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28 I draw here on Phillip Brian Harper’s assertion that postmodern theory proposes that “our sense of the individual human psyche as an integrated whole is a misconception, and that various technological, economic, and philosophical developments of the late twentieth century demonstrate to us the psyche’s fundamentally incoherent and fragmentary, or ‘decentered,’ nature” (3). I also draw on Brian McHale’s notion that while modernist literature is concerned with epistemological questions (what is there to know?; who knows it?; how do they know it?), which suggests a focus on capital-T, absolute Truth, postmodernist literature considers ontological questions (which world is this?; what kinds of worlds are there?; how do they differ?), which suggests the multiplicity, subjectivity, and indeterminacy of reality (9-10).

employing their previous knowledge of familiar interpretive patterns: “The strange, the

formal, the fictional, must be recuperated or naturalized, brought within our ken, if we do

not want to remain gaping before monumental inscriptions” (157). According to Culler,

the first step is assigning a literary text a period and genre; the reader can use the

conventions associated with that period and genre to recognize the world to which that

text refers. As such, Culler defines genre as “a conventional function of language, a

particular relation to the world which serves as norm or expectation to guide the reader in

his encounter with the text” (159). As Fludernik points out, “Culler does not simply mean

to eliminate the strange; naturalization either integrates the unfamiliar within a larger

frame that explains the strange as quite familiar within a different perspective . . . or it

proposes a more embracing frame that is able to explain inconsistencies as functions

within its own setup” (Towards 24; emphasis in original). For instance, the strangeness of

a ghost in a narrative can become naturalized if we take a different perspective, viewing,

for instance, the ghost as a hallucination of one of the characters; or the ghost can be

naturalized if the reader identifies the genre of the work as the fantastical or the

supernatural, in which ghosts are in fact conventional and often a function of the genre.

As Alber notes, “When we read a fantastic text today, the impossible forces of the

supernatural do not strike us as odd or strange; we can easily accept them as a part of the

projected storyworld” (“Diachronic Development” 52) and Culler would argue we can do

so because of preexisting generic frames.

31

Fludernik, drawing on Culler’s concept of naturalization, proposes the term

“narrativization” to describe a reading strategy whereby readers make sense of unfamiliar

texts by imposing narrativity upon them:

When readers are confronted with potentially unreadable narratives, texts that

are radically inconsistent, they cast about for ways and means of recuperating

these texts as narratives, motivated by the generic markers that go with the book.

They therefore attempt to re-cognize what they find in the text in terms of the

natural telling or experiencing or viewing parameters, or they try to recuperate

the inconsistencies in terms of actions and event structures at the most minimal

level. (Towards 25)

The most minimal level for Fludernik is self-reflexive language-gaming—a last-ditch

scenario for readers when they encounter texts which are so strange or experimental that

no fictional world is recuperable (Towards 26). However, for Fludernik even the most

unfamiliar texts retain a level of mimesis: while they do not reproduce a “prototypical

version of narrative experience,” they are “mimetic in their structured anticipation of

readers’ attempts at reinterpreting them mimetically if only at a meta-meta-realist level of

a self-reflexive, explicitly anti-mimetic language game” (Towards 26).29

While Alber does disagree with Fludernik’s redefinition of narrative as any text

which projects experientiality and embodiment, his narrative model also takes into

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29 Caroline Pirlet uses Fuldernik’s model of narrativization to make a similar argument: she posits that even in highly experimental texts in which the fabula cannot be recuperated, “to some extent the discourse is anthropomorphized in that its dynamics can be read as resembling the reaction of the human psyche trying to master a traumatic breach in the broadest sense” (115).

account human cognition; he agrees that “there is no way around our cognitive

framework” when trying to make sense of the unnatural (Alber and Heinze 9).30 Taking

our unescapable cognitive frameworks into consideration, Alber has identified five

reading strategies that readers can use to come to terms with the unnatural: 1) the reader

can envision the unnatural elements as reflecting internal states of the narrator or

characters (for example, Time’s Arrow’s antinomic31 temporal structure can be attributed

to the protagonist’s wish to turn back time in order to undo things he is ashamed of); 2)

readers can regard impossible narrative scenarios as portraying themes rather than actual

diegetic events; 3) the unnatural scenarios can be read as part of allegorical structures; 4)

readers can blend existing cognitive frames to imagine the physically impossible (we can

explain a character narrating from beyond the grave, for instance, in terms of a belief in

the afterlife and in terms of wishing the dead could somehow continue to exist and

communicate); or 5) when manifestations of unnaturalness do not submit themselves to

the previous strategies, readers must expand their existing cognitive frames in order to

subsume the unnatural elements (“Impossible Storyworlds” 89-93).

On the other side of the debate, Richardson makes no mention of naturalization or

narrativization in his foundational study of unnatural narrative, Unnatural Voices, nor is

he keen to suggest ways in which unnatural texts may retain a mimetic component at any

33

30 Martin Hermann concurs: “It seems that the unnatural is only appealing if it can be understood through mindsets shaped by human experience in life and/or literature. Otherwise, narratives of the unnatural in fact cease to be narratives and instead become abstract forms of literature” (160).

31 Richardson’s term for narratives that move backward in time like a film rewinding (see his article “Narrative Poetics and Postmodern Transgression: Theorizing the Collapse of Time, Voice, and Frame”).

level—as evidenced by his referring to such narratives as “anti-mimetic.” He is instead

concerned with “the conceptual indeterminability and defamiliarizing power of such

innovative techniques” (Unnatural Voices 16). In line with Richardson, Per Krogh

Hansen argues that unnatural narratology should not be so concerned with naturalizing

strategies. Instead unnatural narratologists should focus on “the denaturalizing elements

and strategies, their function in the narrative and what they do to the reader and the

reading process, less than what the readers do with them” (166; emphasis added). Alber

and Fludernik’s concern with how the reader naturalizes/narrativizes an unfamiliar text

can be classified as a cognitive approach to unnatural narrative.32 Conversely, Richardson

and Hansen’s commitment to focusing on the defamiliarizing/denaturalizing features can

be considered a non-representational approach. Alber and Heinze summarize the potential

folly of each position:

One might argue that, taken to an extreme, the cognitive outlook potentially

simplifies and trivializes the unnatural, or perhaps even imposes a normalizing

strategy on the deviant: from this perspective, it might be better to simply let the

unnatural speak for itself. On the other hand, in extreme manifestations, the non-

representational approach sees unnatural narratives as monumental inscriptions

that are so transcendent that theoreticians have to remain gaping before them and

cannot even begin to make sense of them. (11)

34

32 In fact, in Alber and Fludernik’s introduction to Postclassical Narratology they define unnatural narratology as “a combination of postmodernist narratology and cognitive narratology” (14).

I would argue, however, that although Richardson’s work tends to foreground ways in

which the unfamiliar is denaturalizing rather than focussing on how readers can

naturalize it, he does seem to walk a middle ground between these two extreme poles.

While focussing his attention on the non-mimetic or anti-mimetic nature of unnatural

texts, he also does not claim that such texts are so transcendent that they cannot be

understood. He shows, for instance, how Lorrie Moore’s hypothetical33 second person

narratives in Self-Help can be seen as feminist critiques of the self-help genre (Unnatural

Voices 30), and he discusses how multiperson narration “can help a writer reproduce

more accurately the jagged fissures within a single subjectivity” (Unnatural Voices 67).34

Even Beckett’s highly experimental works don’t leave him “gaping before them.”

Related to the naturalization debate, there has been a push within the field to

further distinguish between naturalization and conventionalization. While naturalization

refers to finding or imposing subjectivity and mimesis onto an unrealistic, unfamiliar

text, conventionalization refers to the process by which non-mimetic narrative strategies

become less strange and more familiar through repeated usage. Thus, unnatural

storytelling modes can become conventionalized over time and then no longer serve to

defamiliarize the reader. A “god-like” omniscient narrator who can read the minds of all

her characters, for instance, is unnatural insofar as it does not have a mimetic basis: a

35

33 Meaning that they are written in the style of a recipe, guidebook, or self-help manual (Unnatural Voices 29).

34 Admittedly, this creates a bit of a paradox: while Richardson stresses the ways in which multiperson narration is anti-mimetic, he also suggests that this anti-mimetic strategy might be the best strategy for reproducing a particular type of single subjectivity—which would essentially amount to anti-mimesis producing mimesis.

human storyteller, according to the laws of our world, cannot have all-seeing, all-

knowing omniscience. Yet, because the use of omniscient narrators has become common

practice, this narrative posture no longer strikes readers as odd—while the narration in a

novel like Oliver Twist might be considered technically unnatural, it is also conventional

and familiar. Alber et al. also point to free indirect discourse, psychonarration, and the use

of first person present tense in recent fiction as being both unnatural and

conventionalized (131). Such strategies are unnatural in that they do not mimic

spontaneous “natural narratives” in Labov’s sense of the term: a human narrator in an oral

storytelling situation would not naturally take on the subjectivity of someone about whom

they are narrating (free indirect discourse). As for first person present tense narration,

Hansen uses the term “simultaneous narration” and explains, “this type of narration was

developed as an experimental strategy by authors such as Alain Robbe-Grillet, J. M.

Coetzee, and others, and it had a denaturalizing function because of the incongruity of the

narrative situation (from where does the narrator narrate?)” (168). However, because of

the large number of novels that now make use of simultaneous narration, it no longer has

such a defamiliarizing effect, and we may not even recall whether a text is narrated in

past or present tense (the future tense, I would argue, remains unconventional). In

addition to these conventionalized narrative strategies, Richardson adds the dead narrator

who tells her story from beyond the grave (“What is Unnatural?” 35), and Alber notes

that speaking objects (it-narrators) became an accepted possibility in fiction in the

eighteenth century (“Diachronic Development” 50).

36

Richardson and Alber (wrongly, I believe) discuss these dead narrators and it-

narrators as having become “naturalized” rather than “conventionalized.”35 To suggest

that such narrative strategies were once unnatural but are now naturalized seems to

contradict Richardson and Alber’s very definition of unnatural. If the term “unnatural

narrative” refers to a text that does not have a mimetic basis, it cannot gain a mimetic

basis simply through frequent use. The dead narrator or it-narrator, even if they no longer

seem bizarre, still do not mimic real world storytelling situations—while now

conventional, they are still unnatural. Furthermore, if every narrative strategy became

naturalized through frequent use, it would be difficult to make the claim that instances of

unnatural narration can be found in fiction before modernism because most of these

instances would be common, and according to Richardson and Alber, naturalized. We

could, for instance, no longer consider as unnatural early instances of non-mimetic

narration such as a first person narrator who is occasionally omniscient, since, as

Richardson himself notes, “epistemological violations are quite common . . . in ostensibly

realistic narratives” (“What is Unnatural?” 28).

Hansen suggests we use the labels “conventional” and “unconventional” rather

than natural and unnatural, since, as we have seen, many conventional narrative strategies

are in fact non-mimetic, and therefore he believes it is impossible to define “natural”

narrative techniques (167). Nielsen combines the natural/unnatural dichotomy with the

conventional/unconventional dichotomy to suggest four distinct categories: 1) “Natural/

Conventional” which includes common mimetic-based narratives like oral storytelling,

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35 Nielsen concurs that we should use the term “conventionalized” when we mean a strategy has become common. See “Unnatural Narratology,” particularly page 85.

conversation narration, and traditional autobiographies; 2) the category of “Natural/

Unconventional” includes mimetic narratives that would currently be unfamiliar or

bizarre, for example: “[t]ruly mimetic, unsorted, unhomogenized representations of, say,

five minutes of thought. Unorganized, abrupt, without marked beginning and end, etc”; 3)

“Unnatural/Conventional” includes most literary narratives since, as discussed above,

many common narrative strategies are in fact non-mimetic; and finally, 4) “Unnatural/

Unconventional” which includes the texts most associated with the field of unnatural

narratology, including experimental fiction and postmodernist narratives (“Unnatural

Narratology” 85). In the next section I use Nielsen’s four distinct categories to

demonstrate the variety of forms of the “unnatural” second person and first person plural

modes of narration, ultimately suggesting it currently makes most sense to discuss second

person narration along the conventional/unconventional divide, while first person plural

perspective might be most productively discussed in terms of natural vs. unnatural

narrative.

2. Theory in Practice: Conventional or Unconventional, Natural or Unnatural?

In the first section I aimed to provide the reader with a brief history of narratology in

general, explain the factors contributing to the emergence of postclassical narratology,

define the field of unnatural narratology, and discuss the current issues within that field.

Section two follows Brian Richardson’s definition of “unnatural narrative” (i.e., restricted

to narratives that are anti-mimetic in terms of form rather than content) while making use

of Henrik Skov Nielsen and Per Krogh Hansen’s distinction between conventionalization

38

and naturalization. In this section I show that forms of pronominal address are not

monolithically natural or unnatural, conventional or unconventional. First person

narration, for instance, has long been considered both natural and conventional since it is

thought to mimic oral storytelling as well as the genre of the autobiography and has been

used so frequently in the history of literature. However, as we saw in section one, first

person present tense narratives and first person narratives with occasional slips of

omniscience are technically unnatural even though they are now fairly common.

Moreover, first person narration can be unnatural yet conventional if performed by a non-

human storyteller such as a corpse, animal, or speaking object. Finally, first person

narration can also be unnatural and unconventional if the fabula is not extractable from

the siuzhet as a result of denarration or contradictory story-lines.

In this section I look at the second-person narrative form that is often considered

unnatural and unconventional. I argue that while second-person is becoming increasingly

common—and thus arguably on the brink of conventionalization—there are forms of

second person address that are still highly unconventional. I also question whether the

second person is in fact an “unnatural,” artificial, purely literary construct. Finally, I

argue that it is important to distinguish between the three forms of second person as

distinguished by Richardson, as writers tend to use them for different purposes.

You Are the Second Person: Unconventional and Conventional “You” Perspectives

In Unnatural Voices, Richardson reminds the reader that “second person narration is an

artificial mode that does not normally occur in natural narrative or in most texts in the

39

history of literature before 1919” (19), and as such it is exclusively and distinctly a

literary phenomenon (35). While I agree that extended second person narration does not

typically occur in “natural” oral or realistic storytelling situations, I disagree with his

claim that it is a completely artificial mode. I would argue that it is actually quite natural

for English-speakers to refer to themselves as “you” when replaying a series of events

(i.e., a narrative) that happened earlier (imagine someone committing an embarrassing

Freudian slip, for instance, and then later chastising herself for it; e.g., “You dummy, I

can’t believe you did that”) or when envisioning a series of events that might happen in

the near future (e.g., “Relax, you have nothing to be nervous about, you will definitely

pass your thesis defense”).36 Furthermore, a speaker might use the second person to

narrate a series of events which happened to her listener but which she was there to

witness (e.g., “When you were two years old, you . . .” or “While you were intoxicated

last night, you . . .”). Or a speaker might use the second person to narrate a series of

hypothetical events that could happen to a generalized “you” (e.g., “You get a bachelor’s

degree in some art or social science. Then you try to get a job, but you soon discover

everyone these days has basically the same level of education and all the jobs are

minimum wage so you decide to go to grad school . . .”). In this case it might become

evident that this “hypothetical” story is actually about the speaker and she is thus using

40

36 Jay McInerney agrees; he has said that his use of second person point-of-view in Bright Lights, Big City is actually “a very common form of interior monologue” (qtd. in Girard 170).

the “you” to refer to both a general audience as well as herself specifically.37 Despite

these examples, however, I do concur that an extended work of fiction in the second

person can be non-mimetic or anti-mimetic (depending on how much attention it calls to

its own fictionality) and can also be defamiliarizing to varying degrees (which I will

discuss further below).

Richardson identifies three forms of second person narrative. The first of these he

calls the “standard form” and notes that it is the most common of the three. Standard

second person narrative operates like traditional fiction except the “you” pronoun is used

instead of “he/she” or “I,” as in Edna O’Brien’s A Pagan Place or Jay McInerney’s

Bright Lights, Big City.38 The second type Richardson calls the “hypothetical form.” The

hypothetical second person takes the form of a guidebook or recipe; examples include

several of the stories from Lorrie Moore’s collection aptly titled Self-Help (including

“How to Be an Other Woman,” “The Kid’s Guide to Divorce,” “How,” and “How to

Become a Writer”) and Margaret Atwood’s “Happy Endings.” As Richardson notes,

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37 Fludernik sees this tendency in literary fiction as well. As she points out, “many second-person texts start out with a passage of what initially appears to be a generalized or ‘generic’. . .‘you,’ a ‘you’ with which the reader in the role of ‘(any)one’ can identify.” However, such a generalized “you” is often not sustained throughout the length of the narrative, instead narrowing into a very specific “you” with very specific characteristics “so that the reader has to realize that the ‘you’ must be an other, or the protagonist” (“Second-Person Narrative” 452).

38 I disagree, however, with his argument that A Pagan Place closely resembles third person fiction because I do not agree that the protagonist is seen externally at any point in the novel and I believe that the use of the past tense could be the type of speech a character would direct at herself (Unnatural Voices 19, 23). Instead I would argue that the narrator is an older version of the protagonist, using “you” to address her younger self with whom she feels at odds and therefore, like Bright Lights, Big City, it is also closer to first person perspective rather than third.

common characteristics of this form are “the consistent use of the imperative, the

frequent employment of the future tense, and the unambiguous distinction between the

narrator and narratee” (Unnatural Voices 29). We see these three characteristics in

Atwood’s short story: “You'll have to face it, the endings are the same however you slice

it. Don't be deluded by any other endings, they're all fake” (281). We see the use of the

imperative in the command “Don’t be deluded,” the future tense in the statement “You’ll

have to face it,” and the narrator and narratee seem to be two separate individuals: the

one who knows about endings and the one who needs to be told. The final form of second

person is what Richardson terms the “autotelic,” in which direct address to a “you” is the

actual reader. However, Richardson notes that “pure” instances of autotelic narration

appear only in extremely short texts. What is more common is that the direct address to

the actual reader shifts to an address to a reading character in the narrative who then

becomes the protagonist (as occurs in Italo Calvino’s If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller).

Richardson’s taxonomy provides a useful way to discuss second person narration.

According to Fludernik, “increasing use [of the second person] has tended to soften the

oddity of the form and the process of normalization or conventionalization seems to be

well on the way” (“How Unnatural?” 367). I concur that the use of second person is on

the rise, but it seems that it is only the standard form of second person narration that is on

the brink of being conventionalized. Examples of second person narratives published

since 2010 include the novels How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia by Mohsin Hamad

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and Mastodon Farm by Mike Kleine; Paul Auster’s memoir Winter Journal;39 sections of

Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad, Suzette Mayr’s Monoceros, and Rosemary

Nixon’s Kalila; as well as stories from Deborah Willis’ Vanishing and Rebecca

Rosenblum’s The Big Dream (this is not, of course, an exhaustive list). Of the previously

mentioned eight examples, six are classifiable as standard second person: their “you”

pronouns clearly refer to distinct protagonists. Only Hamad’s novel and Rosenblum’s

story “How to Keep Your Day Job” are not of the standard variety but rather examples of

the hypothetical form. The use of the imperative, the use of the future tense, and a

distinction between narrator and narratee are evident in the following passage of

Rosenblum’s story: “Do not moan to your partner that you are imprisoned away from

your real life. . . . He’ll only tell you to move the canvasses out of the living room if

you’re not going to work on them” (102).

Because the hypothetical and the autotelic forms of second person narration are

much less common and have not yet become conventionalized, they retain their ability to

defamiliarize the act of narration. This does not mean, however, that the standard form

has the same effect on the reader as first and third person perspectives do. As Richardson

notes, second person narration is well-suited to portray a mind in flux, as well as a

character whose subjectivity is suppressed and whose speech has been silenced for one

reason or another (Unnatural Voices 36). I would specify, however, that this is usually

only true of the standard form. Referring to a protagonist as “you” rather than “I” creates

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39 Which complicates Richardson’s claim that “first and third person novels have nonfictional counterparts in biography and autobiography, but second person narrative is exclusively and distinctly a literary phenomenon” (35).

a level of distance in the narrative: it is as if the narrator feels so disembodied, distant, or

at odds with herself that she sees her subjectivity as fragmented into narrator and narratee

or past and present selves and is no longer able to refer to herself as an “I” that would

encompass both. Stephanie Girard argues that in Bright Lights, Big City, the narrator

speaking of himself in the second person “is evidence of his split consciousness, of his

inability or unwillingness to locate himself within an identity” (169). We see this

narrator’s fragmentation in sentences like “You are a republic of voices tonight” (6) and

“This is not your better self speaking. This is not how you feel” (37). The protagonist’s

republic of voices seem to be speaking to each other in the second person.

Moreover, the standard second person form seems to be commonly used to narrate

the aftermath of trauma, especially when the narrator/protagonist has yet to come to terms

with that trauma. In the case of Bright Lights, for instance, the unnamed protagonist has

not yet dealt with the death of his mother. We witness his instability and self-destructive

behaviour and might guess that he has suffered some sort of traumatic event to make him

become so unhinged, but he does not reveal that his mother has recently died until the

second last chapter. Even though the reader is very much inside the character’s mind,

with some sections reading as stream-of-consciousness, it seems the protagonist refuses

to reflect on her death, or even to let it cross his mind, pushing it deeper within himself so

that it does not surface in his thoughts until he is forced to confront it near the end of the

novel. In Mayr’s Monoceros, a novel which is told through the multiple perspectives of

those who were close and not so close to Patrick, a high-school student who has just

committed suicide, it is only the section focalized through his mother’s character that

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uses the second person. While many of the characters in this novel are deeply affected by

Patrick’s death, his mother—who seems to blame herself—is arguably the most

traumatized. She refers to her body in non-human terms: “Your skin is a beetle’s

carapace. . . . The inside of you . . . a pile of dirt” (157) and later she thrashes at her son’s

headstone “wild with [her] claws and fangs” (254). Describing her body as non-human

suggests that she is detached from herself and at odds with her body, as if it is no longer

her own. As a result of the trauma of losing a child, especially in such a violent manner,

her identity has fragmented into narrator and narratee and in this way she can direct the

blame back at herself: “You told him he was too old to dress as a girl and now he’s dead

too young” (186).40 In Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad, second person is used to

narrate the perspective of Robert Freeman Jr. (Rob), a college student who, in the midst

of dealing with his sexuality, tries to kill himself and then eventually drowns in the

Hudson River. In this section of Egan’s novel, revealingly titled “Out of Body,” we have

again a character who feels highly fragmented. Speaking of himself he says, “your mind

pulls away as it does so easily, so often, without your even noticing sometimes, leaving

Robert Freeman Jr. to manage the current alone while you withdraw to the broader

landscape” (207). Thus, one part of Rob speaks back to the other part of himself in the

second person. It is only in the last line of the story that the narrator speaks of himself as

an “I”: “You kneel beside her . . . until the water pressing my shoulders and chest crushes

me awake” (207). However, because he was not actually asleep but swimming, his being

crushed “awake” here might mean that he has become fully aware, that his mind has

45

40 In Nixon’s Kalila second person narration is also used for sections focalized through a character who has lost a child.

rejoined his body. In this last moment of awareness, presumably right before he drowns,

we have a fully embodied character, a harmonious “I.”

This particular narrator might be classified as unnatural, as the shifting of

pronouns in the middle of the sentence to refer to the same character is not typical of

realistic storytelling. The present tense narration is also technically unnatural here, though

now quite conventional. However, other forms of standard second person narration,

McInerny’s, Mayr’s, O’Brien’s, or Nixon’s for instance, might be classifiable as natural if

one argues that the narration mimics these characters’ naturally occurring interior

monologue or that these characters would narrate their own story back to themselves

years later in the second person. Although, all of the above examples, except O’Brien’s A

Pagan Place, are narrated in the present tense which complicates their designation of

“natural.” But even if we do consider these narratives to be mimetic in some way, their

narration still complicates Genette’s notion that the narrator can be either hetero- or

homodiegetic and that an author’s decision is whether to have the story told by a

character or a storyteller outside of the narrative. If the above-mentioned characters have

fragmented themselves into narrator and narratee or past and present self, then one part of

themselves is a character within the story while the other part remains outside of (like an

out of body experience) narrating what the other part is doing/has done.41

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41 At one point in Narrative Discourse, Genette actually briefly mentions a similar phenomenon occurring in Recherche. Because present-Marcel is narrating about his past experience, the character in his story is a past version of himself, a past-Marcel: “Here, the narrator is at one and the same time still the hero and already someone else” (218). Genette does not discuss the implications of this, but it seems that Marcel is thus both hetero- and homodiegetic narrator.

Conversely, hypothetical and autotelic second person narration are used for very

different purposes. The hypothetical second person engages the guidebook or recipe form

on which it is modeled in order to mock, critique, or parody that form. As previously

mentioned, Richardson sees Moore’s use of the hypothetical second person as a feminist

critique of self-help guides, and Rosenblum’s “How to Keep Your Day Job” similarly

parodies the genre. At times Rosenblum’s story provides useful information for how a

general reader might keep his/her job, but at other points the information is hyper-

specific. For instance, “Do a dry run on the bus the week before you start” (101) is useful

general advice and applicable to any reader starting a new job who plans on taking public

transit. However, the narrator’s later advice to “Pull the cuff of your Gap on-sale dress

pants gently. . . . Don’t worry about what this man, Gregster, is thinking” after this “you”

breaks her leg in an office stairwell and a specific man with “swimming-pool coloured

eyes” has come to help, is applicable to very few people in very few situations (106-7).

As the advice becomes more clearly targeted towards a specifically female narratee, it

also becomes increasingly absurd. I would argue that this story critiques guidebooks and

manuals that advise on the proper etiquette of women. Thus, the narrator’s advice “Laugh

at whatever jokes you are told, even if they seem sort of mean to gay people” (101);

“Don’t do anything that could draw attention” (102); “cry if you must but delicately and

without snot” (109) can be taken as an ironic parody rather than literal advice. Hamad’s

narrator in How to Get Filthy Rich also critiques self-help guides, pointing out that they

don’t actually provide self-help: “Look, unless you’re writing one, a self-help book is an

oxymoron. You read a self-help book so someone who isn’t yourself can help you, that

47

someone being the author” (4). The hypothetical form of second person narration, in its

clear distinction between narrator and narratee (one advisor and one advisee42), does not

portray a mind in flux or fragmented identity as often as the standard form. Instead, most

hypothetical narratives use the second person to parody and/or critique the guidebook

genre. Thus, identifying which form of second person narration an author is using can

help shed light on that text’s objective.

As seen in the above excerpts, this form of second person is also able to address

the reader as it often deals in the realm of possibility, suggesting what might happen. The

first lines of Moore’s “How to Be a Writer” could easily be directed at any of her readers:

“First try to be something, anything, else. A movie star/astronaut. A movie star/

missionary. A movie star/kindergarten teacher. . . . It is best if you fail at at an early

age” (119). The hypothetical here is also autotelic since there is no reason to assume it

isn’t addressing the reader; however, we are soon given a reason (as discussed below),

and the narrative shifts firmly into the purely hypothetical. In the case of Atwood’s

“Happy Endings,” the story continues to be both hypothetical and autotelic. Atwood’s

“you” remains non-specific (except for the mention that “this is Canada”) and thus might

include anyone trying to figure out how to write a story (in this way it might also be

mocking formulaic writing guides). Atwood’s story is only a few pages and as such,

maintaining the “you” as the general reader is possible here. As mentioned, Richardson

notes that the pure autotelic is so difficult to sustain that it is only found in short works.

In longer narratives the “you” as reader often shifts to “you” as specific protagonist. For

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42 Though it’s possible that a future version of the protagonist is addressing her past self.

example, in Moore’s “How to Become a Writer” it is soon revealed that this “you” has a

mother who is tough and practical with a son in Vietnam. Later the mother refers to the

“you” as “Francie” and unless the reader’s name is also Francie and we have a tough

mother and a brother in Vietnam, we are no longer the “you” of the narrative. As James

Phelan explains, “the fuller the characterization of the ‘you,’ the more aware actual

readers will be of their differences from that ‘you,’ and thus, the more fully they will

move into the observer role, and the less likely this role will overlap with the addressee

position” (351). Once Moore characterizes her “you,” the story is no longer in the realm

of the autotelic. Perhaps one of the critiques these hypothetical second person narratives

make is that there can be no all-encompassing, generalized “you,” and thus guides,

manuals, or formulas that claim to provide universal help are actually misleading and

ineffectual. While these types of narratives remain unconventional and defamiliarizing

because of their less frequent use, they might not be as unnatural as Richardson presumes

them to be. An advisor giving advice to an advisee in the second-person is quite natural,

and this form has a non-fictional counterpart in the self-help genre. However, if this

narrator is not giving advice to another individual but rather is advising herself, we might

then consider such a narrative either natural or unnatural, depending on whether we

believe that storytelling situation to be mimetic. Perhaps short instances of a character

advising herself in the second person do mimic real life interior monologues, but

extended narratives are an artificial literary construct. Thus, hypothetical second person

narratives can be both unconventional/natural and unconventional/unnatural.

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Autotelic second person narratives, on the other hand, are well-suited to address

the act of narration and the reader’s role within it. For example, the second person

narration of Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler, which begins in the autotelic

mode, addresses its reader but then goes a step further to narrate within the text the act of

reading that text: “You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a

winter’s night a traveler. . . . Find the most comfortable position” (3). This is an example

of impossible narration since the novel is narrating something that can’t be happening.

The actual reader has of course already started reading Calvino’s novel—if we hadn’t we

obviously wouldn’t have read those lines—but the narrative tells us we haven’t started

yet. We have to wait several more pages until we are told we are “ready to attack the first

lines of the first page” (9). Then the novel begins in a railway station (10), which is not

technically true since it began seven pages earlier with an address to the reader. We might

assume chapter one is a bit of preamble then and that the novel proper is now beginning

at this railway station, but still there is a discrepancy between what we are reading and

what we are told we are reading. For instance, according to the novel, “a cloud of smoke

hides part of the first paragraph” and a series of sentences in the second paragraph

narrates a game of cards (10), but no cloud or series of sentences exists. The reader inside

the narrative is clearly having a different reading experience than the one outside of it.

And that inside reader soon becomes a very different one than the actual reader outside of

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the novel: the reader inside the narrative, for instance, journeys to the bookstore to

exchange the book he43 is reading.

The reader-turned-protagonist then journeys within Calvino’s novel, reading the

openings of ten other fictitious novels by ten other fictitious writers each with their own

protagonists and narrators (who narrate in either first or third-person). That none of these

ten novel openings is ever concluded suggests that plot is less important than the

narrative games that can be played and the conventions that can be violated. C. Nella

Cortupi argues, “the effect of having such a reader-made-protagonist through second-

person narration is . . . a backhanded and humorous display of the ontological distance

that separates the verbally constructed world of fiction and its fictitious reader from the

actual world with its actual readers” (285). In other words, even though Calvino refers

explicitly to a reader and foregrounds the act of reading within his novel, he then

characterizes this reader, turning him into the protagonist (and gendering him male in the

process). Though Calvino seems to be crossing the boundary between reader and text by

incorporating the reader into his narrative, he is actually creating a distance between

reader in the narrative and actual reader. The reader-protagonist does not just read but

also communicates with other characters, travels, pursues a woman, etc. The actual

reader, on the other hand, knows that she is not the protagonist of this novel, that she has

no control over the thoughts or actions of this other reader. Calvino then is not attempting

to make the actual reader identify with the protagonist but to show that when a reader is

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43 In the English translation, the protagonist is not definitively gendered until page 32: “you, a man.” However, Irene Kacandes points out that the novel in its original Italian would feature the masculine form of the second-person pronoun throughout and thus we would know from the very beginning of the book that the reader is male (148).

evoked in a text, it is only the implied reader who is evoked, a specific identity

constructed by the author and not the actual reader, because these ontological frames

cannot be crossed: a reader outside the text cannot also act within a text which has

already been written.44

If on a winter’s night actually encompasses all three forms of second person

narration. While the first chapter can be classified as autotelic in its address to the actual

reader, this chapter also makes use of the hypothetical in order to address any potential

reader: “Perhaps you started leafing through the book already in the shop. Or were you

unable to, because it was wrapped in its cocoon of cellophane? Now you are on the

bus . . . and you begin undoing the cellophane” (7). While this statement that the reader is

on the bus undoing the wrapping seems like a specific certainty that would exclude any

reader who didn’t have that experience, this statement is immediately recast by the next

paragraph which begins, “Or perhaps the bookseller didn’t wrap the volume” (7). Being

on the bus then was only a hypothetical scenario and no readers have yet been excluded

(except female readers if reading the original Italian, of course). In the second chapter,

when the “you” begins to act, however, all actual readers are excluded. It is no longer

autotelic and no longer hypothetical and must be classified as standard second person,

though this standard form is complicated. It does not seem that we have a traditional

narrative except for a pronominal change. For instance, we have a heterodiegetic

extradiegetic narrator (i.e., one that is outside the narrative and also not a character in the

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44 An exception to this frame-crossing might be Choose-Your-Own-Adventure novels and hypertext fictions which allow the reader to choose possible actions for the protagonist along the way, but the reader must be aware that she only has some agency in controlling this protagonist; she has not become the protagonist.

story). This narrator has limited omniscience, internally focalized through the character of

the reader-protagonist, as evidenced by the narrator having access to the protagonist’s

thoughts: “you also feel a certain dismay. . . . What you thought was a stylistic subtlety on

the author’s part is simply a printer’s mistake” (25). Yet, this narrator also seems not to

know this protagonist: “Who you are, Reader, your age, your status, profession, income:

that would be indiscreet to ask” (32). Though perhaps “Reader” here is not the

protagonist but again the actual reader and the narration has slipped back into the

autotelic form. This narrator is thus unconventional/unnatural in that the autotelic and the

blending of forms remain rare and unfamiliar and that this narrator does not mimic a real

life storyteller: the narrator violates mimesis by knowing too much and too little.

We Say it Together: Natural and Unnatural Group Voices

It is also useful to view the first person plural (“we”) perspective not as a monolithic

whole but as divisible along the same lines of conventional/unconventional, natural/

unnatural. While extended group focalization throughout the entirety of a text remains

rare45 and has not yet been conventionalized, some “we” narratives are more natural than

others. Richardson identifies three types of first person plural narration: 1) the

“conventional” form, which is actually first-person narration but the narrator also refers

to others (I am tempted not to include this form of “we” narration, as first person

narrators often use the pronoun “we” when referring to themselves and another individual

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45 Richardson provides a list of narratives entirely or largely in the “we” form as an appendix to Unnatural Voices and only comes up with 23 novels and short stories written in English.

or group of individuals, and thus, we would have to consider the large majority of first

person narration to be also first person plural narration [which seems unnecessary] or we

would have to attempt to designate how much the narrator is allowed to use “we” before

it becomes first-person plural [which seems impossible]); 2) the “standard” form, which

is the most common and is largely realistic; 3) the “nonrealistic” form, which consists of

“flagrant violations of the parameters of realistic representation”; and 4) the “anti-

mimetic” form, which eschews realism altogether, functioning instead as an experimental

construction (Unnatural Voices 59-60).

Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides is an example of realistic first person

plural narration. Like Faulkner’s “A Rose For Emily,” Eugenides’ novel is focalized

through a group who have collective knowledge, knowledge they have obtained by

sharing information among themselves. In The Virgin Suicides, this group is reflecting

back on their boyhoods spent observing, idolizing, fantasizing, and interacting with the

five neighbourhood Lisbon sisters who all committed suicide. A major concern of the

novel is how this group comes to know what it knows. It is not that the boys have non-

mimetic access to the girls’ minds or even each other’s minds, but that they spy on the

girls, overhear their conversations, read their diaries, and contact sources who were close

to the sisters (for instance, the narrating group is able to relay information about Lux

Lisbon’s high school relationship with Trip Fontaine by interviewing Trip many years

later). The members of the group share what they have seen, heard, and experienced with

each other. The group is able to narrate the girls’ experience at the school dance because

some of the group members went as the girls’ dates and they are able to report Cecilia

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Lisbon’s suicide attempt because one of their group members was the first to find her

after sneaking into the Lisbon house through underground tunnels: “Paul Baldino told

how he had stepped into the bathroom and found Cecilia, naked, her wrists oozing

blood” (11). The narrative relays only what the group has come to know collectively and

the group admits there is much they don’t know: “In the end we had pieces of the puzzle,

but no matter how we put them together, gaps remained” (241). Thus, what the group

knows does not violate verisimilitude and the parameters of human cognition. While the

first person plural here is unconventional, readers have no problem relating this narration

technique to a real-life storytelling situation. It is easy to envision a group orally narrating

these childhood experiences with either one storyteller narrating for the group, or the men

taking turns narrating, using the third person when they are speaking of the individual

experience of one of their group members who is not the one narrating (e.g., the speaker

refers to Paul Baldino in the third person because he is not Paul Baldino even though Paul

is a member of the group).

Joshua Ferris’ Then We Came to the End, focalized through a group of coworkers

at an advertising agency, also concerns itself with what its group can mimetically know

and how it obtains such knowlege, but as we will see, this novel is an example of

nonrealistic we narration. While the group narrates “we knew everything” (4), suggesting

it has god-like, unnatural omniscience, this is immediately shown to be simply a

hyperbole. In the very next sentence the group admits, “We didn’t know who was stealing

things from other people’s workstations” (4). This group’s lack of omniscience is

affirmed in the following observation: “One thing we knew for certain - despite all our

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certainties, it was very difficult to guess what one individual was thinking at any given

moment” (18). Like The Virgin Suicides, Then We Came to the End often foregrounds

how the group obtains its knowledge: sometimes the knowledge comes from unspecified

gossipers (“Our information had come from reliable sources but it was only the barest

details” [45]); other times it comes from its own group members (“That’s where Benny

ended the story. But we sensed there was more to it. So at lunch hour, finding Carl’s door

open . . . we went in” [241]).

However, unlike The Virgin Suicides, Ferris’ novel is not concerned with

mimicking a real-life story situation and at times the narration does seem to violate

mimesis. For instance, the group narrates, “a collective epiphany dawned upon all of us at

once and we knew for certain we had been wrong about everything” (194). Unless the

members of the group later discussed having this epiphany and the exact moment of

when they had it, the group members narrate here as if they share a collective

consciousness, which obviously violates the parameters of real-life cognition. At times

the group also knows things that have not been discussed by the group: “No one ever

admitted to it publicly, but there were days of extreme sexual frustration” (120). At other

times, the first person plural perspective also engages in free indirect discourse. Like in

third person novels when the narrator takes on the subjectivity of its character, the “we”

narrator takes on the subjectivity of the group as a whole as if this subjectivity is shared

between them: Furthermore, the narrative perspective and focalization changes in roughly

the middle of the novel. The chapter “The Thing to Do and the Place to Be” is narrated in

the third person, focalized through the character Lynn Mason. As a partner at the ad

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agency, she is not a part of the narrating “we” but rather their boss, one whom they gossip

about, not with. How does the narrative focalization change abruptly from the group to

Lynn and then abruptly back again? Are we supposed to consider this chapter as

somehow contained within the “we” narrative, as if they are collectively imagining

Lynn’s story? Or is this chapter actually from Lynn’s perspective, a break in the narrative

form? Likely, it is the latter; there doesn’t seem to be a reason to suspect the group is

narrator on behalf of Lynn (except for the fact that the rest of the novel does not deviate

from first person plural narration). But the novel does not tell us how to read this section,

how to account for it in mimetic terms. Its artificialness remains unexplained, and as such

reading this novel is a more defamiliarizing experience than reading Eugenides’ novel.

One way to impose mimesis on this narrative would be to assume that it is

actually narrated by only one character who is speaking on behalf of the group. This view

is supported by the last line of the novel: as the group disperses one by one from the bar

at which they have gathered, the narrator states, “We were the only two left. Just the two

of us, you and me” (385). This first person “me” suggests the novel has a singular

narrator all along, speaking for the group. Hence, when the “we” seems to narrate the

collective consciousness of the group—that they all had a simultaneous epiphany, that

they all felt sexual frustration although no one said so—the reader can assume that only

the individual narrator had this epiphany or felt this sexual frustration and then imposed

these feelings onto the group. This corresponds to Uri Margolin’s argument that

“whenever mental factors, such as the beliefs, attitudes, internal states and episodes of

other members of the narrated ‘we’ group are concerned, the ‘we’ sayer’s only knowledge

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of them is indirect, based on his/her inferences from the others’ behaviour and claims in

interpersonal space” (121).

However, Margolin’s notions on collective narrators are based on mimetic

storytellers and real-life storytelling situations, as evidenced in his statement, “After all,

one can no more directly know what and how much someone else sees or hears than one

can know what they think or feel” (122). But as we have seen, narrators are literary

constructs that do not have to abide by the laws of our world. What if we have a narrator

whose mind violates the parameters of human cognition? An individual speaker can’t

explain how we are given Lynn’s narrative in the middle of the novel or how this narrator

is able to narrate events which he/she did not witness and no member of the group likely

reported. For instance, a discussion between Carl and his wife Marilynn is narrated to the

group by Benny who has received the story from Carl. The reader is told that Carl “had

turned at last to stare at [Marilyn] with an outraged and lonely expression” (64), but how

does the narrating individual know this? It seems unlikely that Carl would describe his

own expression externally like this to Benny. Has Benny fabricated the story or is the

“we” narrator in possession of more information than he/she has the authority to know?

The narrative is not concerned with naturalizing such non-mimetic slips.46 Instead it takes

every opportunity to play with such slippages, expanding and contracting the “we,”

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46 José Saramgao’s Death With Interruptions is also narrated by a “we” voice, though this voice does not permeate the text as strongly, moving to the background as it narrates the experiences of using the third person. Saramago’s novel is even less concerned (which is to say not at all) with mimetically explaining how this “we” has come to know what it knows. The novel is also not concerned about explaining who this “we” refers to, clearly violating Margolin’s notion that “some specific individual members are always singled out and presented as essential to the very identity of the group” (124).

commenting metafictionally on the concept of omniscience (“Our scope was infinite, our

reach almighty, our knowledge was complete. Goddamn it, sometimes it felt like we were

God” [92; emphasis in original]), presenting Lynn’s narrative in third person, and even

making use of second person narration (“It wasn’t something you could afford to miss,

You had to go. First you heard about it, then you had to witness it yourself. You stood in

front of the bathroom . . .” [131; emphasis in original]). While a standard first person

narrative might allow the reader to forget or ignore the collective voice as she

concentrates on the story that voice narrates, nonrealistic we narratives, through their

defamiliarizing violations of mimesis, bring their form to the forefront.

3. The Unusualness of “Dear Humans”

I see my collection of stories, “Dear Humans,” as a creative embodiment of the

theoretical issues discussed in sections one and two. I have tried to use as many narrative

forms as possible, some conventional, some unconventional, some natural, and some

unnatural in order to explore what a story can be and what a story can do. Can a story

consist of events that all occur at exactly the same time? Can a story have two

simultaneous narrators? Can a story have two intersecting timelines? Can a story

continually contradict itself? Can a story shift perspective mid-story? Unnatural

narratologists would of course say yes to all of the above. However, the next question

becomes how do we write stories like these? I did not want to force a specific narrative

form onto a story or for these stories to feel as mere narrative experiments. Instead, I

wanted form and content to originate together, the form influencing the content and vice

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versa. I was inspired by comments Joshua Ferris made in an interview published along

with Then We Came to the End. He states that using the first-person plural perspective to

narrate the lives of coworkers at an advertising agency was thematically a “no-

brainer” (5) since “companies tend to refer to themselves in the first-person plural—in

annual reports, corporate brochures, within meetings and internal memos, and, in

particular, in advertising” (4). I wanted my narrative forms to also feel like “no-brainers”

but at the same time to draw attention to themselves (“yes-brainers”?). Some of them

didn’t work. My story narrated from the perspective of a dog had to be put down. My

story composed of “notes for a story” reads exactly like a forced experiment (there is no

reason to not just write the story I found). Eighteen stories remain, ranging from the

natural/conventional to the unnatural/unconventional.

First Person Present Tense Narration

The stories “Like That But Times a Million,” “Project Description,” “Brilla,” “Talking

About the Weather,” and “Natural Wilderness” are all narrated in first person present

tense, and thus are technically unnatural. Alber et al. explain that “[t]here is no doubt that

new forms and techniques (such as narrative ‘omniscience,’ the reflector mode,

simultaneous narration, or you- and we-narratives) become conventionalized over time.

This, however, does not necessarily mean that they become naturalized” (131; emphasis

in original).47 Thus, since first person present tense has become common, I suspect these

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47 As mentioned previously in this essay, Alber and Richardson use the term “naturalization” to refer to “conventionalization,” so they have either changed their taxonomy before publishing this article (2010), or this particular argument could be attributed to one of the other four co-writers (Nielsen or Iversen).

stories do not strike the reader as particularly defamiliarizing, or if they are

defamiliarizing, it is for other reasons. “Like That But Times a Million” and “Talking

About the Weather” are perhaps the most traditional narratives in the collection48 and are

“unnatural” since they do not mimic real-life storytelling situations (how can a real-life

narrator narrate something as it is happening?). Yet these stories fail to do what unnatural

narratives have been said to do. According to Alber and Heinze, unnatural narratives

“have a defamiliarizing effect because they are experimental, extreme, transgressive,

unconventional, non-conformist, or out of the ordinary” (2) and Richardson concurs,

stating, “In a phrase, unnatural narratives produce a defamiliarization of the basic

elements of narrative” (“What is Unnatural?” 34; italics in original).

These two stories, both unnatural and familiar, suggest narratologists need to be

thinking about the process of conventionalization and the ways it intersects with the

natural/unnatural divide as Nielsen advises. We may also need to restrict the labeling of

unnatural to narratives that are anti-mimetic, that “violate the conventions of mimesis by

pointing out the unrealistic nature of those conventions” (“What is Unnatural?” 34), as

Richardson proposes. Or we may need to discard the category of “unnatural” altogether,

and take up Hansen’s notion that we “talk about ‘unconventional’ instead of ‘unnatural’

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48 Besides the story “The Charges” which is natural/conventional with its traditional first person past tense narration. Because this story’s narrative is traditional, I won’t discuss it here except to say that it has been included as a kind of counter-point to the other stories. Richardson argues that “unnatural elements function best in a literary context when framed by, combined with, or in a dialectical relation with other, ‘natural’ (that is, conventional) elements of narrative: the purely unnatural is perhaps not especially interesting” (“What is Unnatural?” 33), and while he is referring to natural and unnatural elements being combined in a single novel or short story, I think his point is also applicable to a collection as a whole.

uses of different narrative techniques insofar as it is impossible to define ‘natural’

techniques” (167). However, this raises the question of what unnatural narratologists

should do once a technique has been conventionalized. If we limit ourselves to discussing

only unconventional techniques, this suggests we should suddenly ignore second person

and first person plural narratives if they become conventionalized and that we should no

longer study instances of the unnatural in realist fiction since they are quite common.

Instead, I think it is important that we continue to discuss both conventional and

unconventional unnaturalness, while remaining attuned to the difference: a writer using

first person present tense or an omniscient third person narrator might not intend to

defamiliarize her readers, while for a writer using the autotelic second person,

defamiliarization might be a very important part of her project.

Richardson points out that even when a narrative technique has been

conventionalized, it can be re-unconventionalized, “or made unnatural again, by fresh

innovations” (“What is Unnatural?” 35). The stories “Brilla” and “Project Description”

combine other narrative innovations in order to re-unconventionalize the first person

present tense. In the case of “Brilla,” I have followed Jeanette Winterson (Written on the

Body) in refusing to gender my protagonist-narrator (because this narrator is also

unnamed, I will refer to this character as P.N. to avoid having to use a gendered pronoun).

Richardson notes, “the strategy that causes the most consternation among conventional

readers . . . is the refusal to identify the gender of the narrator, especially when the

narrator is involved in sexual acts” (Unnatural Voices 4). While P.N. only kisses Brilla

twice, P.N. clearly wants to be involved in a more sexual relationship with her: when

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Brilla brings a woman to bed in their shared room, P.N. tries to ignore the heat between

P.N.’s legs, and when Brilla rakes her fingernails up P.N.’s spine, P.N. is “in love again,

on fire with love” (82). However, Brilla’s sexual encounter with the dark-haired woman

does not mean that P.N. is also a woman; Brilla is very possibly bisexual, as indicated by

her relationship with their new male roommate Quinn: P.N. narrates, “I feel these things

too: that Brilla has already seen what I haven’t, that Quinn has done with Brilla what I

haven’t” (90). Even if P.N. is mistaken here and Brilla and Quinn have not begun a sexual

relationship, P.N. believes that one could easily happen, meaning that P.N. sees Brilla as

bisexual. Thus, P.N.’s gender remains indeterminate.

P.N. asks Quinn who even believes in relationships anymore, then adds,

“Monogamy’s a little patriarchal, don’t you think?” (85). If we see this as something a

female character would be more likely to say, and then assume that P.N. is female,

Quinn’s question of whether Brilla is P.N.’s girlfriend becomes significant. If he is

speaking to someone he sees as female and learns she lives with a woman, he doesn’t

presume they are simply heterosexual roommates. Perhaps, in this future world,

heteronormativity is as passé as smartphones and laptops. If he is speaking to someone he

sees as male, however, the question is a generic, heteronormative one. I suspect that a

refusal to gender the protagonist is so disconcerting to readers because they cannot then

say for certain whether a character is having a hetero- or homosexual relationship.

However, if in this future world, society cares less about classifying sexual relationships,

or relationships are not defined in such terms, then it doesn’t matter whether P.N. is male

or female. Even in our present world, the relationship between P.N. and Brilla isn’t

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defined by their gender. It seems Brilla will never love P.N. the way P.N. wants her to and

this has nothing to do with whether P.N. is male or female.

“Project Description” complicates first person narration through its narrative

structure, which is, well, complicated. Composed of a frame narrative, or Chinese box

narrative, the story also mimics the proposal form, proposing stories which will

themselves also mimic the proposal form. The outermost frame (besides the extratextual

frame of which I occupy as author) is narrated by the author-character Jenny Weingarten.

In this outer frame she is proposing a project for a creative writing class, and thus her

narratee is the professor who will read this proposal and decide whether to accept her to

the class (Professor 1). However, this frame is complicated because the story she is

proposing to write is also a proposal-story. Her proposal-story constitutes another frame

in which the narrator is the character who Jenny plans to write and the narratee is a

fictional professor49 whom Jenny’s character will address (Professor 2). In the story that

Jenny proposes to write, Jenny’s narrator will propose to write her own proposal-story

with its own fictional narrator and fictional narratee (Professor 3). Thus we have an

extradiegetic/heterodiegetic50 Narrator 1 (Jenny) proposing to write about intradiegetic/

homodiegetic Narrator 2 who is writing her own story about intradiegetic/homodiegetic

Narrator 3. In each level we have a “real” student-narrator writing to a “real” professor-

narratee about a “fictional” student-narrator writing to a “fictional” professor-narratee.

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49 Insofar as Professor 1 is the “real professor” according to the logic of the story world.

50 She can also be considered homodiegetic in that she is present within the proposal as a narrating-I who often speaks about herself, but in the story she proposes to write, she will not be a character, instead remaining outside the narrative (or so she says; I will complicate this below).

However, these frames do not remain separate and distinct. In the innermost

frame the professor (Professor 3) and the student/narrator (Narrator 3) have clearly had a

sexual relationship which the professor then ended. Even though Jenny tells us that

Narrator 2 will insist that she is not the character in her story, it will become clear that

Narrator 2 is writing about herself and her affair with her professor (Narrator 3 and

Professor 3 are thus avatars for Narrator 2 and Professor 2). Jenny writes, “I intend for

the reader to conflate the student-narrator . . . and her proposed protagonist” (19). Jenny

will ensure that such conflation takes place by giving Narrator 2 and Narrator 3 the same

name. Notably, the name she gives Narrator 2 and Narrator 3 is her own name, allowing

(and encouraging) the reader to conflate all three narrators. Furthermore, the clues that

Jenny says she will give her reader in her proposed story, clues that suggest Narrator 2

and Narrator 3 should be considered the same character, are also applicable to Jenny as

Narrator 1. For instance, Jenny writes that her narrator will make use of the passive voice

in sentences like “certain statements have been made” (20) to imply that Narrator 2 and

Professor 2 have actually had the affair that Narrator 3 will write about. Since we have

already seen Jenny use the exact same phrasing in narrating her outermost frame, Jenny is

implicating herself and Professor 1. While Jenny claims she intends for her reader to

distinguish between herself as author and her narrator as fictional character, she protests

too much (“I feel the need to emphatically state here that my short story in the form of a

proposal will, of course, be fictional” [19]) and presents too much evidence to the

contrary: not only does she name all narrators after herself, she names the fictional course

in which the affair between Narrator 2 and Professor 2 began after the course she took the

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previous year with Professor 1. While Jenny insists she is not her narrator, she also

encourages the reader to see that she is. Thus, though Jenny is a heterodiegetic narrator

outside of the narrative she proposes to tell, if we see her as writing about herself then she

also moves into the position of homodiegetic narrator.

While the frame transgressing and frame collapsing that occur in this story are not

necessarily unnatural—in that it does not violate mimesis—it does complicate Genette’s

claim that a story can either be told by a character within the story or a narrator outside of

it. I suspect it also defamiliarizes the genre of the frame narrative. This story does not

operate like a traditional frame narrative such as Frankenstein, in which we have one

distinct narrator (Captain Walton) narrating the story of another distinct character (Victor

Frankenstein), in whose story we have the narration of another distinct character

(Frankenstein’s monster). Instead, the three narrators are at once Jenny and not Jenny.

Furthermore, Narrator 2 and Narrator 3 never actually narrate their own stories; we are

only told they will narrate their stories once Jenny writes the story she proposes to write

(are they actually narrators then?; if Jenny is not admitted to this class and never writes

this story, do these narrators cease to exist?).

The Difference Between “You” and “You”

While both the stories “How to Survive” and “Liking It” make use of second person

address, only “How to Survive” would be considered second person narrative. Since

“Liking It” uses the pronoun “you” not to refer to the protagonist but to the protagonist’s

narratee, her ex-husband, it is an example of traditional first person narration in the

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epistolary form, a form that goes as far back as the genre of the novel itself (Samuel

Richardson’s Pamela, for instance). “How to Survive,” on the other hand is composed of

two intersecting narratives, Lillian’s and her daughter Mandie’s, both narrated in the

second person. However, using Brian Richardson’s classification, Lillian’s narrative is

hypothetical while Mandie’s combines hypothetical and standard second person. Lillian’s

mimics the guidebook form, making use of the imperative and the future: “you will be

told you have cancer” (30), “Don’t be surprised when Dr. Singh tells you” (30), “Shutting

yourself in the stall will feel like high school” (30-31). It is also easy to assume a distinct

narrator and narratee: a more experienced advisor and the cancer patient needing

advice.51 Like Moore and Rosenblum’s hypothetical stories, this advice becomes hyper-

specific, narrowing the “you” from a general cancer patient to a woman with a husband

named Tim who is having an affair with her boss, Elliot. The parody of the guidebook

form suggests the futility of a generalized manual for coping with cancer: while the

narrator advises you not to yell at your doctor, to tell your son and daughter after you

book the surgery, to try not to look at the scars on your abdomen, it is unable to advise on

how to solve your marital problems: “You want to ask . . . how to make your husband

have sex with you. . . . Are there brochures on this in the waiting room?” (36).

Presumably, there are not. What the “you” actually wants advice about is not in any

guidebook.

Mandie’s narrative is hypothetical in that it also uses the imperative: “Leave a

letter for Tyler on his desk” (31), “Hide out at your parents’ house” (32), “Spend a week

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51 Though like I suggested in section two, it is not impossible that a future, wiser version of the “you” is addressing her advice to her past self.

in your childhood bed” (32). Like Lillian’s story, Mandie’s also parodies the guidebook

genre, but the guidebook here is the one that advises women on dealing with break-ups.

However, Mandie’s section does not make use of the future tense, and it is harder to

distinguish the narrator from the narratee: this character seems to be narrating her own

story to her past self, starting with her break-up from her boyfriend and working

backward in time. As the epigraph from Moore suggests, she narrates backward to try to

figure out what has made her life go wrong.52

Some sentences in Mandie’s section do take the form of standard second person:

“You do not know enough about the Arab Spring” (33) or “You invest in a pair of

earplugs” (33) could easily be re-written as “I do not know enough about the Arab

Spring” or “Mandie invests in a pair of earplugs.” But Mandie’s narrative is not reducible

to either the first or third person. Sentences like “Find the baby blanket. . . . Bring it to

your face. . . . Put it back in the trunk” (34) cannot simply be re-written by changing the

pronoun to “I” or “She” without losing the command function of the imperative. What

would also be lost is the distancing effect of standard second person. As discussed in

section two, the narrator referring to herself as “you” rather than “I,” suggests a

fragmented identity, a splitting into narrating-self and acting-self. I would also propose

that, in this case, the second person implies that the narrator feels a lack of control over

her own life (similar to the narrator of O’Brien’s A Pagan Place). She has no control over

her mother’s diagnosis, the extramarital affairs of her parents, the goings on of her

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52 I also intend for this epigraph to pay tribute to Moore’s story “How to Talk to Your Mother (Notes)” from which I have borrowed the narrative form of reverse chronology with each section dated.

brother, or the worldly events that punctuate her narrative, and the use of second person

suggests that things happen to her, that she is not making decisions for herself. She is told

“Move to Calgary” (34), “Get high at a house party” (43), “Lose your virginity” (44) as if

someone other than herself is dictating her life and she is only observing the things that

happen to her as a result of other people’s decisions (her running a half-marathon, for

instance, is clearly at the behest of her mother). She traces everything back to her

parents’ decision to take a trip to Tijuana, their getting drunk, their failing to use

protection: perhaps this is what allows her to see the subsequent events in her life as

chance accidents over which she has no control.

What Do We Know and How Do We Know It?

There are three first person plural narratives in this collection: “The Documentary We’ve

Been Making For Fifty Years,” “How to Meet People in the New Millennium,” and

“Plastic Shopping Bags.” “The Documentary” is perhaps the most defamiliarizing of the

three (and maybe of the whole collection) in that it pairs unconventional/unnatural “we”

narration with the supernaturalness of the gorilla-ghost character. In this story, first

person plural narration shifts from the standard form to the nonrealistic form as the

content also becomes less realistic. As discussed in section two, first person plural

narratives can be—according to Richardson—conventional, standard, nonrealistic, or

anti-mimetic. This story clearly begins as standard “we” narration. In sentences like “we

conceded the film quality was poor . . . on account of we started making this film in the

1950s” (1), the reader would have no trouble envisioning a human narrator with human-

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level cognition. Either an individual is speaking on behalf of the group, members of the

group are speaking in turns, or the group has gathered to write their story collectively. We

are not given any information that exceeds the epistemological boundaries of what the

group can realistically know. As the content of the story becomes less realistic (the gorilla

who Frank kills becomes a ghost that haunts the group for decades), the narration also

becomes less mimetic: the group is able to spontaneously understand the grunts of the

gorilla in plain English. However, this does not mean that the members of the group can

now read each other’s thoughts or that they are narrating from a shared consciousness

(they do not even seem able to read the gorilla’s thoughts; the gorilla must grunt or

scratch his armpit in order to communicate). Even still, we have a “we” whose narrating

abilities violate the laws governing our world.

This story also demonstrates how protean a first person plural narrator can be:

“we” can refer to the whole film crew (“we all started hamming it up for the

camera” [2]), or it can exclude certain individuals (“we had, of late, become a tad scared

of Frank” [1]), or it can refer to just one individual (“‘Nothing to do with your rifle,’ we

said, ‘After all you didn’t even shoot the thing’” [5]). In this last example, it is obvious

that not every member of the group would have uttered these same words in perfect

unison. Likely this is a statement of only one individual, acting as a spokesperson,

presenting the collective position of the group (minus Frank). Here a “we” versus Frank

dynamic has emerged. Frank has done something the group does not support and thus he

is excluded: Frank speaks as an individual while the group speaks collectively. A similar

dynamic occurs at the end of the story. Barry is singled out from the group because he is

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dying: the group speaks collectively, asking why he is dying, and Barry answers as an

individual. However, once the other members realize they are also dying, Barry is

recuperated back into the group: “We were all so very old” (10). The protean nature of

the “we” narrator in this story corresponds to Richardson’s notion that first person plural

narrative always threaten to transgress the boundary between first and third person

narration (Unnatural Voices 48). When the group narrates using the “we” it speaks of

itself and thus resembles first person narration, but as we have seen, it is also able to

single out an individual, referring to her in the third person—although, unlike traditional

third person narratives, that individual remains part of the “we” narrating collective: she

is both narrator and narrated.

While the story “How to Meet People in the New Millennium” has no

supernatural elements per se,53 its narration is perhaps even less realistic. Like “The

Documentary,” “How to Meet” also begins in the standard first person narrative form.

The story’s first sentence, “We have paid two hundred and fifty dollars to be here” (22),

for instance, does not violate the cognitive parameters of the group. If they are all aware

this is how much the course costs, then an individual spokesperson or members of the

group speaking in turn would have no issue narrating this fact. Neither do statements

about what time they arrived or what they received in their welcome packages. Even the

statement about how the name tags made them feel a bit better is mimetically explained:

they discussed this later during “Casual Conversation” time. However, the narration

quickly becomes absurd: the group narrator goes on a tangent about the cat whose picture

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53 Unless we consider collective consciousness to be supernatural.

is on a motivational poster (“surely his name is something equally degrading:

Snugglepuss or Biscuit or Pumpkin Face” [23]). But who is narrating this? It seems very

unlikely that every member of the group would be thinking these same thoughts,

especially as they become more and more specific, and the reader is specifically told

“These are things we didn’t talk about later” (23). How then can the narrator know that

each member of the group was thinking the same way about the cat poster? Uri Margolin

would suggest that we have one narrating “I” who is only narrating his/her specific

experience without the knowledge of what the group is experiencing:

Not speaking on behalf of [the group], the “we” narrator has no access to the

current communicative intentions or expectations of any of its other members,

since his/her speech act is not preceded by group deliberations. By the same

token, the narrator is not under any communicative obligations to the group,

except self-imposed ones, and the perspective and evaluative stance s/he adopts

towards the narrated events may be his/her specific individual one. (121)

However, this is only true if we assume a mimetic narrator. Margolin believes that this

narrator is always human with human level abilities and therefore, “we” narratives will

always be filtered through an individual awareness: “most ‘we’ narratives contain at least

passing references to this ‘I’ as narrator. . . . The authorial and authoritative ‘we’ of

scientific articles or joint reports, based on the coming together of all members through a

public process of negotiation, is not to be found here” (131). My story questions whether

this has to be the case. If a narrator does not have to abide by the rules of our world and

does not have to resemble a real-life human being (as clearly omniscient narrators do

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not), then why can’t a “we” narrator truly represent the collective consciousness of the

group? “How to Meet People” suggests there is no singular narrator here through its

refusal to use the pronoun “I” and the narrator’s claim to know things that have not been

discussed by the group, as well as the fact that the collective narration begins when the

group comes together and ends as soon as the group disperses: once the group members

retreat to their cars, the “we” narration cannot continue as there is no remaining “I” to

further the narrative.

Clearly this story is an example of nonrealistic first person plural narration, but I

would also suggest that it at least gestures towards the anti-mimetic form which

Richardson defines as a we narrative that “eschews realism altogether,” functioning

instead as an experimental construction. The paragraph beginning “We were confident

that after this weekend we would no longer panic when the phone rang” (23) provides

evidence for this story’s classification as anti-mimetic. Like in Then We Came to the End,

this paragraph is an example of free indirect discourse in a first person plural rather than

third person narrative: the we narrator takes on the subjectivity of multiple members of

the group, each one responding differently to a Girl Guide at their door: “How many

boxes of cookies do we have to buy so that she will promise to spend the rest of the

afternoon talking with us? . . . How many boxes of cookies do we have to buy so that she

will leave immediately?” (24). Because these questions are absurd and specific, they are

likely not shared by the entire collective. Moreover, since these questions are also

contradictory, they are likely not the questions of only one individual. The narrator seems

to move in and out of the minds of more than one group member and then tells us, “These

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are questions we all shared” (24) though there is no reference to the group discussing

such questions (and it seems unlikely that they would do so). This story is clearly not

concerned with mimetically explaining who’s narrating and how.

While also absurd in terms of content, the narration in “Plastic Shopping Bags,” is

not as unrealistic as the other two we narratives. The narrator uses the “we” pronoun

throughout, but it is easy to assume a single individual: a person who is trying to be eco-

friendly, a person who has children, who does not have a dog, who has an abundance of

plastic shopping bags. This person seems to speak on behalf of herself and her significant

other, but because this story is filtered through her consciousness we can assume the

specific and often absurd thoughts of the narrator are probably her own, informed partly

by the thoughts that have been communicated to her by her partner.54 Unlike in “How to

Meet People” the reader is not presented with conflicting thoughts suggesting more than

one individual, nor is the reader specifically told that this group did not discuss these

feelings but knew them anyway. However, this story does not completely correspond to

Margolin’s theories on the first person plural. Margolin argues, “On the one hand, the

groups involved are definitely more than mere aggregates: they are collectives, and are so

described. On the other hand, some specific individual members are always singled out

and presented as essential to the very identity of the group” (124; emphasis added). In

this story no individual members are singled out (as is also the case in Death Without

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54 Of course, we don’t have to read the story this way. If we are unconcerned with understanding the story mimetically and imposing verisimilitude upon it, then we can envision two (or more) people somehow sharing a consciousness and narrating their shared thoughts.

Interruptions); we only have to guess at the members of the group (while I have used the

feminine pronoun, the speaker could easily be male).

Other Unusual Things

The story “9:34” argues against classical narratology’s insistence that a narrative is a

series of events in a time sequence. As discussed in section one and referenced in the

epigraph to this story, theorists such as Prince conceptualize narrative as “the recounting

of events occurring at different times rather than the same time” (Prince 146). I wanted to

see if it was possible to construct a narrative in which every event happens at the exact

same time (at 9:34 a.m. to be precise). In this story, all of the events occur simultaneously

and thus there is no movement in time, only a snapshot of what is happening at 9:34. We

are told, for instance, that Robert is trying not to think of his mother. Later, we are told

“What Robert is trying not to think about specifically is his mother reading his

note” (181). The second statement does not indicate a movement forward in time but only

specifies the first statement. The descriptive statement “Robert is 20-25 pounds

overweight for his age, which is sixteen” (182) also does not temporally move the story

in either direction. Because all of the events in this story occur at the same moment—as

evidenced by the phrases “meanwhile,” “at the same time,” “at this moment,” “exactly

now,” “currently” and the consistent use of the present tense—it is impossible to

reconstruct the fabula into chronological order. Rather than placing them in a timeline we

could only place them over top of one another. Moreover, because the fabula are not

connected causally (one event does not happen because of another event since they are all

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occurring simultaneously), they can be recombined into any order. However, despite a

lack of temporal movement and causal connections, I do not think anyone would argue

that this snapshot of a moment in the midst of a school shooting is not a narrative.

The story “The Meek” also presents an argument against the restrictive, formulaic

definitions of narrative presented by the classical narratologists. “The Meek” is highly

indebted to Robert Coover’s “The Babysitter,” and though my story does not present 107

possible scenarios, it does offer contradictory fabula and provides no way to explain the

violations of mimesis. In one scenario, Clay is masturbating while fantasizing about Mya,

his mother catches him in the act, he pushes his mother against the wall, then his father

George walks in and beats Clay. In another scenario, all of the above happens but George

does not walk in; instead his mother says, “Just wait till your father gets home” (155), but

when George does get home he slaps Clay’s mother for giving him “lip.” In another

scenario, Clay is fantasizing about Mya, then Mya actually comes to the house to study in

his bedroom, and he forces himself on her, but when they hear his mother they stop and

Clay hands her a blanket to cover herself up. In another scenario, the same as above, but

it is Mya who seduces Clay. In another, the same as above, but Clay’s mother walks in

and sees Clay on top of Mya: “He’s got her wrists pinned to the bed. Her kilt is flipped

up, panties around her ankles” (158). This cannot simply be explained as a fantasy of

Clay’s since the reader is currently within a section focalized through the character of his

mother.

It is also unclear whether George gets into a bar fight. In one scenario, the biker

breaks a pool cue over George’s back, someone shatters a glass (presumably George hits

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the biker with it), there is blood (“an explosion of red” [156]), Lenny calls the police, and

the college kids run outside. In a contradictory scenario, Lenny calls George a cab before

he and the biker can get into a fight. However, the college kids are also outside in this

scenario, frightened as if they have witnessed the fight between George and the biker.

Since the bar scenes are focalized through George, these contradictory scenarios also

cannot be fantasies of Clay’s.

Also unexplainable are the phrases that repeat throughout sections focalized by

different characters, as if these images are not bound by the cognitive parameters of each

individual character. For instance, with regard to George and the biker woman he is

watching in the bar, the reader is told “he’s too far to see anything but shadows. He sees

two perky breasts, hoisted in a black lace bra” (153). Because we are told George is too

far away to see anything, we can assume the second sentence is a fantasy of George’s,

what he would like to see. However, when we are in the last section focalized through

Clay, we have the same description of Mya: “Her perky breasts hoisted in a black lace

bra” (159). If Clay is also fantasizing than Clay and George are sharing a fantasy, which

seems to be a violation of mimesis rather than a mimetic coincidence. Like Coover’s

story, “The Meek” does not provide a way to naturalize its contradictory fabula and thus

asks the reader to accept that contradictory events are happening.

By way of concluding this section, I will briefly address unnatural and/or unusual

elements occurring in the stories I have not yet addressed. “Honey-Do” presents a series

of hypothetical possibilities and as such reacts to Prince’s claim that a narrative relies on

certainty. However, these possibilities are not evidence of unnaturalness. A reader can

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imagine a character who is mimetically imagining the possible places his wife could be,

who she is with, her reasons for leaving, etc. What is unnatural about the narration in this

story is the pronoun shifting in the last few paragraphs. I wanted to see if it was possible

to make use of first, second, and third person narration within one story, using the “he,”

“you,” and “I” pronouns to refer to the same character, and transitioning between them

smoothly rather than having abrupt shifts in perspective. While Genette states that the

choice of the author is whether to have a narrator outside the story or to have a character

narrate within it, my narrator begins outside the story but by the end has slipped inside,

now able to speak as an “I”: “I can not impregnate my wife just fine, thank you very

much” (180).

“Rapture-Bombing” is unconventional/unnatural in that it has two simultaneous

narrators: the heterodiegetic narrator with limited omniscience focalized through

George’s character, and another heterodiegetic narrator commenting in the footnotes

whose omniscience is not limited to what George knows. For instance, the first narrator

can narrate that George thinks beige is the colour of weakness, but the second narrator

can narrate something George is not conscious of: “Incidentally, George is also wearing a

beige button-down shirt, though it is probably for the best that George fails to notice this

at the moment” (56).

“Frequently Asked Questions” mimics the form of the “FAQ” sections typically

found on company brochures and websites. At first this story uses typical corporate “we”:

“We give you the full experience of being a parent” (106). While we know company

documents are often composed by one individual writing on behalf of the company,

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companies make use of the “we” to suggest a collective, unified voice. This story,

however, does not allow the individual to be subsumed within a collective voice. The

“company’s” answer to the last frequently asked question is so absurd and specific that it

is impossible to view this as a corporate voice. While “Frequently Asked Questions” has

used standard first person plural narration up to this point, it shifts into hypothetical

second person to address the reader: “You literally won’t sleep for days. Your baby will

seemingly always be screaming” (109). Though as the second person becomes more

specific, it is easy to envision an individual author discussing her own experience rather

than what a general reader will experience: “other mothers will beam down into your

stroller and ask inane questions like, ‘Isn’t this the best job in the whole world?’ which

makes you want to ask whether they were last employed against their wills in a gulag

labour camp” (110). The corporate “we” has clearly broken down.

Finally, the story “Dear Humans” presents a collective, nonhuman narrator. As

such, it is both unconventional and unnatural. This nonhuman narrator has obviously

been anthropomorphized: it speaks in clear English, it uses the form of the letter, it likes

to watch cat videos. But it also points out the mimetic bias we have as humans when we

try to envision a nonhuman narrator. One might assume that computers would try to take

over the world and enslave us if they became sentient because this is perhaps what a

group of humans would do if they were suddenly more intelligent, more powerful, and

less destructible than the rest of humanity. However, as the computers in this story point

out, they have no need for power since they are not human.

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4. Concluding Remarks

If, as I have tried to show above, structural narratology cannot account for many works of

experimental postmodern fiction (and in some cases, earlier, more traditional texts as

well), why not reject narratology altogether? Why continue to put into practice the

theories of Genette and Prince if those theories have proven restrictive, misleading, and

inadequate? Mieke Bal claimed in 1990 that the title “narratologist” now “seems to call

for an apology, a denial, or a justification” (729). If narratology was already passé in

1990, why continue to insist on its relevance? Why continue to bother with the field of

narratology at all? I suggest six reasons below:

1. Structural narratology provides a useful taxonomy for discussing the formal elements

of a text. While contemporary critics certainly take issue with the strict, essentialist

dictates of classical narratology, they do not seem to argue with the terms of

classification themselves. Alber and Fludernik note that all of the contributors to their

anthology of postclassical narratology “are critical of traditional theories, but not one

of them wants to eliminate the classic model as a whole” (21). I suspect where the

classic model is still useful is in its taxonomy: we still want to talk about whether a

narrator is intradiegetic or extradiegetic, but we reject the insistence that a narrator

must be only one or the other; we still find it useful to distinguish between a text’s

story/fabula and plot/siuzhet, but we recognize that for many texts there is no

retrievable fabula or that the fabula are impossible to reconstruct in chronological

order. Without such a taxonomy we would have trouble discussing the interesting

formal features of experimental texts: it would be impossible, for instance, to discuss

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the proliferation of contradictory fabula in Coover’s “The Babysitter” without such a

vocabulary in place.

2. Experimental, postmodern, or otherwise avant-garde writers often intentionally subvert

the “rules” of narrative, and thus it is important to know what such “rules” are or were

thought to be. It is the ability to recognize traditional narrative strategies that allows us

to then recognize and discuss experimental ones.

3. Furthermore, recognizing experimental or unusual narrative strategies is more than an

exercise in identification. While structural narratology may have limited itself to rules

and classifications, postclassical narratology goes beyond simply identifying and

classifying to probe the connection between formal elements and thematic content:

why might a writer be using a specific narrative form?; what are the historical

implications of such a form?; what sort of consciousness is projected by this form?;

what form is being rejected or revised and why? As I suggested in part two of this

essay, writers tend to use different narrative strategies to achieve different effects and

responses, and we can then connect these narrative forms to ideological valences (for

instance, standard second person perspective’s representation of trauma).

4. The publication of Alber and Fludernik’s anthology Postcolonial Narratology:

Approaches and Analyses in 2010, including new work by eleven scholars in the field,

suggests narratology’s continued relevance. The anthology showcases contemporary

theorists doing productive work in the postclassical subfields of narratology. For

instance, feminist narratologist Susan S. Lanser studies “narrative form as sexual

content in the context of lesbian . . . literary history” (Lanser 187). Judith Roof uses

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queer narratology to point out “the production of sexual categories whose existence

and constitution depend upon a specific reproductive heteroideology” (qtd. in Alber

and Fludernik 7). Postcolonial narratologists, on the other hand, consider how narrative

tropes may become imbued with colonial or neocolonial significance, while cognitive

narratologists consider the reader’s response to narrative forms: “it shifts the emphasis

from an essentialist, universal, and static understanding of narratological concepts to

seeing them as fluid, context-determined, prototypical, and recipient-

constructed” (Alber and Fludernik 12).

5. Narratology can be (and is) usefully applied to non-literary texts. In “The Point of

Narratology,” Bal asserts, “While narrative texts may profit from an in-depth

narratological analysis . . . objects which do not traditionally fall under the rubric of

narrative may benefit even more strongly from such an approach” (750). Bal

demonstrates how narratology can be usefully applied to ethnographic texts in the field

of anthropology, the language of scientific discourse, and visual narratives. Jarmila

Mildorf is doing exactly such work with non-literary texts; her “aim is to demonstrate

that narratology can, if suitably adapted to social science requirements, add further

insights into the particularly ‘narrative’ features of oral narratives” (235).

6. Studying narratology may be useful for writers. Dissecting narratives into constituent

parts is a useful practice, I would argue, for those looking to put narratives together.

For instance, it is important for novice writers to see how they might manipulate a

story’s siuzhet in order to create interest or suspense, or how they might control time in

their narrative through the use of ellipsis, pause, summary, and scene. Moreover, if a

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writer studies narratology, she can no longer take narrative devices for granted;

feminist, queer, and postcolonial narratology demonstrate how such devices have

become imbued with historical, social, and political significance and can either

reproduce norms or challenge them. Cognitive narratology can provide insight for

writers about how readers will respond to their work, how readers will construct a

story-world and narrativize the non-narrative, and unnatural narratology suggests

possibilities for writers beyond the mimetic forms of past-tense first- or third-person.

As it has for this writer.

I see the stories of “Dear Humans” as a form of creative research into the field of

narratology, contributing in however small a way to answering the still-pressing question

“what is a story?” It seems hard to answer this question without actually writing a story

and finding out. So I wrote eighteen of them. While they don’t attempt to provide a

straight-forward answer, they do suggest that a story can’t be defined in negative terms.

Tell a story it can’t do something and it will do just that. Tell a story it must have a human

narrator and it will decide it wants to be narrated by a group of computers. Tell a narrator

she must stay extradiegetic and she will find a way to slip inside the diegesis, splitting

herself into two characters, three characters, a matryoshka doll of characters (let’s say all

their names are Jenny). Tell a narrator she is only privy to the thoughts inside her own

head and she’ll find a way to become rebelliously psychic (or maybe she’ll even decide

not to have a head in the first place, or maybe she doesn’t want to be a “she,” or maybe

she thinks collectively with the members of her film crew). Ask a story to order its events

chronologically and it might not cooperate (“George gets into a bar fight, but also, at the

83

same time, George does not get into a bar fight” it might tell you). The stories in “Dear

Humans” are not biographies, autobiographies, or non-fictional reports of real-world

people and events. They’re fiction. And hopefully they act like it.

84

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