umbilical

“Where the feminine is not valued, a man has no real intimacy with his counterpart. The denial of the feminine as partner and friend has robbed us of ecstasy. The wounded male, seeks his lost ecstasy in all the wrong places...”
Margaret Starbird

"When the justice is gone, there's always Mum"
Laurie Anderson

I could hear the muffled voices of other wives and families outside the door of my private hospital room. Though there was a door between us, the separation didn’t diminish their jovial inflections and laughter. I was alright with that. The fact that there was love on the other side of that wall made me content. I sat there in my bed, knees up, nestled to my chest under blankets and reading a book. I wasn’t lonely. I didn’t feel alone. My wife was only working that night and she said she would come up after my surgery. I’ll be the first thing you’ll see and you’ll fall in love with me forever, she had said. I smiled thinking about that comment, by myself in my quiet room. I let the book rest in my lap and listened to the voices beyond the wall. There was one woman’s voice in particular that seemed the most soothing; an older woman’s voice, low and husky. She was talking to her husband. I knew it was her husband because it wasn’t the tone one would use for a brother or a friend. She cooed to him with affection and I listened to her in gentle rapture. It was like music; the most soft, unobtrusive music.
I was in hospital to repair an umbilical hernia, where I was once attached to my mother. It was a returning hernia, recurring from its first appearance 35 years ago when I was seven years old, inexplicably now as then emerging and threatening to bring my insides to light through my abdomen’s seemingly weakest point. It might have been from when I was exercising at the gym, crunching abdominals on the machines, twisting my sixpack into shape. There was never any pain, but there were times when I was uncomfortable; especially during sex. I would be worshipping my wife’s body, storming her womb with all my strength, when pangs of discomfort would seize my umbilicus, twisting up and slowing me down, a few times even stopping my progress altogether. Life is all irony isn’t it? I didn’t know if it was from my trying to be a man in the gym or my yoni worship while in bed with my wife, but a balance had tipped and there I was, my insides trying to spill out like weather; from high pressure to low pressure, from full to empty, my excess surging forth with blunt gravitational force to reaffirm some kind of equilibrium, bring my guts to the world.
Where it came from originally is even more of a mystery. What could have caused a boy at the age of seven to split his gut into a hernia? I remember having stomach aches and calling home from school a lot. The stomach aches were always a nagging presence, but they showed themselves most sharply, most often at school. I was a nervous boy, always picked on and never fitting in, so when my belly tightened with worry, I would call home asking to be picked up. It annoyed my father, who always had to stop his work on the farm to come and get me, but the pains were real, I would tell him tearfully over the phone. Tearfully, because the pain really was real, and truthfully because I wanted to get out of there, away from the anonymous slaps on my neck to see how red it could get, away from the tripping feet and the bathroom stall invasions. I believe the hernia, then, came from the anxieties bundled up inside me, growing in the seat of my infanthood and wanting out; again that internal pressure wanting to escape to the wider vacuum of the open air outside. So my father would come with the truck and take me home to my mother. Mom would coddle me and worry about the frequency of my stomach aches, wondering what was happening to her boy for him to be suffering such regular pain. It was happening so much that she finally called the doctor, who called it a hernia, some how sensing the bulge in my belly that had yet to protrude. He set a surgery date two weeks hence and Mom kept me home until the day of the operation. My father protested this but Mom did not want to see me going to school and cause myself undue strain on my already weakened middle. Those two weeks were the best times of my youth. Mom would sit with me through parts of her busy day while I lay on the couch watching television, my head on her lap as she rubbed my stomach to smooth my pains down, humming in her sweet, lovely voice. My mother had the most beautiful singing voice in the world, with the smoothest vibrato, so soft and gentle. She had the voice of an angel. I’ve lost her now. She passed away just two years ago, less than ten months after my father died first.

A sharp, commanding female voice came over the intercom to announce that visiting hours were over and patients were invited to have evening snack in the dining lounge downstairs. Excited, I slid out of bed and opened the door to the community of voices on the other side. Walking by the nurse’s station, I noticed a nurse looking at me and smiling.
“I can tell you haven’t had your operation yet, ” she said. ”you’re walking far too fast!”
“You’re right,” I laughed. “I’m fresh meat.”
She laughed with me as did some of the other men that were walking by at the time.
Walking away, I noticed a man talking to one of the other nurses. He was talking very rapidly in a thick East Indian accent and his wife was next to him, holding his arm almost as if to restrain him. He was dressed plainly in his teeshirt and pyjama pants, but his wife was in the ornate dress that Hindu women wear, a bindi on her brow and a bright red swath of vermillion in her hair. She seemed to want him to calm down as his young teenaged son just looked on, bored and impatient. The man was asking questions, charged with nerves and the nurse was calmly answering all his questions.
“You can take your shower before you go to bed tonight since your surgery is so early, and then you can come here and take your sleeping pill if you need it.”
“I don’t need a sleeping pill.” the man said quickly.
“It might settle you down.” said his wife.
“I don’t need to settle down.” he said.
“Oh, you’ll want it.” said an old man who had been hobbling by. The two men exchanged glances and the older man’s face was so sincere and benevolent, the younger man just laughed and shrugged.
When I came downstairs, the dining lounge was filling up with men looking for their snacks. We were given our choices of orange, apple or prune juice by the server girls, most of them pretty young teenagers in their white and pale blue uniforms. They smiled and waved us on to the tables; each of which had plates piled with muffins and slices of sweet loaves. I sat at a table with about 5 other men, all of us united by affliction and grateful to finally break our fasts, to break bread in fellowship. We dove into our food greedily and started to talk. Looking round the room, I noticed that there were no female patients at all in the lounge and wondered this aloud.
“It’s because we’re the workers- we’re the ones that strain ourselves to hernias.” said one man, older and looking like he had worked all his life to back up his comment.
“I don’t know,” I said. “we aren’t all blue collar here. Maybe we’re actually the weaker sex after all if we’re all blowing our insides out over nothing.” This made the others laugh but I really felt it was true. A girl came around offering coffee and tea and I took a tea, making sure she heard me thank her. She smiled and said I was welcome. We started to talk about private health care and how the public system is so poor when I drifted away from the conversation and noticed the Hindu family coming into the lounge, even though visiting hours were clearly over. They seemed lost as the father led them in although his family looked as though they had every purpose but to sit down with us. One of the servers came to them and seemed to tell them that the dining room was only open to patients. The man seemed to argue with this and the woman’s smile suddenly disappeared. His son stood there and rolled his eyes and looked pleadingly at his mom. To answer, the mother stepped in and told the man something that did not make him happy but put him in his place. She gave him a quick kiss on the cheek and left. His son followed her up the stairs, not even turning to say goodbye. The man stood there, not sure what to do with himself. He looked like a 4 year old boy facing his kindergarten class for the first time. He then noticed a chair at our table and came over to sit down with us. Our conversation was now about how 8000 people came through this hospital each year. I was floored by that number. It seemed like an awful lot of weak stomachs to me. The man however, just sat and ate his banana loaf, eyes scanning the room as if looking for an escape route. I wondered if he really understood what we were saying, or if he could even pay attention to us with his thoughts occupied elsewhere, probably on some car that was just now leaving the parking lot with his wife and son in it.
Snack ended quickly and we broke up the table, happy to finally have treated ourselves finally. We were all laughing but by contrast, The Hindu man got up without saying anything to anyone and went up the stairs slowly and heavily. I decided I wanted to go out and take a walk around the grounds, knowing that I may not have the chance to do this for a while after the surgery, seeing that the sun had already started to fade from its work for the day. I’d been admiring the view from the window of the lounge before with its plentiful trees and gardens and wanted to go out and be part of the view. I stepped through the doors, greeted by a gentle wind and a slight humidity that made the air soft. Through the gardens, I recognized some of the plants and flowers as ones that my mother had planted in our flowerbed; the marigolds and geraniums, along with other plants that were more exotic and I could never think to name. I made my way to the perimeter of the grounds bordered by forest, hoping to find a trail that would take me into a deeper part of the woods. I found one and would have missed it had I not been looking for it. The trail took me to a place where it seemed to turn away from the ravine and where the light seemed to open up from the canopy above. A massive dead tree stood above me as if it were the focal point of this turn in the trail, leaving me no choice but to look upon it, its size so impressive. It provided no foliage and its limbs were mostly gone, giving this little corner more light in its absence. Death had stripped this tree naked, though great swaths of bark lay down on the forest floor with broken branches laying on the ground, seized up by the process of decay. There were great labial knotholes in its trunk, from which branches had once stretched and born leaves and even more limbs. It looked like it a totem, this tree, so prolific it seemed. A historical tree, it was. Much bigger than any of the others around it, I thought to myself it must be the mother of all the other trees; a proud matriarch, gone but still standing as a monument to itself, surrounded by its rich, fertile legacy. I thought of my wife, hoping she was doing alright at work, thinking about seeing her tomorrow. It would be some time before I woudl be able to make love to her again; my incisions would make the act impossible, but I knew this would be alright still. My fear of infidelity was a cloaked, unspoken fear that I kept to myself. I never voiced it to her as that in itself would have been an unfaithful act on my part. I knew she would be patient with me. I silenced my fearful thoughts with the memory of her voice telling me she loved me. She would wait. There was a deeper adoration than the physical love I was thinking about and I knew that it would sustain us through this drought of absence and inability. She was my yoni, my shikta, my divine feminine. I loved her well enough standing there, feeling the wind, breathing the fragrance of leaves and soil around me. Soon however, I felt it was getting dark and moved back through the trail, through the deeper darkness of the thick woods before I emerged and made my way back to my room.

When I returned to my room, I opened up my laptop and found I had an email from my wife that she had left me from work. She was having a rough shift and was not looking forward to a night without me next to her in our marital bed. She was, however looking forward to seeing what I am like drugged to the head with anaesthetic tomorrow. It made me smile the way she made fun of me even though my experience with anaesthetic was not something I wanted to remember. When I was seven, coming to after my surgery, I found that my parents were not there. I couldn’t focus my eyes and the room swayed and rocked viciously. I felt like a dying kitten I had once seen before, whose eyes were filmed over with sickness and could not sit up from nausea. It made the most pitiful mewling, crying aloud for supplication, crying for its mother. I felt the helplessness of looking out from a weakened, low body and found no relief, like it was the miasma of death descending on me. Through the blur of my double vision, I could see my roommate’s mother sitting over him in the bed across from me and I called to her. She pretended not to hear me. I told her that I loved her and asked her to help me. She looked annoyed with me, told me she was not my mother and walked away. I fell back to sleep crying when a nurse came along to soothe me back to rest.

I went and took my shower as my surgery would be early in the morning, then returned to my room to start putting things away in drawers and the closet. I laid out my clothes that I wanted to get dressed in after surgery; my pyjama bottoms and my Superman teeshirt, then wondered if I had packed my rosary with me. After some digging through my luggage, I found that I had. I brought it out and looked at it for a while. I had taken it not so much for the Virgin Mary; I no longer believed in God, but I thought it might shed some good karma, good spirit upon me. I got this from my mother, the superstition and the reliance on ghosts. She was the Catholic in the family, although she never went to church. She held all the ephemera; the rosaries, the scapulars, the family bibles. After she died, we found the crucifix that had once rested on my father’s coffin kept, not hidden but secure, under her pillow. She had kept the faith. Mary may or may not have been watching over me, but it was my mother’s favour I was seeking through bringing this trinket of faith. All I needed during this whole ordeal was faith. Everything would be alright, so long as I had faith that it would be so. I set the rosary in my drawer took the valium that the nurses had left in a cup on my dresser for me. I felt like I would need it. I curled myself into my bed, heaved a deep sigh and let the sleeping pill secret me away from my thoughts.

The next morning came quick and abrupt. At six o’clock, a nurse quickly shaved me and had me wait to be brought to the operating room. Another nurse came and brought me to the holding area; a dimly lit ward of beds where other men like me were waiting for their surgery. Within minutes, yet another nurse came to me and gave me my oxy contins and my Demerol shot. I laid on the bed and let the drugs do their work. The doctor came to fetch me and had me walk to the operating table. I had no idea I was so woozy. I felt like I was walking through a dream, the doctor and a nurse holding me on either side. I was awake through the whole operation, completely trusting the anaesthesia, feeling more relaxed than I ever had before. I could feel each tug and snip but was not concerned at all. In no time at all, I was whisked away in a wheelchair and brought back to my room and helped back to bed where at last I fell into a deep and complete sleep. When I woke, the process of waking was slow and luxurious. I just lay with my eyes closed and breathed the breath of saints, deep and full. I could feel the shiver and tightness of my incision, but never felt any discomfort, just the aura of my numbness. On my back, deep in the cushion of the mattress it seemed, I laid perfectly still as if I had only now just returned to my body to resume my ownership. I heaved a deep, deep sigh and opened my eyes. The first thing I saw then, was my wife’s face looming in space above me, as if she were the Earth to my moon, my mother planet bright and reflecting sunshine into my lunar sky. I could see her clearly, even with my eyes so moist with the dew of sleep. She was smiling at me, wide and proud. My glorious wife.
“Hey, Superman.” She said.
“Hey,” I said, in a croak that made her laugh in the girlish way that I love so much.
“How do you feel?”
I considered the question, taking account, and I smiled. I wanted to get up and use the washroom.
“I feel good.” I finally said. She saw me trying to lift myself and scolded me mildly, telling me to wait. She went to the controls and raised the head of my bed up so I could sit up.
“Do you feel dizzy?” she asked.
“No, but I want to get up.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
I pushed my back off the bed and she came to help me, wrapping her arms underneath mine. I could smell the sweetness of her hair and felt the engulfing warmth of her embrace. I stood up so easily that I felt as if she could lift me up and carry me, light as a baby, to the clouds.

Paradox

After hours of driving, we finally pass into Paradox, New York, so saith the sign announcing at the roadside. Nathan, my older brother looks up from his PSP and laughs at it, still not used to the name. Mum laughs too, just because she thinks it’s funny and wants to share the joke with Nathan and me. Dad just drives on ignoring us, frowning into middle space while we have our moment of ridicule. When we chose the campground we were going to, I heard the word “paradox” and had to ask what it meant. I’d heard the word before, and I thought it was a strange name for a town. Nathan laughed at me though he didn’t know what the word meant either. ”Pauline, it means two things that are together that don’t really belong together.” said Daddy. Nathan said he thought it meant something from another dimension, as if he expected there to be aliens living under the lake or something. I gave him a stinky look to make him feel stupid but he never noticed it. Paradox Lake would be our vacation, where we’d go camping and canoeing and fishing. I wasn’t too keen on it at first, but driving here I started to like the scenery and could imagine myself swimming out to the islands I saw out in the middle of those beautiful lakes surrounded by tree covered mountains. I was beginning to like Paradox, so while Nathan and Mum are laughing, I’m celebrating.

Daddy drives quietly while Mum looks back every thirty seconds to talk with us, like she was nervous that she would turn around once and find us gone. Daddy’s quiet is never really quiet though. He never looks like he’s quiet on the inside. He always has that intense look in his face, like he was looking for something between the car and the horizon, like he was getting frustrated with not finding it. Mum is always the opposite, always super cheery, always wanting us to be happy, giving us what we want even before we know we want it. Daddy wants us to be happy too, but only in that he gets irritated when we’re not. I wish Mum would pay some attention to Daddy instead of looking after us all the time. Every time I get into a zen, imagining myself swimming to one of the islands, or running alongside the car as a deer, she interrupts with some announcement or question, Besides, Daddy looks like he is in a bad mood and needs that cheer more than we do.

We get to the campsite late in the day and both Nathan and I are excited, we want to see it all, the beach, the canoes, the woods, everything we can think of, but Mum and Dad just want to unpack and set up the tents. We help set them up then have our supper. The sun is already going down, on account of our arriving so late, looking pretty but redfaced behind the trees. Daddy bosses the charcoal barbeque to cook our wieners and Mum sets up the perfect picnic table and makes us our dogs the way we want them. Daddy has to make his own and this makes me feel bad for him. Mum does this alot to him and I know he hates it. It makes me feel sad for Daddy. Mum rarely ever talks to Daddy, nor does Daddy talk to her. They never kiss or hug; though Mum is always kissing and hugging us. Mum is a great mom. She does everything for us, but I still wish she would love Daddy the way she should. She should love him just because he’s her husband. He deserves it. He works hard for it. I love him like a daughter should because he’s my father. That’s the way it should be. I don’t have any other reason to need to love him and nothing is going to change that. With daylight fading and the orange campfire glowing ever brighter, I watch him make his hot dog quietly. He sits with us, eating it with his strong jaw chewing in huge manly movements. There are the beginnings of a beard on his jaw and he looks hot and sweaty. There are bags under his eyes that make him look tired and beat. I love my father for the way he takes care of himself, for his strength that shows to me in those same masculine movements, but it makes me sad to see him so tired and quiet. After supper, I go over and sit on Daddy’s lap and nuzzle my head under his chin so I can listen to the thrum of the big planet-sized heart inside his chest. He wraps his arms around me and I can feel him sigh with relief. He knows I love him. We stay like this for a few minutes, then he kisses the top of my head and tells me it’s time for bed. I whine a little bit and I feel his jaw tighten as his arms loosen around me. Mum swoops in to herd me off to bed, but I don’t want to even though I’m tired. Nathan is already asleep in the tent, snoring, which amazes me and annoys me at the same time, but I am glad I don’t have to talk to him at all. Mum whispers to me her sweet nothings and leaves the lamp on for me after she gives me a big kiss and a hug. I roll over and hold my unicorn doll and am asleep before I even know it.

I wake up later and it’s dark. Someone had come in the middle of the night and turned off the lamp and
left me in darkness. My brother is not even snoring anymore, though I hear a new sound that makes me suddenly feel cold in the sweat of my sleeping bag. It’s a hiss, like a snake it seems. It sounds angry and urgent. Followed right after it is a growl like a bear, also angry but seeming to be frustrated. After freezing still for a few seconds, I come to recognize the sounds as my parents’ voices. There is a violent rustling from their tent that starts and ends suddenly, then silence. I lay perfectly still, my heart racing, waiting and listening for something more. There is nothing more. I fall asleep waiting, to dream of snakes and bears.

I wake up for good when the sun is up, though I know it must be early because it’s still quiet outside the tent. Nathan snores away in total stupidity while daylight filters in, bright and welcome. I slide out of my steamy sleeping bag and open the tent to feel the cool air flow in. Outside, I notice to my surprise how close we are to the beach and I stand there looking at it, trying to take it all in even though my bladder needs to pee. The air seems huge outside with the wide view of the lake bowled in by the mountains. I realize how very small I am surrounded by such massiveness. Out on the water in the middle of that expanse, I see a lone canoe with a man in it, paddling along. I watch him for a while, then notice that it’s my father. He’s not too close but I can see his face and the way his body looks. He looks happy. He looks young too. I’ve never seen him in a canoe before but he looks as if he had always been there, almost like he belongs there. I wish I could be out there with him, feeling the breeze on my face like he does, listening to the water flowing around him. He seems so oblivious to the world yet so in tune with it, I wonder if he’s really there; almost as if he’s really a ghost out of some past that was left behind. He starts to paddle away from me to the deeper core of the lake, hitting his stride with strong, sure strokes. Suddenly I feel so much love for him that I want to cry and call out to him though I know he can’t hear me. My father. There’s nothing I can do but watch him float away, my only consolation being that he will come back before too long. I decide to wait for him so when he gets back to land, I can hold him and keep him where he is and let him know that he is loved.

A Hierarchy of Needs

Heat constantly abandons my house. It leaves out every available passage; regardless of the fact that I've paid for it, regardless of the fact that it's my own personal heat, from my breath, my body. Heat must fall from full to empty, high to low, so it spills through every crevice, wasted, into the cold winter air outside. Gravity and other laws of physics dictate this, unfair as they may seem. They have no eye for commerce or conservation. These are the cruel laws that govern my days now, loyal to the currency of supply and demand. Outside, there are pressure systems that have interfered with our lives, taken my family from my home and left me here in a cold and empty house. Off in the continental distance, surging waves of air had flown across the land. A warm, moist low pressure valley from the Gulf of Mexico had flown north across the axis of the Appalachian Mountains then east across the St. Lawrence Valley to the Bay of Fundy. There, it met with a cold high pressure crest off the coast of Labrador. The result was rain, which passed from the upper echelon of cloud miles above our heads to crystalize into what would have been a sweet post-Christmas snow, but instead melted in the layer of warmer air to freeze again only when it hit the cold ground where we live, our frozen habitat. Rain then varnished our world in ice and added on. Normally, a system like this would be a miserable visitor for a night, a day, but a third factor; a high pressure system out in the Atlantic Ocean stalled everything. All came to sit still, frozen. And the ice added on.

The house is cold. It's outer extremities; the bedroom, the bathroom, they hover at a decent 34 degrees fahrenheit. I've brought the thermometer indoors and now I monitor the temperature indoors, scrutinizing nature's intrusion, the flow of heat to cold. The natural disaster outside takes solace from my house's warmth, ignorant of the fact that it had already stolen power from us. Nature is a greedy bastard. Our cities lay under its cold, oppressive weight, crushing great aged trees and causing power pylons to buckle, folding the creatures of the earth down to the earth. Gravity is lord again and we are prostrate in obeisance, sodden then set in place. A frozen system. The very mechanics of the Earth threaten us.

The power went out while we'd been sleeping. We awoke to a cold house, to appliances that would not awaken when prodded, lights that could not break the twilight and a twilight that would not lift. The periphery of life had dissipated in our sleep and left us with the coarser strata of its provisions. The kids, my teenage sons were ecstatic at seeing this. It had only been one day after Christmas holidays and already they were home again and playing pioneer. "Roughing it." my oldest called it. The novelty wore off quickly however, with the realization that pioneers had no internet nor game systems, nor hot showers and microwaves. Many of their freshly opened Christmas presents were useless without power. They are kids on the cusp of the new millenium and the pioneer blood they'd been born with had evolved and left that past behind them. Their complaints quickly became loud and consistent, prompting the exodus to Mamere's where the power was still on and the comforts of home still operated. This is all why I am here alone with the dog, dressed in my layers and a parka, insulated yet brave. The dark solstice had set in and the pagan rites of Christmas had been obliterated by a cruel turn of nature. This is the dark solstice, when night o'ertakes the day and finds me here alone.

The recroom downstairs is now the only room with heat in the house. A few feet away in a walled off corner of the basement, the furnace stands ineffectual, betraying the weaknesses of technology. The fire burns from the stove and its warmth sails up through the open concept of the stairs, creeps where it can through the house. Doors are shut to the bedrooms and bathrooms to deny it, keep it more central and efficient. You are better served where you are, they say. I live these days close to the warmth of the hearth, where the heat originates, from whence it radiates. I'm an inner planet, more alive near the source of my comfort and energy. The dog too, spends his days within its warmth. He lays sprawled on the carpet in total surrender to the floor, sleeping. I have an army of candles here too, to give me reading light, travelling light. I carry a lamp with me through the hallway at night while I check the rooms, use the facilities of plumbing which thankfully have not frozen.

The wood stove has become my solace. I had always loved it, loved the culture of the wood stove, the labours of cutting the wood, the chopping and stacking. I love the trained violence of splitting a log, the capitulation of the its fibres to my strength, two halves sent into flight. This is my command of nature. It's my responsibility to keep the house warm and I'm serious in my commitment to it. The rec room is
where the boys play their video games, where my book collection is shelved, where the family congregates, and I keep it warm and habitable. It takes vigilance to keep the fire going, won't let me walk away for too long, especially now. I learned the art of lighting the fire from my father; the crumpled ball of newspaper, the tent of kindling that surrounds it. I coax air into the flame with the bellows, gently, watching the cinder glow, watching for the impetus of smoke. When the fire catches, I lay the log on the kindling, and close the door, though not completely, just to keep the smoke in the stove and the air coming in. You need to trust that the flame will survive when you put the first log on, my father used to say. Later, I rest another upon it, then another. Then, I close the door and limit the airflow using the bellow to politely negotiate the process. I step back and watch. Soon, the flue rumbles with the rage of the fire, a deephearted thrum, almost a growl full of bass and power. I nod at the fireplace. I nod at myself.

I follow my nightly ritual of feeding the fire to burn through the night with a surplus of logs. The fire burns ferociously, reassuringly, faithfully. I blow out the candles, one at a time, killing the flame with one sudden puff to make the wick smoulder and smoke. I love the smell of melted wax, a deep catholic sense; a factor of vigil. Everything set, I burrow into my sleeping bag on the mattress I'd pulled out from the guest room. On the first night, I'd slept on the couch, but found I needed to stretch out, elongate my legs, fan out my arms. Once I set the mattress on the floor, I found I could sleep. It didn't matter that the mattress didn't belong there. It was a matter of necessity and comfort. Later in the night, I would awaken to feel the dog pressed against me, the stove having exhausted, my body being the next available source of heat.

................................................................................................................................................

In the morning, I venture outside the house to collect some wood from the garage and assess the situation. Even the silence is frozen, I find. The sky is a wintery gray and a fine rain still falls to the earth, almost hangs in the air like a mist to be breathed. This is stalled air, no sailing winds move it. The damage to the trees is the first thing you see. This system has sat down on us, pissing, cracking trees and pushing wires to the snow down below. Mature trees have drop limbs like ballast to lighten their loads. Those that had refused to drop have split in half, the fibres of their age showing, the cores of their birth made bare. The silence is absolute, the absence of technology bringing us a vacuum of sound. Now and again, we can hear the crackle of breaking branches like a staccato of gunfire followed by the glasslike tinkling of ice on ice, but the silence behind it is deep and profound. I look at the branches that have fallen from our maple tree out front; a Manitoba Maple, one of the messiest trees for dropping twigs. The smaller detritus had been shellacked into the snow with ice, but the larger pieces, as thick as my arm or more could be tugged out out of their icy cases and brought to a central spot where I could cut them up. My gas powered chainsaw, fueled from the pores of the earth, cuts, its teeth ripping through ice and wood, its sound roaring into the world. The wood is too fresh to use now. It would have to sit and dry a while, tucked away through the summer, which will have taken the moisture from it and made it thirst for its previous life. Now, there is no thirst for this satiated, saturated wood, so freshly torn from its source. This is just an exercise in maintenance, cleaning up the mess in my front yard.

Between cuts, my neighbour's voice startles me and I almost drop the saw. I'm annoyed. Rule Number One: Never startle a man holding a potential murder weapon.
"Army is out helping the crews!" he says a little too loudly, a little too joyously. He has a windup radio that brings him his news and this is what it's cranked out. I don't really want to stop working, but I indulge in chatting with him. He is an older man, in his 60's. He and his wife are surviving this together. They have a fireplace as well and this is reason enough for them to stay. He gives my house a proprietory glance. "How you holding up?" he says.
I explain how well I am, how the family is at Mamere's and all are safe. I'm good for wood, I'm good for
food, wanting for nothing. He tells me of the damage to his house, how the oak in their backyard crashed a limb through the glass of their sunroom, how they had to cover the hole with tarp.
"Let's hope that's the worst of it." he says wearily. I survey the street, the warzone attitude of it.
"I don't think it can get much worse." I say.
"The news says we're down to one power grid." he says. "If that one goes, it could take months to get power back." I balk at the thought, looking at him, then shutting up.

........................................................................................................................................

The phone rings that night and it's my wife:
"How are you?" she says.
"I'm good." I say. "Cold."
"How is the food situation?"
"Good. Nothing gone bad yet. I might put things outside maybe if its too warm in here."
"Any more damage outside at all?"
"Nothing really to us. The neighbour had a branch through their sun room. We're lucky that maple is so far away from the house- it's in rough shape. I hate that tree. It's so messy."
"You'll really hate it now." she says and I chuckle, hearing my breath crackle in the receiver.

"I miss you." I say.
"I miss you too. The kids have been asking about you."
I feel a rush of pride. My eyes moisten with a sire's love.
"They're good?" I ask, and she laughs.
"Oh you know them, give them a Nintendo and they're A- OK."
We share a laugh, co-parents.

"Any more news about what's happening out there?" I say.
"Crews are working around the clock. Even the army is chipping in. They say we should be getting power within a few days. There's so much damage. It's from here to Nova Scotia."
The scope frightens me. The oppression impresses me, depresses me. Push and pull on my sensibilities.
"I guess all we can do is sit tight and wait." I say.
"Are you alright over there?"
"I'm holding on. It's kind of neat living like this."
"You would think that way."
"I do wish you guys were here."
"We couldn't get in even if we tried."
"You can't even get down the street; there are so many trees on the road."
"We've seen the pictures- Montreal looks like a war zone."
I wonder whether or not I should mention that we are down to our last power grid, how precarious the situation is. Does she need to know? I should not have found out myself, so she does not need to know. In my helplessness however, I realize that she is listening to the news as well. She may be denying me this same information and we are both omitting this very real truth.

...................................................................................................................................


The rec room feels like the only room in the house. It becomes my cave, where my dog and I slide into an almost feral existence. If we are slipping into a new ice age, I am returning to the values that got us through the last one. I have the hearth, the everlasting flame that humanity hath harnessed to its own good. Candles cast a meager light in my lair, but they add to heat. They are flames, the element of my existence. Darkness surrounds me now in the night, but the light is warm. This is the dark solstice, where night o'ertakes the day, but I am brave. Whatever phantom terrors lurk out in the eternal shadow, they are kept at bay now, as I am here in my shelter of light and warmth. I reach for a bottle of wine,
naturally chilled. I feel the need to celebrate in the face of disaster. I am hominid. I am an unfurled descendent of French Cro-Magnon. Neanderthals have eyed me and wondered at my tenacity and innovation. My existence pivots on one power grid under a storm system the size of the St. Lawrence River Valley and I am not concerned. My faith in humanity is my salvation. The worst has already happened and I am content with my dog and my fireplace. Knowledge is power. Schoolhouse Rocks.


The dog sleeps through the better part of the day and night. In some ways, he has the better idea. Sleep is a finer oblivion where thoughts remain within and collate in the mind. I'm not sure what dogs dream about, but the cliché is that he is chasing spiritual rabbits in his mind space. He's never been hunting, has always been an indoor dog that will whine and scratch at doors if left in the elements too long, but perhaps there is a residual genetic memory of rabbits saved for him somewhere in his makeup or perhaps he dreams of chasing teenagers with firecrackers, which he ultimately hates, barks at with the most vigor. Maybe he finally latches onto the seat of one of those low hanging G-Units. Sipping my wine, I watch the dog sleeping. Oh, what a creature of comfort he is, unburdened by morality or culture. His brain has no frontal lobe to house or generate any higher thought. It’s our seat of consciousness that separates us from the animals, makes us sovereign from every other creature on the planet. We have consciences, considerations while his modus operandi is the pleasure principle. He doesn't care if he is stealing food off your plate or out of the garbage. He doesn't care about the mess that he's left behind when he's knocked it all onto the floor. He wants to eat and that's it. My wife always tells me "He's just being a dog." and my return is that I am just being one pissed off human. There is no excuse for his behaviour since I am the one cleaning up after him. I am the one that lost the food. He is fine, just laying there after filling up, farting up the byproducts of his rich meal. He is satisfied while I want to give him a swift punt to the rump. Sleep, you son of a bitch. Sleep that stupid sleep of yours.

I notice that I have barely touched anything here in the house- as if the other rooms have ceased to exist, as if they're anachronisms. The microwave, the television, the light switch are dreams in the ether, useless and cloaked in darkness. I still have books though. As human beings, we've survived ice ages,
Alexandrian libraries and barbarian purges. Knowledge has always been preserved. I pull out Sartre, Of Being And Nothingness. I'm able to read deeper literature now in the silence of time and space, with the help of the soothing effects of alcohol. Reading philosophy is much like reading poetry. It is a matter of precision. You can pick a sentence out of a philosophical essay and mull over it, test it on your palette before swallowing it, look at its colour and light, study its meaning. The words and the wine are one, all cultured comforts in a feral predicament. I sit back in my couch, my seat of consciousness and read.

I pull out one phrase: "Man is nothing but that which he makes of himself."
This seems sensible to me. What have I made of myself? I have my family, my house, my car. My goals have been achieved in life and I am here, living in it. I therefore exist. This is what I'd been building since I was a child, from the ground up and the inside out. First, I'd built my character, stepped into my teenage years asserting my tastes and wants, where Rush and Hipgnosis dictated what I listened to, the virility of beat literature dictated what I read. I'd pulled myself from my parents' influences, the tight skin of diapause into freedom of imago and grown wings and legs to move through my world, happy insect that I was. Satisfied, I then built my world, radiated out from the center. I was a god, an egoist creator. I fashioned my world in my own image, choosing my faculties and my implements, my home and company.

I'm proud of my home. I'm proud of my bookcase full of interest, the rich poetry and deep knowledge. I'm proud of my couch, which keeps me comfortable in front of the fulcrum of my existence; the wood stove. I get up off the couch, cloak myself in a blanket and walk through the house. I love the colour that we had chosen for the rec room walls, the rich golden warmth of it. I remember how I argued with my wife about it and how we had to compromise, how I fell in love with it over time, seeing what she saw. I shared my world with her, so it was good to share her view of it too. There are trophies on shelves that I had won from playing hockey years ago and others from my son's hockey wins more recently. Up the stairs, there is that familiar creaking of the steps, which would always make me worry, thinking I would
wake the family late at night. I get that feeling again, but realize there is no one to wake but the dog, and he is not waking. In the family room is a picture of my grandfather, mending his fishing nets, his 300 year old house in the background. He had done right, I think to myself. My own father had worked his factory job and kept myself and my siblings fed and healthy. I've put my own family on this step, my own sons stepping up with the momentum of life that I had given him. I've done things to be proud of in this life that I've build out of pride and virtue. It's cold upstairs. I walk into the kitchen and see the appliances sitting there in hibernation. I'm amazed at how much I own, from the spoon in the sink to the dishwasher. I bought that bread crumb on the counter. I'm also amazed at how little I need, how I am content with my warmth of atmosphere and thought in the cave downstairs. I'm down to the bare minimum and still happy. I look at the thermometer and it says it is 32 degrees fahrenheit. My house is cold. All is cold but all is well.

.............................................................................................................................................

Walking outside, I find the rain has stopped, but the silence is still atmospheric. The night is like a wall, behind which the world recedes, swallowed by darkness. The cold is still solid and a gloom hangs in the air, unmoving and lifeless. I walk through the snow, my feet crunching through the crust of ice that glazes the ground. It's an abrasive sound, clear and crisp over the silence. The world is cruel. The elements have no feelings for us. Our kindness is indoors, where the warmth and light are.

The stillness betrays our assessments. One day, it's holocaust, the next day it's apocalypse. We live from disaster to disaster, hyperbolizing about our situations and beyond it all, the weather just stands outside, not caring. The cold night is all around me, monotonous, monolithic, superior and neutral. It makes our furor look silly and impotent. The urgency exists only in our minds while the world stands independent of our thoughts, impervious to our impressions and urgings for clemency, hulking against our petulance. It seems stupid, but it is ultimately more powerful than we could ever be. Ignorance is indeed strength because it is completely unmoved by our efforts to break it. My footsteps crackle into the
night. I stop and look up into the sky, invisible in the darkness and I wonder where the stars are. They are behind it all, always there, only cloaked in our own problems.

.............................................................................................................................................

I wake up to sound. Somewhere in the house, a radio is playing. It's faint, but it's profound against the depth of silence that had preceded it. I lay a while listening to it, not sure where I am, what the sound is doing there. I try to gather context. What is this sound doing in my quiet world? I'm not annoyed, however. It's a distant herald. Something has arrived. Getting out of bed, I feel a warmth that had not met me in the morning in a long time; days, seeming weeks. I can hear a hum of electricity coming from the walls of my house. It's as if the house has a pulse. I awaken to the fullness of an active house. I walk up the creaking stairs, surprised, even amazed by the pervasiveness of warmth through the house. The house is busy with noise, having a life of its own. In the kitchen, the noise is stronger. The fridge especially is vociferous, almost angry in its work. I look inside at the food- some of it will have to be replaced. Yes, this is the plan. I come to the realization that my ice age is over and I am thrust back into my time, the brink of the second millennium. We will have to see what the roads look like to make this trip to the grocery store. I laugh at the sudden leap my mind has made into logistics. My laughter is noise too, jumping into this vibrant world to join it. I look out the window and it doesn’t look like anything has really changed, but the propensity for change is there. I can see it happening. It will be cleaned up soon, the rains have ceased and the world will soon burst out of its icy encasement, shake off the frost. I follow the sound of the radio down the halls to the bedrooms. The music, I finally find, is coming from the alarm clock in our bedroom, its sound filling the room fittingly, there to wake us from our sleep in our absence. Its face blinks off and on, 4:05, 4:05...

Game

From the moment our eyes first met, we both knew. From the moment our eyes met, we knew we were destined for each other. I could see it in his eyes, that…pause, that freeze in his expression. He knew he’d been sighted. Of course, he’d only been looking for trouble by stepping out in the open like that, so when he caught me looking at him from across the ravine, he knew.
There was no question about it.
He was mine.

I had made no effort in trying to hide myself, any further than crouching down on my haunches and staring straight down my nose at him. My ears didn't pull back with nerves, no. They turned towards him with intent. Now, of course, he didn’t just surrender right there, you know. He knew what he had to do. We stared at each other in a reciprocal freeze frame for a few moments, he took one step backwards, raised his white tail in alarm and leapt back into the bush. Now you can imagine what I was up against. He had a good 30 foot head start on me, plus that ravine between us. It didn’t matter. I hadn’t eaten in days, long days. I was famished and pissed off, separated too long from my pack, good and ready to rip him to shreds and eat my fill of him.
I’d waited too long.
Our time was now.

I surprised myself at how quickly I cleared both grades of that ravine but like I said, I was desperate. Once I bounded up the other side, I knew exactly where he was. I was looking right at that bouncing white tail before I could even see it, right where I expected him to be. When you’ve hunted for as long as I have, you’re able to predict these things. He was really moving. I could tell he was scared but I didn’t care. For him, there was the thrill of the chase, but for me- for me it was strictly business. It was nothing personal. We just looked at survival in different ways, I suppose. Different vantage points. So yeah, he was fast. He knew all the evasive measures. So many times, he had me backtracking, running around rocks he would leap over effortlessly, cutting slaloms around random trees. He knew these woods as well as I did. They were his just as well as they were mine. I just never lost sight of him once. In fact, I never took my eyes off him. The obstacles were nothing, his evasiveness was useless. Success, my success, was inevitable.

So eventually, inevitably, I caught up to him, hearing and feeling his weight pounding on the soil at every bound. I came in on his heels and swatted at them as they came off a stride, timing it just so. I sent his legs out of rhythm, out of their trajectory, their plane. His body followed helplessly. I broke his synchronicity and her forelegs buckled. He hit the ground hard and as soon as he did, I had his throat in my teeth. He thrashed, kicked, twisted. I could feel the passage of air through his throat as he forced out a hoarse cry in my ear. He fought to turn himself over, get himself standing again. It took all my weight, all the strength in my jaws to hold him still.

Death comes mercifully for prey. The fear, the pain is all in the chase, the struggle. Peace comes with surrender. There’s such peace in surrender. I always feel it when my prey ceases to struggle, that wave of peace that comes over them. I feel for that certain moment when the breath stops and the body relaxes, so limp as to be water. At that moment, I envy them. I’ve never in my life been able to sleep that deep, to rest so completely. I don’t want to die, but only wish that I could feel that kind of serenity. I’ve been finding myself wishing that more and more in recent years. There’s a perfect completeness to death that is just so lacking in my life.

So that’s what he did. He exhaled no more and became like water. He wet my face as I ripped him open and bit by bit, he disappeared into my stomach. I ate until I felt ill and walked away tired and stupid, smarting from the wounds and contusions he’d inflicted on me, my muscles quivering from exhaustion. Someone could have come along and kicked me over and I would be too stupid to fight, too full to run. That’s when I’m at my weakest, after I’d gotten what I wanted. Such a quick descent isn’t it? To fall from the power to take a life to the impotence of being unable to save one’s own. There was nothing for me to do then but find a safe place to hide and get some sleep.

Redeeming the Old Town

The old house seems to be in a state of metastasis, its cells having failed to regenerate over the course of years, not yet a ghost but certainly dying or dead. It’s a dispirited body with peeling paint on its siding, greying wood showing from underneath, baring nails and insulation at the corners and seams. We’re here to visit the town she’d lived in when she was married years ago, sitting parked in my car, looking at the old house from the curb. She’s surprised to see it still standing, having been told by her ex that it had been flattened by a tornado. It stands, against its own will it seems, ignored and passed over even by disaster.
“Wow,” she says again. “Í just can’t believe it’s still standing.”
To me, it looks forgotten and cast away, certainly a detached house, set away like a town leper on a street that is barely even a street; a dead end. I’m her new fiancé, here with her to see where she had been in her past life. “There’s one last thing I want you to make better.” she had said, referring to my job of obliterating the horrid parts of the past. She’s brought me to the old town to bring my own flavour of impression to the place, to have me see it through her eyes and conversely for her to see it through mine. She trusts my judgement to augment hers. We match in so many ways and this is just one. We overlap here and I’m a good cover, warm, like our sheets late at night, like her body over mine as we cuddle. I watch her as she looks appraisingly at the house. She shakes her head. I’m supposing that her appraisal figures in the negative, backwards, to the left, the sinister past. She’s told me stories of heaps of garbage in the living room, power shutdowns, frozen pipes. She’s told me stories of being thrown down stairs, through windows, being kicked in her pregnant stomach. She looks at her past with the same appraisal she gives the house; can’t believe it’s still standing. It should be flattened by now.

When she’s had enough, she asks me to drive on, back into the town proper. It’s a pretty little town, full of character and history (her story, too), a rich town; housing prices are high, as are taxes. We drive by a Tim Horton’s and she tells me about the block party the town put on when it opened. “People wanted that thing there forever.” she said. Cars were lined up past the intersection that day. Everyone wants a Tim Horton’s on their route to work.






We drive the short distance to downtown and park along the main street. Downtown is a state of art. Arts and craft shops are the theme here. She used to love window shopping along this street with her daughter in the stroller, to get away from the house, to get away from the husband. Her stories about the town are usually accented with the phrase “get away from…” and the word “without”. She was without, but now she is with me. Out and with me. In a glass art studio, she cringes as I pull one piece over. I like to touch things to commit them to memory.
“Break it, you buy it.” she says.
“At 345, maybe one day, I will.”
“345 dollars?!”
My touch is gentle and appraising. The piece is like a large glass plate framed with black metal with shards of broken, smoother glass melted into it. These fragments refract the light from outside into splinters of spectral colours. I fall in love with the piece though I know it’s too much to spend on. I have to extract myself from the temptation and leave the store without it.

We hit the pavement, laying shadows on the sidewalk under the shine of the day. She is excited, holding my arm as we walk, planting a kiss on my cheek.
“I’m so glad you’re here with me!” she says, laying her head on my shoulder. I notice that the light is good and take out my camera. I want to get a picture of her here, reunited with her old haunt in a new light, on a new day. I let go of her and aim the camera. She sees me and starts to walk faster.
“Slow down!” I call out behind her. She laughs.
The picture I capture is of her laughing and refusing to slow down.

Further along in the walk, we stop at a bookshop and she buys me a book she catches me admiring. I ask her not to, but she wants to. I’m like a child in letting her, but as an adult, I don’t want her buying me things. I want to be the provider. The child in me wins out though because I love the book; The Forgetting Room by Nick Bantock. It’s only $10.00, a small price to pay. I thank her with a kiss and a hug and she sighs appreciatively with a moan. I think I might propose to her again when we return to the hotel tonight.

Back in the car, she’s a radio hog. She loves to lean over and station-hop for a song that she likes. I don’t mind. I like it when she leans against me, sometimes hugging my arm, sometimes running her touch along my thigh, resting her head on my shoulder. She likes to sing with the radio in a loud, lusty voice. Next to her in the car, I hear her strike octaves and reach falsettos with youthful exuberance. It makes me laugh. I spend longer moments than I should watching her sing as I drive, wanting to commit her image to memory. She catches my attention and scowls.
“Eyes on the road, Mister.”
She sings along with the Top 40, which changes with the flavour of the week; there’s always a new favourite.
“Oh, I love this song!” she shouts, then pouts when the song comes to an end seconds later. “Gawd, why do I always catch them at the ending?”
Sometimes coming in late is still good timing.



Later that night, we’re going to The Ranch, a country/western bar she used to go to with friends when the husband (then) would be on a work trip. She loves country music the most. There are stories in the lyrics that resonate with her, correlate even. Hurting stories, redemption stories, kick-off –your-boots-and-boogie stories. When we arrive, the bar is not full. There are only a few tables with patrons sitting at them. It’s not like a saloon as I’d expected it to be although there are wagon wheels on the walls and the doormen are all in black Stetsons. I look at her in this context and she doesn’t seem content. She’s looking around while she talks, looking for something other than me.
“I don’t know anyone here tonight.” she says, rubbing her thighs. “But then again it’s early.”
It’s a new crowd here at the Ranch. She’s wondering where her crowd is. I want to be introduced to her old friends. I want them to see her new life but instead we’re sharing anonymity here. Suddenly, her eyes widen and she gets up.
“Is that Rick?” she says to the air. I follow her line of vision and Rick is at the bar; a tall goateed man, not as tall as me, his hair shorter than mine. She floats up to him and throws a hug around his shoulders. He seems to recognize her too. I can see his smile and his eyes looking at her. They talk, picking up where they left off and I’m fuming in the audience left behind. Is it jealousy or envy I feel? The two are often confused. I’m feeling that my claim to something precious is being threatened. I have her and she’s talking to another man. I’m wishing I had something I don’t. I wish I had their past. I already have her, whereas four months ago, I didn’t. That’s the difference between envy and jealousy. There’s a certain chronological discrepancy that separates them. Time and possession, time of possession. I’m not sure which one I’m feeling. Maybe it’s a combination of the two, or the threshold of one to the other.
I sip my beer now and wonder who Rick is, what their history is and of course, the heaviest thoughts sink to the bottom. I remind myself that she loves me. My imagination is not serving me well now, as my memory does. I side with memory and pull myself from the bottom. I know she loves me. She gestures my way now and Rick looks over. We see each other face to face and his look is of genuine surprise. I smile as I give a friendly tip of my beer bottle and he walks over to me, his hand outstretched.
“So you’re the man!” he says. He knows about me. She comes up between us as we’re shaking hands, looking proud of having us meet. I’m looking at her with expectancy in my eyes and she laughs. She introduces us with our names. I look at him and appraise him as… someone from her past. That’s all he is- legitimately distant and erstwhile, a denizen of this town far away from the one where we now live. They talk about mutual friends so she’s up to speed with their lives. Apparently, Jane is married now to the Asshole and they have a little girl now. Mike and Kat broke up and he’s taken off with some slut he met on the internet. He asks her when she left the ex. “Two years ago.” she says. He gives me a smiling look that affirms that he sees me as her future. It’s a look that affirms that her life is now better.
“It’s good you left that son of a bitch.” he says.
“Hell, don’t I know it.”
She reaches over to my hand and grasps it tightly.


In the hotel room at night, I’m spreading tealight candles all over the room while she’s in the shower. My plan is to light them all, shut off the lights and propose to her on my knees when she comes out. I thought of this plan just now, rushing to implement it, though safe in the knowledge that she has a penchant for long showers. I’m jumping over the bed like a kid, placing candles wherever there’s free space. I laugh to myself, knowing she can’t hear me, sure she has no idea what awaits her on this side of the door. I grab the lighter now and swoop around the room, lighting candles, relishing the potent stretch of seconds that it takes for the wick to accept the flame. My patience is rewarded with a lit candle and I can leap on to the next. Suddenly I hear the shower stop when there’s two candles left. I know she wastes no time coming out; steps out dripping wet and wraps towels round her body and hair. I have scant time to light the one, forsake the other, shut off the lights and rush to wait at the door she will come through any second now, to propose to her yet again even though my ring has been on her finger already for some time now.

Game Night at the Bull's Feather Pub

The football game blares from televisions around the hotel pub. Their noise fills the room, from behind the bar and from every corner, so loud as to be the air, the atmosphere of the room. There is the cheering and shouting of the crowd in the background, but in the foreground, there is the commentary. There’s comfort in the knowledge of the announcers, they bring a time honoured voice to the game, soothing to the men at the bar. In their power suits, the men look keen and crisp. They are dressed to impress. They are power brokers. They break power, build power through hostile takeovers. They’re men that monitor their quarry, conspire them towards their demise, conquer them, swallow them, then make them theirs. Brokers, they break them.
The businessmen come to the pub tonight, ties loosened, wanting to drink. They congregate at the bar at the end of the night to put the day away. After crunching numbers all day, sealing deals and shaking hands, they need to let loose. They shout above the din of the television, keeping a conduit of conversation through them, keeping it light, drawing laughter from each other. The conversation has to be simple, basic, quickly picked up and not missed, like a lateral pass in football, like a drop pass in hockey. This is their leisure, where they step out of their world and strip life down to its lowest common denominator.
“Wrecked ‘er? Damn near killed ‘er!”
“Wrecked ‘em, wrecked them, not her. You know? Rectum?”
“No, just her. I’m strictly monogamous.”
“Is that how you like it?”
You, behind the bar, you pour their drinks, ply their food. This is your establishment. You have a sense of propriety here. You are good at what you do, you know your job. You give a hospitable persona and they appreciate that. You match their banter, talking like you’re one of them. They like the glow of your face, your smile. They like the liberty of your breasts, your cleavage showing from the open V of your sweater. It makes you the carnal center of the room, the prize. Their eyes dive into your cleavage from every corner to where you, behind the bar, are at its head, its center and fulcrum. They take this as license and you offer this license for gratuities to augment your meagre server’s wage. It is the flow of currency between you, the pursuit of gratuity. They step closer, lean closer on the bar. The bar stretches between you and them like a fence.
You smile and laugh at their jokes and the line gets drawn closer to you, the front moves closer. They are more forward, they make that movement, although you don’t give them everything from behind the bar. The bar stands between you and them. You don’t react to their comments, so they populate that silence with innuendo. They look at your naked finger and this is a state of undress to them. You’re open and vulnerable and it excites them. They sense pursuit and it incenses them.

What they don’t know is that your rings are sitting at home, where at that same moment, your husband is giving your daughter a bath; her last activity before retiring clean and warm to bed. Your ring, that circle of solid and pure gold that belongs on your third finger, the finger that has a direct carnal line to your heart, sits on your dresser while you work. To wear it to work would burst the illusion, turn away gratuities. It sits in the dark waiting for you, in the bedroom where your husband will be sleeping, ready to wake to your return and welcome you home. The patrons will never know this in their fleeting dalliance with you. They may enter the softness of brief association, but would never touch the solid unmoveable truths you hide. You would never let them close enough.
“So how old are you?” one of them asks.
“27.”
“27? Darryl Sittler.”
“Frank Mahovolich”
“Shane Courson”
“He was a bum!”
“Jacques Villeneuve was number 27 too.”
“Same as his dad.”
“You know who should be wearing 27?” the first man asks, looking at you.
“Who?” you ask, knowing by the smirk on his face something is coming.
“Me.” he says.
The look is passed and the other men react with laughter. It has struck the right chord and now the laughter rings like a harmonic. You laugh along and shake your head. With artful timing, you offer another drink and they accept. It’s a toast to good times and more tips for you. At the till, you check on the balance and without warning a toonie sails across the bar and bounces off your breast. The quarter test. You catch it after it bounces off your chest, before it hits the ground and they are amazed, laughing and clapping. They are indeed impressed. You then press your breasts together and they each toss coins at your cleavage, none succeeding, but each having immense fun in doing so. You laugh the hardest, at the irony of it all. When you return to the till, they moan and protest, but you need to get back to work. You pick up the coins from the floor and more are tossed into your shirt, which you shake out from the bottom when you stand back up. They all go into your tip jar. As you busy yourself with your work, the patrons return their attention to the game and their drinks. They see the fun is over and they fall into the next available form of entertainment.

You consider closing early tonight. You’re tired, too tired in fact. This is not where you want to be. It’s too busy tonight, the waitress that was supposed to come in had not and you are doing the pub alone tonight. You know your daughter is having a bath tonight and normally, in the old normalcy before taking this job, you would draw your own bath after your daughter would be asleep. After that bath, you would go to sleep as well. You’ve worked too many late nights now, with too little sleep between them. Bills need to be paid and pounds of flesh need to be served. You think of pounds of flesh; yourself served on a platter and devoured. You know your husband would explode with anger if he knew what had just gone on tonight and you feel pangs of guilt. Your guilt is richer than the change in the tip jar. They are gratuities, tips, but they are not without price and they are not making you any wiser. You frown privately. You shiver. The pub is always so cold, the door always opening to the winter air. You want your warm bed, your warm husband, the real humanity of rest.
A food order comes from the kitchen. You avoid looking at the cook as you take it and wordlessly pass it to a patron although the cook stares at you, hoping for your attention. The cook is a diva, has been making too many suggestions beyond his scope, beyond the kitchen and into your personal sphere. You won’t go beyond that door into the kitchen tonight because there are too many corners, too much heat from the grills. You feel the heat coming from the kitchen but still the cold from the door makes you shiver. You don’t accept that heat. Let him sweat it out alone back there, you think. You decide to close early tonight. You know how to subliminally ease the patrons out of the bar, keep new ones from coming in. The cook will be leaving soon. You will rush him out as well and after he leaves, then you can close up and go home. You intend to do just that.

Stealing Breath

I wake up before you do, to the tapping of the blinds on the windowsill. Air flows through the open window; invisible, insipid, scentless and yet still here. Its presence is only in its effect. Daylight comes in along with it, the ignition of life. Outside, I can hear the transit of the city, the morning rush underway. For moments, I watch your face while you sleep. It’s so pretty with its peaceful, childlike visage. I lean over and kiss you on the lips, but you flinch, kissed out of sleep.
“Don’t,” you say, rolling over and away from me. You don’t like it when I wake you with a kiss. You say it steals your breath, that I inhale the breath that you’re taking. Is your breath so elusive that a kiss robs you of it? I want so much affection from you, but you pull back when I’m excessive. “You’ll survive.” you say, though I always retort with how I don’t want to just survive, I want to live. Whenever we think of breathing, it seems we also think of suffocation. I think of my mother, her breath shortening like a wick, burning out ‘til it was exhausted. For days afterwards, I was ashamed of breathing until she came to me in a dream and told me: I am allowed to breathe. Breathe, Kees.
I lay in bed next to you, listening to you snore softly. I love your snore. It’s never bothered me. It’s your sound, affirming your presence next to me. It goes along with your warmth, your skin on mine under the sheets we share. I yawn, my brain needing the oxygen, a lion’s wide maw, drawing in as much air as I can inhale. I am awake now, thinking of all the things I need to do, imagining my first cup of coffee, the life-giving first sip that puts me online for the day. My mind races through its thoughts. It’s a Sunday, but I want to do some writing and get on my bike. I can hear the world outside, feel the mildness of the morning.
I start to slide out of the sheets and suddenly you are reaching to me, holding my arm and pulling me in. I flow into the momentum of your insistence, pressing my side against your breast as you lay your head on mine. I know you are listening to my heart and I offer it to you, sighing to your warmth and attention. Your breath soon lapses back into the soft rasp of sleep and I stay with you, long enough to know you are safe and comfortable, before I kiss your forehead and slide out of bed. I enter the air of the house, moving through the exchange of open windows, gathering myself together to start my day. There is much to do.