The winners of the 2010 Great Canadian Literary Hunt are now all online for your reading pleasure, and we wanted to take this opportunity to introduce you to the hard-working judges who read through the entries to select this year’s winners. (Just a reminder that we’ve got a handy megalink to all the winning entries at http://2th.is/10HuntWinners.) Our thanks to these talented writers, artists, and poets: we couldn’t do it without you.

UPDATE: The one person who was — mortifyingly — left off this list of people deserving thanks is Stuart Ross, our fiction and poetry editor, who reads every single entry that comes in, helps recruit judges, and supports the contest throughout its almost year-long production process. The only explanation I have for why he wasn’t thanked in this note originally (and that’s still no excuse) is that he’s so instrumental to the contest that we tend to take his guidance and assistance for granted. For that, Stuart, I apologize. Thank you.

We would also like to thank contest coordinator Natalie Samson, who made the whole contest run smoothly this year. Our thanks, finally, to the volunteers who helped make the contest happen: Chantal Arseneault, Claudia Calabro, Luke Champion, Brianne Diangelo, Stef Duerr, Katie Findlay, Claire Haist, Heather Hogan, Kelli Korducki, Allen Kwan, Cory Lavender, Robyn Letson, Jesse Mintz, Vanessa Parks, Anne Thériault, Chris Sorenson, Melissa Wilson, and Ashley Winnington-Ball. Thank you!

Here are your judges for the 2010 contest:

Short Fiction

Gary Barwin is a writer and musician in Hamilton, Ontario. He is the author of a number of books of poetry and fiction, most recently The Porcupinity of the Stars. His website is garybarwin.com.

Jenn Farrell is a Vancouver-based writer and editor, and two-time winner of the Vancouver Courier fiction contest. she is the author most recently of the short story collection The Devil You Know.

Nicole Markotic teaches creative writing at the University of Windsor, and is the author of the novel Yellow Pages and the poetry collections Connect the Dots and Minotaurs and Other Alphabets. Her chapbook more excess won the bpnichol Poetry chapbook award.

Poetry

Alice Burdick is a Nova Scotian poet. Her second major poetry collection is Flutter, which focuses on the small things and important moments of semi-rural life.

Dani Couture was born in Toronto and raised on a number of Canadian Forces bases. She is the author of two books of poetry and is currently working on her first novel, Black Bear on Water.

Jim W. Smith is the author of half a dozen books of poetry and chapbooks. He founded the poetry magazine The Front, and its spinoff, Front Press, published the work of many of Canada’s most important poets. He now works as a lawyer in Toronto, where he continues to write.

Graphic Narrative

Jeff Lemire was born and raised on a farm in Southern Ontario, which inspired his “Essex County” trilogy of graphic novels. He is the author of The Nobody and Sweet Tooth, and in 2008 won the Joe Schuster award for Best Canadian Cartoonist and the Doug Wright award for emerging talent. See his work at jefflemire.com.

Evan Munday is a comics illustrator in Toronto. He is the author of Quarter-Life Crisis, about a post-apocalyptic toronto in which only the 25-year-olds have survived. His website is idontlikemundays.com

Jillian Tamaki is a Canadian illustrator living in Brooklyn, New York. She has published three books of art and comics, including Indoor Voice, published by Drawn and Quarterly. Visit her at jilliantamaki.com.

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Who knew that a hobby so bizarre even had a name for itself? But Mandy spelled it all out for her baffled mother early on, back when she was oh, eight or so. Waxidermy is what she called her riff on Madame Tussaud. For starters, Mandy appropriated the cold white stubs from the shabbos candles and yahrzeit candles her mother had illegally blown out before they were fully burned down so that the flames wouldn’t singe the dining room sheers while they slept. Her mother was a modern woman, happy to observe the traditions to the extent that they didn’t impinge on safety or decor, though her laissez-faire approach to religious observance abraded her daughter’s parochial school sensibilities. Little Miss Holier-than-thou stashed the filched candle butts in a shoe box until she accumulated what she deemed a decent hoard, at which point she melted them down to malleability in the crock pot. Once her pinkie advised her that it was cool enough to work with, she turned the waxy mass out onto her mother’s marble pastry board and moulded it into a marzipanish figurine of one of the relatives.

Mandy, in family lore, had no talent for art. It was her brother Bram who had locked up the Chagall genes. But it was starting to look like they’d given her short shrift. Her sculptures were eerily lifelike; masterful representations of the various members of the mishpocheh Tabachnik. On the face of it, they were a dubious bunch to inspire flights of creativity, but muses must come in all flavours, apparently. Mandy seemed to put her miniatures to no particular fetishy use. She didn’t stick thumbtacks in their hearts or lop off an arm here or a foot there. Once they cooled and hardened, she just positioned her downsized kinfolk very precisely on top of her bureau and there they sat.

Mandy’s mother cleaned house every Thursday. Bella couldn’t help but study her daughter’s munchkin output while she flicked the feather duster over the assemblage. Not that the array changed all that often. It took months and months worth of candle stumps to yield a single new specimen. Bella peered through her bifocals at the statuettes. They were placed in a rough semi-circle. At first, she took the configuration as the lead-up to an eventual ring-around-the-rosie arrangement, an innocent and joyful family tableau, or an incipient hora circle, maybe. But over time she was forced to question her initial assessment. Surely she was hallucinating, but didn’t the layout on Mandy’s bureau look more like Stonehenge?

That impression, ludicrous though she knew it to be, refused to shake loose. Soon Bella was obsessing over the relative positions of the wax replicas that populated the top of the chest of drawers where her daughter stored her Cinderella undies and pyjamas, trying to sniff out their subliminal message. Whatever it was, she figured, no way could it be good.

As Mandy added more bite-size family characters over the years, placing them here and there among the old-timers according to her own internal logic, Bella was able to enjoy a brief period of relief. It was all beginning to look less to her like Stonehenge and more like the diamond at Fenway, but no, that wasn’t quite it either. The particular disposition of the effigies in Mandy’s room rang a faint bell somewhere at the back of Bella’s mind, but she just couldn’t manage to dredge up the matching image from the archives. She was forever ruminating over the deployment of the figurines like a scientist puzzling over crop circles until the penny finally dropped.

A nativity scene. That’s what it was. Bella wanted to be wrong, but the evidence, undisputable, was right there before her. What did her Mandele know from a crèche, but the most recently added figure was the baby Jesus all right, and he was wearing Uncle Seymour’s pocked puss. What the hell kind of statement was Mandy trying to make? The girl had been a mystery to her mother since day one; seldom disobedient, seldom ornery, but always opaque. And if this wacko diorama was indeed some sort of message to Bella, why was Mandy taking an eternity to cough it up? Her daughter had shown herself, growing up, to be a patient sort, but this much restraint was downright pathological.

Not one word did Bella say to her daughter about her revelation; no action did she take. That is, of course, until the day Mandy parachuted the donkey into her mise en scène. That fateful Thursday, Bella lugged the vacuum cleaner into her daughter’s room as usual and dumped it in the corner. She always started her cleaning forays into Mandy’s territory with an inspection of the forms on the bureau; only then could she settle down to business. Bella noticed the new inhabitant at once. The arrangement of bonsai Tabachniks was graven on her brain, and any change to the blueprint leapt immediately to her attention. It was an animal this time, Mandy’s first detour into the realm of wildlife. She dipped her head down closer to examine it nose to nose. Once her focus locked in on the most recent arrival, she had to lean against the wall to steady herself. The donkey bore her own face. The heart-shaped mole on Bella’s right cheek combined with the cat’s-eye glasses were unmistakeable. She was staring at her dopplegänger on four hooves. That was it, the last straw.

Bella barreled out to the kitchen to rescue the crème brulée burner from the bottom of the regifting drawer, and brought the hitherto useless gadget back to Mandy’s room. She aimed the business end towards the peewee clan, pulled the trigger and torched the lot, melting years of her daughter’s exacting labour down to a murky puddle. As soon as the deed was done, Bella suffered an episode of some sort. Looking back, she hesitated to call it a stroke — she never actually lost consciousness — but her joints seized up and her brain hung out the “back in five minutes” sign. When she came to, she cracked open her mouth and started to recite Humpty Dumpty to the four walls. The voice that echoed back sounded normal to her own ears. In her crazed state, she halfway expected that she’d bray. She reached behind her back to give her coccyx an exploratory pat-down. Bella palpated carefully in the same circular motion her ob-gyn had taught her, but she detected no tail bud lurking under the skin. The tension got the best of her. She abandoned the roux of congealing wax on the bureau, hoovered the carpet slap-dash, and then set herself up on the couch with a medicinal Chivas.

A few hours later, Mandy came back from school and retired to her room to do her homework as usual. Bella girded herself for the moment when her daughter discovered the ravaged remains of her life’s work, her entire waxy family incinerated in a holocaust unleashed at the hands of her own loving mother. But there was no outcry, nary a peep. Was this what Bella had been trying to provoke all along in destroying the shot glass statues, the colossal blowout that would break down the wall between them? If so, it was a dud. The bedroom was silent. Bella recalled her relationship with her own mother, a shrieking battleground. She didn’t communicate with her in smoke signals or charades or papier mâché. They duked it out at the highest decibel level in the time-honoured tradition of mothers and daughters. How had an incrementalist like Mandy ever sprung from Bella’s slash and burn loins?

The counter-reaction, though not verbal, didn’t tarry. Mandy hauled the crock pot out of the cupboard that same night and set to work melting the slab of wax. This time, though, she fashioned one solitary figure, a grand statement, bolder than all the rest. No more pissing about with pygmies. The result seemed somehow bigger than the sum of its parts. Maybe Mandy had thrown her backlog of virgin candle stubs into the mix, or could be she’d cleaned out her ears to add to the critical mass. In any event, this wax creation loomed over her bureau. It was, of all things, an African fertility goddess. So perfect was it in every detail that it might have been nicked from a case at the Smithsonian. The idol’s hair was intricately braided and draped, its charged breasts diddled its kneecaps, and its navel pooched out at a perky angle from a distended belly. Only her mother’s myopic face etched onto the sculpture killed the illusion. Bella nuked it on the spot, but there was no stopping Mandy now. She slapped her mother’s kisser onto every last one of her subsequent waxworks. One day Bella was rejigged as a giant Buddha, and the next a garden troll. Mandy scrimshawed her mug onto Che Guevara and Donald Duck and then shoehorned her into Mount Rushmore between Roosevelt and Lincoln. She whipped out her masterworks at dizzying speed, the Edward Scissorhands of wax, but each new opus her mother melted flat. Twice already Bella had had to replace her butane cartridge. She was considering a rare midweek sortie to Costco to buy some in bulk.

Themes began to emerge in Mandy’s oeuvre. Well into her New York period, she moulded her mother into King Kong, one arm slung buddy-buddy over the Empire State Building, and next into an owlish Statue of Liberty. Against all her instincts, Bella fell for this last waxy iteration. When she pointed her trusty burner at her clone to zap it like all the others, her index finger went on strike. Bella holstered her weapon and approached the carving, scrutinizing it from all angles. Then she closed her eyes and massaged her forehead as if performing some interior triangulation. The tumblers of her mind meshed with a satisfying click of resolution. Bella grabbed hold of the statue by the throat. She rocked it back and forth until it popped its moorings, and toted it into the dining room. There she centred it on the buffet in front of the bay window, elbowing aside the Chanukah menorah that was already kitted out with its two start-up candles for the first night of the holiday. She yanked the candles out and jammed the yellow one into Lady Liberty’s torch and the pink one into her head, just behind the crown. Bella stood back and eyeballed her ad hoc menorah. It wasn’t half bad.

For each of the following nights of Chanukah, Bella drilled yet another spiral candle into the statue’s cranium. As was her custom, she snuffed them out prophylactically at half-mast. Even so, enough heat was generated by the amputee candles that it couldn’t help but affect the integrity of the menorah proper. Its features began to morph. Ms. Liberty’s mouth and nose melded into each other harelipwise, her chin lost its resolve, and her toga pleats needed a good pressing. As the Chanukah candles dripped down the contours of the menorah, they clotted along the way, padding the Statue of Liberty’s hips in multicoloured waxen strands until she looked like a Chianti bottle centerpiece in a boho pizzeria. On the eighth and last night, Bella decided, God alone knows why, to let the candles burn all the way down, unchecked. She parked herself at the dining room table after the family retired to keep a firefighter’s eye on the blaze, ready to whip out the extinguisher and let her rip if need be, but she drifted off while the flames were still shimmying full force above the statue’s chignon.

The morning found Bella with her head cradled in her arms. She’d slept the sleep of the dead, a rare reflux-free snoozerama, chloroformed by the latke fumes holed up in the fibres of the blue and white holiday tablecloth. The wooden dreidels lodged upended under her bosom were just starting to prick her awake when she made out the approach of slippered footsteps. Bella opened her crusted eyes a slit to spy on Mandy from behind. Her daughter was contemplating the moonscape of residual wax that coated the surface of the buffet like a patch of psoriasis, all that remained of her glorious handiwork. Mandy nodded her head. She scraped up the wax, carried it over to the kitchen garbage pail, tossed it in among the coffee grounds and the orange peels, and let the lid fall on lesson number one.

Behold my face at a quarter turn: dragonly,
dog-eared, a carnal mask mirroring
half-lit spits of wood. This morning
Nevada furrows, my shoulders
too warm for leather; yet I’ve no better
armour against the wind, the stagey
palms that threaten to bend and replace
my stationary ramps, Caesar’s fountain.
Downrange, I prepare to be bandaged,
hear myself speak fluently in my own language:

“Bridge the strips around my bicep.
It’s where I… fuck, not like that. Grip
the razor down-hilt… there. Push…
shit… it won’t…”. I turn my gaze
towards the melee that surrounds
my bike, making’s landfill a network
of forgotten jumps, a backwards glance
before a maelstrom of sand. Derelict,
I’ve seen how closely my muse lurks,
have heard myself described as hard work:

having the face of an eagle, lion and ox.
Tricked out in off-white chaps, cape,
the valley of the shadow of death,
I gauge the line from rubber to ramp:
uncamp its frame on doubled wings.
Fountain-side, Romans balance,
flock to witness my ramshackle horse couple
with sky: behold my stance,
my corrugated flanks that rake the air, its absence
(as hard to get through as Scotch broth), though once

I groped around and found myself
unmoored at latitude. What mechanics
hold me, having already landed,
what patience, body tossed ass-first
over the gas-tank’s hive? The desert
revives as if in dream: my head a brick,
a helmeted weathervane unraveling
in every plane at once. Lo, it’s clear
that this is paradise, and if given a mic
someone rather bladdered will tell me I’m magnetic.

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The path behind Ganden
cuts through a clutch
of wild flowers, continues
beneath a flutter of prayer
flags and rises to the crown
of a hill. We walk towards
a large, flat stone where
the body was divided
from itself. Instruments lie
scattered like a toolbox emptied
in a slaughterhouse: rusted
machetes, axes, a blood-stained
rope. To the side a fire pit
cradles jigsaw pieces of charred
bone in its ashen basket: a skull
plate, a jaw missing teeth, broken
chunks of spine. Ochre stained
tsampa, soaked with blood, is left
for the vultures to clean. Beyond
this cutting board the valley rolls
out its tongue, licks the sky blue.
A gust of wind tosses up a maroon
coloured cloth, spins it in the air
like a monk rising as the birds circle
above. On the drive back to Lhasa
we pass a lamb still breathing,
its eyes flaring as blood
spills from its mouth.

The year I turn nine we drive up north in daddy’s Oldsmobile to see his brother Lester marry a girl named Lulu. “She’s a lulu, alright,” mama says and daddy wants to know what the hell that’s supposed to mean.

I sit in the backseat with my sister Gail, who says she’s too old for stupid sappy songs, and sing There’s a Hole in My Bucket until mama says will you shut up already. She grabs a tin from the dashboard, hands it to me.

“Eat this,” she says.

The tin is warm from the sun and the milk chocolate fingers inside are melted gooey blobs that smell like plastic.

Gail worries about her figure but I eat every one of them.

The heat in the car makes the rubber and Chantilly and dirty carpet smell stronger than usual. Mama and daddy smoke and the sun blasts through my window and burns my arm and my knees; I’d like to open it but we’re not allowed to open a window because it would destroy mama’s hair. I can feel the blobs of chocolate lying on top of each other in my hot stomach, they don’t seem to know where to go from there. I tell mama I don’t feel well. She says we’re almost at Lester’s.

When I’m sick mama says it serves me right for eating like a pig and that I have ruined the day and possibly the wedding because the Oldsmobile was supposed to take Lulu to the church or had I forgotten. Daddy yells at mama and she yells back and he stops on the side of the road and wipes my clothes and my legs and takes the worst of it off the backseat and Gail and I sit on a rock and when cars go by I’m sure they know I’m a pig who has made a mess and ruined the day and mama sits on another rock and smokes.

Lulu looks nothing like mama. She’s short and round with a ponytail that hangs down past her shoulders like used pieces of brown string. Mama is all bones and hard edges; her hair, which every month Gail helps her turn Sultry-Sable-Black, is teased and lacquered; she has red lips and red nails filed to points that she uses to pretend she’s a lion — roaring showing her claws — I’m supposed to be the lion tamer but I don’t like this game, I don’t know what to do and that always makes the lion angry. It scratches my arm. Once it bled. She said don’t get any on the rug.

Lulu’s head is too small for her body and when she tries to cross her legs the top one sticks straight out so you can see the bottom of her bare foot, cracked, like dirt without rain.

Don’t take this personal, mama says, but have you put on weight? and Lulu says maybe she has and mama says she’s not saying it’s unattractive or anything, she was just inquiring is all and Lulu says personally she’d be happy to lose a ton but the first place it goes is her boobs and that would kill Lester.

“He said as much,” she tells us. “He said he’d rather find me dead in the bathtub than for me to lose weight on my boobs. He said he doesn’t care how big I get as long as the boobs keep getting bigger too, can you believe it?” She snorts when she laughs.

The living room is warm and smells of smoke and diapers and milk. The TV is on, and the radio, and two children, Lily, the baby, and Little Lester, who is almost three, play on grey linoleum with chalk and colouring books. An ironing board leans against the wall next to a white plastic potty, almost full with pee.

“Where the hell are my manners?” Lulu says, handing Lily over to mama who has taken a seat beside a pile of laundry. “You guys want somethin’ to drink?”

Gail and I say yes please and she picks up the potty, takes it to the kitchen and we look at each other. Gail’s eyes are huge and her mouth is open. When Lulu returns she’s carrying two bottles of ginger ale plus the empty potty which she puts back on the floor.

We sit watching the TV and listening to the radio and then Little Lester pulls down his pants and sits on the potty awhile. When he gets up there’s a red ring on his bum and a mound of mushy poo. He pulls up his pants, sits back down on the floor and Lulu has a fit—is he some kind of an animal or what, she screams, and he starts crying and hollering and she tells him get your stinking little turd ass over here and she yanks down his pants, takes some Kentucky Fried Chicken napkins from the coffee table, wipes his bum, tells him to pull up his pants, put the napkins in the potty and park himself and shut up and don’t be so ignorant when we have company!

She sits back then and crosses her leg, tells us he doesn’t usually forget to wipe his bum like that.

“Must be all the excitement,” she says. She snorts a little, smiles, shakes her head. “Kids, eh?”

Lulu’s brothers, Rob and Eddie, come over for supper. Rob is tall and red-headed and works at the mill and Eddie, who is the same shape as Lulu and even has the same long thin ponytail, is a minister.

“Not the kind that marries people,” Lulu explains. Daddy says what the hell other kind is there and Lulu tells him that Eddie, who we should by rights call Reverend Eddie, is a healer. “He can talk to somebody over the phone and cure them of cancer.”

Daddy says horse-shit, then opens another beer. He swats a fly buzzing around his head and mama says does he know that fruit flies are attracted to people who have cirrhosis of the liver and daddy says, “Is that right? Well for your information it’s not a fruit fly, Marguerite, it’s a goddamned house fly, and did you know that house flies are attracted to men who are married to women who hardly ever shut the Christ up for five minutes?”

The Reverend Eddie roars.

After supper the men go over to the Royal Hotel in Rob’s new yellow convertible while the girls stay home and make pink toilet-paper flowers to decorate the Oldsmobile which Lulu says doesn’t bother her if it smells of sick, so does Lester’s truck.

At the wedding mama dances with Rob and slaps his arm, throws her head back when she laughs and Rob shoves up close and they keep right on dancing even during the numbers when other people sit down. Daddy and Lester stand by the bar while Gail helps Lulu paint her fingernails Tangerine Dream to match her going-away outfit. I’m alone when the Reverend Eddie comes over.

“You got B.O. or somethin’?” He laughs, grabs my arm. “C’mon, let’s dance.”

His breath smells and I say no thanks and he wants to know how I can refuse the lord — don’t I know that refusing him is the same as refusing the lord, and I say well, okay then, and he pushes me onto the dance floor for a slow song and shoves up so close my face is touching his sweaty shirt, then he shoves up even closer and I try to move away but he holds me tight and rubs himself into me and I feel something. There is something bumpy and it presses against my ribs. I look around but no one seems to notice me dancing with the lord.

When the music stops he lets go, tells me I’m a very good dancer, says let’s dance again and I say I have to go to the bathroom and he tells me little girls shouldn’t lie. I squeeze my bladder in this way I have to check if it’s full, and it is. I wonder how the lord got this very simple thing wrong. He says we’ll wait for another slow song, let’s sit down in the meantime, and he walks to the back of the room near the coat racks. Sit on my lap, he says, which I do but I have trouble keeping balance. He puts his hands under my dress, grabs my bottom, steadies me. Isn’t that better, he laughs. I feel the fingers of his left hand, and then his whole sweaty palm, pressing on my bare leg and then I feel his skin peel away from mine and his hand goes into my underpants. The lord has his left hand inside my underpants, wiggling his fingers all over, and I don’t know what to do.

I hold my breath so hard my ears ache. Then he pushes me off his lap suddenly and stands up. “Christ!” he says. “You goddamn brat!” He spits on me, leaves through the back door and I’m standing there alone a few minutes before I notice my bladder is no longer full.

There’s a good chance I’ve peed on the lord.

I pray he won’t tell anyone.

On a Friday in October I’m coming home from school when I see mama walk out our front door. The air fills with Chantilly as she passes then disappears into a yellow car waiting at the curb . She’s carrying a suitcase and doesn’t say a word.

When daddy gets home he punches a hole in his bedroom door then drives the Oldsmobile to the Brewers’ Retail.

Gail tapes a rainbow picture over the hole, tells me don’t worry, she’ll take care of us. She pulls money from daddy’s wallet, walks to the Dominion for macaroni and eggs, cans of fruit cocktail; she vacuums on Saturdays, doesn’t have time for schoolwork. Every night daddy comes home yelling about the arseholes at the drain factory then falls asleep on the couch in his underwear.

Gail says she’s the only one who understands him.

“It’s alright, daddy,” she says. “I’ll put the television on for you, here’s your beer and your cigarettes, another glass of whiskey, I’ll leave you some chips, barbecue, your favourite.”

Sometimes he cries, wipes his face with the front of his undershirt, says she’s a good girl, he doesn’t deserve her.

When he blows his nose her eyes light up.

At Christmas there’s a box marked ‘Jolene’ on the floor where the tree would be if we had one. It looks like Gail’s writing. I open it — cherry-filled chocolates, my favourite. There’s only one other present, a small package wrapped in blue paper marked ‘Daddy.’ When he gets up we yell Merry Christmas and Gail gives him the package and he stands there starting at it awhile — then he says holy shit and takes it back to the bedroom and from behind the closed door we hear him: holy shit…holy shit…holy shit…

Gail looks at me and shrugs. “It’s only socks,” she says.

The year I turn ten Lester dies. I assume Lulu’s boobs have finally shrunk and it’s killed him as she always knew it would, but it turns out he drowned on a fishing trip. Lulu asks can she come stay with us awhile, maybe she can help out. Daddy says if she’s casting her net she can bloody well cast in some other direction, but he lets her come and I move into Gail’s bedroom and Lily and Little Lester move into mine and Lulu takes daddy’s room and daddy sleeps on the couch until one morning I see him coming out of Lulu’s room and he says, “You got a problem, Jolene?” and after that he and Lulu sleep behind the taped-up rainbow picture every night and nobody sleeps on the couch.

Lulu makes meatball stew and mashed potatoes swimming in margarine and Cool Whip salads. She buys giant bags of cheesies and cases of ginger ale. Gail worries we’ll soon be poor at this rate, and every one of us as fat as Lulu.

Daddy says he’s never eaten better and pats his stomach and Lulu’s behind after every meal.

Gail doesn’t clean on Saturdays anymore. She goes to the plaza with new friends who smoke behind Zellers and takes clothes into the change rooms to steal under their regular clothes. At night boys tap on our bedroom window and she orders me to scram; if I tell, I’m history, she says.

The house is filling up with dirty laundry and dishes and bottles and toys and queen-size pantyhose and once Lulu and daddy have taken their place in the living room there’s nowhere to sit. Daddy says what’s wrong with the floor and I clear a spot for myself where I can eat and do my homework until one day I get home from school and a white plastic pee pot has taken my place.

When daddy finds out about the boys in our bedroom he shoves Gail up against the living room wall, yells she’s acting like a whore. Gail yells back she thought daddy liked whores. I’m in the kitchen pulling out strands of my hair which is something I’ve started to do, I don’t know why. I lay each strand upon the other, making a neat pile and when I’m done I put them in the garbage.

I hear a lamp break and Gail is yelling something else now, something about knocking up that fat cow, and daddy tells her she’s welcome to get the hell out if it doesn’t suit her and Gail says fine then stomps toward the kitchen and I collect my hairs so she won’t see.

The baby, Dwayne, is born on Christmas Eve which Lulu marks as significant.

“A god-sanctioned birth” is how the Reverend Eddie puts it when he drops by with a mickey of rye to wet his nephew’s head.

By New Year’s Eve the Reverend is gone and so is Gail. She leaves a note in our room saying she’s going to Vancouver, she’ll write to me when she gets an apartment and a job, and maybe I can join her out there one day. She loves me, she says.

The year I turn eleven everything is normal.

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how to fix a broken zipper: if the slider falls off don’t panic, slip it in your pocket until you can find a pay phone, internet café, post office, make a xerox and hide it in your money belt with your broken currencies and american dollars, find an airport and get on a plane, one way,

how to fix a missing button: if the airport’s too far, find the train station and all aboard, feel the slide of metal under your spine as you try to sleep plugged into someone singing about the trans-canada and soon you’re tracing foreign footsteps through the dark ukrainian flatlands, imagine the rich earth, blood and bone and so much overturned sod, pretend you know something about love, about dialing phones, about words that make things happen, make a list in your notebook, alphabetical, of all the things you’ve ever broken, find a length of thread in your pocket and sew up all the buttonholes on your sweater, pull your coat around your chest cold and imagine kyiv as an answer,

how to fix a hangnail: sometimes the bus is the only option, make sure you get a window seat so you can play at recognizing shapes through the caked on dust and dirt, accept anything offered—tangerines, red and silver wrapped chocolates, a wet mouthed bottle of vodka—cram your sweater into the space between your seat and the growling frame, knit your bones together and pick at the rough edge on your thumbnail until blood wells up,

Stan found the kitten’s body licked clean and still on the hard dirt floor of his basement. When he crouched to examine it more closely he caught the sour scent of milk from the others. There were three more of them, still blind, nestled on a forgotten flannel shirt in the shadows. He guessed they were mewing although he’d never be able to hear it now.

He recognized the mother from her battle scars. She was a rough one, with two stripes of fur missing from her backside, the skin underneath scarred black. Last winter they’d heard tell of a cat left outside so long with her litter of kittens that her body froze to the wire fence she hid under for shelter. He and Abby had laughed at the stunned creature, thinking someone should’ve put the poor thing out of her misery.

Now, in the cool darkness of his basement he realized that she’d been having babies long enough to know what would happen if she let her kittens be known. He’d drowned many a litter himself off his wharf—had to, for population control.

“Don’t be contrary with me.” He spoke in the loud, soothing tone he was accustomed to using for his own and Abby’s failed hearing. “I don’t want your babies for nothin’.”

To prove he wasn’t after the kittens, he made a show of puttering around the space. He’d come to get a can of paint to spruce up the jiggers for spring, but now he hesitated to make a racket.

He found a ball of twine and pushed it into his pocket. He fingered the old cod net hanging on his saw-horse, and wondered if he might set it later in the month, knowing these days the fines would be dear.

“See ya,” he waved at the cat and her kittens and closed the door as far as the snow would allow.

For dinner he opened a jar of moose meat and stewed it with potatoes. He ate it with a cup of tea and a heel of bread left over from the batch his youngest made after the funeral. When he’d had his fill he pushed his plate away before he noticed a second plate was waiting to be eaten. He got up and flicked every light switch on before taking his fork to that one too. When he couldn’t eat another bite, he shuffled to the workshop with a flashlight, the leftovers and a half-empty can of milk under his arm.

“No reason you got to be alone and hungry down here I s’pose,” he muttered to the eyes that glowed green in the flashlight’s beam.

These days Stan slept with radio talk shows turned up loud so he could hear them even in his dreams. That was the oldest daughter’s suggestion, to drown out the voices in his sleep with a bit of Ask Attica. The show was a call-in advice segment that offered troubled souls assistance with everything from workplace conflict to garden slugs. Stan liked to imagine what he and Abby would say to each other about the kind of people who called into the show. Stan stared at the oversized buttons on the phone beside his bed.

He dreamed that Abby found the kittens and ordered him to drown them. Tonight Abby was relentless, chastising him for feeding good leftovers to a damn cat.

He woke up apologizing to the emptiness beside him. Last week when his daughters were still hanging around, they made his bed every morning as soon as he rose for the bathroom. He wondered if they still sniffed her pillow, as he had.

He wished he knew which memories they were taking away with them. Already Abby’s trinkets had begun to disappear from her dresser, and framed photos from the walls. No doubt they were taking them as token memories for themselves. They left empty spaces and outlines.

He buttoned his shirt—same as yesterday’s—over the cotton undershirt he’d worn to bed, hastily pulled the quilt over the pillows and lumbered downstairs to check on his tenants.

“Somebody’s going to be looking for you fellas to drown you,” Stan said as he arranged a nightshirt—pulled from Abby’s top drawer—around their makeshift bed. He built the walls high to give them added protection from the cold. “It won’t be me this time.”

The she-cat must have belonged to one of those houses out on the point, where they’d been leaving for town one after the other. Some of them took everything of value on their backs in a single trip. The rest, they left to rot—their homes and animals and all.

It never occurred to Stan to pack up the family and leave, even during the harder years when every time he turned around Abby was pregnant with another mouth to feed.

Once he came across his meanest boy, feeding a goodsized lump of salt pork to an old tomcat. Stan was about to give him hell when he saw the string. He watched his boy give it a tug until the cat retched—its ribcage as visible as the boy’s—and a glistening lump of meat landed on ground.

Stan had shrunk away on hearing his son’s impish laugh. He understood there was satisfaction in watching something take a first bite of food—even if a first bite was all there was. Sometimes they were lucky to get that.

Inhumane. That’s the word that same son used for his childhood. They thought he was asleep after Abby’s funeral. It got better after Smallwood, but there was never very much to be had, his oldest said. I’m hungry just thinking about it, another had hissed. They all had a big laugh about it over drinks of rum in his kitchen.

By the end of the week Stan moved the cat family inside and put them up beside the woodstove. He poured canned milk into a saucer for the she-cat to drink and he even gave her the little bed they’d bought for the dog last Christmas. Abby spent too much money on it at the mall in town and put it under the Christmas tree like Santa himself had dropped it off.

It had surprised him how much he and Abby could dote on a creature—for certain they never showed this much love to their children.

The girls had sent the dog as a gift. He was a miniature something-or-other with long fur that got matted unless Abby took the clippers to it, which made him look comical and cold. He wasn’t much good for anything but being babied.

They’d named him Victor after that man from Young and the Restless, and they were certain he’d outlive both of them, he had that much life in him. He trotted along with his head held high, happy to be out with Stan on a run to the store.

It was on one such run along the boardwalk, a box of frozen chicken under his arm, that Stan saw too late the sharp-eyed eagle gliding in to scoop poor Victor up. He watched helplessly as it carried the little dog away in its gnarly talons.

Stan’s hearing was long too weak to hear the dog’s whimpers, but he’d heard Abby’s throaty cry emerge wet and grief-stricken, as her fists hit his chest, furious that he’d done nothing to protect their baby. He wondered idly if that cry was 50 years in the making.

She’d thudded his chest like that only once before—after their first son’s funeral. The child was in a box so small it didn’t make sense for pall-bearers to carry it, so Stan brought it to the cemetery himself. It was no bigger than a box of bait.

They were made to stand outside the cemetery because the minister wouldn’t allow those who were un-baptized to be buried within its gates.

Stan barely held the baby in the first two weeks because he hadn’t known what to do with it. Then it had turned an awful shade of blue one night in its sleep. Stan had dug the grave himself, tears falling on the soil at his feet as close to the fence-line as the Minister would allow.

“I’ll be your man but I’ll never marry you Abby—not if that’s the feller that’s got to do it,” he’d choked.

And that night, while Abby lay wounded in bed and the Minister moved on to a funeral in the next community over, Stan had got drunk. He made his way in on the road and dug up the cemetery fence, moving it five feet to the left so the fresh mound of dirt sat just within its boundaries.

Abby’s death came a few weeks ago, not long after he lost the dog.

Stan went to check the mail at the post office and when he came home he’d found her on the floor in the hallway like she’d lay down to take a nap. He’d sorted through the mail— even read some flyers from front to back—while he waited for them to come in with the stretcher. He didn’t know what else to do. His son came, and then his daughter, and in a few days the whole bloody flock descended like a gaggle of geese shitting all over the place and scrounging up whatever niblets they could muster for themselves.

Abby would have loved having them all together at once, and he was angry that she wasn’t there to enjoy it.

They put Abby’s box in the cool ground of summer, the scent of wild rose bushes so strong that even Stan’s old nose could smell them. The daughters wobbled beside him at the gravesite, the spikes of their high heels sinking them into the soft ground. The sons stood somberly beside the coffin in black suits and white gloves while Stan held his gaze on the unmarked patch of grass beside Abby’s grave—the place right at the edge of the fence.

Stan stared with the same intensity now, at the soft kitten in his hands. Through his thick, calloused fingers he felt the stickiness of its fur, coated with spilled milk.

He carried it to the kitchen sink that was much too large for his small saucer with toast crumbs and a stained tea mug.

He turned the water to a trickle and let it wash over the animal as it clawed at his hand. When it was clean he chuckled at how cold and small and helpless it seemed. How long would she have struggled if he’d put her in a sack with a rock and thrown it off the end of the wharf? How long did the others struggle before her? Twenty seconds, a minute, longer? How long could a creature hold its breath?

He placed the kitten on top of his bed, where he knew it was too high for her to climb down on her own, and did the same thing to the other two, placing them cold and wet on his bedspread where they would dry in the sunlight. The mother, he had shut away in the laundry room.

He lined a cardboard box with a dirty flannel shirt that he knew would have his scent, and took care to jab a screwdriver into it in several places for ventilation.

He put the kittens inside one by one, feeling the pinpricks of their sharp claws on his spotted fingers. When he sealed the lid he could feel the box shifting with their weight. On the front with a big red marker he addressed the box and wrote “FRAGILE—THIS SIDE UP”. He carried it to the post office resolved to spend the extra money for expedited delivery to the radio station. Care of Ask Attica, he had written in parentheses.

It’s the dog he dreams about at night now, not his wife. He wonders what that eagle’s nest is like. He likes to think there’s a thrill on the way up. You’re in the grip of something stronger than yourself, and you watch your world get smaller and smaller. He imagines the nest is soft on the inside—lined with worn-down twigs and padded with feathers. He hopes there’s a brief moment to wonder at its intricate construction.

Back at home he opened the laundry room door to invite the she-cat out. She pushed her ears back and glared at him, and then swayed her scarred backside as she entered the kitchen. She staked claim to the dog’s bed, which he’d moved near the fire’s heat.

She didn’t look for her babies. She didn’t try to hide. She squinted at Stan as he took a seat in the rocking chair beside her.

“Don’t look at me that way Abby,” he said to her evenly. “Perhaps one will make it. Perhaps they all will. That’s all anyone can ask.”