Illustration by Freyda Goodman

The rules would save them, of that he was certain. Sixty percent certain, anyway. Parthi dipped a wooden spoon in the pot simmering on the stove. Nadia had asked for Indian, and though it wasn’t his favourite food—the smells reminded him of glittery childhood festivals—he wanted to please her. As he stood stirring the masoor daal, passing the time until she arrived, he wondered if there might be a way to calculate the odds of the rules protecting them. He smiled to himself at the ridiculousness of the thought. As Nadia liked to remind him, there were areas of life where math didn’t apply. She once sent him a snippet of something she found online: “The commutative property of math, A+B=B+A, does not apply to life. Lost and found is not the same as found and lost.”

Yes, well, he’d lost his wife to Facebook. But he’d found Nadia on Twitter, a mere five months after Tara left him for her long-lost, middle-school crush. Parthi wasn’t certain what he felt for Nadia, but it was relief to feel something. After Tara moved out, two months into his sabbatical, he’d drawn the curtains and taken to the marital bed, contemplating non-mathematical concepts he’d neglected for years: concepts like duty, commitment, betrayal. And love. He knew the odds of finding love again were low, and yet one night in late March, out of the blue glow of the laptop propped beside him on the bed, Nadia had appeared: @suburbanSpy is now following you on Twitter. Today, four weeks and three days after he received that message, she was following him all the way to his home in Kingston. And though he knew this didn’t mean she was his—there was her husband to think of, but Parthi preferred not to think of him—he didn’t want to lose her. Not now, not tonight. For four hours, from the time she arrived on the train from Toronto, till the moment he dropped her off at her friend Joyce’s, he was free to believe in the proposition that love could outbalance loss.

His cellphone beeped. As he walked into the family room to pick it up, he willed himself not to be aroused. It was a conditioned response: Nadia was the only one who texted him these days, and some of her texts—maybe one in seven—were erotically tinged. So when he heard the beep, he’d feel himself becoming hard, and have to think about something unpleasant. Like grading his Intro to Mathematical Logic exams. How pathetic to have to worry about such a thing at forty-nine.

Train is running 10 minutes late. Looking forward to tasting my “dal.” [insert annoying smiley]

Nadia loved to poke fun at his disdain for emoticons, which she considered symptomatic of his general snobbery. Early on, she’d sent him a list of all the spheres in which he was a snob: wine, food, literature, programming languages, movies, grammar, visual art, and music, especially music, though to some extent Nadia shared that snobbery. It was music that had brought them together, after all.

Parthi opened the fridge and took out an English cucumber. Nadia had requested raita too. As he began to grate the cucumber, noting the random pattern which the slimy strips formed on the cutting board, he considered the unlikely sequence of communications that had   resulted in the coming-together of two such different people: Sandra Brown, his some time student, tweeting that it was “cool when your favourite professor follows you back on Twitter”; Nadia, who followed Sandra, happening to see the tweet in her stream and deciding out of curiosity to click on Parthi’s profile; Nadia’s subsequent decision to follow Parthi and to reply to some of his trivial tweets about food and books.  And his decision to follow her back, a crucial move as it enabled private messaging between the two of them. Before Tara left him, Parthi had used Twitter mostly to connect with other mathematicians and students. Nadia was neither. Her avatar was a cartoon image of a fifties housewife, and her profile page linked to a blog about elementary education. But loss had clearly affected his frontal lobe. He clicked the follow button more readily than before.

On her end, he later found out, Nadia had been exploring his decades-old weblog and following the circuitous links to his memoir. She’d zeroed in on the parts about music, especially his reviews of concerts he’d been to in the early 80s, many of which she’d attended as well. Parthi had committed to memory the first direct message she sent him:

@suburbanSpy: Just spent longer than I’d care to admit reading bits & pieces on your site–so addictive. Was at Heatwave concert, too. Had forgotten lineup

She’d used up all 140 characters, no room for a period. He’d clumsily responded:

@pureMathprof: Funny, I’d pegged you as much younger.

Just what every woman wants to hear, that she’s old! It turned out she was forty-five, with two young boys and a husband. But she told Parthi later,“You had me at Heatwave.”

In the flurry of private messaging that followed, Nadia told him all about the summer of Heatwave, when she was sixteen. She’d gone on an exchange to France and lost her virginity with a purposefulness that Parthi found surprising. “I wanted to lose it with a Frenchman,” she wrote, “but I settled for a Québécois I met on my second night there.” (For the first time in his life Parthi had been tempted to type back “LOL!”) She recounted how she’d returned from Paris in time for Heatwave, an outdoor concert held outside the city, headlined by Elvis Costello and Talking Heads. Nadia had just discovered Punk and New Wave—late to the party, of course—and she said hearing those bands live had transformed her life. By sheer dumb luck, almost thirty years later she stumbled on Parthi’s online recollections of the concert. “It was like a hand reached through my computer screen, pushed through my skin and grabbed hold of the small, molten core of me,” she wrote. “The part that’s still alive.”

Parthi put the grater down and felt in his pocket for the iPod shuffle he’d bought earlier in the day. He’d filled it with the songs he’d been sending Nadia every morning since that first direct message. “Catching you up” was how he explained it to her. He understood her Achilles’ heel. It was his, too: music, which was a proxy for . . . what? Youth, passion, love?

The cellphone beeped again. Parthi glanced at the text: Hi sweetbf. Train’s arriving in your city (!) in 20 minutes. Can’t wait to…abide by the rules! He smiled and turned off the stove. In the entrance way, on the small Ikea table, he found the car keys. The rules were a joke they shared, a reference to regulations governing what could be shown between a man and a woman in Bollywood movies: chaste kisses were okay, but no French kissing; hugs and caresses were permitted if and only if clothes remained on. But Indian movie rules were constantly being contested and negotiated, and so were his and Nadia’s.

It was after their first “real life” meeting two weeks ago that Nadia had decided rules were required. They’d met in a Korean restaurant in a Toronto neighbourhood a safe distance from her home in Lytton Park. Brashly and without having planned it, Parthi had leaned in to kiss her lips, which were soft and tasted of the fruity Gewürztraminer they’d been drinking. Afterwards, on a  park bench, she’d let him kiss her again but when it was over, he noticed tears in her eyes. “Are you crying for M?” he asked, using her husband’s initial because she’d never revealed his full name.

“For M, and for the boys,” she said. “And for us.”

Us. As Parthi eased himself into his old Honda Civic—Tara had taken the Volvo—and pulled the seat belt strap across his shoulder, he realized that he did not understand the nature of this “us.” And he still didn’t know what rules governed it. He picked up his cellphone and tapped the Twitter icon. The DM exchange from last night lit up the small screen:

@pureMathprof: Is cuddling okay? How about kissing?
@suburbanSpy: Cuddling, kissing maybe, but no tongue. And no sex!
@pureMathprof: But, Nadia, the time I took the laptop upstairs . . .
@suburbanSpy: That wasn’t sex. I didn’t touch you.
@pureMathprof: Your words touched me.
@suburbanSpy: From my words to your hand…

Parthi pulled into the driveway and turned off the motor, but left the key engaged so he could listen to the end of the song that was playing. A cheating heart is still a beating heart . . .

“Jesus, turn that off!” Nadia said.

“The shuffle gods,” Parthi mumbled. He withdrew the key from the ignition and stole a glance at the woman in the seat beside him. Nadia looked tired, her green-gray eyes were blood-shot. Her dirty-blond hair, slightly mussed from the train ride, glinted coppery in the early evening sunlight.

“So this is where you live,” she said, gesturing towards the bland brick facade in front of them and the weed-infested lawn to the side.

“Yep.” For the first time since Tara left, he felt embarrassed by the degree to which he’d let the property go. He felt Nadia’s eyes on the side of his face and he turned to meet her gaze. She had once mentioned that M was conventionally attractive and knew how to dress. (“He has a guy at Harry Rosen,” she’d told him.) Parthi had a receding hairline and zero fashion sense. What did Nadia see in him? He could understand how a woman might be charmed by his online persona. Despite his mathiness, he was good with words. In pixels he shone. But in person, for an entire evening?

Nadia placed her hand on his leg, just above his knee. Parthi stared at her fingers, struck by their delicate paleness. He put his own hand on hers, and had a momentary vision of what the hand of a child of theirs might look like. “Quite the contrast,” he murmured.

“Yes,” Nadia said. Smiling now, she pulled her hand away from his thigh, grabbed a small bag from the back seat, and opened the car door. As Parthi followed her to the front entrance, he felt the flutter of an extra heartbeat in his chest. It was a benign arrhythmia that afflicted him when he was nervous. As if reading his mind, she said, “I’m nervous, are you?”

“Hmm” he said, “a little. There’s a decent bottle of Torrontés waiting for us inside.” As he put the key in the lock, she leaned into his body, and when he turned to look at her she kissed him, first on the corner of the mouth and then straight on. He felt her tongue slide against his. He pulled away slightly. “The rules . . .” he began.

“Yes.”

Katie Lynes is a cat person living a dog person’s life in North Toronto. (Her soul, however, is thoroughly French.) She has published non-fiction essays in newspapers and (defunct) magazines, and has recently turned her hand to fiction. “Shuffle Gods” is part of a longer work in progress.

Gillian Wallace has had poems published in various journals including The Antigonish Review, Room, and forthcoming in Descant. Previously, she won Arc’s Diana Brebner Prize and in 2010, she was named a Hot Ottawa Voice by Ottawa’s Tree Reading Series. She has occasionally edited her poems online at http://gillianwallace.ca.

Behind them sits Sudhir, whose restless eyes appraise the scene, darting into the
thick forest all around us, then back to the roadblock. In each man’s mind a
common fear unfolds: at any moment cadres of armed Maoist rebels—Naxals—
will emerge to rob them or worse, alleging them to be spies or profiteers or
corrupt bureaucrats, kidnap or even kill them.

The Kandhamal forests—lush with teak, cashew, mango, bamboo, neem, jackfruit
and the wizened banyan—emit a foreboding coolness, shrouding sunlight and
vision. They hide well those who would gladly withdraw from the world.

We’ve spent a long day visiting experimental preschools in remote Adivasi
(aboriginal) villages in this southern part of the Indian state of Odisha. The
rapidly approaching jungle dusk reminds Sudhir that this is no time to be
indecisive. Yet the roadblock, a telltale sign of impending Naxal ambush,
ultimately causes Sudhir no great distress. The Maoists are known to fire upon
vehicles fleeing their checkpoints, yet flee our vehicle did, once Sudhir so
commanded the driver.

The fear I’d instinctively drawn from the pale faces of the driver and cameraman
made me inquisitive. What did Sudhir see? What does he know about Naxals,
besides the fact that he’s devoted his life’s work to eliminating them? Much of the
evening passed in silence before I asked him.

2.
Sudhir is a Kond—a Kandhamal tribal, a speaker of Kui—from a village three
kilometres from our roadblock, as the birds fly. These forests sustained his
childhood; he knows them better than the road, which is not two decades old. The
forests remind him of many things, like turmeric, which grows wild for gathering
by Kond children, or is cultivated and sold in village cooperatives, and which
these days Sudhir buys in large plastic bags every time, like this time, he returns
to Kandhamal.

As a boy, when his parents arranged for him to attend an English-medium school
in town, Sudhir developed a hunger he’s never fully satisfied. Today he leads a
small team of social workers on a six-year project, backed by a Dutch foundation,
to develop trilingual—English, Odia, Kui—preschool curricula and train local
teachers for new village schools. Even when the government builds schools close
to their villages, Kond children rarely attend. Teachers bus in from towns, or
bribe a supervisor to skip the journey. Absenteeism abounds. Regardless, the
teachers speak only Odia, the state language. Tribal younglings speak nothing but
Kui.

There is an urge inside all of us to make right what is wrong. There is also the
willingness to define what is wrong in our own terms. For Sudhir, it is not poverty
that has broken his society but rather the absence of its expression.

3.
Two years before the roadblock, on August 23, 2008, during the Hindu festival of
Janmashtami, thirty men armed with AK-47s broke into the ashram of Swami
Lakshmanananda Saraswati and massacred him and four followers. The Swami
was a controversial figure in Kandhamal, preaching a gospel to convert (or
reconvert) tribals from Christianity to Hinduism. Between these communities,
tensions roiled.

Local police and state security officials quickly blamed the attack on Naxals,
recently entrenched in the area and the only group likely to be so well armed. But
some Hindu nationalist politicians in Odisha moved swiftly to place the blame on
Christian Konds, and soon there erupted a four-day conflagration of
communalistic violence across more than three hundred jungle villages. Dozens
died. Twelve thousand were displaced. A nun was raped.

The Naxal leadership issued a release taking credit for the assassination of Swami
Lakshmanananda, claiming his ministry persecuted Adivasis. No one was
listening. And in an area about the size of Prince Edward Island, where more
than ninety percent of the 650,000 people live in one of 2500 forest villages,
Kandhamal became a locus of fear, distrust and misinformation. Among Konds,
sympathy for Naxals grew.

4.
The road to Kandhamal leads northwest out of the town of Berhampur,
encountering rain-swelled paddies almost as soon as the last tea stalls and
mobile-phone shacks are behind us. The first villages we approach rise over the
road in clouds of dust from the morning motorbike and bullock-cart traffic. A
small green sign announces each hamlet in Odia and English.

My companions recite the latest gossip associated with each place we pass: here is
the birth village of our Chief Minister, see how nicely paved the roads are here;
there is the hometown of a legislator currently in jail for murdering, allegedly, a
member of the mafia.

Further along we pass the massive Bhanjanagar Dam, an artificial reservoir in the
Rushikulya River that regulates the flow of water downstream to the towns and
heavy industries of Odisha’s coastal belt. Here in this bucolic dominion peasants
and paddies cut a slight pose against the machinery of industry. Timelessness is a
vulgar word in Odisha.

The rural road begins to rise; we are gaining elevation onto the foothills of
Kandhamal. Where earlier we had followed a purposefully paved route with a
dotted white line dividing its two lanes, we now follow a single, cracked,
unmarked lane through unsigned villages. Soon even the hamlets fade into the
forest. Then, our frail road climbs almost fifteen hundred feet in less than three
kilometres of switchbacks. The forest is dense. Nothing stirs. Even the
imagination has gone still.

5.
To the Government of India, Naxals prey upon the wretched like a parasite. The
powers in Delhi developed Operation Green Hunt to fight them with a
combination of army, police and local militias force-raised from among both
tribal and non-tribal communities. They patrolled towns and roads, established
crude bases at the edges of the forests, and waited for ambush.

That summer in southwestern Odisha, Naxal platoons blew up a school that was
employed as police barracks, torched buildings in villages under government
control, assassinated several suspected police informers, kidnapped construction
workers, looted an armored bank truck, infiltrated a tiger sanctuary, felled
cellular towers and other communications infrastructure, staged a three-day
siege of a police station, and set up people’s courts to humiliate alleged
conspirators against Naxalism. Across the state line, they ambushed a police bus,
killing seventy-six Green Hunters.

The government deployed various surrender policies and amnesty initiatives
while arraying troops in targeted sweeps of easily accessible jungle coordinates.
They snatched suspected Naxals at roving checkpoints. They allegedly faked
encounters: extra-judicially killing Naxal leaders in custody and then staging a
firefight. Once they ambushed seventeen Konds at a committee meeting and flew
them by helicopter to neighbouring Andhra Pradesh for interrogation. In Andhra
they’ve been fighting Naxals for forty years.

6.
I had only recently recovered from amoebic dysentery, which from a serving of a
contaminated water-rich vegetable, perhaps cucumber, bore into the liquid
reserves of my body and nearly drained me in a matter of days. An intrepid
protozoon, probably E. histolytica, rendered me fetal, and for nearly a week I got
no further than the bathroom, except to keep my appointment with the Police
Inspector in Odisha’s capital city, Bhubaneswar, to apply for a visa extension.
This proved in excess both futile and medically ill advised.

A sufferer of dysentery is generally disinclined to eat, while at the same time
characteristically prone to a regular evacuation of precious fluids and energy
stores. Every half hour I visited the toilet to discharge a volley of my insides,
while microscopic trophozoites—active ingredients, spawn of the ameboid—clung
tenaciously to my intestinal tissue. I replenished with bottled water and, when I
could, salted crackers. On the fourth day after becoming symptomatic, I tried to
eat rice. On the fifth day, Sudhir rode up on his motorbike with a bag of apples
and bananas.

Then suddenly, in one final—and, I feel compelled to admit in this context,
supremely satisfying—movement of my bowels, E. histolyca was expelled from
my digestive tract in an alien pod of mucus. The trophozoites gradually died off
from the medication. On the sixth day I was back at work, slimmer than I’d been
in years. A decidedly unbecoming shape, according to Sudhir.

7.
The work that Sudhir and his team do in the forested villages of Kandhamal falls
under the general rubric of development, which might be distilled into an axiom
like “Building the capacity of the poor to rise up out of poverty.” It follows from
primeval societal notions that villagers can’t build a school until they first come to
a collective understanding of the purpose of education; that you can’t plant a tree
without comprehending how you may be exploited for your fruit.

Development also exists on a higher plane. It is the process, Sudhir and his
colleagues show me, of empowering people to express what they already feel. The
Adivasis have no use for what is under the earth, the minerals that outsiders
greedily crave. They feel a unity with their nature that is based on mutual respect
and love, which is not the same thing as ownership and control. How can they
express this to the person who would exploit the same land in the name of profit,
of development of a different kind? The role of development is to make this
expression communicable; to give agency, rather than enduring submissiveness,
to poverty.

That is also, basically, the role of Naxalism.

8.
Several months after the roadblock in the forest, a band of Naxals kidnapped a
Block Development Officer in Malkangiri, a district to the west. They plucked
him, his assistant, his driver and another man from a jeep in the forest near a
tribal village. It was a brash show of strength: Naxals control eighty per cent of
Malkangiri; all but the few towns along the main roads.

But the Naxals botched the PR part of the operation. The snatched bureaucrat—a
Mr. Vineel Krishna—was immensely popular among Adivasis in Odisha. Civil
servants of his rank have a foul reputation in rural India for running their own
kleptocracies, but Mr. Krishna had been using his seat to help Adivasis form local
committees to receive government entitlements—clinics, poverty cards, public-
works programs, preschools—and understand their rights against the
encroachment of mining companies.

The Naxals made demands: the release of seven hundred of their jailed comrades,
including several top leaders; the cessation of the Polavaram Dam project, which
will flood a valley along the Andhra Pradesh border and displace thousands of
Adivasis; the cancellation of the destructive Deomali bauxite mine; and the
retirement of Operation Green Hunt.

In the end, some of the jailed were freed to return to the forests, and the cadres
deposited Krishna and his colleagues in town. Sudhir says the Naxals have been
dented by the ordeal: slashing and burning, they failed to distinguish between
good crops and weeds.

9.
Sudhir and I share a tendency, conversationally, for boyish banalities, which
Sudhir undertakes bilingually for the benefit of our Odia-speaking driver and
cameraman. It melts away time in the intense humidity of the jungle road trip.
Once we carved several hours from the monotony of the pre-monsoon swelter on
the topic of animals, which ones we’d eaten, and how they tasted.

I grew up in Texas, and my family is Newfoundlander. Thus I enjoyed a
comparably adventurous childhood, gustatorily speaking. Most of my trump
cards—seal, moose, peccary—required prolonged narrative contexts in order to
equip Sudhir with the vocabulary for translation. His winning hand—peacock,
elephant, water buffalo—was capped with an ace of spades: the Bengal tiger.

Konds do not hunt tiger, except when the tiger has invaded the village. They
accept the certainty that by their lives they risk transgressing the tiger’s frontier,
just as tigers accept the innate risk of being hunted for encroaching upon Konds.

Once, when Sudhir was about five years old, a tiger killed several goats in the
village one spring, and his grandfather and father led the hunt to destroy it. They
succeeded in killing the tiger, after which according to custom the animal should
be eaten by every family in the village, so that the tiger’s spirit will live in each
house and future tigers will stay away. He pressed me to understand this story as
an emblem of tribal folklore. As if all of us aren’t the heirs of myth. Still, he ate
the tiger.

10.
Naxalism refuses to enjoin systems of oppression and poverty that can’t be
reformed from within. The premise of development is the correlative idea that
progress is a form of defiance. Naxals, Sudhir believes, offer an alternative from
oppression in the form of withdrawal and self-governance. They are guerrillas,
sure. There are also Naxal teachers, poets, logistical supporters, propagandists
and social workers.

If someone were to peer into his life from high above and conclude, easily
enough, that it is revolution Sudhir is fomenting with his development, what
would be the error in labeling him a Naxal?

A few minutes after we sped away from the roadblock, Sudhir instructed the
driver to pull over next to a goatherd, with whom he conversed in Odia. Then we
continued our way home to Berhampur.

That was not a Naxal roadblock, Sudhir told me later. Instead, the cunning of
bandits had arrested our exit from Kandhamal: copycats had dragged fallen logs
across the road to mimic the cadres and freeze their victims in fear. The
goatherd—newsman of the forest—confirmed that no Naxals had been reported
in the area that day.

It was the trees in the road: they were already dead. Naxals cut down living trees,
if for no other reason than because they can. Once, when Sudhir was visiting his
preschools, he came to a roadblock of felled trees. As soon as the driver killed the
engine, a squad of armed Naxals (including two with axes) emerged from the
woods to interrogate him. After some discussion of the work he was doing and
where he was from, Sudhir and his driver were freed to pass.

There is no confusion out here. Naxals have simplified things: you are friend or
enemy. Being that certain about the world allows the Naxals to slip in and out of
the shadows quickly, and has kept their movement alive in India for over four
decades. Sudhir angers at news of Naxal violence, and so his calmness in these
encounters demonstrates his mastery of their ways. Yet they both share a certain
understanding of development, and of the forest.

The Naxals cut down a tree because they can, because it proves their will; cutting
down a tree to block a path is an act of defiance, whereas moving a dead tree onto
a road is a cry of hopelessness.

Darby met this guy Turner at the swimming pool in Squamish and shes brought him around the house a few times. She keeps saying were just friends Dad nothings going on. I dont know who she thinks shes fooling because its pretty clear this Turner guy is biding his time. Trust me I can tell when a boy is love struck and I could tell right away he was on his best behaviour. He even calls me sir. At first glance he seems like the kind of kid who could use a good beating because it might do him some good. But the older I get the more I think people are the way they are no matter what you want to believe. They dont change. And if Turner wants to wear scarves and girly jeans then its no business of mine.

I grew up on this little farm an hour or two outside of Halifax. My old man worked three weeks at sea and three weeks at home on a scallop fishing boat. Those were hard men. He came home reeking like the ocean in a foul mood drenched head to foot and ready to sleep. Hed sit in the living room with rubbing alcohol and hed work it into his joints his elbows and his knees and the base of his back to relieve the pain. And he drank. He drank beer and Johnny Walker and whatever he could get his hands on. If he wasnt doing that then he was in the yard fixing the lawn mower or underneath the car and his fingers were black from grease and his jeans all had holes in them but he refused to buy a new pair. He made Ma patch them. Everyone in his generation was like that theyd work themselves to the bone all summer and hibernate in the winter and live off the dole. One day he said to me Rick do yourself a favor and steer clear of women. We were painting a fence in our backyard and I remember he was drinking a beer and he said if I never met your mother Id be a bloody millionaire. I shouldve cut off my balls and been done with it. Who needs em? All women do is shit out kids and cost you money. I was maybe eight years old when he told me that but I never forgot it.

I showed Darby some old black and white photos. She asked a lot of questions and it was the first time in a long time Id thought about my family. We were dirt poor and theres no way Darby can imagine what that was like. Im glad. Darby never met my brothers. My older brother was Josiah and my younger brother was Albee and both of them passed away before she was born. Josiah was a few years older than me and I followed him around everywhere. One time we climbed up twenty feet into this tree and he showed me a birds nest he found. There were tiny blue eggs in it and he stole one. I dont know what he thought he was going to do with it but then the mother bird came and he said run Ricky run away quick. The bird was dive bombing us and I was running around screaming and then it pecked me in the forehead and I was bleeding everywhere. Josiah was laughing and laughing and for years after that whenever he told that story he would say I peed my pants. When he was feeling really mean sometimes he would call me Little Ricky PeePee. Maybe thats a weird memory to have because he was a good brother. He used to sit on the edge of our bunk bed and read out loud to me and Albee. We read the Hobbit and Aesops Fables and Watership Down. My old man would be screaming in the other room and slamming doors and Josiah would sit there sounding out the words and reading them to us one by one.

One day when Darby was in the bathroom I asked Turner if I could bum some smokes and he gave me a whole pack of Benson and Hedges black king size. Darby would kill me if she knew Im still sneaking smokes but really what difference does it make now? Once you have cancer you have cancer and were all going to die anyway. I patted the kid on the shoulder and I said youre a good man Turner. Once they left for the night to go to some party up in Whistler I sat on my back porch and smoked six in a row looking at the sky. It turned orange and then red like the color of blood and then finally it was dark and I listened to the ocean in the distance. I stuck the butts through the slats in the porch so Darby wouldnt find them later.

Albee was a mommas boy and Im not saying theres anything wrong with that. He used to help Ma bake and he would wear aprons and he never wanted to play outside or do anything dangerous. My old man used to beat him and call him a fag and a sissy and one day he caught him wearing one of Mas dresses and he broke his arm. Just like that. He went into the room and snapped Albees arm between his hands like a twig. He took me with him to the hospital and we told the doctor that Albee fell out of a tree and thats what we told Ma too. Thats when I first knew that I had to get Albee out of there and take him far away.

The worst beating I ever took was in Toronto believe it or not. We moved there in 1972 and both me and Albee got jobs working at this nightclub downtown called Crazy Eights. I was a bartender and Albee served tables and it was a pretty good gig at first. But then Albee started catching shit from some regulars. I could see it happen they would grab his ass or try to trip him and one time they knocked a tray of drinks out of his hands and laughed while he apologized and cleaned them up off the floor. There was this one dirtball who didnt know when to give it a rest. It was early maybe ten on a Friday and I came over to tell him he wasnt welcome anymore right in front of his friends and I stood there until he got up from the table and walked out the front door. Because he left with no big fuss I forgot about it but then a week later when I was closing up around two in the morning he jumped me in the alley. There was nobody around and he shoved me against a brick wall with his arm against my neck then he broke my nose with the butt of his hand. I didnt get a single swing in and pretty soon I was on the ground and he was kicking me in the face and then he dumped a garbage can all over me and said fuck you faggot. That was almost forty years ago but when I eat my jaw still clicks from where it was broken.

The doctors told me Im not allowed to drive anymore because of the chemo. But once I got out of my bedroom and pulled on my boots I climbed in my truck and headed down to the police station with my shovels and rakes rattling around in the back. It was dark and there werent any cars on the road and at one point I started coughing and swung into oncoming traffic but I made it there in one piece. When I came into the lobby this young police woman told me Darby was getting processed downstairs. I said I have to see her where is she? I mustve been quite a sight there in my robe but I didnt care and I said I want to see my daughter. I want to see my daughter and I want to see her now.

These days things are different for guys like Albee but back then the world wasnt a very nice place. Heroin was everywhere and once he got started he never stopped. My own brother was a junkie. A few times he came home and his face was mashed to shit. Once I locked him in his bedroom for a weekend and tried to get him to detox and he screamed and clawed at the walls and he told me he hated me and threw himself against the door until it splintered and I was worried he was going to hurt himself. There was nothing that could stop him and then within six months he was dead and there was nothing I could do about that either. The last time I saw him in the hospital he looked like a skeleton and he had all these scabs on his face and he kept saying sorry to me. He said sorry Rick and I told him he had nothing to be sorry about and he held both my hands then he cried for a while and fell asleep. That was the last time I ever talked to him.

All these sad memories I dont know if I really want Darby to know about them. But shes a grown woman now and what can I do? Sooner or later you know youve got to rub your kids faces in shit. Tell them the world is a violent and stupid and terrible place and nothing makes sense to anyone. What a message. Youd think after the universe takes away one of your brothers maybe it would ease up on you for a while. But about a year after Albee died in Toronto I got a letter from Ma. Josiah had been drinking in Halifax and he was always a fighter so one Saturday I guess he talked to the wrong girl and in the scuffle a piece of broken glass lodged in his neck and by the time anyone realized what was going on he bled out right there on the floor of the bar. For a long time I wondered what he thought about while he was lying there and if he knew it was coming. Maybe it came on suddenly and he didnt have time to be afraid. I hope so.

Ive never loved anyone as much as I love my daughter. Im not a touchy feely person but I can say that because its true. And if I thought it wouldve done any good I wouldve gone on a rampage through that fucking police station. I wouldve bellowed at the top of my lungs and overturned desks and smashed windows like some goddamn gorilla. But lets face it the chemo took all my strength along with my hair and Im lucky I could even stand up. Sooner or later you have to stop fighting. The police woman told me I would have to wait a few moments before I could see Darby. They wouldnt tell me what she was charged with. They told me she could be released on bail into my custody but first I would have to take a seat. The police woman said it just like that. She said please sir can you take a seat?

My sister Tanya was born right after the second world war. I didnt hear about her until I was nearly grown up and moved out of the house. Josiah told me Ma used to hold birthday parties for Tanya after she died but when my old man found out he put a stop to that with the back of his hand. Nobody talked about Tanya not in his house. To hear Josiah tell it Tanya was the light of our old mans life and he went around showing her off to everyone in church carrying her and kissing her and nuzzling her like nothing couldve made him happier. I cant picture it. I wonder if my life wouldve been different with a sister and when I try to imagine it I just cant. Tanya wouldve been an old woman by now but she died when she was a little baby just shy of three months. You could live to be a thousand years old and that would never make sense. My parents were dirt poor living in a rented basement newly married in Halifax and the gas fireplace sprung a leak and the next morning my old man found Tanya black in her crib not breathing. Thats pain. Sometimes I think if anything ever happened to Darby knock on wood maybe I wouldve ended up a bitter wreck like my old man. I think it wouldve broken me.

When Darby came around the corner her hair was a mess all blond around her face. I guess they gave her some clothes because she was wearing a grey sweater and some grey sweatpants that said VANCOUVER POLICE on them. She trudged out and she said you have to take me home I need to get out of here. Then she cried into my chest for a while and I held her and when I saw the police woman looking at me I didnt care we were making a scene. Later Darby told me the story how some party got broken up and she was hazy on the details but she was really drunk when she took a swing at a cop. Can you believe it? My feisty little daughter trying to punch a cop. In a weird way I was proud. I guess Turner took a run for it and disappeared into the woods and Darby was alone on the concrete in handcuffs with her face against the ground. She told me what happened sitting in the parking lot and she seemed tired and embarrassed. I told her it didnt matter what happened not really as long as she was okay. You get to be my age and you understand things happen and really they dont matter. She was safe. We drove home down the highway and the headlights stabbed through the fog all the way home.

Will Johnson is a writer from Halifax. His work has appeared in a number of Canadian literary journals, including Little Fiction, The Fiddlehead and Prairie Fire, as well as in the anthology Somebody’s Child. Check out his website at www.goodwilljohnson.com or follow him on Twitter @goodwilljohnson

Freakbird
crammed with debeaked
broilers into a battery cage
24/7 above a conveyer belt
running eggs & shit
out of sight.

Transgenic mutant,
all our sci-fi fantasies
of star voyages,
extraterrestrial traffic
& galactic superpowers
are reduced to you,

hormone-pumped,
gene-spliced producer
of engineered food –
ovoid fodder fried
in greasy spoon diners
sunny-side up.

Recently, Dan MacIsaac’s poetry appeared in Cirque and Prairie Fire.  He has short fiction forthcoming in Dalhousie Review.  His verse translations have been published in a wide variety of literary magazines.  “Layer” is from a series of poems.

I’m having a sarcastic moment with a tin, the colour of robin’s egg blue. I’m enamoured with this rectangular container, its edges rounded, its paint worn and its body slightly dented. I clutch the tin and feel something unexplainable. Under its smooth folk art exterior, outside of its practicality, and under its lid, lives a dirty history. “Minöséget a dolgozóknak. Yeah, right,” I’m still talking to myself. “Füszerétékesitő Nemzeti Vállalat.”

“Are you going to share the joke?” my husband asks.

“Look at this!” I shove the tin in his face. “Do you see what this says?”

“No!” he says jerking his head back. “I can’t read it if you hold it an inch from my face.”

“Sorry,” I answer. “I just get so pissed off sometimes.”

“I didn’t notice,” he says. “That’s a nice tin. What does it say?” Ken grabs the tin and tries to pronounce what I had just read. “Foozere-”

“Don’t even try.” I snatch it back. The word has fifteen letters in it and even I can’t say it easily.

“Look at this lovely red paprika. It looks hand-painted.” I turn the tin in my hand. “And there’s one on the other side, too. And look! A pot of chicken paprikás with noodles.

There’s even a drumstick!” I’m beside myself.

The drawings on the tin are simple in their execution and yet charming. Even more charming, is the pretty young woman dressed in traditional Hungarian attire. She wears a full pleated skirt, a hand-embroidered apron, a kerchief on her head and red slippers on her feet. This pretty woman lovingly tends a large caldron of red broth suspended by a stick over an open fire.

Budapest. We’re in a small, crammed antique shop with a spiral staircase leading up to an overflowing second floor, its wares spilling down to ground level.

“Feel free to go up,” says the middle-aged owner. He’s friendly, unlike the sullen, rude shop attendants I’m used to from my visits to Hungary in the seventies as a child.

“I will.” I smile shyly as I search for the price on the tin.

“It’s from the late nineteen forties,” says the owner offhandedly from under his glasses.
4,800 forints. I’m astonished. Almost twenty-five dollars and not a speck of paprika in it. The average Hungarian worker today earns only five dollars an hour. I remember as a child how cheap everything seemed to my mother and I when we converted our Canadian dollars for forints and headed out shopping to stock up on everything from leather gloves to aluminum pressure cookers, our relatives painfully aware of their meager currency and our ability to buy all we needed.

My mother alone packed our suitcases full for the return trip to Canada. Each day, stuffing one more item into suitcases already bursting at the seams. Another bag of Szegedi paprika, another 50 decagrams of ground poppy seeds, five more wooden spoons, the almost forgotten noodle cutters and another length of spicy sausage. Nervously, the entire family–my mother, my aunts, my cousins and I balanced our suitcases on the bathroom scale. And once we took our hands off the handle in order to get an accurate reading, the suitcase would at first quiver, then wobble like a watermelon and then quickly fall off making it nearly impossible to read the needle on the scale in time.

“Did you see what it said?”

“Twenty-six kilos.”

“It looked like twenty-seven.”

“Twenty-six and a half.”

“Take something out.”

“I’m not taking anything out!” my mother insisted, while the rest of us stressed over airline regulations. Everything in the socialist world was stringently controlled and transgressions readily punished. But for my mother everything in the suitcase was precious. These things were bits and pieces of a life she had left behind.

Still clutching the tin, I inspect old Soviet memorabilia and whisper to Ken, “These are western prices. What is he thinking?” I feel ashamed of my remark. As though ‘he’, meaning the shop owner, should be keeping the prices low for my sake. I had hoped to snag some great deals, to fill my suitcase full again but at these prices I have to choose carefully. Why do I think that Hungarians in this new economy are not entitled to eke out a living from my desire to pillage their past?

On the lid is the evidence of the crimes of Communism. A clue to the changes my mother described that took place after the Soviets secured post-war Hungary. There is a drawing of three men, lined up perfectly, their bodies in slight profile. They look in the same direction. Presumably to the future. One is a worker, with the famous Soviet hammer flung over his right shoulder. The middle man, in all probability, is the foreman. And I’m guessing the man on the right, wearing a suit and spectacles with a folder tucked under his arm, handles the accounts. Collectively, they hold the Hungarian coat of arms. In the background are factories with smoldering smoke stacks. Underneath is the caption that halted me when I first picked up the tin.

“Minöséget a dolgozóknak.”

“So … are you going to tell me what it means?” asks Ken.

“Quality for the workers. State inspected paprika. To Make Valuable Spices National Company.” My initial tone of sarcasm is sparked by my mother’s insistence that the quality of everything deteriorated with the installation of a Soviet satellite government. Quality of life eluded all but official party members who drove sleek, black luxury vehicles, the interiors of which where upholstered floor-to-ceiling with crushed red velvet. The state meticulously inspected everything, from a person’s thoughts, to their mail. So why would anyone be relieved to know that even their paprika was state inspected?

Shepherds and horsemen had been using the pungent plant to spice their stews since the invasion of the Turks in the 1600s. By the 19th century paprika was a symbol of national pride. In 1937, Szent-Györgyi Albert won a Nobel Prize for his discovery that paprika was unusually rich in vitamin C. So for what reason, I ask, would the Soviets need to establish a state-run company ‘To Make Valuable Spices National’? Did no one know how to inspect, let alone grow paprika in this country before the arrival of the Soviets?

Whenever I discover examples of Communist domination I become my mother: bitter, belligerent and bound. My mind becomes obsessive and I see an ugly past when I look in the mirror. I wince at my down-turned mouth and re-live the sensations she experienced. I wonder just how much disdain for the Soviets I inherited by consuming vast amounts of state inspected paprika?

I want to put the tin back on the shelf. I feel as though I would betray my mother by buying it. But the paprikas are alluring on the blue background. A simple, simple paprika tin, exploited and manipulated to infiltrate the kitchens of the population. Each day, people were force-fed a new identity. They swallowed the lies by the spoonful, their guts bloated. The paprika that once nourished them, was now poisoned. Poisoned by a regime that intended to destroy their psyches slowly over time. It hails from the time before the red star began appearing on the Hungarian coat of arms, when the Soviets were just learning how to brainwash the population. This tin is a relic, a testament to the moment before everything turned really ugly in Hungary.

This tin was just the beginning.

But worse was still to come.

I want this dented, blue tin because it substantiates my mother’s stories of how wretched life was under Communism. If I can learn, then I can mitigate my guilt for having been blessed with a life of opportunity and abundance. And when she says to me, “They were trying to turn us into them. But we would never be them.” I can answer, “I understand mother. I wish you’d never had to live through that.”

I take the tin to the counter and start to bargain and when I shave off a few hundred forints, I hand over my money.

“How’s business?” I ask in Hungarian.

“You are not from here,” says the owner.

“No, I was born in Canada,” I answer apologetically.

“You have opportunities in Canada,” he says.

“It’s a good country. But Hungary’s great, too.”

“I’ll tell you,” he says. “Before we could eat, but we couldn’t talk. Now we can talk, but we can’t eat.”

My childhood memories are in grey tones, like a black-and-white from the early 1960s. The people, the buildings, the sky, the entire landscape. The only colour I remember is the bright yellow of the number two tram, that still hugs the Danube today. In those days, the tram was appointed with sullen ticket inspectors wearing dull, spiritless uniforms, working dull, spiritless jobs and going home to dull, spiritless concrete apartments.

Now, instead of grey crumbling buildings wounded by bullet holes, I see colour for the first time in Budapest. I hear people talking freely on the streets, in their homes and in the shops. But I realize now that even Hungarians are paying western prices while earning Eastern Bloc wages.

“We still don’t know what we’re doing.” The owner wraps my tin in newspaper.

“This has to be better than what you had before,” I say gently.

“It’ll never be better in my time.” He hands me my parcel. “Thank you for visiting my shop. Please come again.”

I take the parcel and tuck it in my bag. It finds its way into my suitcase. Protectively wrapped in a towel, the tin comes home to Canada. It finds a resting place on the kitchen counter where, like in a museum, it’s admired by visitors.

I call my mother for what must be the tenth time in the past five years to ask for her gulyás recipe. I could have written it down by now, but I want her to tell me again from the beginning. “How many tablespoons of paprika?” I ask.

I want her to know how much it means to me to get it just right. I get it right for her. At eighty-one her fingers are gnarled and her heart squeezes her chest. But she’s still beautiful. And battered. Like the blue tin.

Rita Bozi has publications in WritingRaw.com, Pages of Stories, FFWD Weekly and has contributed to CBC Radio. She is writing Uprising, a memoir and Hungry, High and Hammered, a short story collection. This past summer she attended The Humber School for Writers. Her co-written play 52 Pick Up, was recently translated into Icelandic.

It was all glances and smiles, cocking her head at an almost imperceptible angle through the half-opened door. The man in blue was already blushing and they hadn’t exchanged a word. He stood before her with a brown cardboard box the size of a Kindergarten boy.

“This parcel is for Les Montague.” The letter carrier read from a yellow paper affixed to the metal clipboard in his left hand. He was sweating. From his exertion and the summer heat rather than Kate’s magnetic lure, she surmised. An industrial-grade metal dolly wedged under the box.

“Our downstairs neighbour.” Les was Kate and Sean’s tenant. Sean thought him bizarre but Kate knew Les was just misunderstood. He rarely left his room. Les worked from home like Kate. She was an accountant; she didn’t know exactly what Les did. “I think he’s home right now. If not, can I sign for it?”

He looked down at the mustard form to verify the status of a particular checkbox. “I can actually leave it on the porch. No signature required.” He looked up, adjusted his cap and made eye contact with Kate for the first time. Brown eyes. “It’s pretty heavy.” He handed her a few smaller envelopes from his sack.

“Do you think you could bring it inside? I have no idea what’s in there, and it’s supposed to get pretty muggy today.” The only time Kate had been successful with her mailman machinations, the letter carrier was a woman. Her name was Verlia and they had a three-month affair last summer.

He put down his mailbag, stood behind the brown box, held it in place with his left hand and tilted the dolly back with his right. “Can you hold the door, ma’am?” Behind him, a little boy in green shorts straddled a tricycle, and sped across the sidewalk past the Canada Post truck. Two older girls with meticulous braids loped behind him chatting. Kate stepped past the brown wooden door and onto the grey-painted slats of the empty porch. She held the screen door open and the man pushed the box into her foyer. She liked his smell.

“Take it right to the door halfway down the hall, past the living room.” She followed him inside, dropping the letters on the hall bureau as she passed. They stood together at the top of the stairs. Kate put her hand on his shoulder.

“I know this is asking a lot, but would you mind taking it down the stairs and leaving it in front of that door?” There were only a dozen steps, but he did say it was heavy. And Kate had felt a lot more tired than usual lately.

Without a word, he leaned back and rolled the dolly downward, bending at his knees and moving slow. She could see the package was weighty from the way it rocked a bit on each step. The mail carrier had a patch of wetness on his sweaty lower back. Kate gazed as if it were a Rorschach inkblot, but couldn’t decide what it resembled to her. At the bottom, he yanked the dolly out and pulled it back up the stairs. He stopped at the top.

“What’s your name?”

“Rish, ma’am.”

“Thanks a ton, Rish. I’m Kate.”

The box sat below them at the entrance to Les’s basement apartment.

The intermittent thunks from downstairs were annoying the piss out of Sean. Les must’ve been to IKEA. Sean decided to check the garbage later for boxes. There was no point in asking the weirdo, who kept to himself to the point of hermitage. Sean couldn’t picture Les shopping; he’d rarely even seen him leave the basement. They had inherited Les two years ago when Kate’s dad moved to New Zealand to be a fag, and gave them the house.

“He won’t give you any trouble,” Mr Verdure had said when made the offer to them. Sean doubted his words, though. The gift house felt like a subtle indictment of Sean’s own abilities to provide for Kate, or his failure to sire him a grandchild. As long as Les the basement gnome wasn’t engaged in some kind of major construction, he thought.

Sean stripped down in the bathroom upstairs and turned on the hot and cold taps. He pulled the shower curtain across and soaped himself up, paying attention to his thick blond hair and his rank underarms and dirty ass. Fencing practice made him sweat and stink, but he preferred to shower at home, even though the clawfoot tub was small and he always got water on the floor. Sean was built tall and wide like a refrigerator. Negotiating the bathroom of this place made him feel like a gorilla accessing the driver’s seat of a Cooper Mini. But something about the shower room at the Salle D’Armes unnerved him too. The men’s changing facilities were so spare, the tiled floors so cold and ancient and cracked. Each shower head a mere nozzle jutting from a connected section of metal piping, as a dozen guys scrubbed down a few feet apart, fully exposed. The water was always too hot. Something of the room made Sean think of a gas chamber, though he had never seen one.

The woman at the front desk knew not to give him a towel when he came. He thought he noticed her staring on a few occasions.

“She wants your piggy in her blanket,” said his brother Daniel, who was also Sean’s fencing buddy. Danny sometimes talked bitchy like one of those drag queens. RuPaul—only short, freckled, skinny and white. Daniel and Sean looked nothing alike.

“Bro, didn’t she see my ring?” Sean thought chicks who went after married men were scummy. He wasn’t interested.

He poured a capful of Head and Shoulders and massaged his scalp. The banging started up again. It persisted for a minute, then stopped, then picked back up again. Jackass. Sean felt the urge to go downstairs and build the Bennø CD rack or Bërgsbo bookcase for Les himself. Then instruct him to load it up quietly. Sean got a feeling Les was intimidated by his build and demeanor, or at least he hoped so. Clearly not enough to fear his wrath for making a racket so late though. This guy’s got no respect.

“God damn fuck. Jesus fuck. What the fuck. Fuck.”

Sean muttered as he rinsed his hair then turned off the water. He grabbed a towel and pawed at himself with it. He pulled on a pair of grey gym shorts and a red tanktop, stepped on a pile of Kate’s bras and panties on the floor, left the room, grabbed the wooden banister and pulled himself downward two steps at a time. The phone rang and he ignored it, reaching the bottom of the stairs and rapping three times on Les’s basement door.

I’ve got my adult Nuk from Pacifiers Я Us in my mouth, but I’d so much rather be suckling a woman’s breast. Especially if she’s lactating.

My former therapist, Dr Zirknitz, says I like to dress like a baby at 33 because I abandoned my girlfriend and newborn son when I was 18. I think that’s simplistic and predictable. I believe you can like something for no reason, or at least no significant reason. Milly and the boy still live in Hull. I send cheques every month.

I’ve got my favourite xl onesie on. It’s black with yellow rings around the collar and arm- and legholes. It has a picture of a giraffe on it and I bought it on eBay for twenty-five dollars. The reason I picked it is that it reminds me of the home uniform of the Pittsburgh Penguins. I like dark colours. Nothing too flashy.

There are forty-six baby outfits in my closet. You can afford to indulge a little bit when you’re a highly paid human-rights consultant. I help people challenge mistreatment at the hands of the municipal, provincial and federal governments. Right now I’m working on the case of a refugee who’s a part-time postal worker. She was sexually harassed—a pair of managers ganged up on her in the postal-sortation plant at the end of the night shift. I hate this kind of unspeakable bullshit and I am very good at avenging it. We are going to win this case.

I’m moving out of this dungeon in a month; I just gave Kate my notice this morning. But some things can’t wait. My adult-sized crib was delivered this morning. I didn’t see it till after dinner time because I was meeting the lawyers in Avizeh’s case. It took me two hours to put the gorgeous contraption together, including an interruption from that meathead Sean. But I followed the instructions, and it holds my weight. I’m laying in it right now. I’ve got two rooms down here, in addition to my own bathroom. The living room looks like any seventies rec room, but the bedroom is my baby haven. I’ve managed to keep that obnoxious goon from stepping too far onto my turf. Kate’s father used to leave me alone. He was a very polite man.

I used to think I took a basement apartment because of shame or guilt about my adult-baby lifestyle. I started to see Zirknitz in an effort to sort through those feelings. What a waste of time. The old fool thinks everything in my life—my relationship to my mother, my choice of employment, my thoughts on my own penis size—ties into my life as an ab. I think it’s all bullshit. I’m moving into an expensive condo; I can afford it. So what if the movers balk at moving a crib that holds a man who’s five-nine and weighs 205? I don’t need to hide. I do, however, need my diaper changed.

A trio of firm knocks on the door. Perfect timing.

Kate had missed her period for the first time in a long, long time. Nineteen days late. She was usually like clockwork.

“How was the flight, Dad?” Auckland to Sydney. For a funeral.

“Long, Kat. The movie made me cry. I’m not up for this.” Over Skype from his hotel room, Kate’s father’s voice had a computerized texture to it, like the chorus of Styx’s “Mr Roboto.” He had dated a man from Sydney for a year but it didn’t work out. David was a very large man and one day he just didn’t wake up. This would be the first time her father had seen him since the breakup. She didn’t know whether to pray for a closed casket or an open one. At very least, a sturdy one.

“I’m sorry.” Kate was organizing a pile of financial ledgers while she talked. As she put the top half of the stack down, the phone cord strummed against her left nipple. It felt sore.

“I could use some good news for a change, that’s for sure.”

She took this as her prompt. “I think I might be pregnant.”

His voice sped up, rattling off questions without waiting for reply. “Are you sure? How do you feel? Do you want to keep it? I didn’t think Sean had it in him. Always figured that dick was shooting blanks.”

“I’m not sure.” Kate fanned herself with a balance sheet off her desk. The central air was on the fritz again. She had asked Sean to take a look, but she would just call the repair guys herself later today.

Her father’s voice cracked. “I love you, Katty. Whatever you want to do, I support you. I love you so much…” The impending funeral, she thought. That’s why he’s over-emotional. She decided to pick up a pregnancy test. And make a doctor’s appointment.

“Feel better, Dad. Call me again after the service, okay?”

Kate traced in her mind the times she’d messed around recently. Sean’s brother Danny had put it in for a few strokes before she’d got a condom on him. Kate put the phone down and sat her client’s financial papers back on the desk. She needed to get outside. A walk to the bank. Get the rent cheque and deposit it. She walked down stairs and knocked three times on Les Montague’s door.

Sean’s last client was a plump lady named Mitsuyo who worked for the government. She came to Modern Fitness on her flex hours and Sean put Mitsuyo through her paces. The elliptical machine, an increasing number of push-ups. She would never be a supermodel, but he watched as a seed of new confidence germinated within her. That’s what made Sean feel good.

He wore his gym shorts and tank home. Christ was it humid. The front door was cracked when he got there. Got to deal with that busted central air, Sean thought. He wondered if Kate could take a break. For the first time in ages, he felt horny. Maybe it was the heat. He was developing a visible, potent chub.

Sean picked up the handful of letters on the hallway table. Three for them and two for Les. He went downstairs to slide them under the door, but found it ajar. Sean poked his head inside, and was startled to hear the sound of a crying infant. “What the…”

The noise came from the corner bedroom. Not bothering to knock, Sean shoved the door and strode through the basement ducking his head for the low ceiling. Something was wrong. If Les is hurting a kid, I’ll strangle him. Sean’s rod stopped its earlier throb and his balls moved protectively upward. He knew something was sick about that guy. He pushed the bedroom door wide open.

The room smelled vaguely of fresh piss. Pastel blue walls festooned with a cartoon border: A recurring image of Spongebob Squarepants chased by an electric eel wearing a lime-coloured baseball cap. The balding freak knelt inside a gargantuan wooden bedstead, balancing himself on the frame atop the vertical slats, wearing an enormous black terrycloth jumper. Kate stood shirtless next to the Brobdingnagian crib with one breast cupped in her hand. Les Montague slowly lapped at her tender aureole with a long flat tongue. He paused mid-lick, and offered Sean an infantile simper.

Sean’s remnant semi-erection turned to sand in his shorts. Kate stood still, swiveling her neck at an acute angle to face him.

“I’m having a baby,” she said. “I don’t think it’s yours.”

Shawn Syms has completed a short-fiction collection and is currently at work on a novel. His fiction has been shortlisted for the Journey Prize, and his writing has appeared in nearly fifty publications including the Globe and Mail, National Post, Joyland, The Rumpus, PRISM international and the Winnipeg Review.

Excerpt 1, from Michelle Kay:

For this piece, we really focused on adding dialogue. Just like fiction, dialogue can really make creative non-fiction that much better. It adds life to your piece, and to your characters. As readers, we get to see how they interact with each other, and the world around them. In draft one, a story about the writer becoming vegetarian in a Chinese-Catholic family, we didn’t get much sense of who the writer’s mother was, though she played a large part in the story. Adding some dialogue also showed us we were also missing out on some seriously funny stuff.

So this:

When I was 15, I told my Chinese-Catholic mother I was becoming a vegetarian. She was not happy.

Chinese food is not just meat-heavy—it is vegetable-heavy too—but more importantly, it is flavour-heavy, whether that flavour comes from a cow or a root vegetable or a sea creature.

Became:

When I was 15, I told my Chinese-Catholic mother I was becoming a vegetarian. She was not happy.

“What do you mean, you don’t want to eat meat?” she said to me in Cantonese. She glanced up from the chopping board where she was mincing beef, looking especially menacing holding the silver cleaver. She often used that rectangular-shaped clever to tenderize meat, skillfully mashing it into submission.

“What don’t you understand?” I countered, noticing a new patch of white in her hair.  “I just don’t want to eat meat anymore. There is no reason other than I don’t want to.”

“What about chicken?”

“Mom, chicken is meat.”

Excerpt 2, from Rob Thomas:

For this piece, we worked on making characters come to life. Often, when we write creative nonfiction, we are writing about people we know: our mom, our dad, our children, best friends, husbands, wives. We know these people intimately, and it’s easy to write this way. It’s important to remember, though, that our readers don’t. As writers, it’s our job to make these people—that are so intimate in our lives—real to others who don’t know them. We don’t have to go overkill on this. This writer’s first draft, a story about his dad, didn’t tell the reader what his dad looked like, how old he was, how he talked, etc. He was able to do so in subsequent drafts with just a bit of detail.

So this:

There is a photograph of my father on our fridge. He sits in the bow of a rowboat. He wears a green shirt and a white fishing hat. A shoreline of evergreens cut across the photograph directly behind his head. My father holds a large bass that his brother Gerry just caught. He holds the fish is very close to the camera, exaggerating its size. My father’s smiles broadly. There is a note, addressed to my son, on the back:

Became:

There is a photograph of my father on our fridge. He sits in the bow of a rowboat. He wears a green shirt and a white fishing hat. A shoreline of evergreens cut across the photograph directly behind his head. My father holds a large bass that his younger brother Gerry just caught. He holds the fish very close to the camera, exaggerating its size. My father is a wiry man. His remaining hair is gray and cut very short but his skin is smooth and youthful. He is probably 68-years-old in the picture but could be mistaken for ten years younger, or more.  His smile is broad and toothy. There is a note, addressed to my son, on the back:

“I couldn’t find a postcard in Mattawa showing me with Uncle Gerry’s bass so I’m sending this picture instead. Weather prevented flying 50km to Hamel Lake most of the day but we flew in for 30 minutes fishing. I caught four perch, one small bass and Gerry caught this one. We missed several more as the bass were just starting to bite as we had to fly out before dark.”

It is a photo of my dad posing, very proudly, with someone else’s fish.

Excerpt 3, from Lissa Robinson:

For this piece, we worked on what can, sometimes, feel like the biggest writing obstacle when it comes to using the “I” voice: focus. The narrative that goes on in our head—that “I” voice—can sometimes be confusing for people who aren’t, well, us. Sometimes we tell too much, or not enough. This writer had lovely detail in her first draft, a memoir about her dad. But she also chose to tell his story, and her own, in a complex way: by relating it to her favourite childhood classic, Wizard of Oz. As we workshopped this piece, the writer was encouraged to tether everything back to that central theme.

So this:

Fairytales are fraught with darkness, violence and death, but there is always some shimmer of hope or a character’s emergence into a state of grace. Or, for that poor wicked witch of the east, a finale, her  monumental fall from grace. Of course, this is a religious interpretation, but it’s worthy of closer inspection because it continues to be one of the mass psychological affects of our time. Although I was raised Presbyterian, religion wasn’t a daily or even weekly ritual in our household, but it still permeated the air. A moral miasma that seemed to infect the very core of my being and was reflected back to me in the mirrored eyes of people lining up for their daily bread. I am not a religion hater, but I have struggled with its purpose and meaning, and have been deeply troubled by the mass shame and violence it has perpetuated in its people.

And so the story begins.

Like the witch, my father had his own fall from grace. But that will come later.

Became:

Fairytales are fraught with darkness, violence and death. In the end, though, there is that shimmer of hope that the good ones will rise above, unscathed, and that we’ll see them emerge into a state of pardon or grace. Where good triumphs, evil fails. For that poor Wicked Witch of the East (and West), the finale is a fatal blow dropped from the heavenly sky.

Like the witch, my father had his own fall from grace.

Sleeping pills and a bottle of rye. A suicide—even a failed one—is an act of lonely despair. A twisted kind of hope at ending the shame and finding redemption. Just imagine, white and black striped legs, crumpled above the knee and splayed out for all the world to see. Oh, the sin.

Ding Dong! The Witch is dead. Which old Witch? The Wicked Witch!
    Ding Dong! The Wicked Witch is dead.

My dad was a creature of habit and he liked his home to be arranged in a certain way and with a particular kind of discipline and order. Early on, I think that’s what kept his own internal wickedness at bay. We were taught to never speak out of turn, but to be stoic and fearless, and to eat all of our peas.

Thanks to everybody who participated! You were all awesome.

Also, don’t forget to enter our Lit Hunt; the deadline is July 31, 2012. We’re also running an online creative non-fiction workshop (free!) for writers who want to learn how to nail their “I” voice. Whether you need mega or minor advice, or just want a second set of expert eyes, this workshop is for you. Click here for more details.

Kyle Dupont: You decided to add a new category in the mix this year for the Great Canadian Literary Hunt with creative non-fiction, I’m sure I’m not alone when I ask what on earth does that even mean?

Lauren McKeon: You’re not—in fact, you could probably ask about 10 different people to define creative non-fiction and get just about as many answers. To confuse matters even more, many use the terms creative non-fiction, literary journalism, narrative non-fiction, and new journalism interchangeably. Having said all that, there are some basic principals of creative non-fiction: the stories are true; they use elements of literature, essay-writing, and even poetry, in their scenes, dialogues, rhythm, and description; many use the “I” voice. In the words of Lee Gutkind, editor of the wonderful journal Creative Nonfiction: “Creative nonfiction heightens the whole concept and idea of essay writing. It allows a writer to employ the diligence of a reporter, the shifting voices and viewpoints of a novelist, the refined wordplay of a poet and the analytical modes of the essayist.”

KD: What are some good resources out there to help me better understand the genre?


LM: You should definitely check out Creative Nonfiction’s website or grab a copy of the journal itself. Try also, The Art of Fact: A Historical Anthology of Literary Journalism, The New Journalism, The New, New Journalism, The New Kings of Nonfiction. There are the genre pioneers: most anything Joan Didion, Hunter S. Thompson, Truman Capote, John McPhee, Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, and on. New iterations of the craft: Susan Orlean, Chuck Klosterman, Malcom Gladwell, Jon Krakauer, William Langewiesche, Tom Junod, and more. Browse your bookstores and the web—creative non-fiction covers so many approaches and genres, you can find it, or elements of it, almost anywhere these days.

KD: When did creative non-fiction really come to life?


LM: Many people will point you to the pioneers I just mentioned—those journalists that really began pushing storytelling and reporting in a new, interesting, and then-unconventional direction. Pretty soon, the mash of journalism and novel-esque narrative technique became the bread-and-butter of many magazines, such as Esquire and Rolling Stone. The new journalism of the ’60s and ’70s has since morphed into what some call the new, new journalism—and all the nuances of creative nonfiction found in publications across the world today.

KD: Has This ever published any creative non-fiction and are you planning on adding it into the magazine on a regular basis?

LM: This has certainly published its share of creative non-fiction in our 46 years. We sure love us a good essay! Many of our best stories also have elements of creative nonfiction: descriptive writing, dialogue, personal insight, etc. And, of course, we would like to publish more. We have a history at the magazine of pushing boundaries, highlighting new writers, and publishing stories you wouldn’t find anywhere else—some of the things creative non-fiction does best. Please send us your pitches, and enter the Lit Hunt.

KD: Is there usually a specific topic people write on like politics or some other type of news worthy beat?

LM: The beautiful thing about creative fiction is that it can, really, be about anything. It includes everything from memoir writing to travel writing, and food writing to sports writing. There are essays, “I”-voice writing, political writing, and music writing. I’ve read creative nonfiction about prison food, a beautiful essay about mayonnaise (by Pulitzer Prize winner Rick Bragg), and stuff about playing poker. Really, as long as it’s done well, the possibilities are limitless.

Send us a full story, or an excerpt, of up to 750 words. We’ll randomly pick three pieces from all the submissions. This Magazine editor Lauren McKeon will then workshop each of our picks with the author. After, we’ll post before and after excerpts online, with tips, for everybody to learn from, discuss, and read.

Send your workshop submission to hunt@thismagazine.ca by June 25, 10 a.m. EST. DEADLINE HAS BEEN EXTENDED TO MIDNIGHT. Yey!

Interested in creative non-fiction, but what to know more about what it is? Check out our most recent Lit Hunt Q&A.

And, of course, don’t forget to enter our annual Great Canadian Literary Hunt. For more details, see here.