CONTENTdm
Prism international 51:2 / Winter 2013
Prism international
The following description is provided by the publisher: FICTION “Urchin” by Jennifer Manuel “Going Soft through Luxury” by Mark Sampson “Division Day” by Zoey Leigh Peterson “That Ain’t Me” by Martin James Ainsley NON-FICTION “Grandpa’s Fries” by Sarah Selecky “Nettles” by Amela Marin “Beat, Pulse, Stir, Mash” by Julia Zarankin “Breakfast Under the Bodhi Tree” by Chris Galvin “House” by Fiona Tinwei Lam POETRY Claire Kelly Rhona McAdam Evelyn Lau Alisa Gordaneer Jane Spavold Tims John Barton Zoe Whittall Kate Kennedy Laisha Rosnau Catriona Wright COVER IMAGE “Amber” by Maleonn, 2008, courtesy of Magda Danysz Gallery Paris-Shanghai
81 Pages
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PRISM internationa FICTION EDITOR Anna Ling Kaye POETRY EDITOR Leah Horlick EXECUTIVE EDITORS Sierra Skye Gemma Jen Neale ONLINE EDITOR Jeffrey Ricker ADVISORY EDITOR Rhea Tregebov DESIGNER andrea bennett SOCIAL MEDIA COORDINATOR Zachary Matteson EDITORIAL INTERNS Selenna Ho Daniel McDonald Karina Palmitesta EDITORIAL BOARD Rosemary Anderson Nadine Bachan Michelle Barker Jane Campbell Alison Cobra Ophelia Crane Kayla Czaga Kate Edwards Charles-Adam Foster-Simard Tara Gilboy Melissa Janae Julia Leggett Jennifer Macdonald Matt Malyon Hanako Masutani Zachary Matteson Sandra Maxson Kimberly McCullough Daniel Otis Beth Pond PRISM international, a magazine of contemporary writing, is published four times a year by the Creative Writing Program at the University of British Columbia, Buchanan E-A62, 1866 Main Mall, Vancouver, BC, V6T 1Z1. Microfilm editions are available from University Microfilms Inc., Ann Arbor, MI, and reprints from the Kraus Reprint Corporation, New York, NY. The magazine is listed by the Canadian Literary Periodicals Index. Website: prismmagazine.ca. Email: prismcirculation@gmail.com. Contents Copyright © 2013 PRISM international for the authors. Cover photo: "Amber" by Maleonn, 2008, courtesy of Magda Danysz Gallery Paris-Shanghai. Subscription Rates: One-year individual Canadian $35, American $40, International $45; two-year individual Canadian $55, American $63, International $69; library and institutional one-year $46; two-year $72. Sample copy by mail is $12. US and international subscribers, please pay in US dollars. Please note that US POSTAL money orders are not accepted. Make cheques payable to PRISM international. All prices include HST and shipping and handling. Submission Guidelines: PRISM international purchases First North American Serial Rights at $40 per page for poetry and $20 per page for other genres. Contributors receive three copies of the issue in which their work appears. PRISM also purchases limited digital rights for selected work, for which it pays an additional $10 per page. All manuscripts should be sent to the editors at the above address. Manuscripts should be accompanied by an email address. If you wish to receive your response by regular mail, please include a SASE with Canadian stamps or International Reply Coupons. Translations should be accompanied by a copy of the work(s) in the original language. The advisory editor is not responsible for individual selections, but for the magazine's overall mandate, including continuity, quality and budgetary concerns. For details on how to place an advertisement in PRISM, please visit our website at prismmagazine.ca/advertise. PRISM occasionally exchanges subscriber lists with other literary magazines; please conract us if you wish to be excluded from such exchanges. Our gratitude to Dean Gage Averill and the Dean of Arts Office at the University of British Columbia. We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the British Columbia Arts Council. January 2013. ISSN 0032.8790 Sb BRITISH COLUMBIA «» Canada Council tcmseil des Arts Arts council <c*z> ,or the Arts du ^mxta MENU FICTION Jennifer Manuel 8 Urchin Mark Sampson 28 Going Soft through Luxury Zoey Leigh Peterson 39 Division Day Martin James Ainsley 62 That Ain't Me NON-FICTION Sarah Selecky 4 Grandpa's Fries Amela Marin 16 Nettles Julia Zarankin 45 Beat, Pulse, Stir, Mash Chris Galvin 55 Breakfast Under the Bodhi Tree Fiona Tinwei Lam 77 House POETRY Claire Kelly 6 Yellow Wart 7 Jack-O'-Lantern Rhona McAdam 13 Aristotle's Lantern 14 Culatello 15 The Year of Food Evelyn Lau 21 Burns 22 Alarm 23 Something Happened Alisa Gordaneer 25 Market/Place 26 Eggplant 27 Elimination Diet Jane Spavold Tims 37 beaked hazelnuts John Barton 38 Pottage Zoe Whittall 41 Spring at 36 44 Hotel Atlas Kate Kennedy 53 Another winter on the marsh 54 La Cumbre, Argentina Laisha Rosnau 59 Bite Marks 60 November 61 Shame, Revisited Catriona Wright 74 BBQ 75 White Contributors 79 Sarah Selecky GRANDPA'S FRIES IVly grandma was Italian, extremely petite, and superb in the kitchen. She taught me how to make fluffy, air-filled tapioca by whipping egg whites into meringue before stirring them into hot milk. She liked to eat oranges with thin slices of Vidalia onions, garbanzos, and a slim drizzle of extra-virgin olive oil on top. Grandma always served herself on side plates, or in small glass ramekins, to make sure she ate tiny portions. My grandpa, however, was Polish, morbidly obese, and liked to show off by eating strips of raw bacon. He'd dangle the bacon over his mouth, wiggle it, and then lap it up with a grin while my cousins and I squealed in horror. He ate three meals a day in his brown La-Z-Boy while he watched television, and he kept a generous stash of hard candies in the side table drawer beside him. Our game: to pester Grandpa slowly and deliberately until he yelled at us or gave us candy. He usually gave us candy at first, which meant we would come back to push our luck a second time. Then he'd yell. This terrified us in the best way. My cousins and I were at our grandparents' house in Evansville, Indiana on the day of the tornado warning. This was the first time I'd experienced one, but my cousins lived through tornadoes every year; they weren't afraid this time, and I followed their lead. My three cousins lived in Evansville, so they often stayed with our grandparents during the day. I was visiting from Sudbury, and this was the first time my parents left me there on my own. In their absence, my grandparents' house felt different, more tangible. It was as though a pane of glass had been removed from a diorama, and now, on my own, I was free to see and touch and live in the real house. As soon as the rain started, Grandma called us down to the basement, the safest place to be during a thunderstorm in tornado season. Grandpa ignored her, so we did too. He heated a pot of oil and stood at the kitchen counter and sliced a whole bag of russet potatoes. He chopped each potato in half lengthwise first, then chopped it again three or four times to make long wedges. The sky grew darker and darker as he worked. Grandpa kept the peels on; that's where the vitamins were, he said. Then he plunged the wedges into the oil. The rain was coming down sideways and thunder shook the kitchen walls. Grandpa's colossal body filled the room like the weather; his billowing grey sweatpants and T-shirt loomed above us. Grandma stayed downstairs for all of this, in part because of the storm, in part because she didn't like to watch Grandpa use the deep-fryer in her kitchen. The storm only enhanced his performance. When each batch was ready, he scooped them out of the oil with a slotted spoon and dumped them out on a cookie sheet lined with paper towels. They were steaming hot, crispy and golden. The light coming out from under the stove PRISM 51:2 hood was the only light in the dark kitchen, and it cast a glow that made the fries look dramatically bright. Grandpa let me and my cousins salt the potatoes after each batch was done. We took turns with the shaker. Then he'd put another few handfuls of wedges into the hot oil, and we'd wait for the next batch. We were way too afraid of Grandpa to sneak any into our mouths. The storm closed in as Grandpa cooked. He didn't rush it, though. It must have taken him about half an hour. The last batch was done just before the power went out. There was still enough light to see—it was only mid-afternoon—but the clouds had turned the yellow-green of a bad bruise. Grandma still waited for us downstairs. We brought the fries to the basement on a big white plate. Grandma had put out paper napkins for us, even though she wouldn't be eating any of it. She'd turned on the little red radio and was listening to the news. The storm took some trees down in the neighbourhood. One came down across the street. Men with chainsaws would have to come chop it up and clear the road the next morning. My aunt and uncle would have to replace their garage because of the damage; fallen branches from the tree next door had crushed the roof. No one was hurt. We were lucky. In the years before and since, Evansville has seen more than one powerful tornado rip through the city: entire subdivisions have been destroyed. On this day, the storm must have been more dangerous than Grandma and Grandpa let on. But learning about the danger came years later; I don't even remember hearing the news that day, even though I know Grandma was listening to it. What I do remember: the wind and rain whipping at the small basement windows, the vibration from heavy thunder, like something was being thrown at us from above, and the potent feeling of polished independence that came from spending the day with my grandparents. I would call it sophistication, if I were to describe that feeling today. But I was a child—only seven years old—and besides, it feels more honest to name it with the food itself, the flavour of which is so vivid I can taste it now: Grandpa's fries, still hot from the oil, almost sweet, crunchy with too much salt. Si pnsmmagazine.ca Claire Kelly YELLOW WART Amanita flavoconia It's your colouring, no one's hungry enough to try. You could be deadly. A teen phenom in a rusted rattletrap. Go fast enough and you're a solid blur of rickety underpinnings. Or you may be delectable. Sauteed or stuffed. Paired with tomatoes. Or drizzled with a balsamic reduction. Tasting of the perfect earth. Chrome yellow dappled on orange. Arresting lack of pattern, but somehow all's cohesive. Until nature goes soft. Rain stripping you smooth. A cat's eye beacon, a reflector in the undergrowth. PRISM 51:2 JACK-O'-LANTERN Omphalotus olearius Crowd of charlatans. Orange doppelgangers clinging to oak-root. Dreaming the lives of chanterelles: froth of golden silk and chiffon, shuffle-step around the stage, shellacked bee- hived manes, lips mouthing edible harmony. Gut rot, but so pleasant to look at. Anyone could be hoodwinked a second time, lured by scent. Bring one with you in the dark, watch its gills glow. pnsmmagazine.ca Jennifer Manuel URCHIN Jd/verywhere there are bicycles and sea urchins. Small children, soaked from swimming, wrap themselves around my legs and arms. Scuttling alongside me, they move wherever I move. Suckerfish on a white whale. The adults sit along the low sides of the dock beside the briny fragrance of the sea urchins, some of which are in buckets, some dumped on the dock into spiky hills of purple and red. These adults, whose fat cheeks are slicked with a glossy sheen, look at me and laugh. Toothless for the most part. Empty chambers of cracked urchins surround their feet. All of them fist sticks and screwdrivers except for two women who smoke. When the woman from the white house approaches, the children unstick themselves from me and scatter. Without explanation, she ties a bracelet around my wrist. It is made with purple and red string, braided. The type of bracelet children give one another in friendship. She stands too close, the smell of her stagnant breath like the mud of low tide. Her fingernails are thick and yellow and rimmed with dirt and dried-up mucous. They voted to send my husband away from the village, she tells me. She squints sidelong at the other adults. I know, I say. You've told me already. He's not allowed to come back, she says, and he's not allowed to talk to little Violet so you tell me if she says anything about him at school. Sometimes he sends Violet presents but she's not allowed to keep them so you tell me if she has something fancy new. Also, Violet lies and she steals things. But she's supposed to talk to her teddy bear; if she talks to her teddy bear, she won't lie and steal. I want to say: Now that you mention it, there's a calculator, two magnifying glasses, a box of chalk and a brand new skipping rope missing from the classroom. Plus my pair of sandals with the fake gemstones. But there is her slack, vacant face. And there is how, like a child, she dresses: shirt buttons mismatched, one pant leg caught inside the top of her sock, a dribble of lunch on her breast. So, I nod. And I smile. And I creep backward until a blood-red urchin ruptures under my shoe. From the big window at the top of the white house, a voice calls out. It is the woman's mother, Violet's grandmother, who sits there at that window all day and watches the boats and counts the catches. Have you heard, she asks me, about the man whose skin turned into tree bark? No, I yell. On the floor below the grandmother there is a smaller window. It lets a narrow tube of light into the basement where Violet sleeps on a mattress with her mother and her teddy bear, between greasy fishing nets and orange buoys. PRISM 51:2 Every night Violet lies awake there in the dark, while her mother snores, and worries the Basket Lady will steal her away. I should probably tell you sometime, the grandmother says, and laughs. Violet's mother twists the bottom of her shirt into a long cotton auger, her eyes cast downward. She grumbles and scurries back to the house. Children return to encircle me, bouncing and squealing, holding urchins out. Eat it eat it eat it eat it eat it eat it eat it eat it eat it. Standing the closest is Violet. She is a twelve-year-old copy of her mother, put together with the same odd mixture of large bulging fish eyes, greasy strands of black hair, tender red swollen gums and woolly yellow teeth, cavernous nostrils encrusted with rings of green snot. Unsmiling, tongue gaping, she comes upon you like a wall-eyed spectre and enters the small orbit of your face without warning. Every two weeks a counsellor flies into the village on the mail plane from Gold River to teach Violet how to talk to her teddy bear and how to keep personal boundaries. The lessons learned never last more than a day or two. There is an urchin in Violet's hand, and it is cracked wide open. The insides are a swirl of liquid and black organs, specks of seaweed, gritty bits of sand. Without draining any of this, she pries her meaty lips into the hole and tilts her head back. I watch, repelled, as she sucks at it all. The noise is desperate, like air gobbled in suffocation. Excretions of something gelatinous spurt out the sides and onto her cheeks. With her finger, she scrapes the gonads at the bottom of the shell and slips them into her mouth. She drags the back of her hand across her face and, after wiping the slime onto her shorts, tosses the hollow globe into the ocean where it floats above a submerged bicycle and dozens of coffee filters that bob below the surface like paper jellyfish. A boy, hopping from foot to foot, drops a purple urchin into my left hand. Salt water trickles into the creases of my palm. My skin prickles. Are the spines poisonous, I ask. Several adults crinkle their noses, No. We offer you that tucip to thank you for reaching our children, says the woman with cheeks like rye bread. She giggles, and her shoulders lift up to her ears. So you got to eat some because it's a gift, Teacher, says another giggling woman. When I moved here last month, arriving by boat with five Rubbermaid totes, a set of rain gear and no roads to make any retreat, I learned that there is no word for welcome in Nuu-chah-nulth. It's shown by giving food. And when it is offered, you must accept. Since then I have come down the hill from my house across from the school to accept rock stickers, chitons, geoducks, gooseneck barnacles and one fish eyeball. But those things had been cooked. They had been cleaned. And they had not been pulsing with datk viscera. Around me, more people from the village start coming and going, taking away their share of urchins or staying a moment to eat them right there. Some of the children stand and watch me, waiting, while others sit, making heart-shaped prints of their wet bums on the cement dock. Armies of dogs saunter among the pnsmmagazine.ca 9 bicycles. An elderly man is seated in his boat, and from time to time he looks at me with anticipation. Now and then, from the other side of the dock, I can hear teasing voices and then something encouraging and then a torrent of laughter. Violet pulls back her lip like a horse, and she laughs too. You're real scared, Teacher! Am I really, Violet? On Violet's back is the knapsack she carries everywhere. It's filled with surprises, mostly stolen. Candy, fridge magnets, braided bracelets, tarnished rings, batteries, beads, broken cigarettes. She gives these surprises away as gifts to other children, to relatives, to strangers who fly here to catch a big fish. Tokens to obligate reciprocity, to delay inevitable rejection, to coerce love. I wonder about the calculator, the magnifying glasses, the box of chalk, the skipping rope. Are they inside that sack now? Then I notice her feet. And she notices me noticing. We both look at the sandals, two sizes past her dirty toenails. Teal stones set on the leather straps. Sure, I could demand them back. But there would be pouts and undulating whines and inconsolable crying. The usual tactics. Sobs so hard the drool suspends from her lips and snot bubbles from her nose. She would then scream that it's her grandmother's fault—She's so mean to me!—and I would find my sandals one day washed ashore or up in a cedar tree. If I eat this urchin, I say, I get those nice sandals. Strands of gummy spit stretch at the corners of Violet's mouth. Jeez, Teacher! she says, but then raises her eyebrows, Yes. Yesterday afternoon two Elders visited our classroom to tell the story of the Basket Lady and Mucous Boy. Wool blankets draped their brittle legs, even though the day was warm. All the children gathered at their feet except Violet, who sat at the far edge of the rug, a frog of a girl, squatting on her haunches, sticking her tongue out at whatever moved past. Old Mary, the Che:k:tles7et'h' woman who runs a candy store from her house in the village, passed a basket of fry bread to the children. Good lessons, she said, always happen over food. As you take in the food, you take in the lesson. You digest what you've learned. It becomes a part of you. Nan Lily, who lives somewhere up the coast in a hut of driftwood and torn- up tarp, reminded the children about the Basket Lady. How big and fat she is, as tall as anything, and real ugly too, covered with hair from her head to her yellow- nailed toes. How she steals children who are bad, rubs chewing gum over their eyes and tosses them into the woven cage she carries on her back. Barefooted, she thumps around the rainforest behind the reserve with naughty children, blind and forgotten, wriggling around inside her cedar basket, their limbs in knots. Tangled like a nest of snakes. The children clutched their fry bread like squirrels, nibbling tiny bites during the long silences. Sometimes Nan Lily paused so long between sentences I wondered if she was in fact taking a brief nap. During these spells Violet came to my desk. 10 PRISM 51:2 The first time she said: Nan Lily keeps glaring at me. I don't think that's true, I said. Why would she do that? Because she thinks the Basket Lady should get me, she said. The next time she said: I hate the part about Mucous Boy. I don't want to hear it. Why not? I asked. It's just a story. It's not just a story. It happened for real. The third time she said: I have to use the washroom. I don't know, I said. Just a minute. I looked out the window beside the classroom door. Through it I could see a circle of orange construction paper taped to the window of the primary classroom across the hallway. A secret signal from the other teacher, which meant one of the younger children was already in the washroom. Violet was not allowed to be alone with younger children. No, I said. Not right now. Maybe later. Jeez, Teacher! Violet said and stomped her foot. Maybe I'll have to pee right here and maybe it'll go all over your stupid sandals! She flung herself back down onto the carpet. One time, said Nan Lily, the Basket Lady stole a boy. His mother loved him very much and she could not ever forget him even though he had been very, very bad. Every day the mother sat on the shore and prayed to the Creator and cried. She cried so hard that snot came out of her nose: first as a trickle, then as a bubble and finally as a thick strand. The snot fell to the ground. The mother thought nothing of it. But soon she saw a face in the snot. The snot grew into a boy, a boy made from mucous. And the mother was not sad anymore. Chuu, she said to the children, which meant simply: done. Klecko, klecko, said the children. Thank you, thank you. Later that afternoon, the class went to the library to write their own narratives on the computers. The school library is in a portable across the field, which was damp with drizzle that day, so I changed into my rubber boots. Violet stayed behind with a teacher's assistant to finish her writing at her desk. She was not allowed to use the school computers because the week before, the same week her father had sent her a new television, I caught her searching the Internet for sexxi boobs koks vajinah. The counsellor had flown in on a chartered flight to help. When I returned at the end of the afternoon, the bell had rung to dismiss the students. All the children were gone. Violet and my sandals were also gone. I found her composition assignment on her desk: i do stuf for my gramma, i got her cofee and i rob her feet, i am reel stoopid. and i am durty. my dad sez so. and my gramma sez so. i shud wip my bum mor. i shud wip my nos mor. it is allways snotty, like moocus boi. gramma luvs me lots too lik the mom of moocus boi. i no becuz gramma give me nu sandells. they got bloo roks on the top. thank you gramma, the end. prismmagazine.ca 11 The urchin's spines, which protect the creature from predators, are hard and yet brittle. A few snap off as I plunge the screwdriver into the urchin, prying it into the mouth, breaking the small circle of five teeth. Around and around I work the screwdriver until there is a hole the size of an egg yolk. At the sight of those membranes and digested waste, ovaries and other organs, I feel myself faltering. What can I do now but go on? Everybody watches and waits for me. Violet holds her hand in front of her face like a wall so that nobody can see she picks her nose. She chips away at that encrusted ring around the edges of her nostrils. It is something she often does whenever she feels anxious or guilty, and she thinks the small wall of her hand keeps it secret. But everybody can plainly see what she is doing, can see her hand swiveling during the excavation, can see when she occasionally pokes the tip of her finger into her mouth. Yet we pretend it is otherwise and we turn our eyes away. Suddenly I am spilling over with urgency: a strong need to end Violet's tension. Is it pity? Mercy? I rim my lips around the hole and pour the salty liquid and its slippery contents into my mouth. It splashes against the roof of my mouth and I force it down. My eyes water. There is a tightening at the back of my throat. My face contorts with retching. The hopping boy points at the roe still inside the shell, shaped like orange tongues, and tells me I'm supposed to eat those. When I try to scrape them out, the boy sighs, tells me I'm going to rip them doing it like that, and pulls them out for me. You have to be real gentle, the boy says as I swallow. He hurls the shell away. There is laughter, some applause from the adults and then more laughter. The woman with cheeks like rye bread says, You weren't supposed to eat the whole thing. I wasn't? No, she says, screwing up her nose. Just the roe. And maybe sip some of the salty liquid. But not all that other gunk. That stuff is real icky. Violet is walking away already. She crosses the grass to the door of the white house. She is barefooted. From the window above, her grandmother scolds her, tells her she is dirty and that she should clean herself sometime. Although my stomach is unsettled and there are gritty bits still caught in the pockets of my cheeks, I pick two urchins from the pile to take to the white house to share with the grandmother. I'll ask her to tell me about the man whose skin turned into tree bark. Good lessons, I recall as I pick up my sandals, always happen over food. As you take in the food, you take in the lesson. You digest what you've learned. It becomes a part of you. I 12 PRISM 51:2 Rhona McAdam ARISTOTLE'S LANTERN In reality the mouth-apparatus of the urchin is continuous from one end to the other, but to outward appearances it is not so, but looks like a horn lantern with the panes of horn left out. — Aristotle, Historia Animalium Who named you urchin? No imp with that devil mouth: pentangle in a spiny orb. Five teeth and a tongue and fifteen hundred breathing-arms. Five hundred million days asleep in stone bedrooms you scoured from the ocean's flank with unstoppable teeth. Five hundred million nights roaming the food beds with your dark lanterns. Lover of fives, the untouchable number. Untouchable in your cloud of spines. In clouds of your fellows you cleave the stems of sea-forests, kiss stone into sand, bring bridges to their knees. Your teeth grow into their blades. Nothing can dull them, gaining edge from inquiry. You embrace the dark in your brittle centre. You are the eye, every cell shrinking from light. Your barbs bristle towards danger, bury a poisoned cusp in your enemies. Regrow lost splinters. You cast your children out into the sea. They grow into arrows: two arms and a mouth and five terrible teeth strong enough to eat you. prismmagazine.ca 13 CULATELLO In 1881, Parmesan poet Giuseppe Callegari named culatello as one of the foods that would be served in Paradise. On the flatlands beside the Po black pigs graze beneath the slender trees, growing fatter than the land. A good life, well-lived they say, shepherding you to the end of it, and into the next. Shorn of your bones you are bathed in wine, massaged with salt and rested. When you next appear, little bottom in your string vest, it's hanging in cellars by your hundreds, meaty pears, pendulous in a darkened orchard. Po breezes wrap you in flora, their bloom between the threads a soft grey down to blanket you. You dwindle through the summer heat and winter mists, meditating on wine and spice until for that last meal you are shaved thin as tissue, stained glass against the light, a wafer of flesh melting upon a grateful tongue, becoming, in some long tomorrow, other flesh. 14 PRISM 51:2 THE YEAR OF FOOD It was a year of walking around food, of narrowing in on microbial detail, or out to topography. There were grains, fruits, mountains, oceans and grass. Buckets of food, handfuls of food, a few grams of food shaved from a nugget. Living food, old food hung from a roof-beam, lit by a cellar window. Soft food, food with crystals or black stones at the core. Food that bled, wept, shrank in the service of its history. Food the colour of salt or set adrift in brine, or bathed dry in salt and left on a shelf to cure. Food on paper, in pictures. The sound of food being made, the memory of food lost with its makers, food introduced by misadventure, or war, or intermarriage. Food as I had not known it, food not made at high speeds by machines for neatness of handling or ease of consumption, not extruded in tubes or formed into slabs. This was food for praise, for poetry, for eating, each piece different, difficult, odd or uneven, misshapen, of nonstandard colouring. Food with family scandal or conquest in its crumb. Food to dwell on for one hungry-minded year. prismmagazine.ca 15 A mela Marin NETTLES "XT IN o!" I threw myself forward to grab hold of the super's arm but it was too late. He was holding the plant, roots and all, victoriously, although his expression changed as I tried to stop him. I had come to get the keys to my new apartment. The super was giving me a tour, because the first time I had come to see it, I was so eager to lease it that I only looked at the kitchen, my favourite room. The tour had revealed the apartment as having exactly what I needed; it was quiet, surrounded by the lush greenery of parks, picturesque trails for taking up running, and, somewhat miraculously, still within my budget. In addition to the kitchen, which met my standards, it had a large bedroom for me that opened up to the porch, as well as one for my son, with whom I was sharing the apartment. As soon as the super had opened the door to the porch, I spotted them: three stalks growing proudly from a flower box. My heart started pounding as though I had seen a former lover across the room. On hikes and at farmers' markets I had sought out nettles, hoping to find them fresh and pale-green. I wanted to touch their soft leaves with those tiny stinging hairs, just as I had when nettles and I first became friends, some 15 years before. Perhaps I hadn't really looked very hard, hoping in secret for a dramatic reunion such as this. Thinking that the colour of my face reflected some sort of nettle trauma, the super had moved quickly, nipping the stalk of one of my precious friends. Luckily, I was able to stop him at one. Two stalks remained, aiming skyward. "I like nettles," I said, trying to sound casual. It was a very odd sort of kismet that had brought me to this beautiful and bright apartment, where I was intending to wrire about the war, to find nettles growing on my porch. They had been an essential part of my war diet. Here was my chance to thank them, or pay tribute after so many years. It had taken me almost a decade to publish my first article about the war. I began with food, which had been a source of pain when there was none, and a source of comfort and joy when we had enough to eat and share with friends. Now I was ready to tell a longer story. I had worked as an arts administrator ever since I moved to Canada, the same job I had done before immigrating. In order to write the book that felt ripe to me, I decided to quit my job as the executive director of a national association and write full-time. "You like nettles?" the super asked. "Have you ever eaten them?" "I have, a few times," I responded. I didn't want to go into the war story. I could see he was excited to have come across a fellow nettle-eater. For Europeans, it is a clear sign of poverty. Or quirkiness. 16 PRISM 51:2 "I didn't like them," he added. "We were poor, so my mother would make them very often, with onions and potatoes." Onions and potatoes! If only I had had onions and potatoes to make the soup with, instead of white rice, a regular staple in humanitarian aid. The rice we received during the war was so small and cracked that it looked like some remnant of an ancient civilization. In fact, I had heard that some of the food distributed by the United Nations dated back to the Vietnam War. "Where are you from?" I asked him. "From Romania." "Oh? Where in Romania?" What if he is a relative of Herta Midler's? I was in the middle of reading her novella The Passport, which featured a small village in Romania where she had been born. It was just announced that she won a Nobel Prize in Literature. My imagination travelled at the speed of light. The nettles were just an omen: I was bound to get a Nobel Prize for the book that I was going to write here in this nettle-blessed apartment. Of course, I couldn't remember the name of the village she had come from, so when he answered, I didn't hear what he said. That is, I didn't even listen, searching my memory in vain, while at the same time writing my acceptance speech and mentioning this fated encounter with only nettles as witnesses. I don't even remember if I said goodbye as I was leaving, nodding while he talked and, at the same time, listing to myself people to thank and dividing the prize money. Like many people who don't believe in higher powers, I develop little superstitions to get me through when times are tough. During the war, it was my friends' love that carried me through the streets, among millions of sniper bullets and shells that fell on the city daily. My favourite writers would magically protect me in bed if I strained my eyes in candlelight and reread beloved books, struggling to understand humanity through their words and thus give some order to the chaos around me. I even tried translating all the military terms and all the words for violence into English, thinking that these words might somehow be easier to understand in another language, might somehow become harmless, like bombs dismantled in translation. The war I am referring to, my war, was in Sarajevo, Bosnia. Until the war I had been living a charmed life with my family and friends. The war took us by sutprise. It wasn't so much shocking as unbelievable; disbelief somehow softened the blows. But reality soon sank in when my two-year-old nephew was wounded in the first month of the war, a bullet exploding in his brain. When a friend was killed walking back from work, just after we had parted, and then more friends. The world I had known disappeared and was replaced by a new reality I soon had to become accustomed to. This realm I stepped into and dwelt in for three years was entirely new, entirely disorienting. Living in a city under siege meant living with no electricity and water, with meagre food supplies and under constant danger of being killed. In the first year of the war, apart from bread rations (250 grams a day per person) prismmagazine.ca 17 and United Nations packages of dried basic foods (flour, beans and rice, with some variations), you could get very few things at the market. Nothing green. Since the front lines were right at the edge of the city, the local gardens and orchards were not accessible. What you could get were grapevine leaves from porches and backyards, which served a double purpose since they could be eaten or smoked, depending on one's priorities. And nettles. War was good to nettles. They finally had a chance to spread in unplanted gardens, usually on or close to the front lines, by abandoned roadsides, in parks that doubled as cemeteries. No wonder then that they have been used for centuries both as food, as medicine and as fibre to make fabric. "Do you like it?" I asked my foreign guests, mostly journalists who were reporting from Sarajevo, some of whom became part of our war family, serving them up bowls of precious nettle soup. I don't think I looked them in the eyes when I asked; I preferred to allow them to lie about how delicious it was. After all, my Sarajevan friends loved it. A soup with something green in it! We licked our plates and wanted more, which we got the next day, and the next, and the next, and the next day after that. We ate nettles throughout the year, having dried the rare plant for the winter. I've read somewhere that nettles were widespread on wasteland and on distressed soil. The explanation is literal, but it fits the metaphorical wasteland and distress I remember from that time. A decade after the war, I read an account by an American writer I knew who came to the besieged city a few times. He had interviewed my family for the book he was writing, and in it he described the nettle soup we shared with him as tasteless. I remember being terribly hurt by his words. Even though I knew very well he was right. We were the happiest when we could add spices to the nettle dish, especially when it was made of older leaves, which have a very specific, sharp, astringent smell. But admitting something like that in the midst of war to ourselves would have felt like a defeat. Tasteless, smelly soup, when it is the only thing you can eat and give to your hungry children, becomes a dish fit for royalty. In a novel by one of my beloved writers Danilo Kis, which rakes place during WWII, a father tells his son a story about how nettles are eaten by princes to persuade him how special he is. I retold that story to my children. I told them they were privileged to eat a delicacy served only in royal courts. Or how nettle pie was infinitely better than spinach pie. And they believed me. We all believed. There I stood, on my new porch in Canada, touching the jagged, neatly paired nettle leaves, caressing their feathery stings. Touched the right way, the thorns are hardly noticeable. If you pass beyond the point of fear of being stung, they let you into their rich world. I used to tell my friends that I was healthy because of all the nettles I ate during the war. They clean the blood like no other plant. And that I was fearless thanks to them. (I allow myself slight exaggeration here and there). After all, the nettle plant was sacred to Thor, the hammer- wielding god from Norse mythology who wore it to banish fear in the presence of danger. With the nettles near, I was ready to write about the war. Anything could happen now. If a war were to start the next day, I'd be fine. Fine with three (now two) nettle stems growing in the flower box. 18 PRISM 51:2 And so rhat fall I began a new life in my new apartment. My book was progressing, mostly in my head; I was making notes and some really bad drawings and watching my third nettle stem recover from the super's attack. I started running in preparation for my first 1 OK the following spring, a run that benefits children with cancer. My nettle friends disappeared with the first signs of winter. In January, I got the news: a Toronto publisher was interested in my book, what was now to be a novella if I could finish it in six months. In January I also learned that I had breast cancer. The stage and prognosis were not known until two months later, after the surgery. In my mind both pieces of news came at the same time. It was simply easier to remember the two moments—of joy and sorrow—merged. "Grasp the nettle," the saying goes. It is what I had to do, with the war, and now again with cancer. I embarked on a voyage that felt like a long dark tunnel, where I had to find light within to move forward. The book became the light. As in math, two negatives were going to produce a positive. The war that I was going to speak of and the cancer treatment that was ahead became closely connected. The thread I saw was woven from nettles. Creating a new diet around a cancer treatment from the bounty available to me in Canada was a much easier task than inventing dishes from sparse wartime rations. Besides, I didn't have two hungry children to feed anymore. In spring, when my treatment started, I happily discovered that my nettles were back, this time much bolder, not the two lonely stalks anymore, but three vibrant plants spreading throughout the flower boxes. Even though I had a variety of green vegetables at my disposal, I chose to cook with nettles: soup and pie to share with friends. This time, the dishes were delicious—truly so, not just in my imagination—infused with life, with memories of survival. In early spring, as I was about to start chemotherapy, the super showed up at my door. In his arms was a large bag of nettles. A month or so before he had tried to persuade me that chemotherapy wouldn't make me healthy. He had mentioned me to his mother (I assume telling her how he met someone who ate nettles) and she told him that a neighbour in Romania, who had been diagnosed with cancer, ate only gtapes for a month. The tumour had disappeared miraculously. I had thanked him for his kindness. I had told him I preferred to try chemo first and resort to grapes later (or mushrooms or popcorn or any other foods that well-meaning people recommended as a cure of cancer). "I'll stick to nettles," I had joked. So he decided to help me. "This will make you healthy again." He had picked them for me at his friends' farm, a few hours from Toronto. It seemed to me that he had planned the trip to coincide with the nettles growing big enough to be picked. But he wouldn't admit it when I asked. He said that he just happened to notice them and happened to remember I liked nettles. It might be an acquired taste to eat nettles. I trust that they did make me healthy again. There is a twin to my super's bag of nettles. During the war, a soldier who had been a waiter in a restaurant on our street would show up at our door with treats for children—cherries or apples he had picked on the front lines. It was prismmagazine.ca 19 the only fruit they saw in a long time. His family had left the country and he was missing his nieces and nephews, so he befriended my children. Once he brought a huge bag full of nettles, the most precious gift in the second year of war, when even nettles were hard to get. We had to dry them because they don't last long—a day or two, even if refrigerated, a luxury we didn't have, living without electricity. Our apartment turned into a meadow of nettles spread everywhere on old newspapers. To thank him, we threw him a birthday party. He cried and promised he'd be back with more. But we never saw him again; he was killed in action soon after. The treatment and the book were completed almost simultaneously. The book had become an anchor to my life, especially in the first months, when the outcome of my treatment was uncertain. I met almost all my deadlines and finished the book on time. Working on my first book in a life-and-death situation, I was no longer afraid that the book wouldn't be a masterpiece. I decided that it had to be the best book I could come up with there and then. By the time I found out that my cancer was stage one and caught on time, I had finished most of the writing. People usually bring their friends and family to hold their hands in the chemo room. I brought my manuscript and my iPod. For a few hours, while I received the drugs intravenously, I listened to my favourite music and cut the text. It felt like the best place to decide what was important and should stay in the book, some sort of imperfect child born to father war and mother cancer. I was still bald when I got the first copy of my book, having just finished radiation therapy. By the time of the launch I had very short hair, which looked almost like stinging nettle hairs, upright and prickly, growing on "disturbed ground" that was my body in abundance. Another winrer passed, and in early summer I decided it was time to leave that apartment. The home had served its purpose. As I was packing, I thought about what to do with the nettles, whose stems were just beginning to show in the flower box. In the end, I decided to give one plant to each of two friends who were fellow nettle-lovers, having lived through the war themselves. Perhaps I thought that by doing this, I would find the nettles easily if I needed them again. I left alone one stem. My friends told me that their nettles withered and died within a week. I don't know what happened to the third one. But I hope it disappeared too, that the people who moved in didn't and wouldn't need it. This past spring, I saw nettles at the farmers' market, but only once. I thought I'd engage the woman selling them in conversation, ask her if she liked nettles and tell her my story. I thought I'd buy some, invite friends for dinner and make a pie. I approached her and smiled. She smiled back, ready to tell me about the benefits of nettles. At the last minute, I changed my mind. I turned towards the farmer standing beside her and reached for the spinach, f 20 PRISM 51:2 Evelyn Lau BURNS I don't remember the injury. The pot of roiling water knocked off the element, the cascade of scorching drops splashing slow-motion through the frozen air. I didn't see her there, she'd say afterwards, again and again, her face abashed and lit with love. I imagine her horror when it happened, the sound of her shriek, the rush to embrace and inspect for damage. The avalanche of her relief when I stood there, whole, spotted like a leopard but unharmed, too surprised to wail. The pain, what there was of it, too foreign for my soft, still-forming mind to grasp. Probably it had been my fault— lurking around her legs in the kitchen like a neighbourhood cat, rubbing up against her good smell of talcum powdet and rhubarb pie. I remember the afterwards, how she handled me with such care for days. As though I was newborn again, unbroken by the rough passage. Almost reverent in my presence, her slim pale hands rubbing ointment in circles onto my body like a blessing. A decade later, her own arms would be scarred with burns like a chef's, from the hours of angry labour in the kitchen— the slamming of hot wok onto the stove, the splash-back of spitting corn oil. Spoons and knives hurled into the sink, cutting board slapped onto the counter. A cacophony of pots and pans yanked from cupboards, the crackle of sizzling stir-fry like flames in hell— beneath it all the ballad of her frustrations, a spoken-word diatribe accompanied by kitchen implements. prismmagazine.ca 21 ALARM The baby's been kidnapped. It's not my fault! I scream into the wind as I run, lugging backpack and diary past the Korean convenience stores and Vancouver Specials of my childhood. The sky the colours of a Ming vase, goldfish swimming in milk. But of course it was— I'd been sneak-eating again, stealing out to the Super-Valu for a brick of ice cream and day-old Danish when the baby needed to be watched, tended. Was she the sister? The mother? The endless, intrusive self psychologists say show up in every dream? Then the fire alarm went off. 2:45am, red-hot and warbling, ululating through the building. Doors slamming along the hall, toilets flushing, fire truck careening down ashen city streets. Nervous laughter from the townhouse gardens. But we'd drown before we roasted— sprinkler heads like little guardian angels hovering over us every few feet. I'm still dressing, moving underwater slow, when it all dies down— the alarm sparking in short bursts, fizzing into uneasy silence. Bird-shaped shadows on the wall. I've grown too old for emergencies, real or imagined, external or self-wrought. Who knew there'd come a day when the face in the mirror, the passport photo, would be this one? In a few hours, the alarm's miniature twin will blare the morning news from the bedside table. 22 PRISM 51:2 SOMETHING HAPPENED Chinatown. Stacks of oranges for sale, globes of citrus fruit heaped into a gold mountain, gleaming in the midday sun. My parents jockeying for position amid the chaos of bargain-seekers, the slap and jostle of elbows and shopping bags— snatching produce from this mound of plenitude, a flood of fruit for pennies a pound. The wonder of living in a land like Canada, where there was so much food you could let it go to waste— toss out a mouldy bean or wilted lettuce, scrape into the garbage the last cold grains of rice from your bowl. My father had driven miles out of the way for this sale and he was smiling with relief, blinking the perpetual haze of wo try from his eyes— yes, here even the unemployed could eat, there would be no digging through the dirt for roots and worms. My mother's hands darted through the pile, squeezing, juggling, hefting an orb to her face for a sniff of distant Florida sunshine, yards of citrus trees where fruit nestled among the shiny leaves like gems. Her fingertips read the Braille of dimples and soft spots like fontanelles in the rind, searching for signs of rot— dots of green and white blight, the sunken squish of a bruise that meant spoiled flesh. I hovered on the edge of the crowd, the shrivelled po-pos who had known starvation shoving me aside on their way in. Bored, embarrassed as any ten-year-old by this display of need, yearning to go home to Gone With the Wind- I fantasized myself a budding Scarlett O'Hara in the skirt of stiff fabric I was wearing for the first time that day, powder blue, with the sheen and slipperiness prismmagazine.ca 23 of polyester. I was jiggling with impatience, pent up life. That's when the man came around the corner. A burnt gargoyle of a face, drunk at noon, a bum from nearby skid row— his first grab was sly, furtive, but when I stood mute and motionless as someone playing statue, his lips stretched in a rictus of pleasure and he came around again, and again, circling the block, thrusting his hand under my skirt while a few feet away my parents picked oranges. Was that all? A sale on oranges in Chinatown, my father out of work and worried, a man's grimy hand between my legs. How proud and grown-up I felt in this hold of silence, guarding my parents' little kingdom, keeping them safe in the discount supermarket. 24 PRISM 51:2 Alisa Gordaneer MARKET/PLACE Market Eastern Market stalls loaded with Satutday morning ghosts: I crave berries and lettuce, peppers, cucumbers, candy-red plums, tomatoes (bushels of tomatoes, bushels upon bushels) and the first corn and shouts of watermelonwatermelonwatermelonwatermelon taste it! But there are few vendors in this early blizzard. Snow vortexes across the shed's open floors. I buy flaccid collards, a paper bag of potatoes, a dozen eggs like condensed snowballs. One item from each vendor. A leek. Maple syrup. A purple turnip, skin withered by frost. Steam rises from coffee into a spatter of hail. Dinner will be a confused soup. But pretend abundance, dollars folded into gloves. Today, nobody shouts. An old man asks for spare change and gets a pale Mexican tomato instead. He salts it right there. Seeds catch in his beard. A drop of pale juice. Now that's something, he says. Place I drive across the freeway for milk. Park and lock. Slush crusts pavement, the automatic doors stick halfway. Aisles upon aisles. Cans. Jars. All the food has become cardboard, metal, glass, plastic. Suggested servings with no content, no context. Resemblance/remembrance gone. Even the meat, a barnyard divided. Cows recline on Styrofoam, diapered under cling film. Portioned representation, mere slices. Ham-pink, steak-red, chicken skin-flaccid. An iridescent trout, its eyes glazed white. I think of Eat up because the starving children, and Waste not want not. And You are what you eat. Boxes, cans, jars. Controlled substances. We consume. On a cereal box, happy children play basketball. We can't eat children. Or basketballs. What else could be inside? At least there's milk. Gallons of it, white plastic udders stabled in the cold case. And still nothing to eat. An old man asks for change and I want it too. He tells me this: a farm once stood on this site. prismmagazine.ca 25 EGGPLANT You've been choosing an eggplant from a cardboard box beside the market's door, standing for five, ten minutes mesmerized by thin purple skins, green caps. Wedged, blocking other shoppers as they pass. Standing and stooping as though you were kneeling in church instead of outside Wong's Groceteria in greying half-light. You're choosing an eggplant from a cardboard box in late November, when eggplants are scarce and the dark rises like bruised skin puffed black. It will open into smoke and seeds. Small-noted music because someone has told you baba ghannouj is the food for pampered old fathers. Your bag is already heavy: tahini, garlic, lemons like toys. Yet you're still choosing an eggplant. Because you want to dawdle in this flickering doorway, making the overhead bells chime as life passes in and out. You're choosing an eggplant to roast until it collapses inward, like your father's lungs: indulgence and indulged, rooted in one. You want to call forth taste where no taste can be found. To do one sacred task: spoon that rough paste into his still opening, hungering mouth. 26 PRISM 51:2 ELIMINATION DIET* (*a controlled experiment) what's safe: rice apples water what's not safe: asparagus, avocado, artichokes, almonds, bananas, berries, bagels, beef, blood sausage, bacon, and cinnamon, cardamom, cumin, cilantro, carrot, coffee, chicory, cannelloni, cannoli, cayenne, curry, collards, cheese, donuts, deer, daikon, duck, eggplant, eggs, flour, farina, fennel, farfalle, filberts, goosefat, grease, grapes, guava, horseradish, ice cream, jalapeno, jicama, kohlrabi, kale, lemon, lime, lutefisk, marjoram, mace, mushrooms, milk, nutmeg, noisettes, onions, oranges, octopus, olives, pineapple, pork, potatoes, peppers, pizza, peanuts, peaches, pears, quince, rabbit, radish, shrimp, salmon, soursop, turnip, thyme, tamarind, udon, umeboshi, vanilla, waffles, xanthan, xigua, yams, yogurt, zucchini, zabaglione. like breath, moving in. moving out. like your own mind, like your own sense. unanticipated reaction: all foods become impossible, every bite risks sullen potential. what's safe: the process of elimination eliminates. (*an uncontrolled result) prismmagazine.ca 27 Mark Sampson GOING SOFT THROUGH LUXURY And then the phone rings while you're enjoying a few preprandial olives. Or was it capers? Yes capers, those little green buds that you fish from the brine-filled jar in the fridge, which squeak when you chew them. You are enjoying a few preprandial capers in the late afternoon when the phone rings. Nothing wrong with that. Nothing wrong with capers or olives. This is who you are. Your wife watches you from her place at the kitchen nook, where she's chopping celery for the salad. You are stirring the ragout. She watches you move from the stove out to the living room to answer the phone. Your wife knows you better than almost anyone. Knows that you love being in your mid-thirties, that you take disproportionate enjoyment in it. The cardigan, CBC opera, the whiskey with an "e" before bed. She knows you don't believe the grey hairs in your beard or the paunch you're getting. Fuck them both, you've told her. / can see middle age the way Sarah Palin can see Russia. She laughed when you said that. This is who you are. You reach for the phone and realize that, no, it is definitely an olive. You're actually thinking There's nothing wrong with a few preprandial olives when you shuffle over to the cordless phone. The olive's pit is still in your mouth when you pick up and say hello. You'll remember that later. You'll remember plucking it from your mouth, that little spent bullet, and rolling it between your thumb and finger as the person on the other end delivers the news. You'll remember how the pit was an off-pink, the colour of pigeons' feet. You set the phone back in its charger. It lets out a tiny chirp when you do. You go back into the kitchen. Your wife looks up, sees the news written all over your face. Sets her knife down. "Liam?" she asks, and you nod, solemn. She gets up, the slinky curve of her hip maneuvering around the nook, and comes over to where you're standing. Pulls you in, puts her arms under yours and up around your back. "Poor little guy," she says. "Poor little guy," you say back. Except none of this will happen unless you go to university. You can't deny it. Yes, it all starts with you in first year, sitting on your dorm room bed watching a girl with short red hair and a rainbow belt flip through your CD collection stacked on the window sill. Fact: You are in love with this girl. Deeply, hopelessly, completely in love with her. This is before you knew what a rainbow belt meant. The girl is seventeen (was skipped ahead in school) and wants to major in classics. You listen to the judgmental slap of each CD case. You want to race to your own defense, say: Look, I was raised by farmers in a shapeless jerkwater! How was 28 PRISM 51:2 I supposed to know Janet Jackson wouldn't amount to much or that Michael Bolton was just lame? I need to bring you some real music, Rainbow Belt says. And does. In hindsight, you would've suspected Van Morrison or Bach. But instead, she brings Scarlatti. Who the hell listens to Scarlatti? Answer: the two of you, there on the floor of your first-year dorm room, your backs propped against the bed, your blue-jeaned thighs touching, the loose end of her rainbow belt, with its cold metal tip, splayed across the back of your hand. You listen to the piano music flood your room and think: Who knew fingers could do thaii Rainbow Belt looks at you. Yes? Fuck yeah, you reply. Okay. So. Do you make a move? Of course you do. You're 18 and living on your own for the first time. Sex is just one grimy dorm room bed away. But with a tenderness you'll appreciate later, Rainbow Belt kiboshes your advance. I'm seeing someone, she says, almost sadly. I think you've met her, that time we were all at the Student Union Building together for poster day. Oh. Right. So now you occupy two types of friendship, circles that overlap in a Venn diagram. In the first, you become Rainbow Belt's good buddy, as dependable as a sidekick. You're there during the biggest belly laugh of her life (a flight of fancy, now forgotten, told in the Day Student Lounge, something about the Muppets doing Aeschylus); and, more importantly, you're there to lend a shoulder when her father abandons the family for another woman. You intercept her at a crucial moment in that despair, invite her up to your dorm room to let her rage about her dad for hours. You listen intently; you console her. You make her laugh; you make her weep; you make her laugh while weeping, and she tells you she treasures you for it. And yet. In that second circle of the Venn diagram, you spend years watching over the flame-like flicker of her movements—the way she talks with her hands, the way she bounces between groups, the way she flirts with both genders—and still fantasize about having her, having her completely. You accept the fact that this will never happen. The first truly adult decision of your life. Except. Except let's fast-forward, say, five years. You've graduated, acquired an entry-level job in your field and moved to the other side of the harbour, where renrs are cheaper. You have a one-bedroom apartment, a George Foreman grill, a bus pass. Your commute is a ferry ride across the harbour to your city's small but bustling downtown. During the last two years of school you gained about thirty pounds and so decide to join a gym. You go Tuesdays and Thursdays after work and once on the weekends. You want large lean muscles, the cut look, like the pro wrestlers you watched on TV as a kid. You're surprised at how swiftly you get into shape. Soon, other changes come. You are maturing. Dramas on TV don't engage you as much anymote. Neither do Hollywood movies or episodes of Friends. You're rereading Douglas Coupland and discovering Philip Roth. You notice how radio commercials have started to annoy you—like a dog whistle prismmagazine.ca 29 you're only now beginning to hear—and so you switch stations, permanently, to the CBC. Then one summer evening, the phone rings. It's Rainbow Belt! She's back in the city after two years abroad. Had switched her major from classics to law during third year and got to do a really cool exchange program in Ireland. She's back now, articling at a firm downtown. She's bought herself a tiny condo in one of those ugly glass buildings that have metastasized along the waterfront. She relays this fact to you, sheepishly. You wanna come over? So you come over. The first words out of her mouth when she gets a good gawk at you are, "Wow, you look fantastic." And you do. Good pecs and a flat stomach and all that. She herself has put on weight, but it suits her, makes her vivacious. She's grown her hair long and dyed it black. She's also acquired an Irish harp tattoo on her shoulder—you can you see it peeping out from under the strap of her skimpy green tank top. Rainbow Belt welcomes you in, apologizes for the size and mess of her condo and offers you a drink. In three minutes flat, she's introduced you to whiskey with an "e," has educated you on the difference between it and whisky without an "e." You sit together on her white Danish couch and set your drinks on her coffee table, which is really just a trunk with enormous hinges. She apologizes, again, for the condo. It'll seem even smaller, she sighs, once Gord moves in. If he can ever sell his pub in Dublin and immigrate here. Your eyebrows fly up like loose balloons. Your face goes slack and a thousand questions pour into your eyes. She understands your confusion instantly, and wants to set you straight. You will never quite remember whether she spoke these words aloud or simply implied them through a kind of whiskey-induced osmosis: Look, don't call what I was a phase, because it wasn't. And don't call it experimenting, because I wasn't. That was who I was then, and this is who I am now. Right. Her nascent heterosexualiry, if it's even nascent, has suddenly made you uncomfortable. You've become acutely aware of her proximity to you on the couch. You try talking to her about other stuff—your job (she has no interest), her family (don't even go there)—but all she wants to talk about is Gord, Gord Gord Gord. It's so hard, she says, doing the long-distance thing, as if it were a Celtic dance with elaborate hops and complicated spins. She's scared Gord won't be able to sell his business and move here. She's scared she's made a terrible mistake, coming home and buying this condo while still so young and poor. She's scared, period. She's getting all weepy and maudlin—it's the whiskey with an "e," probably. And look at you, Mr. Confidence, moving in to comfort her, purting a hand on her side. You're convinced you wouldn't have the confidence to do this if you were still flabby and watched Friends. But you do have the confidence, the strength to be strong. And she reciprocates, puts hands on your sides, up your back really, to where those new racks of muscle are. She readjusts her legs on the couch to dtaw you in. Okay. So. In this circle of the Venn diagram, you learn that, up close, her dye job looks awful but is full of fantastic smells. You learn her chest is soft and 30 PRISM 51:2 yours is hard. In this variant on the situation, she takes her time pulling away from you and then wipes your saliva off her lips with the back of her hand. The moment ends with her wide-eyed, a little shocked, and saying, "That can't ever happen again." But you're not sure she means it. A new circle has been added to the Venn diagram. You're unclear where it overlaps, or what it all means. So back to those olives. You've taken up the habit of a few olives (or capers) before dinner. Nothing wrong with that. This is who you are. Such indulgences make you feel like you've arrived, like you've settled into a final, stable version of yourself. Indeed, you love what your life has become. Your wife is excellent at being your wife. Your job satisfies you and the fridge is always full of food. You love your routines—classical music in the morning, jazz in the evening, three newspapers at Sunday breakfast. But then you get the call that delivers the news. You can now say for certain that, yes, you had an olive in your mouth when you shuffled over to answer the phone. "Shuffle" is a mote accurate verb than "waddle." You are heavier, yes, but you still go to the gym three days a week. It's hard, mind you—you're not so much building muscle anymore as sculpting fat—but your wife is encouraging, doesn't begrudge the hours you spend hoisting weights and grappling with the elliptical machine. She herself does hot yoga. Who the hell does hot yoga? Lots of women in the neighbourhood, your wife informs you. And even a few men. Even a few men go to hot yoga, she informs you. You do not go to hot yoga. So you answer the phone with your olive pit and your cardigan on and your extra pounds of weight. The person on the other end who delivers the news is a friend of Rainbow Belt's. You'll remember how at first you thought she was a telemarketer—they call so often now—and the rudeness you had at the ready. You'll feel bad about that. You'll feel bad about the olive in your mouth. And you'll feel bad when the friend of Rainbow Belt's says, "Somebody's with her now but she just wanted me to call a bunch of people and ..." So I'm "a bunch of people" now Two minutes later, in your wife's arms, you cannot explain how much that stranger's words have hurt you. In the circle of the Venn diagram you now occupy, those feelings must stay unsaid. All you can say is "Poor little Liam" and all your wife can say is "Poor little Liam." And you'll reach for something then, in that moment, a strength you've taken for granted, a hardness you assumed was always rhere. You'll need to be strong for your friend. You'll reach for this, this comforting capacity within a younger you that Rainbow Belt treasured, and realize it's not there. There is a weakness in its place, a softness that has crept up on you. You realize you're a man who enjoys a few preprandial olives and has so few reasons anymore to be strong, to pull off the feat of strength Rainbow Belt will need from you now. But hold on a sec. You can't go blaming an olive for your shortcomings. Think about it. Think about what else might have led to this failure. There's a different version of you. A version that existed once, perhaps doesn't anymore. A mid-twenties version of you who quits that entry-level job (who the prismmagazine.ca 31 hell quits a job?) to go backpacking around Europe. Belgian beers and Prague spires and all that. You do work a little bit—bus tables in Paris, teach ESL in Poland—but mostly you just travel. Gain a knowledge and awareness of the world you didn't have before. You come home after a couple years. Admittedly, you're scared. Who wouldn't be? You're not sure what's next. But to your surprise, you get a job right away. A different, better job than the one you had before. You can't believe your luck. You're convinced it's not luck. You congratulate yourself on being ralented enough to get a different, better job. You reconnect with friends, including Rainbow Belt. Gord has, finally, moved to Canada and she's going to marry him. When you meet the guy, you wonder why. He's nothing like you'd imagined, nothing like what you'd expect an Irishman to be. He's not funny; he's not a good storyteller; plus, he's really short. And apple-cheeked, like a leprechaun. In fact, you will henceforth refer to him in your mind (but never aloud to her, except for that one time) as That Apple-Cheeked Little Leprechaun, or TACLL for short. You also notice that, after TACLL's had a few shots of whiskey with an "e," he's sort of mean to her. Overall, you're unimpressed with TACLL. But Rainbow Belt loves him and is going to marry him. Besides, she's pregnant. She's going to marry TACLL because she's pregnant. If it's a girl, they'll name her Cara. If it's a boy, they'll name him Liam. You go to their wedding. Keep your mouth shut except for You look so lovely, thanks for having me and all that. And she does look lovely. Gone is the dye job, her hair returned to its natural auburn flare; she's lost weight and her wedding dress is like sculpted frosting around her boobs. (TACLL, for his part, is wearing a white tuxedo. Who wears a white tuxedo on their wedding day?) You know you should be staring at Rainbow Belt as this marriage goes down, thinking your mawkish little thoughts about her, feeling that small, inappropriate ache at the sight of her being happy with somebody else. But you don't. You don't think that stuff at all. There's a problem. The problem is the wedding photographer. You can't stop staring at her. She's this sporty little thing with curly brown locks and brainy eyewear—the sexy librarian look, only with a camera. You can't stop watching her, watching her in acrion. The way she dips and crouches to get a good angle, the polite but firm flap of her hand to get people to Move In so she can take her shots. She's so professional. So jaunty. You can't help yourself. You find yourself chatting her up all night. She's busy as hell—it is a wedding after all—but she seems receptive to yout advances. You don't know it at the time, but the wedding photographer is your future wife. After several shots of whiskey with an "e," you find the courage to ask her out. She says yes despite that stupid grin on your face. You take your future wife for Ethiopian down on Quinpool (I love Ethiopian! she exclaims) and everything goes swimmingly. There have been other women in your life but nothing like this. Your future wife is completely outside the Venn diagram, overlapping with nothing, her own isolared circle, a singular version of 32 PRISM 51:2 herself. You dig that. You dig that a lot. After dinner, you agree to go out again. And after that, again. It all advances quickly. It's all great. Of course we'll go. Why wouldn't we go? It's a question your wife posits as you release each other and return respectively to the ragout and celery. It's a question that looms over your head even after you've retracted your hesitations with a flippant No, of course. Of'course we'll go. Why wouldn't we go? It's a question that lingers over the next three days, persisting in the air like a bad smell. It's a question that hangs in your face as you stand in front of the full-length mirror in your bedroom, getting dressed for Liam's funeral. The mirror. You don't recognize the man in it. For the first time, you realize he looks old. Lines in his cheeks turning to jowls, shading under his eyes the colour of gun barrels and those blasted streaks of grey in his beard. In this dress shirt, you can see how he's become a medley of hard and soft, of muscle and fat. Good arms and shoulders but an unmistakable paunch. He looks like a man who enjoys a few preprandial olives in the late afternoon and a whiskey with an "e" before bed. Your wife comes in then, wearing a tasteful black dress, and you turn from the mirror. She sets her small sequined purse on the bed so she can come tie your tie. This after you struggled to get the top button on your dress shirt to close. You're not sure whether your neck is this thick because you're in shape or because you're out of shape. At any rate, the button closes and your wife ties your tie, standing in front of you, forming the knot and tightening it around your neck. Strangling you like she secretly knows all your secrets. The first time you meet Liam is on your wedding day, a little gaffer in short pants and a tie, a rambunctious three-year-old who charms everyone within a 15-foor radius. The second time is a year later, when you run into Rainbow Belt at Costco and she tells you that TACLL has divorced her and returned to Ireland. You think about these two events and how one may have held clues to the other. How much did you see, how much did you detect, on the biggest day of your life? Answer: not much. But who could blame you? At the reception you are a mingling machine, hopping from guest table to guest table. And so maybe you don't spot how TACLL exudes a low-grade annoyance at every adorable thing his son does. Maybe you don't see how Rainbow Belt—her red hair now chopped into a bob, her stomach undulant with the weight she's put back on—sits at their table with her back like a yardstick, het hands folded in her lap. You are truly shocked, a year later, when she breaks the news to you over your oversized shopping carts in Aisle 16 at Costco, her hair long again and Liam propped on her hip. (His knobby knee jabbed you in the ribs when Rainbow Belt hugged you, a hug that lasted a bit too long, you thought.) Son of a bitch. Son. Of. A. Bitch. Really? She nods. He was never happy here, she says, never comfortable. And he really hated being a dad. You are aghast. You can't believe there are men who still do this sort of thing. And you roll your mind back to your wedding day, to see if there were signs, if there were indicators. But if there were, you didn't notice. prismmagazine.ca 33 Or maybe you did. Now that you think about it, maybe you did notice, but you were too caught up in the celebration, the once-in-a-lifetime decadence you'd waited so long for and felt you earned. Cake smeared in your beard and limo waiting outside and all that. So your future wife is now your wife. You decide to become homeowners. It seems like the reasonable thing to do. At the bank, you sit primly together in the loan manager's office, a united front of fiscal responsibility. The loan manager is trying to explain the mortgage rate he's offering you, but you're just not getting it. As you watch your wife nod appreciatively, you realize then how much smarter she is than you. Okay wait, you say. This is, like, Prime? This is almost better than Prime, the loan manager tells you. It's, like, Super Prime. It's Optimal Prime. Optimus Prime? you quip, and your wife throws you a withering look. So the two of you leave the bank with your Optimus Prime mortgage. The house you buy is in the west-end suburb of Clayton Park, which is ideal because your job has recently moved to a building near the Armdale Rotary and your commute, according to Google Maps, will only be 5.3 kilometres door-to-door. You don't realize it at the time, but you will have virtually no reason to ever go downtown again. Following the run-in at Costco, you and Rainbow Belt exchange a lot of emails. She and Liam are moving into a new place, a tiny clapboard house in the north end of the city. She promises to have you and your wife over for a meal just as soon as she's settled. It takes a year—renovations and all that. The one weekend she's free, your wife is not. Your wife has a huge wedding to shoot down in the Valley; she'll be there overnight. So you go alone. You bring a bottle of wine. Seems like the polite thing to do. You find Rainbow Belt's house in a state of delightful chaos: Liam's toys strewn everywhere, unfolded laundry piled on the couch and the boy running around like a maniac. When he sees you in his mother's doorway, he halts on the hardwood, plants both feet and looks up at you with unrestrained charm, even though he may not remember precisely who you are. You tousle his hair and hand Rainbow Belt the wine. She hugs you. You notice she's lost weight since you've seen her last. The two of you demolish the bottle of wine before she even gets dinner on the table. Thankfully, she has a second bottle handy to serve with the salmon steaks and asparagus she's prepared. You watch as Liam dutifully eats everything on his plate without being told to. You watch as the second bottle of wine comes and goes. Soon it's Liam's bedtime. So what will tonight's filibuster be? Rainbow Belt asks him. But it's only a single glass of water and two stories. She invites you into his little-boy bedroom—Power Ranger posters on the walls and a bureau covered in dinkies—and suggests that you read the stories to him. You demur but she insists. So the three of you cuddle in together, there on his bed, like a family, and 34 PRISM 51:2 read Doctor Seuss. It feels weird. But also not weird. Afterwards, the two of you retire to the couch, throwing the laundry into a nearby chair. When it's clear Liam's down for good, she breaks out the whiskey with an "e." Three shots later, you're barely coherent. You try to engage Rainbow Belt about anything else—the weather, the recent war in Lebanon, your Optimus Prime mortgage—but she will have none of it. You're back to where so much of this started, with her talking about Gord, Gord Gord Gord. He's nothing, she tells you. He's a fucking child support payment. He doesn't even write Liam a letter when he sends the bank draft from Dublin. I can't believe my marriage ended up exactly like my mother's. Do you say what you're thinking? Of course you do. You've had the equivalent of an entire bottle of wine and three shots of whiskey with an "e." The words just sort of slip through your teeth before you can stop them. How could you marry that apple-cheeked little leprechaun? You expect shock, perhaps rage. Perhaps a slap across the face. It's what you deserve. But instead, she places her forehead on your chest—the pec muscles there still firm, surprisingly firm, from all the hours you've spent on them in the gym—and lets out a weepy, frustrated I don't know. Okay. So. You black out there for a while. The planet rotates, it's now 4am, and you come back to find yourself lying on the edge of Rainbow Belt's queen- size bed. On, not in. You open your eyes and a grimy dread creeps into your stomach as you realize where you are. You pat your body frantically. Yes, thank God—you're fully clothed. You hear Rainbow Belt breathing along the other side of the bed. You look over. She's there, the covers pulled up to her arm pits, her back to you. Her shoulders are narrow, her hips wide and forming a tall mound in the duvet. She's wearing her PJs, thankfully. You scour your brain for what happened over the last several hours. You don't know. Anything could have happened. An infinite number of possibilities, of circles in the Venn diagram. But what matters most is what you do right now, the versions of your future you'll unleash with your actions, actions that could tear down everything you've built up for yourself, the life you've come to love. One stroke of her red hair would do it. One comforting caress of her cheek. You get up. You find your shoes. You pray you've sobered up enough to drive home. On the trip downtown, you and your wife discuss the last thing Rainbow Belt posted to Facebook before Liam got really sick and she disappeared completely. It was the simplest of status updates: ... will not cope. It hung on her page like an admonishment before the condolences started pouring in. I wouldn't cope either, says your wife, now, turning off North St. and onto Brunswick. I wouldn't. I don't know how she's doing it. Will not cope. It spoke of such decisiveness, the closing off of all other possibilities. And then you think of Liam, forever frozen in his one little circle. Liam, who got leukemia. Who the hell's kid gets leukemia? You haven't spoken to Rainbow Belt since that one night. You couldn't prismmagazine.ca 35 face the awkwardness. Then, a year later, Liam got sick, and it was even more awkward to call her. Even in the two years during which Liam was diagnosed, died, you did not call her. You did not call her. Not once. And you're ashamed of that. You and your wife pull into the parking lot of a stone church downtown. You haven't been downtown in ages, and you're a little ashamed of that, too. Ashamed of the decadent routines that have kept you in Clayton Park, that have softened you, that have tenderized you like meat. Olive by preprandial olive. You get out of the car and your wife takes your hand. Let's go be strong for your friend, she says. The wind picks up as you head into the church. It liberates a leaf from one of the trees near the door. You watch as the leaf twists and twists in the air, making random loops, but never see it touch the ground, t 36 PRISM 51:2 Jane Spavold Tims BEAKED HAZELNUTS Corylus cornuta Marsh. paired hazelnuts hang husks curve translucent, lime they ripen this year, they are mine uptight red squirrels agitate, on guard, we watch the hazelnuts ripen, slow as cobwebs falling, nut pie browning through the glass of the stove door green berries losing yellow, making blue dust motes in a crook of light float, small hooked hairs shine two more days hesitate and red squirrels bury their hazelnuts prismmagazine.ca 37 John Barton POTTAGE George A. Walker, Society Pea Soup Wood engraving, 1987 A time capsule few think not to open at will The soup can waits on the shelf, its label Bossed with a gold seal crisp as a flag The advertised contents our collective unconscious A reducrion to gelatinous brine We call eloquence, tagged As intellect preserved before use, language we cut With water, part diminishing part; to some of us: precious So many dented cans of it, metaphor in facsimile Reduced still further at the till Hunger priced to cheapen each nutrient, appetite cooking up Unearned cravings for poignancy, pro forma if anxious What we dish out unfit to hold salt, memoty's shill Each can a void we cast aside in a recycling bag. 38 PRISM 51:2 Zoey Leigh Peterson DIVISION DAY When the country broke up, someone had to clean out the fridge at the national archive. The task fell to Mitchell, not only because he had the smallest office to pack up, but because it was his hometown mayor who had started this whole mess, and the rest of the staff liked to half-pretend that they held Mitchell responsible. Also it was commonly known he would've volunteered anyway. After Mitchell drained away the various creamers and condiments, he was left with untold leftovers in reusable plastic containers, which he investigated for clues. That's when he noticed. There was one container for each region of the country—the former country—and each one provided a murky plastic window into the cuisine of that area. Or so it seemed to Mitchell. In point of fact, when the rest of the staff gathered to witness this miracle, nobody was entirely satisfied with how their own region was represented. Beet salad is more of a northern rhing, said Lome of his leftovers. His wife was from up north, he explained with some resignation, but if he'd known this was happening, he would've made corncakes. Mhina, proud northerner, said that she had never in her damn life eaten a cold beet, and perhaps softlanders should let people from the north decide what is or is not "a northern thing." Ruben complained that his coastal creote was lacking its sauce because of the nut-free policy a certain incomer had imposed on rhe breakroom. And Marcia and Patricia—who'd always shared lunches, and whose rivered city was being partitioned as they spoke—argued about white gravy versus brown gravy, swearing discreetly in their respective languages, which they both understood perfecrly. Even the refrigerator began to whine and strain. Hana and Lukas were rhe first to broker a deal. She gave him two leftover potstickers to put in his container in lieu of doughboys, and he donared his kasha-loaf ro stand in for buckwheat ribbons. Karina and Harlan conspired to create something like a traditional highland stuffing. Marcus began to gush about "pinkfish-and-peatips," a heretofore secret delicacy which had been kept from mainlanders. The breakroom pulsed with sympathies and schemes. Grandmothers were telephoned. Recipes were exchanged, scribbled on the back of old money from the coffee fund that nobody had taken to the bank in time to redeem. By five o'clock, they had it worked out. The containers were labelled and placed back in the fridge, geographically, a relief map of plasticwares. Then, standing back to admire, they noticed a gap in the terrain. There was nothing from this region, the capital. They couldn't think of what would best represent their adopted home, this city of tongues. So Mitchell was sent to fetch their beloved director, the only person in the capital who was actually from the prismmagazine.ca 39 capital. The director came and peered inro the refrigerator. He said, What, you think someone's going to keep this fridge running? Get your containers and go home, before the borders close. I 40 PRISM 51:2 Zoe Whittall SPRING AT 36 What is virtue, anyway? She swallows a melatonin pill at dawn and climbs into bed; the sun rises without our observation before we pull the heavy curtains together. On the kitchen counter a handwritten note reads 1 saved a man from overdosing on heroin tonight I think we know him from somewhere. Do we know a Matthew? He has beautiful green eyes. He said thank-you. I turn the note over and write To-Do. Today my tasks are simple. Boil the chicken carcass for soup and write a short story. Make some rice and vegetables to pack in Tupperware for her second night shift tonight; remember to be lucid, notice the details, describe the room, respect the reader cut the carrots so she won't choke; soften the onions three spoonfuls of peach yogurt in a glass jar I clutch a rounded mug of coffee while she sleeps, on either side of fate, destiny and wish. All failed concepts. What is virtue anyway. prismmagazine.ca 41 2. This week a train de-railed killing three and injuring 60 A ticket collector at our subway station was shot in the neck I woke up tense, as I often do wondering if I'm in the wrong movie I am not naturally a tense person I wonder if it is my medication for breathing That makes me this way; if it's my girlfriend Do I absorb her stress I would like a coffee, then to quit coffee To lose three lbs and then eat chips I contain a multitude of annoying human flaws And I'm tired of mid-thirties; and I don't want my friends to die in the ways in which they are this decade, one after the other in a senseless tumble 42 PRISM 51:2 Biking in the sun without sleeves is a miracle, is a salve Makes the bloodsport of bike lane ping pong, like a river raft trip in an Ativan haze Oh sun, you are a fraction of perfection Even though you're slowly aging me Certainty sun, I like knowing my friend Lisa has had the same phone number for ten years It's the only one I have memorized Besides my 858-2523 my childhood partyline Today our heads a pirouette of a madman in Norway; Amy Winehouse dead at 27 from booze. I have four slices of apple, a boiled egg; red jam in a small whire saucer; a circle of pepper and salr drawn on the plate I'm trying to write a novel and a film In this heat; I Used to Love running, sings a country voice. The table next to me is Pregnant, the table to my left breastfeeding Everyone appears anxious and nobody reads anymore prismmagazine.ca 43 HOTEL ATLAS You have a book of translations in Brussels You have climbed up onto the roof to take photos in Brussels You have twelve days left of touring in Brussels You realize your parents never taught you to travel in Brussels You have an itchy throat and variant paranoia in Brussels You are in room 426 at the Hotel Atlas in Brussels You read about YouTube composer Nico Muhly in Brussels You reproduce only what you understand in Brussels You are annoyed that writers are considered public intellectuals in Brussels You go to lunch with a painter and a diplomat in Brussels You don't know which fork to use in Brussels You have a girlfriend you don't feel like fighting with in Brussels You anesthetize your tonsils with black cherry lozenges in Brussels You do not correspond with Elizabeth Bishop in Brussels You have twelve days left of touring in Brussels You do not know how Asia feels about the book in Brussels You cannot nap without a slow fade in Brussels You have stopped short of crying out twice in Brussels You wish you knew how to buy the drugs that keep you charming in Brussels You are in room 426 at the Hotel Atlas in Brussels You wonder about kissing a man with a bruised shoulder in Brussels You say oiseau with a shy Montteal accent in Brussels You flirt with the other poet on tour in Brussels You cannot translate the problems with monogamy in Brussels You have rwelve days left of touring in Brussels You are happy to comment on that in Brussels You autograph your own name on the title page with a spelling error in Brussels You are in room 426 at the Hotel Atlas in Brussels 44 PRISM 51:2 Julia Zarankin BEAT, PULSE, STIR, MASH JL host my first dinner party in Missouri as an end-of-semester gatheting for my Russian language students. They show up to class four mornings a week, memorize paradigms, endure bingo with irregular verbs, act out skits on a limited vocabulary, play Simon Says until they master the names of most of their body parts, learn idiomatic expressions, sing along to Russian songs, declaim poems, parse contorted sentences. As a reward, I invite them to dinner. I imagine that my kitchen will be nothing like my mother's chaotic realm: last-minute recipe alterations and an adrenaline rush before the guests arrive. My culinary landscape will be an injury-free place of order, calm and recipes followed to the line, where crucial ingredients never go missing at the last minute. And already, I notice myself slipping. As I cook, I engage in a one-sided dialogue with Mark Bittman, the author of my cookbook, wondering whether it would be acceptable to add some extra cilantro to the guacamole. Would another egg for the frittata hurt? A little more cumin in the chickpeas? I had a vision of ending the meal with carrot cake, but find myself with only a muffin tin an hour before my students are due. I decide at the last minute that, tonight, carrot cake will masquerade as muffins. I tweak the ingredients in the muffin recipe to resemble my mother's carrot cake. More walnuts and raisins, less sugar, more nutmeg, perhaps an extra egg, one-to-one with the wheat and white flour ratio, and—why not—a teaspoon of vanilla. The muffins rise, some of them shaped like the onion domes on Russian churches from my lectures. Little enclosures of spirit. My students are greeted by counters laced with traces of flour, cinnamon and nutmeg. Linoleum floors crisscrossed with carrot peels. I used to watch my mother's hands in the kitchen. Coarse fingers, cracked from too much time doing dishes or dicing vegetables between piano students. Long before Iron C/?<?/~appeared on TV, my mother's cooking already resembled an elite sport: vicious, it demanded endurance and feats of memory. Without resorting to measuring units, her fingers intuited proportions and acted as barometers of consistency and taste. She would dip her index finger into the borscht before the guests arrived, taste it, clench her teeth and run to the liquor cabinet. Without explaining anything, she would add a capful of vodka and breathe, relieved. "Now I can taste a hint of my grandmother's borscht," she said. My mother's cooking was the intuitive science of remembering. I first called my mother for cooking advice the day I tried to replicate her eggplant dip from memory and accidentally over-blended the whole thing into a soup. prismmagazine.ca 45 I had just moved to Missouri and imagined the monotony of the geographical terrain would feel more hospitable if my apartment smelled of home-cooked meals. No matter how many ingredients I added, the liquid mass refused to thicken. "How do you make your eggplant dip?" "I like to add tomato paste. Back when I was growing up in Odessa we added raw onion and tomatoes. In Kharkov your great-grandmother braised the onions and added broiled peppers. The Shevchenkos from Bulgaria tell me they add feta cheese at the end." My mother dictates recipes the way she tells jokes. Punchline first. "Do you have the recipe written down?" "I have Aunt Maya's version in the recipe bag somewhere, but you know het recipes. It's like she leaves the important steps out on purpose." My mother still kept her collection of family recipes in the same indestructible Soviet plastic bag that had once held a coveted spot in our luggage when we emigrated. Sandwiched deep in a suitcase full of linen sheets and duvet covers that we intended to sell on the black market in Vienna, the recipes left the Soviet Union intact. "Can you send the recipe to me?" "What do you want to do with it?" "I want to make it properly." I could have told her I was trying to make a home for myself in the middle of Missouri, and failing. I could have told her the move felt like a mistake, the job wasn't turning out to be worth it. That I wanted to come home to Toronto. "Well, don't forget to squeeze out all the liquid from the baked eggplant insides and always use the pulse button when you blend them in yout food processor. Otherwise rhe whole thing turns to soup." If it hadn't been for an email from E-Harmony informing me that they didn't have a single match for me within a 200-mile radius of Columbia, Missouri, I might never have bought my first cookbook. I had already tried my luck with JDate, hoping to meet someone from a shared culrural background. I went on dates with other tortured academics, including a psychologist who grew up wirh a domineering mother he couldn't stop talking about, and various Russian- Jewish consultants who wore the requisite black leather jackets and ultimately determined that I was neither Russian nor Jewish enough for them. The whole time, my great-grandmother's mantra lurked in the back of my mind: "The way to a man's heart is through his stomach." Which I loosely translated as "you'll nevet meet a decent man until you learn to cook." I ordered Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything on the recommendation of a friend who understood my predicament. If my great-grandmother were still alive, she would have concluded that, at the age of thirty-one, I'd already run out of time. Under Bittman's tutelage I learned how to knead dough for baguettes. He told me how much pressure to apply, which muscles to flex, how to probe the sticky texture with my knuckles. I repeated the incantatory rhythm of his imperative verbs. Beat, pulse, stir, mash. When my phone didn't ring or my 46 PRISM 51:2 email inbox remained empty, I turned to my oracle. I devoured Bittman's lessons in washing and slicing leeks efficiently. Made mental notes on the proper way to roast and carve a chicken. I began to speculate Bittman's upbringing was much like mine, that clearly he was a child of displaced immigrant Jews, wanderers attempting to read logic into our culinary heritage. He had a mother like mine, whose eggplant dip became her only chance at conversation with family members she doubted she'd ever see again. He understood my mother's impulse, as a twenty-six-year-old immigrant recently transplanted to Edmonton and immersed in a language she could barely decipher, to reread family recipes that she had neatly transcribed on graph paper and had probably memorized. The recipes offered a moment of escape, a breath of fried-onion-infused air straight from her grandmother's apartment in Odessa. Bittman's tone offered orders that masqueraded as suggestions, steeped with possibility—just enough options and ideas for added ingredient—so that my sense of independence never felt compromised. I started off as an excellent student and dutifully stocked my kitchen with paraphernalia and equipment: measuring cups and spoons, cookie sheets and a food processor, a lemon juicer, a spatula, spices bought to approximate the colour scheme I remembered from my mother's spice rack, and a cast-iron frying pan, which Amazon.com referred to as a skillet. I stocked my pantry upon Bittman's wise recommendations: variously- shaped pasta, canned beans, spices, dried fruits and nuts, olive oil, vinegar and soy sauce. The apartment isn't what the students are expecting. They're surprised by my bare walls, my Spartan furniture, my piano, the collection of classical music CDs in the living room and organic cereal boxes in the kitchen. I can see them scanning my apartment for traces of another person, a sweater left behind, a toothbrush out in the open, shoes I might have forgotten to hide. Nothing. They make eye contact with me, but I can see their eyes wander, looking for vestiges, trying to interpret the meaning behind unopened boxes lining the wall of my study. I did not design the evening as a potluck, but one of my srudents brings homemade borscht. Andrei had spent a month in Russia this past summer, fallen in love with a Russian girl whom he hoped to marry, and now makes borscht according to her grandmother's recipe. He almost ruined the whole thing by adding three spoonfuls of mayonnaise to the soup, but his classmate Anna stopped him just in time. Nikolai arrives with a homemade foot-long deer sausage, made from the deer he hunted and killed a few months back. It's local and organic, he assures me, since he knows I do the bulk of my grocery shopping at the farmer's market. Part of the allure of the market is that it relieves me from having to shop at a grocery stote called Schnuck's, whose faux-European-sounding name reminds me that I'm living in mid-Missouri. Nikolai is older—a student in his late thirties who had developed a fascination with Russian literature and wants to read it in the original language. The others bring chocolates and flowers, just like our Russian textbook suggests in the section about hospitality customs. Even though we prismmagazine.ca 47 speak English, we address one another by the Russian names I gave everyone at the start of the semester. A week after our phone conversation, my mother's eggplant recipe arrived on my doorstep in a bubble-wrapped package, secured with duct tape on all sides. In all my years of schooling and all my trips to camp, every letter I received had been written in my father's hand. As a child, I found his Russian script easier to decipher since he took the time to write in block letters. My mother spiced up his neatly construcred prose with marginalia—kisses, hugs, hope you're eating healthy, don't forget to write your grandparents, we miss you!—and her words ran wild, sometimes curving around the edges of the page with added arrows, exclamation marks and pictures, but she could never sustain an entire letter. Propped against my apartment door, the oversized padded envelope hunched over slightly, waiting for me to rescue it. My mother had misspelled my address, writing "Forom" Drive instead of "Forum," and omitting an "s" in Missouri. She underlined each line of my address exactly as my father did, but wrote the rerurn address in the top left corner in larger letters than the destination. I opened the canary-yellow DHL package to find the entirety of my mother's recipe collection, with a post-it note attached to the plastic bag: The eggplants are in here somewhere! Call if you have questions! Kisses, Mama. One of the last of our Soviet-era relics, the plastic bag accompanied us by train from Ukraine to Austria, where we spent a year in Vienna in a Russian immigrant boarding house while waiting for visas to Canada. Then it flew with us across the Atlantic in February of 1979, when we landed in a snowy field that the stewardess called Edmonton. The bulky, creased, almost granular plastic may once have been green, bur rhat was during a former incarnation, before rhe bag had been folded, unfolded, washed and hung to dry on my great-grandmother's balcony in Odessa. We stopped washing plastic bags when we immigrated to Canada, but my mother srill treated this one as a prized commodiry. I once saw her reinforcing its broken corners from the inside with tape. I had tried to read my mother's recipes a few times as a child, but the lexicon stood impenetrable: scrawls on scraps of paper in hurried Russian script with measurements set down in grams and milligrams instead of cups and teaspoons. Some were recorded in uncerrain English script on lined index cards. Even though I spoke both Russian and English, I found the recipe bag operated in a language beyond my reach. Holding it upside-down by the reinforced edges, I shook the bag and watched recipes spill onto the carpet, the mismatched pieces of paper and scribbled index cards contrasting with my bare Missouri walls. My mother began collecting recipes when she started cooking seriously, immediately after marrying my father. From there I deduced that the bag must be thirty-one, the same age as me. I immediately recognized the carrot cake recipe on a lined index card with pumpkins drawn in the corners. It was written by Margaret Jackson, my mother's first Canadian friend. I had overheard a conversation about her disastrous marriage to Mr. Jackson, who turned out to be a philanderer, her emigration from Nordrhein-Westfalien, which I took to be a city in Germany 48 PRISM 51:2 rather than a province, the birth of her only daughter Steffi, by C-section, who consistently disappointed Margaret by preferring tennis and boys to Goethe and piano lessons. Long after my morher's friendship with Margaret Jackson had dissolved, her carrot cake recipe remained a regular fixture in my mother's entertainment schedule. The cake was different from the recipes she had brought with her from Russia, which were either custard-filled or shortbread-based. Vegetable cakes appeared exotic to my mother's immigrant taste buds; to her, carrots had their place in a pot of beef stew, or chicken or vegetable soup, or in a frying pan, sauteed with onions and garlic. So this is what Canadians eat, she thought to herself, and ultimately developed affection for it. The recipes tracked the evolution of my mother's cooking, and all her culinary phases: from Campbell's mushroom soup in a chicken casserole to marinated tofu, from white flour to whole wheat and then spelt, from butter to Crisco and back to butter, and a quick foray into macrobiotic territory and bee-pollen fruit- shakes. Even Margaret Jackson's carrot cake changed over the years. My mother replaced sugar with molasses, eliminated the white flour, doubled the spices and tripled the walnuts so the cake became denser and heartier until finally carrot cake disappeared altogether from my mother's repertoire of desserts, because it had left the land of cakedom and entered the realm of health-food. Some of the recipes were English lessons in disguise, which my mother learned in passing, on the phone with relatives who had emigrated a few generations ago. I remember eavesdropping as my mother wrote out words phonetically, as if English conformed to Russian spelling rules: A recipe for pumpkin cake called for half a teaspoon of salt, which she spelled "said," taking into account that the final "d" on many Russian words is considered "voiceless" and pronounced as a "t." When my mother spelled "zucchini" with a Cyrillic "14" at the end, and substituted the Italianate consonant cluster "cch" with a simple "k," I knew exactly what she meant. The end result looks like this: Zuk-M-n-I4. As if she could predict that almost thirty years later she'd have a dedicated reader parsing her syntax, interpreting her marginalia. She followed almosr every new English word with a Russian definition in parentheses. She reminded herself that chocolate chips were located in the same section of the grocery store as walnuts—a word she already knew. After our move to Vancouver, her recipes became more adventurous: Once out of our watchful relatives' reach, my mother discovered spices, wheat germ and ethnic cuisine. Before long, she had mastered the use and pronunciation of sage, turmeric, fennel, tarragon, curry, thyme and "marjoram"—with a stress mark on the first syllable. One scrap of paper listed the contents—eighteen dishes—of a menu my mother concocted in 1984 for my aunt, a published poet, and uncle, her chartered accountant husband. The meal—transcribed in a mixture of English and Russian—consisted of: liver pate hummus eggplant dip prismmagazine.ca 49 vinegret—a Russian salad made of chopped cooked beets, potatoes, carrots, onions, and pickles Olivier salad—a Russian potato salad made with eggs, peas, mayonnaise and copious amounts of dill; "Olivier" is meant to sound French caviar selyodka pod shuboi—literally, "herring under a fur coat" of beets and sour cream baguette and Ak-mak crackers marinated salmon cream of yam soup spinach and feta fritatta green salad ratatouille roast beef boiled beef tongue with wine sauce eclairs pound cake raspberry soup tea and coffee My mother's menu read like something out of the Ancient Roman res gestae tradition—a literary precursor to autobiographies. Emperor Augustus was the first to tell the story of his "deeds done," and his catalogue of glorious life achievements appeared on his funerary inscription. My mother's double-digit list of courses lacked direct mention of military conquests, but it represented no small fear in a kirchen with no sous-chef to do the prep work or dishwashers to clean up. Like Augustus, my mother was casting her image for posterity. "Do you cook like this for everyone?" the poet had asked after dinner. "I don't want my guests to go home hungry." My mother had grown up in a household where my grandfather would rather go without an extra pair of panrs than have his guests think he couldn't afford to put four extra courses on the table. "Why don't you serve more bread?" "Bread?" "Yes. Stuff them with bread." The published poet's golden rule of dinner parties. Yet, no matter how hard she tried, my mother never fully embraced the concept. I used to think that everybody's mother entertained by cooking for three days straight on little more than four hours of sleep and then unfurling a feast that continued until long after midnight. My mother's dinner table spread made up for her heavily accented English and her occasional grammar mistakes. I put out hors d'oeuvres: a cheese plate with crackers, homemade tapenade, guacamole with tortilla chips, hummus, grapes and melon. In my mother's recipes, I found a note that melon is a good palate cleanser. I slice Nikolai's deer sausage, but keep the bulk of it for myself, since Andrei unexpectedly serves us 50 PRISM 51:2 borscht as a requisite second course, which Russians refer to as the official first course, pervoye. "Professor, did you make all this food?" "Of course." "You cook, too?" Oksana asked. "Wow. Ochen' otlichno!" She had invented that expression herself—very excellent—and used it proudly, no matter how many times I told her that one would never qualify "excellent" with "very" "I've never tasted this," Vlad said, scooping up hummus with a cracker. "It's hummus. Middle Eastern." "What's this?" Anna said, her mouth full, pointing to the egg dish she had just taken a bite of. "Fritatta." "Where did you learn to cook?" I think for a minute. My students hadn't seen me preparing for their arrival, laying out a half dozen recipes, combining directions from each one, pacing frantically around the kitchen while the fritatta cooked and the chickpeas percolated, wondering about my last-minute additions and subtractions. They hadn't witnessed me scream at both my mother and Mark Bittman while tossing out my first attempt at cream cheese icing for my carrot cake muffins because I'd thrown in a cup of salt instead of sugar. Nor did they know that my hair wasn't wet from a last-minute desire to swim laps before the guests arrived, but because my attempt to extract the cheese plate from the fridge resulted in a poorly sealed Tupperware container full of hummus falling and landing on my head. The hummus they ravenously consumed had been delicately scraped off my hair and arranged in a Japanese bowl my mother had given me as a housewarming gift. "I have good cookbooks, and I use many of my mother's recipes." Going through my mother's recipe collection, I'd found echoes of her conversations in broken English and nosralgia-drenched Russian scrawled on restaurant napkins, note cards, faxes, other recipes, backs of bank deposit slips, torn-out Russian notebook pages, newspaper clippings, hotel stationery, dot- matrix printer paper. I'd worked my way through traces of moods, hints at desire, phone numbers and names I'd forgotten, trying to reconstruct a life I barely recognized. I'd caught glimpses of the woman who packed her life into twenty suitcases at the age of twenty-five and followed her husband and three- year-old daughter on a train through Ukraine, Poland and into a new world. The recipe for sheyka (literally, a "chicken neck") reminds me of our temporary one-bedroom immigrant housing in Vienna, where life revolved around our kitchen table. The labour-intensive delicacy of sheyka involved cramming stuffing into a "sack" made of chicken skin, sewn together and roasted. I held the skin tight as my mother stitched it together with a needle and thread, the scent of home still within reach. I don't remember my mother ever making sheyka in Canada; the process felt too arcane, too elaborate, and chicken fat schmaltz had already disappeared from our diets for good. In the beginning, I sorted the recipes chronologically, by geographical home, but my system broke down when I noticed my mother revisiting her prismmagazine.ca 51 culinary archive with a deft editor's hand. Almost every recipe includes changes to the original—additions, subtractions, clarifications. She didn't demarcate her life chronologically and I envied the way her borders had become fluid, the way she freely added a touch of cumin to her grandmother's eggplant dip and how she positioned guacamole next to Russian beet salad in her series of hors d'oeuvres. She had crafted a home for herself in the unlikeliest combinations and juxtapositions of ingredients. My students talk about the semester and their favourite characters in the textbook. Someone changes the CD to another, more familiar Russian band, DDT, whose song I had played in class when we studied case endings, and we sing along. "Do you like it here, professor?" Anna asks, suddenly. "I love teaching at MU," I answer honestly. And immediately, as if interrogated. "Was it strange to move here from the East Coast?" Masha asks. I wonder if they notice the barren walls of my apartment, the boxes I haven't yet bothered to unpack in my study. "I'd call it an adjustment," I say. Anna has anothet question. "Are we the best class you've ever had?" "Definitely the best language class." It's the only one I've ever taught on my own. But they don't need to know that. They smile, proud of themselves. Mitya proposes a toast, and we drink (Coke, water, orange juice) to a great class, a great semester and a great teacher. I blush and thank them for being wonderful. We had discussed Russians' love for toasting at parties and how the toasts deteriorate towatd the end of the evening. When you've had enough to drink, anything sounds plausible. We toast Nikolai for his tasty deer sausage, which he claims would have tasted much better with his homemade apple whiskey, and then Vlad toasts the deer that had a quick death, and then Andrei toasts Russia, and soon it's as if we are drinking for real. I 52 PRISM 51:2 Kate Kennedy ANOTHER WINTER ON THE MARSH To explain about the aquatics of this night, the tidal pull of the bar on Main Street, leaving winter enjambed in the door, half out half in. Snow melting on the rug as it plunges down the road. Moira mixing herself a Caesar to join some others. Nick as he joins her behind the bar, slipping easily from role to role, bartender even on his night off. The steam from his cup of tea melting the ice in our drinks. Then a dog, black, surging among the stools, now behind the bar too, tail beating gallons of drink mix, boxes of wine, head nudging Moi as she fills a dish amid the rest of the spill. Two sodden sleds dripping as their stoned owners slide into a table in the corner. Slush soaking into the chairs, pints coursing through a dubious clientele so merrily oblivious to who's waiting, who waited on this night as it circles and drifts, a blizzard that's only half outside. prismmagazine.ca 53 LA CUMBRE, ARGENTINA Adventure finds us in the triangular restaurant canary walls and red tin mailboxes, bright communique. With the scarfed owner arrives a load of wood for the stove necessity of the shoulder season. Recently arrived from the Horn we fairly glint in surroundings so suggestive of expedition, dispatch. May, it's austral fall and the days are scorched, the nights whistling. Still our manner runs a little unnecessarily ruddy-cheeked as though in gaiters or goggled, our tired donkeys lashed skis just out of sight, very last of the pemmican in our palms. All our pedesttian discoveries, boozy meanders here lent a sudden whiff of some true find, some late frontier as we plunder curries and pilafs, another bottle of Malbec, cry, Look, you home-lubbers, all we have stumbled upon! 54 PRISM 51:2 Chris Calvin BREAKFAST UNDER THE BODHI TREE Oometimes in summer, ants drop down from the dangling aerial roots and gnarled boughs of the bodhi tree. The neighbours joke that of all the trees lining Bach Dang Avenue, ours has the most ants. Yet we still sit here, drinking Thuy's iced coffee and brushing the tiny red creatures away before they can bite us. I eat breakfast in the company of this tree and these people almost every day. Our lane runs perpendicular to the avenue, with its two-storey pastel cement buildings on one side and a branch of the Perfume River on the other. Each morning, my husband's cousin Thuy and her friend Ha set up their stands at the foot of the lane, under the tree. A type of banyan, it's at least twenty metres tall and produces pea-sized green figs that turn purple, then black, as they ripen. My neighbours call it cay Bo De, the Buddha tree. It was under one of these that the Buddha sat awaiting enlightenment. It's still dark when the generators for my neighbour's ice machines rumble into action and I hear Thuy's alarm clock through the wall dividing my house from hers. At four thirty the first cyclos clack past to pick up the rectangular bricks of ice. The neighbours' dogs goad each other to bark. I brush my teeth, rush into my clothes, and step outside to help Thuy carry her plastic tables and chairs down to the terra cotta-tiled sidewalk overlooking the river. Whenever I'm not booked to lead an early tour, I give her a hand to set everything up before her first customers arrive. A rooster crows, his voice like a rusty hinge. In the bluish pre-dawn half-light, I wheel out the glass and metal case containing eggs, frying pan, hotplate, and homemade garlic-scented pate for banh mi. The wheels snag in the broken pavement. I cross Bach Dang in a slow zigzag, the motorbikes and cyclos flowing around me, and ease the case up over the curb to its spot by the massive tree trunk. If four people encircled the trunk with arms outstretched, they'd barely touch each other's fingertips. On the side of the trunk opposite to Thuy's breakfast stand, a waist-high ochre-coloured cement enclosure surrounds an altar for those who died in this part of Hue' during the Tet Offensive of 1968. On Thuy's side, a small, sand-filled blue and whire ceramic pot sits in one of the knotted crannies in the bark. The pot bristles with red-dyed bamboo stems of burned incense. Thuy pushes three new sticks into the sand, the smoke curling upwards into the shiny heart-shaped leaves. "The bodhi tree is a symbol of longevity," she tells me. "This one has been here since before any of us around here can remember." In another nook, a birdhouse-sized wooden am, an altar with three walls and a peaked roof, shelters three cups of rice wine, a vase of chrysanthemums, an incense pot and a tiny plastic comb. We burn incense here for the spirits of neighbours who have passed on. prismmagazine.ca 55 One morning, as I sweep the tiles free of bodhi leaves, two elderly women approach, arms swinging, out for a brisk walk before the morning heats up. "Looks like there's a new person selling here," one says to the other as they draw near. When I smile at them, they stare, giggle, cover their mouths, and scurry on, glancing back and whispering. The other expats living in Hue' are teachers, doctors, de-miners, and owners of fancy restaurants. None sell food on the street. Thuy arrives, lugging buckets of water for washing glasses and dishes. She keeps everything sparkling clean. Laughing, I tell her about the two women. She laughs so hard that she has to sit down. She's always amused by the way the local people react when they hear me speak Vietnamese or see me doing anything they don't expect a foreigner to do. Usually, it's something mundane, like lining up to get an official document or buying a sleeping mat at the market. Thuy forgets that she used to react the same way. I savour the chocolaty flavour of my first iced coffee and watch the sunrise, the joggers and the reflections of trees and houses on the water, still and then rippled by a rowboat. The bread girl unloads her wicker basket from her bicycle. She extracts twenty baguettes from under a purple cloth. Thuy piles them up in her glass case, reties her shoulder-length hair into a fat ponytail and asks after the health of the girl's mother. Even as the girl cycles away, two young boys in white shirts and navy-blue school trousers pull up. The taller boy, sitting on the bike's book rack, hands over a few ragged bills. Thuy asks them if they've done their homework and if their grades are good. She slathers two baguettes with pate, tucks in some sprigs of coriander and wraps a square of newspaper around one end of each sandwich. Until Miss Ha arrives, most of the customers come for coffee. Ha gets up at four to cook, then loads up her bicycle for the half-hour ride over. She carries her coal box, soup cauldron and teapot on the tack over the rear wheel. A basket of dishes, herbs and condiments hangs from the handlebars. Beef noodle soup is the most popular breakfast in Hue', but banh canh soup is a close second. Miss Ha makes hers with fat pink crab dumplings. She has rarely missed more than two or three mornings in each of the twenty-one years since she first set up her charcoal box under our tree. A small crowd gathers on the low stools forming a semicircle around her battered aluminum pot. When I catch her eye, she nods and ladles pork stock and crab dumplings over broad rice noodles in a china bowl. She nestles a quail egg into a handful of chopped coriander on top, followed by a sprinkle of pepper-salt and a dollop of chili paste dotted with crisp pork fat. As I eat, a few over-ripe figs plummet from the tree, splatting the tiles with brown goo. My neighbours howl with laughter when I nickname it cay ait chd, the dog-turd tree. Then they slap at the tiny biting ants. I've heard that in India, people eat these figs, which are so much smaller than the ones we eat in the West. When I ask if people in Viet Nam eat them too, my neighbours look at me strangely. "Who would eat that?" "Crazy!" Slap, slap, slap! Tall, white-haired Mr. Anh pulls up on his motorbike with his miniature dog perched between his knees. He joins the group of neighbours arguing about 56 PRISM 51:2 the football game televised the night before—which team won, and who has lost money betting on the wrong side. Mr. Anh buys Bong Da, the soccer newspaper, from the wizened old man with a missing thumb who walks between the tables, offering his armload of daily newspapers. The neighbours lean over it, fingers stabbing at statistics, and the argumenr escalates. I place my stool on the parapet, drink a second coffee and watch the river life and the rippling reflections of the sunlit buildings on the opposite side of the water. At the base of the parapet, a lone man climbs out of his rowboat to scoop snails from the riverbed. Boats chug by and slide under the arch of the Gia Hoi Bridge. The black silhouette of the bridge is mirrored in reverse on the water. One boat transports oil drums. Another carries pineapples bound for the Dong Ba Market, and dragon boats head out to take the first groups of toutists to the Thien Mu Pagoda and the emperors' mausoleums. Several neighbours buy their coffee and breakfast to go. Ha ladles the banh canh into clear plastic bags and twists them closed with elastics. Nothing spills out. I walk back to our house to fetch Grandmother's chipped blue earthenware bowl for Ha to fill. Grandmother sits in her low chair outside our front door, waiting for me to bring it back up the lane. Just as the sun's hot rays poke through the branches of our tree, the rau muo'ng woman passes, waddling under the weight of the baskets of water spinach suspended from her yoke. Thuy sometimes buys all her fruit and vegetables for the day from the yoke-slung baskets of these itinerant women. She calls out: "Oi! Rau muo'ng!" Turning, the woman peers at us from under the brim of her conical hat. Her gap-toothed smile creases her face into a network of lines. She lowers her baskets to the pavement and eases herself into a chair. Thuy pours her a glass of tea. They trade gossip and the woman giggles at Thuy's juicy tidbits. Thuy knows everyone in the neighbourhood and misses nothing. They talk about the storekeeper's niece, who is twenty-eight and still has no children, and they discuss the sums of money a neighbour spends for her day-long len dong trance ceremonies. Then rhey whisper about the family who had gambled all their savings away and had nothing left to pay for their son's funeral. Thuy tells the woman how our neighbors all pitched in to take care of the costs. The rau muo'ng woman rolls the thin cloth of her loose pants up to her crotch, revealing bony legs draped in sagging skin. Shouldering the load of leaves, she stumps down the cement stairway to the water's edge. She wades in, plunges the baskets of leaves up and down, and raises them to let the water stream through the woven reeds. She pulls out two bundles of water spinach for Thuy before she rolls her pant-legs down and, eyeing the oncoming traffic, sets off down the road. As Thuy and Ha bring the chairs and tables back up the alley, repack Has bicycle and sweep up their patch of sidewalk, the che woman comes with her own glass and metal cart, and her multicoloured "sweet soups." At eleven, school children pour into the streets and line up to buy treats before lunch. My little niece Ca, Thuy's daughter, will clamour for me to buy her a glass of iced lotus seeds in syrup with coconut cream. prismmagazine.ca 57 Here with the people in our xom, our neighbourhood, I feel as if I'm taking breakfast with family. Some neighbours stroll out to the bodhi tree still wearing the clothes they slept in. Others arrive in pressed trousers and crisp shirrs for a quick soup before work. The "uncles" sip bitter coffee. The two new mothets nurse their babies, nibble banh mi, and swap stories. Thuy buys hopes of riches from one of the old women and grubby urchins who walk all day in worn-down plastic sandals, selling lotto tickets. Sometimes, if I have an early-morning tour, I include a stop here for tourists craving caffeine. I tease Thuy that I'll miss her delicious coffee if she wins the jackpot. "I'll still make coffee," she says, "but when it rains, I'll take the day off" During monsoon season, Thiiy and Ha string up a blue tarpaulin and everyone gathers under it, adjusting the chairs ro avoid the rain that drips through the holes. In cold weather, we wear puffy winter jackets and huddle together around Has coal box. It's the only time I dfink my coffee hot. Thuy breaks into a wide smile. "I'll buy a building and open a real cafe. Then it won't matter what kind of weather we get." Ha shakes her head. "It wouldn't be the same without your banh mi and coffee. If you left, maybe I wouldn't sell here anymore." I srop here every day, though sometimes just for a quick coffee before going elsewhere for breakfast with my husband. The neighbours may ignore each other or not see each other for most of the day, but the tree brings us all together each morning. It's my favourite place to be during my favourite part of the day. Even during ant season. "I'd miss you both," I tell them, f 58 PRISM 51:2 Lais ha Bosnau BITE MARKS You don't want to leave bite marks on a man's shoulder to have another woman notice them. His shirt should not have been off. It wasn't that hot. She slept with him first, you were with another before her, your swaps separated by months then weeks. What kind of traveling companion was she, dressed like you, journaling just as furiously? You said goodbye to each other in India, Except you couldn't say it, one of you in a silent retreat, the other withdrawing out of the country. It was Valentine's Day. Years later, drunk, she tells you that she was in love with you, briefly, foolishly, the way those things happened. Years after that, you remember when you switched lovers, hypothetical same-sex affairs, but you can't quite imagine that any more. You feel old enough to know what it's like when both men and women stop looking. You buy boxes of apples from the orchard, sink teeth into skin, leave them unfinished, souring in air. prismmagazine.ca 59 NOVEMBER Dishes continue, I don't. The window, this feeling, the evening blinks and poof What happened to all that light? I come out of corners, swinging with lame suggestions, palms open, waiting to meet with something they can hold. A sharp-shinned hawk dives and a quail hits the pane behind my chair and bang! there goes my concentration. Boots pulled on, I go outside to see the damage but it's only feathers. The larger bird will eat the smaller elsewhere and I'll find nothing, not even in spring. 60 PRISM 51:2 SHAME, REVISITED Other people do it better, I'm sure. These kids requiring costumes, gifts, something like talent, balanced just so. These kids are costing me some nights of sleep, some sense of mid-level sanity. Other people do it better, I'm sure, but they seem to love me for it, or despite. I manage crafts, pumpkins, candy—consumption something like talent, balanced just so— then the party we go to puts me to shame, lanterns slung through trees, witches cackling, "Other people do it better." I'm sure I'll feel okay with a drink in my hand. My baby lion roars around the party, unsteady, showing something like talent, balanced just so. I hope for her so much more than a cat costume unpeeled, cold skin against a vinyl seat, thinking, "Other people do this better, I'm sure." Sweetheart, don't reveal too much, too early or remembering will become the same as to forget, something like a talent, balanced just so. prismmagazine.ca 61 Martin James A insley THAT AIN'T ME YESTERDAY I'm gonna kill a man tonight. I keep running the words over in my head and they ain't quite making sense, like it's somebody else talking and I'm missing the gist of it. But nobody's talking; it's just me. I'm gonna kill a man tonight. Maybe it's sitting on this barstool, toed up to a bar I sat at a hundred times before, watching a hockey game I saw a hundred times before—I don't even know who's playing—the TV stuck between bottles of Canadian Club and Bunny's display case of old rodeo trophy belt buckles. Maybe that's what makes the idea hard to digest. How nothing seems any different. I never killed nobody before. —You know Alicia's not workin' tonight, eh, Duck? says Bunny. We're Bugs and Daffy. —Yep. I know. I'm meetin' Carl. I scratch my neck. I shouldn't, but fuck, it's itchy. Gotta get some more cortisone. Tomorrow, maybe. Fucking Kamloops. I keep ending up on this same fucking barstool. Bunny's giving me the eye. I flick the rim of my glass and nod and he brings me anothet CC & 7. I put a pack of Exports on the bar and Bunny sets down an ashtray. Like turning over cards, me and him, with the new smoking ban, but fuck 'em. Nobody checks this shithole. It ain't worth their trouble to save a bunch of washed-up rodeo cowboys and loggers and middle-aged fucking drunkards and drifters from killing rhemselves of lung cancer. They'd jusr as soon bulldoze the joint and put up Spanish-style condos. I guess it ain't strictly true that I nevet killed nobody before. If it wete, I wouldn't be sitting here with killing in mind. But that first killing wasn't like this one. It wasn't planned. I was there, but it wasn't my fault. That one I'm sorry for. That one I'd take back if I could. Carl and me, we know how it went down, and I wish I could have stopped him. But he went up for it, judge and jury, and I didn't. But that's fair, cause it wasn't me that did it. Somebody's put Johnny Cash on the jukebox, so it looks like some hockey player on tv is singing I fell into a burnin ring of fire I went down down down, when Carl walks into Bunny's. —Fuck it's cold out, eh? Sute come up fast. Carl hoists himself onto the stool next to me and Bunny clunks an open Budweiset on the bar in front of him. —Cold enough, I say —Fuckin' A, Carl says, slipping a black toque off his bald head. —I was out in my shirtsleeves a week ago. Figure it'll snow tonight. Carl takes a swig of beer. —Wasn't sure you'd show. What'd you decide? —I'll do it. And you'll keep shut up. —C'mon, Duck. Don't be like that. We go way back. What's done is done, and don't forget who did the time. This is business. Nothin' changes. 62 PRISM 51:2 I turn to look at him, but he's stating at the TV. He's a wall of solid muscle. A spiderweb tattoo crawls out of his collar and up the neck to his ear. —Nothin' changes, I say, but I'm not sure whether I'm asking or agreeing. —Look, you're gone for a day, make the delivery, and it's over. Till the next one. Like fallin' off a log. We watch the game quietly for a few minutes, then Carl says, —Good. So, tonight? I nod. —Ready to go? —Yep. We finish our drinks. I let Carl pick up the tab and we leave together. Outside, he starts for his car and I say, —Just come with me, man. He hesitates. —I can drop you back here later. I'm comin' back into town before I light out. To say goodbye to Alicia. He shrugs, puts his toque on and climbs into my truck. Because of the cold, I guess, the engine won't catch. Two tries. C'mon, motherfucker. Three. Turning over slower. This can't end in Bunny's patking lot. Take a breath and a five-count. Carl starts to open his trap and the old girl roars to life on the fourth turn. I crank on the heater and light a smoke, letting her warm up a bit. —Clinton's place, tight? I pull out of the lot and head out, away from town. I was counting on this. Clinton lives on some forest acreage up out of the scrub. Way off the highway. No sightlines. But we're not going that fat. I need to ascertain some facts. —Clinton know? —Know what? —Everything you know, I say. —Gets more complicated if it goes past you and me. —No, man. Just me. I told him I'd take care of you. If Clinton knew what I know, my market value would diminish, savvy? Besides, I figure history counts for something. This is between you and me. I believe him. Carl's a rattlesnake, but he's no liar. Half an hour out from Bunny's I pull off the blacktop onto a hard-packed gravel road. We're into pine and starting to climb. No light but the Chevy's headlights slashing the road ahead. After a couple of switchbacks I pull over. —I gotta take a leak. I say it the way I rehearsed it, and sure enough, I gotta piss. I leave the engine running and step over to the ditch. When I'm finished, I walk around the back of the truck. It can't be this easy, but when I reach for the tailgate my hand is shaking like a leaf, and— Something's coming up the road. A low rumble, but I don't see any lights in the trees. Helicopter? What is it? It's nothing. It's my fucking heart pounding in my ears. I reach under the tarp and pull the Ruger out from where I stowed it. I slide back the breech-bolt and snap a cartridge into the chamber, walk back to the driver's-side door, open it and point the rifle at Catl. —Show me your hands. Roll down your window. You got a gun. Tell me where you got it stowed, prismmagazine.ca 63 then take it out real slow, like it's your daddy's underpants, and drop it out the window. Carl's real attentive. —I got a .45 in my coat, he says, and draws the zipper down and carefully takes it out and hucks it across his shoulder. It makes no sound in the snowy ditch. —What are you doin', Duck? I tell him not to budge as I reach in behind the wheel to cut the engine and pocket the keys. I scoot around the back of the truck and find his pistol in the ditch. —Now get out, I tell him. —I knew we shoulda taken my car. —I ain't workin' for Clinton no more, and I can't let you talk to Alicia. Stand up there, I say, and wave him up into the headlights. —C'mon, man, we talked about this. What's the problem? The money's good and— —I almost got caught the last time. I'm forty-two. I can't go to prison. I want out — —You want out— —and if Alicia ever knows I was thete that night, me and her are finished. I got a. ... maybe I got a future with her. You know? Chance to settle down and be somethin'. You got no right to fuck that up, after what you done. —What / done? So, what, Carl says. —You're gonna kill me, now? I did eight fuckin' years, man, and I kept my mouth shut the whole time. I coulda taken you with me. You think I didn't want out? You never thought it was your goddamn fault I was there in the first place? —That's history. —History You don't know about fuckin' history. This is history, he says, clawing at his tattoo. —This is history He turns and pulls his coat up his back, showing a thick, ragged scar that runs diagonal from under his belt to his right shoulder blade. —Cocksucker. Well, if you're gonna shoot me with that thing, lemme enjoy a smoke firsr. He holds out his hand and I toss him my pack of Exports, but he can't catch it with the light in his eyes and it hits him in the stomach and falls at his feet. —Lighter's inside, I mumble. —That was twenty years ago, Carl. Once he's gor a lit smoke in his mouth, he tosses the pack back and I light one up myself. —And I spent nearly half that in the pen, Duck. For what you did. —You killed him, Carl. I was drunk. I can hardly remember what happened. —Yeah, your memory never was too good. He takes a long drag and the cigarette crackles. He blows smoke rings into the light and says, —Gonna do it? —Huh? —Gonna kill me, or not? That's what you brought me out here for, isn't it? I raise the rifle and point it at his heart. He smirks and takes another drag. I point it at his face. The rifle shakes in my hands. Fucker fucker fucker. I lower the barrel to his chest again. —What's the matter, Duck? I back away keep the Ruger trained on him. 64 PRISM 51:2 —Can't do it? He puffs out another smoke ring. —Shoulda done some time. Woulda hardened you up. Your problem is you never lived with what you've done, what you are. I lived with me, man. That's what prison is for. Everybody should get the chance. I open the passenger door, roll the window back up and slam the door locked, then I walk back around the tailgate, keeping my sights on Carl all the way. —You always was full of self-tighteous bullshit. Like I evet had anybody but my own self. —Just keep runnin', Duck. You gonna leave me here, you sorry piece of shit? I ain't gonna freeze to death out here, if that's what you're hopin' for. Fact, I'm gonna walk back to town and when I get there, I'm gonna have a chat with yout little Indian girl, there. Ain't leaving out a single detail. Let her live with it for awhile. And then I'm gonna find you and whip you blind. Earliest fuckin' opportunity. I climb back into the truck and start the engine. Punch it in gear and floor it. Carl dodges toward the ditch. He hammers the door panel with the heel of his fist as I fishtail into the road, spraying gravel. I drive fast, skidding tound cotners, and find my way back to the main road. There's a forest service campground I know of. ONE WEEK AGO The rowboat sways a bit in the wind blowing out of the East. I turn up my collar and dangle my beer bottle between my knees. Figure I'm lucky, I been a brush- ape this long and still got a thumb ro dangle a beer by. Guys I know've lost whole limbs to a thrown-back spar or kicked-back power saw, or just plain old slipshod fuckin' carelessness. The water ripples washboard-clean and some ducks kick up a fuss near the shore. Alicia's got het line hanging off the bow, but I packed mine in a while back. —What's the matter, there, Duck? You done fishing? —Ah, this was your idea. I don't mind being in the boat, but fishing's a bit much. I never did see the allure. She doesn't want to, but she laughs anyway. —Har de har har. Dork. —Hey, Alicia, I say. —What d'ya call a cowboy with his brains kicked out? —Duck? she says. —That's funny. Nah, it's a logger. She laughs again, freely this time, a sweet, high whinny of a laugh. I take a swig of beer. —What d'ya call a logger with his brains kicked out? —Already heard it, she says. She's trying to stop laughing. —A fisherman. I grin and light a smoke. —Gettin' cold. Reckon we oughta head back soon? —In a while, she says. It's been sunny all day, ptetty warm for Octobet, but it chills fast, now, when the sun goes. The aspens and willows among the pines on the shore are mostly bare, white trunks against the datk evergreens, like the forest's veins. The sky has prismmagazine.ca 65 a streaky ribbon of pink cloud. Cold to look at. Seeing Carl last night's put me in a stew. It's blackmail, pure and simple, but what can I do? I gotta go back to working for Clinton. With Carl looking over my shoulder. How long? —Duck, she says. —I've been thinking. Thinking I might go back to Williams Lake. To the Tsilhqot'in. Take Mom back to live with her sister. Alicia reaches into my coat for my cigarettes and lights one up hetself. She takes a deep drag. —So she can die at home, you know? She needs more and more care, and I'm trying to hold down two jobs here. It's just me. She's leaving? Fuck. I've only been seeing her for a couple months. Did Carl say something? Alicia's a teacher, but she's only getting sub work in Kamloops, so she waitresses at Bunny's. I didn't know she was Archie's sister at first. I figured the family moved away from here long ago, but she showed up at Bunny's this summet, 'bout the time I finished up that last job for Clinton. Nobody comes from Kamloops, but evetybody comes back. I ask her why she did. She tells me when she finished up high school she went off and got herself a degree in history and English. —I grew up in denial, goes her joke, —but I went to school in Vancouver. She lived in Langley a few years and came back to Kamloops to take care of her momma when her momma's boyfriend died in a highway wreck. —He was a long-haul rruck-driver, she says. —White guy from northern Quebec. Lou. Lucien. Told really funny stories. He fell asleep at the wheel—probably drunk—and drove a truckload of fresh-milled lumber into the ditch. He was a drunk, but he was good to Mom, especially after Archie died. Lou never lost a job. Except that last one. —Why'd you all leave Williams Lake in the first place? —The short answer is it was a shithole. Especially for Natives. This was the 80s. My mom and all her brothers and sisters had gone to the residential school. Had all their language and culture beat out of them. I'm the end product of that process. I don't know three words of Tsilhqot'in. Haven't lived on my people's land since I was three years old. I didn't even know anything about those schools until I went away to university. Mom never said anything about it, except for the time she got to go to Montreal in '67. She was in a school pipe-band ot something, and they played out there for the Expo. She loved that. Still tells that story, but she never says anything else about that school. Anyway, Mom ended up off the reserve, married to a Dutch farmer—my father—who beat up on her, and one day she just had enough. She dips her cigarette in the lake to snuff it out, then drops the filtered butt into the plastic bag she brought along for garbage. —I figure I could get a pretty good teaching job there, maybe for the Nation, on one of the reserves, she says. I can't read nothing in het face. She skims her fingers on the skin of the lake. —If I did take Mom to Williams Lake. If I did that, I wonder if you'd come along. I know we haven't known each other long- —I already left there once. When I leave somewhere, I like to stay left. —You came back to Kamloops. 66 PRISM 51:2 —Yeah, 'n' look what happened: I ended up with you. She laughs, but I know it ain't that funny More'n she does. —Maybe you could find work as a ranch-hand, she says. —Do something with horses. You keep telling me that's what you want to be doing, rather than logging. Get a cushy job on a dude ranch, telling your whoppers to German tourists while you ride the tange. You're a born cowboy, Duck. —Yeah, I'm a regular John Wayne, I say, but she's right about me. Working in the woods, I might as well be in a coal mine. Claustrophobic, is the wotd. The hills to the West of the lake are blanketed in shadow, now, the sky glowing pink and orange above. Some pale white lights appear here and there in the trees. Chimney smoke in falling columns. I'm shivering. If I went to Williams Lake, Carl'd find me. —We oughta get back, I say. —Fish ain't bitin'. —It's so peaceful out hete. Alicia looks at me. What are you running away from, Duck? —I ain't ... I dunno. The past is past, you know? Best to forget. —No. Forgetting is dying. It's giving up. They want us to forget. Who would I be if I let that happen? I shake a couple smokes out of my pack, offer one to Alicia. She takes it between her lips and leans in to my flickering Zippo, holding her hair out of the way with one hand. Her eyes flash behind the flame and I don't know how to hold on to her. I light my own with the same flame. It casts an orange glow on rhe bottom of the boat. —No, the past isn't past, she says. That's one thing I've learned. It's always with us. You gotta live with the past every single day. I don't mean living in the past, like, unable to let stuff go, but ... facing up to it. To what you are, where you come from. We live in history. We can decide what's going to happen, what the next part of history will be. But you can't do it without also looking back. Look at you and me. Where our histories meet. Cowboys and Indians. I oughta cut your heart out, by rights, but I know you're different. I can see Archie's face in hers. Bloodlines. I start to say something. I say something else. —I ... I done some things. That I ain't proud of. —We've all done things we'te not proud of. But you gotta own your mistakes. You're not your great-great-grandfather, but you come out of that history, just like I gotta live with what my momma went through, and the things I did to her myself. I used to hate myself and I blamed her for who I was. We can't control what we inherit, but we can make the best of it. Or the worst. A loon cries somewhere on the lake. I wonder if Hank Williams ever heard one. "Hear the lonesome loon"—that's my song. Fuck it. I can handle Carl. —Listen, I say —You serious about goin' to Williams Lake? —Yeah. —'N' ... 'n' you setious about me comin', too? She nods. —Well. I'm thinkin', the work here's already thinnin' for me. Maybe I oughta head up there. Look for a job. Find a house to rent. When I got it arranged, you and your momma can come up. prismmagazine.ca 67 She throws her arms around me, rocking the boat. —Really, Duck? You want to do that? —Sure. Sure I do. Rent a house with some land behind it, a place a body could tide a horse, like you said. I breathe into her hair. We could make a start. A real home. Leave the past behind. —When would you go? —I'll just bteak the news to the foreman this week that I'm clearing out and I could head up there Saturday or Sunday. She looks real happy. A couple of ducks come in across the deep red sky, squawking. They splash on the black lake near the shore. It's nearly dark. There's one way to make sure Carl never finds me. I know what I have to do. THE DAY BEFORE THAT I'm sitting at the bar, jawing with Bunny, as usual, when Carl walks in with the same old shit-eating grin on his face and I'm almost happy to see him when everything it means hits me upside the head. He's about fifty pounds heavier, and shaved bald where he used to have his wild woodsman hait and beard. More tattoos. A heavy gold chain holding down a black t-shirt where a red plaid flannel collar used to be. But I don't mistake him for a second. He must've been out of jail for years already. I didn't think he'd ever come back here. I'm trying to decide who's dumber: him, for coming back, or me, for thinking he wouldn't. He comes right on over and the notion occurs that he's looking for me. —Duck, you old son of a bitch. —Carl. I shake his hand. —Long time no see. He laughs like this is the funniest damn thing he's heard all week. —Long fuckin' time is right. Near twenty years, by my count. —Yep. Guess so. I look around for Alicia. The place is busy tonight. Maybe I oughta get Carl outta hete. —I figure you owe me a drink, he says. —Let's go sit in a booth. I got some business to discuss with you. He lays a heavy hand on my shoulder and fairly knocks me off the stool, pushing me toward a table in the corner. Alicia sashays by with her tray as we're heading over and Carl says, —Bring me a Bud, honey. We sit down in the high-backed booth. Up on the wall behind Carl an elk head stares at me with his glassy black eyes. I get a hard cramp low in my bowels. Carl makes some chitty-chat about the weather and shit until Alicia brings us the beers. —Who's your friend? she says. —This here's Carl. Old buddy of mine, I say. We used to work together on a logging ctew. Carl was a bucker, too. Carl, this is Alicia. —How do, Carl says. Alicia shakes his hand and gives me a funny look. She isn't satisfied with my introduction. This is like giving Carl the gun to shoot me with, but better him 68 PRISM 51:2 than her: —My girlfriend, I guess you'd say. —Pleasure to meet you. Who'da thought this old cowpoke would have a girlfriend? And such a pretty young one, at that? She gives him a sideways smile, like she's heard that one before. —Well, he does have his moments. I'd love to stay and chat, boys, but I'm working. You fellas stay out of trouble. Carl watches her head off. Thin, satisfied smile on his face. He turns back to me, says, —Got any smokes? I pull out my pack and push it across the table. —Lighter's in the pack. —Nice piece of ass, back there. He lights his cigarette careful and slow, like it's a blasting fuse. His deep-set eyes blink up at me over the flame. —She's pretty ... tanned. —Is there a point anywhere nearby that you might mosey on up to? —It's funny, is all. She puts me in mind of that Chilcoot Indian we once knew. Archie, wasn't it? You remember Archie, don't you, Duck? You didn't take too kindly to him. —Times change. Maybe I changed. We ain't here to catch up on old times, Carl. You said you got business. Carl looks around the bar, through the haze, at the rodeo trophies, saddles and old tack hanging from the beams, taxidermy and faded Charlie Russell prints. The woozy blare of countty-music radio. —What'd you say that girl's name was? Alicia? —Carl, shit or get off the pot. He leans back in his seat. —I'm wotkin' for Clinton, now. He said you up and quit. Working for Clinton. Shit. Him and that goddamn elk leering over his shoulder. —Yeah, well, it ain't like I'm gettin' a severance package. I can't do it no more. I'm gonna go back to regular work. It's like they say in the movies: I'm gettin' too old for rhis shit. —Clinton says he needs a mule, and you're the one he trusrs. —He'll have to get hisself a new one. Why are we flappin' our jaws, here. I already told him all this, like, a month ago. Why don't you do it, you're so tight with him. —I'm an ex-con. I can't cross the border with a car full of greenery. —Well, there's no fuckin' way. I don't trust Clinton, and I sure don't trust the fellers he does business with. I had to display a fuckin' firearm to get out the last time. And then I had to cross the botdet with my nerves wound like guitar strings. —Well, Duck. Lemme reframe this situation for you. Clinton's got a delivery near ready to go and he wants you to take it next Saturday—week tomorrow. I'll meet you here around ten. Be ready to go. If you're not here, I'm going to have to introduce myself properly to of Archie's little sister there. Carl stands up and unfolds a fin to leave on the table. —I hope I'll see you here. You know, it's just business, eh? We used to be real tight, Duck, back in the day. Couple of brush apes. I'm willing to let bygones. He knocks the table with prismmagazine.ca 69 his knuckles. —Same old dive. Bunny ain't even wiped the dust off them old bottles. And this shitty fake country music. Only rhing worse'n country-music radio is every other damn kind of radio, I guess. Hey, Duck. What d'ya call a logger with his btains kicked out? I almost smile. I ain't heard that one for a while. I say, —A cowboy? He winks at me and walks out into the night. TWO MONTHS AGO —My daddy was the one fucked everything up. We had a ranch up near Williams Lake. Been there for five generations. My great-great granddad, Irvine Spencer, was a soldier in the U.S. Army and by the time they marched him out to Utah in 1857, to put down the Mormons, he'd had enough. Killing Indians was one thing, I guess he figured, but the Mormons was white. Alicia gives me a look. —I'm just sayin' what my own granddad told me, I say. —I ain't sayin' it was right. We're lying in her bed. First time and it's loosened my lips better than a bottle of Southern Comfort. Giving her my life story, and then some. I'm downright loquacious. —By winter they'd heard of gold on the Fraser, so one night old Irvine and a couple other fellas snuck off and come up to join the Gold Rush. My granddad said they killed a sentry getting out of the camp, but I nevet knew whether to believe that part. In the next couple years, old Irvine kept heading north and finally made his own strike in the Cariboo Rush, on Keithley Creek, in 1860. Most prospectors never found nothing, and most of them that did blew it on whiskey and whores. Old Irvine, though, held on to some of that gold when his stake played out and bought himself some head of cattle and a couple of horses and srarred ranching. —Where'd he get the land for the ranch? Alicia says. —What d'ya mean? But she knows I know what she means. —That's where my family comes from, you know. I'm Tsilhqot'in, but my mom took me and my brother out of Williams Lake when I was a baby and came here. That ranch might have been my people's land. —Well, maybe you're lucky and you just don't know it. I'm sorry I said it. She turns away from me and leans up on an elbow. The blankets fall away from her shoulders. —Sorry, I say. —I wish my momma'd done the same for us and took us out of there. Had that courage. I put my hand flat on her shoulder blade. Let my callused fingers ride down the muscles that ripple under the skin, soft and glowing like caramel. She lights a cigarerte with my brass Zippo and rolls onro her back, leaning up against the headboard. She blows out a stream of smoke and her small breasts pool across her ribs, little datk nipples pointing up. —So you're descended from a murderous, disloyal, land-stealing Indian- killer, is what you're telling me. You couldn't have mentioned that before I slept with you? —That ain't me. —Just finish your damn story. 70 PRISM 51:2 —Well, after that, my family was ranchers. Not much to tell. We nevet made a fortune, but we kept on there. The homestead passed to the oldest son each generation, except my daddy was the third son, but his two older brothers died in the war, so he got the ranch. —Can I have one a'them smokes, I say. Alicia lights one off the cherry of hers and passes it to me. I take a deep drag and continue. —Daddy always figuted there were better ways to make more money, so what with gambling and bad investments and one thing or another, he let the ranch go to seed and mortgaged the hell out of it and finally had to give it over to the bank. He packed up me and Shelley and Momma and moved us to Vancouver when I was about fourteen. The old man didn't know nothing but ranching and losing money so he ended up as a short-order cook and Momma waitressing and taking in dress alterations. The four of us squeezed into a two- bedroom apartment near Chinatown and Daddy started in to dtinking and beating my mom. Alicia's put out her smoke and she's got the blankets tucked up around her neck. Her brown eyes are welled up with tears but her jaw's set like stone. I don't want her sympathy— probably she's seen worse, and it don't bother me no more—but I don't know how else to play this. This is the story. —One day I guess I had enough and I took a poke at the old man and naturally enough he clobbered the living daylights outta me. When I came to, he was gone, but my momma said I'd better light out, so that's what I did. I was sixteen and I never saw him again. He blew his brains out a few yeats later. Put Momma and Shelley outta his misery, anyway I came for the funeral, but Shelley wouldn't talk to me. She was ten when I left, and she never forgave me, I suppose. —Shelley's the one first called me "Duck." When she was little, she couldn't say "Derek." Gosh, she was a sweet little thing. Wheaty-blonde hair and eyes blue like those Easter-egg candies with the chocolate under the shell. She looked like she'd blow away in a stiff breeze but, damn, was she bullheaded. She wouldn't never sit still, except when she rode a horse. I never seen a horse get the better of rhat gitl. My name's the only thing I got of her. Momma says she's back East, out in Toronto, designing theatte sets or something. When I think about my little sister Shelley, sometimes I get to thinking I'd like to go back to ranch work, get back up on a horse of my own. Alicia slides outta bed and into her jeans and a sweatshirt. —I'm gonna put on some coffee. Want some? —Sure. I lay in the bed awhiles, listening to Alicia move around in the kitchen. Clink of cups. Tap running. Little groan in the pipes. Shiff, shiff, shiff of her knit slippers on the lino. I get up and pull on my jeans and go out to the kitchen. Wrap my hand around her thick black hair and pull it aside to lay a kiss on the back of her neck. —Wanna put on some music? she says. —In here? I look into the living room. —Won't wake up your momma? She shakes her head. —That one sleeps like a log. Go on. Something good. prismmagazine.ca 71 She's got some good music. Kind you don't get on the radio no more. Steve Earle. Hank. Lucinda. Emmylou. Townes Van Zandt. Some old blues and Motown, too. I put onTownes's Our Mother the Mountain. Feel like I'm setting to bunk in this town for a while. I got an itch to go, but this girl's got her hooks in me, for sure. I've only known her for a couple weeks, but it feels like longer. Her momma's asleep upstaits. Felt funny meeting that one. I almost said I was sorry I only put the pieces together myself today, when Alicia told me her big brother Archie was dead. Twenty years ago, he was beat to death by a couple of redneck fucks outside a bar. True story. TODAY Cars and streetlights and Carl's voice stop Duck! and Archie's ruined red face swing past me on a merry-go-round I'm kicking and kicking and the horse with the golden bridle rides up and down the pole past the mirror and the blood starts to stain the ice flowing down his auburn flanks and I don't want to see that face no more so I kick that's me that's me as he goes up and down in front of the mirror and I only see my own face there in the blood and I kick harder and harder and my arm is gripped in a vice and I fly through the light into the black. Bolt upright, quaking like fever, wet sleeping bag around my waist. Fucking horse dream again. Cold shaking hand across to my watch, button-on the light, says it's nearly six. Carl ain't dead. I gotta remember. I feel around for the flashlight, light up the tent, my icy blue egg. I gotta move. Fucking Carl. I shoulda done it when I had the chance. More fool me for thinking I'd wake up with a clean conscience. Snake-oil's all that is. I ain't never gonna have that chance again. Scratch the itch on my neck, but it burns. I've rubbed it raw. The tent-fly unzips like a siren in rhe quiet and I crawl out with my sheepskin coat and hat to put on when I can stand up straight. A fresh dusting of snow fell in the night. I piss behind a tree and a thick cloud of steam rises. There's a touch of light in the East, but ovethead the stats are still clear and bright through rhe pines, you could count them if you had the time. Gotta get going. I'll stop somewhere on the road for a cup of coffee and a muffin. I tie up my bed-roll and tent and heave 'em into the crummy All my worldly goods, there in the truckbed. Power saw. Corks. All my brush ape shit. Toolbox. Saddle I ain't used for years. Guitar I can't hardly play. Canvas hockey-bag full of clothes and my rifle stowed in the cab. Maybe I can find some ranch work in Alberta. Get the fuck out of the woods. A loon cries down on the lake, setting another shiver through me. I climb in the truck and light another smoke while the engine warms up. I'm never going to see Alicia again. I see that, now. That line from Shane comes to me, There's no livin with a killing. There's no goin back from it. That was Daddy's favourite. Stupid kids' movie. But I think it's true. A blanket of cloud rolls across the sky snuffing out the stats. I pull out of the campground in the grey dawn and head along the road. The trees thin some, and 72 PRISM 51:2 behind a split-rail fence to one side a few cattle root around in the thin snow. On the other side a fog creeps off the lake. Dry snow whispers across the blacktop like smoke in the Chevy's headlights. After ten or fifteen minutes, the country opens up a bit, and I see a young chestnut horse, running like the devil's on her tail. She vanishes behind a hillock and I stop the truck and get out. The winter daylight starts to rise, and everything's glowing grey and blue. The cedar fence rail creaks under my boot when I lean into it. Push down. Let up. Creak. Another loon call breaks the quiet, and then comes the soft thundet of shod hooves. Over the rise beyond the fence, the filly gallops back around a brake of aspen, puffing thick clouds out her nostrils. She's a three-year-old, I reckon. Maybe only fourteen hand, but she'll be good for cutting and calf- roping when they throw a saddle on her. Strong and fast. Blowing hard. She cuts left short of the fence and flies past where I'm standing. Playing to the gallety, that one. Her coat like red silk gathers in the cold light and flashes back fire. Snow's starting up again. Like ashes. I drive again heading for the highway. Heading East into the cold light. The snow starts to fall thicker. In the mirror I can't hardly see where I've been. prismmagazine.ca 73 Catriona Wright BBQ The grapevine is strangling the basil. In the grill coals blink black then pale grey, shedding the smell of lighter fluid. All the mint from the balcony bathtub has been juleped. It is unseasonably warm. We are sensibly drunk. I am wearing a dress I bought yesterday from my neighbour. A polyester cosmos of flying saucers and tulips. We fight over the relative merits of day jobs, if they suffocate or inspire. Dodging our voices Frank Zappa cackles about rutabagas. The catfish grows oily and succulent in its foil shroud, cayenne-dusted whiskers igniting the air. 74 PRISM 51:2 WHITE i. Growing up in green, my father ate white, only white in green Ireland and on white plates, at that. White fish, potatoes, salt, parsnips. The way he told it Sunday roasts were slabs of fat, white unmarbled, unmar- red. Served with a side of cauliflower, washed down with milk. An albino diet, monochromatic, monogustatic. Diet of static, white noise. When they moved to Canada, the sight of so much snow set his stomach to grumble. He fell upon the mounds of it, the sugared, floured mounds of it and shoved the cold into his mouth. It tasted white. pnsmmagazine.ca 75 II. He found a wife who knew a thing or two about white: rice, thick yogurt, feta, breast milk, diamonds. O- ver the years all that white carried itself through my fathers' dooms of blood, hurried, white- tushed for a front row spot at the aortal boom and bust. My father tried to calm the white with white: margarine, tofu, pills. But it is white now that slows the flow of blood through arteries, snow-narrowed streets. 76 PRISM 51:2 Fiona TinweiLam HOUSE i\ few years after his fathet moved out, my four-year-old son and I eventually also relocated to another neighbourhood. We moved into a drafty brown stucco house that at first seemed way too big for us. For six interminable months my son pined for our cozy former abode. "I miss the green house," he'd wail inconsolably, sitting on the stairs with his head in his hands. I felt the same way—he and I had memoties of the three of us spending time together in a way we would never be doing again. It would take a while to let go. The tenuous, imaginary buffer from the realities of single parenthood that I'd clung to was gone. Those were hard years of overlapping losses: my mother's cognitive decline leading to her death, the departure of my son's father, and the loss of an opportunity to have a "whole" family. That wintet, after my son's father found a new partner, I tried to compensate for those losses by making Christmas extra special: a bigger tree, more decorations, more presents—and my first attempt at a homemade gingerbread house. I lugged the organic ingredients home on foot, in the rain. Carefully followed the multi-day recipe instructions step by step. Mixed the dough, tolled it out, cut the pieces, baked them, assembled them. But every step had its tiny crisis. A forgotten ingredient. Extta trips to the store. Shrunken gingerbread segments that wouldn't fit together. Royal icing that wouldn't set. A clogged pastry tube nozzle. Kitchen floor and counters strewn with flour, broken candies, and crumbs. I was covered in flour, then dough, then crumbs, then icing sugar, then icing. Finally, one of the two roof pieces broke in half when I was struggling to place it atop the walls. As I grew more frazzled, my son grew more impatient—for him the whole point, of course, was decorating the house with candies. I barked, "You'll just have to wait!" to my whining son while I tried to stop the caving-in roof from sliding down with one hand. As I squeezed mote royal icing into the yawning gaps with the other hand, the self-mocking poet in me was jolted into an epiphany. The metaphotical underpinnings of the whole process became parently obvious. Ruefully, I realized I was trying way too hatd to make a home for my son on both the symbolic and the actual levels. All my efforts were ultimately irrelevant. Home was neither the building we inhabited nor a decorative seasonal baked good that would be tossed in the garbage in a week. The next year we made a less ambitious house—even baking an extra roof piece as insurance after the previous year's debacle. When I burnt the gingerbread parents, I just cut out new ones from the extra roof. After cobbling together a somewhat lopsided but stable hut, I wondered how and where to position the prismmagazine.ca 77 new gingerbread family figures. I decided ro have the mother and child holding hands by the open front door. "Where should I put the dad?" I asked my son. He shrugged, indifferent. I hovered with the piece for a while, then placed the father by the door wirh his hand touching his son's head to create a visible bond between them. As I looked down, it seemed apt—the mother and fathet were separate from each other, yet joined by their child. I cemented them down, wondering how long it would all last. I 78 PRISM 51:2 CONTRIBUTORS Martin James Ainsley's work has appeared in The Malahat Review, The Arbutus Review and British Columbia Historical News. He has a BFA from the University of Victoria and is now working toward an MA in Creative Writing at the University of New Brunswick. He lives in Fredericton with his wife and two children, but the West Coast is home. John Barton has published ten books of poetry, including Hymn (Brick, 2009) and For the Boy with the Eyes of the Virgin: Selected Poems (Nightwood, 2012). Co-editot ofSeminal: The Anthology of Canada's Gay Poets (Arsenal Pulp, 2007), he lives in Victoria, where he edits The Malahat Review. Chris Galvin lives and writes in Canada and Viet Nam. Het writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Room, Descant, Asian Cha, The Winnipeg Review and others. Chris is currently polishing a collection of personal essays about Viet Nam. Alisa Gordaneer is from Victoria, BC, where she writes poetty and nonfiction. She teaches writing of all sorts, and contributes a monthly column about the arts to Victoria's Boulevard magazine.. These poems are from Still Hungry, a recently completed collection of poems about food. Claire Kelly lives and writes in Fredericton, New Brunswick. She has had poems published in Exile and in the Malahat Review. Kate Kennedy was botn and taised in Lillooet, British Columbia. She currently lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where she works as a freelance editor. Her poetry has appeared in The Fiddlehead, Grain, The Antigonish Review and Ryga. Fiona Tinwei Lam is the Vancouver author of two books of poetry, Intimate Distances and Enter the Chrysanthemum, and editor of The Bright Well, a collection of contemporary Canadian poerry about facing cancer. Her poetry, fiction and non-fiction have been included in over 18 anthologies. Her first children's title, The Rainbow Rocket, will be released by Oolichan Books in 2013. Evelyn Lau is a Vancouver writer who has published five volumes of poetry, two works of non-fiction, two short story collections and a novel. Lau's poetry has received the Milton Acorn Award, a Governor General's nomination, and a National Magazine Award. Her most recent collection, Living Under Plastic (Oolichan, 2010), won the Pat Lowther Award for best book of poetry by a woman in Canada. Lau is the 2011-2014 Vancouver Poet Laureate. prismmagazine.ca 79 Maleonn is a photogtaphet from Shanghai, China. His work examines the Chinese identity, stuck between its history and the construction of its furure. Described as one of the 50 leading artists in China by Japanese magazine MAC, Maleonn has exhibited all around the world, including at the Victotia & Albert Museum in London, the Photogtaphy Museum in Chicago and the Shanghai Biennale. Jennifer Manuel has taught elementary school in the farthest northern and western corners of British Columbia. She is currently writing a novel, which explores the ethical and cultural conflicts faced by teachers in remote communities, as het MA thesis in Education at the University of Victoria. Amela Marin is a writer and translator living in Toronto, where she moved from Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Her novella, The Sea, was published in 2010 by Quattro Books. Most recently, she has been exploring the intersections of food, language and memory. Find Marin at www.amelamarin.com. Rhona McAdam has lived in BC, Edmonton and London, England, and spent a year studying food in Italy. Her poetry collections include Sunday Dinners (JackPine, 2010) and The Earth's Kitchen (Leaf, 2011) and Cartography, (Oolichan, 2006). Her firsr book of nonfiction, Digging the City: An Urban Agriculture Manifesto, was published in 2012 by Rocky Mountain Books. Zoey Leigh Peterson's fiction has appeared in The Malahat Review, Grain and The New Quarterly. She lives in Vancouver and is at work on a novel. Laisha Rosnau is the authour of the novel, The Sudden Weight of Snow (McClelland & Stewart, 2002) and the poetry collections, Lousy Explorers (Nightwood Editions, 2009) and Notes on Leaving (Nightwood Editions, 2004). She lives in Coldstream where she, her husband, and their two children are resident caretakets of Bishop Wild Bird Sanctuary. Rosnau is working on her second novel and thitd collection of poetty. Mark Sampson has published one novel, Off Book, and has a second, Sad Peninsula, forthcoming from Dundurn Press in 2014. He has also published stories and poems in journals across Canada, including This magazine, Pottersfield Portfolio and FreeFall. Originally from PEI, he currently lives and writes in Toronto. Sarah Selecky s short-story collection This Cake Is for the Party was a finalist for the 2010 Scotiabank Giller Prize, shortlisted for the Commonwealth Prize for Best First Book and longlisted for the Frank O'Connor Short Story Award. She is also the creator of Story Is a State of Mind, a digital writing retreat. Find Selecky at www.sarahselecky.com. 80 PRISM 51:2 Jane SpavoldTims is currently working on a manuscript of poetry about growing and gathering local foods, under an artsnb Creations Grant—an ideal project for a writet and botanist. Jane has poems forthcoming in Carousel and published in All Rights Reserved, The Dalhousie Review, The Antigonish Review, and The Fiddlehead. Zoe Whittall is a Canadian poet and novelist. She has published three novels and three poetry collections. Her latest novel is Holding Still for as Long as Possible, published by House of Anansi Press. Catriona Wright has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Toronto, and she is an associate poetry editor for The Puritan. Her work has appeared in various publications, such as Riddle Fence, CV2, Room, and The New Quarterly. Julia Zarankin's writing has appeared in The Threepenny Review, The Antioch Review and The Dalhousie Review. In her former life, which ended in 2008, she taught Russian literature at the University of Missouri. She now lives and writes in Toronto. STILL HUNGRY? VISIT PRISMMAGAZINE.CA FOR PHOTOS AND RECIPES RELATED TO THIS ISSUE! prismmagazine.ca 81 UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY i v I. i n u ••.<!-. ARE YOU OUR NEXT WRITER-IN-RESIDENCE? CALGARY DISTINGUISHED WRITERS PROGRAM calgarywritersnrogram com UBC Bookstore Canada's largest 'Mils! bookstore. Save 20% on new releases everyday! Join our book club. :» Buy 2 sul Nearly 200 titles! " e Annual Great M, ORDER NOW! (today at 1fr QrcalH-866-289-: i 3 subscriptions for youfself or GIVE some as a gift. Choose r. ■\ With this much selection it's easy to fine! the perfect titles to read or share. 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