CONTENTdm
Prism international 60:4 / Summer 2022
Prism international
The following description is provided by the publisher: CONTENTS NON-FICTION Vinh Nguyen 79 Waiting, Resolution FICTION Kellv Pedro 7 People Are Not That Honest Robert McGill 18 Your Puppy Meets the World Dylan Fisher 24 The Boys Candice May 39 Dad as House Alison Stevenson 56 In the Garden Jeremy Colangelo 67 Consolation of the Cat-Sitter POETRY Anne Baldo 14 the secrets of monsters Sage Ravenwood 16 Triskaidekaphobia Glenn Shaheen 22 Jumping from High Places in Twelve Open World Video Games Pauline Peters 23 In the Garden of Remembrance Sarah Yi Mei Tsiang 36 Walking on Water Katie Marti 37 photo album ('79) Saya Watanabe 51 Earthquake Ruby Hansen Murray 54 Goodness!! Kiala Löytömäki 65 This Too, Is a Type of Love Jessica Le 73 Breakfast at T&T Alison Braid 75 Fear of Desire nina jane drystek 76 late hibernal Dominik Parisien 78 naming a plant after the dead Contributors 90
98 pages
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PRISM international SUMMER 2022 PRIoM internationa THE JACOB ZILBER PRIZE FOR SHORT FICTION GRAND PRIZE "Glory of Dirt" by Neil Giannone FIRST RUNNER-UP "Shifting Baselines" by Rachel Shabalin SECOND RUNNER-UP "If it wasn't for the nights" by Chido Muchemwa JUDGE Cecily Nicholson READERS Olive Andrews, Warren Bowen, Morgan Charles, Maria Ford Rasma Haidri, Natalina Halas, Colleen Haughey, Micah Kj Rachel Lachmansingh, Sarah Lachmansingh, Tonya Lailey, Clayton Longstaff Margaret McCutcheon, Sofia Osbourne, Marc Perez, Chris Preston Jo Ramsey, Roshni Rar, Marianna Schultz, Andrea Scott, Sierra Tan Be sure to check out these winning entries for free on our website, prismmagazine.ca. 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-462, 1866 Main Mall, Vancouver, BC, V6T 1Z1. Specific back issues can be ordered from the Executive Editor, Circulation: circulation@prismmagazine.ca. PRISM is printed in Canada. Website: prismmagazine.ca Copyright © 2022 PRISM international. Content copyrights remain with authors. Cover image © Alana Paterson, "We Are The Sun," 2015. 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. Single issue by mail is $13. 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 GST and shipping and handling. PRISM occasionally exchanges subscriber lists with other literary magazines; please contact us if you wish to be excluded from such exchanges. Submission Guidelines: PRISM international purchases First North American Serial Rights at $40 per page for poetry and $30 per page for prose. Contributors receive two copies of the issue in which their work appears. Submissions are accepted online or by mail. Electronic submissions are preferred. All submissions must adhere to our submission guidelines, which can be found at prismmagazine.ca/submit, or can be requested by mail at the address above. Advertising: For details on how to place an advertisement in PRISM, please visit our website at prismmagazine.ca/advertise. Our gratitude to Dean Dr. Gage Averill and the Dean of Arts Office at the University of British Columbia. We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the UBC Creative Writing Program, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the British Columbia Arts Council. July 2022. ISSN 0032.8790 IUBCI aplaceof mind |UBC THE UNIVERSITYOF BRITISH COLUMBIA BRITISH COLUMBIA ARTS COUNCIL <2JP. for the Arts du Canada PRISM nternationa PROSE EDITOR POETRY EDITOR EXECUTIVE EDITORS Vivian Li Emily Chou Alison Barnett Emma Cleary Eleanor Panno FACULTY ADVISOR DESIGNER Sharon McGowan andrea bennett EDITORIAL BOARD Dylan Bach, Tanya Banerjee, Heather Bant, Phoebe Blanding Andrew Calderone, Emily Cann, Cara McKenna, Chia-Hua Margaret Chu Josh Comia, Zachary Cooper, Zoe Dagneault, Paul Dhillon Sonia Di Placido, Brook Ellis, Eleanor Fuller, Rasma Haidri Sarah Hobbs, Sara Ibrahim, Samantha Jones, Shelly Kawaja Mimi Lam, Tena Laing, Dayna Mahannah, RJ McDaniel Lisa Moore, Stuart Moore, Kristen Morrison, Catherine Mwitta Rachel Oestreich, Rick Overwater, Deborah Patz, Dora Prieto Fiona Revill, Owen Schaefer, Jaime Silverthorn, Elisabeth Shenher Colin Sterling, kathy thai, Bevan Thomas, Elaine van der Geld Heather Walmsley, Claudine Yip, Ashraf Zaghal EDITORIAL ASSISTANTS Oluwatoke Adejoye, Andrew Calderone, Jasmine Ruff, Brandi Bird CONTENTS NON-FICTION Vinh Nguyen 79 Waiting, Resolution FICTION Kelly Pedro 7 People Are Not That Honest Robert McGill 18 Your Puppy Meets the World Dylan Fisher 24 The Boys Candice May 39 Dad as House Alison Stevenson 56 In the Garden Jeremy Colangelo 67 Consolation of the Cat-Sitter POETRY Anne Baldo 14 the secrets of monsters Sage Ravenwood 16 Triskaidekaphobia Glenn Shaheen 22 Jumping from High Places in Twelve Open World Video Games Pauline Peters 23 In the Garden of Remembrance Sarah Yi Mei Tsiang 36 Walking on Water Katie Marti 37 photo album ('79) Saya Watanabe 51 Earthquake Ruby Hansen Murray 54 Goodness!1 Kiala Loytomaki 65 This Too, Is a Type of Love Jessica Le 73 Breakfast at T&T Alison Braid 75 Fear of Desire nina jane drystek 76 late hibernal Dominik Parisien 78 naming a plant after the dead Contributors 90 Kelly Pedro PEOPLE ARE NOT THAT HONEST The first time Betty lost her wedding ring, someone recognized the ruby setting and returned it with a note. It was strange because when she read it, the unsigned note said, "Dear Betty, Don't leave your jewellery on the beach for all to see. You're embarrassing Buck." The next time she purposely left her ring somewhere, it was returned with no note at all, just left in a plain white envelope on the porch with her name capitalized in red across the front. She thought maybe she was only entitled to the one warning about the ring, but the next day a letter with no return address arrived in the mail, a postage stamp of a floating astronaut glued to the top right-hand corner. When she tore open the envelope, being careful to save the stamp, she found a note written in black marker on light blue construction paper: "Found it on the playground this time. Hasn't Buck given you enough?" She suspected it was from the same Good Samaritan and sighed, crumpled the construction paper in her fist and threw it in the kitchen trash where Buck would never find it. She placed the ring back on her finger. "This town is so small and full of people so rich they know everyone else's business right down to their jewellery," her mother Alma said. "Not rich," said Betty, "just honest." "People are not that honest," Alma said, sucking her teeth. It was true and so Betty would casually leave her ring around town hoping she'd never see it again—at the public restroom in the mall when she took it off to wash her hands and at the local beach during a lazy Sunday family picnic where Betty sat on the rough sand watching Buck teach Isabel to swim while she felt as though she was drowning in her own life. And each time it would find its way back to her like a boomerang. Betty's mother Alma was a bear. In Nicaragua, she had turned their small two-bedroom concrete home into a den to protect her cubs during the revolution, then insisted her eldest daughter marry and move to America for a better life when Buck, an American soldier, wooed Betty with chocolate and fresh papayas and chickens, which her family had rarely seen anymore. Betty had been sending money home for years until her sisters asked if she could care for their aging mother in America, where the healthcare was better. Betty figured they were sick of her. When she stood in the airport in Boise three months ago and the glass doors blew open as if by a tornado, Betty knew her mother wasn't far behind. Soon her mother shuffled forward, her back hunched over, wearing a long navy skirt and white blouse, the gleam of a golden cross around her sandalwood neck. Alma could make Betty feel both the comfort of home and so self conscious in the same second. On the way home, she had prepared her mother, telling her that Buck called her Betty now, not Beatriz. "I didn't send you here to forget who you are," Alma said. When they had pulled into their tidy bungalow Alma grumbled about all the wasted outdoor space, about why Betty had grass instead of vegetables planted in the yard. Inside, Alma unpacked plantains, which she had wrapped in clothing and hidden at the bottom of her suitcase, and started frying them. The kitchen hissed and crackled and Betty was transported to her mother's small galley kitchen in Managua. Betty collected stamps, which wasn't hard because they were always getting letters—from her sisters in Managua, and from her childhood friend Louisa, now living with a wealthy man in Toronto who took her on vacations to Aruba and whenever he travelled for work to Belgium and France. Louisa sent Betty a postcard or short letter at each stop about the towering mountains, the fluffiness of the snow, or the silkiness of the PRISM 60.4 sand, and Betty would close her eyes and imagine herself there, breathing in the light mountain air, watching the snow coat her dark hair, feeling her heels sink into the smooth sand. By the time she had been in Idaho a year, she had an entire photo album of all the stamps she had saved. "Why are you saving those?" Buck asked her in bed as she added the astronaut stamp from the letter that had arrived that morning to the last free spot in her fifth photo album. "Aren't you too old to collect stamps?" He was watching Platoon on the television in their bedroom and machine-gun fire cracked loud, startling Betty. "You're never too old to collect anything," she said. "Can you turn that down? It'll wake Isabel." "Isabel sleeps like the dead," Buck said, flicking off the television. He took a long swig of his beer, emptying it, and placed it back on the nightstand. Betty bobbed her head, looking down at her stamps. Isabel was not a sound sleeper. As an infant she would wake hourly and in those early days Betty walked through life in a haze of bottles and diapers as Isabel's cries circled like a carousel in the background. Even now at age four Isabel cried out at least once in the night while Buck's deep belly breaths kept him swaddled in sleep. Some mornings, as Buck complained about a rough night's rest while showering, Betty would dot concealer under her eyes and pinch her cheeks to look healthy and alive the way her mother had taught her when they still lived in Nicaragua and couldn't afford the Bobbi Brown makeup that covered her bathroom counter. "Hey, look at this stamp I got today," Betty said now, pulling the astronaut from the plastic sleeve and handing it over to Buck. Buck took the stamp in his fingers, yellow from the cigarettes he rolled himself. He was lying on top of the flower-patterned comforter wearing plaid boxers, a white undershirt, and tube socks. From his cheeks grew whiskers that looked like the saplings in their subdivision when they moved in five years ago. "Neat," he said, handing the stamp back to Betty. "You know Marcy, Ted's wife? She collects teapots, and Marlene collects Royal Doulton figurines. Why don't you collect something like that? I collected rocks before the war. Then I grew up." Betty remembered the war. She experienced it inside her family's home in Managua, when first her father didn't return, and then her two brothers, Jacinto and Sylvio. She could hardly remember her father's face now, she only remembered him through his things: the sage green mug he liked to drink his coffee in every morning, his neatly-pressed brown trousers, the sheen of his only good pair of black dress shoes. Her mother buried her father's things in their muddy yard in Managua when it was clear he and her brothers weren't coming home. Betty knew Buck remembered the war too, the uneasiness of feeling as though he was some place he didn't belong. The way he looked at Betty when he sang Isabel a Willie Nelson song, the same song he had sung to Betty in those early days of courting when he lost himself in her to escape the constant crackle from the radio slung on his hip. She knew he thought of the war when he called home to say his supervisor needed him to stay late because someone had called in sick and promised that he would come home that night. The way his voice crackled through the phone, Betty knew he was thinking of the promise her own father had made and broken by not returning. But Buck would never turn down the extra money. He would say yes sir, like he had been trained to do. Betty had lived in America for six years but didn't think she'd stay so long. She had planned a nomadic life with Buck—visits to Morocco and Australia, Italy and Thailand. The freedom that came with being American. But her life here was like her wedding ring—inescapable— despite Buck's best efforts, the road trips he had planned in their early days of marriage to Lake Cascade or Portland. The way he carefully wrapped fried plantains in wax paper so she could snack on them while they drove past the dense forests of Oregon. "See?" he had said to her on one of those trips, patting her leg. "We can still travel." They could, Betty had wanted to say, but this was not travelling. With the television turned off in their bedroom, Buck had fallen asleep and Betty was alone with her stamps. While he snored softly next to her, Betty flipped through the pages of the album and examined each stamp: a red image of the blind Marianne from France, a regal Queen Elizabeth II with a crown high on her head from Canada, green coral underwater from Aruba, mushrooms sprouting from bark in the forests of Nicaragua, and a winter scene of the bare trees of Belgium—all places she could only travel to in her mind. They were the images she held when she closed her eyes, the ones that swam together in her sleep, and floated like driftwood before her during the day when she was feeding Isabel, and cleaning up afterward, and preparing baked potatoes and a roast chicken for dinner. The chickens were so plentiful here she only had to walk to the nearby grocery store to find one. 10 PRISM 60.4 Buck roused from sleep and rolled toward her. "Can you turn off the lamp?" he asked, squinting against the golden honeycomb light that filled Betty's corner of the bedroom. "I have an early day tomorrow." Betty felt a flutter in her stomach, that familiar feeling of life blooming inside her, a secret she hadn't shared with Buck, or Isabel, or even her own mother, who warned Betty almost daily that she should have another child soon before Isabel became too spoiled. "In a minute," she told Buck, reaching for the white T-shirt she had worn that day and placing it over the lamp, dampening the light in the room. Soon, Buck was snoring again and Betty heard Isabel cry out, then the coils from her mother's bed in her room next door squeaked as Alma rose and shuffled down the hall to settle Isabel down. Betty placed one hand on the slight rise of her belly and turned to the last page of the photo album with the empty plastic sleeve. She slid the astronaut stamp back into its safe spot and ran her fingers down the smooth plastic. Then she closed her eyes and followed the images in her mind from one place to the next—her fingers tingling, her heart rate slowing, her belly concaving—until she could no longer hear Buck's snoring, or her mother make her way back to her bedroom, or Isabel rolling around on her toddler bed until she settled, finally, and slept soundly until morning. The short dry summer gave way to a deep cold and Betty found herself sitting in an elementary school gym in mid-December, her belly ballooning in front of her, listening to the Christmas concert that everyone in the small town attended. Betty had plied Alma with a colourful woollen scarf and Alma unwrapped it from her neck as the third graders took the stage. They were all crammed into the gym—adults and kids, reluctant teens and happy grandparents, with more spilling out into the hallway, hovering in the doorway—everyone huffing out great puffs of air and making the room so humid that Betty unzipped her coat and pushed it off her arms. In the seat next to her, Isabel was draped on Buck's lap, her boots hanging just past his knees. The slush was falling off her boots, soaking his jeans. Buck had his arms wrapped around Isabel, holding her tight. He was dozing after a round of nights patrolling the deserted mall. When the concert was over, Betty left her ring on the seat. A few days later she found another note in her mailbox, the words "FINAL NOTICE" written across the front of the envelope, her ring nestled 11 inside a tri-folded piece of holiday paper bordered with poinsettias. The paper held a firm lashing: "You're being ungrateful. Think of Isabel and the baby." She slipped the ring back on feeling hopeless but was soon caught up in the Christmas routine of shopping and tree trimming, while Alma lit candles and called Betty and Isabel to her bedside to pray the rosary every night. The following week, Betty bought Alma an opal rosary for Christmas and went to the garage to hide it from her mother who cleaned their house obsessively to cover up her snooping. Buck had converted their single-car garage into a makeshift tool shed. Betty had wrapped the rosary in two old but clean washcloths—remnants of the first towel she had bought when she moved to America—then newsprint, then finally a grey plastic bag. She pulled open a drawer from an old wooden desk that someone had left out on the curb, and which Buck used as a tool chest. She would have to tell Buck later that she had hidden it here, so that he didn't accidentally toss it around and damage the delicate opal stones. She pushed aside plastic containers of nails, some loose drill bits, a nearly empty roll of duct tape, a screwdriver and Swiss army knife, all resting on top of a clear cellophane package of paper. Betty's fingers, which had been flipping through each thing as if cataloguing them, stopped. She recognized the paper with its poinsettia border and her breath snagged in her throat. Her skin felt pasty, her breath quick, and she pulled back from the drawer as if she had just spotted a dead mouse. Betty sucked the air in the cold garage, long and slow, each breath easing her pounding heart, and quietly closed the drawer. She opened the drawer below, which was filled with old drop cloths that Buck put down when he changed the oil of their rusty Chrysler in the driveway, and tucked her mother's gift between an oil-stained red cloth, which Betty recognized as an old beach towel they had picked up on a day trip to Lake Cascade when she had forgotten to pack one— when their relationship was so young and free that they each forgave these minor inconveniences, and a blue cloth, which she didn't recognize at all. She went back into the kitchen where Buck was leaning over the fridge, pulling out a beer. "Hey," she said, gingerly, "I was thinking of trying something different this year." "Yeah?" Buck said, opening his beer, the hiss hanging in the air. 12 PRISM 60.4 "I thought it'd be nice to send out a Christmas letter with a family update. Do we have any holiday paper around? If not, I could buy some tomorrow." She pictured herself going to the post office and buying stamps to send out the letters, the ones they release to commemorate special events, and showing them to Buck, even if he thought they were foolish. Buck took a long swig, squinting at Betty like she was a deer in his riflescope. She watched his arm come down, the lump in his throat rise then fall. "Why do we need a Christmas letter?" he asked. "I don't like people knowing my business. I'd like to keep everything that happened this year between us, you know?" She did know. She knew very well. But she also knew that she would buy a fresh stock of holiday paper tomorrow and send out the letters anyway. 13 Anne Baldo THE SECRETS OF MONSTERS whisper, tell me all the secret ways that you're a monster, a trap both intricate and critical: you would understand how to destroy them, how to keep them, too. and even beastly hearts must sometimes be unburdened. meet me in february, a month of grey and heartless weather, clouds like wadded cotton in pill bottles, telephone wires cutting sky sharp glint of rock salt over sidewalks and streets, meet me with broken teeth and nerves exposed, ready to believe, or not, gritty shine of winter all over the streets. trees like dark clumps of hair pulled from drains, against the white porcelain sky. tense knuckles frozen, never dressed for the weather, open your coat, fur cuffs pressed against cheeks, {blood moves from the heart to the hands), then put your hand over mine. nettle tea in milk glass, shards of sun. a farmhouse on the lake, where for a long time, nothing grew, weird dreams in the afternoons, books on ufos and mothman. sometimes we want a flock, and not the way a shepherd does, to care for, tenderly; but in the way a wolf wants one, our love full of blood. peel ginger with the cold backs of spoons, have faith in good hearts or even good hearts that went bad. move through bluestem and switchgrass growing tall by the roadside. like a light bulb with loose wiring, i will fix you when you flicker, get married with a gumball machine ring from a&p, skinny gold, blue stone, sunglasses over the dark sickles underneath your eyes, we pick thyme, 14 PRISM 60.4 once said to be a cure for melancholy, keep our insects inside jars, say, we are two sides of the same coin, we are two hands on one body, but a coin toss is never fifty-fifty, and one hand is always stronger than the other, you have to remember — all monsters have a weakness, sunlight, silver, a handful of salt, a garlic clove. or sometimes only the dreadful need we have, to believe we're really loved. 15 Sage Ravenwood TRISKAIDEKAPHOBIA The thirteenth child had to be a curse. Loki brought mischief and treachery to the table for dinner in Valhalla. Twelve gods in disarray. What chaos he sowed. Trickster Coyote would be so proud. One number removed from catatonic twelve. Judas Iscariot was the thirteenth guest to arrive at the Last Supper. What betrayal. Do you believe evil a number or a superstition? Was it evil for a Quaker to believe in astrology? Monstrous family Leeds is about to give birth to their thirteenth offspring. A demiurge's arrival cursed by these ill-fated times; bless not the child. Why didn't father Leeds see this in the stars? A boy spawned during Ophiuchus hidden thirteenth zodiac, symbolized by a man with a snake. You played Creator, no shame in humility; Before molding the clay of a beautiful babe unloved; Making it as abhorrent as familial hatred, blending a Christian and Pagan into a devilish Pan. Hooves, a spearhead tail, goat or horned horse head (letyour imagination decide), give him raptor arms, claws, leather bat wings tenebrous as the night. Gold eyes to pierce the pitch of the Pine Barrens. I know this Jersey Devil, he's the macabre in me. Unwanted betrayal is our birthright. Disfigured, grotesque, bestial? Loved. Evergreen, coniferous brethren; Giants of lore raking Stardust with their boughs. Wind swaying to the night's lullaby, owl hoots; Fox screams and barks piercing the forest; Rutting grunts, deer antlers sawing tree bark to pulp. Foraging wildlife scrambling out of hiding. Blooming Datura, devil's breath waifs in the air attracting sphinx moths. 16 PRISM 60.4 And there with horns hidden in the lowest pine boughs, sits a lone sentinel watching over them all. On a thirteenth day after twilight's gloam search wide for the thirteenth godless child. Be sure to check your heart first, for the eyes are foretelling. He'll know. Egyptians found the number to be lucky. What of our copious monstrous natures? 17 Robert McGill YOUR PUPPY MEETS THE WORLD So you've gone and got yourself a puppy. Great job! At this moment in your life and world history, it seems one of the saner things to do: an investment in the future; a gift to yourself. At the same time, if you think your puppy is coming to you all ready for new adventures, you're dead wrong. Have you not read the work of Dr. Sophia Yin, author of Perfect Puppy in 7 Days? Don't worry, you've been preoccupied, but if you'd read it, you'd understand some things. You'd know that the world will alarm your puppy. The world will frighten it. More often than not, the world will lead to your puppy's over-arousal. Let's talk about preparing your puppy for the world. If your puppy's first experiences are negative, they could ruin it forever. Watching your puppy's fight-or-flight response get triggered may be, in the moment, super cute—who doesn't want to see your puppy bare its tiny widdle teeth or tuck its adorable tail between legs you just want to put in your mouth?—but the long-term payoff will be a disaster. We're 18 PRISM 60.4 talking growling, lunging, barking, and biting. We're talking chewed ottomans, incontinence, and rock-bottom self-esteem. We're talking about you spending the next ten to eighteen years, maybe once a day, saying, "I'm so sorry, he's never done that before." Nobody wants that life. As soon as possible, you've got to expose your puppy to diverse new stimuli, and you've got to make it totally fun. You might think that the steps I'm about to describe don't have a climate-crisis level of urgency, but this isn't a situation that you can hope will be fixed by politicians or science or—ha!—the market. You need to handle it yourself. You might also think that completing all the steps isn't a priority like other things in your life right now, things to help make you a happier, more attractive person, but let's face it, you've got years ahead as a work-in-progress. Your puppy's window of opportunity will be closing really soon. Keep in mind the value of treats. For example, give your puppy a treat every time you introduce it to new kinds of touch. Give it a treat when first handling its ears. Give it a treat when first checking its gums, first opening its eyelids with your fingers, and first clipping its toenails. Also, when first pinching its skin—maybe every time you do that, actually. Give it a treat when first tweaking its nose with the tip of a ballpoint pen. Treats will make your puppy look forward to moments of contact in ways I think you'll find affecting. Introduce your puppy to other kinds of touch. Hug your puppy. Hold your puppy in your lap. Pick up your puppy and cradle it. (To be honest, if you haven't been doing these things already, what is wrong with you?) Put your puppy on its back and scratch its belly. Wipe your puppy with a beach towel like it's a dirty, dirty dog. Hold your puppy upside down. Give your puppy's collar a tug. Grab your puppy by a part of its body. (If you don't know which parts to grab and which to leave alone, what is wrong with you?) In your puppy's presence, bang some pots and pans. Shake out a blanket. Beat a rug. Sweep and mop your kitchen. I bet it needs doing anyway. Open an umbrella. Bonus points if it's raining; you think your puppy wants to get rained on? Blow up a balloon and rub it against your head, thus acquainting your puppy at the same time with balloons and with static electricity. It's important for your puppy to feel comfortable around other animals. Introduce it to a pigeon. Introduce it to a squirrel. Get out of the house for once and introduce your puppy to some alpacas. Introduce 19 it to the cat that keeps crapping in your garden. Introduce it to your college-age children. (I appreciate that you may be withholding this introduction to send the kids a message. You wouldn't need a puppy if they weren't such shits.) Your puppy should get used to different surfaces. Introduce it to hardwood, cork, concrete, and black ice. Introduce your puppy to sewer grates and manhole covers. Introduce your puppy to muddy lawns and carpets, but not on the same day in that order. Your puppy should get used to noises. Introduce your puppy to thunder. Introduce your puppy to fireworks. Introduce your puppy to the crying of babies, or, as I like to call them, human puppies. Introduce your puppy to alarms and sirens. Introduce your puppy to movie scores by Hans Zimmer. Introduce your puppy to the doorbell ringing, and always be the one who rings it, so that if a neighbour eventually comes by to check on you and rings it while you're inside with your puppy, your puppy will give you a really sweet look of confusion. Show your puppy trash cans. Show your puppy shopping carts and wheelchairs. Show your puppy skateboards, and take a photo of your puppy on a skateboard. (If you don't post this photo on social media, what is wrong with you?) Take your puppy to the suburbs. Take your puppy to a shopping mall. Take your puppy to Banana Republic and pick out something nice for yourself. You deserve it! Take your puppy on escalators. Take your puppy for mimosas, but not too many this time. Take your puppy to a police auction and a speed-dating session. Introduce your puppy to other puppies. Introduce your puppy to adult dogs who like to play. Introduce your puppy to adult dogs who don't like to play and who rebuff your puppy's overtures by feigning interest in other activities. Expose your puppy to men. Expose your puppy to men with chinstrap beards. Expose your puppy to judgmental men with deep voices and dicey tattoos. Expose your puppy to your ex and insinuate that there's somebody new in the picture. Expose your puppy to people who differ from you culturally. Consider the challenges that this step poses for you, and reflect on your life choices. Expose your puppy to people wearing ball caps. Expose your puppy to people wearing Uggs. Expose your puppy to your co-worker who seems standoffish but could be pretty great if you got to know them and they stopped wearing Uggs. Expose your puppy to binge-watching. Expose your puppy to speed-dating again. Expose 20 PRISM 60.4 your puppy to somebody in an old-age home. As you do, try not to dwell on which of them will outlive the other. Expose your puppy to lines of credit. Expose your puppy to wearing sunglasses when it's cloudy. Expose your puppy to the nice people outside the bar who helped get you into a cab. Expose your puppy to decluttering. Expose your puppy to the films of Claire Denis. Expose your puppy to zero-hours contracts. Expose your puppy to sleeping in a bed alone. Do not expose yourself to your puppy, or what is wrong with you? Training a puppy is hard. There will be frustrations. There will be setbacks. Through all the hurdles and difficulties, it's important that you not lose hope in your puppy or yourself, and that you not lose hope in the world. I know you still have hope, in spite of everything that's happened, or else what would you be doing with a puppy? 21 Glenn Shaheen JUMPING FROM HIGH PLACES IN TWELVE OPEN WORLD VIDEO GAMES i never realized the last time I played football would be the last time I played football. Not that I care too much about that or that I couldn't break out a ball and launch some tight spirals but I'm in the Age of Lasts. The last time I see friends, the last time I try some weird new drug, some new hair loss pill. The last time I sing a song and forget I ever heard it. 22 PRISM 60.4 Pauline Peters IN THE GARDEN OF REMEMBRANCE And they come rushing down, dark light gleaming, skin onyx polished, smooth as obsidian, gems shining deep. They are black, and they are everywhere and they cloak you like a robe. Spinning you around they clarify your senses: what is green speaks, what is growing sings, and black earth crumbles, humus in the cradle of your palms. They take you on a journey across a wild and boundless country where you find rest in the pasture of your soul. Later you stand in the garden of remembrance listening to bright songs of peace. "Remember us," they say, "remember the earth, and carry your memory like burning coal from one dark house to the next." They are darkness concentrated; they are the beginning. You open your eyes. You say, "Yes, I remember." And laughing, they burst like fireworks into pointillisms of light. 23 Dylan Fisher THE BOYS This piece should be read across the gutter. When they first played the tape, it sounded to them like jazz, the music unfolding itself from a boombox in the sand at the high tide line. The boys bobbed in the shallows, the stomach of the earth. This would happen every year, and every year the boys would watch and watch and watch. Like all songs, the first one ended, and the tourists found their hotels. To the tourists, sleep deprived from a long flight, the beach looked dazzling, looked luminous and breathtaking, looked, they might have said, exactly like the photographs in magazines and guidebooks. It was the boys' job (at least in theory) to keep it that way. 24 PRISM 60.4 They shook their heads to the unwieldy, cacophonous notes. They watched the tourists, pale or sunburnt, American or Canadian, dragging piece after piece of luggage across the long strip of beach, likely headed to one of the many seaside hotels. The boys swam back to shore, turned off the music, put on their clothes, stumbled on the sand peppered with cigarette butts, condoms, smooth shards of glass. Tomorrow. They'd pick it all up tomorrow, the next day, early, at dawn, cart away the trash before the tourists awoke, before their managers could berate them, blame them, for the sand's uncleanliness. For this reason, they called themselves The Curtain or The Wall or The Creeps. The youngest, Chamil, was fifteen. 25 The oldest, twenty-nine. Emmanuel, was They worked in the hotels where the tourists stayed, the bars where the tourists ate and drank, the beachfront stores where the tourists shopped, sure they were always scoring a deal. "Is this authentic Sri Lankan music?" asked the tourists in their broken guidebook Sinhala, the men shirtless, patches of post- pubescent hair on their chests, the women all in floral bikinis, shifting their naked shoulders in rhythm to the music. The boys did not know, were not sure. He had taken the tape from Rocky who had taken it from Kasun. From where Kasun had found it— at his aunt's house in Galle—it had traveled from Calcium City, where it had been played several times by a younger, cooler cousin, solid and muscular, one who, barring any unforeseen revolution, would fall into a government position following his college graduation. 26 PRISM 60.4 They found the tourists in the hotel's bar, drinking Lion Lager or Old Arrack from oversized carafes, maps spread out across their laps, planning for the days ahead. With the tape once again playing, the boys starting it from where it had been stopped, the bar teemed with sound. Chamil, who worked at the Heritage Resort at the far end of the beach—a government armory only several years before—shook his head. He offered the tourists a joint, its flower smuggled in from Tamil Nadu. The cousin had received the tape as a gift from a friend in Kandy who had received it from a friend in Jaffna. That was as far as any of the boys could trace it back. 27 They did not know that the tape had been born in Calcium, recorded in a warehouse by a group of misfits and musicians in a single, frenzied take. But, playing again, it filled them with energy. Determined to pick apart its sound, they tried to define it by its sonic contemporaries and forerunners, to name a few: Bob Dylan, Bob Marley, Joan Baez, John Prine, Dire Straits, Warren Zevon, Prince, Willie Nelson, Charlie Parker, Waylon Jennings, Lionel Ranwala and WB. Makuloluwa, Nas, Bach, Weird Al Yankovic, the Arctic Monkeys, Rihanna. When it sounded like blues, they sat in the bar's wicker chairs, smoked hand-rolled cigarettes, the wax paper melting from the sweat on their fingertips, and spoke of the long war, the one they'd supposedly escaped. Each boy one-upping the last, rubbing salt out of their eyes, proving themselves to the tourists with their stories of tragedy and loss: "My cousin lost both his arms" and "No, no, listen, my house was burned to the ground" and "Machang, brother, my dad was kidnapped. I never saw him again." 28 PRISM 60.4 By the third track, everyone stoned or drunk, they began to dance. On its first listen, the tape had had a burdensome quality to it, and the boys had not wanted to play it any further, the entire group ready to give up before even reaching the second song. "It's kinda proto-heavy metal," said Buddhika, who grew up in the Hill Country, in Kandy, "reminiscent of an early AC/DC." They rattled off names and genres, showing what they knew. The tourists listened in, catching bits and pieces, trying their best to puzzle these stories, almost unimaginable, together, to make sense of this violence in terms of the beauty of the Lankan countryside. It seemed to go on forever, the music carrying the night even when the sun should have been rising, the sound now akin to disco, with its repetitive, thumping beat. 29 The boys and tourists alike twirled and hopped about the bar's sandy floor. They felt it in their groins. They touched one another's naked shoulders, suggesting places nearby to visit in the morning. "We'll take you there," the boys promised, their vowels rounded, to match the glass polished in the sea. The bar's lights shuddered and dimmed, casting shadows across their bodies, soft and sweet and young. In an aside, away from the group, Emmanuel, pock-faced but handsome, watery-eyed but confident, asked one of the tourists: "Would you like to go to my room?" With the crack of the music in the distance—"It sounds folky, twee," she said—the boy struggled to put on a condom. The music from the tape played as the sand worked its way into their half-naked bodies. Their accents all sounding the same. This was not the intention of the music, not originally. 30 PRISM 60.4 They did cocaine, or what they thought was cocaine, that Emmanuel procured from his swim trunks. The tourists, then, high on cocaine or what they thought was cocaine, whispered to themselves and to the boys. "We can show you the world." When it sounded most classical, five or six songs in, they all knew this must be a dream. She looked over her shoulder. They went toward the water. They briefly struggled on the beach, wrapping their arms around one another, before returning to the group, no one the wiser. Whatever it sounded like, it had a charming effect on both the boys and the tourists, who came all the way from America, New Zealand, Australia, all the way to see this beach, this water. But that, now, did not matter. There are only so many available minutes on the average tape. 31 This one—a C90—held approximately forty-five on each side. Eventually, after flipping it over, it finished, and the group was overcome by different less definable sounds: the crashing of waves, the island settling slowly into the water, their breaths swirling in the humid air. "These are very good," the tourists said. "Yes, good," said Rocky, then vanished suddenly and without a goodbye, going to the water with the rest of The Wall, The Curtain, The Creeps. To have no worries, to not think, to surf or smoke their lives away. They are not stupid, see what's going on. 32 PRISM 60.4 In the morning, the next day, when the tourists awoke, the beach was mostly clean. Rocky made them all cocktails. In another world, this, the water, was where they might live, make their homes, fall in love, their long, frizzy hair deflating in the surf What did these boys want from life? They knew the tourists would eventually leave. An American grabbing the tape before departing, smuggling it away in her luggage. To share with her friends back in the States, the wild, untamed music, music from this place that rarely made sense. There—in a furnished apartment on the Eastside—she might have tried to digitize the tape, rewinding the reel until the spools were taut. 33 Thousands of miles away, still on They found another tape, other the island, the boys moved on. songs, new tourists. 34 PRISM 60.4 But the sound wouldn't come out right—not how she remembered it—or perhaps the tape would be damaged beyond repair. Different from how it was when she'd heard it that night on the beach, beneath the moon's shadow box, the world in its inverse. They swam into the sea and then back to shore again, finding reason in this repetition, each time thinking they might drown, and each time coming back up for another gulp of air. 35 Sarah YiMei Tsiang WALKING ON WATER Yesterday we walked across the river, the baby strapped to me, my boy puffy in a snow suit. The clouds made their own tracks across the sky, and the ice that held us up will groan like an old man in a week or so, then break into smaller and smaller pieces, and our footprints will sink to the bottom with the shipwrecks and shopping carts and everything else we abandon. 36 PRISM 60.4 Katie Marti PHOTO ALBUM (79) i do not remember houston or the hotel pool where you taught me to swim they say you tossed me in the deep end and when i sputtered to the surface everyone cheered ta-da! but stories are not memories so i do not remember houston or the hotel pool though i would like to feel the wonder of being weightless again for the very first time and hear the rounded edges of your voice as you scoop me up and parade me around wave to the puerto rican bartender blow kisses to the lifeguard from acapulco i rub my nose on the stubble of your chin and my nostrils sting with the smell of yellow listerine i do remember the flight from the gulf of mexico to the bay of fundy and if i close my eyes i can still taste stale smoke as the stewardess fills a plastic cup with coca-cola and places the entire full-sized can on the tray in front of me my mother sleeps beside me and the ground below looks like a quilt i can barely spell my own name 37 and yet i am beginning to understand the laws of motion and the difference between fledging and fleeing 38 PRISM 60.4 Candice May DAD AS HOUSE The summer I was twelve, my father spent every day working on our new house, hoping to finish it before school started again. He was a substitute teacher and had the whole summer off My siblings and I watched him assemble scaffolding, lay down boards. Drill, saw, and hammer. Then my mother announced she was leaving. She kissed our cheeks and told us she needed a holiday, that her head couldn't take the sound of one more nail being pounded in. "You'll be back though, right?" I asked, gripping a sticky popsicle as she filled her car with luggage. "When the house is finished?" My brother and sister stood on the porch, watching. "I'll be just down the road," my mother said. "You can visit anytime." We lived on a rural acreage on Vancouver Island, surrounded by cedar trees overlooking the Strait of Georgia. Our family of five had recently moved into our new house from a cramped RV. The house was good enough to live in, but still needed a lot of work. The morning my mother 39 left, my father was drilling holes on the deck and barely lifted his head to watch her drive away. My siblings were preoccupied with their respective summer adventures. My older sister Winona was seventeen and I hardly saw her— she left in the mornings wearing tie-dyed tights, a flappy overcoat, and long silver earrings, heading towards the highway where she hitchhiked to a larger town an hour away. In the evenings, she'd come home smelling of cigarette smoke and cologne, but my mother was no longer there to question her, and my father didn't notice because he would be twisted around the scaffolding on the side of our house, laying two-by-fours or pulling them out, or he'd be hunched over the skill saw, forehead furrowed with thoughts of tiny measurements. My brother, Joffrey, spent his days hunting for salamanders in dug-out ditches, or exploring the vacant lots clustered around our neighbourhood. He'd return home covered in mud and hide tree frogs and beetles underneath his bed. My father didn't notice that, either. During mealtimes, everyone would stare at each other with slightly glazed, distracted eyes—but not me. My eyes were steady and fixed. I stared at my dad, making sure he didn't go anywhere. No one else had noticed that he had a tendency of disappearing that summer, too. His first disappearance happened in mid-July, a few weeks after my mother moved out. My father was laying down parquet flooring in the living room. I was busy catching and releasing bugs and bumblebees that flew in through the windows that were open for ventilation. My dad crawled on his hands and knees with a pencil tucked behind his ear, spreading toxic-smelling adhesive across the floor. I handed him tiles and he placed them on the glue. "Madeline, next," he'd call, when he was ready for another tile. I pranced over, the ocean breeze lifting my summer skirt, a bee flitting past my face. "Here you go." "Whenever you lay parquet," my dad told me, gently placing the tile in position, "you have to remember the overall layout, your vision for the entire room. Every tile has its place." "Okay," I said, rescuing a dragonfly that had gotten stuck in the windowsill. I walked the dragonfly towards the window, his paper-thin wings crackling. After I released him outside, I went into the kitchen and poured myself a glass of orange juice. 40 PRISM 60.4 My dad hadn't finished the kitchen yet. The floor was still whitewashed plywood, smoothed by our feet, and the counters were sanded but not painted, waiting for an overlay. There were no doors on the cupboards, and a gaping hole stood in place of the dishwasher, yet to be installed. "Maddie, tile please!" I rinsed my cup in the sink and returned to the living room. I picked up a new tile and noticed a fly circling around the living room. But my dad wasn't there. "Dad?" I called. Maybe he went to the bathroom. "Tile please. Quick, before the glue dries." I swivelled on my heel, taking in the whole room. He definitely wasn't there. "Dad?" I called again. Was he tiling a different room now? "Yes, Maddie, I'm ready. Tile!" But his voice was close. It was still in the living room. "Dad!" I called. "I can hear you but I can't see you! Where did you go? He went silent, then, not answering me. The breeze from the sea had calmed, and my skirt was flat. Suddenly the tile in my hands became very heavy. "Madeline?" Now I sensed the location of his voice—the floor. I looked at my socked feet, standing on the part he hadn't tiled yet. I wasn't supposed to step on the parquet until it was good and dry. "Oh, shoot," my dad said, and I dropped the tile, falling to my knees, pressing an ear to the parquet he'd just laid down. "Maddie, this is going to sound crazy, but—" "Daddy?" I screamed into the tile. I pounded my fist on the geometric pattern. I scratched against its grain; I tried to pull the tile up from the glue, but it was already fixed. "Are you under there?" I called, knocking on the hardwood. "Maddie, listen," my dad's voice said, and it was coming directly from the parquet. "Go call your mother." "But I don't know her number!" I said, starting to cry. It was true. Mom had pointed out the house she was staying at one day when we drove past—a large suburban with brick columns and a circular driveway—but I didn't know anything else about it. 41 "Look, it's Ernie's house," said my dad's voice from the parquet. "His number is taped to the fridge door. Call him, and tell your mother it's an emergency." "Ernie?" I asked. "Why is she living at Ernie's house?" Ernie Custalow was a real estate agent; he'd come by the property a few times when we lived in the RV I'd only met him once or twice, and he smelled like barbecued oysters. "Never mind that," my dad's voice said. "Hurry up and call her." I raced to the kitchen, nearly tripping over the box of tiling on my way. I picked up the phone from its handle and stretched the cord as far as it would go, squinting at Ernie's phone number on the fridge door. Then I dialled, trying to hurry each number as it wound around the circle. Ernie's number had a lot of zeros. The phone rang and rang, but no one answered. I hung up and dialled again. Still no answer. I tried a third time and finally a child picked up. "Hullo?" He sounded about four. "This is Madeline Prichard," I said. "Is my mom there?" "Hi. Who this?" the kid asked. "Who is this?" I asked back. "Logan." In the background, a loud television played cartoon jingles. "Logan," I said, "I need to speak with my mom." "Mommy not home." I could feel a shake coming from my voice. "I need my mom, Logan. Is this Ernie Custalow's house?" He hung up. I dialled again but the phone just rang, no answer. I was about to dial 9-1-1, something I'd never done before but had learned about in school, when I heard a great big gasp from the living room. I ran back and there he was—my dad, sitting hunched over on the floor. His skin had turned from its usual sunshine-tanned to washed-out white. "Daddy!" I leapt and hugged my arms around him. He gripped my forearm with clammy hands. "I called Ernie's but no answer," I said. "Well, a little kid answered. Logan. Is that Ernie's son? Does Mom know about him? She didn't—" But my dad pressed a finger to my lips, stopping me. "Shh," he said. "Shh." So we just sat there on the half-finished parquet floor. My dad's skin finally returned to its normal colour, and I watched six more insects fly into the living room through the open window. It was later in the afternoon, now, the air colder on my skin. 42 PRISM 60.4 "I'm fine," my dad finally said. "I just got carried away with this tiling project." He picked up the tile I'd dropped on the floor. "I'll finish this row and call it quits for the day. You want to get some water on for spaghetti?" "Okay," I said. But I knew he wouldn't call it quits. He'd tile until it was dark and he'd have to strap a flashlight to his forehead to see what he was doing. I paused at the door before heading into the kitchen to start dinner. "Daddy?" My dad chipped away the dried adhesive where he'd missed placing a tile. He grunted. I saw the bags under his eyes, the shine of his hair, greasy from not washing it. "What did it feel like to be one of those tiles?" My dad smiled then, one of those sheepish, tired smiles I'd seen in black-and-white photos of him when he was younger, before he'd gotten married and had any children. "Go on," he said, shooing me away. "Make extra noodles, please. I'm extra hungry." After the parquet-tile day, I officially volunteered to help my dad finish the house. What if he became the parquet again and couldn't get out? He beamed at me while serving us French toast for breakfast. "Daddy's little carpenter," he said, as I drenched my toast with maple syrup. My sister had left early that morning, her jewellery jangling with each step down our unpaved driveway, and my brother scowled at me from across the table. "Want to help us today, Joffrey?" my dad asked. "We're hanging the bathroom door." "I'm going to Mom's house," Joffrey said. "There's a fallen eagle's nest in the backyard. And Ernie bought a speedboat!" "Huh," my dad said, but he wasn't listening—he was paging through a manual that came with the thermostats, another project to be completed. "Say hi to Mom," I told Joffrey when he headed off on his bicycle. Though she sometimes stopped by our house for short visits in the yard, I hadn't seen her in a while—maybe a week or longer. And I hadn't been inside her new place yet, Ernie's house, because I felt loyal to my dad and our unfinished house. They would feel sad if I abandoned them for the newer, shinier place. Besides, I had to watch over my dad. "Daddy's little carpenter" turned out to be a misnomer, because my dad didn't actually want my help. Once he put on his work shirt and 43 became engaged in a project, he hardly noticed me. He would mumble measurements and questions to himself, scratching notes with a thick pencil on the unpainted walls. On the day we hung the door, I sat in the corner of the bathroom on the plywood floor, twiddling the brass doorknob in my hands, pressing the cool metal against my cheek. I spread the nuts and bolts in patterns on my lap, and practised handstands in the boxed-out area where the shower was supposed to go. My dad ran up and down the stairs from the basement where his shop was set up. He chiselled the side of the door, hung it in place, took it down again, trimmed it using the circular saw downstairs, and then drilled a notch for the lock. I moved to the empty clawfoot bathtub, a deep basin that smelled of warm water and Ivory soap. I lay on my back, my mind drifting: I thought about starting grade seven after the summer was over. I thought about my mom coming back to our new and finished house, and how I'd get to knock on this very bathroom door when she was in here. {Mom, it's me. Can I come in?) Maybe Winona would teach me how to apply mascara in front of the mirror hanging over the sink, once the sink was installed. Maybe Joffrey would fill the bathtub with frogs and snakes— gross!—That made me laugh out loud. "Dad!" I yelled, my voice echoey from the tub. I wanted to tell him to check Joffrey's pockets when he got home for crawlies or jumpys. No answer. I listened for my dad's footsteps. He'd been going up and down the stairs all day. But now the house was quiet. "Dad?" I asked, grabbing the side of the tub and peeking over the edge. The bathroom was empty except for piles of door-hanging equipment: my father's yellow drill, a tape measure, ruler, screwdriver, and a hammer. The nuts and bolts I'd been playing with earlier sat in a mound beside the toilet. I stood up, barefoot in the bathtub. His voice sounded like a house-creak at first, which my dad had explained was the 'shifting foundation,' like bones settling into place. The house-creaks used to scare me, because they came out of nowhere and sounded very much like footsteps outside my bedroom door—which for now, was just a hanging woollen army blanket, not a real door. I jumped when I heard his voice. My ears pinged like a receiver, and I listened very closely. "Maddie," his voice creaked. 44 PRISM 60.4 "Daddy!" I called, stepping out of the tub. I walked around the bathroom, pressing my ears against walls and objects, trying to amplify the sound of his voice. Where was he? "Say something else," I said, my ear against the door hanging in its frame. "Just keep talking, and I'll find you." My dad started singing "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?", one of the songs he knew how to play on guitar. He used to sing it to my brother and me when he tucked us into bed at night. I followed the song around the room, pressing my ear, trying to find him. Door: no. Tape measure: no. I picked up the brass doorknob that wasn't installed yet and held it to my ear. "Long time ago," my dad sang from within the doorknob. "Daddy! There you are!" I cried, kissing the doorknob. "Hold on. I'll go call Mom at Ernie's." "Wait," my dad said. "Just wait a minute, please?" I paused, cupping the doorknob in my palms. "I'd like to stay here a while," my dad said. "Inside the doorknob?" "Yes." "You don't want me to call Mom?" "No," my dad said. "There's no reason to." "Oh. Okay." I sat cross-legged on the floor and made a nest with a couple of scratchy old bath towels, placing my dad the doorknob inside the nest, like he was a precious golden egg. "What's it like in there, Dad?" I asked him. "Mmm, it's peaceful." "Do you like being a doorknob?" "I might like it," he agreed. We sat in the bathroom until the windows cast a mid-afternoon light and my stomach growled with hunger. "Don't go anywhere," I said. "I'm going to get some crackers and I'll be right back." "Mmm." I raced to the pantry and pulled down a box of Stoned Wheat Thins. Then I grabbed ajar of strawberry jam and a butter knife. Maybe an apple would be nice, too. I walked back to the bathroom, carefully balancing my snacks and trying to take a bite of apple at the same time. I dropped it all when I finally got to the bathroom, because there he was—my real dad, with his paint-stained T-shirt and jeans, his unbrushed 45 hair and focused blue eyes—busily screwing the brass doorknob to the door. The summer continued to tick by. Winona's eyeshadow thickened and she dyed the tips of her hair dark purple, almost black. She bought herself a pair of used army boots and stayed out later, sometimes overnight, going on 'camping trips,' she said, with her high school friends. Winona didn't talk to me much that summer, but I snuck into her room when she was out and touched all of her makeup, swirling the lipsticks from their tubes and marvelling at the sanitary products she hid in a dresser drawer. Joffrey spent more time at my mom's new place; he'd begin nearly every sentence with "Ernie says," until my dad told him to "Knock it off about Ernie," and then Joffrey started spending the night over there. So it was just me and dad at the house, most days. My mom phoned a couple of times to invite me over. "I want you to visit before the end of summer," she told me one evening. "You'll like this house, and Ernie and Logan. We can go out in the boat!" "I have to go," I said. "I'm caulking the kitchen sink with Dad." "Tonight? It's nearly nine o'clock." "We're almost finished." My mom sighed, unimpressed. The third time my dad disappeared into the house, I was helping him lay brick around the chimney on the roof. I'd waved at Joffrey from way up high as he rode to Ernie's on his bicycle. My dad tied a rope around my waist, looped it around the scaffolding, and told me to sit still, because Lord knows we didn't need an accident that afternoon. My dad slapped mortar and laid down brick after brick, gradually building the chimney higher as the sun crossed the sky overhead. I picked scabs off my knees and sang Anne Murray songs while my dad sweated and grunted beside me. When he disappeared, I'd only looked away for a second, squinting into the horizon at a far-off neighbour working with a digger in his backyard. This time I didn't call out, didn't panic when I noticed my dad wasn't there. I had a good feeling I knew where he was, so I slung my arm around the chimney-in-progress like it was my dad's own shoulders, and leaned my head to rest against the grainy brick. 46 PRISM 60.4 "Do you like the house, Maddie?" my dad asked from within the chimney brick. "I will," I said, "when it's finished." "Soon. Working hard." "I know." We sat up there together for about an hour—me watching the sky turn into the pink-coral-blue of summer dusk, and my dad enjoying being a chimney brick, I guess. He returned when I was distracted again. I'd been practising my whistles, trying to mimic the shrill commanding one that Joffrey could do, using two fingers. My eyes were squeezed tight and when I opened them, still whistle-less, my dad was back, quietly adding more water to the mortar that had started to dry up in the pail. He whistled the tune of "Leaving on a Jet Plane" and continued to lay bricks until the sun went down. By the end of August, the house was finished. At least, it was mostly- almost finished. "Just detail work, now," my dad said. "We can pick away at it." We walked the rooms and made to-do lists, like installing rods in the closets, replacing bare bulbs with sconces, tiling the kitchen backsplash—that kind of thing. "Fussy work," my dad told me. "But the house is more than liveable, don't you think?" I adored our house. My bedroom floor was smooth with parquet, and I loved sliding across it in my socked feet, pretending I was a figure skater. I loved rapping the brass knocker on the front door, which my dad had let me attach using the electric drill. I loved the smell of our freshly painted walls; I loved opening and closing the cupboard doors, the closet doors, the bedroom doors. A week before school started, my dad was hanging a ceiling fan in the living room. I dialled Ernie's number and asked to speak with my mother. By then, Logan knew my voice and how to hand the phone over to someone else. "Mom," I said, "it's time." "It's time for what, honey? Are you finally going to come visit me here?" "No," I said, impatient. "It's time for you to come back to this house." "Oh," she said. "Sweetie." "At least come look at it. We've worked hard all summer and it's finished. It's very nearly finished and it's perfect. I want you to see it." "Maddie, I don't—" 47 "Come this afternoon," I said, hanging up. She arrived driving a new car, and she'd dyed her hair lighter and lost some weight. She kissed my cheek. I stopped her at the front door. "Knock it," I told her, pointing to the door knocker. "I installed that myself. Dad helped." "That's wonderful," my mom said, but she didn't use the knocker. Instead she walked into the entry and stood very still, looking around the room. "I laid these tiles with dad," I said, pointing at the ground, "and we chose two slightly different paint tones for the wall and ceiling, see?" My mother nodded, walking into the short hallway that led to the kitchen. She ran a finger across the clean wall, and smoothed her hand against the counter top. I ran to the cupboards, opening and closing the doors. "See, look!" I said. We wandered from room to room, my mother quiet as I pointed out all the finished features of the house. Finally she asked, "Where's your dad?" "He was in the living room earlier," I said, "installing a ceiling fan." We went to the living room but my dad wasn't there, of course. I sat my mom down on the couch and took her hands in mine, like I was the grown-up and she was a small child who needed a talking to. "Well?" I asked her. "What do you think?" "It's coming along," she said, taking in the room—the parquet tiles, the window casings, the ceiling fan gently stirring the air. "Do you like your—and dad's—bedroom?" I asked. "Isn't the pocket door cool?" My mom didn't answer. I stood up and clicked a switch on the wall. The ceiling fan turned faster. "You can't live at Ernie's anymore," I told her. The breeze from the ceiling fan lightly lifted the hair around our faces. "Madeline," my mother started, "it's complicated." I clicked the ceiling fan up another speed. "It's simple," I said. "This is your new house. Dad built it for you. You're supposed to live here, with us. My mother stood then, her cheeks turning pink. She looked like she might yell at me, like she used to for singing too loudly at night, or for chasing Joffrey around the RV when she and my dad were cleaning up the supper dishes. "Where is your father?" she asked. "I think we should talk about this together." 48 PRISM 60.4 I clicked the ceiling fan as fast as it would go. It whirred and shook a little as it spun above us. "Can you turn that down, please?" my mother asked. "I'm getting cold. Go find your dad." "He's right here," I said, pointing up. "He's in the ceiling fan. Don't you recognize him?" My mother rubbed her eyes and suddenly looked very tired. She sighed. "Maddie, this isn't a game, you know. This is—" "He's here, too," I said, pointing to the floor. "And he's over there, in those new windows. And he's in all the things you can't see—all the wiring, the thousands of nails, the screws and bolts and every single measurement taken in this house. Can't you see him? Can't you?" I was the one yelling now, and my mother looked shocked. Her eyes glassed over but she didn't cry. Instead she took a deep breath and said, "It's just a house, Maddie. And if you're so excited about it, you should see Ernie's. That will really impress you." She walked back to the front door. "We'll talk later?" she called, but I didn't answer. She clicked the door closed and then she was gone. I dialled the ceiling fan back down, slower and slower. It hummed to a stop. "I see you," I told my dad. The day before school started, I lay on my bed, feeling shaky. Each time I thought about getting on the bus the next day, a wave of nausea rippled my stomach and I had to think about something else. I wished I could stay at home with my dad, sanding down corners or making plans for the outside. The next big project was landscaping. A timid knock on the door startled me. "Yes?" I asked. "Come in, Dad." But it was Winona who gently pushed the door open, peeking her face in and smiling at me. She had on less makeup than she'd been wearing all summer. Just some shiny lip gloss and natural-looking eyeliner. "You look pretty," I said, sitting up. "Thanks." She sat cross-legged on my bed. Her tights were ripped in the knees and her baggy T-shirt was printed with a laughing skeleton and roses. She handed me a little box. "I thought you might need something like this," she said. Inside the box were three things: a tube of black mascara, a silver necklace with a peace sign pendant, and a package of sanitary napkins. I could feel my cheeks flush and the panicky feeling 49 came back in my stomach. "Want me to show you how to apply the mascara?" Winona asked, and I nodded. After she left, I looked in the mirror and blinked my eyes. A fleck of mascara landed on my skin. People always said I looked just like my dad, but at that moment I could see my mom's face, too. "You're not at Ernie's," I said to my reflection. "You're here." Once school started, I would race home at the end of the day to help my dad with the house, the landscaping, the endless projects that always necessitated another project. And I kept an eye on him, too. He was a sprinkler system, a fence post, a garage door. But he always came back. "Don't worry," my dad said, passing me a ruler and a carpenter's pencil. "I'll be right here until all my work is done." "Like the terraced garden beds?" I asked. "Yes." "And the driveway?" "That too." "Anything else?" I said, polishing an apple on my T-shirt. I offered him a bite. "All the work, Maddie," my dad said, apple juice dribbling down his chin. "The house and the yard and the little family in it." I didn't ask him where he'd go once everything was finished, really finished, but I knew that would be a long way off Who knew where any of us would be, by then? Sometimes we sang as we worked, double-checking measurements or taking turns with the skill saw. Sometimes my dad would tell me stories from his childhood, or I would talk about my day at school. But most of the time we were quiet, simply absorbed with the tasks of building, of growing. 50 PRISM 60.4 Saya Watanabe EARTHQUAKE the big one is coming soon people say. sensational headlines remind us there is a monster under the surface of our beloved city. that one day, umbrellas and rain boots and arc'teryx jackets will no longer help us weather this storm. yesterday i noticed a tremor in my ring finger. at school, i fixate, watching the green pencil crayon dance and quiver, radiating with ripples and aftershocks from my hand like magic. sometimes i forget this body is mine. survival kits are expensive— one way ticket to Hawaii expensive— and ugly. fill a suitcase with water tablets, matches, a first aid kit, flashlights, and tarps. and then another, with granola bars, soup cans, and instant noodle packs. print out escape plans and wonder, where do you go when everything is gone? 51 my dad is an earthquake. these days he moves constantly —feet tap dancing, hands gesturing, palms open and closed, racing down the stairs, and bumping into walls— or not at all, trapped in a body once belonging to him. i study his hands on the plastic tv remote, and watch his thumbs leave oily fingerprints like the rings in a tree trunk. pin-rolling, on and on. buy toilet paper and bulk bundles of paper towels. browse real estate in calgary or kamloops, solid cities on steady earth. drill artworks into walls, go to work, see friends, drink mimosas, while you wait for things to shudder and burn. we shake differently, i think, i decide, i pray, i hope, selfishly. there are worse ways to die but i am always scared of all the wrong things. 52 PRISM 60.4 chocolate bars, or other sweet treats, says the checklist online. how simple it is, that sugar, shimmering dopamine, is the secret to survival. at night i can feel the bones in my body trembling, every muscle twitching. electric. i curl into myself like a cat, holding wrists to ears knees to ears heart to ears listening for little tremors everywhere. ativan dreams are opaque and white like the sky before snow, i write and i wait and i worry for big things to come. 53 Ruby Hansen Murray GOODNESS!1 We want what you now We want your Indian Country now Thin strings you(r) throat gomg down Indian slabs Lay tired pulling logs waiting house thin throats tied thin throat tired wagon-top waiting canvas back lay waiting baby cheeks forget baby why house Nonsense Ma hang Indian(s) tired haul logs know Indian country Exclaimed forget why 1 Words from page 123 from Little House on the Prairie. 54 PRISM 60.4 Little sunbonnet lay waiting tired forget why She said, put papoose back Baby(s) aren't always wanted Ma, waited, want[ing] days and days To(o) tired Laura always lay little logs along the house 55 Alison Stevenson IN THE GARDEN After tea, she led Michael out to the garden to pick some vegetables for him to take back with him. "I'm sorry Cecily and Terry couldn't come," Michael said, "but Cecily had something she couldn't miss, and Terry— well you know how difficult it is to drag a teenaged boy away from his friends." They walked across the lawn, the grass soft beneath their shoes. She clasped the pruning knife in her hand. The trug basket hung over her arm. "Of course, darling," she said. "Anyway, it was lovely you could come." And it was lovely. And only right and proper that her grandson should prefer to spend time with people his own age. Good that Terry had friends, and that Michael and his family were healthy and happy. That was the main thing, wasn't it? "We'll all come next time," he said; it was not the first time he had said so. She knew she and Paul were lucky to see their son as often as they did. Their daughter Susan lived in New Zealand and came once a year. "That will be very nice," she said. "Now let's get you that veg." 56 PRISM 60.4 The vegetables were at the bottom of the garden, past the raspberries. They stopped along the way to look at the flower beds. The scent of lemon balm hung in the air. There was still colour: phlox in pink and blue, anemones, little flames of astilbe. Hydrangeas, which she'd never much liked—they seemed to her somehow stuffy—but Paul liked them, and they filled the space. At one time, the garden had been the only thing that kept Paul going, so she ought to be grateful to hydrangeas. They'd arranged the garden so the flowers and ornamental shrubs were what you saw from the back windows. The vegetables were tucked in behind. The flower beds were not as well-kempt as they'd once been, and the vegetables, being further away, sometimes went to seed. She cut tomatoes and courgettes, then left Michael picking beans while she went back to the house to get some bags for him to carry it all in. Coming through the back door, she had the sense that the house was empty. She went to the sitting room. Paul was where they'd left him when he'd fallen asleep earlier, sitting in the armchair by the window, sunlight lying across his lap like a blanket. She watched a moment for the rise and fall of his chest, then went to the kitchen for the plastic bags. Walking back across the lawn to where Michael was, she felt a prickle of anxiety. She thought of another garden, many miles and many years away. That place had been a convent before it was commandeered to be used as a military hospital, the elderly nuns removed to somewhere safely behind the lines. Behind the hospital was a garden. The nuns must have tended and nurtured it for years without number, vegetables young and tender beneath the protective soil, flowers coaxed into offering up their fragile beauty. When the weather was fine, she and the other nurses put the men on the terrace behind the hospital, wheeling them or helping them to chairs set where the sun shone on them, and on their bandages and their crutches, though some of them could not see it. You were to show kindness and humanity to the men, efficiency and professionalism. You were not to show pity, nor shock at their disfigurements nor disgust at the stench of their putrid infections. Some of the men could not leave their beds. At night they moaned and cried out in the rustling of sheets for what was lost. The ones she tended would never be sent back to active duty, at least there was that. Many would be going home to rebuild some kind of life, while others would instead remain under the soil of that land. You were not to grow attached, Matron warned, nor encourage any attachment to you. She had 57 tried to obey. But sometimes a shard lies unseen beneath the skin, only later causing pain. As she neared Michael, she called out in a bright voice, "Here are the bags—I hope you've got a good haul to fill them with!" "I don't need all this," he said, laughing and shaking his head. "I won't take all your best tomatoes." "Oh, we can't keep up with them, just the two of us," she said. "We're sick of them to tell you the truth—fed to the teeth." Michael laughed again and began filling the bags. She thought of Paul at that age, nearly fifty. How very like his father Michael was, his thick, dark hair beginning to grey. But she could not visualize Paul laughing at that age. She wondered how much Michael remembered of that time. They'd never spoken of it. Michael seemed happy with Cecily and Terry, thank goodness. As they turned towards the house, Michael said, "I'll just pop in and say goodbye to Dad." "He was still sleeping when I went in. Probably best not to wake him. You know how he is with goodbyes." They walked beside the house towards Michael's car. "Are you sure he's alright?" Michael asked. "He'll be better tomorrow." "I could stay," said Michael. "No, you go—you'll already be late for dinner by the time you get home." She was giving him an out, knowing he would take it. "I'll call later, then." He seemed suddenly deflated. "Give him my love." She waved until the car was gone, then walked to the house. Paul was still in the chair. The sun had moved on and the room was dim, the only sounds were the ticking of the clock and Paul's breathing, slow and heavy. His hair was like a white haze around his skull. "Michael gives his love," she said. There was no answer, no sign he'd heard her. She repeated it louder and he opened his eyes and looked about him. When he met her eyes his face was lax, his expression unfocused, as if he were seeing her through a blurry window. As she watched him, he blinked at her, but his expression did not change. She felt the anxiety return, the beginnings of a familiar despair. She had seen that same look many times before, though not for years. They'd always known the medication might not work forever. Foolish to have let her guard down and allowed herself to believe it was done 58 PRISM 60.4 with. But it had never come on so sudden before. There'd been none of the usual signs he was being sucked back into the hole. And, like a heavy stone tied round her, he would drag her with him. Even the thought of it felt like a weight. She looked at him more closely. Saliva trailed from the corner of his mouth. Something about his face, maybe it was what she had sensed before. One side of it seemed softer than the other. She moved towards him. "Paul?" He looked up at her and said something, but the words fell out garbled and she couldn't understand. He said it again, something that might have been, "Janet, I don't feel right." "I'll get you some water." She went and got it and held it out to him. His hand stirred in his lap, but he couldn't seem to raise his arm. She knelt in front of him and offered the glass to his other hand. She cupped the hand in both of hers, pressing his fingers around the glass, and carefully raised it to his mouth. He choked and coughed and she stopped. She studied his face. On the soft side, the eyelid drooped. And the corner of his mouth. She knew then it wasn't the depression back. It had been fifty years since she'd practiced as a nurse—she'd resigned when she married, as was expected at the time. Yet she could recognize the signs of a stroke, even a mild one. She looked into his eyes as she decided what to do. His eyes looked back. She should be afraid for him—she knew very well how important it is to get treatment right away, and that a mini-stroke can be a prelude to something more severe. But instead, what she felt was relief—that it was something physical, something that could be explained. So often she'd watched him being hollowed out from the inside by forces nobody could account for or control. He would withdraw into himself, and she would be left alone. Since the onset of his condition, she had borne the burden of care, for him and for the children. Sometimes she'd wished she could just let go of all the worries, hand off their weight to someone else for a while. But there was no one else; Paul was too fragile a vessel to carry them. So instead she kept on, trying her best for him, pouring herself out as if she were medicine poured into a spoon. But she had no power to heal his mind—for that they had to rely on time and circumstance and a precarious combination of medications the doctor prescribed on the basis of trial and error. 59 She reached out to her husband and wiped the corner of his mouth with her thumb, brushed the back of her hand across the stubble on his soft jowl. After all that had gone before, these last years had been good. Going on ten years since the antidepressants had finally pulled him out of the dark place—the old Paul back, even if some of his confidence was left behind. She wasn't ready to lose him again; her breath constricted at the thought. She didn't want to turn his care over to other hands and be left alone without him, didn't want to see him efficiently whisked down the gullet of a hospital corridor. What if this was the end? If it was, then let her be at his side. She did not call the ambulance. Instead, she straightened to standing. "Would you like to go upstairs to bed, my love?" she said to him. He looked up at her. "Yes." He nodded. "Bed." He had difficulty standing. She had to help him up. She stood in front of him, lined up her knees with his, reached her arms around and levered him out of the chair. Without noticing, she donned the old brisk demeanour, like putting on a starched uniform. "Up we go then." When they got to the stairs, he couldn't balance. He had little strength on the one side, the hand that should have held the bannister. She got him up by pinning the weight of his torso against the wall as she helped his legs one by one to the next step. He was larger than she, and it took all her strength. As they neared the top of the stairs, she became aware of how far it was to the bottom, how precarious their position. She stopped for a moment, breathing hard from the exertion of making sure they didn't both fall. "I'm sorry..." he said, his face near hers, then something she couldn't make out. "No, my darling," she said. "We'll manage this together." They reached the landing, then the bedroom. She sat him on the edge of the bed and fetched some clean pyjamas, the ones with the small blue squares all over. She crouched in front of him and began to undress him, turning his hand over to undo the buttons on the cuff of the tidy shirt he'd chosen for Michael's visit. His hands—she'd always liked his hands. When she and Paul first met, she hadn't been in London long; the war was not long over. She'd spent the previous three years serving in the Military Nursing Service, stationed at various hospitals at the front, her last posting a year at an evacuation hospital near Naples. Paul was everything the men she'd been amongst were not—care-worn doctors, ambulance drivers brash and 60 PRISM 60.4 forward, broken patients who would never be mended. Paul, with his easy manner, embodied all the lightness and stability she craved. He was sophisticated and assured—tortoiseshell glasses and a fine suit he must have had before rationing. He seemed at ease, comfortable with his place in the world. He took her to nice restaurants, concerts, dancing, his hand firmly cradling the small of her back. He was attentive, gentle, calm, with an easy laugh. He'd spent the entire war in a safe position in the War Office. From there, it had probably all seemed to make sense. He seemed untouched by hardship. She wanted to be able to feel that way. They did not sleep together until their wedding night. It was not her first time, nor his, she was sure. But she had never undressed in front of a man with the lights on; it had always been a stolen, furtive thing. In the hotel room after the reception, she and Paul held each other's gaze across the bed as they each stripped off their clothes, then stood before one another as husband and wife in unashamed nakedness. She began to explore this body of his, to let her hands roam over him and her senses drink him in. And to feel his hands on her. It was a delight. She could lose herself, and forget all she had seen of the destruction that war can wreck on the flesh of men. She finished undoing the buttons and slid the shirt off Paul's shoulders. He smelled of soap and familiarity. His skin was warm—smooth and unblemished, though his shoulders had become a little sloped, a little bonier, over the years, time pulling everything downwards. She folded the shirt and set it aside, then reached for his pyjama top. She felt an impulse to reach out and caress the grizzled hair on his chest, but she stifled it. Whenever she acted as his nurse, she drew an unconscious line and kept herself on the other side of it. She wasn't impersonal, but she was somehow apart, not the same person who was his lover. At other times they were still passionate, touch was a murmured dialogue between them, a give and take. Or else they spoke their wants aloud: roll over; here; yes, like that. But when he was unwell, there were things that needed to be done. She wanted him to know he was safe, that she had things under control. She would sometimes feel the presence of Matron peering over her shoulder, making sure she was doing things properly, that she wasn't breaking any of the rules or taboos. Of course, Matron must surely be long dead by now. 61 Paul's face was close to hers as she did up the final button. She leant and kissed his cheek. "Michael picked green beans for us," she said. "Shall we have them tomorrow?" "Michael," said Paul, brightening momentarily, then lapsing into thoughtfulness. "I missed him. Is he gone?" His speech was still muddled, but either it was getting a little better, or else she was getting better at understanding him. "Are you hungry? I'll make you something light—soup?" "That would be nice." When he was changed and in bed, she went downstairs to the kitchen. She took a container of vegetable soup from the freezer, and chopped fresh green onions to add. While it heated, she stood by the sink and looked out the window. She could just make out the back lawn in the gathering dusk. How many times had she stood here and watched Paul in the garden, working, or with Susan as a toddler carrying her own small watering can that he had bought for her or, later, tilting the two children in the wheelbarrow? The three of them would be giddy with silliness over whatever they'd been up to out there, looking up like guilty conspirators when she called them in for lunch. Paul spoiled them. As the children got older and became more engrossed in their friends and in school, they were often out. Around that time, Paul was beginning to have 'moods,' and would retreat to bed so the children wouldn't see him in his state. They seemed incurious about where their father was, never asking what happened to him. "Did Michael have a nice time skating?" Paul asked anxiously. "Did Susan enjoy the dance?" By the time Paul's episodes became worse, both children had left home. Michael or Susan would call, and she would explain he was unwell. "I think it might be a cold coming on." She didn't like to worry them; Michael had his exams to study for, and Susan was forever complaining about the dramas in her relationships or at work. Strange to think that at that age, she herself, having finished her nursing training, but with little experience of the world, would soon be in a foreign country in the midst of unspeakable suffering. But things were different then, people were different. If you gave children too much and did too much for them, you took away from their ability to become independent. Still, there was no point in burdening them with things they couldn't do anything to help. They had their own 62 PRISM 60.4 lives to live. Anticipating their visits brought Paul back to the world, to a state near happiness. "I thought I might move the garden benches nearer the flowering almond tree. And build a sandbox for little Terry. Remember last time how much he liked..." But when they left again, he'd be cast down lower than before. For her, visits from the children were fraught with concern at what the end of the visit might bring. Even after his medication had started working, she still carried a residue of wariness. She came into the bedroom carrying the tray with the bowl of soup and a plate of bread and butter. Paul seemed to be dozing, but he woke when she put the tray on the bedside table. She switched on the lamp, then fetched the chair from the corner. "How do you feel?" He gazed at the ceiling, seeming to consider. "Tired." "Can you manage some soup? It'll do you good." He struggled to push himself to sitting as she helped position the pillow behind him. "Slide a little further back." The tray had legs that folded out. She set it in front of him. She watched him eating, the way his nostrils flared slightly as his lips reached to meet the spoon. She'd made sure the soup wasn't too hot. His hand was unsteady; a few drops fell onto the front of his pyjamas, but he didn't notice. "It's good," he said, turning to look at her. "What would I do without you?" His speech was still a little slurred. "What would I do without you?" she answered. She felt there was more to say—too much more, so she said nothing. When he finished the soup, he leant back against the pillow. "Did you want anything else?" she asked him. "No," he said. "I had all I wanted." She took the napkin from the tray and reached out to wipe a dribble of soup from his chin. When she put the napkin down, he took her hand and held it against his chest. They sat quietly. His breathing started getting slower and heavier, and as she watched he gradually slipped away from her into sleep. At the hospital in Italy, she'd had care of the most serious cases. There was one young man, from Somerset they said, whom she couldn't forget. One night, when the ward was still, she pulled a chair right up to his bedside. His breathing was shallow, fading. She had tended him for two weeks, ever since he was brought to the hospital with terrible wounds 63 from an explosion, and in all that time he'd never awoken. There was nothing to be done anymore but wait with him. No need to protect him from infection; it would not be long. No danger he would become attached. Her knees were underneath the bed, her chest against the mattress, starched uniform against starched sheet luminous in the half-light. Arms at her sides and hands in her lap, she leant forward and laid her cheek at the edge of the mattress. She watched him as he slept, as a lover might, his face filling her field of vision. In the dim light, she could imagine how he might have looked before. What was his name, that ruined boy? It was gone, lost; she had dropped it somewhere along the way. She felt a twinge of guilt at the betrayal of forgetting. She hoped he'd understand that she'd had too many things to carry. Paul's breath was deep and regular. She eased her hand from within his softly curled fingers and picked up the tray with the dirty dishes and the soiled napkin and took it downstairs. It was dark outside, too dark to see the garden anymore. As she washed the bowl and plate and spoon and put them on the drainer to dry, the window only reflected back the kitchen and her own face. On her way back up to the bedroom she felt exhausted. She clutched the bannister and stopped to catch her breath. She wouldn't be able to keep going up and down these stairs forever. She stepped quietly into the bedroom. Paul was still. She turned off the bedside lamp and in darkness took off her clothes and got into bed, careful not to disturb him. As her eyes adjusted, she could see the small squares on his pyjamas. His back was like a wall, making him seem closed off to her—here and not here. "What would I do without you?" People are always leaving—maybe tonight, tomorrow, or maybe not for years. She couldn't protect him from it, nor shield herself. Her impulse had been to try to hold on. But that had been selfish; she couldn't give him the care he needed. She wouldn't disturb him now. She would let him sleep. But in the morning she would drive him to the hospital and then, once things were settled, she would call Michael. She reached out and laid her palm against Paul's sleeping back, then shifted her body across the gap between them to press her whole self against him. 64 PRISM 60.4 Kiala Loytomaki THIS TOO, IS A TYPE OF LOVE Dreamworld is vast, oceanic. You take ten gallons of oil, dump it in the sea (all of it). Light your cigarette, drop the match in the waves, theatrical, almost. And everyone screams, the water is on fire. Alchemical mistake of the century. Headlines arrive. Punching the gut. They leave just as fast. Though, I am still vomiting saltwater. Cellular empathy mirrors nature in a body, a human one, then cries out salt in an effort to give homeostasis to the waters. It is so human to think a gift is something meaningful. The first time I met the ocean was when she laced her fingers in mine, whispered: We say dreams, but we are always awake. Which meant, kiss me under the stars while waves break against rocks. With this, saltwater flooded from between my legs. 65 You see, I push saltwater from every hollow in this body, this human one. Queer love takes form when a bed becomes ocean and just like the water I find dead zones, hypoxia laid out, boundless, because how do we love when the ocean is on fire? 66 PRISM 60.4 Jeremy Colangelo CONSOLATION OF THE CAT-SITTER The little boy was calling. From her seat at the console Beatrice turned, and saw the reflections in the grey cat's eyes twinkling in the green light. Standing had been difficult these last few years, and Beatrice could feel the age in her joints. Yet Bea arose. The force of gravity upon her feet felt new. Walking, kneeling, the small cat, Amity, let out a cry and struggled, his claw stuck in the fibers of the sleeping chair. Bea lifted him up, pulled the curved claw from its hook, and held Amity like a newborn to scratch his chin and kiss his forehead. "That's it. There you go. Nothing going on in that grey head of yours then, eh? Just mischief and being cute." She paused and said, in a whisper to his ear, "I know; I love you too." There was a wheel, like a hamster wheel, at the far side of the room, beside the exercise bike and weights, the 3D printer and the sewing machine. Bea put Amity on its fabric track and scratched the base of his tail as he stretched out and got going. The slight rumble of the track- wheels as he ran and the weak thuds of his paws kept pace with the hum of the motor in the nearby fan. 67 Their universe, the two of them—was one small room, meekly divided by furniture here and there to give a sense of order and arrangement. There was glass on the wall beside the sleeping chair. And through the glass, Bea could turn and watch as a spry bird with a great red mark across its chest doused and ruffled in a birdbath, black and wrought- iron. The birdbath rested on a long bright lawn bordered green on brown on green again, with bushes and shrubs and tall gnarly old trees. In the distance there was a sound of moving water. And above the treeline came what looked like summer sun, and beyond it, maybe, oceans cool and dangerous as the space between the stars. Bea put her hand against the glass and it felt cold. Each day began when it began and then refrained from ending. She would rise from perhaps six hours of deep sleep to the mews of Amity who, as was his custom, led her out of bed towards the feeding bowl to watch as he ate. Instinct made him afraid, and yearn for other eyes to look out over him, and Bea was glad to run her hand up his spine and feel the warmth of his body. When he finished eating, messy as always, Bea was careful to sweep up the bits of meat from the floor and then scrape them into the wastebin to be composted, dissolved, broken down into their basest parts. There was no reason to do this cleaning save the pleasure that it gave her. The idea, which always came to her these nights, that the food left out might attract ants, that such creatures might still share a world with her, brought joy. With Amity still running on his track, she sat down in the sleeping chair to rest her aching knees. She recalled the old belief that flies and maggots could spring up, godlike, from the rotten flesh they ate, that new life could arise for want of old, and pushed away all falsifying recollections so that the notion might sit still with her. She let come the sleep. Rising again, perhaps eight hours later, when the lights beyond the glass went dim and her diurnal companion called for her attention, Bea held him close and savoured his new warmth. Bea had seen on camera the way she slept, how when dreaming she would clutch a pillow tight against herself, how it could make no heat of its own but draw in and collect her body's and release it back—an echo of her past self comforting the future. Amity never joined her, never curled up with her in his sleep, but rested at a high spot by the glass, on the 3D printer, to watch the night. 68 PRISM 60.4 On the console came, against her will, the to-do of this new day. Breakfast: three eggs, one slice of bread, instant coffee (milkless), a ration of butter. Completion rate: 98%. Lunch: instant noodles in boiled water and a ration of carrot sticks. Completion rate: 75%. Dinner: Pre-mixed salad, frozen burrito heated in microwave, nutritive supplement, daily medication. Completion rate: 86%. Primary daily task: monitor the console, radiation levels, trajectory, hazards both possible and confirmed. The task on which all other tasks depend. Completion rate: 100%. Secondary daily task: engage Amity in mutual recreation. Completion rate: 54%. Tertiary task: personal development, e.g. exercise, reading, artistic practice, research, or entertainment. Completion rate: 34%. The weight against her brain was heavy; notions also have their gravity. The console was the only messenger from the outside, and the language of its speech was danger. For a long time, Bea had resisted the idea of being saved, of her work screen being less than a true transparent window. She had believed in the truth of her imminent demise as one might believe in God. A world that was bad was a world that agreed with her intuition, and with the sliver of existence she could see. But she began to suspect—the sensors, transmitters, the sensitive devices built along the outside hull—that no human eyes or hands had touched them, or repaired them, in a decade or more. Threats, confirmed and theoretical, began to wander in and out of her attention. Moments of terror stretched from seconds to days. The report of an impending asteroid—unavoidable, the bringer of her instant death. The high alert, impossible to disengage, stayed muted, blinking in the rightmost edge of the screen, continuing to warn for the past two years. Nothing was real and nobody existed. So perhaps there was an after this. A beyond to this small room. Amity's black nose wriggled at the fresh steam of the dishwasher, his eyes—following everything—traced dense plastic plates and forks in military grey as Bea on schedule placed them in their spots, marked with laminated labels written by another hand. These old words still would guide her. Plates. Spoons. Forks. The thin clang of stainless steel as she shut the cupboard door. The important day had not felt vital to her until she heard the knock. It was Amity that heard it first, and Bea who followed, pressing her ear 69 against the wall. That was one reason to have a cat, why she'd risked so much to grab him as she fled: to provide some other eyes and ears with which to calibrate. Prisoners kept in solitude too long became undone, their unmatched senses running wild, the hell of other people giving way to the purgatory of an endless space. There was, suddenly, a creaking—no, a groaning. The whole structure of the craft bending to some thing out there, beyond. There was panic in the room, cat and human. Nearly sick with novelty, she straightened up at the console and sorted through its phantoms, seeking visions of the outside world. Any number of things it could be, some good and some quite terrifying. Long tendrils curling in from the empty space, traces of radiation and its echoing. She would have to see beyond with her own eyes and hope that her sensations could survive exposure to whatever waited there. But the panic was not just her own. Bea opened the old space suit, its domed helmet and thick boots, and laid it out in pieces on the floor. Following her checklist, she began to reassemble it, like the fancy getup of a graduation ceremony worn again years later, its starchy tightness not fulfilling but inflaming her nostalgia. Amity, Bea knew, could tell what was about to happen. Abandonment again, the increasing distance, what had happened when he came aboard with Bea not knowing this would be the end of others, not realizing what was being lost. He shouted at her. His cries came out with anger and with loss. Bea could not explain to him her reasoning, could not even say that she was coming back. The protective suit was old, and space was dangerous. For the first time in ten years Amity would be alone, and he knew it, but did not know why. He took his stress out on the chair, clawing at it, waiting for Bea to come around as she usually did to shoo him away. But she did not, so he scratched harder, meowing loudly, calling for attention, calling not to be alone. Bea, struggling, nearly ready, trying now to make her heart a stone, saw him stuck, his paw again caught in the fibers of the chair. For a minute she looked on, silently begging him to free himself, but when he could not she took off her helmet and her gloves and walked on over, lifting him to feel his softness on her face. Taking him upon her lap, she quickly cut all the claws on his front feet, holding him as he struggled, clipping him against his will. As he cried out, tears began to flow, a whimper from her lips. This is how she was to leave him, if she died. This is how he would remember her. 70 PRISM 60.4 She activated the auto-feeder. He would have to learn to eat without a guard that night. She pressed her forehead against his, a gesture, maybe, he could understand. "Nothing threatens you. Your life's as safe as I can make it. Please learn not to need me." Through the airlock Bea stepped, a bright white tether bound up to her waistline. She pulled a switch—the door hissed and the air rushed out and then there was no sound at all. She felt the listlessness of space, the gentle floating, the black void of the outside and that great danger following her always—the debris of her ship flying on its own long journey, bringing her life to a rapid end. The fundamental danger of all extra-planetary space, a universe that with one exception seems actively designed for lifelessness. Steady now, used as one could be to outer space, enjoying the painlessness of her old joints, she turned her gaze out from the ship to see— Blue water on a brown expanse, and clouds heavy overhead. The distant image of the Earth, fictional oceans with real water in them. And then beside it, to her far bigger, the great vessel Eratosthenes, a vast and spherical colony ship, around which she had orbited for all these years. There was tearing on its side and a cavernous hole where long ago the reactor had blown through. How many others had made it to their micro-habitats, the closest thing to a lifeboat they possessed on what had been a one-way trip? There was nowhere else to flee the radiation. But she was now, again, in orbit around Earth. The old programming, the emergency protocol, had taken her there. Freedom could come, escape could come; even on that blasted planet—idyllic only from afar, there could be a place for her. As she clawed along the outside of her ship—far larger than the room, and made mostly of support systems and storage for supplies—she found and fixed the sensory equipment as best she could, disengaging all that could not be saved. She moved slowly, cautiously, holding on with the magnets on her hands and feet between short hops with her air jets. Other micro- habitats pockmarked around the vessel, empty cells amassing darkness. She sought, but did not find, the source of the knocking. It was slow work. Her fingers had no haste. Over and over she turned back at the world and the broken colony. She had only to cut the tether and push off and she could go back in, wander its stark halls, visit this old home of hers, see if any ants survived in the trapped pockets of fresh air. Her hand stopped at the latch. The bodies could still have flesh on them, could still float there, unrotten in the sterile rooms. 71 There was still one task to perform. She only had to venture back into her chamber, sit again at the console, and activate the beacon that would call her rescue. The console hadn't even shown her the Earth amid the noise of its errors; every few minutes she found her head turning, neck arching back, her very muscles disbelieving what her eyes had seen. Barely thinking, Bea pulled herself back to the airlock, opened it, pressed the magnets in her boots against the floor. There was a switch on the wall for her to pull that would close the airlock, draw her again into the well of artificial gravity. She felt a tingle in her legs, the memories of joint pains returning. But she could not. The image of the console, of its blinking lights, of its eternity—the destiny of it, the deepening endless space, halted her before she could move. She could imagine Amity curled up under the table, or in one of his sleeping spots—against the cold glass and its dancing birds. She imagined him calling out to her. Perhaps he would take over the main chair and seat himself as the master of that space. Perhaps in time he would learn to live alone, her little boy. Leaning against the wall, still with many hours of oxygen left, Bea turned around and saw the Earth behind the curve of Eratosthenes, which swung with dreaded precision round and round. Behind it, the sun and its bright lights appeared, the first time in decades she'd seen a star rise up. Her first horizon beaconed, as did many more. All she had to do was let herself back in. Bea stared at her hand on the switch and begged for it to move. But it moved with her, round and round, and would go only where she bid. 72 PRISM 60.4 Jessica Le BREAKFAST AT T&T Made a to do list for myself, scrawled on the back of an old grocery store receipt. Titled it Things I Should Have Done By Now. Wrote it in Sharpie and watched the ink catch and pool like constellation. Ouroboros. If I connected the dots I'd ruin my list. If I connected the dots I'd have a drawing of a knife. The top item on the list: the first time I nearly drowned— the lifeguard, her breast a hard globe against my cheek, the second time my mother at the neighbourhood pool. The third time to impress a girl with my newly shaved armpits and then my head pushed underwater. The static of the old TV swarming my finger, the glazed hum of Sea King Chinese Restaurant, ^W., always, yes boss, chili paste an underpainting, a grade school art assignment about my Home & Native Land, pruning my nameless family tree. The list is long. I wanted to toss it into the backyard but that would be littering. Instead I sat on the front stoop with the light on, which also contributes to pollution, I guess, and watched as a spider, untouched by rain, spun in a gauzy, honey-slow circle. I know the stories of labour like a closed wound. Backs pulled down to dirt, fingerbones ground to dust, to flour. It was supposed to scare me but instead it was a kind of delight. Consider—an immortalization not in the planting of a tree but in the rising of a good sourdough. Your exit 73 off earth ferried by the distance from plate to mouth: wouldn't it be lovely for your last moments to nourish rather than to destroy? Like drowning yourself in a pond so that years later it teems with fish. I call it being in the right place at the right time. Otherwise known as joy. Which was almost my name. Which is my name. Thank you, strange coworker of my father who I will never meet, for my first glimpse of truth. I must owe you a lot. Let's share a loaf of bread in the afterlife. 74 PRISM 60.4 Alison Rraid FEAR OF DESIRE Just this morning Julia scraped frost from the swingset into my mittened hands, saying, Snow, the word from that morning's flashcard with its perfect cool geometry and waited for me to toss it up, make it fall down as snow, as it never had before. She's performing a miracle, you tell Julia, though we are all outside of language and understanding, only the miracle joyous between us, not needing our thought or description. Leaving work, we stop in the underpass where carp are swimming, thick bodies flickering in deep green buckets. In two weeks it's Christmas. Soft round mouths leap towards the hose's freshwater. My face becomes the blank moon of the underpass spilling over them. You point, choosing your fish, and a man leans forward with a flashing knife, with an apron stiff with blood. The carp is luminous, white and pearled as rice. Our desires surface and show their bright underbellies. First want is the method, then we are. Lightly, it begins to snow. 75 ninajane drystek LATE HIBERNAL it seems the wind is saying build back the walls we'd torn down to weave threads oftouch & thought the walls were only half crumbled years only half spent i love open fields as much as subway stops & now i cannot know both — should not know either — the desire for summer is wetting my lips & what is sweeter i cannot recall the last time i felt so soft my walls are too real or my lack too sparse others prefer structure long days & short nights i am committing to more summering to building a cabin in the hills & time with my father as he turns 69 i have forgotten how to move i have forgotten how to easily let the fluff flypast 76 PRISM 60.4 i am going to read in the grass i think in the hills there has been enough cold to kill the ticks i am burning for & the world is burning i am forgetting to & i am wanting days that don't melt but the only thing i want & the only thing i want are walls around hours to count my fortune of being alive i am boxing myself in i have seen my sister box & box herself & my friend too says she has spiralled catoptric inside her walls i don't know how to commit like that & it almost saddens me i hope for hot rains & swimming naked i hope for friends & for petals rubbed too hard between fingertips 77 Dominik Parisien NAMING A PLANT AFTER THE DEAD the cactus bloomed and resentment with it. slow growth didn't offend but the blooming was a bright pink fresh new grief, taunted by a potted plant, seasons passed and promised promised promised the old made new. remembering alone is too passive, i'd hold your bones if they held me back, a minute, a moment, there was no passing on this want, all there was was dirt and green and occasional colour named after the dead, what right has death to vibrant shades, i gave in to that eventuality eventually, looked forward to this not you named you's seasonal return, i even called it love, one year i kept this hope too close to the sun. there came no bloom only barren green and absence was another death, i called it callous, cruel, underserving of your name, i thought to leave the cactus to the cold though there isn't snow or dirt enough to cover grief, then life like grief bloomed suddenly again, unnaming the plant only felt a little like goodbye. 78 PRISM 60.4 Vinh Nguyen WAITING, RESOLUTION When I came out to my mother, she said, "It's okay. You're normal. There're lots of people like you." She said the word normal in English. I waited until the last moment of my semi-annual visit home, right before I had to leave for the airport. I waited thirty years to tell her. All that waiting spilled out of me as tears, and when they came they could not be contained. I sat on the kitchen stool and sobbed. She was preparing lunch, noodle soup for me to eat before I got on an airplane and left her behind again. She had been moving through another ordinary morning before I barged into the kitchen and said, "Mom, I have something to tell you...I'm gay." I dropped it on the floor and it laid there like a cracked egg—the yolk broken and oozing, the shell in fragments. She put her knife down, leaving the cilantro half-chopped, its scent filling the room. Steam escaped from the boiling pot behind her. She remained calm, turning the dial to switch off the stove. I was the one who shook. I had rehearsed what I would say over and over again since dawn—I had walked up and down the stairs, opening and closing doors. I had prepared a plan—if she reacted badly, I would yell at her, 79 accuse her of never knowing me. I'd storm out and flee on the plane, and there would be thousands of miles as a buffer between me and my disappointment. I was worried about protecting myself and not her. But I should've known that she didn't need protecting—at least not from me, who she could never see as a monster. She had seen all that life could do to a person, so her son coming out was never going to shatter the refuge she had worked so hard to provide. She led me to the couch and told me what she knew I needed to hear. "—I understand." Her face stoic. And then, "Nothing will change." All I could muster in response was a silent nod. "My child." Seeing my mother's tender resolve made me cry even more, made me realize how much I still needed her to be my mother. I could describe coming out as release and freedom, but for me that afternoon it was a longing to come home, to be my mother's son all over again. Seeing my tears, my mother thought that I was lost and conflicted. She said, "In life, the most important thing is to be a person with integrity—to respect yourself." What for me was relief, she saw as shame. But relief is sometimes just shame taking its final gasp, asphyxiated from the inside out. She put a hand on my shoulder and said, "Me thirang con"—mother loves child, or I love you. I couldn't stop crying. All I wanted at that moment was to pry open my suitcase and unpack, stay with her forever. Later, she insisted on taking me to the airport. We sat in the car in silence as my sister drove along the endless Calgary highways, the flat Prairies around us broken only by intersections and clusters of suburban houses. I thought about how many times in the years to come we would have to say goodbye to each other, again and again. At the airport, she gave me a hug. My arms tried to memorize the impression of her tiny body, the feel of warmth as her head pressed against my torso. Then, she brought her hand to the small of my back and steered me through the throng of people, ushering me away from her. On the plane, I started crying again as the flight attendants performed the safety demonstration. The woman next to me stared straight ahead and casually slipped on her earphones. I peered out the window and watched the runway outside, a moving puzzle of trucks and planes and 80 PRISM 60.4 small people in orange neon vests. Then the world picked up speed and began to blur. It tilted as I was lifted into the air, and the ground that had held me just seconds before dropped beneath me. What I saw was a miniature city of toy buildings and cars, roads that led nowhere. It didn't take long for clouds to swallow everything up, and the fragments of my life with my mother disappeared. The airplane entered a new time zone as day turned into night. I closed the shade and shut my eyes, as if for the first time. My mother is the second child, and eldest daughter, in a family of fifteen. She was born in the late 1940s in an occupied nation trying to fight its way out of colonial rule and into self-determination. The Vietnam into which she was born was already at war. Everything that marked her passage through life had occurred under violence—as accords, escalations, coups, displacements, offensives, counterinsurgencies, curfews, and body counts. When the American war was over, there was nothing left but war: a country in ruins, millions of people dead, an imprisoned husband, three young children to raise, and no way to make a living. In 1975, when the fighting ended, my mother was a high school teacher. Her husband was the division head of military police in the Army of the Republic of Viet Nam. This army and the nation it defended only exists now in a yellow heritage flag with three red horizontal stripes— representing the blood of its people, and memories scattered across the diaspora. The exception of war was ordinary life for her, and she waited for peace, only to discover it came in the form of tanks rolling down a boulevard. Peace was a termination slip from the school, and a letter inviting her husband to a brief meeting. That meeting turned into eight years of incarceration in re-education camps. At the conclusion of waiting, she knew, were more battles to be fought. A new war, one that was not as much new as the old one hobbling forward on crutches, became the next ordinary. It now took shape as three hungry mouths to feed. Her children, my siblings, needed both a mother and father, so she stepped into the city's battered streets and spent her days squatting on the curb by an opened suitcase containing cigarettes. Whether the family ate depended on how many men had enough money to satisfy a nicotine craving. When she realized that cigarettes were small game, she began trafficking in gold, the most precious and stable material in a black market. She learned to hustle in the toughest of economies, befriending gangsters, evading cops, and getting out of deals gone wrong. When I came out to her, she had long left this past behind. She had escaped Vietnam and spent her life in Canada cooking at home and tending the garden. But before this could happen, she had to carry her children on a boat, through the jungles, and survive three years in refugee camps. She had to find her way to a new country and build a life for her broken family. All this she had to do without her husband, who, upon eventual release from the re-education camps, returned home to his family, only to step onto a boat and disappear a few years later. For a long time, she waited to hear from him, knowing in her exhausted bones that he'd met the fate of many other refugees in the open water. Time, slowly dripping from a kitchen tap, is what my mother has now, minutes and hours and days and years of it. It is her reward for living when others died. But living after war is always a waiting, for the next moment, for the potential catastrophe to come. Living is not a resolution to war, but its long-lasting residue. A couple of weeks after I came out, my mother called to check up on me in Toronto. She wanted to learn more, to ask why I am the way that I am. And whether I was sure—"Of course, I'm sure." Might it have been a bad fever I had when I was a child—"That's not how people become gay." Might it have been the influence of friends—"Yes, but not in the way you think." Could this be something that I reconsider because the world is so unforgiving—"No, mom, I cannot." "If this is the case, then you must take every precaution," she replied. Make yourself smaller so the surface that can be attacked, that can be injured, is minimized, because if there's one thing she knows for certain, it's that anything can happen at any moment. You can wake up one morning and lose everything. When this happens, nothing can save you, not even your mother. If you are not vigilant, then life will slip out of your hands, and all of it, the suffering, the waiting, the effort, will have been a waste. She called again the next week because plastered all over TV screens was the face of Jun Lin, the Chinese international student Luka Magnotta murdered. She asked if I had read the horrific news, if I'd seen what could happen to a person. She didn't say it, but I knew that she meant a person like myself. Sadness seeped into me because my mother had to see her 82 PRISM 60.4 youngest son in the dismembered body of a gay Asian man. But this sadness came out as irritation—"That could never happen to me," I said, more to convince myself than for her sake. The entire country heard about his hands and feet first—mailed to elementary schools and political party offices—before we saw his face. And later, the face that lingered in memory was the face of his mother, the woman who crossed the Pacific Ocean to mourn her only son. Lin never got to come out to his mother—she only found out when another man's desire severed his body into parts. At Magnotta's trial, Lin's ex-lover testified that Lin felt some pressure to marry a woman. Perhaps he had to leave home, to come to Canada and be a foreigner in the country of longing, to look for intimacy and step on cracks that separated pleasure and pain. It was revealed that Lin and Magnotta met through a Craigslist advertisement for S&M sex. It was suggested that Magnotta might have cannibalized Lin. The media reported that Lin's mother lost the will to live, haunted by a video of his death people watched online. When Lin's mother said goodbye and put him on a plane, she didn't know what awaited him on the other side. She thought that Canada was a multicultural country where her son could be safe. Knowing all this, my mother implored me to never forget to view the world as a treacherous place. She was worried that her son might too be lonely, that he might seek out and face danger. "WHAT DID YOU SAY? FAGGOTSf the hate spat out of the man's mouth with ease. Unmoved, my partner responded by enunciating the word "nothing" with calm elegance while I sat shaking beside him. Ten minutes earlier, we had slipped out of a dark and sweaty bar on Bloor Street West, the place where we first met and fell in love. We had been surrounded by friends, BIPOC and queer folx dancing to old skool hip-hop, bodies pressed up against each other, pressed up against the wall, dripping in the heat. Passersby would hear only bass, and looking in they would see only light and shadow moving behind a fogged-up window-front, and the sign "Holy Oak Cafe." We had walked a block from the Cafe, buzzed with drink and the city, and entered a Pizza Pizza. Inside were late-night partygoers similarly looking for carbs and fat to end the night and soak up alcohol. The four of them—white men in sneakers—were already there, at the front of the 83 line deciding what to order. They took their time so we sat down and waited. We could see the commotion, that they were not satisfied with the slices left-over on the counter, sitting under the glass display. The staff—brown men in uniform—were trying to explain that the kitchen was closed, gesticulating with their hands that nothing could be done. The four white men looked at the display counter again, and one of them pointed at the back kitchen. Everyone else in line expressed exasperation without uttering a word, either crossing their arms, turning their heads, or scanning the room to make eye contact with others who understood exactly what they felt. Then, one of the men yelled out: "Fucking Pakis!" His friends started to leave but he, still hungry, turned around and barked, "This is what you get for letting immigrants into this country!" The staff stood there. Everyone else just stood there in silence. When they passed us on their way out, my partner casually said, "Starve to death." The man spun around once again, "What did you say?" He brought his face closer to ours, "WHAT DID YOU SAY? FAGGOTSr "Nothing." There existed a moment when our faces could have been smashed in, all those words turned into snot and bloody pulp. But perhaps the damage had already been done that night. Perhaps the four of them were too stunned because someone dared to not say nothing. And then they left, but "Paki" and "immigrant" and "faggot" laid there on the floor like globs of cloudy phlegm. When I came out to my mother, I said the word "gay" in English because I didn't know a Vietnamese word that wasn't derogatory, that didn't come from the French term for "fag," which came from pederast, or one that didn't mean "the wrong kind." So many words were lodged inside my throat, choking me silent. After a stretch of silence on our walk home from the Pizza Pizza, my partner asked, "How did they know we were gay?" I chuckled. "I don't know...maybe because I had my hand on your thigh?" This broke the tension, but I was still dislodged by what had transpired. There's something singular about this kind of violence that estranges you from yourself, leaving you lost beside or underneath or 84 PRISM 60.4 somewhere behind yourself. Out of sync. There's a shadow next to you, but you're unsure which one is self and which is shadow. You're forced to see yourself not with your own eyes, but with those of a hostile world. Once I was walking down the street and as I passed an Asian couple going the opposite direction, a white man on the curb yelled: "Zipperheads!" I didn't know whether he was throwing that grenade at me or the couple or all of us. He was clearly intoxicated, but he did not forget an obscure slur for Asians, one that came from the American military and that appears in one infamous Hollywood film, the same one in which Vietnamese women are depicted soliciting servicemen with the line, "Me love you long time." The couple walked by without flinching, unaware that they might have been the intended target. I don't think anyone on the street knew that zipperhead originated in the Korean and Vietnam Wars, referring to the zigzag tracks that were left behind when tanks rolled over dead Asian bodies, the splitting open of the head when it was shot. I continued walking. I got on a streetcar, but one that was going the wrong way. I forgot where I was headed and what I needed to do that afternoon. I came home later that day with milk, a bag of chips, and oranges, when I needed a can of crushed tomatoes and parmesan for the evening's pasta. I wasn't physically hurt, but "zipperhead" did what it was supposed to do, which was push me off that sidewalk, rip me from myself. The split of the zipper is a psychic one. That is its blunt and enduring power. There is a readily available arsenal of words and derogatory epithets that can be used to wound someone like me, even if I'm ostensibly protected, even if I'm sitting in a comfortable income tax bracket, if I have a PhD, or if reading The New Yorker is supposed to shield me from becoming collateral damage in mundane warfare. And what words did I have to return to him or the man at the Pizza Pizza? "Honky," "white trash," "cracker"—all water balloons to hand grenades. But my partner's question was important. I didn't actually have my hands on his thigh. We weren't holding each other or being affectionate; we were just a Vietnamese man and a Turkish man waiting for pizza. But those guys knew we were gay because we were not white, because being racialized already made us other, lesser, queer. It didn't matter if we were gay or straight, we were faggots because we didn't leave his whiteness unchallenged. And "faggots" was just one of the number of things the 85 man could have hurled at us. It just happened to hit home, or he knew that it would because faggot is also immigrant is also chink is also terrorist is also Paki is also foreigner. And when home is hit, the door is blown off its hinges, fixtures are overturned, and the family photos hanging on the wall are destroyed. The year I came out, I decided to get a tattoo. I wanted to physically mark the change, and to remind myself that I have a past. I wanted something that no one could destroy. I chose a hieroglyph of a boat carved onto an ancient bronze drum from Vietnam's pre-historic Dong San culture. The boat was highly stylized, consisting of simple lines and dots. The image was supposed to symbolize my heritage, and also commemorate my experience of being a refugee, someone who was uprooted from his country of birth by way of war and who left by way of boat. Because these early Vietnamese were a maritime people who explored the seas, traveling across the archipelago of present-day Southeast Asia, they were also involved in violent conflicts. The boat accordingly contained glorifications of war and its spoils—specifically, a beheading of the enemy. Looking at the tattoo now—which is wrapped around my left forearm, just below the elbow—I realize that, even though I replaced the beheading with a creature resembling a dog, there was no way for me to look back in history and not see the violence. Finding my way back to an imagined origin is to comprehend how that origin is forged through death and destruction, not just in recent history but also in the ancient past. Any sense of home and belonging, I've come to understand holds within it the impulse for rupture. To have a home is to be ripped from it too. Or to find oneself resisting its pull, moving thousands of miles away to establish distance. And safety is an illusion to keep the rest of the world momentarily at bay, a blissful waiting before the inevitable explosion. In Vietnamese, the word nwac means both "water" and "country, homeland, or nation." The idea of a community of people growing rice, sharing language, and launching boats is rooted in water. But in the aftermath of war, water was the means by which many of these people were separated from their community, when they desperately took to boats to escape the incoming communist regime. This tattoo on my arm represents both home and a lack thereof. If it evokes an essence, origin, or past, then it is also a reminder that I cannot possess such pure or precious things. 86 PRISM 60.4 At the parlour in a hip area of Toronto, the tattoo artist told me that the needle's pain was like being scratched by a cat. She added that, fortunately, it wouldn't last for longer than ten seconds at a time. I sat in the chair for three-and-a-half hours. The steady rush of adrenaline made my stomach grumble with hunger. I closed my eyes and smiled—remembering what I managed to tell my mother before it was too late—and the sensation of skin breaking, the blood, and the ink soaking into my body pleased me. It scared me how much I desired this feeling. When she first saw my forearm, my mother told me to stop getting tattoos. She and I were sitting inside a small restaurant in Calgary's Little Saigon, a complex of strip malls meant to recreate a past world. She knew the owner, so they made chit-chat while I stared out the window, where the South Vietnamese heritage flag was flapping in tandem with a Canadian flag at a four-way intersection. This was the closest to Vietnam we had been in a long time. I was hungry so I ordered vermicelli and rice crepes. My mother only wanted a small bowl of chicken pha. When the owner left, my mother turned back to me and commented on his daughter nearby, "That girl used to be really fat." I made a face of annoyance at her and did not respond. We sat in silence and waited for our food, each stuck in our small existence. When it arrived, she chewed her food slowly and carefully. Everything she does is done with so much care, each movement weary of the one that came before, wary of the one to come. I tried to eat as fast as I could, swallowing every bite whole. As we were finishing up, two men entered the restaurant and stood discussing their upcoming fishing trip. My mother looked up: "How enjoyable it is to go fishing in old age." Her voice trailed across the room. This time, I couldn't resist, "Mom, can you please not talk about people in front of them?" She responded by pivoting her body to the window and the world outside, as if looking for a distant memory that neither of us remembered existed. There was no expression of resentment or hurt. There was just my mother, who I desired to both hold and run away from. 87 I was a child when my father died seeking refuge. He stepped inside a boat, and the boat launched into the sea, and we never heard from him again. In my mind the boat is always splintering into a million tiny pieces, waiting to be put back together. For many years, I grew up thinking that his absence was the single most important fact of my life. I defined myself as a fatherless person— my longing, my melancholy, my isolation from the world were all a result of living with his death. I spent years searching for him in stories that others told and in the faulty memory of a five-year-old child. I cried and dreamed of him. All the while, my mother clothed and fed me; she yelled at me and hit me with a feather duster when I misbehaved; she picked mushrooms, cleaned toilets, and made sandwiches to earn money. She made sure my siblings and I stayed alive. I remember watching her get ready for work one morning when I was a teenager, and realizing that she had been wearing the same sweater for over ten years. There were holes in it, ones that she could not, or did not have the time to, patch up. She was dealt a life not many people could survive, one that no one would want to endure, and in the process she became someone I know of as my mother. But I don't know her. My father I could invent, keep him still. There is no reality—no unfolding life—to contradict the smile I've drawn, the happy-go-lucky man I've constructed who could drink anyone under the table, the devoted husband and father, the parent who would indulge me or talk me out of trouble. That is to say, my father is a static fiction I've long preserved. My mother I had to live with and continue to discover over time. She has the potential to surprise me still, to disrupt any narrative I form about myself and our lives. And I must reconcile her immense courage with the woman who sits across the table from me, casually observing others living life. This mother could easily drift away without me noticing. That is to say, because she is alive, my mother is a complicated person for whom I must renew my love time and time again. I had always thought that finding my deceased father was the most difficult thing to do. My mother I never had to look for because she was always there—whole, stable, and real. On one of my visits to Calgary after I came out, we sat in the living room together. I was on my laptop, and she was channel surfing next 88 PRISM 60.4 to me. I was at the half-way point of a two-week stay, so I was ready to return to my own life in Toronto. I couldn't wait to get away, but I also knew that the moment I stepped foot inside the airport, something in me would crack, and I'd want nothing but to be by her side again. When I looked up from my screen, I saw her staring at the TV, cozy underneath a cheap synthetic blanket, watching as the bachelor was giving someone a rose, and, in that moment, I understood that the person I'd been seeking all along was her. When I began writing about my mother, I hadn't known how much I didn't know. Instead of asking her to tell me her story, I thought that I'd watch her from a short distance and record moments of our life together. I reasoned that this was safer. I was afraid that I'd learn things I wasn't ready to know, or if we began to talk, I too would have to confess parts of myself. A while ago, I submitted an essay to a literary journal on Submittable. It contained this description of her: She sits leafing through a huge pile of flyers. "Oh my god, they are selling rice cookers for $9.99 at Canadian Tire!" There is excitement in my mother's voice as she clips coupons, many of which she will never use. Like my mother, I've become an observer of others, a commentator who sits on the sidelines. I clip small, everyday moments of her so I can piece them together and make her more than what she is, but never enough of what she means to me. I waited for a response from the journal. I logged in to check and did so again and again. Waiting became excruciating. I realized that if I was waiting for answers, I would wait forever, that no resolution would come—not to my father's death all those years ago and not to the depth of my mother's enduring life. Writing, I crashed into another dead-end. I was dog paddling in overlapping circles, never moving far from the same spot. Once in a while, fragments of flotsam drifted by me. When the rejection came six months later, I felt not disappointment but freedom. 89 CONTRIBUTORS Anne Baldo's poetry and fiction have previously been published in Carousel, CV2, Hermine, and Hamilton Arts & Letters. Her first collection of short fiction, Morse Code for Romantics, is forthcoming from The Porcupine's Quill. Alison Braid is the author of the chapbook Little Hunches (Anstruther Press.) Her work has appeared in West Branch, Arc Poetry Magazine, and TNQ. She lives in the Okanagan Valley. Jeremy Colangelo is an author and academic living in London, Ontario. He is the author or editor of three books, including the story collection Beneath the Statue (2020), and works in Carousel, EVENT, The Puritan, The New Quarterly, The Dalhousie Review, and elsewhere. He is currently writing a novel. nina jane drystek is the author of a:ofin (Gapriot Press, 2021), knewro suite (Simulacrum Press, 2019) & was shortlisted for the 2020 Bronwen Wallace Emerging Writers Award for Poetry, she co-founded Riverbed Reading Series & writes collaboratively with VII. find her @textcurious, textcurious.ca & in Ottawa, unceded Algonquin Anishinaabe territory. Dylan Fisher's first book, The Loneliest Band in France, was the Winner of the Clay Reynolds Novella Prize, a Coups de Coeur from the American Library in Paris, and the Colorado Book Award in Literary Fiction. He lives in Atlanta, Georgia. Ruby Hansen Murray is a columnist for the Osage News. See her work in River Mouth Review, Under the Sun, the Massachusetts Review, Pleiades, Midwest Review, Colorlines, and Moss. She's a citizen of the Osage Nation with West Indian roots living in the lower Columbia River estuary. rubyhansenmurray.com Jessica Le is the author of the chapbook The Nearest Sweetest Thing (Anstruther Press, 2021). Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Watch Your Head: Writers & Artists Respond to the Climate Crisis (Coach House Books, 2020), The Rumpus, Salt Hill Journal, and elsewhere. She lives in Ottawa. Kiala Loytomaki is a nonbinary queer settler of Sami, Italian, Russian and Scottish descent. They are an emerging writer and live on the 90 PRISM 60.4 unceded territories of the Musqueam, Skwxwii7mesh and Tsleil-Waututh people (Vancouver, BC). Writing is how Kiala finds portals that move complexity and grief into love, justice, pleasure, kialaloytomaki.com Katie Marti is a Mexican-Canadian author of poetry and short stories. Her work was longlisted for the 2021 CBC Poetry Prize and is forthcoming in CV2 and PRISM. Born in Tiohtia:ke/Montreal and raised in Mi'kma'ki/ New Brunswick, she lives on unceded traditional l9kw9ipn territory in Victoria, BC. Candice May is a writer from British Columbia, Canada. She writes short fiction and flash prose, and her work has appeared in Best Small Fictions 2022, Pleiades, December, Epiphany, SmokeLong Quarterly, Masters Review, Sundog Lit, Atticus Review, and elsewhere. She is currently working on a collection of short stories. Robert McGill is the author of three novels, including, most recently, A Suitable Companion for the End of Your Life, published by Coach House Books. His short fiction has appeared in The Atlantic, The Dublin Review, Grain, and Hazlitt, among others. He teaches at the University ofToronto. Vinh Nguyen is a writer and educator. His writing appears in Brick, The New Quarterly, and The Malahat Review. Dominik Parisien is the author of Side Effects May Include Strangers (2020) and his work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Arc Poetry Magazine, Humber Literary Review, Riddle Fence, Tupelo Review, and others. He is a disabled, bisexual French Canadian and he lives in Hamilton, Ontario. Alana Paterson is an emerging photographer living in BC. She received her BFA with a Major in Photography from Emily Carr University of Art + Design, Vancouver, and a BFA from Lesley University in Boston. After a decade of commercial and lifestyle photography work, Paterson shifted her practice towards social documentary. Kelly Pedro (she/her) is an award-winning Canadian journalist whose work has appeared in The Toronto Star, CBC, The London Free Press, and others. Her fiction has been shortlisted for the Phyllis Grant Zellmer Fiction Prize. She's currently working on a collection of linked short stories. She lives in Kitchener, Ontario. 91 Pauline Peters is a queer African-Canadian writer from Toronto. Her work has been published in Canadian Literature, The Antigonish Review, Room, The Fiddlehead, The Windsor Review, The Nashwaak Review, The Literary Review of Canada, untethered, and Blank Spaces. Her chapbook The Salted Woman was published last year by Hedgespoken Press. Sage Ravenwood is a deaf Cherokee woman residing in upstate NY She is an outspoken advocate against animal cruelty and domestic violence. Her work can be found in Contrary, The Temz Review, Grain, Pioneertown Literary, Grain, The Rumpus, Lit Quarterly, Massachusetts Review, Savant- Garde, ANMLY(Anomaly), Native Skin Lit, and more. Glenn Shaheen is the author of four books. He is the Executive Director of the Radius of Arab American Writers and teaches at Prairie View A&M University. Alison Stevenson lives in Toronto. Her work appears in Prairie Fire and The New Quarterly, is upcoming in Guernica Editions' anthology This Will Only Take a Minute, longlisted for the CBC and TNQ/Peter Hinchcliffe prizes, and a finalist in the Alice Munro Festival. She is working on a collection, alisonstevensonwriter.com Sarah Yi Mei Tsiang is the author of Grappling Hook (Palimpsest Press 2022), Status Update (2013), and Sweet Devilry (2011). She has been featured in Best of the Best Canadian Poetry and shortlisted for the CBC's Poetry Prize. She is the Poetry Editor for Arc Poetry Magazine. SayaWatanabe (she/her) received a Bachelor of Arts in English from SFU where she was the recipient of two creative writing awards. Her writing explores themes of identity, family, diaspora, and immigrant experiences. She currently resides, works, and writes from Vancouver, BC. 92 PRISM 60.4 In search of a writing community The Federation of BC Writers is here for you! J 0 Workshops/ Webinars 0 Contests 0 Readings 0 Articles 0 Networking 0 Meet Fellow Writers 0 Discount Membership for Writers Under 30 0 Digital Writing Circles 0 Find Inspiration & more! o Join today I /bcw /federation t/of BC WRITERS bcwriters.ca/]oin 5upportad by tht Provimaof BriUdi CokinJjfa PRISM INTERNATIONAL J PRESENTS THE PACIFIC SPIRIT POETRY PRIZE EXTENDED DEADLINE: October 15, 2022 PRIZES: Grand Prize: $1500 First Runner-Up: $600 Second Runner-Up: $400 TO THOSE WHO KILLED ME THE BROKEN PLACES "A scorching debut. Donovan is a sleuth to be reckoned with." - Sam Wiebe, award-winning author of the Wakeland novels Disgraced ex-cop Sloane Donovan has relied on her job as a fitness instructor to keep her mental illness and PTSD in check-until she finds a close friend dead, apparently by her own hand. "A well-crafted, affecting debut." - John Vigna, author of Wo Man's Land denly it's not. When me earcnquaxe mis, Vancouver erupts in chaos and fear, and a strange assortment of people are thrown together in an oceanfront mansion, the fault lines beneath their relationships cracking through to the surface. WHY I'M HERE "An immersive and intelligent page turner. a treasure." - Publishers Weekly Award-winning author Darcy Tamayose returns with a collection of fantastical stories linked by a complex mingling of language and Japanese Canadian culture, as well as a deep understanding of grief and what it makes of us. UPTHE COAST "Frayne writes about the far North with the same wisdom and tenderness she brings to the lives of her unforgettable characters." - Marni Jackson, author of Don't / Know You? Fifteen-year-old Gale is desperate to get out of Whitehorse, a fact that is immediately clear to counsellor Helen Cotillard. She has been having anxiety attacks, so severe they landed her in the hospital. Helen soon begins to realize that Gale's distress at being separated from her little sister llels a calamity from her own past. Kathryn Will cock and her sisters grew up in logging camps on the coast of B.C. in the 1960s when children were set loose to play in the wilderness, women kept rifles next to the wood stove, and loggers risked their lives every single day. Newest Press newestpress.com $6000 prize mona in three categories • Poetry • Short fiction • Creative non fiction Commit these deadlines to memory February 1,2023 Long Poem Prize | $2500 Two writers divide the winnings May 1,2023 Far Horizons Award for Short Fiction | $1250 One writer gets the prize August 1,2023 Constance Rooke Creative Nonfiction Prize | $1250 One winner takes all Complete guidelines at malahatreview.ca nquiries malahat@uvic.ca ooo Defining excellent writing since 1967 University of Victoria Affordable, world class literary cross-training atUBC Write and learn on our breathtaking campus in Vancouver, Canada, one of the world's most livable cities. Or participate in a vibrant online community from wherever you live. Study at the BA Minor, BFA or MFA level, or take non-credit courses through the edX platform. Why choose UBC? Work with award-winning faculty. Unprecedented 12 genres of study. Entrance and continuing scholarships. Flexible, part-time low residency MFA. TA in undergraduate writing courses.* Teach in local high schools.* Edit and manage one of Canada's oldest literary magazines, PRISM international.* Participate in the Brave New Play Rites theatre festival. Note: some opportunities are MFA-only www.creativewriting.ubc.ca PRISM is contemporary writing Anne Baldo Alison Braid Jeremy Colangelo ninajane drystek Dylan Fisher Ruby Hansen Murray Jessica Le Kiala Loytomaki Katie Marti Candice May Robert McGill Vinh Nguyen Dominik Parisien Kelly Pedro Pauline Peters Sage Ravenwood Glenn Shaheen Alison Stevenson Sarah Yi Mei Tsiang Sava Watanabe "Just this morning Julia scraped frost from the swingset into my mittened hands, saying, Snow, the word from that morning's flashcard with its perfect cool geometry and waited for me to toss it up, make it fall down as snow, as it never had before." — Alison Braid, "Fear of Desire" 7 ' 72006 " 86361' 2 pnsmmagazine. ca $12
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