This isn’t a typical Litbit, if there is such a thing, because of its length mostly, and there’s no audio. I wrote it specifically for a short story competition with a 5000 word limit – it weighs in at 4999. It is currently on the short-list and I am on the edge. I am breaking a soft rule by offering it but we won’t tell, and I’ll take it down in a day or two. I hope you’re sitting by a lake with a side of forest – or maybe you’ll read this and imagine you are – either way, thanks for being here, and happy Canada day, hoser.
Our Mutual Bones by Sherry Cassells
EVERYTHING WE DON’T SAY
I hate these goodbyes.
We barely say the word anymore but it comes anyway, without pronunciation.
My mother says she knew when they bought the place its dangers. The cliffs of course, the storms, the wild lake, the jaggedness, she loved it all, but the remoteness, what she adored most, she cited as its truest peril. Alone before children – she tried to explain to me, her childless daughter – is different from alone after children. She won’t say lonely, our vocabulary continues its decline, love is in our bones, quiet as grief, but we don’t say it.
I stand before the lake, my knitted hands clasped behind my back, my head tilted to the sky. If this were a yoga pose it would be called heaven; if this were heaven I could stay.
There is so much sky here our eyelids are full of it, our gazes sink to the low horizon, in the direction of prayer. I learned early to look up for photographs. I am the startled one while others continue their private petitions.
The sky looks trampled; tomorrow there will be snow.
My mother didn’t take the screen door off this year and I hear it, a moment of summer slams to mind and then she comes to my side. I catch a sweet whiff of her. She has to tilt her head back to look me in the eye her lids are so full of sky.
She knows it is difficult for me to leave.
If you go today, you’ll miss the storm, she says, and before long I am a bubble along thin roads. I remember a tree here, a line of smoke there, puzzle-piece Jerseys jostle through the fallen fence in Maynard’s field, a ship in Lake Superior like something caught in my eye.
This is where I grew up and everything means something.
I feel a certain sharpening when I see the restaurant ahead – but I don’t recognize this stab as a foreshadowing – I have no idea that tomorrow I will look back on today and all the rest of it as my before life. I decide to stop in for a coffee, and when somebody hollers about a grilled cheese I get a sudden deep craving for the gooey buttery crunch. I am normally neutral to food but I need this, so I order one and take a booth at the window.
The sky hurtles by; it feels as if I am still driving. The people in the booth behind me are talking so loud it’s like they’re in my back seat.
My senses are acute from the enormity of home and all of its superlatives – the towering house on the gigantic cliff above the enormous lake, the whopping sky. Normalcy will kick in with distance but it will be nightfall before this quietly happens.
My lunch arrives right away, no crunch, the bread is soft and pale but I am only briefly disappointed, this is the true nature of grilled cheese, gooey buttery soft.
I half-listen to the men in my back seat.
How long has it been you said? Twenty years? Twenty five?
it’s not so much the lake itself – twenty two, it’s been twenty two years – it’s more what the sky does to the lake and the way these things, these effects, are reciprocated ... it’s like a conversation, ya know, it’s a cumulative event that starts at dawn and –
Why twenty two years? Why’d you wait so long?
I tried to go back but I was just a kid ... ran away seven times the first year … didn’t even make it out of Toronto the first two times –
Are you gonna finish that?
got as far as Thunder Bay twice – no, go ahead – anyway the colours, they don’t stop all day, around noon the sky and the water are almost the same ... but different ... I don’t know how to describe it ... it’s ... it’s ... like one is a painting and the other a poem, but they are saying the same things, artistically, ya know ...
Listen, man, I gotta get back to the station, this storm is gonna make me a lot of money today, let me take you where you gotta go ... you didn’t give me an address –
I’ll know it when I see it.
Wait! You don’t know where we’re going?
It’s on the northwest coast, like I said.
This is Lake Superior, bro, the northwest coast is –
even at night you could feel the poetry ... add moonlight and o Jesus! ... the northern lights were there all the time, too ... they were like electricity, ya know … you could see them through the clouds if you knew what to look for ... I caught on eventually ... overwhelming for a kid, ya know ... I mean I didn’t know where I was half the time or how I got there –
This is my language.
My formative view of the world as it came together from our house on the cliff is being described in words and paint. There is suddenly something other than stomach between my heart and bowel, a different atmosphere, and in this new space I shimmy from my booth, age 12 again, I stumble out of bed and into the bedroom across the hall where Tommy sleeps, I squirm into the booth behind me, he says my name like falling rocks, Stephanie, and I disintegrate. No. Wait. In reality I dare not move from my booth, I must keep steering, I have lost control before.
He used to open his covers for me like a wing after my nightmares.
I told him my standard-fare ones, the recurring dreams that I was used to, the ones that didn’t have the catastrophic elements to qualify as nightmares, the kind that woke me with a wet gasp instead of an unutterable scream. Under their weight I was able to make it across the hall to Tommy’s room in a single bound – but don’t get me wrong – these dreams would terrify a less seasoned nightmarer.
Tommy recognized the non-traumatic ones and pulled them out of me word by word.
Which one? he asked at first, but eventually he understood their consequences and asked no more. We tried to figure out where the dreams came from, we lay shoulder to shoulder dissecting the events of the day and sometimes we’d find a clue, like after the barn-on-fire dream we might remember the burned Yorkshire pudding, or after the dead-flock-of-sheep one we might remember the frantic chorus of bleats we heard when howls came in the wind.
These dreams, however gruesome, were each remarkably beautiful in a similar way.
The colours more luscious than their daytime equivalents beneath a sky that churned with galaxies in which pale planets rode the horizon dusty and large. The forests grew in a gorgeous yet grotesque way, like a fairy tale about to turn.
One of these dreams started in exquisite peaceful silence, it was like the opening to a movie, the sun behind the trees caused vibrant stripes across our exaggerated lawn, the sky tumbled peacefully, and suddenly the front door crashed open and Tommy ran full-speed across the green terrain of my dream and straight over the cliff.
Of course he knew when I’d had this dream, he apologized for his role, he suggested I might be able to change it if I thought about it in a meditative way, maybe I could alter my dream bit by bit – and turn him into a bird.
To help this along, he sometimes “went bird” during the day, I can’t explain how he did this, not overtly – not by chirp or swoop – it was both more than and less than that.
My other nightmares were unspeakable, too difficult for lucid articulation, too grave for me to admit, they came with a different sort of peril. In their hell I shouldered overwhelming responsibility to the people I loved, I was forced to make decisions upon which their lives depended, without the intelligence, or the time to properly make them, I woke with unspeakable grief and guilt and clamored into his room writhing.
Unaware of my crime I felt I deserved my punishments but Tommy whispered the same thing all those mangled nights, our heads at prayer. You’ll grow out of them, Stephanie, he said.
I never asked about his dreams but I had the feeling they paled in comparison to the horrors he’d experienced in his life. I’d taken a peek into his folder once when the children’s aid woman was there, I had the idea that if he weren’t hurling himself over the cliffs of my dreams, he would do it outside of my dreams.
I tried to make him a bird.
I cannot put my efforts into words in the same way I can’t tell you how Tommy “went bird” to encourage me, nor can I determine if the bright feathers I see when I close my eyes at this moment were really there, in my dream I mean, or if over the years I have placed them in my memory one after the other.
Still with me?
He was only two weeks older than me, I don’t know how he knew the apocalyptic tendencies of my dreams would lessen, but they did.
Still I suffer the residue of those snap decisions, and if adulthood can compensate for childhood trauma, I consider everything now with care like spun glass, I twirl each concept every possible way, I study consequence and variance, I learn how all angles react to light, to the touch, to time. I am so overcareful with decisions that the impatient universe often takes over and makes them for me.
I know what I do by doing nothing.
Tommy was only with us for a year, rare for an Indigenous kid to get placed in our community but we were fresh out of needy white kids, I’d seen the flyer for a summer foster family with his small dark picture, a full fringe of phone numbers at the bottom. I ripped it down and left it on the counter at home. This was how I got both my dogs and again it worked. In a week Tommy was there and just like the dogs he spent the first few days flat on the grass, pressed between earth and sky, he’d hear the screen door and turn his head, his green eyes already starting to angle.
I look outside at the disappearing road. The snow is a full day early. I stand behind my prediction; the storm itself is at fault.
On the first day of summer holidays, he’d been with us exactly a year, I got up in the night frightened and confused, I crossed the hallway as usual but his door was open, my brightly-lit mother like a moth turned to me, Tommy’s small bathing suit in one hand, a few shirts scattered on the bed, she said, his mother is here and she wants to take him to Toronto, Stephanie, what do we do?
I had only just woken from a disaster, a true nightmare, and another dilemma for which I was unprepared was too much for me. I DON’T CARE! I hollered.
In the morning he was gone.
Just a smear of ketchup on my plate, my tea is finished, the cheque is on the upside-down table. No. Wait. The cheque is upside-down on the table, the storm is fierce, the voices have stopped, my back seat is empty, the obedient universe has kicked in again.
What would I have said to him anyway?
Probably a compensatory joke, but it’s not free, it would cost one of us, probably him – you sure know how to make an exit! – and the blame would slide to his 12-year-old self, he probably thinks it’s his fault anyway, foster kids think everything’s their fault, and then the moment where I disintegrate, uttering every I’m sorry in the unsorry universe. I think that’s what’s in the space between heart and bowel, it’s full of sorry.
I pay the bill and go through the first set of doors. I pause in the vestibule, my eyes at prayer. There’s a particular silence that comes with this much snow, and don’t ask me how I know but I know that at this very moment I am on the brink of leaving before behind.
This feeling. It reminds me of the moment I was able to quiet the Tommy nightmare, the moment I was finally able to make him fly.
He comes through the door all green-eyed and snowy, my eyes float up in their wet whites, he says my name.
THE LOST WEEKEND
The barn is positioned in what my father called Tourette’s Tunnel where it’s Kansas-windy and swearing is allowed. You can see the wind, it has worn a pathway through the field and this path has changed position over the years, in tiny increments, there may come a day when the house is in its tunnel but by then we will be long gone. I never understood how the barn stayed put and its toppling was often a prelude to my nightmares, my mother’s sheep dropping from the cliff in clumps.
But the sheep understand the wind like sailors, they traipse along the edge in little clouds. My mother is a weaver, she spins and dyes, I did not so much learn this as absorb it, I too weave and spin and dye, I too understand the wind and the sky. I have a studio in downtown Toronto where I work at the angle of prayer, one eye on the weave one eye out the window, I see through the skyline in front of me unto the sky at home.
Tommy is beside me now, beside himself in a way, we are driving home through the snowstorm that only this morning replaced goodbye. I am telling him something that happened exactly a year after he left; he is the first to hear it.
I went to New York by mistake when I was 13 and nobody knew.
We were at the airport, a school trip, and I heard my name: Stephanie Towers, it was infused with airport urgency, please report to gate three. I pulled away from my class and they flowed by without seeing me, I was used to being overlooked, I thought it was because I wasn’t pretty enough, Tommy said it was because I tended toward obedience.
I allowed myself to get shuffled into another life, of course I had the feeling something was wrong, but something was always wrong, I was used to dreams like this, nightmares in which I was dropped into unfamiliar situations, usually dire, where I had limited time to diffuse whatever peril I faced, always catastrophic.
I ended up in New York, where I retrieved Stephanie Flowers’ luggage, I’d already found her purse under my first-class seat, I followed her itinerary, checked in at her hotel, and in the morning I walked all the way to the Museum of Modern Art and used her pass.
It blew my mind – this is not a euphemism – I went back to the museum all three days and achieved total decimation. I got pretty, ditched obedience, switched no into yes and yes into no.
I used the open-return ticket, such a cinch, and got to Ottawa airport with plenty of time to rejoin my class, someone said oh hi Steph, someone showed me something they had stolen, Mr. Harris winked at me, there was a kerfuffle about who sat next to me, when I read my Ottawa essay out loud in class the following week somebody whistled, a few people cheered, I got an A++.
One of my new friends’ uncle was a Buddhist, he lived in their basement, I managed to corner him, I asked him how coincidence was explained in Buddhism and he looked at me and said it wasn’t.
My lost weekend. A lesser nightmared 13-year-old would surely have been traumatized, but my trauma was not trauma at all, rather it was an exuberance, a deep gasping joy from which I got a head full of ragged ideas.
I hadn’t known it possible to do such things, I had not thought they were allowed.
In an attempt to restore order to a world that went mad every night, I tied down the barn, I made wool rope thick as my leg, bore holes, dug loops, and tied that sucker to the ground, each corner a knot the size of a boulder.
I haven’t had a nightmare since.
Now I work on a smaller scale, on life’s more private dangers.
THE COUNTING OF SHEEP
We keep driving, our silent heads on swivel.
Tommy used to run full-speed from the front door of the house across my green summer nightmares and over the cliff but there is nothing full-speed about him now. He is time-delayed.
Suddenly, urgently, I gasp: Did you try to come back?
That’s a great story..
Was your mother good to you?
Seven times the first year.
Another ship noses into the snow-globe.
His turn: What other preventative art did you make?
I didn’t know where you were.
A net. At the cliff.
She was mean as a badger.
Is she dead?
A net?
Three newly careless sheep fell into the net right away – this is not a nightmare – plunk, plunk, plunk one after the other and I couldn’t rescue them. I gathered hay and grass and tossed down water-saturated weaves every couple of days. They lived their lives suspended and died at the first ice storm, in as quick a succession as they had fallen. Mid-storm I shore the top rope and left the bottom as it was, tied at the base of two trees, three jagged white sheep cracked into the lake, and now the net hangs upside-down, I’ve seen it from a canoe like graph paper, funny little holes like each square’s a dice – portioned out swallows’ nests.
We both answer – YES! – our conversation like a weave.
I know my mother hears the squeaky tires and rushes to the kitchen window where she looks out from behind rooster curtains. Her lids fly open – she gains her years when this happens – when her lids are full of sky she looks no particular age, or perhaps all of them. She comes out the front door full-speed, I haven’t had this complete bowel-dropping fear since the nightmares, I have long-abandoned compartments that start to hinge open, she falls safely into Tommy’s stretched-out arms.
White on white Tommy and my mother, their puffs of love, I see it at the moment exactly as I will put it into wool. Reassurance remains at the heart of my work, I like to include elements of balance and stability, these are invisible, and wild textures together indicative of harmony, proof that love exists, and a trademark of mine, some say it’s the reason for their collectibility, I leave open ends, the last few inches encouraged to fray.
The rest of the day has the air of a dream, I tread softly, me and Tommy smoke cigarettes outside, we huddle near the house, the snow is three feet deep and still falling, you would never know there was anything in front of us but a white textured wall, the trees are visible but diminished, like thin scars. Once in a while the wind torques through Tourette’s Tunnel in a sharp curve that misses the barn, thankfully, but practically buries it in snow.
My gaping compartments sometimes crave a good nightmare.
WE HYPOTHETICAL CATS
I like the shadows birch make on the snow like gray bones. I like the eyelashes of far away cedar. I like the lake when it’s pancake ice, I can hear it now like a choo choo train, I love being snowed in.
Tommy is out by the barn chopping wood, my mother is happy in the kitchen cooking. She makes us spelt bread, saucy main courses, something with marrow, pies with lattice tops, vegetables shined with butter, she is humming o when the saints we have no power but kerosene for light, a fireplace, a wood stove o when the saints my mother has opened up the porch to the sheep o when the saints you never know how noisy a creature they are until you hear them on a wooden floor come marching in.
Tommy says I make woven art that consumes nightmares – such is his conclusion when I tell him of my city studio – but I know little about him. His backpack is large and titanium-framed, patched with crests from far-flung places, he will tell me when he tells me if he tells me, the patches are aged in increments, the most tattered barely reads Recherche Archipelago, the brightest is Pamukkale, Turkey.
I think his description of my work is a good one but I tell him I would use the word absorbs rather than consumes because they are neither gone nor are they present.
Okay Schrödinger, he says.
I laugh, but I am not the only cat here.
My mother comes in from the kitchen, I said before I am neutral to food but not this food, I am crazy for it, she puts the tray down on the coffee table, I hear it sizzle against the wood, this is my favourite food and she makes it for me every visit, hot dogs rolled inside dough. It tastes like we are 12, Tommy says. She sits across from us in the rocking chair that was my father’s, it’s too big for her, she looks like Shirley Temple dying to be grown up, her eyelids swell, she turns to Tommy who is beside me and angles her head, what do you do, Tom?
He is wearing my father’s sweaters, two of them at once, I smell Amphora Red pipe tobacco my father used to smoke, the sweaters have been in the weaving lineup for twenty years, sometimes she rolls strips of a shirt he wore into a weave, a shape of frayed plaid here, a waft of corduroy there, the red twill of a scarf, a long ripple of double-stitched denim.
Everything and nothing, he says.
The second cat lands.
We play Scrabble with our own rules, winter words only, they needn’t touch, we get 14 letters each, the scattered ones are face-up, the first word over 12 letters wins, if no such word is achieved it’s the old point system. Tommy gets “heartbreaking” and we give him the win without questioning the winterness of the word, we play again and again, eventually my mother goes to bed, we lay out words like shovel evergreen squall, despair anguish sorrow, we seem unlikely candidates for happiness, we hypothetical cats.
Again my question is urgent and real: How do you keep your nightmares away?
I don’t.
But when I go into his room that night he corrects himself.
I cross the hallway bare-footed, barely touching the cold floor, he opens his covers for me like a wing.
You never asked what my nightmares were about. Not once.
I never asked exactly but I got you to tell me.
Can I ask about yours?
He adjusts his wings.
I only had garden variety nightmares until I left here and every one since has been the same, foster kids go from house to house not home to home, this was the only home I ever had, my benchmark nightmare was leaving here. That’s why I stay on the move. That’s how I keep them away. You can’t lose a home you don’t have.
THE WORLD’S GREATEST VAGABOND
On the seventh day the snow stops falling, there can be no snow ever again, the reservoir is surely bone dry forever.
There is a pump house on our grid and it is attended by the municipality so our power is never out for long, but bright kerosene dots remain in my eyes so everything I see is adorned with blunt stars – it’s a familiar effect – I used to get Tommy’s spiraling silhouette like a daytime eclipse, I might be tending the sheep or running along Tourette’s Tunnel exuberantly swearing, and I would bang into it.
It’ll take a while for them to get to these roads. Mrs. Chalmers, our mayor and my mother’s friend calls, she’s the one who will dictate what gets plowed and when, my mother says no hurry I have everything I need, I hear please don’t ever come.
Today my mother is baking with our overflowing eggs. We have a poultricidal flock of chickens, we started with five when I was a kid and all these generations later we still have only five, they like to chase one another over the cliff and they squawk bloody murder all the way down.
The four hens are living in the back porch now as they do every winter, old Foghorn’s out there pacing and shitting, we throw him food into the deep snow and he tunnels all day, the snow rises as he goes, occasionally his head pops up for air like he’s swimming, he is most often the murderer.
Tommy says what’s that?
We are outside smoking. He points to a snowy spiral in the forest, and that, he points to another and then he sees they are everywhere, that that that, I tell him for the first time the nightmare of fluctuating gravity in which he climbed trees, gigantic gnarling misshapen things, and I’d wake up with the sound of his body landing in the soft grass, like swallowing water.
Jesus, he said.
They’re ladders, I squint.
Of course they are.
My turn: Where will you go next?
Uruguay in January.
The words are like a weave, uruguayinjanuary, warpinweft, januaryinuruguay, weftinwarp.
I’ve noticed his parka, his boots, gloves, goggles, his laptop, the titanium backpack that weighs less than nothing, I don’t ask, but there is something between weavers, my mother stops cracking eggs into the batter, she takes the wool, she turns and says URUGUAY? How on earth can you afford it Tom?
Like a card shark he pours onto the kitchen table between hot dogs and stew his credentials, he writes for National Geographic, Thomas V. Dove.
Of all the warps and wefts and sudden silhouettes this week has begat, all the upside-down snow, the blunted stars now sharp, the windy profanity from Tourette’s Tunnel, the only true miracle is Tommy’s astonishing life.
EVERYTHING WE SHORE
All of Grumbacher’s efforts fall short, there is no painterly name for this sky, this is the science of reflection and refraction, not to be romanticized unless by mythology – I would call the colour Icarus.
Mrs. Chalmers says the roads will be clear tomorrow, there’s an igloo-shaped building near the pump-house full of beach sand they will pour over the roads but studded tires are necessary, mine are not, so Tommy’s been working in the barn forging chains for them instead, he reveals himself to be master of much, I hear the tink tink of his hammer in the very top folds of my brain like the highest key on the piano, the beat goes on.
Have you any wool, my mother asks and my ridiculous answer I say in purposeful monotone, three bags full.
Enough until spring?
I think so.
The barn is hot, you could shore some this afternoon.
I can feel it already the fresh wool and what it releases.
I will do Glory, I say.
Our finest sheep. I will let her out into the atmosphere for a few hours this morning, a practice that enhances the wool especially in winter. I throw on a coat and run along the trodden path to the barn, oh! the piece I will make in Icarus!
It is early and the sky is gray but for a hot shock of pink that lights up the thin horizon, tink tink, I pull the door open into the dark humidity and stench, the sheep shuffle, Tommy is hammering in the tucked away cave my father built for forging. He smiles through the doorway, I take Glory into the morning, my hand on her neck, her strands of hair reflect for the moment the light but will soon accept it.
We have to push the snow away with our bodies, it’s up to my thighs and Glory’s chest, in her eyes the horizon arches and the clouds swell, her breath is white, her mouth frosty, the snow is dry and light. Tommy told us last night about similar snow he encountered skiing the Mweka route on Kilimanjaro where no skiing is allowed, part of his style of journalism is breaking these rules but he told us he doesn’t break them, that he has the utmost respect for these sorts of rules, that it’s the editors who like to portray him a rogue, in reality he bought permission with a ten thousand dollar donation to the National Park, courtesy of the magazine.
AN IMPROPER ENDING
Literary pedanticism is deadly, I was going to give this story a proper ending, with goodbyes and intentions, give us false mouths full of normalcy and then wrap it up like a good writer should, but there is a greater resolution that came to me just this morning on my way home from yoga, I had to lower my window and breathe.
Ujjayi breath. Lion’s breath. Roar.
I know it’s futile to put into words the manipulation of time, it’s like explaining how the atmosphere from home comes when I weave Glory’s wool, for the colour of Icarus is in the mind alone, yet only hours ago, true time, I realized what happened those snowed-in days with my mother and Tommy, there is validity when a phenomenon occurs in three minds simultaneously and unknowingly, we shore the years into practically nothing.