STAN'S HOUSE​


Sohki stood beside the several metres of water she needed to cross and regretted signing up for this. She turned toward her colleague in the jeep; he'd tried last week and failed, and so now the Environment Ministry was sending her in hopes a female might soften the old curmudgeon. Her colleague tipped his hand to his mouth, reminding Sohki he’d promised one beer if she got through to him, two if she didn’t.

The puddle, as Sohki called it, was actually the former side street leading to Stan Novak’s house, now a brown and stagnant expanse. She waded through in tall boots, poking a walking stick before each step. Stan’s house stood upon an incline, so that, if you could ignore the boards nailed over the windows and doors of neighbouring houses, it looked almost as if nothing had happened. His flagstone walkway had recently been weeded and swept clean. But his shed, lower down and closer to the river, was ripped open at the back, wood and tools spilling out like an exit wound.

When she reached the dry part of his lawn she stomped her heel in the soil, predicting it would be dry enough for bulldozers in two weeks. Rechecking that her mask was in her bag, she knocked on the door. Lights were on, but nothing happened. She knocked again, and Stan swung the door open abruptly, his heavy frame suddenly close. “Oy, they sent a girl. How cunning.”

“May I come in, Mr. Novak?”

He scratched his grey beard, as if weighing his appetite for amusement, then motioned her in. As she took a step her boots sunk slightly into the carpet. The air was moist but not as oppressive as she’d feared, although she knew the worst moulds were scentless. The whole effect was earthy but not unpleasant, like the peat moss bogs she once bounced upon in Australia, with the added aroma of toast.

“Your boots, madam.” He stood straight, eyebrows raised, left eyelid drooping, dressed in a polo shirt and thick-soled sandals. He motioned toward a tray tucked against the wall, on which boots and an umbrella stood tidily.

Sohki glanced inside. Some of the carpet had been removed, exposing bare concrete, but remaining patches had black smears and darker sections near corners. Out of diplomacy, she removed her boots. Stan directed her toward the living room, where the drywall and insulation had been ripped out of the bottom third of the walls. A jug of bleach stood in one cavity.

She chose the chair with the least upholstery. If she could have ignored everything lower than her kneecaps, and the abandoned houses out the window, it would have been a perfectly normal place to entertain guests. The moisture in her socks climbed up around her ankles.

“Well, coffee?” Stan said. “Or do you suppose my kitchen’s condemned?”

“Mr. Novak, I know you’re aware that – ”

“Ah, but are you aware?” He pulled a folder from the bookshelf and handed it to her. “Everything the town needs to rebuild. Pro bono.”

“So you’re not worried about another flood?”

“You’re welcome.”

She was moving too fast. “Yes, you’ve put a lot of work into this.”

“Good. So offer me something reasonable for my repairs.” He glared.

Sohki, aware of her browner skin and how often she was mistaken for someone much younger, abandoned her strategy of appearing disarming. She stood up while keeping her gaze fixed on Stan, having learned recently how to hold herself unapologetically as a tall woman. His eyes, which came up to the level of her chin, softened and retreated. She then quickly spread the plans out on the dining table, feigning careful consideration. “I see you’re planning another flood barrier.”

“The last two were just shoddily made.”

“It’d have to be forty metres high, cost three-hundred million, and would still cause erosion downstream.”

“Don’t bungle it this time.” He tapped a pen on her shoulder.

Sohki jerked her shoulder away and glared at Stan. “You’d be safer and financially better off by accepting the buy-out package.” She spoke slowly, deliberately. But she regretted not better concealing her disdain.

He approached within six inches of her face, as she’d been warned was his tendency. “My house,” he said, flashing his yellow teeth, “is worth twice what it was in 2022. Not the pittance you’re offering. I nearly gutted the place after the last flood.” He motioned toward the kitchen. A tall faucet gleamed atop a large island with stainless steel countertops, clean and sleek, straight out of a design magazine, if it weren’t for the darkened and buckling cabinet doors near the floor. “Everything I worked for, you want to dismantle.”

“But with the package you could rebuild fully, on higher ground.”

“What do you know about building?” He stomped to the back door and whistled. Sohki heard distant barking. A black dog, wet and scrawny, barrelled inside. Stan stroked the dog as it leapt around him. He opened a pantry filled with neatly organized mason jars containing food Sohki couldn’t recognize, and fed the dog from one jar. He then pulled something out of another jar and nibbled, looking toward the sunroom in the back, long enough for her to wonder if he’d forgotten she was there. Casually, she walked toward the island. A creak in the tile floor panicked Sohki, momentarily flashing visions of the floor collapsing beneath her, before she remembered that Stan’s house didn’t have a basement.

Stan tossed a biscuit out the back door, and the dog followed with the same disorganized movements. “Nothing wrong with how I live my life, missy.”

On the wall, a family photo from the early 1900s hung in a large frame. About a dozen people sat or stood together, looking severe and unhappy in the way of most family photos of the era.

“Wouldn’t it be good to live where you didn’t have to worry about the next flood?”

“There may never be one like that again!”

Sohki couldn’t tell if he actually believed this. There had been three major floods in the past ten years, the kind formerly called once-in-a-hundred year floods. Then she saw Stan’s expression harden.

“Know your facts. 1938, ‘47, ’59, ’72, ’99, even the 2010s. All manageable.”

“But the past ten years?”

His arms tensed and vibrated. “No more stupidly built levees!”

Her mind flashed with rainfall projections, trends in atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, things no trained mind could witness and conclude that rebuilding in this floodplain made sense. Building in the first place had been near-sighted, but you could almost forgive that. Yet she knew that talking about a changing climate worsening the natural tendency for floods would only derail the conversation with a former oil executive. “I know this house means a lot to you.”

Stan narrowed his eyes and grinned. “There go the feminine wiles.”

Sohki wanted to smack him. Maybe even to leave a mark on the oily plains of his impish face, a tiny mark compared to those left by men like him on her ancestral lands. She breathed in deeply, resisting, yet remaining professional at this point seemed futile.  “You’d rather be expropriated, then? At the current value of this place?”

“Don’t you dare swindle me. I never swindled anybody. I came here with two suitcases. Barely spoke English. I worked for my money. Nothing wrong with that. The Premier himself toured my biggest wells.”  

“Right. A self-made man deserves a bigger government handout?”

Stan’s jaw twitched. Sohki sensed he was concealing the same impulses she’d had a moment earlier. She thought of her phone. In her pocket. Her husband often complained his headstrong wife would land herself in trouble one day. She had been told the RCMP had removed everyone’s guns.

Stan stomped to the dining room wall, yanked off a frame, and nearly threw it on the countertop beside Sohki. A Business Award of Distinction, from the province for Novak Oil Ltd. He leaned in across the counter, projecting the fermented scent of what he’d eaten. 

“Nothing wrong with how I lived my life.”

“Mr. Novak, it’s not about you. We trying to protect the whole town, and to do that this area needs to remain a floodplain.”

The dog barked, and burst through the back door into the sunroom, noisily knocking over a thick metallic tube that had been fastened to a window. Stan hollered and shooed the dog out, then remained there, readjusting the tube and cursing for so long that Sohki again wondered if he’d forgotten about her. The sunroom had windows on three sides, and through them the garden shrubs appeared lush and well-tended.

She moved closer. Stan finished reconnecting one end of the tube to a large fan in the window that hummed quietly. He then moved furtively to reattach the other end to the top of a metal garbage can standing on top of several layers of carpets. The can was filled with a thick grey slurry.

She stepped back. She’d been trained on many hazardous situations but couldn’t gauge how potent, if at all, this could be.

Stan pulled something long and thin out of the garbage can; an electrode, Sohki suspected, connected to a wire running out the window. Stan looked at the tiny calcifications on the bottom, smiled with satisfaction, and glanced at Sohki with eyebrows raised. He reinserted the electrode and stirred the slurry with a spatula.

“Are you trying to make carbon nanofibres?” She asked.

“I already have. I’ll rebuild the town with this. Stronger than steel. Just you wait.”

So maybe he didn’t deny the excess carbon in the air after all. Although she couldn’t guess what he might blame it on. But companies had been trying for decades to extract carbon directly from the air – as if to liposuction away the problem – and so far all had failed. While she watched Stan tending like a gardener to his contraption, wondering if an assessment of his mental capacity to make decisions about property should be conducted, he spoke without looking up from his task: “One day. That phone of yours. They’ll say you should’ve known all along what it was doing to you. Or maybe it’ll be something in your soap. Or your fancy new shoes.”

Sohki became acutely aware of her phone in her pocket, a warm sensation, as if it was radiating through her skin. Not her womb, and could she be…? No, this was just psychological. But she’d intended to carry it in her bag anyway, just to be on the safe side. The precautionary principle.  Inverse Square Law. These terms from her degree came back to her, mockingly.

In the garden, birds landed along the cedar hedge, and as a glint of sun caught the blooms of the prickly pear cactuses she found herself grieving his garden. It would soon be bulldozed, on her own instructions. Returned to nature was the phrase in the briefings.

She pulled the buy-out agreement from her bag. The rustling of papers knocked Stan out of his focus and his expression hardened. “Enough of you already. Out!” He pointed toward the door. 

“I could just leave these here – ”

“Out!”

She turned, pulled out her phone and strode toward the front door while texting “2” to her colleague – the two-beer salute. She peeled off her socks and shoved them into a specimen bag. Her bare feet slithered against the edges of her boots. Turning the handle felt like unlocking a cage, the blast of fresh air a consolation, a promise of return to her normal duties and sense of life moving forward. Sohki took a few steps out and then looked back at Stan, who stood in the doorway, the hem of his pants coming undone, wicking moisture around the seams.

“I’ve always been a homeowner,” he said, flatly, a quiver in his wrist where he gripped the doorframe. “Nothing wrong with that.”

He appeared to her as shrunken, dwarfed by the two-storey structure around him, and something in Sohki dissolved, lifted, something hard she had been holding, and this struck her as unfair. She resented the part of herself capable of such forgiveness. And she had done what had been asked of her, so the words that she spoke came as a surprise to herself. “Why don’t you come for a walk with me?”

Stan stared, quizzical.

“I’d like you to get some fresh air.”

His wrist still quivered, but his face and posture softened. So it was with an almost childlike obedience that he turned slowly and reached for his boots.

​


"This story first appeared in Little Bird Stories Vol. VII in 2017" ​

HOROSCOPE
 
 
i.
Dead Sea, Red Earth As far as one can anticipate into the distance
 
When you set me on fire, I go down like California redwoods When I smother you with my pillow, you
Are a pale haze When you make me cry I am glutted by the deluge, and I will now rush up as an eagre.
You eat cereal in our bed until you fall asleep. Drip milk on my hands. In dreams you come with me,
charting devotion, walking toward the glowing ball of pink in the sky then orange now gold But this is
real— I want to wake you up, to shake you, but it is me who is sleeping with milky
hands while Wildfires tear through the coast Keep triggering aftershocks This landslide is
Looking for answers How dark does the world become before you start calculating stillness
 

THE TRANSCENDENTALISTS
 
On the morning of the protests, Mal and Lucy were still arguing about what to do. Or, Lucy, at least, was still arguing. Mal, meanwhile, was letting the reeds move languorously around her. Women who’ve known each other for decades have their pet in-jokes, their nearly meaningless teasing. Lucy accused her: “You’re letting the reeds move languorously around you.” Mal, sitting on the raw wood floor of the shack, ignored this.
 
Lucy had written the phrase years earlier, when she’d been married to a man and bitterly envious of Mal. She had written a long paragraph in imitation of Mal’s prose, of one of her famous tangents: maybe the world was erected on the back of a soft-shelled turtle whose elegance lays in its ability to, like many turtles, lower its heartrate to such a degree that it can survive deep under the water while it sleeps, unbreathing. There was humor in its molelike face and its penile neck, out of which its head withdrew and stretched. So this is what it is to be alive, Lucy wrote, squinting, searching, and ridiculous as a penis. She wanted to tease Mal, she wanted to be a little mean to Mal, but it was the case that actually laboring over the paragraph had given her new respect for her. Mal didn’t laugh then, and she wasn’t laughing now. Sometimes she seemed to be quite humorless in person, though in her writing she loved to overlay elegance with buffoonery. Also, she was exactly the sort of person who might have lowered her own heartrate until she, too, could live for many years in an airless room, having airless dreams as the reeds moved languorously around her.
 
“Mal, baby,” Lucy said. She couldn’t help the slightly whining tone in her voice. “The world is ending.” She awaited a retort, but none came. “We have to go. It won’t be safe here.”
 
“I’m not in it,” Mal said. She tilted her head, that elvin face with its pixie cut, woodland creature with wide-set eyes.
 
“You’re not?”
 
“I’m not in the airless room,” she said. “See?”
 
She gestured to the old tea-towel covered in small needles and hollowed out sticks. Dried reeds.
 
“What’s that?” Lucy said.
 
“Darts,” she said. “I’m soaking them in strychnine.”
 
Thoreau had women to bring him meals, women to visit and wash his clothes. These two actually were women. Mal had taken her admiration for the American transcendentalist, her despair at the dying of the planet, and her desire to be self-sufficient and turned all that into a way of life.
 
“Will that work?” Lucy said.
 
“I think so.”
 
Lucy was no elf. Buxom, blonde, and shouldered like a man. When she was young her lips were practically famous for how pillowy they were. She sometimes felt too large for Mal’s shack, and she let the screen door slam as she went outside. She’d been the one to pack two identical bags with freeze-dried foods and a water-filtration device, with binoculars, a compass, first aid. Only Lucy had a gun, a revolver from her second divorce, during which she’d been in a dramatic phase, in a mood to burn everything down. Mal would have her darts. They hadn’t worked out a mode of communication. Her phone had, for days, been as inert as a brick.
 
Lucy stared at Mal’s creek. Mal had made a million dollars for her observations of that creek, a million dollars she’d been too pure to spend and which now did not exist. Mal had lived for a decade in the shack. No running water, no electricity, just four walls and a woodstove, a bunch of oil lamps, a desk, a hard, small bed. Whenever Lucy visited in those days, it was as a pollutant, or so she loudly liked to remark. “You’re like a houseplant that absorbs toxins,” Lucy said. “It’s like your meditations have actually cleared the air.”
 
Mal emerged from the hut. “Are you ready?”
 
Now they were both standing there staring at the creek. Too much had already been written about that creek.
 
“Can you even see this anymore?” Lucy asked.
 
But of course she could.

*

*

*

*

*

*

Was love like peace? Like capitalism? Only an idea, easily destroyed? Mere structure, mere abstraction, some convenience to build a life around?
 
That thing between Mal and Lucy, which Lucy felt stretching too far and nearly breaking as she’d watched her, her like a little red laserprick of light on a digital map going fast away, that thing was eternal. They would die, Lucy thought, clutching the revolver, checking again and again that it was loaded. They would die and they would reincarnate or rot, but energy could be neither created nor destroyed. She had taken Mal out of her soft shell and into the world. She made Mal weak, and Mal made her strong. Lucy was nothing but a vampire.
 
Mal had left home with no money, had burned her degree and her prizes, and had disowned her well-meaning parents. Had no ties. But love was stronger than death, Lucy thought, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it stronger than Mal?
 
She searched for Mal when the tents had been posted and the fires made. She clutched her gun all the way through the empty streets. People were in hiding.
 
Lucy’s calves ached, her shoulders seemed bloody where the bag rubbed in a perversion of a massage. Still, she walked. At the edge of the woods there was a bit of Mal’s red sweater torn off and attached to a gnarl. Then another bit, and another. Without the sweater, she’d be freezing. It was like Mal had made a trail, though the trail was only leading to the shack, which Lucy would have found anyway. So it wasn’t a trail? Lucy couldn’t think, and maybe Mal, all those hours ago, couldn’t think either. She knelt at a stream—the wrong creek, not yet Mal’s creek—and rinsed in the water that looked like poured metal in the fogged moonlight. Rinsed off the blood and the sooty earth. Lucy flashed her light on roots and moss, on needles and dried leaves, finding more frayed wool here and there. Nowhere was any flash of light returned to her. Lucy croaked out Mal’s name, like a frog, and then she thought: I don’t believe in metaphors anymore. Someone give me the facts. As she neared the shack, she came upon the body of a dead sparrow, brown and plain. Years ago, she’d written a poem on the occasion of a dead bird that resembled Amelia Earhart: exploded eye, decaying like leather in the rain. And then she had written an essay about writing the poem, and several lectures, and now here it was again, her bird, as though she’d never anthologized a thing.
 
Her heart pounded like bootsteps. No more metaphors, she thought. She had become only body, no spirit. The jeep was gone. The mud had suffered some violence from the tires. The ground was gouged. She left me, Lucy thought. Any alternative was worse than that. Anger might keep a person alive, though even this was more than Lucy could bear to admit. She wanted to raze the shack, that beloved shack. More beloved than Lucy was. She wanted to spit on a grave.
 
Fine, Lucy thought. See you in another life.
 
She could have slept in the shack and turned back in the morning but this was not a time for such a reasonable choice. She refused to live as Mal did, with a monk’s abandonments. She wanted to throw herself up against the things that were not herself. To find out if maybe the world is real. The boots were cutting her feet. She took her punishment with her shoulders back, head held high, still clutching the red threads like a wilted bouquet.
​

​CONTAINERIZATION
 
A ship earns money only when she's at sea.
                                                 Malcom Purcell McLean
 
everything is here     iPhones and drones  rhino horns a thousand dud dolls rolls of evergreen AstroTurf   smurf calendars   coloured pencils          penicillin  silicone muffin trays   ways of clearing up spots  dry rot  [in the  flat-pack cabinet]    nets – phishing and inter –   winter boots for the  huntsmen in the bananas  sultanas dramas made for tv a refugee curled around the tight toasters warming on her own breath death masks for museums reams of blank paper   draper’s dummies gummy bears in a million colours and flavours favours for rich CEOs everything pitching in the ocean’s swell like a fat ark of everything we value and don’t the globe shrunk to a plastic glob of efficient intermodal        […]