SHORT FICTION: ANN CAVLOVIC

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

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" ​

Based in Quebec, Ann Cavlovic’s fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in Canadian Architect, Event, The Fiddlehead, The Globe and Mail, PRISM international, Room, SubTerrain, the anthology This Place a Stranger (Caitlin Press), Today’s Parent, and elsewhere. "Stan's House" won the 2017 Little Bird Writing Contest judged by Esi Edugyan. Her stage play Emissions: A Climate Comedy was the most attended show of the 2013 Ottawa Fringe theatre festival. Please visit her website: www.anncavlovic.com