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Proceeds will be donated to RAVEN ​& Climate Justice Toronto.
A warning, a movement, a collection borne of protest.
In Watch Your Head, poems, stories, essays, and artwork sound the alarm on the present and future consequences of the climate emergency. Ice caps are melting, wildfires are raging, and species extinction is accelerating. Dire predictions about the climate emergency from scientists, Indigenous land and water defenders, and striking school children have mostly been ignored by the very institutions – government, education, industry, and media – with the power to do something about it.

Writers and artists confront colonization, racism, and the social inequalities that are endemic to the climate crisis. Here the imagination amplifies and humanizes the science. These works are impassioned, desperate, hopeful, healing, transformative, and radical.
​

This is a call to climate-justice action.

...Watch Your Head does not disappoint. It serves as a warning to heed, a reminder to be thought of often, and a well-thought-out piece of art. Throughout the anthology, readers encounter pieces that provoke and insist, demanding attention, consideration, action, and creativity. Essays and stories and images alike bring about questions and statements on Indigenous rights, white privilege, exploitation of land and people, colonial power structures, place, home, language, and imagination.
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This anthology is not to be missed. The pandemic may have defined our year, but the climate crisis defines our time in geological history. See how this roster of talented writers and artists advance the conversation, put the crisis in context and call for climate justice.
                                                     
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SHORT FICTION: ANN CAVLOVIC

9/16/2021

 
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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

FICTION: ADAM GILES

4/5/2021

 
OFF THE GRID
 
The hamsters in Burnaby were assholes. One was on this gluten-free, low-carb diet and even if you bought the right brand of gluten-free, low-carb diet pellets, he’d still crap in your hand if you weren’t cradling him the way he liked to be cradled. Meanwhile, because of the special treatment, the other guy, whom the ad described as “beleaguered but friendly,” squealed and thrashed in the cage. Twice a day with this. All winter. But it was a rent-free place out west. It was a start.
 
Mom called every day, usually when she was at the nursing home, visiting Dad.
 
“Any chance we’ll see you for Christmas?” she said.
 
“These gigs don’t come with vacation time.”
 
“Well, that’s not very nice.”
 
“Snowbirds don’t fly home until spring, Mom.”
 
“Snowbirds? It hasn’t even snowed yet.”
 
“That’s climate change for you.”
 
She put Dad on the phone, and I told him about my hamsters: the high-maintenance one and the angry one.
 
“Rodents?” he said. “I’m on my deathbed and this is what you’re doing with your time?”
 
Dad had been on his “deathbed” for nine years. The stroke paralyzed his whole left side and while the doctors said—with hope, hard work, and time—there was a chance of recovery, Dad was a pessimist, so hope and hard work were out. Which left only time.
 
The high-maintenance hamster crapped in the angry one’s bed and I told Dad I had to go.
 
“You remember when you were a kid?” Dad said. “When you’d ask me what I wanted for Christmas? And I could never think of anything?”
 
“Yeah.”
 
“I just thought of something.”
 
“Okay.”
 
“A pillow over my face.”
 
The angry hamster took note of the crap in his bed, looked at me, and started into some lunges and shoulder stretches. Prepping for another squealing/thrashing episode.
*

In Surrey it was low-chirp budgies. These were normal budgies, genetically modified to chirp a little less. For rich folks. These particular rich folks were the Smuggs, 30-something department store catalogue models who spent half the year in Montreal, modeling.
 
The guy next door, Steve, lived in an eco-home. Solar, geothermal, rainwater harvesting, the works. A net-zero footprint. Which was great except that it reminded me of what I left behind in Toronto. I gave up my construction job for a non-profit that traded eco-homes for inefficient detached houses. Curbing wastefulness, promoting green lifestyles—luring sheep from the flock essentially. The pay was garbage and even if the dream of being self-sufficient, owning an eco-home myself, seemed impossibly out of reach, I was doing my part to save the planet, building these places for other people. Steady, noble work. Turning 40 though, living at home, earning less than one’s mother, there are existential questions one begins asking oneself.
 
Steve smoked weed, so I was over there quite a bit. We lounged in his backyard amongst the stray stalks and shoots of the overgrown vegetable garden. I brought over the budgies in their cage. Steve didn’t know the Smuggs even had them.
 
“They’re low-chirp,” I said, taking a drag.
 
“So they don’t ruffle anyone’s feathers,” Steve said, throwing his head back, laughing at his own cleverness.
 
Steve always had his Green Day playlist going, which I thought was maybe a little too on-the-nose given his eco-lifestyle.
 
“These guys are probably average environmentalists at best,” I said. “They’re more anti-establishment.”
 
“What do you think environmentalism is?” Steve took the joint from me. He pointed to the Smuggs’s house next door. “You know these pricks have a second monstrosity in Montreal? How’s that for a footprint?”
 
My high was coming on strong now. The Smuggs: younger than me, set for life with money, and I was taking care of their stupid birds. How did everyone get so far ahead of me?
 
“It’s all temporary,” Steve said. “Time is borrowed. You give everything back to the Earth when you check out. A house here, a house there—what’s the point? People gotta feel important.”
I closed my eyes, felt myself drifting.
 
“You know, those budgies really are pretty quiet,” Steve said. “It’s nice.”
*
The pygmy goat in Coquitlam was a hush-hush job—the municipality frowned upon keeping them as pets—so Mr. Jenkins and I usually stayed home. But his owners had a leash for him and said he liked walks along the mountainside. Which was perfect: after the ocean, the Rockies were the main draw for me out west.
 
It was surreal, the humbling perspective of seeing the endless range of wave-like peaks up close. Mr. Jenkins led the way, his little bum wiggling along a mountainside trail. He was 15—I read online that these guys live 8 to 18 years. He was just happy to be outside, looking for adventure, oblivious that the clock was ticking.
 
Mom called. She was at the nursing home visiting Dad.
 
“Your friend Derek phoned,” she said. “Apparently you cancelled all your social medias? He said you went AWOL. You didn’t give him your cell number out west?”
 
“Not really looking to be reached.”
 
“Apparently they’re planning some boys trip to Vegas.”
 
“Ah, the mid-life crisis tour.”
 
Mr. Jenkins went off road, bounding through tall grass, westbound toward the setting sun, which somehow, within minutes, turned the sky from blistering orange to an almost artificial pastel pink. I imagined Mom, had she been here, shitting on the moment, warning about the imminent threat of ticks. You’ll get Lyme, she’d have said. That’s what you get for straying from the trail.
 
“Dad’s going downhill,” Mom said. “I try to keep his spirits up, but he checks out, isolates himself.”
 
“He’s got stuff to process,” I said. “Things to come to terms with.”
 
“He shouldn’t be doing it alone.”
 
“We come into this world alone…”
 
“Ugh. Please come home,” she said, her voice breaking. “I can’t keep this up by myself.”
 
I could have moved away from home before 40. Living with one’s parents until one was nearly middle-aged wasn’t exactly the path most travelled, but somehow it was always easier to stay. Comfort, fear, whatever it was, I just went with the flow, let life happen to me.
 
“I’ve got my own stuff going on now.” It was weird hearing myself speak up, risking ruffled feathers. “I have my own things to process, to come to terms with.”
 
Mom cried. “Is it selfish that sometimes I wish the stroke killed him?”
 
It was a Sunday morning. Mom was at the butcher’s for her monthly haul of resource-intensive animal flesh. She came home and found Dad slumped over the living room ottoman. Doctors said he was 20 minutes from being a goner. So close, Dad said.
 
“You’re allowed to put yourself first,” I said.
 
She gave Dad the phone. He told me about bingo night at the nursing home.
 
“Won six dollars in change,” he said. “You know the difference between me and this handful of coins?”
 
Here we go.
 
“They’ll still be in circulation next year.”
 
Mr. Jenkins veered back to the trail and stopped to pee under an enormous tree, a lone Douglas-fir, set apart from a dense patch of other Douglas-firs higher up the mountain. Probably a hundred feet tall, this tree. Been around forever. Pissed on by generation after generation of domesticated animal to walk this trail. Resilient though: growing despite urine-soaked roots.
*
I was supposed to be a veterinarian. Couldn’t get the squeamishness under control though. I failed Grade 11 Biology because I passed out when they set the scalpel and frog corpse on my desk. This was a disappointment for Dad. He worked at an oil and gas company with the dads of my classmates: he heard about it at work; I heard about it at home. I was the “bleeding heart.” Every family had one, a sheep of a different colour.
 
In Vancouver, I walked Jericho Beach. The ragdoll at the duplex near the university was a social guy, ran with a gang of neighbourhood cats. Self-sufficient.
 
This was it: the ocean. I guess not technically. An inlet of the pacific? A connected waterway? A manageable sampling of ocean: to ease sheltered people into the experience, to curb the stupefying awe.
 
Guys in camping chairs fished off a pier. A lapdog—a Shih-Poo or otherwise genetically-modified animal—curled up in one guy’s lap.
My bare feet sunk into the sand, granules filtering up through my toes. The sands of time. Time slipping. Slipping between the cracks. All those nice clichés we use to process such things. And then of course the surf rolling in, erasing every footprint along the beach, smoothing over all traces. Like no one was ever there. Profound stuff.
 
One of the camping chair guys reeled in a fish, a huge thing. Out came the camera. Photos of the impressive catch. Then the clever idea for a photo of the thrashing fish next to the Shih-Poo—for scale. The fish, hanging from the line, hook still through its face, and the dog, pink bow on her head, locked eyes. Then posed for the camera. And the guys, they were just happy to be outside, excursioning, oblivious that the fish wasn’t having a good time. Which was fine. Because maybe they’d have strokes one day and forget about happiness altogether.
*
The entire flight to Toronto I was trying to calculate my share of the emissions, reconciling necessity with hypocrisy. What would Dad have said? Old Bleeding Heart’s polluting the skies.
 
It was probably selfish to give up the non-profit job, to stop fighting the good fight so I could “find myself” out west. But saving the planet was never about saving the planet anyway. Try self-preservation. Animal instinct. Convincing myself I had a say in avoiding carbon suffocation, heat wave incineration, etc. Because a lone wolf stands a chance against the pack, right? Because creatures of habit are eager to change?
 
It was shoulder-to-shoulder through the terminal. At the baggage carrousel, I stood amongst fellow cattle. Outside, I waited in line for a taxi. I was back. Back in that pack.
 
Was it selfish to wish an end to your fear? Or maybe the fearful just weren’t supposed to survive.
 
Dad died yesterday. Mom was there. She was always there. For everyone. I used to feel guilty for letting her take care of me so long. I thought leaving would unburden her. It never occurred to me that taking care of people wasn’t a burden. It was instinct.
 
A cab idled at the curb. Spewing exhaust. I could have taken public transit, but I was done wasting time. The sun was going down. There were arrangements to arrange.
 
Mom would ask me to stay. I had a return ticket. She’d offer to take care of it though—everything.

Adam Giles’ short fiction has appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, The Feathertale Review, The Humber Literary Review, Riddle Fence, The Dalhousie Review, and other journals. His story “Corduroy” won the University of Toronto Magazine Short Story Contest in 2013. He lives in Mississauga, Ontario with his family. Find him on the web at www.adamgiles.ca.​

FICTION: DAVID HUEBERT

2/21/2021

 
 LIKE AN ICEBERG
 
 
“What harm could it do?” Sam says into the frozen waterfall. He holds an ice axe in each hand, a tangle of straps and carabiners jingling on his orange harness. Sam huffs mist into the air. Above us, a hundred metre wall of ice. 
 
Ice climbing was Sam’s idea. The doctors cleared the trip to Banff, but told him not to overdo sports. He’s already weaker than he was, and he doesn’t need undue stress on his immune system. Mum went cross-country skiing on her own and Sam said he was going to the grocery store, came back to the time-share condo with his arms full of rented equipment.
 
“We can walk there,” he said. Lately his face has started to thin out. He was already going gaunt. But in that moment he was gleaming. 
 
“Sam. It’s not a good idea.” 
 
“Come on you lanky sapling!” He was smiling like a champion, the way he smiled when he talked about his art. “You were born to climb.” 
 
I couldn’t say no.  
 
Now he tightens his crampons and steps into the ice. “Here we go, Long John Silver,” he says over his shoulder. He climbs briskly. Lately, he’s been subtly weakening. But now his face seems to glow, and he moves quickly, even with the heavy gear.
 
“Like this, right?” He grins down at me, kicking his toe into the ice.  
 
“Toe in the crampons, put the screws in every ten metres, I think.”  
 
“What?” Sam smiles down, pounds his ice axe into the waterfall. He’s only two metres up, so the fat five-foot icicle he releases is relatively harmless. I’m just glad I searched “ice climbing basics” on the walk over, and that we’re staggered. 
 
I wait for him to put the ice screws in and set the anchors. Then I climb up behind him, driving my axe in. On this side, it seems, the freeze is a little more consistent. 
 
The desk clerk at the neighbouring hotel said this is a popular moderate-expert spot, but that it was still a little early and the ice was temperamental this time of year. I guess no one else decided to test a frozen waterfall for the first time on Christmas Eve. 
Before long we’ve found a rhythm, grinding the ice axes in, huffing into the cold, blood flowing. The axes are light and powerful. The waterfall could be a little more frozen—the odd large chunk sloughs off when the axe hits. But it feels just solid enough.  
           
We hit a hump in the waterfall and walk flat-footed across a ridge. Who would have thought simply walking on crampons would be the craziest part of all this? 
 
The next bit is the last tongue, a sheer climb of thirty metres. Dig, toe, tug, breathe. After the last screw, Sam climbs impossibly fast. He’s a little crazed, hard to keep up with.
 
“Is it too late to say this is stupid and crazy?”
 
Sam grins down at me. “Two choices,” he calls. “Up or down.” I haven’t seen him so happy in weeks, maybe months, maybe ever. 
 
I dig deep. Toe-in, axe, smash, pant. I’m sweaty, tired, hungry, cold. But I’m almost there. Another chop, some ice chunks off. Then I get the axe in, the last one, and I see my brother’s hand reaching out. 
 
“See,” he says, pulling me up the top. “It wasn’t that hard.” 
 
He’s flushed and beaming. I’m thirsty and sweaty. 
 
Sitting on the top, we look out on the snow-cloaked vista, unpacking our sandwiches and cold trail mix. The pines droop with yesterday’s snow. Sam starts talking about water, about ice. “Staring into the ice all the way up,” he says. “It was so intimate. Wasn’t it?” I shrug like “yeah” and he goes typical Sam, saying how crazy it is, how we take it for granted that an entire river can freeze and thaw, liquid becoming solid, then changing back.  
 
“We don’t see it,” he says. “The world’s all around us. All this surging wonder and we don’t see it. We just walk through it like ghosts.”
 
He pauses, swallows a bite of sandwich. All around us the mountains towering, hunching like great still gods.
 
“Sometimes,” Sam says. “I think it takes a sickness like this to really live.”
 
I don’t argue that. I just let the words hang, breathe, dangle. I let my brother feel what he needs to feel. 
 
“Sorry,” he says eventually. “I’m being morbid again.” 
 
In the distance there’s a road cutting through the mountains, sun glinting off the hoods of SUVs. Sam points to a distant peak and we watch an eagle drift down, then rise again, riding a thermal. A wind passes through the mountains, shaking snow off the branches of the smaller trees. 
 
Fishing through the trail mix for an M&M, I gesture around at the vista. “It is beautiful up here. Satisfied?” 
 
“Yeah,” he says, standing up. There’s a strange glint in his face. “Absolutely.” 
 
Carefully, he brushes the snow from his legs. Then he smiles at me, the look in his eyes gone manic. He says, “I love you brother,” and starts to run. Races full speed in his crampons, tearing for the edge, the hundred-metre drop. 
 
I stand up and take a step but it’s useless. He’s already at the brink. Already leaping, spreading his arms like wings. Over the lip of the frozen river my brother hangs, for a moment, and falls. 
*
A friend once told me that grief is like an iceberg: most people only see the tip of the pain while the bulk broods in the hidden depths. I’d like to go see one someday. They don’t come up the bay, wouldn’t make it past the peninsula, especially these days. There are more and more of them now that the glaciers are calving. Some are as big as Jamaica. Ice islands floating in the open sea. I would have liked to go see one with Sam, if he was still here. Maybe one day I’ll go out to sea, and I’ll think of him as I watch one bob and melt, float out to the great Pacific garbage patch.
 
“And then,” Sam says to the people gathered in the living room. “I jumped. I flew.”  
 
It’s February now, and Sam’s confined to a bed in the kitchen. The palliative care nurse Cass’ mother helped to arrange is more or less living with us. As he waves them, excited, his arms are strangely thin. Around his mouth he has the wrinkles of a forty-year-old smoker. So wrong beside his youthful eyes. 
 
There’s a room full of people—Mum, Cass, Jeremy, even Roger—gathered for my birthday. We’re eating my favourite: grilled cheese with singles and peanut butter ice cream cake. Sam is being as charming as possible, telling the ice-climbing story like this great exploit. Like it’s funny. Which, maybe it could be, in another place and time. 
 
“And then he asks, ‘You satisfied?’” Sam chuckles, takes the plate of cake Cass is handing him. “We’re up there on the side of a mountain looking out over all the pines, the winding frozen river below.”
 
He starts fumbling for the plate. He’s clearly having trouble, getting frustrated with his fork. He’s getting some weird looks. Everyone’s waiting for him to tell the story or take a bite. He reaches his fork forward and misses, sighs, circles back. 
 
When Sam jumped off the edge of the frozen cliff, I didn’t realize he was still strapped in. Even still it was stupid. He broke two ribs crashing into ice and sprained his hip from the drop. When I walked to the edge and saw him dangling there. “I needed to do it,” was all he’d said. “I needed to feel it. I needed to feel.”
 
He knocks the cake onto the ground. Everyone is tense, trying not to grasp. No one says anything. Mum watches, stunned. She stands up but can’t seem to move. “Um,” she says. 
 
Sam is glaring at her, then the window. His jaw is set, his face thin, frail, his arms shaking. 
 
Cass stands up. “Okay,” she says to the room. “It’s probably time to go.” 
 
People stand up nervously, gather their things. 
 
Sam grins morosely, perversely. “Happy birthday,” he sings with an awful off-tune melody. “And many more.”
 ​
*
When we were little, maybe eight and ten, Sam and I went swimming alone. There’s this beach at the edge of Sych Harbour, if you follow Hill Street all the way up and back down again. It’s a day’s bike ride there and back. Mum was working the day shift and Sam had just started looking after me on his own and he took me there. We brought sandwiches and a thermos of red juice and biked all day but when we got to the beach we didn’t stop. We biked past the hillocks and the tall grass to a place where a river led out to the sea. “You have to go hard and fast,” he said. “Straight across. There’s an undertow.” I heard “under-toe,” pictured a wire-haired gnarl of a toe that grew up from the floor of the river and tried to grab small children. We waded in and found it strangely cold in the full of summer. It wasn’t wide but it flowed fast. “Come on,” Sam said, and I waded in behind him. He leapt and started swimming and I watched the water twist him. Watched it turn his body and push him diagonal to the sea, the current taking my brother away. Stood there wanting to follow him but shocked still. The rush was taking him, torqueing him, though he was working hard, wailing his arms up and over, pushing and pushing with all his power until finally he reached the other side, crawled wheezing to shore. As soon as he had his breath he turned back to me. He’d gone far, far, down the river, halfway to the open mouth of the sea. But when he cupped his hands and called out, I could still hear him, barely. And I could hear the grin in his voice. “Come on,” he shouted, shivering with cold and joy. “It’s amazing! The river—it’s alive!” 
​
The thing about icebergs is that they melt, and there’s something beautiful in that: ice leaking into water. Because when you zoom out, you see that ice was water all along. Water changes from solid to liquid, but that doesn’t mean it’s gone.
 
I didn’t follow him that day. I waited and watched as he swam back across to safety, through the living river. I knew, then, that I would never be as alive as he was. I knew that life was both in time and beyond it. And I knew that my brother was a tossed stone rippling the river of me. 
David Huebert’s fiction debut, Peninsula Sinking, won a Dartmouth Book Award and was runner-up for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award. In 2020, David published his second book of poetry, Humanimus. A new story collection, Chemical Valley, will appear in fall 2021. David teaches at The University of King’s College in K’jipuktuk/Halifax, where he lives with his partner and their two children. ​

FICTION: CATHERINE BUSH

9/14/2020

 
BLAZE ISLAND: AN EXCERPT

 
Miranda woke in darkness. She was riding a fierce wind. The changes were not going to stop. Someone was moving about below her, and the small sounds would have been reassuring, except that it was only a little after five a.m. Whoever was below had lit a fire. Heat ticked in the metal chimney on the far side of the room, the ticks speeding up. Miranda whispered to Ella, the dog, not to stir.  

Through the half-open door of her father’s bedroom, she took in the tussle of his empty bedclothes, reading glasses tossed atop his dresser. Always there had been secrets in this house, and she had surrendered to her father’s desire for them, the things they’d kept hidden about their past, other things he’d attempted to hide from her and she’d allowed herself to ignore, but a new impatience surged as if she were struggling to climb over the fence that encircled her.

Downstairs, in his coveralls, eating a slice of toast at the counter, her father turned sharply at the sound of her footsteps. “Miranda, what are you doing up?”

“Couldn’t sleep.” She kept her voice as low as his. He’d made only the one mug, not a pot, and everything in his posture made her presence an intrusion. He wasn’t welcoming her, she was merely slowing his escape.

“Why don’t you go back to bed. There’s no need for you to be up so early.”

But she was wide awake. “Where are you off to?”

His face relaxed into a smile. “To see if by some miracle I can access the internet at the cabin.”

​“Can I come with you?”

It was an impulsive thought, and he said no before adding, “There’s no need for that.”

“Why not if I want to. Are you meeting someone?”

He shook his head. “Best to have one of us stay with our guest.” Our guest, she thought, and then, more possessively, my guest. Something else gnawed: Would her father lie to her? Had he before, would he again? Did her own safety make the lies justifiable?

“Dad — the plane that landed at the airstrip the day before yesterday, who was on it and what are they doing here?”
Her father gulped down the dregs of his tea and set his mug in the sink.

“Miranda, I need you to sit tight for a bit. Can you do that for me?”

He was ruffling her hair, asking her to do something for him once again. She shook herself free, some essential part of her refusing to be deterred, a new resolve forming in her throat.

“Why won’t you answer me? I’m supposed to do what you want but you’re always hiding things from me — saying we should never leave then inviting people here and going off with them. What are you actually doing? Whatever you’re up to, it isn’t just weather monitoring, is it?”

“Miranda.” He stepped into the middle of the room. “If I’ve kept secrets, it’s only been for your own good. Things are in such a precarious state. I’m trying, from this out-of-the-way corner of the world, to do everything I can—”

“What if I don’t want to be protected like that?”

He didn’t have an answer, other than to show her that she’d jarred him. When he hugged her, the strength of his embrace stopped her mouth even as she struggled to say more. The next moment, with a rustle of jacket and shudder of boot, her father was gone.
 
Always when she’d allowed herself to think about the future it had been shaped by the contours of the past: how else did you envision what was to come other than by reconfiguring what you knew? There were days when, swayed by Caleb’s suggestions, Miranda had imagined living with him on the far side of the cove even as another part of her retracted from the dream. She had assumed that somehow Caleb and Sylvia would be in her life forever. What she loved would always continue, how could it not? More often she’d seen herself living in the little white house in Green Cove with her father and Ella, taking care of her father, because he needed her to do this. She’d ruffle Ella’s fur, meet her brown-eyed stare. There’d be more animals, because she wanted more, she would tend the land, build a bigger greenhouse, listen and note each time the wind shifted, there would be order and safety in such a life, in its deep choreographies and self-sufficiencies, in being responsive to sea and sky and the wild and ragged weather growing wilder all around them. There had been ruptures and alterations, but nothing had shaken her fundamental belief in the continuity of this life, given to her after the biggest rupture of all, the catastrophes that had sent the two of them fleeing to the island: everything here was proof that, despite grief, a new life could be made. Even the rupture of losing Caleb, painful as it was, had somehow been bearable. She’d gone on. They all had. Now, though, the world looked so different she wasn’t sure she could step back into the body she’d inhabited only a day ago.

Catherine Bush is the author of five novels, including Blaze Island (2020), the Canada Reads long-listed Accusation (2013), the Trillium Award short-listed Claire’s Head (2004), and The Rules of Engagement (2000), a New York Times Notable Book and a L.A. Times Best Book of the Year. She was recently a Fiction Meets Science Fellow at the HWK in Germany and has spoken internationally about addressing the climate crisis in fiction. She is an Associate Professor at the University of Guelph and Coordinator of the Guelph Creative Writing MFA, located in Toronto, Canada, and can be found online at www.catherinebush.com.
Picture
Blaze Island: a novel
By Catherine Bush
Goose Lane Editions, 2020


Synopsis

The time is now or an alternate near now, the world close to our own. A devastating Category Five hurricane sweeps up the eastern seaboard of North America. On tiny Blaze Island in the North Atlantic, Miranda Wells finds herself in an unrecognizable landscape. Just as the storm disrupts the present, it stirs up the past: Miranda’s memories of growing up in an isolated, wind-swept cove and the events of long ago that her father, once a renowned climate scientist, will not allow her to speak of. In the storm’s aftermath, things change so quickly and radically that she hardly knows what has happened. Blaze Island asks how far a parent will go to create a safe world for a child and how that child will imagine a future. A gripping story, the novel unfurls in the midst of constantly shifting elements: drifting icebergs, winds that grow ever wilder, and the unpredictability of human actions.

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