Universal Disorder...

1

He had always been this boy.
     He had always been in the middle of everything: his mummy and daddy and grampa, the trailer and the yard, the fields and the trees, and the sun and the night turning round.
     And everything changed; the snow melted and the grass sneaked up green. Grampa went to the hospital and Charlie drove the wheelchair up and down the long bright hall. Grampa made paper birds, and when the snow came back, Charlie flew them home in his hands. Daddy took him spinning on the lake of ice in the Meteor station wagon with the fins and red rocket-lights—and a meteor was a rock that fell out of the sky, burning.
     “Give me something with wheels and I’ll fix it,” Daddy said. One night, a chair appeared at the door of the trailer looking like a broken deer, and his daddy made it better. People left spiny monster machines in the yard for his father to wrestle, hammering and yanking, crawling out from underneath covered with dirt and grease—the machine’s blood and guts.
     But welding was like the sun; you could get blinded. Once Charlie wore the mask, his father’s arms around him, and helped Frankenstein two trucks into one. The black glass dimmed the splashing stars, and he joined steel to steel, holes burning in his shoes just like Daddy’s.
     Every day before supper, the trailer shook and the door banged and Charlie peeked out from under the table at Daddy’s big steel-toed boots and the scamper of Mummy’s slippers. Something very quiet happened—because she was so little, and sweet and yummy—before she shrieked and there was a bum-slap tickle-fight.
     The steel toes came under the table, and Charlie yanked at the laces and pulled the boots off, so Papa Bear could grab him under the table with his big grey paw-feet.
     “Gotcha, Baby Bear.”
     Charlie-Bear pounced on the big grey paws, and tussled his way up—soft warm-armed smell of tractors—and Papa Bear kissed open Charlie’s paws, and stroked them against his bristly cheeks—sandpaper, Sam-paper, Sam-I-am paper—I like to eat green eggs and Spam.
     And Charlie ran to get the Green Eggs book, but Daddy couldn’t read it.
     Charlie said, “No Daddy, no Daddy, it goes like this…”
     And Mummy was all wowser-happy, because Charlie didn’t usually talk much, and she was surprised he remembered.
     But Charlie wasn’t remembering, he was membering.
     Charlie could read because he could, even though he was too little for school—but Daddy couldn’t read because he couldn’t—because the words jumped around like bugs, and he slapped himself because he was trapped in his stupid head! But sometimes Mummy cried because she was the one who was trapped, and Daddy stomped out and hammered things: bang, bang, bending metal on the anvil, the anvil just sitting there.
     Mummy was Lou-Anne, and Daddy was Robbie, and Charlie crashed his head again and again into the table leg, 5, 6, 7… and he screamed because he couldn’t decide to stay with his mummy or go out to his daddy! his daddy!—his hurt and shaking heart.
     “What’s wrong with him, Lou-Anne? Jesus. There’s something wrong with him!”
     And Daddy carried him outside when he cried so hard his stomach hurt and he couldn’t breathe.
     “Shh, Charlie, shh…”
     Was that when they lay in the grass and the night came in the day? The dark mask over his face, he looked straight at the sun, and it didn’t burn his eyes.
     And the sun was hiding behind the moon, and he was lying on his daddy on the earth, arms warm around him.
     “Shh… Listen.”
     Breath and breath… thump-thump, thump-thump… his head against his daddy’s heart, with wind and songs, crows and chickadees, crickets and dragonflies.
     The everything was always there, even when you weren’t thinking about it.
     And the sun was coming out: the second dawn of the day.

∞

Novel

The Book of Beasts

Chapter 1

Skinny, big ears, red hair messed like the knots of hay sticking out of a cow’s mouth. These were the things he heard about himself after he got into the habit of listening, when being seen and not heard became too boring. He told himself he didn’t care, began scratching his face. Get rid of the spots. Even if his mother said she liked them, that they were delicious, especially when she was a dog, and licked them off his nose — see the freckles on her tongue? They tasted salty, she said, were delicate and crunchy like little potato crisps. Sometimes he was a dog, too, and so he scratched anyway. And then his father told him to stop that scratching, sit still, and he would, almost, until every adult eye was averted, and then his hand would strike like the tongue of a frog, and he would stuff another jaffa cake in his mouth.

Everything was alive to him. Not just the neighbor’s cat and his grandfather’s King-Charles’ spaniel, not just the ladybirds and dragonflies and earthworms, but the turnips wincing as they were pulled from the ground in his mother’s garden. He made little playful screams whenever his mother tore lettuce apart for a salad, said ouch, ouch, when she chopped onions, misinterpreting her tears as sympathy for the poor vegetables. He refused to eat the tiniest grape from the vine, even though his father told him it would perish anyway. He kept it in a little baby-food jar in the fridge, and took it out to hold it in the palm of his hand and pet it like a kitten.

His first word, as a baby, had been meow, and he was a cat-sneak behind doors and beneath the tablecloth. His grandfather called his father a senseless dreamer — that acting, way back then, for God’s sake — who should never have married a child who was such a harpy, whatever that meant. It seemed to mean an Irish woman who wore her red hair too loose, her blouses too tight, and who didn’t care what she said in polite company — and Oxford was nothing if not polite in the late 1950’s….

Novel

Le Bestiaire des anges

The Book of Beasts translated into French by Lori Saint-Martin and Paul Gagné

Chapter 1

Dieu se prénommait Timmy, et c'était un petit salaud aux chevaux noirs, à la  peu semblable à un drap mouillé, aux gencives qui saignaient et aux poings bourrés de cailloux d'oxyde de fer qu'il lançait au visage de James, et chacun laissait sur sa peau une tache de son. La mère de James lui disait que ses taches de son lui venaient de Dieu, et c'était la vérité, car James ne se souvenait pas d'en avoir eu avant que Timmy commence à lui lancer des pierres. Les taches étaient vilaines, mais au moins James n'y était pour rien. Il finit par se convaincre qu'elles venaient de ses plaies, comme le sang qu'il voyant au flanc de Jésus, celui qui coulait le long du crucifix en plâtre de sa mère, telle de la bave pleine de bulles. Voir le sang de Jésus l'affolait moins que voir le sien. En fait, aprés avoir compris que les taches de son étaient laides, sauf sur sa mère si belle, James eut de la difficulté à se regarder dans le miroir....

Poetry

Sex, Death, and Naked Men

Red Neck Love

Four-by-four buckshot with rust
snap of gravel
aspen trembling shadows
on dust
on windows.

They spread the muscled lips
of barbed wire
and pass through
with black soled feet.

Sun finds them in the grass
while irradiating oats
foxtail.
The blades emboss her spine
his knees.
A blinking steel tower
the relay of microwaves above them.

The stubble field
beyond is the penitential
bed of nails. Hammerheaded
wells pump oil.
A wick of methane
burns the air.

short stories

The Seasons are Horses

Breaking Eggs

 
It sits on my desk in a sour cream container, in a nest of white and pink Kleenex. On it is a happy face, slightly screwy, and a squiggle of yellow marker on top for hair. The assignment is to carry an egg around for a week, pretending it’s your kid. Dad could hardly believe it when I told him Mrs. Bowman makes the Family Life class do this every year. He told me to do what I want - even scramble it and lose the ten marks if it would make me feel better. I don’t know why I’m taking this stupid class anyway. Just because Stephanie’s here and everyone else is doing it, I guess.
     “...and at this point, the sperm meets the egg.”
     Mrs. Bowman’s flabby cheeks get redder and splotchy. Reproduction embarrasses her almost as much as it embarrasses Stephanie. Stephanie’s only 16 like me, so it’s forgivable. Mrs. Bowman has three kids, so it’s not.
     “Can you imagine Mrs. B. having sex?” I whisper, and point out Mrs. B.’s bulgy panty line. Stephanie once told me I was the funniest person in the world. She’s weird with jokes. She laughs the hardest at the dirty ones, but won’t tell them ; she absorbs them but then won’t let them escape.
     “Shh, Lori,” Stephanie always blushes when she laughs.
     “Our next topic is motherhood, the most important part of the Home Economics course,” Mrs. Bowman says, right after she skims over the pregnancy handouts with us. She’d been sick, so we were way behind in our notes. I think she got sick on purpose, just so she could skip over the sex part...