Krista > Books: atlantic-can‎ (42)

“I c-curse—I c-curse them greedy bastards,” he grits out. “I—I—” and with the curse still on his lips he slumps, his head rolling onto Roan’s shou

“I c-curse—I c-curse them greedy bastards,” he grits out. “I—I—” and with the curse still on his lips he slumps, his head rolling onto Roan’s shoulder. A horrid sound wrenches from Mose and a terrible pain fists itself from Roan’s belly up through his chest. He catches himself on a sob and is startled like a child who’s known only the pain of the flesh. He drops his forehead against that wildly thatched brow and his mouth trembles.

He is struck with the desire to beat the remaining snow from this cold grave, to shovel down through the earth until he reaches Frances Elizabeth and the little nest of bones upon her skeletal breast. Then all would be still, the spirits pummelled back into their graves and he restored to what he was before the old nurse spun out her confession.

Uncle Jack sings, his voice starting to hoarsen, sounding rougher than an anchor dragging the ocean floor. “Abiiide with meee, ooooh, abiiiide with me.” The men sing with him: they sing to keep themselves going, they sing to banish the cries of the dying, they sing to banish their own fear of dying, they sing to banish the night and banish thoughts of their weakening legs and frozen fingers and hungry bellies, and their songs are their tears and their voices are as one and it is louder than the winds.

“God alone ordains the state of things,” he said.
The Widow shook her head. “O fools learn sense,” she said.
The Beadle flinched at those words, at

“God alone ordains the state of things,” he said.
The Widow shook her head. “O fools learn sense,” she said.
The Beadle flinched at those words, at the feculent gall of the woman to speak down to him with scripture. He said, “An adversary there shall be even round about the land. And he shall bring down thy strength from thee, and thy palaces shall be spoiled.”
“The Book of Amos?” the Widow asked and he nodded. “Am I the adversary, Mr. Clinch? Or would that be you?”
“We shall have to wait and see,” he said.

In the days after the killing, several men took young Solemn Lambe aside to advise him against doing anything rash to avenge Dallen’s death. Abe Strapp was best left to God’s judgement, they said. Solemn was not quite twelve and the notion of God’s judgement was too hypothetical to offer comfort. You won’t be helping anyone if you winds up dead like your father, people insisted. As if they wanted to make the boy complicit in their own infuriating helplessness.

She lifted her head to look away from that feeling and caught sight of the mirror above the fireplace, the shattered glass reflecting her back in slivers that almost adhered, the figure there riven and distorted and still undeniably herself. It made her think her instincts had been right all along — the world agitated against coherence, against concord, and the truest portrait a person could manage was fragmentary, incomplete.

I was seven that November when we were tossed from our apartment in St. John’s. I had lived in twenty houses by then. I don’t remember a lot of the

I was seven that November when we were tossed from our apartment in St. John’s. I had lived in twenty houses by then. I don’t remember a lot of them, but most of them were scattered along a couple of roads in a place called the Goulds, about an hour away from town. It wasn’t much of a place, not even a village, but it was where Jennie was born and where her parents, Lucy and Ned, still lived, on Petty Harbour Road.

Repairing me seemed to be impossible because no one seemed to know why I was sick. A doctor I could not remember having been to see had once said I had a nervous cough. Jennie seemed to think I had a nervous cough because I was nervous all the time. She said she had heard of other people who had nervous coughs, but she never named them. Calling it a nervous cough made it sound like I was constantly trying to clear my throat, but that wasn’t the case. The cough was so deep, so loud and so relentless that each of my three brothers had tried to kill me to shut me up.

I didn’t want to be led to the living room by Jennie and have to kneel with her while she held my hand to keep me from losing my balance and tipping over sideways like a statue. I didn’t want to walk among the same grown-ups I had walked among the day Lucy had her false alarm, Jennie’s boy dressed to the nines as if nice clothes could disguise the fact that I looked as though I would be the next to go.

By way of parable she told the story of her own family, of her stepmother. Because if I were to marry Joe, I’d be a stepmother too. It was a story

By way of parable she told the story of her own family, of her stepmother. Because if I were to marry Joe, I’d be a stepmother too. It was a story she recounted often, with only minor variations in fact and tone, but the take-away? What she was actually telling me? This is how we love.

He didn’t see the knife. The knife came when he was being kicked in the head. He saw the boot coming and confused the sensation of the knife with the kick to his skull. There was a synaptic misfire and he felt the knife slide through his skull. But it had punctured his jeans and skin and maybe organs and wasn’t anywhere near his head. It went deep. He could hardly believe it happened twice but at the same time he believed it.

She meant I should pay attention if I wanted something and I’d have to act and that it wouldn’t be easy. Of course, she was right. Because this is a story about my son and how he was stabbed at a party and beaten by a handful of monsters and how nobody chooses yearning, it chooses you.

I felt it was me. I was generating the storm, making it happen with my rage. The rage was as big as the storm, just as malevolent, tearing out of my chest. Or the storm had entered me. It was inside me, freezing everything, starting with my womb, which was frozen, breaking up like an iceberg, pieces sliding off. It was my womb or my heart, or the balancing fluid in my inner ear. I’d lost any sense of balance. The cold crept through me.

In any case, they soon come back. The flickering along the wrack continues until morning comes. The sirens, now that night is done, must go back to

In any case, they soon come back. The flickering along the wrack continues until morning comes. The sirens, now that night is done, must go back to the sea and hide — they lost their voices when they died. They cannot sing their secret song, “The Mystery of Right and Wrong”; they know the words but no one who would sing them truthfully to you.

I wasn’t sure if the book was making me worse or if it was all that was holding me together. My supposedly secret illness. But it somehow reassured me to think about the ways my sisters coped. Carmen had her drugs. Gloria had her hypersexuality, though not many people called it that at the time. Bethany had her anorexia. I had my diary and Het Achterhuis, which I kept reading even after I knew it by heart. The thought that we were all freaks made me feel less like one.

Girls, get used to contradictions, truthful lies and false non-fictions. What isn’t there is everywhere; the things which are, are not, you see, however much they seem to be — and what is not is what will be as long as you and I agree.

It struck me that Rachel had been right when she said that history happened not in some nebulous, exceptional elsewhere, but in ordinary concrete places, to commonplace people. My world shrank to this pair of unexceptional streets, to Hans and his family, to Anne Frank and hers. History, the war, the fate of the Franks, were personal, local, terrifyingly actual and immediate. I imagined Hans as a teenager looking out of one of the windows of the house, his hands pressed to the glass as the Nazis marched past, their boots clumping on the cobblestones, row after row of bluff and bravado and menace without purpose, a lethal behemoth composed of men just like the ones who ran South Africa and those who supported them, greater only in number, driven to savagery by a group of men whose madness they need not have fallen for but did for reasons that flattered none of humankind.

This is not infatuation.
This is small game hunting at the local coward gun club. And what is worse, as every stroke of recognition is finally deliv

This is not infatuation.
This is small game hunting at the local coward gun club. And what is worse, as every stroke of recognition is finally delivered hard against Iris's hurt timepiece, is that all was lost the moment she opened the door and let him step across the threshold. He wanted her less from there.

Olive: whose gentlemen callers are never gentle or men but dregs of former humans driving red pickups full of smoke. Their pumping cherries recalling every murder program ever aired to warn, no, educate, no, remind, no, inform single women of the danger lurking just outside their double-locked doors, checked and rechecked and checked again for certainty.

Iris was meant to want nothing, demand less, not more. Her father's absence laying well the groundwork for the first one and then the next one and then John. He had told her in an honest afterglow that they were not even half a thing. Not even half a thing, ringing on repeat in her head. One foot in front of the other through the slush on the downgrade toward The Hazel. Not even half of something. She has learned to abuse herself in a misguided attempt to thwart expectation. You don't deserve any better. But very deep inside her body a tiny voice whispers into soft cupped hands...
...but you do.

Jo would say he is a predator. The worst kind of man. A faux-minist. A liar. He made Iris believe in a falsehood. Fooled her. Groomed her. Identified the want in her and pretend-extended this back, though slightly out of reach of Iris's grasping hands. He kept her reaching and now she has been stretched beyond herself. No longer knowing her own mind.

You know, Joanna, that I did not invent the Keurig, right? Though I wish I had. And off she went pontificating about the coffin-maker not committing the crime. Major David chewed down slowly while peering over her shoulder for an exit. Had there not been a number of junior staffers in the kitchenette that day, he would have just walked away from her. Just stop listening was a tactic he regularly employed. He left conversations with his wife and daughters all the time. It was a vagina-proof strategy.

The people in charge, having allowed most, many, okay, more than before, the privilege of literacy, had now deemed having an educated citizenship a right hassle so were marking it up in a hurry, man. If motivation could overcome the hesitation and apathy long enough to scale that wall, people still would know that Dot was scared and full of remorse.

Rape is a powerful word well-despised by rapists the world over, because they rightfully don't like being called out for what they are or what they do as it will for sure impact their ability to continue doing so. Not full on prevent them from continuing to rape, but it is a kind of inconvenience in life moving forward.

Olive offers, I saw a pink caribou once.
And Iris nods and says, I want to be like that. After. I want to be a whole new animal.

For lack of a daughter, then – a proper daughter, a daughter who called more than once every couple of months, a daughter who visited more than onc

For lack of a daughter, then – a proper daughter, a daughter who called more than once every couple of months, a daughter who visited more than once a year, a daughter willing to shoulder her way past the slammed-shut door of “Fine” every time she asked her mother, “How are things?”– Irene had managed to recruit herself a son.

I was so grateful in that moment. When I tell this story now and people ask what I was thinking, it's this feeling of incongruous peace that I remember. It exists in my memory as the quick, satisfying sound of a zipper being hoisted. I never mention it, though – not that it seems so irrelevant compared to the details that come later, the juicy stuff that makes people cringe and cover their eyes. It's just that this is the moment of which I'm most ashamed. Ziiiipppppp! My pathetic gratitude. The wide-open door of it.

I know that it's perverse, the pleasure I get from this whole process. That's why I've told this story as many times as I have, to so many different people. It's one of those pleasurable if not quite healthy compulsions, like picking obsessively at your cuticles.

What do you want? I ask him in the dining room. They all said about his mother, the Irish whiskey heiress, traipsing from bank to bank, raising the mo

What do you want? I ask him in the dining room. They all said about his mother, the Irish whiskey heiress, traipsing from bank to bank, raising the money. They said her dresses and her red hair. (Marconi)

The hole in her nylons that Marty has torn has a creep, it creeps, widening in an oval big as the palm of her hand, peeling back or unravelling, a gazillion filaments, small and laddering down the leg, invisibly giving, breaking, no, not breaking exactly, more evaporating and it is her desire, a spreading, licking, a hole in the nylons because even though she comes to work put together because what are these stockings but a petroleum product made as thin as a lick of light, tickling, so that her skin pudges through, like dough rising or anything that rises, and then the keystone shoebox is knocked maybe half an inch with each – let’s take a moment to acknowledge the paradox – very gentle, controlled but forceful, holy thrust/bang, tinged with maybe a little love for her, however ephemeral, so that the tightly jammed shoebox, maybe twelve shoeboxes above her head, juts itself out of the tightly packed wall of shoeboxes that rises from floor to ceiling all the way down the very narrow storage closet, and keeps jutting farther and farther with each lovemaking rock of Marty’s hips and buttock contraction and the tilt of his head, bent as if in prayer, but also, pouf, blowing a mouthful of her hair away from his lips because, he stops just for a sec, because a hair, one of her hairs, seems to have gotten into his mouth and they’re both caught up in the micro-work of what is it? A hair? Phwah-phwah, he’s trying to get it off his tongue, and there he has it, have you got it? Pinched between finger and thumb and saliva shine, he rubs it away, and the engorging freckled dong deep inside, now, slow at first but deliberately slow, sea cucumber slow, in the deep cold is what they have down there, holes in the bottom of the ocean where everything is eyeless, groping but sentient, and phosphorescent and just as if they were not in the mall, as if the blow-out sale were not in progress, as if you couldn’t buy one, get the second pair half-price, as if Steve would not be in here any second to get a load of shoes, slowly and at the same time, warp speed, she is kissing his white eyelids.

What he'd said when he met Trisha's girlfriend: I'm available when you gals want to take it to the next level. He'd made fists low, near his waist, and wrenched them back and forth while jutting his hips, twice to the left, twice to the right, mock-wincing with each, you know it, anus pulse, and repeating, Oh yeah, oh yeah. And then a few lines of Loverboy's “Turn Me Loose”. (The Fjord of Eternity)

Back during the pre-op consultation the doctor had slouched in his chair, not even unslouching while he sketched on a pad and then sent the pad spinning over the desk to the Caretaker. The doctor's head cranked to the side on his shoulder, his jaw jacked up by a blue-veined fist, his elbow resting on the plastic arm of the office chair, his legs yanking the swivel chair side to side with a two-toned squeak, until the square jaw nudged off the knuckles and the doctor was lifted from the haze of his lassitude, blinking as if to assert his presence back in the room, the Caretaker lost in the ballpoint illustration, the testicles and the tubes going to the testicles and where the cut happens, a slash dug into the paper with such force it punctured the surface of the pad with a tiny hole, which, the doctor swore it was a foolproof procedure.

As Nan Finn said of people who went missing in the woods at twilight, they had been led astray, not by fairies but by snow when there should have b

As Nan Finn said of people who went missing in the woods at twilight, they had been led astray, not by fairies but by snow when there should have been no snow, a rogue blizzard when winter was a month away, led astray by the pale, bewitching light of late November, the lulling light of sunset in the fall.

The Vanishing Vatchers. I was left with nothing but the setting of their lives, the stage, the props and costumes, the performance that only I had fallen for and which had moved on to somewhere else. That its run was done, everyone but I believed.

I spent the balance of the war setting down an alternative version of my life, which I called The Custodian of Paradise and which I fancy I might someday publish. Such was the measure of my despair that I devised a fictional existence that was far stranger, far more fantastic than my real one.

I turned round and rested again, facing west now, up the Bonavista as the section men said, toward the continent of Newfoundland, the intersection of the main line and the branch, the never-glimpsed wilderness from which the question we had failed to answer had been borne to us, the country that would never be discovered or forgotten, the colony of unrequited dreams that would never be acknowledged as a nation except by those of us who made it one.

She was drowning in misery, choking with unhappiness. She was only eighteen – what was wrong with her? Why didn't she leave Bo? She was no good – that had been proven to her finally and irrevocably. She was just no use; totally use-less, “a total waste of skin”, as the Sarge used to call her when she was little. She didn't like to think about that sort of stuff, because she didn't want to emotionally cash in on that whole “my mother was so mean to me blah blah blah” thing. She had no time for those dreary sob sisters. She was getting on with her life, not sobbing and complaining all the time about what her mom did to her. She was moving forward – well, when she wasn't staying in bed twenty-four hours a day, or picking herself up off the bottom of the staircase, or too beat up to do much of anything.

“The motto of Vanderland is 'There is a world elsewhere.' It's taken from Shakespeare's Coriolanus.”

“It seems an ironic motto,” Landish said, “given t

“The motto of Vanderland is 'There is a world elsewhere.' It's taken from Shakespeare's Coriolanus.”

“It seems an ironic motto,” Landish said, “given that it's the complaint of everyone at Vanderland that the entire world is elsewhere.”

Landish told him that on this ship, the men in charge of engines had what were known as “engine ears”, which meant that they were deaf from the noise the engines made. Also, there were pursers who made sure that no one’s purse was stolen. There were men called stewards who were in charge of serving stew. And other men called porters who were in charge of serving port. “I’ll give you my stew if you give me your port,” Landish said, but Deacon shook his head.

You remember what I says. You're the fortunate one. You still gets to be with us for a bit longer. The other one – well, he's watching on, somewher

You remember what I says. You're the fortunate one. You still gets to be with us for a bit longer. The other one – well, he's watching on, somewhere. But we gets to live the riddle a bit longer. Hey, b'y? That's good, isn't it?

She gave a dismissive shrug. But she was choking with words, he could tell. Just like Sylvie. Choking with words. Wanting to talk about things. Things about Chris and the accident. Things about him, Kyle. Things about themselves. And he never knew what things they wanted to tell him and have him tell them and he bloody didn’t care about them things. Just leave it alone, leave it the bloody hell alone. Christ, he was working on getting things out of his head, not shoving more in.

Everybody and their dog had moved on from those days of hand-fishing and hauling nets but his father mourned as he would a fresh dead mother. There's them who can't change with the times and those who won't, his mother told him. And your father's both kinds.

Across the river, massive wooded hills of the northern peninsula sighed through the fog. A long flagging reached downriver and the water buckled against the northern cliff wall, pooling itself into dead black depths before elbowing out of sight through a thicket of still leafless alders and drowning itself into the sea just beyond.

Nothing in the natural world, no forest, no river, no insect nor leaf has any intrinsic value to men. All is worthless, utterly dispensable unless we discover some benefit to ourselves in it – even the most ardent forest lover thinks this way. Men behave as overlords. They decide what will flourish and what will die. I believe that humankind is evolving into a terrible new species and I am sorry that I am one of them.

The governor was a haughty snob, un bêcheur with a cleft chin and a bulge of throat fat. He gave off an air of having hung in a silk bag in the adjoining room until it was time for him to emerge and perform the duties of his position.