1

Spike walked into the polished, marbled, and columned lobby of Manus Industries, Inc. carrying two bright-red five-gallon containers. Despite that, she was ignored by Security. Duh. She was wearing grey cotton cargo pants and a grey sweatshirt. And she had short spikey hair. Besides which, she had no boobs. And it looked like she forgot to put her make-up on. She probably didn’t even shave her legs. Let alone you know. The one Security guy shifted his overflapping belly. The other one scratched his armpit.

Once she reached the corporate goldfish pond, she set down the containers, then shrugged off her knapsack. She took out a little fish bowl and a long-handled net, then put the knapsack on a nearby overstuffed leather chair. She carefully leaned her phone against the knapsack, set to record. Returning to the goldfish pond, she filled the bowl with its water, then scooped up the five goldfish that were swimming about, transferring them into the bowl. She noted that another seven were not swimming about. It was disturbing, for more than one reason, but convenient. She left them floating belly up.

Next, she up-ended the five-gallon containers, putting into the pond chlorine compounds, dyes, solvents, adhesives, coatings, inks, and oils. She’d spent her week as a temp doing on-site research, watching what went down the drains, comparing existing paperwork with regulations and best practices. Then she’d done the math. Parts per million and all that. Her action was not an exaggeration.

She’d thought about announcing her action—she was particularly fond of bullhorns—but thanks to the out-of-control advertising industry, anything duller than strobing neon and deafening sound, which was pretty much everything that was real and true, failed to make an impression. So, she acted in silence. That might be noticeable.

And indeed, a small crowd had gathered. Though probably only because this was the most interesting thing that had happened all day, maybe even all week.

As a result, the two guys lounging at the Security Desk finally paid attention to her, and headed her way.

She left the five still-alive fish in their bowl, their new but considerably more constrained living space, perched on the ledge, on the edge, between the emptied containers, each thoughtfully labeled like a granola bar with its Nutrition Facts.

After zooming in for a close-up, she pocketed her phone, grabbed her knapsack, then, seeing the approaching guards, broke into a trot for the door, slaloming, just for the hell of it, between the pedestalled busts of past presidents—odd to call them busts, as surely none of them were women—to make a nicely coordinated exit through the heavy revolving doors. She crossed Bloor Street, moving from the shadow of one skyscraper into the shadow of another.

Meanwhile, in the other skyscraper, on the fourteenth floor, in cubicle 20371-b, the one with the pathetically inept sound-absorbing divider covered with bright orange fabric that had a tear near the top corner and leaned in perilously because one of its shiny silver supports was broken, Jane Smith was focused on the screen of her laptop. Not the screen of her desk computer.

It was a dark and stormy night, she’d typed. Which meant that the program had failed again, she added. Then stopped. Don’t storms, by definition, necessitate dark? Or at least cloud cover? Is there any kind of storm that happens on a sunny day? A wind storm. Wind happens without cloud, doesn’t it? And magnetic storms. And solar storms. No, they’d happen in outer space, where it’s—no, wait, the sun’s right there. Always shining. So why is it dark in outer space? She pondered that for a while, then moved on. ‘Night’ by definition necessitates dark. That was the bigger problem.

No, the bigger problem was that such sloppy work, work that opened with such obvious redundancy, got published. Life was so not fair.

Though of course ‘dark’ could just mean there was no moon.

It was a relatively dark and stormy night. She retyped the first sentence. Then totally changed the second one.

“Ready to go to lunch?” Spike bounced into Jane’s cubicle.

Jane jumped a little, because she hadn’t seen or heard her coming, grinned, because she was always happy to see her, then looked pointedly at a huge clock hanging on the wall. Because it was 10:00.

“Good point,” Spike said. “So we’ll go in ten minutes.”

“Much better.”

Spike cast about for something to do for ten minutes—

But then it occurred to Jane. “Hey, why aren’t you—” she looked at her intently. “You did something, didn’t you.” Spike was always staging ‘Moments of Truth’. She’d record them and then upload them to YouTube.

Spike shrugged, then perched herself on the corner of the desk.

“What did you do,” Jane asked, in the tone one uses to reprimand an incorrigible terrier whose tail was wagging.

“Oh, nothing.”

She waited.

“I turned the corporate goldfish pond into a reflective pond.”

Jane thought about that. “In all three senses of the word?”

Spike thought about that. “Yes.”

“Good for you!” They high-fived. Jane would watch the video later.

“So who are you today?” Spike changed the topic, looking for a nameplate somewhere on the desk. Then realizing that only desks in corner offices have nameplates. Hm.

“Cynthia Lewis,” Jane said. Not that it mattered.

“And what does Cynthia Lewis do?”

“I haven’t figured that out yet. It’s only … 10:05.”

“But it’s only 10:05 on Thursday. Haven’t you been Cynthia Lewis since Monday?”

“Good point.” Jane thought about that. A little.

“Maybe she just sits here,” Spike suggested. “In which case, you’re doing an excellent job!”

Jane grinned again. “But it wouldn’t necessarily be ‘just’. Being can be doing.”

“You’ve been reading Sartre again. Or Heidegger.”

“Chodorow,” she corrected. “And Rachels. You know … if you give someone a lethal injection and they die, that’s active euthanasia, because you’ve donesomething, but if you withhold food, that’s passive euthanasia, because you’re not doing anything. Supposedly.”

“But they still die.”

“Exactly. So even by not‑doing, by just being, you’ve done something.”

“Cool.” Spike liked that.

She looked at the clock then. It was not yet 10:10. “So is Cynthia a pregnancy or a nervous breakdown?”

“Or?”

“Good point.”

It still wasn’t 10:10. “How’s the novel coming?”

Jane grimaced as she turned her laptop so Spike could read the screen.

It was a relatively dark and stormy night. Even the Jell-O was scared.

Spike laughed. “I like it!”

“Ah!” A Very Important Man had appeared at the cubicle, looking friendly and patronizing. “Just the girl I’m looking—”

“Excuse me?” Spike said to him, surreptitiously reaching into her pocket to record. “Does she look like a child?”

Jane grinned at Spike, then looked at the man, waiting for his answer. It was a very good question.

“I beg your pardon?” The man turned from Jane to Spike, surprised to be addressed, let alone interrupted, in that way. Especially by someone who looked like Spike.

“Not my pardon you should be begging,” Spike replied. Then repeated, “Does she look like a child?”

The man didn’t understand her point. So he ignored her. Go figure.

“Look,” he turned back to Jane, “I need those financial reports—”

“If you can’t tell a child from an adult,” Spike commented, “you should not have access to financial reports.”

“What?” The man was confused.

“The word ‘girl’ means ‘female child’.”

“Oh excuse me,” he said insincerely. “You’re just the woman I’m looking—” He knew as soon as he said it that that was worse. No, wait a minute, how could that be worse than a grown man looking for a girl? Okay, now he was really confused.

“Who are you?” he said to Spike, even more irritably.

Jane grinned.

“I’ll tell you who I am if you tell me who the hell you think you are!”

“I need those copies by 10:30,” he turned back to Jane.

“No,” Spike corrected him. “You want—better yet, you would like—those copies. Please.”

The man left, clearly angered. But he’d be unable to articulate why exactly.

“Ten-thirty!” he shouted back.

Spike waited a moment.

“So have you found the photocopier yet?”

“No,” Jane replied, ruefully.

“Have you looked?”

“No!” she replied, indignantly.

Spike grinned. Then looked at the clock. 10:09.

“You know,” Jane said, thoughtfully, “I don’t even think he’s my supervisor.”

“He’s a man, you’re a woman, by definition …”

“Yeah,” Jane said. Sadly.

“Okay, time for lunch!” Spike announced and popped off the desk.

Jane saved her work, backed it up to the permanently-plugged-in mini flash drive, then closed her laptop and put it in her bag. She took two steps after Spike, then stopped and went back to her desk. She moved everything from the inbox into the outbox.

“Time for lunch!” she agreed.

And the two of them left the building.

“Hey, Jane, Spike.” Bridgit greeted them with a broad smile as she placed two glasses of water onto their table. “The usual?”

“Yes, please.” They settled into their favorite booth in the corner of the dessert café, then casually looked around. Most of the customers were, as usual, women. It was nice. It was one of the reasons they were regulars.

“So are you going back to Manus?” Jane asked. Probably unnecessarily.

“Don’t think so.”

“Got anything else lined up?”

“I hear Riverdance is holding auditions.”

Jane took a sip of water. “You’d be able to use your psychology degree.”

Bridgit returned with two cups of tea and two different, but equally decadent, chocolate desserts. And that was the other reason.

“Thanks, B,” Spike said.

“Yes, thank you, thank you,” Jane said, immediately forking off a huge piece of her Chocolate Divinity Cheesecake and mumbling “need this, need this …” Of the two, she was a little more … addicted.

“Mmmm,” she leaned back, as the ecstasy travelled from her tongue to her brain. “The pure pleasure that is chocolate.” She lovingly licked her fork.

“Mr. I‑Need‑Those‑Financial‑Reports should just chill and have some chocolate,” Spike said, taking a bite of her own euphoria.

After her second, more leisurely, forkful, Jane commented, “Men don’t seem to have the capacity for pure pleasure.”

Spike thought about that, then nodded agreement. “Their so-called pleasures are really just victories, aren’t they. Which means they derive pleasure only through competition. What’s the philosophical term for pleasures like that? Pleasures that aren’t pure.”

Jane gazed off in deep thought, crinkling her forehead, searching for the obscure and technical word …

“Impure pleasures,” she announced.

“Yeah, that’s it,” Spike grinned.

They continued to enjoy their lavish desserts. Slowly.

“Yesterday he called me Janey.”

“Who?”

“Mr. I‑Need‑Those‑Financial‑Reports.”

“Billy? Ricky? Bobby? Do you know?”

“Do I care?” she responded. “Wish I had a name, though, that didn’t have a diminutive version. What do people call you when they want to reduce you?”

“Ezzie-the-Lezzie.”

Jane looked at her. “Oh. Right.”

For a while, Jane had envied Spike, née Esmerelda, her community. For a while, ten years ago when they first met at a Women’s Issues group that had formed when they were both in their second year, she had accompanied her to the lesbian bars, thinking that politics surely trumped sexual orientation, but she felt like such an imposter. She simply wasn’t physically attracted to women.

’Course, now, she wasn’t physically attracted to men either. At some point in her mid-twenties, she faced a mind-body problem not addressed by Descartes: the dissonance between the two had become too great to ignore. And, apparently, too great to reconcile. She was delighted, therefore, when she realized, a short year later, that her body had opted for asexuality. She was completely comfortable with complete celibacy.

Furthermore, she quickly discovered that just as people were mistaken to assume that all straight women performed femininity, she had been mistaken to assume that all lesbians were politicized. As Spike had pointed out, one’s sexual orientation had nothing to do with whether one thought about shit. So maybe she wasn’t missing out on community after all.

Then again, as a straight woman who didn’t buy into the feminine mystique—either the make-up and heels thing, or the male attachment thing, or the kids thing—she was some sort of freak (where were the post-70s straight women who’d said goodbye to all that?) who didn’t fit in anywhere. She couldn’t even claim a hyphenated-Canadian status based on skin colour or ancestry. So she was missing out on community. It’s just that she just didn’t envy Spike anymore for that. Especially since The L Word.

She still thought lesbians more likelythan straight women to reject male domination in any of its forms, but she recognized now that that could be an accident of sociocultural practice rather than the result of conscious recognition and analysis of the patriarchy. That gay men were as likely as straight men to subordinate women seemed to prove Spike’s intriguing point: same-sex orientation didn’t necessarily entail rejection of sexism, despite the latter’s basis, and embodiment, in heterosex.

“I shouldn’t have quit teaching,” Jane said after a while.

“You didn’t quit. You were fired.”

“I was a sessional,” Jane protested. “Sessionals don’t actually get fired.”

“They get not-asked-to-teach-again.”

“Well, yeah.”

“And why did that happen?” Spike reminded her. Clearly they had spoken about this before. “Because you criticized the students’ opinions.”

“It was a Critical Thinking course!” She protested again. “The whole point of the course was to teach that not every opinion is equally acceptable.”

“Even so. That was disrespectful,” Spike was clearly quoting. “The students were offended. Especially what’s‑his‑name who went running to the Chair of the Philosophy Department. Who, in turn, felt compelled to mention it at the national philosophy conference. To everyone he met.”

“Little prick.”

Spike flagged Bridgit to their table.

“She’s going to need another one of those.”

Jane slouched into the bench seat.

“Remember the students’ evaluations?” Spike asked. “She made it perfectly clear that she knew more than any of us. She—”

“I was their professor!”

Bridgit appeared with another slice of Chocolate Divinity Cheesecake.

Jane took a large forkful.

“At least I was in the company of my intellectual peers,” she mumbled.

“You mean the faculty, right?”

Jane gave her a look.

“As I recall, you weren’t too impressed with them either. And I quote, ‘Inquiring minds don’t give a fuck.’”

A long few minutes passed before Jane spoke again.

“I hear that in Paris, they have chocolate bars.”

“They have them here too. At the 7‑Eleven.”

“No, I mean chocolate bars. Not chocolate bars.

“Oh, well then.”

“Like instead of serving beer and … beer, they serve, like, a hundred different kinds of chocolate.”

“Yeah?”

Jane licked her spoon. She also licked her plate.

“We have to go to Paris then.”

(free download of complete novel at jassrichards.com)

1

“Whatcha doin?” Dylan said to Rev as he entered the screened-in porch with a cup of coffee and a couple slices of cold pizza.

“Watching the lake ice over.” Rev was on the couch, her hands already wrapped around a cup of coffee, staring out at the lake.

“You can do that? You can actually see the moment the water turns to ice?” He set the pizza on the table between her couch and his chair, then settled in.

“No. Well, in all my years here, no. Which is why I’m watching now.”

“But it’s only November.”

She looked at him.

Right. When she was deciding where to settle, where to look for her dream-come-true cabin-on-a-lake-in-a-forest, she’d narrowed it down to somewhere in B.C. and somewhere in mid-northern Ontario. She’d chosen the latter, thinking that if she lived in B.C., she’d miss the variety offered by the four seasons. She didn’t know that mid-northern Ontario had just two seasons: winter and bug season. Each lasting six months. Though, it had to be admitted, the latter offered a variety of blackflies, deerflies, horseflies, mosquitoes, and no-see-ums.

“And what are you two doing?” he said to Froot Loup, the baby wolf who’d followed him out of the forest one day and then adopted him, and Corn Flake, her best bud from down the road, both of whom were sprawled out on their nest of blankets at the end of the porch.

Loup stared at him. Wasn’t it obvious? They were chewing on his shoe. One of the new ones.

They sat in companionable silence, the four of them, for what was left of the morning. Rev and Dylan had fortuitously come upon each other a few years prior, after a twenty-year gap following their graduation from teacher’s college. They’d gone their separate and, apparently, quite different ways. Rev had failed with a boom, Dylan with a fizzle.

They’d each sent a letter or two over the years, but because Dylan had quit his teaching job in Nelson to go on tour with A Bunch of Drunken Indians (he played tambourine), and Rev had been fired, more or less, from one teaching job after another and so went from one address to another, they never received each other’s letters.

When they’d reconnected, it was like time had put a bubble around their relationship. It was intact and unchanged.

Dylan had turned his nomadic house-sitting lifestyle and his history not-quite-degree into a freelance sort-of-career as a travel writer. And although he still took off every now and then, he had become content, even happy, to hang out at Rev’s cabin on a lake in a forest.

Rev had become an off-site item-writer for the LSAT, crafting the multiple-choice logical reasoning questions that went onto the test, making good use of her philosophy degree and her inability to get along with people.

At around one o’clock, just as they were finishing their breakfast — the forementioned coffee and cold pizza — it started snowing.

“Let’s go kayaking,” Rev said. She never started working until the evening. Most of her neurons didn’t even come online until noon, and it took until then for them to warm up.

Dylan looked out at the pretty white thick flakes. “Yes, let’s! It’ll be so … Option (B): delightfully incongruous!”

“Indeed.” She grinned. Despite her hermit nature, Rev enjoyed having Dylan around. Somehow he didn’t destroy or invade her solitude. And he made her life fun.

They changed into their kayaking clothes and headed down to the water, Froot Loup and Corn Flake bounding along with them. Because, hey, something was going to happen!!

Rev got into her beloved red kayak, tied to one side of the dockraft — a Rev construction, just an eight-by-eight raft permanently pulled up on shore but buoyed at the far end by two floats. It did the trick. Which was to give her, one, a take-off platform for her kayak, and two, a sit-down platform for her lounge chair, from which she watched the sparkles on the water on sunny days and moonlit nights. And three, because of the floats, it didn’t have to be taken out every winter and put back in every spring; it just rose and/or fell with the ice instead of being bent and/or broken by it.

Dylan manoeuvred his recently-purchased lime green kayak from its spot on shore to the other side of the dockraft. They’d considered just tying it to that other side, but quickly realized that on windy days it would keep banging into the dockraft. And annoy the hell out of Rev.

She pushed herself away from the dockraft and — Corn Flake jumped in.

“Okaaaay,” she quickly steadied her rocking kayak. Flaker quickly assessed the situation, but did not change his mind. He sat down, snuggling himself between her knees. Did want to go with her. Did not want to go overboard.

“Ready?” She turned to see that Loup had, similarly, jumped into Dylan’s kayak. Cool. Or not. Dylan didn’t have her kayaking skill. And Loup was a good twenty pounds heavier than Flaker. She watched as Dylan struggled not to capsize.

“Down!” she called out to Loup.

Instantly, Loup lay down in the cockpit. Dylan’s kayak stabilized considerably.

“See what good teachers we could have been?”

Dylan opened his mouth, then closed it. It was true. They had spent a great deal of time teaching Loup how to … survive. As a pet wolf in a neighbourhood full of rednecks with rifles. And they had, apparently, succeeded.

Even so, she was quarantined during hunting season. She didn’t mind the bright bandanas — usually orange, but sometimes neon pink or neon green or, Dylan’s latest purchase, bright turquoise with a bunch of yellow dinosaurs swimming about. She hadn’t been so keen about being tied up for two weeks at a time. Now, however, she got to spend much of the two weeks with Flaker. At his place.

After the first hunting season, and after it was clear that Froot Loup and Corn Flake were best buds, he and Rev had offered to pitch in for half the cost of replacing Kit’s ten-by-ten pen with something considerably larger. Kit gladly tore down the pen — it had been all she could afford since she’d just bought the house — and fenced in her whole property instead. It wasn’t as large as Rev’s lot. More importantly, it was level and rectangular. So that was where Loup now spent most of his time during hunting seasons. Safe, and happy, with Flaker.

They slowly made their way out of the cove and into the lake per se, wisely hugging the shoreline. Once they were past the stretch of cottages, Dylan let Loup get up.

“Steady … ” he said as Loup negotiated sitting in the kayak. “Good wolf.”

A few minutes later, halfway across the widest part of the lake, a necessary crossing in order to get to the little river Rev was heading toward, Rev risked a glance behind her to see that Loup was sitting between Dylan’s legs, following Flaker’s lead, and being very still. Dylan was concentrating on paddling, compensating for Loup’s weight, which was not quite evenly distributed. All was well.

Until Flaker decided that the view would be better from the prow.

Rev recovered quickly and grinned. Flaker sat there like a not-so-little hood ornament as they moved steadily along the water’s surface through the falling snow.

“NO!” She heard Dylan shout a moment later. Just before she heard the splash. “REV!”

Resisting the urge to do otherwise, Rev made a slow, wide turn.

“She tried to jump onto the prow! Like Flaker! And didn’t quite — ”

“I see.”

Loup had surfaced near Dylan, who was paddling haphazardly, in a mad panic, trying to stay close to her in case, in case —

“She’s okay,” Rev called out. “Look, she’s swimming.”

“But the water must be ice cold!”

“She’s got a thick coat. She’s moving. In fact — ” Rev pulled ahead of Froot Loup with several strong, even strokes, despite the fact that Flaker was now standingon the prow, anxious about — or perhaps just curious. About. Rev intended to lead Loup to the nearest shoreline. Which was, fortunately, at the mouth of the river they’d been heading toward.

“Stay … ” she said to Flaker. Who promptly jumped down off the prow, into the cockpit, and half onto Rev’s lap. He shoved his head over her shoulder, trying to keep Loup in sight.

“Or don’t,” she grinned, counterbalancing with ease. Then barely breaking stroke, she turned the kayak and continued, paddling backwards. Flaker jumped up onto the prow again.

“STAY!” Rev said again, far more sharply. Flaker’s coat wasn’t nearly as thick. And though he wasn’t as heavy as Loup, it would be awkward, possibly impossible, to pull him out of the water and back into the kayak if he decided to jump ship and help — or join — Loup.

No need. Loup swam toward Flaker. Of course she did. Kept swimming toward Flaker, as Rev kept paddling, backwards, toward shore. Dylan paddled behind, calling out calmness and encouragement. And, occasionally, a slight course correction. It was rather like that time in Algonquin Park …

A minute later — a long minute later — the procession touched shore. Loup immediately jumped into Dylan’s kayak, and then — then — shook herself.

Dylan screamed.

“Ice cold, yeah?” Rev grinned.

Fortunately, Dylan had taken Rev’s advice at purchase and his kayak clothes, like hers, were relatively waterproof, as well as windproof. So once Loup was done, and both she and Flaker were back on land — Flaker had flown from Rev’s kayak into Dylan’s to make sure Loup was okay — Dylan stood up and shook himself. Not as efficiently. But still.

They carried on then, up the pretty river, paddling in the falling snow, Loup and Flaker electing to run along shore. It was so quiet, so beautiful. And so delightfully incongruous.

*

“FUCKING SHIT!” Rev spat out the words. There, where the river became shallow enough for the ATVs to cross — they’d made a trail through the forest where none had been — and it was annoying as hell on humid days because the engine noise could be heard all the way to her cabin — they saw an abandoned fridge, a TV, and a car battery. Just sitting there. Dumped.

“Why go through all the trouble to bring it here, and not to the dump?” Dylan was perplexed.

“Because it’s hazardous waste. You need to buy a ticket to take your fridge to the dump, and you need to wait until a hazmat day to take car batteries. The TV is electrical waste … can’t remember if they accept that all year long or if that’s a special day too.”

“Unbelievable.”

“Actually, it’s not.”

Rev told him then about how she used to take a big garbage bag with her when she walked through the forest — once in the spring when the snow melted and all the garbage tossed by the snowmobilers was exposed, and once in the fall after the summer people had stopped coming and tossing their shit. She’d seen entire bags of household garbage dumped, old clothes, soiled diapers, and yes, car batteries and household appliances.

*

On the way back down the river, Loup and Flake elected to get into the kayaks again. And onto the prows again. All was well for a few minutes. Suddenly Flaker leapt off the prow to catch a snowflake, then splashed into the river, giggling. Loup followed suit. They both swam to shore and waited to be picked up. Rev and Dylan obliged. Once back in their respective kayaks, Flaker and Loup shook themselves. They both screamed. Rev and Dylan, that is.

Flaker and Loup positioned themselves back on the prows. A few seconds later, each made another spectacular launch to catch a snowflake. Then swam to shore, and waited for pick-up.

“Shake!” Dylan insisted.

Loup jumped in and shook.

“I meant before you got in.” He smiled lovingly at Loup.

“Probably impossible to teach the concept of time to animals who live in the moment. So completely, so easily,” she added with admiration.

“Yeah.” He grinned. With envy.

Then he thought, hell, he was already soaked. So next time, Loup launched himself off the prow, he followed suit.

Easier thought than done. He didn’t launch, so much as spill, overboard. Spectacular in its own way.

As evidenced by Rev’s look of disbelief. Because the water was ice cold. Maybe not quite as cold here in the shallow river as out on the lake, but still. And their kayak clothes were kayak clothes, not drysuits.

When Dylan surfaced, he grinned. Tried to grin. Found he had little control over his facial muscles.

“Did you catch one?” Rev asked.

“One what?” Apparently also little control over his brain.

Okay, then. She climbed onto the prow, set her sights on a thick flake close to the water’s surface, then dove for it. And looked like a soggy bologna sandwich sliding off a kitchen counter. Never mind. Caught it! Did she rock or what?! Aim low, that’s the path to success!

Flaker and Loup stared at them as they struggled to shore, giggling, their clothes dragging. They were bedraggled. The word was meant for them right then, right there.

“Shake.” Dylan said.

“I am.”

“No, I mean — ” He demonstrated.

Flaker and Loup stared at him. Pathetic.

Rev shook herself. Fell over.

Truly pathetic.

Flaker and Loup converged on them and started to lick them dry. They got their heads done, and then — the four of them stared at the kayaks floating down the river, out of reach.

“Oh yeah. Didn’t think of that.”

“If we run, maybe we can catch them before they get out onto the lake,” Dylan said. “You run! You’re fast!” Rev had indeed been a runner. Long-distance, but still.

She took a couple of swish-swashing steps.

“That’s not running!”

“Nor is it fast,” she agreed.

She rolled up her pants, unzipped her jacket, then tried to take off her soaked sweatshirt.

“Hurry!” Dylan urged. “They’re getting away.”

She glared at him. Settled for wringing out her sweatshirt as best she could.

She tried again. To take a couple steps. They still swish-swashed. But not quite as much.

“That’s better. Lift your knees,” Dylan called out as she swish-swashed away.

She turned and glared at him again. Flaker and Loup had, in the meantime, sat down. To wait for the humans to figure it out.

“You just need to catch one. Then you can get in and paddle after the other one.”

“Or we can just walk home from here. Deal with the kayaks tomorrow. It’s not like they’re going to drift out into the ocean.”

“Are you on speaking terms with any of your neighbours? One has a boat we can use?”

She glared at him yet again. Flaker and Loup had lain down.

“Eventually they’ll hit shore somewhere,” she said. “We’ll just walk around the lake until we find them.”

“Okay.”

They both stared at the river then.

“We’re on the wrong side, aren’t we.” Dylan asked the obvious.

“Wrong as in morally wrong or — ”

“Wrong as in we’re going to have to swim across.”

“Yeah.”

“Isn’t there a shallow spot where we could just — walk across?” Dylan asked hopefully. His teeth chattering.

“Yeah. Back where the ATVs cross.”

“Oh.” That was at least a mile back.

After weighing the extra wetness, negligible, against the time saved, considerable, they decided to swim across. Then wrung themselves out. Then started walking. Loup and Flaker followed them across the river, shook themselves, then took the lead.

*

“Pity we didn’t bring an extra set of dry clothes,” Dylan said at one point.

“We did. At least I did.”

“And — Oh.”

*

“Do you think our clothes will ice over? You could watch and see. It happen.”

*

“We should call the Coast Guard when we get home. Tell them we’re safe, in case someone reports — Oh. Right.”

“Besides, there is no Coast Guard.”

*

“So did you catch a snowflake? As you sailed out across the water?”

“Yeah.” She grinned. “You?”

“Yeah.”

*

Two hours later — Loup and Flaker had taken the scenic route home — not that Rev or Dylan would know — both had spent considerable time in the forest, yes, but on the trails — they were warm and dry, sitting on the rug leaning against the couch in front of a fire, sipping hot fudge chocolate.

Loup and Flaker were lying a safe distance away.

“Oh, we forgot — ” Dylan pushed away from the couch and crawled toward the pile of kindling, opening a little tin box tucked nearby. He took out a packet of something and tossed it into the fire.

“Oh yeah!” Rev said and smiled. The flames went turquoise and green and orange and red … The packets were called Funky Fire and contained a mix of chemicals that coloured the flames by oxidizing — something. Dylan had found them at the hardware store, unbelievably enough.

A few moments later, he opened another little box that looked like it contained chess pieces and pulled out a baggie, rolling paper, and matches. He’d found an apparently abandoned marijuana patch in the forest one day, had tended it back to health, and now called it the Marijuana Meadow. M&M, for short.

*

As Rev took again the joint Dylan passed to her, she nodded at Loup and Flaker. “Whoever hypothesized that wolves became domesticated because they sought the Neanderthals’ fires on cold nights … didn’t know wolves.” Almost lost the thought there for a moment. It had been such a long sentence. “Even most dogs are wary of fire.”

Dylan agreed. “They’d much rather wear little hand-knit coats to stay warm. And booties. Little pink booties with white ribbons.”

“Fifi flashbacks?”

He nodded. Dylan once had a dog, Bob, who left him for life on a farm with kids and — Fifi.

“Did you ever think that maybe Bob left you for the farm? Not for Fifi?” Because, frankly, she couldn’t see any dog leaving Dylan for little pink booties with white ribbons. “Maybe he just wanted to run and run and roll around in the muck and run some more … ”

“I never thought of that!” Dylan glowed. “I should’ve gotten him a farm!”

“Or at least a bunch of muck.”

“Yeah,” he drew in, “I probably couldn’t afford a farm.”

“But you could afford a bunch of muck?”

“I don’t know. How much money does a bunch of muck cost? If a bunch of muck did cost … money?” He giggled.

“I don’t know. Where would one buy a bunch of muck? If a bunch of muck could be bought.”

“Oh — Oh — eBay!” She cried out. As soon as her brain had caught up. Because she bought everything on eBay. It was so much easier than going to a store.

“Do you think they sell it by the pound or square foot?”

“Which is more important, weight or volume?”

Dylan imagined being Bob. Not for the first time. “Volume.”

Rev got up to go get her laptop. Fifteen minutes later, she returned.

“Did you get lost?”

“Oh shut up.”

A few minutes later, “Oh, wow … ”

“It’s expensive?”

“They’re so pretty. Dylan, look at the sea butterflies ...” She turned her laptop toward him.

“They are pretty … Oh, look at that one. With the feathery … things.”

It took another minute or two. “How did you get to sea butterflies? Weren’t you going to look for muck on eBay?” He scrolled down to see more images.

Rev thought for a minute. Or two. “Oh yeah. I have no idea. But look at how pretty they are … ”

2

Next noon, after their coffee and cold pizza, Rev called the township to report what they’d found by the river.

“But it’s hazardous waste,” Dylan heard her say as he entered the kitchen, Loup and Flaker trailing behind. “Depending on when the fridge was manufactured, Freon could be leaking out. The battery could be leaking too. Battery acid.” It sounded like she was trying to convince the guy it was important. Nothing more was said. She hung up a moment later.

“Well?”

“He told me to go online and fill out a complaint form.”

“Bureaucracy.”

“Don’t think so.”

He looked at her inquisitively.

“I’ll bet that if I were a man, the guy would’ve — you call. See what happens.”

“I’ve got a better idea.” Dylan went into his room, rummaged in his knapsack, and returned with his smartphone.

She stared at it. Then remembered that they could use their cell phones at her cabin now. Without climbing onto the roof. Bell and Rogers had finally improved their service and although her internet access wasn’t truly high-speed, it was now light years ahead of the dial-up she’d had to use for far too long.

“Call again,” Dylan said, handing the phone to her. “Use the voice modulation app. Choose James Earl Jones.”

“Seriously?” She accepted the phone and explored the app.

“I prefer Alvin, myself,” Dylan continued, “but … ”

She made the call. The same call. Dylan reached over to put it on speakerphone.

“Yeah, some woman just called about that. Where is it exactly?” the man asked. As if the woman had been unable to tell him.

“Where the ATV trail crosses the river.”

“And what exactly has been dumped there?” As if the woman had been unable to tell him.

“A fridge, a car battery, and a TV.”

“Oh, well, yes, we definitely want to get that taken care of. It’s hazardous waste. Depending on when the fridge was manufactured, Freon could be leaking out. The battery could be leaking too. Battery acid.” Rev gave Dylan a look.

“We’ll send someone out this afternoon.” A murderous look.

“Thank you.” Rev handed the phone back to Dylan.

They were both quiet. Rev with anger, Dylan with disbelief.

“You know what we really need,” Rev started to say, but Dylan had already left the kitchen again.

He returned in a few seconds with his laptop, sat at the small table, and started tapping away … Rev waited, watching, wondering —

“It’s already been invented.” He tapped a few more keys, then turned the laptop so she could see as well.

“Holy shit.”

It was an app called ReGender. It was Photoshop meets Holoshop.

“No surprise, really,” Dylan said casually. As if the world hadn’t shifted under his feet. “Remember when you started using a male name for your emails? And then went into a few chatrooms as a man? And remember that program we played with, the one that changed all the pronouns?” He started exploring the website.

“Yeah. I called it a Bechdel test for novels,” she said. “If you could change the pronouns and not end up laughing, the work was truly non-sexist. And fantasy,” she added.

“I know you’re not into gaming,” he said, tapping away, “but when women use male avatars … ”

Right. Because what woman wouldn’t want to present as a man? To be taken seriously for one goddamned minute. The people in the chatrooms had not dismissed her out of hand. They’d actually engaged with her for what she said. Not for what she was assumed to be because of her sex.

“‘Smartphones,’” he was reading the ‘About It’ page out loud, “‘have been able to project miniature holograms since 2015.’” He looked up. “Did not know that.”

While he thought of all the fun he’d been missing, Rev picked up where he’d left off. “‘ReGender projects a hologram that completely masks the person holding the projecting smartphone.’”

Better pay, better performance reviews, promotions.

“This is going to make someone very, very rich.” She turned to Dylan. “We have to buy stock. Now.”

“But,” he’d scrolled down, “it’s only in the beta — They need people to test it.” He looked over at her. Grinning from ear to ear. Daring her from ear to ear.

“Hell yeah!” She peered closely at the page he’d clicked to. “Oh.”

They had to attend a two-week orientation and training session. Then commit to five months of testing. So five and a half months. She’d have to leave her beloved cabin for five and a half months. Their blasphemy tour had taken eight months. And that had been enough travel to last a very long time, as far as she was concerned. She’d started missing her cabin first week out.

“But it’s in the winter. Mostly.” He nodded outside to the still falling snow. “As soon as the lake freezes over, you won’t be able to kayak anyway … ”

She considered that. In fact, she’d accompanied Dylan on a couple of his housesits during the previous winter. Because, yeah, she wouldn’t’ve been able to kayak anyway. Or sit outside in the porch. But those trips had been for only a few weeks at a time.

“Where is it? Spending the winter in California would be nice. Isn’t that where Google is?”

Dylan turned back to the screen. “It’s not owned by Google.”

“Yet.” Rev got up and headed to the porch. Her laptop was on the little table beside her couch. She settled in, powered on, and found the site. Dylan followed, carrying his laptop, and settled into his chair. Loup and Flaker followed, glanced at the two of them, then at each other, then gently pushed their way out through the hanging strip of grocery-freezer plastic in the bottom half of the door. Early on, Dylan had modified the screen door so Loup could go in and out as she wished. Maintaining its function of keeping the bugs out had been a challenge, but after several failed designs, he’d prevailed. And then had the brilliant idea of changing the screen to heavy plastic once the temperatures dropped.

“It was created by some people in Halifax!” he said with surprise a few moments later.

“The home of 22 Minutes! That makes so much sense! Dakey Dunn — Was Mary Walsh involved? I’ll bet she was … ” Rev scrolled and clicked …

“In any case,” Dylan said, scrolling and reading, “It looks like they’re wanting people to be, or go, all over. We choose five locations from a list and spend a month at each. All expenses paid.”

“Really? Including the expense to get to those five places?” She explored the site trying to confirm that. “And from those five places,” she thought to add.

“Travel, accommodation, and an honorarium!” Dylan kept reading. It did seem a little unbelievable.

“Are any of the places in California?” She was looking for the list. “The orientation is in California, right? Isn’t that where Google is? Oh, no, wait, you said the app wasn’t owned by Google … Okay, that doesn’t make sense.” She leaned back, thinking she’d identified evidence of a hoax.

“What doesn’t make sense?”

“There’s no way a start-up from the Maritimes, or, actually, anywhere in Canada, could afford what this is going to cost … ”

“Hm.” Dylan agreed. With disappointment.

“No, wait — ” he said, returning to the ‘About’ page and reading. “They went to California to pitch it to Google, but instead ended up getting the beta test funded by a start-up in San Francisco.”

“So they got bought out?”

“No … they still own it. I think. I don’t really know how these things work … But they’re still in California … In San Francisco.”

“Okay, that makes sense. No sane person would spend winter in Halifax if they didn’t have to.”

“Which is why the orientation session is in San Francisco,” Dylan grinned at Rev. “In January. Average temperature, 57 degrees. Rain. No snow.” They’d stayed in San Francisco during their blasphemy tour, but only for a couple days. He wouldn’t mind going back.

“But they still want to test it in both Canada and the States? That would make sense.”

“It would, yes, if Canadians own the app and Americans are funding the test.”

“Well, I was thinking it made sense because they intend to market it to both Canadians and Americans.”

“Wouldn’t they also want to reach the Asian market? So Japan and China should be on the list! We could go to Japan and China!” Dylan had already been, to bothJapan and China, but —

The very thought of being among so many people made Rev sweat. “You can’t speak Japanese, remember? Besides, Asians don’t need the app. They aren’t as sex-differentiated as we are.”

Dylan raised his eyebrows. “You just can’t tell them apart.”

“That doesn’t make me racist,” she said quickly. Because he was right. She couldn’t. She had trouble with black-skinned people too. “It just makes me inept at facial recognition. I can’t tell white fat-assed crew-cut rednecks apart either. In fact, put snowmobile helmets over their heads and they alllook the same.”

“Still,” Dylan said. “Asian porn,” he added.

“Yeah.” She conceded the proof of sexism in Japan and China.

“It’s sort of a 24/7 thing,” he said a few moments later, having resumed scrolling through the site, “having to test it. But you could probably keep meeting your LSAT quota … ”

“Okay, that’s good … ” she was starting to warm up to the idea. Because 57 degrees. Not keen on so much rain, but. No snow.

“No, wait.” She looked up from her laptop and at Dylan. “What about Loup?”

Oh. How could he have forgotten about his beloved Froot Loup?

“We can’t take her with us. Can we? I mean, not only the travel, but a wolf in the city? Fraser made it work, but Loup’s not Diefenbaker.”

No, Loup wasn’t Diefenbaker. Dylan set his laptop aside. Oh well, it was a good idea. While it lasted.

But Rev wasn’t going to give so easily. Every year, the winters got colder, longer, and noisier. The guys who had a snowmobile were the same ones who had an ATV. And since all the ads told them they could go anywhere, everywhere, on their manly man-machines, they did. “OWN THE LAKE!” one ad actually commanded.

Which, now that she thought about it, explained their angry “You don’t own the lake!” response when she’d politely requested that they at least turn around before getting to her cabin at the dead-end cove of the lake. She’d thought, naïvely, that their response had demonstrated an elementary understanding of public property. That, she’d thought, stupidly, she could build upon, with further discussion …

“We can ask Kit if she’d look after Loup!” she suggested. “That way she and Flaker could be together. Which they are most of the time anyway.”

On cue, the two of them walked through the plastic flap.

“Yeah … ” Dylan was coming back to the possibility.

“She’d take them for a run in the forest every day.”

“Yeah … No. She couldn’t. When she goes on out-trips, Flaker stays with us.”

“Oh. Right.” Another reason they couldn’t go.

Kit worked at a wilderness camp for so-called troubled adolescents. Once a month, several staff members went on a ten-day trip with several of the kids. The idea was that the kids would develop character. And what have you. Mostly they developed the latter.

“Well, it wouldn’t hurt to ask. Maybe she’ll have an idea … ”

*

Two days later, when Kit was due back from her current out trip, they headed over to her house to return Flaker and ask about Loup. Since she lived just a couple miles away, on dirt roads, they walked. Flaker bounced around, trying unsuccessfully to herd Rev and Dylan, while Loup, as was her habit, moved stealthily through the forest, about twenty feet in. It was an instinct they’d decided not to challenge. On the one hand, it made her more of a target. Should hunters break the rules and cruise close to the road for animals to kill. But on the other hand, it kept her otherwise hidden. In any case, she always had on one of her bright bandanas. Which sort of made both sides of the issue moot.

“NO!” Rev suddenly yelled as Flaker took off. There were half a dozen wild turkeys pecking about on the road some distance ahead. They needed to be herded. Around the wet spots of melted snow.

“NO!” Rev repeated, breaking into a run, Dylan on her heels.. “They can HURT you!”

Indeed they could. Standing three feet tall, with vicious beaks, and even more vicious claws, topped by spurs on their ankles, they’d actually put a man in the hospital some years back. Though god knows what he’d done to trigger their attack.

No need to worry. Froot Loup had also broken into a run. A far more impressive run.

“I didn’t know turkeys could fly,” Dylan said a moment later, coming to a stop beside Rev.

“I don’t think that qualified as flying,” Rev replied. “Looked more like running-for-your-life-while-hysterically-flapping-your-evolution-isn’t-intelligent-design-either-wings.”

They were close enough to see Corn Flake glare at Froot Loup.

Froot Loup looked apologetic.

Corn Flake forgave him. Because ever since he’d gotten caught in that trap — well, it had been a wake-up call for both of them. Injury, perhaps even death, was a possibility.

Five minutes later, they arrived at Kit’s place to see her outside waiting. Joyously, Flaker flew into her arms. He was better at it than the wild turkeys, Rev noted. Kit caught him, swung around to absorb the impact, crooning while she turned in a circle. Rev became slightly dizzy. But did not fall over.

Once that part was done, Flaker lay down on the grass, belly up. Kit obliged, getting down on the grass beside him, and beginning an intensive belly-rubbing session. Flaker’s tail thumped the ground.

Froot Loup had watched the whole thing. Timidly, she approached, and lay down beside Flaker. Also belly up. Not missing a beat, Kit started belly-rubbing Loup as well. Loup’s tail started thumping as well.

Rev nudged Dylan. But didn’t need to. Until now, Loup had done that only with him. And it had taken months. Dylan didn’t know whether to be happy or sad that he was doing it now with Kit.

“Say yes,” he eventually called out, grinning, but a little teary-eyed.

Kit looked up. “Yes?”

Once the belly-rubbing was, apparently, done — because, hey, first things first — Kit turned her full attention to Rev and Dylan. “Wanna come in for a beer?”

“Sure!”

Rev didn’t like beer, but she was socially astute enough, now, to recognize that the question need not be taken literally.

“Loup too?” Dylan said at the door. Then chuckled. They used the French pronunciation of ‘loup’ so it triggered his inordinate fascination with the way words sounded.

“Of course, Loup too!”

As soon as the five of them settled in her screened-in porch — pretty much mandatory in that part of the province — Kit asked what the ‘Say yes’ was about.

“Well, we’re thinking of going away. For six months. There’s this thing … ” He completed the explanation.

“Wow.” Kit digested the information.

“And so we were thinking, we were hoping, now that your place is fenced in, that maybe — ”

“What did you do with Flaker while you were on out-trips before?” Before he’d discovered Loup. And Rev and Dylan.

“I took him with me.”

Okay, so they need not feel too bad about leaving Flaker without a second home for six months, but that was probably not a good option for Loup.

“If we had a bit more time to train Loup,” Kit started thinking out loud, “I’d love to use her to scare the shit out of some of these baby-psychopaths I have to deal with … ”

Dylan was confused. But Rev was not. Given her classroom experience. “I’m not sure that’d be a good idea,” she said to Kit. “Loup might not be able to understand faking it.” Loup was definitely not Diefenbaker. Well, Draco.

“You’re right,” Kit easily changed her mind. “It would be confusing. And I wouldn’t want to put Loup through that.” She reached out to stroke her fondly. “Besides, honestly? I wouldn’t put it past some of them to pull a knife on her.”

“Okay, so a definite no to that idea.” Dylan had caught up.

“Once I had to leave Flaker here,” Kit said. “I can’t remember why — oh yeah, we had an interim supervisor who said I couldn’t take her with me. Anyway, I had a friend come over a couple times a day to let her out … ”

“But even if you left Loup outside … Ten days is a long time … ” Rev said what was on Dylan’s mind.

“Do you know anyone who … ” He trailed off.

“What about Dr. Theresen?” Rev suddenly thought of the vet they’d taken Loup to. Actually they didn’t take Loup to her, she came to Loup. They’d heard about cats in cars, and had thought that wolves in cars might well be worse. Dr. Theresen was wonderful about the whole baby-wolf-adopts-Dylan thing. And the Flaker-caught-in-the-trap thing. When Loup had gone nuts.

“Or,” Kit said, “I’ve been thinking … ”

They waited.

“I’ve been thinking it might be time to get out.”

“You’re thinking of quitting?” Dylan was appalled. Kit seemed to love her job.

“Not completely. Just stepping away from the front line. I’ve been offered a managerial position.”

“You? Behind a desk?”

Rev jabbed Dylan.

Kit laughed. “No worry, I had the same thought. But, you know … There comes a time … ”

“You’re burned out. You don’t care anymore. About the kids.”

Kit looked at Rev, surprised to see the empathy in her eyes.

“No, I do, I just — No, I don’t. Not really. Not anymore.” She said it in a progressively smaller voice and looked down at her hands, hanging limply in her lap. She felt ashamed, sad, confused — She reached out and started stroking Flaker, snuggled beside her. “It’s just … You try and try and put yourself out there again and again, and they call you a SAP. Sad and Pathetic,” she translated. “Not to mention a bitch, a cow, a cunt, a — ”

“It’s a paradox,” Rev interrupted. Because the litany was all too familiar. “Unless you harden, you keep getting hurt and die a death of a thousand cuts. But if you do harden, you’re no good to them anymore. Lose-lose.”

Kit nodded. “They shouldn’t really call it being burned out. It’s more like being … hollowed out.”

Dylan stared at the two of them. After all, he’d been a teacher too, like Rev. He’d worked on the front line with kids too, like Kit. But he had experienced nothing like this. Were students harder on women? In the way they were talking about? Rev had told him about eventually having to brace herself before she entered the classroom because of the hostility. Every day at least one of the students would call her a bitch. He’d never been called a bitch. A wank, maybe, and a faggot, certainly, but not a bitch. And since he wasn’t gay, it didn’t hurt. Not in a real, personal way. But Rev and Kit weren’t bitches either, so — well, yes, they were. Given that ‘bitch’ just meant, really, ‘woman’. Hey, that was something they could test! With the app! Well, if they could get temporary teaching positions …

“Okay,” Dylan turned back to the purpose of their visit, “so, if you decided to take the desk job, that would be, like, Monday to Friday, nine to five?”

Kit nodded. With some disgust.

“But it’s a promotion, right?” Rev asked. “Better pay?”

Kit nodded. With a smile.

“And when would it start?” There was hope in his voice.

“January.”

“Oh well, then.” Could it be this simple?

“No talking about how it was meant to be,” Rev said, to no one in particular, “or that it’s fate or kismet or, heaven forbid,” she grinned, “a sign from god. Think about it,” she said to Kit. “And don’t let — ”

“But I have thought about it,” Kit said. “The promotion, I mean. I’ve been thinking about it for over a week. Actually, I think my heart decided as soon as the offer was made, and my head just needed to catch up. Or vice versa.”

Dylan nodded. His head often needed to catch up.

“Honestly, I think this, your request, is just the nudge I need to say yes.” She turned to Dylan, “So, yes. Yes!”

“Okay, then!” Dylan was delighted. “Thank you!”

“We haven’t actually applied yet,” Rev said, “so let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Fun though that is,” she turned to Dylan, anticipating his comment to that effect.

“And, but, if we do get accepted, we may need to leave a few days before January. To get to wherever we’re going.”

“No problem. I have a couple weeks’ vacation I can use.”

“Okay, then. We’ll apply and let you know. If we get accepted, we’ll figure out the details then.”

“Okay. There is one condition though.”

“We’ll pay for her food, of course,” Dylan quickly said. “We’ll even pay for — how much does wolfsitting cost?”

“And any vet bills,” Rev said, then turned quickly to Dylan, “not that there will be any.”

“You remember Dr. Theresen?” Dylan asked. “She’s Loup’s vet.”

“I remember,” Kit smiled, assuring him. “I know. Are any of her shots due during your absence?”

“Oh. Good question. I’ll check.”

This was going to be okay, Dylan told himself. Kit was clearly responsible, and she clearly cared about Loup.

“Your condition?” Rev came back to that.

“Bring back one of the beta versions you guys will be testing. I wouldn’t have to deal with half the shit I have to deal with if I looked and sounded like Schwartzeneggar.”

They stared at her.

“You mean ‘shit’ figuratively, right?” Dylan asked.

Kit stared at him.

“One of these days, when we come back, I should do a story about — that.”

(free download of complete novel at jassrichards.com)

1

“Guess what happened while we were away,” Dylan said to Rev. They were in her screened porch, Rev sunk lengthwise into her couch staring out at the sparkling lake, Dylan stretched out on a lounge chair staring at his open laptop.

They’d just come back from their infamous ‘blasphemy tour’, ostensibly a series of speaking engagements at American Bible Colleges, sponsored by the Atheist Alliance Consortium, to talk about their recent adventure in court. They’d been charged with blasphemy when they’d added “‘Blessed are they that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stone.’ — Psalms 137:9” to a billboard just outside Algonquin Park. A Right-to-Life billboard.

A great number of things, Rev thought, would have happened while they were away. An infinite number of things, if Dylan was including events that had occurred in alternate universes. If she took into account his interests, that would narrow it down. But not by much. Ah. The laptop. If he was reading the news, then, given the news producers’ interests, that would narrow it down to just half a dozen things. Politics, business, sports, cars, houses, and travel. Well, one thing, really. Money.

“Are you rea—”

“You’re just supposed to say ‘What?’” Dylan said.

She thought about that for a moment. “Why?”

He groaned, grinned, then sighed. Bloody hell, but he was going to miss her. He was a professional housesitter, and so didn’t really have a home of his own, but since their serendipitous meeting about a year ago, some twenty years after they’d gone through teachers’ college together—at the end of which they had both been voted most likely to be brilliant teachers and, simultaneously, least likely to be hired—he’d been spending half his time at her cabin on a lake in a forest, near Sudbury. He had a housesit scheduled in Argentina for two weeks hence, but, he thought now, maybe he’d cancel it and just stay here. Stay home, he happily amended.

“Okay, where?” Rev had decided to narrow it down.

“What?”

They stared at each other.

“Have some Froot Loops,” he said and held the box out to her.

“There’s no pizza left?”

“Someone ate it all.”

“Hm.”

He returned to his laptop, and she returned to the sun-glittering lake. She had missed it dearly while they were away and now couldn’t get enough of it.

“So,” Dylan tried again, “have you read the news recently?”

“No,” she replied. Then added, “Not since the early 90s.”

He looked up from his laptop in disbelief, stared at her expectantly, and was not disappointed.

“It’s always the same old shit,” she explained. “About which I can do nothing, since I am the epitome of powerlessness. So what’s the point? Stupidity doesn’t entertain me.”

Dylan snorted.

“Which means, by the way,” she continued, ignoring the snort, “that I depend on you to tell me when some Nero’s gone nuclear. Or some yahoo gets the blueprints for the reactors mixed up and installs the earthquake supports backwards. Again. So I can go up to the loft.”

“That’s not going to stop you from getting irradiated.”

“No, but it’s where I keep my suicide kit.”

He considered that information for a moment.

“Why the loft?” he finally asked.

“I figure, generally speaking, if I’m that depressed, I’m too depressed to climb the stairs. So it’s a—”

“Got it. Good idea.”

And then another moment.

“And what’s in your suicide kit?”

“A bottle of Jack Daniels, a razor blade, and lots and lots of Nyquil. And a pen and some paper.”

He nodded. “To write what, exactly?”

“Oh, you know, last words about the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. Or maybe just our epitaph.”

“Which would be?”

She thought about that for a bit. “‘I told you we were sick.’”

He laughed. “Indeed.”

“And yet,” he said then, pointing at his laptop, “guess what happened—”

She glared at him. Sort of.

“Canada passed the Parent Licence Act,” he said quickly.

She slowly turned her gaze from the lake to him. “You’re kidding.”

“Nope. The NDP voted for it because it would piss off the Go-forth-and-multiply Conservatives, and the Conservatives voted for it because it would piss off the You-can’t-touch-our-civil-liberties NDP.”

He passed his laptop to her so she could skim the article.

“Wow,” she said when she was done.

“And,” he continued, happily, “That Magazine wants me to do an article about it.”

“What magazine?”

“That Magazine. Remember? There’s this magazine called—we’ve been over this before. Haven’t we?”

“Oh yeah. Cool!”

She turned her gaze back to the lake.

“You should call up Hugh LaFollette,” she said after a few moments, “if he’s still alive. He published a paper on the idea back in the 80s. And Jack Westman wrote a book about it. You could cover the legal implications, the moral implications, you could interview parents, Family Services, the Church…” She was off and running. As he knew she would be.

Dylan was typing away. A moment later, he hit ‘Send’ and a note arrived in Argentina.

2

They worked for a bit. Rev was a test development freelancer, writing logical reasoning questions that went on the LSAT. What else does one do with degrees in Philosophy, Literature, and Education? And Dylan started gathering background for his new assignment. He was a freelancer as well and typically wrote travel articles, which fit well with his housesitting and his degrees in History and Education, but occasionally, more often since reconnecting with Rev, he wrote pieces with a little more substance. Such as this one.

After a while, they decided to go into town to rectify the pizza deficiency.

On the way, Dylan summarized his findings for Rev.

“So, you have to be eighteen.”

“That makes sense,” Rev said as she drove her pine-tar-spattered car along the dirt road that lead from their driveway to the main road. “You’ve got to be eighteen to drive. Surely parenting requires the same level of maturity.”

“More, I’d say,” Dylan replied. “Maybe driving has greater potential for physical injury, but—”

“But getting in a car accident doesn’t mean you’ll end up with maggots in your diaper.”

Dylan looked over at her. “Not usually, no.”

“But,” she backed up a bit, “we’re assuming a correlation between age and maturity.”

“Good point,” he pulled out a little pad of paper and a pen and made a note to himself.

“According to Covell and Howe,” he recalled, “professors of psychology and political science, respectively, and both directors of a children’s rights center in Cape Breton, people should demonstrate the ability to be responsible for their own lives before being allowed to assume responsibility for a child’s life.”

“But, again, that’s assuming a correlation,” she turned from the dirt road onto the main road. “If that was the rationale for the age thing. Being a certain age doesn’t mean you’ve taken responsibility for your own life.”

“True.” Dylan thought for a moment. “What would?”

“Having moved out of your parents’ house? And lived on your own for a year? I heard a guy in the hardware store once whining about how now that his wife had left, he’d had to figure out how to cook his own dinner once he got home. Poor baby.”

“No surprise as to why his wife left.”

“And yet the woman at the register was so sympathetic. She actually cooed.”

“Whereas you…”

“Oh I was sympathetic too.”

Dylan thought this highly unlikely.

“I agreed that figuring out how to turn on an oven could be tricky for a man of forty.”

They passed the graveyard of a gravel pit. It had been in full operation twenty-four hours a day, six days a week, for eight months while the highway had been four-laned. Rev couldn’t stand the noise, which, due to the acoustic corridor formed by the long lake, reached her cabin despite being miles away, and she’d had to move for the duration. At her own expense, of course. Neither the township nor any Ministry she called was willing to intervene. The pit owner had a right to run his business as he saw fit.

“Okay, what else?” she asked.

“No drug addictions.”

“And what are they counting as drugs?”

“Gotta get that list,” he made another note to himself.

“No mental illness,” he continued. “Gotta get that list.”

“I wonder if they’ll consider religious belief a mental illness.”

“They could consider atheism a mental illness.”

“Who’s ‘they’, that’s the question. Get that list.”

“No mental retardation,” Dylan resumed.

“That’s going to upset the disability lobby.”

“Yeah, I should interview someone about that.” Another note to self.

“Ask them if they’d hire the special person down the street to build their house. Unsupervised.”

“Hm.”

“What else?” she asked.

“You have to have a minimum income, 20% above the poverty level.”

“Well, it does take money to raise a kid. Food, clothing, music lessons. Or something. But we don’t want it so only the rich can have kids.” She noticed in passing that the only remaining independent gas station in the area had finally, inevitably, gone out of business.

“Well, 20% above poverty level doesn’t exactly make you rich,” Dylan replied.

“True. Though if you’re living at poverty level, an extra 20% can make you feel rich,” she remembered back a couple decades. There was a time she was scrubbing toilets at the hockey camp for minimum wage, despite the three degrees in her back pocket.

“Would we rather have kids fully funded by the state?” he wondered aloud. “They could have made it like in China. People who agree to have only one child get priority access to housing, health subsidies, and pensions, and the kid gets priority access to nurseries, schools, and employment. People who have more than one child have to pay an ‘excess child’ levy, which is, I believe, quite steep. I think it’s a ten percent deduction from their total income, until the child reaches sixteen. In addition to having to pay for all the medical and educational expenses for the additional kid. Benefits like that would be a real incentive to get licensed. I wonder why—”

“Because it would’ve been an incentive to have a kid just for the money?”

“But if the money wasn’t paid directly to the parents—and it wouldn’t be, in the case of access to housing and schools—”

“I think I prefer the minimum income thing. Why should I pay for someone else’s kids?” Rev asked. “They had ’em, they should pay for ’em. Do they pay for my choices? When I decide to take a trip—”

“Well, they pay for some of your choices. If you’d broken your leg when you fell off what’s-her-name’s Harley—”

“Yeah, but—”

“And we already do. Pay for other people’s kids. We pay for their education, to a point. And their broken legs. And—”

“Yeah, and I’ve never really been happy about that,” she said. “It’s like the biochem cube thought experiment.”

Dylan glanced over with raised eyebrows.

“Suppose John Smith makes biochem cubes,” Rev recalled the experiment. “Biological-chemical cubes of something or other about one metre by one metre. With an input for the resources required for sustenance, and an output for the unusable processed resources.

“Why does John Smith make biochem cubes? Good question. Truth be told, they’re unlikely to make the world a better place. And he doesn’t sell them.

“So. Should we make allowances for John Smith? Should we give him a bigger salary? A break on his income tax? After all, he has, let’s say, ten biochem cubes to support. If they are to stay alive, he has to provide. He needs a bigger house. More electricity. More food.

“Should we encourage his ‘hobby’? Or should we censure it? Because once his biochem cubes become ambulatory, the rest of us have to go around them in one way or another. And when we’re both dead, his ecological footprint will have been ten times mine. Or yours. More, if the biochem cubes he made are self-replicating.”

“Well, when you put it that way,” Dylan said after a moment.

“Though you know,” Rev thought aloud, “if only qualified people will be able to have kids, there may be fewer broken legs. Or what have you. And I don’t mind paying for the pure accidents. It’s paying for the consequences of other people’s stupidity, or thoughtlessness, that I mind. And I guess I can generalize that to the kids themselves. I mind less paying for a cherished, wanted child than for the result of some drunken or otherwise mindless fuck.”

“To put it delicately.”

She grinned.

“What else?”

“You have to take a course on child development,” he said.

“Good. Is it a long course?”

“Don’t know the details. Yet.”

He made a note.

“No prior convictions for child abuse. Which will upset the child abuse lobby.”

She glanced over quickly to see if he was serious. “There’s a child abuse lobby?”

“People have rights!” he parodied.

“There has to be a minimum of two partner-parents,” he continued, “and since this is Canada, there are no specifications as to sex, sexual preference, or skin color of said partner-parents.”

”Cool.”

“But,” he summarized, “all that applies only to those who want to raise the child.”

“What do you—ah. Right. Of course.” Then, several moments later, when she’d fully caught up, “Wow.”

“Wow, indeed,” Dylan agreed.

“Mandatory testing?”

He nodded.

“Mandatory engineering?”

He nodded again.

“Wow. That used to be illegal in Canada. Now it’s mandatory?” Then a few seconds later, “That’s opening a can of worms.”

“And yet—”

“And yet, like the other, it doesn’t have to. Are they insisting on genetic enhancement or just…whatever it’s called when you correct genes. Like for, what, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, Lou Gehrig’s—” She paused for a moment, thinking. “What disease would you want to be named after you?”

3

When they walked into the pizza place, they saw a new guy back in the kitchen area. He lumbered out to the counter, a perfect picture of boredom and fatigue, then reached for a pen and the pad of pre-printed order forms. He waited.

“One with green olives and pineapple, one with black olives and mushrooms…”

“One with onions and peppers,” Dylan said, then turned to Rev, “and one Veggie Special?”

“Sounds good.”

The man ticked off various boxes.

“All large,” Rev anticipated his question, “and all undercooked a bit.”

Driving into town for just one pizza would be environmentally irresponsible, so she ordered several each trip, then froze them, heating up one slice at a time in her toaster oven. Four large would be a month’s supply. In theory.

The man re-entered the order into the computer system.

“And a bottle of Pepsi,” Dylan added.

“Yeah, make that two,” Rev said.

They waited a few moments.

“That’ll be $103.76,” the man said. Rev handed over her credit card.

“So,” she said to the guy as he processed the payment, “what do you think about the new parent licence thing?”

“What?”

“The new law that says you have to get a licence before you become a parent. He’s writing an article on it,” she nodded to Dylan.

“I think it’s stupid,” the man said.

Dylan nodded. “I’ll be sure to put that in my article.”

• • •

They stepped outside with half an hour to kill.

“While we wait, shall we check out the word on the street? What I have so far is—”

“An unrepresentative sample?”

“Maybe. Hopefully. Probably not.”

“Okay, sure,” Rev said. They looked to the right. They looked to the left.

“Okay, maybe the word in the mall?” Dylan suggested.

Rev hated malls. They were everything she—hated. “Another day. The park?”

“Yeah, but the ice cream place first.”

So they walked down the empty street to the ice cream place. It was a seasonal establishment and had just recently re-opened. Soon the summer people would stream in every weekend with their loud and large self-importance, but today they had the place to themselves. Dylan considered the possibilities, walking along the freezer with its selection of ice cream in brown cardboard barrels, then looking up to study the sign that listed extras. He asked for Strawberry Cupcake with green sprinkles. Rev asked for Triple Chocolate, then wandered to the adjoining fudge counter.

“Pity it’s not cheesecake,” Dylan said what was clearly on her mind.

“Yeah. Even so…a piece of the Egg Nog fudge too, please,” she said to the youngish woman behind the counter who was busy scooping their choices.

“So what do you think about the new parent licence thing?” Rev asked her she handed their cones to them. “He’s doing an article about it.”

“I think it’s about time,” she replied, slicing off a piece of Egg Nog fudge, then wrapping it. “I’ve got a little girl, just turned eight, and I swear I spend half my time undoing the influence of other people’s kids. Do you know how difficult it is to refuse your own kid when everyone else’s kid has it or is doing it?”

“I never thought of it that way,” Dylan said, taking a lick of his Strawberry Cupcake. “Thanks for your comment.”

She scowled as she rang up their order. “I just know she’s going to want to give blow-jobs when she’s ten.”

• • •

They paid for their cones and the fudge, then crossed the street and entered a small park. Once they had walked around the perimeter, they sat on a bench, idly watching some kids on the brightly-coloured playground equipment.

Suddenly Dylan got up, tossing his cone, and rushed to the monkey bars to rescue a purple-faced upside-down toddler.

“Hey, get away from my kid!” A large woman, followed by an even larger man, stomped toward Dylan from one of the other benches.

“I was just helping—”

“He didn’t need any help!” the woman shouted.

“Actually, he did,” Dylan said. “At that age, there’s no way he’d’ve been able to pull himself back up. In a moment, he would’ve fallen off.”

“Then he would’ve learned an important lesson!” the man grunted. “Not to climb up there in the first place.”

“A moot lesson for a paraplegic and/or vegetable,” Rev commented, having joined the circus.

“Are you calling my kid a vegetable?”

“If he’d fallen, on his head, which he would’ve have, given—” Dylan decided to withhold the physics lesson, “that’s exactly what he would’ve become.”

“But you probably wouldn’t’ve noticed much difference,” Rev assured the couple.

There was a moment of dead air.

“Are you saying I’m a bad mother?” the woman challenged Rev.

“Duh.” She licked her Triple Chocolate.

“But I love my kids!”

“Oh please,” Rev responded, “the word means so many things, it’s useless. Whatever, your love is obviously insufficient.”

“But I’d do anything for them!” she insisted.

“Except take Child Care 101,” Dylan said dryly as they returned to their table.

“You know,” Rev commented, as she offered Dylan a lick from her cone, “one article isn’t going to be enough.”

“Not even close,” he agreed.

(free download of complete novel at jassrichards.com)

Rev slowed as they approached the border at Fort Erie and chose a car lane that had virtually no line-up. Carefully manoeuvring into the narrow lane, which was marked by concrete dividers on either side and a huge concrete pillar on the driver’s side—whose function intrigued, and absolutely eluded, her—she pulled up snug behind the car in front of her.

Almost instantly a voice boomed out over the speaker. “BACK UP YOUR VEHICLE!!” Simultaneously, a border guard appeared out of nowhere and walked briskly toward their car, making forceful ‘back up’ signs with his hands.

“BACK UP YOUR VEHICLE NOW!!” The voice commanded.

“All right, all right,” she grumbled, puzzled by their urgency, and put the car into reverse. She grabbed onto the back of Dylan’s seat for leverage, turned to look behind, and started to back up.

“Rev!” Dylan said almost immediately. But too late.

She heard the clunk. Then the clatter. And when she turned to face the front again, she saw that the rear view mirror on her door was gone, clipped by the concrete pillar. So that’s what it was for.

She mumbled something as she opened her door to retrieve it.

“REMAIN IN YOUR CAR!!”

“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” she ignored the command. It was just a rear view mirror and it was sitting right there.

“DO NOT EXIT YOUR VEHICLE!!”

She exited the vehicle. More or less.

“Shit,” she muttered.

Dylan didn’t dare glance over—he was staring straight ahead in disbelief, exclaiming with full Irish, “Bloody hell—” Besides, he knew what had happened. “Please tell me you fell out, you’re on the ground, and you’re going to stay there,” he managed to say.

“Yes, yes, and—” she tried to stretch her legs, but apparently her knees were doing their very best imitation of concrete— “don’t have any choice. I hate this growing old—” she growled.

“Yes, well, we can commiserate about the tragedy of being over forty later. Perhaps when we turn sixty. Because at the moment we’re surrounded by half a dozen border guards. All of whom are seriously armed.”

“What?” she popped her head up.

“Men with guns!” Dylan shouted.

“Oh.” She ducked back down.

“PUT YOUR HANDS WHERE WE CAN SEE THEM!!”

Dylan raised his hands.

Rev also raised her hands. Her head hit the pavement. “Shit!”

Dylan winced. “Are you—still conscious?”

“Yes. Unfortunately. I really—”

“—used to have abs. I know.”

“STEP OUT AND AWAY FROM THE VEHICLE.”

Dylan did as he was told.

“STEP AWAY FROM THE VEHICLE!” The voice repeated.

“Just give her—” he looked over at her— “an hour.”

“Oh shut up.”

Two of the three guards who had been aiming at Dylan swivelled to Rev.

“She was talking to me,” Dylan said quickly. “Rev?” He was afraid to look directly at her in case that looked like they were colluding to—do something.

“M’AM, KEEP YOUR HANDS RAISED, STAND UP, AND STEP AWAY FROM THE VEHICLE!!”

She grunted. And cursed again.

“He called you ‘m’am’,” Dylan said out of the side of his mouth. “That should give you—motivation.”

•

Although the Chief Officer had, spread out in front of him, their passports, birth certificates, drivers’ licenses, and DBR cards (Dylan’s homemade DO BLOODY RESUSCITATE!! cards), he still asked.

“Names?” His pen was poised over the lengthy, and sadly empty, form in front of him.

“Chris Reveille.”

“Dylan O’Toole.”

“Address?”

Rev told him.

“And where is that exactly?”

“A bit northwest of Sudbury. Near the border between Ontario and— Montreal,” she said with a straight face.

Dylan quickly looked away to hide the grin.

“And Penticton?” The officer looked at Dylan.

It was too easy. “Same general area,” he replied, pursing his lips.

In the year since Rev and Dylan had quite by chance reconnected, some twenty years after they’d gone through teacher’s college together, he had introduced her to life as a housesitter. As a result, they divided their time between her cabin on a lake in a forest (a bit northwest of Sudbury) (near Montreal) and Paris, Portland, Peru, or wherever else he could get a housesit. (Penticton was simply where most of his stuff happened to be in storage; long ago when he had applied for a driver’s license, having a fixed address seemed like a good idea, and nobody, apparently, had checked to determine whether the address he’d given was actually residential, so using it a few years later when he applied for a passport seemed—wise.) In fact, the speaking tour they were at that moment starting so eventfully followed a mishmash route determined by the engagements arranged by Phil, their contact at the Consortium, and Dylan’s housesitting arrangements.

“Phone number?” The officer continued.

“Oh, I don’t have a phone.”

He looked up at her.

“No one north of Toronto has phones yet.”

Dylan snickered and quickly looked away again.

“So how can we reach you?”

“Well the mail comes through. Once the lake thaws. In August.”

Dylan was shaking ever so slightly.

“’Course, the dogsleds run all year. Though the polar bears killed half of ’em last year. One even came right into my igloo.”

A guffaw turned into a cough.

“I see. And what is the purpose of your travel to the U.S.?”

“Um, we’re on a speaking tour,” Dylan thought he’d better take over.

“This speaking tour. Is it a paid tour?”

“Yes.”

“That is how you’re going to be supporting yourself while here?”

“Yes.”

“And so you have work visas?”

“Oh. Um—we’re being paid an honorarium that is, I believe, exempt from—”

“Who’s sponsoring this speaking tour?”

“The American Atheist Consortium.”

The Chief Officer looked up from the lengthy form then. And one of the other border guards, having heard that part, walked over.

“Hey, I remember you two,” he said. “You were charged with, what was it? Blasphemy! For what you wrote on that Right-to-Life billboard.”

“Yeah, but we weren’t convicted,” Rev spoke up.

“Yes, we were,” Dylan said, turning to her. How could she have forgotten? Of the two of them, she was the more worried about it. Being, of the two of them, the more formally employed. He just then noticed her glare.

“Oh yeah,” Rev remembered, turning back to the Chief. “But we got a suspended sentence. The conviction was just—”

Dylan stepped in again. After all, he was the one who’d just royally blown it by announcing they’d been convicted. Though of course it was easy enough to check. As it no doubt would be. Now. He turned to the Chief, “The conviction provided a platform for the judge to make headlines, and history, by showing that The Bible is itself blasphemous, since what we had written on the anti-abortion billboard was from The Bible.”

“‘Blessed are they that bash their babies brains out’,” the officer volunteered. “Or something like that,” he added, when his superior gave him a scathing look.

“This speaking tour,” the Chief Officer continued the interview. “What exactly are you going to be speaking about?”

“Well, I’m not sure it’s any of your business,” Rev chafed. “What?” she said to Dylan when he poked her. “He can’t detain us just because we intend make good use of the freedom of speech while we’re here. In your fine country,” she added belatedly, turning back to the Chief. But then couldn’t help further adding, “The one that gives such warm, fuzzy welcomes.”

The officer put down his pen. And struggled for control. “You have to understand that post 9/11, we’re just a bit more concerned about who gets into our country.”

“I understand that. What I don’t understand is how exiting one’s car increases the threat level.”

“Well as long as you’re inside your vehicle, you’re contained,” he explained. “Obviously you’re less able to put our lives in danger.”

“That would be true if I’d planned to come at you with a knife. Or a piano wire.”

The officer, and Dylan, looked at her curiously.

“But if I’d put a bomb in the car—”

Dylan noticeably slumped in his chair. The officer picked up the phone.

“—and was willing to give my life to Allah to get at the 72,000 virgins…what?”

•

So as they sat in the designated quasi-secure area, watching a team of Michelin men carefully unpack their car and set each item some distance away, in another designated quasi-secure area, Dylan idly commented, “It’s 72 virgins, not 72,000.”

“Someone’s been doing research for our book,” Rev looked over at him, smiling happily.

As soon as the trial was over, they’d been approached not only by the representative of the American Atheist Consortium suggesting a speaking tour, but also by a representative of a major publishing company offering a book contract. Which both delighted and annoyed Rev. Delighted, because she’d spent the last twenty years writing, and despite thousands of queries to agents and publishers, had not been able to get a single book published. And annoyed, because she’d spent the last twenty years writing, and despite thousands of queries to agents and publishers, had not been able to get a single book published.

“Well, the hadiths say 72,” he qualified. “The Qur’an itself doesn’t actually mention a number.”

“What are the hadiths? The Biblical form of the hads?”

“No,” he grinned, “they’re sort of like addendums to the Qur’an.”

“Hm. I’ve never understood the appeal of virgins anyway. I mean, wouldn’t you want a woman with experience, someone who knows—”

“A woman who knows?” Dylan shuddered theatrically.

•

An hour later, they sat looking out at all of their belongings sitting on the pavement. Red tape, ironically enough, was being strung around the area in which said belongings sat.

“We could call Dim,” Dylan suggested. Dmitri had been their lawyer for the blasphemy trial. He was also one of Rev’s former students.

“Or we could call someone who actually knows law. Dim doesn’t know dick.”

“Actually—”

“Right, okay, he does know dick. Still, we need someone—”

“Who knows American law.”

“Alan Shore! We could call Alan Shore!”

“Do you have his number?”

“No.”

“Then we can’t call Alan Shore. Even if he were real.”

“Spoilsport.”

“How about your buddies at LSAT? You’re still writing questions for them? I mean, while we’re doing this tour thing?” Freelance test development was Rev’s employment. She wrote critical reasoning questions for the LSAT. Questions like ‘If X, Y, and Z are true, which of the following is also true?’ And ‘Which of the following would most undermine the argument made in the passage above?’ It’s the kind of job someone with a degree in philosophy did. When they weren’t driving a cab. Dylan, on the other hand, wrote travel articles. Which fit perfectly with his housesitting lifestyle. And his almost history degree.

“Yeah. Which is why we’re not calling them.”

“Oh. Right.”

“Let’s just call Phil. Surely the Consortium must have legal counsel on call.”

•

“And you know,” she said a while later, as they continued to stare out the window, since it was the only show in town, “even if there is a potential bomb in the car, that wouldn’t necessarily be a threat. It’s looking at it that could turn it into a real bomb. And even then, there’s only a fifty-fifty chance of that happening.”

“Hm.”

“So maybe we should tell them to stop looking.”

“I don’t think the Chief would appreciate the finer points of quantum indeterminacy.”

“Still. He should have said that there’s potentially a bomb in our car. Not that there’s a potential bomb in our car.”

“You could tell him that.”

A while later still, Dylan said, rather listlessly, as he handed Rev a Pepsi he’d gotten from the vending machine in the room, “So I guess there’s no point in asking whether we could fix the car while we wait.”

“You could do that?”

“Well, no.” He took a long drink from his own Pepsi, then stretched out in his chair again. “I thought we could find a phone booth, I could go inside, and come out MacGyver.”

“You mean Superman.”

“I was being patriotic. Being at the border does that to me. Another half hour and I’ll break out in the national anthem.”

“No you won’t,” she scoffed.

“I might. If I knew the words.”

She laughed. “We are soCanadian.”

“Anyway,” she said, “there aren’t any phone booths anymore. Remember? They took them all away when cell phones were invented. By Satan.”

“There’s still phone booths,” Dylan said. “There’s just not any phones in them anymore.”

“At least no working phones,” she amended.

“And the ones that have working phones don’t have phone books.”

“Or you could come out as Benton Fraser,” she said after a moment.

“I like how MacGyver dresses better.”

She laughed. “And yet, don’t you remember your first practice teaching assignment? You went all young Republican on me. Gone was the rat’s tail, and the earring, and the lime green t-shirt,” she poked at the lime green t-shirt he was currently wearing. “You were such a—disappointment.”

“Yeah, well. Look how that turned out.”

She smiled. He’d ended up quitting his first teaching job, which had been up on some reserve, after just three days. To join a band called A Bunch of Drunken Indians. He played tambourine.

“At least I didn’t get fired,” he said. “Countless times.”

“I could count them,” she said cheerfully. “If I had four hands.”

“Speaking of which, maybe Dad’ll come, and rescue us both. You’d fit right in on the mothership.”

“Hm.” She seemed lost in thought.

“What were we talking about?” she finally said. “What was your point—with the phone booth?”

He thought for a moment. “Can’t remember.”

“Geez,” she said, “it’s like we’re still—shit!”

She sat up straight and looked out anxiously at all of their stuff. Sitting nicely exposed on the pavement.

He had suddenly had the same thought. “No, didn’t we use it all before—”

“Yeah, in a Betty Crocker kind of way.”

“Oh. And where exactly are your—” he hazarded a guess “—brownies?”

“Well, more like ‘pudding in the middle’—brownies. They’re in with the sandwiches,” she answered his question.

“Okay,” he said, thinking quickly, and standing up to do so. “In an hour or so, if we’re still here, we’ll just casually say we’re hungry, we’ve got food in the car, could we please just—”

“Right. First giggle and they’ll know.”

He giggled. “You’re right,” he sat down. “We’d never pull it off.”

“Well, let’s not worry. Unless they bring in a—uh-oh.”

A grey SUV had pulled into the lot, and clean-cut young man in a uniform got out. He opened the back passenger door and a dog got out. A huge floppy dog. A very eager and excited, huge floppy dog.

“Wow. What is that?” Rev wondered aloud. “Looks like a cross between a Great Dane and a—”

“Bear.” Dylan looked at the dog with interest.

“Yeah. I thought police dogs were, well, police dogs.”

“There is no such breed. They’re all German Shepherds.”

“And that’s a bit stereotyped, don’t you think?” she asked.

“What, you think they should hire French poodles instead?” he giggled.

“Well, actually, the French—”

“Or Siberian Huskies!” he blurted out, gleefully.

“Why don’t we have a dog?” she wondered aloud a short while later, as the Chief Officer presumably explained to the K-9 unit, of two, whatever needed explaining. “Why isn’t there a Canadian something? Regardless,” she got back on track, “that’s gotta be an explosives-sniffing dog, right? So we’re okay.”

“You mean they specialize? To that extent?”

She shrugged. “Ask an Epistemology prof something about Metaphysics and he’ll refuse to answer on the grounds that it’s not his field.”

“Really? That’s a bit—something.”

“‘Articulate’ is not the word you’re looking for,” she grinned.

“It’s not, no,” he grinned back.

•

“What kind of sandwiches?” Dylan asked another short while later, when the dog had apparently eliminated their two suitcases, his laptop, and their box of books and cds. Several miscellaneous bags remained.

“Tuna.”

“Oh, good, yeah for sure we’re okay. The dog’ll never find tuna.”

“Could work in our favour. The tuna might mask the—uh-oh.”

The dog had found the lunch bag. And pretty much swallowed it whole.

Dylan pondered the situation. “What happens when—”

The dog had resumed checking out the remaining bags, then suddenly seemed to forget what it was doing. It sat down. And wagged its tail. Dylan grinned.

The officers conferred and then the Chief and the K-9 unit came into the building through the waiting room. Suddenly the room was far too small. Since the dog took up a full quarter of it.

“I’m sorry, sir,” the dog’s partner was saying to the Chief. “We just came from a scene, sir, and Peanut—”

Rev let out a small snort. The young man glared at her.

“—ate the evidence. That’s why he—he’s got the— He’s hungry,” the young man finished.

“And you didn’t think to take him off duty?” the Chief glared at him. The young man, not—Peanut. It’s hard to glare at a giggling dog.

“No, sir. It was a very small amount and given Peanut’s size, I thought it would have no effect.”

In the moment of silence that ensued, they all followed the Chief’s gaze. Which was fixed on Peanut. Who was stepping once to the right, then once to the left—lifting his front paws absurdly high, like a Lipizzaner stallion—then cross stepping three times to the right, into the wall; he then repeated the pattern in reverse, left, right, cross step to the left. Into the wall.

“What the hell is he doing?”

“‘Thriller’. Sir.”

Dylan burst out in a delighted giggle.

“Me and the guys at the unit—after class— The K-9s are very smart, sir.”

As the Chief started to leave the room, Peanut jumped and turned half way around, wiggled his bottom half, then jumped and turned again to face them. And wiggled again.

“That’s not in ‘Thriller’,” the Chief said, stopping at the door.

“No,” the young man agreed. And looked at Peanut curiously.

“Um, what kind of dog is that?” Dylan asked the young man, as the three—four—of them waited in the waiting room for various decisions to be made.

“It’s a Newfie. A Newfoundland dog.”

“We do have our own dog!” Rev said. The young man looked at her. “We’re from Canada.”

“Oh.”

“And you really call them Newfies?” Dylan asked.

“Yes, why?”

“Oh, not important,” Dylan smiled as he and Rev exchanged a look.

“Their thick coat and webbed feet make them perfect for swimming in the cold ocean water,” the young man said, “such as is off the coast of Newfoundland. So I hear,” he added.

“Never been?” Rev asked.

“No. Never been much out of here,” he confessed.

“And that would explain it,” Rev said sotto voce to Dylan.

“He’s got webbed feet?” Dylan was staring at Peanut’s paws, intrigued. “Can we see?”

“Sure. Peanut, come ’ere.” Peanut got up from the quadrant he’d claimed and lumbered over. “I’m Jon Tucker, by the way,” the young man said, reaching out his hand to Dylan. “But everybody calls me Tuck.”

“Dylan,” Dylan replied, shaking his hand.

“Rev.” She joined in.

As did Peanut, who offered his paw.

“I miss Bob,” Dylan said, smiling broadly as he shook Peanut’s paw.

“He used to have a dog,” Rev explained as she too shook Peanut’s massive paw. “Bob. But Bob left him. For Fifi. Who lived on a farm. With lots of kids.”

Tuck nodded with understanding. As did Peanut.

“You wouldn’t leave me, would you Pea?” He ruffled Peanut’s loose and very full coat. “You’re my little Sweet Pea,” he said in a gushy voice, and Peanut planted a big sloppy one on Tuck’s face.

As the Chief walked in. And stared.

Tuck jumped out of his chair and stood. “Sir.” He straightened.

Peanut, perhaps feeling the need to stretch a bit, sauntered past him through the open door into the larger office.

Dylan and Rev also got up.

“All right, here’s the situation. I’ve made several phone calls,” he sighed, “and this is what’s happening. You,” he pointed at the young man. “You’re aware that eating the evidence is cause for dismissal.”

Tuck looked devastated.

“Not you, the dog.”

“Oh. Right. But—”

“We’ll find you a transfer.” He sighed again. Clearly this was becoming a long day.

“And as for you two,” he directed his attention to Rev and Dylan, “we’ve got a meet set up for tomorrow morning. Our legal counsel will be here, as well as your Mr. Brightson and, presumably, legal counsel for the Atheist Consortium.”

“But—” Rev objected.

“As for tonight—”

“We’re not free to go?” Dylan asked.

“You’re not cleared for entry yet, no. So I’m keeping your passports. And your driver’s licenses. Your car hasn’t been cleared yet in any case. We can’t get another K-9 unit here until tomorrow.” Tuck shrank the tiniest amount.

“You can have these back,” the Chief handed over their birth certificates and DBR cards.

“As for tonight—” he ran his hand through his hair. “We’ve got a holding cell, but that’s not really appropriate. Tucker, make a reservation at the nearest hotel. And provide transport.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And show them which bags they can take with them.”

“Yes, sir.”

“But we’re not under arrest or anything,” Rev clarified.

“No. Just—please don’t go anywhere. I believe you’d agree it’s in your best interests to be here for the meeting tomorrow.”

Dylan nodded. Rev conceded a nod a moment later.

“Oh—” the Chief stopped on his way out. “I’ve had pizza brought in, you’re welcome to—” he stopped in the doorway. The five large pizzas that had been perched on the corner of his desk were now five empty boxes on the floor. Peanut was asleep in the corner, grinning, and wagging his tail. The Chief ran his hand through his hair.

“So,” Tuck said to Rev and Dylan, when they were all in his SUV and on their way out of the border station parking lot, Rev in the front, Dylan in the back with Peanut—his head, like Peanut’s, sticking out the sun roof.

“Phtt, phtt, ummmrrpht, ummrrpht—”

“What the hell are you doing?” Rev turned to ask Dylan.

“Trying to get that jowls flapping in the wind thing going. Like Peanut.”

“It’s not working,” she pointed out the obvious.

“No. It’s not,” Dylan agreed cheerfully.

“So,” Tuck tried again, “Do you have any preference as to where we go for dinner? Chief said I can claim it as expenses.”

“Pizza’s good,” Dylan said.

“So very good,” added Rev.

“Okay, pizza it is. I know a great place close by.”

“Phtt, phtt, ummrrpht, ummrrpht—”

•

He took them to Bette’s Bar, a comfy basement bar furnished with old upholstered furniture and a couple of chrome and formica dining room tables. Peanut had obviously been there before and knew he was welcome. He made a beeline for the kitchen.

“It’s got karaoke!” Rev shouted as they walked past the bar, with its few occupants, toward the small stage. She actually broke out into a trot.

“What’s she going to sing?” Tuck asked.

“God only knows,” Dylan muttered, remembering the last time she sang, which was in the car on the way, too much of the way, to Montreal. She was enthusiastically tone-deaf.

“Oh I love that song!” Tuck followed Rev onto the stage.

“No, I—”

Rev quickly made a selection, then stepped away from the machine, mic in hand, ready to sing. Tuck took the other mic and once the song started—she’d chosen The Beatles’ “Ob-la-di Ob-la-da”—he sang along, adding harmony. Or trying to, given Rev’s tenuous grasp of pitch.

Part way through the song, Bette and the entire kitchen staff came out to watch the horror that was Rev singing. Or to thank her for not choosing “Hey Jude”. At some point Rev realized, somewhat impossibly, that Tuck had a really great voice, so she switched from vocals to air drums. The kitchen staff cheered. And went back to the kitchen. At about that point, Dylan decided to join them on stage. He played air tambourine. Tuck really did have a beautiful voice. He had amazing control not only of pitch, but of volume and timbre as well.

“Oh wow, this is just like old times,” Dylan said when the song had finished. “Let’s do another one,” he said.

Bette had reappeared and caught Tuck’s eye with her query.

“A couple large,” Tuck called out. “No, make that three,” he said. “I forgot about you two,” he turned to Dylan and Rev. “So should that be four?”

“No, we can split a large,” Dylan said.

“Make ours vegetarian?” Rev asked.

“One vegetarian,” Tuck called out.

Bette nodded and returned to the kitchen.

“What was the Drunken Indians’ favourite song?” Rev asked, turning back to the karaoke machine.

“‘One little, two little, three little Indians’.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Well, they’d changed the words.”

“To what?”

“Kill Whitey.”

Peanut strode out of the kitchen at that point, a grin on his face and tail wagging.

“Hey, you guys want a show?” Tuck asked.

“Sure, what did you have in mind?”

“Peanut, come ’ere!”

Peanut bounded up to the stage.

“Have a seat,” Tuck gestured grandly. Rev and Dylan claimed a table and sat to watch. Tuck made a selection at the karaoke machine, then turned to Peanut.

“‘Do ya wanna get rocked?’” he asked him in his best Def Leppard voice.

Peanut shimmied in excitement.

Tuck started singing as an old Tommy Roe song began to play. “‘I went to a dance just the other night,’” he made a slow circle in the air with his right hand, and Peanut did a slow circle to the right.

“‘I saw a girl there, she was out of sight,’” Tuck made a circle with his left hand, and Peanut did a slow circle to the left.

“‘I asked a friend of mine who she could be,’” he continued. Peanut was totally focused on Tuck, trembling with excitement, waiting for—

“‘He said that her friends just call her Sweet Pea.’” When he heard Tuck say his name, Peanut let loose for a moment with a full-body wiggle, then immediately concentrated again.

He stepped toward Tuck as Tuck stepped backward, completely in time to the music —“‘Oh Sweet Pea, come on and dance with me’”— right, hold, left, hold, right, hold, left, hold. Then he broke out into a freeform prance and shimmy on “‘Come on, come on, come on and dance with me!’” Dylan was wild with delight, hooting and applauding.

Then Peanut stepped backward, as Tuck stepped toward him, “‘Oh Sweet Pea, won’t you be my girl?’” Then broke out again in a silly freeform that was full of nothing but energy and bliss. “‘Won’t you, won’t you, won’t you be my girl?’”

Dylan almost had a stroke when he saw what Peanut did with the brief percussion solo that followed: a complicated eight-beat sequence of up, down, right, left, rollllll, up, hold.

The song changed key for the second verse, but the choreography remained the same. Slow circle to the right, then to the left, then, to Dylan’s great delight, the forward and backward walk followed by the Peanut’s over-the-top freeform for the chorus.

“That was fantastic!” Dylan bubbled as Tuck and Peanut finished the song and sat down at their table. Peanut didn’t need a chair; he just sat at their table, and his head easily cleared the top.

“Thanks!” Tuck beamed with pleasure at Dylan’s appreciation.

“How long did it take to teach him that?” Rev asked, equally impressed.

“Well, a while,” Tuck confessed. “But—”

“But I’ll bet he didn’t mind.”

“No, I don’t think he did,” Tuck ruffled Peanut’s coat.

Bette brought out a pitcher of beer and three glasses. Peanut didn’t drink beer, of course, but he apparently had his own water dish. At least, it had his name written on it.

“To Peanut and Tuck!” Rev raised her glass in a toast.

“Yeah!” Dylan clanked his glass to Tuck’s then to Peanut’s dish. Peanut grinned and thumped his tail.

Bette returned with their pizzas, one vegetarian for Dylan and Rev, one pepperoni and mushroom for Tuck, and a double meat-lovers for Peanut. Rev and Dylan grinned when they noticed, as Bette set Peanut’s pizza in front of him, that it was already cut into bite-sized pieces. Peanut stared at it, intently, then looked at Tuck, just as intently. Tuck made a show of blowing on the pizza. Peanut stared at it again, intently, then looked at Tuck again. Tuck blew on it again. Satisfied, Peanut dug in.

“He burned the roof of his mouth on the cheese once,” Tuck explained. “Ever since, Bette doesn’t bring his out until it’s definitely cool enough for him to eat, but he insists just the same that I blow on it to make sure.”

“Well of course,” Dylan said.

“So,” Rev asked, after they’d had a few bites, which was about the time it took for Peanut to totally finish his, and he had left the table, “how is it you two came to be in the K-9 unit?”

“Well, I majored in music.”

“Ah,” Dylan said, and Rev laughed.

“But I wasn’t any good.”

“You sounded pretty good up there,” Dylan said. “You’ve got a beautiful voice.”

“I—thank you. But it’s not up to performance standard. Classical performance standard,” he amended.

“You could sing non-classical,” Rev said.

“Yeah. That’s what I thought too. And I tried a couple times to get a band together, but, in the meantime, I switched my major to business.”

“Well,” Rev said, “they’re so closely related—”

Tuck grinned. “You know how they say you should think about what you really love to do, what you would do even if no one paid you, and that’s what you should do?”

“Yeah, whose bright idea of career counselling was that?” she muttered.

“Well, I realized I love to hang out in bars—”

“And you found someone to pay you to do that?” Dylan asked, wonderfully interested.

“No,” Tuck laughed. “I figured I’d become an agent, a scout. I’d discover new bands and make them rich and famous. And myself in the process.”

“Ah, so that’s how you became a—” Rev feigned understanding.

“No, that was Dad,” Tuck sighed. “He paid for my university. And when music didn’t work out, and I switched to business, he said I had two years after I graduated, and if that didn’t work out either, I had to join the academy.”

“He was a cop,” Dylan said.

“He was a cop,” Tuck agreed. And sighed again.

“And it didn’t work out,” Rev stated the obvious. She was good at that.

“No. It seems they’ve got to be famous before you sign them. And if they’re famous, they’re already signed. Plus, I realized I’m not that good with the high end of things. I can prepare a killer business plan, and I schmooze well enough with the guys in the bands, but I don’t do meets with the banks very well.”

“So why the K-9 unit?” she asked.

“Oh, well,” he said oddly, “I don’t like guns.”

“You mean they wouldn’t let you have one,” she took a guess.

“That too,” he confessed sheepishly. “In the K-9 unit, the dog is the gun. Peanut’s trained to defend and attack.”

Rev and Dylan looked over at him. Doubtfully. Since he was lying belly up on the couch—the whole couch—paws hanging limply in the air. His eyelids were fluttering, and his tail was wagging.

Tuck reached for the pitcher. “A refill?” he asked.

“You’re in charge of transport?” Dylan asked.

“I am,” he said and turned his glass over.

“Then, yes, another round indeed!” Dylan held his empty glass under the pitcher’s spout, Rev followed suit, and they each took another slice of pizza.

A little later, after Rev and Dylan had filled Tuck in on how they came to be where they were, Tuck asked, “So what’s your speech about?”

“What speech?” Rev asked.

“Well, it’s a speaking tour—so I assumed—”

“Ah. Right. Well Phil said—Phil’s our contact at the American Atheist Consortium—he said we’d never get past the first sentence.”

“Apparently we’re speaking at a lot of Bible colleges,” Dylan explained. “He’s billed us as Bible Enlightenment.”

“Which is not untrue,” Rev interjected.

“No,” Dylan agreed.

“So I have the first sentence written,” she announced happily to Tucker.

“You do?” Dylan looked at her inquiringly.

“‘Hello.’” She said.

“A little formal, don’t you think?” he said. After a moment.

“What, you’d go with ‘Hi’?”

“Yeah.”

“People would never hear ‘Hi.’ We need at least two syllables.”

“Okay, how about ‘Good Morning.’ Three syllables,” he said proudly.

Rev considered that. Carefully. “What if it’s afternoon?”

“Okay, ‘Good Morning slash Good Afternoon.’”

“That’s stupid. ‘Slash’.”

“Well we wouldn’t actually say ‘slash’,” he groaned.

“So,” Tuck just had to interrupt, “Do you two always have this much—”

“Fun?” Rev supplied the word.

“We do, yes,” Dylan supplied the answer.

And they grinned at each other.

•

(free download of complete novel at jassrichards.com)

She pulled on the door to the auto shop from the outside, and he pulled from the inside. Thus demonstrating the law of reality that says when two or more people do exactly the same thing, it has no effect whatsoever on the world at large.

“Dylan?” she then said through the glass. Amazed.

“Rev?” he said back. Equally amazed.

They tried again. As people who want to change the world at large do. Only this time they both pushed. Demonstrating exactly the kind of teamwork they’d perfected back in teacher’s college. They eventually coordinated their actions and were face to face.

She was so not a hugger and he just kind of was, so you know how that part went.

“Well,” she said. And then didn’t say anything else.

So that hadn’t changed, he thought. Happily, he realized. Her capacity for small talk had always approached nonexistent.

“What are you doing here?” she said next. Okay, that sounded wrong, she thought, fully aware of her arrested social development, but not really giving a damn.

She took in the well-worn jeans, the lime green t-shirt, and the second-hand suit coat he managed to make so very his own. Still loose and lean. The pink rat’s tail was gone though.

“I thought you were teaching up in, what was it—Nelson?”

“Yeah…”

“You were all excited about it. Small community, informal school. I was a bit surprised, actually. Thought you’d go for the action of some inner city school.”

“Yeah, well, that must’ve been Monday.”

She waited.

“Tuesday I joined a bunch of drunken Indians,” he smiled cheerfully, the Irish lilt still in his voice, “and we formed a band.”

She broke into a grin. Typical Dylan, really.

“What’d you call yourselves?”

“A Bunch of Drunken Indians.”

She burst out laughing.

“I didn’t know you played an instrument,” she said in the ensuing silence.

He hesitated. She waited again, sure it would be good.

“Tambourine.”

This time she snort-laughed.

“Still haven’t lost the laugh, I see.” He started giggling then.

“Nor you.”

They stood there grinning at each other. And then just sort of picked up where they’d left off some twenty years ago.

“Hang on—” Rev went to the counter, paid for her new brakes, then joined Dylan standing outside.

He’d gotten a couple cans from the nearby vending machine and handed her one.

“Thanks,” she said. She noticed then the knapsack slung over his shoulder, a larger bag at his feet. “So. You need a ride?”

He looked around, as if he were considering what to do next with his life. “Okay,” he said.

She led the way to her car. It was a black Saturn, polka-dotted with—

He studied it. “What in god’s name did you do—” he walked around it, “to piss off an armada of pigeons?”

“It’s globs of pine tar.”

“Oh.” He leaned forward to take a better look. “So it is. Doesn’t this place clean your car before they give it back?”

“I asked them not to.”

“Right. And you did that because…”

“It’s my anti-theft device.”

“Ah.” He considered that. “Good idea.”

She unlocked the back door for him to throw his bags in. “Besides, in the summer, it’s all sticky and a real bitch to get off. Better to do it in the winter when it gets all hard and you can just flick it off.”

He looked at her expectantly.

“I’m not standing in twenty-below to clean my car,” she said. But what she meant was, I’m not an idiot.

“Cars are not meant to be clean,” she continued. “They stay outside all the time. Where it’s dirty. Where there’s gravel roads. And mud puddles. Which they go right through without a moment’s hesitation. Most of the time.”

She got in and reached over to unlock the passenger door. “You’re going to want me to cut my grass and sweep my driveway next.”

“You have grass and a driveway?” He got in.

“Well, not exactly. But if I did.” She pulled out of the lot and onto the highway.

“So what, exactly, do you have?”

She looked over and just—beamed. “A cabin on a lake in a forest.”

“No,” he said. “What you always wanted!” He smiled broadly, happy for her.

She nodded. “My dream come true. Been there for over ten years now. And you?”

“I’m sort of between dreams.”

“But what about—”

“It’s in storage.”

“What—your dreams?” She grinned.

“No, my stuff.” He grinned back.

“You got stuff?”

“Everybody’s got stuff.”

*

“My god, last time I saw you,” she glanced over and thought back, “you were—blurry.”

“That’s because we were drinking tequila under the table.” He took a slug of his pop.

“Riiiight,” she drew the word out, remembering. The cafeteria had been pathetically made over for a graduation party of all the bright-eyed and bushy-tailed new teachers. He was a History and Psych major, she a Philosophy and Lit major. He was going to make history a hands-on course, an experience! His students would not fail to learn from the past! They would not be compelled to repeat it! And she was going to make philosophy not just a new course, for high school, but a mandatory one. What could be more important than learning how to think? Logically, critically. And what could be more relevant than learning how to figure out right and wrong? They were both taking ‘Society, Challenge, and Change’ as one of their teaching subjects. And they couldn’t wait to get into the classroom.

“Did you ever finish your History thesis?” she asked. “Didn’t you get into the B.Ed. program on the condition that you finish your Honour’s thesis and get your B.A.?”

“And I got the Nelson job on the condition that I get the B.Ed.,” he said proudly.

“Don’t tell me,” she said. “You never finished it.” She glanced over. Then waited.

“I forgot what it was about.”

She snort-laughed again. He giggled.

They’d left the town and were on an empty stretch of highway, nothing but forest and rock.

“And what about the getting married and having kids thing? I remember you were so in love with this girl….” Rev thought back. “Wasn’t she Japanese? That’s right, you were learning to speak Japanese! And you insisted on being faithful…” she trailed off, eyes on the road ahead.

He looked over and smiled, then looked back out the window.

“Yeah, well. She wanted to move to Japan.”

“And you wanted to move to Manitoba.”

“Actually, I went to Japan. About a year or so later.”

“And?”

“Turns out I hadn’t learned to speak Japanese.”

She glanced over again.

“Hm. And there’s been no one else?”

“Oh there was, from time to time. But women have these—” he gestured vaguely, “expectations—”

“What, that you have a steady job and support them?”

“Yes!”

“And—”

“And I much prefer unsteady jobs.”

She grinned.

“And you?” he asked. “You weren’t going to get married and have kids.” He had a horrible thought. “You didn’t, did you?” He looked over in alarm.

“No,” she said. With ‘absolutely not’ in her tone. “Men have these—” she gestured vaguely, “expectations—”

“What, that they’d have a steady job and support you?”

“Yes!”

“And—”

“And I could never be a kept woman.”

“No. You have trouble enough being a woman,” he grinned out the window.

“What’s that supposed—well, yeah,” she conceded cheerfully. “Remember—”

“Remember—” he said at the same time. They grinned at each other. “Professor Bixby’s report, right?” Dylan pursed his lips. “‘Miss Reveille needs to work on her professional appearance. A bit of make-up and some jewelry would help.’”

“I still can’t believe he said that,” she said.

“Hey, I offered to lend you my earring—”

She looked over. “You’ve stopped wearing it.”

“Yeah, well, for a while there it sort of got appropriated as a symbol—and now—”

“Things don’t mean what they used to,” she said.

He nodded.

*

“Though I have to say,” she continued after a comfortable bit of silence, “I look around and all the women my age have these nice homes, and they drive those expensive stupid mini-van things, which they keep in a garage, and they have furniture—”

“You don’t have furniture?”

“I have stuff that functions as furniture.”

“Well then,” he said conclusively.

“Okay, yeah, but, what gets me is they all act so—entitled. And I just want to shake them and say hey, if it weren’t for your husband, you wouldn’t have any of this!” She stopped talking for a moment as she changed lanes to pass an expensive stupid mini-van thing. “I hate these things,” she muttered. “Can’t see around them to the road ahead. It’s like driving behind a truck.” She zipped back out of the oncoming lane, then continued. “And yet I don’t know where I went wrong. Because if I haven’t been home raising kids for twenty years, I should be the man. I mean I should be able to afford that nice house, that garage—”

“Not that you’d want a garage.”

“No, but.”

“Or real furniture.”

“Well—” she wasn’t so sure about that. “But how do they do it? How is it that all these men have all that stuff and money left over to totally support someone else? I’ve been barely able to support myself.”

“What do you mean? All these years I’ve been taking comfort in the knowledge that at least one of us—you haven’t been teaching? All these years? You never answered my letter.”

“You sent a letter?”

“Yeah, telling you about the band.”

“I never got it. ’Course I moved a lot the first few years—well, until the cabin, actually. I thought maybe you’d written—so I sent another letter.”

“I only got the first one. ’Course we went on tour—”

She looked at him.

“What?”

“You’re telling me there are people who wanted to hear A Bunch of Drunken Indians?”

“Well, when you put it that way—” he paused. “But it must have happened. Otherwise—never mind.”

She glanced over, grinned again, then resumed her update. “I did get a teaching job. It was just part-time though. But that was exactly what I wanted. Because, as you recall, I was working on my first novel. I was going to be a writer,” she said with mock enthusiasm. Mocking enthusiasm. “Yes I was.”

“What happened?”

“Well you know what it was like back then. We were lucky if we got any kind of teaching job. Unless we wanted to teach English overseas. End of my first year, I was declared redundant.”

“There were two of you?” He giggled. Then said, “I meant what happened to the ‘going to be a writer’ part.”

“Oh, I am a writer.”

He waited.

“I write the questions that go on the LSAT.”

“You became a lawyer?”

“No, I don’t know anything about the law. Well, I do, but—”

“Ah-hah! I thought so!” He seemed so—pleased. “Misdemeanour?”

“Yeah—how did—” She glanced in the rear-view mirror before making a lane change to pass another stupid mini-van thing.

“The principal—” she sighed as she started the explanation. “I’d become a sub and after a few months of a day here and there, I got a long-term placement at one school—the principal caught me teaching my grade ten boys how to put on a condom.”

“All of them at once?”

“Yes—no!” She reached over and cuffed him one. “It was a late and lazy Friday afternoon, and some of them were hubba-hubba-ing about their hot dates for the weekend, and I said something like ’You guys do know how to use a condom, right? ‘Cuz if you put it on wrong, it’ll bust, and you’ll end up a daddy.’”

“Bet that got their attention.”

“It did indeed.”

“So the principal laid charges?”

“I was ‘corrupting minors.’”

“Socrates would be proud. Still, it seems a bit over-reacting.”

“Well—”

“It wasn’t the first time.” He waited.

“I refused to stand for the anthem,” she said. “Every goddamned morning they wanted us to proclaim our allegiance. You’d think we were in the Soviet Union. Or the States. ’Nationalism is—”

“—an infantile disease,’” he finished the quote. “And the next time?”

“Well, the long-term placement got turned into a short-term placement—”

“Isn’t it usually the other way around?”

“Smart ass. At the next school,” she continued then, “I started a discussion club. I chose abortion as the opening topic.”

“Well, you can’t do that at St. Mary’s of the Eternally Blessed Virgin Who Never Goes To First Base Not Even If She Really Really Wants To. Especially If She Really Really Wants To—” he stopped then.

She looked over at him with inquiring eyebrows, but he didn’t elaborate. Didn’t really need to.

“It was a public school,” she said. “A regular public high school. Next time, it was something else. I can’t remember.”

“Yes you can.”

“Yes I can. The next time—oh it doesn’t matter. The next time, when I—” she paused to find the right word, “left, I offered to sponsor an annual Award for Independent Thought. To be given each year to a graduating student chosen by the teaching staff. Each May, I’d send a book prize for the award. They’d give it out at the graduation ceremony in June.”

“And?”

“The Awards Committee refused my offer. They said it would be too complicated to administer.”

“Ah, well, they’re administrators. The May-June thing probably stumped them.”

“So if you aren’t a lawyer,” he said after a while, “how can you write the questions that go on the LSAT?”

“I write the questions for the critical reasoning part. You know, ‘If X, Y, and Z are true, what must also be true?’ or ‘Which of the following conclusions can be drawn from the information provided above?’”

“Multiple-choice questions? I love multiple-choice questions! No, wait a minute. I hate multiple-choice questions!”

“And they certainly don’t all go on the LSAT. I send in my quota per month, they go through first review, second review, sensitivity review, edit, penultimate review, re-edit, and ultimate review. If the question makes it that far, if the on-site team is convinced the question would stand up in a court of law—”

“You have to defend your work in a court of law?”

“Well, it turns out the LSAT test-takers are a litigious bunch. Go figure.”

He grinned.

She passed a transport truck on an uphill. “But no, not me. The onsite-staff. That’s why they’re so picky about accepting questions. They have to be able to say, for example, that in item 34, the question itself is perfectly clear and totally unambiguous, there’s no way it could be justifiably interpreted to mean anything other than what it means, and that option (B), for example, is absolutely and demonstrably correct, no ifs, ands, or buts about it, and each of the other options is just as demonstrably incorrect.’”

“That sounds—exhausting.”

“Yeah.”

“But you like it.”

“I do,” she looked over and smiled. “It makes my neurons sing.”

“Ah, well, neurons singing, that’s always a good thing.”

“And when they buy a question, I get paid well. ’Course when they don’t—”

“So you have a flexible income.”

“Exactly. But it’s a job I can do whenever I want and wherever I want. And I don’t have to deal with people.”

“Because you have no people skills.”

“I do not,” she agreed.

“Which is why you went into teaching,” he grinned.

“Okay,” she looked over at him, “that was a wrong turn. I so wanted to make a difference, you know? But I didn’t. I couldn’t. And I figured that out,” she said, proudly. “After ten years.”

“So whatever happened to—ten years?” He put his hand on the dashboard as if to absorb an impact.

“That’s how long it took, remember? For real jobs to come around again. The ones with benefits and a pension plan. But, since I wasn’t exactly bright-eyed and bushy-tailed anymore—”

“No, I imagine by that point you were walking into the schools with a loaded rifle, taking aim at the principal, and screaming ‘Leave the kids alone!’” He tilted his can and finished it.

“How did you know?” she dead-panned.

Pop sprayed out his nose.

“So when I got out of prison that time—”

He started choking, so she gave him a moment to recover.

“—I was de-certified.”

“I can see how walking into the classroom with a loaded rifle might have that consequence.”

“Well I just got so tired of the—resistance. Schools are such hostile environments,” she added.

He raised his eyebrows at the irony.

“That explains it,” he said then.

“What.”

“Well, you’re still angry.”

She flared at him.

“Just a little,” he pulled back as his eyebrows got singed.

“’Course I’m angry. Aren’t you?” She looked over at him. “And if not, why not? What happened to you? I mean—after Japan…” she tried to cue him.

He shrugged. “I wasn’t as persistent as you. I didn’t try as hard.” He looked out the window. “I’m not entitled to be angry.”

“Hm,” she nodded thoughtfully. “We’ll come back to that.”

He grinned.

“So whatever happened to the novel,” he said after a bit. “Did you finish it?”

“I did. Portrait of an Artist as a Young Woman. It’s in my desk drawer. Unpublished, unknown, unread.”

“How—appropriate.”

“Isn’t it just.”

“Couldn’t get a publisher?”

She snorted. “Twenty years and I still can’t get an agent.”

“Um, you ever think it just might not be very good?” he said a little delicately.

“Of course. But apparently that’s not an obstacle to getting something published.”

“Good point.” He looked out the window again.

“So what about you,” she asked again. “Are you still playing,” she couldn't keep a straight face, “the tambourine?”

“No, alas, my tambourine days are over.”

She waited.

“Carpal tunnel syndrome.”

She burst out laughing, and a snort escaped.

“Well,” he resumed, “I too have a flexible income.”

“Doing?”

“Oh, this and that. And a good deal more of this than that. For a while I was a dj at a radio station.”

“Oh yeah? That must’ve been cool.”

“It was. I did social commentary. I’d play ‘I Can’t Get No Satisfaction’ followed by ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want.’ Or the Carpenters’ ‘We’ve Only Just Begun’ followed by Deana Carter’s ‘Did I Shave My Legs For This’ followed by Neville’s ‘Everybody Plays the Fool.’ Then one day, I played ‘I’ll Be There,’ ‘I Am Here,’ and ‘Here I Am,’ followed by ‘What Am I Doing Here?’—and—it was all just so confusing.” He paused.

“And so then you were not there?” Rev said helpfully.

“And so then I was not there. At the moment, I’m a freelance reporter.”

“Yeah? How did that come about?”

“Well I started in Obits. ‘John Smith led an unbelievably boring life. And now it’s over.’ They saw right away I had a gift.”

“So they fired you.”

He nodded. “Thus I became a freelance reporter.”

“Ah. Though I was after an explanation more for the reporter part than the freelance part.”

“Ah. Well, I wrote an article about something, and it got published. And I got paid. So I wrote another article. About something else,” he clarified, “and it got published as well. And I got paid again. So I wrote—”

“Got it. It was that easy to get published, eh?” There was, of course, a tinge of sour envy in her voice.

He looked over, regretting immediately his insensitivity. “Well, remember that we established the irrelevance of quality.”

“Yeah, yeah.” She was not convinced. Either that or she was convinced.

“So what do you report on?”

“Oh, this and that.”

“And a good deal more of this than that, I’ll wager.”

He grinned over at her.

*

“So whatever happened to Leech?” she asked after a while.

“I don’t know. I didn’t stay in touch with anyone. Everyone was so…so. Present company excluded.”

They were both quiet for a bit.

“We would’ve made the best teachers,” Rev said. Sadly. Bitterly.

“Which is why we quit or were fired,” he replied.

“Or declared redundant,” she qualified, defensively.

“Same thing. They could’ve declared the football equipment redundant instead.”

“Seeing as there were already a number of ways in which young men could display their stupidity,” she agreed.

“Or the football team,” he said.

“Seeing as.”

“I bet he became a principal,” he said then.

“Who?”

“Leech.”

“But he borrowed your notes even for classes he attended!” she said. Then she sighed. “You’re probably right.”

They drove on. After a while, when the sad and bitter had dissipated somewhat, she thought to ask, “So where are we going?”

“I don’t know, you’re driving,” he said. Grinning.

“So your car—”

“Died. I left it at that shop to be a multiple-organ transplant donor.”

“Oh. But you—”

“Where were you going before you met me?” He grinned at how that came out. So did she.

“Actually, I was on my way to Montreal. To see the fireworks.”

“You’re driving to Montreal,” he repeated with some disbelief, “to see fireworks. But that’s so—oh, yeah,” he said then, “they have that international competition. I’ve heard about that. Lots of sparkles and—okay,” he said after a moment.

“Okay what.”

“Let’s go see the fireworks.”

She smiled. It was so—Dylan.

“So you speak French then?” he asked.

“Probably as good as you speak Japanese.”

“Then we’ll do fine. How hard can it be to ask for directions to see the—” he exploded his hand and made some noises.

She glanced over. “The re-enactment of the War of 1812?”

“No, silly. The War of 1812 wasn’t in Montreal. Or in 1812.”

She shot him a look.

“Okay, yeah, it was in 1812. But it’s not something most students know, I can tell you that.”

They drove for a bit.

“Hey, before we go to the fireworks,” he pointed just up the highway to their left, “let’s go to the ice cream place.”

“Okay,” she slowed and pulled into the small parking lot. When they walked in, they saw it was the local hang-out. An assortment of teenagers occupied the corner with a table. Gangsta rap was pumping from a jukebox at the far end.

“That’s—confusing,” Rev commented.

“What?”

“Rap coming from a jukebox.”

“Hm. But the Fonz would approve.”

“Think so? I don’t know.” She took in the sullen-looking teenagers sulking in the corner. “The Fonz was basically a happy person, don’t you think?”

The teenagers looked back at her belligerently.

“It wasn’t just the principals, was it,” Dylan said.

“No,” she confessed. “At first, yes. But eventually—no.”

She brushed the pain away and went up to the display freezer. She cruised by slowly, reading the names and looking at each of the open round cartons.

“Do you have soft ice cream?” Dylan asked the young woman behind the counter.

“Yeah, but only in vanilla.”

“That’s fine. I’ll have a soft cone in vanilla.” His eye was caught then by the containers of ice cream condiments. “With pink sprinkles,” he added delightfully.

He heard the snicker and turned to see the smirk. “Fag,” one of them said.

“Why, because I’m getting vanilla? Or because I’m getting a soft cone. Or is it the pink sprinkles? Just curious.”

They laughed and jostled each other.

“Whichever,” he continued, “you realize you’re being totally irrational, yes? Because what could the flavor or consistency of the ice cream I prefer—or the color of my sprinkles—possibly have to do with my sexual orientation?”

Rev turned to look at the boys. They were not amused. She tried to catch Dylan’s eye, but surely he knew. He couldn’t help himself. She understood. Or did once. If it moves, teach it.

“I’ll have the Chocolate Almond Deluscious,” she turned back to the woman, unable to watch.

The woman gave Dylan his vanilla cone, then scooped out Rev’s cone. While they were paying, the boys shuffled out. Good. No, not good. They were clustered around the door.

“We can eat our cones here,” Rev suggested.

“Don’t be silly. The décor is awful.”

“But I don’t have my rifle,” she muttered.

Dylan went to the door, and opened it, but the boys didn’t move to make room for their exit.

“Excuse me,” he said, reasonably enough.

“No. We don’t excuse fags.”

Dylan paused a moment. “I thought we went over that.” Then he smooshed his ice cream cone into the biggest guy’s face and yelled to Rev, “Run away! Run away!”

They sprinted to her car and got in.

“Lock the doors!” she shouted at him.

“Drive!” he shouted at her, tumbling into the back seat to get the locks.

She zoomed out of the small lot and back onto the highway. He clambered back into the front seat, then looked behind them to assure himself that they had not had a car.

“What the hell were you thinking?” she demanded.

“That it was too bad we didn’t have a cow we could throw over the castle wall at them?”

She looked at him then burst out laughing. “Wasn’t it a killer rabbit?”

“No, the killer rabbit was before, wasn’t it?”

“No, don’t they go up to the castle wall—oh, hell, I can’t remember.”

“Okay then.”

“Okay then what.”

“Okay then we have to find a video store, rent The Holy Grail, and find a motel for the night.”

“Yeah,” she looked around vaguely. “My eyes don’t like driving in the dark these days. I hate this growing old shit,” she added.

“Me too. But before we grow old, we have to find another ice cream place. I want my pink sprinkles.”

Rev rather smugly picked up her Chocolate Almond Deluscious cone from the drink resting place. Dylan looked at her in amazement.

“It’s chocolate,” she said. What more need she say?

*

They drove another hour before they found another ice cream place. It was in the next town, and it wasn’t so much an ice cream place as a corner store that had an ice cream counter. As for the pink sprinkles, Dylan had to improvise. He bought a little box of cake decorations, no doubt made in the 1950s, and sprinkled its contents on his vanilla cone.

Conveniently enough, the store also had an aisle of videos for rent. Which was surprising, Rev thought, since most people in the area must be getting more movies than they could ever watch through satellite TV. There wouldn’t be any cable service, and she suspected that until they got closer to—somewhere else—anyone with an aerial would be getting only two or three stations. Even DVD rentals were becoming passé. They looked through the comedy section, which was understandably old, but apparently Monty Python was older still.

“Excuse me,” Dylan absently waved his cone to get the attention of the young man behind the counter. And almost lost it, again. “You don’t by any chance have Monty Python and the Holy Grail, do you?”

“Yeah, it’s in the half-price bin. Sarah brought in Don’s old collection for sale. Buck a piece.”

“Don doesn’t want them anymore?” Dylan couldn’t believe anyone would give up their Monty Python collection.

“Don died.”

“Ah.” He was momentarily disconcerted, then started searching for the Holy Grail in the half-price bin.

“Is there a motel in this town?” Rev asked in the meantime.

“Another half mile. End of town.”

“Thanks,” she said, as Dylan cried out, “Aha!”

They paid for the video, left the store, walked back to the car, then drove the half mile to the motel.

“Do you find it personally disturbing that Monty Python fans are dying already?” Dylan asked.

“Yes.”

“Hm.”

She pulled into the small parking lot of the motel at the end of town. He grabbed his bag out of the back seat, and she got hers from out of the trunk. They walked into the office, a quasi-apartment attached to a row of five motel rooms, and rang the little bell on the cluttered desk. It didn’t sound loud enough, given the hockey game coming from behind the curtain. So they rang it again. When the play stopped and a commercial came on, the motel guy came out from the back.

“Hi there, we’d like a room for the night, please,” Rev said.

The motel guy shuffled over to the cluttered desk and looked at a handwritten list of sorts.

“Only a double left.”

“That’s fine,” she said. She filled out the paperwork and gave the guy her credit card. It took a few tries for the swipe to take, but eventually her payment was processed.

He gave her a key. “Unit #5, at the end. Check out’s by two.”

“Thank you, kind sir,” Dylan said, as they walked to the door.

“Here,” he reached out his hand to Rev, “give me that. You move the car.” She gave him her bag and went back to her car. He walked down to unit five, stopping on the way to get a couple cans of Pepsi from the vending machine. She met him at the door, then had to convince the key that it was indeed made for Unit #5. Dylan tossed her bag on one bed and his on the other.

“Well, that explains the video rentals,” he said, nodding at the old TV and VHS player chained to a cabinet. He put the video into the player and flopped back onto one of the beds, as she headed to the washroom.

“You still smoke?” he called out to her, sitting up then and tugging his knapsack toward him.

“Oh man, you’ve got a joint? How big is it?” she hurried back into the room. “Is it a Cheech and Chong joint?”

He laughed as he handed her a can. “They only had Pepsi.”

“Don’t you love the free market? It lets companies buy the freedom of distributors.” She took the can and popped its lid. “Thanks.”

Dylan got up to press the ‘play’ button—there didn’t seem to be a remote—then settled back onto the bed. He pulled a baggie out of his knapsack and a book of matches. As he lit up, Rev arranged the pillows of the other bed against the bedboard.

“Oh don’t be silly, I can’t reach that far.” He lamely held out the joint to her in the space between the beds.

She picked up the pillows from her bed and tossed them beside his against the bedboard. Settling herself companionably beside him, she took the joint.

She drew in. “Last time I smoked,” she said as she exhaled, “I was doing my laundry. Took forever to get my shirts onto their hangers. Have you ever noticed how complex a spatial task that is? Matching the two shoulders of a shirt with the three corners of the hangers. It was kind of like playing musical chairs. One corner was going to be left out, and I couldn’t figure out which of the five it should be. Around and around I went.”

“So why’d you stop?”

“I got dizzy.”

“I meant—”

“The guy I was with, we split, and then it was forever until I came across someone else who had a connection. And then, well, the next day is a total write-off in terms of lucidity.”

“You still notice a difference?” he giggled. “What with the growing old shit?”

“Oh shut up.”

They watched the movie, drank their Pepsi, and smoked the joint.

“Bring out your dead. Bring out your dead.”

“To Don!” Dylan said soberly.

“To Don!” Rev echoed.

Then the Requiem scene followed and they both lost it when the first monk slammed himself in the head. By the third one, Rev had tears in her eyes from laughing so hard.

“To Don!” she gasped.

“To Don!” Dylan echoed.

About an hour later, Dylan called out, “Here it comes!” The cow came flying over the castle wall and they both collapsed again in giggles.

“You know what we forgot?” Dylan said.

“The airspeed velocity of an African swallow?” Rev suggested.

“Doritos.”

“Ah.”

“And pizza.”

“Do you think the local place is still open?” she asked.

“Did you see a local place?”

“Well, of course. By definition any place we see here is a local place.”

“Good point.” He considered that. “Okay, did you see a local pizza place, that’s what we need to determine,” inordinately pleased with himself for identifying the obvious.

“No I didn’t see a local pizza place.” She ruminated on that for a moment. “But that doesn’t mean one doesn’t exist.”

“You got an A in Epistemology, didn’t you.”

“I got an A in everything.”

“Okay, put on your shoes. We’ll go look.”

“I’m not driving.”

“Of course not. The whole town is just half a mile.”

“Okay, I can do that. I can walk half a mile.”

“I should think so.”

“But I have to piddle before we leave.”

“I should think so. Piddle after we leave and you’ll be charged with another misdemeanour.”

“Do you think piddling in public is a misdemeanour?” she called out through the bathroom door.

“Well it should be. Don’t you think it’s a lapse in decorum, a mis-demeanor?” he giggled. “A mis-demeanour. A misdemeanour is a mis-demeanour. Perspicuity,” he added. And giggled again.

She came out of the washroom.

“Perspicuity,” he said again. “It sounds funny,” he explained.

“Especially coming from you,” she agreed. “Okay, I found the door out of the washroom. Now we have to find the door out of the room. And it won’t be the same one,” she added.

“That’s a helpful clue. It adds,” he sputtered with delight, “perspicuity.”

“Maybe we should just order out for the pizza,” she suggested, suddenly daunted by the quest they were embarking upon.

He looked at the phone, doubtful. “Can you negotiate all those numbers? They’re very little.”

“Good point. Okay, here’s the door.”

They stumbled out of Unit #5.

“Okay, which way?” she asked.

“To the holy grail! To the pizza!”

“Yeah, but which way?”

Dylan pondered as he looked one way, then another, then another. “Forward! It’s always easier to walk forward than it is to walk backward!”

She agreed and they walked forward onto the walkway that joined their unit to the walkway running along all five units. When they got to the corner, Rev stopped.

“Having hanger flashbacks?” Dylan asked her with concern.

“Yes. I am the shirt.”

“And I am the walrus. Let’s go this way,” he suggested. They turned left and walked into bush.

“Okay, now let’s go this way,” he suggested. They turned around. “Isn’t that the highway I see in yonder distance?”

“I believe so,” she said. “Isn’t that where we need to go?”

“I believe so,” he replied. “Engage! Warp speed five!”

They stumbled along the motel walkway to the highway.

“Okay, so far so good,” he proclaimed. “We have come a long way.”

“And no one’s thrown a cow at us yet.”

“The night is young,” he cautioned. “And there are cows about.”

“Which way now?”

They looked at the highway stretching in both directions. They looked behind them, and they looked in front of them.

“Up!” Dylan shouted. They looked up. “Ah, stars.”

“Oh, look,” Rev said, “there’s a bunch in the shape of a—cluster.”

“Is it moving? Are the aliens coming to get us yet? I want to go home,” he cried.

“Okay, but before we do, let’s get some pizza.”

“Right. Good idea. I’m hungry.”

They turned right and started walking along the shoulder of the highway.

“Okay, we have to be careful to keep the gravel under our feet. You remember what happened to the rabbit in Watership Down.”

“But it wasn’t a killer rabbit.”

“No. But it was road kill just the same.”

“Look! Pizza Pizza Pizza!” he cried out.

“I think there’s only two of them.”

“How fortuitous. Because we need only one of them.”

They kept walking, toward the Pizza Pizza sign.

“Keep our eyes on the pizza and our feet on the gravel,” she said, “and we’ll be fine.”

“Feet on the pizza, eyes in the gravel, we’ll be fine,” he agreed.

Eventually, they reached their goal.

“We’re here!” he shouted triumphantly as he burst through the door.

“Yeah,” the young man behind the counter said, clearly not as enthused about it as Dylan. “And what can I get for you this evening?” The script had definitely lost its sparkle.

“Pizza pizza pizza!” Dylan cried out.

“Just one,” Rev clarified. With perspicuity.

“But a really, really big one!” Dylan insisted. “I’m so hungry,” he confessed to Rev.

“Duh,” Rev giggled. “We just walked all the way here from the motel,” she explained to the guy.

“A whole quarter-mile,” he said dryly. “Bet you could eat a horse.”

“Or a cow!” Dylan burst into giggles. “Throw one over the castle wall!”

The young man started to smile then. “Riiight,” he said. “So that’ll be one family size pizza, with the works, two cans of Pepsi, and two bags of Doritos.”

“Yes!” Dylan cried out. “No! Four bags of Doritos! We need four bags of Doritos.”

The young man smiled more broadly then. “Can you carry all of that all the way back to the motel?” he asked as he started making their pizza, plopping one of the ready lumps of pizza dough onto a floured table. “I mean, I’m off in ten minutes. We close at midnight. I could deliver on my way home.”

“Could you? Yes! Deliver! That’s a very good idea!” Dylan turned to Rev. “He’s going to bring the pizza to us. Instead of the other way around.”

“Wow.”

“All right, then.” Dylan was pleased. “That’s settled. Now what?”

The guy chuckled. “Why don’t you take a seat and I’ll deliver you two as well.”

“Brilliant!” Dylan said. “But you can’t put us in a flat box. We’re not road kill yet.”

“Okay,” he smiled. He finished making their pizza and put it into the oven as Dylan and Rev found the little table in the corner and sat down. Rev started examining the cross bars under the chair’s seat. The way they intersected in the corners then went off in different directions.

“Wow,” she said.

“I’m so hungry,” Dylan moaned.

A bag of Doritos came flying at them from behind the counter.

“Look!” Dylan said to Rev, “We are blessed! Doritos fell from the sky and landed on my head.”

The young man burst into giggles.

Ten minutes later, he was bundling Dylan, Rev, a family size pizza, two cans of Pepsi, and three bags of Doritos into his beat-up Neon.

He drove back to the motel.

“Which—do you remember which unit you’re in?”

“The one near the bush,” Dylan said.

“We walked into the bush. Before.”

“Before we walked out of the bush.”

“Okay, here we are. Do you have your key?”

“Oh no! I forgot to take the key!” Rev cried.

“That’s okay! I forgot to lock the door!” Dylan said.

Sure enough, the door was unlocked. They walked in.

“Come in, come in, good kind sir! Here, have a Pepsi!” He opened one of the cans and gave it to the young man. He opened the pizza box.

“And have a slice! Have a seat!” He gestured vaguely to the room. “Have a name! I mean, what’s your name?”

“Shaun.” He moved the chair from against the wall closer to the bed upon which Dylan and Rev had settled.

“And you live around here?”

“Yeah, just down the highway a bit. I live with my grandpar—I live with my grandmother. My grandfather passed away.”

“So did Don,” Dylan said.

“You knew him?”

“Who?”

“Don.”

“No. The guy at the video store said—”

“Wait a minute—you’re Don’s son?” Rev figured it out. She wrote for the LSAT, after all.

“Grandson.”

“Grandson? Just how old was Don?” Dylan asked.

“I don’t know. ’Bout your age, I guess.”

“Cannot be! We’re about your age!”

Shaun laughed. “You got that right.”

Dylan pulled his knapsack onto the bed and began rummaging through it. “Ah, the last one.” He pulled out a crumpled joint. “Alas. No matter,” he reached for the matches, lying on the table between the beds. “Here, join us.” He lit up, then passed it to Shaun. Shaun took it, drew in deeply, then passed it to Rev. She took a small drag, then got up to press ‘play’ on the VCR.

“To Don,” she said, lifting her can of Pepsi. Dylan echoed her, waving the joint.

“To Don,” Shaun said, raising his slice of pizza. “My grand-dad.”

They watched the rest of video as they ate, drank, and smoked. The killer rabbit scene came on.

“Run away!” Dylan cried out. “Run away!”

Shaun’s eyes began to tear.

“It’s okay,” Dylan noticed. “It’s just a flesh wound,” he said, then collapsed in giggles. Shaun couldn’t help joining him.

“He’d’ve loved this,” he said when he recovered. “This is perfect.” He looked at Rev and Dylan. “Thank you so much, you guys.”

Dylan and Rev nodded a ‘you’re welcome.’

The video played to the end, then started its automatic rewind.

Dylan got up, pressed the eject button, then put the video back in its box.

“Here,” he said, handing it to Shaun who’d also gotten up. “Your grandmother shouldn’t’ve given them all away. Though I can understand why she might’ve. But you should have this one.”

“Yeah. Thanks.” Shaun turned to leave. “Hey. On your way out of town tomorrow?” he half-said, half-asked. Rev nodded confirmation. “Stop at the grey bungalow. I can replenish your supply if you’d like.”

“Good man. We’d like. Till tomorrow, then.” Dylan put his hand on Shaun’s shoulder at the door.

*

(free download of complete novel at jassrichards.com)

Those of you who have read TurboJetslams: Proof #29 of the Non-Existence of God might think that Vic lived happily ever after.

You’d be right about the happily.

You’d be wrong about the ever after.

1

What happened was the pandemic. At first, Vic thought that was a good thing. After all, everyone was told to ‘Stay put’ and ‘Don’t go out except for essentials’. But apparently, like the many men who thought ‘No’ meant ‘Yes’, a lot of people thought ‘Stay put’ meant ‘Go somewhere’. Either that or a lot of people’s definition of ‘essentials’ had an uncanny similarity to the definition of ‘wants’.

So as soon as the pandemic hit, people from the city rushed to their cottages in the north to spread the virus. Like rats leaving a plague ship. In a caravan of SUVs.

People generously offered their weekends-and-summer-holidays cottage to all their relatives and friends, and their relatives’ friends and their friends’ relatives, and soon every cottage had continuous, and crowded, occupancy.

Those who lived in the rural north were concerned about the added strain on their already struggling services. Grocery stores, pharmacies, hospitals … (The beer stores and the liquor stores didn’t seem to experience any interruptions in supply or reduction in services. See above regarding ‘essentials’.) Yes, the incomers promised to wear masks. And no, they wouldn’t stop on the way, they’d bring what they needed with them, they wouldn’t even have to go to the local grocery store.

Well, the last part was true. Because the local grocery store started offering order-and-deliver service: people from the city could call ahead, place their apocalypse order, and then cashiers would do their shopping for them while the rest of us waited at the check-outs, six feet apart, and then the baggers would deliver van loads of meat, eggs, milk, cheese, vegetables, fruit, hamburger buns, hot dog buns, ketchup, mustard, relish, steak sauce, salad dressing, marshmallows, cookies, chips, chocolate bars, frozen pizza, ice cream, toothpaste, soap, shampoo, and toilet paper—lots of toilet paper—to their cottages. While the rest of us waited at the check-outs. Six feet apart. Of course, the local grocery store charged a hefty fee for the service, but people who had two homes either had a hefty income or a hefty debt such that an extra couple hundred here and there wouldn’t make much difference. In fact, the sooner they could declare bankruptcy, the sooner the rest of us would, one way or another, pay their debts for them.

And then, when there seemed to be no end in sight—because when the geneticists got to the omega variant, they could just go back and use all the letters of the alphabet they missed—the rentals appeared.

Vic had thought that what with people losing their jobs or getting fewer shifts, the non-stop construction and renovation—with its ever-present noise of chain saws, excavation machinery, circular saws, nail guns, power drills … would stop. Or at least diminish.

She was wrong. Very wrong.

Opportunistic wannabe-entrepreneurs stepped forward in droves (well, raced to the bank in droves) (the opportunistic banks) to provide five-star accommodations for the rats. Within a year, there were 5 brand new houses on Paradise Lake, all built specifically to be rental properties. That means the houses had a living room with leather couches, a huge flat-screen tv, and a small bar, an entertainment center with its own huge flat-screen tv and a playroom corner, a kitchen with marble counters and stainless steel appliances, two full bathrooms, three bedrooms, and a couple bunkies, so they could say ‘sleeps twelve’ and charge $7,000 a week for a multi-family rental. Such rental properties also had a beach with a firepit, a yard with a swing set, and two docks—one for the kayaks and canoes (provided), one for the jetslams and motorboats (bring your own).

And there were more to come. In fact, there was such a frenzy of development (think ‘goldrush’), it was hard to find a contractor, so one guy started the excavation himself on his newly-bought waterfront property. Which was, essentially, a slice of cliff. The inspector took one look at the excavator half in the lake and stamped “FAIL” on his report.

Picturesque (ugly) cottage signs sprouted up along the roadside almost overnight. Our Summer Home, TGIF, The Family Cottage … (Alongside signs for a quarry, a logging company, the hardware store, a construction company, and the beer store. There were no signs for a fabric and yarn store, or a bakery, or dance lessons at the rec center. The Township stank of male armpit.)

Vic hated the signs. They were like pus-filled boils on the otherwise beautiful forest that edged both sides of the roads. Some signs had the name of the rental property faux-carved onto a faux-paddle. (No doubt for the properties featuring a fleet of jetslams.) Others showed smiling beaver and bear, reminiscent of Disney fairy tales. Still others were— Well, they were all advertising. No one who actually livedon Paradise Lake posted a sign indicating that they lived there. Why would they? Because there were road signs (Spruce Lane, Sunset Lane, and Paradise Lake Lane) and house numbers. If you wanted to tell someone where you lived, you just gave your address: 13 Sunset Lane (or whatever). (And if people couldn’t read the road signs, well, how were they going to read the cottage signs?) There was simply no need for the signs. At every intersection.

Except as advertising. And what they were advertising was a lie: it was ‘cottage kitsch’ meets ‘myth of the north’. The signs fostered the delusion that people were entering the remote wilderness ‘up north’ (so empty, the roads had no names), where, because it was so uninhabited (evidence to the contrary right next door) (not to mention all the other cottage signs), they could do whatever they wanted.

If they thought instead that they were just leaving their own neighbourhood and renting a house in the middle of someone else’s neighbourhood (and would have to act accordingly), the whole endeavour would lose its charm. And the $7,000/week price tag.

One time, some strangers stopped Vic on the lane, on her way to her mailbox, and asked her why she was so rude. Apparently they’d waved at her when she’d kayaked past the cottage they were renting and she hadn’t waved back. WTF? She was supposed to wave at people she didn’t know? And she’d been paddling at the time! She was supposed to stop, and put her paddle down, just to return their wave? She could have nodded, she supposed, but really, she just wasn’t into that. (She’d bought her cabin-on-a-lake-in-the-forest for the solitude and the beauty. Sigh.) And she suspected they weren’t either. When they walked through their neighbourhood, back home, should they ever do that, did they wave, nod, and/or smile at everyone they saw, strangers included? No, it was part of the whole ‘We’re at the cottage having a fun time with all these nice people’ thing. A sort of tourist delusion. Vic wanted to shout at them—and she might, next time—that she wasn’t part of their ‘cottage experience’. This wasn’t The Truman Show. She was a real person. She did not come into existence when they arrived and disappear when they left. She lived there, 24/7, in a house that was just up the road from the house they were renting.

The cottagers who had not yet offered their cottage to family and friends when they weren’t using it soon started doing so, suggesting a modest financial contribution to the increasing property taxes triggered by the increasing property prices triggered by the increasing number of rental properties (and the bidding wars instigated by greedy real estate agents).

There was no change in what could be called unofficial and therefore unregulated trailer parks—lots upon which a trailer was parked, understood to be the prelude to the construction of at least a cottage (within two years, according to Township law) (though ‘two’ seemed to mean ‘eventually’) (or ‘never’—because taxes for a trailer were a mere $200 compared to well over ten times that for a cottage). No change except that where previously, it was not unusual for there to be 3 trailers, 2 of which were in various states of collapse (it was cheaper to just leave them there than have them towed to a scrap yard), now it was not unusual to see 7 trailers, 3 of which were in various states of collapse. Because like the cottagers, the trailer park owners were inviting their family and friends …

So. Do the math.

No wait, I’ll do it for you.

In the beginning, when Vic first bought her cabin on Paradise Lake, three hours north of Toronto, a good half hour off the main highway, there were 10 houses on the lake: 5 were occupied by permanent residents and 5 were summer cottages. Slowly, over the course of twenty years, both doubled—surprising Vic because she’d thought that all that forest was Crown land—making 20 houses: 10 permanent residences and 10 summer cottages. That meant 20 people at the lake year-round (say 2 people per permanent residence, times 10) and another 30 (2 people per cottage, times 10, plus kids) on the weekends and during their two weeks of summer holiday, but since those 30 would never be up at the same time, let’s say year-round occupancy was 20, summer occupancy was another 20, so 40, max.

Now, there were 30 houses (that’s 3 times as many): in addition to the initial 5 new houses, another 5 were built on what had been Crown land—Vic was dismayed to discover that the Ministry could, and apparently did, sell Crown land for cottage lots when the relevant municipality claimed said sales would contribute to its “economic development objectives”. (Since the additional tax revenue would surely be offset by the additional road expense, the enthusiasm with which the municipality filed such claims with the Ministry gave one the impression that the council members thought the additional tax money would go directly into their own pockets.)

Due to various sales (in one case, the owners wanted to be closer to kids, grandkids, and hospitals; in all of the other cases, the owners fled in disappointment, despair, and disgust) and subsequent transformations, only 7 of the now 30 were permanent residences, only 6 were traditional summer cottages (arguably: 2 were trophy houses, cottages purchased then renovated, merely for inviting colleagues for the weekends and showing off), 2 were multi-family conglomerate summer cottages, and 15 were rental properties. And there were now 4 trailer parks.

That meant there were 14 people living at the lake year-round (the 7 permanent residences, times 2 per), but during the summer (and spring and fall and sometimes winter, because the rentals would try to maximize their occupancy/income), there were an additional 24 (the traditional 6 cottages, times, let’s say, 4 per—only a few had kids, but they all had family and friends who would come up when they weren’t there), plus 16 (the 2 multi-family conglomerates, times, let’s say, 8 per—two families at a time seemed to be the norm), plus 150 (the 15 rentals, times, let’s say, 10 per), plus 64 (the 4 trailer parks, times 4 can-be-occupied trailers, times 4 occupants per). For a total of 268. Compared to the pre-pandemic summer occupancy of 40. That’s—I said I’d do the math for you—ALMOST SEVEN TIMES AS MANY PEOPLE. At the lake. Pretty much on any given day from May to October.

And compared to the people-who-actually-live-there occupancy? There were, let’s see, 268 vs. 14—ALMOST TWENTY TIMES AS MANY PEOPLE. At the lake. Pretty much on any given day from May to October. People who could talk, and walk, and, more to the point, who could drive jetslams and ATVs and—

You can see why Vic bought a gun.

Ha-ha. Just kidding.

She didn’t have to.

2

Shiggles was no more and her new little sweetheart, Shoogles, was far more vocal. Vic had only some success teaching her to ‘just watch’ when she raced to the gate or to the dock to shout something at passersby. Which, honestly, was just fine. Given Vic’s desire to also shout something at passersby …

But it occurred to her, a little more vulnerable now due to age, that she should do the same. Just watch.

So she started keeping her small camera beside her when she sat down at the water. (And bought a second one to keep in her kayak.) It had a powerful zoom lens. After all, she had, whether she wanted it or not, a front row seat: a new vintage lounge chair with repaired webbing and a comfy cushion, sitting so very nicely on her new extra-wide dock. The old vintage lounge chair had, one day, decided quite suddenly and without warning to stop being a chair: all the UV-weakened webbing tore at once, and she found herself ass-hard on the dock in the middle of a jigsaw puzzle of aluminum frame pieces. The old dock, on the other hand, had, one day, let out a big sigh then just slowly leaned, a little, then a little more, eventually settling ever so gently on the bottom of the lake at a perfect 45 degree angle. (She had appreciated the warning. And the slowness with which she was lowered into the cold water.) So. A front row seat. At her own entertainment center.

She quickly discovered the power of the camera. Perhaps people thought she was actually taking pictures and videos. (She was.) Perhaps people feared she would post them online. (She did.) With appropriate captions. (Of course.) “Moron renter pretends he’s not trespassing” (some guy standing on the shoreline next to someone’s dock, fishing). “Family of four can’t tell a private beach from a public beach” (said family of four having a picnic on the Campbell’s picnic table and using the float toys they kept in a bin beside their kayak).

3

One day some kid drove his jetslam straight into a ten-by-ten raft that had been floating freely in the middle of the lake. Those who lived at Paradise Lake knew it was out there, somewhere. It had been making the rounds for a good two weeks, often getting stuck (safely, though unaesthetically) in a patch of shoreline muck, then when the wind changed and rose to strength (or when someone gave it a few hard jabs with a kayak paddle), it would become free and resume floating, to somewhere else (out of sight).

The raft had ‘PROPERTY OF THE ROBSONS’ in huge red letters on its side. So you’d think the kid—it was the Robson’s grandkid (one of the many grandkids) (of the many Robsons, the ones who had the Robson cottage for the first week of July every year)—would’ve veered away at the last moment to avoid hitting it. But maybe he couldn’t read. Or didn’t know his last name. After all, he was only six years old.

4

But, as Shoogles would attest, the whole ‘just watch’ thing was only so much fun.

So Vic bought a megaphone. It had three voice distortion settings: Darth Vader, Jack Nicholson, and Alvin the Chipmunk. For good measure, she planned to aim it across the cove when she used it, figuring that the natural echo chamber that had nearly driven her insane (before she started wearing earplugs as a matter of routine) would confuse people as to the source. Or they’d assume it was the Taylors—whose shit was still sitting there on the peninsula across the cove, in her face all day long. (Or would be if she hadn’t hung strips of gorgeous Dupioni silk across the middle of every lakeside window in her cabin: fiery orange in one, shimmering fuchsia in another, and iridescent gold in the third.) (As for when she was down at the water, she’d attached branches to her dock, vertically, every two feet, from the middle of the front along all of the right side, and then strung some equally gorgeous Ashland maple leaf garlands from branch to branch, at just the right height. Sitting in her chair, positioned just so, the entire shoreline was hidden. She saw only water and then trees and sky. Not one dock, not one cottage, not one light at night … and, best of all, none of the Taylor’s shit. It was amazing, the power of ‘out of sight out of mind’ … )

She had occasion to use her brand new shiny megaphone the very next day. Shortly after she settled down at the water, a fishing boat puttered into the cove and parked a mere ten feet from her dock. (Good thing their over-priced on-board fish-finding tech didn’t indicate that the fish they were trying to catch was under her dock.)

And then one of the guys stood and began to urinate over the side of the boat. She reached for her megaphone, set it to Darth Vader, and called out “Hey, stop that! The lake is not a toilet!”

In his rush to zip up and turn to look (because of course he hadn’t seen her sitting there, just ten feet away), or maybe lacking the coordination to do both at the same time, perhaps especially since he was probably pissing pure beer, he fell overboard.

His buddies didn’t notice.

The guy drowned.

Oh well.

(free download of complete novella at jassrichards.com)

1

All her life, she’d wanted to live in a cabin on a lake in a forest.

And do nothing but read, write, and think.

After ten years of crappy, part-time, occasional, relief, and temp jobs, two years of which were spent counting cars at busy intersections—what else does one do with degrees in Literature, Psychology, and Philosophy?—she managed to have $10,000 in her savings account. Enough for a down payment. So she started calling real estate agents a little north of Toronto.

When she told them what she wanted and what she could afford, they laughed.

So she called real estate agents a bit further north. They still laughed, but not as loudly.

She kept calling, further and further north, until finally one agent, just this side of the Arctic circle, simply asked, “How soon do you need it?”

“No rush,” Vic replied. “I’ll just keep renting until I find the perfect spot.”

Several months and a few near-perfect spots later, the agent took her to a cabin for sale on Paradise Lake.

She started falling in love with the place on the drive in. They’d driven ten miles from the nearest town, five miles on dirt roads, the last two of which wound through trees on either side.

She continued to fall in love as they turned into the driveway. It was long. You couldn’t even see the cabin from the road.

And as soon as she walked around to the lake side, she knew.

It was perfect.

“Yes,” she said. “I’ll take it.”

The agent stared at her. “Don’t you want to see the inside?”

“Okay.” But it didn’t really matter. The washroom could have required some assembly. The floor could have been missing. She didn’t care. Because she couldn’t take her eyes off the view.

The lake was surrounded by hills, all heavily treed, all wildernessey.

The cabin was on the side of a small cove at the end of the lake. Crown land curved around the cove, extending into a peninsula across from the cabin. So she saw nothing but water and trees, lake and forest.

She felt like a violin that had finally found its bow.

There was a vacant lot on the right. Again, heavily treed and wildernessey.

“It belongs to the gentleman two cottages down,” the agent said. “I think he’s keeping it for his kids.”

“Well, if he ever wants to sell it, tell him I’ll buy it,” she told her. “In a heartbeat.”

As she stood there, unwilling, unable to move, looking out at the little cove, the water, the trees rising all around, it felt…right. Just—right.

After nineteen addresses in ten years, she was home.

The lake side of the lot was a bit steep, but it was certainly do-able. Maybe when she was sixty and had no knees left, she’d have to put in stairs, ramps, or a pulley system, but for now, it was good. She simply made a little twisty path between the trees, saplings, weeds, and whatever.

There was no point in cutting, clearing, and planting grass. The slope she was on would probably erode away if she so much as touched it, and in any case, it would be impossible to mow. Not that she had a lawnmower. Or intended to get one.

So she left it all, front and back, as is. Better for the bugs that way. As she found out the following spring.

She spent the first two months, September and October, making it habitable. All of the bits in the washroom were assembled, and there was a floor, but…

She got rid of the cookstove that was in the middle of the living room slash kitchen and took out the counter that divided the space in two. She wanted room to dance.

Next, she replaced the huge fridge with a smaller one. Got rid of the oven and put in a doggy door. Put a mattress in the corner at the back. Took out the wall between the two small bedrooms. Almost took out the supporting beam. (She was having such fun with the sledgehammer.)

Good thing her new neighbours, an elderly couple living at the other end of the lane, happened to come by. (She discovered, much to her delight, that there were only three others living on the lake: in addition to the elderly Johnsons, there was MaryAnn, who lived across the lake and had two young boys, and the Campbells, who lived just past the Johnsons and were expecting their first child. There were also three houses on top of the hill coming in, all occupied by retirees. There were a few summer cottages, whose owners may have been up every now and then through the fall; their presence wasn’t particularly noteworthy.)

She also took out the doors and closets of the two small bedrooms. Ex-bedrooms. Used the wood to build bookshelves onto three of the walls, put her desk against the fourth—the one with the large window, overlooking the lake—and had herself a study.

Then she cleaned the place. The soot on the walls was so thick from the cookstove that she had to change the water in her pail every five minutes. She washed, rinsed, washed, and rinsed everything.

She spent the next two months, November and December, understanding what the word ‘winterized’ meant. Or, rather, what it didn’t mean.

And then she spent the next fifteen years making her cabin on a lake in a forest even better. She had a trench dug for the water line to the lake, but even so, had to dive into ice cold water three springs in a row to fix the foot valve, having been without running water for half the winter: one January, the valve sunk to the bottom and got stuck in the muck; the next year, it rose to the top and froze into the ice; the third year—she couldn’t remember what happened to it the third year. She did remember that when she was ten feet under and taking too long, she reached such a oneness with the world, she was convinced she could breathe water. After all, it had oxygen in it, right? H2O.

It would take another ten years before she was able to afford a well, but she hadn’t drowned in the interim, so that was okay. In the meantime, there was a delightful spring on the adjacent crown land, and it was all very Henry David Thoreau to haul water. For the first two weeks.

She tarred the leaking shingled roof every few months, apparently never tarring the actual holes, until she could afford a metal roof.

She replaced the windows one at a time, as she could afford them, with glazed double-paned sliders. And eventually folded up for good the plastic she’d been putting over them every winter.

She had huge eight-by-eight picture windows put in the main room on either side of the fireplace. Going with all-glass, no crossbars or divisions for inserted screened windows at the top or bottom, turned out to be a bit of a ventilation mistake, but oh, the view! She put her couch—once she discovered laptops, she started writing not while seated at her desk but while sunk into the couch (which had been given to her by one of her piano students, probably only because that was easier than carting it to the dump—it had a broken spring, hence the ‘sunk’)—in front of one of the large windows, angling it just so, to see the sun sparkle on the water through the gaps among the trees…

Speaking of the fireplace, she discovered that despite the implicit presence of fire, a fireplace is not a source of heat. If you just stand in front of it, your hands might get warm. Provided you shove them into the flames. But otherwise? And since she’d cleverly had the baseboard heater removed—it ruined the aesthetics, being under just one of the glorious pair of picture windows—she was very cold the first winter. She bought a woodstove for the second winter. A Canadian Tire special. It was all she could afford. But three years later, she got a high-quality Regency fireplace insert. Much neater than the woodstove jutting out in the way of her dancing. But then, since she couldn't see the pretty flames from her couch in the evenings, she replaced it the following year with an Osborne insert, the one with the bay window door. Eventually, since heat doesn’t travel sideways, she bought a furnace. And so, after fifteen years, she was finally warm.

She replaced the Picasso-wannabe dock with a dockraft: an eight by eight raft that doubled as a dock. It had one end anchored solidly on shore, the other end floating on barrels, which meant she didn’t have to haul it out every winter—not that she could have done that, given the vertical—because it could just rise and fall with the ice, instead of getting yanked apart by it.

Blackflies swarm, she discovered, and they crawl on your arms, and on your legs, and along your hair line, and in your ears, and your eyes, and your nose— And they bite. Blackflies are near-microscopic piranhas with wings. This—this swarming and crawling and biting—goes on for a good six weeks. In mid-April, if it was warm enough, she could finally go outside after the long winter, but a mere four weeks later, in mid-May, the blackflies drove her back in. Between the blackflies and the mosquitos (and the deer flies and the horse flies), once she swatted at herself so hard, she knocked herself out. So as soon as blackfly season ended, and she’d recovered consciousness, she built a screened-in gazebo. (No frickin’ way she was going to build it during blackfly season.)

(She also discovered, by the way, how impossible it is to get a roof on if you make it first, on the ground. Even if you have your elderly neighbours to help.)

Alas, the gazebo didn’t keep the bugs out, and for the life of her she couldn’t figure out why. So a few years later, she had a screened porch added to the cabin. When the guy moved the gazebo, because it was exactly where the porch was going to go, he ended up setting it in a slightly depressed area behind the cabin, and she could see, clear as the daylight coming through, a space all along the top. She bought a caulking gun and went crazy. Good to have a back-up.

Once the screened-in porch was done, she was delighted to discover that when she was in it, she could hear the spring gurgling up. So she carefully arranged the rocks just so, for the falling water to make the prettiest tinkly sound.

(One of the summer people used the spring for water and always tossed aside her carefully arranged rocks—did he think nature had arranged them just so? She finally asked him if he could just set them aside, sensing that it would be going too far to ask him to please just put them back the way he found them. Why? he asked belligerently. She told him. Politely. He looked at her like she was kidding, no doubt unable to take a woman seriously. And kept tossing the rocks into the bush.)

She also had the cabin extended a bit, while she as at it, so she could move her bed to the lake side. She had a window put in right above it so at night, she could hear the beautiful calls of the loons.

She replaced the narrow lakeside porch—one day she stepped out the door and it just sort of swooned to the left and settled onto the ground with a sigh—with a sturdy deck, large enough for a lounge chair, a tree trunk table on the left for her work, and another on the right for her tea.

And, finally, she took advantage of a government program that would subsidize adding more insulation to her cabin (all it had was eight inches of that pink stuff) (which had, in the crawlspace, fallen down, and she spent a day in hell, strapping it back up so the floor would be warmish). She’d postponed the extra insulation for so long because she thought it had to be added from the inside. Adding it to the outside, to the cabin as it was, just meant adding another layer of siding—instead of dismantling three walls of books in the study and another wall of LPs and CDs in the main space, as well as the kitchen sink, counter, and cupboards.)

Much of this she did by herself. All the while staring at the lake. (Which may account for the numerous injuries she sustained.) (Though the lack of tools, skill, and knowledge may also have played a role.) She couldn’t take her eyes off of it. The lake. She still couldn’t fifteen years later. Still, fifteen years later, whenever she walked through her cabin, she looked out the large window at her desk, out the sliding glass doors, out the two large windows in the main space—to the water, to the trees, to the nothing but lake and forest.

She found employment, barely, taking whatever she could get, determined to do whatever she had to, to keep her little cabin. She did some freelance editing, some relief work at a women’s shelter, some supply teaching. She deejayed for weddings. Scrubbed toilets for minimum wage.

And spent her free time, such as it was, down at the water, on her dockraft, sitting in an old lounge chair, reading, writing, and thinking, Shiggles lying beside her in the sun or underneath her in the shade.

She and Shiggles would watch the ducks come in for a landing, and the heron, who would regularly come to their end of the lake to fish. There was an otter, who wintered one year under her kayak. And of course the loons. In spring, she’d see them, baby on board. And she’d hear them. Oh, the sound. It was absolutely breath-taking.

Sometimes the water was placid beyond belief, and sometimes it was corrugated by the wind. So sometimes the lake would sparkle in the sun, and sometimes it would glitter. She loved the clarity of sparkles when they were distinct and close, but she also loved the distant multitude of them.

And every day between five and six o’clock, when the sun descended to just the right point, its beams at just the right angle, it would light up the trees like a spotlight, then leave them in shadow as it moved in a slow pan from left to right. In spring when the leaves were new, the cove would be transformed into a shimmering chartreuse emerald.

Then for a few minutes, it would stream through the trees, like through cathedral windows, and then a few minutes after that, it would light just the outer tips of the branches, frosting on a cake.

And then it would be dusk.

Often she would sit down on the dockraft at night, listening for the loons and watching the moonlight on the dark water. It had such a different quality from the sunlight, it was a silver gleaming mercury.

The lake was small, a little over a kilometer in length, four hundred meters across at its widest. It took less than an hour to kayak the perimeter, but there was a little creek feeding it, which was delightfully kayakable up to the shallow spot at which point you could just turn around or get out and pull your kayak across the rocks and rapids for a hundred meters and then carry on. And at the end of the lake, which was actually just the swollen end of a river, you could keep going, up the river, for about five miles to the other end where it opened up again into another lake. This is what they did, she and Shiggles. Almost every day. They’d see not just the forementioned ducks, herons, otter, and loons, but also muskrat and the occasional mink. And, as occasionally, deer, moose, and bear, on shore or swimming across.

Sometimes there was just enough wind on the water to make trillions of teeny bubbles that caught the light and swirled amid the showier sparkles, and if she timed it right, in terms of her direction in relation to the sun, it was like paddling into the Milky Way.

She couldn’t see the sun set from her cabin, so she often kayaked back late. If she paddled backwards, she could watch it, sometimes gorgeous orange and red. And then she’d turn around and paddle home in the moonlight, in the starlight, the beavers circling, strong and stealthy, then suddenly swishing and slapping. And the loons calling…

Up the hill about five hundred meters from her cabin, there was an old logging road which led into the forest. They walked and ran for miles. It was amazing. The road, such as it was, crossed over a little babbling brook and then passed a couple small lakes. Several trails split off, going to other small lakes. Her elderly neighbours urged her to buy some pepper spray in case she met a bear, but she didn’t think she needed it. She trusted the wildlife to be reasonable. She found a magical spot about five miles in, full of maple trees. In the spring, it was a luminescence of lime and tennis ball green. In the fall, it was a palace of scarlet, gold, and tangerine.

After twelve years of whatever work she could get, she got lucky and landed a few courses at the university an hour away. She continued to live at poverty level, putting the rest of her income toward the mortgage, and three years later had paid it off.

Just in time, because she lost the courses. (She didn’t realize that student expectations had risen; they now expected an A merely for showing up.) But by then, high speed internet was finally available at Paradise Lake, and she discovered the wonderful world of online teaching. With no mortgage to pay, her living expenses were cut in half, and given the per course pay of online teaching, she could support herself with just ten hours a week. Sweet.

So she thought she’d write a book. To that point, she’d been writing short pieces—poetry, prose, op-eds, articles. But now, she thought, a book. Yes. Something to do with applied ethics. Maybe a primer for adults. Two of the courses she’d taught at the university were Business Ethics and Contemporary Moral Issues, and it was clear (quite clear) that the students thought they already knew right from wrong. After all, it’s something we’re taught as children.

But most people, she’d observed, hadn’t updated their childhood. So ethically speaking, most people remained unsophisticated. Ethically-arrested. Morally-challenged. ‘Don’t kill’, and for the women, the somewhat higher standard, ‘Be nice’, are woefully inadequate. And 'Do what your parents tell you' is fine until you realize that your parents don’t have a clue most of the time. Yes, she thought, I’ll write a book about doing the right thing.

No job to go to meant she didn’t have to set her alarm. So she just got up when she woke up, and was down at the water by ten, which was when the sun crested the trees and set the cove a-sparkle. She worked—reading, writing, and thinking—for a couple hours, staring at the water, and when she was ready for a break, she and Shiggles went for a long walk in the forest, solutions to the problems, gaps, and rough spots of the morning’s work presenting themselves at miles two, three, four.

When they got back, she’d write again, articulating and polishing those solutions, gaps, and rough spots. Then, unless it was one of her two teaching days, they’d go out onto the lake in her kayak until dark.

She spent a week like that. A whole week. The first week, she thought with such deep satisfaction, as she sat in her chair watching the wind blow a patch of sparkles across the water, thinking that the last twenty-five years had been hard, very hard, but worth it—to have gotten her to where she was now, sitting down at the water at her cabin on a lake in a forest, able to do almost nothing but read, write, and think— The first week, she thought, of the rest of my life...

And then one of those TurboJetslams* screamed into the cove.

When it became clear that it wasn’t leaving until it had churned and cross-churned every square inch of water, like a dog lifting its leg at every single tree, and she had run out of new and creative ways to express herself, despite the impossibility of being heard above what was unquestionably the most annoying sound on the planet, she packed up her books and her writing pad, and, trying not to breathe, a headache from the fumes already forming, headed back up to her cabin.

And she knew right then and there that Sartre was right.

Absolutely, unequivocally right.

————————

* Using any one of the more familiar terms would attract a lawsuit, and ‘personal watercraft’ sounds just so…inoffensive.

2

Turned out it was the visiting nephew of the guy who owned one of the cottages across the lake. She sighed with relief. It was a temporary thing then.

• • •

3

The week after the nephew, and the TurboJetslam left, she started hearing another noise. Distant banging and clanging and mechanical groaning and shrieking… She went to investigate.

And found Tim or Lyle, one of MaryAnn’s two boys, now both in their mid-twenties, doing some work on their road. What she was hearing was the backhoe Tim or Lyle was on, which she assumed they’d rented for a day.

Or, since whatever they were doing to the road took all day and then some, had rented for a week.

Or two. Because next, they landscaped the entrance, putting huge boulders on either side.

Or three. They rearranged the boulders.

Or four. They widened the trail that led off their driveway up into the hills. Making the dirt bike trail wide enough for ATVs maybe.

Or five. They knocked down the boulders and dragged them half way up the trail.

Then she heard that they weren’t renting the backhoe. They’d bought it.

They’d gotten dirt bikes several years ago, when they were maybe fourteen or fifteen. She’d often hear them, zooming from their place, onto the road, then into the bush via the logging road at the top of the hill, unnecessarily shifting gears and revving the engines all the way.

And now they had their very own backhoe. Delightful.

It must’ve been cheap. Because they weren’t, as far as she knew, employed. It looked like something from the 1950s. You could hear it rattling apart as it rolled along.

And when it started digging? Under about two inches of top soil, the whole area was pretty much rock. So when the boys—men—boys—started excavating, it was like nails scraping along a blackboard. Times a hundred. Amplified. Because of the acoustics of the place: small body of water surrounded by forested hills, remember? So imagine a cave. Now put a pool of water in it. An almost-always calm pool of water. Now stand on one side of the pool while someone on the other side drags a huge metal bucket across the rock. For five hours.

Week six, she didn’t know what they were doing. But she thought surely it would at some point stop. When the job was done. Right?

Turns out it continued off and on all frickin’ summer. Clanging, clattering, crashing, dragging, scraping. All frickin’ summer.

Turns out they were making a road through the forest along their side of the lake. Using the brute force of a backhoe apparently.

Until now, the road had gone just as far as their place. Once it joined with the logging road in the forest on this side, she realized, they’d have a racetrack around the lake for their dirt bikes. The ones with the modified mufflers.

Modified? Removed.

Thing is, she never knew which days they’d be at it. With the backhoe. Well, same goes for the dirt bikes, but that was another story.

And she never knew what time. Sometimes she’d be woken up at eight o’clock in the morning by the banging and booming— She once dated a guy who prided himself on being able to pick up a dime with his backhoe; these boys couldn’t pick up a dirt bike. Not in ten tries.

Other times, they’d still be at it, or get to it, at eleven o’clock at night. Apparently backhoes have headlights.

And that was another thing. When it started, she had no idea whether it would last for ten minutes (one of the boys must’ve had ADHD) or ten hours (the other must’ve had OCD).

And that’s basically the definition of torture. Not knowing when the pain will start or how long it will last…

The following summer they were at it again. Possibly pushing the rocks they’d excavated back in to where they had been, so they could drag them out all over again. She could take no more. So she called to inquire.

“Just another day,” Lyle said. “Then we’re doin’ the footings for Don’s garage.”

“And how long will that take?”

“Oh, most of the week.”

“So you’re saying that what I heard today, it’ll be like that for most of next week, all day, every day?”

“Pretty much.”

“Okay, thanks.”

She booked a house on Manitoulin Island. She’d always wanted to go. Now seemed as good a time as any. She couldn’t really afford the $900, but she couldn’t afford to spend the rest of her life in prison on murder charges either.

So she packed up Shiggles, her laptop, some books, some clothes, and left.

She didn’t know Manitoulin Island had a lot of skunks. Shiggles found one first day.

It also had porcupines. She found one of those the second day.

And poison ivy? Third day.

The drive back at the end of the week was a long nine hours, including a stop at a drugmart. She’d run out of calamine lotion.

She got home late Saturday night. By the time she unloaded, unpacked, and showered (no soap, that just spreads the rash) (she’d found that out on the fourth day), it was two a.m.

Six hours later, an explosive boom woke her up. What the—wait a minute. She knew that sound. It was the sound of Lyle’s excavator bucket being dropped onto rock. Agonizing scraping followed. And then cursing, weeping, and wailing. That was her.

It stopped around eleven. Lunch time?

She called.

“Yeah, we didn’t git to ‘er last week. We’re doin’ ’er now.”

She was speechless. And not because of the ‘doin’ ‘er’.

So she bought a pair of ear protectors. The kind worn by guys who operate jackhammers.

They did nothing to block the sound of Lyle operating—and she used the word loosely—his backhoe.

So she bought an expensive pair of noise cancelling headphones.

They did nothing to block the sound of Lyle operating—and she used the word wincing—his backhoe.

Then she bought a pair of earplugs, ones with a noise reduction rating of 33. The highest possible.

They did nothing to block the sound of Lyle operating—and she used the word breaking into a sweat—his backhoe.

Then she bought twenty different kinds of earplugs: wax, foam, silicone, rubber, plastic; swimmers’, musicians’, machine operators’; disposable, reusable.

She figured out that what was most effective was to roll the reusable putty-like kind and stick them deep into her ear canals (carefully following the ‘Do Not’ instructions on the package).

Unfortunately, the best brand of reusable putty-like earplugs had been discontinued. But she found a store in the UK (ya gotta love eBay) that had 20 boxes left, 8 pairs per box. She bought ’em all.

Even so, she could hear the agonizing shriek of metal on rock, the booming of metal onto rock, the—

She bought a pair of over-the-ear headphones and a portable CD player. She put her earplugs in, put the headphones on, and set the volume on the CD player to max. There, she sighed. That did it.

The following summer, apparently the boys couldn’t pay their hydro bill so they used a gas generator. She damn near went insane. It was an old generator. (Of course.) It changed frequency unpredictably. It sputtered sporadically. It throbbed continuously. But mostly it ground her nerves into mush.

Imagine standing next to a transport truck with its diesel engine idling loudly. Imagine that it’s not a very well tuned engine, so it doesn’t make a steady hum or even a steady growl that might eventually disappear from consciousness. Imagine that it has just enough variation to keep your attention.

And imagine that it never stops.

Why a generator had to be on twenty-four hours a day, she had no idea.

Why it had to be situated on the lake side was an even greater puzzle.

And why it couldn’t be enclosed in any sort of soundproof housing was beyond her.

You’d think the gas would cost more than the outstanding hydro bill, but maybe that’s just the way she did math.

That was the summer she bought four more pairs of headphones and four more portable CD players: in addition to the set (earplugs, headphones, and CD player) down at the water, she now had a set in the screened porch, another on the deck, and another in her kayak; the last set was a spare. Just in case. She loaded each CD player with the most masking kind of music she could find. Turned out to be new age stuff mostly. Gentle music with a background of waves lapping, beaver slapping, loons calling…

• • •

4

It was at about this time that she realized the cove and peninsula weren’t crown land. Well, not all of it. Walter, one of the three on top of the hill, owned it. It was more or less connected to his house lot. He was, or at least had been for the last fifteen years, content to do nothing with it, which was perfect as far as she was concerned, but since it was so very important to her, she told him she’d love to buy it if he ever wanted to sell it.

He wasn’t interested in selling. He said his own lot was worth more with the cove and peninsula attached.

Was he planning to sell? No, he meant when he died.

But you’ll be dead, she wanted to say, what do you care how much it’ll be worth?

And anyway, how could he know the two lots were worth more together when he didn’t know how much she was willing to pay for just the one?

Alas, she let it go, since she really didn’t have the money anyway.

Two days later he died.

And his next-door neighbour, one of the other three on the top of the hill, inherited it. At least that’s what she thought at first. She later found out that Walter had left it to a friend of his, an elderly gentleman. Who thought it should go to Walter’s relatives instead, so he contacted the brother in Austria. Who didn’t want it because of the tax implications. Somehow Karl, Walter’s neighbour, knew all this and flew to Austria. He came back with the property. For nothing. Or close to.

Anyway, one morning she saw Karl down on the peninsula, right across from her, clearing away some of the lovely foliage that acted as her visual and acoustic screen, keeping what was behind the peninsula out of sight and out of hearing. She paddled over and casually asked, “So what are your plans for this?”

“None of your business!” he screamed at her. “It’s my property!”

Even so, it is my business, she thought. When she’d righted herself, having toppled over from the blast. If it affects me, it’s my business. The stakeholder model.

Furthermore, she questioned any argument that derives absolute, or even non-absolute, rights from ownership.

She also questioned ownership based on monetary payment; isn’t it wiser to say that whoever appreciates and takes care of something is the owner?

However, she sensed that this was neither the time nor the place to engage him in those discussions.

“Sell it to me then,” she said, reasonably enough, “and it’ll be my property.”

“Get away from here!” he screamed, waving the machete he’d been using. “This is mine!”

She pretended he hadn’t gone momentarily psycho. (There’s a backstory: briefly, right after Walter died, she and Karl agreed to share custody of Kodiak, Walter’s dog, until she could find a good home for him, and one day, when she and Shiggles went to get Kodiak for their afternoon walk—something they had been doing for years, since Walter was unable to go very far, and Kodiak, being a young German Shepherd, was clearly up for their five miles into forest—Karl had just come out of the bush with him, and Kodiak, having scented her and Shiggles, but not having seen them in the driveway at his house, took off down the hill ‘after’ them, pointedly not listening to Karl when he called to him; Karl, displaying impressive logic, became angry at her for having witnessed his emasculation. By a dog.)

The lot consisting of the peninsula and the wrap-around end of the cove was assessed at $23,000. She offered Karl $25,000. Then $50,000. Then $75,000. The real estate agent intimated that anything less than $100,000 wouldn’t even be considered. The wrap-around end of the cove was near-cliff, the way down to the peninsula from the house was steep and roundabout, and the peninsula itself was too narrow for anything, she thought, so it would probably always stay as is—just a parcel of land attached to the house lot on top of the hill. She didn’t have $100,000.

A year later, she was awakened by a chainsaw that sounded like it was right outside her bedroom window. She got up to investigate and was horrified to see that Karl had driven his jeep down the I-guess-it’s-not-that-steep-after-all hill and had parked it on the I-guess-there’s-more-room-there-than-I-thought peninsula. He was cutting down the trees.

As quickly as she could, she paddled over, still in her pjs, and begged him to stop. She explained how very important the view was to her, how she spent all day just breathing in its beauty, how it was the raison d’être for—

He said he was clearing it for a boathouse and a dock. She suspected the real estate agent had told him that that would make it more attractive to potential buyers. Apparently there had been not one offer in the year it had been up for sale. She wasn’t surprised. They were calling it waterfront. So when people showed up, they understandably looked around in confusion for the water. When they were told that it was five hundred meters down and around and over, they probably got back into their car without even looking at the house.

“But,” she said to Karl, “what if the next people don’t want a boathouse and dock? Or what if they do, but not right here?” (Maybe they’ll put it further down the peninsula, she hoped, out of her sight.) “Why not let them decide what they want to do with this?”

He ignored her. The chainsaw continued to roar.

“They might love the trees as much as I do,” she persisted, shouting to be heard. “You might be decreasing its value to prospective buyers.”

He continued to ignore her.

“Please, just wait a minute— You have no idea what— Once you cut them down, you can’t put them back up! Karl, I’m begging you—”

Completely ignored her.

Even though, by this time, she was actually sobbing.

Later that day, she invited Karl and his wife down to her place for tea so he could see what she was talking about when she went on and on about the view—because it really did look different from the inside: from the outside, it looked like there was no view to speak of. She could show him how important it was to her, how she spent all day, every day, whether inside on the couch, or in the screened porch, or on the deck, just looking out at the nothing-but-trees-and-water, it wasn’t just a beautiful view, it was integral to the wildernessey solitude ambience that was, in turn, integral to her very life—

He said he didn’t have time.

A few days after that, she heard him further along the cove, toward her. With his chainsaw. Was he going to cut down the whole cove?

Surely, she thought, there were laws against that. It was so steep that without the trees’ roots, the whole thing would just collapse, crumble, and wash away into the lake. Even if he took down just one or two trees, the rest would follow, a few with every wind.

She called the Township, the Ministry of the Environment, the Ministry of Natural Resources, and Ontario Hydro (they had a line going through it), all the while hearing the chainsaw roar. Finally she got through to a real person by selecting the ‘Complaint’ option on one of the phone menus. She said right away that she wasn’t making a complaint so much as seeking information about what could and could not be done on one’s private property, waterfront, and proceeded to explain the situation. The man said he’d come out right away. She was surprised.

On her way into town—she was afraid that if she stayed, she would have gone over and thrown herself around the largest tree, only to experience multiple amputations, followed by decapitation—she saw a Ministry vehicle pull into Walter’s driveway. Karl was there, putting away his chainsaw. Lunch break?

On her way back, she pulled into Karl’s driveway. She’d had another idea: he wouldn’t sell the peninsula and cove part to her, but maybe if she offered to pay the taxes until he sold the whole property, he would at least agree not to cut down any more trees in the interim.

“Hey, Karl, I have an idea,” she said as she got out of her car and walked toward him, crouched beside his car. She proceeded to present her offer. He continued to polish his car.

Then he got up slowly and said, “Someone called the Ministry and made a complaint about me cutting down a tree. On my property!” He was angry, she realized then. Of course.

She told him that she hadn’t made a complaint per se, she had merely asked for information. Because in some places you can’t cut down trees even on your own property unless…

Actually, he was enraged, she realized belatedly. His accent had made it hard to tell. He started pushing her, and flicking his rag at her. (Good thing he hadn’t had his machete in his hand. She later found out that during a previous tantrum, he’d whipped a pipe wrench at someone.)

“Get off my property!!” He kept pushing her, even though she was getting back into her car as quickly as she could.

“FUCKING CUNT!” He slammed her car door against her just-barely-inside foot.

Then as she turned on the ignition, he reached in through the open back window and smacked Shiggles really hard.

It was then that she bought the pepper spray.

Fortunately, snow started to fall early that year, and Karl put his chainsaw away for the winter.

In the spring, he listed the property with another agent, at $295,000. Down from $395,000. She considered making an offer. For the whole thing. She’d sever the two lots, keep the peninsula and cove part, and sell the house part. But by then it wasn’t clear that severance would be permitted. The office in charge told her they couldn’t make a severance decision until they received an application, and you couldn’t apply for a severance until you owned the property. Pure Kafka. So she decided against the purchase. It was a huge financial risk. She’d have to borrow the money, of course, and she’d have to put up her own cabin as collateral. What if she couldn’t sever? And what if she couldn’t resell for what she’d paid? Loss or not, she’d be back at square one, hoping the next owner would leave the peninsula and cove as is.

So she crossed her fingers and held her breath, hoping that anyone who really intended to make use of the waterfront would buy a lot with a more accessible waterfront, and that anyone who would buy this lot would, like Walter, just enjoy seeing forest and distant water out their window.

(free download of complete novella at jassrichards.com)

The following week, I received another call.

“Carson won’t come into the house.”

Hm.

“Carson is a dog?” Just making sure.

• • •

As I pulled up to the house, I saw Carson lying in the front yard, as far from the house as the long rope she was attached to would allow. She was a cute little spaniel.

Or would be if I could make the pain in her eyes go away. Even from a distance, I could see something was seriously wrong. Surely they’d taken her to the vet, I told myself as I walked up the patio stone path to—it hit me. A wave of stench. Of cigarette and perfume. So strong, I immediately started getting a—ah. Carson, her sense of smell being 10 to 100 thousand times better than mine, because she has 220 million olfactory receptors, whereas I have a measly 5 million, must have the worst headache. She probably feels like her skull is about to implode. Or has been fracturing apart in a never-ending slow-motion tectonic— Or maybe she feels like someone’s been pounding away— I massaged my temple.

And if the smell was in her luxurious black-and-white coat, as I’m sure it must be, she wouldn’t’ve been unable to get away from it all this time. Weeks, apparently. I’ll bet she wants to die.

I hesitated, then realized that my clothes probably already stink, even from ten feet away, so I was going to have to wash them. When I was a dj, and smoking was still allowed in public buildings, I had designated dj clothes that would never come into the house; I’d take them off outside my house, dump them in a waiting pail of soapy water to soak overnight, then rinse them and hang them up to dry, outside, leaving them there until next gig.

I approached the forlorn little dog, crooning. “Hey, Carson, how are you?” I said every so softly, crouching down and reaching into my pocket for a treat. She looked up at me, head throbbing. Couldn’t even bother to get up. Probably felt nauseous at the thought of a treat. I reached out my hand—she lifted her head and pressed it against my palm. I reached out with my other hand and cupped her head. She wagged her tail, ever so slightly. I thought about where her temples might be.

The front door slammed. I winced. Carson winced.

“Are you Brett?”

“Yes,” I stood up.

The man came toward me, hand outstretched.

He smelled, yes, but—a woman followed, cigarette in one hand and, I swear, atomizer in the other.

“Randy, is this the woman you talked about?” Hair doesn’t come in yellow, I thought to myself. And lips don’t come in scarlet.

“Yeah, hon, this is Brett.”

I backed away from her. And there was no way I was going into the house.

“Carson has a headache,” I said. “And so do I. From your cigarette smoke and your perfume.”

They didn’t seem to understand.

“When did Carson start refusing to go inside?” I asked.

“Right after Sherry moved in. A couple weeks ago. We thought Carson was just a bit jealous, you know, and would get over it,” he smiled at Sherry. Who sidled up to him. “But you think she has a headache?”

“I think her head is throbbing so hard—my head is throbbing,” I reached up to my temple again, “and her sense of smell is a thousand times stronger, ten thousand times stronger, possibly a hundred thousand times stronger, than mine. So what do you think?”

They looked at each other in confusion.

“Why do you think all that no-smoking and fragrance-free legislation was passed? Simply because a bunch of people didn’t approve?”

“Tell you what—” I was so eager to get away, I didn’t really think this through. “I’ll take Carson and give her a bath—the smoke and perfume is in her coat, she’s probably had the migraine of all migraines since you moved in,” I barely glanced at Sherry. I wanted to kill her. She was causing me a lot of pain.

“You take the drapery to the drycleaners, shampoo the furniture and the carpets, wipe down the ceiling and walls and … everything, with something strong, but unscented, leave all the windows open for a week—then call me.”

“Oh,” I added, in case they didn’t get it, “and you’ll either have to give up smoking and stop wearing that gawd-awful perfume or move out.”

I untied Carson’s rope and led her to my car. She came willingly. Shit. This was the part I didn’t think through. Once I let Carson into my car, I was going to have to shampoo the car. Thoroughly. When I drove home from my dj gigs, I wore a plastic raincoat. Damn it. Well, there was no way I was leaving her here.

“Do you have any large plastic garbage bags?” I turned back to the man.

“Sure. Hang on.”

He went back into his house, and came out with a box. I pulled out the first five and handed them to him, then kept the sixth one, the one that had been so inside the box it couldn’t possibly be contaminated. I hoped.

I tore a hole out the top. Not as easy as it sounds, by the way. Then I put it over poor little Carson like a poncho, wrapped the end under her bottom, and set her carefully on the back seat. I got in, ‘forgot’ to wave, then backed out of the driveway.

Carson tore her way out of the plastic bag in three seconds.

And—this was the other part I didn’t think through. No way I was taking her inside my house. To give her a bath in my tub. I didn’t want to be taking my drapery to the cleaners and shampooing all of my furniture and carpets. I had an outdoor hose, but my experience was that most dogs didn’t like being sprayed with a hose. Spunky Doo excepted. And I didn’t have one of those little wading pools. Oh well, the beach it is, then.

Problem was, now I had to go home and get Snookums and Kessie. Couldn’t go to the beach without them. But they wouldn’t know, you’re saying. Oh listen to yourself. Of course they’d know. They’d smell it on me. Once I got the smoke and perfume out of my clothes. Which I could do at the beach. Good thing it was a hot and sunny day. Okay, so I’d just have to give Snookums and Kessie a bath as well.

I thought about the car on my way home to get Kessie and Snookums. And Chum. How he knew we were going to the beach, I’ll never know, but there he was, sitting at my driveway, looking up the road, waiting for me. His beach ball in his mouth.

So he’d had to have a bath as well. I pulled out my phone. In for a penny…

“Impromptu trip to the beach, bath included, can Spunky Doo come?”

“Of course. And for the record? The answer’s always yes. Whenever, for whatever. I’ll have a key made for you.”

“Impromptu trip to the beach, bath included, can Hunk come?”

“Um…yeah, sure. He’s moping around, I don’t know what’s wrong with him.”

“He misses Little Miss,” I said, again. Ever since the dog show fiasco, Little Miss’ person had refused to let her come with us, even though I’d assured her that Hunk had been neutered. Every time I picked him up, Hunk moaned when I turned left at the critical intersection instead of right. “Did you call her? Little Miss’ person?”

“Um, no, I forgot.”

Asshole.

• • •

They all kept their distance from Carson. Kess firmly pressed herself into my lap, Snookums crowded Chum on the front passenger seat, which she did in any case, and Spunky Doo leaned into Hunk, who, oddly enough, didn’t protest, at the other end of the back seat. Just as well. I suspect Carson wasn’t in the mood to be social.

Maybe I could find a carwash service close to the beach. Arrange for someone to follow me to the beach, take my car back, shampoo it, three times, then bring it back to the beach.

Or I could just sell it. My head had really started to throb. Despite having turned the fan on to high and opened all of the windows. I should’ve taken an extra-strength Ibuprofen or something.

I pulled into the parking lot at the pet store and once inside, headed straight to the shampoo aisle. I found something that was both unscented and biodegradable. Grabbed a bottle. Changed my mind. Grabbed the gallon jug. Paid without a word, fingers to my temple.

As I exited the store, I saw Kessie, Hunk, and Chum sitting in a circle on the pavement some distance from my car. Shit! Where was Snookums? Frantic, I scanned the entire parking lot as I broke into a run. No Snookums. Okay, maybe she was still in the car. How did Kessie get out without breaking her leg? And where was Spunky Doo? I couldn’t see him in the car or anywhere in the parking lot.

As I approached, Kessie and Chum parted a little. Snookums was barricaded inside their circle. As was Spunky Doo. Who was being repeatedly nudged, perhaps even nipped, by Hunk. Maybe Spunky Doo was supposed to have been part of the protective perimeter. It was unclear to me. And probably to him as well.

I watched in disbelief then as Chum, closest to the passenger door, crouched down a bit. Kessie leapfrogged over him back in through the window. Snookums followed.

“Good dogs,” I hugged Chum and Hunk when I got to them. “Such good dogs,” I put my arms around each of them. I opened the front door for Chum, and the back door for Hunk and Spunky Doo. Carsonwas, as expected, still lying listless in the corner of the back seat.

• • •

As luck would have it, I passed the high school on the way to the beach, and they were having a carwash. My first clue was the music. I could hear it from a block away. The original Rose Royce. Seriously?

I passed half a dozen of them dancing at the edge of the road, waving huge signs—‘CAR WASH $10’.

They were clearly having a good time. A very good time. Perfect.

I pulled in, nodded to the motley, and wet, crew at the road, then stopped near the small crowd of teenagers closer to the building, surrounded by pails, rags, sponges, washing—more or less—a silver minivan. There was another small crowd a little further away working on a black SUV.

“Hey, how’s it going?” I said. As soon as they saw my carful of dogs, the two small crowds converged into a large crowd. The silver minivan was momentarily forgotten. As was the black SUV. Two kids reached in to pet Chum. Kessie scampered over and put her tennis ball into the hand of one of them. Ever hopeful.

“No,” I said, reaching to retrieve the ball. “Soon.”

Two others at my side cooed at Snookums, who had traded places with Kessie and so was now in my lap. She wagged her tail.

Then Spunky Doo wriggled his way out the window—and went immediately to the group that was dancing. He joined in. The kids were delighted.

I quickly got out of the car. “Spunky Doo!” He was too close to the road. Fortunately, three of the kids danced him back to me, giggling all the way. Especially the one trying to teach him a bit of ballet.

“So,” I said to the crowd-at-large. “Do you have stuff to do the interiors as well? Like real upholstery shampoo things?”

“No, we just have rags, pails, and shit,” a tall young man said.

“Do you need your interior done?” A big and blonde young woman stepped forward, then stopped. Her nose twitched. “What is that smell?”

“Cigarette smoke and—”

“Chanel No. 5,” someone else identified it. “I thought they outlawed that stuff.”

“Apparently not,” I said, then briefly told them about rescuing Carson from the world’s worst headache and then having the world’s second worst headache myself.

“They have those upholstery things at the grocery store,” another young woman, compact and freckled, offered, nodding across the street. “You could rent one.”

I glanced across the street. “Tell you what,” I said to them. “A hundred bucks if one of you goes over and rents one, and a couple others follow me to the beach, to drive back my car, then you shampoo it, many many times, then deliver it back to me at the beach when it’s done.”

They conferred among themselves.

“We’ve got a better idea,” one of them said. A bunch of them proceeded to heft Spunky Doo back in through the window, then stood aside as the freckled girl half-climbed half-dove in after him.

“Cool.” I smiled. Oh to be fifteen. Sixteen. I hoped. With a valid driver’s licence.

• • •

“So,” she said, having found herself nose to nose with Hunk, a doberman, “Is he friendly?”

I grinned as I turned out of the parking lot. “Do you still have both arms?”

She laughed. “Hey you,” she addressed Hunk. “You’re a big—guy?”

I nodded. Hunk didn’t respond. I really needed to resolve the Little Miss problem.

• • •

A few minutes later, we pulled into the parking lot at the beach. I let the dogs out (yes, that was me), grabbed my gallon jug of shampoo, then turned to Sam, the freckled young woman.

“Two hours?” I asked, handing her my car keys.

“Should be long enough.”

“And not a trace of smell. Or I’ll just have to do this all over again.”

“You got it.” She looked at Carson, huddled at my feet, the only one not already splish splashing at the water. “Poor thing.”

• • •

Once I assured myself that we had the beach to ourselves, and everyone was safe doing their thing, I turned to Carson. She’d be first to get a bath. And again the last. At least. I took off her collar, washed it, then put it in my pocket. Might just buy her a new one. Then I picked her up and walked to the water. I waded in, then knelt and set her down. She was very cooperative. Or so depressed she didn’t care what anyone did to her. Wet, lather, rinse. Repeat. I ran my fingers through her coat, working the shampoo right into her skin. I was thorough. Wet, lather, rinse. And repeat again. She shook herself, then walked out of the water, and despondently lay down in the sand.

Chum was next. He’d been in the front seat and so hopefully the smoke and perfume hadn’t permeated his coat that much, but he had the thickest coat of the bunch. Clearly he’d been given baths at the beach before. He set his waterlogged beach ball on the sand, beside Carson—sweet—then stood still in the shallow water as I lathered him. He was, of course, already wet. I then retrieved his ball and threw it out as far as I could. He swam after it. And now he was rinsed.

Kessie’s turn. Wet, lather, rinse. Her and her ball. It became fluorescent again. She was delighted. I threw it down the beach for her to race after. Airdry.

Snookums hadn’t had a bath at the beach yet, but she’d been watching and waiting for her turn. I set the jug beside her in the shallow water, poured some shampoo into my hands, then ran my hands along her little body, scooping up water as needed to work up a lather. She licked the white foaming soap off her leg. Ugh. She shook, and since I hadn’t yet rinsed her, sent flecks of soap all over me. Just as well. I smeared them into my tshirt and pants, adding more from the jug.

She hadn’t actually swum yet either, preferring to splish splash along the water’s edge.

“Chum!” I called our resident lifeguard.

He came swimming toward me with his ball in his mouth. I took his ball and shoved it into my pocket. I left Snookums standing in the shallow water and started walking out, encouraging her to follow me. She wasn’t sure. Chum stood beside her, encouraging and reassuring. He took a few steps into the deeper water as well. She still wasn’t sure.

I went back to her, picked her up, and carried her in my arms until I was up to my waist. Chum was swimming circles around us, showing her how it was done. I eased her into the water, supporting her as her little legs started pumping. She grinned. I gradually supported her less and less, and eventually she was swimming all on her own. I dropped down and immersed myself. Rinse.

She made a circle back toward me, then, assured that I was still there, swam toward Chum. And, possibly inspired by the pet store parking lot events, onto his back. He continued swimming, Snookums still on his back like a baby loon on mama. Interesting.

Once out into the deeper water, he let himself sag, and Snookums was on her own again. She swam a little bit, then climbed back onto his back. He turned and swam back toward me a bit, then sagged again. Snookums swam back to me on her own. I picked her up. She giggled.

Then I set her into the water again and started walking back to shore, Snookums swimming beside me all the way.

And then I threw Chum’s ball for him, again out as far as I could. Such a good dog.

Hunk and Spunky Doo were next. Both had very short coats, so even though they were in the back with Carson, I assumed they weren’t suffused through and through with the stink. Which was just as well, since, at least in Spunky Doo’s case, I’m not at all convinced I got every part of him.

Finally I turned to Carson again, still lying on the beach. I went to her, picked her up, and the jug, then walked back out. I sat down in the shallow water with her in my lap and proceeded to carefully shampoo her chin, her muzzle, the fur around her eyes, her ears—I even rubbed my shampooed fingers inside her ears. Then I shampooed her under parts. And her tail. And under her tail. And between her toes. On each paw. I was determined to cover every part of her. Her headache must have started receding, because this time she swam around a bit. Rinse.

Bath time over, I started walking along the beach. Airdry set on slow. I threw Kessie’s ball along the shore for her, again and again, and I threw Chum’s ball into the water for him, again and again. Snookums did her usual splish splash thing along the water line, and Spunky Doo did his usual race ahead, race back, race ahead thing. Hunk wasn’t interested in playing in the water today, so he just walked beside me, as did Carson.

When we got to the ice cream place, I realized I didn’t have my wallet. I said as much to Shane, the university student who helped run the place every summer.

“No problem, I know you’re good for it.”

“Great, thanks!”

Mint, Butter Pecan, Peanut Butter Swirl, Tiger Tail Licorice, Espresso Express and—Carson was interested. That was a good sign. A very good sign, since ice cream could be a headache trigger of its own. I asked for a taster of Vanilla. Keep it simple. She agreed. Vanilla it was. And Triple Chocolate Brownie Fudge for myself. Because I can, I told Spunky Doo. Again.

We finished our cones, Snookums finished our faces, taking special care with Carson’s, and we headed back.

I had no idea what time it was, so we just sat in the sun until Sam brought the car back. It was, as promised, completely unscented. Still a bit wet, but then so were we.

• • •

We went home and had some supper. Carsonate well, finishing up an entire bowl full of kibble, which I took as a very good sign. Kessie showed her how to use the doggy door that led into the fenced yard, and Snookums helped me prepare the guest bed, again contributing a little squeaky mouse from her bowlful in the bedroom. I showed Carson that that was her spot, and not surprisingly, since it had been quite a day for her, she lay down immediately. (Well, not quite immediately. She turned around five times pawing at the towel to bunch it up a bit more.) (Apparently I hadn’t done it right.)

• • •

Next morning, a little nose poked my face, gently. Kessie. She’d nudge, then stare, waiting. If I didn’t rouse, she’d nudge again, staring and waiting.

I opened my eyes, saw her, and the joy in her eyes, which was reciprocated, and then I saw Carson sitting beside her. Smiling. Carson was smiling. Yay!

She settled in to our routine quite nicely, which was good, because her people never did call. It seemed Randy would rather have Sherry in his life than Carson, and apparently Sherry would rather smoke and wear perfume than have Carson in her life. Their loss. Carsonwas a delightful little dog, happy, alert, and well-mannered.

I retrieved her old collar, took the tag off, and threw the collar away. I washed the tag, just to be sure, then wrote my phone number on a piece of paper and taped it to the back. I then threaded a red bandana through the tag ring and tied it around her neck, making a note to buy her new tags and a proper collar.

It occurred to me that if Carson’s sense of smell was better than normal, for a dog—after all, many dogs seem to live with smokers and perfume wearers with no problem—we might be able to do something with it. I’d happened to read about the possibility that dogs might be able to detect cancer. Surely they’d do that by smelling it. Could Carson smell cancer? And could I teach her to let me know when she did? It was an intriguing idea.

I called the local hospital and spoke to the head nurse of the cancer ward. Until that day, I didn’t know that our hospital even had a cancer ward. She thought my idea had potential. I suspect she was willing to try anything that might reduce the number of people who’d been diagnosed, by traditional means, too late.

We arranged for a room in the basement to be totally disinfected, to become as much as possible scent-free. Then I set up a schedule asking for volunteers—people who’d been diagnosed as having cancer and people who knew they were cancer-free.

Soon after that, we were on our way to the hospital for our first day of training. As we approached the designated room, I heard a loud and angry conversation coming from within. So I paused before entering, to see what the issue was, hoping it wasn’t someone already making fun of Carson and my idea.

“I’m just saying that when you say shit like that—’I thank God he spared her, we’re so blessed’—what does that say about the rest of us who die from it? We’re not blessed? God didn’t care enough about us to spare us?”

I took a step forward, but the woman wasn’t done.

“And she didn’t recover because you prayed for her. She recovered because the cancer stopped spreading. Probably because of the treatment she received. Has your precious little group never prayed for someone who didn’t survive? How do you explain that?”

I started forward again, but—

“You know what I’m tired of?” Another voice. Male this time. “‘Fight it—you’ve got to fight the cancer, Don!’ Because then when I get worse, or die, it’s my fault. Like I wasn’t fighting hard enough!”

“Yeah.” Another woman. “You don’t fight cancer. Or any other illness. You endure it. You treat it. You prevent it in the first place. Why isn’t the government getting rid of all the carcinogens in our environment? Instead of handing out little pink ribbons.”

“Oh don’t get me started on those little pink ribbons!” Yet another woman. “Why they think they need to prettify breast cancer is beyond me. Do they think we can’t take it otherwise? It’s all pink this and pink that, like they’re trying to make it all nice. All girly. First, we’re not girls. Second, it’s not nice. It’s life-threatening. It makes you get rid of chunk after chunk of your body. I don’t see them putting cute little ribbons on gangrene.”

“That’s because gangrene isn’t sexy. Breasts are sexy. That’s what they’re capitalizing on. I swear it’s just an excuse to get boobs in the media. When’s the last time you saw a brown ribbon campaign for colon cancer? Which, by the way, kills more of us than breast cancer.”

“Like wearing a ribbon does anything. For anything.”

Another silence. Again, I stepped forward to enter—

“Speaking of pink, have you been to a Home Hardware lately?”

Loud guffaws.

“Those pink rakes? And screwdrivers? Like we’ve been avoiding raking the leaves and making small repairs all these years because the tools were navy blue and black.”

“Yeah, men are the color-phobes—no offense—not us. They won’t go near a pink screwdriver.”

“It’s all about maintaining the divide. Men on this side. Women on that side. What the hell for?”

“Either that or it’s fucking patronizing. It’s not the lack of pink toolbelts that’s been keeping us out of the trades.”

Another pause in the conversation. I stepped forward and into the room.

“Hi,” I said. “I’m Brett, and this is Carson.” I thanked them all for coming, then explained what I was trying to do, essentially that I hoped Carson would smell something similar with each one of them, and then not smell that something with the next roomful of people.

I walked her from one person to the next, asking at each one “Cancer?”, then putting her right paw on their foot, which would be her way of telling me ‘yes’ (I’d decided against a bark for obvious reason), then giving her a treat for getting it right.

Half an hour later, the room was full of people who didn’t have cancer. “Cancer?” I asked at each one and did notput her paw on their foot, then gave her a treat.

Half an hour later, another room full of people with cancer. And then another roomful of people without cancer.

• • •

We did this every day after our afternoon adventure with the crew. I was afraid she might be too tired to concentrate, but she wasn’t. I made sure to vary all the variables. I included men and women, people of all ages, people with different kinds of cancer, people with different stages of cancer.

I almost made the mistake of teaching her to identify those who’d had chemotherapy, until I thought to ask about that. In the first couple rooms full of people with cancer, all of them had had chemo, and I suspected that that would change one’s smell. So I started being sure to include people who had not had chemo, and switched to her left paw. Just to be sure.

I didn’t reprimand her for mistakes, since I wasn’t confident they were mistakes. Perhaps the cancer had gone, and the person didn’t know yet. Or perhaps the person had cancer. And didn’t know yet.

Then I started her on mixed groups and didn’t find out myself who had cancer and who didn’t until after Carson made her decision, just in case I was subconsciously cueing her. We’d go around the room, and at each person, I’d ask Carson, “Cancer?”, and we’d wait for her response. Then I asked the person. Again, I rewarded Carson when she was right, but just sort of ignored her when she was wrong. In case she wasn’t.

• • •

One day, an orderly was waiting for us outside the room. He looked like a football player, and I could see how his muscle would be put to good use here.

“Are you the person who’s teaching the dog to smell cancer?” he asked.

“Not quite,” I replied. “I’m hoping Carson can already smell cancer. As well as a million other things. I’m trying to teach her which one of those million things I want her to tell us about.”

“Cool. Is it working?”

Carson stepped up to the man, and put her left paw on his foot.

He looked at me.

“Do you have cancer?”

He nodded. “Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. Stage two.”

“Then I guess it’s working.” I would’ve smiled, but—the man had cancer.

“Wow.” He crouched and started petting her. “You are a fantastic little dog, do you know that?” She wagged her tail. Of course she knew that. “She’s your dog?” He looked up at me.

“Not really.” I told him Carson’s story.

“So does that mean you’re looking for someone to adopt her?” he asked.

I hadn’t really thought about it. Well, I had, but— “Are you interested?”

“Yes. Yes, I am,” he crouched again and resumed petting her. “You have a lovely coat,” he told her. “Oh, I knew you’d like that,” he was stroking her forehead, up from between her eyes.

“I could continue to train her,” he looked up at me. “I mean, it’s perfect. I work here, in the cancer ward, as an orderly. Tim Muldoon,” he reached up to shake my hand. “I’m here every day. So she could come to work with me, every day. I could—how exactly are you teaching her to tell the difference?”

I explained my method. And surreptitiously observed Carson while I did so. She was almost purring.

“I’ve been keeping notes of everything,” I said. “But I don’t have enough data yet to determine whether she can smell only certain kinds of cancer. Or only when it gets to a certain stage. I’m also wondering about whether she’s smelling chemotherapy or other treatments instead of cancer.”

“I haven’t had any chemo,” he glanced up at me.

“Okay, that’s encouraging.”

“But there are other treatments that surely leave a stink, so to speak.”

“Yeah, I figured.”

“You know,” he said, standing up, “police train their drug sniffing dogs with a kit. It has a bunch of different scents, each on a strip of paper in a sealed bottle or something. I wonder if we could do the same thing. If different cancers really do have different smells, and there’s no reason to assume otherwise… I’ll talk to the people here in the lab. I swear Ellen is a wizard, maybe she can come up with an equivalent, a cancer detection kit for Carson to use.”

“That would be great!” Why didn’t I think of that?

I looked down at Carson, still considering his request.

“Do you smoke?” I should’ve asked that at the beginning.

Tim laughed. “God, no. And I don’t wear Chanel No. 5 either,” he said. To Carson. “No perfume, no cologne, I’ll even switch to unscented soap and deodorant.”

“And you’re sure you want a dog in your life?”

“I am,” he looked down at Carson, who was actually sitting closer to him now than to me. “I’m sure I want Carson in my life.”

“But what about when—”

“My prognosis is very good. And with Carson, it’ll be even better.”

I was thinking quickly. I knew next to nothing about this person. Then I told myself, once again, take your cue from the dog. And Carson knew—Carson knew he was perfect.

“Okay, but I don’t want to just leave her here, now, with you. That feels too much like I’m just abandoning her.”

“It does. Why don’t—”

“When do you get off?”

“Actually, I just got off. That’s why I came down here. To wait for you.”

“Oh. Okay. Then how about we drive over to the pet store and the three of us will pick out a bunch of stuff for her. I didn’t bring anything from where she was before, and I haven’t actually gotten around to even buying her a collar yet. As you can see.” I nodded to her red bandana. “Then we can drive to your place, we can get her settled in, and then I’ll say my goodbyes.”

“That sounds great, doesn’t it, Carson?” Tim bent down and they snuggled. “We can get you a new collar, and a leash, and a bowl, twobowls,” he corrected himself, “one for your food and one for water, and some toys…” he babbled on as best he could between licks. “You didn’t have anytoys at your old house? Well, then, we’ll get you lots and lots of toys, we’ll fill our house with toys, yes we will…”

(free download of complete collection at jassrichards.com)

(one of the stories from "This Will Not Look Good on My Resume")

In this respect, my next job was an improvement of sorts. I worked on maintenance at a summer camp. It was a beautiful camp, on a lake in Muskoka, with swimming, canoeing, arts and crafts, theatre, waterskiing, tennis, golf, horseback riding, and etiquette for the ruling class. Maintenance was responsible for thegrounds, the docks, and the buildings (dining halls, rec halls, cabins, washrooms/showers, offices, infirmary, sheds, and stables). For a while, I did okay. There was some concern, I admit, when, on the day the kids arrived, I started dancing around, weaving in and out of clusters of mostly wide-eyed and wary kids, taunting “I don’t have to deal with you! I don’t have to deal with you!” However, since the episode wasn’t repeated, everyone pretended it didn’t happen. And I went about my business cutting the grass, repairing the docks, painting the cabins, and so on.

But then there was lunch. With the rest of the crew: Jimmy, the youngest member, summer help for three years while getting a forestry diploma, and now full-time; Clyde, a little slow—slow-thinking, slow-moving; Zeke, a wiry guy who would have reminded you of a World War I marine even if he didn’t have that tattoo of an anchor on his arm; and Mac, our supervisor. Jackie, summer help like me, wasn’t there. She didn’t eat lunch. But the others did, and they were talking about going hunting on the weekend.

“I don’t understand hunting,” I joined in. The look Mac gave me indicated that women were to be seen and not heard. Hm. John’s brother? He did have a ridiculously large and sturdy all-in-one wrench thing hooked onto his belt loop.

“I don’t understand the desire to kill,” I spoke again, loudly.

“It’s not that,” Zeke said. “It’s the excitement, the thrill of stalking an animal that’s big and wild and can tear you apart!”

“Yeah right. Like Bambi’s cousin’s going to tear you apart.”

“And it’s the challenge!” Clydeadded. “Deer are smart, you know!”

I’d say the average deer has an IQ of what, three? So I had to ask, “Smart compared to who?” For example, I understand there were a lot of hunting injuries the year the M-10 Moose Call came onto the market. Well, what do you think’s gonna happen when some moron stands in the middle of the forest during mating season and yells out in moose language ‘COME FUCK ME NOW!’

“The challenge?” I continued. “Give me a break. You guys hunt in a group, so already it’s what, six against one? And you use dogs, and ATVs, and even helicopters, to scare the animals out of the bush. And then you’ve got some geezer sittin’ in a truck parked at the side of the road just waiting to pick off the first fear-frenzied creature that runs across. Oh, the challenge.” ’Course then again, since said geezer has probably been chugging beer all afternoon, I guess that would be a challenge.

“It’s not just all that,” Jimmy pitched in. “We like the meat.”

“Then why don’t you go to a deer farm and just shoot one that’s out grazing in the field? Or a cow farm. Hey, I know! Get a job in a slaughterhouse!”

“’Cuz it’s gotta be wild,” Zeke grinned at Clyde.

“Okay, why don’t you just go shoot a skunk?”

“Big and wild,” he winked. He winked?

“Yeah, about this ‘bigger is better’ thing,” I responded. “It’s completely illogical. I mean, anyone can shoot a moose that’s just standing there. If you really wanna brag, hang a pair of chipmunk ears on your wall.” They looked at me with such— What? Had I suggested castration again?

“And the wardrobe,” I carried on. “Also highly illogical. I mean we have the—,” I adopted the bored and very gay voice of a pretentious British fashion designer, “—matching pants and shirt in camouflage ‘I’m hiding’ greens and browns. With perhaps a smudge of olive or taupe. While the accessories—vest and cap—are in fluorescent ‘I can’t help but be seen’ orange. The ensemble fairly shouts ‘I’m a man.’” By this point, they were ignoring me. Well, eating did require their full attention.

Another time, another lunch, I heard Jimmy and Mac mumbling to each other trying to figure out if Cathy, one of the new kitchen staff, was Chinese or Japanese. Or maybe Korean. Vietnamese even. They asked me what I thought.

“Isn’t she Canadian?” I replied innocently.

They glared at me. Now what? Oh. I’d broken another rule. The ‘Never ever expose our dim-witted prejudices, we take pride in being assholes, we take even greater pride in being ignorant assholes’ rule. So I asked her when she next passed by our table.

And with only half the attitude she was entitled to, she answered simply, “Canadian.”

Never one to pass up what was coming to me, I said, “See I told you so! Ya bunch of dim-witted prejudiced ignorant assholes.” Well, lunch was clearly over.

They all got up, heavily, as if eating was a job well done.

“Tonight then?” Mac looked at Zeke.

“Yup—Clyde’s place, right?”

“Right—”

“Who’s bringing the beer?” Jimmy asked.

Ah yes, it was Friday. Friday night was poker night.

“Y’know why women can’t play poker?” Mac asked, smiling nastily at me, rubbing in the exclusion. “They’re no good at bluffing.”

Hm. “Guess you’ve never had sex with a woman then, eh?”

•

So on my third day of ‘firewood duty’—a supposedly punitive assignment that involved being dropped off at the chopping site first thing in the morning and not picked up until the end of the afternoon, leaving one all alone all day long to chop firewood—I figured as far as being on the maintenance crew goes, life doesn’t get much better than that—on the third day of chopping wood, I developed my Theory of Man. Frankly, I think it rivals the Theory of Everything for explanatory value regarding life, the universe, and, well, everything.

My theory is this: men have a defective chromosome. The Y was supposed to be an X, but somehow it ended up missing something. Maybe it’s a case of stunted growth or arrested development. Whatever, due to this defective chromosome, uniquely characteristic of the male, men are less evolved.

Consider their fascination with movement. They always have to be doing something. They can’t sit still. This importance of movement is characteristic of many lower animals. Certainly it’s required for flight and fight. (And no other options occur to lower animals.) And for many, movement is a form of posturing—which explains the way men walk, and stand, and sit. On the other hand, such excessive physical activity may simply suggest that the organism’s mental activity doesn’t provide enough stimulation.

Not only must they be doing something, they must be doing it loudly. Men seem to be inordinately fond of engines, jackhammers, and chainsaws. This desire to make noise is suggestive of the lion’s roar—the louder the noise, the greater the threat.

Because, usually, the larger the animal. And of course size is another male obsession. Girth which in a woman would be considered obese and disgusting is carried by men as if it increases their value, their authority: they thrust out their gut just as they thrust out their chest. It brings to mind the many other animals that inflate themselves—the blowfish actually doubles its size. Men are concerned not only with physical size—in general and in particular—but also with the size of their paycheques, their houses, and their corporations. Simply put, the bigger, the better.

Closely related to the size thing is the territory thing. Men occupy a lot of space. Again, look at the way they stand and sit. They take up, they occupy, more space than they need—they lean on counters, sprawl on chairs, take over small countries.

Consider also men’s obsession with speed. Cars, trains, planes. Sex. Speed is, of course, important for flight, one of the forementioned behaviours favoured by so many lower animals.

Like their sexual response, men’s emotional response is, well, uncomplicated. They are easy to please. This lack of complexity is further indication that they are less evolved.

Some say that language is the mark of higher life forms. And, of course, as any grade school teacher will tell you, boys lag behind girls in verbal development. They’re just not very good at communicating. I believe the word I’m looking for is ‘inarticulate.’

By way of summary, consider dick flicks. Also called ‘action movies’, there is indeed lots of action. And lots of noise. The heroes are usually big. And they have big things—big guns, usually. The central conflict of a dick flick is almost always territorial. There is little in the way of plot or character development, but there’s always at least one high-speed chase. And, understandably, the dialogue in a dick flick consists mostly of short and often incomplete sentences.

•

Alas, lunch wasn’t the only problem. There was also that ‘Merger Maniac’ thing. Of course, maintenance staff was not supposed to interact with the kids—it goes without saying that we’re unqualified to do so. Which is why one kid stopped in his tracks on hearing me, seeing me, the janitor, take a moment to play some Chopin on the piano in the rec hall I’d just swept. Janitors can’t play Chopin. It totally rocked his world view. I’d probably sent him into years of therapy.

Anyway, one bright summer day while doing the washrooms, and pondering the cleaning products I was supposed to use—my rubber gloves were disintegrating—I heard what sounded like an awful lot of kids chanting “More! More! More! More!” Curious, I stepped outside, toilet brush in hand, to see four or five teams of kids on the playing field, each under a huge banner variously proclaiming Microsoft or Monsanto or something. After the chant, they’d huddle in their teams and apparently plan hostile takeovers, because then they’d all run around and, according to rules I still haven’t figured out, some won and some lost, and the kid in the corner with a huge stock market ticker tape thing changed some numbers.

At the next scrimmage, I ran onto the field with my pail of water—yes, dirty washroom clean-up water—and doused ’em all. I flicked my rag in the face of each of the camp leaders present, yelling, like Pink Floyd, “Leave the kids alone!”

I tried explaining—to Security, ironically—that I was not threatening to throw bricks at anyone, nor did I even haveany bricks, but the incident went on record nevertheless.

•

And then there were those little signs on the sanitary receptacles. One sign per receptacle, one receptacle per stall, ten stalls per washroom, five washrooms—that’s fifty times a day I’d read “This sanitary receptacle is provided for your convenience. You are requested to co-operate and use it for the purpose intended.”

‘For our convenience?’ I suppose the toilet paper is for our convenience too. No doubt some man came up with these signs.

‘A sanitary receptacle’? That’s just wrong. The receptacle may well be sanitary, thanks to yours truly, but I think what’s meant is ‘a sanitary napkin receptacle.’ ’Course the napkins put into the receptacle aren’t very sanitary at that point—‘menstrual napkin receptacle’ would be more accurate. But men do have trouble with such words. (Though they seem to handle ‘cunt’ easily enough.)

‘You are requested to co-operate.’ Someone’s been watching way too many late night movie interrogation scenes. Really, I think a ‘please’ would’ve sufficed. And actually, I don’t even think we need a ‘please’. I doubt we even need to be asked. I mean, why shouldn’t we ‘co-operate’? Women are generally inclined to keep things clean. And this was, after all, the girls’ washroom, not the boys’. (Twice as much time was allotted for cleaning the boys’ washrooms. At first, I thought that was because the men on the crew worked twice as slowly. But then one day I was assigned to the boy’s washroom. Until then, I’d always thought ‘pissing contest’ was just a metaphor.)

Lastly, ‘for the purpose intended.’ What else might we use a ‘sanitary receptacle’ for? A lunchbox? A weapon? (“And now for tonight’s top story: as we speak, gangs of women are roaming the streets armed with sanitary receptacles...”)

So I took all the little signs off the receptacles and bolted them to the walls in the boy’s washrooms—one above each urinal. Alas, this too went on record.

•

And then there was that trip to the dump. Jimmy, Jackie, and I were to make a garbage run. Not knowing how long the trip would be, I asked Jackie, who’d gotten into the front seat of the pick-up beside Jimmy, who was already at the wheel, if I could ride up front instead. “I’m very prone to motion sickness.” It’s true. Ask any one of eight airline attendants. And five train attendants. I even get nauseous working the microfiche machines in the library.

“Oh no, me too,” she moaned. She had a crush on Jimmy.

Well, the solution was obvious. “Okay, Jimmy, how about you sit in the back then and one of us’ll drive?” He glared at me. Then angrily started the pick-up, jerked it into reverse, and headed out to the road, spinning gravel and bumping recklessly over all the ruts. I guess I was staying in the back. My stomach lurched. What’d I say? I couldn’t figure it out. Surely he knew I could drive; in fact, I was driving my van clear across the country ’bout the time he was just getting his license. Halfway to the dump, it dawned on me.

“Oh I get it!” I leaned forward into the front seat. “My truck is my penis!” And then I threw up.

•

Near the end of the summer, the kids put on a talent show. Curious, I joined the other members of the crew sitting at the back of the main rec hall. Suddenly, everyone stood. What’s this, they stand for the Camp Director’s grand entrance? I looked around in disbelief. Then everyone—kids, counsellors, staff—started singing the national anthem. They were standing for the anthem. Shit. If I’d known that, I would’ve shown up late. Mac glowered—down—at me. I’d never actually seen anyone glower before. Glare, yes. Glower, no. Then as soon as it was over and everyone sat back down, he jeered at me, “Too stiff to stand?” (I’d been chopping firewood again.)

“No, I just don’t stand for the anthem.”

“Why not? You some kind of commie?”

“One question at a time,” I kept my voice low, as someone had come onto the stage to introduce the evening’s events. “I don’t stand for the anthem because first of all, it’s a bit arbitrary—why not play the town anthem instead, or the provincial anthem, or the planetary anthem? Second, why even encourage group bonding? I prefer to encourage individual identity: it’s much less dangerous, not to mention healthier.”

He gave me a blank look. You know that look of incomprehension, the look Sultan, Köhler’s chimp in that famous experiment, probably had on his face before he understood he could pile the crates on top of each other to reach the banana?

“Whenever we divide ourselves into little groups,” I continued to explain, against all odds of succeeding, but because the guy was taking a long time to introduce the first act, “there’s a good chance we’ll get into a hyperemotional, nonrational gang thing. And groups based on territory, such as nationalistic groups, are the worst. If you have a sense of self, you don’t need the identity of a group, a gang. As Einstein said, ‘Nationalism is an infantile disease.’”

“So you are a commie.”

“What?” It took me a few seconds to figure out his mistake. “Communism is an economic system, not a political system. It’s at odds with capitalism, not nationalism. And actually, my guess is that communists are quite nationalistic. They probably stand very proudly for their anthem.” Was the first act ever going to begin?

“You should still show some respect.” What a fine upstanding citizen he was. As self-righteous as they come.

“But I don’t respect—”

“What’s your problem?” He cut me off angrily. And a little loudly.

“I don’t agree with what the anthem is saying, that’s my problem. For example, the line ‘I’ll stand on guard for thee’—well, I won’t—”

“You don’t have to sing it, you just have to stand for it.” He was getting very impatient with me.

“Well, when I stand for something, I standfor it—for what it means.”

“Oh quit your nitpicking, it’s not really supposed to mean anything!” He was shouting by now, and people were starting to turn around to look at us.

“Then why does my not standing for it upset you so much?”

•

Amazingly enough, I wasn’t fired. I quit. Well I didn’t actually quit, I just kind of left early. It was near the end of August, the kids were gone, and we had just begun the summer’s-end clean-up. Apparently it would take the better part of a day just to drive around and empty the cabins of all the stuff left behind—clothes, food, you name it. A mere hour into that day, Mac whipped an unopened container of talcum powder into the pick-up from a cabin door. I happened to be standing between him and the pick-up. He looked first, I saw him. Turns out I ducked in time, the container sailed through the open back window, hit the windshield, and exploded. Pink talcum powder filled the interior. With the fresh scent of roses. I figured then was a good time to pick up my paycheque and not say goodbye.

•

But working with inanimates—the firewood, mops, and so forth, I mean—went so well, I got another maintenance job, this time at a rural recreation complex. And this time I was fired. You’d think little could go wrong when you’re dealing with inanimates. Not so.

Apparently I wasn’t happy enough. It was the second time I was being fired for not being happy enough. Still, it threw me. I mean, it’s not enough that I do my job well?

“You don’t have lunch with the rest of us,” the assistant manager said. “Not even coffee breaks,” she complained. “You’d rather play with your dog.” Well yeah. (I had been taking Kessie with me on nice days. She amused herself in the bush while I did whatever it was I was supposed to be doing. But at five to ten, five to twelve, and five to two, she’d be sitting outside whatever building I was in, waiting patiently, confidently, her ever-present bright fluorescent green tennis ball at her feet.)

•

I did spend one break watching the skating practice with the garbanzo guy. (It was a cold and rainy day—Kessie’d stayed at home.)

“Why aren’t there any men’s precision teams?” I asked him.

He looked at me, then back at the skaters.

“Sure, it requires attention to detail and a highly developed spatial sense. But men have those abilities, don’t they? I mean, isn’t that why, we’re told, they dominate science and engineering?”

He looked at me again, but said nothing.

“Maybe it’s the degree of cooperation required. Men are capable of cooperation—that’s what team sports are all about—but in hockey, football, basketball, and the like, there’s always room to be a star. Not so in a precision skating team. I betcha that’s why there aren’t any men’s synchronized swimming teams either. There’d be way too many drownings.

“And sure, men are capable of the timing that cooperation entails. Quarterbacks and their receivers demonstrate this all the time. But the perfect synchrony of a precision team performance is achieved not by such discrete instances of cooperation, but by continuouscooperation. The sport requires ongoing adjustment to others, which requires awareness of and sensitivity to others, not to mention patience, and persistence, with the practice. It’s not only about relationships—to the ice, to the music, to each other: it’s about maintaining those relationships.”

He spoke then. “Drill.”

Right. “Oh, well, give a man a gun—”

We continued to watch the guys skate around. Then another thought occurred to me. “I know what it is: members of a precision team have to put their arms around each other—that’s it, isn’t it?”

He exploded at that point, shoving himself back from the boards. “I don’t know why you’re so hell-bent to get men into it! Let the girls have their synchronized skating. If they played hockey, they’d get hurt.” True. They would. Because men have made beating someone senseless part of the game. And, in another case, the game.

“After all,” he added, “you gals’re more prone to injury, you gotta admit that.” This from the sex that has its reproductive vitals hanging by a thread, at the bull’s-eye of the body, with nary half an inch of fat for protection. And competes on the pommel horse, voluntarily.

•

“You’re quiet when the others are chatting on the job,” the assistant manager had continued. I’m thinking, I thought.

“You hardly ever smile,” she said. That’s because of what I’m thinking, I thought.

“For minimum wage, the smile’s not included,” I said. Unsmiling.

“Well, perhaps some day you can go back to school, get a degree, and get a job that pays more than minimum wage. I think you can do it,” she smiled, encouragingly. And I remembered then that, of course, I’d put only grade 12 on my resume—if I’d listed my degrees, I wouldn’t’ve gotten the job. And it had been either that job or welfare.

“And truth be told,” she said, “I wasn’t pleased with your little informal pay equity inquiry.” I had noticed that there seemed to be a clear division of labour, based on sex, and I had wondered if there was a difference in pay. Aloud. (And yes indeed, people get paid almost twice as much to stack chairs as to clean them.)

“Or your mention of black lung.” This was after one of my coworkers had said her whole arm was numb the evening of the day we did the dining hall floor. Said dining hall was as large as a school cafeteria and we had to scrub each tile, on our hands and knees, with a steel wool soap pad thing.

“Numb?” I had asked. “Does that happen a lot? I mean, how often do we have to do that floor?”

“Yeah, why doesn’t she just rent a couple of sanders or polishers or something,” one of the other women asked.

“You guys ever hear of black lung?” I asked. “Occupational hazard of working in the mines. They eventually got compensation for it, I think. Employers have to provide a safe and healthy workplace. You should say something.”

Right. Maybe something like, “When can I pick up my severance pay?”

(I figured the Labour Board would have fun with this one. But of course unless you’ve worked for three months at the same place, none of the labour laws regarding dismissal apply.) (You’d think I would’ve remembered that.)

(free download of whole book at jassrichards.com)