Dalhousie University Libraries Hosted Journals

Sheskin, David

DAVID SHESKIN
THE PLUMP BOAR
AT THE AGE OF 44, Barton Martin, Professor of Mathematics at Princeton
University, begins in earnest to search for a wife. In order to ensure the
success of his mission, yet at the same time keep it strictly confidential, the
professor is told by his psychiatrist to contact a marriage broker in Romania
by the name of Hulda Grest, who twenty years ago found him his beloved
Nadia. Mrs. Grest is a big-boned, heavyset woman who speaks five languag￾es. Although single at present, she had five husbands who all died of natural
causes within eight months of taking their vows. Most of the men she deals
with in her role as a matchmaker tell her they are looking for a young, at￾tractive woman. These men, however, are middle-aged or older and more
often than not are lacking in both manners and hygiene. Although she often
takes it upon herself to instruct such men on how they can make themselves
more appealing to women, few have heeded her advice. Yet in spite of this,
she can inevitably find most any man a suitable mate.
In their initial correspondence, Mrs. Grest instructs Professor Martin
to submit an ad that she will post in a newspaper purchased by women who
are searching for a husband. The professor submits the following advertise￾ment:
Attractive and accomplished professional man looking for a woman
with whom to share his life. Desired age between 25 and 35. Must be
attractive, intelligent, have scrupulous hygiene, and not be burdened
by overwhelming emotional problems. All candidates should be able
and willing to bear children. I will be in Bucharest during the last two
weeks of August and will expect a woman who is agreeable to marriage
to return with me to live in the United States.
Upon his arrival in Bucharest, the professor takes a taxi to the Hotel
Luna, which was recommended to him by a colleague who attended a con-
338 The Dalhousie Review
ference for mathematicians in Prague years before. His colleague, who was
single at the time, commented on how many attractive women there were in
Eastern Europe looking for husbands. A year later, he married a lady he had
met in Prague. Shortly after his colleague’s marriage, Professor Martin ran
into the man and his wife, who was nothing short of gorgeous, at a restau￾rant. Three days later, the professor broached the idea of looking for a wife
with his psychiatrist.
When Professor Martin arrives at the hotel, it is not at all what he ex￾pects. It is old and run down, and it appears to be the sort of place where,
among other things, prostitutes ply their trade. In spite of this, Professor
Martin tells the old man at the front desk that he wants a room on the top
floor that does not face the street. Upon entering his room, the professor
notices that it has a peculiar yet not entirely offensive odour. Although the
purpose of the professor’s trip is to find a wife, he also has a paper to prepare
for a conference in Brussels that he will be attending in December. Because
of this he spends his first few hours reclining on the small bed in the corner
of his room, trying to sort out the ideas his paper will address. Afterwards
he records some of his thoughts in a notebook he always keeps in the inside
pocket of his jacket. When it becomes dark outside, he calls Mrs. Grest, who
tells him that he should come to her apartment at noon the following day.
When he exits the elevator to go out to find a place to have dinner, the
old man at the front desk asks the professor if he likes his room.
“It seems to have a peculiar odour. Not unpleasant, yet unfamiliar and
strange.”
The old man smiles. “There are many strange odours in Bucharest. I
give you something with which to freshen the air. Lay it on the dresser, and
the molecules will be redistributed such that they have an air of familiar￾ity.”
“That is an unusual way of putting things. I take it you have a back￾ground in the sciences?”
“Are you a scientist?”
“A mathematician.”
“I’m afraid I’m not very familiar with mathematics. Although I read
many books, I really know very little about scientific matters.”
“Perhaps you could tell me a good place to get dinner?”
“Two blocks down on the right there is a small restaurant that serves
tasty, nutritious food. It is called The Plump Boar.”
The Plump Boar 339
As he enters The Plump Boar, the hostess greets him with a business￾like nod and seats him at a table for two in the middle of the dining room. A
minute later she escorts another man to the adjacent seat, who introduces
himself as Martin Barton, Professor of Mathematics at the University of
Melbourne. This other man also made the long journey to Bucharest from a
faraway city and coincidentally, or perhaps not, also submitted the identical
ad in search of a wife to Mrs. Grest, with whom he too has an appointment at
noon the following day. For a moment the two men are frozen in their seats,
staring at one another with the realization that they are looking at their mir￾ror images.
The hostess hands each man a menu and says, “It is called the EPR
paradox, and it confounded Albert Einstein, among others. Being that both
of you are men of science, perhaps you know that it involves a mysterious
relationship between two particles that is maintained no matter how distant
they are from one another. The EPR paradox is so named because of Ein￾stein and two young colleagues of his, Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen,
who in 1935 published a paper in which they argued that quantum mechan￾ics was incomplete, since it was incapable of explaining how the behaviour
of two particles can be related to one another over vast distances. The para￾dox is perhaps best understood if one envisions two apparently independent
particles that drift into space spinning in orbit. At some point we measure
the direction of the spin of Particle A and observe that it is spinning clock￾wise. We next determine that Particle B is spinning counterclockwise. As the
particles drift further apart, we measure them again. At this point in time
Particle A is spinning counterclockwise and Particle B is spinning clockwise.
We continue to periodically measure the spin of the two particles as the
distance between them increases. The direction of spin for Particle A varies
randomly each time we measure it, but each time we measure the direction
of spin of Particle A the direction of spin for Particle B is the opposite. With￾in the field of quantum mechanics there is no known energy or force field
that can account for the relationship between the spin of the two particles.”
In this instance, the two particles are Professor Barton Martin and Pro￾fessor Martin Barton. Although the two men are not related to one another,
from the moment they were conceived their lives have been inextricably
linked. If one were to possess extraordinary visual acuity, one might detect
the slenderest of silver threads connecting them at their navels, yet until to￾day this all but invisible connection has not altered the progression of their
340 The Dalhousie Review
lives. That is about to change. For you see, after the two men share a meal
of ciorbå de burtå (beef tripe soup), sarmale (cabbage rolls), and cozon￾ac (sweet bread), the hostess will present each man with a fortune cookie.
When the men crack open their cookies, they will find a small strip of pa￾pyrus upon which is engraved a cryptic message that only those well versed
in mathematics will be able to decipher. Having decoded their messages,
only one of the men will keep his appointment with Mrs. Grest the next
day. A week later he will depart Bucharest with a new wife, and within the
next sixteen months he will have a son, who three decades later will commit
a heinous act that will forever change the course of human history. As for
the other Professor of Mathematics, he will make his way to the rear of the
restaurant where he will discover a door that will open onto a staircase that
will convey him into some obscure corner of the universe where an infinity
of mirror images rotate in opposite directions until eternity.
Once the two men exit the premises, the hostess says to no one in par￾ticular, “It is only at The Plump Boar that the paradoxical laws of physics
are reconciled in such a way that some sort of equilibrium is restored, which
allows natural events to progress in the manner that is consistent with the
intent of the Creator.”

The Plump Boar

Benjamin, Chris

CHRIS BENJAMIN
CONTAMINATED BLOOD
TANYA IS DIGGING WHEN SHE HEARS THE TORTURED SOUND. Her
wife, Dr. Sarah MacDonald, has a backlog of blood vials that she is certain
are all contaminated. She’ll never have time to process them all. Most of
those patients have since died from the Oil Blood. Tanya suggested dump￾ing them into the cove, but Sarah said any contaminated blood is mostly oil,
so doing so would be like intentionally puncturing the hull of an old crude
tanker. Instead, Tanya has dumped them into a metal barrel they use for
autumn leaf burning. By the time she covers the hole, she has identified the
tortured sounds as a stricken braying, a noise like a stabbing victim trying
to find breath. She enters the barn to find Sunshine—who replaced their
car thirteen months ago at the start of the Oil Blood contagion when they
didn’t have much need for one anymore—pushing out a foal on a slipstream
of lochia. Tanya inhales the iron-and-feces scented air, doing quick math in
her head. Sunshine hasn’t seen another horse since she arrived, more than
a year ago. They don’t take her that far.
This realization sends Tanya running to the house for Dr. Sarah, eager
for an explanation or theory. Sunshine has already proven herself extraor￾dinary, sold as a hobby horse yet able to carry Tanya on her back at speeds
that would make Secretariat jealous, for entire mornings without stopping
to rest or even for a drink. Dr. Sarah jumps into her muck boots, dons her
lab coat and a headlamp, and brings with her the doctoring bag she threw
together at the start of the closure, a fashionable old burgundy tote bag filled
with a stethoscope, thermometer, gauze, anesthetic cream, stitching thread,
tongue depressors, and the like. “That for Sunshine, the foal, or me?” Tanya
asks. Dr. Sarah inspects the horses as if they’ve pulled some sleight-of-hand
magic trick, as Sunshine meticulously licks at the foal’s amniotic sheen.
It’s the slowest Tanya’s ever seen Sunshine move. “Filly,” Dr. Sarah says.
Sunshine’s licking reveals a hairless animal with deep, black skin. No mane,
no eyelashes, thin little sausage of a tail. Tanya folds her arms to stop her-
342 The Dalhousie Review
self from shuddering. Dr. Sarah’s voice provides more comfort. “Come look
closer at what this extraordinary horse has made, I suppose on a tryst one
night we forgot to latch the barn door, yes?” It was a logically perfect conclu￾sion, and Sunshine herself confirmed it with a canny whinny.
Except Tanya knows that she has locked the barn door every night and
twice and triple checked it. She doesn’t say it aloud, but Sunshine is more
precious to her, more comforting and useful in these times, than even Dr.
Sarah. For whatever reason, and whatever Tanya’s scientific wife might say,
Sunshine has created this offspring herself. She names the filly Immaculate,
which Dr. Sarah takes as another example of Tanya’s deadpan humour.
The next morning, Dr. Sarah calls Dr. Lewis, a veterinarian, who says
that hairlessness in a horse is a genetic mutation, which brings with it an
abundance of disease, a death sentence that will take down a foal within
weeks or three years at the most. “Best to prevent such misery,” he says. Dr.
Lewis mentions the phenomenon to his technician, who tells his roommate,
who posts about it online. Tanya can’t stand Dr. Lewis’ advice. She hides all
of her wife’s barbiturates and stands vigil in the pen, watching Immaculate
trot circles around her mother, playfully rearing up on her hind legs, life
bursting from her pores. Tanya can see that the foal will grow even larger
than her mother. She runs wider and wider circles, to the point Tanya is
surprised that Sunshine doesn’t follow to keep a closer eye, or whinny her
daughter back. Tanya notices a boy at the far end of the field, standing on a
lower rung of the fence and holding an apple out, with his phone pointed at
Immaculate. Pictures will soon be on the internet. Immaculate snatches the
apple and disappears it in a single movement. “Greedy little bitch and bald
as a poor man’s picnic table,” the boy says, laughing. Tanya sees the boy is
far from alone. There is a group of a dozen shyer children behind him, and
a few adults too. A couple is tossing cookies over the fence, as if a newborn
foal needs a fix. Immaculate has inherent wisdom enough to ignore them,
practising her whinny as if telling them where to take their sugar snacks.
Another man, barely the acceptably safe Oil-Blood distance from Tan￾ya, clears his throat, startling her. He introduces himself as Barney Putnam,
from over Lakeport way. “I’m starting a circus,” he says. “With things as
they are, people are craving old-timey entertainment. Simpler times. Is it
true you named her Immaculate? That’s goddamn perfect.” She takes his
card and excuses herself, leads Sunrise back to the barn, with Immaculate
trailing at her mother’s hooves. The next day Father Immanuel arrives and
Contaminated Blood 343
asks for time alone with the filly. Tanya was raised in his parish, but Dr. Sar￾ah has no trouble telling him in lurid terms that the horse was conceived in
the usual way, under the cover of darkness with an erect horse penis finding
relief inside a horse vagina that may or may not have been moist. “Similar to
what your parents did to make you.” The worst visitors are those claiming to
share Dr. Sarah’s scientific view, saying Sunshine must have escaped, that
a hairless horse is about as clear a sign of God’s hand as leprosy, yet they
want to study the “specimen,” needle her magnificent skin—which Tanya
knows feels softer than her lover’s, and which she also knows transports
her fingertips like the surface of water transports a schooner. They want
to extract fluids, cut off any chunks they think she can live without. They
want to strew bits of her to far-flung labs at the world’s corners so leading
experts on equine genome syndromes can find signs of impending decline,
defying what Tanya sees before her eyes, a filly that has in her few days
on earth almost caught up to her extraordinary mother in her size, speed,
strength and endurance. She has done so while eating nothing more than
her mother’s milk and the occasional apples of strangers greedy for snap￾shots of the freakish-looking animal. Dr. Sarah lets a local professor she
trusts take some samples for the labs, and he promises to procure proof that
her obvious strength and speed is illusory and impermanent. What isn’t,
Tanya wonders.
Each day the crowd grows, to the point they realize hundreds of people
must be leaving their zones to see the hairless wonder. Dr. Sarah calls the
RCMP, five of whom arrive in riot gear and line up to march around the
outside of the pen chanting “Stop! Back Up! Stay Back!” The crowd dis￾perses in waves, letting the gendarmerie pass. They roll back to the fence
with their sugary treats, all of which Immaculate ignores. Sunshine reaps
the spoils. The commanding officer, who wears her red dress uniform and
brown Baden Powell hat, explains that most of her usual detail are out and
about levying fines. Tanya, who is claustrophobic in good times and has
started suffering daily heart palpitations, builds a wooden turnstile at the
head of the driveway and puts a large tip jar beside it. She releases her stress
by riding Immaculate bareback around the pen, reaching speeds that make
her fear the horse will break free from centripetal force and fly her Icarus￾like into the sun and subsequently the sea. Tanya’s the only one who rides
her. Having grown up around half-wild horses in Cape Breton, she’s more
than comfortable, elated in fact, when Immaculate lowers her head as Tanya
344 The Dalhousie Review
places a stool beside her, to give herself a boost onto the horse’s back. Tan￾ya’s skin tingles, anticipating the transformation of curious crowds into an
amorphous blob as they speed by and the expansion of that blob to include
sky and cloud and sea and rain and fire, a continuous circular streak smell￾ing of taut skin, muscle, and sinew.
Inevitably the afflicted arrive presenting their wounds. A schoolteacher
who says she was laid off and lives in a room filled with empty bottles, a new
one every day. A man who says the cops beat him down for buying books
at a store instead of online. A man who transports his five hundred pounds
on an electric scooter; he says he almost drained the battery coming to see
their horse, and if it can’t help him walk again he doesn’t know how he’ll get
home. And a child celebrity with cancer, whose baldness and frailty almost
moves Tanya to let her sit in front of her as she rides Immaculate, but Dr.
Sarah proves herself to be the wiser half, predicting an ill child will come to
harm at such speeds without even a saddle. They haven’t tried to break Im￾maculate yet. Inevitably the Oil-Blooded people arrive, frightening everyone
but Dr. Sarah, who sees them every day. She has plenty of masks on hand,
but Tanya won’t let them anywhere near Immaculate, whose response to
the afflicted is always to nuzzle her face against theirs. That’s her response
to everyone. Some interpret this as proof of her healing powers; others say
it is a deep longing within her, something she herself needs. Barney Putnam
worries the vets are right, that she may peak early, wither and die young,
and he brings his strongman—a local farmhand who once finished second
in a provincial deadlift contest—to pet the young horse in the hopes some
of that strength will rub off. “Silly,” Tanya says. “By your logic she needs a
marathoner, or better yet a centenarian, if longevity’s what you’re after.” Dr.
Sarah says that Immaculate’s good bedside manner is sweet, but it won’t
cure the terminal. Immaculate refuses all their proffered thanks, sugar
cubes, apples, and handfuls of hay. She takes no food at all, no longer even
milk from her mother, only moderate gulps of water in the morning. The
lack of nutrients doesn’t slow her. She is much larger than her mother now,
a good 19 hands.
It so happens that three of the Oil Bloods die a day after their visit with
Immaculate. Their masked spouses and offspring arrive, demand proof of
the horse’s lineage, and question whether beautiful Sunshine is even the
true mother. “I told you before she’s a bastard,” Dr. Sarah says, resorting as
she does for simpletons to old-timey language. “We’re doing scientific tests,”
Contaminated Blood 345
Tanya adds, earning her a heavy stink-eye from Dr. Sarah, who doesn’t low￾er herself to saying those tests have nothing to do with lineage. Dr. Sarah is
as curious as anyone to observe Immaculate’s lifespan. However potent, she
expects it to be short, and everything about it fascinates her. She’s making
daily measurements of height, weight, and speed with Tanya on her back.
As Dr. Sarah glares, the bereaved rip off their masks and throw them into
the pen. Sunshine sniffs at them and lies herself down, not bothering to
find shade, as Immaculate goes for a few more quick laps. As Immaculate
gathers momentum, her hooves as loud and invisible as thunder, Tanya no￾tices a shift in the sound of the crowd assembled at the far side of the pen.
They are jeering. She runs to the gate when Immaculate stumbles rounding
the bend, shaking blood from a cut over her eye. Dr. Sarah joins them, and
Tanya manages to grab hold of Immaculate’s jaw, steadying her head as she
comes to a halt. She has no mane to grab. As Dr. Sarah cleans and dresses
the wound, Tanya scans the crowd. She sees not one but several slingshots
hanging from children’s back pockets. Enraged, she screams, wishing they
would all get sick and drown in their own crude. To hell with them, their
negligent parents too. They can have their money back. No one takes cash
anymore anyway.
That evening Dr. Sarah receives an email with lab results. They provide
more questions than answers. No abnormalities to be found, which is more
than the needed proof for Tanya and less than satisfactory to Dr. Sarah.
They want more samples: bits of hoof, eye discharges, vaginal fluids, earwax.
No hurry, just curious is all. Are they sure it’s female? Does it have normal
looking metacarpophalangeal and metatarsophalangeal joints? “Fetlock,”
Dr. Sarah says. Ankles. What’s the specimen’s current height and weight? Is
it losing size yet? Yet, the letter says. It’s the same with every lab, their flac￾cidity on display, nothing unusual showing up in any tests and more asinine
questions than useful information. Tanya emails them all back to explain
that Immaculate’s mother, Sunshine, has always been a wonderfully intui￾tive horse but that Immaculate is so attuned, almost simpatico, with Tanya,
offering quizzical expressions when the crowds disperse in the evenings and
they are together in the barn, Sunshine gently snoring already. “It is as if
Immaculate absorbs my gist but wants to ask for certain elaborations and
is hampered only by the shape of her mouth, her physiology, which though
hairless is otherwise perfect, for a horse. And you ask me about her ankles?
This is what happens when men try to run things themselves.”
346 The Dalhousie Review
The following day there are no crowds, not a soul in fact seeking to view
or touch the hairless horse. “Well, you’ve put an end to that cash equus,”
Dr. Sarah says with a light punch on Tanya’s arm, which makes her feel
heroic. She has saved Immaculate from the farting masses. But they later
hear that Barney Putnam has managed to wrangle himself a Big Top Tent
with a second-hand aquarium the size of a double decker bus, which now
houses a giant octopus that eats oil, to which news Dr. Sarah makes a face
that looks like she’s swallowing her own throat. No longer heroic, Tanya is
disgusted by fickle humanity, enchanted by the most novel thing. “It’s not
Immy’s fault,” says Dr. Sarah, who refuses to use Tanya’s formal biblical
name for Immaculate. But Tanya is as mystified as anyone by Immaculate’s
aloofness and the timing of the deaths of those three Oil Bloods. She knows
Immaculate’s sweeter nature and that this empathetic animal would never
mete out any harsh justice, even if she had such powers. Let them think
what they will, let them have their garbage-disposing mollusc, their hope
for a return to the status quo. Good riddance to white trash. “Her name is
Immaculate,” Tanya says. “Sure is,” Dr. Sarah says, but she won’t say the
word.
They argue, and Tanya spends the night in the barn and discovers that
Immaculate sleeps standing up. Deep, REM sleep, all night long. Plenty of
horses nap while standing, but they lie down at night. They’re able to lock
their leg joints while relaxing enough to have a nap. Horses enjoy a good
nap, and it’s good for them. In the barn they know they’re safe enough to
lie down and have a proper sleep. But Immaculate either doesn’t bother or
doesn’t feel safe. Tanya gives her a full rub down, massaging her long, taut
muscles for over an hour. Immaculate nickers, sighs, grunts, and snorts her￾self to sleep. She must be relaxed, but her muscles still feel flexed, ready to
flee.
In the morning Tanya jolts up at the feel of hot breath on her neck.
Sunshine’s. Tanya rubs Sunshine’s nose, stands, and brushes hay from her
overalls. Immaculate is sleeping still, her breath impossibly slow. Tanya
puts a hand against her side and runs it over her skin, which is smooth and
muscled like a bodybuilder. No movement. Tanya puts her face to Immacu￾late’s. The horse’s eyes are closed. She says her name as Sunshine nuzzles at
her from behind, looking for breakfast, unconcerned for her child who has
so quickly grown into something else. She can’t die. She is too healthy. Too
perfect. Tanya can’t imagine how they’d even dispose of such a specimen, as
Contaminated Blood 347
the experts keep calling her. They’d love to get their hands on her lifeless￾ness.
Desperate, Tanya grabs her mounting stool from a hook and throws her￾self aboard, kicking in her heels as she never has had to before. No response.
She claps her hand down on Immaculate’s neck, then claps both together
and shouts her name. “Immaculate!” Sunshine has joined in now, whinny￾ing then squealing. Tanya pulls on Immaculate’s ear. “Wake up, darling.
Forgive!” She tugs again, and Immaculate snorts. Alive. Tanya is so thrilled
she leans down and kisses her closed, black eyelid. Immaculate twitches her
skin as if shaking a fly. Tanya takes the hint, fetches some roughage for Sun￾shine, and goes to make nice with Dr. Sarah, who agrees to give Immaculate
another inspection. “But it may be her time, dear. She’s had an extraordi￾nary run.” Tanya refrains from telling Dr. Sarah of Immaculate’s sleeping
habits, choosing to delight in it like a secret treasure rather than provok￾ing her partner. They check on her frequently over the coming days. Dr.
Sarah is astounded by the tightness of the skin, the power emanating from
Immaculate’s every twitch. When a fly lands on her rear, she moves her
skin and it vaults off as if catapulted, soon flying too close to Immaculate’s
mouth so that she snaps a quick end to its brief life. “Now you’re hungry,”
Tanya says. But the horse remains immobile for three days, her biological
and surrogate mother on vigil together, Tanya patting her intermittently
with heated towels and cold compresses, Sunrise nuzzling and nickering.
But on the third morning, Tanya wakes to a constriction at her throat, feels
herself being pulled from her sleep upright, Immaculate biting her hood and
yanking. On her feet, she throws her arms around her love’s neck, and she
can feel the horse’s will through its veins. Immaculate wants her to ride. She
opens the gate that leads to the pen and climbs aboard, ready for the rush,
glancing back at Sunshine but only for a millisecond before the jolt, and they
are gone, less accelerating than snapping into highway speed like flicking a
switch. They are gone, over the gate and beyond the pen, Dr. Sarah waving
uncertainly. They are gone from the yard, beyond the town’s outer ring and
surely beyond their allotted zone, trees and ground and sky one nebulous
blur. Tanya thinks they pass the new circus, with the oil-eating octopus. She
hears the cheers or jeers of some illegal crowd with more cash than places to
spend, but she is afraid to turn her head and can only hang on and see where
Immaculate takes her.

Contaminated Blood

Doerksen, Patrick

PATRICK DOERKSEN
THE BACKDOOR LOCK
AFTER THE ACCIDENT, Lenn used the backdoor. It was a way around the
sadness; through the back he wasn’t coming home from work to find Molly
once again not smoking on the front porch, not waving through the kitchen
window, and not reading those slim French novels in the den by the vesti￾bule. Through the back, he wasn’t really coming home at all.
The lock’s PIN code hadn’t been changed since they’d moved in eight
years ago, but until now Lenn hadn’t taken the time to learn it. He had pre￾ferred that Molly let him in, the same way he’d preferred to keep his files,
his contacts, his passwords—all the keys to his life—with her, like an ongo￾ing trust fall. “Dangerously absentminded,” she called him, and this was her
manner of coddling. That was fine. God knew he’d done his share.
In the change bowl he found the PIN code written on a slip of paper.
She’d placed it there for his sake: a numerical ghost of herself to let him into
the house, continuing where she’d left off.
The lock’s operation was simple enough. Coming home, you entered
the PIN code and hit the oval button below the numbers, stamped with a
padlock symbol. Leaving, you pressed the oval button twice. The gears made
a faint electric whinny as the deadbolt pulled in or pushed out. That was all.
Even the numbers were easy. One, two, three, zero: three steps up and then
a total collapse.
But though the lock required no physical key, Lenn had difficulty. Again
and again he found himself standing beneath the portico at the backdoor,
blinking at the lock’s cool flash of bronze, and wondering: had or hadn’t he
just entered the PIN code? Or maybe he’d done so incorrectly? Without a
key to provide that unmistakable kerchunk of a deadbolt shifting position,
he was never as sure as he liked. So he’d re-enter it: step, step, step, col￾lapse.
And then one evening in late September he noticed the mug he held, the
tea already half-drunk, wasn’t his.
364 The Dalhousie Review
Lenn’s custom was to steep a pot of herbal tea until the water went tepid.
Molly had disdained this, her English blood crying out against cool tea, but
the process structured his evening: he washed the dishes while it steamed
beside him on the counter, then took it into the living room to read. He be￾gan with one of the dozen periodicals he kept up with and, when the first cup
was finished, switched to a novel. An empty teapot meant bedtime.
Lenn eyed the mug. It was very like his old one, but it seemed to be
made of authentic bone china because its Celtic knot pattern shone through
the mug’s pale interior when held to the light. He glanced around the living
room, bewildered. Had Molly broken and replaced it without telling him?
Yes, that was her all over, her sweetness emerging in secret, sly little acts.
Ah, Molly!
The thought filled his head with its weight and brought his chin to his
chest. He shook with tears.
But then it happened again and again—half a dozen times over the next
few months. Things altered. He came home to find that all the upholstery
bore the imprint of his backside, as though he’d sat in each for years. He
slipped into bed and nearly yelped at the new softness of the blankets. He
went down to the basement to chop wood and found, where the hatchet
hung, a heavy fireman’s axe.
“Dangerously absentminded”? This was something else.
Then there was the day he took down, for dusting, a certain photograph
of Molly. On vacation in the Lake District for their tenth anniversary, they’d
gone for a walk and encountered a mottled, shaky-legged lamb. Molly had
always been shy to express her affection for small animals—she scorned all
easy sentiments—and the photograph bore this tension visibly: she stood
a few paces away, half-looking at the lamb, as though resisting an urge to
stoop down and beckon it closer. It was one of Lenn’s favourite pictures. He
had taken it knowing that her protests were insincere, that she wanted a
picture and only didn’t want to want one.
Now, looking at it closely, he saw something new. Something that hadn’t
been there before. Her face was lit by a secret smile.
Lenn’s neck prickled.
He once dreamed that Molly had left him for someone else—not a man
but a dark and stooping shadow without a face. The dream showed him ex￾actly what it felt like, exactly how he would inhabit the shape of that fury
and that grief. His own sobbing woke him, and there in bed Molly comforted
The Backdoor Lock 365
him from the sting of her own infidelity. She’d done nothing, and yet he had
been so angry at her. How could she cheat on him with that thing, which he
knew was her own depression, her own sweet melancholy?
Lenn shattered the glass frame on the mantle. Then he lowered himself
on the recliner chair, pressing his hands flat to the armrests to keep them
from trembling.
Finally, after work the next day, he made the connection. Parking in
the alley, unlatching the gate, and taking the weedy stone path to the back
portico, his thoughts were elsewhere; he’d done this so many times that it
happened automatically. And so, once again, he found himself staring un￾certainly at the lock’s bronze panel. Had he just, or hadn’t he just? For good
measure he entered the numbers again.
Immediately, a not-quite-human voice called out from within the
house.
“Lenn!”
In the living room he found a macaw. It was perched in a tall cage by the
spider plant; a feathered rainbow, it cocked its head at him and called again.
“Lenn! Come home!”
He had always wanted a macaw—would have had one long ago, in fact,
but for Molly’s insomnia. After the accident it had crossed his mind that
maybe now was the time, but it felt opportunistic. Now here it was, and it
already knew his name. He inspected the bronze plaque on the cage—“Pol￾ly”—and an uneasy shiver passed through him. But of course that’s what you
called macaws. “Polly wants a cracker.” The name had nothing to do with
Molly. He found some seeds in a cupboard, and the bird ate naturally from
his hand, as though it had done so a hundred times.
Lenn understood now. If unlocking a lock gives you access to what is
yours, then a further unlocking gives you further access. Yes—when he en￾tered the PIN code once, the bolt slid back once; when he entered the PIN
code again, the bolt slid back once more, to let him more in. Entering the
numbers twice wasn’t the mistake. The mistake was only entering them
once.
Nervous, yet unable to do otherwise, Lenn began to deliberately double￾enter or sometimes triple-enter the PIN code when he got home in the eve￾nings. Might he be greeted by his favourite vinyl of Bach’s cello suites, set up
on a record player? A row of warm macaroons arranged on the counter? But
often, hoping for one thing, he got another. It seemed he possessed tastes
366 The Dalhousie Review
unknown to himself, tastes that the backdoor lock knew and revealed in
stages. It replaced his library, book by book, and he followed along eagerly,
for the new books were filled with marginalia in his handwriting: he knew
he was meant, in effect, to catch up with himself. “Passion is not enough,”
went one poem he’d underlined. “We die and are put into the earth forever.
We must insist while there is time.” Polly he moved to another room, in
order to remain uninterrupted; she had an unnerving habit of squawking
at him, “Come home, Lenn! Come home!” His absorption in these books
was so great that, finishing his tea, he didn’t go to bed but made another pot
and kept reading. For the first time in months, he felt gladness. Things were
happening again; life hadn’t dried up.
The evening a bottle of Bowmore Eighteen replaced his Jack Daniel’s, a
glass already poured. It felt to him like a toast.
Half-drunk, he went outside into the back patio’s box of moonlight to
peer with a penlight into the lock. The deadbolt rested far back in the shaft,
like a worm in its tunnel. A flash of excitement lit his chest. He could make
it retreat further than that. He’d been unlocking the backdoor two or three
times and thinking that sufficient, but this still left the door mostly locked,
even ninety-nine percent locked. He hadn’t yet entered his own home. Not
once, not really.
Just then there rose a faint scuffing sound from inside. Lenn stiffened,
listening. It came again.
In the basement, by the laundry room, he found a door. It was a solid
oak slab that stood eight feet high with a huge brass knob in the centre, and
it was locked.
He hadn’t set foot in the basement since he’d finished off the last of
Molly’s frozen pies from the deepfreeze. Who knew how long it had been
here? He put his ear to the door and heard a shuffling sound, like a creature
pacing on the other side. He knocked, but the thing kept on.
A strange feeling came over Lenn. He stood very still. What was that
now, sniffling? He waited. Long minutes passed, and his hand turned sweaty
against the wood. All at once the sniffling broke out into full-throated sobs—
a sound so hopeless, so heartbreaking, that his skin tightened and all that he
knew was the urge to kick down this door and end that sorrow. Then, from
the weeping, a voice rose up.
“Lenn! Oh, Lenn!”
His mind buckled like knees under a load.
The Backdoor Lock 367
Lenn threw himself on the door. The wood was so taut in its frame that
not even a piece of paper would fit underneath; it didn’t give one hair. A
minute later, panting and sore, he collapsed with his back to the door, his
head against the brass knob.
Maybe, he thought, she isn’t really there. Maybe it’s just her voice. Or
maybe, if she’s there, it isn’t really her. She had driven into a concrete via￾duct, the car had burst into flames, they had only identified her by her teeth.
This couldn’t be.
Molly wept on.
“They said you braked, Moll, but you didn’t swerve.”
His sobs were gum in his throat.
“Why didn’t you swerve?”
He had asked so little of her in their life together. He hadn’t asked her
to work, to have children, to switch medications, to do anything at all. Just
be. Was even that asking too much? “Goddammit, Molly—did you do it? Did
you?”
His outburst sickened him into silence.
That night he brought the mattress from the master bedroom to the
basement and stayed there until morning and then the rest of the day, skip￾ping work, not eating, just leaning against the door and listening. “I’m here,”
he said now and then. “I’m right outside.” Maybe it made some sort of dif￾ference. Maybe a part of her heard. With this hope, he began to reminisce
out loud. “Remember that summer after our honeymoon?” he asked. “You
were angry with me, and I said you could shave my chest hair into the shape
of a heart if it made you feel better, and the next three weeks of vacation I
was too embarrassed to go swimming. Remember that autumn you bought
all those strange-looking squash and put them everywhere, in the bed, in the
shower, behind a seatbelt in the car, like new members of the household?”
He went on. There was so much gone, so much of them that was now
cut in half, and he felt compelled to rehearse it, to press himself against the
ache of this half-having. It brought to mind those moments at the end of so
many evenings when he would draw Molly to the couch, and they would sit
together in stillness, neither of them needing anything from the other, nei￾ther of them with anything to say, everything passing through his awareness
without judgment. There was an intensity to that peace. Sitting beside her,
he realized anew each time: this was the point of it all. Not work, not books,
not busyness. If he didn’t get to sit next to Molly at the end of the day, the
368 The Dalhousie Review
day had failed. Only now, while he was sitting with Molly, she wasn’t sitting
with him.
At last, Lenn pulled himself away from the door. He knew what he need￾ed to do. On the patio, his t-shirt stinking of himself, the night rain striking
the portico, he faced the lock. One breath. Two breaths. He punched the
PIN code and hit the oval unlock button. The gears drew the deadbolt back:
lrrr-zzz. Then he punched the PIN code and hit unlock again and again. As
he went on, he could feel something happening on the other side—a shifting,
an expanding. At last he stopped, afraid. Never had he entered the numbers
so many times in one go. Surely this would be enough.
When he stepped inside, all was changed. At first glance it didn’t seem
to be an inside at all: columns rose like ancient trees, making contact with
a ceiling almost too high to see and creating a space so vast that a breeze
had formed. Through the windows, which were everywhere, a hot silver
light shone, as though the moon floated just on the other side. Lively cel￾los played a melody he couldn’t recognize. There were clusters of soft blue
lights swaying in the air, vines growing up the walls, and birds perched on
those vines. Not any birds: macaws. “Come home, Lenn, come home,” one
said, and the rest took up the chorus. He looked to his right, where the living
room had been, and saw vast bookshelves with material fit for an eternity of
reading.
There, beside them, a stairwell descended to the basement. He flew
down the steps and fell upon the brass knob, but the door was still locked.
Now Molly’s sobs were louder than before, a banshee keening that
drowned his thoughts. He smashed his foot against the solid, unbudging
wood. It would take more than this to break it down, he sensed. It would
take the strength of the whole universe and a little more.
Without forewarning, just as a wind suddenly dies, Molly’s wailing
ceased. From within he heard the sound of a faucet followed by flowing wa￾ter, like a bath being drawn. Molly, who had suffered a guilt complex with
even the simplest pleasures, had always needed to be talked into a bath. The
energy bill, she’d say. We bathe too often. Humans aren’t meant to have so
many baths. Were there baths when our ancestors lived in caves? Her ex￾cuses always missed the main point: she loved them. And Lenn, with ritual
regularity, teased her around to it each time. It was delicate, painstaking
work, but how he liked to win, to see her finally slip beneath the steaming
water with a sigh deeper than bones. And now she was in there, drawing a
The Backdoor Lock 369
bath he hadn’t talked her into.
Lenn went for the axe. A part of him expected that the blade would
not be able to enter the wood, that some invisible force might stop it. He
planted his feet shoulder-width apart, brought the great steel head above
him, and drove it into the door. The edge went deep. He brought it up again,
its weight like a promise in his arms. “Molly!” he cried. And the blade came
down. It rose up and descended until his arms were groaning, and still he
hacked. Wood chips sparked off. A splinter-sized hole appeared. The hole
grew until he could reach his hand through and unlock the door from the
inside. Sweat dripped from his eyebrows to his cheeks. He flung it wide.
In a deep freestanding tub at the centre of a great darkness, Molly was
submerged to the chin. Her eyes met his, and time stalled.
She stood. Tiny fingers of water ran down her collarbone and between
her breasts. She took a step out of the tub. Her skin was flushed red as a
peeled beet. The redness was too much; he wondered a moment if she had
skin at all. Then a towel covered her, and she took a step forward, her raw
skin steaming, and whatever doubt Lenn had harboured vanished.
“You were dead,” he said. “The crash. The funeral. These months alone.
You were dead.” He moved forward and, while she stared at him in aston￾ishment, embraced her. Her solidity made him gasp; it filled him with an
uncontrollable need for her presence, and the deeper he pressed into her the
more he needed. But she remained quite still.
He pulled back. Molly was looking out into the hall, where thin silver
light fell on the floorboards and cello music feathered down from the stair￾way. Confusion, hope, pain, fear: all were mixed together in her eyes.
“Lenn . . .”
He flinched at her tight, quiet voice. Had he, after all this, made the
same old mistake? Moved by that saviour impulse she found so tiresome,
had he only intruded yet again, unwanted, into her dark mood?
She’d once said to him bitterly, “You are the only person I know who
won’t just let me be unhappy.”
But that refusal was love, wasn’t it?
“Come with me,” he said.
She pulled away from him all the way up the stairs. “Where are we?” she
said, seeing the vast room. “What’s that light at the window? Is that a ghost?
An angel?” Her questions increased in pitch as he led her to the backdoor.
The rain hadn’t let up, and the portico was too thin to cover them both. It
370 The Dalhousie Review
slapped her bare skin.
“It’s the lock,” he said. “A good thing is happening, if we want it to. We
can go deeper in. There’s more unlocking still.” He entered the PIN code
and heard the familiar electric whinny of the deadbolt receding. He entered
it again, gripping Molly’s trembling hand.
“I want to go back,” she breathed. “I’m scared. Take me back.”
“Into the basement? Into the dark?”
“Yes.”
“No, Moll. I won’t. I won’t let you do that to yourself. Not again. Not
anymore.”
As Lenn entered the numbers, again and again, something began to
happen to the door. It grew warm, as though a sun burned just on the other
side, and a sound came through, a thousand distant cellos going back and
forth on the same note. Now there was the scent of jasmine. Now his tongue
prickled. He was afraid, yes, but also excited, and feeling Molly’s hand in his
gave him the necessary courage. How strange that entering your own home
should take courage.
“Please,” she said.
“Molly, when will you learn that your unhappiness is mine? That I’ll
always come for you?” He kept punching in the PIN code.
She looked at him, naked, shivering, her brown irises like tight fists
clutching fear.
“Put your hand on the doorknob.” She hesitated, and he guided it there.
“Now open it, Molly.” The deadbolt slid deeper and deeper, impossibly deep,
the unlocking happening now at a level outside imagination, expanding into
a place beyond any he had hoped might exist. “Open it,” he said. “Open it.”
And she did.

The Backdoor Lock

Coupal, Chelsea

CHELSEA COUPAL
ORTHODONTICS
I bumped into your sister in August. Somehow, summer feels
far away even in the middle of it; melancholy, even in August,
this heat. She has the same mouth as you. The way her lips
fold over her teeth, the way her smile curves downward.
I haven’t seen you in five years. Your teeth were tucked away, peas
behind smooth shells, or beads. I used to run my tongue across them.
I still bite my nails until they hurt, still write you alive at night sometimes.
I went to the orthodontist finally. I pretend we’re walking
to your mother’s grave, sun breathing on the backs of our necks,
hair on my arms standing on end. August, early evening, melancholy.
The bright moon, already open, one pearl. Somehow you felt far away
even in the middle of it. I haven’t seen those places in years.
But they show up unannounced; the way rain comes,
and you can smell how dry it’s been, the dust that’s settled over everything.
She really does have the same mouth as you, lips that fold together,
tidy as a note. I bumped into her in August. She knew me right away.
I pretended I don’t still hold those days between my fingertips,
even though I run my tongue over the front tooth I chipped
around midnight fifteen years ago on a Bohemian beer bottle. I still do.
He asked if I wanted braces. But teeth are bones, aren’t they?
Orthodontics 399
Orthodontists force them into straight lines slowly. Our teeth say who we are.
Yet over and over, we force them together, slowly. These beads, bones, and pearls.

Orthodontics

Enns, Anthony

CONTRIBUTORS
CATHERINE AUSTEN’s novels have won the Canadian Library Association
Young Adult Book Award and the Quebec Writers’ Federation Prize for Chil￾dren’s Literature. Her short stories have also appeared in The Fiddlehead,
The New Quarterly, and Write.
GARY BARWIN is the author of 26 books, including Yiddish for Pirates
(2016), which won the Leacock Medal for Humour and the Canadian Jewish
Literary Award, and Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted: The Ballad
of Motl the Cowboy (2021), which also won the Canadian Jewish Literary
Award. He lives in Hamilton, Ontario.
CHRIS BENJAMIN is an editor and writer in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He edits
Atlantic Books Today, and his fourth book, Boy With A Problem (2020),
was shortlisted for the Alistair MacLeod Prize for Short Fiction.
RICHARD BRAIT is a corporate lawyer in Toronto, Ontario. He is currently
completing his M.F.A. at Bennington College. His poems have been pub￾lished or are forthcoming in Event, Exile Quarterly, The New Quarterly,
The Queen’s Quarterly, and TickleAce. He was also shortlisted for the Fish
Anthology’s Lockdown Prize in 2020 and won the Gwendolyn MacEwen Po￾etry Competition for Emerging Writers in 2021.
NANCY BRANCH’s short fiction has been published in The Antigonish Re￾view, Found Press Quarterly, The Mitre, The Nashwaak Review, The New
Orphic Review, The Prairie Journal, Taproot, and Waterlines, among oth￾ers. Her creative non-fiction pieces have also been chosen as finalists in The
Malahat Review’s Open Season Awards and Room’s Creative Non-Fiction
Contest. She currently lives in the Eastern Townships in Quebec.
AUSTIN CHISHOLM is a poet and writer living in Vancouver, British Colum-
442 The Dalhousie Review
bia. He completed his M.A. at the University of Western Ontario, and his
non-fiction has been published in Megaphone Magazine and The Tyee.
CHELSEA COUPAL’s first poetry collection, Sedley (2018), was selected by
Chapters Indigo for an Indigo Exclusive edition and shortlisted for three
Saskatchewan Book Awards. Her work has also appeared in Arc, CV2,
Event, Grain, and Best Canadian Poetry, among others.
PAUL CRESEY works at the Royal BC Museum in Victoria, British Columbia.
His short fiction has been published in Burning Water, Grain, The New
Orphic Review, The Prairie Journal, and Qwerty, and his collection Exit
Strategies is forthcoming in 2023.
MALKA DASKAL received a M.A. from Columbia University and was the re￾cipient of the Maricopa Artist of Promise Award in 2016. She is currently a
fiction reader for New England Review, and her work has appeared or is
forthcoming in The Bookends Review, December Magazine, Kind Writers,
Passages, and The Traveler. She lives in Phoenix, Arizona.
LYNN DAVIES is the author of three books of poetry, including most recently
How the Gods Pour Tea (2013). She lives in Fredericton, New Brunswick.
JAMES DEAHL is the author of 29 literary titles, his four most recent po￾etry books being To Be with a Woman (2016), Red Haws to Light the
Field (2017), Travelling the Lost Highway (2019), and Earth’s Signature
(2020).
PATRICK DOERKSEN is a graduate of the 2017 Clarion Workshop at the Uni￾versity of San Diego and holds a M.F.A. from New York University. His work
has appeared in Aurealis, FreeFall, and Mysterion, among others, and one
of his stories was selected for the Journey Prize Anthology (2017).
ATMA FRANS’ stories and poems have appeared in Arc Poetry Magazine,
Chiron Review, CV2, Lighthouse Literary Journal, The New Quarterly,
Obsessed with Pipework, Understorey Magazine, and elsewhere. She lives
in Gibsons, British Columbia, where she is currently working on a collection
about (inter-generational) trauma and happiness.
Contributors 443
FRED JOHNSTON’s most recent poetry collection is Rogue States (2019). His
work has also appeared or is forthcoming in Descant, The Edinburgh Re￾view, The Fiddlehead, The Financial Times, The Guardian, The Irish Times,
The London Magazine, The Malahat Review, The New Statesman, Poetry
Ireland Review, Prism, The Sewanee Review, The Southern Review, The
Spectator, Stand, and The Sunday Times, among others.
ROBERT KOSTUCK’s work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in the an￾thologies Everywhere Stories (2016) and Women of the West (2017) as well
as the journals Bryant Literary Review, Concho River Review, DoveTales,
Event, Free State Review, Kenyon Review, Louisiana Literature, The Mas￾sachusetts Review, Saint Ann’s Review, Southwest Review, and Zone 3.
LANCE LARSEN is the author of five poetry collections, including most re￾cently What the Body Knows (2018). His poems have also been published
in American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, New England Review,
New Republic, New York Review of Books, Paris Review, Ploughshares,
Poetry, Southern Review, and Times Literary Supplement, and his prose
has been published in Brevity, Georgia Review, Gettysburg Review, and
The Iowa Review. He has won a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from Rag￾dale, Sewanee, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and six of his non￾fiction pieces have been listed as notables in Best American Essays. He cur￾rently teaches at Brigham Young University, and he completed a five-year
appointment as Utah’s poet laureate in 2017.
CLAYTON LONGSTAFF’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Canadian
Literature Magazine, Geist, Prism, and elsewhere. He currently lives on the
unceded territory of the Lekwungen and WSÁNEĆ nations on Vancouver
Island, British Columbia.
LAWRENCE MILLMAN is the author of 18 books, including such titles as
A Kayak Full of Ghosts (1987), Last Places (1990), Northern Latitudes
(2000), Lost in the Arctic (2002), Hiking to Siberia (2012), and Fungipedia
(2019).
AMANDA PETERS is a writer of Mi’kmaq and settler ancestry. Her work has
appeared in The Alaska Quarterly Review, The Antigonish Review, and
444 The Dalhousie Review
Grain. She won the 2021 Indigenous Voices Award for Unpublished Prose
and was a participant in the 2021 Writers Trust Rising Stars Program. She
has a Certificate in Creative Writing from the University of Toronto and a
M.F.A. from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
She currently lives in the Annapolis Valley, Nova Scotia.
ANTHONY PURDY lives on the South Shore of Nova Scotia. His poems and
stories can be found in recent issues of The Fiddlehead, FreeFall, Fresh
Voices, The Goose, Poetry Pause, Prairie Fire, and Queen’s Quarterly. One
of his stories was longlisted for the 2021 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story
Prize. His critical work, published in nine books and over seventy essays, has
been consistently interdisciplinary and intermedial, embracing the fields of
modern French literature, comparative and general literature, film and vi￾sual culture, and the intersections of literature with both art and science.
DAVID SHESKIN is a writer and artist whose work has appeared in The Jour￾nal of Irreproducible Results, Notre Dame Review, Permafrost, Puerto
del Sol, and Stand Magazine. His most recent books are Art That Speaks
(2018) and David Sheskin’s Cabinet of Curiosities (2021).
JOHN TUSTIN’s poetry has appeared in many literary journals since 2009.
MICHELLE WAMBOLDT was born and raised in Truro, Nova Scotia, and now
lives on Nova Scotia’s beautiful south shore. She earned a B.A. in English
from Dalhousie University and a Journalism Diploma from the Humber
College School of Journalism in Toronto, Ontario. Her debut novel, Birth
Road, is forthcoming in 2022.
HOWARD WRIGHT lectures at Ulster University in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
He was awarded second prize in 2018’s Ver Poets Open and Commended
in the McLellan Prize. His poems have since been published in Blackbox
Manifold, Cyphers, and Stand. Others have appeared in Northwords Now
and Abridged.
JANET YOUNGDAHL’s writing has appeared in The Antigonish Review, Light:
Journal of Photography and Poetry, The Malahat Review, The Maynard,
and Red Wolf Journal.

Contributors

ENNIS, RON

ON THE ICE

MILLS, TARA

TARA MILLS
GOLDEN JACK
BORN CAESAREAN ON A SUNNY TUESDAY AFTERNOON in September,
we meet Jack arms first, reaching to the heavens, willing himself from grey
to blue to pink. His eyes are pale and clear, and he has a thin shock of white
hair. He is cherubic, and I think it’s going to be easy; I’m going to be good
at motherhood.
At six months, we start missing milestones. We know there’s something
different about our baby, but neither of us has the courage to give voice to
our growing concern. Our worries are met with his own. He sizes us up with
a furrowed brow.
At six months, a well-meaning father at baby music nicknames him The
Siren because he screams unrelentingly when upset. Before class begins
each week, he crawls around the circumference of the room and won’t join
the circle until he’s removed all the vent covers. His teacher is permissive
and lovingly calls him The HVAC Man. One day we arrive to find she has
innocently rearranged the furniture. He withdraws and is inconsolable. He
shakes his head and throws himself against the wall. Things are unfamiliar
to him. I hurry out of class with my flailing, red-faced boy and don’t cry until
I sit down in the front seat of the car, out of sight. This is the beginning of
our retreat.
I have always wanted a baby but find myself longing for time and space
to pursue my own interests again. The calendar fills with appointments and
therapies. I try leaving him for little stretches, but he cries so hard when I go
that there’s a call to come home before I’ve left our street. I am the only one
he wants. Mendelssohn’s Hebrides overture plays in the car. Classical music
keeps him calm while I drive. “Mom, I love this music,” he says at two years
old. “It tells me my secrets.” He closes his eyes and waves his arms in time
with the intense, stormy melody. He cries silently when the music softens.
“Mom, I learned at school today that you don’t feel the earth turning
around.” Jack’s brain doesn’t register rotary vestibular input, which is a
Golden Jack 105
complicated way of saying he can spin and will never get dizzy. At three
years old, I try to keep up with what he says in spite of my own dizziness as
I watch him.
There are x-rays, ultrasounds, and therapies: occupational, speech, cra￾niosacral. There are pediatricians, developmental psychologists, and early
childhood interventionists. It feels punitive; no one can give us a diagno￾sis, and I keep trying to will away his differences. His dad buries himself in
work, but there is no escape. I am consumed with appointments and wait￾lists, with grief and love all tangled up in one precious little life.
He wants chocolate cake for his fourth birthday. “Mom, can we write
that down?” he asks. I’m making a grocery list at the table as he sits beside
me cutting a stack of flyers into tiny pieces. I give him a pencil and a piece of
my paper.
“C,” I say. “Can you write a C?”
“Do that one for me, Mom,” he says.
“H is next,” I say. “How about an H?”
“Sure, mom. That’s the one with two sticks and a line connecting.”
We go on like this, spelling CHOCOLATE CAKE, putting it all down on
paper. He is content with this; we can connect over letters—the C and the H,
all the way down to the K and the E. This is how he knows I love him. Love
is always an action.
It’s hard to love Jack with touch. He flinches if touched by surprise, and
you have to come at him straight on. He doesn’t let his dad touch him at all.
“Don’t touch me,” he says and recoils. It’s only when he’s sleeping that his
dad can lay beside him and touch his cheek or hand. Together, we lie in bed
with him asleep between us and listen to his heart beating softly against the
cave of his chest.
He hits and bites the doctors. He spits at nurses. He throws furniture.
His doctors joke that I’ve earned my own medical degree over time, learning
to do things he won’t allow them to do. I position him on the x-ray table, at￾tach electrodes, and administer medications. I can touch but still fumble to
reach him.
“Mom, tell me about the tadpole becoming a frog.” I tell him all I know
and make up the bits I don’t remember—egg then tadpole, tail then legs,
gills for underwater and lungs for land.
“And then he gets his ribbit?” he asks. He is little at first, and then he
gets big. He is one thing and then transforms into another thing. This is
106 The Dalhousie Review
metamorphosis—first there was the idea of you, and then there was you. In
evolutionary speak, Jack wants legs but still has a tail. He wants lungs but
still needs his gills.
“Mom, we should catch the moon and put it in the branches of our tree.
You reach up and get the big moon, and I’ll get all the little moons.” He re￾ally believes we could. He thinks I have the power to bend the world to him.
Truth is, I’ve been stuck trying to figure out a way to bend him and make it
a little easier, but he does not bend.
“Mom, you are beautiful, so you are bonita. You are beautiful—bonita.”
He latches onto words that feel good in his mouth. He’s learned the word
bonita at school and likes the way it feels on his lips and tongue, enunciating
each syllable. I like the way it feels when he says things like this. He takes
pleasure in the physicality of words in his mouth, and I take pleasure in
their meaning.
“Mom, do you like me?” he asks.
“Yes, I like you a lot,” I say.
“But do you like me when I ruin things?” He breaks all his toys. He puts
holes in walls and destroys the furniture. He gets angry with me and shits in
my boot.
“Yes, I even like you when you ruin things. I like you all the time. Even
when I’m angry, I still like you.” And I do.
“I like you all the time too, mom. Even when you’re angry.”
We learn to go places built for everyone. Public spaces cannot exclude
us. Cincinnati’s old buildings hold us in the beautiful in spite of all that is
failing. We touch the lion’s marble foot. We talk about the mummy in his
sarcophagus. We stand in front of Cassatt’s Mother and Child and hold
hands.
He knows to keep his voice low in these places. He knows we have to be
careful. He is quiet and looks, and I look too, remembering a life before him,
when I studied art history and worked alone in a printshop with zinc plates
and acid.
They try to measure everything: big machines take pictures of his brain,
electrodes are fixed to his head, blood is drawn. Their words are clinical,
polysyllabic, and foreign. Everything microscopic is blown up and exam￾ined, but they still don’t know anything. We buy a classroom set of wooden
blocks and hope constructing his own world will be a way out of his growing
frustration with the one he’s stuck in. We unpack them together and build
Golden Jack 107
Mary Cassatt, Mother and Child (c. 1899)
108 The Dalhousie Review
houses, ramps, and roads that cover the living room floor. Things fall apart,
and we start again.
I ache to take back all the time I wasted blaming myself and carefully
cataloguing the mistakes I made. I have always worried over him in a way
my husband does not; he doesn’t need to find a reason like I do.
“Mama, do they know about Jack?” his little sister asks before we brave
the world and risk a playdate or a trip to the library. At three, she knows he’s
unpredictable—he lashes out and is easily frustrated and quick to rage. We
often leave abruptly. My heart aches for her; a typical childhood is not what
she’ll get. It can be a struggle to keep her safe, raise them both, and try to be
a family. I love them immensely, but I have to love Jack more.
What stories do we tell him to make meaning of his life? “I’m a You￾man,” he says, “but not all.” He identifies with The Thing, a rock-hided su￾perhero in The Fantastic Four. His sister leans into me and says, “Mama,
he’s just human,” and she’s right. He knows he’s partly like us but is also
certain he’s made of something else.
“When I grow up, I’ll wear a belt and have a beard on my face.” This is
what he knows. Daddies wear belts and have beards. Daddies go to work,
and mommies stay home. His rules for us are rigid, and he expects things to
stay the same.
We make plans to move back to Canada, where access to the growing
list of services we need are covered under a national health plan. Public
school hasn’t worked out, and we’ve started using credit cards to pay for
therapies we can’t afford. We drive north from Ohio to Ontario. We make
our way to the east coast and the Isaac Walton Killam Health Centre, Hali￾fax’s children’s hospital.
The outbursts are more frequent. We can’t always identify a trigger, and
his behaviours seem malicious. Doctors ask us to log his behaviour using an
ABC chart: antecedent, behaviour, consequence. We try to stay two steps
ahead of him, to mitigate and offer distractions. We are trained to put him
in a therapeutic hold when he rages to reduce the risk of injury.
We give up our privacy for Jack. In-home visits and family histories are
documented and repeated. Specialists come into our house to set him up
with multiple therapies and aides. Child Services make unannounced home
visits. When Jack was young, we hoped for a fix. We tried diets and special
schools, read all the special needs books, and wrung our hands over every
detail of his care. There is no fix. He is just Jack. Today our hopes are much
Golden Jack 109
simpler: that one day he will make a friend.
It’s hard to know if he understands how his behaviour impacts our fam￾ily and even harder to know if he can help it. Does he feel loved? The little
boy we wanted to teach to ride a bike is not what we’ve been given. I am in
mourning for years until I can name the loss.
When he is ten, specialists recommend genetic testing to try once again
to label him and give a diagnosis. Everyone is eager to name our family’s
affliction. They want to name what they cannot understand or at least find
its source. At this point, a label doesn’t make any difference to us. He disap￾peared for an afternoon and learned to ride a bike. He’s stopped smearing
shit on the walls. These are tangible improvements.
They urge us to do the tests, and we agree. The first is a broad stroke
look at his DNA, ruling out the common genetic conditions of which he
shows symptoms. Finding nothing, they move on to a more detailed and
costly micro-array. Here they discover a small anomaly: a duplicate set of
genes on chromosome 22 that appears related to autism and a minor heart
defect. Researchers admit they don’t know much; they need more kids with
the same extra bits as Jack. We agree to put his name and results in a da￾tabase and revisit the clinic in eight to ten years. He will be twenty in ten
years. We will be beyond his childhood.
When he is violent, I wonder if we will reach a breaking point. I fear all
the love and advocacy will be for naught, and he will end up in the care of
the province. I worry about losing him if things fall apart. It breaks you wide
open to leave a small child in a pediatric psych unit. It breaks your heart to
see that sometimes he’d rather be there than with us.
We give him some of the independence he craves and allow him to walk
downtown to the library alone. He walks to the comic book store for dollar
comics and the gas station for slushies. I look at his camera while he sleeps
and see his adventures documented in photographs of brightly painted graf￾fiti and craggy harbour rocks. There are no faces. He still observes people
with a furrowed brow.
We didn’t think he’d learn to read or write, but he does. He writes me
notes and leaves them on my bed: “I’m sorry I bit you,” “I want to go to pub￾lic school,” and “Will you let me have a girlfriend?”
I can’t say I wouldn’t fix him if we could. But if we took away that little
duplication on chromosome 22, what other parts of him would we lose?
Would he still be Jack? I love him, and he is a burden.
110 The Dalhousie Review
Today, they rush out the door. My daughter skips down the hill to el￾ementary school with the other kids on our street. Jack, always running late
and having to be reminded multiple times to brush his teeth and put on
socks, stops at the front door before heading out to his special education
school and asks, “Did you cut up my apple?”
He has asked the same question every morning since he started school.
“I sliced your apple,” I say. “Now get going before I slice you up too.”
“Mom,” he says, “that’s impossible.” He pauses only briefly. “Do you
know why that’s impossible? Do you know why? Do you know?” He is eager
to spit out the answer but has learned the script of conversation.
“You’re late,” I say and move him out the door and into the world. He
starts to run but looks back with a broad smile and those clear blue eyes,
excited to deliver a clever response.
“It’s impossible because I’m made of gold.” He throws his head back
and laughs, certain that what makes him different is the gold he knows he’s
got inside. I watch him go and think maybe that’s all he needs to know.
Maybe, after all these years of tests and searching, that’s all we need to know
too.

GOLDEN JACK

WAYMAN, TOM

TOM WAYMAN
MAY RISE
Each droplet that descends from sky
to strike gravel or soil
has its own DNA, and on impact
a root emerges
through the sphere’s surface tension
to burrow into
earth
Drop followed by
drop: heavy rain
Then a second root
pushes clear of the globule
to penetrate wet ground
and a stem rises
of aspen, cottonwood
or huckleberry, hawkweed
From the new shoot
a leaf extrudes, more
The downpour is converting the riverbank
meadow, roadside, mountainside
to a pointillist green
haze that cascades out
from trunks, branches, twigs: a surfeit
that swamps spruce and fir in a
flood of dark green to yellow
green, every tone glistening
May Rise 117
in steady rain
Above on the forested slopes
cloud fragments
float up like smoke from the task
of transmuting the May valley
until it is as equally rich in
water
as leaves, leaves, leaves

MAY RISE

ENNS, ANTHONY

CONTRIBUTORS
JOHN WALL BARGER’s poems and critical writing have appeared in Alaska
Quarterly Review, American Poetry Review, Best of the Best Canadian Po￾etry, The Cincinnati Review, Kenyon Review Online, Poetry Ireland Re￾view, ZYZZYVA, and elsewhere. His fifth book of poems, Resurrection Fail
(2021), was a finalist for the Raymond Souster Award and the Eric Hoffer
Award. He currently teaches in the B.F.A. Program for Creative Writing at
the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
JOHN BARTON’s twelfth collection of poetry, Lost Family: A Memoir (2021),
is in contention for the Derek Walcott Prize. “The Douglas Treaties: A Revi￾sion” is a golden shovel—a verse form devised by American poet Terence
Hayes: the end words, when read in order, are a line from another poet.
In the case of “The Douglas Treaties,” the end words match those in the
epigraph, which form the first sentence in Emily Carr’s sketch “The Blouse”
from her memoir Klee Wyck (1941).
TANYA BELLEHUMEUR-ALLATT is the author of the critically acclaimed
Peacekeeper’s Daughter: A Middle East Memoir (2021), which was a final￾ist for the Quebec Writers’ Federation Mavis Gallant Award for Non-Fic￾tion, and the poetry collection Chaos Theories of Goodness (2022). Her
fiction, essays, and poems have also been published in The Antigonish Re￾view, Best Canadian Essays, BigCityLit, carte blanche, Event, Grain, The
Malahat Review, The Masters Review Anthology X, The New Quarterly,
Prairie Fire, Queens Quarterly, Room, subTerrain, Syncopation, and The
Toronto Star.
MARION STARLING BOYER is the author of four poetry collections: Green
(2003), The Clock of the Long Now (2009), Composing the Rain (2014),
and The Sea Was Never Far (2019). Her poem “The Men Asleep at the Bot￾tom of the World” is a cento made up of lines from the following poems:
Contributors 143
Siegfried Sassoon’s “The Death Bed” (1917), “Dreamers” (1918), “Glory of
Women” (1918), and “The Last Meeting” (1918); Wilfred Owens’ “Anthem
for Doomed Youth” (1920) and “Dulce et Decorum Est” (1920); Rupert
Brooke’s “The Great Lover” (1915), “Retrospect” (1915), and “The Soldier”
(1915); and D. H. Lawrence’s “Discord in Childhood” (1916) and “Piano”
(1913). It will also appear in her forthcoming collection, Ice Hours, which
won Michigan State University’s Wheelbarrow Poetry Prize.
JASON BROWN was a Wallace Stegner and Truman Capote Fellow at Stan￾ford University and currently teaches in the M.F.A. program at the Univer￾sity of Oregon. He has published three short story collections: Driving the
Heart and Other Stories (1999), Why the Devil Chose New England for His
Work (2011), and A Faithful but Melancholy Account of Several Barbarities
Lately Committed (2019). Stories from his most recent collection have also
appeared in Best American Short Stories and The Pushcart Anthology.
WAYNE CURTIS is an award-winning writer who lives in Fredericton, New
Brunswick. He has written twenty books and has contributed to national
newspapers and magazines. His latest collection of short stories is Winter
Road (2020).
WILLIAM VIRGIL DAVIS’ most recent poetry collection is Dismantlements of
Silence: Poems Selected and New (2015). He has published five other col￾lections: The Bones Poems (2014); Landscape and Journey (2009), which
won the New Criterion Poetry Prize and the Helen C. Smith Memorial
Award for Poetry; Winter Light (1990); The Dark Hours (1984), which won
the Calliope Press Chapbook Prize; and One Way to Reconstruct the Scene
(1980), which won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize. His poems have
also appeared in Agenda, The Atlantic Monthly, The Gettysburg Review,
The Georgia Review, The Harvard Review, The Hopkins Review, The Hud￾son Review, Literary Imagination, The Malahat Review, The Nation, The
New Criterion, PN Review, Poetry, Raritan, The Sewanee Review, South￾west Review, The Southern Review, TriQuarterly, and The Yale Review,
among others.
RON ENNIS’ stories have appeared in several literary reviews and have won
two writing contests. His story “Water Street” was also nominated for a
144 The Dalhousie Review
Pushcart Prize. He recently completed a novel titled Atlantic Places.
STEPHEN HENIGHAN is the author of six novels, most recently The World of
After (2021), and four short story collections, including Blue River and Red
Earth (2018). His recent translations include, from Portuguese, Transpar￾ent City (2018) by Ondjaki and, from Spanish, The Country of Toó (2023)
by Rodrigo Rey Rosa.
SEAN HOWARD is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently Un￾recovered: 9/11 Poems (2021). A sixth collection, Trinity: Tribute Sequenc￾es for Robert Graves, is forthcoming. His poetry has been widely published
in Canada and elsewhere, and it has also been featured in The Best of the
Best Canadian Poetry in English (2017).
ANNETTE LAPOINTE lives in Treaty 8 territory, on the traditional lands of the
Beaver people, and teaches at Grande Prairie Regional College. She has pub￾lished three acclaimed novels and a short story collection. Her latest book is
. . . And This is the Cure (2021).
JACLYN KAR YIN MCLACHLAN is a wine writer who has published food and
drink reviews in various publications for over ten years, most recently in
Toronto Life. She is currently based in Toronto.
ERIC MILLER recently published a translation of Titia Brongersma’s The
Swan of the Well (2020). An extract from his novel The Canada Act also ap￾peared in Spolia Magazine, and his most recent poetry collection is The Day
in Moss (2008). His work has also been featured in Brick, The Fiddlehead,
and Ploughshares.
TARA MILLS is a writer and editor living in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. Her
work has been published in Canada and abroad, including in The Antigonish
Review, The Globe and Mail, and The Silver Needle. She currently teaches
writing at NSCAD University, and her book-length work on intimacy and
justice is forthcoming.
GERALD ARTHUR MOORE is an adventurer, part-time university lecturer,
high school teacher, and rugby coach in Moncton, New Brunswick. He is the
Contributors 145
author of the poetry collection Shatter the Glass, Shards of Flame (2018),
and he received the PubHouse Books Chapbook prize for Trigger Fingers
(2019). His work has also appeared in The Antigonish Review, Boston Po￾etry Magazine, The Military Review, The Nashwaak Review, Off the Coast,
Prairie Fire, Queen’s Quarterly, Quills, Qwerty, and Vallum.
THOMAS R. MOORE’s fourth book of poems is Red Stone Fragments (2019),
and his poem “How We Built Our House” won a Pushcart Prize.
J. ALAN NELSON’s stories, essays, and poems have been published or are
forthcoming in Acumen, Adirondack Review, California Quarterly, Con￾junctions, Connecticut River Review, Illuminations, Kairos, Ligeia, Main
Street Rag, New York Quarterly, Pamplemousse, Red Cedar Review, Re￾view Americana, South Carolina Review, Stand, Strange Horizons, Texas
Observer, Whale Road Review, and Wisconsin Review.
REBECCA PĂPUCARU’s stories have recently appeared in Event, Grain, and
The New Quarterly, and her story “Yentas” won The Malahat Review’s No￾vella Prize. Her first collection of poetry, The Panic Room (2017), also re￾ceived the Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Poetry and was a finalist for
the A. M. Klein Prize for Poetry and the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award.
JAY RITCHIE has a M.F.A. in Poetry from the University of Massachusetts
Amherst. He is the author of the poetry collection Cheer Up, Jay Ritchie
(2017), and his work has also appeared in Event, GlitterMOB, Peach Mag,
Powder Keg, The Puritan, and Spork. He is currently Managing Editor of
Vallum Magazine and is completing a Ph.D. in English at McGill Univer￾sity.
TOM WAYMAN received the George Woodcock Award for Lifetime Achieve￾ment in the literary arts. His poems have also recently appeared in The Hud￾son Review, Labour/Le Travail, and The New Quarterly. Other poems are
included in the anthologies Home: 100 Poems (2021), Worth More Stand￾ing: Poets and Activists Pay Homage to Trees (2022), and Best Canadian
Poetry (2022). His most recent poetry collection is Watching a Man Break
a Dog’s Back: Poems for a Dark Time (2020).
146 The Dalhousie Review
DAVID YEREX WILLIAMSON is a college administrator, instructor, and poet
living in northern Manitoba. His recent works have appeared in The New
Quarterly, Prairie Fire, The Prairie Journal, and HeartWood. He is also
an associate member of the League of Canadian Poets and the Manitoba
Writers’ Guild.
ERIN WILSON’s poems have appeared in The Connecticut River Review, Ju￾niper, The Literary Review of Canada, Minola Review, Pembroke Maga￾zine, The Prairie Journal, Salamander Magazine, and elsewhere. Brian
Brett wrote of her first collection, At Home with Disquiet (2020), “At last,
a voice at home with music. A voice that understands rhetoric, simplicity,
complexity.” Her work has also been long-listed for the CBC Poetry Prize,
and she currently lives and writes in a small town in northern Ontario.

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