*

We’re squatting stolen land, our money ones and zeroes on a mainframe, every unearthed relic a reminder that everything we can see—this leaf in our hand, these clothes on our backs, these trinkets, these treasures—will all end up faded and buried.

There’s a white brick building at the end of the street. Six or eight apartments. Not a single window or balcony faces the park, they all open onto an interior courtyard. When we first moved to the neighbourhood we laughed at the building every time we passed by. We’d talk about it for the minute or so it took to get to the drugstore or the market, picturing an architect who’d lost his license, fallen off the wagon. We despised the slumlord who let the drywall molder in the corners and took two weeks to change burnt-out hot water tanks in the basement. With your windows in plain view like that there’d be no way to walk around naked after getting out of the shower or have sex undisturbed in the living room. And what would the neighbours say if you closed your curtains in the afternoon? That those neighbours were having sex again, surely. Then we’d go back home to our two-bedroom and make dinner and forget all about the white building.

On garbage day we have a field day. People leave furniture, knick-knacks and tools in the alley and we come by and salvage whatever we like. Nothing too dirty though. Some stuff deserves to be thrown out—rain-soaked mattresses, broken dishes, spaghetti-stained Tupperware microwaved until the bottom warps—trash ripe for the garbage truck’s gaping maw. Other things end up on the sidewalk with nary a scratch. Then we would crown ourselves honorary garbage men, redeemers of junk, repossessors of the rejected.

That was before winter. Now we don’t laugh at the white brick building any more.

*

A cat sits on a rock in front of a lake. Its tail lies outside the frame, its back to the camera, its face is turned toward it. An ordinary cat, black and brown with a striped face. The rock must have been carefully placed on this perfectly mown lawn. Behind the cat stands a clump of trees whose leaves take up half the photo. The other half shows a calm lake, a few cottages here and there. “Sept. 86. Frisson. Beaulac.”

*

My child is a wonder—everyone says so, and they don’t know the half of it. He doesn’t do anything special. He’s my window onto a locked world. He makes me notice just how strange everyday things can be, how slender our purchase here in these times of stroboscopic darkness, with people we love so listlessly that we stop seeing them, because today overwhelms us and tomorrow looms, planned out in full, another day to strike off on the calendar. Our cat cries at night. It’s sort of my fault. It never used to go out—a purebred—and then one day it ran away. We thought we’d lost it but then it came back and ever since we’ve let it do what it wants. It got to like this freedom and now it never stops meowing at the door to be let in, and I can’t sleep. The coming morning isn’t always quite the same pastel colour. I don’t know if it’s these soft hues that distort the perfectly normal things in my apartment but sometimes I’m afraid even to go to the bathroom or have a drink of water before jumping back under the covers with my girlfriend. There’s something lurking there, grey or ochre, waiting to come creeping in through the curtains. Maybe it’s our mortality, which we pretend to forget by living our tightly packed lives. When I can’t sleep I sit in the living room and look at photographs. It’s the way of the world as we know and live in it: parents die first and their children take their place.

Sometimes, after a month or two has slipped by, I notice my girlfriend again. We’re both there again. I say to her: I don’t believe you. You chose to spend your life with me and that impresses and embarrasses me, takes me back to the basics, my senses. Glass is cool; cork coarse; parsley crisp. In these moments of weakness I feel the weight of unspeakable events around every corner. I’ve dreamt my death a few times, both asleep and awake. The last time three generations of our family were sitting at a table on the back deck. The sky was so densely packed, so full, that we breathed in the little drops that formed on every surface, and the silence weighed heavy and when the lightning struck we knew it was the end. The transformer on its pole in the back of the yard sparked and crackled like a Roman candle, lighting up the opaque cloud cover at irregular intervals. The world looked like a tarnished daguerreotype. A Boeing passed low overhead before crashing in Montreal North. Panic set in; we all scrambled for home. But we may as well have stayed put—a new missile was hurtling toward us so fast that nothing else was audible. I was going to lose my family. A father unable to help his son. When the plane had finally annihilated us everything was slow, silent and painless, as if suspended.

*

Some fifty scorched tree trunks emerge from a bog. Most of the vegetation lies low, as if afraid to stray too far from the muddy water.  Several trees have fallen over but others are still standing, unburnt, narrow leafless branches bent every which way, bark split and peeling off in strips as if clawed off by a bear. A section has been cleared. The water reflects a sky much darker, surely, than it really is. “August 86. Lac à vase.”

*

Nothing is new at our house. It’s a museum of brown, the most unassuming of colours. That’s the price you pay for free stuff. On July 1st we always celebrate, not gloating that Quebecers wait for Canada Day to move but rejoicing that they leave so many shards of the past behind in the streets and alleyways. We take our fill with a clean conscience. Harvest lasts a week; high season. At any other time of year we can only assume something has gone wrong—a breakup, a lost job, a move back to the parents’ basement—you learn to smell the end approaching. Like many mammals garbage hibernates so winter finds are rare. This winter we got something though. At the end of the street, next to the dirty white brick building, a complete array of furnishings lying in the snow—gutted cardboard boxes spilling out utensils, dime-store romance novels, drapes and floral curtains still clinging to their rods. An entire apartment spat out and a sidewalk snow plow pushing it into a manageable pile to be picked up by the city or torn to pieces by a snowblower.

If my own death is just nothingness I can accept and face it without fear. But I will not brook the death of others. When we get back to the things that matter and I notice my girlfriend again I tell her: I don’t know what would become of me if something happened to you. My son will be just fine. He does somersaults and bashes his head on whatever stands in the way. A few quick tears and a bump and he gets right back up. He’s just as vulnerable as we are. In the pastel hours I can’t sleep, I clutch my girlfriend for warmth and lie in dread of the horrible things that will tear my son from my arms. Maybe one day we’ll be walking past a guy with a huge dog that will attack the stroller for no reason and sink his teeth into our son’s face, so much like my own. Dogs are unpredictable. An ancestral lupine rage comes over them sometimes. “Your son did something wrong, my dog felt threatened!” the man is yelling in self-defence as I kill him with my bare hands. Maybe one day as I do the dishes I’ll drop the butcher’s knife and it will pierce his tiny caramel-smelling neck and plant itself between his cervical vertebrae. Maybe one day while we’re driving our number will come up. Hanging upside down in the heap of crushed metal, suspended in the air by the seat belt, I’ll hear the radio still playing but no cry from the back seat. Maybe one day an illness will disfigure him, an illness that was biding its time in our genes, passed down from father to son, just waiting to crop up, deform his body and wreak havoc on all our lives.

But nothing happens to him except beauty; nothing is really ours except slowness. It’s important to remember.

*

A woman has replaced the cat in front of the rock but the photographer has moved. A medium-range shot. She’s blinded by the sun, squinting—yet the trees behind her are in the shadows. She wears powder blue slacks, a white sweater with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows, a white scarf with red flowers tied like a cravate, huge white earrings. Her cheeks are red, she’s almost smiling. White hair in braids. The lake is darker than the sky. A few fat clouds seem to float. A dock leans out from the shore. “September 86. Me, age 67, next to the cottage.”

*

We took the alley, our son in his sled. The plow had finished piling the apartment’s remains and sputtered off. Our joy at this windfall subsided when we understood what we were looking at: the worldly possessions of an elderly woman who had evidently died alone. No one to sort through her things and dispose of them with even a modicum of respect. The landlord had thrown everything into the alley while her corpse lay in a drawer in the morgue next to the other unclaimed bodies. It was too cold to go through everything so we decided to pay our respects by saving a piece of her past. We took one box. When we got home we surveyed its contents: a flower pot, some embroidery, four photographs.

I watch people through the window, press up and sweat against my neighbours in the Metro, ignore the other people in a lineup. I can’t do anything for them, wish nothing upon them. I know we’re all cursed. The proof is in the asphalt fumes, the ubiquity of violence, the victory of numbers over letters. We are nothing amid the concrete and the oil; they will crush us if we stand in their way, no matter who we are—academics, refugees, old-age pensioners. The most sublime landscapes remind me I will soon be food for worms. What I think of as mine can be taken from me at any moment, by law or by force. A tiny nudge is all it takes, one last straw.

But I can’t give up altogether, even if the ties that bind me to others have come undone and my body’s similarity to those around me no longer means anything. My conviction of generalized failure is battling with another feeling, one I thought long disproved by my worldly experience. Hope. It disappeared in my twenties with the long-held illusion of fundamental human goodness. When my son was born it returned as something private. I hope he will stay healthy. I hope my girlfriend will escape the fate of so many women and avoid the cancer that will rot away at her insides before she can even retire. I hope my dad isn’t too unhappy in his bachelor apartment. I hope when my friends celebrate they do it for the right reasons. After embracing the whole planet my hope has slowly contracted to cover only my immediate surroundings. I hold out my hand in the cacophony, that I might occasionally touch someone or something. The worst successes of our era—keeping the pyramids standing while airplanes crash; individualizing hope. A minute hope, diffused, exposing the world’s false appearances like the glow of my alarm clock when I can’t sleep, coals without heat, pointing toward an exit, portending the arrival of the pastel morning light. You have to hold this tiny hope in your hand until it burns your palm, until it turns red from blood, or maybe shame, who knows. Sometimes I can see who I am. The room always grows dark again. My son is beautiful and will stay that way a long time surely; he is everything that is human in this land of dried out husks. I’m waiting for the catastrophe, the great impending chaos. I’m waiting for the full moon when the bells of the last churches yet unsold ring out to summon all those who still remember what it means to be together. If my son is old enough to choose and wants to join them I’ll give him my blessing and then I’ll set off, with anyone who cares to come along, somewhere we can survive a few months longer, probably up north.

Bruno was written and performed by Cristal Duhaime with Eden Daniel. Recording help from Sarah Gilbert.

The doctor takes a white, plastic device out of a rack. It looks a lot like Molly’s lady razor that’s clipped to the wall of my shower enclosure. Before all this happened, when we used to shower together, and while waiting for my turn under the water, I’d act like I was irritated with something or other that she had done the previous day. I’d take her razor off the wall and hold it to my ear like I was calling security to get her out of my shower. I’d say, “Security? Yeah. Take ‘er out.” She used to really laugh at that. There’s nothing like making a woman laugh when she’s in your shower. We stopped the whole showering together thing after the first trimester. Actually, she stopped it.

After struggling with the cord that’s all curly-q’d up like a pig’s tail, the doctor presses the flat end of the device into the goop and starts smearing it all around Molly’s belly, quadrant by quadrant. The ball of goo flattens into a glazed whorl all the way around until it makes her nice and shiny.

I feel like I have a moment to myself. As if there’s a dead zone where nothing is expected of me until the doctor is finished. Once that happens, then I’ll know that this is real: more real than before the goop ball, or the ride in the elevator, or the car ride over here, or the long talk in my living room we had last night, or her mother getting up in my face with that perm. I hate that perm.

I turn my head and look out the fourth story window. It’s around noon now, and the streets under the clinic are dwarfed by the half-constructed Breast Cancer Institute. On our first trip here together it was a parking lot. A really convenient one, too. When I realized the construction site just destroyed my prime parking spot, I made some comment as we drove to lot double-Z next to the English knick-knack shop that Molly insisted we stop at after her first appointment because she wanted to find something called Marmite.

“You don’t see anyone building a multi-million dollar research facility for testicular diseases.”

Molly only said, “Yeah, you guys are so neglected aren’t you?” I’ve got to stand by my point though. I’ve never seen the word “testicular” hanging on the side of a building in backlit letters three feet high.

I can see down to the donut shop on the corner. A young man and woman emerge from the glass doors into the mid-day light. He’s carrying about ten boxes of donuts in front of him. Donuts don’t weigh much, but apparently if you’ve got enough of them they must weigh a ton because he looks like he’s really struggling, trying to hold the stack steady with his chin holding down the top box. The wind picks up and he wavers for a second. I see the green ribbon tied around the young woman’s hair flap in the breeze. Then I see her try to steady the donut stack but he seems to brush her off like he’s sure he has it.

They stop for a moment as if confused. I can see her mouth move at him and he actually moves his right arm as if he wants to look at his watch, but it’s almost as if he does so out of reflex, like he’s forgetting that his arms are full. The breeze picks up again just as a pristine black 1971 Plymouth Hemicuda roars by them. He stumbles, catches his balance, and makes a valiant attempt to hold the boxes steady, but overcompensates and, sure enough, the top box slides to the sidewalk right on its front corner, ensuring that the top flips open, and a dozen pink and blue donuts tumble all over the sidewalk. I watch one roll like a doughy wheel off the curb and into the street where a second Hemicuda, this one white and not nearly as pristine, flattens it. The donut stays stuck to the car’s wheel, a mushed up wad of bread and sugar going around and around as the car drives out of sight.

I can only see the young woman from behind. She seems to be shaking. From as high up as I am, she looks like a ribbony whirligig of hair and shaking fists. He’s beet-red with the kind of goatee I got rid of months ago. He’s shaking his head and I’m guessing he’s trying to explain. My kinship with all men is making me telepathically beam my defenses down to him. Honestly, she couldn’t check her cell phone for the time?

And then I see her put her hands on his arm very quickly, and then back to her face. She turns just enough, and I see she’s actually laughing in mad fits. I can’t hear it through the glass, but I can tell it’s that kind of laughing that erupts out of a woman with such sudden force she ends up snorting, which always makes her laugh more.

Suddenly I’d give anything to be in the shower with my girlfriend again, just like how we used to be. I’d rub a quarter-sized blob of her cherished imported shampoo through her hair while she’d crane her soapy head back into my palms and ask what we had to do that day. I’d say “nothing.” Then she’d sigh and say “Nothing. Sounds wonderful.”

I don’t want to look at the laughing donut couple anymore. I don’t want to see what they decide to do with the donuts scattered at their feet like wonderful offerings. I turn my head back into the examination room just in time to see an image of a grey shapeless mass twitching on the screen in front of us. The screen itself has lines across it, making it look like our baby is just off the centre of a bombsight. I’m thinking about actually mentioning that out loud when I look up from the screen and see my girlfriend and the doctor looking at me. Time seems to slow and I see them frozen for a moment, looking at me with wide eyes and expectant smiles. I know they just said something to me, and it was probably the kind of special thing about “blessings” where you really need to have something important to say back after they say it. I look at Molly’s face: the doubt, disbelief, and irritation just starting to cross the outer markers of her happy facial features, before I say the first thing that comes to my mind, which is, “Wow. There’s not much time left, is there?”

Then I see the doctor look away from me and awkwardly back down to her chart. Molly’s smile has now dripped halfway off of her face and I hear a third roar from the street below and now I’m wondering just how many Hemicudas are circling the streets down there, or if one is chasing the other, or if there’s a convention, or if Molly would like to watch Phantasm II with me when we got home. I’d make popcorn for her and even put it in that red bowl she insists on eating popcorn out of even though it would stay warmer longer if she’d just keep it in the bag. I wouldn’t mind if she covered her eyes during the gory parts, and when the Hemicuda in that film flips over and explodes, then I’d tell her about what I saw out the window. Then she’d understand why seeing two and hearing a third in such a short time span was such an odd occurrence. It’s such a rare car.

Phantasm II is a ninety minute film, for God’s sake. Just ninety minutes. That’s all I want. That and for her to shake her fists at me and laugh.

What? His head emerged at the side of the shower curtain.

Why didn’t you flush the toilet? she asked.

His head disappeared again, and she put the toilet cover down and sat on it. The mirror needed cleaning.

Who were you talking to? he asked.

My brother. Did you wash your hair yet?

I’m starting now. What did he say?

I think I’ll go to bed, she said. The mirror was coated in condensation now.

Kath, it’s like eight o’clock.

Maybe we’ll go away for the weekend, she said.

Sure, if you want, he said. Where do you want to go?

She closed the door carefully behind her, but she knew that he could hear her leave. He wouldn’t slip his head out to look, but maybe he’d wash his face again, by mistake.

In the bedroom, the strange light of dusk made green things look yellow. It wasn’t eight o’clock yet, and the bed was unmade.  She considered changing the sheets but stood looking at the open blinds covering the windows. They were open but not pulled up. In the morning they would make bars on the floor as the sun tried to get in.

He came in from the shower and, looking at him, she wondered if she had put on weight, too.

It’s a nice night, he said. We should go for a walk.

No, she said. I want to go to bed.

He put his arms on her shoulders and they were damp and heavy. She bent her knees a little and waited. What did your brother say? he asked, and she pushed on his shoulders and backed away.

It was rainy there today, she said. She pulled a pair of shorts and a yellow top from the dresser and changed quickly as he pulled pants on. She hoped he wasn’t watching.

What else? he asked.

He saw my mom last week. Can we really go away this weekend?

Yeah, do you want to invite Tom and Lorraine?

No, let’s not go. I should clean up in the garden. We have so many weeds this year, she said.

He tugged at her hair but didn’t say anything.

She went around to the other side of the bed and examined her fingernails. Nick, I have a lot to do this weekend.

How did your brother say your mom was? he asked.

She’s fine. They’re fine. They’re all good, she said. She pulled a shred of skin from the side of her nail and dropped it on the floor while he rubbed his eyes. The curled piece of skin landed and she fixed her eyes on it.

Did your brother say if he and Sharon are going to come out here at all this summer? he asked.

They’re not. They’re going to have a baby, she said.

Once she thought whiskey referred to a cat with preciously long whiskers and that bonfire was a type of flower that grew along the beach, but she had learned otherwise before she met him. Now he stood there, drops of water behind his ears rolling toward his bare shoulders.

He said, I didn’t know that.

Her own cat’s whiskers had been short, and she wondered now, looking at the skin on the floor, if that was why she left her cat behind when she moved in with him.

Well, she said. They are. They’re going to have a baby.

Really, let’s go away this weekend. Just us. We can go down south a ways, he said.

They’re going to have a baby at the end of summer.

She picked up the shred of skin, hardened already, and tore it in half, then set both pieces on the nightstand. My mom, she said, and then clacked her teeth together.

It’s short notice, he said, but we could try to get that cabin we stayed in last fall.

Are you going to put a shirt on? she asked.

He stood looking at her, and she thought of the deep-coloured snapdragons in the back garden. They were something like what she thought bonfire should be. He turned and pulled a shirt from his drawer.

It smelled funny, she said. And there was nothing to do. We drank too much that weekend.

I thought you had a good time, he said.

I don’t care if they have a baby or not.

Hey, he said. It’s okay. Hey.

He pulled her face into his neck, and she let him.

Nick, when I was a kid, I thought that a dinette set was china with a sunset printed on it, and everyone in the world got married and got one.

Why?

Well, it makes sense. Dinette, sunset. You know. I thought everyone got one but that they weren’t all the same. I thought there were different variations, and I wanted one with lots of red.

We could try to find something like that, he said. But now he let go of her, walked toward the door, and stopped. He rocked back and forth over the squeaky floorboard just inside the bedroom. She stepped back, farther into the room.

It isn’t real, she said, rubbing her eyes. She pressed hard with her fingertips, and was relieved when spots clouded her vision.

We can get married, he said. He stood across the room and grabbed at a piece of fuzz floating through the air.

Maybe you should go for that walk.

We can get married. He opened his fist, and the fuzz drifted out.

I want to stay here by myself for a while, she said. Just a little walk?

He was quiet, and she hoped he wouldn’t say it again. Please, she said.

He walked out of the bedroom, and things that had looked yellow deepened to green. Her bed was green, and little green flecks, like seedling weeds, showed again in the rug. She changed her shirt and picked up the cordless next to the shreds of her skin.

Mom, she said when her mother picked up the other end. Did Kevin call you? Did he tell you about Sharon? She’ll be the mother and I’ll be the aunt and you can spoil your only grandchild. It’s going to be great.

She said it into the phone, but she listened for his breathing in the hall.

Marianne could see Mrs. McGettigan getting out of the truck that brought her home from the fish plant. Mrs. McGettigan wore her blue uniform over a couple of sweaters. It was a cold summer. Mrs. McGettigan had on her fish plant headpiece; a white plastic scalloped tiara and hairnet, and she carried two plastic bags. Fish and her leftover lunch. She watched through her window as Mrs. McGettigan went up her drive-way. She watched her rattle her screen door and peer in the dark window and realized she was locked out. She watched her try to rattle the window open then look up at Marianne’s house. Marianne went to the door and called out, “Come up.”

“I’m off early. He’s not home,” the tiara bobbed up the hill. The wind lost her voice in the grass. Mrs. McGettigan was meek and a bit lonely. Nobody seemed to like her husband Leonard and their family had a faint outcast quality. They burned electric heat instead of wood, and Leonard built houses in subdivisions instead of being a fisherman. They were sixty.

Mrs. McGettigan laid her bags by the daybed and sat down. She kept her headpiece on and did not loosen her uniform buttons. She sat with her hands clasped and knees together. Marianne could see the print of long johns under her navy stretch pants. The fish plant was cold and the floor was always wet. Marianne made two slices of buttered toast and peeled a banana and put it all on a plate and gave it to Mrs. McGettigan with hot tea.

“Leonard wouldn’t like it if he knew I tried to go in through the window.” Mrs. McGettigan did not move her lips much when she spoke. Her bottom lip was going numb and lately so was her right hand. She was going to the doctor about it tomorrow. Her voice was high with a sad tone in it.

“Does he expect you to sit and wait for him in the driveway?” Marianne shouted because Mrs. McGettigan was deaf in the left ear. Her husband told everyone it came from always rooting around in it with a hairpin even in the night in bed. Marianne’s cat rubbed Mrs. McGettigan’s ankles. Mrs. McGettigan had six cats. She bent and stroked Marianne’s with big strong strokes. She picked it up and hugged it, rocked it and kissed its head, puckering her lips generously as if they had not a bit of numbness in them.

“No but he wouldn’t like it. I’d rather he didn’t know.” They talked about cats, the cold summer, the coming garden parties. “Nothing like they once were. There’s nothing there for children now. When we were young there were pony rides and games. Now you’re up to your knees in scratch-and-win. I’ll make lemon squares for the tea.” Her house was always full of iced cakes and puddings. Marianne worried about the toast and banana but Mrs. McGettigan said, “The bread’s nice, it’s the brown bread isn’t it?”

“It didn’t rise very much.”

“They had maggots in the machine and they had to clean it out. That’s why I’m off early. I wasn’t supposed to get off till six and it’s only three. I don’t know when Stuart will get home.” Stuart was her daughter’s husband. “He went for a blood test. He had his heart operated on last year. I don’t know what time they went.”

“I saw them go a couple of hours ago. Laura was all dressed up.” Marianne remembered Laura getting in the car with an unlit cigarette in her mouth and a blouse covered in flowers. Their little girl had on black patent leather shoes and a red baseball cap. “How’s your cup?” Marianne filled it. Past the McGettigans’ house the fences and islands were unlit. “It’s hard to get a second fine day.” Thomas Silver had said that to Marianne the other day from his turnip garden.

“It is so.” Mrs. McGettigan smiled. Timidly she said, “I’ve been thinking of going south again.”

“South?”

“Down to Florida. I was there seven times.”

“Seven?”

“Yes. The first time, I went by myself.”

“You went to Florida alone?”

“The first time yes, and then I went again with some other girls from the shore. But I haven’t been these four years now. I’d love to go down again.”

“I can’t believe you went to Florida alone.” It was obvious Mrs. McGettigan didn’t mind her surprise. Her eyes were wearing little proud hoods.

“Oh yes, I loved every minute of it. It was easy. I asked them at the travel agent’s here before I went what to do and they said go around the corner when you leave the airport and told me what bus to take to Pasadena where the hotel was.”

“And what did you do then?”

“I got settled away and I was downstairs asking directions and out on the street in no time.”

“What did you do?”

“I went shopping. Shopping at the malls. Window shopping. They told me where to get the bus. I just had to go across the street and wait, and the bus would come and take me to the Tyrone Square Mall, and I’d ask the driver at the other end how to get back, and I’d do that every single day.” She looked as happy as Marianne had ever seen her. “I’d even go to the bingo, two nights a week, down there.” She went to bingo two nights a week up here. If she couldn’t get her husband to take her she scandalized the cove by hitch-hiking.

“The Tyrone Square Mall has a hundred and forty-four stores. I’d go to K-Mart because I’m used to K-Mart here. They had a JC Penney. There was a good bargain basement there. They had beautiful blouses. That was the first time I went now. The other times five of us went shopping together. One of the girls who works at the Arcade here says the same blouse that was five dollars in Florida would be seventeen fifty or twenty-five dollars at the Arcade.” Her body lost its stiffness. She sat back among the cushions and dreamed. She picked the banana up, tore a piece off and ate it. “We went to Indian Shores first. We didn’t like it. All you could see was a bridge and a few hotels, and I saw a few pelicans out on the water. So we moved to Clearwater where they have the Jolly Trolley that takes you to the Sunshine Mall where all the clothes is cheap.” She finished her banana. “I love bananas.”

Marianne felt surprised she said this so fervently in the middle of Florida. “Did you enjoy Florida more by yourself or with the others?”

“With the others. They would go down on the beach and I’d not be one for the beach. I’d cook supper, set the table and everything. One time we bought a big round roast for seven dollars and they said how will you ever cook that, we’ve got no oven. In Clearwater they only had four burners and the fridge underneath. It was cute. Anyway I made a pot roast out of the roast. It fit right in the pot and I fried out a bit of pork, no, shortening, and then kept adding a bit of water and onions until it was cooked, and made mashed potatoes with it and with a small bag of flour–you could get different sizes of everything–I thickened the gravy. So we had a good meal out of it. They couldn’t believe it. And the roast was so big we had meals out of it for days after. We’d make roast beef sandwiches.”

She stroked the cat. “At the Sunshine Mall they had balloons with a number inside each one. You’d prick the balloon and I got a banana split every single day for seven days for one cent except the eighth day I had to pay forty-nine cents. That was my last day there.”

“Were the banana splits good?”

“Good, yes they were good.”

“Were they big?”

“Big, yes they were really big. The other four would be jealous of me because they’d have to pay full price, sixty-nine cents.”

The door opened and Mrs. McGettigan’s granddaughter came in eating Glossettes. She scrambled on the day bed and looked at her nanny. “We thought you weren’t home.” She tried feeding a Glossette to the cat. Mrs. McGettigan did not seem to be in any hurry to go home.

“Is the fare expensive?”

“It’s four hundred dollars return, plus eighteen dollars a night if you share four to a room.” She said the woman who works at the Arcade phoned yesterday thinking maybe they’d go back down in September.

“And are you going?”
Mrs. McGettigan got up then. She should be home making supper instead of sitting down eating banana and toast and talking about Florida with Marianne. “I must go now.” She picked her bags up and said come on to her little granddaughter. She didn’t answer Marianne.

“Do you think you’ll be going?” Marianne shouted.

As she was going out the door Mrs. McGettigan spoke in an automatic voice. “If I win the seven digit number tonight maybe I’ll go down.” Marianne asked her how much the prize was. It was five hundred. But Mrs. McGettigan had to get supper. She should never have tried to get in the house through the kitchen window. She should never have forgotten her keys. She had not known there would be maggots in the machine. All the same Leonard would be mad if he found out. Marianne watched them bob down the bank, the white plastic tiara and little red hat. Murres and puffins screamed around the island. From the wind over Thomas Silver’s turnip garden she caught scents of peas pudding and wild roses.