I’m struggling, trying to get back to writing about my family, about parenting, about marriage, about how we learn to love, all topics of the long project explorations. I wish I wasn’t, but I am. I don’t know why; I’m trying to figure it out. My body and mind resist.
Instead, I turned toward reworking a flash fiction piece I’d drafted more than two years ago. The story felt sufficiently removed from my personal life and I felt curious and ready to explore its uncanny unfolding. The story is called The Amateur Poet Roadkill Collector’s Night Log. So yeah, that’s what it’s about. The protagonist is male and he writes poems for each of the carcasses he scrapes from the asphalt. I know, very strange.
The piece arrived as a response to a prompt, a straightforward prompt, to create a hermit crab story[1]. What I love about the story is that it arrived entirely from the subconscious well of imagination. And it wasn’t until after working through its revision I recognised, with surprise, the narrative is very deeply associated with my personal life.
The original draft focused a lot on describing the violence inflicted on animal bodies by machinery (cars). One line in particular astonished me; it felt like it dropped to the page from the firmament.
The vibrating line in the draft referenced a mother raccoon and two babies hit and killed by a car: the curl of their little hands. So like my daughter’s.
I have trained myself, through practice, to keep writing, to never stop to question such a line or argue myself out of recording it or crossing it out or deleting it because it doesn’t “fit’ the story I think I’m working on. I’ve learned these gifts from the subconscious always “fit” the story. In fact they are, often, the story. And if I sit with the story and let it breathe with its vibrating line…well, sometimes I can figure it out[2]. I’m getting better at this.
The character of a daughter was a complete surprise when writing about raccoons. And what did I mean about the curl of a hand? The image and the comparison felt very strong, tugging me for my attention. I have thought about this story off and on since its first draft. It was clear the roadkill collector had lost his daughter…to death? To drugs? At one point I went too far in my thinking (thinker-tinker-tanker) and planned to write the story with the roadkill collector character—he is never named, his identity is flattened to his employment role—having been a soldier in a war zone. I imagined the character forced to watch children die by the hands of weapons he held or, at least, upheld…but I could feel this was the wrong path (a feeling not unlike the tension deliberating multiple choice options on an exam…a knowing that one particular answer, at least, is not the right one). I know it’s the wrong path when I get too analytical and conceptual (I note here, “daughter” had morphed to an abstract collective “children”)[3]. Instead, I needed to lean into the emotions I could feel from this image, emotions I often avoid. Loss. Grief. Possibly regret?
My best friend as a young kid was my next-door neighbour Andy. We raced round the neighbourhood roads and lawns on our bikes playing cops and robbers. We competed for who could climb a tree the fastest or to its highest bending branch, for who could hold their breath the longest beneath the lake’s surface, for who could turn the most somersaults without coming up for air. We dug worms he’d use to fish off the end of the dock. We fashioned ice forts from snowbanks, piled leaves high to catch our catapults. We set up elaborate tracks for running hot wheel cars and in the sandy path we’d rubbed clean of grass with our bare feet running between our houses, we dug marble pits. I lost most of my marbles to him.
We never spoke at school, adhering to the tacit code boys never play with girls. If I ever smiled or waved to him in the school yard, he looked through me with a cold indifferent gaze past my shoulder to a horizon beyond. I have no memory of walking to and from school with him. He showed me how ants might be laser beamed lit and charred to crumpled crisps with such a simple angling of sunlight through a magnifying glass…something I was never inclined to repeat, feeling terrible for the poor insects…though I couldn’t resist lighting bits of paper on fire. He thrilled using a hammer to detonate the percussion caps on the papery strips meant for his cap gun. Once or twice, he let me wield the hammer. I didn’t ever cush on him …I would say I was too young for those feelings except I do remember other boys I liked that way[4]. But with Andy I never did. When he was seven and I was eight he was diagnosed with leukemia. He died two years later.
His death was not a surprise for me. It was a relief. For two years I witnessed how his medical treatments—radiation, chemotherapy, surgeries—transformed his pink skin to grey, stole the frenetic energy from his limbs and the bright spark of light from his eyes. He lost all his hair.
The hardest part was that I was no longer allowed to play with him. This was because I had not yet had chicken pox. It was explained how his immune system was compromised and that if I caught and passed chicken pox onto him, he would die.
There were times in those two years of treatments when his hair grew back in…grey…never the lustrous brown curls he’d had before. His energy returned too. We played together-apart, with the fence and our yards between us, devising games and competitions we could move through with the physical distance between us. If he lost a competition, he became petulant and agitated, and I risked losing my playmate for a day or two. So, I often let him win. For me, this trade off was better. He felt he retained his champion status, that he might conquer his illness, and I knew I could keep my friend.
On one spring day, when I could smell the green of the grass growing thick, the green I crushed beneath my running feet and the cerulean sky cradled puff ball clouds and the sun was yellow and hot and the bright bloom of dandelions had grown into grey fuzzy seed heads that, when snapped beneath my toes, released fuzzy sails to the air, floating the breeze and winking the light, Andy and I were racing each other around the perimeter of our houses. Except, this round, he’d joined me to race around mine. As we rounded the southwest corner, the path and the space between our bodies narrowed and he reached out his hand to curl into mine. We held hands only for a moment. A few running strides. But I recall it as a moment of joy. Pure joy. Innocent joy. And I recall I knew it then too…recognised the moment in the moment. Also, I remember thinking the connection, despite violating the distance rule, could only be something pure and good, something a God would want to happen.
The following spring my mum, drying her hands with a kitchen towel, turned to me and told me to go over next door to say goodbye to Andy. She did not mince words. She said, he would die that night and that it was important I say goodbye. The distance rule no longer mattered.
When I entered the living room, Andy was propped up with pillows and blankets on their sofa. I could tell instantly my friend was …hardly there anymore. His father, sitting across the room, fiddled to put a fishing rod together, dropping the reel and picking it up and mumbling the advantages of various feathered lures and float distances. Standing there, the grey green boy with his fuzzed head webbed with blue veins I could trace with my eyes, I understood two things: that Andy’s dad did not believe his son would die and that Andy was using all his energy to prevent himself from dying so as not to hurt his parents. A tremendous guilt washed over me then, that I knew these things. That I wished each person would let their belief go so that each might feel relief. That I would never speak my knowings, my opinions, aloud. That I recognised death when I saw it and others didn’t.
Andy died that night. I’ve always been grateful to my mum for telling me he would and telling me to say goodbye. I was ten years old.
Ever since, I’ve questioned the balance of medical technologies against quality of life. In medical research, quality of life is rarely an outcome measure. Length of life is. Mortality is. We do not measure what matters. And we believe keeping a person alive for as long as possible is the goal. I’ve never agreed with that. This is the exploration spinning round the inside of the Poet Roadkill Collector story. It amazes me, how the 750-word exploration captures my feelings. It’s my favourite story I’ve written so far. I’ve offered it for publication. I’ve received my first rejection (Bending Genres). I’m researching where I might offer it next. I wait to see if others are equally moved by it.
The other week, my ex-husband emailed to say he wanted to drop off my cooking spices, he had no use for them. He arrived a couple of hours later and handed me a large box filled to the brim with jars and containers of spices and teas with their various mixes I’d created. The glass jars were covered in dust; I haven’t lived at the farm for two years.
I had not seen or spoken with him since summer, when my sister, Nyree, and I went out to the farm to move the last of “my stuff”, a pickup truck’s worth (he loaned me his truck) of the remains of my mum’s things left in the barn after moving her into long term care. It was an emotional day and very hot for lifting and sorting boxes. When I returned the truck, I suggested we might try to share thanksgiving or xmas dinners together this year, with our girls.
He laughed, a short, high bark of incredulity, marking me as I stood before him, as if I were infected with some combo of leprosy and schizophrenia, his refusal to entertain such a preposterous idea sharp between us. On the inside, my heart shed strips of tissue and continued to split into multiple planes of our history, of my existence.
The spices I use for my cooking…I buy in tiny quantities because I prefer they’re fresh, that their taste is alive and kicking. I know there’s a metaphor here; I refuse to invite it. But. I now understand why I’ve resisted writing into the long project these last weeks. The exercise I’d worked through, crafting the personal essay describing the dissolution of my relationship with my ex-husband, required I enter places of emotional pain, inhabit them, explore and sit with their incandescent teachings. I need some recovery time, need to build up my courage and stamina to re-enter those memories again to write them. This is part of process too, this patient waiting in order to sing.
And while I wait, I always read[5]. I love to read.
[1] A hermit crab story can be fiction or nonfiction. The writing is form driven—it imitates the way a hermit crab uses another creature’s discarded shell for its home—a story written following a pre-existing form, a form that is unusual for essays or short stories, like a prescription warning label, a recipe or a multiple-choice quiz. In the story I drafted, I used what I imagined a night log might look like for a person who worked a job cleaning the roads of the animals killed. A hermit crab story is supposed to use the form as a technique to resonate with the subject of the story, for example, a prescription warning label form serves well as a container for a story about addiction, or a recipe form for how to make a kid with mild anxiety disorder (I wrote this story years ago…). In the Roadkill Poet draft, the form receded as to become almost meaningless…instead, the form became the technique to section the story with time stamps (and mile markers) a reader might follow without taking up too much narrative space as the character moves through his night shift. It simplified, perhaps even flattened (no pun intended) the technique, but the form does its utilitarian work just as the roadkill collector trades the macabre job for a paycheck.
[2] It’s a pleasure trying to figure out what a story is about. Sometimes it’s frustrating too, because I can feel when I’m barking up the wrong tree, so to speak. Then I turn to the forest of trees and wonder, well, which tree (story) is it? This requires patience. It’s through the process of writing the story will let me know what it’s about. It moves through me, the instrument of its making.
[3] Also, I planned, like, in my mind, to write it this way….I never actually sat down to write that version. Eyeroll. Maybe one day I will…there’s another scene from a different story I’ve written, a war scene with a child, a mother and a mine field …calling to me…it would be a short story though; the character of the child needs to be fleshed out…more than a flash narrative.
[4] I recall flirting for the first time, creating an elaborate story about the “diamond” (cut glass) necklace I’d pilfered from the dress up box and clasped round my neck. I lifted it from my collarbones toward my chin so the boy I loved, Steven Chapman (fancy remembering his name?!), was induced to lean in closer for inspection, so close, so close our lips almost touched. Grade one.
[5] Recent reads: a beautifully crafted memoir by Carvell Wallace, Another Word for Love, written and structured around theme, memories related to love with all its prismatic renderings. I cried frequently, resonating with many of the scenes and feelings expressed; Hamnet and Judith, a novel written by Maggie O’Farrell which I loved for its descriptions of Elizabethan era farming as well as its connected scenes tumbling the pathway of bubonic plague bacteria across Europe. Also the making-love-in-an-apple-shed scene; two stupendous stories in recent The New Yorker issues, The Mother of Men, by Lauren Groff (also cried in this one, the paragraph where one of the Venezuelan labourers disappears, for this is the communication in this brilliant story) and The New Coast by Paul Yoon – loved the longing and disorientation I felt reading this story, also the experiences of a child rendered alongside adult reflection; Dreamtigers
by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Mildred Boyer and Harold Morland, I love how he explores dreaming and creative writing together; and, for the fourth time, because each time I try to make my way through the essays, I come up against a passage I just can’t seem to grasp or integrate and have to put the book down, Mark Doty’s The Art of Description, World into Word. When I pick this one up, I start at the beginning again, and each time I get a little further into this tiny book (I really love The Art Of series published by Graywolf Press). And here’s a poem I love by Mark Doty, “Brian Age Seven”.
Process Peace 