Erin Fisher - That Tiny Life

Melanie leans over the counter. Her coat — his old coat — rises from the back of her knees. Way too big on her. So are the cut-off boots. She clicks on the candler and is lightly backlit — tufts of wool and dust. She turns sideways and kneels. The beam of light, meant to pierce eggs, is fierce, but doesn’t change the illumination of the room and she doesn’t look his way. A flash of red — the heat lamps again — shoots across the wire frame of her glasses. She raises her hand to the candler.

She looks different. Her jaw is relaxed — first time he’s seen it unclenched in years. Maybe ever. But that’s not it. In the beam her palm becomes a radiant orange, rosy with bones. Like a flashlight tucked in the mouth for a ghost story — how the beam shadows the sinuses. That’s not it either.

What is it? What’s different? Her usual glasses, the same frames for the last three years, but he can see more of her face than he’s used to. Her cheekbones — too wide now, but possibly pretty when she grows. Her face — her hair is cut, that’s what’s weird.

Her hair. Right. He held her. He did that.

Leave now , he tells himself. He shouldn’t be here. He’s still drunk. He should leave her alone and go. Now. Only there’s footsteps in the hall.

Melanie jerks her hand out of the light and stumbles up. The door opens. Axel scans them both. Shit.

“Wait.” Milo steadies himself on a bookcase. Melanie gives him a look — disgust? Contempt? Both. He deserves both.

Axel sucks in his cheeks and strides into the room. He seizes Melanie under the armpit. With his free arm he points to the wall and waves his finger at charts and breeding plans taped on the plastic sheeting. He sucks his cheeks again then slaps Melanie across the jaw and lets her drop. “Out.”

Milo steps toward them and stops. Do something. Do what? He coughs — Axel’s kicked up a wake of dust and hay particles. Her hair, he did that.

Melanie, one hand to her ear and chin, scrambles through the hay and cords toward the exit.

Milo raises his arms and gives her space. “You’re missing school,” he says. Well, she is.

Melanie rushes by him, shoves Kendra and some kid at the door.

Milo coughs again and wipes his mouth. Her footsteps boom down the hall and front stairs.

Kendra picks at the back of her hand. “What are you waiting for?”

She either means “Get lost” or “Why the hell is he not helping his daughter?” Why is he waiting? He runs after his kid. Down the stairs and across the drive. “Melanie.” He grabs her backpack from the fence and skids into the snowy paddock. “Melanie, wait.” He stops jogging and leans over, planting his hands on the rickety slurry fence as his daughter runs away from him, over the paddock toward their house. As much as the field lets her run: the mud’s suction on her boots half-trips her every third step, until she does trip on the porch stairs — the stairs he hasn’t shovelled — and crawls into the house.

He straightens up. His feet sink further into the mud. “Kiddo.” The front door shuts behind her, but the screen door hasn’t latched and it creaks open again. The house is not that far off, maybe a hundred metres, but the thought of following her inside makes him tired. It’s an effort to even think of crossing the damn paddock. And if he did go after her, well, what he’s done is, again, past apology. He rubs a hand over his chapped skin, fingering the cracks at the corners of his lips. Too dehydrated to even spit. Too sore — suddenly too stiff from passing out at the kitchen table — to move.

Across the field the bathroom light switches on then off. Melanie should be in class. Bent over a desk doing long division. Or, what’s the math grade eight covers? Tries to cover, in that school. The graffitied tables are probably the same tables from when he was a kid. Some of the carved “fucks” are probably his. His old textbooks — they’re probably still in use. Students are likely still allowed in the lab supplies. Well, not allowed per se, but there was no lock on the chemical cupboard when he was in eighth grade. Hell, that time he convinced the loner kid to coat his hand in water and ethanol and light it on fire. The alcohol had pooled between the boy’s fingers and the kid’s skin had bubbled. Smokies on a campfire. Barbaric.

The light’s faded, and dark blue-grey has collected at the base of the clouds. An hour or two must have passed. Time does that lately, skip him over when his mind’s elsewhere. It means, at least, that he doesn’t have to think, so that’s good. So is feeling sick — it’s deserved.

In front of him, the poles around the slurry tilt like the wind has forced them over. Not that there’s wind. He’s still holding her pack. He unzips it. Crumpled paper. That’s it, nothing else. No real reason for her to even bring the pack to school. Except to fake having it together, “it” being her life. His fault. Seven years with him. Since she was six. And almost a whole year doing his chores here at the dairy. Christ.

What’s her life actually like? Her school and friends. What are the names or looks of any of her teachers? It’s like dredging, trying to pull these thoughts out of his brain. Does she have friends? Memory. It’s like having dropped his keys in the pasture.

The job is quick, an hour or two, each barn stall rigged to electronically read the ear chip of each cow and dispense feed with the correct antibiotic or hormone. All she has to do is attach the milkers, and those vacuum on automatically when she brings them close enough to the teats. Then there is the consistent chug of the milk machines, and the chewing, and the comforting way the cows lean on the metal rails in their stalls so that their sides touch. She works her way between two of their great boney asses and lays her cheek on a back.

“Hey, cow.” Her jaw’s tender, and the cow hot and full of pulse. The hair she has left falls into her face. She closes her eyes and rubs her hand over the cow’s short hide. Her fingers are soft from napping in the bath all day, and small tan hairs stick to her fingertips. One of her first memories is of cows. In it she is standing with her back against her father’s legs and looking up at big, wet, bovine noses. Their pink tongues lick their own pink nostrils. Could it have been this farm? She can’t think of a time when her father had driven her anywhere, or taken her on any sort of trip. Maybe, and this thought is a shock, she’s lived here before? But no, there’s only the one memory.

Everything else takes place in the city. The same city where Candice, her bestie, still gets to live and spend her school year reading fortunes at lunch hour and inventing quizzes for boys — Circle Five: cupcake, banana, melon, left, right, hand, feet, puppies, dinosaur, neon, black, kiss, sex. They never know how to answer, boys. She rubs her nose on the heifer. The warmth of the cow radiates through its hair against her lower lip. She cozies up and kisses it.

She and Candice spent all of grade seven lunching in the art room around the Ouija board. The mood of the art room — with its batik and dusty papier mâché — wasn’t voodoo enough for the board, but the point wasn’t exactly Ouija anyway, the point was the boys they hung out with around the board, so they forgave the lack of spook. The room, at least, was private.

Melanie’s hand, partly covered by Rowan’s, moved with the dial.

“B. J. You know what that means.” Candice buffed her nails on her jeans and the boys laughed. “Blow job?”

She hadn’t. She let go of the dial and tugged the back of her pants. They were too loose to hold properly to her hips, but the smaller size at the store had left two inches of ankle bone visible.