Erin Fisher - That Tiny Life

Kids dawdle and fall from a single school crowd into their standard cliques around the yard in the muddy snow. One girl uses the bathroom and comes out pinching an eight-inch chunk of blonde hair, her hair. Of course. She left it all over the floor and vanity. The girl throws it at a jock, who flings his arms up and overplays his jump backwards.

Cody, hands aloft, walks past the twins and Angelique and the other girls who’ve swapped bracelets and hair clips to some code. These girls, they wouldn’t last a lunch hour against her old school and Candice, not with their catalogue parkas and knowledge of hay and horses and potato guns. Angelique — the tall brunette whose winter boots curve along her ankle and leg, and who, despite Melanie’s cut-off galoshes and oversized winter coat, had hung with her — grabs Cody’s elbow and flicks his bangs from his eyes. “Can you see in there?”

Cody blushes and squeezes by the group into her house.

“Maybe Melanie could give you a buzz?” Angelique calls after him. Melanie closes her fists. The girls squeal and whisper like they’re besties, “I can’t believe you did that,” and “Oh-my-god he’s adorable. Did you see the skirt?” Angelique steps toward Melanie and says, “Did you want to say something?”

Melanie crosses her arm over her chest and holds her shoulder. What can she say? Candice would have liked the kilt too.

Angelique puts on a concerned look. “No? Your mouth was open. But you know your hair looks great. I mean, it’s a lot less greasy short.” The Kratz twins titter. Angelique turns and huddles with the group.

She should leave. She’s in pyjamas — leave already. But she can’t make herself walk up the stoop and down the hall where the old man is, where his parts are. Maybe she should go in there — she could give anyone who walked in a real shocker. “Shut up,” she whispers. Shut up.

Milo presents Mr. Friessen with her grandfather’s knife case.

“Be my guest,” Mr. Friessen waves Milo toward the cow.

The class crowds the cow and Milo selects the old man’s butcher knife — long, but widely curved at the tip — and slices down the belly. The settled blood is an astonishing watery pink. She expected a creamy beading around the slit, but of course the cow’s not full of milk. Milo pries the flesh back and unfolds a calf — a wet slip of hooves and tacky fur. The eyes are blueish and pearled and useless, although the calf, judging by the size, might have lived if they’d cut it out sooner.

Mid-afternoon and already the sun’s jerked behind the western valley wall and let the clouds lower and darken.

“Should be one hundred seventy feet of gut.” Friessen and Milo scoop the heifer’s innards onto the ramp. A jock steps over and helps stretch the intestines across the paddock. A trio of nerds lift out the organs. The ditzes and idiots close in. There’s hacking and chasing. The eyes are removed — oblong things, filmy black at the front, gripped by red muscles at the sides. They burst and goop sprays down a Kratz sweater. The power flickers back on but there’s no talk of milking. Kids balloon their latex gloves into translucent udders and bop them volleyball style. Nose holding. Whining. Piling it all back on the tarp in the three o’clock dusk. Then her friends are back on the bus. “Sure you don’t want to come, honey?” Melanie shakes off the chaperone. Then they’re gone.

On the table: a silver sugar dish and a lighter, plates, a bucket of scummy water and a drowned cloth, cups. The kitchen isn’t untidy, it’s filthy. And cold. The sink is full of dishes, so he looks for the bathroom, where the vanity is covered with long clumps of hair.

Axel’s house, cluttered with dyes and leather, bird skulls on the shelves and feathers in vases, is eccentric. His place with his mom is too clean — so scrubbed it’s noticeable (his mom scratches the tub enamel with coarse cleaner) — but this house, it’s barely a house.

Someone coughs.

“Hello?” he says. “Are you all right?”

The kids across the field are counted — the teacher taps each teen on the head and calls a name — and they pile on the bus and drive away into the dark. Now that the power is on, she showers, wearing her long johns, in the outside stall of the hatchling barn. Heat steams off and streams upward. In the cold afternoon night, the clouds thin and are inhaled south along with the river, leaving the tops of the mountain bare and stippled wintergreen with hemlock and pine. Her underclothes turn brown and clear and heavy.

Axel locks the white in the flight pen and trudges over. He sits on the steps with his back to her. Her jeans and shirt and camera are draped over his shoulder. She peels her long johns and undershirt and underwear and leaves them in a pile at her feet. She takes the hard, yellowed bar of soap first to her hair and nails and then to her body.

He says, “We can clean you a room.”

She rinses her face and spits. Rinses again. The muscles in his shoulders are knotted. He’s tense. He wants her to stay? To be what the boy isn’t? What is he thinking? How long has she been here now? Has she ever been more clear about what she needs from him? That he’d offer her a permanent room. A room, not a bird. The kid’s room, too.

She picks up her underwear and slaps them over the side of the sink next to her. “I have a room now?” she says. But it’s not even the room that bothers her. It’s not that he’s writing off the boy, who needs, well, someone. It’s that he’s asking for help. Asking her. “You talking about giving me Cody’s room? You want me to move in?”

She shuts off the shower. Axel stands and turns to her. The heat from the shower is replaced by late-afternoon chill. Is it that she’s naked? Is that what makes him think that giving up his role — she’s his apprentice — will fix his plans, his bird, anything? He’s holding on to her and he doesn’t know what he’s holding on to.

She takes her clothes from his shoulder and meets his eyes. Blue, set in tanned, weathered skin — not wrinkled, that would imply he has extra flesh. He’s bone and leather. “No, Axel,” she says.

He limps to the house.

“Shit.” She leans on the shower wall. Her shoulder blades stick to the cold plastic. “Just, shit.” Across the highway the bare aspen dapple the riverside. Beyond them the black water pushes pallets of ice against the riverbank. Cows, some still on the highway but most of them back in the pasture, stand and fade — dull patches in the dark. The front of her truck, shiny in the snowy ditch down the driveway. She sets her clothes on the steps and turns the shower back on.

He limps the steps to the house and sits. Rolls his sweatpants above his knee and removes his prosthetic. Doesn’t bother him anymore, except sometimes he dreams the pain — a contorted limb that won’t relax.

His brother visited him in hospital when he was scheduled to lose it, like he told the boy. Travelled from the farm to Quebec, where the medivac had flown Axel after he’d landed his kayak at the camp with that smashed leg. The hospital had called his brother, unable to talk sense into Axel.

“How do you expect to hold a falcon during surgery?” His brother leaned over him on the hospital bed. He held the gyr, downy and peeping, to his chest.

“A bird in the hand,” he said.

“Two feet on the ground.” His brother leaned so close Axel worried the bird would be crushed, and tucked his fingers under the falcon.

He let go. Damn him, he could have cried. His brother kept a hand on his shoulder while the nurses rolled the stretcher into the hall. Locked eyes when he had to let go. Brown eyes. Like the boy, Cody. When he was wheeled back with a freshly severed stump, his brother put down his newspaper. “Was it worth it?”