Craig Davidson - Sarah Court

Though I give the impression of omniscience, it is not so. Whether Frank is dead or alive in fortuitous or inhospitable circumstances is really up to you. Stiff as a rod in a Brazilian banana boat? Fine. Should you wish to picture him in more charitable circumstances, well, everything is within the realm of speculation.

Dylan Saberhagen runs out to greet his father and Abby. Had it been me guiding this narrative, I suppose I would have let him die at the Motor Motel. Please try not to hold this inclination towards the most horrid variable against me. How svelte the boy is! Brain damage altered the appetite suppression centre in Dylan’s brain. As has been said: the brain is a funny organ and it breaks in funny ways.

Nick’s car wends up Martindale past the pond where Dylan caught poison ivy years ago. Nick unrolls his window to let air flow through his spread fingers. Wind skates up Abigail’s legs to stir the hem of her dress. Nick’s gaze momentarily wanders to that bare strip of thigh — a sight that once would have locked a thrilling tension across his chest — but now he only lays a hand on the armrest as the fabric touches his fingertips to resettle.

The Lion’s Club carnival is on in Port Dalhousie. The heavenly smell of fried dough, or at least I’ve heard it described as such. The beach is studded with Tilt-A-Whirl, Zipper, bumper cars. All manned by a leathery roustabout. A pavilion christened “Our Poisoned Seas” is erected beside the marina. An oilcoated shark floats in a glass box of formaldehyde. Its black eyes stare over Lake Ontario.

An Educational Initiative Made Possible by Mister Conway Finnegan and Wal-Mart, reads the plaque beneath the shark.

The lake shore is teeming with residents awaiting the fireworks. A ferry crosses the lake, its windows bright as Kuggerand gold as if ferrying the sun itself.

Nicholas spots Wesley Hill and his son. They greet each other with great warmth. Colin has caught something he wants to show everyone. A lunar moth batters the cage of his spread fingers.

“You mustn’t do that,” Wesley tells his son, as he’d told him years ago. “Moths have a protective powder on their wings. If it comes off, it’s like… well, you without your skin.”

Colin opens his hands. The moth floats up into the night.

“Did I kill it?”

“He’ll be okay,” Dylan tells him. But everyone knows the moth will die.

You are all in this together. That huge thrashing teardrop of life. Consider the story threads. Where they start and end. A young pyromaniac enthralled by fireworks ends with fresh eyes in a woman’s sockets. A car thief telling an odd boy how to hut whirr a vay heckle ends with an equally odd boy hanging himself in a motel closet — only to be saved by that first odd boy, now a man, who once stole a Cadillac belonging to the other boy’s grandfather.

Some say the only way to break such chains is to leave the place they’ve been forged. Yet every town is essentially a box with an open top, isn’t it? If you do not make the choice to step out of the box, well, can you really call it a trap?

Further downshore stands my benefactor, Jeffrey, with Patience Nanavatti. They should not be here, as they could be spotted — indeed, Danny Mulligan stands not far away with his daughter Cassie upon his shoulders — but Patience’s father will be honoured with a fireworks fusillade tonight. Between them sits a bitch with a livid scar on her flank.

At the merry-go-round congregate the residents of Tufford Manor. Clive hands out blankets to his thin-blooded charges. William Lonnigan wipes away a runner of gossamer-thin drool descending from Clara Russell’s bottom lip. She’s by far the most docile tenant at Tufford Manor. Clara Russell causes absolutely no fuss at all. After all, she is alive in the sense a ficus plant can be considered alive.

I myself hover peripherally. The moonlight reflecting off my silver eyes tends to look alarming. When I alarm your species, you fuckers have a nasty habit of locking me up. Do you not enjoy my being here? I unnerve you. Yes, I do that. But it is quite possible I am not here at all. Could be it was only a box. You know, the sort magicians escape from. An empty, boring box. If that is what you would rather believe, well, I urge you to do so. It may even be true.

Dylan presses his forehead to Nicholas’s hip. As he gets taller he will adapt this same gesture to elevated portions of his father’s anatomy. He will press his forehead to the spot under Nicholas’s rib cage, the crook of his elbow, the round of one shoulder. When fully grown Dylan’s habit will be to wrap one hand gently round the back of his father’s skull and press their foreheads together.

Nicholas’s hand slips down to Dylan’s neck until it brushes the tracheal scar on his throat. They both flinch. Years from now a girlfriend, Dylan’s first, will kiss that scar. She will ask how he got it. Dylan will say he tried to hang himself as a boy. A hole was cut in his throat to let in air. He will direct her fingers to the thin but prominent scars near his ears, from the bootlaces, and the others, even smaller, made by his father’s frenzied fingernails.

“What was it like?” she will ask. “The coma.”

“I don’t remember,” is what he will tell her. “I don’t know you’re really supposed to.”

“How long were you in it?”

“Eleven days. I woke in the hospital. Mom and Dad were there. I thought maybe they were back together. Patched things up or whatever. But they weren’t. They weren’t.”

“Why did you do it?”

“Sad, I guess. Why do people do it all the time? Every day?”

He’ll smile. She will think he is about to touch her but he will not.

As he grows older, Dylan will realize how so much of anyone’s life is slip-slide-dancing along the edge of some karmic razor blade. Some of you get cut deep. Others get off unscathed. This town has a saying for instances of just such dipshit luck: Even the blind squirrel will find a nut .

All the people you’ve met within these pages will find happiness. You believe that, don’t you? On a reduced scale, yes, but that scale reduces itself starting the moment you suck first breath. You organisms have so many flaws. Worst is how you seek to be happy at all times. Happiness is best when it arrives in modest measurements and in small moments. To ask for anything more is lunatic.

More often than not I think you carbon-based scraps of interstellar waste are not sustainable as a species.

But my, it is entertaining to watch you go about your business of extinction.

Now the fireworks begin to explode into the summer dark. Oooohs and aaahs . Last is Philip Nanavatti’s finest creation. Globes of fire detonate, flaming umbrellas opening in the sky, tinting the lake every colour of their creation.

Spectators close their eyes. There it is. The Mushrooming Imprint.

And so the residents of Sarah Court make a wish. Each of them their own. Even though a fireworks display is not a regular outlet for wish-making.

What is it you would have them wish for? Well?

Make it that, then. Why not? Make it that.

Thanks to Brett and Sandra for taking this book on, and to Erik for providing such a brilliant cover. Thanks to my hometown. And thanks to Roald Dahl, whose story “The Man From the South” provided the basis for a scene in the third section. I mean, it’s a pretty blatant rip, but I figure Quentin Tarantino already ripped it off even more blatantly in Four Rooms , so mine is, at best, a facsimile of a rip-off.

Craig Davidson has written three other books: The Preserve (as Patrick Lestewka), Rust and Bone , and The Fighter . His nonfiction has appeared in Esquire, The Washington Post, Nerve, Salon, Real Fighter, The London Observer , and elsewhere. Currently, he’s hanging his hat in Fredericton, New Brunswick, where he is the deputy editor of an alt-urban weekly.