Craig Davidson - Sarah Court

“Square it!”

Screaming this over the motor’s roar and the boom of the Falls, hammering the engine full-bore and skipping over the water, spray wetting my face so I can no longer tell if I’m bawling, though it’s highly conceivable I am.

“Go on go square that bastard one more time!”

My son melts a path into the day. Burning through like an ember through a page painted every colour of our world. Throttling headlong to catch him and when I reach for him he will take my hand.

I have never seen anything burn so fierce trapped so close to earth.

Onthe day she ordered a police deputy to shoot my squirrel, Clara “Mama” Russell sat on her bed with a baby and a short-barrelled revolver.

I’d come home from school to discover my pet squirrel, Alvin, shot. He’d gotten into the baby’s pram. But Alvin was harmless. The baby wasn’t even hers. I banged on her door. Jeffrey, one of her boys, answered. Well-dressed and terribly clean. Another of her boys, Teddy, would later burn our house down.

“Mama’s pipe is flowing very black,” said Jeffrey. I pushed past him and found Mama with the baby and the gun. Mama Russell, a solid woman. A human dumptruck. But right then, with her radish eyes and bloody fingernails, she looked like a cheap umbrella blown inside-out by the wind.

“Patience Nanavatti, isn’t it? The fireworker’s daughter.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Mama.”

“Yes, Mama.”

A shiny silver six-shooter. I’d never seen a gun. Could have been fake except for how it dimpled the duvet. That way its weight expressed itself. Mama picked it up. She tickled the baby’s foot with the gun’s silver hammer. Then she set the barrel under her own chin. Brought it to the tip of one ear round the curve of her neck. Had it been a razor she would’ve slit her own throat.

“What it is to be a parent,” she said. “Choices. Each more difficult than the last.”

Her eyes snagged on that silver “O” of the barrel as it traced the her upper lip. She seemed perplexed to find it there — in her house, in her hands — and she dropped it.

“Oh! But it isn’t loaded.”

She never did show me the empty chambers.

“You won’t tell anyone. Our secret, Patience. Promise me.”

“I promise.”

The womanangles through racks of OshKosh B’Gosh bib overalls and Jamboree caterpillar-patterned dresses under a display poster of a bugeyed kid heaving on a giant harmonica. She vanishes behind a bin of pickedover boxer shorts.

Wal-Mart. High-intensity fluorescents, elevator music — presently Belinda Carlisle’s “Heaven is a Place on Earth”—the thoughtless seethe as shoppers quest for Windex or paperclips or rotisserie chickens. Spell of consumerism: they find themselves outside with bags of crap viable under these lights but in the sane light of day clearly worthless. Fuck me, they must think, what am I doing with this giant plastic candy cane full of cinnamon hearts?

Myself, I steal. Whatever fits unobtrusively in my pockets. Batteries up to D-cell. Panties, though a woman with too many panties seems debauched. Dr. Scholl’s jelly shoe inserts, even though nothing’s the matter with my feet. Not that I’m poor. Only that walking past the sensors — I make sure to rip off the magnetized tags — girdled with ill-gotten loot, I am satiated. Before long the emptiness crawls back. My existence is consumed, in fact, by emptiness avoidance. I’ll scan nuptial announcements in the paper, don a fugly crinoline dress, show up at churches to insert myself into photographs. It’s an art, fitting unobtrusively into the frame. Time it right and there’s you with a shit-eating grin backgrounding an earnest portrait of total strangers. My crinoline dress and goofy grin cropping up in wedding albums all over the Niagara peninsula; couples will flip through years later wondering: Who the hell’s that? and say: “She must be from your side of the family.”

That woman in kidswear is shoplifting. I can smell my own. Normally I’d watch the rent-a-cops descend on her. Instead I return the Energizers to their hook and trail after. Down an aisle of picture frames: the same cute, blonde, pigtailed girl grins out of them all. Passing through women’s wear I unhook all the bras on the display mannequins: a horde of armless, legless, nipple-less silver torsos in my wake. Catch my profile in a mirrored support column: green eyes beneath brows that fail to reach the inner edge of my eyes give my face a truck-flattened, wide-set aspect. A combat jacket from the Army Surplus. We frumps are the most easily ignored.

I find her in Housewares fingering crockpots. She can’t steal those — tough to convince security you’re afflicted with a crockpot-sized stomach tumour— so I figure she’ll make for Cosmetics. Stuff her socks with eyeliner pencils. She’s really down at the hoof. An air of unconcern about her looks. Except there’s no calculation to it, the way some people go about slovenly as a half-assed statement. No more interest in her appearance than your average bag lady.

She pulls a U-ey at Fabrics. I lose her amidst unravelling bolts of merino wool. I do my best impression of a neurotic shopping for pinking shears—“These ones have the comfort-grip handles,” I whisper. “These are endorsed by Martha Stewart”—until she exits the public toilets.

Wal-Mart’s toilets. Same Wal-Mart halogens, same Wal-Mart paint: eggshell white with a greenish under-hue. The colour of an egg with a stillborn chick inside. Water slicked over the tiles. Had she tried to flush a tampon — a boxful?

A puffy lump wedged down the lone bowl. Mycoloured: I mean to say, the colour of skin. The fact it’s in a toilet prevents my understanding. A baby in a crapper fails to conform to any known reality so remains as unbelievable as satellite footage of that same baby orbiting Saturn. Face down, arms pinned in the guts of the bowl where the plumbing begins so all I see is a wad, not distinguishably human, clogging things.

I reach into the toilet to grip the body and turn it, her , face up. Skin stained 2,000 Flushes blue. I accidentally bonk her head on the lid and hope to Christ I didn’t hit her fontanelle and squash something — her sense of smell? zest for life? — permanently.

I cradle her, dripping, to the diaper change station. Root my index finger through her mouth fearing the insane bitch stuffed her throat full of toilet paper. Close my lips over her mouth and nose. I might’ve inhaled her entire head if it wasn’t so bulbous, that being the style of baby heads. Blow too hard and I’ll rupture her lungs. So I’m blowing as if to inflate a fleshed-out plum.

Not a cough, sigh, or puke and all this is now barrelling toward a senseless end. Trying to pour life into a permanently stoppered vessel — had to head the list of Worst Human Experiences. Top five, guaranteed. My fingerprints all over this beautiful dead body.

“Breathe.” Thumb-pumping her sternum. “You stupid little bitch, breathe .”

A gutful of warm toilet water. This wee infant girl’s bawling.

I was toldmy mother died birthing me. You could say I killed her, though this is the only course nature can unfortunately take. My father survived, but you could say his heart did not. It went hard as pig leather in his chest, with no capacity for much else but me. And Alvin, as it would turn out.

Philip Nanavatti, my father, built fireworks. An archaic livelihood, same as a cobbler. His work funded by cigarette companies who organized a competition, Symphony of Fire, where fireworkers from across the globe set off volleys from rafts floating on Lake Ontario. He was more wizard than artisan. Much of this had to do with what he created. A cobbler mends shoes, a pair of which is owned by everyone and exist permanently beneath our eyes; through natural processes of alignment, the cobbler comes to be seen the same. Fireworks are totally unnecessary. The cobbler is earthbound. The fireworker’s domain is the heavens.