Zsuzsi Gartner - Better Living Through Plastic Explosives

Dan’s face is slack, a spent stocking. Please don’t hurt our son. But Patricia. She looks straight at Nina and threatens to rip her entrails out. Not so much in words but in an understanding that passes between them like a kind of heat. Patricia’s teeth now a serval cat’s, a guttural hiss issuing from deep in her throat. Nina’s striated flesh already clings to Patricia’s yellowed incisors and she’s crunching down on her bones as if they’re pretzels. Muscles roll like small ball bearings under the skin of her jaws.

“I never knew my dad was such a good actor!” the boy says with evident admiration. “But Mom… ” He sighs and shrugs his shoulders, palms turned up, like a badly mugging child star, Jonathan Lipnicki maybe, without the owlish glasses. Nina has told him his parents had been enlisted by Miss Peach to go along with the pretend kidnapping in order to bring media attention to the marmot cause.

“You have a very nice burrow here, you know!” he tells her as he waits patiently in front of the TV for any word about the official class animal.

Nina rummages through the cupboards, looking for something a child might want to eat. Clumsy paws knock a large jar of pickled beets to the floor. Glass pierces beet flesh, vivid purplish-red juice spills everywhere. “Fuck!”

The boy looks up from his vigil on the floor. “You’re not really a marmot, are you?”

She tries to whistle through her teeth. He’s informed her- more than once already-that the Vancouver Island marmot has a singular whistle when it’s in distress.

Nina sits down on the floor across from the boy and twists off the mascot head, the frigid basement air hitting her face and neck, skin instantly congealing, skin shrink-wrapping her bones as it dries. “You’re not really a child, are you?”

On the news there’s a story about another one of those disappeared houses and an aerial shot of the North Shore starting to look as unpopulated as it did back in the 1950s, or so the reporter says, in a way that implies this is somehow a bad thing.

The boy lifts the marmot head from Nina’s lap and plops it onto his own head.

Years later, when Nina looks back on all of this, which will be less often than you might think, it’s not the feral hatred in Patricia’s eyes or Dan’s crumpled sock-puppet face that she remembers, but this, a boy’s small hands gripping the matted plush of the marmot head to keep it from toppling off, his breath amplified inside the cave of the mesh skull, and inside her own skull the echo of the insistent plink, plink, plink from the bathtub faucet that never stops dripping, the grunts of her neighbour through the thin walls as he hurtles exotic weapons at an unseen enemy, her mother’s laughter, jostling Nina’s head as it lay in her lap, when the nun held up the Nazis’ distributor cap and said, “Reverend Mother, I have sinned,” while the cathode glaze of the late-night movie washed over them, mother and daughter, the bowl holding the crumbled remains of ripple chips on the coffee table, and the Family von Trapp escaping, yet again, over the Alps to Switzerland, to asylum, to a type of freedom in neutrality, and Nina, then only seven, maybe eight, not really thinking, not knowing, that maybe life would never get better than this.

The boy exudes such calm despite his proclivity to exclamation. Maybe all children are like this in private. She could surround herself with more children. She could be like that old woman who keeps hundreds of cats who will feast on her body when she dies, scrapping over the choice bits, the desiccated liver, tender, swollen kidneys ballooning up around her spine, her heart like a dime, cold and thin.

Then, a muffled “Pee-yoo! It really stinks in here!”

On the news, an impeccably dressed woman with long, dark hair curtaining her face falls to her hands and knees, scrabbling at the earth with her bare hands, flinging hunks of sod through the air and keening while onlookers watch from a safe distance beyond the gaping hole in the ground. A huge vehicle, like the ones U.S. soldiers used during Desert Storm, is parked behind her, engine still thrumming, door ajar, a red, white, and blue RE/MAX sign on its side. Somewhere, someone is cocking a rifle. Somewhere, someone is singing a haunting aria.

It’s about the things you want. Don’t let anyone tell you differently. It’s about the things you can’t have.

Is it so terrible to want what you can’t have? Can someone tell Nina that? Huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh? Anyone?

This much we know. Across the playing fields just east of the Jericho Beach Youth Hostel they hobbled, some of them holding hands, Mei Li and Xiao Yu for sure, yes, they would have been holding hands-fingers threaded together in a tight weave, like a waterproof basket made of reeds bobbing along an irrigation canal, a baby girl wrapped in newspaper mewling inside. The other girls hurried alongside them. Mei Ming would have started singing; she was the musical one, the one with that voice , as we often heard the mothers of the other girls grudgingly admit.

They stopped halfway across the field. We can tell you that. The moon that night was a fat crescent, like a window on an outhouse door in a New Yorker cartoon. Their strange footprints must have shimmered in the fresh snow. A herd of deer , an early-morning dog walker might have thought, how odd .

How much odder the truth.

A number of the girls appear to have eaten chocolate bars, miniature Caramilks no doubt left over from Halloween, the wrappers casually tossed near the second baseline of the ball diamond. One of them smoked a cigarette, a Matinée Extra Mild, the butt found lightly rimmed in marzipan-scented Lip Smacker where the footprints abruptly ended. Another wrote Up yours in the snow, not with swaggering piss the way a boy would have, but by clumsily dragging her small heel. ( Not my daughter , Frank de Rocherer insisted the next morning, stamping his slipper-clad foot-in their panic most of the parents hadn’t thought to get dressed. As if that mattered now, which daughter smoked, which daughter was profane, which daughters had insatiable sweet tooths.)