by Ursula Pflug
“What’s this?” my mother apparently asked. She was just a young unmarried lady back then.
“I don’t know,” the real estate rep said. “It must be a typo. I’ve never heard of a portal before. I’ll go home and check the master listing.”
“I know what a portal is,” my eighteen-year-old mother allegedly said. “Magic, of course, is not at heart either wand waving or spell weaving or the gathering by moonlight of certain types of nuts, berries, and owl innards, but a form of thought,” she apparently continued. “The other things in the aforementioned or any other list are just supports, but without mastering the type of thinking that is called magical, all your crystals and ceremonies may be worse than useless.”
My grandmother fished a pen out of her purse and wrote it down right away. This speech was the first, and almost the last, clue that there was anything different about my mother. Whether Grandma got my mother’s words right or not we have no way of knowing, because our grandfather didn’t also copy down this strange proclamation. And my mother certainly didn’t write down her channeled wisdom. Maybe if she had, she’d have had the strength of will to stay out of wells. She might’ve written books and inspirational tracts she could’ve sold and bought me and Dave new school clothes come September, instead of the church sale and Value Village rags Pa was able to provide.
And so they bought the place. Sometimes people assume we’ve been living here for generations, beneficiaries of a land grant. It is true that during the Irish famine the local government gave away lots of hundred acre tracts of swamp and brush and bush to starving farmers from Ireland. That was what the Williams Treaty was all about, swindling the local Michi Saagiig out of what they had left, so it could be given away for free to white folk. Blue and his cousins still complain about it and why wouldn’t they?
Mainly, the only people who think we’re a land grant family are newcomers, for the old timers around here still know exactly who is who and some of them are old enough to find it a point of scorn that my best friend is Indigenous. I figure that along with a lot of other things that is their problem more than it is mine.
My mother jumped down the well the day after her wedding to a local settler boy. Everyone thought her young husband must just have been awful until a beautiful baby girl floated to the surface nine months later. That would’ve been me. Dave followed a year later although how Pa impregnated Ma once she was living down the well I was too shy to ever ask.
Pa did a fine job raising us. I think he missed my mother a lot and wished he had been able to provide whatever it was she got suckling at the portal down the well, but of course he could not. Special as he may have been he couldn’t provide her with whatever other dimensional flavour it was she loved best, for it simply doesn’t exist here on Earth, not now and probably never. Ma never did tell me what it was either.
sss
This year’s harvest was a bumper crop in everything the earwigs didn’t eat, although I’ve had better-tasting tomatoes; they prefer things on the dry side. Siena and I bottled for weeks. Come November, Blue went hunting; he said it was how he gardened. Successful on the second day, he brought me half a deer for my freezer once they’d done cutting and wrapping it at the organic abattoir. I thanked him and he asked whether he could tan the hide in my barnyard. He lives in a little apartment in town, so there is nowhere to tan a hide unless he does it in the parking lot of his building, which wouldn’t work for a number of reasons.
I said okay. Once he was done with the hide he nailed it up in my barn and said I was welcome to it. This seemed puzzling to me but I figured he had his own reasons for doing things, as well as his own ways. When I went and checked I saw the hide had a telltale slit in its ear. This made me sad. Would I be able to eat this beautiful wild creature we had fed all summer? Had Georgia been easy to kill because she was half tame from snacking on our carrots while we stood by and watched? Had my whispered warnings to the trees gone unheard after all? I didn’t know whether to tell Blue the story or not. I didn’t want to make him feel bad, for the food and the skin were beautiful gifts, and he would not have shot her had he known she was our pet. As to the mother raising operation he suggested we try sinking rare earth magnets into the well.
sss
We worked most of the morning and half the afternoon with a complicated assemblage of pulleys and ropes, magnets, delicious snacks, and photographs of my brother and me when we were babies. The snacks were for us, not for my mother. Like a baby in amniotic fluid, we figured she had been nourished by the earth herself while she was sunk. When we finally got her up we stood discussing how to get her back to the farmhouse. It was because she was too heavy to carry. Blue is a really big and really strong man but he couldn’t lift her, not even a few inches off the ground. We finally got her into the wheelbarrow, but it took the two of us. I am as shrimpy as they come but was still able to help with the leverage. It all seemed like a rerun of our tablets adventure except so much more important. Would she split in half if I dumped her accidentally? And what would her insides look like if that happened?
We trundled her up to the house. Blue kept saying he’d never seen anything like it, and he’d gotten a few women up out of wells.
“Anything like what?” I asked.
“The amount of water,” he said. “The wheelbarrow keeps filling. We’ve had to empty it four times between the well and the house.”
“True. It’s as much water each time as a king-size duvet you’ve just removed from a machine where the spinner doesn’t work,” I said.
“It’s got to be magic on that count,” Blue pointed out.
“How so?” I asked.
“More water than the body of one small woman can contain,” he said.
“It must be some portal down there.”
“That’s what they’ve always said,” he agreed.
Artificial respiration. They used to teach it to all the children at swimming class. Maybe it was so that should their mothers throw themselves down wells, the children could perform this trick once they were fished out. And once they were able to breathe by themselves again, their mothers’ eyes would open. That was my hope anyway.
We got her up onto the table in the farmhouse, an old varnished job, slightly better than the one you use for slaughtering chickens on. Then I pinched her nose shut tight and pushed air into her lungs, over and over and over. You are supposed to give up after three minutes, or is it twenty? When do you make that decision, and how? Blue said I should just keep going, since magic was involved. I said I didn’t believe in magic.
“Portals then,” he said. “Call it portals.”
Those I believe in. I kept going, breathing into her mouth and then the moment came when her chest started to rise and fall, rise and fall.
Rise and fall, rise and fall.
“Well, that’ll be that then,” Blue said, making for the door.
“Stay for soup and tea?”
“Dinner date, Clarissa.”
I meant to thank him profusely but he was already gone.
I sat and looked at my mother whom I had never seen before, even though she had carried me for nine months and given birth to me from inside the bottom of a well. It was the original water birth.
Her eyes were open and she was breathing. I put pillows under her but left her on the table as she was still too heavy to move. The pillows soaked through immediately. She was dribbling big puddles all the time as if she were an unending source of water.
“For the last fifty years I have been sure my life would have been different if I had only had a normal mother like other folks, and not a drowned one,” I told her. “Waterlogged, silent, unmoving. Your hands waving feebly, not that Dave and I could even see them except when we attached waterproof video cameras to poles and stuck them down the well.”
I think that is what sent my little brother to Vic in the end. He couldn’t sta
nd Christmas after first our grandparents and then Pa died. Just me and Dave left, sending cameras and mics down the well, hoping Ma would wave and offer Christmas greetings.
“Why are people never called Orange?” I asked after trying to help her sit up for the fourth time.
“Give me back my necklace,” she gurgled.
I went and got it from the bathroom and clasped it around her neck, gently as I could. She didn’t thank me. She fingered the necklace as if she knew each bead from memory but didn’t look down at it. She didn’t speak again either. Mainly she dripped and dribbled.
After a couple of days I got tired of all the mopping. I put her back in the wheelbarrow and took her to the barn. She had drained so much water I could push her on my own now. Even in the barn she was still spitting water. Finally I hung her up, thinking it might help. Thin rivulets streamed out of her fingers and her feet. I began to realize she had probably been drowned all this time, after all. While our resuscitative methods seemed to have worked, her breathing and even her speech weren’t breathing and speech per se, so much as some kind of enteric nervous system response.
sss
Blue has been scarce. Maybe getting mothers out of wells is more exhausting than he makes it look. No one calls anymore except the telemarketers. I keep making lists and forgetting them. I make tea and forget to drink it. I stay up late worrying about my brother. I wear my grandmother’s and my aunt’s necklaces, but I don’t think they’re helping.
When I go down to check on Ma she blinks at me, or maybe I just think she is. She fingers her own necklace almost constantly, wearing away the filigree. Georgia O’Keefe’s skin is nailed to the wall beside her. I think one day I will use it to make a coat for my mother. She would like a deerskin coat I think, after having spent decades down a well. The damp must have seeped into her bones something fierce.
The Lonely Planet Guide to Other Dimensions
RACHEL CLIMBED THE SECOND HALF of the dirty stairs to the upstairs hall, half-empty Tiger beer in hand. The Red Arcade Hotel, she suddenly felt, existed in another dimension. Although it didn’t, not really, of course not. But it felt out of time or out of place or both, as if it was all there was to the universe and her life. No past, no future, no world at all, just this hotel and time to write. The hotelier, a young queer songwriter from Toronto called Berndt, was a big supporter of the arts. Maybe he had bought the hotel because he too, could intimate the presence of the portal even if, unlike Rachel, he didn’t have the word for what it was.
Although you never knew.
Rachel knew about the portal because her fingers were tingling. She loved portals even though like menopause they caused or maybe just worsened ADHD. Portals felt prickly, like electricity, and whooshy, like white water canoeing, and delicious, like arousal or an amazing book or the first beer. She knew not to go looking. You couldn’t rush a portal. Like inspiration it would come when it was ready.
She had booked a week at The Red Arcade on a self-directed residency in the hopes that the hotel would be a place where she could recapture her youth. She was broke and Berndt had told her she could swap workshops for her room rate. She didn’t care about her crow’s feet and laugh lines, but she wanted to be able to write like a young person, without a deadline, without tweeting about what she was working on, without rephrasing the cover letter twice after dinner. Although nowadays, maybe all young writers did those things and it was the old ones who didn’t.
Her fantasy trilogy had done well enough as these things went, but she had lost part of herself along the way. She had lost the first writer, the youthful creator who loved William Burroughs and feminist science fiction and black American women writers and French symbolists, and wanted her writing to be the purest possible expression of who she was and believed that doing so made the world a better place, opening doors to spirituality and imagination in a post-capitalist world, not just for herself but for her readers.
Yeah, whatever.
Rachel unlocked her door with an actual key, instead of putting a card in a slot. The room smelled of old carpet and rotting plaster. She wrenched at the window in its wooden frame. A stick was called for, not a memory stick but the old kind of stick, the kind one threw to dogs and started fires with and used to prop windows open. Hotels like this, Rachel thought, should provide a window-propping implement. At last she thought to try an upright pencil; amazingly, it didn’t snap. Rachel was relieved. It was summer, too hot to sleep without an open window in a musty old hotel with no AC. She fell into bed. There were two, both twins with godawful mattresses. She chose the opposite one from the one she slept in the night before after staying up late with Berndt talking about anarchism and music and literature. She had only slim hopes that it would be better.
Rachel closed her eyes, still thinking about writing, which of course was much different from actually writing.
At a certain point it had gone flat. She’d start something new and in no time at all the main characters became words, the settings became obvious strings of words, the plot became words. Fiction writing only ever worked when the people were real and the colours of the tea cups were as bright or brighter than the colours in this world.
She couldn’t sort it. She went to sleep.
sss
The bus that travelled the coastal highway no longer made the turn into the village. It was already getting dark when Esme asked the driver to let her off at the dusty crossroads.
“Do you have anything underneath?” he asked.
She shook her head. She carried one bag, a big flowered tote, and wore only her jean jacket and a straw hat with her dress. He wouldn’t need to get out and open the luggage compartment.
“You know people there.”
“Sure.” It wasn’t actually true, unless Margit still ran the hotel. “When will you be back?” she asked. Esme knew the bus would follow the water to one more town, before looping back and making the long trip back to the city.
“I turn around here.”
“It didn’t used to be like that,” she said, and she wondered. How did one get to the last town now, by walking? Was there any vehicular traffic? Could one hitchhike? “The bus used to go to the actual last town.”
“There isn’t another town.”
“There was the last time I came,” Esme said.
“And when was that?” the driver asked.
“Ten years ago.”
“You came here ten years ago?”
“With my aunt.”
“I wonder if I knew her. Not that I was driving this route then.”
Esme was going to volunteer her aunt’s name but then thought she had better not. You never knew what people were saying. “And where is your aunt now?” the driver persisted.
Esme picked up her bag and started down the stairs. “In town.”
“This town.”
“No, the last town,” she said.
“No one lives there now,” he said.
Not even Annielle? But suddenly Esme was afraid to ask. What could have happened?
At least he had finally admitted it existed, even if he hadn’t mentioned it by name, but then neither had she.
The town renamed Dream long ago by the woman Annielle many said was crazy.
Esme climbed the rest of the way out of the bus hauling her canvas bag with the orange flowers. “Where is the hotel?” she asked from the road.
He pointed. It was the right turn as she had thought. But you had to ask—sometimes the hotel moved, especially in the summer. “It’s just past the bend, that’s why you can’t see it.”
“I was going to bring my suitcase, the one with wheels. This bag is heavy.”
He shook his head. “They’d just have gotten stuck in the potholes. It’s closer than you think.” He hesitated. “Closer than it used to be. Sometimes we used to stay overnight. I liked that. I could have a drink w
ith John.”
sss
Rachel woke an hour after she’d gone to bed, her body vibrating like a tuning fork.
Three twenty a.m. What else could it be?
She opened her computer. Might as well grind away at her story for a while. Three twenty almost always meant not getting back to sleep at least for a couple of hours.
Turn the internet off, she told herself. If you piss away the night on “research,” Youtube and Twitter, you won’t get your shitty story finished. In addition, you will miss the information oozing through the portal. Right now. As we speak. So shut the fuck up, shut the computer, pay attention.
She had first felt the portal on the stairs, its presence making her skin prickle and her mind light up with some kind of caffeine much better than caffeine. It had taken Rachel most of her life to understand that she really could feel the presence of portals and sometimes even stick her head through them. She might have crow’s feet and be afraid she’d lost her flow as a writer but being able to unequivocally identify portals was a fairly snazzy trade.
Portals were usually formed because of the confluence of various geophysical factors combining. Here, Rachel wagered, it was the high mineral content. People came to this area from all over the world to hack smoky quartz and tourmaline out of the road cuts every summer; they stumbled over big amethyst geodes just going for a stroll in the woods. There were stores and festivals catering to the phenomenon. Little did the crystal-crazed know what was actually going on around here; so few of the people who claimed to be “sensitives” ever actually were.
When Rachel next woke up it was daybreak. Was it late enough to go to the upstairs kitchen and make coffee? She was afraid of waking the young Norwegians who stayed in the top floor dorm. Like a lot of northern Europeans who were a little obsessed with the Canadian wilderness, they had come to hike in Algonquin Park. The hotel was close to the eastern gate and a good starting point.
