Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club

by Megan Gail Coles

  She should leave this place. It has degraded her beyond all recollection.

  Iris had been this whole time slaving away at grunt work only to have George swoop in and save the day. One please, daddy, is all it will take from this woman who has always had a daddy who responded to the very first please. People fall over themselves to do things for George. They marvel at the opportunity to pay her a compliment. Favours are endlessly supplied. They boast on Twitter for having bought her a cupcake.

  Iris doesn’t know what it is like to be the favoured woman.

  But she knows well what it is to envy after the space. Everything she has toiled over is Magic-Erasered away like her emotional sweat was nothing but more energy to sustain John while he tried desperately to maintain some ideal for his wife. Keeping George blissfully unaware of his human failings was far more important than what would ultimately undo Iris.

  She is seeing this take shape as she moves around the dining room in a sort of fog. She catches them from the corner of her eye visiting the tables of couples they vaguely know. John picks up someone’s baby and gives it a little nuzzle. Hearts bang wild against cavities, at least two. George is glowing now. She is embracing the opportunity to be their necessary messiah. John needs her, and this need makes her happy as she is reborn vital and shiny again. Her father will handle that business with Canada Revenue. All she has to do is ask.

  John probably always knew that. He was exaggerating his anxiety to dip himself further into Iris’s panties. For a bit of fun. Not even just for pleasure. There were far more pleasurable marks he could have made. Alabaster scratches so easily after all.

  But this is not infatuation.

  This is small game hunting at the local coward gun club.

  And what is worse, as every stroke of recognition is finally fully delivered hard against Iris’s hurt timepiece, is that all was lost the moment she opened the door and let him step across the threshold. He wanted her less from there.

  Iris is for sacrificing.

  She watches John return the baby before slipping his arm around George’s waist as they chat casually with the young couple at table six. Near the window booth. Priority seating. George changed the reservation herself because they were middle school friends of hers. John pulls George toward him playfully while making some joke, it is a gesture he has done to Iris many times, in front of her co-workers, his staff. His hand resting on the small of a back.

  Iris replays all the long drawn-out conversations where she reassured John that it would be okay. The restaurant wouldn’t fail. And if it did, maybe it would be a blessing to have it all fall apart. All those evenings turning tables and smiling and faux flirting to make a buck or earn a good review, another follower on the newer cooler social medias, a ding, a like, a bump, a fork, whatever it took to assuage him, Iris was fully there, invested in the daily domestic drudgery of partnership.

  She pulled her weight without fanfare as if she was his person because he said so.

  You are my family, John said.

  And for a hint of happy, she had betrayed all her people.

  Jo, Harry, her own mother, even Olive. No one was as important as John.

  That day in the park, Iris had thought, this park is not my park, these people are not my people.

  She remembers clearly spinning boys wearing ball hats around to face her, having no regard for their clothing, age or height because she had lost trust in herself. The passing moments had penetrated her remaining confidence. Each passing second conveying that she was no longer trustworthy. Maybe she never was.

  She thought he was wearing a blue T-shirt covered in Minions. The joke: they are really earplugs. She thought he was four years old. Their belief: that everything changes at five. She thought he was three feet tall. The theory: drinking packets of vinegar will make you grow.

  But then Iris didn’t know what to think, because if she was right it meant he was not on the playground. Oh, despicable Iris. So she touched other people’s children in the hopes that they might morph into him. She even turned around a little girl with a pixie cut. Her mother firing daggers.

  Iris was a strange woman touching another woman’s daughter in a park. She wasn’t even searching for a little girl. She was searching for a little boy. Her best friend’s only child.

  She decided to never tell Joanne she lost him.

  She had raced around the swings, shouting his name, nearing hysteria. Feeling the panic rise up. Her breathing had become short, she couldn’t catch it. She thought she might choke on her own guilt. Quick little waves rolled against her breakwater. And Iris tried to brace herself for them. She was scaring all the children. And their parents. Iris was everyone’s living nightmare in a blue dress and cardigan. Very large sunglasses hid her terrible eyes. Iris had almost looked like a responsible human. And this was worse because it suggested that even responsible humans could misplace children.

  Harry. She yelled, has anyone seen Harry?

  She remembers looking at her forearm where his hoodie hung only to realize she was gripping it with her other hand.

  But those people hadn’t known her Harry. Her favoured child. Iris loved all children but she loved this one the best. This is never spoken aloud but understood when he crawls into her lap while she ejects details of some new hurt to Jo in code. It was obvious when he ran his fingers upward through the back of her hair, pulling the short twists apart, that they were meant to always be friends. He had unfurled the curls while confessing his preschool secrets. He told her she was the best grown-up person. He whispered, even better than Mom.

  Some children are just nicer children.

  That day in the park, Iris thought, this will mark my life. And it did.

  Every event to follow would be dated according to that moment. And the next moment.

  And the next. She would always be trapped in a loop where she remembered what she was doing the day before she lost Harry, the week before, the month. Losing him would define her. She would think of nothing else. She would be that mad woman on repeat. People forever examining her past offences and deciding that every choice she had ever made in life suggested this would happen.

  She had always expected to lose him. To lose them both.

  Why? Maybe it was all the drowned fishermen where she grew up. Or the never-ceasing wind. Maybe it was living in constant fear of darkness. The empty cupboards every second week. The cut phone, or her worried mother on the couch. Canadian country music playing in the background. The soundtrack to her father’s departure. Maybe it was that. Maybe it was everything.

  Because Iris had never felt wholly deserving of Jo’s friendship. Had been trying to make it up to her for a decade. Trying to pay her back. Trying to keep her. All of Iris’s relationships ran that way. Impoverished at the core. Permitting it to fall to shit and rebuilding. Iris is not great at maintenance. She was always getting over something.

  Jo says: you will get through it.

  Life with Iris is a series of events to get through. She speeds past herself like angry men in trucks. That day she had wondered if she would be okay before it is okay to wonder that. And then she had been wracked with guilt to show such concern for herself that way.

  Iris thought, I am really an asshole.

  And everyone in the park was suddenly a pedophile. She knew that this could not be true. Somewhere logic suggested that this was not possible but Iris was not logical. The man with the dog. The woman on the bench. The groom sneaking a secret smoke. The saddest young teenager in the world. They were all sexual predators. They had kidnapped him. They wanted to sell his organs to Chi
na. He was in a trunk somewhere.

  My god, she thought, he could be halfway to the ferry by now. But her phone said otherwise. Iris knew how long she had been searching because she looked away when she got the texts. The sound of a construction worker’s whistle.

  How could she have looked away like that?

  Iris threw up then, too. Heaved a little against the gate of the new pool house that the Peace-A-Chord crowd despised. They didn’t feel it was meant for them. No one felt deserving of anything nice.

  That’s for people who grew up riding horses and drinking smoothies.

  Iris can remember the smell of bile in her nostrils. It smelt of Sunday morning. Of finding her wallet in the mailbox, placed there while she searched frantically for her keys. Iris was always freezing on the steps of her imagination. Always falling off the subway platform. Swerving into oncoming traffic. It hadn’t happened yet but her certainty of it persisted. It was even more likely to happen now that she had lost Harry. Her accidental death was imminent. The oceans would warm, the rich would grow richer, and Iris would die as a result of her own poor choices.

  This: the reason she continued to smoke.

  Jo and Iris had fallen out twice in life before that. The first time because Iris had improperly installed Harry’s car seat. The whole rig just came forward. The second time because she had eaten all the salad greens.

  Your selfishness is costly, Jo said, while she opened a tin of tuna.

  Iris bought a better car seat and moved into her own apartment. But those were the fights.

  Iris had caused them. This one would be on Iris too. Ultimately, she knows she is a bad human. There were tiny signs to support this. She would never adopt a rescue dog. Or help old ladies with their bags. Her apartment was visually clean but rotten on the inside. She still found black hair stuck to the back of the crisper eighteen months after moving in. There was a lingering cat smell left behind by previous tenants. Something Iris could not scrub out, no matter the time spent scrubbing. The kneepads her mother bought were still in plastic in the linen closet because who needs knees if you expect to duck out before forty.

  She had called Jo from the playground. Formed words. Put them together in different orders. She had mixed them into explanations. Built excuses. But Jo hadn’t heard them. She couldn’t because she was busy screaming that Iris better find him. Or else.

  And that’s when the saddest teenager in the world walked up to her, tugged her sleeve, called her ma’am, cause to him she was a ma’am. And she turned to this morose, sweaty creature as Jo yelled through the phone and she saw the Minion first. Secretly, an earplug. She saw him. He was in front of her. Harry: smiling.

  But it was too late. She had already lost him.

  Weeks later Jo would say all the things in a Facebook message. She could not hold on to them a moment longer. Jo dug into every gross piece of Iris with abandon. She skinned and flayed her alive with her own shame before demanding to know what the fuck Iris had been doing when she should have been watching her son? And Iris couldn’t say but she didn’t have to. Jo knew.

  You’ll have no one left, chasing some man who doesn’t love you. John doesn’t love you.

  And Jo was probably right. He probably doesn’t and Iris will likely end up in jail. Or dead in a ditch like every other silly woman who loved a bad guy.

  Iris has done shameful things that she knows should go unspoken.

  She has spoiled her gorgeous brushes so that she could blast her hurt and indignation through a handheld. The delicate sable set hewed to the chrome tabletop, a tangible reminder of her ability to destroy. Worse still was Jo arriving one evening with strawberries and a found-on-Kijiji easel to discover her well-researched birthday presents forsaken in the kitchen. Quietly taking in the pointed-round and angled-flat brushes rock hard against the acrylic palette. Speaking just above the appliance hum.

  I spent a lot of time and money on those brushes.

  They had been meant for future Iris, who quickly promised to replace them just as soon as she got paid. Jo had placed the strawberries atop the stove, it being the only clean surface, put the easel down on the floor where she stood and shaken her head as she left.

  Be careful, Iris.

  That was all before Iris mislaid Harry. Iris promises herself she will finish the painting of the dumpster gulls as soon as she gets new brushes. She will. Soon. She will give it to Jo and beg her forgiveness. She has to pay her phone bill first but after that, for sure she will beg. Iris thinks of her gallery rep when last they spoke.

  I can’t sell what you can’t finish.

  Iris sighs and tries hard to remember the moment she last felt just happiness.

  Her whole life has been tinged with low-lying sorrow. She has never been able to count on just one side of a feeling. But this is the worst. The worst hand she has ever been dealt. There have been other unplayable hands: her father’s alcoholism, her mother’s depression, his leaving, her crying; each time Iris thought this is the worst, no, this. Abandoning Olive. Bad. Financial ruin. Worse. Drug addict ex-boyfriend. Worse than that. Eating disorders. Homelessness. Violence. Bad. Badder. Baddest.

  But no. Iris was just being readied. Life was a rigorous training period. And then, so swift and accidental. Like a poisoning. Ba-bam. John.

  Most days Iris feels like the cat her cousins found in the brook. A black stray so eager for affection, not feral at all even for her obvious abandonment. Everyone in the cove struck by its congenial nature. Her cousins took turns picking it up, passing it around, marvelling at the volume of its purring. And then, they threw it off the wharf.

  To see if it could swim. To test its endurance.

  And that half-starved, already wounded cat swam ashore. All were in awe: a magical cat.

  How clever. Some cat. They ruminated on the amazing cat and praised its perseverance in the face of such struggle. They rubbed its ears, they held it close inside their coats. Its warm heart beating against them. Poor puss believing it had finally proven itself worthy of affection, convinced of its safety the whole way out the wharf, right up until the moment it was once again flung, air bound, flying as cats do, with its paws outstretched, preparing to land in the cold cove water.

  Nevertheless, each time the cat would return for a caress. Wet and worn. Puss believing that this would soon be over. Someone would intervene.

  And each time Iris’s cousins hove it away and waited in amazement. Speculating on the quality of cat. What fine kittens their indestructible cat would breed. Later, having learned her lesson too late, poor puss struggled to escape them before being soothed.

  Here kitty kitty. Sweet kitty. Lovable kitty. Pretty kitty. A favourite kitty.

  And though the cat understood none of it, she warmed to their voices as she wanted nothing more than someone to care for her now that she was too hurt to care for herself. Not to feed her. She was a mouser. Not to shelter her. She would find a place. But to care for her. Press a face into her fine fur and say she was a good cat. But this never happened. Those boys threw puss off the wharf until she didn’t swim back.

  Iris feels like a drowning cat.

  She scans herself for the reasons why this happened. Her dad drove off that day with his clothing thrown into the back of his truck. Sweatshirts and jeans liberating themselves from the pan. A wool sweater. His hockey coat she collected from the shoulder of the road. She was always picking up after men.

  A curious sight: this twelve-year-old girl carrying a winter’s worth of knitwear.

  Iris thought she would be a hero when he returned. But Iris’s dad di
d not come back that time. Or ever. The first time he called, she was too busy to talk for long. She had a math test. And a skating party. He had gotten annoyed and hung up.

  Iris failed the math test. Never went to the skating party.

  The next time he called she said there was a girl who looked like her. He didn’t call again for months. When he did finally call again the conversation started with I’m sorry and Iris learned to forgive men she loved for disappointing her. Her father was teaching Iris everything wrong before she got a chance to learn anything right because he did not know what a girl child needed or wanted. He only knew what he needed and wanted.

  He needed Iris to comfort him long distance. He wanted to be one of the good guys without doing the good guy work. Even in retrospect, his lack of care for her small self still makes her want to cry.

  But everyone would see.

  Major David is certainly eyeballing her every move around the dining room. Mutual loathing wafts off the pair of them and the tension line is pulled taut.

  It seems most days that every decision made in council chambers is meant to further exaggerate how poorly and unessential single women like Iris are to Major David. She does not have a truck or even a Costco membership.

  She stays close to her own driveway.

  Once she ambitiously drove to the arena Dominion because Jo had said avocados were on sale for fifty cents. Limes too, Jo said. It will be like you’re in Mexico! So Iris had tried because avocados were nice fat. The kind of fat you wanted that would make your skin recognizable and elastic again. Iris would look in the mirror on day three of avocado lunch and remember bright-eyed Iris.

  But that person no longer exists. Iris killed her. She had a fair bit of help. But it was Iris who did the deed. Every time she lied that she was not mad. Every time she said her feelings didn’t matter. Every time she says sorry when she knows she’s done nothing wrong.

  The times she has refused to say it when she knows she should.