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.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
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.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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.
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