You find death more interesting than happiness?
As a rule, yes. Death and hatred. I’m attracted to what’s consistent in a person.
Something beautiful has the potential to express more, no? Because it’s more rare?
You’re rare – I say – Most men can’t express themselves unless they’re hating something. Spend an afternoon with my ex-fiancé and you’ll know everything he’s ever been unhappy about.
He is a photographer also?
He’s an asshole, but yes, a camera technician. He left me for my best friend. He said he needed someone less grim.
What is grim?
Less bothered by the world, more light-hearted. People don’t always tell you the truth when they want something. It’s amazing what they will say so they can leave something out.
Harim runs his hand up my back onto my neck, palming my skull and gently tugging my hair. His face is an injury of stubble, eyelashes so dark they look dyed – We’re not all born to thrive in the same universe – he says – People are like plants that need different recipes of the same nutrients, the same water. You and him sound like separate species.
We are – I run my fingers through my pubic hair. I should have shaved – Were.
Is it possible you hate me because I’m also good at something? – Paul lights his cigarette on the bedroom’s balcony and blows the smoke out at the galaxy of streetlights tracking Bloor Street into the centre of Toronto.
Oh, I don’t know. Most likely – I unhook my earrings – Most likely, because I’m that bitch that just can’t be happy for her partner. Especially when he’s crude and inappropriate at absolutely inconceivable times.
Paul sucks at his smoke and exhales through his teeth – Well, it’s funny, Les, because I find it difficult to even look at you lately. It’s horrible to say but I guess it’s better now than later. You’re a skeleton, Les. You’re addicted to the smell of blood because you somehow think it’s going to one day reveal to you the meaning of your life. And frankly, I hate having to be the villain, which is what you always turn me into. Not everyone’s your enemy.
Maybe they are – I say – You are.
As much as jihad has been given a bad rap, I admire them for at least being honest with their hatred. It’s always outwardly expressed, is what I want to say. Not left to fester in some stomach vault where it decays into molten clods of resentment that eventually eat through you until they drop out the bottom. Life is cheap to a terrorist, a more-where-that-comes-from attitude of wasteful abundance I can’t help but envy.
You’re a cunt, Paul.
And deep down you’re demented – he furrows the carpet with his toes – That’s why you try so hard to fix it in me.
Turn up the sound – Harim instructs – What does this mean, tainted love?
The song buzzes out through dirty speakers on Harim’s shortwave propped in the valley of the bedcovers between us.
It means something is wrong with your love.
What could be wrong?
I don’t know – I say – The person who gives it away. Maybe the one being loved. Maybe their heart is a polluted river poisoning colonies of goats. Lyrics don’t always make sense. But then again it’s difficult to make sense of anything lately.
Tell me what doesn’t make sense – Harim is generously patient and it shows in his over-interest. I churn under his attention.
I just could never reconcile Paul’s façade with who I knew him to be. Like the cake and the icing were incoherent together. I could see through him and he knew this but pretended anyway. And then that bomber pretending she was pregnant. It made me feel sick and I thought I was past that.
People always pretend – Harim says – We try so hard to be convincing.
People pretend so they don’t feel guilty about failing – I shift onto my side – Paul always said, “I pretend not to be drunk so I don’t feel guilty about not being sober.” Do you know how infuriating it is for someone to still do that? I mean, to continue to act when they know they’re not fooling anyone?
Harim lifts his thick arms, crossing them behind his head – Some people are not comfortable without armour. They’re scared of appearing fragile, being taken advantage of.
Furrows of black hair suffocate both armpits. The word fragile doesn’t seem as though it belongs in his mouth. It assumes an awkward, alien shape and I hope to god he’s not going to weep or burst into song. The reason I’m in bed with him now is because he seems so impenetrable, relaxed and secure as a fortress with his face edged in the light from the bed-side lamp. Like I could fire a rocket at him and he wouldn’t explode. Like it would clang into his chest and drop into the ditch grass, undetonated. I lean over and kiss his mouth and then his neck. I rub my cheek across his chest then bury my nose in his underarm. His coarse hair smells sweet like a field of damp grass; I inhale him as if inhaling earth studded with shrapnel, a roadside crater littered with bush flowers and sunbleached thighbones, barricades of gnarled sandalwood trees that extend out into the endless scrubland.
The woman must have woken up that morning and tried to eat something. She would have tied the pillow around her stomach and then harnessed herself with the belt of explosives before the sun hit mid-day. She would have felt their calamitous weight hanging from her middle as she walked, peering out from beneath her burka at the grid of the world she would soon splatter herself against. How many hours or days prior had she imagined herself blown to bits, the pieces of her packed against the concrete walls, in the divots where the plastic chair legs met the dusty ground. How often had she thought of the instant she would burst into a constellation like the tails of crimson fireworks igniting outward from one molten core.
I just need to disappear for several thousand years – I feel him pull me even closer into him – Bury me in sand and forget me, then no one would have to pretend anything.
A camera in lust for images is as dangerous as any bomb. What appeals to me most about photographs is that what gets us closest to the truth is not always so truthful itself. And how it’s not always the truth we’re even looking for, just something meager and approximate to pacify us in the meantime. Like marriage, martyrdom is a lie: Karbala is hundreds of miles from Jerusalem, across the most desolate and hostile terrain. Bellies are as likely to be bombs as they are babies, and I’ve never been much of a deceiver but I’ve always made my way towards those who are. As much as I believe in the truth of loving, I know I’d become bored with it. That other, more powerful explosions will drift their scalding tentacles across the countryside and intoxicate me beyond reason until I am inspired, revolted and infatuated again.
GLOSSARY
bhajan: Hindu devotional song
dupatta: a long scarf worn by South Asian women
ghat: a series of steps leading down into a body of water
farang: a Thai word that refers to anyone Caucasian
kanji: the adopted logographic Chinese characters used in modern Japanese writing system.
khao soi: a Thai dish of Burmese descent
longyi: a long piece of cloth used as a skirt or loincloth
mohinga: considered the national dish of Burma
rambutan: a red plum-sized prickly fruit
riel: the currency of Cambodia
Rizla: English brand of cigarette rolling paper
shalwar (or shalwar kameez): loose pajama-liketrousers worn with a tunic by Pakistani men
sadhu: a Hindu holy man
vairagi: a Hindu renunciate or ascetic
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
“The Stampede” was published in 2010 in Clark-Nova’s anthology Writing Without Direction: 101/2 short stories by Canadian authors under 30. “That Savage Water” was published in the Maple Tree Literary Supplement in 2011. “A Severed Arm” was published in Lies with Occasional Truth in 2008. “Les 3 Chevaliers” was published in Pax Americana in 2008. “Crawling with Thieves” was published in Th
e Southernmost Review in 2009. “The Vagrant Borders of Kashmir” was published in Nether Magazine from Mumbai, India, 2012. “Soft Coral, Sinking Pearl” was published in Cha: An Asian Literary Journal from Hong Kong in 2012. “A Feast of Bear” was published in Jonathan in 2012. “From the Lookout There Are Trees” was published in the anthology Everything Is So Political in 2013. “A Fire in the Clearing” and “The Pigeons of Peshawar” appeared, respectively, in the 2013 and 2014 Carter V. Cooper Short Fiction Anthology–Book 3 and 4, and in ELQ/Exile: The Literary Quarterly 37.3 and 39.1. “Jesus Very Thin and Hungry” appeared in ELQ/Exile: The Literary Quarterly 38.1. A hearty thank-you to the editors of these publications.
A special thanks to the Toronto Arts Council and the Ontario Arts Council, without whose support this collection would have taken decades.
For those teachers of risk, craft and imagination: Larry Garber, Rosemary Sullivan, Paul Quarrington, Sarah Kathryn York, E. Martin Nolan, Graham Arnold, Danielle Van Bakel, Brooke Lockyer, Kate Jenks, Catriona Wright, Jillian Butler, Andrew MacDonald, Michael Collins, Eric Overton, Josip Novakovich, Andrew Battershill, Troy Cunningham, Claire McCague and Jeff Parker. This collection is the brighter because of you.
Effusive thanks to the Exile Editions family whose generosity and enthusiasm are boundless.
Ultimate thanks to my partner, Sergio Beristain, who believed before I did.
CVC YEAR THREE "SENIOR" WINNER
From the winner of the Giller, Commonwealth,Trillium and Writers’ Trust prizes, comes an outstanding col ection of eight stories.
“[The book has] a fidelity to the kind of sensual language that has always been a hallmark of the author’s writing.” —National Post
“While many of these stories are stationed in memory of the new immigrant experience, the titular story strikes a harmony of hurt as an elderly Barbadian immigrant stumbles around Toronto in black-face, lost in a fog of nostalgia, his struggle with age resurrecting and reciprocating his struggle with racism.The parallel is just the tip of the iceberg of insight Clarke’s wisdom offers in these stories.”
— Telegraph Journal
2013 autumn release 5 x 8 212 pages
CVC YEAR TWO "SENIOR" WINNER
“The 20 pieces that make up Wide World in Celebration and Sorrow: Acts of Kamikaze Fiction could be considered a kind of literary tasting menu for those unfamiliar with Rooke’s oeuvre... and many of Rooke’s signature registers – the absurdist humour, the literary and philosophical allusiveness, the sudden violence – are on display [and...] interact with each other as readily as with a reader.”
—National Post
2012 autumn release 5.5 x 8.5 272 pages
CVC "EMERGING" WRITER WINNERS -YEARS ONE AND TWO
“Moreno-Garcia has a spare prose style, but it is one that belies the complexity and depth of her ideas and is well suited to the many common folk who populate her stories.There is a subtlety and seriousness amid the skulls and bones, and beauty among the omens and death. ”
—The Winnipeg Review
Spanning a variety of genres – fantasy, science fiction, horror – and time periods, Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s exceptional debut collection features short stories infused with Mexican folklore, yet firmly rooted in a reality that transforms as the fantastic erodes the rational.
2012 autumn release Fiction 5 x 8 224 pages
“Miscione excels at writing about horrible things in beautiful ways. Her prose is not only deft and neat, but often wrenchingly lovely, so that much of the text comes across like a suppurating wound wrapped in hand-stitched lace.”
— Quill & Quire
A remarkable first collection. Existing somewhere in that chasm between bodily function and souled-ness, Christine Miscione’s debut collection Auxiliary Skins illumines all that’s perilous, beautiful and raw about being human.
2012 autumn release Fiction 5 x 8 160 pages
CVC YEARS THREE AND FOUR SHORTLISTED
George McWhirter grounds his delightful characters in the real, while his sharp wit and creative scenarios border on the fantastical.A woman adopts a dolphin-man, an Irish madam runs a railroad bordello in the desert, a drought-stricken river joins a jobless man on his way to the pub for a pint of solace, a Catholic woman’s seventh child, son of a seventh daughter, is left to the mercy of five convent-schooled sisters. The Gift of Women is about sexuality and religion, the surreal and the magical, tales of earthy and incendiary women, capable of setting a man, the Alberni Val ey and al of Vancouver Island on fire.
2014 autumn release 5 x 8 256 pages, french flaps
All books available at www.TheExileWriters.com
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