All I Ask

by Eva Crocker

  When I left the house the next day, I nearly stepped on the mouse. It had landed alongside the front step when Holly dumped it out the window. The entrails blooming out of its mouth had changed colour; they were a less vivid red. It looked stiff, more like the mechanical mouse I’d wanted it to be the night before. I heard the neighbour kids yelling in their porch. The basketball bounced off the inside of their door. I kicked the mouse under our front step and went to work.

  * * *

  On Friday the landlord called to say someone was coming by to look at the chimney. A standard inspection — if we couldn’t be there to let him in, the landlord would come by himself. The appointment was already scheduled for Monday morning at 9:30, the only time the furnace guy was available.

  “I’ve been trying to arrange this for weeks now,” the landlord said on the phone. “You’d think I was trying to get a meeting with the prime minister.”

  “It’s fine, I understand,” I told him. “We’ll be here.” I didn’t want him coming in and appraising the state of the house.

  Holly and Dave King were asleep in her room when the furnace guy knocked. Kris had just left for work. The furnace guy was wearing a grey jumpsuit and carrying a steel toolbox. There was a cell phone clipped to his waist. I pointed to the basement door, saying, “It’s just down there, in the back of the room. Do you need anything else?”

  “Should be all good.” He reached up and tugged the cord hanging from the light bulb above the stairs. “This’ll only take a few minutes.”

  I sat on the couch next to Snot and Courtney. I refreshed my email. There was something from Joanna. The subject line said, An update on funding. I opened the email. The funding had come through. Filming mid-August as planned.

  I wanted to call Viv but at that moment the furnace guy batted the basement door open. He was holding a rag over his mouth with the hand that wasn’t holding his toolbox.

  “This house needs to be evacuated. Get the animals out. Everyone in the house needs to get out immediately.”

  “What?”

  “Are there other people in the house?” The furnace guy was making his way to the front door. “We need everyone out. There’s a carbon monoxide leak. A serious leak. I have to make some phone calls.”

  “My roommate’s upstairs, I’ll get her. Don’t leave the front door open. The cats will get out.”

  “The doors and windows need to be left open.”

  “The cats.”

  “You can’t breathe this in, it’s dangerous.”

  “I’ve been breathing it.”

  “Legally, I need you to evacuate. Immediately.”

  The furnace guy closed the door behind him.

  “Holly,” I yelled as I dug through the porch closet for the cat carrier. “Holly!”

  I ran up the stairs holding the empty cat carrier by one handle and banged on her bedroom door. “The furnace guy says there’s a carbon monoxide leak.”

  I could hear them moving on the other side of the door.

  “He said it’s dangerous, we need to leave, he said immediately.”

  Holly opened the door. Dave King was pulling on his jeans.

  “Can you help me put the cats in here? They hate it.” I held the carrier up.

  “Remember I said about that smell?” Dave King said as we jogged down the stairs single-file.

  Through the front window I saw the furnace guy pacing in front of the house with the phone to his ear. I went and got the cat treats from the kitchen cupboard. Holly had Courtney in her arms.

  “He’s all freaked out already,” Holly said.

  I held the carrier open. It stank of stale cat piss. Holly tried to lower Courtney in, the cat swiped and Holly dropped him. Beads of blood sprang up on Holly’s forearm and blurred into a runny line.

  The furnace guy opened the door and called in, “I really need you to get out of the house.”

  “Yeah, we’re coming,” Holly said, too quietly for him to hear.

  Dave picked up Courtney; I came over to him with the carrier and together we managed to force his struggling body into the bag. Once he was inside he froze and I zipped it shut.

  “Do you remember me saying that about the smell, though?” Dave said. “That was the smell.”

  “Carbon monoxide doesn’t have a smell,” Holly snapped. “It’s odourless.”

  Snot was bunched up on the sofa. He let me pick him up but he pulled his sides in and howled.

  “It sounds like a human baby,” Holly said.

  “It sounds like he’s saying hellooooooooooo.” Dave King carefully unzipped the carrier; Courtney stayed curled in the back. I pushed Snot in and closed the mesh door. The furnace man was in the living room with us again. Holly was holding one of Natalie Swanson’s J-Cloths against her bleeding arm, dark red spreading through the stiff blue cloth.

  “Listen, my boss needs me to confirm the house is evacuated.”

  “Then what?” Holly asked him.

  “You need to leave the windows and doors open. Let the place air out.”

  “When can we go back in?” I held the heavy carrier against my chest with both arms. The smell of ammonia filled my nostrils. Snot let out another long, low howl.

  “I’d give it at least forty-eight hours.” The furnace guy opened the front door and waved us out like a game show assistant showing off a prize.

  “What about our stuff?” Holly said. “We can’t just leave with the windows and doors open.”

  “I have to get to my next appointment,” the furnace guy said.

  Holly and Dave King sat down on the front step with the door wide open behind them.

  “People die from carbon monoxide poisoning,” Dave said.

  The furnace guy put his toolbox in the pan of his truck and got in. The automated window on the passenger side lowered and he called “Good luck” from the driver’s side before pulling out of the parking lot.

  I laid the cat carrier on the sidewalk and sat on the curb. I raised a hand and waved to the coughing woman. I took out my phone and texted Viv, first about the film and then about the carbon monoxide. I watched the screen to see if she would answer immediately, then I stuck it back in my pocket and waited for the familiar vibration to let me know she’d responded.

  Acknowledgements

  Firstly, thank you to my editor, Melanie Little, for your invaluable guidance and encouragement. I’m enormously grateful for the opportunity to work with you, and I learned so much. Thank you to Sarah MacLachlan, Cindy Ma, Alysia Shewchuk, Maria Golikova and everyone at House of Anansi Press for your friendship and for all the hard work you do. Thank you to the Newfoundland and Labrador Arts Council and the City of St. John’s, whose financial support gave me time to write, and without which I never would have been able to finish this project.

  Thank you to Carmella Gray-Cosgrove and Susie Taylor for reading bits and pieces of this book, for sharing your works in progress with me and for hours of conversation about reading and writing. Thank you to Robert Chafe for helping me hammer out an early version of this story and for blowing my mind with your playwriting lectures. Thank you to Jen Squires for your advice as well as your warmth and generosity. Thank you to Rosellen Sullivan for patiently talking me through some complicated technicalities. Thank you to my aunt Lynn for being a powerful and inspiring force of good in the world and for your help with this manuscript. Thank you to my mom and dad for filling the house I grew up in with love and books. Thank you to Emily Amaral, Theo Crocker, Becky Gibson, Jessica Gibson, Alex Noel, Catherine Roberge, Devin Shears and Jess Tran for your endless support, I love you all immensely.

  EVA CROCKER is the author of the critically acclaimed debut short story collection Barrelling Forward, which won the Alistair MacLeod Prize for Short Fiction and the CAA Emerging Writer Award; was a finalist for the Writers’ Trust Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ Emerg
ing Writers and the NLCU Fresh Fish Award for Emerging Writers; and was a National Post Best Book. She lives in St. John’s, Newfoundland.

  House of Anansi Press was founded in 1967 with a mandate to publish Canadian-authored books, a mandate that continues to this day even as the list has branched out to include internationally acclaimed thinkers and writers. The press immediately gained attention for significant titles by notable writers such as Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, George Grant, and Northrop Frye. Since then, Anansi’s commitment to finding, publishing and promoting challenging, excellent writing has won it tremendous acclaim and solid staying power. Today Anansi is Canada’s pre-eminent independent press, and home to nationally and internationally bestselling and acclaimed authors such as Gil Adamson, Margaret Atwood, Ken Babstock, Peter Behrens, Rawi Hage, Misha Glenny, Jim Harrison, A. L. Kennedy, Pasha Malla, Lisa Moore, A. F. Moritz, Eric Siblin, Karen Solie, and Ronald Wright. Anansi is also proud to publish the award-winning nonfiction series The CBC Massey Lectures. In 2007, 2009, 2010, and 2011 Anansi was honoured by the Canadian Booksellers Association as “Publisher of the Year.