In any event, after a long hiatus from submitting and getting writing published, I got back on the horse over the last 12 + months, and finally succeeded in having another story published by Scrivener in its Summer 2011 issue. There are still plenty of submissions out there (fingers crossed), but this represents the most recent work I've had published. For those who are interested, however, in the business of writing and getting short fiction and poetry published, I would recommend joining Places for Writers on Facebook. They offer a good community of writers to engage with, as well as a constantly refreshed listing of publications and contests looking for submissions representing a wide array of subjects, interests and genres. A must for any aspiring writer on-line!
Snowing Shovels
It was snowing, but Gillian would say it was coming down by
the shovel. Gillian had lots of sayings
that made me think of something other than what she meant. I imagined falling shovels and people
running, screaming. Sometimes at night I
would curl into her, finding her hair on the pillow and sink into it for
protection from her metaphors and similes.
I hoped it didn’t get any heavier. Gillian was knocking off the snow, scraping
the thin crust of frost from the car windows.
I fed breakfast scraps to the dog. The constant whirr of the dishwasher
powered away at the dishes.
I knew what Gillian would be thinking: it was a fifteen minute trip to the nursing
home on a good day. It was hard to tell
whether this was becoming a good day or not.
I doubted she would see it that way, what with the shovels. For a moment, I was lost out there in the
descending white. He startled me.
“Speck did nurses, but Bundy, he preferred co-eds.”
He was cataloguing.
This was something he did. It was
explained to me as a means for him to hold onto memories. Lists.
“Clifford Olsen murdered children.
Willy Pickton did prostitutes from Vancouver’s lower East side.” I’d not heard this particular list
before. “Pickton claimed to be a
half-wit who befriended the friendless.”
He savoured that for a moment and smiled at retaining this morsel.
If I hadn’t experienced the listing before, I might be put
off. He slurped coffee through his
moustache. He lowered the cup and turned
it in slow circles on the formica.
Little brown rings emanated from his turning. Aside from the content, though, this was just
another list.
“What would you do?
If you were a serial killer …” I
lifted a scrap of bacon like a string pulling the little dog into the air. She leapt four feet straight up, teeth
snapping on air. I dipped the bacon a
little and she jumped again, getting hold of it this time.
What would I do, I wondered.
What or who. The dog sat stock
still as I lingered by the frying pan, a finger skimming through the grease,
trawling for hardened hunks of burnt fat.
I knew that an answer would be required.
The dog curled her lip, a springy tongue rolling one side of her mouth
to the other. A white sheet was lowering outside, sky and landscape becoming
one. I imagined Gillian disappearing
into the massing snow on the driveway.
The trees on the boulevard were losing definition. I hoped she’d find her way back into the
house.
“What I’d do,” I said, stalling. “Well, first I’d have to research all of the
methods of killing. I’d try to be
creative, I suppose, if that’s a sort of creativity.” He was twisting in his chair, losing patience
with my tactic. “I figure it might just
be a twist on how it’s been done before, some new variation. Perhaps strangulation with a garden
hose. Maybe.”
That’s when it struck me.
Like a shovel.
“No.” It was
formulating, the words coming slower than the idea, like a gentle drift of lazy
flakes. Not shovels. “No, not strangulation.” I had it now, and I could see that he wanted
to know the how in intricate detail.
“No, here’s how it would go down.”
I think I sounded excited.
The front door opened and Gillian came in. She banged the snow from her boots on the
front doormat. The dog left the frying
pan to investigate as the furnace came on, a whoosh. Just me and him and how I would do it if I
were a serial killer. He was attentive,
his eyes fixed.
“First, I’d have to find a victim. Perhaps professors of Canadian literature, or
left-handed jugglers. Comedians,
lawyers. I’d work that out, but that’s
not so important, not as important as the how.”
I was hoping to shock him. I
could tell that he was ready to be shocked.
Gillian clomped in from the front hall.
She had a small peak of snow on the hood of her ski jacket, crevasses at
the folds in her sleeves filled with snow.
She was a glacier. At any moment,
she might let loose an avalanche.
“The how?” he questioned.
This wasn’t strictly in keeping with the catalogue he’d been working on,
the tedious task of rearranging everything he knew into categories so he might
hold onto it longer. I knew that I might
be interfering with his therapy. I might
blow up a snowstorm that would bury his efforts at organization. But it had to be about the how.
“I’d use some ruse, maybe a personal ad. The promise of money or sex or both.” The words were speeding up now, driven along
on the back of the idea. “We’d meet, me
and the victim, somewhere unremarkable.
A park. Some time around
dark. There’d be no sex, no exchange of
any kind really. No DNA, no
fingerprints. No, just a knock on the
head.” Gillian should have been alarmed,
the sang froid of it all. She looked
puzzled, but not yet sickened. It was
his fault, he started it. Perhaps she’d
already figured that out, amidst the slow melt.
It was her father, after all.
He was still hanging on my words. “So, they’re knocked out. Now what?”
I wondered if some old part of himself was crying out, realizing how
wrong this conversation had gone. Seeing
past the exercise. He had an excuse, at
least. I was just enjoying myself.
“Then the creative bit.
The killer’s idiom.” He took note
of that, I thought. It had just come to
me. “I’d transport them to a disused
warehouse where I had a tank of liquid nitrogen. Minus one hundred and fifty degrees Celsius
or thereabouts. Cold enough to freeze
the warmest heart.” I looked at
Gillian. “They’d be dunked. Frozen solid.” She looked like my first victim, as she
glanced at the clock. He had to be back
before lunch, so he could get reacclimatized before feeding time. “Cryogenically frozen.” He nodded, not seeming to notice that I’d
become a sadist.
“From there it would be easy. I’d take them somewhere way up north and
stick them in the ice and snow. Keep
them cold and out of sight.” He was
still nodding. Gillian edged forward.
“Dad,” he looked at her.
“We need to get going.” The dog
slipped past Gillian, nudged the older man’s free hand. He began turning the coffee cup in small
concentric circles again. He lifted it
and slurped a little more of the coffee, thinking. I wasn’t sure if I was going to make the
list.
“One thing,” he said, not like he was trying to trip me
up. Just sorting through the
details. “If you hide the bodies in the
ice, how will anyone ever know that they were killed? They could just be disappeared.” Was he talking about his own peculiar
situation? The not-yet-dead but gone
missing waging a war to remember and be remembered? I had to think then. The outside was undifferentiated white. There was no knowing how far you’d get before
you disappeared into it. Or got hit by a
falling shovel.
Gillian was impatient.
A stolid form, melting into my wife again. Her agitation at not moving was almost
palpable. I lifted a bacon-greased
finger to my mouth. Tasted. Gillian’s father looked to his daughter. A drip fell from the hood to the floor. He looked out the window. He turned his coffee cup. He was losing the plot.
“No, not totally missing.”
I broke the silence. Another drip
dropped on the kitchen floor. The dog would
get it. “I’d make sure that I left just
a little showing, maybe a finger, the tip of a foot sticking out, so someone
would find it. Some sign where the
bodies were buried.” This somehow
satisfied him. “Global warming might do
the rest.” He stopped with the
cup-turning. I was satisfied with this
twist on the idiom, too. The careful
placement of the departed so that they don’t go unremarked. Gillian’s father slipped back into his
previous tone.
“Professors of Canadian literature?” he said. Almost a smirk. Almost the person gone missing inside his
mind. Gillian was dripping and, I
thought, fuming. Her father worked on
how this fit the catalogue, working out a place for this story. Somewhere between places I’ve been with my
family and cars I owned. Between
birthday presents and television programs that I enjoyed as a young man. My favourite places to golf. Biggest news items of the last 20 years. The names of dogs and cats I had as a
child. I thought perhaps my murderous
plot might find a place in the archive now.
Or perhaps it would just give comfort for the next few minutes.
I guess we may never know.
The snow was deepening, everything pretty much blanched and
assimilated. You’d have a hard time
finding anything out there on a day like this.
Gillian gave me a look like I couldn’t miss her meaning this time. She would go get his coat and his boots and
get him back to the home. And then she
would return to me out of the thickening snow and I would not need to be
reminded who she was. And my heart
wanted to burst.
Her father turned as he followed Gillian out of the
kitchen. He looked me up and down,
measuring me or trying to create a moment that could be recalled later. Again, the almost smirk.
He said, “I don’t think you’ll get away with it.”
No comments:
Post a Comment