Innehållsförteckning för Issue 171: Who's to Blame? - Summer 2024 från The New Quarterly

WHEN OUR DAUGHTER WAS SEVEN, SHE CAME INTO THE KITCHEN, WHERE I was waiting to take her to school, and slapped a piece of paper on the counter. She told me I needed to sign it before disappearing to get her coat on. The paper was from the school, an official document from the office with words that indicated she was in trouble. When I turned it over, I saw a series of drawings in boxes that was clearly her work: first image a stick girl and stick boy; next image the boy’s hand on the girl’s head; next image another stick girl appears with her hands on the boy’s shoulder. I was struggling to follow the narrative. When I asked her about it, she said that the boy had…

Creatures of the Field A scent of wild roses, yet I seeno roses, nor rosebushes, nor hipshanging red. A small garter snakeat first just a glimpse of movementin the grass, then its striped lengthcorkscrews away from my foot. The greens, the greens. And tomatoand sunflower with their primaryjolts, small pastel daisies. The windruffling the willow. Revelationspoke through my memories, a slimshape sidewinding through stems. Have I ever held my own shed skin,wondered at the length of it, how itcurls and coils in drying, becomes apale rustling husk I might preservein a linen press? Fine woolen ghostscarry a waft of roses in their folds. Can I make tea or jelly from the rosehips,bottle that phantom waft of fragrance?Denial is a folding, hospital-corneredso small traumas will lie flat, slideinto drawers, tuck neatly…

Every night, I prayed to the Erinyes because I wantedvengeance, because I had never sworn a false oath.I muttered and scrawled words in fury, resolve as pure as Herpahestus’s fire. The bond is broken, I told Alekto;Forever! I screamed to Megaera; Do your work, I instructedTisiphone, who needs no encouragement. My son did not improve, nor did the world, but the passions of action made a swordof my grief, the Erinyes aroused at the clarity of my causeand the purity of my worship. I had prayed in the right way, yet the boy was dying. No instance better than the righteous!Whirling through the world was an agonal no and the world,it stayed infuriatingly green and beautiful as, still, I listened to my son breathe, his wind more ragged, crisp—as if…

Full Wolf Moon I am the shadow slipping from room to room through slices of moonlight. Night streets stretch empty. Yards slumber under fresh white linen. Blue as moonshade, my body mists through spacious cold and weighted pines. Among wind-curved drifts my heart and pen replenish. Travel gently, my cherished friend, each day smaller in your white bed. Morning, clawed prints of unseen creatures. I know their secret creeping and their hunger. March Day blows in from the east, swirling time in its breath time I will spend shovelling pain into my back and feet, regret into piles along the path. Drifts whiten valleys in the lee of my neighbour’s dormers. Small avalanches stream from the eaves, too fast an hourglass. This wind is an animal, long teeth against my…

AT CHERRY BEACH WE UNTIE THE KAYAK FROM THE ROOF OF THE CAR, HAUL IT across the pebbly shore, and place it down near the water’s edge. Carmen turns to face me, her green eyes hidden behind sunglasses, her teeth flashing brightly as she grins at me. “Catch!” she says, tossing a paddle at me, but I miss it because I’m watching her instead of the paddle, thinking about how sexy she looks. She’s standing on the beach with her sneakered feet planted firmly apart, wearing her cut-off jean shorts with the frayed edges—all those little threads trickling down on her brown thighs—and her favourite baby blue hoodie, the one that says ‘I Run Like A Girl’ on it. We climb into the double kayak and push off into the…

Safeway Bags Play Hooky Our stretch marks were starting to ripinto slits from the weekly lugsof lentil tins and pasta boxes.After hauling bunches of kale and parsley,you’d ball us back into the drawerdamp. This pickled us into a funk.A few more trips and we’d be demotedto schlepping slippers to the in-lawsor worse, to line the bathroom’s waste bin.So when you left the car trunk openand the wind offered a lift, the two of usflew. Ballooned over the avenue.Twisted and flipped like skiers launchedfrom a jump. Surveyed, from a kite’sheight the neighbour’s trampoline.Teased ash branches trying to nab us.Even passed a few old sacs rooftop tanning.Landing in a park, we spooked magpieswho abandoned their French fry hunt.Our handles from an angle must’veresembled the empty socket of a cyclops.We somersaulted across the…

Dmytro Plaksin, who gave private music lessons around Mariupol, still has the key to the dressing room that he called home before the bombing.—The New York Times Magazine, 4/9/22 found in a cupboard—a jumble of keys in a jar tiny metallic sharks, jaws openwith nothing to bite into each conjures up imagesof cars we once drovehouses we lived inkeys to past livesa bundle of love letterswe locked in a drawerthe spare key to our mother’s housekept long after she died the rub of a key in our handsecurity stabilityhome each piece of woodframing the door is blessedwalls and roof intact, floors sweptclean linens on the bed and tableporcelain and glass unbrokenevery room holding the soundof our voices until we return a home vivid in the dreams of the dispossessedhuddled on…

FRANKLIN SHOULD HAVE BEEN MAKING FRIENDS INSTEAD OF STARTING TROUBLE. He’d been at it again today and I began to wonder if the guy would ever learn. Franklin already knew where he was headed after only a month at the Joyceville Penitentiary Assessment Unit. It wouldn’t be to the worst place—max at Millhaven and its constant isolation—but where he was headed was no joke and no way was he prepared. Assessment units determine your level of risk and where you are going for the rest of your sentence. It was hard to read Franklin just by talking to him. I shook my head just thinking about him, floating for a minute in the peaceful white noise of the laundry room. I’d heard before going to prison that it could be…

Coffee Shop Wisps of steam rosefrom their double doublesMy mum and dad sat and sippedcoffee and ate large brown muffins. They’d stayed togethertoo long but that was the wayit was back then—you grittedyour teeth and carried on. Their fights were fierce. Wordsthat wounded. Broken glass and shardsthat shredded the threads of the webof wonder that they’d woven together. In ’72 my father cried in a barduring that famous hockey game.The guys all thoughtit was because Canada wonbut that wasn’t it. That was the day he got the papersand it was over for good. Now easier friends than loversthey stared out the windowat a half empty parking lotand sometimes their fingertipsreached across and touched. Poppies In France, I watchcrimson carpetsin farmers’ fieldsquiver in the breeze. My father would have seenthem during…

Life By Water I was thinking of the poets I have spent time with,an uncurtained night window in front of me, a lamp on and somebody sleeping in the next room,another behind a screen around a bed on the floor above—a quietness informed by breath. A poet said she lived next to a river and its life became her thoughts:they were like water-striders easing into a current.I did not know how cold she was, or if she were hungry.I did not think of other lives that awaited her.Poetry was her love of species—especially kindsof disregarded insects. She refused to kill,and that became her existence. My brother lures miceinto boxes with trap door lids smeared with peanut-butter.He frees them in the meadow, but do they fleeor re-enter the familiarity of the…

Megan Beadle is an emerging writer and freelance editor from Toronto. Her writing highlights include being published in The Antigonish Review, having a cover story for the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, getting picked as the winner by Catherine Hernandez for the Room Magazine Short Story competition in 2019, and recently getting an OAC recommender grant from Anansi Press. Robert Benz is a child of immigrants. He was born on Nakota territory, grew up in Denendeh, and has spent most of his adult life on Cree and Métis land. He has been a bush pilot, an actor, and, when budget allows, a wanderer. His work has appeared in New Welsh Review, The Dalhousie Review, and The Antigonish Review. He is an MFA in Writing student at the University of…

I’VE BEEN A CLOSET POET FOR DECADES. Writing poetry feels to me like a dangerous, delicious pleasure, an indulgent but necessary form of creative expression, a dirty little secret, and one I would’ve happily kept to myself, were it not for the big cardboard box sitting under my desk, haunting me. That box contains the only evidence of the thirty years my aunt spent living in a notorious residential hospital. In the 1960s Canadian writer, journalist and broadcaster, Pierre Berton, opened a national conversation about the mistreatment of disabled adults through his exposure of an institution known as, The Asylum for Idiots, (later, Huronia “home” for the developmentally delayed.) Despite Berton’s CBC documentary coverage, Huronia and its “overflow” sister institutions, Cedar Springs near Blenheim, and the Oxford Regional Centre (ORC)…

FOLLOWING A COLOUR-CODED BARRAGE, THE DAY’S SQUARE IN AMI’S CALENDAR held a single word. SABBATICAL, pencilled in her teacher-quality capital letters. An unfamiliar anxiety slithered up her back. Even as an adult, the academic year had persisted in governing her time. When she was being honest with herself, she knew that it was as much a comfort as a frustration. The iron-clad structure began to soften with the warmth of the steeping coastal sun and in the diminishing expectations of those around her. Sitting alone in her dusty bedroom, Ami found herself in a season out of time. Unlike all the days before, packed full of grant applications and seminars and field hours, she didn’t have any responsibility. The confines that held her seemed to warp. In anticipation of this…

CHRISTINE AND I WERE BEST FRIENDS FOR A TIME IN JUNIOR HIGH. WE WERE tight. My sister Clare knew her too, but I wouldn’t say they were close. I haven’t seen or heard from Christine in four decades but when she pops into my head in the middle of my first Al-Anon meeting, my gut signals it’s for a reason. Sometimes intuition should be our guide. The Al-Anon meeting is a gesture of love for Clare, who is living with us, temporarily. When she suggested I switch my Ashtanga class to another night to spend Tuesday evenings at meetings for families of drinkers, I did it without complaining. I would feel incredibly guilty if I did not attend. I absolutely should attend. But I don’t buy into their three C’s:…

Life Skills (1) Dissection I had a gift for pithing.My lab mates brought mefrogs they couldn’t bear to kill.I dispatched them quicklynerve muscle boneclean precise forever.At age fifteenmy grasp of sufferingwas so small. Where is the perfect spotto sink the probesnap the cordlinkingme to you,painlessly sever everylonging impulse thoughtso firmly holdingme in thrall?My aptitude for leavingis so small. (2) Extravagance He came from up the valley.He lived in a shelter downtown.She taught him life skills and yogaat the Booth Street Sally Ann. He made her a brooch of seashellsbefore he disappeared,a flower with petals like tear-drops,the work of a master’s hand. (3) Maximal density packing Several decades later her husband learnsto make a golden loaf open crumb tallrise straight sides smooth top. Then pies.Then cake. She gives up baking throwsin…

THE LITTLE THAT REMAINED OF THE TEMPLE OF ARTEMIS WAS STREWN ACROSS a marshy lot in Turkey: chunks of foundation, a tall pillar of unsteady-looking pieces poised to fall. As I squinted at it in the golden November daylight, I recalled losing a mark on a high school test about the characteristics of Ionic versus Doric versus some other type of column. Decades later, here I was, in front of a patched-up pillar with grooves carved down its length, realizing I only remembered the question. I still didn’t know the answer. The guide was speaking in Spanish, a language that I only vaguely and Paul—not a “languages guy,” he’d once told me—did not at all understand. We’d missed the English tour and though this guide was supposed to cater to…

THEY MOVED IN JUST AFTER CHRISTMAS, A STRANGE TIME TO RELOCATE TO AN isolated farmhouse at the end of a twisted dirt road. Saskatchewan winters still took her breath away but now that they had the baby, Abby was happy to have the privacy and promise of a summer garden after living in a teacherage trailer on Thunderchild reserve where her husband taught. They had left eastern Canada on a lark, planning to save enough to spend the following year in Greece but the baby had derailed those plans. Before Will left in the morning, he always built a strong fire in the wood/oil furnace in the cellar so that when she and the baby awoke for the day, the kitchen would be warm. The house was drafty, having been…

Lean into the wind of the boat’s thrust forward. Cheek burnsin the shape of a scorch on white linen. Mum said her friend died of heat stroke in a tin boat like this one. Shooed meout of the kitchen, rinsed clothes forced through the mangle. Still haunted by an image from an old TV show: devil grants a man lovein exchange for his bones. His bride comes home, finds a puddle of flesh on her bedroom floor. All flame, no fire, Mumhissed when I insisted I will marry you. Fifty years circling the lake. A loon surfaces, its partner also. There, the cottagenested among pines. In its windows, the sunset blazing. Waking in a room not familiar, green pinpoint of lighton the ceiling. Smoke sensor or laser? Rumble outside, snowplow…

HIS HANDS SHAPING CLAY WERE QUICK AND DEFT, MATTER-OF-FACT, LIKE DRESS-ing his daughter when she was a toddler, with a let’s-get-it-done directness, irritated, cajoling, all of it underlaid with an I-would-die-for-this-recalcitrant-lump-of-mud intensity. He worked in a converted garage behind his house on Avenue E, breathing life into bronze dogs, people, horses, anything that walked. My favourite was a moose, the antlers exquisite, that stood in a gallery downtown. I would sit there sometimes, sketching or scribbling notes, but I usually wrote at a table in the coffee shop down the street from my second-storey bachelor. We would walk, most evenings and into the night, long meandering rovings that covered the city. The old town with peeling three-storey houses and Chinese cafés, the poor, the artists, graffiti, murals, sidewalk sculptures. Through…

Gazing at Swifts you note that each bird looks primed to disappear,turning its body forty-five degrees and anglingbehind a St-Denis Street roof. You hope the flock’sdescendants will be here in a decade, scarfingmayflies and vanishing with split-second dodges.Smart money tells you that they’re alwayson the hunt, never back at those stick nestswhere you’d think they’d spend more timeejecting a gruel into upward-tilted beaks. Whatever’s taking a toll on their numbers,meaning whatever’s killing all the bugs,you vow not to fret about it come autumnwhen the scattered flocks will re-assemble,birds you’ve never actually seen massingover Montreal except as a couple dozenfamished swifts feeding over a fountain,but what if they did funnel up in drovesfrom a disused heating plant chimney? Here’s to furtherance of a kind you cangamble on like a wetland left…

CORY WAS DRIVING, SO IT SHOULDN’T HAVE BEEN MY FAULT. I SHOULDN’T HAVE felt this guilt. There’s no original way to describe a car crash. No authenticity in the flashing lights, broken glass—we are culturally numb to these images. When it happened, it felt like something that had happened to me before, or something that couldn’t be happening to me. The stitches, one for every incalculable loss. Cory. I don’t think I ever would have left him. I don’t know if he ever would’ve left me. Cory was five years older than me and like most eighteen-year-old girlfriends of older men, I was refreshed by how much he wasn’t like guys my age—oh, those dreaded guys-my-age. Of course, I’d liked his soft voice, his soft brown hair, his startling aether…

TNQ (SAY IT THREE TIMES QUICKLY...) The New Quarterly is grateful to the institutions and individuals who support our work: to St. Jerome’s University which houses us; to the University of Waterloo in conjunction with the Ontario Student Assistance Program for paying our student interns; to St. Jacob’s Printery for services various; to our Board of Directors and our many volunteers extraordinaire, both in the editorial ranks and in the office; to Carolyn & Bill Pegg for countless hours spent organizing and running charity bingo sessions on our behalf; to the funders of our contest prizes—the late Edna Staebler, the family of Nick Blatchford, and the English Department at St. Jerome’s University; to our funders at the national, provincial, and municipal level (listed on our masthead); and to the many…

I swing at thickets of poison ivy with this garden toolthat’s not really a sickle but good enough to clear a pathbehind the swimming pool where the neighbour’s kid got a rash on his legs worse than anything his mother’sseen in all her years of nursing. So now I must domesticatethis overgrowth nobody goes near except that boy who caused an awkward tension in our neighborhood.I swing through ivy, ferns and something calledstinging nettle and then I hear a ping, feel it in my wrists, that thwack of rock and metal. Among the thornsas thick as witches’ fingernails; a polished blockof granite etched in Gothic Font. A woman who lived just twenty years lies beneath my feet, her body on a bedof satin, or, more likely, wrapped in shower curtain.We…

SARAH HAS BEEN DEAD FOR A WHILE BY THE TIME I ARRIVE AND SAM SITS IN A crumpled heap on the floor. I was hoping she’d call me for this. The second the phone rang I grabbed my shoes. “I’m so sorry,” I say, putting my hand on Sam’s shoulder. “You gave her a really good life.” Sam looks up at me, scowls, and swats my hand away. “Fuck you, Gwen. Sarah was a guy.” “He, then,” I say, correcting myself. “You gave him a really good life.” I lean over to inspect the goldfish floating upside down in the water like a bloated cigarette butt and pick up a chopstick. I poke at him gently, turning him over in the bowl in search of a tiny little orange penis…

I CAN’T STAND ANOTHER SECOND UNDER THE UNFORGIVING FLUORESCENT LIGHTS, being eyed by men in suits who carry signs bearing the names of people more important than me. If I stop moving, I’m afraid I’ll sink into the ground and become part of this transient setting forever. I weave through the travellers until I spot the payphones against the wall. I slip my credit card into one of them and dial the number Jeremy gave me. There’s unsurprisingly no answer— Jeremy never answers his phone. It’s always on silent. I leave him a voicemail to tell him I’ll make my way to him. He asked if I wanted him to meet me, but I told him to just send me the directions to his place. I didn’t want to sound…

IT’S NOT 1969, BABY GIRL. THIS ISN’T WOODSTOCK. WE’RE OLD LADIES NOW, BUT we were young once, radiant but self-conscious, at the pinnacle of beauty. Halcyon days. Our other friends are here too: Janis, Bob, Joni, Eric, Jimi, the members of Jefferson Airplane. The air crackles with music and possibility. Twelve of us stand in a circle at dusk, willing mischief, golden rays kissing the open faces of the blooms and we are here for a night of revelry at the wildflower farm. The perfume of milkweed and sweat pea is a welcome respite from dirty laundry. What I feel in my bones is an ache for adventure. We’ve left our age, our responsibilities—our men, for those of us who have them—at home. The flowers are swaying to the bass…

Dear P.K. Page re. care instructions for our beloved Planet Earth Can we still call it beloved if we haven’t loved itproperly, softly, like a laundress, like a mother, likea lover, like seraphim, and instead have loved itmore like all the world’s miners-and-farmers-andloggers-and-ranchers-and-fishers, plus the rest ofus, each one of us, going at it hard, all at once, andperhaps with more hunger than love, our big handsgrabbing—mouths open—always for more and more? The World in My Mouth after Sharon Olds’ “My First Weeks” I had the world in my mouth at the outset, sniffed out Mother, took her in with first breaths, learned to latch while her eyes said, it’s all yours to consume. Drink up, drink up. All this before the formula folk click-clacked up the hall with their…

STUCK TO THE DASHBOARD, THE BOBBLEHEAD NODDED VIGOROUSLY. ITS jiggling grew more frantic whenever a wheel hit a pothole, which happened often since the country road was in terrible shape. It didn’t help that the vehicle was a beat-up hearse, a gray 1977 Cadillac whose rusty suspension had the nasty habit of worsening shocks instead of absorbing them, and whose frame sent sparks flying as it scraped against the pavement. The bobblehead, a souvenir from Mexico, was a skeleton lady called La Catrina who wore a big hat adorned with tiny fake ostrich feathers. Whenever the hearse ran over a rock, roadkill, or a pothole, La Catrina was sure to lose one of her plumes. Slouched in the passenger seat, Drissa amused himself by collecting the feathers one by one,…

TROY WAS DOING HIS BEST TO FOCUS ON HOW NICE A DAY IT WAS—OUTSTANDING, really. Thanks to the bluebird skies and high-pressure systems, the de Havilland Beaver was punching swiftly through the sky. The mercifully clear weather conditions were a welcome distraction from what was happening behind him. He reached forward and flipped the switch that would carry his voice to the terminal where his wife was on dispatch duty. “Ground control this is Charlie Uniform Echo. ETA eight minutes. Gears down.” “Charlie Uniform Echo, this is ground control. ETA eight minutes. Gears down. Ambulance standing by. Take care up there.” “Charlie Uniform Echo.” Troy knew his wife had undoubtedly done the math; she would’ve realized right away that they were back too soon. He had definitely pushed the limits…

NOAH WASN’T IN ANY OF HIS USUAL PLACES. THE SKI TRIP HAD BEEN HIS IDEA but now Andi couldn’t find him—he wasn’t in his bedroom or in the basement with his jars or in the blue nylon tent in the backyard where he slept in warmer weather. She returned to the kitchen where her older son Richard was shaking his head, like he should have known better than to have come. “Sorry, but I should be at my site,” he said. “If he’s not here, he doesn’t want to go.” “Please take a breath,” Andi said, “find your trust.” Richard set the orange ski boots he had brought for his brother firmly on the linoleum and started scrolling on his phone. Andi had another thought and dashed back to the…

ARE YOU IAN ROY? I’m not, I answer. And then, almost as inexplicably as that denial, I apologize with a shrug. This was 1997. My wife and I were on a beach in Nova Scotia. It was early fall, a sunny but cool and windy day. The beach was deserted or had been until a man appeared from behind some rocks and started walking towards us. The first thing I noticed about this man was that he was dressed entirely in khaki. He had on a wide-brimmed Tilley hat that cast a shadow over his face and an unbuttoned shirt that billowed and flapped in the wind. He wasn’t wearing an undershirt, and I could see his pale, hairy chest. As he got closer, I saw that he was carrying…

BY THE TIME CAMERON HAD DRIVEN ALL THE WAY FROM KELOWNA TO THE lake house, the road wasn’t much more than dirt, and in lots of places it was mostly mud. The old couch sat by the roadside at the end of the driveway, discoloured, mould spotted. When he turned off the car, he cut short a broadcast on climate change he’d only half listened to. A grey band ringed the cedar siding on the house, marking where the water had reached this time. Thigh height. There had been some attempt to clean it; a spiral of scrub marks started at one corner and narrowed until it stopped against the front steps. It did not restart on the other side. His steps sunk into the gravel driveway, and water the…