mannequin

the snow was white and uniform

taken by me

Is it possible to discount the weeks we spent together in something resembling contentment from the pain that came before, the pain that made me largely useless? I have tried, I do not think it's possible. Wipe clean, begin again. Bathe in the dazzling beam of light, let it drench your skin. Be birthed anew. Is that what you must ask of me? Does forgiveness truly exist without the privilege of remembering nothing? Even if by some Catholic miracle I forget such things, frivolous memories in the grand scheme of things, my body will remember, faithful hoarder it is. The dry, cracked flesh of my lips will remember the dry, cracked flesh of yours. These scabs will scar, and so will your swift—your ever so swift—departure.

My father was coming home to die and I learned this yesterday. I have been sitting with the fact in the same manner as one continues walking with a pebble in their boot they cannot be bothered to remove because removing it would mean stopping, and stopping would mean feeling the full weight of the foot. I have been careful, in all my years of living, not to name feelings before I am certain of them. I do not say I am sad unless I am certain and I am rarely certain. And so, in conclusion, I go around saying nothing. This life of mine is not an unhappy life. It was a life shaped by my father the way certain valleys are shaped by what moved through them and then at once, departed, the glacier is gone, has been gone for ten thousand years, but the valley remains in the form the ice made, and you can still see the pressure of it in the curve of the walls, the depth of the floor. I had been shaped by what had left me and this made the life entirely, irreversibly mine.

The town's name is meaningless. The two hundred people living here, set against the weight of the earth’s population, amounts to nothing. I have lived here all my life except for the year I tried not to, which does not count because I came back. It has been twelve years since he departed. Nothing has changed except the dog has gone rabid and chews at the vinyl siding—installed after a hail storm, ill-fitting against the original structure of the house, an old, tiny, stripped to the bones church, refashioned as a house in my grandfather’s generation, the house with steeples that pinch the sky. I used to think the steeples were magnificent. Now they are just steeples. This is what happens to magnificent things when you are thirty-three and your father is on a train home to die.

Once, he took me upon his shoulders and jumped and I reached up, so high that for a single moment I was almost elsewhere. His ankle rolled when he landed back on the fertile ground and I remember the grass coming up to meet me as I fell and continued falling. It was a fall that I imagined snapping my spine into halves, then quarters, then whatever came after. A day before, I had learned fractions in my school. And how if I were to split a pie down the middle I would now have two halves of a pie. If I were to split it once again across the perpendicular middle, I would now have four quarters of a pie. I did not think about what came after because I had not been introduced to the minutiae furthering this knowledge. I did not think about death because I had not yet been acquainted with the concept, not until he packed his bags and walked to the nearest train station—and that was its own kind of death—an hour away by vehicle, and we had no vehicle except my bicycle with the training wheels still attached. A great service he had done me by leaving it. The Pastor told me my father had walked the whole way and boarded the first train to Saskatchewan. They were looking for him by then, a day having passed, and I in my childish fright having run to the Pastor for help. No, who can blame him. Alberta is too hot in summer and too cold in winter and spring is a relief and fall is an anxiety and he had at least the decrepit sense to leave a safe full of cash, enough to sustain me for five years without employment.

In the pictures from my childhood, I am always looking back. Was it the thrill of being paralyzed in time that sought me to look backwards, backwards at myself, at time? Or was it the proprietor of my paralyzation that urged me to look back? Look back. Look back. The cameraman is always important in this act. I wanted to understand who it was he saw. There are not many pictures. My father had one camera, a film camera with a cracked casing held together with electrical tape, and he used it infrequently and mostly badly, thumbs in the frame, subjects cut at the knee, horizons tilted as though the world were listing. I notice only now that in these photographs I was always captured at a distance, half turned towards him. At the fair, on the merry-go-round, at the edge of the creek behind the church, always the same posture, shoulders halfway turned, chin lifted, finding him with my eyes across whatever distance he had put between us. I used to think this was the camera's fault. That he had called to me and I had turned and he had caught me mid-turn, that the look was incidental. But I have studied those photographs for twelve years and I know that isn't right. Even in moments of apparent pleasure, I was already, at seven, at nine, at eleven, wondering, is he there, is he still there, how far, how long.

In one, I am riding the merry-go-round at the annual fair, lips dewy and stubbornly chapped with the caramel apple he bought for me. Ninety-nine cents. Before everything became too expensive. Before demand began to outweigh supply and the economics of our relationship was forever changed and altered in the course of our life together. He was thirty-three then, or he may as well have been seventeen and clueless with the mechanics of sex and domesticity. I am thirty-three now. Nothing about this fact feels significant except that it is, obscenely, inescapably significant, the way certain facts are. Quick recovery from thin membranes of ecstasy could have prevented our life together and as I mull over it from time to time, I become increasingly unsure of whether I should praise his dullness or be saddened at the life he could have had without me. Looking back, always.

For a couple years since his leaving, I would aimlessly wander the town, only to find myself pressing my palms to the cold church doors wondering what it was other people felt inside them. I once followed the Pastor to his car after Sunday service and asked him where my father had gone exactly. He said Saskatchewan. I said no, where. He looked at me for a long time and then said, I'll pray for you, child. I gave him a nod and walked home.

I lost my virginity at seventeen, a year since he’d gone. I had thought it only right, since he had also lost his virginity at seventeen to some unnameable girl. I was desperate to keep one arbitrary feeling linked to us, as though he could travel anywhere but a thread, flimsy as it was, would still connect us. Some small biological commonality. So that wherever he was he would feel it, a tug, and look up. He could be in Russia, a barren country of communists, and he would feel it. I lost it to the cashier at the only gas station in town. He smelled of sweat and diesel and he never let go of my hand. He took me to prom and spun me around until I couldn’t stop thinking of the merry-go-round, decommissioned not long after my father left. The lights blurred into a seance of colour and I wondered what my father was doing at that precise moment. The boy’s face became his and I kissed him until his lips tasted of heavy fog over a Russian city I would never visit, and I waited for the tug and nothing came back and I kept kissing him anyway, because the alternative was stopping and stopping would mean feeling the full weight of the foot.

I still dream of him walking the road out of town. It would be an early morning, dark, the flat Alberta land that goes on until it becomes Saskatchewan and then just keeps going. In the dream I am on my bicycle with the training wheels still on, following at a distance, and he does not look back, and I do not call out, and we go on like that for a long time, him walking and me pedalling, both of us pretending the other is not there. The dream has no resolution because it is not that kind of dream.

The morning I received the news, I was waiting on a letter from the same gas station cashier I coupled with in my adolescence. Edwin had grown handsome and been collected by a travelling theatre troupe and had written to me occasionally from cities I had never seen, his letters growing less frequent as the cities grew more numerous. His last letter had come six months ago from somewhere east. When he'd still been here we had settled into something resembling a marital arrangement, having only each other to complain to about the translucent sphere of the town we shared. He would clean his plate and complain later about my hospitality, given that he had shown me the singular pearl of joy in our town. Sex, of course.

I fondled the envelope in my hands, walking towards the centre of town. I gazed at the messy scribbles of my name and my address with great reverence, carefully tracing the loops of my name, then finally bringing it under my nose to inhale it, waiting for Edwin’s signature diesel smell to go straight to my head, like a strong wine I had the pleasure of once trying when I'd had occasion to entertain older men passing through. To my dismay, it smelled nothing like diesel, it smelled more like the soft undercurrent of iron, the belly of disease. Perhaps, a tiny bit of a sweet jasmine-like scent. When I reached the doors of the bakery of the old woman I worked for, I couldn’t hold in my impatience. I quickly ripped the seam of the envelope with my nail and unfolded the single piece of paper carefully tucked inside. My eyes travelled quickly across the page only to be met with four strange lines. It was my father. Twelve years later, he has finally written word. He’s coming by the seventeenth. He wrote that he has no one to turn to except me, he wants to be with his child in his last moments of life. I became dizzy with the amalgamation of sadness, fever, horror. I turned from the doors and hurriedly made my way home.

He had kissed me for the first time when I was thirteen. I had been standing in the kitchen, washing a dish, and he had come in from outside smelling of the cold and of himself, a smell I cannot describe without producing it from somewhere deep within my body. He had kissed me on the temple first, which was usual, and then on the cheekbone, and then at the corner of my mouth, and then on my mouth, and I had stood very still and finished washing the dish. I had understood that something had happened. I had not understood what to do with that understanding, and so I had put it somewhere internal and covered it with other small adolescent sufferings, school, feeding the dog, the mechanics of playground politics, whether Billy from 3-F would accept my confession.

He did it again, and again. For three years he kissed me in the kitchen, in the hallway, once in the car—borrowed from a neighbour—when we had driven to the city for groceries and sat in the parking lot of the supermarket, and he had looked at me for a long moment and then kissed me until I could feel it in my sternum. I had not stopped him though I had not encouraged him either. I had simply been there, being kissed. He left when I was sixteen. I have wondered, sometimes, if he left because of what he was doing, or because of what he was becoming capable of, and whether that departure was an act of restraint or cowardice or both and whether the distinction even matters at all. I no longer find the question interesting. What matters is the bicycle. The safe, full. The training wheels still attached, as if I were still a child who might fall. As if he had not already been the primary architect of every fall I had taken and would continue, from a great distance, to be. He must have believed, even then, I needed protecting from something, though he had never asked himself from what, or by whom.

He arrived on the 5:40 train, and I went to meet it because I wanted to see his face before he saw mine. I wanted the advantage of at least a single second. I stood on the platform in the cold, my coat buttoned haphazardly, one hand in my pocket holding air. The train arrived and when the doors opened, three people got off, then my father. He looked smaller. Not in height, no, he was the same height as he was twelve years ago, but he was smaller in some other sort of dimension, as though the mass of his beer belly and his thick thighs had been redistributed or consumed. His coat was too large. His hair was white. I had not imagined the white hair. In all my years of preparing for this moment I had given him his original hair, the brown I remembered, and the white was a simple and devastating piece of information for it meant that time had genuinely passed, that the years had not merely accumulated but had physically altered him, that he had lived inside them while I had been living inside their absence, and we had arrived here from different directions at the same place. His face was my face, yet older, diminished by whatever had been happening to it in all the years I hadn’t seen it, and yet, recognizably mine. I had known this intellectually but seeing it was different. We exchanged stilted words and I took his bag. He did not argue. We walked to the car I had borrowed for the occasion and drove the twenty minutes home in silence. He looked out the window at the distant mountains and said nothing.

He was in the house for three days before he mentioned it. I had put him in the spare room, and he slept twelve hours a day and ate what I brought him and did not ask for anything he didn’t need. He was a considerate guest. I noticed this with something between gratitude and fury. He had become, in the decades of his elsewhere, a person who knew how to be in someone else’s space without imposing. I had spent years wandering the town pressing my palms to cold church doors, looking for the man who once took up every room he entered, I found myself estranged from the man in front of me. Where was my father? I pondered this question all night.

On the third morning he came to the kitchen when I was making coffee and sat at the table and said, I know what I did. I kept my back to him as I poured the coffee. He continued, I’m not asking you to forgive me, I just want you to know that I know, you understand, yes? And I thought, ah, there he is. I turned around and put his mug on the table and sat across from him. He looked at the mug. His hands around it were the same hands that once held the ankles of my feet, still large, still careful, now also fragile, the skin loose on the knuckle, veins risen like rivers finding their old beds. I had kissed those hands when I was a child. I had held one of them on the merry-go-round at the fair, the lights cycling past. I asked him then what he knew exactly. He replied, I know what it was, what I made it be. The dog was scratching at the back door. The coffee was too hot to drink. Outside, the light was the colour of things that have been and continue to be. I asked him if he was in pain. He said he was. Some.

Sometimes I am thirteen at the sink and he has not come in yet and the water is running and I am just a child with a dish and nothing has happened and nothing is going to happen and I am fine, I am just fine, I am washing a dish in the morning like a child who lives in a house with a father who has not yet come in from the cold. Sometimes I am thirty-three and he is dead in the spare room and the snow is falling on everything equally and I am sitting in a chair waiting for a feeling that will not come. Both of these are true at the same time. My body has always known this.

He died on a Tuesday, twenty-two days after he arrived, in the spare room with the door open and the dog at the foot of the bed and Berta, who I’d asked to come, sitting in the corner doing something with her hands that might have been knitting or might have been prayer, it was hard to tell with Berta. I was in the kitchen making bread. I did not know he was dying until Berta stood near the kitchen threshold and looked at me. I turned off the oven and followed her up the stairs. By the time I got to the spare room he was already elsewhere, yet again. I stood in the doorway for a moment and watched his lifeless form, an amalgamation of flesh and bone, shapeless, without movement, I stared at the slackness of his jaw, the hands loose on the blanket. His eyes glossy and vacant, the white of his eyes now yellow from the slow deterioration of the twenty-two days spent in near isolation. The dog did not move from the foot of the bed. I went in and sat in the chair by the window.

Outside, the first snow of the season was falling. It fell on the mountains and the flat land and the steeples of the house that pinched the sky and the vinyl siding the dog had chewed. It fell on the train station platform where he had stood and I had stood and we had looked at each other across twelve years. It fell on the road he had walked in the early morning of my sixteenth year, the long flat road out of our town, and covered it indifferently, until you could no longer tell what was there before.

I sat in the chair and watched the snow and did not cry. I was waiting to cry. I was very sure I would cry. I was always waiting for the feeling to arrive and take shelter in the cavity of my chest, but waiting only seemed to draw it further away. I thought about the photographs, all of them, me always looking back, the camera always at a distance. I thought about the merry-go-round and the caramel apples and his hands and the kitchen in the early morning cold when I was thirteen and standing at the sink. I thought about the safe full of money and my bicycle with its training wheels and the pastor falling to his knees and the owls watching from their perch and Edwin on a stage with one hand extended and the eggs I had made for him every morning for twenty-two days.

The dog panted, slobbering on my knee. I looked at my father’s face for a long time then. Then I looked at my hands in my lap, still faintly floury, the lines of my knuckles white with it, the blue of my veins protruding. The snow was falling on everything, always averse to choosing where to fall. It fell on the merry-go-round and the gas station and the church and the train tracks and the road and the house and the safe and the photographs in the drawer and my face and his face and the long flat distance between them, and covered everything the same, and kept falling, and the world it made was so white and uniform, that there was nothing in it you could point to and say, here, this is where it happened, this is the place. The snow continued falling and I found that, almost, a relief. I pressed my lips to the veins of his hand, there was neither a rush of feeling nor absence of it. There was just the hand, and the veins, and the flour still in the lines of my knuckles, and the kettle whistling in the other room. I get up. I go on. The pebble is nothing to me. Nothing at all.

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Fiction. I could have edited and compressed more of the language I used to arrive at a feeling but I am a hoarder at heart, I hoard my words and cannot ever depart from them. Special thank you to my goat, my day one, (one of) the best person(s) to watch films with from two different points of the world, the internet has done nothing except this right, they gave me a free test subject for new writing I find myself in a state of unsureness over, ILY, JLG Noga. And as always, thank you, my beautiful subscribers, for reading.