you can make out the man you will be speaking to.
He tells you he is listening.
You want it to last.
He repeats that he is listening. He calls you his child.
You can’t find the words you had prepared. So you stand up.
And you want him to remember you.
You’re hot. You lean into the screen, study it, look for the man on the other side.
And you stick out your tongue. You drag it slowly over the holes. You look for a path that will take you closer to him. You leave trails of saliva on the varnished wood. You slowly slide your tongue into each slot, and on the other side, he has fallen silent.
You leave the confessional, a splinter between your teeth.
You feel light. He won’t forget you.
There is no gas left to fuel the cars.
Achilles attaches his to two horses. They will be his motor.
The idea is not his; it is spreading across the country, ironically called the Bennett buggy, after Canadian prime minister Robert Bedford Bennett, who is one of the people running the country into the ground.
Your father comes home late at night in his Bennett buggy.
You sleep between Monique and Claire. Claire talks in her sleep. A foreign language that sounds like Latin. You shove the end of the sheet in her mouth to shut her up.
Claire is five years old. At age eighteen, she will enter the convent, bound to God for the rest of her life.
The sound of horseshoes downstairs: your father, Achilles, is coming home. The crisis has taken his job. Now he has a make-work job, invented by the government to deal with unemployment, something to keep men from weeping or sleeping at the library. To keep them from overdosing on free time.
Achilles comes home more tired than before. He liked being useful, and make-work jobs change every day but are all in vain.
Today, he picked dandelions. They’re a weed; there are a lot of them, everywhere. Enough to keep the men busy for a few weeks.
Achilles must have uprooted five thousand of them. He roamed the city, eyes peeled, looking for yellow flowers. Enough to make a person go mad. Golden streaks everywhere. Achilles has blisters on his hands. He was paid eight cents for his work. He is not unemployed. He earned a living today.
Achilles liked being a teacher.
You love Achilles.
You hear him unhitch the horses from the car; you tear down the stairs and throw yourself at him.
He tells you to go to bed, but you don’t obey right away. You know that you still have two chances. You help him feed the horses.
He tells you again to go to bed.
You bring him a damp towel, which he wipes his face with.
You ask him whether you can go with him tomorrow.
He tells you to go to bed.
You know you have to obey this time.
You go upstairs.
Achilles goes into his bedroom and lies down next to Claudia. He lifts her nightgown and touches her thighs. He turns his wife over and seeks brutal refuge in her. Where he is a man. Where he is proud.
Claudia doesn’t want to but doesn’t say so.
Claudia is thirty-three years old and has five children.
Claudia is a distant cousin of Émile Nelligan.
Claudia has black eyes that arch downward. Waning moons.
Claudia has long fingers that have played Chopin.
Claudia has short nails with dirt under them from the potatoes she peels.
Claudia doesn’t sleep anymore.
Claudia knows that she has to have six more children to get the two hundred acres of dirt the government has promised.
Claudia thinks that she already has dirt under her fingernails and doesn’t want any more.
Claudia doesn’t talk anymore.
Claudia is being smothered by Nocturnes.
Claudia doesn’t know where to love her children because there is no room left.
Claudia is filled with emptiness.
Claudia is a desert.
Claudia wakes the oldest ones.
Asks them to help set up a pallet in the hallway.
Claudia will sleep next to the piano now.
Away from Achilles’s penis.
You’ve been in line for two hours. The ration card in your clammy hand. You close your fist over it so as not to drop it, or else everyone will go hungry, because of you. You’ve pictured the scene at least twenty times: the card falling, the wind kicking up and carrying it off. You running after it. The card flying off to the river and throwing itself into it. You hesitating and diving in. The river swallowing you up. You floating with the dead in the cemetery.
You tighten your grip.
Take a few steps forward.
Seven ounces of sugar, seven ounces of butter, one and one-third ounces of tea, five and one-third ounces of coffee. The weekly food ration.
The lady in front of you smells like burnt caramel. Her skirt brushes your face and you like it. You want to sleep under it. Your little head pressed against her fat thighs. Her damp, sweet skin. You would slip your tattered card into her sock for safekeeping. And you would rest a while in the shade of her bottom.
The line moves forward a few steps, and you collide with her feet, apologizing.
As you put the food away, the radio is broadcasting the commentary on the French-Canadian Hilda Strike’s one hundred-metre dash at the Olympic Games in Los Angeles.
At the whistle, Hilda is off like an arrow, a projectile; she splits the air, shaking off her adversaries, leaving them in her wake. In just two strides, she is already one metre ahead of her competitors.
You freeze, a bag of sugar in your hands, suspended, caught up in Hilda’s flight.
The Meteor from Montreal. The Canadian Comet.
‘Suzanne?’
Your mother, annoyed that you’re just standing there.
Hilda shatters the world record, she pulverizes her adversaries, she gulps in air as the astonished crowd looks on. ‘Hilda! Hilda! Hilda!’
