Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club Read online

  Also by Megan Gail Coles

  SHORT FICTION

  Eating Habits of the Chronically Lonesome

  DRAMA

  Squawk

  Copyright © 2019 Megan Gail Coles

  Published in Canada in 2019 by House of Anansi Press Inc.

  www.houseofanansi.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  All of the events and characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Coles, Megan, author

  Small game hunting at the local coward gun club / Megan Gail Coles.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-4870-0171-1 (softcover).—ISBN 978-1-4870-0172-8 (EPUB).—ISBN 978-1-4870-0173-5 (Kindle)

  I. Title.

  PS8605.O4479S63 2019 C813'.6 C2018-901839-9 C2018-901840-2

  Book design: Alysia Shewchuk

  Cover art: Rebecca Suzanne Haines

  We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada.

  I wrote this for myself.

  And the beautiful vicious island that makes

  and unmakes us.

  This might hurt a little. Be brave.

  Prep

  Olive waits below the sad mural painted in memory of some long ago drowned boy.

  She can see up and down Duckworth Street from her perch though there’s not much to see this early in the morning. A scattered taxi slogs by carrying fiendish-looking passengers who attempt to discreetly smoke from barely cracked windows. Discretion is a skill they have fallen out with but they don’t know that yet. They still fancy themselves stealth, piling four parka-plied humans into a single toilet stall, scarves dangling beneath the door, telling tails on them all.

  Volume control is a thing of delusion in the confined spaces they inhabit. It will be years before this is fully realized by those who escape the scene or are thrown into adulthood by overdose or pregnancy. These lucky few will feel overwhelmingly, retroactively embarrassed by their one-time rock star fantasies. Olive can hear them bawling about their supposed betrayals as clouds of tobacco smoke and slurry syllables updraft skyward through the slightly parted window.

  But Olive forgives them their make-believe follies.

  They are no better or worse than most of the half well-off, half grown-up humans she has met. They are just flawed and vulnerable to the pitch. Olive is no different. She has chased the white dragon into smoky rooms where grad students complained about unkindly thesis feedback while wearing thousand dollar watches. A holiday-tanned winter wrist, a baggie held aloft, another Volvo fob serving key bumps round the ring. Under such circumstances, Olive is for the most part silent. She can pass for one of them until she releases language into the world.

  Olive often holds her rural tongue for fear of being found out.

  She is not a card-carrying member of the townie majority. Rarely are there other fugitive faces for Olive to hide behind on nights when she wants to get on the go. There was a Mexican painter once. A Russian musician. There was the one Pakistani fellow whose name Olive could never recall. She did not think it was unpronounceable, she just could not pronounce it.

  There are lots of words still beyond her reach.

  Like Olive can think of no words to describe the pain felt where her pants nearly meet her feet. She winces and tucks her chin farther inside her coat. She tries to push her neck back to save from catching skin in the zipper. She sniffs back hard and swallows a slippery lob. Her grandmother would not approve of hoarding mucus in the body but her grandmother would not approve of much of what she does lately. Olive sighs and swells and swallows spit to slide the lob along.

  Ollie my dollie, get a tissue.

  Her grandmother’s voice is always a program running in the back of her mind. But Olive can’t sacrifice a tissue on mere mucus this morning. Her store of napkins is running low and the last time she tried to hock and spit the wind gust blew snot back onto her sleeve. The line of mucus running from her lips to her elbow turned her weak stomach over. A middle-aged woman in a bright blue Canada Goose coat muttered oh for the love of god as she hurried past the translucent boundary. This made Olive feel gross.

  She swallows that gross feeling down again while she waits.

  She can distract herself for a time from the damp soak settling in her heels by watching the craven-faced respectable people meander to their grown-up jobs after a weekend of pretending to be twenty-five. But they are not twenty-five. They are not even thirty-five and feel as such. Most internally promise to stay home with the kids next weekend as they turn their faces to or from the sunshine depending on the quantity of painkillers ingested in the car. This temporary commitment to sobriety is bookended by revolving party systems.

  Some relish vitamin D while others resent it.

  The division will not last long, though, as the sun already has started to duck back inside the nimbostratus. It will storm again today as surely as the nearly forty will go out again in four days’ time. The babysitter will be called. The cat will be let in. They will flee their houses for a little look around.

  Get the stink of house off ya.

  They will reliably cloak this smell of domestication in alcohol and nicotine and self-loathing until Monday. Mondays are for quitting everything. Again. Except when it storms on Monday. Then quitting everything is pushed to Tuesday.

  Today is such a Tuesday.

  The weekend warriors refuse to sell out and so have fully bought in pound for pound.

  Olive is just the same. She too had been sold the notion of party drugs as lazy fun and then fast gobbled them hand over fist. Swallow, snort, smoke; ingestion is an irrelevant matter of personal preference and ease. There is no wall to wall them out. Or in. Drug trends are trending along regardless of national media reports daily updating all on their progress east and upward. Olive has watched the same scenes play out on repeat in dark corners of the late night since arriving in Sin Jawns.

  They’ve gone and stashed the kits everywhere to protect against the siren call. A first line of defence kept behind wine bars. Under the bathroom sink. In purses. And Olive knows she must address the long list of reasons why self-medicare is needed to comfort her.

  Eventually.

  But today, right now, before all else, she must get inside somewhere to prevent worse from happening.

  She covets the dashboard heaters inside those coked-up cabs.

  Olive hears the latch squeal before the hinges squeak. A black arm heaves garbage bags onto the sidewalk one after the other. There are so many. More waste than is normal. Food that went off during the previous day’s storm is now bagged and tossed out for collectors who will not come until it fully clears. Olive worries the birds will have at it.

  Omi will be blamed for the weather’s interference in the city schedule if he doesn’t re-collect it. Olive wills hi
m to remember so he won’t get in trouble. Omi is from Nigeria. Olive thinks he is her age but she can’t be sure. She has been trying to figure out how to ask without seeming ignorant or making him angry. She has never seen him angry but is still afraid ignorant questions might jeopardize their friendship. She didn’t even know they were friends until he said. One day weeks ago while she was waiting for Iris, he approached her on the sidewalk.

  Girl, you okay?

  Olive didn’t know how to answer this honestly so shook her head.

  Omi was staring at her skeptically. She worried there was something on her face. In her teeth. She dug through her pockets hoping he would think her busy searching out some important thing. She muttered quietly to the ground before adding I’m good as a hurried afterthought.

  Excuse me?

  I’m good!

  Olive had barked much too loudly. Omi put up his palms in mock terror.

  You good. Got it.

  Olive then pretended to investigate the fraying fringe on a bag that had been new when it had not been hers. She bashful blushed at the ground.

  Hey, where you from?

  Here.

  Sure, but where’s your family from?

  Around the bay.

  Around what bay?

  What?

  What’s your bay called?

  There’s no bay.

  There’s no bay?

  I mean, there are lots of bays. I mean, it’s more of a peninsula.

  Olive held up her left pinky and left thumb while watching her other digits labour to curl tightly into her palm’s pad. A gesture she learned in adolescence had quickly become reflex. She pinched her left pinky with her right forefinger and thumb before quickly unsnapping the clasp to correct her constant mistake. Olive swung her wrist around to flash knuckles facing out at Omi, who watched her waiting with growing curiosity. Olive recoiled her central digits once more for effect and popped her beloved peninsulas.

  This is Newfoundland.

  She pinched her left thumb and forefinger.

  We’re here.

  She then reached over the interior to pinch her pinky and wiggle it a bit.

  I’m from up here.

  They both stood quietly transfixed by Olive’s wiggling pinky until she stopped wiggling it. She stood there looking at her held little finger wondering what to say next.

  So . . . you all white?

  And Olive had not known how to answer this direct question dredging through the whole of her life like it was just a fact to simply say.

  Cause you don’t look all white.

  And Olive feels small again.

  She hears the older girl whisper first the taunt before sliding her freckled hand down across Olive’s bare arm and then turning to wipe her fingertips along the skin of whoever stood close behind, the whole of the lunch line recoiling at the thought of contact with dirty little Olive, hysterical screeches gaining volume and velocity as they passed this gruesome contact to the furtherest student standing at the back.

  Olive’s germs on you!

  Olive’s germs.

  And the schoolchildren passed her shame through the cafeteria, giggling and howling, yuck, reaching at each other in delight as they rid themselves of her germs. Olive, the tarriest one in line. There were other tarry children, a whole range of shade, a spectrum really, but they were not hated by this girl as Olive was hated. Bullies were just other girls back then. Olive feared them at the bus stop and missed the bus a lot.

  Her grandmother yelling for her to leave earlier or this will keep happening.

  The teacher that day finally grabbed the ringleader by her pale arm and shook her as Olive looked on in tears.

  Mrs. Morris barking, you’re no better than she is, little miss! You’re no different!

  Shaking the one girl Olive wanted to befriend but feared, until both girls were crying in the lunchroom before the whole student body. The smell of seven-layer dinner resting in their throats, gagging them both.

  You say you’re sorry right now, say you’re sorry to Olive!

  But the girl who started the hateful game would not say she was sorry.

  I’m sorry.

  The sound of regret in the man’s voice brought Olive back to her adult-self.

  Perhaps you are not supposed to ask that here.

  No.

  What?

  I’m . . . not all white. Not really. Part Indian.

  And that was the first time Olive had said it aloud to a stranger.

  I didn’t know you had Indians here.

  We do.

  So who are your relations?

  I don’t know.

  And Olive is embarrassed because it’s true. She doesn’t know her relations. Some were accidentally lost, others mispronounced on purpose. Few could read the little paperwork they had to prove themselves before the flames came. Never was there a parish hall built permanent stone enough to protect against fortune’s wood stove and a minister in his cups. St. John’s burns down encore and all applaud the rebuild while Olive’s forgotten place is blamed indefinitely for reckless kindling. The wealthy are permitted accidents, the poor found guilty.

  Olive’s once foreign brethren running from famine and feudal rule. Her native side stopped, stunned and suddenly steady, by the influx of men. The works of which settling for each other and the merchant’s collar.

  Olive is expected to magically untangle a hundred years of snarl for casual conversation.

  Forget your relations. What’s your name? What are you called?

  And the man’s voice was warm and she had always sought out warm places in others.

  Olive.

  My name is NaNomi but my friends call me Omi so you can call me that.

  Olive smiled a little and then a lot at the thought of having a black friend called Omi. It made her feel beyond her circumstance and capable of moving further out of reach.

  Omi finally hops out onto the sidewalk in a T-shirt and jeans. Sneakers. His footwear is insufficient for this dirty work. He is sweating. Great bands of sweat trench his face as if he has been weeping, though Olive knows it is sweat. She has seen him be accosted on a city bus without flinching. She has watched him lug a desk the length of Water Street a few feet at a time in the freezing rain. He is not a tearful man.

  His perspiration will turn chilly in the mere moments he is exposed to the elements. He grabs up the bags and returns them to the porch in quick release. One snags on the brickwork and tears. Its slurpy contents slide out over the facade, and Olive feels bad for him as he hurries to scoop up the offending end and retie it tail to top. There is brownish liquid oozing from the plastic, and Olive knows Omi will have to carry his disgusting package across the whole dining room to reach the back door where the dumpsters are kept. She also knows that he has likely mopped already and wonders if he will mop again or spot clean to remedy the situation. There is a possibility that this will keep her on the curb longer as she is not allowed in while other staff members are staffing. She tucks herself in behind a car so he does not see her. He will insist she come in from the cold. This act of self-determination will anger the man who determines things around here. Besides, Olive does not want Omi to see her like this. She’s a state.

  Omi kicks snow toward the brick face while grumbling in English.

  Olive wonders if he ever grumbles in his own words. She wonders what that would sound like. Olive doesn’t even know her words. No one in her family taught them to her because no one in her family knew them. The act of not knowing was itself a mix of love and fear meant to conceal and
protect from child collection back when they called it an orphanage.

  Hush, Ollie, be a good girl or the booman will take you from Nanny.

  Olive didn’t know what kind of girl she was meant to be then and she certainly doesn’t know now.

  Olive’s never been brown enough for brown girls.

  Or white enough for white girls.

  * * *

  Iris wakes clutching her dead cellphone in an outstretched hand. Her arm has grown heavy and numb. She has to lift and shake it with her other hand to revive circulation.

  It is insensate from the pressure of being her arm.

  She had folded herself into the recovery position on the couch with her full weight upon the one free texting hand. She is wearing a coat and boots, apparently intent on going somewhere. She remembers. She had been upset. Been drinking through the storm. This had all been bad enough before he had come over. He had not been drunk of course.

  He is almost never drunk when she is drunk.

  Like the first time. Iris had been drinking cheap wine and sketching moose at home. It was a Wednesday evening. There had been no romantic lead-up to the encounter on that particular day. In fact, Iris had been weaning herself from her phone. There was a new guy a work who made her laugh and so she got to thinking that things could change if she changed them.

  This night was back when Iris still believed men and women could just be friends.

  She was busy being herself in her apartment. Listening to Destroyer records. Eating handfuls of dates from the open fridge. Sticky fingertips upon her brushes. Slow deliberate strokes. More dates. Another glass of Beaujolais. Fingerprints on vinyl. Antlers are tricky. They refuse to reveal themselves. But Iris was certain they would be hers. She was willing herself to see some pattern in her practice. She would keep after it into the night. This was her whole plan. And then . . .

  I like smoking with you.

  The little box on her phone told her and she smiled, of course. It is a statement meant for smiling. The intention is to curl a lip and maybe a toe or two, and Iris’s lips and toes were still capable of curling then.