Krista > Books: 2023‎ (100)

“Tad, did my mother ever talk to you about Rouge?” He looks at me. Just for a second something flashes darkly in his eyes. Like a cloud passing qui

“Tad, did my mother ever talk to you about Rouge?” He looks at me. Just for a second something flashes darkly in his eyes. Like a cloud passing quickly over the sun. It’s there and then it’s gone. And then: “Rouge,” he repeats like a question. Too much of a question. He squinches up his face like he’s confused. “No? Never heard of that. Rouge, huh? Is that French or something?”

I have to pack this place up. Hire someone with money I don’t have, to fix all the broken shit. Sell it. Then get the hell out of here and go back to work. All in a few days. It’s impossible. It may as well be a tower full of straw that I’m supposed to spin into gold. I may as well be waiting for a goblin to show up with his dark promise to help me. In the wall of cracked mirrors, I see that my skin is in desperate need of mushroom mist.

Let’s skip cleansing and go right to acid, my favorite. Mother’s favorite too. Acid is like cleansing but better, right, Mother? It goes deep into the ick you can’t see with your human eye, and it just melts that away like a witch. Shall we do the one that smells like it’ll numb your face or the one that smells like burning? You pick, Mother. Mother’s smile says surprise me.

Nothing saves us in the end, Tom said, stroking my hair. Not gods or shadow gods. Not heaven or the endless deep. Not blood or cream red as blood. Rouge, as they say. And he smiled his smile that lit me up.

“Tad, did my mother ever talk to you about Rouge?” He looks at me. Just for a second something flashes darkly in his eyes. Like a cloud passing quickly over the sun. It’s there and then it’s gone. And then: “Rouge,” he repeats like a question. Too much of a question. He squinches up his face like he’s confused. “No? Never heard of that. Rouge, huh? Is that French or something?”

I have to pack this place up. Hire someone with money I don’t have, to fix all the broken shit. Sell it. Then get the hell out of here and go back to work. All in a few days. It’s impossible. It may as well be a tower full of straw that I’m supposed to spin into gold. I may as well be waiting for a goblin to show up with his dark promise to help me. In the wall of cracked mirrors, I see that my skin is in desperate need of mushroom mist.

Let’s skip cleansing and go right to acid, my favorite. Mother’s favorite too. Acid is like cleansing but better, right, Mother? It goes deep into the ick you can’t see with your human eye, and it just melts that away like a witch. Shall we do the one that smells like it’ll numb your face or the one that smells like burning? You pick, Mother. Mother’s smile says surprise me.

Nothing saves us in the end, Tom said, stroking my hair. Not gods or shadow gods. Not heaven or the endless deep. Not blood or cream red as blood. Rouge, as they say. And he smiled his smile that lit me up.

“Tad, did my mother ever talk to you about Rouge?” He looks at me. Just for a second something flashes darkly in his eyes. Like a cloud passing quickly over the sun. It’s there and then it’s gone. And then: “Rouge,” he repeats like a question. Too much of a question. He squinches up his face like he’s confused. “No? Never heard of that. Rouge, huh? Is that French or something?”

I have to pack this place up. Hire someone with money I don’t have, to fix all the broken shit. Sell it. Then get the hell out of here and go back to work. All in a few days. It’s impossible. It may as well be a tower full of straw that I’m supposed to spin into gold. I may as well be waiting for a goblin to show up with his dark promise to help me. In the wall of cracked mirrors, I see that my skin is in desperate need of mushroom mist.

Let’s skip cleansing and go right to acid, my favorite. Mother’s favorite too. Acid is like cleansing but better, right, Mother? It goes deep into the ick you can’t see with your human eye, and it just melts that away like a witch. Shall we do the one that smells like it’ll numb your face or the one that smells like burning? You pick, Mother. Mother’s smile says surprise me.

Nothing saves us in the end, Tom said, stroking my hair. Not gods or shadow gods. Not heaven or the endless deep. Not blood or cream red as blood. Rouge, as they say. And he smiled his smile that lit me up.

Challenge to Civilization: Indigenous Wisdom and the Future is the third book in my series on Indigenous spirituality. The Knowledge Seeker addressed

Challenge to Civilization: Indigenous Wisdom and the Future is the third book in my series on Indigenous spirituality. The Knowledge Seeker addressed the nature and viability of Indigenous beliefs, and Loss of Indigenous Eden examined how Indigenous sacred knowledge became oppressed, suppressed, and discounted. This book will demonstrate that Indigenous spirituality is not only still relevant but will be critical to human survival in terms of restoring balance with both natural and supernatural worlds.

Civilization has waged a relentless and often violent campaign to colonize Indigenous Peoples emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually. Part of this campaign has been to portray Indigenous societies as proto-civilizations that would have eventually trodden the path of human self-centredness, greed, and destructiveness. As an alternative, I create the word “ecolization” — a state in which humans recognize that they are not the central purpose of creation, remain grateful for the opportunity to experience physical life, and continue to obey the Creator’s “original instructions”.

In mainstream education we are taught that archeologists, geneticists, and other scientists are convinced that life originated from some sort of biological soup. It is contended that we, as humans, are simply advanced apes — a sort of evolutionary accident. But such an account never existed among Indigenous Peoples. The theory of evolution has been around for less than 200 years, compared to Indigenous stories, such as humanity’s coming from the stars, that have existed for tens of thousands of years. So why are Indigenous stories not given more credence, or at least equal exposure to scientific accounts?

The wetiko (greed-driven) cultures that are now in control of world affairs pretend to solve problems through a combination of rationalism, economic development, and military threat. Unfortunately, they lack spiritual authority and will never possess it until they reconcile with Indigenous Peoples and their ancient wisdom. Only a moral revolution can bring humanity back to its original path. What if we could redirect our intellectual, economic, and technological energies into healing Earth? This would lead us closer to a future that recognizes, celebrates, and honours the higher nature of our species.

I had been alone for weeks
when we met there,
below Dante. The three of
us lounged in a pensione,
I was writing a book about
a dying man.
Twenty years

I had been alone for weeks
when we met there,
below Dante. The three of
us lounged in a pensione,
I was writing a book about
a dying man.
Twenty years later, you were in a bed,
on Brunswick Avenue. And
I kissed your feet,
Connie, one of my shy
farewells.

It was your year of last
things,
but you were luminous,
within those final fires.

excerpted from “Below Dante”

When that English novelist
returned to poetry
he learned again the
breaking line’s breath-
like leap
into the missed life

till there was no longer a
story, only stillness
or falling.
He’d altered so many
truths as prose
it was like herding cattle.

excerpted from “1912”

Let us speak about our
enormous flaws as told
to us
by others — accountants,
wives before leaving —
about how we deceived
ourselves, even our dogs
by ignoring their
concerned pre-walk,
tear-stained howls,
though they rested often
on our chests
making sounds like old
ships.

For years I wrote during
the day
above a veterinarian

The howls, the heavy
breathing, the sighs
from that faraway
untranslated world

How many times, over the years, would my father remind me — quoting Martin Heidegger — that “Language is the house of being”? It would be decades b

How many times, over the years, would my father remind me — quoting Martin Heidegger — that “Language is the house of being”? It would be decades before I’d read those words myself in a book by the German philosopher — who was also a member of the Nazi Party — and feel again that sharp pang of recognition: the difficult knowledge that some of the most enduring ideas had been written by complicated figures, like Thomas Jefferson, who believed in racial hierarchies, inherent superiority and inferiority. More and more I would come to understand that it was not simply ignorance that I’d need to push back against, but also the stores of received knowledge — philosophy, history, science — that I would encounter in the most learned places.

My need to make meaning from the geography of my past is not unlike the ancients looking to the sky at the assortment of stars and drawing connections between them: the constellations they named inscribing a network of stories that gave order and meaning to their lives. That’s one of the reasons I write. I’ve needed to create the narrative of my life — its abiding metaphors — so that my story would not be determined for me.

Singing to me as we passed the state flag of Mississippi was a way to counteract the symbolic, psychic violence of it. Through the triumphant, stirring rhythms of the song, my mother was showing me how to signify, how to use received forms to challenge the dominant cultural narrative of our native geography, and to transcend it by imagining a reality in which justice was possible. Her voice was a counterweight.

The act of writing is a way to create another world in language, a dwelling place for the psyche wherein the chaos of the external world is transformed, shaped into a made thing, and ordered. It is an act of reclamation. And resistance: the soul sings for justice and the song is poetry.

The Utahraptor stood tall — twelve feet tall — before her, clothed only in his feathers and a jaunty Santa hat. His massive hocks rested half-on th

The Utahraptor stood tall — twelve feet tall — before her, clothed only in his feathers and a jaunty Santa hat. His massive hocks rested half-on the lawn, crushing the gentle brush of snow that had fallen earlier that morning, and in one of his little hands he carried a large tin of Quality Street chocolates.

In her senior year they’d met Rob, a PhD student from Australia, who was studying the implications of DNA deterioration on the culture of dinosaur populations in Tasmania. Holly had been captivated by his interest in dinos; he was the first person she’d met in the wider world who took dino culture seriously, seeing it as a genuine foundational aspect of dino society rather than a veneer imposed on them by human society, seeing dinos as fully conscious, fully sentient beings who deserved equality and consideration.

The Utahraptor brought his muzzle to Holly’s mouth and nuzzled. The little feathers on his cheeks tickled her as he rolled his lizard-lips against hers, careful not to slice her open with his sharp predator teeth. It was the strangest and most alluring kiss Holly had ever received.

“Is this okay?” Rocky whispered to her, a glorious fount of meat-breath that bathed her face in a delicate mist of saliva.

“Yes,” whispered Holly. “Yes, it’s wonderful.”

“The Church is a human institution. We built it to honour God — but humans built it, and humans are fallible. The bond between a parent and child, though…that is God’s own work. And loving you, whatever choices you make, is loving God.”

The purpose of our life is sometimes known to us, and sometimes it isn’t. We may have changed someone’s time here by setting them on a different pa

The purpose of our life is sometimes known to us, and sometimes it isn’t. We may have changed someone’s time here by setting them on a different path. Or we may have made them feel just a little bit better with our smile. We may not know what our purpose is, but knowing it is less important than living it. I don’t know if mine has a name, but I believe I have found it in my moments. I hope my stories help you share yours.

What if we were to view death as part of the certain, albeit unknown, lived experience? What if we spent our lives not running with our feet pounding on the pavement but instead we floated through it like a river, secure in knowing that death is our final harbour?

One thing I have learned so far from parents, children, friends, and patients is this: the big moments are important, but so much more happens during the spaces in between. I speak of those times that aren’t planned in our calendars: strolling in meadows; falling in love; finding hope in times of adversity; watching the sun as it sets in a clear evening sky; accepting an ending; growing old; conquering a fear; giving birth; smiling at a stranger; failing at something; watching a flock of birds take flight; making mistakes; feeling an animal's care; meeting new people while away; seeing an ocean wave approach and recede and knowing it’s been doing this forever. These moments are the stories that make our lives, and the ones that truly matter in the end.

The professor’s study was like a painting. It had a sofa and a table that ran along the back, two lamps and jars of pens. The desk had an antique g

The professor’s study was like a painting. It had a sofa and a table that ran along the back, two lamps and jars of pens. The desk had an antique globe on it and a lot of paper folders. It faced glass doors that led onto a balcony overlooking the garden at the back, towards the shops on Caledonian Road. The garden was full of flowers and his wife was down there, watering the plants. On a bookcase to the side of the desk was a typewriter and Milo saw various piles of books; on top of one of them was a watch and a passport.

As he sifted through the ties, he knew the truth. Campbell would continue persuading himself that his book was a ripe and playful intellectual riposte to the times they were living through, but in fact he’d just needed the money. He lived with his duplicity as if it was an energy. He failed to see the danger in any of it. He had identified a daft subject with Why Men Weep in Their Cars, a daft subject he had immediately commodified to his own advantage, hoping it would be the huge bestseller that might relieve him.

“Mum used to say it was the genuine task in anybody’s life, to find your country.”
“I can see her pencil markings in the book,” Gosia said.
“It’s the thing she always talked about. She dreamed of it, her Highlands again, after her own long journey. But I never knew, really, if she meant home — like Ethiopia — or there,” he said, pointing to the book.
“Maybe she meant both, the old place and the new place,” Gosia said. “She dreamed of a road that carried the old road with it, right back to the start.” Her face was lit up when she said that, and Milo nodded.
“Like Caledonian Road,” he said.

He’d always felt shielded by irony and art’s mysteries, but sitting in his cosy hut, it again occurred to Campbell that he was not above it all. Maybe that’s the way a crisis gathers force and dimension in a person’s life, when anxiety metastasises from one damaged area to another.

My name is James. I wish I could tell my story with a sense of history as much as industry. I was sold when I was born and then sold again. My moth

My name is James. I wish I could tell my story with a sense of history as much as industry. I was sold when I was born and then sold again. My mother’s mother was from someplace on the continent of Africa, I have been told or perhaps simply assumed. I cannot claim to any knowledge of that world or those people, whether my people were kings or beggars…I can tell you that I am a man who is cognizant of his world, a man who has a family, who loves a family, who has been torn from his family, a man who can read and write, a man who will not let his story be self-related, but self-written.

Night fell like a different animal, its own season. My voice, even in my head, had found its root in my diaphragm, had become sonorous and round. My pencil had more firmly grasped the pages of my newly dried notebook. I saw more clearly, farther, further. My name became my own.

“To fight in a war,” he said. “Can you imagine?”
“Would that mean facing death every day and doing what other people tell you to do?”
“I reckon.”
“Yes, Huck, I can imagine.”

My name is James. I’m going to get my family. You can come with me or you can stay here. You can come and try freedom or you can stay here. You can die with me trying to find freedom or you can stay here and be dead anyway. My name is James.

What the records tell us is this: human desire is a powerful thing. It is also ephemeral, lost in the moment it is felt, though its traces remain i

What the records tell us is this: human desire is a powerful thing. It is also ephemeral, lost in the moment it is felt, though its traces remain in the world long after. From a swelled root to a crinkled leaf: in the plants we eat, there are remnants of our search for the medicinal and the palatable, and in their genetic makeup, a record of our movements between places.

I am fascinated by the way words can be bound tight to past places, by the way a simple question can unfold an entire scene, long thought forgotten. The way a fruit — even just its mention — can carry more than its weight in flesh.

Simply through repetition — in storybooks and novels deemed classics, curricula — British landscapes come to signify romance, an ideal in nature. I pay no attention to flora outside my window — in a flat land of canola and corn, where forests are built of sugar maple and pines. I read so little of these plants, and in truth, they hold little interest for me. It will take me years before I realise that I’ve built my notions of beauty from the stories of a distant land.

I’m absolutely certain that I’m now the most boring and ordinary that I’ve ever been. I’m very relaxed and surprisingly well mannered. I go to bed

I’m absolutely certain that I’m now the most boring and ordinary that I’ve ever been. I’m very relaxed and surprisingly well mannered. I go to bed early, I avoid red meat and gluten, I get excited about trips to Costco. My slide to all this mundanity started in January 2019, when I tried to have a one-night stand with my high school boyfriend and accidentally married him instead.

After my daughter, Violet, was born and her arrival didn’t miraculously transform a grown man, I joked that we’d wanted a “save the relationship” baby, but we’d ended up with a regular one instead. No one in my family or friendship group had ever been a massive fan of TB, but I stand by his good qualities now like I did then. He’s not a terrible person, just a bit of a dreamer, and we were wrong for each other. My daughter, I believe, just really wanted to be born. Souls can do that, you know. They — from, I dunno, space or wherever — can match you up with a random person, drag you from Canada to the UK, strike you down with lupus, and keep you in an unsuitable relationship just so that they can exist on Earth. It’s all part of their journey, and I would never resent Violet for what she had to do to get here. If anything, I respect the hustle.

The days are long, but the years are short, and it’s on our minds that every minute we spend caring for our family is an investment in the beautiful future we are hopeful for, when all the kids are old enough to be our friends. Having a family with my high school boyfriend, just as my hormonal teenage brain predicted, is the type of basic shit that I’ve come to live for.

“I want to read about the trouble a person might have with making things. About what might stop a person from making things, making art, I mean. Li

“I want to read about the trouble a person might have with making things. About what might stop a person from making things, making art, I mean. Like money,” Nicola added, “or time.”
Doubt.

Reading was easy. All she had to do was sit very still and the world would shift; inviting her in as a citizen, liking a tweet because it was true enough she could have written it. Watching, Nicola soon learnt, was also a form of taking part. A form that, sitting at her quiet desk in the Feminist Assembly, she felt impossible to get wrong.

The knuckle inside Susan, swelling with what she had failed to understand, turned purple with pride in her throat. The colour grew elbows, firmly in place, unable to interrupt. She had driven for eighteen years in the rain and she’d be damned if she unravelled now. And besides, she thought, it would be beyond absurd to alert a stranger to the black pool of solvents, dyes and fatty acids still bleeding out from under her chair and onto her feet, especially one in the middle of a monologue. She pulled a fitted sheet over her own stupidity and smoothed it out, waiting patiently for her accident to dry and for Marcella to finish.

Face taut, she begins to arrange the shards. Working urgently with chapped hands she slathers ceramic mortar onto their new joins, following the contours of their freshly broken edges with intuitive speed. This way, the fragments shape themselves. Up, up. She chews her lip in concentration. Spots of blood rise from under the skin to meet the air that flaked them. She stands back to inspect her work. What does it want? Legs. Filling her nails with dirt she quickly folds the form back in on itself, hollowing it out before it sets, and gives the next instruction. Nerves. She hurries through a box of discarded farming tools and bits of machinery, collected on her evening walks through the fields. Without gloves she grabs at a spoke to free it from its wheel, ripping one and then another like screeching hairs, her palms now streaked in scars of rust. Strange fronds. She works them into the form like whiskers. Weirdly delicate. Freshly desperate. Not even pots anymore but innervated beings.

A rather grinding autobiography, isn’t it? Same old, same old, but it can’t be helped. Life, when it is happening, doesn’t care to tell you which part is telling and what it tells. That is the frustration. I suppose all this aimless rambling is caught up in feelings of pointlessness and futility and the ever-increasing sense of ageing into an absence where every addition feels like a load, wiping tables, wedging clay.

Maybe we haven’t spoken up for the others partly because of the unconscious, innate quality of our ties with them. Possibly we need the telescopic

Maybe we haven’t spoken up for the others partly because of the unconscious, innate quality of our ties with them. Possibly we need the telescopic view — the distance of forgetting and the jolt of recognition as a remembrance surfaces — to know what we adore. Maybe we can only look back in longing, over time or space, when the object of our care is far away. And our old home is gone.

My presence in both of these subcultures is liminal — I float around on the margins. Neither fish nor fowl. Not really an activist, due to my aversion to slogans and crowds and open conflict. But also not a constant participant in the establishments of publishing or writing. Since the social and economic hub of publishing is New York, where I’ve chosen not to live. And since most literary writers also work as professors at universities, which I’ve chosen not to do.

If regret is the ghost of the past, for me, extinction is the ghost of the future. Now my worry is less about leaving than of what will be left. I hate the feeling. And yet that turning outward of fear may be the only thing of true value that I’ve ever learned.

Advice to anybody with the plan of naming your kid Junior: going through life as mini-you will be as thrilling as finding dried-up jizz on the carp

Advice to anybody with the plan of naming your kid Junior: going through life as mini-you will be as thrilling as finding dried-up jizz on the carpet. But having a famous Ghost Dad puts a different light on it, and I can’t say I hated being noticed in that way. Around the same time Maggot started his shoplifting experiments, I was starting to get known as Demon Copperhead. You can’t deny, it’s got a power to it.

What’s an oxy, I’d asked. That November it was still a shiny new thing. OxyContin, God’s gift for the laid-off deep-hole man with his back and neck bones grinding like bags of gravel. For the bent-over lady pulling double shifts at Dollar General with her shot knees and ADHD grandkids to raise by herself. For every football player with some of this or that torn up, and the whole world riding on his getting back in the game. This was our deliverance. The tree was shaken and yes, we did eat of the apple.

What the companies did, he told us, was put the shutthole on any choice other than going into the mines. Not just here, also in Buchanan, Tazewell, all of eastern Kentucky, these counties got bought up whole: land, hospitals, courthouses, schools, company owned. Nobody needed to get all that educated for being a miner, so they let the schools go to rot. And they made sure no mills or factories got in the door. Coal only. To this day, you have to cross a lot of ground to find other work. Not an accident, Mr. Armstrong said, and for once, we believed him, because down in the dark mess of our little skull closets some puzzle pieces were clicking together and our world made some terrible kind of sense. The dads at home drinking beer in their underwear, the moms at the grocery with their SNAP coupons. The army recruiters in shiny gold buttons come to harvest their jackpot of hopeless futures. Goddamn.

Live long enough, and all the things you ever loved can turn around to scorch you blind. The wonder is that you could start life with nothing, end with nothing, and lose so much in between.

In the wake of the high-profile trial came even more quixotic, conspiratorial, and occasionally ridiculous interpretations of the theft. When reali

In the wake of the high-profile trial came even more quixotic, conspiratorial, and occasionally ridiculous interpretations of the theft. When reality proves either insufficiently romantic, or appears to cloud over some darker truth, the public, and particularly overenthusiastic journalists, tend to add spice to the pot.

It would have been all but impossible to “shop” the Mona Lisa and find a buyer. It was simply too famous. That left a number of possibilities that various newspapers put forward: first, theft by a lunatic, who had no particular motivation; second, theft on commission by a criminal collector; third, theft as practical joke, perhaps by a journalist looking for a scoop; fourth, theft by a political group hoping to blackmail the French government; and the most bizarre of all, fifth, theft to sell forgeries to unsuspecting criminal art collectors. What seemed to occur to no one was the real motivation: an ideologically driven theft to repatriate the painting to Italy.

So, there is only one Mona Lisa by Leonardo. It is on display at the Louvre. The truth behind it is plenty intriguing, including real, demonstrable secrets hidden beneath its surface — there’s no need to buy into the ooga-booga conspiracy theories.

Once upon a time, humans lived with much less interpersonal violence, without harsh patriarchal domination of women, and without systemic social in

Once upon a time, humans lived with much less interpersonal violence, without harsh patriarchal domination of women, and without systemic social inequities in general. Life wasn’t easy, but social exploitation and inequity figured much less than in later, civilized societies. That is the “Eden” of this book’s title. Our penchant for regular, organized interpersonal violence, the real worm in this apple, started after Eden, when we settled down, and our populations grew much larger.

What spark of genius prompted the world’s first civilizations? Seemingly, none. Little about them suggests a higher form of human life. Essentially, there occurred a confluence and concentration of earlier innovations. Only the aggregate itself was strictly new. Pottery and basketry, woven and dyed clothing, horses and carts, oxen and plows, beer and bread, oil and wine, kingship and state religion — these came together with synergy in urban life. Urban environments exacerbated social inequality but also unleashed cultural dynamism.

An enormous part of world history is the raw mistreatment of half of humanity by the other half. Obviously, making common cause with the whole world is going to be hard, but we have to try. What if we teach that all our fates are absolutely intertwined, that no Earthling is an outsider on this blue marble floating in the limitless void, that we do share a common history, and a common destiny, too?

I only knew that I was drowning. By the time I realized what was happening to me, I was already fully submerged in treacherous ocean water, riding

I only knew that I was drowning. By the time I realized what was happening to me, I was already fully submerged in treacherous ocean water, riding the current. And no matter how hard I kicked back at the rolling tide, I seemed no closer to its surface. I was tossed and battered and crushed by every folding wave, my body a knot, tangled, in every direction. I opened my mouth to scream, an involuntary compulsion brought on by fear, but water forced the words back down my throat. It was cold and dark and the only end in sight was my own.

This is madness. Pure madness, I thought. Then unconsciously gripped one of the skulls at its eye sockets as one would do with, say, a bowling ball, and as soon as my fingers slid inside, a barrage of bright images flickered in my thoughts. Telepathic messages straight from the hollowness of the skull. The quick flashes of light startled me, causing my hand to retract and the light to instantly fade. Was this dead relic communicating with me? Nonsense, I thought. But despite thinking it to be nonsense, I once again pushed my fingers as far back into the sockets as they’d go. The flashes of light returned, but that time I was able to make out clear images inside my head, as if they were flickering onto the wall of my closed eyelids. They were displays of memories, or perhaps dreams, I hardly knew the difference. And each skull had its own story to tell.

We’ve never lived on earth. I point this out to him as the bus veers up the street. In the world we’re creating together, no animals exist, no seasons

We’ve never lived on earth. I point this out to him as the bus veers up the street. In the world we’re creating together, no animals exist, no seasons either. We live eight storeys up and never touch soil. We follow highways not rivers. We name our heat waves after our grandmothers. We pretend our pain is weather. We dream of houses we’ll never own. Of second homes, seventy minutes out of the city. Of well-lit rooms and comfortable chairs, of gardens, but never children. ~We Have Never Lived on Earth

Lukas said that he imagined that the moon would be a lot like Antarctica, a place he planned to travel to. It would be remote and cold, but life was certainly possible with the right equipment. If I lived there, on the moon, he meant, he promised to visit. Only if I invite you, I said. ~How to be Silent in German

Kent and his friends Jake and Roy joined us and we continued south together, like the monarchs, finding security in numbers. We stopped at the 7-Eleven to buy Fuzzy Peaches and Twizzlers, which allowed me to get a better look at Kent. He was tall and thin in the effortless way of adolescent boys and supermodels. Though — Lucia often reminded me — supermodels live on diets of Coke Zero and iceberg lettuce to maintain their birdbath collarbones; teenage boys do not. His thick hair slid over his eyes making my aorta cancel all blood circulation to my head.

What have you lost?

People mostly, I tell him. Not just my parents, who are both alive, on separate continents; or Lukas, who is alive but no longer writes; not just friends, who, at one point, occupied large quadrants of my attention but now don’t seem to matter anymore. Like a film projected on water, they waver and disappear. It’s not just lovers, either, with their seed bank of memories, or the woman, sleeping in her toy tent on some lifeguard-less beach, or in her houseboat, alone, or the toddler at the train station in Montreal, or the injured octopus…

The currach’s skeleton of sally and hazel rods is in the middle of the workshop floor and it really does look alive, and the centre laths makes it

The currach’s skeleton of sally and hazel rods is in the middle of the workshop floor and it really does look alive, and the centre laths makes it look like a boat now, I will admit this, and I admit to feelings of excitement just looking at it, maybe a mixture of nerves and excitement, which are perhaps the same thing, and the vast expanse, all the huge space its frame is taking up,

it’s greater than all of us.

The cathedral bell rang out fast.
Bell | bang | bell | bang
Half past the hour.
It knocked a start out of Jamie who was stood in line behind other boys in blazers and school bags clasped to them. A few leaves whipped up in the rusty gulley at the entrance and a bird perched on the head of a marble statue. A full-sized laminated picture of Jesus was nailed to the main door, his heart plucked out of his chest and rainbow shards of light shooting from him. This was new and it threw Jamie. He memorised it for tomorrow. Eoin warned him that there could be new things. He said not to panic if this happens. But Jamie preferred when Eoin said nothing. Saying not to panic was like telling him not to think of an elephant in a tutu.

Stood there, Tess thought about Tadhg walking out to the Forge, alone, about Jamie and his machine, about how fulfilled she was being among them and how naively Jamie was hoping, the bright hope he had, that the energy, wherever it would manifest from, would be enough to connect everyone, the living and the dead. But there was nothing for the half-living, Tess thought —

Nothing at all for the dead walking among them.

In many ways, the Aeneid tells a tale of change and transformation, propelled by the inscrutable forces of fate towards a preordained telos (end) — th

In many ways, the Aeneid tells a tale of change and transformation, propelled by the inscrutable forces of fate towards a preordained telos (end) — the foundation of Rome. This is a world in which opposing forces ultimately cancel each other out or supplement each other to constitute a newly unified whole. The Trojan horse is central to this endeavour. It represents both Greek ingenuity and Greek deceit, the end of the story of one city and the beginning of another, and human, divine, and animal identities. Above all, however, Virgil includes it as part of a narrative in which Sinon’s false story matches the concealed human contents of the horse to form a compelling strategy by which the Greeks trick their way into the city. And yet, unlike his Greek counterparts, Aeneas, the hero of Virgil’s Aeneid, cannot boast about having been one of the fighters hidden in the horse. His humanity emerges when he flees the horse’s deadly human cargo — and turns a story of destruction into a story of a new beginning.

Humans, in their interactions with non-human creatures, continue to grapple with the ambiguity at the heart of the human condition: we are indeed animals, but animals that like to think of ourselves as different. The resulting paradoxes haunt us up to this day. They are fundamental to the human/ animal story as the medium perhaps best suited to explore the shifting ground of our humanity: between the wish to be different from all other creatures inhabiting this planet — and the ultimate realization that we are not.

Greek and Roman literature holds plenty of examples in which animals are used to act as a mouthpiece and channels of communication for the oppressed. The ‘father’ of the fable, Aesop, was himself a slave and some of the tales attributed to him (and other ancient authors) used this genre as a form of social critique. In other words, the oppression of certain animals serves as a means to address the oppression of certain humans. In this way, the story anticipates a more recent acknowledgement: that the oppression of women, people of colour, and animals shares the same roots by being grounded in the same conception of the human.