Waving Not Drowning

She's been away longer than she was here. So strange. Home. How that changes. At some point two years turned into twenty and the old neighbourhood is now unrecognizable. Everything's smaller, less foreboding. Even Mr. Robichaud's hand hammered lawn ornaments seem tiny. Spent, worn, rusted out. Marnie's old house feels minuscule, a bungalow on a postage stamp lot facing an overgrown, decommissioned public park. Barbed wire fence and tagged clapboard demarcate what was once their secret hideaway. Where Do Not Enter meant Come On In. Flashlights and stolen magazines, hooch water concoctions and bottle upon bottle of dry roasted barbecue peanuts. So many memories here. Whatever clarity she had is obscured by nostalgia. When something begins it also starts to end. She read that the other day and can't shake it loose. Why bother starting anything if there's no hope, no possibility of infinite happiness? She longs for the old days of pure potential wh...

Bumper to bumper, Shawn's inching along, moving at a snail's pace. It'd be quicker to walk at this rate. Some crazy motorcyclist flies by weaving in and out of traffic, along the emergency shoulder, across 4 lanes of traffic. He's the guy that's gonna hold us all up later as the emergency services peel him off the back of some trailer or scrape him off the asphalt, all blenderized up with his fibreglass crotch rocket and ballistic nylon body armour. Why did he take the car? Shawn's beyond frustrated, he's moved into aggressive affirmations: Please someone hit me in the face the next time I decide to drive through the city at rush hour on a whim to pick up tickets. Please please please, with a blunt  object, right to my temple. Hard. The cars inch forward, red lights fading then slamming back on, re illuminating the creeping dusk like angry fireflies. His favourite time of day, quickly being lost to gridlock. The magic hour. At least the humidity broke. Windo...

It's late. Far too late for her to be up. Five hours, maybe? Not enough sleep but at some point the red wine and baba ganouj took over from the desire to crawl into bed. She survived it, though. Eight months of dread, knowing that this day would inevitably come and she'd be inundated with all kinds of reminders that he was really gone. A day for him and he was no longer here to celebrate or be celebrated. Her first instinct this morning was to call him at home but then she remembered. Every day, it's a re learning, a remembrance of what is no longer here. The new normal. Still a daughter yet now an orphan. Jacquie tried to console herself with the fact that at least she didn't have to suffer the annual ritual of yet another family style restaurant rotisserie chicken dinner with dear old Da to celebrate Father's Day but right now at this very second she would give anything to be sitting across from him in a naughehyde booth complaining about how the fries used to be ...