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CHAPTER 1
October 11, 2007
he excavator's head hovers over the remaining half of a large blue house as if it doesn't know what to do, or doesn't want to do it. But the man pulls its reins and the machine complies, sinking its thick teeth into one hundred years of brittle history.
Three women stand on the sidewalk, watching their home of three generations come apart. Wood shingles crack, old windows smash as they hit the sidewalk. Ada, the youngest, stands with her back to the wind as it blows knots of unbrushed hair against her cheeks. Her arms are wrapped around her grandmother, Mattie, who is a foot shorter than her and swathed in a scratchy wool blanket. Ada's mother said it was too cold for the old woman to be outside for so long, but Mattie said she had to see this. Really, Joan thought it was a masochistic desire that shouldn't be indulged. But in the end they all went.
Joan makes a fist and breathes through the hollow to warm her fingers as she watches the excavator punch through what's left of the roof. She remembers her father re-shingling the house fifty years ago, working up on the roof at dusk, hammering down asphalt shingles after he'd finished with the cedar shakes. He stumbled in as she and her mother were sitting down to dinner, holding his bloody hand in a dirty handkerchief. He'd sliced off the tip of his thumb cutting a shingle and wanted help finding it. They searched with flashlights in the damp night, pawing through leaves. Joan thought she found the thumb but it turned out to be a slug. Mattie found the nub eventually, though by then Ian had decided he didn't need it. He said to throw it out. Little Joan couldn't sleep, thinking of the piece of thumb in the trash bin. She stayed awake all night, imagining it lying among eggshells and coffee grounds. In the morning she dug it out and her mother helped her bury it in the backyard with a shake for a headstone. Joan can see her memories cracking apart as the shingles hit the ground. She didn't want to watch this.
But Mattie doesn't mind. She'll miss the old home she came to as a newlywed and watched her daughter and granddaughter grow up in, but the neighbourhood is changing. Sports bars and chain stores with bright plastic signs have transformed it into a parade of shoppers and late night drunks. She doesn't want to know what the young man with the baritone bellow thinks of the ass of the girl ahead of him, her heels clicking fast as she tries to put more sidewalk blocks between them. And the ghost of her love, who has stayed with her at the house for the past year, will come with them to the new place across town.
As the excavator's rusted teeth chew away at the top floor where Ada and her grandmother slept, Ada says goodbye to the creaking stairs and wheezing iron radiator, which she is convinced was poisoning them all as it heated the house through layers of lead paint. She'll miss the high ceilings and backyard with the clawfoot tub full of lavender and goutweed. But the new house will be better. Her grandmother's knees need a rest from those stairs and her mother needs the money.
And Ken — Ken doesn't like pulling apart these old homes. He sits in the cab of the excavator, working the shovel, gingerly sliding its teeth on either side of the wall and drawing it toward himself, feeling a little sick as he hears the wood splinter. The same way he feels when his daughter cracks her neck, giving him nauseous shivers. "Kiah, I swear to God, if you keep doing that you're gonna paralyze yourself." He's heard the chiropractic horror stories. His best birthday present last year was a gift certificate from his kids for a massage. Not at the spa they send their grandma to on her birthday, but the physio clinic where he didn't have to be embarrassed by Enya and plug-in waterfalls. Kiah wanted to send him to the chiropractor, but there's no way that can be good for you, he's always said. He needs to relax, not feel like he's in some mafia movie where he's about to have his neck snapped in one quick twist.
The gold radiator tumbles through the broken floor and down the stairs, and he thinks of his mother's stories. Houses flattened to the ground with not enough warning to move the couch out of the living room, or even to box up family photographs. As frustrating as it might be to watch your house be bulldozed for a Starbucks, it can't compare to being evicted and relocated, the buildings and roads of your entire bright village erased.
"It must make you feel a little better to be tearing down white folks' homes," a crew boss joked to him once.
"Not really," Ken said.
Because as these people get pushed out of the south end to make room for sleek condos with minimalist furniture stores selling ceramic stag heads, and cafes serving six-dollar coffees on the ground floor, Ken and his family will be pushed farther north. The family who lived here has to move somewhere, and the north end real estate market is real hot these days. The north end of the city has "culture" and "soul," young non-Black agents tell their non-Black clients, which is a code meaning that there are enough Black people around to make you feel cool and worldly without ever having to talk to any of them.
Some of Ken's neighbours have already been pushed off the peninsula and begun what is often a northward migration, back to the Bedford Basin from whence they came. Others are making space for themselves in Spryfield, old Scotian families who wouldn't say they're from anywhere but here settling beside young migrant mothers who call to their kids in Kreyol and are answered back in English.
So no, Ken thinks, it doesn't make him feel better. But today his job is to flatten this house. He pulls on the lever and another wall collapses. A window smashes on the sidewalk below and the crew boss shouts to the onlookers to stand farther back. Ken pauses to watch as two women try to lead a reluctant old lady away from the spectacle. Slowly, she concedes and is taken by each elbow.
The woman keeps her neck craned back and her eyes on the house as she's led down the street. Maybe this was her home, Ken thinks. He gives her a wave from the cab of the machine, though he's sure she can't see him. She waves back.
"Yep, say goodbye to the house, Mum," Joan says. "Bye bye, house."
CHAPTER 2
October 12, 2007
Ada's hand probes the corners of her soft bag and finds: book, spoon, penknife ... pen? No, a piece of stale licorice. Many, many receipts, like a little pile of dried leaves. And some actual dried leaves — maple, the reddest ones. But no pen. She hadn't had time to scrawl down her dream this morning as she usually does, head lying still on her pillow, barely able to see her own writing as her stiff sleepy hand moves along the horizon of the page, recording her dream in inked loops and lines. Her mother was up early, still unpacking boxes in their twelve-days-new house, and that meant Ada had to be up unpacking too.
The walk to the café, across from the art school on a cobblestoned cul-de-sac downtown, is longer from the north end of the city than it was from her old house in the south, but only by a few minutes. You can pretty much walk from anywhere to anywhere in Halifax in under half an hour, it's like some kind of geographical law. From the house on Queen Street, Ada would walk along Barrington, through a downtown that big-city people find quaint. A few lonely high-rises reach above old brick and stone buildings like children growing taller than their parents. The ground-floor shops sell vintage dresses, silver sand dollar earrings, donairs and poutine, second-hand books, tobacco, dildos, and lollypops stuck in the headdress of a wooden chief. There aren't as many stores to stare into on the walk from the new house, but past the cop shop the road rises up the hill toward the Citadel, and from there Ada can see the ocean.
Now, sitting at this small table with a mug of milky coffee, the dream is leaving her. She just needs to remember the main part and she trusts her subconscious to fill in the rest, once she finds a pen. The old man at the counter — not so old, sixty maybe — with loose skin and long, grey eyebrows that grow into the hedges of his sideburns, has a pen in his breast pocket. But he doesn't seem to like Ada. When she comes in and orders coffee from him, he looks at her out of eyes that sit in a tilted-back head, skeptically appraising. But she wants that pen.
How did it begin again? she thinks. You were there, help me out. What did you say? No, it wasn't what you said, it was something you did. Oh! Teeth. You were collecting my teeth. Okay. Teeth. I can remember that. And now to get the pen.
Ada weaves between the tables and up to the counter.
"Excuse me, I wonder if you've got a pen I could borrow for a minute?" she asks as she stares at the man's pocket.
"What will you use it for?" he asks, eyeing her from under knit brows.
"To stir my coffee," she replies. And he smiles. Pen in her hand.
Teeth. Teeth. Teeth.
She slides back into her seat and opens her book.
I am sitting in the kitchen and she sits across from me at the table. She made us dinner — these very tall sandwiches made of layers and layers of bread with all different kinds and colours of jam between. I lift mine up, holding it sideways like an accordion, and move to take a bite. I put my mouth on it and taste sweet tartness. I move my lips and tongue around but I can't bite. I see myself from outside my body and discover that I have no teeth. I try the sandwich again. Nope. I try to explain to you that I can't eat your dinner, but I can't talk either. You see the problem and start to look around the kitchen for my missing teeth.
Ada pauses her frantic scrawling as she notices that, again, she is addressing her dream journal to you. Since she met Pan she hasn't been able to speak about her in the third person for long. Even her inner monologue is addressed to Pan. She worries. She'll try again.
She looks on the floor, inside teacups, in the fridge. Aha! She finds a tooth. My tooth. They are like Easter eggs, precious and gleaming coyly from nonsensical locations. On top of a can of apple juice in the fridge. In the bowl of a dirty spoon in the sink. On the ledge of a picture frame. I think she is about to bring them to me so I can put them back in my mouth, but no — she puts them in her own mouth, one by one. Do you need a second row of teeth? Are you a shark?
You again. She gives in.
No. You swallow them, my ivory teeth. Polished and ground down flat like piano keys. Not like yours — ridged still, at thirty-two. How is that possible? Do you eat only soft foods? You do eat a lot of soup, you told me once. But you swallow them. And with each swallow a spot, shiny and hard, appears on your face and spreads to join up with others. They are smooth and cold and they are forming a shell. It covers your cropped dark hair. It spreads down your beautiful neck. And now it has covered your head entirely. You blink at me from your enamelled head and I blink back at you with my eyes and blink with my toothless mouth, opening and closing. I should be angry, I think. You swallowed my teeth. But instead I pull your cold, hard face to mine and kiss you on your smooth forehead.
And that's all. Grateful to her subconscious, Ada folds her soft book shut and looks up. And there's Pan, standing a few steps inside the door to the café, watching Ada with a closed-mouth smile. Ada smiles back and Pan's lips break apart, exposing her ridged teeth.
So strange, Ada thinks. But I'd like the feel of them on my tongue.
Rough little pebbles.
Pan moves toward Ada with her casual gait and sits down like she means it.
"Hi," Ada says, kissing Pan with her blinking eyes.
"Hey, Ada."
Pan gulps Ada's coffee with her elusive lips.
Your lips are dry, Ada's inner monologue runs. They crave my licking. They tell me so, from across the table. Kiss us. Kiss us. Wet us with your tongue. Don't you hear them?
"Sorry, what?" Ada asks, distracted by her own narration.
"I asked how you were," Pan repeats, her tongue soft on the backs of her teeth, the corner of her mouth lifting in an amused half-grin.
Ada tells her about her day, a list of activities she offers as proof that she can do more than sit around and daydream of Pan. Night-dream of Pan. Jerk off thinking of Pan.
They've never kissed. Only in Ada's head, many times. Her imagination is so convincing, she forgets sometimes that it hasn't really happened. It has taken her so many modifications to reach this height of fantasy. In an x-ray, the points at which Pan has embedded herself in Ada's body would glow like silver stars and lines. A connect-the-dots of her obsession.
It's a tendency she's always had — forming crushes on remarkable strangers. Ada still sees some of her old favourites around the city, but they don't send heat coursing through her limbs like they used to. Don't thrill her like Pan does. She still has a fondness for them, though. Keeps them in a cubby in her heart, next to the goth punk she listened to at sixteen.
The blue-haired boy with an upper lip twice the size of his lower used to make her body-drunk when she would pass him on the sidewalk. Once, when she caught his eye leaving a bookstore, a flush bloomed in her cheeks so deep that it didn't recede until two hours later while she sat on a dock in the harbour with her face to the wind.
The girl with the yellow umbrella was another consuming crush, and the person with the thick, jewel-red eyeglass frames. Colour seems to draw her — these three cover the primaries. Especially in an ocean city, where mist coats the streets grey, bright colours have the power to cut through her daydreams.
But Pan was different. The reverse of how someone usually catches her eye. She saw her first nearly a year ago in this, her favourite café, its walls painted golden yellow and decorated with green leaves, red berries, and blue birds that hold up a large chalkboard banner painted on the wall above the counter. Pan, in the corner with her black coffee, black-framed glasses, and ink-smudged newspaper, always wears grey. Nothing but grey. That day, a grey sweater zipped up over a darker grey T-shirt with faded black pants — grey on the thighs, white on the knees. A woven scarf wrapped around her neck, also grey. Ada couldn't see her shoes, but did later when she followed Pan out as she left the café and saw that they matched the cobblestones perfectly.
Pan camouflages herself in this city. But in this bright place her greyness makes her conspicuous. And now not even the grey city can swallow Pan in all her layers of smoke and slate. Ada's eyes turn to her wherever she is. A heliograph flashing on the periphery.
"Do you want a coffee or something?" Ada asks.
"Nah, I'll just drink yours," Pan grins. "How are you healing up?" she asks, hunching her shoulders, her rough-knuckled fingers encircling the ceramic mug.
"Not bad," Ada says. "But they're really tender. I bumped one in the shower yesterday and almost cried."
"You have to be careful with them. They're hard to heal. I ended up taking mine out after a couple of years. You can't say I didn't warn you."
Pan did warn her that nipple piercings were hard to heal. But Ada's running out of things to pierce, and nipples seemed a logical progression from septum, which came after navel, now housing four curved barbells — a jewelled compass in the centre of her body, and that was after her lip. So she had Pan pierce them both. Twice. The first ones three months ago, angled inward with the curve of her body, and these ones, pierced two months later, crossed over the first ones in Xs. And now they're having coffee before she has Pan pierce her nostrils — both. Not all piercings hurt, but her nipples fucking did. Especially the second set. But then, it's a question of hurt. And in this case it was a hurt that Ada wanted, so in that way they felt incredible. Pan's needle puncturing her tender flesh. The grip of her gloved hands, the hot push of steel. Her nimble fingers sliding the delicate bars through the wounds, lubricated by a slight seeping of blood from the holes, creating two small kisses on either side of Ada's heart.
Ada likes when she brushes them by accident and the pain comes gently back to her. It's an echo of what Pan inflicted on her, a fond reminder. She smiles with her secret.
Should I tell you that I went and saw your show at the gallery across town? Ada wonders. Because I did. Of course I did. You must have figured I would. Ada had fallen in love with a print Pan had up in her room in the tattoo studio. "I just fell in love with your print," Ada had said, and was sorry immediately after, face red and eyes shut tight.
"I went to see your show."
It escapes out through her mouth before she can consider it further. "Oh yeah?" Pan grins.
Pan always grins, never smiles. A smile is more open, vulnerable. Pan's grin is a grin because it's a smile backed by confidence. It's sly, though not quite a smirk. It's boyish and way too charming.
"Whadja think?" she asks.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Crocuses Hatch From Snow"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Jaime Burnet.
Excerpted by permission of Nimbus Publishing Limited.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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