Toronto

She would always be alone. Like her parents. From childhood’s hour, she felt, she dreamt, that she had not been as others were, was drawn, from every depth of good and ill, towards some mystery that she could not quite reach. Could not even see. She had a purpose. Of that she was sure. But the finer details — or even the larger, more vague ones — were beyond her. And such was her difficulty in trying to circumvent this ambiguous calling — so clear, she could not help but see right through it — that she looked on the rest of humanity, her acquaintances and friends and even the occasional circumstantial lover, chasing the paths set out by their parents, or their likes and dislikes, or their economic station, with a heaping tray of contemptful jealousy. As if she existed outside the world in which they squatted.

Pa never wanted to hurt people. Before his execution at the hands of the state of Texas or afterwards, when he came to be the focus of the only death penalty case that turned into a custody case that—my lawyer reckons so—turned into a right-to-die case.

The media tagged Pa as “the abnormal brain” in this whole Reanimator of the Rio Grande story, as it came to be known, but there was a man behind that brain. I know you expect a daughter to say so, but it was true.

Actually, there was a half dozen men behind that brain, or more specifically, parts of them. Back some time ago, Pa was arrested after his armed robbery of a Piggly Wiggly done went wronger than wrong can get. Two stockboys were shot and killed, their blood sprayed onto jars of pickled hotdogs, I was told.

Ma and me hadn’t seen Pa in years at the time of the robbery. We heard he tweaked out on meth after getting laid off from a tool and die shop.

1.
Sauntering down Aisle 6 at the 24-hour Dominion grocery store, Lee is cradling an overly large zucchini. It sits inside the sleeve of his thick pea-green parka, where he is pretending to house a broken limb. He conjures the cast’s hard shell and the way he’d have to lay on the couch watching daytime TV instead of dishwashing for eight hours at a time. He considers breaking his elbow, a swift snap. Then it wouldn’t be a lie.

Lee has a strange relationship to the truth. The truth sticks her tongue in his mouth obsessively. She runs her hand up his leg, almost, whispering, Why are you shoplifting a zucchini, you fucking idiot? Lee suspects he has latent Tourette’s, what with these voices coming in sharp spurts, accompanied by a shudder or a shoulder tick.

“Do you want to fuck?”

“Hmm?”

“Anymore?”

“Of course.”

Like everyone else, dismal poverty and ruthlessly wonderful lovers could characterize your early twenties. Never will so many people be in love with you, it has been said. Unless you were fortunate enough to have a few clammy affairs, never will you so enjoy giving a blow job. You were not paying close enough attention and were barely aware you were twenty-nine by your thirtieth birthday.

You had settled with Albert, you shared a well-decorated apartment, bills and a bed that he took to sleeping in after masturbating while you showered and pretended not to notice. You did the same, it was the unexploded firework detonated for the purpose of safety and well-being at the end of an ineffective day. It sometimes seemed too much, not enough—that static life threatening buzz.