The Tent

the howlers, red and shining in the light from your burning paper shelter, but you keep on writing anyway because what else can you do?

TIME FOLDS

Time folds, he said, meaning that as time goes on and on it buckles, in the extreme heat, in the extreme cold, and what is long past becomes closer. You can demonstrate this by pleating a ribbon and sticking a pin through: Point Two, once yards away from Point One, now lies just beside it. Is time/space like an accordion, but without the music? Was he making a statement about hard physics?

Or was he saying: Time folds its wings, at long last. Time folds its tents and silently steals way. Time folds you in its folds, as if you were a lamb and the lack of time a wolf. Time folds you in the blanket of itself, it folds you tenderly and wraps you round, for where would you be without it? Time folds you in its arms and gives you one last kiss, and then it flattens you out and folds you up and tucks you away until it’s time for you to become someone else’s past time, and then time folds again.

TREE BABY

You remember this. No, you dreamed it. Your dream was of choking, and sinking down, and blankness. You woke from your nightmare and it had already happened. Everything was gone. Everything, and everyone—fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, the cousins, the tables and chairs and toys and beds—all swept away. Nothing is left of them. Nothing remains but the erased beach and the silence.

There is wreckage. You didn’t see that, in your dream. A jumble of smashed years, a heap of broken stories. The stories look like wood and chunks of cement and twisted metal. And sand, a lot of sand. Why is it they say the sands of time? You didn’t know that yesterday but now you do. You know too much to say. What can be said? Language turns to rubble in your throat.

But look—there’s a baby, stranded in a treetop, just as in those other dreams, the ones in which you can lift yourself off the earth and fly, and escape the roaring and crashing just behind you. A baby, alive, caught in a green cradle; and it’s been rescued, after all. But its name has been lost, along with its tiny past.

What new name will they give it, this child? The one who escaped from your nightmare and floated lightly to a tree, and who looks around itself now with a baby’s ordinary amazement? Now time starts up once more, now there is something that can be said: this child must be given a word. A password, a talisman of air, to help it through the many hard gates and shadow doorways ahead. It must be named, again.

Will they call it Catastrophe, will they call it Flotsam, will they call it Sorrow? Will they call it No-family, will they call it Bereft, will they call it Child-of-a-Tree? Or will they call it Astonishment, or Nevertheless, or Small Mercy?

Or will they call it Beginning?

BUT IT COULD STILL

Things look bad: I admit it. They look worse than they’ve looked for years, for centuries. They look the worst ever. Perils loom on all sides. But it could still turn out all right. The child fell from the eighth-floor balcony, but there was a sheepdog underneath that leapt up and caught it in mid-air. A bystander took a picture, it was in the paper. The boy went under for the third time, but the mother—although she was reading a novel—heard a gurgling sound and ran down to the dock, and reached into the water, and pulled the boy up by his hair, and there was no brain damage. When the explosion occurred the young man was underneath the sink, fixing the plumbing, and so he was not injured. The girl survived the avalanche by making swimming motions with her arms. The father of two-year-old triplets who had cancer in every one of his organs watched a lot of comedy films and did Buddhist meditation and went into full remission, where he remains to this day. The airbags actually worked. The cheque did not bounce. The prescription drug company was not lying. The shark nudged the sailor’s naked, bleeding leg, then turned away. The rapist got distracted in mid-rape, and his knife and his penis both retracted into him like the soft and delicate horns of a snail, and he went out for a coffee instead. The copy of Darwin’s Origin of Species the soldier carried next to his heart stopped the oncoming machine- gun bullet. When he said,_ My darling, you are the only woman I will adore forever,_ he really meant it. As for her, despite the scowling and the cold shoulder and the unanswered phone, it turned out she’d loved him all along.

At this dim season of the year we hunger for such tales. Winter’s tales, they are. We want to huddle round them, as if around a small but cheerful fire. The sun sets at four, the temperature plummets, the wind howls, the snow cascades down. Though you nearly froze your fingers off, you did get the tulips planted, just in time. In four months they’ll come up, you have faith in that, and they’ll look like the picture in the catalogue. In the brown earth there were already hundreds of small green shoots. You didn’t know what they were—some sort of little bulb—but they were intending to grow, despite everything. What would you call them if they were in a story? Would they be happy endings, or happy beginnings? But they aren’t in a story, and neither are you. You tucked them back under the mulch and the dead leaves, however. It was the right thing to do on the darkest day of the year.

Acknowledgements

Material in this collection has been previously published as follows:

“Our Cat Enters Heaven” in Brick; “Warlords” and “Voice” in The Walrus; “Take Charge,” “King Log in Exile,” “Salome Was a Dancer,” and “Post-Colonial” in Daedalus; “Life Stories” and “Resources of the Ikarians” in Short Story; and “Chicken Little Goes Too Far” and “The Tent” in Harper’s Magazine.

In addition, “Bottle,” “It’s Not Easy Being Half-Divine,” and an earlier version of “Nightingale” appeared in a limited-edition booklet published in aid of the Harbourfront Reading Series; these three and “Take Charge,” “King Log in Exile,” “Thylacine Ragout,” “Post-Colonial,” “Faster,” and “Bottle II” were published in a limited-edition booklet called Bottle, in aid of the Hay-On-Wye Festival in Wales; “Tree Baby,” “But It Could Still,” and “Something Has Happened” appeared in New Beginnings, an anthology published in support of the Indian Ocean Tsunami Earthquake charities; “Bottle” appeared in a German-language literary advent calendar called Das Geschenk; and “Chicken Little Goes Too Far” was auctioned in a holograph-illustrated edition of one, in aid of the World Wildlife Fund.