Better Living Through Plastic Explosives

chlorine-filled diapers that had caused testicular cancer in third-world baby boys. The diapers were banned in Canada.

Plastic explosives? A Tampax cocktail? (They had experimented with that one-a tampon soaked in lighter fluid stuffed in a soy sauce bottle-and Regan had singed off his shaggy bangs. Leonard suggested the tampon be a used one for added symbolism. “We’re not trying to make a feminist statement,” Damien sneered.)

Eventually Carmen told them all to shut up. She was pouting. She had wanted them to chain themselves to a railway crossing in Poco, blocking a chlorine shipment from Sarnia, but Damien insisted Greenpeace had cornered the market on that tactic and that Carmen just wanted her tits splashed across the front page. It never occurred to the recovering terrorist at the time that this was most likely true.

But homemade plastic explosives today, the possibilities are endless. What did people do before the Internet, she wonders, offering up a prayer of thanks to Google. Add a glass jar of napalm-petrol and generic soap shards-for extra kick, one site advises. “Put it in a mason jar next to the explosive device for maximizing damage to the target.”

The process of extracting potassium chlorate from household bleach is time-consuming and maddeningly multi-step, but her science degree at least taught her a modicum of patience with process, if not with life. Fractional crystallization, it’s called. Science could be so poetic. “Craft project,” she tells her husband when he asks about the smell coming from her workroom. “A surprise for everyone at Christmas-I think they’re getting tired of updated copies of my Grafting Perennials classic.”

She considers calling in her ultimatum from the phone booth at the corner of Hastings and Penticton, one of the few left in the entire city that hasn’t been gutted or entirely disappeared overnight as if it had never existed. But they already have a record of her name, her request, her particulars, as they’re called.

They issued an ultimatum way back then as well. Of course they did. Written on one of the company’s own diapers filled with dog shit and deposited on the front steps of the captain of industry’s Scarborough mansion. It never made the news, though. That should’ve been a warning to them. But. Maybe a maid removed it before anyone else could find it.

The family was supposed to be away that night at an out-oftown function, intelligence had it. Intelligence being Regan and Gerry. That should’ve been a warning as well. The daughter at a friend’s. The “help”-god, she hated, still hates, that term- had the night off.

She had volunteered to do it-no, insisted. This was about children, the future. All the things she believed in. Damien gave her a big, soul-sucking kiss before she headed out. Carmen glared. Leonard saluted. Somewhere, making its way to the press, was their manifesto. She remembers how her legs were wobbling, almost comically, as if she were a drunken Olive Oyl. But she managed to move forward, a spastic walk before she started to run, shaky baby steps towards a better world.

The car will ignite as its wheels crossed the line. That much she knows.

If the driver has a passenger, well, that’s collateral damage. And there is still the possibility the City will choose to see it her way. Hope, the thing with feathers.

Khan from Surrey: “My tomato plants have bites on them. Very little teeth. You think a big bug with a large mouth or a mice with a small mouth?”

The Gardening Dame: “Tell me, Khan, are you the kind of man who might tie his wife to a chair with gardening twine and set her on fire?”

MEAN LOOK

It feels great, this violent disgorging from the earth, the recovering terrorist thinks as she tears up blood grass by the roots with her bare hands. Her husband and son are off somewhere with The Hound. Next door there’s the conscientious whirring click of a push mower. Across the street kids screech in someone’s backyard as they get hosed down-yelling No! when they mean Yes! In the distance a train groaning through the cut, sirens, an ice-cream truck, crows. Summer in the city.

“We all missed you at group on Wednesday.” Dieter squats beside her, his face so close she can see that his glasses are steaming up from the heat.

If this were a movie her next line would be: What the %?*%$ are you doing here!? But she just shakily stands as the chasm separating her two lives buckles, a cave-in of the Grand Canyon, burros with scratchy blankets on their backs scrambling for their lives, tourists wailing before clods of red earth pack mouths, ears, nostrils-sensory deprivation before oblivion.

“This has gone too far,” Dieter says. No, it hasn’t, Lucy thinks, not far enough. She could strike out with both hands, fury swipe, poison jab. “You don’t even know who I am,” she says instead.

“You are a bitch. You know that, right?” His eyes brim behind those distorting lenses. What did children call him at school? Four-eyes? Froggy? Fag? Did anyone recover from the nastiness of schoolyard taunts? Did he ever think about blowing up his tormentors? No, Dieter was a purist. He believed in causes, not himself. He believed in people.

Then there’s Houndoom launching herself at Dieter, Foster straining at the other end of the leash. She introduces Dieter as a member of her book club. “Just checkin’ out the ’hood,” he tells Bruno, his eyes skittering like tropical fish.

Afterwards, Bruno says, “‘Just checkin’ out the ’hood?’”

“He’s usually more articulate,” Lucy tells him. “His German heritage, you know. All those million-dollar words.”

“If he wasn’t so obviously gay, I’d say that looked liked a lover’s quarrel.”

Foster squeezes between them, panic in his voice: “Hey, Mom! I just noticed Houndoom doesn’t have any balls!”

If Hope is the thing with feathers (a sentiment that always puts Lucy in mind of the white feather floating through the treacle Forrest of that Tom Hanks movie), then what is Faith? Surely a thing with nasty thorns. Those who clutch at it remain bloodied but unbowed. Unlike so many in her circle-if you could call it a circle-she doesn’t mock the faithful. Not after seeing what faith could do.

Lucy visited the dead girl’s parents while she was pregnant. It was close to eleven years since that night. The girl would’ve been-what? Married and teaching Sunday school and awaiting her first child? A junior missionary in Honduras? A party girl downing tequila shots in her university dorm? A fledgling Olympic hurdler?

The house didn’t have the look of a tomb or a shrine, as she’d imagined. It was cheerful in a perfectly ordinary way. On the mantel was the girl’s picture, along with wedding photos of adult children and a grandchild holding up a lacrosse trophy. Lucy had pretended to be soliciting for a downtown mission for runaways and they actually invited her in off the doorstep and offered her tea. “Bless you,” she said. “All other doors have been shut in my face.” The odd locution she had borrowed from one of the nuns in Lilies of the Field.

Lucy had just wanted to witness how, if, someone could survive the death of a child. She looked at the photos and commented on the handsome family. “Two grandchildren?” she asked. No, their daughter, Anna, she was told. “She died when she was eight,” the father said. “She was at her first sleepover. Nice people. There was a fire.” They offered nothing more and she didn’t ask.

Until that day she had thought of almost nothing for weeks but aborting the fetus, leaving Bruno, disappearing like Damien had, as if he’d never even been. What would that be like, to have never been?

“May I?” the mother asked. Not even showing at four months. It was as if the mother had a sixth sense. When the woman put her hand on her belly, that’s when Lucy almost cracked. As she walked towards the door, only a kick from her baby to her navel, its first, kept her from turning around and, palms outward, dropping to her knees and begging, “Crucify me.” But they would probably have forgiven her, which would have been even worse.

LAVA PLUME

In the distance, at the far end of the block, Lucy hears the car before she sees it. The tragically amplified bass, the pointless revving of the engine. She pictures the weasel-faced driver with his sparse chin hairs and Tasmanian Devil tattoo, a plump, scantily clad girl riding shotgun, egging him on. Lucy is all steady nerve and muscle, magma