“What are you doing to him?”
“You bumble through the universes trailing death, yet you think I’m the monster.”
Wake up, Jared thought. I want to wake up.
“I could never hurt your family and friends as much as you’re going to hurt them,” Georgina said. “But I’m willing to try.”
4
WEE’GIT
The moment Jared returned felt to you as subtle as an interferometer detecting gravitational waves—two gargantuan astrological bodies had collided with sufficient violence to ripple time and space but at enough distance that on Earth the event was announced with a little chirp.
You have 535 official children, most of them sperm donations meant to help prove your friend Chuck’s pet theory that guided evolution was the only solution to the Anthropocene. Chuck, a Wild Man of the Woods, had done a lot of mushrooms and acid. Your son Jared’s origin story was messy and involved good intentions and booze, the classic ingredients for paving the road to hell. How can one singular kid among so many be such a headache? Of course, Jared turned out to be the only Trickster in the bunch. Of course.
His presence had been constant for so long you assumed he’d survive to boring adulthood, but everything about him is dangerously tied up with his mother and his grandmother. And, if you admit it, in the searing failure that was your attempt to help, which led the psycho witch to amputate your head with a shotgun. Yeah, yeah, you and Maggie had hooked up, thus Maggie’s desire to blow your head off, which normal people would think about but not do. Yeah, yeah, she was the daughter of your most recent ex, but she was flirting with a boy who was going to get her hexed by the very, very volatile Sophia. So in a way Maggie killed you for attempting to do her a good turn.
Usually, when you were free of your physical body, you could wander around and find someone to resurrect you, but Jared’s mother had other ideas. Your unmarked grave in the woods became your world. You made up games to pass the time. How many trucks versus ATVs will pass by this spot in one month? The ratio was usually 2:.01. It wasn’t a well-used road. Aggressive alders bent over it like an arch. Dusty weeds flourished down the centre and on the mossy verges. Once in a while, once in a great while, there was a jogger hell-bent on fitness, intently puffing by in bright, shiny gear. Most of the time it was you and trees. The squirrels avoided you. The deer chewed the understorey shrubs and stared at you, tasty and nervous. A black bear ambled straight through you, intent as it was on getting to the salmon stream it remembered, ignoring you calling, “Come talk, what’s your rush?” It rained. A lot. The sun rose and set. A lot. You didn’t even have a good view of the night sky, the stars.
The psycho witch had tethered you to your body. Not sure how that was even possible, but here you were, stuck to your grave like a bug to flypaper. At least your head had been shot off near a road. You tried to will yourself nearer to the bits of skull that might still be around, but you remained stuck.
A raven croaked in the trees.
“Brother!” you cried in relief. “Brother!”
The raven examined you from a branch. “Wee’git?”
“Yes, hi, that’s me! Thank God, thank God! I’m stuck here. Can you help me out?”
“What’s my name?” the raven said.
“I need you to get a message to Chuck. Charles Hucker. He’s—”
“You don’t remember me, do you?”
“I’m stuck with human eyes,” you said. “Sorry. If I was in my raven form, I could, um, tell who you were.”
“So what we shared meant nothing to you.”
“Human eyes are so limited. Your feathers are all one colour to human eyes.”
“Stay there and rot, you liar,” the raven said before launching upwards, laughing.
“What’s your name?!” you shouted. “Come and tell me your name!”
No one is ever going to find you. No one is ever going to resurrect you. You are going to stay on your little plot of land until the sun bloats up like a corpse in water, scorching the surface of the earth before swallowing it. This is your life from now until the last red dwarfs blink into nothingness and the black holes dominating the universe fizzle into oblivion. You will be unremembered, maligned, marooned. Bored.
Pop.
You are in Anita’s kitchen. Oh, this is not good. This is not good at all. You would rather be bored in the forest than here. But you are here and if Anita, your ever-loving ex, wants you here, it is not for anything good. She made herself clear and her psychotic daughter used her shotgun to drive home the point that you are not to come around here no more, no more.
The baby in the high chair wears a blue onesie and a blue bib and blue socks. Chewing on his hands, eyes fixed on yours. He has a spray of Cheerios around his tray along with a half-full bottle of apple juice, but he’s alone in the kitchen. A tiny sparkling thread connects you to him, tiny diamonds glittering, a dewy spiderweb on a summer morning.
Anita sits in the living room, rocking lightly, head turned away from the baby. You can see her curls.
Oh, you are in hell. Maggie had your baby. You are a daddy. And Anita thinks the baby is you, doesn’t she? Anita thinks you’re going another round through childhood, replaying your greatest hits. You’re kind of insulted the woman you were practically married to thinks you’re that much of a moron. She had dumped you and immediately married Albert, even though everyone knew what an arsehole he was. You just meant to hang around long enough to make sure she was safe. So you hung out as her baby boy. Things went awry. Let’s
