Small Predators Read online

  Copyright © 2018 Jennifer Ilse Black

  ARP Books (Arbeiter Ring Publishing)

  205-70 Arthur Street

  Winnipeg, Manitoba

  Treaty 1 Territory and Historic Métis Nation Homeland

  Canada R3B 1G7

  arpbooks.org

  Cover artwork and design by Kenneth Lavallee

  Interior design and layout by Relish New Brand Experience Inc.

  Printed and bound in Canada by Friesens on paper made from 100% recycled post-consumer waste.

  COPYRIGHT NOTICE

  This book is fully protected under the copyright laws of Canada and all other countries of the Copyright Union and is subject to royalty.

  ARP Books acknowledges the generous support of the Manitoba Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Province of Manitoba through the Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Book Publisher Marketing Assistance Program of Manitoba Culture, Heritage, and Tourism.

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Black, Jennifer Ilse, author

  Small predators / Jennifer Ilse Black.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-927886-07-6 (softcover).--ISBN 978-1-927886-08-3 (EPUB)

  I. Title.

  PS8603.L2543S63 2018

  C813’.6

  C2018-900490-8

  C2018-900491-6

  Dedicated to the University of Manitoba,

  and everyone I loved there.

  CONTENT NOTICE:

  Sex, drugs, ghosts, visions, crude language, skin picking, graphic self-violence, suicidal ideation, the neoliberal university, social media, millennial ennui, white guilt, white saviourism, scat (lots of literal shit), empathy exhaustion (lots of figurative shit), capitalism, activism, pathetic fallacy, global warming, the human pathosis of global warming, student despair, general despair, colonization and other state violence, end of days.

  Contents

  Prologue

  1. Fox Scales the Stalk

  2. It’s Never as Simple as a Page Marked 1

  3. Trauma

  4. The Pit

  5. The River Isn’t Listening

  6. Home is an Urn of Ashes

  7. Pretend there is a Future

  8. Mesh

  9. Minutes

  10. Forgiveness is an Open Casket

  11. How to Finish What You’ve Started

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  The NONSUCH

  Your source for campus news

  Campus Explosion, Suspect in Critical Condition

  AN EXPLOSION at the University of Manitoba’s historic Abbott College Monday afternoon has left a lone suspect in critical condition in hospital.

  Canadian Security Intelligence Services (CSIS) has taken over the investigation, a Winnipeg police spokesperson said on the scene. “The explosives appear to have been detonated from the sewer beneath the college.”

  Witnesses report evacuating the building after the fire alarm was pulled around 1 p.m. Monday afternoon. Authorities are confident the evacuation was complete. No casualties have been reported.

  “We’re all struggling to come to terms with what’s happened,” said the university’s Vice President Health and Wellness, Sandra Goodhell. “Students are shaken and we are doing what we can to ensure classes resume their normal schedule. The university will be providing free group and individual counselling sessions to all students on request.”

  Carl Shucksly, a first-year student at the university, was waiting for class to start when the alarm was pulled. “Everyone was moving really slow but we realized something was wrong when we got outside because [the suspect] was screaming and waving a knife around.”

  The suspect reportedly hung a banner and made a speech outside the college before turning a knife on herself as explosives were triggered. Authorities suspect that mental illness may have played a role in the attack. The university has not yet confirmed whether the suspect is a student or employee of the institution.

  “It’s just so senseless,” Shucksly said. “You’d think a school would be safe and then something like this happens.”

  “Security services will be increased in the interim while administrators meet to review campus safety policies and emergency protocol,” said Goodhell.

  1

  fox scales the stalk

  Autumn is resentful. Maybe that’s not fair but it’s how I feel. There’s something in the dry, dying, quick and brief crescendo of colour fighting the inevitable loss of life; something in the crust of frost on morning grass, cold fighting to lock in the damp, clinging to each slip of dew. It’s the stubbornness, I don’t know, it’s familial—like the way a cousin might mutter at your queerness under their breath but never quite out you to grandma; their tone might quake, quivering surface of water about to boil; you might grip their leg urgently beneath the dining room table, trembling of tectonic plates. I guess it’s different though because in that scenario your cousin has all the power, and autumn, well autumn has almost none. Maybe autumn is you in that scenario, eyes fogging, frantic, pretending to retain your composure but under the table digging fingernails into your cousin’s knee, biting your tongue, crusting dew to the grass.

  If you’re not in the prairies I feel sorry for you. I’m sure it’s beautiful where you are—it always is, almost everywhere—and that’s not what I mean anyway. It’s just, Mink once told me the sun doesn’t feel anything. It’s conscious, she said, fingers toying her wrist—absent—but it doesn’t feel anything, it just provides. Was the sun benevolent or sociopathic in her imagination? I couldn’t tell then and still can’t but I remember that I didn’t respond. I suppose I didn’t say much at all back then. It was better to listen. I think for myself a lot more now, at least, I speak what I’m thinking more often, and I wish Mink could know that. And I wish she could know that I think she’s wrong about the sun. The prairie asks the sun what it’s feeling and the sun responds in shades and bursts of sky; the prairie is compassionate, empathetic, it helps the sun communicate. If you’re paying attention the prairie will teach you how to be open, how to listen and how to empathize.

  Tonight I’m lying in an open field behind a long, gated suburb that wasn’t here when we were kids, two suburbs over from our older, bleeding suburb. I remember kids saying our neighbourhood was built on top of an old garbage dump—they buried all the trash a few dozen feet below and dropped some big houses on it and that’s why the sidewalks are always sinking and the whole place stinks like shit. Rusted tin cans and styrofoam cups push up along the sidewalks and bloom in the gardens. Kids would say the gas from all the rotting garbage was seeping up from the soil but it couldn’t get out fast enough and one day the whole suburb would explode. I didn’t really believe that but every spring I’d watch the line between the window frames and the garden plots get a millimetre thinner. I bet if you tore the planters out you’d see a series of descending lines like the rings inside a tree trunk, recording each year’s sinkage.

  When I was little I would try to dig up the dump in my backyard. I had two goals:

  1.another person’s trash, right? And, also

  2.just in case. Best that the neighbourhood doesn’t explode.

  I never found any trash, though—actually, I never got more than a foot or so deep—after that the gumbo gets so fucking thick with clay it can’t be penetrated by a garden spade in a kid’s thin grip. I buried some trash of my own though.

  I got a digital watch for my eleventh birthday. It had a bulging plastic frame and a velcro strap. It had an alarm function programmed on and off by a slim plastic bu
tton. One morning the button fell off and the alarm wouldn’t stop. I couldn’t quite fit my fingernail far enough into the gaping plastic to turn it off. I tried to smash it but the face shattered and the alarm continued. I put it in the garbage bin in the garage but you could hear it all the way from the kitchen to the basement if you listened close. I didn’t want dad to know it was broken so I took it to one of my gumbo holes in the backyard and buried it. I imagine it’s fossilized now, its perfect plastic bones carved into a relic of cold clay, echoes of its ancient beeps rippled in the surrounding muck.

  The plot where I’m lying is a field now but soon it’ll be another suburb. Winnipeg is just like that, constantly brimming outward, thinning with the spread, like spilled milk. The sign is already erected—an eight-foot brick-and-mortar pedestal at the intersection of two pretend streets with a slab of limestone at the centre top of the imposition. Some day that slab will be carved upon with flowery cursive declaring the neighbourhood’s title—something that imagines a scene like “River Gardens” or “Emerald Hills.” The web of rivers is at least three kilometres out in any direction and there isn’t a fucking hill in the whole south of this province but that’s just the way these things go. It’s more about planting an image than honouring one and the perfect-flat prairie is never enough for the suits who get to do the naming. I guess they couldn’t think of anything catchy yet so they just erected the pedestal blank. You’d think it’d be much harder to get the letters on after the fact. You’d think they’d do that with some sort of laser that you can’t just point at something fixed in the ground. But I guess sometimes it’s better to stick your flag in the mud even if the flag is blank. I guess that feels important.

  I’m lying on my back in the dry-flat prairie grass beneath the pedestal and I’m listening to the distant buzz of cars on the highway, the little-perceptible, warm hum of my phone in my pocket, and the small clawing snap of grass beneath me as my weight shifts. My head is turned and I see horizontal, the sky to the right of me and the dirt to the left, a scattered brush of grass scratches my eyes—each blade lit with the setting sun as though a drop of blood is running down its sharpest edge. My arms are spread before and behind me and the fingertips I can see are lit with the same setting red—they flex and fold like twitching, severed arteries pulsing final heartbeats. In a few minutes the sun will be resting directly in my palm.

  My phone buzzes. I dig into my coat pocket. The shock-bright screen reads

  Where are you

  Irritated. It’s not even a question. I put the phone back in my pocket and roll onto my back but now my chest is full of fast tumbling stones, gushing pressure builds in my ears. Phone buzzes again. I pull it out, roll on my side

  Are you ignoring me

  No, I think. Fuck. It’s not even a question. I roll onto my back. Phone buzzes again and I don’t pull it out but I imagine it probably says

  Fox…

  or

  Please

  or

  Helllloooooo

  Aggressive. Distracted, I forgot to wait for the setting sun to rest in my throbbing palm. Now it’s too late; the sun is gone. There is no horizon, just the last strokes of blue melting into the dark prairie dome.

  “Why didn’t you respond?” I hadn’t heard him coming. He stands directly over my head so that his legs are the wide imposing base of a mountain, his torso sloped by the trim line of his long tweed coat. His head is the snowy peak—obscured, like by clouds, by the smoke off his joint.

  “I want to be alone.”

  “You could’ve let me know. I was worried.”

  “About what? It’s flat for miles. You were obviously staring right at me when you sent those messages.”

  Badger moves to my side and extends a hand to pull me up but I stay in the grass. He drops down and sits next to me, one knee poking up and out from his long coat. I sigh and roll my spine up, hug my raised knees.

  “Tell me what’s going on with you,” he says.

  “Tell me what you mean by that.”

  “Don’t do that, Fox. Shit.” Badger swings his pocket knife open and pokes away at a thick block of wood in his palm, joint dangling lazily off his lip. I pluck the joint and drag.

  Badger and I met in my first year. We sat beside each other in intro philosophy and he was always flicking little wood shavings onto my desk. I told him to fuck off with the whittling and he suggested a compromise: we switched seats so that his shavings would land on someone else’s desk. We became friends after that. If daily joints by the river, social silence, and a shared crude nihilism counts as friendship. He was constantly fucking whittling. Badger told me his grandad taught him to carve—would guide him on instruction, affirming or denying each push and dip of the blade with a throaty “mhmm” or “mmuhm.” Badger said he stopped whittling when he was a teenager. He got embarrassed and threw away all the figures he and grandad had made together. Now grandad is dead and Badger whittles again. I imagine that he tries to recreate the shapes he made with grandad—the shapes he lost to his teenaged embarrassment—but Badger never told me so, that’s just what I imagine. Badger tosses all his carvings in the trash. He says his hands are useless without an “mhmm” to guide them but I don’t know if that’s really it or if he’s just ashamed to be creative and also ashamed of being ashamed. I don’t think he’s held onto anything he’s ever made.

  “I went to see Mink today,” Badger says, his eyes guiding the stiff curve of his knife. “I just wanted to tell you.”

  I figured that this would be about Mink. Everything has been about Mink since she was hospitalized.

  “Ok,” my voice pockets in my throat, “How was it? Are you ok?”

  Badger stills his hand, pulls the blade from the block, brow furrows. “I dunno. It was really hard.” He looks up at me and then back down. “I went right after she was admitted but that was different. They had her on all these sedatives then. She couldn’t really communicate. She’s different now. Whatever meds they’ve got her on are more balanced, I guess. But she’s too calm. It’s creepy. She’s more cryptic than ever.”

  I nod and make that sympathetic “mmmm” sound with my throat. I know I sound disingenuous but my eyes are brimming and I don’t dare open my mouth. I hide my cheeks in my arms so he won’t see me flushed. I take a deep slow breath through my nose and hold it. My brain rattles like dry static in my skull. Badger doesn’t look up.

  “She doesn’t remember any of it—Abbott College or ripping up her arms—not even my first visit to the hospital. She’s lost whole days.”

  I make that pathetic “mmmm” noise again, stand up, rest my back against the pedestal.

  Badger stays in the dirt, arm balanced against his knee, focus on shimmying the knife carefully. “Look, I’m sorry to bring this up, but Mink mentioned you. She’s bringing you up with everyone.”

  I exhale. “Yeah, I’ve heard.”

  “She’s just in rough shape, you know,” he says, flicking a large shaving off the tip of his knife, “and she’s sorry. She won’t stop saying how sorry she is. And she won’t stop saying how she wishes she were dead.”

  “How is that supposed to make me feel?” Too loud and too quick.

  “I don’t know, Fox.” He looks up at me. “How does it make you feel?”

  I shake my head, kick a heel in the dirt. Badger’s brow furrows again. He turns his eyes back to his knife. His shoulders slouch toward his chest.

  The sky is quickly filling with darkness. Stars slip quietly into the sky like swimmers emerging from a dark lake, smooth black water rolling up and around cresting heads, gliding over shoulders—flexing blemishes that grow out of the perfect depths of molten dark.

  I was never any good at constellations. I know the Big Dipper, that one is easy, and I know Orion’s Belt, although I don’t know which stars make up the rest of him—that’s about it. Mink and I made up a couple of constellations of our own lying in this field: Big-Clump, Little-Clump, Long-Potato. I don’t know that we ever reall
y tracked the stars well enough to say for certain that December’s Little-Clump was actually April’s Little-Clump. It’s likely that we just assigned a similar clump of stars the same moniker. It didn’t matter. It still doesn’t. People don’t need star-clumps to map the passing of time anymore.

  “Did you get Lynx’s meeting request?” Badger says. Why is it so easy to change the subject gracefully with a knife in your hand?

  “Yeah.”

  “I think we should go. I know it’s been tough to face the collective but we can’t put it off forever.”

  “Yeah, I dunno. Maybe.”

  His brow is still furrowed and his eyes still glued to his carving. I dig my hand into my jean pocket and grip my keys in my fist.

  “It’ll be good for us to do some work again. We’ve all been a bit out of it since Mink was arrested,” Badger says.

  “Yeah. I get it.”

  “And we sort of owe it to each other, you know?”

  “Sure.”

  “I just really think you should be there.”

  “Yeah. I get it. I’ll go.” I grind my keys between my fingers and my teeth against each other and smile at him when he finally looks up at me again. A trickle of blood fills my palm.

  As the sky deepens the stars become brighter, they reach toward the earth with long thin fingers of cool shimmering light that touch the field and cling to single blades of grass, forming tethers of sticky film that connect sky to ground. The grass grows brightly at the tugging of the star webs, grows thick and strong and tall to tower dozens of feet over me. Each blade sprouts a top-nest of full and vibrantly glowing seeds. The brightness of the star is amplified by the stalk, the stalk made weighty and strong by the star, and the thin strings of new matter tethering them, flux and fold, in the atmosphere between.

  I push off from the pedestal and move towards the nearest starstalk. The webs emit soft heat like the warmth of a body and, when I wrap my bloody hand around the stalk it reacts, pulses, returns my grasp and guides me up further, pulling the weight of my body off my feet and into the sky. The trunk makes room for my hands and feet; it is warm and sticky; it clings and, as I pull my hand off to reach higher, a tendril of the warm web trails behind it, attached, a net grows around my limbs and torso. As I reach through the bundle of wet seeds at the top of the stalk, they move aside to invite me in, rolling and folding their mass—warm orbs, separate pieces connected by a central gravity—around my fingers and arm. The mass throbs, gentle, until my whole body is cocooned, curled and comfortable and completely contained, as though I am now the gravity, the pulse’s core.