I feel especially put together because I am wearing an outfit; I bought all three pieces at the same time, indicating my financial stability and dedication to appearance.
I suppose I could have said that I was between jobs, or that I was changing careers. That I’d been distracted by the curious landscape of southern Quebec…
Father was the kind of man who separated the halves of his finger just to show my brothers and me the red flesh after accidentally slicing it with a construction knife…
…neither Roger nor I had dates that night. We’d spent the last two hours sitting in our skivvies underwear and robes in Roger’s room…discussing our almost-completed term papers.
We leave the car in a narrow spot along the shoulder of Highway 1 and slide the boy into the red backpack, careful as we work his long legs through the seat…
… a nurse had shown me a cancer kid’s crayon drawing. “See that little blue car down there at the bottom of the hospital the child drew? That’s your car.”
Flames rejoice around the kindling, their elegantly dangerous silhouettes leaping from stick to log and back to stick again, bright against the dark of the night.
I hesitated to say it. I was only eleven, but everyone else, likewise entrenched in orange and black and equally pissed about the penalty, was chanting.