The assistant sounds like someone, in fact, quite a bit like Stella herself used to be. Maybe she has been insane all these years only she doesn’t know it. Let someone else do the work while she blogs about literacy, uranium, Indigenous land claims, nutrition and brain function, agribusiness, genetic engineering, wind farms, etcetera. The list is endless. She knows a little about everything, just the right length for a blog post, or a comment on someone else’s blog. She has opinions about very serious things and also about the Oshawa bus and plastic owls.
You know those plastic owls? You can order them from the catalogues of nurseries that sell objects as well as plants. The big plastic owls are taken home and affixed to garden posts. They are supposed to keep critters away, the sorts of critters that might come at night and snack on all one’s nice fresh lettuces.
Before the Change, the only good part of the milk run was you could get off in ’Shwa and smoke. It is just as well she quit, because the new driver, a short blonde woman, told her she doesn’t let any Peterborough passengers off the bus in Oshawa anymore, not to smoke or make phone calls or go to the bathroom or anything else. “I used to,” she said, “but then I had to go chasing after them when they didn’t come back in time.”
Stella thought about it later. At the time she was busy resenting the woman for not letting her off to smoke. But later she thought why didn’t the driver just leave these rude people behind? The reason, of course, was that they’d complain and she might lose her job if enough people complained.
Sometimes there was a new driver for the second half. Sometimes even a new bus. Once she stood there in an empty station, she remembers, with a driver. They both smoked. There was a post beneath the overhang, the part of the structure that sheltered waiting passengers in case of inclement weather. She is not sure what the post was for, normally. The driver silently pointed at the top of this post, where a large grey owl perched.
“It is plastic,” she said. “It is to keep the little brown bats away at night, and the raccoons. They would frighten the waiting passengers. You can buy them in gardening catalogues.”
The driver smiled. “Just wait and watch,” he said.
She waited and watched.
The owl turned its head and looked at her.
Then the bus came, and Stella got on it. When she looked out the window both the man and the owl were gone.
A Shower of Fireflies
THEY’D GO DAYS WITHOUT BATHING, wear the clothes they’d slept in. She wrote in the margins of the passing years, trimmed the wicks of the kerosene lamps. Was amazed in August by the Perseids, by congregations of moths. She remembers how, when they first arrived, her little son asked where the water fountain was. He couldn’t differentiate between this drumlin overgrown with mullein, thistle, and milkweed and the city park he’d left behind. Almost two decades later, he’s still living at home. He’s handsome and funny and helps out a lot; she wants to give him the world, but she knows she’d miss him.
One summer she found a box of mason jars in the damp dirt basement, so old the glass was wavy and tinged with green. The boy and his cousin caught fireflies and put them in the jars to use as flashlights on their late-night walks. In the morning, the candle ends on the old scarred picnic table would be full of moth wings. Moth bodies. Poems to mature later. She stayed home and nursed, listening for boys’ voices coming home over the hill.
The new baby grew round and sturdy, could identify plants at three. She helped in the garden as soon as she could walk, but protested when her mother squashed broccoli butterfly larvae between thumb and forefinger. By midafternoon, the kitchen was lined with mason jars of the green worms. When Margo visited, she said, “Do you know the jars in your kitchen are full of butterflies?” So busy trying to find time to write and keeping the fire going, she hadn’t noticed them hatching. Twenty years later the girl is gone. Margo said, “It’s the wild one you remember more.”
The fireflies lived in those glass jars, year upon year, winking in the bedrooms at night. The butterflies still line her kitchen. Sometimes she thinks they’re not in jars at all, but in her throat, made, too, of green glass. Sometimes it swallows you up, all that green, and when it finally spits you out two decades later, you look around and say, this place has changed, and so have I. You have to know how to hold on to things, and you have to know how to let them go. Tonight they’ll sit on the back step, she and her son. It’s August again, just like it was when they first came. They’ll open the jars and let them go. The fireflies will fly up to meet the shooting stars, soon become indistinguishable.
The butterflies will find her daughter and settle on her arms, sink into her skin. Become the tattoo that reminds her who she is.
She wonders what her own tattoo will be. Is glad she waited this long to get her own; maybe she’s finally old enough to choose just the right one.
Daughter Catcher
THE WITCH SIENA LIVED at the bottom of the gardens on Vine Street where there were woods, mostly cedar and willow for it was damp. Nature’s natural cycle seemed altered there, for the ground was in places knee deep in broken sticks, and littered with the arms of dead trees. It was March, and Siena piled sticks and some old half-rotten clothes into a big heap; the village teenagers might come one day to have a bonfire. No one else came down much, so that the few paths were often overgrown, too brambly to struggle through, and decorated with takeout containers, beer bottles both whole and dangerously broken, and Styrofoam, both in cup and slab and pellet form.
The streets and driveways of the village were swept clean often, the lawns sprayed and weeded and raked and mowed, but no one cleaned up the ownerless woods, unless the witch did it. Siena didn’t actually hear what people said about her, but she could guess: they thought she was stupid enough to think if she cleaned up after them they might give her daughter back. Noelle wasn’t dead, Siena was sure of that. She’d have felt it if the girl was dead, just as she’d have felt it if her men had died. But her entire family was still alive, Siena knew it for a fact. She just didn’t have them near her anymore, the way they were supposed to be.
Early spring runoff filled the lowland gully beyond the fallen trees and piles of sticks. While she gathered bottles, disconcerted as ever by how many there were that once contained hard liquor of all sorts, Siena talked to herself. When had she begun? She knew it didn’t help her reputation much, that she’d spent too much time alone in the raggedy woods. She rarely entered the village proper anymore except to fill recycling bins before anyone else was up, as she was doing now. It was very early on Thursday morning, and Siena was fulfilling her weekly ritual of carrying sacks of pop cans and bottles up the disused lane from the woods to the street. Surreptitiously, she tipped the sacks into the big blue plastic boxes, otherwise woefully empty. Why, Siena often wondered, was it better to dump garbage off the bridge at night than to sort it into bins? Why was that so hard? But the villagers couldn’t, wouldn’t, didn’t.
Siena knew that even before dawn on Sundays the townsfolk made an opposite trek to her own: they went out, also with sacks, but they went to the bridge and tossed in their old pillows, used condoms, empty pill bottles, pornography, vomit stained sleeping bags, single shoes and sometimes even used toilet paper. They treated the gully beneath the bridge as an impromptu landfill in the middle of town. Yellow, green, orange and clear garbage bags hurled on top of one another made such a nice sound: a kind of sliding squishing ker-thunk. The witch, they seemed to think, would deal with it. She always had.