Sarah Court (29 page)

An Educational Initiative Made Possible by Mister
Conway Finnegan and Wal-Mart,
reads the plaque
beneath the shark.

The lake shore is teeming with residents awaiting
the fireworks. A ferry crosses the lake, its windows
bright as Kuggerand gold as if ferrying the sun itself.

Nicholas spots Wesley Hill and his son. They
greet each other with great warmth. Colin has caught
something he wants to show everyone. A lunar moth
batters the cage of his spread fingers.

“You mustn’t do that,” Wesley tells his son, as
he’d told him years ago. “Moths have a protective
powder on their wings. If it comes off, it’s like . . .
well, you without your skin.”

Colin opens his hands. The moth floats up into
the night.

“Did I kill it?”

“He’ll be okay,” Dylan tells him. But everyone
knows the moth will die.

You are all in this together. That huge thrashing
teardrop of life. Consider the story threads. Where
they start and end. A young pyromaniac enthralled
by fireworks ends with fresh eyes in a woman’s
sockets. A car thief telling an odd boy how to
hut
whirr
a
vay
heckle ends with an equally odd boy
hanging himself in a motel closet—only to be saved
by that first odd boy, now a man, who once stole a
Cadillac belonging to the other boy’s grandfather.

Some say the only way to break such chains is to
leave the place they’ve been forged. Yet every town is
essentially a box with an open top, isn’t it? If you do
not make the choice to step out of the box, well, can
you really call it a trap?

Further
downshore
stands
my
benefactor,
Jeffrey, with Patience Nanavatti. They should not
be here, as they could be spotted—indeed, Danny
Mulligan stands not far away with his daughter
Cassie upon his shoulders—but Patience’s father
will be honoured with a fireworks fusillade tonight.
Between them sits a bitch with a livid scar on her
flank.

At the merry-go-round congregate the residents
of Tufford Manor. Clive hands out blankets to his
thin-blooded charges. William Lonnigan wipes away
a runner of gossamer-thin drool descending from
Clara Russell’s bottom lip. She’s by far the most
docile tenant at Tufford Manor. Clara Russell causes
absolutely no fuss at all. After all, she is alive in the
sense a ficus plant can be considered alive.

I myself hover peripherally. The moonlight
reflecting off my silver eyes tends to look alarming.
When I alarm your species, you fuckers have a nasty
habit of locking me up. Do you not enjoy my being
here? I unnerve you. Yes, I do that. But it is quite
possible I am not here at all. Could be it was only a
box. You know, the sort magicians escape from. An
empty, boring box. If that is what you would rather
believe, well, I urge you to do so. It may even be true.

Dylan presses his forehead to Nicholas’s hip. As he
gets taller he will adapt this same gesture to elevated
portions of his father’s anatomy. He will press his
forehead to the spot under Nicholas’s rib cage, the
crook of his elbow, the round of one shoulder. When
fully grown Dylan’s habit will be to wrap one hand
gently round the back of his father’s skull and press
their foreheads together.

Nicholas’s hand slips down to Dylan’s neck until
it brushes the tracheal scar on his throat. They both
flinch. Years from now a girlfriend, Dylan’s first, will
kiss that scar. She will ask how he got it. Dylan will
say he tried to hang himself as a boy. A hole was cut
in his throat to let in air. He will direct her fingers to
the thin but prominent scars near his ears, from the
bootlaces, and the others, even smaller, made by his
father’s frenzied fingernails.

“What was it like?” she will ask. “The coma.”

“I don’t remember,” is what he will tell her. “I
don’t know you’re really supposed to.”

“How long were you in it?”

“Eleven days. I woke in the hospital. Mom and
Dad were there. I thought maybe they were back
together. Patched things up or whatever. But they
weren’t. They weren’t.”

“Why did you do it?”

“Sad, I guess. Why do people do it all the time?
Every day?”

He’ll smile. She will think he is about to touch her
but he will not.

As he grows older, Dylan will realize how so much
of anyone’s life is slip-slide-dancing along the edge of
some karmic razor blade. Some of you get cut deep.
Others get off unscathed. This town has a saying
for instances of just such dipshit luck:
Even the blind
squirrel will find a nut
.

All the people you’ve met within these pages
will find happiness. You believe that, don’t you?
On a reduced scale, yes, but that scale reduces itself
starting the moment you suck first breath. You
organisms have so many flaws. Worst is how you
seek to be happy at all times. Happiness is best when
it arrives in modest measurements and in small
moments. To ask for anything more is lunatic.

More often than not I think you carbon-based
scraps of interstellar waste are not sustainable as a
species.

But my, it is entertaining to watch you go about
your business of extinction.

Now the fireworks begin to explode into the
summer dark.
Oooohs
and
aaahs
. Last is Philip
Nanavatti’s finest creation. Globes of fire detonate,
flaming umbrellas opening in the sky, tinting the
lake every colour of their creation.

Spectators close their eyes. There it is. The
Mushrooming Imprint.

And so the residents of Sarah Court make a wish.
Each of them their own. Even though a fireworks
display is not a regular outlet for wish-making.

What is it you would have them wish for? Well?

Make it that, then. Why not? Make it that.

Thanks to Brett and Sandra for taking this book
on, and to Erik for providing such a brilliant cover.
Thanks to my hometown. And thanks to Roald Dahl,
whose story “The Man From the South” provided the
basis for a scene in the third section. I mean, it’s a
pretty blatant rip, but I figure Quentin Tarantino
already ripped it off even more blatantly in
Four
Rooms
, so mine is, at best, a facsimile of a rip-off.

Craig Davidson has written three other books:
The Preserve
(as Patrick Lestewka),
Rust and Bone
, and
The Fighter
. His nonfiction has appeared in
Esquire,
The Washington Post, Nerve, Salon, Real Fighter,
The London Observer
, and elsewhere. Currently, he’s
hanging his hat in Fredericton, New Brunswick,
where he is the deputy editor of an alt-urban weekly.