Outskirts

BY SUE GOYETTE
ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOSHUA JENSEN-NAGLE

The art for this story is by Joshua Jensen-Nagle, who creates images of memories and dreams using a signature technique that combines resin with photographic prints. The Toronto artist has mounted over 30 exhibitions in the past six years and is collected widely throughout North America and Europe. jensennagle.com

Custodians

The night waded into the ocean. Up to its waist, it looked back to us on shore. Its look was morose and someone said: why is it going out so far? One of us stood and waved.

Its shoulders drooped as if carrying the stones it had collected all day back into the water, as if carrying the weight of the world. None of us saw it actually go under. We were

asked later, pressed into remembering. We’d been drinking. There had been an argument about who actually said what. It’s like you neglected your own child, someone said,

thumping his fist. I thought it was a moose, someone finally confessed. It moved like a moose, with those long strides, head and shoulders above caring about any of us.

Someone else had been reminded of her father, it had the same gait of him leaving the house for the office. Who am I, someone else said, who am I to stop anyone from doing

what they want to do? Once it was in the water, it seeped into everything. The pines and spruce at the edge of the inlet, the cabin on the other side of the dunes. The harbour

further along the shore was a rebellion of small-fisted lights. We lit a fire and waited for it to wade back out. Someone walked the water’s edge with a flashlight. We might have

better luck, someone said, if we even knew what to call it.

Sacrifice

The light of the moon ricochets off the bulrushes and projects itself into a moose. Your foot on the brake is doing mouth to mouth. C’mon. The minute is overweight and

sweaty. All you see is a wonderment of nonchalance. This beast has swallowed the woods and is transporting them across the highway. You hunch, convinced you could

drive under it. You hunch because you’re facing something both horny and holy. Doesn’t everything important start with that same impulse? Your heart in the passenger seat

needs its asthma pump. Have you seen its asthma pump? Your heart in the booster seat kicks the back of your seat: are we there yet? The night is looking out the window at

its own reflection. You call out to your angels, you pray for giant cartoon hands to pull this moment from its bones. This is how you were raised. Desperate. You are not in

good shape and now you are skidding. Up close the moose is an elegance of scraggle and you succumb. To die with this new idea of beauty. The car is a curtsy before everything

wild on a trespass of highway. And you are the chosen apology. Your hands loosen. When you look back up, it’s no longer there and days later: was it ever?

Bargaining

Here is the shadow of one small child. Here is the warmth from beneath the sleeping cat. Here is the recorded breath from a rushed phone message apologizing. Here is my

daughter’s bike. No, not my daughter. Here is an oven mitt and a can opener. Here is the linden tree hungover from drinking an entire record collection of slow-moving

seasons and lost loves. Here are the headlights of a car heading for the
hospital. Here is the baying of fear and the coyote of awake. Here is a year of routine. Here is saved gift

wrap and string. Here is the teenage bellow of boys, their hearts full moons demanding more sky. Here is the cloud that resembles a small god lying with its back to us. Here is

an hour of rain and here is the thirst of anything captured. Here is my father’s cough. Here is a reading lamp and an address book of rivers. Here is an obituary for a forest.

Here is a briefcase full of diaries. Here is a suit to wear to the trial. Here are small scissors to trim your hems. Here is a mirror. Here is a photograph someone took of you

when you weren’t looking. Here is memory pressed between pages, its petals translucent and dim. Here are the promised jewels. Is that enough? We swim the channels of your

long hours so easily, and you, you hungry ocean, when did you start being so tempted to keep us?