Free South of Elfrida by Holley Rubinsky

ruthless, a quality he lacks in his poetry. His poetry tends to lie down, take a meandering view, nothing ball-breaking or cruel or overwrought, as her words are. He reads the note again. Okay, he’d made a few honest observations about her character. The day after Tombstone and The Copper Queen, they’d driven down to Nogales and parked at McDonald’s and walked into Mexico, despite the drug wars. Stefan was prattling, nervous. She insisted the restaurant she’d chosen was worth the risk. They’d been seated behind a pillar and she complained until they were reseated, after which the vindictive waiter ignored them. The tortillas were from a package, and the whole day was a bust. His telling her she was demanding was like canned frosting on a crumbling cake.
    Traffic is building up; an ambulance, siren sounding delirious, honks and butts its way through. The sky used to be blue, but now the smog is as bad as LA . He places the note and the folded cheque on the table. The cheque is evidence that at last some attention has been paid to his long-suffering friendship.
    The ambulance has made it to an off-ramp. He hates this apartment. The building is so shoddily constructed, the walls are so thin, that he can hear the refrigerator door slam in the apartment above his. He wanders over to look into his own fridge. A head of organic cauliflower he paid too much for still looks okay. He’d bought it because he was worried about not consuming enough fibre. She’d phoned to read him a recipe for cauliflower and sweet-potato soup. Chicken broth and something else. Was it coconut milk?
    He thinks it was coconut milk. But he’ll give her a call. She loves being helpful; she’s easily flattered and eager to share. As he reaches for the phone, a thought nags him: She wouldn’t really banish him, would she? No, he assures himself, no. She’s too loyal. Especially to her suffering.

Coyote Moon

    One time—it happened in October, two and a half years ago—Lee saved a rooster’s life. The rooster was a bantam called Cuthbert, named after an Anglo-Saxon saint. Lee’s husband, Gregory, was into saints and chickens. Cuthbert lived with his two hens, Irma and Matilda, in a small coop at the bottom of the unfenced yard, below Lee and Gregory’s house in the mountains in the southeast corner of British Columbia. The coop was situated in the open area before the ground sloped and fell into a steep ravine that dropped farther to the creek.
    In saving Cuthbert’s life, Lee didn’t do anything daring like race to rescue him from a pack of dogs, she didn’t swat a vaguely cognizant yearling bear about to go against his fruit-eating nature (that summer had been hot and dry, and huckleberries were scarce), and she didn’t shoo the rooster off the road just as a logging truck went rumbling by. Lee’s saving of the rooster was quieter and, in its own way, dramatic. Gregory said it was miraculous.
    One night, a bear, perhaps desperate with hunger—it was, after all, late in the year and almost time for bears to hibernate—shuffled up from the ravine, sniffed the air and smelled the chickens huddled on their roost, and clawed at the door. Gregory had forgotten to latch it, so the bear shouldered its way inside and broke the roost. It mauled two of the chickens—Irma escaped, as usual—but Matilda and Cuthbert were left wrenched and crumpled on the straw floor. The bear then ate most of the bag of chicken feed and left its signature in the yard: a mound of scat full of plum pits.
    In the morning after Lee left for her teaching job at the school, Gregory went down, as he always did, to check on Cuthbert and the girls. He was shocked, he told Lee, to see the old wooden door off its hinges, the scatter of Cuthbert’s orange and black feathers, and both tiny, unmoving bodies. He barely glanced in before despair overtook him. He ran around the yard and up onto the