Free Kiss of the Fur Queen by Tomson Highway

semi-darkness, the moon, playing her usual tricks on glassy surfaces, made the Fur Queen wink. Nonplussed, the priest replaced the photo on the pillow and slinked down an aisle towards the door, as another cloud broke the moon’s silvery spell and enfolded him once more in darkness.

E IGHT
    O n a stage festooned with white crêpe-paper bells, large red satin bows, and deep red velvet curtains, Gabriel Okimasis was dancing. His little feet were kicking dust, his cowboy hat was bouncing up and down and would surely have flown right off his head if it hadn’t been for the string under his chin, the white satin tassels on his red cowboy shirt were swinging left and right and back again. A six-year-old square-dance caller standing on a low wooden box called “Do-si-do and swing your partner round and round, promenade!” to the rhythm of Jeremiah’s festive, jiggly piano music The eight miniature cowboys and cowgirls did exactly that.
    “À la main
left,” the caller shouted, and Gabriel swivelled to the left, grabbed the right hand of his partner, who grabbed the next male dancer’s left as Gabriel moved on to the next female dancer’s left hand. And so it went until the circle was completed and Gabriel had returned to Carmelita Moose.Gabriel was so happy he wanted to grab Carmelita Moose and twirl her over his shoulder until she saw stars, but the choreography did not call for such elaborate moves. Instead, the dancers formed circles, squares, spinning wheels, and daisy chains. Their rhythm was so infectious, their enthusiasm so irresistible, that the audience tapped their feet and clapped in time.
    Gabriel beamed with pleasure and once, in the middle of a turn and tap-tippity-tap of the feet that required particular panache, winked down to the place where, on the bare floor of the boy’s gymnasium, beside a Christmas tree as tall as a house, Jeremiah sat, playing the piano as if he had been born for that sole purpose. In a crisp white shirt, perky black bow tie, and sleek black dress pants, his back as straight as a paddle, Jeremiah was banging out “Maple Sugar” in a way that would have made Abraham Okimasis’s chest puff out with pride, had he been there.
    But he wasn’t, and neither was Mariesis. Nor was any other parent of these dancing children among the two hundred in their audience. The front row of seats was occupied by twelve nuns, two brothers, and two priests. The hawk-nosed, owl-eyed Sister Saint-Felix beamed like a car light at the keyboard-pounding Jeremiah Okimasis, who, she crowed every chance she got, was her best student in a fifty-year career tortured by one crushing disappointment after another. As Gabriel Okimasis bounded past centre stage, the principal followed the dancing form until it disappeared into the wings. The curtains closed and applause resounded.Father Lafleur sat still for a moment, then clapped three slow thoughtful claps.
    The fingernail of a giant index finger, a crescent moon hung in the sky, pointing into uncurtained windows to reveal sleeping children, row on row on row: white bedspreads, white sheets, white pillowcases, the hair on small dark heads grown to fluffy black brushcuts.
    A sliver of light flashed once from the dark recesses of the room. It could have been a firefly except that this was mid-December. Other than the soft rhythm of children purring in their slumber, there was only the sound of cloth brushing against cloth, stopping briefly and then swishing on. The firefly reappeared and disappeared again as it approached the row where the dreaming Gabriel Okimasis was furiously engaged in a do-si-do made particularly complicated because his partner, Carmelita Moose, kept floating up, balloon-like, so that, while his feet were negotiating quick little circles, his arms had to keep Carmelita Moose earthbound. The undisputed fact was that Gabriel Okimasis’s little body was moving up and down, up and down, producing, in the crux of his being, a sensation so