Free Blasted by Kate Story Page A

going to return the uniform. And the red shoes. I want to get the clothes I left there. The T-shirt smells like fucking curry .” He opened my door. “Do you like curry, Earl?”
    â€œI have an intestinal condition. I can’t eat spicy foods.”
    I was seeing two Earls now. I walked into my apartment, then turned back to them. “Earls,” I said, sniggering at my own wit, “Do you ever get lonely?”
    The two Earls merged into one, his mouth slightly open, a surprised and eager flush on his sallow cheeks. “Lonely?” He took a step toward me.
    â€œMe, too,” I said, and shut the door in his face.

CHAPTER 6

    After seeing her up on the Hill, I couldn’t shake my obsession with Shanawdithit. Even the costume fiasco and monument vandalism didn’t dent it. I clung to the thought of her like a drowning man to a life raft, wrapped my heart around the thought of her. I developed a ritual meant to summon her. I’d start by braiding my hair, two braids to show how sister-like I was. Then I’d take off one shoe and hop counter-clockwise in a circle so big that, when I was done, I could lie down within its circumference. I’d lie there, limbs spread out like a starfish, close my eyes, and say her name. Three times I’d say it: Shanawdithit, Shanawdithit, Shanawdithit, come. Then I’d force every last bit of air out of my lungs and hold until sparks danced under my eyelids and I felt like I was going to pass out. At last I’d suck air and sit up fast, eyes flying open. This time she’d be there, and I’d see her again.
    The morning after my encounter with Earl, I awoke fully clothed on my back in the middle of the floor, spread out like a starfish, like I was ten years old. Sun baked me, and the ceiling whirled; my head and body ached. Not like when I was ten. I rolled over and began crawling toward my bed.
    Once, I’d enacted the ritual in my bedroom and sat up to see my own reflection in the glass – eyes wide and wild. It made my heart leap – in fear or joy I couldn’t tell – for one long moment, until I realized what I was seeing and lay back down again with a groan. Sometimes I wondered if I’d ever see her again. Sometimes I wondered if it was right to pull on a dead person so much. But I couldn’t stop wishing.
    It was taking me an awfully long time to crawl down the hall to my mattress. What day was it? Monday, I thought. At last I gained the mattress,sour in the heat. I pawed at my clothes until I succeeded in getting naked, and spent the rest of the day collapsed there, semi-conscious.
    The spring I turned twelve my parents gave me a copy of The Beothucks or Red Indians: The Aboriginal Inhabitants of Newfoundland . Almost a hundred years after Shanawdithit died, James Howley had collected every scrap of writing about the Beothuks – letters, reports, newspaper articles, journal entries, the works – and compiled a fat book. It was all a bit much for a twelve-year-old but I drank it in. Again and again I looked at the reproductions of drawings that Shanawdithit had made. She’d drawn them for the man Cormack who took care of her for a while. Symbols, boats, mamateeks and houses, people. She drew events: the catastrophic last encounters between the remnants of her people and the whites who tried, too late, to contact them with friendly intention. The notes said that she drew her people in red lead, the whites in black ink. I had to imagine the red lead because the book didn’t have any colour plates. People of the Red Ochre, they covered themselves in it, their babies, it was who they were. I read about consumption, knowing it meant tuberculosis, although inevitably in my mind it evoked the sterile sweep of a shopping mall. I read with longing and wonder – back then, you could have walked into the woods and actually have seen them – they were really there. One military man, Buchan, wrote