Free The Death of Small Creatures by Trisha Cull Page A

now. It’s like living in the gut of a ship.
    We moved in at the end of the summer. Our old apartment building across from the high school on Caddy Bay Road caught fire. We left our red walls behind.
    â€œYou have three days to move out,” the fire chief said, even though our place was relatively undamaged. But the smoke wreaked evil—the co-mingling of the natural and unnatural elements of those things that form the architecture of modern human co-habitation, of communal living—the scent of burnt wood and plastic mingling with paint and carpet, a hint of fried electrical wires and a subtle undercurrent of fibreglass, all those sloughed-off skin cells, all the hair from everyone’s hairbrushes, maybe even asbestos.
    It was the plumber welding pipes in the wall behind the bathroom sink in 304 who did it, the spark from the plumber’s blowtorch. The plumber did it to us.
    This is what communal living smells like up in flames—a post-mortem of human decay and industry, capitalism up in smoke. I couldn’t help but think we deserved this, because the scent of a house fire is like a warning. It smoulders. It shrugs. It whispers from the ashes,
It isn’t natural to live this way
.
    Only one soul—a cat—died in the fire.

    Going back many hundreds of years, every woman had the right to propose to a man on February 29, the leap year, the day considered to have no recognition in English law, thus the day was leapt over and ignored, hence the term leap year. It was considered to have no legal status, therefore, neither the day nor tradition had legal status. A woman would consequently take advantage of this day beyond tradition and propose to the man she wished to marry.
    The waiter brings us our skate wing. I look down upon it, note its shape, its ravaged capacity for deft motion through water, its other wing amputated, perhaps lying over there on Leigh’s plate, the other wing, the other half. Are we dining on the same animal ripped in half? I cannot help but feel a sense of travesty.
    Oh, where’s the severed capacity for flight?
    The ocean is so far away.

    I’m standing on the deck, staring at the moon.
    I smell herbs from the garden. The boys, the three young chefs living in the suite below, keep an herb garden in the yard, along with three potted tomato plants, so the air holds the tang of fresh basil and mint, combined with the hearty sweetness of the tomatoes. Morning glory has twirled up the trellis, and the white blossoms have pursed shut into little funnels reaching into the darkness.
    The sky is so black and starry. Nothing is in the way. Nothing stands between me and
it
, whatever
it
is, that thing that compels us into action. And I don’t mean perseverance but rather something more in line with necessity, to live despite ourselves, the surge of being.
    I feel it in the hard times more than in the joyous times. It feels like a hard, round object the size of a golf ball moving down my throat, then taking up residence in the hollow region of the guts, as if we come with an empty space inside us in order to harbour the pain of existence.
    My heart contracts.

    Halloween last year:
    Here’s a dilapidated jack-o-lantern sitting out on the deck in the rain. The Modigliani portrait of the beautiful woman with an elongated nose gazes at me knowingly from the corner of the living room. The flames in the gas fireplace lick the glass panel that separates the open flame from the world. The glass panel gets dangerously hot.
    I have warned Leigh’s children to be careful. “Watch the glass. Don’t sit so close.” I have never had to warn the oldest boy because he seems to have acquired in his small-for-his-age delicate body an evolved understanding of a three-dimensional universe, how we fit, what precautions must be taken in order to come out of it all in one piece. I sense this in the way he reads diligently, hair tussled, always curved into the process