Read Online The Selected Short Fiction of Lisa Moore by Jane Urquhart, Lisa Moore - Free Book Online

she’ll kill me tonight, I can’t get away from her. If she was a man I would have done something, I wouldn’t have put up with it. But it’s taken my mother so long to understand. How could I tell them?”
    The breeze blows gently through the window. It is the sunniest day we’ve had in a long time. You can hear some of the music from the Canada Day celebrations. I ask about the cops.
    â€œI was sitting on the front step and the glass showered down on top of me and I said by Jesus that’s the last time she’ll break a window in my house. When Tom, my neighbour, came through the door, I was in the process, I was proceeding to kill her. I said, Tom, call the cops, please. They came in and arrested her.”
    Somebody knocks on the door. Maureen crumples.
    â€œPlease don’t let anyone in.”
    I walk out over the glass. A man is standing outside. He says, “I’m with the CBC. Can you tell us what happened here? We heard someone was arrested.”
    I say, “Well, it’s pretty insensitive to come around here right now, isn’t it?”
    He says, “We don’t know what happened, that’s all.”
    I say, “Nobody here’s going to tell you.” It strikes me how absurd it is to speak to him through the broken window without opening the door. Down the street, a man is pointing a camera at us.
    Then Maureen and I drink the tea. We sit in silence until the phone rings. It’s Mike. He asks if everything is okay. He says he is going to order the kids a pizza. I say that sounds good. I tell Maureen Jill can sleep at our house. We get a broom and start to clean up. Maureen hauls out a big sheet of plastic she has for sealing broken windows.
    When I get home, Joan is dressed in Mike’s tuxedo. She hasn’t heard anything about the incident on the street and is dressed to go to the strip joint. I expect the dancers to be ugly in some way, but they have beautiful bodies. They dance on a raised stage and the bottom of it is covered with mirror. I have never been in this bar before. They have ultra-violet lighting that seems to erase everything in the room except whiteness. The women wear white G-strings so their crotches glow as if they are floating. There’s a man in a dark suit and tie sitting atthe table in front of me. I glance up and see him in the mirrors around the bottom of the stage. The mirrors reflect him from the neck down; his head is above stage level. His white collar is glowing, sharply cut. At first glance, it looks like a headless body. I watch his hand in the mirror, lifting his Scotch and aiming it at the empty neck of his shirt.
    Joan and I are loaded, walking home past the Anglican cathedral. She starts to cry. I never hug people. I’m not a very physical person. But I hug her suddenly. I draw her body into mine and I grab her hair in my fingers. It shocks me when I realize I have a fistful of her hair in my hand and it is the exact texture of my husband’s. She’s wearing one of my husband’s jackets over the tuxedo. The jacket is gold silk. It looks like a wedding band on him. It has started to rain on our way home, while Joan is crying. The rain falls in giant splotches on the quilted jacket, making it heavy and tarnished.

PURGATORY'S WILD KINGDOM
    J ulian is thinking about the woman and child he left in Newfoundland when he moved to Toronto. He’s remembering Olivia preparing him a sardine sandwich, the way she pressed the extra oil out of each sardine on a piece of paper towel. Then she cut the head and tail off, each sardine, until they were laid carefully on the bread. Her head was bent over the cutting board. Her blond hair slid from behind her ear. He could see the sun sawing on her gold necklace. The chain stuck on her skin in a twisty path that made him realize how hot it was in the apartment. She was wearing a flannel pajama top and nothing else, a coffee-coloured birthmark on her thigh,