Moments of Release
Three fictions inspired by three images.
I
I ascertained, in my tenth year, that I had been raised by a foreign species. They wore clean clothes and smiled with their teeth, but beneath the surface they were primitive creatures, whose purpose was to light trivial things on fire so they could furiously stomp them out. The fire that was this ski trip started with a stomp-off between Mom and Dad over booking a vacation that promised “zero relaxation”—as if either knew how to relax by a pool, or a beach. They’d spent a full week smouldering over the snow report, only to wake this morning to surprise powder and redirect the flamethrower at our sleeping bodies, infiltrating the kids’ room, raving about lift lines, stripping sheets and assembling sandwiches and stuffing feet into boots whose stiffness they’d whine about for the rest of the day.
The inferno was tempered for a few hours thanks to first tracks and blue skies and the Fireball cracked open at noon. I could feel its presence re-kindling, later that night, in the pace they sucked down their drinks, in Auntie and Uncle’s tongue-kissing in the hot tub, in the snarl of my father to GET BACK HERE when the kids, freaked out by the kissing, leapt onto the pool deck to launch snowballs at the teenagers loitering outside the property fence. Their return fire forced us to take shelter under the waterslide—but now the beacons were lit. Our parents vacated the tub, cursing at the cold as they ascended the icy staircase to the waterslide platform, where they had a clear line of fire over the fence.
RELEASE THE TREBUCHETS, I yelled, as we built snowballs under the slide and lobbed them up to our parents. I had just seen Return of the King and this was Minas Tirith, with orcs swarming the walls. Only I might’ve mistaken who was Orc and who was Man. A glimpse of Dad with a devilish grin before unloading his fury into a throw that tore his rotator cuff, as we would discover the next morning. A yelp as my uncle tagged a teenager squarely, and cruelly, in the face. As our frozen skin tingled back in the tub, after the teenagers had fled, I noted the glares from the mothers at the fathers; they had revealed too much of the creatures beneath, now the kids would know for sure.
Back at school, I posed my Species hypothesis to my favourite teachers. Mr. Savoie from Science class frowned and pointed at the anatomy board. Homo sapiens we are, he said, like Yoda—regardless of age, ethnicity, sex. Mrs. Cameron from English perked up at the question, gesturing at the book on my desk with a wry smile. A theme we’ll cover soon, she said. I take it you’ve read ahead. I nodded back as if I had, indeed, absorbed a single sentence from Bridge to Terabithia. They were aliens, too, these teachers. I was relieved to be part of a species that needn’t smother their instincts with whisky and weather reports, nor pretend that books and diagrams held a single truth about the world.
II
Doing pull-ups at the outdoor gym beside the high school, trading sets with a disheveled man who’d already crushed three Labatt 50s during his workout, which mostly consisted of dangling from the bar with a wet cigarette between his lips. I’ve always had a soft spot for this place. The motley crew of muscular bodies, goth kids by the bleachers, speakers fighting for air space, and chatty throngs of middle-aged women speed-walking the track, contained a social fabric that made me sorry for my hours spent in a mirror-lined room, wearing noise-cancelling headphones and clean sneakers, pursuing a vanity project that mattered to no one. Here it felt, however marginally, that I was participating in the world. The school’s clock tower loomed over the track, reporting the same hour it had all summer. Here was the worst school in the inner city, according to the Toronto District School Board; a ranking that seemed unworthy of the dialogue occurring between its stately façade and the neighbourhood, best embodied by the woman twerking against a soccer net to a blaring Missy Elliott track, her ass pointed at the unfazed monument.
A family approached as I finished a set, two parents trailed by six children. The mother wearing a headscarf and the father a flowing tunic. I dragged over a tire for one of the kids to grab the bar. His siblings tried to yank him down as he clung on, kicking at their flailing arms. The father asked, with a thick accent—perhaps North African—for directions to the “maple school”. I pointed at the building. That’s the one. He stared at it with his mouth open. The bar-wielding kid dropped to the ground.
No, no—the school, the high school, said the mother. That IS the school. I pointed at the engraving over the entrance. A brief silence as she whispered a prayer, then started to sob. The kids, chattering in Arabic, swarmed around the tallest boy who remained frozen, gaping. The father also stuck on an island, before shaking his head and wrapping an arm around his wife.
They continued hugging, laughing. I wished they might stay there a while, on that happy side of the struggle. My prayer was answered by a lady who’d been circling the school, arguing with its walls, as she smashed her bottle against it with a guttural, blood-curling scream. The family flinched, the parents’ spines stiffened. I went for another round of pull-ups.
III
Because I was a grown-up now, with my own life, and parameters, I resisted settling seamlessly back into my childhood bedroom. The crisp sheets, folded towels, and first sleeps on a mattress that once had my contours memorized did not deter me from telling anyone who would listen about my feeling “boxed-in”. A feeling exacerbated by the literal boxes everywhere: in my old closet, in random corners, in every shelf of the garage. I announced to my parents, on the first night, that I was spearheading a decluttering project. Each day we’ll pick a room to attack. We’ll be ruthless. I framed the activity as being for them.
Like last year and the year before, the project stalled. I watched memories light up my dad’s face as he flipped through old CDs, bickered with my mom over the tackiness of that ornamental plate, and conceded the battles on both fronts. My hopes of proving myself as a man who takes charge of things outside these walls quickly faded. I emerged from the depths of a month-long adolescent regression by way of a return flight notification, wearing my father’s sweatsuit, feeling blobby and indolent, having blissfully forgotten the routines and rituals that propel my real life, in that other place.
On the evening before my flight, I came home tipsy, 3am, banging pots against the stove and slamming the fridge door while preparing a snack. I used to do this as a teenager; an inadvertent, drunken signal to my parents that I’d survived the night. On this occasion, I imagined the sounds stirring them into a cozy half-dream in which I never left—where the friction of our co-existence became the norm and they had to encourage me to seek the world rather than my flocking to it impatiently. I lost track of my limbs, amid this hallucination, and elbowed the cast-iron to the floor. A heavy thud, a dent in the hardwood. A failed performance under the spotlight of the kitchen stove, a turd of Beyond Meat burger smushed against my sock. A glimpse of loneliness quickly undone by a lamp flicking on upstairs, the hurried footsteps of two bodies descending.
