In the Land of Birdfishes Read Online Free PDF Page A

IT COME into the room when he stopped loving me. Like it was something sitting between us. Like it was eating with us at the table. Touching me in bed at night. His not loving me. It felt like something we’d overlooked when we renovated the house. A ghost we’d just discovered.
    First it was something that belonged to the house, that hung around the furniture. I’d open a drawer and find it rolling around with the plastic forks, the twine, the clatter of pills in their bottles, the saved stubs of emergency candles that one night had burned for hours, the keys to the locked doors of homes and cars we no longer owned. And then, after a while, I could no longer shake the feeling that when I put dinner on the table there were two of them there raising a fork. Stephan and this shadow. The ghost, I thought, maybe, of us as we’d been before. Unable to depart from the thing we’d become.
    Because there was nothing to be done, I did nothing. But at night, I complained to the thing that was happening to us like it had ears to hear me. The thin skin below my left eye started twitching. I had loved him since even that thin skin around my eyes was smooth and perfect.
    He looked at me like I was a threat to him.
    When I was a child, there was a couple down the road who’d come across the border when the war began. They were young and wore weird, bright clothes. The husband built boats. I loved sitting beside him when he worked, smelling the wood smell of the shop. Sometimes he’d let me sand the boards with the last, finest piece of sandpaper, when the wood had become, after several stages of him bent over it, pushing and drawing different grains of sandpaper back and forth, like velvet. Soft as skin. When Stephan first took work as a carpenter, it was like love had a floor and it had opened up and I’d fallen down a whole other storey in love. He brought that smell, of built and mended things of wood, into our home. We lived in the North End of Halifax then, and together we tore out walls, replaced windows, hammered together a breakfast nook and built-in shelves. Some mornings, I’d get up before him when the sun was still low and pad around the dim house, turning the lights on in every room, pretending to be a stranger looking at our life, and feeling so lucky it frightened me.
    He’d never done roofing before. He was helping out a friend.
    He was supposed to build walls. He was meant to build floors. Foundations. Frames.
    It was a simple thing to happen with a complicated end. The way it’s easy to lose your footing and difficult to step from a roof out into air. The way falling is easy and landing is considerably more complex.
    Sometimes I think of what he must have looked like on the ground. He could have been anybody, just someone else’s husband or friend, broken. I picture myself standing there with him at my feet and I say, “Is that supposed to be surprising, amI meant to look at this
body
and think, Who’d have thought a person could become garbage so easy and so fast?” If I’d been there, I’d have been able to stop loving him. Ha. I’d have said, “You think I wasn’t expecting this?” And I’d sleep at night because there’d be nothing but dark around me and not him, falling, hitting the ground again and again.
    They thought he’d die—they told me, “Be ready for him to die,” and I said, “Be ready for my lawyer.” But he didn’t die. He didn’t die, and if something like that happens, you start to think maybe you were wrong about everything. You think something awfully damn good has reached down and put its big ole finger on your head and said, “Go on, get out of here, I spare you.”
    He got better.
    And then he got headaches.
    And then he got moods like he wasn’t even in that broken head of his anymore. He was defensive. He was distant. He went somewhere far, far away. And he just never came back.
    I went to the doctor and I said, “When I touch him he flinches.” The doctor said