Maybe Patty Osborne, who reviewed Canada in the Rough (Geist 62), should visit a slaughterhouse and take lots of pictures of how they kill the animals she eats. The farmer’s little calf, raised by a child and now maybe has grown to an adult with the big brown eyes, paraded into a room and shot in the head with a ramset a couple of times before it goes down.
We have men on the slope and men on the ridge. In the gully, more men. Men on the main road wait for the men on the esker to move up onto the ridge so that they (the men on the road) can take their (the esker-men’s) place. Men hesitate and grumble. The valley is all men. Men, men, men.
A man I haven’t thought of for nearly thirty years became a smoker of five-cent cigars during the war, and when the war was over he became a despiser of nincompoops and began taking his whisky from a pocket flask engraved with a tiny laurel wreath.
When Malcolm Lowry’s shack on the beach at Dollarton, B.C., burned to the ground in 1944, he and his wife Marjorie were able to save the manuscript of only one of the novels that he was working on at the time. A few months later the same manuscript had to be rescued again when the house that friends found for them in Oakville, Ontario, also burned to the ground.
The Strongest Man in the World liked to set his folding lawn chair out on the asphalt next to his gold Cadillac and stretch out in the sun with dark glasses on his nose and a two-litre carton of milk in one hand.
You could see nothing through the window until a tapping began at the glass, a grey leafless branch, and you wondered what makes someone sit at a window table when it’s dark outside. You had to ask for another glass of water, yours was filled with hair. While you waited you didn’t know what to do with yourself. The shag carpet was green. You were looking at the dirt under your nails when you heard conversation from the next table over, something about a man’s ears. You took a drink from your new glass and were surprised to find it was orange juice, not water at all. When you called this to the waitress’s attention, she apologized sweetly but said it would be good for you, and you noticed for the first time that her necklace held a gold pendant that said Eat Shit.
