From Crow. Published by Goose Lane Editions in 2019. Amy Spurway was born and raised on Cape Breton. Her writing has been published in Babble, Elephant Journal, Today’s Parent and the Toronto Star.

From the kitchen window, all I can see is the suffocating snarl of Mama’s rambling rose bush, a yellowing sea of overgrown grass, and the skeletons of spruce trees that have seen better days. It didn’t used to be like this. This land used to feel spacious and green and alive. But just like the inside of the trailer, the outside has morphed into a jumbled mess of things that should have been pruned, pulled, and purged a long time ago. Part of me feels compelled to feng shui the fuck out of this grubby little shack and start planning a landscaping makeover that I’ll probably never get to enjoy, but that Mama will appreciate. Instead, I’m going to slash a path through the overgrown grass, find the old bonfire pit, and start burning stuff. Tree branches. Newspapers. Memories. She’s all going up in flames tonight.

It takes me three hours, six minor injuries, and four hundred and fifty-eight curse words, but I do it. I find the old bonfire pit and yank away the tired, tangled vegetation that had swallowed the circle of hefty beach rocks. I lug a dead tree from a corner of the backwoods, and set it beside a pile of newspaper lugged from the corners of the living room. I tuck a wad of ancient dryer lint and yellowed grass inside a little stick teepee in the centre of the stone circle. Spray it with twenty-year-old hairspray, just for fun. I gently cradle Mama’s Zippo lighter in the palm of my hand. With the sun just beginning to set and Mama working the night shift, I’ll have myself a merry little bonfire here. The first one since the summer I left. No s’mores and weenie roasting, but I’ve got a 1995 Shiraz that I bought at the snotty Toronto sommelier thing one of my Tinder conquests dragged me to, just days before Tumourpocalypse. I’m sure it will taste deliciously ironic when I slug it straight from the bottle in front of my Cape Breton backwoods junk fire.

I flick the Zippo and stoop, holding the flame to the lint ball until it ignites, then coax it along with a gentle stream of breath until a car comes barrelling up the driveway. A tinted-windowed Mustang blasting some schlock rock song, probably in an attempt to drown out the car’s multiple rumbles of age and failure. It’s Peggy, driving one of “The Twins,” which is what she proudly calls the couple of crappy “classic” cars she took from Skroink in their divorce.

Except it’s not Peggy.

The woman emerging from the driver’s side is skeletally thin. Or at least, most of her is. Other parts seem to be outlandishly large. Her tiny, deeply bronzed frame is tightly wrapped in a lime-green sarong, which can’t contain her wildly gigantic boobs. Big, round, leopard print-framed sunglasses crouch precariously on the tip of her elfin nose. Her twig-thin wrists and neck are weighted with layer upon layer of enormous red, yellow, and blue wooden beads, while on her head, dozens of thick platinum dreadlocks spring from beneath a zebra-print scarf.

Tendrils of blue smoke curl from the outrageously large blunt she sparks as she ambles across the yard toward me. I almost don’t notice a spell of the squirrelly vision coming on. At first, I mistake the mirage of lights and colours for shades of sunset in the sky. Mama and I used to play a game at sunset and sunrise, where we’d each have to pick a colour from the ones we saw arching and flaring along the horizon. My eyes always found the patches where the cool blue of the ether met the warm glow of the sun, creating streaks of baby blue and bright pink tinged with wisps of an otherworldly violet. My brain has now plucked from my memory and conjured around this woman the impossibly real shade of sky-blue pink, which moves with her like a peacock’s trippy plumage as she prances toward me on stupidly high platform sandals.

“F’eyed known there was a bomb fire, ida brung some bleedin’ marchmellows.”

It’s Char.

Behind the giant glasses, beneath the platinum blonde dreadlocks and oversized bangles, and through a very bizarre and very fake quasi-British accent, it is Char. Because nobody else calls them bomb fires. Or marchmellows. The grammar though, that’s Mr. Hillier’s fault. He taught a whole generation of kids from Down North that it was “bring, brang, and brung.”

“Bollocks! Hang on!” Char shrieks in my ear just as her twiggy arms coil around me in a hug. Mashing out the cherry of her mega-joint on the heel of her clunky shoe and stuffing the remainder into a fold of the zebra scarf, she boings back to the car, jettisons the driver’s seat forward and wriggles into the back. When she emerges moments later, she’s got one tit hanging out the top of her shrink-wrap sarong. Latched on to that tit is a tiny, squirming, naked baby. A tiny, squirming, naked, deep-brown-skinned baby with a giant orange afro.

She sashays back over to the firepit and smoothly drops into a cross-legged seat on the grass without even jostling the now still and peacefully feeding baby boy.

“Char, where’d the… is that your… you had a baby?”

“Got him down the Congo.” She shrugs. “Those African tribeswomen, they don’t care. They’ve got more babies than they know what to do with. Better me snatching the little fart than a bloody tiger, or him dying of ammonia.”

“The Congo… you just took him? And came home?” I blink, still attempting to process.

Char’s oddly coiffed head pivots back on her pencil thin neck and she howls with laughter. The baby doesn’t flinch. A tiny trickle of bluish breast milk dribbles from the corner of his soft mouth.

“Jesus, Crow, ya dumb ass! Of course he’s mine. How else would I get these giant milk-bag knockers he’s slurpin’ on? Usually, I tell people I stole him first and then whip out the tit, just to see the looks on their faces, but the little bugger was starving. God, you’re some gall-able.”