Test

Picture this: a cord hangs from the arena ceiling. At the end of the cord is a metal loop, and all around the loop is my sister’s hair. The method by which her hair is attached to it, is a family secret. To an audience, it looks loose and accidental but underneath it’s plaited super tight, in a closely-guarded sequence of knots and twists that take nearly two hours to put in. I know, I’ve done it. 

When I was twenty-one, I ran away. Into the chaos. Entropy found me one evening, outside in a pub-garden in late December. The winter rain was horizontal and the wool of my tights baggy and sodden on my shins. I had, for weeks, been nursing a rabid and teeth-grinding mercilessness.

We spent those days long hot and bright wading through the tall grass out the back of the house. Swimming through it as if it were an ocean and we were happily adrift. Or we edged around the verdant slime lining the pathetic trickle of the beck and followed the line of it right up to the new estate and back again.

I was abducted by aliens on the 4th July. I was crossing my backyard as it happened, texting Bilal. It was all crack and glitter overhead. And then, I was lying on the other side of the yard by the gate. Damp soil in my mouth. The text I never finished was just an empty bubble on the screen.

After you admitted your fear of ketchup, the perverse side of me went to Dépanneur Ultra and bought a family pack of ketchup chips. You have to be raised in this country to desire those lurid furrows of salt, stained deeper than other flavours, so you know where to lick. I am a hummingbird this way, drawn to red crannies you needle your tongue into. That was not meant to be a sexual advance, though you’ll probably read it that way. The perverse side of me is called, “Délphine,” by the way.

Fact. Bears can swim. Indeed, bears are excellent swimmers. Legend. The Ojibwa tribe native to America’s Great Lakes tells of Mishe Mokwa, a mother bear who lived with her two cubs on land that’s now Wisconsin. One day, the bears’ forest caught fire: a raging blaze that drove them to land’s edge, where woods meet water.