Best Canadian Stories 2021 by Diane Schoemperlen

Author:Diane Schoemperlen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Biblioasis
Published: 2021-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

LADY WITH THE BIG HEAD CHRONICLE

Angélique Lalonde

1. Lady with the Big Head in the Garden

The lady with the big head is out there in the misty morning. Is she wearing a veil? What is she doing in my garden? The mist is sitting on the river, slightly spread over the land. I see the mountain beyond, and the lady with the big head stooped over my onions. Not like yesterday when the mist was so thick I wouldn’t have seen her if she were there.

Was she out there yesterday, picking calendula seeds to save for next season? She didn’t ask me if she could tend my garden while I am in the house doing other things. She’s never talked to me at all. She avoids me if I try to approach her, floating off into the mist or the memory of mist, then reappearing later doing different things in different places. I saw her digging at an anthill with the bear that has been hanging around our yard. She used a stick and the bear used her big broad paws.

The lady with the big head was helping the bear, or the bear was helping the lady with the big head, I’m not sure which. Either way they were digging up the anthill near the apple tree. I didn’t mind that. I had noticed the ants were in the sickly tree crawling all around and that probably was not a good sign, so maybe the lady with the big head and the bear were helping the apple tree too?

She might be taking some onions, or weeding, or eating slugs. I can’t tell exactly what she is doing because of the veil that hangs down from her big head over her body and drapes on the ground, hiding her movements. Also the light has not yet come, only a faint blueness and all that mist. I could offer her a hot tea but if I walk out there she’ll float away from me.

Later I’ll go look and see if she’s taken onions or left any knick-knacks. Once I found a golden spool of thread so strong, fine and shiny, I knew it was magical. The kind of thread that could be used to build spider webs that are always visible no matter the light. Visible but still translucent, an ephemeral quality of there and not quite there, only gold instead of silver. It might be what she makes her veil out of, or at least what she uses to mend the veil, because now that I think of it the veil is not golden, it’s more of a purple-grey shadow. Sometimes she has it pulled back and I can almost make out her features as she goes about doing things ladies with big heads do. She looks a little bit like me and a little bit like Rod Stewart, which is an odd mix for a lady. A couple of times I’ve glimpsed her looking like my dog, John Black, who died last winter.

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