Dead Flowers by Alex Laidlaw

Author:Alex Laidlaw
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Short fiction, Canadiana
ISBN: 9780889711457
Publisher: Harbour Publishing Co. Ltd.
Published: 2019-04-26T16:00:00+00:00

War Story

The baby woke us up around one, and my wife got out of bed with him because it was her turn. I think she nursed him, but I quickly fell asleep. The next thing I knew she was shaking my foot with a free hand, and I couldn’t quite make sense of what was happening. I looked at the clock and saw that more than an hour had passed, which meant she’d been up with him all this time, going room to room through the apartment, rocking him and singing to him, trying to keep him from crying, trying to get him to sleep. I got up and pulled on a shirt, found my jeans in a pile on the floor and put them on. At some point in the last two weeks I had learned that the only way to get the baby to sleep at a time like this, in the middle of the night, when every other recourse had failed, was to take him for a walk around the neighbourhood.

I stood at the top of the stairs, and with Henry in my arms, and without bending down, tried to shimmy a foot into my canvas shoe. My kitchen shoes were also by the door, and they were more comfortable and easier too to slip on, but being as they were coated underfoot with a layer of grease, they presented something of a hazard, something to be avoided while descending our stairs in the dark with a one-month old babe in my arms. As I stood there refusing to take a chance in those shoes, I gave myself a mental congratulations. After all, this was proof I was maturing. I was learning. I was being responsible.

We were still new to Montreal, having moved here in the winter while my wife had been pregnant. She hadn’t known that she was pregnant at the time. If she’d have known, we never would have moved, she never would have come. She hated Montreal and I respected her for that because she, I thought, was a rare kind of animal.

Everyone I’d ever met had been enamoured with the place, as I was too. The red brick, the iron stairs, particularly those in our neighbourhood, with balconies overhanging the street, and even trees locked into their little plots on the sidewalk—every little piece of it had me enthralled.

Out at two or three in the morning, it was calm and quiet. Being summer, it was warm. So warm that my son could be dressed in pajamas and I could walk with him simply cradled in my arms as if the city was ours, belonged to us, as if the world was our living room.

Up Saint-Philippe to Notre-Dame, past the tattoo parlours and the mattress stores, the marchés aux puces with their doors caged for the night. As usual, we walked past the Café Riviera and stopped and stood for a while. Through the big front windows we studied the pattern of shadows and light on the floor.

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