Written in Stone by Peter Unwin

Author:Peter Unwin [Unwin, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BISAC: FIC019000 FICTION / Literary FIC077000 FICTION / Nature & the Environment FIC014000 FICTION / Historical / General
Publisher: Cormorant Books Inc.
Published: 2020-10-17T00:00:00+00:00

19

WHO ARE YOU?

“Tolerant to Black Rot and Downey Mildew, the Arcadia broccoli is one of North America’s finest stress tolerant hybrids, and provides impressive yields with good dark green colour and outstanding side shoot development….”

BETWEEN THE BLACK ROT AND the development of side shoots the Holderlich’s cat came through an open window and gave her a rather chilling look before slinking out of the room. Apparently, she didn’t cut it. She no longer made the grade. There was no other audience, just mirrors on the walls of the rooms and a critical cat. The page proofs glared at her. She pushed them aside, stood up, and just as suddenly sat down.

Unlike the Arcadia broccoli, she felt herself intolerant to Black Rot and Downey Mildew. She felt Black Rot and Downey Mildew had infested the airwaves and the lint in the carpet, that she herself was a breeding ground for both of them. She was alone in a house with a growing residue of mildew, black rot, and a streetwise cat that didn’t belong to her. There was no audience. No children. There had been a cone biopsy, a second one performed in a white room in a hospital downtown. It came back to her very suddenly. Mostly she was unconscious. Squamous Dysplasia. The drugs came on and she’d thought that squamous dysplasia was located in British Columbia, and that she had gone there to hide from a bad relationship. The anesthetist possessed a bloodshot eye. The doctor had spoken to her. Please. This is very important, I need to tell you this. Are you clear? She was clear. Everything was clear.

To her husband her complications had been a much-longed-for get out of jail free card. During their journey home, after her release from hospital, he found it difficult not to skip through the streets beneath the white chestnut blossoms. To not look relieved was an effort. He largely viewed children as shrunken adults with little experience on the trail, deadly on a portage, and ignorant of carbon dating or geothermal physics. This did not stop children from adoring him, following him, and stalking him. To his alarm children and small animals routinely mistook him for a combination of Francis of Assisi and the ice cream man.

She closed her eyes and at that moment the doorbell gonged and she went to it automatically, like a sleepwalker. No one was there. A box sat on the porch. She did not have to sign for anything. She brought the box into the kitchen table and opened it. Fifty copies of a paperback issue of The Apocalypse Already; Rock Writing and the End of the World, by Paul Prescot. The book had been an irritant, a secretive little project that, for the first time, he did not desire her assistance on. It was barely more than a revised version of the “Legs That Walk by Themselves” chapter from Pictographs, Petroglyphs and Paradigms of the Apocalypse; a closer look at the rock painting site on Coldwell Peninsula.

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