A Complicated Kindness by Miriam Toews

Author:Miriam Toews
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780307371157
Publisher: Knopf Canada
Published: 2008-01-07T16:00:00+00:00

In the morning I watched dust enter my room through a crack in my blind. No, I heard my sister saying, that dust has always been there. It’s the sunlight that illuminates it. I checked myself for bite marks. I wondered what it meant to bite yourself in your sleep. Would I soon begin to tear out clumps of hair? Would I be able to kill myself eventually without realizing it?

My dad and I used to dust with Lemon Pledge but when it ran out we stopped, although we talked about it a couple of times. Some pledge, my dad had said and I gave him credit for being funny intentionally.

Ray had already left for school. He had put his coffee cup on the counter, on top of the plate he’d used for his toast. I put them into the dishwasher and then I looked into the fridge to see if there was anything to make for supper. There was a knock on the door and I went over and opened it and the neighbour girl was standing there wearing her bathing suit and rubber boots.

Hello, I said, I have to go to school.

Can you play charades with me? she asked.

I said no, I didn’t have time, but she looked so sad and forlorn and kept saying please over and over so I said fine, quickly. I stepped outside and sat on the front step and she sat down in the grass.

Start, I said, hurry up. I’ll guess.

She didn’t move.

Are you doing it? I asked. She nodded.

Are you a…weird little kid? She shook her head.

Hmmmm, I said. Hang on. I went into the house and got my smokes and sat back down on the step and lit one up and said are you a rock? She shook her head. She was just sitting there in a vaguely square shape. God, I said. I blew smoke rings at her. Can’t you do some kind of action? She shook her head and started to giggle. Are you a book? I asked. She shook her head again. A fridge? She shook her head. Okay, forget it, I don’t know and I have to go to school now, I said. I threw my butt into the grass and went into the house and slammed the door.

Three seconds later she knocked again and I opened it and she told me she had been a Shreddie. Okay, I said, I’ll pour some milk over you and eat you, and she screamed and ran away. I thought probably I would not be a very good mother to Roy Orbison and Nova.

On the way to school I stopped to watch a group of twelve-or thirteen-year-old boys throw rocks into a new abattoir being built next to the junior high school on the other side of the highway. There was a twenty-foot wall of concrete cinder blocks around it and every day it got higher and higher, but the men were working from the inside so you couldn’t actually see them.

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