jamieproctor.ca

She would’ve liked to have had it mailed, but the postal system flatly refused.
She would’ve liked to have had someone purchase it for her, but the local couriers wouldn’t do it and the idea of employing – even temporarily – someone who wouldn’t wear a uniform made her nose twitch. Paid in cash, even? Disgusting.
So Shelley drove a car down to town, downtown, and paid a certain specialist a certain sum of money off her credit like a civilized human, even if she had to carry the goods back in her own two hands.
Gingerly. Carefully. Even through the packaging, it was dangerous. She’d need to have someone clean the car afterwards.

At home she cut away the cords and the wrappers and the box and the padding and the second box and the airtight seal and lifted out her prize. Still fresh.
The durian was smaller than she’d expected, if slightly spikier. Its smell, however, was right on target.
Still, it wasn’t the smell she was there for.
Behind Shelley was a wall, and on that wall was a picture frame, and held captive in that cradle was an apple.
Beside that was a banana. To the left of THAT was a pineapple and so on and on and on from raspberries to pitaya to papaya to kiwis to kumquats.
There was an empty space at the end, at the bottom left. It needed something round and thorny that tasted like fine custard and stank like mustard gas. So Shelley sat at her easel, her canvas before her, the durian (on its own – no bowl, no lesser fruit) behind that, and she looked, and she looked, and she thought about art.
She thought about the curve of the brush, of the selection of the colour, of the blending of eye and hand together – one unmoving, the other never ceasing.
Then she shrugged her shoulders and stopped thinking and began to paint instead.

When you’re really concentrating you’re barely awake. Time and space go away, the body stops existing and the mind follows. All that’s left is motion.
Shelley sat in that state for a long beautiful moment and then sneezed.
God, the durian smelled. It smelled bad. Really bad. Worse than she’d thought. And that wasn’t even the problem, the problem was the PERSISTENCE. She wasn’t getting used to it. She couldn’t ignore it.
So she sealed it inside a plastic bag and sat down again and picked up her brush.
Time went away, space went away.
The body vanished and boy that reeked GODDAMNIT
Shelley got up and walked around the house and found a clothespin in a drawer she’d last opened about twenty years ago and slammed that thing shut on her nose.
She sat down with unnecessary force, hissed to herself, put time in her pocket and space in her wallet and counted to three and
Nope.

She put the durian in another room. It didn’t help.
She took a picture of the durian and painted from that. It didn’t help.
She moved to a different part of the house. It didn’t help.
She threw away her work, threw away her reference photos, threw out the durian, went to her summer cottage, found a picture of a durian on the internet with her tablet, and began to paint.
Five brushstrokes in she stopped and sniffed.
“Fuck.”
Then she leaned over, very carefully, and sniffed the canvas.
Her eyes watered.
“FUCK.”

She tried febreeze.
She tried lemon juice in water.
She tried lighting matches, then she tried burning candles, scented and unscented.
She tried sniffing garlic really hard to see if it was her imagination or if there was something else going on (it wasn’t her imagination, and the garlic smell didn’t last long).
She tried, in a fit of desperation, switching entirely to drawing in charcoal to trap the scent. It didn’t work either but it was a nice effect so she kept doing it, and all her durian attempts became black and white and various compromises of grey.
She was getting closer, Shelley suspected. Closer. It was fainter now. Yes, that was it. It was fainter. Just a little closer. Yes.

The next day she finished it.
She woke up and she finished it.
She woke up and finished it and had an extra-long breakfast and then had a long, long walk along her private beach and tried very hard not to cackle. That would be admitting a struggle had taken place, which was all too close to admitting a defeat.
That last corner in the bottom left was going to look AMAZING when it didn’t exist anymore.
Then she walked back in, and stopped, and felt that buzz in the air before she even inhaled and confirmed it.
Durian.

The stairs to her studio room were broad and generous but she still took them four at a time, fury lending her wings, and even moreso the reek in the room as she flung the door wide.
Oh god it stank. Like a whale carcass in the sun, like a wheel of limburger in a chemical toilet, like rotten flesh in a blender full of peach juice.
“I FIXED THAT!” she yelled at the canvas. Oh god how did it still look normal? How was it still just a charcoal sketch? How was it not oozing, dissolving under the stench?
So many questions it made her want to fall apart and scream until her head split open and there was a durian in there too. How? How? HOW?
But Shelley was an artist, and so she stopped doing that and let time and space fall away and raised her brush and made art happen. Pointy-end first.
It hissed, and then it all came out at once and no amount of matches could’ve done anything at all.

Shelley was still lying there when they found her four days later. The body reeked, but the rest of the house was as still and sterile as a doctor’s office.
Except for the canvas, which smelled a little like febreeze and lemons and charcoal. But in a nice way.

The paintings weren’t left to anyone in particular and were auctioned off by a distant cousin to raise funds for charity, which worked very well – the strangeness of the artist’s passing was still in the news, which helped drive the prices up.
The Portrait of Durian: Grey in particular went for over half a million.

Somewhere in the skies above Newyorkopolis soared Large Hero, the largest hero. His name filled the whole sky, and he perched on it and looked at everyone and everything they were doing and asked himself where they needed two hundred pounds of completely invincible muscle to charge through a wall and physically annihilate people.
He listened to them. He watched them. He was the best and most moral of all panopticons, up there in the big blue horizon, invisible and omnibenevolent.
And then he saw a sight that could not be condoned. A sight that filled him with more horror than he could possibly imagine.
Quick! Quick! Disaster must be prevented.
Large Hero dropped from the sky like a bird that had remembered it was a brick, leading with his fists – the most important and heroic parts of his body. There was something far worse than crime afoot.
Change.
Sure enough, there on the very steps of the courthouse, there stood a vile, ruthless mob, brandishing filthy and unlawful signs and shouting most uncivilized rhetoric. And among them, dead guilty, stood a super-heroic being, unmistakably in her willingness to wear brightly coloured quasi-spandex in public. She had caught several tear gas grenades and thrown them into the stratosphere.
“Stop right there!” shouted Large Hero. “Desist! Halt! Avaunt!”
“Never!” called the super-hero. “I am participating in public protest, rather than remaining aloof from it! I am a citizen and should act within society to change it for the better!”
“Have you lost your MIND?” demanded Large Hero, rhetorically. “Once you start doing this sort of thing, where will it END? Interference in normal society, violating the good, clean, righteous letter of the law…these sort of delusions can only end in violence and despair for you and all of the public you delude into following your deranged whims. You should stick to simple and wholesomely apolitical things, like extrajudicially beating up, electrocuting, and/or freezing solid people that steal money from banking institutions, unless they use suits instead of guns in which case you should begrudgingly protect them from all retribution.”
“Preposterous! Outdated!”
“In that case, why not concern yourself with foiling ultramaniacal mega-death schemes executed by mad geniuses, who seek mass death and obvious self-aggrandizement exceeding that which is deemed publically laudable? Sweep out the upstart riff-raff, thwart the unseemly, revel in the applause of all as you protect and serve the rightful and unending order of things.”
“This seems morally dubious,” said the super-hero.
“THIS ENDS NOW,” hollered Large Hero, and he punched the super-hero and they went into a very long and extremely epic fight scene that destroyed lots of buildings and vehicles yet conspicuously avoided showing direct physical harm coming to a specific human being. It concluded with Large Hero being victorious and he made a quip and so on.
“Now you realize the error of your ways, which has been established by your losing a physical contest while I state basic moral homilies. You’d better listen to me now.”
“Ah, yes, you are correct now, I realize the error of my stupid, headstrong ways,” lamented the super-hero. “Your fists are bigger and therefore more moral. Your enemies are now my enemies; your battles my battles. You are my heart and soul and inspiration and I will live, die, and kill as you command.”
“Not kill!” shouted Large Hero. “Never kill! Slam their heads into concrete; render them unconscious with concussions and internal hemorrhages; break ribs and snap arms; bash skulls and crack spines – yes, yes, yes, revel in that, take great glee in that, make witty one-liners at that, be proud of that! But no, no, no, you’re never killing anyone (directly). Never! It is the line that shouldn’t be openly acknowledged as being crossed.”
“Aw jeez you’re right again,” mourned the super-hero. “I can’t get over how right you are. All I am is dumb and wrong. I should listen to my elders and betters and better-sellers.”
“Oh, we are not as different as you might think, young woman,” said Large Hero, as he led the super-hero to his impossibly expensive and super-futuristic satellite superstar base, the Good Star. “You see, I too was once misled in my ways!”
“Impossible!”
“Oh yes! In my heady youth, I thought that there were things that must change – minds, actions, the way of the world even. Such arrogance! Why, I took down slumlords, threw wife-beaters out of windows, and even disrespected the police. But in time I grew older, and became well-known, and realized this: with great publicity comes great money, and you can’t let shit get in the way of that. Best to ride the waves and not make them. There is no such thing as society; merely normal faceless interchangeable folks and the madmen and hoodlums who would take their wallets, lives, and comically large bank vaults filled with brown bags with little ‘$’s on the side.”
The young hero raised her head and her eyes were glistening with the tears of the awakened sinner. “Oh my god, my Large Hero,” she said, nobly kissing around his feet, “you are completely right. I will never try to change anything ever again! When I imagine the future, I imagine my fist whacking a garishly coloured man with an evil scheme to cause change, forever.”
Thunderous applause filled the Good Star. Thousands of beefy gloved hands smacking into each other, from a trillion giant muscly arms. Most of them belonged to slightly smaller Large Heroes.
“Wellll…. Maybe not forever and EVER,” said Large Hero. “You’re sort of new in town. You might just get bumped off the next time everyone has to fight off the evil ALIEN armies of Masterdooms. Don’t worry though, you’ll inspire a lot of heartfelt tears and rage from me, for at least five minutes. Now stand up! Raise your head high, recite our oath, and be redeemed! No more are you a person, now you are SUPPORTING CAST! Welcome to the status quo squad!”
Eyes filled with pride, the hero raised her hand. “I will fight for things as they are now, and not one step further.”
“I will be small, and contain a tiny core of character,” said Large Hero.
“I will repeat myself incessantly.”
“I will repeat myself incessantly.”
“I will repeat myself incessantly.”
“I will repeat myself incessantly.”
“I will position all disputes as violent conflict, and I will ensure that my side will always possess the greatest violence.”
“Nothing will ever change, ever, as long as we are on watch,” said Large Hero.
Everyone shed beautiful tears of joy.
“Now, if I’m not mistaken, there’s an invasion of evil people from far away coming this afternoon. They aren’t like us – they have no individuality, and all of them don’t care about the value of life. It’s war now, between the pure and innocent US and the vile and contemptible THEM. So feel free to kill as many of them as you feel like, as long as it doesn’t make you too grim and broody!”
“Hoorah!” called everyone.
Then Large Hero and the Status Quo Squad all flew up, up into the big bright sky, like birds seeking a plane’s engine. And they did it forever, in the golden, eternal moment that they made sure would never end.

The sun was coming up, and just in time too. The little mudbeetles were at my wrists again, mouthing where the rope had scabbed them.
Not biting yet, just considering. But the less time they had to puzzle over it the better. The light sent them away, cringe by cringe, until at last they were vanished into their little mud-burrows and I had the entirety of the flats to myself again.
Wonderful. All the mud I could see.

The tide was coming back in again; I could see the little blur on the horizon becoming more assertive. Soon the water would come, the buoy would rise, and somehow my body would be made of lead weight and I’d get some fresh blood at my wrists and ankles where the ropes sat and gnawed in their stubborn way.
By then I’d be hoping the sun I’d just welcomed would go away.
All day long I’d bob on the blue, fingers and toes clenching and unclenching as something-or-other bumped the buoy and I wondered at how much my digits must look like bait before the ache in my tendons led them to dip back into the cool relief. I’d stare at the world half-turned, still-turning. Upside down trees far up the shore. The faint splash of waves over a distant shoal. A worrying flick of a dorsal fin. A horizon split between the water and air turned on its side, so that each eye saw a completely different shade of blue.
Then the night would come, and the buoy would sink, and I would be left slumped on blackened mud with the receding roar of waves.
By then I’d be asleep. Until the mudbeetles came out.

I should’ve counted the days. I was sure I’d tried. I must have. It was a very important thing to know – how long had I been without food? Without water? Without rest, real rest?
But it was also useless because I wasn’t going anywhere ever again. As a compromise, I had quickly and carefully forgotten the order of sunsets and sunrises. I was here, that was all, and that was all there ever would be.
It was because I hadn’t counted the days that I didn’t know when this happened.
I was staring at the shoreline, watching the strange short-legged little lizards pick at the tide’s scraps, when something held my hand.
Firmly. Not roughly, but no softness to it. I didn’t even know it was happening until it was done and I could feel the water against my fingers again.
I looked. It hurt my stiff neck, it made my head swim, but I looked.
There was nothing there.
Relief. Strangely disappointed relief. I sagged with it, and black spots floated in front of my eyes as my spine screamed at me. They really could’ve tied me more carefully; at this rate my head felt like it’d explode before the thirst got me. What was a death sentence worth if I was too dead to appreciate the agony?
But they’d been in a rush.
They’d all been in such a rush.

Sometimes when the current bobbled at me I swung around and thought I could see the vastship still squatting there, perched off the reef’s edge – left behind like me. But it was only my imagination outgrowing my eyeballs.
All gone. Such a rush.
A soft, insistent rush. Shh-shh.
Ssh-shh.

*
Shhh-shhh. Waves against the bow. Sshhh-shhh, strong and fast. They said we shouldn’t stay out too long today, but oh no, we had to show off. Oh no, couldn’t lose now. Doscy and Huks, the fastest fishers aboard the Barebonnet, the ones that brought back more food faster, the ones that came back with more teethmarks in their hull than you’d find in a good steak flung into Redbrow waters.
We’d hunted them. We’d taken glow-eels. We’d pulled up Kanavi crabs. We’d taken everything with fins or gills or both and then because we were curious and invincible and bored we’d come hungering for something new. Come here, to Afar, where the land was sour and shrouded and the food was hard to come by without a boat and a net and a line and a prayer. And a good gaff-hook.
But what good were any of those without a good right hand?
There was Doscy, screaming, but quietly, between his teeth. All the rest of his lungs on his arms, on that good right hand holding his good gaff-hook, clutched against the side of the boat. Kicking furiously, dangling in spray and water and trying to get just that last inch of purchase back into the boat.
He had it.
Then it had him. I saw his expression change just a little, before it took him down.
After that I was on the deck of the Barebonnet, and I was throwing up. Nothing in it but water, nothing in me but water, and all of it spilling everywhere, everywhere.
“I shouldn’t have done it,” I told them, as they dragged me off, to dry, to heat, to feed –fix the machine, stop the damage. “I shouldn’t have told him to stay.”
I shouldn’t have said that.
*

I woke up to searing pain. A mudbeetle had grown ambitious, and had decided to take the measure of my thumb. The thrashing hurt more than the actual bite, and I started to wonder about blood poisoning. Maybe what was inside me would kill me faster than what wasn’t after all.

No clouds. Days of the fairest weather I’d seen in six years off this coast, and here I was in a position to broil from it. Skin was starting to do interesting things, not that I could see most of it – but I could feel it, inch by inch. I hadn’t imagined that I could grow more leathery.
Worn skin or no, I felt it then, and I made a nasty noise inside my throat.
Something wasn’t touching me.
Something was very close to me and not touching me, and it wouldn’t stop.
Go away go away go away go away go away.
My fingers and toes were curled into evil little knots, my joints creaked with panic as every bit of me tried to raise itself up, to get away from the blue.
There was a little fluid noise – too smooth to be a splash – and the texture of the water around me changed again. Something was gone.
The feeling passed, and everything hurt. I fell into a heap and wished the sun would burn the brain out of my head.

*
A day off.
An unspeakable luxury, a horrifying punishment. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I nagged the cooks in the galley and got underfoot in the hold and finally was sent to check through the catch just to stop me from driving everyone insane.
The fish reassured me. They were ugly, strange things, and even now half of them nobody had seen before. But their stares were empty and honest.
Next day, next dawn, I was ready again. I held the engine, I entrusted my gaff to a stranger. Not Doscy, never again Doscy, but one of those other ones, the ones we’d mocked with thrice the catch.
He looked at me with sympathy. I remember that. He felt bad for me.
I hated that. I wanted respect. I remembered the respect. Not this.
And I hated it even more by day’s end, when he leaned over the rail to haul up a fat sheener and it took him over, just like that.
I never had anything to remember him by but that sympathy. And oh, that hurt even more when I came back to the Barebonnet and told them.
*

Something wasn’t touching me again.
It wasn’t touching me, and when at last my muscles gave out and my feet and hands slumped into the water, I saw just how much it wasn’t.
Swirls of current tease me. Something big enough to drag the whole buoy back out to sea is here. Something big enough that it’s a miracle it can fit this close to shore. Something big enough that I have no idea why it cares about me.
Why is it looking at me? Why isn’t it touching me?
It touched me.
Yes, it had definitely touched me. One ankle was in contact with something that wasn’t water.

It stayed there until the water began to ebb, then left. I didn’t know how I’d ever sleep again and then I did.

*
Twice is coincidence, but coincidences still make people uncomfortable.
This time I didn’t get a day off. Just ‘off.’ And they started showing me how to do scut-work, to please the vastship, to grease the hull, to clean the deck, to pick the bones free from the eviscerator, and all the other million tiny things.
The dead man had not only looked at me with sympathy. Many, many people resented me. Bad luck, and a bad shipmate. Two in a week? With one crewman? What was he doing? What had he done?
When the third woman vanished off the deck in front of me as I mopped, hands too full, feet too slow, mouth too slack? That was enough to settle it right there.
*

And there I was. Spine against cold metal. Eyes against the rising sun. Mind crawling back into its battered little envelope as the mudbeetles left me be.
This was a peaceful moment. No dreams. No water. Just the wet, flat mud and my eyes.
Something was toppling trees inland and eating them. It was slow and fearless and I admired that.
Still, I really wished the buoy was facing the other way. It must be waiting right there, silhouetted against the incoming waves. Waiting for me.
What was it?
Glimpses, that’s all I had. Three little glimpses spread over three different days and a touch against my hand, my ankle.
And a ripple.

You couldn’t use the land here, they said. People tried, they failed, they stopped. That which lived Afar knew of us, and it knew it was not for us. The mountains watched you. The swamps encircled you. And the mists… well. You couldn’t escape them.
How had we thought the seas were different?

They were with me now, I knew. Doscy and that sympathetic boy, that nameless woman. They were with it, and it was with me, and it would never stop. Not now that it had seen us.
Why would it? It was curious, and invincible, and bored.
There were wonders out there to see, if you had a strong will, and a strong right fin, and a jaw so long and strong that could snip sunworn hawsers like strands of spider-silk.

I sat there. Buoyed up, back to back, against scales that for all their endless age had seen much less sun than I had in just these past few dying days.
It was raining. Against my will, my mouth was open, and so I lived as we cruised onward.
They were with me, and I was with it, and we sailed onwards together in the vastship’s wake, ignoring the pull of the tides, hungering for something new.