I feel like reading somebody else’s book today maybe even on their couch or if they have a boat my presence on the water I am told is of remarkable consequence. I’ll bring the food and you bring the pretend wine which I will swallow in gigantic gulps, almost waves like my father did, making each minute brighter, he said, than the last. There are no vacancies today for make-believe aunts or pretend uncles, nor will I feign a friend across the street whose house I might go to when my father’s minutes started going the other way.
All that was really across the street in this story was a field, a deep one and flat, somebody once said it looked like a septic field, that’s why it was so green, and people started saying it smelled like shit when it didn’t and that’s when they started calling my house – the shrunken cardboard-looking box in which I grew up – The Shit Shack.
Once you put the possibility of a shit stink in the air it never ever goes away people were always trying to catch a whiff of my house, of me, all those kids none of them ever gave me a break they just left me alone with my meagreness in the lunch room but when we started getting waves of immigrants those same fuckers were all plural about their generosity and that’s not even what it was.
It was one of the new kids from Laos, Kit was his name, he had nothing his family lived in a run-down motel room, who approached my table I think I may have growled and he gave me half a sandwich somebody had given him.
I looked up Laos in the atlas after school – I usually went to the library it was like I was floating in there I loved the library more than anywhere – and Laos was described as a landlocked country and I’d never heard that term before it explained how my life felt except in a different way.
(loss and tragedy)
Later, when we were brothers (I taught his entire family English in that little hotel room and eventually moved with them to Toronto) I asked why he gave me that sandwich in the first place.
Kit was never one to let his kindness get in the way of the truth, his honesty is how I knew my house really did smell like shit, but still I thought he was going to say something sweet and noble, for Kit was cosmically sweet and noble, but he said in his most Laos way, I facking hated tuna out of a can.
Kit saved me and whatever you do don’t listen to him. He likes to say it was the other way around.
