excerpt from "Dog Eat Dog"
by Courtney Bill

“Do you think you could hate me?”
“What?”
“If you tried, do you think you could?”
Your eyes search the airport window. Outside, asphalt chases the horizon. Black spruce scrabbles against the grey. “Yeah,” you say. “If I had to. I could hate you.”
We stand next to the Churchill Terminal gift shop, its collection of linocut relief prints, glass work, paw-print earrings. Every sign says the same thing. You are here: the edge of the Arctic. Population 900. Remote luxury.
I say, “What are we doing here?”
You laugh for the first time. “Don’t you remember?”

In the beginning, you told me a story. You were five. Your mother was on the kitchen floor, dead. You remember the blue that seeped across the tiles from the windows. You thought you had killed her.

 

 

 

From The Malahat Review's summer issue #231