The animals, p.1
The Animals, page 1
T H E A N I M A L S
Copyright
FIRST EDITION
© 2022 by Cary Fagan
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Title: The animals / Cary Fagan.
Names: Fagan, Cary, author.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20220217092 | Canadiana (ebook) 20220217106
ISBN 9781771667647 (softcover)
ISBN 9781771667654 (EPUB)
ISBN 9781771667661 (PDF)
Classification: LCC PS8561.A375 A79 2022 | DDC C813/.54 — dc23
The production of this book was made possible through the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. Book*hug Press also acknowledges the support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Ontario Book Fund.
Book*hug Press acknowledges that the land on which we operate is the traditional territory of many nations, including the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee, and the Wendat peoples. We recognize the enduring presence of many diverse First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples and are grateful for the opportunity to meet and work on this territory.
Dedication
To Frank W. Watt
for his encouragement all those years ago
2 1 3
Secrets
Dorn, whose profession was the making of miniature scale models, was not usually embarrassed by his commissions. It might be said that he was locally famous; even if people in the village didn’t know his name, they were familiar with his models, which were displayed in the windows of almost every shop, restaurant, and business. There were also half a dozen in the municipal museum, all from businesses that had closed. While Dorn often worried that he would run out of commissions, there seemed to be just enough shop turnover to keep him occupied.
This new project was for yet another new enterprise beside the hardware store. For some reason, nothing seemed to survive in that location for long; Dorn had completed commissions for a wool shop, a vacuum cleaner store, and a wedding gift emporium, the models all now in the museum. The new one, called the Velvet Touch, was a sex shop. It carried all sorts of creams and sprays, battery-operated devices, visual materials, and manuals, as well as costumes made of spandex and artificial leather and chains. It seemed to Dorn rather doubtful that the Velvet Touch was going to prosper when the other shops hadn’t, especially since customers could easily be spied ducking inside from the main street.
Stooped over his bench in the ground-floor workshop at the back of his small house, Dorn worked on the scene. A tiny male figure, his even tinier penis erect, was tied to a bed while a woman in a peek-a-boo bra leaned over him with a whip. To better visualize the scale, one might imagine the whip as being the length of a toothpick. The model was near to being finished; at this moment, Dorn was using his finest brush to add shading to the man’s penis and then to the woman’s nipples.
Everyone has secrets — countless secrets that are neither important nor particularly interesting. Only a very few have secrets of any consequence, and Dorn was not one of them. These dull truths get added to as one gets older, and a new, ridiculous one for Dorn was that every time he worked on his miniature woman, which could have fit into the palm of a large hand, he felt the stirrings of an erection. Now was no exception. He felt only a mild shame, however; the arousal was understandable given the celibate life he had been leading since his last girlfriend had left three years before. The woman hadn’t been from the village but rather the city. Like so many outsiders, she had come on a holiday, only to “fall in love” with the charms of the place. Dorn had wondered whether she was confusing her infatuation for the village with her feelings for him. But he had put these doubts aside and tried to be happy. Unfortunately, his first thought had been the correct one, and as her enthusiasm for village life withered, so had her affection for Dorn.
Now Dorn straightened up, feeling an ache between his shoulder blades. He was thirty-eight years old and already experiencing some of the pangs of oncoming middle age. He went to the washroom sink and cleaned the brushes and palette, scrubbed his hands, and hung his canvas smock on a hook. From the cupboard behind the small oval mirror, he took two brushes: one for his fair hair, which he kept long enough to fall over his eyes if he didn’t brush it away, and one for the short, reddish beard that adorned his narrow face. He had no illusions about being handsome — his eyes were a little droopy and his nose was crooked — but he liked to appear neat (a habit, no doubt, that came naturally to a maker of miniatures), and after this grooming he took the few steps needed to reach his front hall, put on a cotton jacket, slipped off his work sandals and slipped on his outdoor sandals, picked up his battered paperback copy of Vordram, and left the house.
2 2 3
Happy Café
Dorn lived on Linder Row, which ran above and parallel to the main street. He walked down, passing the various restaurants and shops, each with one of his miniature scenes in the window. Preferring not to see his own work, he was careful to keep his gaze turned to the street.
The Happy Café, almost exactly in the centre of the shopping row, was not at all like sophisticated city coffee houses, with their reclaimed wood tables and local art on the walls, or their clean modernist lines. Instead, it had an ornate gable over the door and wood trim inside that made it look like a storybook cottage. The staff wore little suede dresses or shorts with suspenders and pointed hats with elfin ears. It had opened almost twenty years ago, when the village was trying to reinvent itself as a tourist attraction. The stone quarries to the south had become exhausted not long before, and a scheme to allow a multinational company to harvest the northern forest was halted by a legislative order. What if people, especially families, stayed three or four days, spending their money on restaurants, bed and breakfasts, attractions, souvenirs? The village council received grants to help transform businesses so that they looked like cabins, castles, or any sort of enchanted place, and the founders of the Happy Café took full advantage. So did Dorn’s first customers, who wanted adorable window displays that might draw people inside.
The effort succeeded, although the initial surge of interest in earlier years had naturally slowed until now the village catered to a modest trade. There was even a challenger to the Happy Café in the form of a modern coffee chain at the far end of the main street. Dorn, however, remained a loyal customer. The reason was simple: Ravenna.
Ravenna was a loyal customer, too.
He entered the café, pushing through the curtain of beads. It was a little warm and humid, pleasantly womb-like, a place where one might curl up and fall into the deepest sleep. But his senses woke on seeing Ravenna, who had the corner table and sat with a cup and her usual folder of student work, which she seemed to be endlessly marking.
“Hey there, the usual double espresso?” said the elfin server behind the counter.
“Yes, Glin, thanks.”
At the sound of his voice, Ravenna looked up and smiled, pushing away a few strands of hair that had escaped from her ponytail. Once she had been the villagers’ hope for an athlete who could make the country’s Olympics team. The village had belonged to one country and then another, and even a third for a short interval, and perhaps it was this historic identity crisis that made the prospect seem so exciting. Ravenna’s sport had been the javelin throw, in which she had won local, regional, and then national competitions. Four years older than Ravenna, Dorn had seen her throw only once, when he was walking by the school’s athletic field. Tall and willowy and a little awkward, she had reminded him of a giraffe. He had stood watching, entranced by her odd stance, her ungainly run, and then the force with which her slender arm hurled the javelin into the sky.
But Ravenna hadn’t made the Olympics. She had decided not to try out for the national team but instead to immediately enter teachers college. There had even been a front page newspaper editorial begging her to reconsider. But that had been years ago and, so Ravenna claimed, meant nothing to the students in her classes now.
Dorn took his coffee and sat across from her. She made one more pencil mark and looked up at him. “Look at this student’s work,” she said. “It’s a holy mess! How can anyone think clearly who’s scribbling like this? It’s hardly surprising that half the answers are wrong.”
Dorn smiled, for he had noted that Ravenna had crumbs on her blouse, the remains of her dinklberry muffin. True, she wrote with extreme neatness, but everything else about her was charmingly dishevelled.
“My homework was always praised for neatness,” Dorn said. “And I still received a bad grade in math. So I’m not sure what that proves.”
“It proves that you didn’t have a good teacher. You should have had me.”
“No doubt. If I could have heard you above all the noise.”
She gave him a look. “Where did you hear that?”
“A little bird told me.”
In fact, it was Tul and Tule, the owners of the sex shop, whose nephew had reported that Ravenna’s class was “super fun” because the teacher could hardly control her students.
“I assure you,” Dorn interrupted her, “that I would have much preferred the atmosphere in your class.”
“Okay, let’s drop it. Are you doing anything tonight? I’ve got the Supper Club. We’re going to that new bistro on Styvvin Place, it’s supposed to be really good. They give us a special price in the hope that we’ll tell our friends. There’s always room for one more, if you want to come.”
“You know I don’t have gourmet tastes. I’m just as happy with a sausage and a beer. Your Supper Club friends would consider me a boor.”
“And you’re a reverse snob! You’d look down on them for caring about what they eat.”
“That’s true,” Dorn said with a slightly forced chuckle.
“So you look down on me.”
“I always look up to you, Ravenna. You’re five centimetres taller than me.”
“Ha ha, as if I haven’t heard that joke a million times. Holy smokes, are you still reading Vordram? Thank God I don’t teach the upper forms. See, I’m starting to yawn just thinking about that medieval tombstone. Isn’t it like three hundred pages?”
“Just about. But it’s different if you’re reading it just for yourself. I missed it in school, during those months when I was home sick.”
“Right, your mysterious illness. A severe allergy to school, probably.”
“Maybe. That’s when I started woodcarving. My uncle took pity on me being stuck at home and gave me an inexpensive set of tools.”
“So something good came out of it. That doesn’t mean you have to punish yourself by reading it now.”
“It’s different when it’s a choice. I admit it’s heavy going and I only get through a few pages at a time. But the poetic style is interesting, thirteen-syllable lines and with that scheme of stresses and internal rhyme —”
“Please!”
“Also, I think it really illuminates the national character.”
“Well, listen to you. Maybe you should be the teacher.”
“Right now I’m in the section where the Woodcutter, half starved, finds an unusual fruit growing from a tree in the forest. Do you remember it?”
“I remember only the agony of extreme boredom.”
“He eats this fruit,” Dorn went on, “and then lies down under the tree and has the strangest dream I’ve ever read in a book. He dreams that he sprouts breasts — large female breasts — on his arms and legs. And then, while he’s staring at these protrusions —”
“Protrusions!”
“— a dozen infants suddenly appear. Infants with wings, flying down from the trees. Not angel-like at all. Scary. And each one attaches itself to a teat and begins sucking voraciously. The Woodcutter is naturally appalled —”
“Of course! He’s appalled by a normal maternal act. Very much in keeping with your so-called national character. So what happens?”
“Never mind. Let’s talk about something else.”
“Come on, Dorn! I want to know. A teacher’s education is never finished. What does the Woodcutter do?”
Dorn made a face and looked away. “He takes his axe.”
“Oh, please! He kills the infants?”
“Not exactly. He cuts off each of his breasts.”
“Oh, that’s even more sick. Thanks for sharing, Dorn. And now my free period is almost over. I’ve got to rush back to school. Well, this has been most enlightening, Professor Dorn. Ta-ta!”
And with that, Ravenna shoved her folder into her bag, pulled her long legs from under the table, and hurried out of the café with a jokey wave. Dorn opened his book and read slowly, using the little spoon to scoop up the remaining coffee-soaked sugar granules at the bottom. After some time he got up, pushed in his chair, and put both his cup and Ravenna’s (she always forgot) into the bin at the end of the counter.
“Can you do me a favour, Dorn?” called Glin, steaming milk for a new customer.
“What’s that?”
“You’re neighbours with Leev, aren’t you?”
“That’s right.”
“He’s ordered his usual bag of coffee beans. But he phoned to say that he can’t come in to pick it up. Nobody’s had a chance to run over there yet — do you think you might drop it off?”
“My pleasure.”
“Fantastic. It’s sitting beside the artificial-sugar packets. So what model are you working on now, Dorn? Anything interesting?”
“No,” he replied quickly, picking up the bag of coffee beans. “Nothing very interesting.” And then he went out again.
2 3 3
First Animal
Dorn walked one block south and turned off the main street. At that corner he passed Sizzel’s Bookshop, the only long-established business that did not have one of his miniature models on display. In fact, old man Sizzel denounced all of the village’s attempts to “sell this bullshit nostalgia,” and Dorn couldn’t help admiring him for it. There was nothing at all quaint about his bookshop, which had the ambience of a discount shoe store with its linoleum floor, metal shelves, crowded aisles. It wasn’t unusual to encounter a dead mouse in a corner trap. The books were stacked vertically in piles, making the lower volumes difficult to retrieve.
The sole concession to the locale was a narrow case near the back with shelves devoted to the work of Horla, the village’s one famous contemporary author. Although elderly now, she still lived somewhere nearby and was even seen occasionally, walking with a cane in her bony hand.
Dorn passed the bookshop, went up the street, and turned so that, as always, he would pass the school in the hope that Ravenna might look out her classroom window at the same moment and see him. Then he went home.
Or rather, to his own street, Linder Row, for he had the bag of coffee to deliver. The houses were all identical: extremely narrow, two storeys, pale brick, clay chimneys shaped like rising onions. What differentiated one from the other was the wooden front door, which each inhabitant had painted according to their taste. Red, yellow, green, striped, even polka-dotted and paisley. Dorn could well remember a dispute between Leev’s wife and the widow who lived four doors down. Leev’s wife had painted their door a particularly attractive shade of blue-grey. And then some three months later the widow had Misoi, the village handyman, paint hers a very similar colour, perhaps just a little more blue. Leev’s wife had become indignant. She complained to poor Misoi, who was just doing his job, even as he applied the lacquer finish. The widow herself was away (deliberately?) visiting her sister in the city, and Leev’s wife had to wait until she came back. Nevertheless, she knocked on the widow’s door. What did she mean by using the same colour? Was it a bad joke? Did she have no respect for a person’s right to individuality? And the widow had responded, What nonsense, they aren’t anything alike, perhaps you just like my colour more than yours, and so on.
Leev’s wife refused to drop the issue. She called a special meeting of the Linder Row house owners and forced them to take a vote. Dorn himself contrived to have a bad cold that day and so did not attend; if he had, the vote would not have been tied. Leev’s wife insisted that she would take her complaint to the village council, but not long after that (probably it was a coincidence of timing), she left Leev and moved to the city, becoming one of the many exiles from village life. About a year later, the widow died and the new owners repainted the door a rather unpleasant shade of orange. Leev, now alone, left his own door as it was, the colour of a child’s clear and wondering eyes.
Dorn walked up the short path to Leev’s house, the pleasant weight of the coffee beans in one hand, his copy of Vordram in the other. He used the brass knocker. A commotion behind the door caused him to take a step back: a terrible growling followed by a smack against the other side. Did Leev have a new pet?
“Who’s there?”
“It’s your neighbour, Dorn.”
“Right. Hold on a second.”
There were more sounds of scuffling and then Leev’s stern voice. The bolt retreated and the door opened, but only a few centimetres. Leev stared with one eye through the gap, blocking the space with his body. Something seemed to be pushing him from behind.
