The 2023 Metro Times Fiction Issue

There are four people sitting around a kitchen table in a house alongside the Snye — the Chenail Ecarté — the edgeland of Bkejwanong Territory, “where the waters divide.” From the outside, looking in, the room glows orange. Light diffracts through a wicker lamp swagged on a gold chain over a hefty wood table with mismatched chairs and unpainted chipboard-panel walls. Jars of expired spices, family photos, decorated plates, and other curios sit on shelves in random spaces, along with stacks of cookbooks whose covers have turned tacky from decades of gas stove fumes. There is comfort in this particular kind of grit and clutter that attaches itself to rural self-built homes from the 1960s, away from the scrutiny of building codes and permits. The way lives and undusted objects expand to fill any available space.

Outside again, stepping back, the ad hoc-ness of the house reveals itself in other ways. Constructed over two decades of scavenged materials, its improvisatory style makes it difficult to determine where the true front of the structure lies. This quality makes it churn in memory and evade clear remembrance. It is a self-camouflaging blur—an architectural shift — softened at the edges by swishes of willow branches, a rutted gravel road, and folksy installations of found objects leaning against fence posts on the laneway to its door.

Although it is night — pitch blue-black with no streetlamps for miles — in the chilled-out April air, anyone who has lived in the area long enough can perceive the dense marsh on the Snye planning its annual crawl from the reservation toward town. Local white children with relatives who hunt ducks and fish are told that the floating mats of bulrushes, grasses, and cattails mark the legal boundary for gathering rights. If their boat drifts too far inward towards this buzzy wetland border, townie fishermen who have come to dip their hooks into the richer, luckier, river stock are asked to leave. Each year, retired grandfathers of Euro-Canadian descent can be found posted up on stools in the donut shop, mumbling paranoid thoughts to their coffee mug reflections: “Y’know, I think that rez over there is getting a little closer to town each year with all those rushes.” Island folks prefer to avoid sparking backlash in this small town, with its underbelly of tension and occasional violence towards most things Indigenous. Sometimes a verbal crosscheck emerges with a reminder: “This was all of ours once, before you arrived.” If you press your ear firmly against the ground this time of year, you can hear the crackling sound of seeds and insects pushing and popping their way up to the surface.

The table is in the house of a retired archeologist. An eccentric missing several fingers on one hand who, as a hobby, upcycles bones from roasted chickens into complicated sailing ships. In the mudroom where one enters, strings of drying animal bones hang from a workbench pegboard. The lingering smell of collagen and calcium incinerated by a Dremel tool, rasped leather, and airplane model glue permeate the room. Carcasses and hides in various states of processing could make it seem to those who didn't know better that they had stumbled into a backwoods horror film. Past the kitchen, on the fireplace mantel, a crumpled piece of tinfoil is used as a prop to backfill a story about a late-night call from the government in the 1980s to recover an alien craft that washed up on the shores of Lake Erie. Conspiracy theories and emergent folklore collide on this property, in a time more aligned with the Time-Life’s Mysteries of the Unknown encyclopedias and Unsolved Mysteries than Ancient Aliens.

Everything up until this point — though it may appear unsettling to outsiders — has been adopted into small town normalcy and legendry. Two of the people in the kitchen reside in the house, the other two are visitors. Weekend social callers. From tipped back chairs, things lean a little wine hazy, but aren't so muddled that the events of the night could be imagined. Above the table, there is another visitor — an injured crow that wandered onto the property, now recuperating in a cage hung at the ceiling in the corner next to the table. At first wary of visitors, she gradually begins to improvise around their conversation, adding top-end clicks and pops, guttural shuffling, and a low-beat throat rattle.