She’ll know by now, he calculated, imagined her reading his note, it shaking in her hands like a big white leaf. He tried not to think what she’d be thinking, but couldn’t stop the surges of anguish, anger, remorse…
Don’t! But they persisted—short circuits in the neural network, flashes of contrition he’d have to put up with until they burned themselves out.
Then what?
He rolled the sausage over, stabbing it with his fork and pushing it toward the other side of the aluminium pan. It spat and sizzled like a horny cat defending its turf, then gave up, displaying unmistakable signs of submission. “You will be eaten,” he threatened. “I shall devour you, tip to tip.”
Leanne hated camping, if you could call a pit stop off the Trans-Canada Highway anything so grand. Hated ‘greasy’ sausages, too. But he didn’t think of his new lifestyle choices as rebellious, at least not intentionally so.
Guy’s got to eat. Got to sleep. And for now, he’d have to make do. It wasn’t as if he’d planned his exit. I’m a refugee, he pleaded. A victim of domestic strife. He wouldn’t go so far as to accuse her of violence. She’d never actually hit him, or even threatened to. But a disgusted glance, dismissive sigh, goading comment—they’re forms of abuse, aren’t they?
He’d chosen naan bread instead of hotdog buns to wrap his sausages in. Sausages, not wieners, he insisted, wieners being a cut below in his nuanced lexicography. His change in status didn’t include wieners and certainly shouldn’t have been lamented as the initial phase of an inescapable spiral down, down to an inevitable crash landing on the hard, urban pavements.
He laughed out loud at the very thought, drawing suspicious stares from the motorists, stopped to admire the viewpoint-vista up Finlayson Arm—the glittering water; infolded, tree-clad hills; awe-inspiring brilliance of the light.
What? he challenged. Just cause I don’t wear shorts with a permanent crease doesn’t mean I’m crazy!
The naan bread wouldn’t fit in the pan along with the sausage, so Buddy speared the doomed tube of meat and laid it out on the pink plastic plate, where it would have to wait to be eaten. Then he flopped a naan into the pan and shoved it round a bit to get it coated with grease. The totem at the far end of the picnic area eyed him. Disdainfully, Buddy thought, scornful of the white man’s store-bought version of living off the land. Buddy bobbed in agreement.
His mobile, still switched off, weighed heavily in his hip pocket. Sooner or later, he’d have to power it up, and he imagined it exploding with the choking magma of Leanne’s outrage.
Later, he decided.
Laying the sausage back in the pan, he pinched a corner of the fried naan to wrap it. No onions, no mustard, just meat in a bun. That would have to do. For now, he vowed. He placed his supper on its plate and sidled up to it on the picnic table’s slab bench. Beside his dinner, opened as if it expected him to have something meaningful to write, was his blank notepad, minus its first page.
Buddy sighed. It wasn’t as if nothing had happened in recent memory for him to recount, but he just couldn’t bring himself to setting the current events of his life down on paper. Anything he had to say would flow off the nib of his pen like attempted justification or rationalization. He looked at the date, which he’d logged in his newly devised cipher at the top, right-hand corner of the page: 20190915-1536, it said in his precise hand—September 15, 2019, 3:36 p.m.
He had nothing more to say. Like the runes etched into a tombstone’s granite, his date stamp said it all.
Next: Out the corner of an eye