Believing Cedric by Mark Lavorato

father noticed and walked over to it, getting as close as he could, trying to give it an egg before the others could crowd in. “We have worked hard to be out of Russia’s reach,” he said gently, leaning farther over the fence, talking toward the horse’s face. “We have worked very hard.”
    When the others had reached him and were gathering closer, one of them nudged his arm and the egg fell from his hand, landing in a clump of bunchgrass, still intact. The timid horse had heard it, and sidled closer, surreptitiously manoeuvring through the others, and when it found the egg in the grass, it threw its head back high to swallow it, stamping the ground once.
    His father straightened up, speaking through a smile, “Perfect.”
    Now, six years later, Peter holds that conversation in his mind like a piece of incontrovertible evidence. He’d been following the lead-up to the Cuban Missile Crisis for weeks without even knowing he was. The US had been debating whether or not to invade Cuba for months, while the papers printed clips of a Russian naval buildup in the Atlantic that didn’t make any sense. Then, the day before, Kennedy finally set the public straight, announcing that the world was indeed in crisis and that he had just given the Russians an ultimatum: Cuba was quarantined, lines on ocean charts were drawn, and the consequence of crossing them was firmly implied. The Russians, however, hadn’t shown any sign of stopping.
    Then today, after coming home from his shift, he’d picked up The Lethbridge Herald from the doorstep, flipped through it, and within minutes had walked to the cupboard of dusted bottles and pulled the whisky from the shelf. The front page read, UNITED STATES AND RUSSIA MAY CLASH BY NIGHTFALL , with a subheading stating that both US and Soviet forces had been ordered into a “state of combat readiness and diligence.” But what had struck him the hardest was a political cartoon inside. It had pictured the two leaders of the superpowers at a poker table, the tense faces of the political world watching from the barely illuminated sidelines, the smoke of Castro’s cigar threading through the lamplight. Kennedy was sliding a teetering heap of poker chips into the centre of the table, Khrushchev eyeing him coldly above his cards. The president’s mouth was open to say the one word in quotation marks below. “Call.”
    True, he didn’t know Russians in the same way his father had, but he was sure he understood them better than most people, and certainly enough to know that the world was about to see a nuclear exchange of some kind. Because the situation had already snowballed too far, too fast, and now, at the very least, one or two buttons would have to be pushed, and this, out of the simple need to maintain posture. Something, somewhere , had to be annihilated. As his father said, you cannot change a Russian’s mind, and within days, whether the world realized it or not, those missile-laden ships carving through the sea toward Cuba had come to signify the very embodiment of Russia’s political conviction, of its tenacity, of its bold and stubborn determination. Could anyone really picture such boats being snubbed, being wrist-slapped, and pointed back home like a child kicked out of a game for disregarding the rules? Not likely. No, Peter thought, sliding the newspaper onto the kitchen counter, this would come to blows. In the end, his father, thinking that they were out of Russia’s reach, had been wrong.
    As it happened, Peter’s wife spent her Tuesday afternoons at a friend’s house, and the fact that she wasn’t there to spend time with, on this day of all days, seemed almost poetic. Because, as Peter was now substantiating, that was how you had to do it, you had to live like nothing was ever going to happen to you—you or anyone else you cared about. You had to buy your groceries, keep to schedules, and