Pontypool Changes Everything

Pontypool Changes Everything by Tony Burgess Page B

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Authors: Tony Burgess
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right foot a spoon lies halfway under a roll in the carpet where she has kicked it.
Not paying attention.
The smell of her body causes Les to grab his mouth, and this sweet odour sinks deep enough into his face to prevent tears. He yells her name.
    “Helen!”
    The zombies in the yard outside are dead, and so the alliterative chain does not begin again. The first chain, however, is now speeding across Vaughn Township and west, deep into Mississauga.
    Les returns to the playpen and lifts out his son.

    The intersection of King and Dufferin is a solid cube of ice that Les has to pass through. The sun is lowering shadows and Les sees the dark drifts of jawlines, the eyes that spin like worms away from each other. A woman, her blanketed shoulders pinned against the bus shelter, listens to a siren: all mother she ignores it. Disappointed again, she pulls a towel up across her face. The ice cube melts behind him and Les spreads his fingers across the baby’s belly.
I am the adult.
He feels the tiny bird cage of the child’s chest.
Mother.
He remembers a guidance counsellor in grade 10 closing a file and, with a hand-washing return of a pencil to its packet, sliding his chair back from the desk to introduce the door to Les, saying: “You will probably end up alone. You shut me out, I shut you out.”
    This baby is strange. The most important thing in my life
… 15
strange to me.
    And it is crying.
    Loud.

16
Picture Where You’ll Go
    Les Reardon has not even pictured where he will go. The place does exist, of course. But where he goes is only partially dependent on pictures. For now the picture is a billboard in Gravenhurst. Not yet subjected to feasibility, it confuses southbound motorists with its baby-blue pyjamas, blonde widow’s peak and praying hands.
    Ellen’s praying hands, pointed under her chin with infant formality, drop to her side; she leaves a fingerprint of her husband’s blood there, like a broad cleft. Her head is clearer and softer now. She stands at a full open acre of intersection in Pontypool and confers with a greater range of Ellens than ever before. The real estate agent, the Bewdley priestess, the killer of her husband, the reeve, the degenerated mind. Near the centre of each is a shrewd and deflecting person, more lens than light, who will tell Ellen when she has stopped being useful to herself.
    Not yet. Ellen feels a clam-sized piece of breakfast seal off the base of her throat. It frightens her.
Now is when you just choke to death.
She presses four fingers deeply into the top of her chest. The clam leans off the opening and releases her swallow. The relief softens her mind further and she makes a fist of her long hand to push against her mouth. The crying that she feels is very young, and she cannot trust herself to let it up. The reeve soothes Ellen, telling her that these nextfew moments won’t matter, she can feel exactly as she wishes — cry, Ellen, go ahead, cry.
    A car leaps into the air over a hill to the west. As it slows, Ellen, the killer of her husband, turns her back, not daring to look down at what she’s wearing. She stares out into the field and, imitating a painting she once saw, holds her hand like a visor off her brow. She reaches down to bunch the side of her dress, still in imitation of the painting, and recognizes the fabric.
Damn, I’m in my dressing gown.
The car slows before it reaches the crossroad and it stops on the shoulder beside her. There is no way to collect herself, she knows, and even if there were she would still be incapable of speech. The sound of a man’s voice. In the turn she makes toward it, Ellen decides to present herself as unstable and unaware. A golf pro struck by lightning. A movie star found wandering.
    “Excuse me?” The passenger window drops and a thin face appears. “Oh, my dear woman! Oh, precious, listen, get in the car.”
    Ellen steps back and pulls the collars of her robe against her chin.
    “ OK sweetheart, it looks to me like you

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