Circadian Nicole Baute
I flew to Canada to see my dying grandmother. She'd shrunk to half the
size of a regular woman and her skin felt like wet paper. There was an
extreme cold weather alert and I lost my gloves on the train. Grandma said
the hospital wasn't so bad but she wished she could go swimming. I live
abroad with my husband and when someone says "are you going home?" or "get
home safe" I never know what they mean. My childhood cat ate her babies or
so my mother explained when I was old enough to know. All except for one,
which was the colour of marmalade and later lost an eye. Sometimes humans
don't want their babies either but more so if they are girls, at least
where I live. I would take any baby, really, but I can't trick my body
into thinking I'm safe. Sometimes there's turbulence on the long flights I
take east or west around the earth but we know turbulence doesn't cause
plane crashes, mechanical problems do, like when the de-icer fails during
extremely cold weather. Grandma wasn't too cold in her room, she was too
hot and too hot and then she wasn't anything. My mother cried and I smoked
a cigarette and tried to prepare for the day when I am her and she is
Grandma. When I first met my husband I wanted to wear him, to consume his
brown eyes and wonkish charm, even though he was shorter than me and even
though he did that oh snap thing guys did back then. Later he said, I
think we want the same things out of life, which is easy to say at
twenty-five and hard to prove at thirty-four. My grandma met my grandpa at
a bar after the war. He was handsome in his soldier's uniform and everyone
bought him drinks because our side won. A week later she found out he was
seventeen and broke and not a soldier but by then she'd already decided.
There were unidentifiable objects floating in my tea at the funeral home
but I drank it anyway. I saw a woman who had been a year ahead of me in
school. She wasn't exactly my friend but she helped me get my first job at
the grocery store and once on the school bus she explained how to
straighten my hair with an iron. I couldn't believe how beautiful she was
at thirty-seven with two kids; her eyes were tired but her skin glowed. We
looked at each other like two people lost in time until she said "I've
been following your travels" and I said "Your kids are adorable" because
we were both on Instagram. She reminded me that my grandparents used to be
champion ballroom dancers, which I had forgotten, and I felt sad that we
were never really friends. A front came through and the temperature shot
above freezing. The snow thawed and in the cities people found metro
passes and lost gloves in diminishing snowbanks. Back home the air
pollution lifted and the supreme court was accused of corruption. Back
home my mother opened a bottle of wine and told my father she was ready to
retire. Back home my husband said, remember that time we hiked to Machu
Picchu and when we got there, you cried? It was seven years ago but I
still don't know why I did that. I guess I wanted to know where all the
people had gone.
Nicole Baute is a Canadian living in Delhi. Her work has appears in Joyland and others.
"Circadian" is a third-place winner for the Mythic Picnic Prize in Fiction.
Read NB's postcard.
Detail of photo on main page courtesy
of Alessandra.
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