Issue 157 Is Online!

search index
of all issues

Search This Site Enter word(s) to search for:

1. Paint thinner

My uncle is an artist. Lately, he's been painting huge works of Aaron: Aaron as a baby, Aaron in a canoe, Aaron sleeping. Enormous oil paint trees bloom Aaron. Aaron sprouts in watercolour gardens, Aaron grins out of line-and-ink clouds; Aaron lingers. Funny how grief leaks out, pools around us. My uncle floats in his grief in a kind of glass-bottomed boat, painting what he sees, what he remembers, what he wants to have happened.

2. Water purifier

Lots of blues and greens in these paintings; the natural colours almost ironic, considering how much time Aaron had spent waving lighters under the crystal methstuffed bowls of glass pipes, sucking up the poisoned smoke. He'd quit "glass," as he called it, only very recently, and told me about getting clean. He booked a week off work, locked himself into a dark room at his parents' house with a bottle of water and a bucket. Came out after only three days, blinking and pale.

"Almost disappointing, really," he said. "If I'd known it would be so easy, I wouldn't have wasted so much time all fucked up." He went home to Jane with clear eyes, as if someone had spritzed them with Windex, wiped them down with a wad of paper towel.

3. Match heads

When he was little, he used to steal his parents' cigarettes, make tiny nooses out of dental floss, and string them up, broken, in the kitchen. He'd poke pin-holes in the ones he didn't execute, or soak them in the sink. "But it's bad for you," he'd say, when they, enraged, discovered the smokes destroyed, the corner stores in our small town closed. "It will kill you." He'd follow them around while they smoked, coughing pointedly. They don't smoke anymore. They stopped right around the time he started sneaking out behind the chicken coop with pilfered cigarettes, the hens churr-ing disapproval as he stared at them through the filmy window, smoke curling out of his mouth.

4. Coleman fuel

Aaron was an artist. He would hold rods of coloured glass in the flame of a gas torch, melt them into shining, undulating curves. Later, when the shapes were cool, he'd wrap them with silver wire, or copper, and thread them on to twisted silk cord. His hands were scarred, rough with tiny burns from propane spittle or errant molten droplets, cuts from glass that shattered when he heated it too quickly, and needled into his fingers.

When he first started making jewellery to sell, he would use pieces of broken glass: amber from Budweiser bottles, green from Tanqueray gin, blue from Skyy vodka, clear glass from the U-brew chardonnays he always seemed to have stashed in his fridge. But that glass fractured in the flame so easily, and even he had to admit that buying so much alcohol was a fairly expensive way to procure such a limited palette, and the shrapnel strewn around his studio was dangerous, especially when Jane and her son moved in with him. Simon padded around after him, and Aaron found himself worrying about things he never had before: how the drain cleaner was stored in an unlocked cupboard, how slivers of glass might be lodged between the floor boards, how easily a house might burn down in the night. So he stored anything toxic a small child might try to drink out of reach, used quality glass in his sculptures, and installed smoke detectors.

Jane was, suddenly, pregnant. Aaron couldn't stop smiling. He got clean. They bought a car that had room for two car seats in the back.

5. Cement cleaning acid

Jane told me that Aaron was driving, wheezing a laugh at her as he hunched down in the driver's seat to feel around with his right hand for a CD in the pile at Simon's feet in the back. He grabbed one, glanced back at it. Missed the red light. Heard shattering, then nothing.

6. Lye

He was unconscious at the scene, but the doctors poked at him, shone lights in his eyes, took x-rays, poked some more. "You're incredibly lucky," they told him, when he woke up. "That was a terrible accident. You're incredibly lucky no one was hurt badly." They bandaged up the cuts from the broken windshield, told him to get new glasses because his got bent when the left side of his face hit the window.

My uncle drove the three of them home. Everyone was relieved.

7. Cold medicine

I heard from my mum, after everything was over: Aaron's cell phone was broken in the crash, and he didn't have a home phone, so the doctors had to phone my uncle.

"We were just looking at the x-rays again," they told him. "We need Aaron to come back in."

My uncle drove out to Aaron's place, bounced Simon on his knee while Aaron had breakfast. Runny eggs, a glass of orange juice. Toast. He had a smoke. My uncle doesn't remember what they talked about, sitting in the September sun on the front steps of the house.

The doctors didn't use the word "lucky," this time. They said something about "easy to miss," something about "perforated," something about "aorta," something about "immediately," something about "surgery."

Jane said she kissed him as they were rolling his gurney into the OR hallway, and he told her he wanted sushi for lunch, not hospital crap. He told her to go get some, so he could have it when he woke up. The nurses pushed him past her, past the doors. She watched him through the little window in one of them, saw his mouth moving as they rounded a corner. She was sure he'd be fine.

He bled out, on the table.

8. Filters

My uncle and aunt had Aaron cremated. I didn't go, though my dad did. I sat in the sunshine and drank beer with my mum on the back porch, lit a candle when we figured he was in the furnace, spilled a little Okanagan Spring on the ground for him, a little Johnny Walker. I fumed, my hand fisted around the glass pendant hanging around my neck, a twisted green and white one. "Why'd he need the CD just then? Jane would have grabbed it for him. Stupid fuck." I was drunk. My eyes were dry and stinging. "Then he'd still be around. No crash. And the baby. Jane wouldn't have lost it"

My mum wasn't looking at me; she was poking her finger in the pool of wax at the base of the candle. Something fell over in the living room, and I lurched up, yelling. "Aaron, you wanted to be gone. Just go, then. Fuck off. No haunting allowed." My mum stared, unblinking, into the flame.

I have a picture of him - grinning cheekily, his left eyebrow ever so slightly arched - hanging on my apartment wall; on the same nail hang three of the pendants he made. Every three or four months, the picture falls, but the pendants never do. The glass covering his picture never breaks.

9. Secure Area

My uncle has Aaron's urn in a corner of his studio. Made by an artist friend of the family, it's covered in images of Aaron copied from photos, from my uncle's own work. Right after he died, someone said something about commissioning mini-urns, so everyone could have a little bit of Aaron. But his urn is still heavy with his ashes, and no one has said anything since. No one wants to ask for a piece of their son, to ask his parents to let go of even a trace, even a dusting, of him.

10. Heat source

At his memorial, Aaron's sister passed out curls of glass he hadn't had time to make into pendants. She wrapped them with hemp twine, telling each of us that "it wasn't his aesthetic at all, it's mine, so there's both of us, in this. Which would you like?"

We sat around the bonfire, the light glinting off the pieces we had chosen and tied at our throats. We told each other how proud we were that he had burned through his addiction, how at least he had died clean, how he had died so in love. When we ran out of words, we drank silently, our faces hot with flame. No one wanted to leave.

Months later, I drove out with my dad and my uncle to my grandpa's cremation. My grandpa was in a closed, raw plywood box. We watched the crematorium worker press the red button to start the conveyor belt; we watched the box slide into the furnace from behind the viewing window. Dark curtains slithered closed once the box was gone; we could see ourselves in the plexiglass.

My uncle, looking at my reflection, told me about how Aaron was in an open box, made of some kind of cardboard, how everyone who came to his cremation got to stand near the furnace and say good bye. He said it didn't look like Aaron, that Aaron never looked like that, even when he was sleeping. He said he doubted it was really him. He said he got to push the button.

My uncle's eyes were red-rimmed, glassy with tears. My dad put his hand on my uncle's shoulder, and we went outside.

We stood beside the car, watching the chimney. The furnace burned so hot that it made the air over the crematorium shimmer, made the blue sky and the green trees in the distance waver, as if they were caught under old glass. As if they were somewhere underwater.