Better Living Through Plastic Explosives by Zsuzsi Gartner Read Free Book Online

Alex’s neighbour Sasha had told her fiercely on more than one occasion. Now Sasha, her pierced labia, wife Marcia, and fouryear-old, Destiny, lived in a semi-gated townhouse complex in Port Coquitlam.
    Others were going on spiritual pilgrimages to Varanasi or Amankora or joining the circus. In fact, all around the city children were abandoned to aging relatives or the newly minted private kiddie kennels by their thrill-seeking parents. The older children banded together, moving nomad-like from neighbourhood to neighbourhood, performing odd pantomimes for spare change. How can we have children? We are children! the parents laughed as they formed their human pyramids or checked their supply of water-purification tablets needed to survive their third-world spirit quests.
    Mainly, though, there was a lot of talk about moving off-grid. The grid, that matrix of power and telecommunications, heat and light on command, was something Alex could understand. She had a healthy respect for the grid. Like IKEA, like steel-cut Scottish oats and cargo pants, the grid represented common sense. She would cling to the grid with bloody, tattered fingers if anyone attempted to dislodge her. Alex overheard a couple in JJ Bean loudly debating the pros and cons of a $25,000 residential wind turbine or a bicycle-powered generator. The woman seemed particularly concerned about not losing access to Netflix. “If you want to get off the grid,” Alex found herself saying, as if offering advice on the daily blend, “try sub-Saharan Africa.” The woman called her an earth-raping, racist, Trotskyite bitch. The guy just winked and tongued the foam on his coffee.
    Steel girders formed the roof of the heritage building across the street—an abandoned Free Methodist church turned award-winning performance space—replacing the rotting wood beams of the original. Piece by piece, what was meant to be a renovation had been slowly turning into a replica, like those museum reproductions of Bastet cat goddesses and busts of Pericles you could use for bookends. Now it stood neglected, the skeleton of some great beast washed ashore on a remote island and bleached to a pewter gleam by the sun.
    And there was Alex with her free-floating sense of hollowness in her own rib cage. Her period hadn’t shown up for over six weeks, and her first thought was stress, then malignant carpet fibres. A single polymer thread clinging to her uterus, gathering her blood and tissue to it, a teething fibrous leech. She waited another week before even contemplating the alternative.
    A child? It seemed she already had a child. A playmate for Rufus? There was an idea! Alex found she wasn’t as horrified at the thought as she thought she’d be. It could be Duktig !
    But the stick stayed white. No thin blue line.
    Rufus asked: Do you ever wonder if we’re too straight? Too fluoridated? Too hydrated?
    From: < [email protected] >
    To: < [email protected] >
    Sent: February 10, 2008
    Subject: ??
    Hey Roof? You know the Janjaweed? They call them demons on horseback. There’s a guy here, ostensibly with Human Rights Watch, but he has some kind of “deep intelligence” (read: he has something they want). The word is that the Sudanese govt. is backing this raging Arab militia. It’s genocide plain and simple. So I get this interview with a demon “general”—this alleged war criminal who arrives at the rendezvous somewhere near his garrison on a camel. And the thing he wants to talk about is dental hygiene. He got his teeth fixed by a recruit who was a dentist in Dubai. Now he religiously uses whitening strips. “Like Hollywood,” he tells me. He’s supposed to hate the infidels, right? So I stand there dumb as a moth in my chador (de rigueur due to his Muslim sensitivities) while he asks about my dental plan and whether I prefer Crest or Colgate.
    This is so hysterically not what I expected that my questions, all