The Death of Small Creatures by Trisha Cull Read Free Book Online Page B

Leigh without saying a word, careful not to touch anything, and he is careful not to touch me too. I open the fridge and guzzle back a litre of orange juice.
    Sometimes I don’t eat all day, can’t figure out what to eat in replacement of meat. Salads require so much work. Cutting up vegetables is tedious. I hate vegetables anyway. Sometimes I eat fish, but that’s all.
    In the evenings, I buffer the hunger with booze, numb the pain and disappear. Pouring alcohol into an empty stomach is like pouring bleach into a basement. The mornings after nights like this, I wake up bleached out, anaesthetized, bloodless.
    Climbing the stairs to Fiona’s office is exhausting. “Your body is probably in shock,” she says. “I can’t help you until you stop drinking.”
    Fiona, I can’t stop drinking until you help me.

    I close my eyes and see my uncle hanging from a noose in Grandma’s garage last year, can’t imagine what maternal inkling made her go out back in the nick of time, open the door and find him there, what supernatural force flooded her seventy-nine-year-old frame and instilled her with the strength to hoist him up and get him down, to save him.
    Just now, my mother sits across from me in a slippery plastic swivel chair on the
Spirit of Vancouver Island
and says something I’ll never forget. Sunlight streams through the windows, glares off the white surface of the table between us. Seagulls hang in currents of wind beyond the glass, their wings spanned, their beaks opening and closing in seagull-talk but no sound coming out. The words leave her body and brand themselves into my heart.
    Depression runs in my family.
    My sister Tammy has severe anxiety issues. My brother Sean positions all of the cans in his cupboards so the labels face outward. My sister Sandy lives a few blocks away from me. She polishes each individual apple from the tree in her backyard.
    The seagulls open and close their mouths, no sound, just sunlight and waves and the vessel slowing as it enters the islands.
    â€œI don’t know if I can do this anymore,” my mother says, and I know what she means.

    I can’t believe this is me. I don’t want to believe this is me.
    â€œYou are actively suicidal,” Fiona says. I balk at this summation of my psyche. Her conclusion seems melodramatic. I have, after all, only been thinking about it. Thinking about it doesn’t make you suicidal. “How would you do it?” she says.
    â€œPills,” I say. It’s a no-brainer. I don’t understand why anyone would deliberately inflict more pain upon themselves than necessary. Why make such a mess? Why not just go to sleep?
    â€œOn a scale of one to ten, one being you’re nowhere near, and ten being you’re ready to do it now,” she says, “how close are you?”
    Her scale raises an interesting question. If I were a one I wouldn’t be in therapy, and if I were a ten I’d already be dead. So for all intents and purposes, the scale is a paradox. “Five,” I say.
    She asks me how the medication is working. I tell her I feel tired and foggy, but that this is preferable to the gut-wrenching pain. I consider telling her I’ve been having Technicolor dreams—blue lightning bolts shooting from my fingertips, like the Emperor in
Star Wars
. “I want you to check in with your doctor,” she says.
    So I go see Dr. Pastorovic; she increases my dosage and refers me back to Fiona. This goes on for a while, this back-and-forth scenario.
    Fiona speaks to me in gentle tones, but doesn’t put up with any shit either. When I tell her I feel like at any moment I could fall off the edge of a cliff, she asks me to locate this feeling. “Groundless,” I say.
    â€œBut how do you feel?” she says. I find it difficult to describe my feelings without the buffer of metaphor. Like a bird. Like the earth is slipping out from under me. Like I’m