sure was a goddamned unlucky one.
In 1962, Brenda Egan’s aunt, a martyr to the deepest possible grief over the loss of her niece, accidentally set herself on fire on Blackmore Island. Gossip had it that she had rowed out to the island to lay flowers there in Brenda’s memory, and had died trying to build a campfire to stay warm while she drank herself into a stupor.
The Egan family prevailed on the local newspaper not to print the details due to the grief they had already endured. The editor, a family man who had seen the gruesome media feeding frenzy that had resulted from the original tragedy, took pity on the Egan and Schwartz families and kept the story out of his newspaper, reporting the woman’s death only as a heart attack, thereby ensuring that most of the gossip would be stillborn, except for local word of mouth.
After a time, people in town stopped telling Brenda and Sean’s story, because it could only be gossip, and it seemed cruel to gloat about the deaths of anyone that young, no matter what they’d been up to out there in the dark when they were supposed to be watching the moonrise on the town beach.
Tom Egan died in 1972, and his wife, Edith, moved back to Selkirk, Manitoba where her people were from. The memories of what she had lost that terrible night were too much to bear alone.
John and Gladys Schwartz lived quietly in their house in Alvina. They kept Sean’s room as a shrine. Gladys dusted his wrestling trophies daily and never passed a photograph of her son without touching it. John never set foot in Alvina United Church again after Sean’s memorial service. He maintained that no god who’d seen fit to take his beautiful boy was worth more than the shit straight out of his arse, and wouldn’t get any worship from him, not in a hundred years of frosty Fridays in hell.
Gladys, on the other hand, became devout. She brought her grief to the Lord and laid it on his shoulders, putting her faith in the comforting notion that there was a plan that she didn’t understand yet, and that she would see Sean again someday.
They died within a year of each other, in 1990 and 1991 respectively.
By 1995, thirty years after the tragedy, the story had passed into children’s campfire lore, no more or less real than all the other stories about the haunted island “near here,” stories of drowned children, mysterious flickering lights in the water, sudden fires, dark ladies, covens of witches and devil worshippers, and so on.
By 2005, Brenda and Sean had become “the boy and the girl” who went skinny dipping after having sex in the woods and had met their deaths at the hands of demons, or a serial killer, depending which version was being told at any given time. Apparently, the house was still out there somewhere on that island, but there were tens of thousands of islands. It could be any one of them, assuming it even existed. Besides, it was almost spookier not to know. In town, no one remembered their names, which most of the old-time residents of Alvina would have said was just fine had anyone asked them. But no one ever did.
Life moved on, and it had all been so very long ago.
And this is how legends begin in small northern towns on the edge of places other people only drive through on their way to somewhere else: with a scream in the dark, and half a century passed in waiting.
Plume moths remove remembering.
Their feathery snowtouch on the eyelids
sifts out thought and will,
leavens facts until they rise
into the air and pop
into oblivion.
Moths’ delicate footprints
on the skin, invisible
as sorrows, chase away
longing and desire, chase
knowledge of things.
Of self, of trees and acorns,
glass jars, death and daisies,
gazelles and geodes.
All of it, gone.
—Sandra Kasturi, from “Moth & Memory”
Chapter One
AMANDA IN THE MIRROR
“I will relate to you, my friend, the whole history, from the beginning to—nearly—the end.”
—Diana Maria Mulock, “M. Anastasius”
In 1962, Brenda Egan’s aunt, a martyr to the deepest possible grief over the loss of her niece, accidentally set herself on fire on Blackmore Island. Gossip had it that she had rowed out to the island to lay flowers there in Brenda’s memory, and had died trying to build a campfire to stay warm while she drank herself into a stupor.
The Egan family prevailed on the local newspaper not to print the details due to the grief they had already endured. The editor, a family man who had seen the gruesome media feeding frenzy that had resulted from the original tragedy, took pity on the Egan and Schwartz families and kept the story out of his newspaper, reporting the woman’s death only as a heart attack, thereby ensuring that most of the gossip would be stillborn, except for local word of mouth.
After a time, people in town stopped telling Brenda and Sean’s story, because it could only be gossip, and it seemed cruel to gloat about the deaths of anyone that young, no matter what they’d been up to out there in the dark when they were supposed to be watching the moonrise on the town beach.
Tom Egan died in 1972, and his wife, Edith, moved back to Selkirk, Manitoba where her people were from. The memories of what she had lost that terrible night were too much to bear alone.
John and Gladys Schwartz lived quietly in their house in Alvina. They kept Sean’s room as a shrine. Gladys dusted his wrestling trophies daily and never passed a photograph of her son without touching it. John never set foot in Alvina United Church again after Sean’s memorial service. He maintained that no god who’d seen fit to take his beautiful boy was worth more than the shit straight out of his arse, and wouldn’t get any worship from him, not in a hundred years of frosty Fridays in hell.
Gladys, on the other hand, became devout. She brought her grief to the Lord and laid it on his shoulders, putting her faith in the comforting notion that there was a plan that she didn’t understand yet, and that she would see Sean again someday.
They died within a year of each other, in 1990 and 1991 respectively.
By 1995, thirty years after the tragedy, the story had passed into children’s campfire lore, no more or less real than all the other stories about the haunted island “near here,” stories of drowned children, mysterious flickering lights in the water, sudden fires, dark ladies, covens of witches and devil worshippers, and so on.
By 2005, Brenda and Sean had become “the boy and the girl” who went skinny dipping after having sex in the woods and had met their deaths at the hands of demons, or a serial killer, depending which version was being told at any given time. Apparently, the house was still out there somewhere on that island, but there were tens of thousands of islands. It could be any one of them, assuming it even existed. Besides, it was almost spookier not to know. In town, no one remembered their names, which most of the old-time residents of Alvina would have said was just fine had anyone asked them. But no one ever did.
Life moved on, and it had all been so very long ago.
And this is how legends begin in small northern towns on the edge of places other people only drive through on their way to somewhere else: with a scream in the dark, and half a century passed in waiting.
Plume moths remove remembering.
Their feathery snowtouch on the eyelids
sifts out thought and will,
leavens facts until they rise
into the air and pop
into oblivion.
Moths’ delicate footprints
on the skin, invisible
as sorrows, chase away
longing and desire, chase
knowledge of things.
Of self, of trees and acorns,
glass jars, death and daisies,
gazelles and geodes.
All of it, gone.
—Sandra Kasturi, from “Moth & Memory”
Chapter One
AMANDA IN THE MIRROR
“I will relate to you, my friend, the whole history, from the beginning to—nearly—the end.”
—Diana Maria Mulock, “M. Anastasius”
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