An Alchemy of Words

The Thousandth Death

"The Thousandth Death"

There was a sandpit where I used to live,

up on the top of a hill.

If the wind was right, you could smell

the chickens from the Government Job Creation Project.

Just like the government to try raising chickens

when all the cod are gone.

E.J. broke my finger there.

He threw a beer bottle at me and crushed the bone.

I drank a lot of milk in those days,

but the bottle didn't even crack.

It's just as well, though, because my family

is the type that faints at the sight of blood.

I don't quite know when it started,

but I ended up at the top of that hill by myself

a lot, throwing stones at the gulls and stuff,

just sitting there, my thin legs hanging over the lip,

thinking that it would take a Newfie to come up with the idea

of digging a hole at the top of a hill.

I threw my bike over the edge, once.

It was orange and ugly and,

when it landed, that sand all shifted and slid, burying it.

I had to make my way back to the road and

follow it all the way down to where the sand trucks loaded.

I would have been able to get a new bike but the front wheel was still showing.

The sandpit was where I caught my first bird.

It was a fighter, though. Must have survived all summer

because the Government Job Creation Project had gone under in early spring.

I thought about bringing it home to mom so we could have it with figgy duff

but this time the bottle broke and I would have looked foolish

with a dumb rooster slung over the handlebars.

My first bird in a hasty, shallow grave,

I took to throwing stones, angrily, at beer cans,

hoping to be able to nail Bobby Hope the next time he bugged me at the bus stop.

His parents named him after the comedian

but he wasn't half as funny as he thought her was.

When I finally did nail Hopeless, it was with an umbrella

and all the guts of an old lady.

That final year, Shakespeare told me that a coward dies a thousand deaths

and, on the the day before we left, I went up to the sand pit

to jump, breath held tight between clenched teeth, over its edge.

Eyes closed, not wanting to see, only to feel, I fell

into the shifting sands, dreaming of asphyxiation and

the whisper of coarse silt settling over me, the lid of my sarcophagus.

Grit in my teeth, I pedaled home again,

no longer a coward, but a failure nonetheless.

[first published in Saskatchewan Writers' Guild, WindScript, Volume 11.]

˗ˏˋ・。☆.・゜✭・.
AUTHOR'S NOTES
✫・゜・。.・。. ✭

Back, once more, to Labrador and to the strange and endless worlds that lay buried within that sandpit. Layer upon layer of memory sifting away to reveal the gnarled roots of my soul, all the tangled tendrils raw and sheathed in burnished bark.

We dig together, you and I, ever deeper, to find that ancient taproot, the shrivelled seed, the umbilical knot that marks the moment where I begin.