Better Living Through Plastic Explosives by Zsuzsi Gartner Page A

yet. When night comes they’ll resume their siren call to distressed souls.
    Just last week, another suicidal person jumped from the bridge to the absolution of the frigid waters below. Honey believes in fortitude, but fortitude is sometimes not enough. This is why the Blessed Virgin filled with holy water stands on her state-of-the-art dash. Honey likes to cover all her bases. You can bet your sweet bippy.
    â€œIs this where you live?” the boy asks as they round the side of the house to the entrance that leads to Nina’s basement suite. She tries to see it through his over-privileged little eyes. The back fence, chicken wire, sags low with the weight of accumulated morning glory, now dying, revealing a rutted back alley strewn with KFC carcasses the raccoons have freed from garbage bags. There’s more than one abandoned upholstered chair, the stuffing festively mounding out like popcorn.
    Next door, her neighbour, a well-muscled, mulleted thirtysomething on permanent disability from complications involving a cuckolded husband and an illegal firearm, practises his nanchukas. He’s part of a subterranean tribe of basement dwellers that emerge blinking into the mid-afternoon light from their illegal suites like small nocturnal animals long after those with more conventional circadian rhythms have scattered for the day.
    â€œCool,” the boy says.
    The man looks over and grins, wiggling his Fu Manchu moustache. “Wherever you go, there you are.” The guy has a paperback of Carlos Castaneda’s The Teachings of Don Juan spread-eagled on a vinyl lawn chair beside an ashtray, a roach clip holding the still-smouldering twist of a joint perched on its rim. He tokes for medicinal purposes, he’s confided to Nina more than once, as if she gives a shit. As if every second house on the street wasn’t a grow-op. Nina is tempted to tell him she’s the one who blew the whistle on the operation the Grow Busters pot squad raided two blocks over last year, the one that turned out to be a federally licensed medical-marijuana site—even though this isn’t true. She just wants to knock the co-conspirator look off his face, the one he always gives her when they happen to come up out of their suites at the same time.
    He either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care that Nina is dressed like an oversized rodent, but he’s very interested in the sharp kirpan fastened to the boy’s belt. There’s also a cloth covering the small bun on the boy’s head. A patka , a sort of pre-turban turban for Sikh youths, the boy explained to Nina in the car, as she madly tried to recollect if his parents had looked even remotely South Asian. When had she stopped looking at people, really looking rather than simply noticing the things about them that drove her crazy?
    â€œLittle man, they let you wear that to school?” the neighbour asks. The boy pulls free the dagger and starts citing some B.C. Supreme Court case. “So, when you have a culturally diverse society,” he concludes, “rights and obligations sometimes conflict!”
    He doesn’t realize she’s not a real marmot, but he can sum up a legal argument as if reciting a nursery rhyme. Nina wonders, not for the first time, whether the child is some kind of idiot savant.
    The guy shows the boy how to wield the nanchukas, holding one wooden stick firmly in his fist while deftly manipulating the one on the other end of the connecting chain. The boy makes a feeble pass at twirling the weapon, while the guy carves the air with the kirpan.
    â€œCareful,” he says. “I’ve kunked myself more than once and my head’s probably a lot thicker than yours.”
    Dwayne, Darrin, Dork? Nina has lived beside him for eight years and still can never remember his name.
    It should be mentioned that the mountain has not swallowed a single sentient being. The disappearances never occur when anyone is at home. The