The Selected Short Fiction of Lisa Moore by Jane Urquhart, Lisa Moore

silver convertible off Red Cliff. I couldn’t understand why he had driven back to St. John’s from Mexico to commit suicide. He had lived in St. John’s for only the last five years of his life.
    I read, “the haiku is like a finger pointing at the moon. It’s important that it’s not a bejewelled or perfect finger. It only points to something.” I met Mike, my husband, after that. We were out drinking and Mike brought me home to his apartment, which was Gordon’s old apartment. Mike had used the last of Gordon’s shaving cream, wore a pair of Gordon’s construction boots that were left under the bathroom sink. They fit him perfectly.
    My mother’s only sister, Sherry, is a real estate agent. The best in St. John’s. In the weekend paper there’s a whole page, a pyramid of real estate agents’ photographs. Sherry is always at the top, or in the second line from the top. The agents are placed according to their sales. Sherry is afraid of two things. Fire and cats. She says when she was a baby, a cat lay over her face, filling her mouth and nose with fur, almost suffocating her. She was less than two years old but she remembers it. Cats are attracted to the smell of milk on the baby’s breath. She didn’t want Mike and me to buy this house. A fire trap, she said.
    I was sewing a dress for my step-daughter with a friend who lives on the other side of the city. We were drinking coffee and Tia Maria. The phone rang and it was Mike. He said hewas standing in the front doorway of our house. Fire was pouring down the street. He said it was still safe there, but embers as big as his fist were dropping at his feet. The sky is orange, he said. I pulled the phone over to the window. There was an orange and black cloud breathing in the sky on the other side of the city. I said, That’s over my house. He said, You should see it, it’s like lava in the street. They’ll evacuate us when it gets hot enough.
    I ran home. Some streets were blocked. Ours was a frozen river of water from the fire hoses. A blizzard of orange flakes. I had to cover my head with my scarf to keep my hair from catching fire. Mike had closed the front door because of the soot and smoke. The radio said if the fire reached our street the whole of downtown would be lost. It said the firemen were losing control. There were high winds. A policeman rapped on the door of our house with a billy knocker. He said, Move now, NOW. The street was full of people carrying blankets, photo albums, figurines. A spark landed on my daughter’s hand, making a tiny burn. We went to my sister’s, stayed up all night listening to the radio, drinking, unable to get drunk. At three in the morning the radio said the firemen had contained it. Our house was safe. I felt a quick stab of disappointment. I wasn’t comfortable in the city any more.
    I woke early, afraid of looting. The Dominion supermarket had burned to its foundation. Blackened girders twisted up from the debris. Beautiful arcs of water shot from the fire trucks at the four corners of the lot. Everything hissing, steaming, delicate rainbows. Under a broken metal shelf I saw a pile ofbrilliant oranges, strangely preserved, each with a tiny white cap of snow. Our front door had been beaten in, tracks of soot over the carpet — the police had checked each house for someone left behind.
    Since the fire the house has become infested with mice. The cat is playing with a mouse now, under my chair. I have my feet drawn up on the seat. I smash the mouse under a book. The cat finally bites its head. I hear the crunching of the bones of the mouse’s skull between the cat’s teeth; although the body is still moving, the tail has become a stiff S. In a few seconds the cat has devoured the entire body. She gives a cry. I half expect the mouse to scramble out of her mouth, whole. Perhaps because I know the mice will keep coming.
    My daughter caught