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

cold the night we were evacuated. Her cough sounds like cotton ripping. I draw her into me, her spine between my breasts, the soles of her feet burning against my thigh. I curl around her like a shell around a soft snail. Even her fingers are hot, as if the fire entered her hand through the little burn. When I was a child I used to climb into bed with my sister because I wanted to protect her from the devil. I believed the devil could draw my sister away through her dream, to a parallel universe, where there was a parallel city. Anything could be drawn out of this world, sucked into that one. Three years younger, she slept on her stomach. I’d put my nose in her hair. It had the colour and smell of unripe corn. She dreamed so strenuously that her cheeks were red, her lips slightly parted. I would lie on top of her, matching limb for limb, my arm over her arm, my leg over her leg, my fingers locked into hers.The way you lie flat if someone has fallen through the ice. The devil couldn’t pull us both down. I’d hook the bone of her ankle between my toes. I could stop her from falling too deeply that way, by hooking the bone of her ankle, but that always woke her up and she’d throw me off.
    I went to see a Japanese performance artist. Wine glasses set in a circle like the numbers of a clock. Each wine glass filled with a different coloured spice. Grey-green, mustard, turmeric. He tipped the contents out on the floor and they floated down in gaseous clouds. On the video screen it looked like an aerial view of the Earth. The way the Earth looks as though it’s made of water and cloud, with nothing holding it together. The video cameras were as fragile as cheap toys. He attached wires to himself, and a gas mask with a paper bag on the end, that filled and crumpled with his breathing. The screens showed a mushroom cloud exploding over and over, silently. Then he made a pyramid of the wine glasses and poured a jug of honey into them. The honey clung to the stems of the glasses until each glass was filled. It glistened in the spotlight, the whole pyramid one viscous city of glass. Then he put a syringe into his arm and poured his own blood into the glass, mixing it with his finger.
    I became fascinated with real estate when Aunt Sherry became an agent. All of my cousins punctuated every emotional event by buying or selling a house. It took me a while to recognize this pattern. Who would expect symbolism in real estate? But when I think of it, Sherry has made real estate her life. There’s her religion — a private part of her I can just barely guess the workings of — the fierce and protective loveshe has for her family, and real estate. I see all these parts of her bleed into each other. The houses she has bought and sold are spread out over the city like clues in a scavenger hunt. Some houses she’s sold three and four times to different families, noting the changes in wallpaper, carpet, light fixtures, as though the house has a camouflage that matches the families that move in. She will often point out houses that have ghosts. A house where a son murdered his seventy-three-year-old mother, and she was found two weeks later. Sherry says this property is eternally on the market, the house like a lost soul that can’t find bodies to move into it. She’s bought houses for all her children, and when any of them tell a story, they always start, When we were on Holbrook Avenue, or Forest Road, or Prince of Wales Street.
    There’s a small island of trees and grass near my house. My daughter and I played there tonight, to bring down her fever. It had snowed the night before, covering the bone dry sidewalks, and another squall blew over in the afternoon. It was past Sarah’s bed time, and my toes were cold in my rubber boots, but we stayed out as long as we could. The streetlights threw perfect shadows from the trunks of the trees, thick straight columns like the Parthenon’s. An image