A BITTER DISAPPOINTMENT #1
James came from a prominent Toronto family and was married to a well-off woman whose family had emigrated from Hong Kong. He was very serious and proper and spoke in deep monotones that put you to sleep immediately; one of those grey, featureless monoliths constructed during the Stalinist period personified. He had an excellent memory and could recite Wordsworth word for word, but without feeling or heart, the way a monkey can play piano if you teach it which keys to hit.
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A BITTER DISAPPOINTMENT #2
Dutch came from a small town outside Sault Ste Marie that had one small strip mall with a diner where Dutch started his kitchen career after leaving school at 15. He started by washing dishes and mopping floors, cleaning up after customers spilled their food and cleaning the toilets. But Dutch was not without ambition, and was soon doing food prep for the cook, a retired lumberjack who’d lost one eye to a flying wood chip and who was continually slicing his fingers because of his lack of depth perception.
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TURTLE
Turtle awoke to muffled moans from behind the thatched wall that created a barrier between the bedroom he shared with his grandmother and that of his mother. He rolled silently onto his stomach and raised himself to his hands and knees. Crept off the worn rattan mat that was his bed and across the finely swept dirt to a space in the wall where two sheets of bamboo met. Peeked through the gap between the tattered edges of the bamboo but what he saw he didn’t understand. Not really, even though he’d seen it many times before. But he was happy to see that this time it was not his mother making the noises, her face wincing with deadened acceptance.
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