26

WHAT IS SO FINE?

Ellen Peterson is not a zombie. She is standing in the dark, at the edge of a pool. She is not entirely sure whether she has walked here or whether magical inward steps have led her here to a place that she makes of herself. The surface of the pool reflects the full moon, and, Ellen thinks, it looks like a large plate in the centre of a satin tablecloth. Ellen drops to a crouch and places the tips of her fingers into the cool, still water. She wriggles her fingers and watches the reflected moon. It soon breaks into diamonds on the surface — diamonds she feels against the back of her hand. Ellen stops moving her fingers and the moon collects itself as white filings haloed over a magnet. Then it breaks again. This time clear in half. Someone is in the water. Ellen shrinks back from the edge. She focuses in the dark and silhouettes start to appear. A fallen tree lies across the bushes. This is familiar. A boulder, now lightly glowing, sits in the water at the far side of the pool. This is the carp pond. Ellen is relieved that she is in fact somewhere: a somewhere that she knows. I am the reeve of this pond. Someone is gliding through the water near the boulder. Ellen feels less threatened. She has jurisdiction here.

“Hello there.”

Ellen stands on the bank, closing the front of her bathrobe: a reeve in a bathrobe is better than no reeve at all. The person in the water stops and turns toward her with a splash.

“Excuse me, hello, is everything alright in there?”

“What do you mean?”

The man’s voice is whiny and defensive. There is something disturbing in the question.

“I’m Ellen Peterson, the reeve of Pontypool. There’s a great deal of trouble in the area tonight, and I’m asking if everything is OK with you in there. Aren’t you cold?”

Another voice to her left.

“Why, if he’s cold will he freeze?”

The voice, so tremulous, makes her shiver. The question somehow hasn’t been put to her rhetorically.

“Well, no, I don’t think he’ll freeze.”

A third voice in the bushes behind her.

“Are you lying to him? Is he going to freeze?”

The voice is so frightened that Ellen covers her mouth.

The man in the water has slipped behind the boulder and he holds its sides with his hands.

“If you’re lying to me then you could hate me.”

Ellen drops her hand. She feels the pull of sadness in the light that has emerged on the surface of the tree hiding these people.

“I don’t know you; I couldn’t … hate you.”

The head and shoulders of the man to her left glide into view at the centre of the pool.

“You don’t hate him yet. But if you don’t know him will you stab him with a knife?”

The man behind her squeals sharply, and he flees crashing through the trees. Ellen can’t quite believe this conversation. She has no idea how to meet its requirements.

The conversation that she is having isn’t, of course, normal.

That conversation would have its several participating members hitting a variety of vocal registers using a tiny lexicon. This lexicon has migrated to them from Parkdale, and they communicate through it with the sonic sensitivity of birds. They repeat the words Helen, help and hello in an evolution of the alliteration that’s more like an imbrication, shingling the words over a now silent H. And exactly who is stepping down into the pond and repeating the phrase “messy car, dirty bird”?

Ellen has not detected the eighteen silent beings that surround the pool, hiding in fear among the trees. Each of them moves three words from cheek to cheek, like loose peas in a whistle.

“What do you mean stab you?”

Ellen’s robe rides in a terry cloth wake around her as she steps through the water toward the boulder.

“That’s what I said. That’s what I meant.”

Ellen stops still as three other beings float out from under branches that overhang the pool’s edge. They move steadily in the moonlight, forming a guard around the boulder.

“He means what he said. Now you want to kill him.”

“No. I don’t.”

“If you don’t want to kill him, does that mean that you want to run him over with a car?”

One of the silhouettes yelps as if struck and dives to the side.

“I … I … don’t want to hurt any of you.”

Ellen is aware that the pool is now occupied by at least a dozen of these strange people.

“Not hurt? Not hurt? Do you mean not hurt now, but later? Like in the morning you’ll want to punch all of us? Punch us with a cannon?”

“Or a missile?”

“Or … or … maybe poison?”

“And angry now? Are you angry now?”

Three zombies splash at the water in a strange seizure that ends in one of them attacking another. The zombie being attacked strokes the back of his assailant with a consoling hand. The assailant bites uncontrollably at the man’s chest, opening a honeycomb of muscle and flesh. The victim soon slides under the water, and his mouth, the last cup on his body to be filled, glides away to drown. Ellen feels a panic lock her.

The killer stands up straight and exhales heavily, sending a piece of tongue flipping into the water. A woman directly behind Ellen speaks.

“Say sorry.”

The killer shakes his hands in the water. He closes his eyes, and in an emotional outburst that is small and painful he rolls his head back.

“I can’t.”

Ellen steps forward, her heart pounding in her chest. She raises open hands across the water and moves slowly toward the killer.

“You don’t have to be sorry.”

A teenage girl jumps out of a tree and stands in a moonlit path that drops into the pool.

“He doesn’t?”

Ellen feels a carp slide itself like a cat against her ankle. A mile long. She catches her breath and waits for it to pass.

“No, he doesn’t have to be sorry.”

Another carp swims into Ellen’s joined heels. She turns her foot, letting it move between her calves. It’s slippery and fat and it tickles. A group of eight zombies moves quietly off the bank into the water. Several of them ask the same question at once.

“It’s OK that he killed Albert?”

Ellen scoops water up onto her dry lips. She notices the little bump of Albert’s floating tongue.

“It’s OK. It’s OK.”