Return of the Trickster by Eden Robinson (ebook voice reader TXT) 📗

Your grandfather loved the stars, knew the Dog Star, the Star with Ears, the phases of the moon tugging the tides. If he was alive now, you would buy him the biggest telescope you could afford and a cabin on the shore of a dark lake.

Jared watching you with serious eyes.

The memories you did not explore with Jared: The bully boys that tipped you off the raft you had helped them build and used their paddles to take turns dunking your head underwater. How they chased you with sea urchins on sticks and the winner was the one who stuck an urchin to your back first. How you had only been safe when your grandfather was alive. Your mother was so low in the ranks you and she were practically slaves. Common. She was a braggart, someone few people liked, and the ill will trickled down to you and your sister. Your sister was beautiful. You were fair game. She was fair. Who knew the world of gods would be much like home? You had expected godlike power to come with godlike status, but here you were again, weak amongst powerful bullies. It was not the world you expected when you ascended to semi-immortality.

You hadn’t expected to lose your memories when you took the form of an infant to watch over Anita. You expected to maintain your faculties in a baby’s body so you could make sure Albert behaved, that Anita was safe. But you really became Anita’s baby, her child, her kid. It’s embarrassing now how much you loved her house, being home, being the centre of her world. When the Trickster memories broke like a rotten egg, you tried to pretend you hadn’t remembered who you were, but it was all spoiled and she knew almost as soon as you did.

Jared will turn on you. People are selfish and ultimately self-involved. You knew that even as you were telling him stories in his bedroom, even before your sister, once so fair but now more deformed than the last time you’d met, found you in your grave in the lonely woods.

“Brother!” Jwasins had said. “Who killed you now?”

“You know damn well,” you replied.

“You and your angry witches.”

Her grinning old-woman skin hid the twisted thing she’d become. You knew she was ambitious. She’d used the Great Dying to marry her way up, taking names and status. But you never thought she’d cross the line between useful magic and harmful. It marks her: her lengthened jaw, her gnashing teeth, her odd gait. Ogress. While you were cooling your heels in the woods, she’d been eating her way through smaller beings to become something much less human, radiating rotting, ill-begotten power, a flesh-and-blood Chernobyl.

“I’d love to resurrect you,” she said.

“But…”

“I want us to be a family again. You’re all I have, brother.”

The wolves surrounding her were bred with coyotes and probably dogs. Mutts with attitude. Alert. Ready to pounce. The familiar giggling buildup to cruelty. Your sister used an English name now, something generic and simple, but you couldn’t remember it at that moment, alarmed that she’d taken the next step in the villainy handbook and gotten herself some henchmen. Their teeth and growls were distracting.

“I want to know your children,” Jwasins said. “I want to be a part of their lives.”

Uh-huh. Yup. The vainest woman on Earth, who only started using magic when her looks faded, trying to stay young and beautiful. When that failed, she ate everything magical that moved to stay alive long past her best-before date, refusing her destiny as a lowly mortal. That Jwasins was suddenly feeling the love for him? She was plotting again, obviously. But you could work with that to get yourself free.

“Sure!” And you told her the names of all the children you knew of, except for Jared and two other random kids to cover up the fact that you were trying to hide him. You genuinely might have missed a few others. You can’t really remember the seventies.

Pop.

But your sister found him anyway. When Jared disappeared, you felt him leave the earth and assumed he’d died. You felt the universe without him. Jared, seriously, was no Einstein. He wasn’t going to revolutionize the world. He wanted to work as an ultrasound technician in a mid-sized hospital and buy a new car every ten years. That’s as big as his dreams got. The world didn’t lose a shining humanitarian, great thinker or renowned artist. He earnestly blundered into trouble like Mr. Magoo.

Your grandfather, the Trickster before you, sat down the beach as the masks burned, as the frontlets burned, as the button blankets burned. The fresh converts prayed as they watched their treasures destroyed. When the ashes from the missionary purge were cold, he walked into the forest.

You can’t save someone who doesn’t want to live.

Then your son returned. Here it was again, the distinctive Jared-shaped tangle of empathy, self-loathing and power. The irritating klaxon horn of his panic split your skull as his organs frolicked on the hospital floor. You regretted your one-sided bond. You’ve offered to teach him, but he has issues with you. Mule-headed like his mother and his grandmother. The kind of stubbornness that gets you dead.

Baby Jared, kid Jared. How much he cared about his stupid train. How much he loved dancing around his bedroom to “The Ketchup Song,” even though it made his mom pull her hair and threaten to throw his boom box down the beach. How, when Jared went to sleep, he reached for your pointer finger.

Are your own dreams much bigger than his? Your small house in Kitsilano, filled with your treasures. A life that doesn’t include constant terror and harassment. A full fridge and the sky to fly through.

You like your life. You can hear your son, frightened, a tsunami siren blaring his location to the world. You want to tell him to shut up before he attracts the attention of any more severely crappy beings,