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

Richie drives. You slog towards it through the rain. You gird yourself to see the bear curled up in the back. It’s skinny, wretched and moaning. Not a real bear. It follows Richie. You screamed when you first saw it, and then realized it wasn’t earthly. Maggie smacked you.

“It’s a fucking family spirit he inherited,” she snapped. “It won’t fuck with you if you don’t fuck with Richie.”

You got embarrassed because you’ve been shrieking a lot lately, like a girl in a monster movie.

You understand now why Jared didn’t want to see these things, and wouldn’t help you see them no matter how you begged. They’re bizarre and not often friendly. But once you start seeing them, you can’t unsee them. You’ve made your choice about red pills and blue pills and there is no going back. Maggie rummages in a bag by the bear and then goes back to the root cellar and tosses a grenade down the stairs. A muffled kaboom. Why? you wonder.

She’s kind of a pyro, Jared thinks. She likes it when things go boom.

His shirt is a bib of blood. He smells as if he bathed in vodka. He’s slumped against the door and not breathing. “How do you live without your organs? How is that possible?”

“You don’t,” Maggie says. “Not for long. Even if you’re a Trickster.”

She shoos the organs into the cab, where they shiver like excited little dogs. When they press themselves against Jared, they are reabsorbed. He’s in your brain, but passively observing, just wanting to be outside his own head. Away from things he doesn’t want to think about. Places in his mind he doesn’t want to visit.

That’s basically why you used to cut yourself: to get outside your own brain. Maggie, at least, externalizes her rage. Your mother measures hers out in calories allowed. Six almonds for a snack. Five hundred calories for supper. Punishing the three percent left of her body fat with gruelling sessions on the treadmill at 5 a.m., before the careful ritual of hair, makeup and clothes. Hot lemon water for breakfast with cayenne pepper and sugar substitute.

Your mother always asked you in that tone, “What are you telling the world about yourself with this outfit?”

“Fuck you, World,” you liked to respond, just to get a rise.

Your mother’s not exactly breaking out the AK-15s and killing her way to get to you. When you had her served with your emancipation papers, you seem to have reached the natural conclusion of your relationship. You didn’t want to go back to the body-positive gulag she foisted on you, blind to the irony of putting you in treatment for self-injury while she wandered free. You didn’t think you were telling her to fuck right off completely, but apparently you were. Your dad has always been more of an absentee roommate who leaves you Post-it Notes about cleaning your egg off the cast iron frying pan that you used to make some breakfast and suggesting you might want to re-season it to be respectful to the house you share.

“You’re a good tracker,” Maggie volunteers.

“Just with Jared,” you say.

“When you’ve got juice, you have to be careful who you bone.”

This is not awkward. Not awkward at all. You are not ashamed of your sexuality or the fact that you are sitting in a truck with your ex’s mother, sharing each other’s thoughts. Richie glances at you in the rear-view mirror, a man who gives new meaning to rough around the edges. Frayed T-shirt and frayed jeans and messy beard and shaved head, a bent boxer’s nose and wild eyebrows. You are not going to imagine their sex life. You are going to think about anything else. You’re grateful Richie can’t share thoughts.

Richie starts the truck and pulls out on the highway, putting distance between you and the compound. Jared suddenly leaves his body and you scream because you think he’s died, but Maggie informs you that he’s travelling and please shut your fucking hole she needs to think.

“What’s up?” Richie says, reaching over to put a hand on her thigh.

Maggie squeezes his hand. “Jared’s travelling. He just left his body.”

Richie pulls over to the side of the road. They can see Jared walking away, strolling down the shoulder as if he’s going to start hitchhiking any minute.

Maggie presses her fingers against her temples. “Can you get him back in his body?”

“I don’t know,” you say. “How’d he even leave it?”

This is as far as I can go, Jared thinks.

Thin, dewy threads connect him to you and to Maggie. Maggie wants him back in the truck. Now. There’s shit they have to figure out before the rest of the coy wolves organize.

You’re getting a headache from having so many people in your head. Maggie tosses you a half-empty bottle of Tylenol Extra Strength and a bottle of no-name water.

Jared, please, you think.

He is suddenly in the truck bed, sitting on a metal cooler, reaching down to pet the bear. It groans in obvious pain and Jared pulls his hand back.

What happened to your bear? Jared thinks.

Not the time, his mom thinks back.

“Drive,” Maggie says to Richie.

—

Jared’s eyes don’t blink. It’s creepy. His body stares at the ceiling as it lies on the motel bed. Travelling Jared is on the roof, watching traffic.

You’ve never given a lot of thought to souls. The idea was always an airy abstract to you. How do you make someone inhabit their body when you know what it’s like to hate every imperfect millimetre? All the vague pull-up-your-bootstraps slogans and plaster-a-smile-over-your-existential-horror bumper-sticker cheerleading made you feel worse for not being able to buy into the bullshit everyone else seems to be shovelling with gusto.

Maggie has left you here with a loaded gun. The safety is off. She needs space. And pizza. Richie went with her because he won’t let her drive this angry. Too many payments left on the truck to let her grind it against all the fuckers of this world too stupid to follow