PREFACE
Karen Mulhallen

MEMOIR
Larry Frolick - The Dark Side of the Moon: My Toronto, 1967–1999
Alex Pugsley - Fudge
Madeline Sonik - Ashes

FICTION
Robert Raymer - The Future Barrister
M.H. Vesseur - Babyface Junkie (Translated by Paul Vincent)
Douglas Glover - Pointless, Incessant Barking in the Night
Emi Benn - What Martha Did

ANNALS OF TRAVEL
John Keyes - Evacuation Route (A Canadian Goes South)

POETRY
Ariel Gordon - Waterage
David Day - Cry of the Curlew
Myrna Garanis - Myrtle on the Midnight
Brian Henderson - Something to Remember the World By
Jeffrey Herrick - Divine Wind; Hohle Fels
Leanne Averbach - Dusk, If That
Roo Borson - Nara
Joanna M. Weston - The Canoe

PORTFOLIOS
Anitra Hamilton - Humpty Dumpty
John Massey - Soldiers
Jim Hake - The Joy of Repetition

Back of the Book
Contributing Editors' Columns - Mark Kingwell; Rosemary Sullivan
Contributors’ Notes
Co-Editor’s Diary - Gauthaman Ravidran
Production Editor’s Diary - Whitney French
News and Notes
Advertisements

this morning
clouds weighted the ocean
mountains blurred

ripples lipped the shore
with quiet tongues

while an arbutus leant
from thin soil giving shelter
to a beached red canoe

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My friends had names like Timmy and Tommy and Ted. Fudge had friends with names like Johnny Red and Sneaky and Frenchy Burger, one of his better inventions. There was also Surging Herman, Sully, Big Fish, Beasley, Bubbles, Veeper, Fuzz-Head, Chug-a-Lug, and someone named Blomgren. He called me Mickey. Nicknaming was an easy diversion for Fudge and these names indicate the kind of cartoon fraternity he lived in, or wanted to live in, and I list them in such detail because I copied them down as I heard them. In those years I carried with me an extra copy of Watership Down — I’d received three copies for Christmas that year — and on the blank fly-leaves of the paperback I scribbled lists and jokes and doodles of werewolves. Fudge’s nicknames belonged to people from an alternate Halifax, a Halifax outside the scheme of the city as I knew it. This was a place of errant characters, rogue adolescents who wandered the university campuses for fun and profit, rink rats who played pinball and hung around bowling alleys and the container pier and the food court at Scotia Square mall.

These places in turn seemed linked to the mythology of an older, grey-misted Halifax. That there was, say, a secret undersea tunnel between the Old Town Clock and George’s Island. Or that if you wore green on Thursdays it meant you were gay and you were going to Citadel Hill to be gay with other gay people. Or that there was a demonic motorcycle gang on Agricola Street called The Thirteenth Tribe. This was a while ago now, back in a Halifax of stubby beer bottles and foil-lined bags of Scottie’s salt-and-vinegar potato chips — a Halifax when slush on a store’s foundation might melt away to reveal a cloth election sticker for Robert Stanfield. The city then seemed a more pluralist place, home to twisting streets, hide-and-seek kids, clapboard houses — a folk expression of the Maritime demotic. The houses are still there, of course, but now painted mimosa with teal trim, front façades appointed with brass carriage lamps and decorative flower boxes. But I liked those selfsame wooden Victorian houses precisely because of the missing shingles and peeling paint and sagging porch stairs — when a side door might lead to a draft dodger from Virginia needing a gram of hash, or grad students wanting acid for a house party, or a women’s macramé group refilling an order of pot. Delivering drugs was a new kind of paper route for me, it brought me into landings I could never have imagined, and Howard Fudge was the ferryman into these underworld ports of call. He steered me into a Halifax I didn’t know was there.

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She is the terror of the neighbourhood. God help the ‘holy rollers’ who roll to her door with pamphlets on the world’s demise. Just a tap, and she will open, making the prospects of Armageddon as appealing as a picnic. And to neighbours who neglect to kowtow as they shuffle past her porch, she is equally unkind. She once said, “Wipe that smirk off your face, before I knock it off,” to a friend of mine who had smiled at her. This was in 1972, long before he knew he was gay, or my brother came out of the closet, or the two of them became friends, then lovers, then enemies. It was before she told me, “I blame you for your brother’s homosexuality!” then had a heart attack that left her with angina and a prescription for small, white nitroglycerine tablets, which she held one at time, under her tongue. It was before I started high school, before Roe v. Wade, which might seem irrelevant, but isn’t, since my mother had never wanted to have children, and all four times she became pregnant she hoped she would miscarry, but didn’t.