Susie Moloney

Poor Janet lay in bed listening to the alarm, trying to ignore it and knowing it would never, ever go away. In the first few blinks of waking up she had nudged at Les, curled up on his side beside her. When he slept on his side, he didn’t snore as badly. She nudged him and felt his body roll with the force of it, but otherwise, gave no other response. She was about to speak Les get up time for work when she remembered that Les wasn’t working these days and then the day ahead washed over her and her stomach tightened and any thoughts of sleeping in or not getting up were lost in churning waves of stomach acid and tightened shoulders.

The alarm kept up its tinny shriek, a cross between bells and a rattling aluminium door. It sounded just like one of those wind-up alarm clocks of the sort that she remembered in her parent’s room from when she was a kid, but it wasn’t. It was a plug in. The wind-up clocks wound down eventually, and after a minute of the ringing, you could go back to sleep. If you could stand a minute. In January you could; when the floor was cold and the car had to run a full fifteen minutes before you could drive it without stalling, and if the coffee had to be made and if you forgot to make your lunch for work before going to bed, you could stand it. Probably you could stand two minutes of ringing if it meant not putting your bare feet on to the cold January floor. The plug in alarm didn’t run down. It rang until the little button was pushed. It was Les’ mom’s old alarm clock. She gave it to them when Jan complained about Les not getting up for work. The clock was procured like magic, practically out of a hat. Les’s work record embarrassed his mom. They fought about it all the time. When he wasn’t working, they avoided his mom’s place.

It was all the way across the room. To shut it off, you had to get out of bed. You couldn’t even crawl to the end of the bed and reach out to the dresser and shut it off. He’d done that too many times. They started to put it on the chair in the corner. Something about the chair made it sound louder too. It’s the acoustics, Les-than-a-man had said, grinning. Makes the chair vibrate with it.

“Shut off the fucking alarm,” Les mumbled from under the blanket. Jan was already half-way out of bed by then, so she didn’t say anything back. The bedroom was freezing. They all but shut the heat off at night save a little dough, Les said. Les-than-a-man.

It was 5:30. She had five hours to get her shit together before her meeting with the government accountant. She was being audited.

I’m being audited. Jan thought it to herself as she pushed in the little button on the back of Les’s mom’s alarm clock in hopes that the words would lose some of their power, the power they had held over her for the last two weeks, but in spite of the two weeks that she had to get used to the idea, it all still made her stomach tight and sore and her head ache.

I’m just a dumb waitress, she thought. I’m a big nobody. What do they care what I have? She’d said this and more to everyone who would listen for the last two weeks, until Les-than-a-man told her to can it. She scuffled a foot under the end of the bed fishing for her slippers and found one and put it on. She got down on all fours to find the other one. Les had pulled it off her in a stupid gesture (it was supposed to be romantic or something but it had just been stoopid) last night when he wanted to have sex. She told him she wasn’t in the mood, but he said I’ll make you in the mood and then what was she supposed to do? But her slipper had gone flying.

He always did the wrong thing at the wrong time. Like mornings, when he slept instead of going to work.

The house was cold enough that she wrapped her robe around her middle tight and hugged her arms to her middle. She slipped out of the bedroom and closed the door behind her. The first thing she did was turn the heat up. No way was she doing bullshit paper work in a cold house. Then she made coffee. Strong.

It was still dark out when she went down into the basement and started hauling boxes of receipts upstairs. She brought the first two up and even just the sight of them, with their box tops folded in on each other in a pinwheel felt so overwhelming that she decided to start with just the two of them and then work her way up to the other box, still in the basement, and then the assorted bags and folders with the other papers in them.

The boxes were from the liquor store, from when they moved. One was a Captain Morgan’s Rum box and the other a Canadian Club. Scratched out with black marker was the notation “kitchen” in her handwriting. Written under that was “tax shit,” in Les’s handwriting. Ha ha, she thought, Les-than-a-man. That’s what it was, though. Shit.

The coffee maker gurgled as though there wasn’t a care in the world that couldn’t be taken care of by Maxwell House in the Morning, but it filled the kitchen with such a warm and homey smell, that Janet thought she might cry. It reminded her -- the dark, the coffee smell, the tight stomach -- of when she was in school. Her dad would get up and make coffee come on girls and then call her and her sister to breakfast. Her mom worked a night shift at a bakery and she slept while the three of them ate and mumbled quietly at the table before school and work. Jan hadn’t done well in school, mornings before she went filled her with a familiar, comfortable sort of dread, based more on the tedium of the long day ahead than any real fear. It wasn’t she was worried about failing a test, or a grade or getting a bad mark on a paper. She didn’t do well, and wasn’t expected to by either her parents or teachers. Sometimes it just worked that way. She left after tenth grade, not exactly with her parent’s blessings, but with a basic understanding that neither she nor school were doing each other any favours. She went right to work at a diner on Rail Road, making $3.25 an hour. She’d been a waitress ever since. And she was a damn good one. She even liked it. Her parent’s had her sister to be proud of. Betty had gone all the way through school and then, in a move that was incomprehensible to Jan, went on to more school. She was a medical secretary now, and worked at one of the hospitals in the city. She was married with two kids. Her husband was a mechanic. He made good money too.

But no tips, was their joke together. Not very funny, considering it was the tips that got her into this mess.

Janet had been waitressing for ten years. Never once had she claimed any tips. Not once. Ten years, ten tax reports filed, not once had anyone said fuck all about tips. Then she was talking to a new waitress, Terri Pringle, who said, in passing one day, that you had to claim your tips on your income tax.

“They’ll come after you, if you don’t,” she’d said. Terri worked part-time. She was a student at the community college and she had said the whole thing with such confidence that it shook Janet up.

Tentatively she had said to Terri, “I’ve never claimed my tips.” She’d tried to say it with as much mustered confidence as the younger, student-y Terri, but hadn’t managed as well.

“My dad’s an accountant,” she said. “They’ll come after you for that.” Then the shift had changed and everybody went home. Terri didn’t even work there long.

Jan had asked around after that. She asked the other waitresses and they would sigh and the debate would start, but most of them said they never claimed their tips. One girl said they automatically assume tips on top of your wages. “Ten per cent,” she said. “Look over your last year’s return. Where it says: undeclared income?’ Look there. They’ll have added ten per cent.”

They hadn’t. Her mother and dad said not to worry about it. “You get it done at the H and R Block, don’t you?” She did.

“They do it for you there.” But her mom had looked a little frowny over the whole thing you don’t want to do anything to get into trouble, she’d said later, when they were alone.

Don’t be such a putz, Les-than-a-man said. “Declaring your tips would be like when we borrow ten bucks from my mom and then declaring it as income.” He laughed at the very thought and then watched tv. He reminded her, though, when they were going to the H and R Block to get their taxes done. Don’t be a putz, he’d said, and he shook his finger at her and raised his eyebrows in a perfect imitation of his mother when she said to him, you get a job now, you hear? don’t be a bum like your father.

In the end, she declared her tips. Or at least, a rough estimate of them. The H and R man had raised his eyebrows, too, and Jan had trouble deciding whether that was because she was claiming them, or because the number was so low, or too high. Her face had reddened and she felt like she’d been caught in a lie, but of course she had no real way of knowing if she was lying or not because Terri Pringle -- I could kill Terri Pringle -- hadn’t even mentioned declaring tips until nearly October. Jan had guessed based on what she made from around November-mid when she decided inside her head to play it rightto the end of the year. She thought she was safe in her guess because people tipped more around the holidays, and she counted them.

She poured coffee into her bunny mug and got down on her hands and knees on the floor in front of the first box. She cracked it open, not knowing even what year she was about to see, let alone whether or not it would be her stuff or his. Les had a business on the side sometimes, fixing bikes. His stuff was mixed in with hers, but he only claimed the money he made working extra for his buddy Tom, who had a bike shop, because Tom declared it.

The box was filled to the top with little pieces of paper. A musty smell came from the box, like old books at a garage sale. A couple of little pieces fluttered up and settled back down, like fall leaves when you swipe by them on your bike on the way to school. Thinking about school set her off again. She wanted a Tums, but she’d eaten the last of them the night before.

Gee-zus.

Her and Les were both savers of paper. Paper had some kind of authoritarian hold over her feral self. Paper made her feel more feral than human, or certainly sub-human in some way. Especially white paper. Around very white paper with lines and numbers or words on it, she felt stained and dusty and smudgy. The lines, even and black or blue, the careful tally of numbers in a row, the dots matching up with each other, they seemed like representatives of some kind of legal authority. She also felt this way about soldiers and policemen, doctors and dentists; pieces of paper felt like they could boss her, regardless of what was written on them. Could as easy be a receipt from the drugstore for tampax as a subpoena, didn’t matter. Coloured paper wasn’t so bad. She kept the pizza flyers and the two-for-one deals that came from the carpet cleaning people, and ads offering her fifteen per cent off her next oil change, with a sort of grown-up sigh, and filed them in a pile on the table beside the front door. Anything that came in a white envelope (especially a white envelope with a little window on the front) went reverently over to the desk in the corner, where she paid bills. She even kept the newsletters sent by her member of parliament, just in case. You never knew. Someone might ask. Something.

She didn’t claim much on her income tax. She claimed panty hose and her uniforms, of course. And shoes, but they were the special (ugly) orthopaedic shoes that she had to wear because of her bunions – an occupational hazard of working on your feet for ten years. In a few years she imagined she would have to have some sort of an operation on varicose veins. Annie had it done last year after she nearly couldn’t walk for the pain. The operation fixed her up pretty good, she said, but by the end of the year -- when Terri Pringle left never to return -- I could kill Terri Pringle -- new ones were troubling her.

She claimed gas mileage whenever she had to work extra at a catering job that her mother sometimes got her through the bakery. Mostly Bridge Lady teas and things, but once a Sweet Sixteen party. That had been quite a bash. Not only had it been catered, but the whole place had been professionally decorated by one of those balloon joints. They turned the No. 16 Legion Hall into a pink cloud, with a real balloon waterfall in the corner. Not just streamers, either, but yards and yards of pink fabric had been draped over walls and tables and the whole thing had been just beautiful, although a little hard on the eyes after an hour or so. Most of the teenagers took off after the presents were opened, but that was okay because the mothers and aunts and old ladies had stayed for hours, wanting only more tea and the waitresses weren’t too taxed on their feet and were paid for the whole day. Her mom and the others had made tiny little cakes -- twelve kinds -- the sort that were just a bite and sickly sweet after the first couple, but lovely to look at. Just perfect. They were tipped as a group and shared after those events. She wondered if the others had claimed the tips on their income tax.

Janet started going through the receipts, one by one, noticing that while her whole body felt sick and tired, and shaky, it was only her hands where it showed.

Sometime over the next two hours, Les woke up and ambled into the kitchen and poured himself a cup of coffee. Janet, engrossed in 1996 fuel receipts didn’t even look up. In fact, didn’t realize he was up at all until he kicked and scattered a pile of health-relateds (Les’s filling, but paid for by her, ergo her health-related receipt, plus two massages and a visit to the chiropractor, all from 1998) receipts when he opened the fridge door to get the milk. They went flying towards the free-standing cabinet where she kept her baking stuff and tupperware.

“Don’t,” she shrieked, shocking them both. She bent over double from her position, sitting on the floor surrounding by boxes and pieces of paper (almost of them white), and fished out two receipts that had slipped under the cabinet. “This took me hours,” she said.

“Sor-reee,” he said, and muttered something about someone being a little cranky under his breath. He settled in on the livingroom sofa, out of Janet’s line of vision, but she heard him open the paper.

She felt mildly guilty for snapping at him when he’d just woken up -- Les was not a morning person -- and so called to him in the livingroom, “How come you’re up so early?”

He grunted. She waited for his answer, and realized the grunt was going to be all she got, and so bent back over her receipts, searching for something, anything, over the last six years that would save her ass.

“Dear Mrs. Lancaster,” the letter has started. Right away, reading it, before she even opened the envelope in fact, she knew it was bad news. The long, thin, pristine white envelope was addressed to her and her alone, the erroneous “Mrs” making it somehow worse. The corner was stamped with a government of Canada logo and no return address. Under the logo was “Department of Revenue,” and her stomach had tightened.

She had come home after her shift smelling like French fries and mud pie and wanting nothing more in the whole wide world (ever again) to take her shoes off and sit on the couch. Les’s truck hadn’t been in the drive and that had given her a little lift. The house would be empty and quiet. She didn’t even wonder where he was, didn’t give it a thought (although hoping in the same breath that he was out looking for work and knowing that it was more likely he was playing pool at the legion or else was at his mother’s cadging twenty bucks). She grabbed the mail not even looking at it and threw it on the table. The letter from the government skittered out, sliding across the Formica with its weight.

“Dear Mrs. Lancaster,” it began. “A review of your 2000 tax remittance noted that you filed $362.96 in income under ‘other source.’

“Your explanation of the additional income was for gratuities received through your employment at the Happy Diner where you are listed as ‘serving personnel.’ A sequential review of tax information filed for the years 1996-1999 indicated that while during those years you were also employed by the Happy Diner as serving personnel, no gratuities were claimed for those years.

“You are therefore required to appear at your nearest tax office on or before February 13, 2001 with records indicating this discrepancy in a independent audit. Please call the number at the bottom of this page to make an appointment with your auditor, no later than ten days after the receipt of this letter.”

It was signed by a secretary for a director at Revenue Canada (Auditor’s Department!) whose name was Mr. Peter Norris. Peter Norris. She’d never heard of him, never would meet him, but she had a vague feeling from then on that he had her file on his desk ready to be stamped, “Guilty,” the implications of which could only be dreamed about, in a nightmare fashion.

She’d left the letter lying around for a couple of days, never once forgetting about it for even a moment. That had been a Friday. Saturday night her and Les had gone out for a couple of beers with their friends Gord and Paula and Janet had drank more than a couple of beers, uncharacteristically, pissing Les off because it meant he had to drive them home and he’d had a warning four years earlier for drinking and driving. “They’ll cut my ass off, I get caught,” he’d said, petulantly, more than a little in his cups himself. She’d laughed at that. “They won’t cut your ass off. They’ll take away your license,” she’d said, matter-of-factly. “Cut your ass off. What does that even mean?” She could get snarky like this only when she was a little drunk.

“Same thing,” Les said. She fell asleep in the car and even then, didn’t stop thinking about the audit.

She finally told Les about it that Sunday, when he was trying to watch football and nursing a hangover with a beer. “Get yourself a lawyer,” was what he said.

She told her mom and dad that same day, walking over to their place right around supper time, needing just a little comfort food and maybe a bit of advice. What she thought she really wanted was to hear her dad tell her it was all right and then to tell her to bring her stuff over to him and he would take care of it. Maybe call her Princess, like when she was little.

“Just get your things together and explain to the government that you didn’t know you had to declare your tips and that you’re very sorry and you won’t do it again,” her mother told her. She made beef casserole with shell noodles. It tasted like grade five and homework, because of how she felt.

“You never should have declared them in the first place,” her dad said, from his chair in the livingroom, where he was watching the game and switching over to Matlock, between quarters.

On the following Monday, Abby at work said, “You get yourself a good accountant and let them do the work.”

She got herself Ramona Jacobson, who tsk-tsk-ed and oh my-ed everything, called her Lancaster and charged by the hour and talked really fast. The woman wore those half-glasses that old people wore, even though she didn’t look more than ten years older than Janet, and sometimes she peered at her over them as though Janet were some sort of alien creature worth a second study.

Ramona Jacobson scared her almost as much as the audit, but at least she was on her side.

The phone rang at eight-thirty just about knocking Janet out of her slippers. Her eyes were stinging from being open so long and her fingers were black and coated with ink. It rang twice before she realized Les wasn’t going to pick it up and she got up off the floor, very careful not to disturb any of the fifteen piles of varying years and subject matter (unfortunately in no particular order) that were distributed around the floor in the kitchen.

Les was still reading the paper. He shifted without looking at her, his bulk moving slowly over the vinyl seats of the sofa, so that air escaped from one of them making a hissing sound, like a fart.

“Lancaster, I just wanted to remind you to bring all the co-malgamated T-7s. And while I got you, don’t forget the super-annuated close forms. Even the one’s for your spouse.” Ramona Jacobson spoke very fast on the phone, breathing it all into Janet’s ear like sitting too close to a speaker for too long.

“That’s right. And the T-6s, too. From the legion work. Gotta go. If you need anything, I’m in a meeting for the next hour and then you can get me on my cell. You have that number?”

“It’s –” and then at the speed of light she rattled off what seemed to be an account number at the world’s largest bank.

“You can get me on it until 11. Shit! I have your Geswins! Well, that’s all right. What time’s the appointment?”

“1:30, right. Hmmm. Forgot about that. Anyway, I’ll meet you there. If you need me, you can still get me after the hour. Gotta go, I’m late, good luck!” And she hung up.

Janet hung on to the phone, desperation creeping over her face more quickly as she realized that Ramona Jacobson had hung up before she had a chance to ask what co-malgamites were. And the super-annuated thing? Had she said that? Malgamites, or something. What was that? Something else too. She hung up before Jan had a chance to ask....

She hung up and stared at the phone as if it was going to ring again. It didn’t.

“Oh yeah, when’s that thing?” He turned a page of the newspaper with such slowness, such snapping of newsprint, such rolling of fat that she wanted to turn and scratch him to pieces as though making him bleed and scream would somehow release the rising pulse of terror inside her.

“Well, you’re in for it. Shouldn’t have claimed them in the first place,” he said, then he chuckled. And he folded the paper over, smoothing the pages down against the coffee table. Jan went back into the kitchen, glancing up at the clock. It was 8:35. She had three hours left before she had to get in the shower and get dressed and down to the auditor.

There was a fourth box in the kitchen when she re-entered. It was perched on the edge of the vinyl chair that was covered with brown flowers, a cast off from her mom’s place. Their old kitchen suite. The kitchen chairs of her youth. If you got close enough they smelled like her sister and mashed potatoes.

On the side of the box was written, “taxes 1997.” She thought she had been through all the 97s. Her heart sank, and yet lifted at the same time, as though in this new box might be the answer, the legendary, mythical piece of paper that would lead to the path that keep her out of prison. The Holy Trail.

Ignoring the rest of the receipts in the box she’d last opened (“tax crap 98 or 96"), she went right to the new box and pulled open the flaps. Little pieces of paper fluttered up. She grabbed one closest to the top.

“Windlemiers,” it said at the top. She frowned. Windlemiers? She shook her head. There were a series of code numbers at the top. Then a lonely figure. “$267.95.” Two more figures followed, the only two she could puzzle out.The itemized taxes: Provincial and federal. Okay that’s good. Janet nodded encouragingly to herself. Taxes, right, good; that was what she was looking for, right? Under the taxes was the total and then another series of codes. A figure that might have been the date seemed absent. She puzzled over the first series of codes, in case that was it, and then the one at the bottom. Nothing seemed remotely date-related. She tried to think of what on earth might cost $267.95 all at once and could come up with nothing but a car repair. They rarely had $267.95 (or even just $267.00) all at once to pay something. Not after pay day, any way.

She nodded to herself. Car repair. That would be good. She could say it was car repair to get to a Legion job. There was no date. Her heart pumped a little harder with the lie. (Not that it was necessarily a lie, it could be true, how did she know? How on earth was she supposed to know?)

She dropped it with haphazard abandon in the vicinity of the pile supposedly of “car repair.” The year no longer seemed to matter. She could hear the clock ticking in her belly.

The phone rang again about twenty minutes later and it was for Les. Jan had just cut her finger, a paper cut, and it stung. She stuck it in her mouth and sucked, the pain exquisite and small. Through that, she heard him mumbling into the phone, listening with only half an ear (he wasn’t currently cheating as far as she knew, and he wasn’t actively seeking employment and so it would only be some bum friend or other and therefore was not very interesting. Then he called from the livingroom.

“Hey Lancaster!” he called (he had taken to calling her that when she told him about the accountant calling her that; he thought it was funny). “Call-waiting for you.” She stumbled into the livingroom, her eyes unable to see great distances after all their small work.

She took the phone and the man on the other end was talking before it even got to her ear.

“-- confirming your 1:30 pm appointment. You understand that you’re expected.” Her mind snapped awkwardly on the moment and gave her all her reference material out of panic.

“Yes, I understand. I will be there. I am meeting my accountant,” she said, hoping the last bit came out with some authority.

“Good, good,” he said, and then paused with horrible time-stealing importance and affability. “So many people just try to avoid the inevitable by not showing up, you understand. It’s not that I believe you won’t be here -- I’m not saying anything at all about you personally, it’s just that many people try to avoid the inevitable,” he said. It seemed to Jan that he had just spoken in a loop, saying every word with such deliberation that the time it took excluded the others and so he repeated them, endlessly.

“Yes?” she said firmly, having no idea what he was talking about. The accountant will take care of it, she heard her father’s voice in her head. And Abby’s. And her mother’s. Even Les might have said something like that right after sex. Maybe.

“Good, good,” he said again, his voice on a loop. She nodded into the phone, eyes glazed over, looking towards the sunburst clock over the dresser they kept in the livingroom to keep their CDs in. There were sweaters in the bottom drawers. “Yes,” she repeated, because he seemed to need something more.

“Good, good, then,” he said. It was almost 9:30. “At 1:30 am, then,” he finally finished, as though it were an affair or something pleasant. His voice was affable, something she’d only read about and that filled her with suspicion. He hung up and she handed the phone back to Les.

“Thanks for taking so long,” he said, sarcastically. She went back into the kitchen.

One was beside the stove, and written in big, bold black letters, all capitals was, “Existentials, 1999.” The other two were half-hidden under the table, but she saw them, even as they tried to wiggle closer under. The box she had been working on was only just started, but she tore into the new one with a fierce sort of will. The kitchen was littered with paper, her comings and goings had scattered some of the neat stacks until they were literally piles. You get piles from sitting on cold cement in your pajamas, she thought wildly; her mother used to threaten that.

Ripping open the new box she stared blankly at a receipt that appeared to have no dollar figure. The date was 99, though, as the box had promised. For this, she was eternally grateful. June 16, 1999. Thank you, Jesus, I am absolved of sin in the blood of the receipt. Thank Jesus.

“Jesus wouldn’t have claimed them in the first place,” Les said from the door. “I’m Picking up Beaner and we’re getting that starter for the pick up,” he said vaguely. “I might stop over at mom’s after,” he said. She didn’t look up. He picked his way around the piles of paper and said nothing about them.

Ramona Jacobson called back at ten. “Don’t forget the willimusteers and the mono-magnisiums. Also the Pat-Rilancers; they’re with the S-2 forms. Okay? Gotta run. You know you didn’t bring them to the last meeting and that was your choice, Lancaster. Oh! For god’s sake, jiggle things around and make sure there’s at least a thousand bucks in your mainstream, eh? Get me on the cell, 873dog95-24eat at sam’s30.” And she hung up.

Janet cut her finger, a paper cut, on the pad of note paper by the phone. She sucked at it.

There were six more boxes, all unopened when she walked back into the kitchen. She stared at them with a baleful, exhausted sort of defiance. They were marked only randomly, some had the routine, black felt marker scrawled across, others didn’t. They were marked, “Hornets, 98.” “Case Histories, 1996.” And worse, “Receipts and Recipes for Disaster, 1998.”

A copy of the Desiderata on pink paper, decorated with filigrees on the edges.

“Go placidly among the noise and haste –” she recited, remembered from a vague and unmemorable adolescence.

Sometime after four that day, Les and Beaner walked into the house and heard the phone ringing. They’d picked up the starter for the truck and then dropped by Les’s mom’s place. She’d given him twenty bucks after a hard ride. You get a job, Lester. Get a haircut, Lester. You’re living in sin, Lester.

He and Beaner had laughed at this at the Kegger on Main, Les a little less hardier than Beaner, whose mother was dead and in her grave fifteen years.

“You gotta tape that, Mom, put it on a loop so I can play it back later, like a motivational thing, you know,” Les had said to his mom. They’d repeated this bon mot up until their fourth beer when they got into sports with more of a vengeance.

“Janet,” Les screamed when he walked in. The phone rang. “Let the machine get it,” he said to Beaner. “Old lady’s not home. Must be working,” he said to Beaner.

“Does the Pope shit in the woods?” Beaner answered. This struck Les as hilarious.

In the livingroom the machine picked up the phone. A woman’s voice screamed fast, into it. “Lancaster! Lancaster! Lancaster!” The boys ignored it.

Beaner followed Les into the kitchen. The fridge was blocked by an enormous pile of paper, literally blocked. Everywhere in the room was paper. It reached as high as the counter.

Les tried to get the fridge door open and couldn’t. He looked around at the mess, a mess he sure-as-shit wasn’t cleaning up.

“She had some tax thing. Guess she didn’t get it cleaned up. She’ll do it later,” he said, but his mouth was dry. It was more paper than he’d ever seen, ever. He brought a hand up to shield his eyes, the sunlight, filtering in the west window was shining off the endless white, nearly blinding him. “Fuck,” he said, equally vaguely, utterly unsure as to what to do. The paper presented a problem.

Les looked at his buddy and then followed his gaze to a spot on the floor where the mountain dipped nearly to linoleum. Pinky-brown flesh showed against the blinding white. A slender wrist and hand.

Without a word, Les stepped one giant step around the mound nearest the fridge and crouched, piles of paper reaching right to his crotch, a necessary lunge that pulled his groin muscle.

He picked up the hand, gingerly, like he might a mouse. “Cold,” he said, but not without feeling. “Better call someone,” he added, his voice cracking. Beaner didn’t move.

There were tiny scratches all over the arm, little nicks in otherwise, white, smooth flesh.

“Looks like paper cuts,” Les said, nodding. One summer Les had worked at a heating and ventilating company in the city. Mostly he had stuffed pink insulation into walls and then covered them up. He stuck his hand through the mounds of paper, along the route of the arm that he’d just felt, curious.

“Body’s warm,” he said. He looked over his shoulder at Beaner’s pale, sick face.


HOME ABOUT FICTION POETRY ART SUBMIT NEWS MORBID ZINES ODDITIES BEWARE CONTACT FEARS HZ2 KASEY.LANSDALE BOOKS FILMS JEANI	Susie Moloney
The August Special Guest is Susie Moloney You can visit Susie at: http://www.susiemoloney.com
THE AUDIT by Susie Moloney Poor Janet lay in bed listening to the alarm, trying to ignore it and knowing it would never, ever go away. In the first few blinks of waking up she had nudged at Les, curled up on his side beside her. When he slept on his side, he didn’t snore as badly. She nudged him and felt his body roll with the force of it, but otherwise, gave no other response. She was about to speak Les get up time for work when she remembered that Les wasn’t working these days and then the day ahead washed over her and her stomach tightened and any thoughts of sleeping in or not getting up were lost in churning waves of stomach acid and tightened shoulders. I’m being audited. The alarm kept up its tinny shriek, a cross between bells and a rattling aluminium door. It sounded just like one of those wind-up alarm clocks of the sort that she remembered in her parent’s room from when she was a kid, but it wasn’t. It was a plug in. The wind-up clocks wound down eventually, and after a minute of the ringing, you could go back to sleep. If you could stand a minute. In January you could; when the floor was cold and the car had to run a full fifteen minutes before you could drive it without stalling, and if the coffee had to be made and if you forgot to make your lunch for work before going to bed, you could stand it. Probably you could stand two minutes of ringing if it meant not putting your bare feet on to the cold January floor. The plug in alarm didn’t run down. It rang until the little button was pushed. It was Les’ mom’s old alarm clock. She gave it to them when Jan complained about Les not getting up for work. The clock was procured like magic, practically out of a hat. Les’s work record embarrassed his mom. They fought about it all the time. When he wasn’t working, they avoided his mom’s place. Les-than-a-man. That was what Jan’s mom called him. It was all the way across the room. To shut it off, you had to get out of bed. You couldn’t even crawl to the end of the bed and reach out to the dresser and shut it off. He’d done that too many times. They started to put it on the chair in the corner. Something about the chair made it sound louder too. It’s the acoustics, Les-than-a-man had said, grinning. Makes the chair vibrate with it. Janet didn’t know if that was true, but it did seem louder. “Shut off the fucking alarm,” Les mumbled from under the blanket. Jan was already half-way out of bed by then, so she didn’t say anything back. The bedroom was freezing. They all but shut the heat off at night save a little dough, Les said. Les-than-a-man. It was 5:30. She had five hours to get her shit together before her meeting with the government accountant. She was being audited. I’m being audited. Jan thought it to herself as she pushed in the little button on the back of Les’s mom’s alarm clock in hopes that the words would lose some of their power, the power they had held over her for the last two weeks, but in spite of the two weeks that she had to get used to the idea, it all still made her stomach tight and sore and her head ache. I’m just a dumb waitress, she thought. I’m a big nobody. What do they care what I have? She’d said this and more to everyone who would listen for the last two weeks, until Les-than-a-man told her to can it. She scuffled a foot under the end of the bed fishing for her slippers and found one and put it on. She got down on all fours to find the other one. Les had pulled it off her in a stupid gesture (it was supposed to be romantic or something but it had just been stoopid) last night when he wanted to have sex. She told him she wasn’t in the mood, but he said I’ll make you in the mood and then what was she supposed to do? But her slipper had gone flying. He always did the wrong thing at the wrong time. Like mornings, when he slept instead of going to work. The house was cold enough that she wrapped her robe around her middle tight and hugged her arms to her middle. She slipped out of the bedroom and closed the door behind her. The first thing she did was turn the heat up. No way was she doing bullshit paper work in a cold house. Then she made coffee. Strong. It was still dark out when she went down into the basement and started hauling boxes of receipts upstairs. She brought the first two up and even just the sight of them, with their box tops folded in on each other in a pinwheel felt so overwhelming that she decided to start with just the two of them and then work her way up to the other box, still in the basement, and then the assorted bags and folders with the other papers in them. The boxes were from the liquor store, from when they moved. One was a Captain Morgan’s Rum box and the other a Canadian Club. Scratched out with black marker was the notation “kitchen” in her handwriting. Written under that was “tax shit,” in Les’s handwriting. Ha ha, she thought, Les-than-a-man. That’s what it was, though. Shit. The coffee maker gurgled as though there wasn’t a care in the world that couldn’t be taken care of by Maxwell House in the Morning, but it filled the kitchen with such a warm and homey smell, that Janet thought she might cry. It reminded her -- the dark, the coffee smell, the tight stomach -- of when she was in school. Her dad would get up and make coffee come on girls and then call her and her sister to breakfast. Her mom worked a night shift at a bakery and she slept while the three of them ate and mumbled quietly at the table before school and work. Jan hadn’t done well in school, mornings before she went filled her with a familiar, comfortable sort of dread, based more on the tedium of the long day ahead than any real fear. It wasn’t she was worried about failing a test, or a grade or getting a bad mark on a paper. She didn’t do well, and wasn’t expected to by either her parents or teachers. Sometimes it just worked that way. She left after tenth grade, not exactly with her parent’s blessings, but with a basic understanding that neither she nor school were doing each other any favours. She went right to work at a diner on Rail Road, making $3.25 an hour. She’d been a waitress ever since. And she was a damn good one. She even liked it. Her parent’s had her sister to be proud of. Betty had gone all the way through school and then, in a move that was incomprehensible to Jan, went on to more school. She was a medical secretary now, and worked at one of the hospitals in the city. She was married with two kids. Her husband was a mechanic. He made good money too. But no tips, was their joke together. Not very funny, considering it was the tips that got her into this mess. I could just kill Terri Pringle. Janet had been waitressing for ten years. Never once had she claimed any tips. Not once. Ten years, ten tax reports filed, not once had anyone said fuck all about tips. Then she was talking to a new waitress, Terri Pringle, who said, in passing one day, that you had to claim your tips on your income tax. “They’ll come after you, if you don’t,” she’d said. Terri worked part-time. She was a student at the community college and she had said the whole thing with such confidence that it shook Janet up. Tentatively she had said to Terri, “I’ve never claimed my tips.” She’d tried to say it with as much mustered confidence as the younger, student-y Terri, but hadn’t managed as well. “My dad’s an accountant,” she said. “They’ll come after you for that.” Then the shift had changed and everybody went home. Terri didn’t even work there long. Jan had asked around after that. She asked the other waitresses and they would sigh and the debate would start, but most of them said they never claimed their tips. One girl said they automatically assume tips on top of your wages. “Ten per cent,” she said. “Look over your last year’s return. Where it says: undeclared income?’ Look there. They’ll have added ten per cent.” They hadn’t. Her mother and dad said not to worry about it. “You get it done at the H and R Block, don’t you?” She did. “They do it for you there.” But her mom had looked a little frowny over the whole thing you don’t want to do anything to get into trouble, she’d said later, when they were alone. Don’t be such a putz, Les-than-a-man said. “Declaring your tips would be like when we borrow ten bucks from my mom and then declaring it as income.” He laughed at the very thought and then watched tv. He reminded her, though, when they were going to the H and R Block to get their taxes done. Don’t be a putz, he’d said, and he shook his finger at her and raised his eyebrows in a perfect imitation of his mother when she said to him, you get a job now, you hear? don’t be a bum like your father. In the end, she declared her tips. Or at least, a rough estimate of them. The H and R man had raised his eyebrows, too, and Jan had trouble deciding whether that was because she was claiming them, or because the number was so low, or too high. Her face had reddened and she felt like she’d been caught in a lie, but of course she had no real way of knowing if she was lying or not because Terri Pringle -- I could kill Terri Pringle -- hadn’t even mentioned declaring tips until nearly October. Jan had guessed based on what she made from around November-mid when she decided inside her head to play it rightto the end of the year. She thought she was safe in her guess because people tipped more around the holidays, and she counted them. She poured coffee into her bunny mug and got down on her hands and knees on the floor in front of the first box. She cracked it open, not knowing even what year she was about to see, let alone whether or not it would be her stuff or his. Les had a business on the side sometimes, fixing bikes. His stuff was mixed in with hers, but he only claimed the money he made working extra for his buddy Tom, who had a bike shop, because Tom declared it. The box was filled to the top with little pieces of paper. A musty smell came from the box, like old books at a garage sale. A couple of little pieces fluttered up and settled back down, like fall leaves when you swipe by them on your bike on the way to school. Thinking about school set her off again. She wanted a Tums, but she’d eaten the last of them the night before. Gee-zus. Her and Les were both savers of paper. Paper had some kind of authoritarian hold over her feral self. Paper made her feel more feral than human, or certainly sub-human in some way. Especially white paper. Around very white paper with lines and numbers or words on it, she felt stained and dusty and smudgy. The lines, even and black or blue, the careful tally of numbers in a row, the dots matching up with each other, they seemed like representatives of some kind of legal authority. She also felt this way about soldiers and policemen, doctors and dentists; pieces of paper felt like they could boss her, regardless of what was written on them. Could as easy be a receipt from the drugstore for tampax as a subpoena, didn’t matter. Coloured paper wasn’t so bad. She kept the pizza flyers and the two-for-one deals that came from the carpet cleaning people, and ads offering her fifteen per cent off her next oil change, with a sort of grown-up sigh, and filed them in a pile on the table beside the front door. Anything that came in a white envelope (especially a white envelope with a little window on the front) went reverently over to the desk in the corner, where she paid bills. She even kept the newsletters sent by her member of parliament, just in case. You never knew. Someone might ask. Something. You never knew. She didn’t claim much on her income tax. She claimed panty hose and her uniforms, of course. And shoes, but they were the special (ugly) orthopaedic shoes that she had to wear because of her bunions – an occupational hazard of working on your feet for ten years. In a few years she imagined she would have to have some sort of an operation on varicose veins. Annie had it done last year after she nearly couldn’t walk for the pain. The operation fixed her up pretty good, she said, but by the end of the year -- when Terri Pringle left never to return -- I could kill Terri Pringle -- new ones were troubling her. She claimed gas mileage whenever she had to work extra at a catering job that her mother sometimes got her through the bakery. Mostly Bridge Lady teas and things, but once a Sweet Sixteen party. That had been quite a bash. Not only had it been catered, but the whole place had been professionally decorated by one of those balloon joints. They turned the No. 16 Legion Hall into a pink cloud, with a real balloon waterfall in the corner. Not just streamers, either, but yards and yards of pink fabric had been draped over walls and tables and the whole thing had been just beautiful, although a little hard on the eyes after an hour or so. Most of the teenagers took off after the presents were opened, but that was okay because the mothers and aunts and old ladies had stayed for hours, wanting only more tea and the waitresses weren’t too taxed on their feet and were paid for the whole day. Her mom and the others had made tiny little cakes -- twelve kinds -- the sort that were just a bite and sickly sweet after the first couple, but lovely to look at. Just perfect. They were tipped as a group and shared after those events. She wondered if the others had claimed the tips on their income tax. Janet started going through the receipts, one by one, noticing that while her whole body felt sick and tired, and shaky, it was only her hands where it showed. ***** Sometime over the next two hours, Les woke up and ambled into the kitchen and poured himself a cup of coffee. Janet, engrossed in 1996 fuel receipts didn’t even look up. In fact, didn’t realize he was up at all until he kicked and scattered a pile of health-relateds (Les’s filling, but paid for by her, ergo her health-related receipt, plus two massages and a visit to the chiropractor, all from 1998) receipts when he opened the fridge door to get the milk. They went flying towards the free-standing cabinet where she kept her baking stuff and tupperware. “Don’t,” she shrieked, shocking them both. She bent over double from her position, sitting on the floor surrounding by boxes and pieces of paper (almost of them white), and fished out two receipts that had slipped under the cabinet. “This took me hours,” she said. “Sor-reee,” he said, and muttered something about someone being a little cranky under his breath. He settled in on the livingroom sofa, out of Janet’s line of vision, but she heard him open the paper. She felt mildly guilty for snapping at him when he’d just woken up -- Les was not a morning person -- and so called to him in the livingroom, “How come you’re up so early?” He grunted. She waited for his answer, and realized the grunt was going to be all she got, and so bent back over her receipts, searching for something, anything, over the last six years that would save her ass. ***** “Dear Mrs. Lancaster,” the letter has started. Right away, reading it, before she even opened the envelope in fact, she knew it was bad news. The long, thin, pristine white envelope was addressed to her and her alone, the erroneous “Mrs” making it somehow worse. The corner was stamped with a government of Canada logo and no return address. Under the logo was “Department of Revenue,” and her stomach had tightened. She had come home after her shift smelling like French fries and mud pie and wanting nothing more in the whole wide world (ever again) to take her shoes off and sit on the couch. Les’s truck hadn’t been in the drive and that had given her a little lift. The house would be empty and quiet. She didn’t even wonder where he was, didn’t give it a thought (although hoping in the same breath that he was out looking for work and knowing that it was more likely he was playing pool at the legion or else was at his mother’s cadging twenty bucks). She grabbed the mail not even looking at it and threw it on the table. The letter from the government skittered out, sliding across the Formica with its weight. “Dear Mrs. Lancaster,” it began. “A review of your 2000 tax remittance noted that you filed $362.96 in income under ‘other source.’ “Your explanation of the additional income was for gratuities received through your employment at the Happy Diner where you are listed as ‘serving personnel.’ A sequential review of tax information filed for the years 1996-1999 indicated that while during those years you were also employed by the Happy Diner as serving personnel, no gratuities were claimed for those years. “You are therefore required to appear at your nearest tax office on or before February 13, 2001 with records indicating this discrepancy in a independent audit. Please call the number at the bottom of this page to make an appointment with your auditor, no later than ten days after the receipt of this letter.” It was signed by a secretary for a director at Revenue Canada (Auditor’s Department!) whose name was Mr. Peter Norris. Peter Norris. She’d never heard of him, never would meet him, but she had a vague feeling from then on that he had her file on his desk ready to be stamped, “Guilty,” the implications of which could only be dreamed about, in a nightmare fashion. She’d left the letter lying around for a couple of days, never once forgetting about it for even a moment. That had been a Friday. Saturday night her and Les had gone out for a couple of beers with their friends Gord and Paula and Janet had drank more than a couple of beers, uncharacteristically, pissing Les off because it meant he had to drive them home and he’d had a warning four years earlier for drinking and driving. “They’ll cut my ass off, I get caught,” he’d said, petulantly, more than a little in his cups himself. She’d laughed at that. “They won’t cut your ass off. They’ll take away your license,” she’d said, matter-of-factly. “Cut your ass off. What does that even mean?” She could get snarky like this only when she was a little drunk. “Same thing,” Les said. She fell asleep in the car and even then, didn’t stop thinking about the audit. She finally told Les about it that Sunday, when he was trying to watch football and nursing a hangover with a beer. “Get yourself a lawyer,” was what he said. She told her mom and dad that same day, walking over to their place right around supper time, needing just a little comfort food and maybe a bit of advice. What she thought she really wanted was to hear her dad tell her it was all right and then to tell her to bring her stuff over to him and he would take care of it. Maybe call her Princess, like when she was little. “Just get your things together and explain to the government that you didn’t know you had to declare your tips and that you’re very sorry and you won’t do it again,” her mother told her. She made beef casserole with shell noodles. It tasted like grade five and homework, because of how she felt. “You never should have declared them in the first place,” her dad said, from his chair in the livingroom, where he was watching the game and switching over to Matlock, between quarters. On the following Monday, Abby at work said, “You get yourself a good accountant and let them do the work.” She got herself Ramona Jacobson, who tsk-tsk-ed and oh my-ed everything, called her Lancaster and charged by the hour and talked really fast. The woman wore those half-glasses that old people wore, even though she didn’t look more than ten years older than Janet, and sometimes she peered at her over them as though Janet were some sort of alien creature worth a second study. Ramona Jacobson scared her almost as much as the audit, but at least she was on her side. ***** The phone rang at eight-thirty just about knocking Janet out of her slippers. Her eyes were stinging from being open so long and her fingers were black and coated with ink. It rang twice before she realized Les wasn’t going to pick it up and she got up off the floor, very careful not to disturb any of the fifteen piles of varying years and subject matter (unfortunately in no particular order) that were distributed around the floor in the kitchen. Les was still reading the paper. He shifted without looking at her, his bulk moving slowly over the vinyl seats of the sofa, so that air escaped from one of them making a hissing sound, like a fart. She grabbed the phone on the fourth ring. “Hello?” she said, like a question. “Lancaster, I just wanted to remind you to bring all the co-malgamated T-7s. And while I got you, don’t forget the super-annuated close forms. Even the one’s for your spouse.” Ramona Jacobson spoke very fast on the phone, breathing it all into Janet’s ear like sitting too close to a speaker for too long. “Huh?” she said. “Bring the what?” “That’s right. And the T-6s, too. From the legion work. Gotta go. If you need anything, I’m in a meeting for the next hour and then you can get me on my cell. You have that number?” “I don’t know.” “It’s –” and then at the speed of light she rattled off what seemed to be an account number at the world’s largest bank. “Um thanks,” Janet said. “You can get me on it until 11. Shit! I have your Geswins! Well, that’s all right. What time’s the appointment?” “Um –” “1:30, right. Hmmm. Forgot about that. Anyway, I’ll meet you there. If you need me, you can still get me after the hour. Gotta go, I’m late, good luck!” And she hung up. Janet hung on to the phone, desperation creeping over her face more quickly as she realized that Ramona Jacobson had hung up before she had a chance to ask what co-malgamites were. And the super-annuated thing? Had she said that? Malgamites, or something. What was that? Something else too. She hung up before Jan had a chance to ask.... What everything is. She hung up and stared at the phone as if it was going to ring again. It didn’t. “Who was that?” Les said from the couch. “The accountant,” she said, bewildered. “Oh yeah, when’s that thing?” He turned a page of the newspaper with such slowness, such snapping of newsprint, such rolling of fat that she wanted to turn and scratch him to pieces as though making him bleed and scream would somehow release the rising pulse of terror inside her. “1:30,” she said. The only thing she knew. “Well, you’re in for it. Shouldn’t have claimed them in the first place,” he said, then he chuckled. And he folded the paper over, smoothing the pages down against the coffee table. Jan went back into the kitchen, glancing up at the clock. It was 8:35. She had three hours left before she had to get in the shower and get dressed and down to the auditor. ***** There was a fourth box in the kitchen when she re-entered. It was perched on the edge of the vinyl chair that was covered with brown flowers, a cast off from her mom’s place. Their old kitchen suite. The kitchen chairs of her youth. If you got close enough they smelled like her sister and mashed potatoes. On the side of the box was written, “taxes 1997.” She thought she had been through all the 97s. Her heart sank, and yet lifted at the same time, as though in this new box might be the answer, the legendary, mythical piece of paper that would lead to the path that keep her out of prison. The Holy Trail. Ignoring the rest of the receipts in the box she’d last opened (“tax crap 98 or 96"), she went right to the new box and pulled open the flaps. Little pieces of paper fluttered up. She grabbed one closest to the top. “Windlemiers,” it said at the top. She frowned. Windlemiers? She shook her head. There were a series of code numbers at the top. Then a lonely figure. “$267.95.” Two more figures followed, the only two she could puzzle out.The itemized taxes: Provincial and federal. Okay that’s good. Janet nodded encouragingly to herself. Taxes, right, good; that was what she was looking for, right? Under the taxes was the total and then another series of codes. A figure that might have been the date seemed absent. She puzzled over the first series of codes, in case that was it, and then the one at the bottom. Nothing seemed remotely date-related. She tried to think of what on earth might cost $267.95 all at once and could come up with nothing but a car repair. They rarely had $267.95 (or even just $267.00) all at once to pay something. Not after pay day, any way. She nodded to herself. Car repair. That would be good. She could say it was car repair to get to a Legion job. There was no date. Her heart pumped a little harder with the lie. (Not that it was necessarily a lie, it could be true, how did she know? How on earth was she supposed to know?) She dropped it with haphazard abandon in the vicinity of the pile supposedly of “car repair.” The year no longer seemed to matter. She could hear the clock ticking in her belly. ***** The phone rang again about twenty minutes later and it was for Les. Jan had just cut her finger, a paper cut, and it stung. She stuck it in her mouth and sucked, the pain exquisite and small. Through that, she heard him mumbling into the phone, listening with only half an ear (he wasn’t currently cheating as far as she knew, and he wasn’t actively seeking employment and so it would only be some bum friend or other and therefore was not very interesting. Then he called from the livingroom. “Hey Lancaster!” he called (he had taken to calling her that when she told him about the accountant calling her that; he thought it was funny). “Call-waiting for you.” She stumbled into the livingroom, her eyes unable to see great distances after all their small work. She looked at him questioningly. He shrugged. “But get off, cause I have Beaner on the other line.” A bum friend. She took the phone and the man on the other end was talking before it even got to her ear. “-- confirming your 1:30 pm appointment. You understand that you’re expected.” Her mind snapped awkwardly on the moment and gave her all her reference material out of panic. “Yes, I understand. I will be there. I am meeting my accountant,” she said, hoping the last bit came out with some authority. “Good, good,” he said, and then paused with horrible time-stealing importance and affability. “So many people just try to avoid the inevitable by not showing up, you understand. It’s not that I believe you won’t be here -- I’m not saying anything at all about you personally, it’s just that many people try to avoid the inevitable,” he said. It seemed to Jan that he had just spoken in a loop, saying every word with such deliberation that the time it took excluded the others and so he repeated them, endlessly. “Yes,” she said, because she couldn’t think of anything else. “And you’ll be sure to bring your liabostities?” he asked. “Yes?” she said firmly, having no idea what he was talking about. The accountant will take care of it, she heard her father’s voice in her head. And Abby’s. And her mother’s. Even Les might have said something like that right after sex. Maybe. “Good, good,” he said again, his voice on a loop. She nodded into the phone, eyes glazed over, looking towards the sunburst clock over the dresser they kept in the livingroom to keep their CDs in. There were sweaters in the bottom drawers. “Yes,” she repeated, because he seemed to need something more. “Good, good, then,” he said. It was almost 9:30. “At 1:30 am, then,” he finally finished, as though it were an affair or something pleasant. His voice was affable, something she’d only read about and that filled her with suspicion. He hung up and she handed the phone back to Les. “Thanks for taking so long,” he said, sarcastically. She went back into the kitchen. Three more boxes were in the kitchen when she came in. One was beside the stove, and written in big, bold black letters, all capitals was, “Existentials, 1999.” The other two were half-hidden under the table, but she saw them, even as they tried to wiggle closer under. The box she had been working on was only just started, but she tore into the new one with a fierce sort of will. The kitchen was littered with paper, her comings and goings had scattered some of the neat stacks until they were literally piles. You get piles from sitting on cold cement in your pajamas, she thought wildly; her mother used to threaten that. Ripping open the new box she stared blankly at a receipt that appeared to have no dollar figure. The date was 99, though, as the box had promised. For this, she was eternally grateful. June 16, 1999. Thank you, Jesus, I am absolved of sin in the blood of the receipt. Thank Jesus. Jesu anumi ablo... What would Jesus do? “Jesus wouldn’t have claimed them in the first place,” Les said from the door. “I’m Picking up Beaner and we’re getting that starter for the pick up,” he said vaguely. “I might stop over at mom’s after,” he said. She didn’t look up. He picked his way around the piles of paper and said nothing about them. Good bye. Maybe she only thought it. ***** Ramona Jacobson called back at ten. “Don’t forget the willimusteers and the mono-magnisiums. Also the Pat-Rilancers; they’re with the S-2 forms. Okay? Gotta run. You know you didn’t bring them to the last meeting and that was your choice, Lancaster. Oh! For god’s sake, jiggle things around and make sure there’s at least a thousand bucks in your mainstream, eh? Get me on the cell, 873dog95-24eat at sam’s30.” And she hung up. Janet cut her finger, a paper cut, on the pad of note paper by the phone. She sucked at it. There were six more boxes, all unopened when she walked back into the kitchen. She stared at them with a baleful, exhausted sort of defiance. They were marked only randomly, some had the routine, black felt marker scrawled across, others didn’t. They were marked, “Hornets, 98.” “Case Histories, 1996.” And worse, “Receipts and Recipes for Disaster, 1998.” In one she found a bird’s nest. Her grade ten orienteering report. A bill of sale for a car she’d never owned. A copy of the Desiderata on pink paper, decorated with filigrees on the edges. A receipt for fourteen pairs of panty hose (taupe) in size 7. “Go placidly among the noise and haste –” she recited, remembered from a vague and unmemorable adolescence. ***** Sometime after four that day, Les and Beaner walked into the house and heard the phone ringing. They’d picked up the starter for the truck and then dropped by Les’s mom’s place. She’d given him twenty bucks after a hard ride. You get a job, Lester. Get a haircut, Lester. You’re living in sin, Lester. He and Beaner had laughed at this at the Kegger on Main, Les a little less hardier than Beaner, whose mother was dead and in her grave fifteen years. “You gotta tape that, Mom, put it on a loop so I can play it back later, like a motivational thing, you know,” Les had said to his mom. They’d repeated this bon mot up until their fourth beer when they got into sports with more of a vengeance. “Janet,” Les screamed when he walked in. The phone rang. “Let the machine get it,” he said to Beaner. “Old lady’s not home. Must be working,” he said to Beaner. “Wanna beer?” “Does the Pope shit in the woods?” Beaner answered. This struck Les as hilarious. In the livingroom the machine picked up the phone. A woman’s voice screamed fast, into it. “Lancaster! Lancaster! Lancaster!” The boys ignored it. Beaner followed Les into the kitchen. The fridge was blocked by an enormous pile of paper, literally blocked. Everywhere in the room was paper. It reached as high as the counter. “What the hell?” Beaner gasped. Les tried to get the fridge door open and couldn’t. He looked around at the mess, a mess he sure-as-shit wasn’t cleaning up. “She had some tax thing. Guess she didn’t get it cleaned up. She’ll do it later,” he said, but his mouth was dry. It was more paper than he’d ever seen, ever. He brought a hand up to shield his eyes, the sunlight, filtering in the west window was shining off the endless white, nearly blinding him. “Fuck,” he said, equally vaguely, utterly unsure as to what to do. The paper presented a problem. “Holy shit!” Beaner said. “What the hell is that?” Les looked at his buddy and then followed his gaze to a spot on the floor where the mountain dipped nearly to linoleum. Pinky-brown flesh showed against the blinding white. A slender wrist and hand. Without a word, Les stepped one giant step around the mound nearest the fridge and crouched, piles of paper reaching right to his crotch, a necessary lunge that pulled his groin muscle. He picked up the hand, gingerly, like he might a mouse. “Cold,” he said, but not without feeling. “Better call someone,” he added, his voice cracking. Beaner didn’t move. There were tiny scratches all over the arm, little nicks in otherwise, white, smooth flesh. “What are those marks?” Beaner said. “Looks like paper cuts,” Les said, nodding. One summer Les had worked at a heating and ventilating company in the city. Mostly he had stuffed pink insulation into walls and then covered them up. He stuck his hand through the mounds of paper, along the route of the arm that he’d just felt, curious. The body itself was warm. “Body’s warm,” he said. He looked over his shoulder at Beaner’s pale, sick face. “Paper’s a good insulator,” he said.	Susie Moloney was born and raised in Winnipeg, Canada. It's fitting then that her very first novel was about a very Canadian phenomenon, a snowstorm that wouldn't quit. Published in 1995 by Key Porter Books, Bastion Falls made Susie's first mark in the world of fiction. Two years later, her break out novel A Dry Spell was published all over the world, translated into multiple languages, and included a movie option with Cruise-Wagner Pictures, Tom Cruise's production company. The Dwelling followed with critical acclaim and became a best seller. Her next novel, The Thirteen, will be released by Random House. Susie's photo credit: Richard Wagner Photography