Monkey Beach

by Eden Robinson

La’es, they say, La’es, la’es.

La’es—Go down to the bottom of the ocean.

No one in the fishing fleet reported seeing the Queen.

I saw Jimmy at Monkey Beach. He stood at the edge of the sand, where the beach disappeared into the trees.

I turned back and

saw him. Just for a moment, just a glimpse of a tall man, covered in brown fur. He gave me a wide, friendly smile, but he had too many teeth and they were all pointed. He backed into the shadows, then stepped behind a cedar tree and vanished.

I always think that the small appearances of sasquatches indicating bad lucks or something shitty is going to happen -- an omen for those things.

I used to think that if I could talk to the spirit world, I’d get some answers. Ha bloody ha. I wish the dead would just come out and say what they mean instead of being so passive-aggressive about the whole thing.

As I grew older, he became a variation of the monster under the bed or the thing in the closet, a nightmare that faded with morning. He liked to sit on the top of my dresser when he came to visit, and he had a shock of bright red hair which stood up in messy, tangled puffs that he sometimes hid under a black top hat.

Seven of the chickens were killed that morning, and the rest escaped through the hole in the net and were hiding down on the beach.

Given a choice, I like to move in up to my ankles. Wait until my body adjusts. Up to the knees. Wait. Up to the thighs. Wait. And on and on, slowly, until I am dog-paddling around.

The Greeks ironically called the Black Sea Euxinos: friendly to strangers. Those who know the ocean know it doesn’t make friends. Exitio est avidum mare nautis—the greedy sea is there to be a

doom for sailors.

Mom told me to be on my best behaviour. She didn’t tell Jimmy to behave himself, but he sat quietly on Uncle Mick’s sofa.

“No, you don’t. Ba-ba-oo was an asshole. He beat Gran. Instead of sending him away, she sent Mick and Mom to residential school.”

He was going to tell everybody at school that I was a wussy baby, and that was what they were going to call me forever.

her, they pulled her dress up. She was wearing pink panties but they told everyone she was wearing diapers.

“You’re nowhere near as bad as your mom was. Now, she was a holy terror.”

She had forced us to read a book that said that the Indians on the northwest coast of British Columbia had killed and eaten people as religious sacrifices. My teacher had made us each read a paragraph out loud. When my turn came, I sat there shaking, absolutely furious.

This adds up to the historical facts of how Native or Indian kids are expected to learn to hate their own culture, a practice that would leave to the Native erasure by the white people.

“Fuck the Oppressors.”

“My little warrior.”

The man turned and walked into the woods. The son—I don’t know how I knew he was the son—stopped waving too, but stayed and watched us.

He tried to phone her when he got back, but she said she was beat and wet and wanted to go to sleep. The next morning, your ma-ma-oo came home and asked him who made the snow angels. Your dad went to the window, and the whole front yard was covered with them.

‘That’s when I knew I was going to marry her,’ your dad told me.”

“Crazy? I’m crazy? You look at your precious church. You look at what they did. You never went to residential school. You can’t tell me what I fucking went through and what I didn’t.”

A log, white with age, jutted out of the water. Balanced on top of the log was a long-legged bird staring out at the lake. At first, I thought it was a crane, but I couldn’t remember cranes being blue. The bird’s long thin beak pointed towards me as it rolled one yellow eye then the other, checking me out. I stayed very still—the bird was almost as high as my waist and looked cranky.

“If you see blood on your panties, don’t be afraid to tell your teacher or your parents. Let them know, and they will help you get the right equipment.”

sex led to misfortune.

Girls in our class had become very silly, standing around the playground and whispering about this boy or that. I was glad I didn’t have to be a part of it.

Oh, projected stereotype notions of sex and gender.

The little man woke me near dawn, his eyes glittering and black.

Spotty wakes me from a dream about Monkey Beach. She is in the greengage tree when I wake

up. She screeches, hops, and I hear her hit our roof, then trundle back and forth, her claws clicking against the shingles. La’sda, she says. Go into the water. La’sda, la’sda.

Contacting the dead, lesson one. Sleep is an altered state of consciousness. To fall asleep is to fall into a deep, healing trance. In the spectrum of realities, being awake is on one side and being asleep is way, way on the other. To be absorbed in a movie, a game or work is to enter a light trance. Daydreams, prayers or obsessing are heavier trances. Most people enter trances reflexively. To contact the spirit world, you must control the

way you enter this state of being that is somewhere between waking and sleeping.

She finally met her match. She was never going to be happy until she argued him into the ground. Did Mick tell you about Washington and the Trail of Broken Treaties?”

Jimmy shrugged. I’d never seen him like this before, and wondered if he would actually go through with it.

Namu, Ma-ma-oo explained later, means whirlwind. The area is famous for whirlwinds. Usually, they’re only the small ones; they play on the water, go in the bay and dance out.

The crows wait at the outskirts of the squabble. They are little black dots that flutter and edge nearer to the corpse until the sea gulls drive them away. A flock of crows is called a murder.

Make your hand into a fist. This is roughly the size of your heart. If you could open up your own chest, you would find your heart behind your breastbone, nestled between your lungs. Each lung has a notch, the cardiac impression, that the

heart fits into. Your heart sits on a slant, leaning into your left lung so that it is slightly smaller than your right lung. Reach into your chest cavity and pull your lungs away from your hea...

The bottom of your heart rests on your diaphragm. The top of your heart sprouts a thick tangle of large tubes. Your heart is shrouded at the moment by a sac of tissue, a membrane called the pericardium, which acts like bubble wrap by both protecting your heart and holding it in place. Peel away this sac. Inside is a watery lubricant that minimizes friction when your heart beats. Shooting down from the aorta—the large tube ...

Behold, your heart. Touch it. Run your fingers across this strong, pulsating organ. Your brain does not completely control your heart. In the embryo, the heart starts beating even before it is supplied by nerves. The electrical currents that ripple across your heart causing it to contract are created by a small bundle of specialized muscle tissue on the upper right-hand corner of your heart.

The whole paragraphs are so beautiful and symbolic.

“Doesn’t participate in class. Not working to full potential. Not concentrating, please set up an appointment to discuss study habits, etc.”

Jimmy, on the other hand, made the honour roll every time. He’d even made it into the Northern Sentinel, holding up a swim medal with one hand, the other arm over a teammate’s shoulder. The caption read, “Future Olympic Hopeful Jimmy Hill Wins Regionals.”

As long as I could add and subtract, I didn’t feel a need to have any great math skills.

But you were right tho. The only math skills you need to have in your life are substraction, addition, multipy, and divide. The rest? Not needed.

“All the time. So does your dad. He hides it. You hide it.”

Food is dust in my mouth without you. I see you in my dreams and all I want to do is sleep. If my house was filled with gold, it would still be empty. If I was king of the world, I’d still be alone. If breath was all that was between us, I would stop breathing to be with you again. The memory of you is my shadow and all my days are dark, but I hold on to these memories until I can be with you again. Only your laughter will make them light; only

your smile will make them shine. We are apart so that I will know the joy of being with you again. Take care of yourself, wherever you are. Take care of yourself, wherever you are.

Names have power. This is the fundamental principle of magic everywhere. Call out the name of a supernatural being, and you will have its instant and undivided attention in the same way that your lost toddler will have yours the second it calls your name.

They discovered the man—transformed into a b’gwus—who then killed his

adulterous wife and brother.