It’s about memories as wounds, opening to reveal a little of what’s inside and then healing over but leaving a scar. The book itself is like a little wound. 3″ X 6″, with a red cover, but real pretty inside. The narrator is thirteen and drives the local school bus to the town’s only high school. “My father was the town’s mechanic and everyone figured I knew what I was doing.” The story is woven out of a few violently brief memories, the violence muted, though, by the surreal timelessness of the interwoven memories. “I remember the details of the moment. I can see the stitches on the ball as it floats to me out of my memory. Trying to make the double play. The gun raised to his eye then the grass bends with a slight shock. The duck shudders in mid-air, a piece of meat erupting from it’s side. The gesture of the face is a stitch linking the past and the future. This stitch of the moment. The duck a woman’s abandoned glove.” Precision is the word I keep thinking of. This little book is perfect in the precision of it’s choices. Each sentence presents itself as though it came out of nowhere, but in the end it seems as though the journey took the only course it could have taken.
chap-book / 12 pages / publisher: conundrum press / main creator: Andy Brown / $1 / 266 Fairmount, Montreal, PQ, H2V 2G3