The Fly.

The dead fly, it’s been lying on the bathroom floor for one week now. Its wings are shriveled close to its body, its little feet curled into hooks digging tight into its belly, the head tucked, antenna limp and hanging, hiding the photo-reception sheen of all its eyes now dulled to a sad matte. The same spot on the floor, the fly has been lying there despite the cat, despite the whoosh of air in and out from doors opening and closing, despite the wet shower towels dropping on the hair and dust caked floor beside it.

I see it. Every time I pee. The toilet stares straight at this carcass of summer gone by. I could reach out, pluck the little wings between two fingers, flush the fly down the toilet with the paper and waste.

But I don’t.

Living with the dead fly gets easier, you know. The more I see it, the more I expect it. Every time I close the door to the bathroom, unzip jeans, I look for my friend, sticking like a sore memory in the back of my mind to the dirty bathroom floor I refuse to wash lest destroying my new friend’s home. It’s happy here, I can tell. I’m happy to have it, it knows.

It’s a dirty little reminder, my winged friend, a nuisance analogy of death and decay. Before it dove into tailspin, smashing into the weathered linoleum, it munched on the remains of my dying spider plant, the leftover raw chicken in the kitchen garbage pail, the feline feces hardening in the litter box.

An omen of the ugly and unwanted, the dead fly on my bathroom floor happily digested the garbage my life left over. Buzzing past turned ears tired and sleeping, it went about its business not asking more of me, but instead trailing my disastrous path, not criticizing, not shaking a little tarsus at my want for waste.

Scoff, roll your eyes – I welcome criticism of my messy house, my unkempt life, my emotional chaos showing itself in piles of unwashed socks and dusty baseboards, stained counter tops and empty wine bottles piling up, up, up beside the front door.

The little fly, before and after death, it’s just fine with me and I’m just fine with it.

xoxo,

M.L. H’art

Smile.

It is my job to make you smile and I will kill you with kindness.

This woman, despite the perfectly placed blouse masking her weight-related insecurities and the carefully chosen glass blown beads hanging deep into her respectively covered cleavage, an attempt to appear more professional, she doesn’t want to smile. But I don’t care. It’s my job to make her show me teeth.

“Thank you! And have a great day now!”

I am the Wal-Mart greeter with the happy yellow smiling stickers.

This guy, with his backwards hat and ill-fitting angry attitude hanging from narrow shoulders, jeans in desperate need of a wider set of hips and a broader perspective, shoes worn thin from one too many poorly executed kick-flips and long shifts behind the burger grill – he needs to smile, I can tell.

“Hi there, how are you today?”

I am the friendly telemarketer selling you long term disability insurance you don’t need.

The sour old man with the broken heart, crushed twenty years ago by a beautiful girl who left him for his best friend, the old man who’s since shut out his family and chosen, instead, the depths of a dark downtown apartment with one window for light and a small hotplate for tea and a weekly trip to the library where he reads soft pages of 1930’s inspired mafia mysteries – a smile would help him.

“Good afternoon, sir. Might I interest you in some information today?” Smile, Vaseline teeth.

I am the Green Peace warrior on the street corner convincing you to save the dolphins.

The young mother pushing the stroller stuffed full with two kids, another towing behind, makeup a forgotten luxury of time, clothes wrinkled and smelling of stale milk, a worried look on her face because she’s wondering just how she’ll manage to get Jr. down for his nap in time for her PA meeting this afternoon when the ladies barge in her front door and scrutinize the dust bunnies tucked snugly under couch cushions, she should smile more.

“Hello, oh aren’t your children so sweet!”

I am the late night wonder salesman showing you impressively sharp knives perfect for all your tin can cutting needs and it’s my job to make you smile. I will kill you with kindness.

xoxo

M.L. H’art

Maude.

“I haven’t passed along my advice on becoming a writer, have I?”

“No, I don’t think you have, Peter”

“Hold this,” he says as he hands me his awkward camera bag, handbills and papers falling out from all corners.

“A long time ago when I sailed around the world – oh, you should do that! Sail around the world, see all the ports. And travel over land too! – I landed in South America (silly me, I thought I could spend just a few weeks there and see everything not realizing South America is an ENTIRE continent!) – anyway, I ran into a fellow from England. He asked me where I was from and I proudly told him British Columbia – he was English you know, so I made sure I said Brit-ish Col-umbia carefully. He asked what town I was from and I said: ‘Oh a small northern town, you likely wouldn’t have heard of it.’

“’Try me,’ the fellow said and so I told him: ‘Fort St. John.’

“’Well!’ said the old Brit, ‘I know of Fort St. John. I used to work for the newspaper there!’

“Then you know our famous Maude!’ I replied.

“’I know her, the bitch! All she wanted was a slave!’ exclaimed the angry Englishman, recounting his obvious distaste of his employment with the paper.

“I retold this tale of meeting the disgruntled Brit to my father over the telephone some months later. My father was quite dismayed at such a lack of respect for the great Maude. My father said: ‘She’s neither a witch nor a slave driver. She is the reason we have a printing press in Northern BC!’”

“Turns out, my father told me, as a young woman, Maude lived in the southern states. She was charged with the responsibility of packing the horse bags which were sent up to soldiers in Canada leaving for the war. She’d always dreamt of seeing Canada and marrying a Canadian cowboy and so in one of the packs she slipped a note that said:

I have dreamt of marrying a Canadian Cowboy. If you will marry me, please write me back.

“Sure enough, within a few months’ time she received a response from a lonely cowboy from Manitoba. Those Americans, they don’t know much about Canada, but Maude packed her things, hopped the train and found herself in Vancouver where she instead met a man and fell madly in love, forgetting of course about the lonely cowboy in Manitoba. She and her husband were pushed out of Vancouver during the war, moving farther and farther north until they settled in Fort St. John, where they started a local newspaper.

“Now, something interesting you should know about Maude is that she had no higher a reading level than the third grade. But whatever was written when Maude’s fingers hit the keys was what was pressed. The typesetters weren’t allowed to make any corrections. And so, if there was an 8 instead of an apostrophe, people became accustomed. They knew what she meant anyway.

“Now, here I was a young journalist in the Amazon Jungle as my father told me this story about the great Maude who’d move from the states to escape the war to start a career as a journalist with only a third grade education.

“So, I wrote to Maude. I asked her to give me what advice she could to a young journalist stuck in the Amazon. This is what she wrote….”

He handed me an oversized piece of folded paper, creased and worn from being carried in the confines of his coat pocket, shoved up against hand bills and notepads, pens and lens brushes.

“Don’t read it now,” he said. “Take it with you. Read when you have time. There’s good advice here.”

I took the paper, shoved into the depths of my purse, forgot about it until I got home later that night.

The letter, it said:

February 1, 1975

Dear P;

I was happy to hear from you and sorry to know your dad had to find the travelling the hard way. He was always a rugged type and I am sure once he got home and back to his own feed box, plus neighbours et c . he’g soon get over it and only a pleasant memory left.

I am an old lady now Peter, 87 last summer and do not expect to give much advice or results on anything I do. I remember oyu as a bumptious and self confident sprout and I am sure to get into the journalistic game, all you would ha ve to do is just enlarge on what you wrote to me. I would think the Alaska Highway News, which is now owned by some eastern syndicate, would be glad to gave your copy, specially ff you make them see your predicaments , relative to some co0incident, mountain, highway, hill or muskeg, down deep there in the Peru country.

I am sure if you didn’t try to write, jut tell, such as being a tool push comparied to one at Baldonnel, or you missed the feed-bag with a stubborn switch and late fot e for the dinner you were so hungry for, would make good readin for the oil Patch.

Sit diwon and tell. That8s all I ever did on the paper. I never went to school longer than the 3^rd readers, and I sure you could wrap rigsn around me. Be natural, say what you see, or act, then qualify and they will likely be sending you a gumdrop for the effort. I gave the AN to our son Dan and Georgina and a Dutch boy we important from the Hague. They sold it for a lot of dough and Dave Radler, is the president of the deal. I have no desire to ever leave home. We saw the Orient to the Equator in 1937, bombed out of Shanghai etc and etc to Lillooeet has some of everything all the other places, either too mch or too little. Thank you for your letter. Dont wait, just start in and with all the curle-cures on your penmanship, better print you copy by hand, on lines and only on one side of the paper. God bless and good luck,

M.

**

xoxo

M.L. H’art

Ed. Note: This post serves as a very loose recount of a story heard in passing and is a fictitious embellishment on behalf of the author’s imagination. To learn more about the real story of the Alaska Highway News, please see comments below or track down the Canadian History programs on the Discovery Channel.