Punch drunk.

I imagine that’s how my parents felt while they were making me. When they were young

and probably stoned, full of those big, animal impulses that compel us to rub our body parts

together and mix up our fluids—a thing we do over and over again for the whole of our lifetimes,

no matter how smart or stupid we are.

Punch him in the face.

That’s what I’d do. And I imagine that’s what my mother wanted to do, too, eight months

later when my dad was long gone and she was alone in a gray and blue delivery room, labouring

hard to get me out of her.

Punch. (Full stop.)

That’s what my mother started to call me after she saw how I came out (which was

squalling and scrappy, with my hands clenched and ready to brawl). I was a little premature but a

wild woman even then, and beside all the really tiny babies in the ICU, the ones who were

actually half way between living and dying, I looked robust. And I’ve stayed that way—hearty,

and quick with my fists, I mean—pummeling the air and anyone who gets their face in the way,

ever since.

My legal name is “April May Elizabeth Simons!” but only uptight or exasperated people

call me that. Examples: Mrs. Eghetz, my grade six teacher, who said, “I will not condone violent

behaviour by indulging such an ungodly chosen name;” and my mother when she was yelling,

which was often enough; and, more recently, the judge.

“Do you understand what I’m saying to you?” Her Honour’s name was Francis J. Denver-

Pringle and that sad hyphen was her own doing, I’m sure of it. She was ramrod, an airtight piece

of a woman, with a completely vertical spine (how does that happen?) and a body that moved

Punch. (Full stop.)Hilary Fair

1

only at the neck and the head. (And sometimes a little more, of course, like when she lifted her

hand to write things about me on the papers in front of her.) Her face was stony and humourless

—compensating, probably, for the fragility of her little bones. Underneath the lacquer, the

aubergine pantsuit and the robe, I bet she is breakable. There must be a real, vulnerable little

heart in there, ticking away, trying to squelch out the feelings. Why mess with a name like

Denver unless it was the best option you had? Unless you still needed someone else’s strength

and advantages to help hold you up? (You wouldn’t, am I right?)

Women are good at compromises, even when they’re soldiers. It’s how we’re still a

species. I’ve read about this: At work, where I check out books for people and then put them back

on their shelves and my shoulders crack when I raise my arms above my head, “Feminism” is

catalogued in the three hundreds. 359.24AUTHORLASTNAME. That’s just slightly above eye

level for those of average height. What do you make of that?

The judge squinted and pointed a highlighter at me as she spoke. “Ms. Simons,” she said,

“are we clear here?”

“Absolutely, Franny,” I wanted to say, and I had the urge to gnaw my own hand like I had

Tourette’s, like I’d seen a character do in a TV movie which was both funny and so sad, which

was precisely how I felt standing there, wrinkly-necked and clunky as a wildebeest, in a

courtroom with panel lights and felted walls. I both love and hate to make a scene. “Absolutely,

Franny,” the character had said, “Absolutely.” Chomp, chomp, chomp.

Sometimes I am unsure if I have a working heart. Then I cry at the sight of a rotting

squirrel. I don’t know where all the feelings come from—they just gurgle up from my belly and

pound out through my mouth, like a vomit missile too fast to catch.

Punch. (Full stop.)Hilary Fair

2

The lawyer named Paul (that Legal Aid assigned to me, not my choice) elbowed me

lightly in the guts and jerked his head toward the judge’s bench: “It’s imperative that you’re

polite,” he said, hardly moving his lips before his mouth went back to a straight line. I’m told my

own resting face is a pout and I’m not sure how to fix that. I am just a little bit worrisome.

He’d also said, “Do you have anything else you can wear?” back when we first met, a few

weeks before, in a little windowless room where we were trying to decide whether or not I would

plea. Pants stick to my thighs and creep into my butt crack, so I wear heavy tights and long, loose

T-shirts instead. Claire, who is my boss, says this is fine for the work I do because I am mostly

alone in the stacks, and because most days our primary visitors are the underemployed and

mentally ill. Libraries no longer require sweater sets and pearls, thank Larry (that is what I call

God). They are essential halfway houses for the people most other places won’t lend a washroom

key, and I take that seriously. Flipping the bird at dress code is an equalizer. I understand

intersectionality, and I have my own activisms.

Paul poked me again, this time in the side of my thigh because I was standing up beside

him. I was looking down on him now, and I shifted my weight into my heels, just trying to get

more comfortable, and he cleared his throat to hurry me up. His cheek was twitching a little and I

could see the moles on his bald head quiver: he was jerking it up and down in such a fast,

microscopic nod it looked like he had a little tick of his own. But, instead of saying that—or any

of the other things I was thinking—I simply said, “Yes. Yes, your Honour,” which was half,

maybe three-quarters, cow shit. Because I understood, yes I did, but I did not agree.

And so I made myself feel better by sitting back down in my chair and pulling on the

seam of my shirt, and taking a minute just to think about how much that fucker deserved it no

matter what I’d just said to the judge. Because what is guilt? I try to have none of it, particularly

Punch. (Full stop.)Hilary Fair

3

about this. Sometimes I eat whole boxes of crackers—when I am alone in my apartment, where I

can lie on my mattress, which is on the floor with everything else, and listen to the rail cars go by

and watch their shadows move on my white walls. I fear hunger—that’s why I will always be a

little bit fat. But I am trying to learn to watch my impulses. To “own” my actions, and to allow

the shame to lift like clouds all around me. That’s what Nina advises. She is the counselor who

was assigned to me at the court. “Just try to notice everything,” she says (and by that she means

all the vomitous feelings) “with equanimity and compassion.” Which, did you know, is

exhausting? But together, every Wednesday night at seven o’clock, she and I sit together in her

neutral office with dim lights and pillows and motivational posters and we notice together how I

still want to pound Stephen, to punch the living shit out of him for all the times he punched

Melissa. And then we also notice that that would undo all the work I’ve done.

Most of the time it feels like I just make the same brain circles, round and round again,

but Nina says my process is unique, that I am finding my own way out of the loop. “I’m with you

on this journey,” she says, “but you’re the guide.” More (and maybe immense) cow shit. But

also: Mandated. And sometimes, it’s even a little bit comforting.

I used to kill frogs and I got over that. I am waiting for this one to pass, too.

Melissa was in the court that day and all the pretty parts of her looked swallowed up and

beat. She had dark circles under her eyes and her makeup only made them worse. She shouldn’t

wear her hair in a bun—it makes her face particularly round—and the bulge in her stomach was

poking up through her brown sweater, which kind of matched her hair, which made her look like

a monochrome lump except for her pale skin. (There were no wins for her that day.) She sat

behind the bar and far away from me, refusing to look no matter how many times I turned in my

Punch. (Full stop.)Hilary Fair

4

chair to stare at her before Paul sniped “Turn around” through his teeth and her Honour looked

back up.

I don’t tell anyone, but I think she’s pathetic. That’s how I get so provoked. Do things

ever get simple? Love crumples and folds, and then you flatten it out again—that’s just how it

works. But this time it’s different: The creases are tight and there are probation terms.

***

Melissa used to share her lunch with me. All the way through elementary school she

slipped the carrot sticks and chunks of salami and fruit snacks that her mother packed for her onto

my desk in little piles. They went beside the Kraft cheese slices I brought, wedged between

pieces of the white bread my own mother bought at the A&P on Friday nights. Mom (wrong, I

almost never call her that)—my mother worked there as a cashier, under the fluorescent lights

and in a burgundy and cream uniform, which she hated because she was both vain and sensitive.

“I look gray,” she’d say when she got home from her shifts even though her hair was still

all brown and she looked just fine. She’d sigh and turn away from the mirror. “God, I just feel

like I’m frying up and dying sometimes.” Often she would hug me after she said stuff like that,

like there was something I could do about it. Like, in that very minute, I was the remedy, not the

reason, for all her bad feelings.

“Do you know what the three lucks are?” Melissa asked me that when we were six, while

we were pretending to be kangaroos and playing house in the oak trees at the very back of her

backyard. “Love, happy and food,” she said and she served me some yellowing leaves on a piece

of bark. She was the mommy and I was the little baby. “Now, honey, I need you to eat all this.”

In Melissa’s real house, her other names were Honey and Darling and Pet. She put a pebble in my

Punch. (Full stop.)Hilary Fair

5

mouth: “Swallow!” she said, “or they’ll have to cut you open to get the bugs out.” Then she put

her hand to my forehead and kissed it. “Don’t worry, sweetheart, I think you’ll be ok.”

When I was actually sick, my grandmother took care of me while my mother was at work.

She stroked my back and tickled my arms and stirred up the ginger ale so there weren’t any

bubbles to prickle my guts. That’s what we said when we had a flu: “There’s a prickle in my

guts.”

I grew up calling her Tilly because she wasn’t ready to be a Gran, and I remember that her

skin smelled like lavender and sweat even when she was freshly clean, like just minutes out of

the lake. Tilly took me there, to Lake Huron I mean, for daytrips in the summertime.

“Caw,” she’d call as she pulled up in her big old boat of a car, always honking—three

shorts, two long—and then she’d lean across the front seat and yell “Caw…Caw!” again.

“Caw!” I’d scream back, all the junk I’d crammed into my backpack smacking my thighs

through the canvas as I ran toward her, and we’d natter like gulls all the way there.

Tamarack trees lined the path into the beach we liked best, and Tilly showed me how to

rub my face in the needles. I spent the afternoons ripping up into the sand dunes, picking snake

grass like Tilly showed me (“Not by the root, Punch. Like this, like a suction cup”), then down

into the water, then flopping onto the beach and rolling myself into a sand dollar, covering every

inch of me in granules until it was too itchy to bear.

Tilly sat in her red striped chair for all those hours, arms and legs spread as wide as she

could to get all the sun which made her freckles come out and the skin on her shoulders pucker

like worn out leather. We’d watch the sun dip below the lake with our feet in the water, my bum

on the wet sand beside Tilly’s chair, getting wetter with each wave that rolled up to hit me but I

most certainly didn’t care. We ate the egg salad sandwiches and digestive cookies she’d packed

Punch. (Full stop.)Hilary Fair

6

in paper bags and that she’d left in the back of the car all day. “It’s white,” she’d say, handing me

my sandwich, “it doesn’t heat up enough to turn the mayonnaise.” And we’d clink our Coke cans,

and she’d say nice things like “Cheers” and “Isn’t this romantic?!” and even if I’d had a belly

ache for days, it would have been worth it.

My birthday is July 7, 1987, and Tilly made me a cake every year until 1995. My lucks

died when she did.

But by then, I had Melissa. Sometimes my mother’s manager sent her home with expired

candies from the bulk bins. When he did, it usually put her in a good mood and we would sink

into the couch cushions together and play a memory game with the produce codes she needed to

memorize to get faster at her job. Bananas #4411. Limes #4048. Pears #4412. She’d dole out

chocolates wrapped in blue and red foil for each one I got right, and I would line them up on one

of my crossed legs, saving them to share with Melissa later. I’ve given all my love, happy and

food to her for the last twenty-three years.

“And do you know what the three hates are?” Melissa asked that, too. “Mad, sad and too

attached.”

I have been poisoned with the hates. But I am recovering. The leaves are dropping and the

apples are nearly finished now. The law is a rational brute: I am not allowed to see her. It’s time

to let go.

***

Before the boys came along, we spent our days biking around, down the streets lined with

big houses and big yards and big trees, where the pretty and happy families lived, and where

Melissa lived, too, until her dad got so sick he died and then her mom moved away. We’d

collapse in Melissa’s backyard, eating all those stale chocolates and orange slices and tickling

Punch. (Full stop.)Hilary Fair

7

each other or, as we grew up, playing MASH. “You can’t marry me, silly,” she said when I wrote

her name in the slots for each of my prospective future husbands.

When my bike tire was flat, Melissa’s father pumped it up for me—it’s a thing that

fathers do if you have them. He didn’t know that I had taught Melissa how to light fires with a

magnifying glass, or that we’d made the dry leaves under his back deck smolder the week before.

“That should do it, kiddo,” he said, and when he stood back up, he ruffled my hair and

that made my body buzz right up. He had a big black beard and his name was Mr. Nicholson,

though I only ever called him “Yessir,” or “Thank you.” I have one photograph of my own dad,

looking skinny and frantic, wearing jeans and no shirt, with long, stringy brown hair and a very

scant beard of his own. Did you know there is an actual place called Holiday Valley? I found it

on the map. He sent me a postcard from there once, when I was too young for it to be meaningful.

I kept it until I was ready to rip it up. And then I just didn’t hear from my dad ever again.

When it was time to go to my own home, in a plain brown brick apartment building not

unlike where I live now, I would walk away and sit under the oak trees, by the silly little pond

with Shubunkin goldfish and ornamental grasses in it. I always just needed a minute and,

sometimes, to have a little cry. Tilly called them that: little cries. I haven’t had one in a while. I

wanted a house with a pond that needed to be cleaned each spring because it got clogged with

algae and poop. I still wish for that. After a while, when it really was time to go because Mrs.

Nicholson was in the car and waiting for us, giving a brisk honk every few minutes to remind us

to hustle, Melissa would come over and take my hand.

“It’s time for Punch to leave now,” she’d say to the fish, every one of which had been

named either Rod or Digby by her older brother. “But she will come back.”

Punch. (Full stop.)Hilary Fair

8

That is no longer true. I won’t be back there, none of us will, and Melissa will never hold

my hand again. Instead, she wears the ring Stephen gave her like it’s the symbol of something

good. I say something that fugly can only be a sign of a grave mistake, but it’s not my judgment

call—the courts have told me so.

I’ve never had an orgasm with a man, so I guess I don’t get it—the yank those endorphins

might put around your heart, even for a schmuck. I also haven’t tried that hard. Only once, with a

plumber and in the back of his van when I was eighteen. That might sound extremely hot, but he

was a nice, bland guy named Matt and it wasn’t much of anything. He made some guttural noises

in his throat and then he rolled off of me. “Thank you,” he said, crouching to stand up in the back

of the van as he pulled up his jeans. Then: “Are you hungry?” (Which, of course, I was.)

We sat up front, with the windows rolled down because it was one of the last beautiful

days of the year, eating borscht from used paper coffee cups, no spoons. I appreciated that. The

dishes were always my chore, and I am living my adult life in protest: I try to eat only from

disposable surfaces.

“Smarten up,” my mother would tell me, but she did go on to fry up and die—her brain

did anyway, just like Tilly’s—so she’s not saying much of anything anymore.

Matt told me I was pretty, which was a lie, but it was one no one had ever told before and

he said it after the sex so it wasn’t obligatory and so I just said “Thank you” and looked out the

window. After that, I buzzed my curls away. Now, not even the garbage men look at me.

Melissa touched the stubbly hairs on my head after I did it. “I’m sad,” she said, “That was

one of my favourite parts of you.” I loved her so much I wanted to lick her. Like she was my cub.

I wanted to eat her up so that she would go down and live inside of me, so I could always, always

take care of her.

Punch. (Full stop.)Hilary Fair

9

***

“No,” she’d said when I asked if I could practice kiss her. We were fifteen.

“Please,” I’d said, “I’m nervous.”

But she rolled over in the grass, away from me and we never spoke of it again. Instead, I

spent most of my adolescent and teenage years clutching whatever arm she had free, feeling

awkward and horrible while she kissed her boyfriends and they poked at her breasts. My blood

would rush to my throat every time one of them said: “Can I lick your nipple? Just let me see it?”

We walked around the downtown of our little city like that, always a chain link of three,

Melissa and I in the heavy, matching Doc Marten boots that her mom bought for us, and our

tights with skulls on them, and our acne covered foreheads—hers always so much prettier than

mine even when it was pocked. The boys on the other side of her were a constant rotation of

stooped shouldered fools with names like Tim and Brian and Jesse and Carter. I felt helpless, like

when I was a really small child and my socks were falling down inside my boots but I was stuck

like skewered meat in my snowsuit and there was absolutely nothing I could do about any of it.

I’d already started noticing other girls at the pool in the summertime and feeling the heat

and having no idea what to do. I lacked confidence. Of course I did: I wore the same neon green

windbreaker from grade four to grade nine because it took that long to grow tall enough to grow

out of it. How do you surmount things like that? I’d been called “Fat ass” forever by then, and

after that came “The Butch.” I’m still dusting those off. I assume none of this is a surprise? Or

that the proximity to Melissa, and to the moderately popular boys she dated helped my social

status, so that all the uncomfortableness was semi worth it?

Once, we tried to skate—all linked up at the elbows with Melissa in the middle. Her

boyfriend at the time, a lanky ginger guy named Jared, unlatched himself from Melissa’s other

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10

arm and held out his hand. “Come on,” he said, and I got a few glides in before my toe pick stuck

and I fell onto the ice. He helped me up and we tried again. There are so many things I never

learned to do, but skating is not one of them. I have Jared to thank for that.

It was Jared who introduced us to Rickety Dick, too—the out-of-his-head man the cool

boys met outside the pool hall while they were smoking pot, when he came up to them asking to

buy their dirty socks.

“The dirtier the better,” Rickety said. Literally, he said that. “Three dollars a pair.”

I don’t know his real name: He was unsteady on his feet and didn’t make eye contact and

he had a rip through the crotch of the sweat pants he always wore, which is where Rickety Dick,

or Ricky Dicky Dicky as they sometimes called him, came from. Poor, gross Rickety. Teenagers

are beasts. And I was one of them.

I was already washing my own clothes then, so my mother didn’t notice that I started to

toss my socks in with the boys’. I could get six pairs of white men’s sweat socks for six dollars at

what used to be a Woolco, which was fine for me. (I have big feet.) And the revenue from all

those dirty socks bought me cafeteria cookies and cigarettes for two years straight. It was the first

time I knew I could make money and take care of myself; I have Jared to thank for that, too.

I remember doing deals right at Rickety’s freaky house, close to where Melissa lives now.

It was brown and ramshackle back to front, with a clapboard porch that had two corners that met

at forty-five degree angles. There was a clock out there that always read 5:10. It’s still there,

though I don’t know if he is. I remember watching his eyes through his bottle cap glasses while

he peered into the paper bag Jared gave him. “Look man,” Jared said, “These aren’t my socks and

they’re really dirty.” I’d found a pair of men’s socks, balled up and absolutely filthy, in the

corner of the laundry room in my apartment building. I gave them to Jared because Rickety liked

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11

boys best. “You’ve got to give me at least five bucks for them,” Jared said while Melissa and I

stood behind him, back from the steps. Five dollars at least, we’d decided; we were enterprising

like that. I liked Jared and I wish he’d stuck around so that he could be the one responsible for the

baby currently squirming in Melissa’s belly.

***

This all started because Melissa took me to a yoga class. No, that’s not true, that’s

deflection. (I’m correcting my cognitions one by one.) But it’s true that she took me there, and

that she bent over right in front of me, putting her whole body in my view as she tried to ease her

growing stomach down to the ground. The tiny, sprite of a teacher walked around the room,

quietly hopping over all the women splay-legged on their mats, and I just sat there, staring at the

backsides of Melissa, and reaching for my feet.

“Notice the koala-tee of your breath,” the teacher kept saying, and her accent kept

distracting me from the bruises down the back of Melissa’s white arms. The teacher came over to

me and ran her fingers down my thick, nubby spine trying to nudge my trunk closer to my legs.

“I can’t,” I said and she walked on.

For an hour, the women around me bent and stretched and reached and sighed and the

teacher prodded us to notice our breath but all I could feel was how ripping hot mine was. Every

one of my breaths scorched, even as they came in my nostrils, which is when they are supposed

to be cool. The sight of the baby inside Melissa wringed out something in my own groin.

They serve tea in the foyer of the yoga building after class, and she and I stood there

together, surrounded by framed posters of trees backlit by the sun and of silhouettes of people

holding their feet by their faces, standing on mountain peaks and under waterfalls. “He just

wanted me to move away from the stove,” Melissa said, as if that was a good explanation for the

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12

purple fingerprints I’d seen, that she’d now covered with a long sleeved shirt even though it was

only August. “It happened by accident,” she said.

“Some days, he’s so excited,” she said later, as we walked down the street. “But

sometimes he gets so mad he won’t even look at me. He just leaves the house and doesn’t say

where he’s going or when he’ll be back.”

I put my arm around her shoulder and she leaned her head onto me. “And sometimes, I’m

excited,” she said, “and then other days I just don’t want this baby at all.”

Later that night, I sat alone at the bar close to my apartment, drinking cheap 50s with my

back and shoulders curled over the bottles I was emptying. Craig, the bartender, was slow to clear

my place. Or I was fast to drink them, the bottles ordered two at a time, like one was for a friend

that never showed up. My biceps were flexed, my arms anchored on the bar by my elbows and

totally exposed in the loose black tank top that makes me feel powerful and also kind of

attractive. I was trying to notice the koala-tee of my breath. I was also thinking hard about

Melissa. It’s so easy to forget that you’re breathing. “The air is all around you,” the teacher had

said, “Let it in.”

Night is when I’m most alive. I often walk the river alone, confident in the heft and

strength of my body, unafraid of the shadows. I’m a thick-shouldered girl with a cavernous belly

button. “It could swallow you up,” I used to say to Melissa when she poked her finger into it and

I’d scrunch my belly fat into a doughnut around her hand.

“Yuck!” she’d squeal. “Do it again.”

I walked the river that night, on my way to Melissa and Stephen’s crappy little house

where their baby will live with them soon. I had never been inside, only as far as the driveway,

then to the front porch the day I helped Melissa move her things. I breathed in all the air, feeding

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13

myself with the cool and the dark. I was all jazzed up and bristly and ready to go by the time I

walked up the driveway—past the unmowed grass, onto the porch with the broken railing—and

started pounding the door.

I can be big as an ogre. Yes, I can.

“Stephen!” I hollered. And then I pounded the door some more. “I can see you,” I said,

moving to the front window. The TV was flickering and I watched him start to haul his body off

the couch.

I pounded the glass. Really hard. “You,” I said, with one more smack of my fist on the

pane, “c’mere.”

He rolled his dumb eyes; I could see it happen even in the dim, flashing lights. He was in

sweat shorts and no shirt, the balloon of his gut a firm bubble that didn’t shift even a little when

he moved. How do men get fat that way? Like, hard fat—like you could bounce a ball off it—

whereas mine is just billows and softness all over me?

He lumbered toward the hallway and switched on the porch light. There was only a screen

door in my way, but I couldn’t go in. Not to the smells of Melissa in a house that trapped her,

with the din of commercials ticking in the background and the scraps of the dinner she’d made

him in the open trash bin. Disgusting. The air in that house is thickened by shame. That’s an

extension of the hates.

“What are you doing here?” His face was scrunched, his eyes lost in the apples of his

cheeks. No matter, they are neither lovely nor insightful.

“What the hell do you want, Punch?”

“I want you to let her go,” I said.

To which he replied: “Get the f* out of here.”

Punch. (Full stop.)Hilary Fair

14

To which I responded: “I know you hit her.”

At which point he lunged at the door but I didn’t move at all and so he just put his hands

on either side of the frame and his face right up to the screen. He tilted his chin up, calling me on.

“Get the hell off my porch, you ugly bitch.” He was sneering at me, that rotten fat face of

his, and I just couldn’t help it (I really couldn’t): My fist just wound itself up and it smoked him

in the nose, right through the screen. There was a brilliant crack and then a moan. And I have to

admit it, there’s not a speckle of guilt in me for it.

Stephen jumped back and clutched at his face, and I yelled, “Melissa” into the door but

she was already standing halfway down the stairs. She’d been asleep because the baby makes her

tired.

“Come on, Melissa,” I said, “You can stay with me,” and I actually turned to go before I

realized that she didn’t move.

“Get out of here, you crazy bitch,” Stephen said, still holding his nose. “What the f*,

Melissa? Get rid of her.” He was yelling now, and as he said “Get her the hell out of here,” he

reached up the stairs and pulled Melissa by the arm. She let out a little cry—of shock or pain, I’m

not sure which—and then I just became a bull, with horns as big as my body and froth in my

nose.

I was through that screen door so fast. So fast that Stephen didn’t have time to prepare for

how my body would thunder up on his. I wound up and then I wailed on that mangy lump and all

of my weight toppled forward onto his. Smash, crack again. Bones padded by fat hit the floor. I

do my best not to swear, to save it for when it really counts et cetera, but in that moment I rained

a litany of curses down on that pussy fool and when I stood back up I kicked the fucker, too.

Punch. (Full stop.)Hilary Fair

15

He rolled around on the blonde laminate floor and his strawberry hair kind of blended in

and so he was just a wad of hairy flesh and green shorts, clutching first his head and then his

belly where my foot made contact with the solid fatness of him.

“PUNCH!” Melissa’s yelling voice stopped me, broke through the euphoria that would

have let me keep going. I could have cracked his head. Let all the lukewarm brains and

wickedness drain right out of him. Better, of course, that I didn’t. There is no long-term damage.

That’s how I got off with all kinds of counseling instead of jail.

But: Melissa. She waddled her own temporarily fat belly over to where Stephen was lying

on the ground and when she looked up at me it was not to say, “Ok, let’s go.”

“Stop it!” She kind of screamed that at me; that’s what made me step back. “What the hell

is wrong with you?” Her face was flushed and she was crying.

“But you’re so unhappy,” I said. It was the only thing I could think of. And it was

certainly true. “You’re so unhappy,” I said again, “and he isn’t safe. Look at your arms.” She said

nothing. “He’ll do the same to your baby,” I said, but by then Stephen was sitting back up, using

the railing to start to stand.

“You get the f* out of here, y’dyke,” he said, “Beat it.” He started to take a step toward

me and Melissa put her body in the way, which made me bristle back up.

But she said, “Please, Punch, you’re making this so bad. Please go.”

To which I said, “But you can come with me.”

To which she replied: “No, I can’t. You need to leave. Please, just go.”

Punch. (Full stop.)Hilary Fair

16

I’m not the only one who’s asked her to leave. Each month her mother calls, from the east

coast where she now lives with her own mother, to ask Melissa to move out there with them.

“Bring the baby here,” Mrs. Nicholson says, “You can’t do this alone.”

When Melissa reminds her that she’s not actually alone, Mrs. Nicholson says things like,

“Oh but honey, I think you are,” which is two-thirds totally unhelpful and mostly just makes

Melissa cry.

When I didn’t move, Melissa’s face scrunched up like Stephen’s had and she clenched her

fists like she did when were little and she was really cross and she yelled at me: “Go, Punch! Just

go. Get the hell out of here.”

I backed up, through the screen door, out onto the squalor of their porch where I’d started.

“She needs a garden,” I said, mumbling into my shoulder because by then I was feeling ashamed.

“At least give her that.”

And then I just walked away, goose-stepping a little because there was still beer roiling

around inside me, back through the neighbourhood where they live, among all the other people

who are too tired by life to mow their lawns or fix their roofs or haul their trash to the curb. The

meth heads walk down the middle of the road with their eroded teeth and mouths ajar, gaping at

the moon, and the crazy lady in a string bikini has screaming fights with the crows that have

nested in her trees. She doesn’t get it: they’re not going anywhere and they have memorized her

face, which means they will squawk at her and dive bomb her head and shit on her driveway until

they die.

On the edge of that neighbourhood, there’s a large graffiti eyeball on a padlocked garage

door. I walk by it everyday on my way to work and I avoid looking at it because it sees into me,

reinforcing what I already know—that I am just like a Great Dane, large and fragile and strange,

Punch. (Full stop.)Hilary Fair

17

with a short life expectancy. (Just like the women that came before me.) My knees already ache

when I walk. I didn’t think I’d live to thirty, but my odds are looking up a little more by the day.

Up the street, a few blocks past the eye, there is a café called Gilad. I don’t go in there

anymore because that is where Melissa goes—on her breaks from the dental office that is further

yet up the street—and I must always be fifty metres away. The coffee is bitter and it chafes my

stomach anyway. So I have changed my route to the library, to make a big curl around Gilad and

the office where she answers calls and wants to learn to clean teeth. Now, I walk down side

streets, past family homes and a little corner market where I have begun to buy my fruit. The ripe

bananas were on sale when I left the court that day. I felt inspired and they were reduced to clear,

and so I bought five arms—no, they come in hands—I bought five hands of them. Her Honour

had just handed out her rules and let me go home.

“You are baking a bread?” the old lady behind the register said as she dropped some

quarters in my palm.

“Yes,” I said, “Maybe, yes.” But they are living in the freezer now. (It’s only been nine

weeks.) Someday I will bake for myself, I’m sure that’s true, but I am still a little bit leery of

kitchens. I cut off the tip of my left middle finger when I worked as a line cook in high school,

trying to chop parsley fast enough for the eggs made by a cook name Kyle who smelled like eggs

himself and who spit when he talked.

My hands are still my favourite feature, though. They are mottled and scarred, much like

my body, and mostly by every punch they have given or deflected from my face. But they are

also gentle—enough that they can hold my kitten and stroke her under her neck without breaking

her tiny bones. They can be soft enough to make another’s body purr. And to lure a little creature

out from behind a garbage bin where she was crouching, cold and hungry and all by herself, just

Punch. (Full stop.)Hilary Fair

18

by rubbing the fingers together and gently scooping her up when she got close. There’s a pride to

that, a sense of my own unique kind of goodness that I can hold onto.

I had a dream last night that Melissa came to my door. She didn’t say anything, she didn’t

have a voice left, and her mouth was all sideways and her dark eyes were tired and wet, and it

prickled me up again, but then I took some deep breaths (right there in the dream) and I counted

them. I tried to breath in her suffering, a big purple fog of it, and to breath out my love for her

and then I was able to say, “Hello,” and she came right into my apartment and just got into my

bed and rolled over to curl up against the wall. And then I was beside the bed, tucking the

blankets in around her and then all of a sudden her baby crawled out from under them and then I

was holding that baby—a little girl with a kitten’s face—and I cooed and sang to her and my

voice was beautiful somehow, and I stroked her head with my gentle fat fingers and we watched

Melissa sleep.

My kitten’s name is Molly. She is getting plump and she is already scrappy, just like me. I

clean her stinky shit from the litter box and throw the bags down the chute every day. I give her

licks of salmon from the can. And I laugh when she topples off my mattress or flips ass over her

teakettle (that’s how Tilly would say it) when she runs around like a lunatic and trips on herself.

Like I do.

My hands are still my favourite feature: they are what dole out all of Molly’s lucks every

day. They are her lifelines, right and left, and they are, for me, even with all their spotty, brindled

bits, the best reminder I have of how hard—and how softly—I can hold onto life.

Punch. (Full stop.)Hilary Fair

19