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Hide and Seek (Caitlin $14.95)
The characters in Margaret Thompson's debut collection of short fiction Hide and Seek (Caitlin $14.95) search for solace and try to make sense of the events that affect them. In "Guerilla,"; Matthew is stunned by the news that he has AIDS. With his girlfriend Sylvia away for the weekend, Matthew mopes about his apartment in a funk. He recalls the terrible motorcycle accident that led to a blood transfusion given during the "life saving"; operation in his late teens. It took 18 units of blood to pull him back to life. And that same blood that saved him will now probably be responsible for ending his life. "And I was grateful, so grateful,"; Matthew grimly recalls. "The gods must have laughed themselves sick.";
In "Momento Mori"; five-year-old Sky Dreamweaver goes missing on the Sunshine Coast in the winter of 1970 during the hippie heydays. Ironically Sky's parents had moved away from the big city in order to leave their front doors unlocked and feel that their children were safe. Initially everyone assumes a scruffy looking stranger driving a grey pickup could be the abductor. But after several days of searching, shadows of old depressions under the fresh snow are discovered. The narrator and Sky's father, Ethan, look at the faint tracks which go down a slope and out into the middle of a pond, hoping that they were made by a fox or a dog. "They were so vague that I almost convinced myself they were not there,"; recounts the narrator, "but for another shadow, in the centre, more substantial, sunken, as if the surface of the pond was thinner at that point."; Young Sky's body is later pulled from the bottom of a pond. And Ethan carries her small limp form to his wife as onlookers watch the eerie scene.
Later Ethan is seen filling a gerrycan with gasoline. His house is set on fire and all that is recovered is a charcoaled lump that investigators believe was once a human being. "They thought the remains were possibly male, but they couldn't be absolutely positive. Like so many human ends, it dangles, still, inconclusively; of the two who could resolve the mystery, one has retreated into the anonymity of elements, and the other apparently stepped off the edge of the world that night, and somewhere out there perhaps, nameless and shadowy, still runs and runs from harm.";
[BCBW 1997]
In "Momento Mori"; five-year-old Sky Dreamweaver goes missing on the Sunshine Coast in the winter of 1970 during the hippie heydays. Ironically Sky's parents had moved away from the big city in order to leave their front doors unlocked and feel that their children were safe. Initially everyone assumes a scruffy looking stranger driving a grey pickup could be the abductor. But after several days of searching, shadows of old depressions under the fresh snow are discovered. The narrator and Sky's father, Ethan, look at the faint tracks which go down a slope and out into the middle of a pond, hoping that they were made by a fox or a dog. "They were so vague that I almost convinced myself they were not there,"; recounts the narrator, "but for another shadow, in the centre, more substantial, sunken, as if the surface of the pond was thinner at that point."; Young Sky's body is later pulled from the bottom of a pond. And Ethan carries her small limp form to his wife as onlookers watch the eerie scene.
Later Ethan is seen filling a gerrycan with gasoline. His house is set on fire and all that is recovered is a charcoaled lump that investigators believe was once a human being. "They thought the remains were possibly male, but they couldn't be absolutely positive. Like so many human ends, it dangles, still, inconclusively; of the two who could resolve the mystery, one has retreated into the anonymity of elements, and the other apparently stepped off the edge of the world that night, and somewhere out there perhaps, nameless and shadowy, still runs and runs from harm.";
[BCBW 1997]
Submitted on August 13, 2003 in By David.
