[ unfinished ]

By rob mclennan

Every memory twisted by revision.
                                    Jac Jenc, “Default”

1.
 
He texts: I exist for no reason but to finish these things. The late spring air was cucumber-cool, swirling light past his cheek. He lifts a hair from his mouth.
 
Alaric was there to complete the deck. His father had been dead and buried for sixteen weeks, but here was Alaric, living out of a shoulder bag in his old bedroom in his parent’s house, and working to complete his father’s half-finished retirement project.
 
His mother didn’t even want the damned thing. The morning immediately following Eric’s retirement party, he’d begun dismantling rooms. New kitchen, new hall closet, new living room hardwood. And then, the deck. For Alaric’s mother, Liesl, it was all too much. She threw up her hands and yelled for him to get out of whatever room he had intruded on, interrupting her thirty-eight-year morning routine of quiet reading. He rarely listened. Eric was half-through tearing up the yard and measuring lumber when his heart gave out, and he fell dead on the cobblestone. Fifty-seven years young.
 
 
2.
 
Liesl sits in the renovated living room, unable to read. Unable to do much of anything.
 
Neighbours still drop by with food donations: scalloped potatoes, roast beef and loaves of tuna fish sandwiches. She serves what she can, and what she can’t, she freezes. The fridge is too full.
 
 
3.
 
Alaric left home and his father’s expectations the moment he turned eighteen, a weight he spent years setting down. One stone, then another. And how he is here, again, in his parents’ yard. He can’t tell if the stress has returned, or if he feels the ghost of it. A phantom pain, like a phantom limb.
 
Alaric knows he isn’t his father. He doesn’t raise his voice, nor his hands in anger. When he requires calm, he counts to ten. The closest he’d come was inciting a brawl at a Montreal nightclub when he was eighteen years old. He took out three guys before the bouncer threw him out the back and into the trashcans. Once he recovered, he simply ran around the block and returned through the front door.
 
Granted, that was more actual than close. And the cliché of being tossed into the alley, into trashcans. Perhaps that’s all he is. His father dies, and he returns to finish his father’s business.
 
Lyta texts back: Get over yourself. It’s a deck, not the Taj Mahal. Do what you have to do, and come home.
 
Alaric also knows that if this were a Hallmark move, he would fall for a girl from the village, one he hadn’t thought of since high school. There the whole time. A realtor, or a lawyer. Or someone who works at the hardware store, where he collects his supplies.
 
If this were a Hallmark movie, it might have to be Christmas.
 
And it would have to be a girl. Hallmark movies don’t seem to allow for boys. All the boys from the village.
 
 
4.
 
Northward, beyond the back of the house: the Canadian Shield. The rolling, rumbling flatness. Kilometres or miles of unobstructed view, depending on how or where you were raised. Between how his father spoke and his grade school offerings, Alaric blended a combination of the two. He spoke in miles, but he measured distance in kilometres.
 
The alphabet song: his mother correcting his “zee” to “zed.” No, she countered. That’s how Americans talk, Liesl scolded. We are Canadian.
 
A grove of trees at the back of their five-acre property was all that remained of the bush. A grove of trees by the barn, where his father stored the bulk of his tools and the riding mower. The falling-down barn, with broken windows and loose boards. At one point, this part of the village still farmland, since broken up and sold into lots. Now a half-dozen houses behind where he stood. When Alaric was young, there had been an assemblage of trees. It had been swampland. This new vista was disorienting.
 
When still a boy, he’d lost a shoe in that swampland. Perhaps it still lay out there, underneath a front yard or foundation. His father’s rage at the loss. His mother’s solemn disappointment.

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​Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of some fifty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, his most recent titles include On Beauty: stories (University of Alberta Press, 2024), the poetry collections the book of sentences (University of Calgary Press, 2025) and edgeless (Caitlin Press, 2026), and the anthology groundworks: the best of the third decade of above/ground press 2013-2023 (Invisible Publishing, 2023). The current Artistic Director of VERSeFest: Ottawa’s International Poetry Festival, he spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta.