Tragic.
The way she dug into him hard with her crampons, her ice pick,
working her little cleat to numbness against some
pointed part of his anatomy: rise & fall, rise & fall, rise &
fall, as deep in that dark room from which old children
had once emerged, she felt only the T-bar of pharmaceutical
barrenness pressing against her walls, her mind tallying up
this budget of flesh, when, from the distant valley
she kept slipping to, she heard, vaguely, as from some
underground source, his collapse into wetness.
Catherine Owen is a Canadian writer from Vancouver who has published nine books, won several awards including the Alberta Book Prize and been translated into Korean, Italian and Turkish. She works as an editor and plays bass in metal bands.