Archives for the 'Shorts' Category

Thank you for the Granta subscription. The second magazine arrived before I’d had a chance to finish reading the first. I suspect the third one will be here shortly, and the second is still in its wrapper. That’s shameful, I know. And it must look ungrateful, too.

But as you know, time has been scarce these past months — as has energy, which only is replenishing itself now as I begin to see the fruits of all my labour, all that anxiety. I wanted to wait for that sweet moment of relief before turning the words that you gifted me with all the attention and compassion that they deserve. That moment is around the corner, I begin to feel its beat through the small and deep dramas of these end-of-year days. The anthologies are stacked beside my bed, perfectly right-angled edges aligned perfectly right, like bricks, like they hold up the weight of how much we know about what words can do, have done for us. Thank you.

It is strange, and nauseating, how powerfully our bodies react to intangible things, how viscerally ears note silence (no one in this city said my name as perfectly as you did, no other sound delimits as perfectly home) and skin absence.

I know this must be getting old for all two of you, but it’s still pretty exciting for me — today we had to do a whole mock trial in my Advanced Trial Advocacy class. It was a civil case, with lots of case law, and both these things made me nervous. Nor had I had as much time as I’d wanted for prep. But the judges had glowing praise! One said that in his seven years of teaching this course, my opponent and I had given the best closing statements he’d ever seen.

More than the praise itself, is the fact that I was at best a passably good litigator when I began this class. It’s so encouraging having proof of concrete improvement — especially for someone who talks as quickly as I ordinarily do.

I know it’s pretty tasteless of me to boast about this here, like this, but all of maybe two people in the world even read this site any more, so I think my secret’s safe.

“Judges and the legislature rely on historical precedent to maintain absolute [jury] secrecy, yet forbid any validation of the assumptions underlying these justifications. This represents a fundamental difference between the social sciences and the law, reliance on precedent and the status quo vs. empirical data.”

– Chopra, S. R., & Ogloff, J. R. P. (2000). “Evaluating jury secrecy: Implications for academic research and juror stress.” Criminal Law Quarterly, 44, 190-222.

Today is orange. The sky is a solid grey, a canvas clear through to the horizon of green houses and technicolor orange trees; and in the corner, the sun glows dully, a smouldering twilight at noon. The day is mine, with the heater on and the window open wide enough a sliver for the rain to be the perfect accompaniment to the day’s calm progress through housekeeping, working, studying. A brown orange ladybird appears on the cover of my novel, dragging its rearmost left leg, eight black spots on each folded wing. Ultimtately, it the wind that roars, snagging in the trees, not the rain. The balcony door swings open, wavers for some minutes, then slams neatly shut. The day is a photograph.

I just realised that I’m free to leave Vancouver in little over 2 weeks. Whoah. I wonder what this winter break will bring; the last two actually were life-changing.

Guys! I was a rockstar in my advanced trial advocacy class today. I was the last student up, representing a man who’d been accused of murder. I was full of pauses, full of meaningful glances at the judges, full of elbow-patched sportsjacket gravitas. I was pretty sure I was going to get shot down for being too Hollywood, but I was determined to get as much fun out of it as I could before that happened.

And then my submissions were over, and the first word I hear is, “Excellent!” Another judge asks if I’d ever done this before.
“Closing statements?” I ask, confused because we practise something new every week. “No.”
“No, trials,” he says, smiling.
“… No.”
“Well, everyone was great tonight,” he says, “but you took it up a notch.”

Guys. That notch had nothing on 5’3″ me.

Here’s the thing, though. Several weeks ago I had to do mock opening statements for this course, and I was definitely not a rockstar that night. Progress!

Another thing is that there are concrete reasons I felt comfortable with delivering today’s content. Much of it revolved around the presumption of innocence. I’d already spent this morning talking about precisely that bit of law with grade 12 students in a workshop on criminal law. They were an incredible collection of youth — so engaged and well-informed (we law students had to field questions about the Keystone Pipeline protests, the criminality of police negligence re missing & murdered aboriginal women, and where bail money goes, among other things. Phew.) — so I walked away from that morning meeting riding a high that carried over into the evening class.

As well, the work I’m doing in the Innocence Project has driven home for me the crucial importance of protecting the rights of accused persons. We just cannot afford to keep messing it up. There are too many innocent people languishing in jails. The knowledge that I’m accountable to one such person made the material urgent, made it live. When I talked about the fact that sending innocent people to jail does not further the pursuit of justice, even though that means acknowledging that we do not know who the real murderer is, I had perforce to speak slowly, because this is the core issue I’m struggling with in my casework. It’s a frightening thought; it demands sobriety.

So, I’m really excited for that to be part of my professional life — this urgency, this stress/anxiety/guilt/fear, and this chance to perform. Members of the jury, indeed.

If this was desire, it was unlike any desire I had felt or known before. This was something infinitely more helpless. What I knew and could rationalise, could harness and dispel were those old longings stretched out tight along skin, those manic hums reverberating in our ears and on our tongues. Those were hungers easy enough to shoulder and then shrug off, eyelashes low on our faces, fingers tight in each other’s fists. Irreverent, gentle; loving and infectiously excited; we were self-sufficent, satiable.

This gnawing is impossibly different — felt not on my skin but, in a painful return to the literal: a hunger in my belly. Some gaping vacuum that persisted in growing off our shared nothings, feeding ravenously off our silences. I could not repress it, until I began to feel it press against muscle, bone, surface. I would think of you placing your hand there, the pads of your fingers and the soft thrust of your palm resting on that imperceptible pulse under my skin, that throb under the rise of my stomach. In this imagined proximity, my skin is paper-thin and irrelevant. Where your touch translates in my abstractions into a synaesthesia of palpability and absence is at the surface of that foetal loneliness.

In the real world moments now of our bodies folding into each other, what I want most desperately is to curl your hands around that hollow, to wish your fingers into willing this insupportable silence away, replacing it with that wordless language of clairvoyant touch that used to define us. But the new silences between us — too quickly become too familiar — give my courage pause; we fall asleep in those suspensions, wake to interruptions insupportable in the mornings’ grey light. Love is insufficient.

It is shocking how much we put our hearts through. Denial was humanity’s sweetest invention.

Hah. And then (last night) we had a class in cross-examinations. We watched four mocks. And I remembered why people hate lawyers so much.