Complicated Kindness - Miriam Toews - Hardcover

One I live with my father, Ray Nickel, in that low brick bungalow out on highway number twelve. Blue shutters, brown door, one shattered window. Nothing great. The furniture keeps disappearing, though. That keeps things interesting. Half of our family, the better-looking half, is missing. Ray and I get up in the morning and move through our various activities until it's time to go to bed. Every single night around ten o'clock Ray tells me that he's hitting the hay. Along the way to his bedroom he'll stop in the front hallway and place notes on top of his shoes to remind him of the things he has to do the next day. We enjoy staring at the Northern Lights together. I told him, verbatim, what Mr. Quiring told us in class. About how those lights work. He thought Mr. Quiring had some interesting points. He's always been mildly interested in Mr. Quiring's opinions, probably because he's also a teacher. I have assignments to complete. That's the word,complete. I've got a problem with endings. Mr. Quiring has told me that essays and stories generally come, organically, to a preordained ending that is quite out of the writer's control. He says we will know it when it happens, the ending. I don't know about that. I feel that there are so many to choose from. I'm already anticipating failure. That much I've learned to do. But then what the hell will it matter to me while I'm snapping tiny necks and chucking feathery corpses onto a conveyor belt in a dimly lit cinder-block slaughterhouse on the edge of a town not of this world. Most of the kids from around here will end up working at Happy Family Farms, where local chickens go to meet their maker. I'm sixteen now, young to be on the verge of graduating from high school, and only months away from taking my place on the assembly line of death. One of my recurring memories of my mother, Trudie Nickel, has to do with the killing of fowl. She and I were standing in this farmyard watching Carson and his dad chop heads off chickens. You'd know Carson if you saw him. Carson Enns. Arm-farter in the back row. President of the Pervert Club. Says he's got a kid in Pansy, a small town south of here. Troubled boy, but that's no wonder considering he used to be The Snowmobile Suit Killer. I was eight and Trudie was about thirty-five. She was wearing a red wool coat and moon boots. The ends of her hair were frozen because she hadn't been able to find the blow-dryer that morning. Look, she'd said. She grabbed a strand of hair and bent it like a straw. She'd given me her paisley scarf to tie around my ears. I don't know exactly what we were doing at Carson's place in the midst of all that carnage, it hadn't started out that way I'm pretty sure, but I guess carnage has a way of creeping up on you. Carson was my age and every time he swung the axe he'd yell things at the chicken. He wanted it to escape. Run, you stupid chicken! Carson, his dad would say. Just his name and a slight anal shake of the head. He was doing his best to nurture the killer in his son. It was around 4:30 in the afternoon on a winter day and the light was fading into blue and it was snowing horizontally and we were all standing under a huge yellow yard light. Well, some of us were dying. And Carson was doing this awful botch job on a chicken, hacking away at its neck, not doing it right at all, whispering instructions on how to escape. Fly away, idiot. Don't make me do this. Poor kid. By this time he'd unzipped the top half of his snowmobile suit so it kind of flapped around his waist like a skirt, slowing him down, and his dad saw him and came over and grabbed the semi-mutilated chicken out of Carson's littlToews, Miriam is the author of 'Complicated Kindness - Miriam Toews - Hardcover' with ISBN 9780676976120 and ISBN 0676976123.