Better Living Through Plastic Explosives by Zsuzsi Gartner

Dramatization , it reads in tiny type at the bottom of the magazine ad. The clients’ names and story are fictitious and intended to be an illustration of services available through Merrill Lynch. Investment results may vary.
    Still, there’s that light and the unnerving placement of naïf objets d’art . And Patricia, coiled to spring even in repose. It’s as if Jeff Wall has done an ad for Merrill Lynch. The People You Will Never Be So Kill Yourself Now (cibachrome, 2006).
    Another house on the North Shore has been swallowed by the mountainside. A stunning cliff-edge post-and-beam completed in 1956. It’s been happening with alarming frequency lately. There are those who find these disappearances—what else to call them?—less dramatic but more frightening than the mudslides triggered by torrential rains that have destroyed both houses and their inhabitants. Those incidents could be ascribed to foul weather and bureaucratic ineptitude. Those tragedies are always well attended by debris and rescue squadsand grim-looking television news crews who are secretly elated by the great fucking visuals (a direct quote).
    What happens goes something like this: You leave for work in the morning and on your return there is the peeling arbutus, with the tire swing still dangling from the lowest branch, the rope slightly frayed but not so much you’ve ever noticed. There’s the cedar hedge that hid the partially disassembled Triumph Twin in the carport that you will now never ride down the I-5 to the Coast Highway, cruising all the way to Eureka to visit that chowder shack where you first met (so never mind that the clam chowder tasted like it had been stewed in an ashtray, you’ll always remember it as ambrosia). There’s the empty koi pond—so incompatible with the wandering black bears and the fat, happy raccoons—with ghost fish flickering in the shallows. The upturned blue box is still at the curb. And in the spot where the house once stood is a long, dull pucker, a barely perceptible seam where the earth has hastily knit itself together.
    And no insurance policy in the world with a clause to cover what has happened.
    Honey Fortunata (her real name) sings “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” as she manoeuvres her new lease-to-own Hummer along Georgia towards the Lions Gate Bridge. It’s been her anthem, practically a mantra, ever since she heard it on Martha Stewart’s Apprentice . “Everybody’s looking for thomething …” The slightest trace of an accent—people often mistake it for a lisp—creeps into her voice whenever she’s feeling emotional.
    There are those who would view the Hummer as capitulation, but Honey tends to look on the bright side—that’s how she stays afloat. She kept what her favourite British children’sstories called a stiff upper lip when her mother left seven-yearold Honey with her grandmother in Davao City and flew fifteen time zones across the Pacific to take care of another woman’s children. The lip barely quivered at age fourteen when she didn’t even recognize her own mother on the international arrivals level of the Vancouver airport, or the six-year-old girl who, her mother told Honey, was her sister. That same lip, encased in sensible matte-finish Taupe by MAC, stayed the course when her mother died and when her little sister, Charity, decided that sliding her crotch up and down the pole at No. 5 Orange was preferable to attending classes at Van Tech Secondary while Honey worked days sorting processed meats into neat stacks at Subway and studying nights for her real estate licence.
    Let the other agents travel in packs like cowardly hyenas or teenaged boys with pants riding the barrens of their non-existent buttocks. Let them retreat in fear, taking jobs in felt-lined cubicles on the nineteenth floor of a securities company. Honey Fortunata, snug in her Kevlar pantsuit, behind the