This Will Be Difficult to Explain and Other Stories by Johanna Skibsrud Page B

all about the angle of the thing. At that very moment, Clarence’s wife (who had once again greeted meat the door, saying, “I was starting to wondah if you was coming at all”) was upstairs, readying herself for her own feature photo. Much to my relief, she had quickly agreed to the suggestion—disappearing hurriedly up the dark stairs, in order, she said, to change into something that would “suit.” It was, of course, Clarence’s wife—not Clarence himself—who could answer the few and simple questions I’d prepared, and fill in the gaps of the story. I simply had to wait.
    And so, in the silence that did not weigh so heavily now, I began to tell Clarence a story of my own, about the time when I was fifteen years old and I saw a snake devour a trout, in shallow water, at the bottom of the Lakehead road. I don’t know why that was the story I thought of just then. At first, I thought I might inspire Clarence to tell some story of his own. That an errant word might stir in him some long-forgotten remembrance—but after a while I forgot about Clarence almost altogether.
    I had been out with my brother, Frankie—I said—in our uncle Trevor’s boat. Uncle Trevor used to be married to Aunt June, but now he lived in Bangor, and didn’t have a boat, and I never saw him. Frankie worked at the mill in town, but I hardly saw him either. Even when I did, it was like we hardly knew each other the way we always had to try so hard just to find something to say. But back then, it was different. We often went off together, sometimes for whole afternoons, and when we could find it to take—a couple of beers, or when we were especially lucky, someof Uncle Trevor’s homegrown weed—we did, and drank it, or smoked it, or both, and felt for an hour and a half better than we ever had, or ever likely would again. It was as if it was not then—sitting at the edge of the lake in Uncle Trevor’s boat, with a long line dropped straight down, which we never bothered to recast—but at every other time that the world was only half-real, and we were half-men, and full of illusions.
    On that particular day Frankie had found a quarter bottle of Uncle Trevor’s whiskey in the bottom of the boat, all wrapped up in a life preserver. When he found it, he gave a whoop and a holler, swinging it above his head for me to see, and then the two of us drank it down, all of it. Or what was left. Our eyes bugging out of our heads with all the effort it took not making a face. Then we sat around in the hot sun for some time. Not feeling real at all—or grown-up, or anything. After a while, Frankie staggered up and puked into the lake. I watched him, but it was hard. The whole world, and he with it, seemed to spin unsteadily in slow circles. I had to hold on to my head in order to make sure that it was not my head that spun. But no—my head stayed in its place, and the world spun. Something must have come unfixed inside me. Either that or the world—and my position within it—was a lot less solid than I had so far supposed. Perhaps this—I thought suddenly—was what dying would be like someday, when it happened. A beginning to … unravel somehow, break away. Until, finally, all the small and disconnected pieces that had somehow,inside you, mysteriously, and for so long, conjoined, began to slowly disentangle themselves from one another, be sent—spinning—away …
    I did not, at first, hear Frankie yell. Or, rather, I heard the yell, but I did not hear Frankie. That was how disconnected everything had become. But finally I realized that it was Frankie who yelled. That the yell stemmed from a probable cause—was directed toward an equally probable effect. I got up reeling, dragging myself down in the direction of the lake. Then, there it was. The snake, his jaw slackened and unhinged, inching his way over the body of a fish, over three