FIRST ENGLISH EDITION
Published originally under the title: La dévoration des fées © Catherine Lalonde & Le Quartanier, Montreal, 2017
English translation copyright © 2018 Oana Avasilichioaei
The production of this book was made possible through the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. Book*hug also acknowledges the support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Ontario Book Fund.
We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the National Translation Program for Book Publishing, an initiative of the Roadmap for Canada’s Official Languages 2013-2018: Education, Immigration, Communities, for our translation activities.
Book*hug acknowledges the land on which it operates. For thousands of years it has been the traditional land of the Huron-Wendat, the Seneca, and most recently, the Mississaugas of the Credit River. Today, this meeting place is still home to many Indigenous people from across Turtle Island, and we are grateful to have the opportunity to work on this land.
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Lalonde, Catherine, 1974–
[Dévoration des fées. English]
The faerie devouring / Catherine Lalonde ; Oana Avasilichioaei, translator.
— First English edition.
(Literature in translation series)
Translation of: La dévoration des fées.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-77166-427-1 (softcover)
ISBN 978-1-77166-428-8 (HTML)
ISBN 978-1-77166-429-5 (PDF)
ISBN 978-1-77166-430-1 (Kindle)
I. Avasilichioaei, Oana, translator II. Title. III. Title: Dévoration des fées.
English. IV. Series: Literature in translation series
PS8573.A38345D4813 2018 C843’.54 C2018-904274-5
C2018-904275-3
“(I speak like a grandmother)”
She said it from the get-go, when in the beginning was the word, when the very first words existed, the first she hearkened to in her life. Cruel precious revelations, gospel truths, migraine inducing, inaugural gift of the wicked faerie godmother magically brewed by faerie fingers ladyfingers: five words, five, like poison in the ear, like fledglings of misfortune, ponderous, prophetic, oracular; snake oil liniment and the whole kit and caboodle, and in her black heart a future spindle sharpened.
She said it. The grandmother said it. After the clamour of flesh, after the bloody harvest of the mound—liver, spleen, entrails, adorable arteries—the little mound more torn out than pushed, uprooted by the neighbour’s skilled hands, Wilfred Thomassin the daughter, human forceps and sweaty expertise in the clammy chamber. She said it while the mother lay dying of too much blood and loss; and of spilling, becoming liquid agony. The grandmother said it so that they knew it in advance, before the morbid bloodless face, before the melting morphology that rock-a-bye baby, only the first will hear this common tune, for when mama breaks, the cradle will fall, and down will come baby, first and last, cradle and all.
There came silence. When the spent mother’s face turned inside out like a glove, her human countenance howled outside herself, reduced for a split second to strident screams and lips, acrobatic decibels, then lips and silence silence silence; hair eyes nose teeth mouth fallen to the wayside, charms of a bracelet useless in this carnage, the string of the face broken right off and its pearls swallowed in silence. The spent mother’s face, ravished, reduced to living tissue; visage become vagina; while from below the fresh face emerged in sublime agony, shat out, brand new. A fresh branchiole in the infinite genealogy of matryoshka dolls that suck their faces, like serpents, by eating their own tails.
She said it. After the scream that sounded the passage to being, as the death knell tolled, as the ridiculous squealing heralded life beginning, she said it; just after the air dance, in the chill of boiling oil that makes howling flesh actually alive, struck down by the horrible harshness of light—terrible winds, sounds, uncocooned sensations—once the thing and sublime agony expired, when the wailing fell silent, she said it.
The words came in response to the soothed screams when in the water gently warmed on the back burner they placed the refuse—the born thing uprooted rather than delivered, this rump not yet slapped and hatched too soon, this forced living thing, dragged outside the freshwater cage, with unlimited lungs (air going in, from outside inside, a sensation of rusted revolving doors and crushed glass), eyes full of pus, all vernix, precerebral palmate paws, prehuman earthworm—she said it while outside the breaths, races, forced and anxious foolish laughs of the four others plus one (who only half counted) pierced the walls for an instant, while they began hearing beyond the cedar panelling, beyond the casket of the dying mother, a syncopated life resounding, beating, beating, beating wholeheartedly, continually, as it gets used so used to being.
She said it surrounded by the circle of women. Five words, five, as though under the influence of laurel poked and torched, she said it knowing in advance, while Luciana Matriciana drew the sheet to erase white with white the flour face music and milk of the mother dead forevermore. She said it amid the smoke and crackling wood, in the first moment warmth pleasure when the small fry was plunged in water—water, amazing discovery!—at the exact temperature at which it would then remain, this flesh come too soon, in the second drawer of the wood stove, under constant surveillance and quicksilver eye, for some two or three weeks depending on weight.
Weeping for her daughter, her only one, her Snow bled white she said it, and the crown of thorns banded her lips from then on always plainly Gramma. From then on always, a grandmother old forevermore, old of mouth and all around. From this source, five words fell out, branded in lead, five that slipped out, lost; as though wept, pearled, one by one, as drops of blood—or tears—would have done if she still could.
She said it, Gramma said it:
Fuck.
It’s a girl.
“Tell your daughters not to follow my example.”
Wilfred Thomassin the daughter is there. She costs a pretty penny, Gramma says. She’s worth her weight in gold, instinctively opens the wood stove drawer, anticipating the cries. Keeps an eye on the thermometer, throws on another log or stokes the embers, even lets her suck cow milk off her callused fingers. Nipples are for the rich. Rock-a-bye baby slurps the taste of hair leather dung soil, then gets the runs of jaundice. Three times she gets it, and the sprite toughs it out. The sprite—the name sticks. She fattens up. She’s hard-headed.