Bytown Episode 4

The wreckage of all your good intentions

Émile has never said much about the life he left behind, or how he came to wash up in Bytown. Some pasts stay buried. Others come looking for you.

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  • Deeply cut five-lobed maple leaves on a thin drooping branch, sharp through a diagonal band across the middle of the frame and showing their paler undersides, with the rest of the canopy dissolving into soft green and white behind them and patches of pale sky showing through
  • A red-painted arched footbridge sweeping across the frame from lower left to upper right with a single figure standing on it, big leafy trees behind and above, a bench and a lamp standard on the far bank, goldenrod and tall weeds crowding the near bank and a shallow stony creek along the bottom edge
  • Broken grey limestone blocks stacked against one another in hard overhead sun, the fractured faces bright and the wedge-shaped gaps between them dropping to black, with a band of green foliage along the top edge
  • A white domestic turkey flecked with black barring standing on thin grass strewn with fallen brown and yellow leaves, seen from above in hard midday sun, its bare deep-red carunculated head and neck turned in profile and a dark bristled beard hanging from its breast
  • A black square-mesh fence held sharp across the whole frame with everything beyond it thrown far out of focus into bands of colour: green along the top, pale grey-white through the middle and lower half, and an unidentifiable bright yellow shape sitting in the centre
  • A large grey limestone boulder filling almost the whole frame in soft early light, its upper bedding planes splitting into thin flaky plates and the lower face smoother and rust-stained, with a strip of asphalt at the top left corner and mown grass at the right edge
  • A square black road sign with white straight-ahead and right-turn arrows, bolted to a galvanized post and shot from close and below so it leans back against a pale evening sky, with suburban brick houses and a parked car at the left and empty asphalt and sidewalk running away to the right
  • A pale mauve and rose dawn sky filling the whole frame with no ground in it, fine streaked cirrus running across the upper right and a warmer peach band along the bottom edge
  • A monitor photographed at an angle, screen glare across it, showing the mcm.1889.ca home page: a pill-shaped badge reading BYTOWN RETURNS SEPTEMBER 26, the headline "Twenty-seven years of chaos.", a paragraph about webfiction released under a Creative Commons licence, and buttons reading "Start with the projects" and "Subscribe". A woman's rain-lit profile fills the right of the screen.
  • A cream Huacaya alpaca in a black nylon show halter, head and neck filling the frame in hard midday sun, turned in profile with its eyes lowered and half shut, its dense crimped fleece rising over the face into a woolly forelock, with a second animal and blurred livestock pen railing behind
  • The near corner of a concrete bench slab, far out of focus, cutting diagonally across the lower half of the frame, with a suburban park sharp behind it at dawn: mown grass, an asphalt path curving away, a soccer goal at the left, young staked trees, a playground structure at the right and houses along the skyline under an amber pre-sunrise sky
  • A close-up of pale yellow-green trifoliate leaves in direct early-afternoon sun, one cluster sharp in the right of the frame with the raised midribs and surface texture caught by the light, the rest of the shrub falling away into a soft wash of the same foliage behind
  • A pale beige tile with an embossed mark on a wooden desk, two dark tiles fanned behind it, a notebook and pen blurred in the foreground
  • Rain-beaded asphalt seen from directly above, with a shallow pothole worn through to the darker aggregate beneath and a thin weed growing out of its edge

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Dogs and Seizures

So we foster dogs, which I think I’ve mentioned. This came about because, after my wife’s accident, we were forced to ride the bus on day — not an easy feat for someone with a brain injury — and on that bus ride, she saw a service animal. Something in that moment made her realize that she wanted to take care of animals the way animals took care of humans in need, and so as soon as we were able, we started fostering.

These days, we focus on palliative dogs who don’t have long to live. One of our current fosters, Peppa (so named because she snorts like a pig) has recently started having seizures, and… yikes.

OK, slight diversion: long ago, I wrote a story and mentioned a character had Tourette’s. Someone who had actual experience with Tourette’s wrote to me and told me how I was actually 100% wrong about the condition, and pointed me at some resources. I think I was more like 200% wrong, and I have made a point of never making that kind of mistake since. Or, well, as much as I can.

The same thing is currently happening for seizures. I mean, I still don’t have a ton of experience with human seizures, but dog seizures are pretty damn terrifying all on their own. Peppa will be in a deep sleep on her bed and then suddenly she’s making these strange, jerky breathing sounds that you’d mistake for choking if it weren’t accompanied by desperate flailing.

The seizures last less than a minute, probably, but it feels like ten thousand years have passed before she finally starts to gasp and grunt properly, and you can see she’s come out the other side.

She’s usually calm for about five minutes, just catching her breath again, so I can hold her and try to convince her she’s fine. Apparently dogs don’t actually know they’ve had a seizure when it happens, so as far as she’s concerned, she just came out of a deep sleep with her heart racing for no reason. So we get a few minutes of calm before she starts to think of ways to burn off that energy.

And then we have what I like to call “all night disco derby”, which consists of Peppa, half-blind and disoriented from the seizure, running around the house at full speed, trying to do… something. She’ll run straight into walls and furniture without slowing down, no matter how hard you work to stop her. If you put down padding, she’ll push through it. If you try to hold her, she’ll squirm free.

Keep in mind this usually starts at around 9:30-10:30PM. At least once a week. And the disco derby lasts for around 4 hours.

So as you can imagine, I spend half my time being not-quite-awake, and the other half worrying about the next time I will be not-quite awake.

That said, she’s the cutest little thing in the universe, so she gets a free pass.

All of which is to say: I don’t make fun of Tourette’s anymore, and I don’t make fun of seizures, either. Sure, it’s limiting my off-colour punchline opportunities, but at least I don’t have to feel bad about laughing at this kind of misfortune.

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