Today's work on Tatamagouche. (Patreon)

I messed up and did not record the stream of me editing the two scenes I worked on today, but I will post them here in the hopes that you find it interesting to see the evolution of the end result over time.

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1.

A weight will lift, a leaf will fall.

It seems obvious that a branch will only hold a certain weight, but it is more complicated than that. It only seems obvious because people think of a branch as broken or not broken. On or off. People like binaries. They like to think the world is logical. But if the tree is alive and strong, the branch might halfway break. It might twist with fibrous strength and hold on forever, a body strangling and swinging wild instead of hanging still with an efficiently broken neck.

I am glad my mother did not hang herself. She was too careful and precise for that. She devised a plan and then implemented it. The remains of my father's pain pills, two cinder blocks from a neighbour's garden, and a chain around her waist. A quiet pier on the north shore, and a note so that she didn't just vanish into the Atlantic.

There was no chance of a mistake. No chance of her swinging on that strong broken branch any longer. My father's death had broken the branch inside of her, and even though she would never say it, my sister Sunday and I were the living fibrous wood inside of that branch, holding the rope, keeping her alive, and strangling our mother ever since. She had been swinging for too long.

And so she fell.

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"Count to ten before violence," my mother said. At the time, I was bleeding from my ear. It rang and rang so that I could barely hear her voice under the sound of a hammer against steel. I wanted violence now. I wanted a knife. An axe. I wanted the world cracked in two.

"What good does ten seconds do? What am I supposed to do for ten seconds?"

My mother leaned close.

"Plan," she whispered.

It was a real whisper, meant just for me. Quiet and firm.

"Never thought of anyone but herself," Two pews ahead of me, my aunt is stage whispering. Which is not a whisper at all. Her words are meant to reach. Her opinions are important. They're meant for everyone.

"Coward's way out," she says. About my mother. At my mother's funeral. Hammers on steel.

Ten seconds. There are three people to my right and five to my left. I will go left. She is sitting two pews forward, on the aisle.

"Selfish is what it is," she continues. Two pews forward. Five sets of knees to the left. I take the old bible from the shelf on the back of the pew. It feels heavy enough. I can hear my mother's word. Plan. My mother's smile.

"So soon after their father died? To leave them with nobody? Selfish. Cowardly. The easy way out." My plan does not include consequences. There are no consequences more important than my mother. She had broken down crying in the car after her own mother's funeral, talking about the casual stupid cruelty of her sister. There had been nothing for me to do then. Now?

I get up and start sliding between knees and the pew ahead. I can hear Sunday behind me, following. In front, Aunt Linda, turning to see what her husband is staring at. I take the bible, firmly two handed, stepping sideways into the pitch. Into my mother's sister's face.

Sunday reaches me. The violence is already over. There's nothing left to do but stand here, watching our aunt bleed from her nose.

"I counted to ten," I whisper, and Sunday squeezes my shoulder and leans her head against mine.

"We all grieve differently," my sister says.

My aunt has no idea what to do. Her smug certainty has vanished. Her words are gone. Counted to ten and knocked right out of her stupid head.