Instead of a review of Quickening by Terry Griggs (Biblioasis, 2009), I offer a reading of the title story, "Quickening."A first-person monologue, this eight-and-a-half page story recounts a childhood of disaster and self-discovery on Manitoulin Island.
The female narrator, who is unplaced in time (we don't know how old she is, where she is, or why she is telling this story), begins by telling us when she was five years old her cat Remy was reduced to a pile of ash by a devil.
Or as she puts it:
A creature burrowed up through the earth, pushed into the lodge through a loose floorboard in the closet, and walked down the hall into the living room breathing balls of fire that landed like tossed sunwheels on the couch, in the curtains. I was five and carrying my losses to date lightly, easily. Then something got Remy. A grey tabby dispersed like ash. That he had "wandered off" was the official word. I couldn't believe it. Not Remy. Not from me.
The truth of the "official word" and the children's truth of the imagination is the central tension of this story, which recounts a number of incidents but has only a vague plot.
If there is a "story" to this story, it's about the narrator's family's ill-fated luck. And the narrator's position and growth within it. Loss is the repeating image of the story. Remy, the cat, is lost, but so is the lodge, their livelihood. Then the grandfather gets married, silly old fool.
Here's a cluster of words from the story I underlined in search of a pattern: wayward, guilty, troubles, disgrace, descent, failure, muted, deleted, gone, lost, vanish, cruelty, raging, black, choking, fiery, wrong, hopeless, lose, inedible, disturbing, bizarre, unreliable, horrified, scary, not to be fathomed, infiltrator, unholy, missing, sorrow, clouds boiling black and murderous.
A number of times, the narrator asserts how wise she was at five: "I was five but I wasn't a fool -- what the years add to knowledge of cruelty is only detail."
In other words, reader, you can trust this story. It is truthful, not fantasy.
Yet it is rich with the magic images of childhood. It includes a baby snatched up by a bald eagle, who's shot out of the sky by the baby's mother. It includes a boy flying a kite that gets caught up in the propeller of a low-flying aircraft. The boy is lifted into the high limbs of a nearby tree.
The narrator tells us:
Don't be deceived by childhood. You can be five and know that something is about to be born, something scratching inside you, batting around your insides like a cat playing with your guts. ... You will be delivered of yourself, you think, but this takes years.
The story ends with the narrator leaving childhood forever. She begins school:
I didn't want to go. ... No amount of begging brought me my passage back home. No one came to rescue me, not even my grandfather who could usually be trusted in matters of rebellion and escape. I was powerless, as we all were. Even though our cheeks were still masked in baby fat, sorrow was plainly visible on them.
This is a quirky story made delightful by the odd perspective that frames all of the action. We don't know where this narrator is now, but we know she experienced a great loss. Her story is told with lively wit and keen self-assurance.
But one wonders if there isn't an element of self-deception also.
Why "Quickening"? Two definitions from Wikipedia:
- Quickening is a phenomenon in the Highlander films and television series. When an Immortal is beheaded, there is a powerful energy release from their body which is called a Quickening
- In pregnancy terms, the moment of quickening refers to the initial motion of the fetus in the uterus as it is perceived or felt by the pregnant woman. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, to "quicken" means "to reach the stage of pregnancy at which the child shows signs of life."
I think the meaning is this story is closer to #2 above. At five-years-old, the narrator is telling us, life began:
When I was five, birds appeared to me as lightly dressed miracles. Though even they had bodies made real by accident or disease: lung worm, heart failure, broken wings, severed talons, slashed eyes. It makes you wonder. We have all this material wound around us, this long constricting scarf of skin. Taut across the belly, holding in a rushing red sea.
Yet, with the beginning of school, we suspect that the narrator's magical life is also unfortunately ended.
This is a complex story and for some readers it is likely to be an unsatisfying one. It has one of those ambiguous endings that many readers find off-putting.
Readers who take pleasure in the intelligent use of language and who like to puzzle out meaning will be eager to look up more work by this author.
It's a worthy adventure.
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