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Normal History Vol. 324: The Art Of David Lester

Every Saturday, we’ll be posting a new illustration by David Lester. The Mecca Normal guitarist is visually documenting people, places and events from his band’s 31-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.

An excerpt from Holding Up the Falling Snake Sky, a novel (literary fiction) by Jean Smith

The word “claustrophobic” felt like the tide coming in at Tin Can Beach on the Bay of Fundy where, as a boy, he’d built barricades out of old tires, chunks of cement, waterlogged plywood covered in frayed fiberglass and anything else he could haul into position to try and halt the slow-but-steady rise of the world’s highest tides. By the time he was old enough to disappear for the day, he’d walk the 20 minutes from his family’s small, second-storey apartment in a dilapidated tenement building on Coburg Street in Saint John, straight down Charlotte and across the vacant land where locals dumped broken furniture and yard trimmings punctuated with the odd box of old magazines and newspapers.

On one occasion, while Martin was dragging a tattered blue tarp into place, he saw an eel measuring about a foot-and-a-half swimming anxiously along the perimeter of his barricade, no doubt looking for a crevice to squeeze into. Martin spontaneously looked up, as if the eel was a reflection of something above him. The seamless blue sky and the idea of the eel being able to swim over the top of his construction as soon as the water was high enough triggered Martin’s claustrophobia. He felt every drop of the world’s water rushing in his direction while the eel twisted aggressively, popping its snake-like head out of the water to assess both Martin and the obstacle. In Martin’s mind, the snake fish was after him and on the wide open beach, everywhere was too far for him to run. As the water rose up towards his ankles he couldn’t do anything to stop the eel.

Wrenching a chunk of cement out of the barricade he stumbled backwards, landing hard on his right side. The side with the limp. He hated it when his mother referred to it as your limp or his limp.

Martin can’t participate in PE today because of his limp—she’d print on the back of a piece of cardboard she’d torn off the top of a corn flake box or whatever was handy, sending him off to school before he could find the words to say that a limp was a symptom and not an actual…

He jumped up, grabbed the chunk of cement and positioned himself on a half-sunk truck tire to wait for the eel to get close enough for him to drop the chunk of cement on it. To crush it. He stood motionlessly until his thin, freckled arms began to tremble. The wind whipped his overly-long, mid-summer hair into his eyes. In his peripheral vision, the long blades of grass that lined the shore hissed as they slithered together—they themselves were not so far from the snake-shape that loomed nearby, defying him. Killing the eel was the only solution, but the eel was long gone.

“This Is Different” from Jarred Up (K, 1993) (download):