The World Afloat

By M.A.C. Farrant

City of Victoria Butler Book Prize: M.A.C. Farrant, The World Afloat (Winner)

In The World Afloat, a series of seventy-five “miniatures” that melds narrative with elements of prose poem and farce, master of the absurd and expert observer M.A.C. Farrant peers into the complexities of human experience – through the rear window.

Inside the linoleum-lined kitchens and lace-trimmed living rooms that drift through these stories, Farrant interrupts the daily routines – doctor’s appointments, gardening, mealtimes – of her eccentric yet familiar characters with intensely surreal, laugh-out-loud moments. What happens when a whimsical spirit becomes captive to a middle-aged body? At the end of a Love Your Package workshop, what does the wrap-up dinner look like? Can a soggy tomato salad really end someone’s marriage? Brimming with pathos and bathos in equal measure, Farrant’s smart prose offers escape and renewal from the monotony of modern life, while at the same time poking fun at her readers’ pathological devotion to the technology and interpersonal relationships that leave them feeling bored and empty. Sexuality and depravity, childhood and bad parenting, and love and divorce are all deftly handled in this hot flash of a book that goes straight to the heart of things. As each “miniature” reads stranger (and truer) than the one before, Farrant manages to coax her readers from their well-worn, earthbound narratives and into a world afloat on satire, absurdity, and, in her most brilliant moments, expansive joy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Talonbooks
• Release date: Feb 15, 2014
• ISBN: 9780889228399

M.A.C. Farrant

M.A.C. Farrant is the author of seventeen works of fiction, prose poems, non-fiction, memoir, two plays, and over one hundred book reviews and essays for the Vancouver Sun and the Toronto Globe & Mail. Her memoir, My Turquoise Years, which she adapted for the stage, premiered in 2013 at the Arts Club Theatre in Vancouver. Her novel, The Strange Truth About Us – A Novel of Absence,” (Talon) was cited as a Best Fiction Book of 2012 by the Globe and Mail. The World Afloat (2014, Talon), the first in a trilogy of collections of miniature fiction and prose poems, won the Victoria Book Prize. One Good Thing—a living memoir, published by Talon Books in 2021, was a BC Bestseller. Forthcoming from Talon Books: Jigsaw—a puzzle in ninety-three-and-a-half pieces, (2023, NF); My Turquoise Years 20th Anniversary Edition (2024). Archived material is in the “Special Collections Branch” at the University of Victoria.

Book preview

The-World-Afloat-Cover-EPUB.jpgThe World Afloat Title Page

Contents

Cover

Part One

Young Man with Leaflets

Tanya’s Muffins

How the Summer Wash Deserts Us

The Day Is Old Enough to Have Complications

A True Story about Normal Circumstances Including Some Insane Footage

Everyone’s Life Is a Labyrinth

A Frothy Moment Keeps the World Afloat

The State

A Noise in the World

When the Last Straw Is a Tomato

We Appreciate Him Now

His Trouble

Couple Sucks Same Candy

Juliet Nearly Succumbs

Bit Part / Twin Peaks

Nothing Could Be More Like Life Than What We Were Watching

He Could Be Droll

Autumn Idyll

Steak Soup

The Freshest Look Is an Odd Shape

Orange as a Ball

Some of the Many Reasons

The Times Felt Like Doctoring

Feathers, Dirt, Bugs

The Moment Contracts

Part Two

Otherwise a Blank Canvas

No Kidding!

Espresso

Geese Like Carpet Bombers

Wanting Cake

White Sheet over Old Idea

How Wondering Is Essential

How the Lighthouse Meant Something

How Some Rewrite Their Epic Poems

How Time Expands

How She Rations Herself

How Mixture Causes Relationships

How I Was Wearing the Hood That Day

White Suit / Far-Off Reality

Meetings That Mattered

Say the Words

Country Life

Canary

Pause and Repeat

Jackie’s Little Town

This Was Not Supposed to Happen

Out of Order

In Vain

Nobody’s Going to Sleep Tonight

Today’s Forecast

Part Three

Chickens and Us

Last Amphibian Flees Calgary Airport

Smooth

Along the Way

Our Spiritual Lives

Once Again

The Favoured Form

Back Then

Nearly There

Story Interruptus

An Outpouring of Generous Abandonment

We’re Having a Foxy Time Where Everyone Gets Dressed Up

Local Gossip

Her Advice

An Interesting Woman

Private Life

Bulletin

Over

Things Blowing Over

The Smart Jam Is in Finance

The Logic of a Dream

The Prayer We Prefer

The Americans Will Not Save You for Christmas

The Rockets of It

The Next Story

Acknowledgements

Also by M.A.C. Farrant

For Bill and Anna

A day of prodigious beauty – clouds, like the inside of your head explained.

– James Tate

Part One

Tick Tock

He was walking down the street.

He dropped dead.

He was a watchmaker.

Which street?

Young Man with Leaflets

The young man standing at my front door offers to safeguard my heart. I already have a couple of people doing that, I tell him. One of them is out back, sharpening the axe.

I know he wants me to commit to his superhero for the next fifty years. But I already have a superhero.

Her bra size, I say, is three times larger than a normal woman’s and she has this incredible desire to dress like a slut. A lot of men don’t like her because she’s so stunning and monumental. Girls and women, I add, tend not to be interested in overly muscled guys with thick necks and big chains beating each other up. Is your superhero one of those?

Jesus Christ! he says.

Well, mine’s such an icon, I say. She’s just like Marilyn Monroe. Women dress up like her for Halloween and at conventions. Do you dress up like yours?

He doesn’t get to answer because the phone rings, Bizzy barks, my superhero shoots through the door in her blue satin shorts, and Manny Moss comes round the side of the house swinging his axe.

The sun flickers like it is shorting out and the young man backs away. The scene is a bit funny in a conceptual kind of way. I think, Here is a moment of perfection, one where you want everything to stop.

Tanya’s Muffins

I was having a really intense time with Parker, constantly taking my clothes off. I didn’t have an issue with this because his family was going through some heavy counselling. So it felt like being naked in his office was helpful for reducing his stress.

Tanya, he said, don’t expect deep messages or metaphors from me. It is what it is. It’s a ride.

I was okay with that. I got to sort of pop in and pop out and that was great and very relaxing. I thought, Probably the best mindset is to think of this as a project; just whittle away at it and see where it goes.

So every day I’d deliver muffins to the pretty little secretaries and then visit Parker in his office. And every day he’d pull out his spring-loaded measuring thing and we’d measure away for twenty minutes or so.

But then he was like, This is terrible, this is horrible. He was really choked, right? And all I’d done for something new was put my sword on his desk.

The secretaries frickin’ loved it. They were like little brown birds that had been shoved from the feeder and this touched me deeper than skin.

The sword’s a ceremonial