Modern Fables

By Mikka Jacobsen

Modern Fables is a darkly funny, feminist collection of essays about love and place.

In this darkly funny book about love in the digital age, Mikka Jacobsen challenges the notion that a single woman in her thirties writing about love is simply desperate. Instead, in an unflinching collage of coming-of-age narratives, she both elevates singledom and upholds the value of finding profound love. A work of feminist thinking, these interlinked essays blend memoir with cultural and literary criticism, exploring first loves and teenage drug-slingers, sports culture and blowjobs, catfishing and the problematic advice of self-help gurus.

At the same time, Modern Fables considers how we are shaped as much by the places we are from as by the times in which we live. Growing up and living in the deeply conservative Canadian prairies, what does it mean when you're not at home at home? Whether she's writing about a settler mother's forays into shamanism in "The Indian Act" or considering the favourite writer of every Calgary man's online-dating profile in "Kurt Vonnegut Lives on Tinder," Mikka Jacobsen pulls no punches, delivering a fiery manifesto on love and place for our times.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Freehand Books
• Release date: Sep 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781990601224

Mikka Jacobsen

Mikka Jacobsen is a fiction and nonfiction writer from Calgary, Alberta. Her work has appeared in The Fiddlehead, The Puritan, Prairie Fire, subTerrain, Canadian Notes & Queries, The Missouri Review, and Lit Hub, among others. Modern Fables, a collection of essays, is her debut book.

Book preview

THE WAKE

I have fucked the dead. He was alive at the time. Coupled in memory with pulsing and life-giving acts, does death ever seem more absurd? I suppose not everyone knows this macabre nostalgia. My grandmother, for instance, who died shortly after celebrating a fiftieth wedding anniversary. Or did she have another man — or woman — before my grandfather? I hope so, for any trace of eroticism had seemingly vanished by the time I knew her grim face, pressed slacks, and oversized glasses. Still, there was something courageous and wanton in the way my grandmother would sneak a cigarette from my aunt — stem held loosely, elbow resting in her other hand, and blowing smoke in a defiant slouch — when my grandfather was out moose hunting or whiskey drinking.

Kyle and I fucked only once, and by then my heart was elsewhere. This was a year or so after high school, and I was unprepared for the squalid heaviness of this time. It surprised me, how suddenly easy it became to predict the future of everyone around me. Such plans had likely been there all along — blueprinted in the homes, the familial wealth, the features of my high-school friends. And it became only more apparent when we were released from school. In our relative freedom, those who’d already been sinking would sink, and those who’d been given swimming lessons, coaches, and parents in the stands would lap the drowning rest of us.

The whole time I was thinking of my former boyfriend Phillip, who I hoped would hear of the liaison. In a jealous rage — for even when young and fresh to life’s disappointments, Phillip was full of anger — he would restore my heart, my life, and my mind to some kind of order.

I had just returned to Calgary after travelling overseas for several months with my friend Magda. I was heartsick the whole trip: an endless dissection of a tearstained goodbye at the airport, hearing of Phillip’s new girlfriend in a sweltering payphone booth, a sunburned man and a blowjob on a beach, weeping in damp and spider-ridden hostel beds, and dreaming nightly of Phillip, who was often bathed in shimmering light, like a ghost.

And when I returned, having found travelling dreary, having failed to find myself abroad, it seemed everyone I knew was falling apart.

I began working the cash register at a hardware store. My father got me the job. He’d been in buying lumber. He’d seen a Help Wanted sign, knocked on the office door, and found Deb. A bone-thin woman with breast-high Wranglers, gel-stiff curls, and long red fingernails, she was the Front Store Manager. The nails were to show us cashiers how Deb herself was unfit for the job, a mind-numbing punching of codes. She would click the nails against her office desk. I don’t know what exactly was said between Deb and my father, but he arrived home looking righteous. My new career would begin the next morning. The job paid seven dollars per hour. It offered an employee discount. (Even on lumber: my father had asked.) Over microwaved pierogi, he gave me a look that suggested I ought to be grateful, even ecstatic, to have landed such a position.

---

I hated the long days behind the till. I hated the incomprehensible questions about practical things that I, with a queen- like stupidity, considered irrelevant — air filters, faucets, light switches, electrical boxes, copper wire, wrenches, saws, valves, ducts, screws, treated lumber, bags of cement. I hated the Do-It-Yourselfers who set dripping septic parts on the Returns Counter. The store was full of things I wholly relied on but completely ignored. It seemed I knew nothing, cared nothing about the requisites of life.

At noon I would take lunch with the other girls. At Humpty’s Restaurant, on the strip mall’s other side, we chewed BLT sandwiches and chain-smoked. If Deb joined us — an honour — she ate nothing, drank black coffee, and smoked vigorously. From June, a freckled, jealous cashier with a hip-length ponytail, I learned that Deb was only recently promoted to Front Store Manager. From Irene, a permed, depressed paint mixer with glasses and a BFA, I learned that there had been some infidelities with June and Deb’s husband. Or was it Deb and June’s husband? I don’t remember now. At any rate, the thinness, the Wranglers, the manicure, it was all rather new. Deb had previously been a much larger woman. Or so said June. Fat, was what she said, in a repulsed whisper that rose to envy. And now? She eats nothing. She’s living on air. In our regular booth, under hovering smoke and the dull light of a seashell sconce, June’s face looked violent. We sold those same sconces at the store.

The cashiers were all women, as men worked in the lumberyard — a coveted position. The yardmen were Live Action Role Players. Certain high-status cashiers were their girlfriends. Braydon, a stout yardman with a bandana and a black beard, taught me the true meaning of the word leer. In my mind, he is missing a front tooth, but I doubt my memory’s accuracy. He caught me one day in the staffroom, where I was eating jujubes. Would I like to attend a feast, he asked. All the girls were going. I would get to see his chainmail suit, made by his own two hands. The suit was worth thousands of dollars.

I stared at my crossword puzzle. 19 Across, 9 letters: Was defeated by.

I already bought the ticket, he said, meaning mine. The supper is rack of lamb.

When I began shaking my head, he added, It cost sixty dollars.

I have a boyfriend, I lied. But you could still come.

---

I had never been so depressed. It shocked me that people wore out their days so grimly. Not yet twenty, I wasn’t going to spend my life as a hardware store cashier. That my colleagues seemed to genuinely enjoy the rote tasks and unsurprising betrayals was all the more alarming. Any long-term plans of my own were lazy and opaque, but something extraordinary was surely crouched on the horizon. I assumed the future would, more or less, spring forth. The way it had all my life till then. While a handful of my friends had moved away to attend universities in various parts of the country, no one at home was building anything up from the eroding structures of childhood, the collapse of guidance and prohibition. They were stocking shelves at party supplies stores, manning the desks of tanning salons, folding franchise pitas, shaking fryer baskets. It seemed impossible that things would go on like this. We were simply preparing for life’s arrival. Magda, for instance, was planning a move to Hollywood to act in films.

---

Naturally, I was still living with my father. Alice lived with her parents, too, working at Party City but attending college part-time. Shedding their childhood homes like snakes, Kyle, Colin, and Johnny had rented a three-bedroom apartment in Marda Loop. It was thrilling and ugly the way apartments are ugly: brown cupboards, beige carpet, dirt-streaked walls, a tiny wrought-iron balcony. They called it the crack house. The name was meant as a joke, to show their cavalier approach to adult life. Bottles stuffed with cigarette butts, the bathtub full of dirty dishes, garbage bags bloated with empty cans, a smell of stale alcohol and ashes, cigarette burns in the carpet: this was how one lived, if one lived on the edge of things.

As is typical of jokes, the name elbowed an uncomfortable truth. For I believe those boys did smoke crack in that apartment. Showy lines of cocaine were laid like tracks over the glass coffee table, trenched on a magazine or book (no, I don’t think there were books). But as Whitney Houston once quipped, crack was something else entirely.¹ Rather than élan, it suggested dereliction, poverty, engulfing need. Sometimes I smelled a hint of burnt plastic coming from behind the locked bathroom door. Otherwise, the act was hidden.

It saddens me now to consider how I misspent my early adulthood, unalarmed by such recklessness. I myself neither snorted cocaine nor smoked crack any of the nights I spent drinking six-packs under a rainbow of ceiling-tacked Christmas lights and an atmosphere of smoke. Part of me knew that this was precisely what disaster looked like, that no one who found herself in such a disenchanted place was anywhere she truly wanted to be. But I had the same dissociated relationship to my nights in that apartment as to my days at the hardware store. It was as though none of it really belonged to me. I was only a tourist. This was a stopover. A grotesque sideshow in a fallen prairie city. Something I could tell about later, in sunnier, thriving climes.

Yet the longer I stayed, the more I acclimated to those hazy nights. The long days at the register with noon-hour cigarettes and BLT sandwiches. The unrelenting human drama of each slow but teeming place. How easy it was to slide into swamp-like stasis. How easily life derailed.

---

A sheetless mattress lay on the floor of Kyle’s bedroom. The quilted fabric was gilded with flowers. On an upturned milk crate sat a shadeless lamp. Its bare bulb shone against Kyle’s sea-blue eyes, his cracked lips and dimples. A shiny pink scar. I liked how he smelled of old sweat and rye. It was deeply comforting, almost prayerful — the dirt under his fingernails, our bodies the same size and naked, and Kyle’s arm latching my waist as he slept. I grew hot and pressed my forehead against the cold wall below the window. Outside, it was winter. I was careful not to move too much, lest he turn from our embrace. As I lay awake, my mouth sour with cigarettes, remorse, and semen, I wondered when and how this night’s news might reach Phillip.

Before he fell asleep, Kyle had turned my face toward his. I wish I hadn’t been so shallow, he said, tucking a strand of hair behind my ear, when we were in high school. It sounded like an apology, or possibly a compliment, and felt like neither. The way I remember it, these are Kyle’s last words to me.

Alice was asleep in another boy’s room in the apartment, platonically or passionately I could not say. She was a private person. And with my awful need to confess everything, I felt her privacy a betrayal. I imagined her face in sleep — blonde wisps across her jaw, mascara crumbling under her eyes — an image I knew well and adored. Growing up, she and I had often shared a bed. I pictured her arm, like mine, pressed against a cold wall below a window. But Alice’s hand was wrapped in a wad of toilet paper, taped up and ugly, like a child’s failed craft.

Earlier that night, the glass-topped coffee table in the living room had shattered. I remember laughter, and Alice turning her bright eyes on a shard of glass the shape and size of a carving knife. What compelled her to reach down and grip her tiny hand around the glass? (Alice was a small girl, delicate and beautiful.) She raised her fist above her head, then performed an up-and-down stabbing, like you might to mime murder. She smiled broadly, as though posing for a photograph, before pain made her realize what she’d done. Her fist opened. The red shard fell to the floor.

Music blared, throats swallowed, cigarettes burned.

Fuck me, said Alice.

In the bathroom, I held her hand below the tap and soaped the gash running parallel to her lifeline. I pulled open her fingers to inspect the wound for bits of left-behind glass. Of course, there was nothing medicinal in the cabinet — antiseptic, gauze, bandages. So I used vodka, toilet paper, and Scotch tape. Wincing, Alice tried to laugh at the food-crusted dishes in the bathtub, her mummified hand. But we were both shaking. Everything is fine, we said to the mirror, a Bloody Mary summons in reverse. It’s fine. Everything’s fine.

Neither of us knew why she’d done it. A joke gone awry, a misperception.

We left the bathroom. We returned to the couch. Someone had collected the broken glass. The ruins of the coffee table lurked on the patio. There was blood on the carpet. Everything else was the same.

---

A few days later, Johnny said in a casual way, I bet Kyle’s using needles. There were several boys in the apartment. Phillip was there, not to see me, but to sell someone drugs. I was watching his movements — his eyes on the scale — with a feigned and cat-like disinterest.

Johnny said, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Kyle has HIV.

A quick sick smile flickered over Phillip’s mouth.

I couldn’t tell whether the others knew about Kyle and me. But I was certain Johnny didn’t know, or he wouldn’t have made such a brazen announcement. He would have told me privately, concernedly, as I would have told him. But the look on Phillip’s face said that I had been promiscuous, and a fatal disease might be no better than what I deserved. Phillip, I was sure, knew all about it.

Obviously, I panicked. My heart was throbbing — it almost hurt. And it was then that I stopped watching my life as though it belonged to someone else. I stopped waiting for something to arrive. It had arrived, as a threat. Certain I would be sick, I fled to the bathroom. I cupped cold water on my face. I towelled with my T-shirt bottom.

It’s fine, I said to the mirror. Everything is fine.

I, too, had grasped the sharp edge of something that felt like the end of the future. I left the apartment without once looking at Phillip.

The next morning, I watched my blood fill three vials. Its darkness buoyed and sickened me. The nurse said that I couldn’t know with any certainty for six months. It doesn’t always show up in the bloodstream right away, she said. So I would have to wait and come back then. The nurse had a sad sympathy in her eyes that gave me no comfort but fed my fear. That same afternoon, I packed a suitcase and drove two hours south to live with my mother and stepfather. In January, I enrolled in classes at the small university where my stepfather worked. For six months, I read The Odyssey and Oedipus Rex, spy thrillers, and Anne Carson. I spoke to nobody but them.

---

Back in high school, before I’d ever met Phillip, and before I’d ever lain naked with anyone, I’d fallen in love with Kyle as the first person I had ever heard say with any conviction that he hated his father. We were slouched in a vinyl booth of a chain restaurant where he, Kyle, worked in the kitchen. It was Kyle, Nina, and me. We each had a pack of cigarettes on the table (the way you would now see three phones on the table), and a waitress had come by twice to change the ashtray. Cokes with red straws fizzed untouched. On Friday nights, Nina or Alice and I would go to a cheap restaurant, order a Coke, and smoke cigarettes. Sometimes a waitress would be snide, but we were on friendly terms with the one who had emptied the ashtray. One slow night, she’d told Nina and me about her rape.

After his shift, Kyle had seen us smoking at the table in our hoodies and eyeliner. He’d approached shyly. We all attended the same high school. Kyle and I had taken drama class together, but we weren’t really friends.

A sad childhood, he said, lighting a cigarette. A bad dad, he said, and it sounded funny coming from the corners of his mouth. Kyle had a dimpled smile and smelled of fryer oil. In drama class, he’d been a good actor.

Having rarely heard anyone explain his life with any real honesty, I was enthralled. Mostly, Kyle spoke about being afraid. He lived in fear. Of his father, he said. The fear clouded his life. I knew this cloud; I too lived in its shadow. For a fleeting but long enough few hours, in the booth of a neon-lit restaurant, I felt a perilous communion.

Even so, I stayed silent about my own sad childhood. For mine wasn’t nearly so sordid. But I was amazed that it was possible to do otherwise. And that, in speaking sorrow, one might become loved. Electrified, I watched Kyle across the table. His slender fingers looked elegant around his cigarette. His big lips held a slight sneer, even when he smiled and dimples appeared like coins in a money cake. His teeth looked unhealthy — yellow and greying. It seemed very wrong on a teenager. I felt pity for those teeth, a feeling I mistook for love. I kept repeating the phrase to myself like an incantation: bad dad, bad dad.

---

After that night, for several months that at sixteen felt like whole lifetimes, it was never just