Green Fuse Burning

By Tiffany Morris and Kaija Heitland

After the death of her estranged father, artist Rita struggles with grief and regret. There was so much she wanted to ask him – about his childhood, their family, and the Mi'kmaq language and culture from which Rita feels disconnected. But when Rita's girlfriend Molly forges an artist’s residency application on her behalf, winning Rita a week to paint at an isolated cabin, Rita is both furious and intrigued. The residency is located where her father grew up.

On the first night at the cabin, Rita wakes to strange sounds. Was that a body being dragged through the woods? When she questions the locals about the cabin's history, they are suspicious and unhelpful. Ignoring her unease, Rita gives in to dark visions that emanate from the forest's lake and the surrounding swamp. She feels its pull, channelling that energy into art like she's never painted before. But the uncanny visions become more insistent, more intrusive, and Rita discovers that in the swamp's decay the end of one life is sometimes the beginning of another.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stelliform Press
• Release date: Oct 31, 2023
• ISBN: 9781778092671

Tiffany Morris

Tiffany Morris is a Mi’kmaw/settler writer of speculative fiction and poetry from Kjipuktuk (Halifax), Nova Scotia. She is the author of the horror poetry collection Elegies of Rotting Stars (Nictitating Books 2022) which won the Elgin Award in 2023.

Book preview

Devastation of Light: The Recovered Paintings of Rita Francis

Gallery Autochthone is proud to present Devastation of Light: The Recovered Paintings of Rita Francis. Recovered from the artist’s cabin following a mysterious disappearance, the six paintings presented here demonstrate a watershed moment in Francis’s burgeoning career. The urban Mi’kmaw landscape painter departs from the muted tones of her previous work, leaning harder into the abstract elements of her style, including inspiration from her cultural heritage. Moving deeper into an experimental mode, her mixed-media acrylic work utilizes elements of the pond where she was a resident. Repurposing sticks, moss, and other detritus from the pond’s surroundings to reconfigure the viewer’s orientation within the landscape, Francis challenges the landscape tradition itself. The startling and mysterious pieces shown here are designed to cajole, disturb, and interrogate the viewer, showing us everything from Mi’kmaw symbols to tortured figures contending with the land in new ways. Pain strikes through the alienation and intimacy of each painting’s relationship to the land. In these paintings we see the murky, urgent depths of a woman’s spiritual journey into the swamplands of uncertainty.

1

The Pond When the Moon Threw No Light

24 x 36

Acrylic on canvas

The first in the series, The Pond When the Moon Threw No Light is a charcoal-hued grisaille: the dark grey brushstrokes are thickly layered on the canvas, creating a deep, mossy texture, surprising the viewer with the revelation that this piece contains no alien elements—you would almost think the moss had formed on the work itself. The darkness of night on the pond is illuminated with small strokes of gold and white, surrounding pale humanoid figures that are barely discernible. Francis depicts these figures in faint outlines, descending, ghost-like, into the black pool of the water. The mysterious figures seem unaware of the viewer’s gaze, and the overall impact is one of voyeuristic unease. The interaction between the human and other elements of the natural world is unsettled here, punctuating the darkness only with the movement into water and the viewer’s sense of witness.

Loon illustration by Kaija Heitland

Dark shining night sighed into the expanse of the pond. The Frog Croaking Moon, Squoljikus, was a faint sliver humming into the sky above. It threw no light.

Rita watched the running silhouettes from the pitch-black shadow of the cabin bedroom. She’d awakened to the crunch of footsteps on gravel and stumbled, sweaty and confused, from the rickety single bed. Footfalls rushed the spring peepers and bullfrogs into silence. Her own heavy breathing surrounded her, almost obscuring soft movements down the bank: splashing deep into the green-brown water.

Pain pulsed up her leg from the stumble. She crouched at the window, breathing dust and mildew as she squinted over the windowpane and into the distance. Technically, there was no reason to stay hidden in the bedroom, but there was also no reason for anyone to be at the isolated pond, or near this small cabin — let alone for people to be in the water in the middle of the night.

A bloated, pale body flashed through her mind, conjured from the passive consumption of a thousand police procedurals screaming blue light into her parents’ living room. She fumbled toward the bedside table, feeling for the cool glass of her phone. No texts had sent or come through since she’d arrived at the cabin, but just in case — just in case — she should check. Her hand shook and she nearly dropped the phone. When she hit the button she grimaced, waiting for light that didn’t come. Her phone was dead. From outside the window came a loud thump, followed by dragging, grunting.

A body. A limp assembly of limbs, heavy with the absence of story. Of course. It had to be a body. Rita shut her eyes tight. It couldn’t be held off; the memory was a wave destined to crash over her. It always happened this way — a procession, a rosary of grief, focusing and shuddering through her memory: her father in his coffin. The eagle feather in his hands. His eyes — she remembered, with a lurch in her gut — were sewn shut. No matter how much she’d tried to forget that fact, she couldn’t forget anything she’d learned about the embalming process in late-night YouTube spirals, her wakefulness burning electric with the fear of her own mortality.

Incense and murmured prayers had filled the thick basement air of the reserve church. Prayers her tongue couldn’t shape. She had neither the full grasp of the Mi’kmaw language at her disposal, nor the religious background of her cousins or her brother. Maybe if she had grown up on the rez it would be different; the community was ninety percent Catholic, eight percent Baha’i, and traditional in their own admixtures. It was a place where prayer could be shaped by any number of languages, few of which spoke to her own soul, or her life, or her memories.

The trauma rhythm continued its perfect torture: the same flashbacks came in their expected sequence. The hospital looming in the distance. The ICU with its bodies stretched out in beds, some destined for death despite everyone’s efforts, prayers, begging palms held open to the sky.

What could she do? Rita exhaled again, a slow and deliberate attempt at calm taken from a history of therapy appointments where bored counsellors recommended breathing techniques, strategies for noticing her own embodiment through body scans, stretches, any number of ways to contend with the weight of her being. The perfect blackness of night in the cabin danced swirls in her adjusting eyes as she breathed, steadying only when the sounds outside stopped. Crouching at the window, she stared as silence cut through the dark. She couldn’t see anything out there.

Maybe this wasn’t real. Hallucination or not, she could ignore it, crawl back under the covers. If whatever was going on out there was real, it would not be worth the risk of being seen. It could be people out for a midnight swim, people throwing anything into the pond — not necessarily a body — and whatever happened in this nowhere town was none of her business, right? It could be some weird local thing, she didn’t know. Possibly no one had noticed her rented car, itself black and tucked beside the cabin in the black night. She could check the locks, go back to bed, forget all of this.

She could be dreaming. She’d sleepwalked as a kid, hallucinated all manner of things, found herself waking up on the porch some mornings with muddy feet and the imprint of grass on her arms, impressions of an unknown hour. There was even the one night, when she’d awakened to a gunshot, the sounds of screaming that rose and fell and then died. In the morning she’d told her mother about it in a trembling voice. Her mother had laughed. She hadn’t heard anything. Rita must have been dreaming. No one else had heard anything, her mother had said, and surely such a thing would cause a ruckus, would wake the whole neighborhood, wouldn’t it? For the rest of the week Rita had scanned the newspaper but found nothing.

Well, t’us, vivid dreams are a good thing for an artist to have, her mother reassured her. Lots of creative people get inspiration that way.

The Mi’kmaw language always sounded weird coming from her mother, even though her mother was half Mi’kmaw. She had been estranged from that side of her family for years and wouldn’t tell Rita why, wouldn’t share any knowledge with her other than a few words or phrases. She was much more into telling Rita how she should behave and what convoluted beauty rituals could improve her appearance. Rita knew her mother wouldn’t want

Reviews for Green Fuse Burning

[Kayleigh Wiebe · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Horror mingles with grief. You can feel the tendrils of alienation wrap around you and pull you down. But you come out the other side in reconciliation with life and death, and how despite your dissociation, your depression, Creator loves you and you are always at home on the land. the combination of eco-anxietyvand Indigenous identity made for an engrossing read. Although the writing was a bit too literary and flowery for me, thus why not a full 5 star read for me.