Nancy Huggett

Contrafabula

My mother didn’t end up in the hospital with an unknown diagnosis that quickly turned to cancer. The doctor didn’t draw black blood. The moon was not full, never full, never traced an amber arc in the night sky above the city as I tossed and turned on a gurney squeezed between my mother’s bed and the cold window. I did not settle her neighbour, distraught with dementia, on the other side of the flimsy curtain and sing old hymns to calm her. I did not yell at the doctors or the nurses or the fancy palliative care dragon who guarded the gates at the end of the hallway, the exit wound of this my mother’s life. I did not drive back and forth on that interminable highway stretched taut between two cities. I did not keep the secret of my mother’s dying from my daughter, who was not waiting for brain surgery to save her precarious life. I did not crumple or cry when the police officer pulled me over for not speeding, but laughed and dared to dance a feral dirge into the field of dried cornstalks clacking in the wind. He did not rescue me, nor put me back in my red car. He did not teach me how to use the cruise control. I was not wild. I was a derecho dancing a squall line and I kept going.

Nancy Huggett is a settler descendant writing and caregiving on the unceded Territory of the Anishinaabe Algonquin Nation (Ottawa, Canada). Find her work in The Forge, Fiddlehead, and Passages North. She’s garnered awards (RBC PEN Canada 2024 New Voices Award) and a gazillion rejections. She keeps writing.