home for the holidays - by rayne fisher-quann
I am shivering, reading cold northeastern prose and there is a word for what I do but I do it anyway, carefully setting dinner on the table uncooked, before setting the table on fire. — David Berman, Of Things Found Where They Are Not Supposed To Be 1. Nobody takes care of southern Ontario.1 On the drive from my parent’s house to the hospital — a two-hour stretch of deep suburban highway we’ve driven hundreds of times in my life, for hundreds of reasons — this is the only thing I can think about, again and again. Nobody takes care of anything here. In Mark Fisher’s book The Weird and the Eerie, he theorizes that the feeling of eerie is formed from absence; eerieness is conjured “either when there is something present where there should be nothing, or there is nothing present where there should be something.” Ontario, too, is defined by absence: acres of empty farmland, dead or dying; an occasional horse with no stable, brushing off flies; abandoned barns, their rotted roofs slumping in
Explore this link on the map →