This month’s Sunday Short selection is taken from Kit Dobson’s We Are Already Ghosts (University of Calgary Press).

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But, then, does that not mean that we are all narcissists? Clare Briscoe looked out the window: she caught the sun on the lake. That we hold ourselves in regard, that we should seek to hold ourselves in regard—is that not a form of the very deepest narcissism? A Buddhist practice, after all, she mused, seeks to give up desire in the name of self-improvement. Or perhaps in the name of self-forgetting. It could amount to the same thing. It would depend on whom you read. Mahayana, Theravada. She imagined a statue of the Buddha, then a lotus flower, on water. The sun glanced off the lake. Clare moved on the couch so that the light wouldn’t catch her eye: she shifted her weight from left to right. She dropped her hand. The book rested on the back of the couch.

Clare thought of Narcissus, looking into the pool. We are so fond of our reflections that we seldom look to ourselves. Perhaps Buddhism might take us in another direction at this point, Clare noted. She thought of her yoga mat, of its smell. She chided herself for the conflation. What her son Michael would soon identify as Orientalism. Though of course the traditions were linked—Buddhism, yoga—if not quite the same.

The smell in her mind, in her memory, turned to that of soil, to her long-deceased mother’s simple love of the narcissus flower, her dirty hands patting plants into place in the garden out front of the cabin. The cabin rendered once again suitable for receiving guests from the city.

Daffodils.

What happened to Narcissus? Was he turned into something—like in most of Ovid’s tales—or did he just die?

But she hadn’t really been thinking of that. She was thinking of a lover she had had once. Years ago, somewhere tropical. She could recollect, but she didn’t really wish to place the memory. The where wasn’t important. She remembered his size, his gentle but urgent press against her. She could recall the feeling of taking him in, enveloping him. But his face, his face was gone. She could weep for that loss! The most tactile memory was of afterward, of his feet padding the cool tile flooring on the way to the bathroom. The gentle slap, slap of the soles of his feet. And then he was gone. It was enough.

How moments touch us, Clare thought. The children should be back soon.

She looked out the window again. If she could paint, if she had that skill, the view would make for a good painting. It was a quiet place on the lake. William loved the views. Her grandmother had been a painter: her painting was slow, painful, determined. She said that she had once been happy with a painting that she had done, Clare’s mother Daphne had told her. Clare wondered what it had been an image of, that painting. And why she could only be happy with one of her works. What struggle! Why do it if it so seldom brought joy! It was a long time ago, between the wars. It seemed to have been a different world. Clare remembered her grandmother’s small, unsteady hands in the evening of her life. It was years after she had caused a scandal, bearing a child late, an unwed mother who left her home as a result. But more than anything, Clare remembered her grandmother’s Afghan shawls, her quiet strength. The surname that they kept. Daphne had cared for her mother-in-law in spite of the odds: they were often together during Clare’s father’s long absences.

The first generation makes the money. The second maintains it. The members of the third generation, the artists, spend it. Clare read that somewhere, but she couldn’t remember where. In the city she could go to her books. At any rate, she was maintaining it, she supposed.

The children really should return soon, back from the lake. The sun would burn them if they stayed much longer, she thought. But they are old enough to know better, more or less. Or at least they are old enough to take responsibility. The older ones are. It took a long time to let go of those habits of worry, the persistent patterns etched by the quiet years of steering the children in healthful directions.

Of checking on them in the night to make sure that they were still breathing.

Soon it would be time to make the evening’s supper. To get the supper made. In the city she wouldn’t have to do so. But it was a pleasure here. A warm pleasure. Chicken. She would make chicken. Alas a dirty word, alas a dirty third, alas a dirty bird, went her mind. Chicken. She would make chicken, she thought, her lips pursed, remembering the lines.

She had been beautiful. She knew it! She had known how to use it, too. She found herself with him. Clare had foundered in the first marriage, ship upon the rocks: it was unhappy. But both she and William read. That was a consolation. Absolutely nothing to sneeze at! All these years later—and still they loved one another.

What is it. Mean. Potato. Loaves. She had made bread earlier. The pleasures of the cabin. There were potatoes. Roast a chicken. She was always happy to use the kitchen, the bigness of this kitchen in the lakeside cabin built for her parents. Gerald and Daphne pouring their dreams into this then remote space—remote from their perspective. Was that it, to succeed? Clare wondered, though she had seen it. And did it lead to happiness?

Narcissism, her other thoughts interrupted.

At any rate, she did love the cabin. It was a grand space. Not ostentatious, but very comfortable. Large, but not sprawling.

The children would be back. Speaking of narcissism! Their teen years. It was to be expected, after all. Swimming off the dock, sunning on the flats. The cool of the smooth floors in her hotel room. Clare found her bookmark, closed the novel. A peculiar bird—supper. She had been faithful to William, after all—almost completely. She expected that it was much the same with him, but she would never ask. Whom would such a questioning serve? At this point! At the end of it all, it didn’t really much matter. Things had turned out as they had. She was happy enough.

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