Read an Excerpt from Linda Quennec's Fishing for Birds, A Novel of BC and Cuba

In Linda Quennec's Fishing for Birds (Inanna Publications) widow at just 32, leaves her home in Vancouver Island searching for solace. After settling on a tiny island, she meets Ivy, whose stories of 1920s Cuba become a refuge for Kate. Their friendship is nothing she expected but somehow becomes the link back to the world, and life, that she so needed - until a visitor arrives who threatens to throw Kate's new beginning into chaos. 

Alternating between Ivy's Cuba of the past and Kate's modern day British Columbia, Fishing for Birds is a vibrant, empathetic portrait of very different women learning from one another to move through grief and loss. 

We're very excited to share an excerpt from Fishing for Birds with you here today, courtesy of Inanna Publications, where we meet a young Ivy. Get a glimpse of Quennec's lush prose and storytelling here. 

Excerpt from Fishing for Birds by Linda Quennec:

It’s an opportunity. She can’t stay in tonight; the world will surely turn on its side without her there to breathe the perfumed night. Three months of hanging around her grandparents’ place. While she feels a mild stab of guilt for misleading them,  she’s restless and knows that there will never be another opportunity like this once she’s left the island. She’d have no chance at any sort of freedom if her parents were here. She silently thanks the brilliant gods who’ve stocked the Cuban waters so abundantly with tuna—the blessed silvery shoals thickening the emerald waters, imparting the need to stay late at her shift. She feels an almost religious “thanks be to God” rise up in her head—a result of too many weeks of church. An avid fisherman, Señor Canton requires all of his staff on the lines so that he can take advantage of this prime season. All Ivy had to do was exaggerate her working hours when disclosing them to her grandparents.

A few curls pop out of alignment, but she licks her fingers and slicks them back against her temples, adding a headband with a large gardenia. She’s brought extra beads from back home and strings them around her neck. A dab of Oma’s long-neglected Chanel  and she is ready. She’d said her goodbyes at the office before sneaking into a washroom to prepare. No one need notice the effort.

The night welcomes her, sultry and full of energy; it’s impatient she’s taken so long. The rising, syncopated buzz of cicadas has long given way to the kindling intoxication of a clear, tropical night. How could anyone stay inside? By this time back home, a humid chill would be penetrating every pore, cloistering everyone in their houses for months and months. Even summer nights would be chilly.

Ivy hastens toward her bicycle, her steps taking a little longer in the white dress, clingy at the bodice and flared at the hips. Will Emilio be there? She wouldn’t be honest if she didn’t admit that much of the effort had been made with him in mind. She checks for the observant eyes of her colleagues, hikes up her dress, and flings her leg over the seat. Pedalling, she pushes through the warm, thick air and into the trees—jungle, her parents would call it, making it sound so primitive.

Twenty minutes later she finds the narrow trail, altered by darkness, but discernible still. Night creatures, whatever they are, are deafening and obnoxious—she remembers a friend saying once that North Americans are calmer and more conservative because their forests are quiet, while people with Latin blood reflect in their spirit the warm cacophony of the tropical rainforest. A generalization, but it seems true tonight. Even the tiniest of creatures celebrate.

It takes fifteen more minutes to get to the clearing. The swimming hole at its centre looks as though it has stolen the moon and hidden it there, grasping and pulling it down into a viney embrace. Everyone Ivy knows is there, along with several people she’s not yet met. A layer of sweet cigar smoke hovers over the moon-filled lake, and everything pulses and teems with creatures—human and other.

Peter Freisen offers her a cigarette and a light. The excitement is palpable—rebellious friends joining together after having made it past the gauntlet of parental obstacle. Someone is playing drums.

“Oy, Rubia. Come dance.” Her heart leaps, looking for Emilio, but instead it’s a spindly Dutch boy, a friend of Peter’s. Down by the water, he bounces and shakes in a group of sweaty bodies. Ivy joins them, closing her eyes and feeling her own body sway with delight, as though she’s shaking off ten coils of heavy rope. Mark and Maureen are there, as are the German twins from up the street, and a lot more Americans. She moves as sensuously as she knows how, in hopes of becoming magnetizing. Her eyes closed, imagining Emilio. Three songs later there is still no sign. She chides herself, knowing that it would not be likely for any Cubans to turn up at this sort of event. She decides to socialize, heading back toward Peter and a few of his friends as they squat with drinks a few yards up the bank. Peter pours a glass of pungent rum and offers it to her.

“You enjoy your time here, Rubia? He spreads a blanket for them all to settle on.

She leans back, observing the night sky, which is perforated by what looks to be the glow of heaven. “God, yes. Where have I been all this time?”

“In the wrong places, I think.” The two men and women laugh. A girl Ivy hasn’t met before with an equine face and short, black bangs gives a throaty, cigarette-infused chuckle. “It takes a while to find a party in the middle of the jungle.”

Ivy sips her rum and looks out at the lake. No local would ever dream of doing this. There is some kind of distancing from oneself that comes solely with the expat experience, as if this isn’t really happening. None of them are really here in totality. Just parts of themselves, living a parallel existence.

The last glug of fiery rum pulses through her veins, while the group on the blanket descends into a mellow, philosophical mood. She reaches her arms up, stretching, then makes her way back to the haze and rising pulse of the dancers. Drums continue to punctuate the stillness and humidity.

She’d almost given up hope of seeing Emilio when over on the far side of the lake she sees him. Kate watches as he winds around the path. Who does he know here? Not in the least bit tentative, he strides across the flattened grasses and finds Ivy with his eyes. She continues to dance, allowing him to come closer to her. His wavy brown hair looks a little messy, and she notices for the first time that his dark eyes have the webbed beginnings of laugh lines radiating outward. She’s never asked his age, still doesn’t really know him.

“Do you like to dance?”

They make their way into the crowd, and Emilio pulls Ivy tightly against his chest, closer to him than she’s ever been to any man, subtracting all remaining space between them.

His dance is unfamiliar, more insistent and directive than she’s used to. He smells of soap, and she begins to feel webbed within a sort of net, like a sticky spider’s web, although she’s not sure who the spider is. It’s getting crowded, and most people are up and dancing now, trampling the grasses further into submission. Emilio is tall, but she’s able to stretch her arms up around his shoulders and join his rhythm. Before long he has her hips and is gently moving them with his large hands. “This is how to dance if you go to Havana.”

Ivy laughs at his line, but the lesson continues and she is an attentive, if not slightly drunken, participant. Drumbeats melt into one another until Ivy and Emilio become a single swaying branch, hips fused, bodies liquefying.

“I’d like to go to Havana.” She looks up at him.

He responds by taking her hand and pulling her away from the others, heading toward the thickness of trees.

She stops, pulls him back. “What are you doing?”

He takes off his shirt and wraps it around her shoulders. His answer is a smile. She’s intrigued enough to follow.

They find a clearing where they can still hear the music and continue to dance, which before long leads to his mouth finding hers. This is all new to Ivy, but within a few minutes she dispenses all her well thought-out boundaries as they move into rapid exploration of one another. Ivy pushes away the warning voices in her inebriated head, most of whom sound like Oma, as she threads her fingers through wavy hair, her mouth moving instinctively to his neck. Before long he lifts her up and she swings her legs around his waist, as though she’s done this many times before. He pushes her against a tree and brushes his mouth softly against her ear. The bark of the pine is rough through his shirt and the cushion of his mouth travels over her, hands everywhere. Is this happening? She feels a surge of euphoric fear. I can stop him. But then her mind travels away. Just one moment more. But she’s standing again, and he is removing her clothes, laying them on the ground.

In what seems to take very little time and effort he’s taken off everything, opening her skin to the moonlight. He cradles her back and lowers her slowly onto the pile of clothes, continuing to search her mouth, hands finding their way to more intimate places, releasing gasps. Then in one fluid motion he pushes into a place where pain and pleasure tear simultaneously and a new dance continues as his body works, slowly, pressing itself into this task alone, lifting her. She asks him to slow even more as the pain begins to transform. He meets the clumsiness of her rhythm and brings her into his with slow caresses and a hungry mouth, and it’s too late now. Despite knowing better, she allows everything. Lungs, long, thin limbs, the deepest of places. Alive.

*

Did it happen? she feels the solid pew beneath her hips and squirms. The hawklike minister is exceptionally agitated this morning; it seems that he himself possesses the all-knowing, damning power. Ivy searches for the remorseful side of herself, but it hasn’t surfaced yet. Oma casts sidelong glances. Ivy doesn’t want to give her grandparents reason to send her back to Canada, so so she’ll have to be extra cautious for the next week or so. Perfect granddaughter, no trouble at all. Her head pounds.

“How late did Señor Canton keep you last night?” Opa asks on the walk home, from beneath an arched eyebrow.

“I don’t remember. Must’ve been around midnight.”

She’d scrambled in clumsily around three a.m., folding herself beneath the window sash. The dogs were cooperative; the treats in her pocket helped with that.

“Glad he’s not fool enough to suggest the Lord’s Day. I think he’s taking advantage.” Oma shuffles along the dirt road. “What do the other parents think?”

“It’s just temporary, for the tuna run. I’m sure they don’t like it, but it’ll be over soon enough.”

Her grandparents always take Sunday off from the bakery. On Saturday night they bring home whatever hasn’t sold that week—heavy German loaves with the odd sweet danish thrown in. Oma sets the percolator and Ivy thinks she might slide with exhaustion beneath the table before it burbles its way to fruition. Her Sunday saviour. She watches Oma’s hands spread out sausages and other cured meats and cheeses along with the breads, noting that her chubby fingers resemble the very foods they are preparing. Oma is a practical woman.

Soon Mrs. Freisen joins them. Conversation switches to German and Ivy inhales large gulps of coffee, fades into the deliciousness of last night. Emilio had accompanied her home as far as the trailhead. A pause there as he leaned his bicycle against a tree and kissed her, hands in her hair. She’d wanted to throw her bike down and continue, but he stopped and told her she should get home.

“I think we need to find a way to meet again.”

“Oh yes.”

She hasn’t intended any of this. She knows as soon as Mark and Maureen find her they’ll be full of questions she doesn’t feel equipped to answer. She can almost see their expressions, watch them reframing their opinions of her, for better or worse. It doesn’t really matter, though. They haven’t known her that long to begin with, and she’ll likely never see them again after she leaves. Besides, this new thing in her—this thing that is her, that wants to live, talk, read, feel what a body can do —has its own driving intentions. Not her decision, really. She’ll go back to her old self when she’s back home. But not before then. 

She replaces thought with sensation: the excitement of drumbeat and how it sounded in the trees—permeating, amaranthine, unfading, inviting her body to forget, to dissolve into dance. And then Emilio. She’s never known anyone like him, so without hesitation, so present in mind and body. Not that she’s ever known anyone in this way before. She thinks of his soft Spanish words and checks again—still no remorse. The only worry in her mind is the forgotten condom, but he’d sworn his intentions at the outset of the night were not to seduce her. She respects him for this, tells herself they’ll remember if it happens again.

Vibrating with coffee and the remnants of last night, Ivy excuses herself from the breakfast table and heads to the kitchen to clean. Best to avoid the swimming hole today.

___________________________________

Excerpted from Fishing for Birds by Linda Quennec, copyright 2019. Reproduced with permission of Inanna Publications.

Linda Quennec is a writer, traveller, and PhD student in Depth Psychology. An island-dweller at heart, she took inspiration for her novel Fishing for Birds from the natural beauty of Coastal British Columbia and the fascinating Isla de la Juventud (formerly Isla de Piños) where her German grandmother was raised. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Naropa University, and is a graduate of The Writers’ Studio at Simon Fraser University and The Humber School of Writing. Her work has appeared in Quills Canadian Poetry, 3Elements Review, Cirque, Emerge, and DoveTales literary journals. She lives with her husband and twin daughters just outside Vancouver, British Columbia.