Suddenly light, p.1
Suddenly Light, page 1
© Nina Dunic, 2025
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, by any method, without the prior written consent of the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may use brief excerpts in a review, or, in the case of photocopying in Canada, a licence from Access Copyright.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Title: Suddenly light / Nina Dunic. | Names: Dunic, Nina, author.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20250191288 | Canadiana (ebook) 2025019130X | ISBN 9781778430695 (softcover) | ISBN 9781778430701 (EPUB)
Subjects: LCGFT: Short stories.
Classification: LCC PS8607.U537 S83 2025 | DDC C813/.6—dc23
Edited by Bryan Ibeas
Cover and interior design by Megan Fildes
Typeset in Laurentian with thanks to type designer Rod McDonald
The publisher dedicates this book to Matthew Montgomery, a generous reader and friend of the press, who did not live long enough to read it.
Invisible Publishing | Halifax, Fredericton, & Picton
www.invisiblepublishing.com
Published with the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada.
In memory of MM,
a friend of a friend
Contents
Cardinal
Falls
Awake
Bodies
Stupid
The Apartment
Divorce
Fries Supreme
Dinner
The Artist
“I Didn’t See Any Children With Balloons”
The Dog
Youth
Runners
Kin
Acknowledgements
About the Author
About the Publisher
Cardinal
It was a strangely snowless December. Derek and I had not seen each other since the summer, spending an afternoon in July on a clean, steel-and-glass patio in midtown, getting a bit drunk but trying to flatten it out with food. We eventually moved to a crowded eastside pub and then a dive bar—our venues growing as sloppy as we were. As usual, by the end, we were suddenly falling into brotherly hugs and talking about things that normally did not appeal to either of us. Our parents, work, women that had disappointed us. Often the same stories. Repetition was not tiresome but soothing, like wheels going round and round. Then french fries, sleep, and he took the train back to Burlington in the morning.
Now it was my turn to visit him. It didn’t feel much like Christmas yet without the snow, but I usually went to his place around this time of year. I liked a little bit of snow around, to feel festive. Otherwise the decorations in the shops—and women’s pretty little scarves or coloured tights—somehow turned a little sad; their efforts seemed misplaced in a grey city. It was a theme with me, a little bit of prettiness turning lonesome.
Brenda didn’t come with me. Derek’s apartment—a rented floor in a cold, brick house—was not suited to hosting company, did not have a proper table for a proper meal. More than that, Derek was not suitable company for girlfriends; he did not know how to interact with women he was not interested in. Or any person, for that matter—polite obligations taxed him and, drinking, he would grow snide. Brenda and I never said anything along those lines, about the table or otherwise; I just saw him sometimes and did not extend the invite, and she did not ask to come.
The small train station was warm and crowded on a weekend close to the holidays. A man wearing a coat with a hockey team logo stood holding a sloppily wrapped gift, staring at the wall-mounted board that showed train times. A pale, thin young woman sat nearby, not looking at anything. She seemed twitchy and abandoned, with red around her nostrils—she should have been wearing a hat. A mother in her thirties bustled in, attempting to both soothe and admonish three restless children; there was a hard brightness in her voice intended for the rest of us. But a well-off couple was the warm, glowing centre of the station. They both wore coats with the shoulder patch—indicating they spent on jackets what I once spent on a used car—and both had aviator sunglasses, mirrored. Like twin helicopter pilots. Their lips looked creamy and moisturized, and I admired them for a few minutes; they looked like they would never get old, never get sick.
The train ride was an unremarkable passage through industrial tracts of land and the ugly backs of buildings. Occasionally the train passed a new development, a subdivision of pink and beige townhouses, huddled together, staring at each other through kitchen windows. Who wants a pink house? The brick was probably called “salmon” or “coral”—but it was pink. Burlington. I texted Derek and said I would be landing at quarter after four. He texted, K. I fiddled with my phone for a few minutes, cycling through apps but not lingering on anything in particular. Finally I posted, help, i’m going to burlington.
Derek seemed to have lost a little weight. I smiled through the passenger-side window and then got in the car. It looked all right on him; he didn’t look thin exactly. He looked maybe younger—except the eyes; his eyes looked older. He was wearing a leather bomber jacket over a navy-blue sweatshirt, with trim pants—not jeans—tucked into bulky boots. Handsome guy. He was grinning at me, evidently in a good mood today. I was relieved.
“Heeeeeeeeeeeey Jamesy,” he drawled out in an impressive display of older-brother dominance.
“Your car smells like shit,” I said, my younger-brother attempt at appearing gruff.
“I can’t smell it anymore.” He was still smiling as we were pulling out. “I refuse to smell it anymore. I win.”
Derek wanted to drive to the bar but I told him we should walk. Park at your house and walk to the bar, I said. He made a theatrical sigh but turned for the house, knowing I was always willing to mention a former girlfriend’s younger brother, killed by a drunk driver. Patrick. He was the only dead teen in our high school. It changed our school; we had assemblies about it. It changed my girlfriend. For a long time I thought I would stay with her, take care of her, marry her, to make up for it.
We parked, didn’t even step inside the house with my bags, just walked to the bar with our shoulders hunched up and hands stuffed in our pockets. “Cold,” Derek said.
“Patrick’s colder in the ground,” I said. I win.
The waitress brought us a pitcher of beer. In the city you called them servers, but here they were waitresses. There was a female performance aspect. The contours of her smile changed as she looked from me to Derek.
“How’s Brenda?” Derek asked, pouring a pint. One question, no follow-up, so I would have to make it count.
“She’s good. We’re talking about moving in together. She also talks about kids too, which I am thinking about. So we’re good; it’s serious.”
“Ah,” he said. “That sounds niiiiiiiice, James.”
I hadn’t mentioned marriage; it was a word that carried some weight between us. “So what happened to Erica, then?” I asked. “The same that always happens?”
“The same,” he said, smirking. “She just wanted attention; it didn’t necessarily have to be mine.”
“Well, you pick them for the same reason, so.”
“So,” he repeated. He rubbed the side of his face with his palm, his thoughts leaving the room. “Yeah,” he concluded.
He was a warehouse manager for a spice importing company. His clothes often smelled vaguely of cumin,
coriander, a tickle of pepper. The rest of his life was the gym and hockey, weed and beer. His notebooks, though. His notebooks filled the lowest shelf on his bookcase—mostly the kind of inexpensive “cahiers” that we had used in school. A few of them nicer journals that were purchased for him as gifts, hardcover, a few leather ones with the embossed initials. He filled them, and then they filled the shelf.
“I just write some words when I’m high,” he would say.
He knew that I wrote a lot for my job—part of my role in marketing—and he knew that other people read my work, commented on it, and even shared it. Once or twice he expressed some admiration, although he never read what I wrote—it was industry stuff, ultimately disposable, even to me.
His work was the same. His boss was okay, but another manager there got on his nerves—“a little prick.” The renter that lived upstairs had moved out, and the new renter was a really old guy who was a bit weird, but harmless. At least he was quiet; shifts at the warehouse started at seven a.m. The renter did like animals—birds and squirrels and chipmunks and such—and this seemed like an endearing quality, considering he also walked strangely and sometimes swatted at his own head.
“He doesn’t seem to have anyone at all,” Derek said, rolling the pint glass between his palms. “If he has a phone, I’ve never seen him with it. I guess it makes sense—he’s crazy. But you’d think he could find another weird person. Seems bad enough to be crazy, but crazy and alone—it’s a bit too sad.”
“Well, you’re sane and alone.”
“Yeah, but at least I have a thriving, creative career,” he said, deadpan. Then he grinned—picturesque.
I told him my work was getting better. They had hired beneath me so I was able to delegate a lot of menial work—mostly the reporting—and although it wasn’t actually a promotion, it felt like one. My building recently updated the gym and sauna but also increased maintenance fees significantly, which I was not happy a bout. Brenda and I were talking about cohabiting anyway, which meant I would save half on everything. She had a cat, and I showed pictures on my phone; Derek liked cats.
In about two hours, once we started on rye, he would bring up Sam. Sam was The One. Sam got away. Sam was on the internet somewhere, sharing photos of herself, and lots of people liked it. She was the drunk topic for years. He dumped her but regretted it, and she never asked to come back, and he was too proud to ask—so she found someone worthy but less proud, and he found less proud women but not worthy ones. So she had come out on top, and he had lost.
It fractured some fundamental part of Derek. I didn’t know whether it was the mistake itself or his inability to right the mistake that hurt him most. I didn’t know how much of it was about Sam at all—but his awe, his terror, at his own immovable ego, even under a lifetime’s worth of regret. And he was right to be afraid. It was so stupid—and so characteristic of him—to prefer his ego over his own happiness.
I had met Sam; it was apparent why I should be smitten. She was attractive and lively, somehow both direct and elusive at the same time. Alpha female, provocatively dressed, brisk in movement—she seemed quite an important figure to be associated with. She was disapproving, pretty, tough. And it made men feel important, her presence. Derek’s kind of woman.
And it was such a Derek fate to be sitting in a pub in Burlington, still talking about how stupid social media was but how a lot of people liked Sam on it, about six years after the last time they spoke.
The year they broke up. During one of my visits, while he was in the bathroom, I pulled out his notebook and flipped through some pages. Most were crammed with short sentences and small sketches, but one page was blank except for a rushed scribble across the top of the page. She doesn’t know who I am. That was it, on the page. I had a painful tug in my heart for my brother. He didn’t see how much time he spent ensuring nobody knew who he was. He expected he could always do that, but that someone would still know.
After midnight, after rye, he was slumped forward on the bar stool. The game was long over and now they were playing clips. “One of these guys liked a photo of Sam,” he said, gesturing to the basketball players on the television. I didn’t ask about it.
We left the bar after spending several hours watching and talking about sports. We were drunk. Flurries were coming down as we stomped home, not feeling the cold, but our bodies strangely, painfully contracted nevertheless.
“I’m cold, James!” he shouted.
“I’m cold, Derek!” I shouted back.
Snowflakes flew into our eyes and flashes of the sidewalk, my boots, and occasional trees or lampposts, flickered through my vision.
We got back to his place. He showed me the sofa and a pile of blankets. “You’re my favourite brother,” I said, stupid with relief.
“No, I’m not,” he said.
He went to the bathroom to brush his teeth, and I walked over to the bookshelf, the bottom row. I pulled out a recent journal and opened to a page close to the end.
I felt like a scattering of red birds.
I closed the book and lay down on the sofa, pulling the blankets over me and feeling a strange, warm consciousness in my arms, my stomach, my thighs, my feet pushing beneath the cushions, tight muscles uncurling. A scattering.
He came out of the bathroom and walked over to the sofa, standing over my feet. His figure was silhouetted by a light in the hall. “I just want you to know something.”
“Okay,” I said.
“There is a chance I might kill myself,” he said, without emotion. “But I don’t want you to be upset, if it happens.”
“I won’t,” I said.
“Okay,” he said. “Thanks, bro.”
He walked down the hall.
I realized my overnight bag with toothpaste and socks was freezing in the backseat of the car. I reached for my phone and texted Brenda, goodnight sweet princess.
Derek didn’t kill himself. He met a girl named Jessie and they lived together in a comfortable arrangement. He didn’t talk about her much, but he’d text her once or twice as an evening progressed.
Brenda and I moved in together, got married a few years later, and had a daughter soon after that. Time started passing quickly. I watched my daughter look at me with eyes that flashed with new understanding, every week, every month. I could see her consciousness flutter and open, like petals on a flower. Derek liked her. Her name was Belle—Annabelle, but we called her Belle.
I knew my brother. Handsome guy. Lone wolf, too proud. Our parents died early and had despised each other, taking great pains to conceal that from us. There was a final and total meaninglessness to their abrupt lives. I felt it too. The strange weight. Mostly at the edges of the night, as things were winding down. I knew what Derek wanted—scared of death and loneliness, the threat was his bravado. Made him feel brave enough to let the night end, alone. Let himself fall asleep, alone. I got it.
We were kind of destroyed the next morning. The old man was outside the house, on the front porch. Derek seemed surprised to see him out front and cleared his throat a few times, saying good morning and introducing me quickly. The man was not interested in me but wanted Derek to see the neighbour’s tree out front, a young oak. There was a cardinal in it. Its colour was a deep gash in the neighbourhood’s grey; it was inexplicable, startling. “It’s pretty,” Derek said.
Falls
Spring was coming. The sun was lingering a little longer in the west, throwing orange light across the fronts of houses. Dogs and children ambled outdoors, unhurried, silhouetted against the sky. The air was warming, smelling of damp earth, becoming clean.
Often I woke around this time, just before dusk. I worked security at a mall, overnight shift, four years now.
Phoenix Falls, an upscale mall about half an hour outside downtown—it pulled a lot of people in on the weekends; it was rare to get good-sized parking lots right off a main thoroughfare. People drove from all corners of the city. They only just built it about six or seven years ago; before that, it was some massive, empty industrial area, a complex of buildings for something they don’t make anymore. I thought they might turn it into trendy townhouses and lofts, but they didn’t.
It was a nicer area now. People were buying up the small houses around there; many were torn down for new, big builds. There were nicer cars in the driveways and large family vehicles.
Sometimes I drove around a bit, window open a few inches. I drove past the houses after all their lights were off, except for maybe a bedroom at the back of the house—but sometimes there were no lights at all, everyone asleep, or on their phones in bed. It felt good seeing the small homes and imagining the small, warm rooms inside. It made me feel benevolent toward them; I would be awake while they slept.
The main entrance sat at the end of a long four-lane ramp that gently curved around. You felt like you were circling and climbing as you approached the mall. Apparently the structure looked like a bird from above—a blocky kind of bird outline. They were proud of that, featuring it on their website in several photos and using the shape for their logo. But from the ground, it just looked like stores.
I pulled into the lot and saw a black pickup truck that I didn’t know—the only car, except for Dan’s hatchback and the two dumpers at the back. It was parked close to the entrance. That must be Mike. I looked at my phone—nothing.
Mike was the new guy; he’d started after the last one left to go work for his brother’s business. There was high turnover on the shift. That was my intention as well—this was meant to be a temporary job, an empty and quiet break until something else—but somehow I ended up seeing more new guys come and go than I thought I would. Time was getting away from me. I got out of the car and walked toward him; Mike was standing close to the building.
“Hey man,” he said to me. He was a very tall white guy, at least four or five inches over six feet—even his head was tall. He was muscular, though, big—not skinny-tall. Gym guy.
“Hey, you must be Mike,” I said.
