It’s raining cats and dogs.
Thomas Chandler Haliburton

“How many fingers am I holding up?” asked my uncle, but all I could see were the rafters. Someone had climbed up and scrawled Ibid. It was amateur boxing night at the curling rink in Melanson, and I was flat on my back three feet above the hog line. My uncle had entered me as a sixteen-year-old flyweight, having read in the Herald that a Complete Young Person’s Dictionary of Mammals was up for grabs. I was excused from cub-scouts on the pretense of catching Trevor Esposito in his last game in goal for the Badgers. The gash above my eye was thus blamed on a slapshot that Trev had just barely parried over the boards, a grand tale of pure athleticism that we quietly rehearsed in the emergency room; we had stopped at Canadian Tire to pick up a puck. We drove in silence most of the way home, until great placental raindrops began slapping the windshield right around Berwick. My uncle switched on the windshield wipers and said “The first thing you need to know about aardvarks is that they are the most secretive of all mammals.”

Graeme Bezanson is from Nova Scotia, the historic home of T.C. Haliburton and games played on ice. He is the editor of coldfrontmag.com and works with children with Autism Spectrum Disorders. He lives in Brooklyn.