Pontypool Changes Everything

As his sister becomes less mobile Jimmy begins to forage out in the newly fallen snow for easily visible and trackable wildlife. An abundance of rabbits crisscross their property, and Jimmy spends hours falling in the snow behind them, throwing rocks at them, and spraining his ankles in their doorways. He returns late in the morning to Julie, empty handed and surly. As the weeks progress and they begin to hate the sight of each other, Jimmy pretends he’s going hunting and sits out of view at the picnic table, shivering in the cold just to keep away from his sister’s icy glare. Julie sits at the stove, wearing a zombie’s trenchcoat, craving another human being, anyone who speaks, who isn’t mute and stupid.

They survive the winter this way, occasionally patching together an understanding that their mutual hostility is born of their hard life together. On some winter nights, in the deep silence of the deep snow that surrounds them, they hold each other and accept each other with hands that stroke kindly, remembering. The spring will bring them back. The spring will bring new life.

And it does. With the first thaw Jimmy manages to kill his first rabbit. He stands in the doorway swinging it proudly by the ears as Julie applauds with her tired arms. He reaches for a knife above the bench to skin their dinner. Julie feels a strange clench yank at her body from below.

Every version of the birth of a child is always lacking something. Neither a satisfactory miracle nor a base torment, childbirth is only one of the thousands of aggressive events that never actually occur in people’s lives. It is enough of something, however, to put everyone on alert. And Julie and Jimmy are no exception.

Julie is sitting on the zombie trenchcoat that stretches open across the floor. As the coat soaks up the fluid that has crashed out from between her legs, Jimmy frantically lights candles along the dirty edge of the freezer. He crouches down at a distance in front of her and, having no instruction as to any role he might play in the birth, he assumes a position natural to the expectation that an object under pressure will need to be caught, maybe in mid-flight. Julie is receiving more primal instruction, and she follows each muscular cue with a howling face.

The top of the baby’s head appears and Jimmy falls backward off his haunches. The baby flies to the floor, as if shot from a gun. She lies still in a broken case of transparent veins. Jimmy sits up, looks over his sister’s body, looking for her face, but her head is thrown back and turned toward the wall.

Suddenly the baby springs to its feet and runs toward Jimmy. She turns on her umbilical cord and slams her back into his chest. Julie looks up in horror to see her baby daughter facing her. The baby snatches the cable in her tiny hand and twists it into her mouth. With tough gums on soft flesh, she clamps down, crunching the cells. Jimmy jerks back from his daughter. She runs toward the door and with a tug on the cord she snaps her mother’s hips off the ground, breaking the bond. In the doorway she makes a threatening star shape with her arms and legs, and darts her eyes back and forth from parent to parent. She screams — “Fuck you!” — emptying the contents of her lungs down her front before disappearing.

Julie and Jimmy remain on the floor, their eyes uncomprehending and their mouths flung open. Julie attempts to rise first, but she can only slide onto her knees before falling over. She waves frantically at Jimmy, who stands, trying to overcome his fear of his daughter. He is terrified of her. He is scared for his life. Julie falls toward him and swipes at his hip, sending him running to the door.

Outside the shack a pile of wood is stacked waist high on one side of the door; on the other there is a cage of ribs. Jimmy turns the corner. Sitting at the picnic table are the three complete skeletons that he assembled for company. Now that spring has thawed away their snow-sculpted features Jimmy no longer recognizes them and jumps back. He runs in the other direction, looking for a daughter who has run away from home. He takes off in a circle around the shack, frightening a large raven that claps at him before swooping over to the picnic table, where it attempts to land on a fragile black collar bone. The raven crashes through wet ribs, clattering the brittle cage off the table and into the melting snow, releasing a sweet gas through the air. Jimmy clutches the front of his mouth and gags. His sister appears, leaning on a stick and trailing a long red rope on the ground behind her.

About one hundred metres south of where they stand staring at each other are two men in hunting caps. They’re crouched down in a path that leads up to a picnic area from deep in the woods.

“What the hell was that? What the Jesus was that?”

The larger hunter looks out from under a red flannel visor. He swallows and winces for his partner to be quiet. He whispers.