Obsessia

There have been Lindqvists at the gate of the Tamarack cemetery for as long as there has been a cemetery to keep, and Agnes was the last of them, and she knew it the way you know the weight of a coat you have worn every winter of your life.The sexton's house stood just inside the lych-gate, a narrow clapboard thing of two storeys with a steep roof that shed the snow onto the path in long slumping falls through the night. Her great-grandfather Anders had built it in the autumn of 1898, out of the same green spruce he used for the town's first coffins, and it had never stopped settling. In the cold it spoke. The nails in the clapboards let go of the frost one by one with small sharp r…

The draw for the Kessick & District Curling Club's New Year's Day Fun Spiel was random, the way everything Doris Lamontagne did was random. That is to say, by the time Ellie Koski dropped her name into the toque, she had already been on Danny Gauthier's team for about a week.She knew it the moment she walked in. It was in the way the lounge went quiet for a second and a half and then got very loud, the way a room does when forty people decide at once to be interested in the coffee urn. It was in the way Doris, eighty-four years old and four foot eleven in her purple parka, held the toque out to her with both hands like a collection plate and did not quite meet her eyes.&quo…