Mel Murphy moved to Seattle in 2004. Growing up, she split her time between dirt-poor rural Nevada and posh Monterey, California. Former day jobs include: janitor/maid, USFS wildland firefighter, seasonal postal carrier, newspaper reporter and waitress. She dropped out of a fourth-rate university in 1995 to go to work. In 2009, she self-published a collection of her stories, “Trailer Trash Confessional”. One of her stories was short-listed for the Bridport Prize UK in early 2011 and another was published by Black Matrix Publishing in June 2010. She likes handsome men and margaritas – together, not separately.   http://heartseamonkeys.blogspot.com/

The War with Canada (January 20, 2012. Issue 34.)

The first time I tried to kill him was when I was nine and he was five. I was supposed to be nice to him, she said. He was family, a relative from Up North. Where was that? Oregon? But he was her relative, not mine, so he was fair game. My stepmother was originally from England but had relatives in all corners of the Commonwealth, including some place with the confusing name British Columbia. It was a name that tried to bind two completely different states of being like Welsh Enchilada or Scottish Cancun.

I found his shock of black hair and lightning-blue eyes annoying and the careful way he said things, with that clip, especially irritating. He would purse his tiny boy's mouth and out the words would come just like normal but it was there, submerged in the vowels and consonants. It was like running your thumb over the notches of a brass key in a darkened hallway or tense, uncalled for politeness.

He had been in California only three days with his parents and all of them looked like lobsters. Seeing him and his gangly father decked out in just-purchased cowboy boots and a tight polo shirt, I snickered at their raw red arms and cheeks. His mother was a small, ghost-pale thing in giant khaki shorts who said 'Oh, geez' too much.

Go play now, she said, pushing me toward this small, sallow creature with the too-big eyes in the starched dress shirt. Show him your room, she ordered. I led him to my room where he hung near the doorway. He approached my model horse collection and picked up a black Arabian pony, its molded plastic legs caught in mid-stride. I scowled at him. He put it back leaving an obvious fingerprint that I would have to remove during the next polishing and re-ordering of the neat plastic stable.

I flopped down on my bed, the one with the ridiculous pink and green plaid duvet she had selected, and eyed him, fantasizing about his demise.

"Ooh, you got a snake!" he said turning toward the aquarium, in which lived a California king snake named Charlie with striking black and white stripes. My older brother caught it a few weeks ago. We bought mice at the pet store but Charlie ignored them, keeping his head buried under one coil, waiting to die so he could be free of this hellish glass prison.

I lay on the bed with one leg over the side, kicking at the frame.

"Is it poisonous?" he asked, afraid to venture over for a closer look.

"Deadly," I answered.

He looked at me, blinked those neon blue eyes, uncertain whether I was joking. Obviously he didn't have any older brothers or at least limited experience in being lied to.

"I wanna go outside," he whined.

Sighing dramatically, I rose from my bed and showed him out the front door. Outside, massive California oaks creaked and shifted in the hot breeze, while dust whorls lifted and died on the gravel driveway. Brushfire weather.

This gorgeous day was wasted because of these foreigners. Today, I was supposed to go to the boardwalk with my stepmother and maybe the beach. There would have been seashell collecting, brie cheese, Hershey's bars and Top Forty music on the car stereo. But that plan had been nixed when she'd gotten the call the night before from his mother who was my stepmother's niece, which made him about as related to me as our Mexican landscaper.

He found my old tricycle parked near my Dad's Mercedes in the open garage but he wasn't interested in that. I had a new bike, a shiny two-wheeler and the training wheels were coming off in a week. He said he wanted to ride that. I moved the bike to the top of our driveway where the slope started and it was a non-stop dash to the street below and the ditch with jagged rocks.

"Get on, I said, "I'll push you."

He wasn't falling for it.

"Let me," he said with surprising authority. He took the handlebars and steered the bike back over by the garage. Awkwardly, he sat on the banana seat and poked at the pedals with the tips of his Keds. This made the bike inch forward about a foot and back about six inches. Working in this idiotic fashion, he got the bike over where one of my stepmother's complicated flowerbeds started. The flowerbeds were not to be walked in, touched, bumped, dug in, probed or in any way upset or there would be no more late-night Creature Feature ever again. The Canadian was jeopardizing all my TV viewing for the summer.

"Don't," I started to say, my hands already clenching into fists.

He looked up at me and snorted.

"Red, white and blue," he said giggling, pointing at the petunias which were red, white and blue in honor of the Fourth of July.

He jammed his toes down on the pedals and rode the front tire over first one and then another doomed plant.

Furious, I grabbed the back of the bike and yanked him back. Laughing, he turned and looked at me, getting ready to press the bike forward again. I swung at him with my left fist. His head snapped around and he went face down into the black soil of the flowerbed. He rose up a shrill mess. For a second I thought I'd done some real damage. Then, between tears and the blood oozing from his twisted lips, he yelled, "MUM!" and I knew he'd live.

I didn't get a second chance to kill him for seven years. The second time was a more appropriate setting: the crystalline waters of Monterey Bay and its black cliffs and tide pools with abrupt rip currents that carried Japanese tourists out to sea.

This was one of the last times my stepmother took me to the beach. After that, our relationship declined into hatred.

That day, she wore white Gucci hot pants, a lemon-yellow halter top and a big sun hat. My stepmother was high on Valium and table wine. She lay on a big blanket working on her nut-dark tan and read a Danielle Steele novel while I tempted fate by climbing the rocks that ringed that section of Seal Beach.

I worked my toes over the sharp rocks as I moved crab-like with my hands out in front of me. I wore one of my older brother's Supertramp t-shirts, which hung down mid-thigh and a pair of cut-off jeans. My stepmother's allowance for designer clothing did not extend to me since I was a tomboy and would ruin any decent togs inside of ten minutes. Under the t-shirt I wore nothing as my stepmother had once again talked me into leaving my brace-like bra at home. In the last two years I had become aware of and appalled by the mesmerizing effect my tits seemed to have on almost everyone. It was like having a clubfoot that people wanted to look over and talk about during cocktail parties.

A filthy station wagon pulled into the parking lot above the beach. Out poured the Canadians. First the father, more gaunt than I remembered, but not quite as tall, and the frail mother. This time, they wore white zinc sun block. They looked like burn victims. And there was an addition; a little girl, six years old. I was pleased. She would keep my stepmother distracted while I finished the boy off.

"There you are!" my stepmother yelled, waving her tawny arms. Her drawl was halfway between Anthony Hopkins and Swansea. 'Are' sounded like 'Aah'.

The family piled out of the back seat in a flurry of blankets, picnic baskets, inner tubes – all the things you don't need at the beach. They lugged umbrellas down to the sand.

My stepmother hugged her ghostly niece and did that fake cheek-kiss thing. She did this was to make sure everyone knew she was wearing perfume that cost $250 at the counter in Macy's.

The little girl was a smaller version of her mother. Mousy hair and skin so white she could have been in a zombie movie. They huddled under one of the umbrellas while the girl showed my stepmother her lame Barbie collection.

Who the hell was that?

From behind the station wagon came a square-shouldered boy in navy blue surf trunks with an inner tube under one arm. He flip-flopped down to the beach in flip flops, kicked them off and stood at the base of the ledge I was on. My gullible little victim had been replaced by a boxer.

"Hey ya," he said.

I climbed down for a better look.

He still had slight baby fat under his chin and around his middle but soon he would be taller and leaner than me. He would surpass me in social grace without even trying. I wore glasses and so did he. But his didn't seem to interfere with the profile of his face the way mine made me look bug-eyed and more myopic than I was. His arms and legs were proportionate to his body while mine seemed way too long for such a short torso and big tits.

I reached the bottom of the rocks and stood on the sand with my hands on my hips. He was still about three inches shorter than me. He held out his hand to me and I took it, thrown by this strange gesture I'd only seen adults perform.

He noticed I wasn't wearing a bra.

"Find any starfish … err anything?" he asked my tits.

Desperate for a quick end to this misery, I said, "I'm going in" and turned and waded up to my waist in the swirling, chilly water.

"They said there's rip tides."

"Are you afraid?" I taunted him and — not as gracefully as I'd hoped for — dove in and got a nose full of salt water. I came up sputtering but kept my back to him so he couldn't see. I pulled my clunky glasses off and hooked them in the waist of my cut offs.

He took his metallic-framed glasses off and laid them in the sand. Less gracefully than me, he plunged into the water and paddled out, pushing the black inner tube in front of him.

The surf was light in our little cove and we swam out until we were hidden by the rising rocks on the east side.

"Hey!" he shouted, discovering our voices echoed between the rocks.

Laughing, we splashed and sputtered. The water was swimming-pool deep but when a slow-moving swell pushed in, it brought a school of good-sized fish and we hung above them in the wave, marveling at the shimmering life drifting below our feet. Everything was dappled green, gray and brown and stood out sharply against the bone-white sand.

"That's a shark!" he croaked, pointing to one fish in particular. It was a soft gray and barely three feet long. Its form seemed less clearly drawn than the other fish as if it was half there and half in some other dimension at the same time.

He found some stones in the cliff face and started dropping them over the shark like depth charges, trying to time the drop with the tide, which was increasing in strength.

"Don't," I said, worriedly.

"Why? It's only a shark. Someone should kill it."

"You can't," I said lamely, "This is California. There are laws. See that sign?"

I pointed to one of the beach patrol signs poking up in the sand at the top of the beach. Technically I wasn't allowed to gather hermit crabs. It was illegal. Even seashell collecting could get you fined.

"I can't see good enough to aim without my glasses," he mumbled.

I found this endearing.

"Have you ever kissed a girl before?" I asked, paddling water beside him.

He looked up, surprised, and I saw some of that guileless little boy in his face.

"Yeah, a couple of times," he answered and I knew he hadn't.

I grabbed the back of his neck and smashed my mouth down on his, like I was giving him CPR. Our teeth knocked together like ice in a highball glass. He struggled free and in doing so, one of his hands pressed against my left tit for a second. He reeled back like the day I'd hit him and stared, this time at my face.

"I'm gonna catch that shark," he said firmly, "you'll see!" and dove, swimming around me and into the trench of water between the cliff and the fierce black rocks.

A few moments later he came up on the far side of the cove, coughing and sputtering. He turned and looked at me, and the infamous water shifted. An invisible hand swept into the cove, lifting both of us so high up we could see the edge of the parking lot. I grabbed the inner tube and paddled just to stay in place.

I heard him cough and the invisible hand of water tapped him against the rocks.

Cussing, I dragged the inner tube behind me and swam out hard the mere twenty feet to where he was and held the inner tube out to him.

"Here, take it," I said. Scared, he looped one arm in the tube and together we dog paddled back to the beach.

I didn't see him again for another three years.

The third time, he was taller, lanky now like his father but also pretty like his mother. With her heart-shaped face, the initial burst of razor stubble made him look wolfish and older than he was. His chest was flat and broad and he'd been experimenting with weight lifting so his arms were disproportionately muscular compared to his skinny legs.

He was wearing a Rush t-shirt over Ocean Pacific corduroy shorts and big white sneakers with no socks. The glasses were gone, replaced by contact lenses. His eyes really were violet blue. He stood beside his father in my father's living room, rocking on his heels. It was my turn to be bashful and afraid.

"Hey cuzz," he said, nodding to me, his voice lower making his clip even more submerged. "Show me your room," he teased.

We went to my room, only it wasn't my room anymore. It hadn't been my room since I was nine. Now it was the guest room and I was the guest. I was between semesters at a dubious university in another state. He was finishing high school up in Vancouver. He would be sixteen in December. I was lunging toward 21 and eager for the day I no longer had to sneak into bars.

"No more snake," he said nodding towards the shelf where Charlie had been incarcerated years ago.

The room was pristine. My stepmother had the carpet replaced and everything had been re-decorated in a terrifying duck hunter motif. My overnight bag was sprawled open on the bed. Some cassette tapes drifted above my T-shirts and dirty socks.

He thumbed through the tapes inquisitively. "Ooh, you like New Wave," he teased.

I nodded, nervous.

We drifted outside even though the California air was chilly and the fog was pushing in from the coast.

He leaned back against his parent's car. They had a new one now, a BMW with a ski rack. Reaching into the pocket of his windbreaker, he tugged out a pack of cigarettes and stuck one in the edge of his mouth James Dean style.

"Want one?" he said with practiced casualness.

I shook my head 'no'. Now I was the one on the bike at the top of the slope and he was getting ready to push.

"Hey, you're wearing a bra," he said looking right at my chest and smiling that creepy, powerful smile. His teeth were too white and his nose was too straight.

They were all so much whiter than we who had the distant taint of New York slums no matter how brief or how long ago. America was a giant, roiling act of desperation. Canada was a successful day hike led by thoughtful Victorians in tweed coats and long silk skirts. People who collected butterflies had immigrated to Canada. People who collected venereal disease and debt had moved to America.

I looked at him, shocked. Who the hell was this raffish monster and what had he done with my game little victim?

Desperate, I eyed the back of the BMW and spotted a white stick with tape protruding from some luggage on the back seat.

"What's that?"

"My hockey stick," he said, with a shrug. "They have a rink up in San Jose and Dad's taking me up there in a couple of days."

I was stupefied. He'd come armed this time.

There was a rumble and my older brother wheeled into the driveway on his motorcycle and shut it off. The scents of grease, leather and Old Spice filled the air.

"Where's Dad?" he asked, nodding to our visitor.

"In the house," I said and he dismounted from his bike, which was the definition of masculine freedom.

Our cousin dropped his cigarette and wandered over to my brother, shook his hand. They had a brief, muttered exchange about engine size, cubic centimeters. I watched in horror as my brother handed him the keys and he hopped on the Kawasaki and started it up. He rode it in small circles around the driveway and, when my brother walked into the house, he gunned the engine and disappeared up the road.

I stood there feeling like I'd been mugged. My brother had never given me lessons. I'd been forbidden even to touch any of his bikes, let alone ride one, and here he tossed the keys to a virtual stranger.

I went into the house, shut the door to my room and picked up my portable cassette player. I put in A Flock of Seagulls album and listened to I Ran (So Far Away).

That night my stepmother's relatives from Canada went to a motel a couple miles from our house and the kid took off in their BMW during the night, managed to pick up a pretty surfer girl and was in the process of screwing her when some cops found them at a rest stop off the interstate. I never heard through the family grapevine whether he was punished or not. This was even more appalling than the act it self. An entirely different set of rules applied to him.

A day later, I said 'goodbye' to my Dad and stepmother and drove back to my university and far less affluent surroundings.

I didn't see the Canadian again for twelve years. The last time was in Seattle. It was raining. It was spring and there was no California sunshine. There was no sunshine for miles in any direction. The eternal 700-foot ceiling hung over everything like a vast terrarium hood. I was north of downtown coming out of an up-scale grocery store in one of those newly gentrified areas with the ridiculous metal salmon sculptures everywhere.

It was sunset and he had just climbed out of a minivan with his daughter. He was scolding her and tugging her along by the hand. She had long blonde hair and his neon-blue eyes. He was dead tall. He had the kind of easy handsomeness they write articles about in women's magazines. There was just the slightest hint of a beer gut but he had at least a decade to go before that would be a problem. The license plate on his minivan was a local one.

I was tired, lugging two full sacks of groceries, one of which included a pint of ice cream. I was on my period, bloated and overflowing with that nameless anger that single women in their thirties get while lugging grocery sacks home on rainy evenings to their one-room apartments where maybe there is a cat or a dog waiting, if they are lucky.

"Jesus Christ, hello!" he said right there in front of me.

His little girl looked up at me, curious enough to pause in her whining. She was carrying a Barbie doll and wore pink plastic shoes, which matched her hair barrettes.

"Hi ya," I stammered, jolted out of my self-loathing to look up into a face at once familiar and strange. The same eyes, the same hair but with a short goatee now and a pierced eyebrow.

He held his free hand out and I had to work mine around past one bag to shake it. He did not let go of my hand.

"Ohmigod, this is so freaky. I was just tellin' tha wife about you and your folks the other night," he said.

"They're dead."

I just dumped that out there, a final sandbag in an emergency flood wall that is vanishing under dark water.

"Oh geez, sorry. How's your other mum?"

"She's dead too," I said.

I should have been smiling. A smile is a weapon. He taught me that. I was alone and unarmed in that dark parking lot.

"Oh. Well, hey, this is my youngest, Bree. Say 'hello' Bree."

Bree said 'hello' and I saw quite a bit of that kid on the bike in her face, which was heart shaped and guileless. There would be wild fistfights over her in the playground.

"How you been?" he said and right away, "How's your brother?"

I shrugged.

"He's rich and I'm poor."

"Ya probably don't get down there much anymore, eh?"

"No, there's no reason now."

"So you're teachin' … college?"

"Not exactly," I said, "I just teach ESL part-time at the community college," and because I had to do something, anything to defend myself, "And you?"

"Ooh, that's good," he kept looking at my face. I hadn't a clue what he was looking for. And realizing I'd just lobbed the ball back into his court: "Oh yeah, I'm a building contractor. My father-in-law, he's loaded, and now I'm his partner. We do decks and extensions mostly; just finished a custom recording studio. It's nice."

"Well, hey, it was good to see you," he said and let go of my hand.

"You too," I said and too shrilly, "Take care."

He walked toward the light of the store and I moved toward the darkness of the street and the anonymity of the bus stop.

"Oh hey!" he shouted.

I froze and turned, the saddest being on earth under the weight of those twelve years.

"Ya know what? When my wife and I were on our honeymoon, in Mexico, I went scuba diving and got a shark. Shot it with a spear gun. It was like over a meter long!" He gestured with his hands, grinning that lethal smile.

Then, he waved and we both said 'bye' again.