I’m six years old; my brother Etienne is eight. We’re alone at home with Maman in our house on the army base in Valcartier, north of Quebec City. My father, a logistics officer with the United Nations, is on the other side of the world, in the Middle East, keeping peace. I have a framed picture of him on the Golan Heights between Israel and Syria, where he keeps watch, chronicles the enemies’ movements with binoculars, tracks their advance in a ledger. I blow him a kiss into the night sky and then, once tucked into bed, am swallowed whole by fear, consumed like a small forest animal in the jaw of a nocturnal bird …
Bio:
Tanya Bellehumeur-Allatt is the author of the critically acclaimed Peacekeeper’s Daughter: A Middle East Memoir (Thistledown, 2021) and the poetry collection Chaos Theories of Goodness (Shoreline, 2022). Her fiction, essays, and poems have been published in Best Canadian Essays (2015 and 2019), the New Quarterly, Grain, EVENT, Prairie Fire, the Malahat Review, subTerrain, carte blanche, Antigonish Review, Room, Queen’s Quarterly, BigCityLit, Syncopation Literary Journal, and the Toronto Star.