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    Searching for Sam
    Searching for Sam
    Searching for Sam
    Ebook144 pages1 hour

    Searching for Sam

    By Sophie Bienvenu

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    About this ebook

    Mathieu lives in the street by choice, eschewing drugs, cigarettes, and alcohol. His main companion is his dog Sam, a pitbull, who he says has helped keep him alive. When Sam disappears, Mathieu’s frantic search to find her brings him into confrontation with the secrets of his own past and the pain and grief that drove him onto the street. The novel is a monologue from Mathieu’s point of view, a sort of confessional in which Mathieu opens up to the reader. In flashbacks to his past, we discover the tragedies of his life and the people he has lost. In this book about survivors, Bienvenu takes a tender look at the underside of our cities, and the people that get left behind.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTalonbooks
    Release dateMar 11, 2021
    ISBN9781772012910
    Searching for Sam
    Author

    Sophie Bienvenu

    Sophie Bienvenu is a Québécois writer. After studying visual communication in Paris, she settled in Québec in 2001 and quickly established herself as a successful blogger. Et au pire, on se mariera(La Mèche) her first novel, was followed by Chercher Sam, translated as Searching for Sam by Rhonda Mullins, and Autour d’elle, also translated by Rhonda Mullins as Around Her. Ceci n’est pas de l’amour (This Is Not Love) was her first poetry collection, published in 2016 by Poètes de brousse. Bienvenu’s writing takes its readers on an emotional journey, an intense exploration of profoundly human characters, transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary.

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      Book preview

      Searching for Sam - Sophie Bienvenu

      BEFORE, ME AND SAM WOULD CRASH IN FRONT OF the fabric store that burnt down, on Masson. We could spread our shit out, and it wouldn’t blow away, so it was sort of like being at home. Sam slept in the corner, and people would stop to ask, Where’s your dog? because she was so hard to see from the street. It was a good spot, but we couldn’t stay there long because they started doing work on the store, to put in whatever to replace the fabric store. Maybe a restaurant. Probably a restaurant.

      Before that, you could usually find us in front of Poivre et Sel.

      It was a good spot. But that was the problem. It was too good. Once, there was even four of us begging: me and Sam, the old guy with the baseball cap, the guy with the guitar and the wolf dog, and a little Black kid selling chocolate bars for school. Obviously, the kid was blowing us all away, so we got fed up and decided to pool our takings and get a slice. The old guy tried to scam us, then the other guy got mad, and the manager ran us out and threatened to call the cops. It went downhill from there.

      The old guy and the other guy started beating on each other and calling each other goddamn thieves. The wolf dog tried to grab the old guy’s calves, but he was tied up so couldn’t reach, till the two of them ended up on the ground, and then he managed to bite the old guy’s arm. The old guy started yelling, Call off your dog, call off your dog! He tried to swat him, but the dog didn’t back off. The old guy pissed himself and rolled over onto his stomach to hide his face. The guy with the guitar shouted Off! and the dog let the old guy go. The younger guy untied his dog and took off yelling, turning back a couple of times to make sure his insults landed where they should. The old guy sat up and leaned against the wall. He rubbed his arm, snivelling like a kid who had just had the shit kicked out of him, when he was the one who had basically started it.

      The few people who were on the street at that time of day, in the middle of the afternoon on a weekday, crowded around to make sure they got a good view, in case one of the guys killed the other or something. It’s not every day you get to see a murder.

      A girl went up to the old guy and kneeled down beside him. Sir, are you okay? I’m going to take a look at your arm, is that okay?

      The other people thought it was gross, you could tell. Some of them thought she was brave; some told themselves that if she hadn’t gone up, they would of, but the truth is every one of them thought it was gross. Because when it comes to the homeless, you can give them money, you can smile at them, or even ask them how it’s going, but you can never, ever, touch them. Because they’re way too afraid our misery is catching.

      NOTHING WAS EVER CLEAN ENOUGH AT MY HOUSE. My mother cleaned everything, all the time. I wasn’t allowed to touch anything because I left fingerprints. I wasn’t allowed to walk anywhere because I left footprints.

      Would you leave him be?

      You can tell you’re not the one who does the cleaning.

      You don’t clean. You try to erase any trace of life.

      That’s when my dad would get up, put on his coat, and gesture with his head for me to come with him. I would run and get my coat.

      No, no, no, you stay here with your mother! my mother would say. And to my dad: You won’t take my son away from me, you can be sure of that.

      After a while, I quit hoping she would let me go with him. After a while, maybe because he was chicken, maybe because I was, I wound up hating him.

      IT’S NOT EVEN NOVEMBER, BUT IT’S STARTING TO get real cold, especially at night. Sam keeps sniffing the air in the park in a weird way, not like when she smells a squirrel or garbage juice. As if something is itching her inside her nose, as if she knows something’s coming. She looks at me to see whether I have a plan, and, well … I don’t. So I grab her around the neck and give her a hug. It doesn’t reassure her, but it warms me up. A little.

      I cried the first night we spent outside. Not so much because I was sad. Because I was empty. It was like, What do we do now?

      It was December, but there wasn’t any snow yet. I heard maybe we could crash at the Maison du Père, so I went to see, but they didn’t take dogs. So I ended up under a porch downtown, in an alley that smelled like garbage, puke, and piss. I lay down between an old bike rack and the wall, under the fire escape. I stared at the garage door in front of me. Night turned from yellow to brown. When everyone was sleeping, that’s when the worst came out. I tried to breathe right, like a woman having a baby, or more like a guy running. Breathe in, breathe out … so I wouldn’t suffocate. But it stank so bad. I started bawling.

      Sam was licking my tears and poking me with her cwet nose.

      Cold and wet.

      SHE ARRIVED WITH HER HEELS SMACKING THE floor. It made the whole apartment block shake, even though she was light. The dog was following her so closely that if you looked real fast, it was like a centaur or a weird animal with a dog’s ass and a human front.

      Sam keeps poking me with her cwet nose so I’ll pay attention to her!

      What’s ‘cwet’?

      What do you mean?! (She was looking at me as if I was a friggin’ idiot.) Cold and wet: cwet!

      Yeah, right. I’m an idiot.

      She walked over to me to stroke my arm, as if to say, no, you’re not (but kind of, a little), and she put her head on my shoulder and sighed.

      What are you doing?

      OUR FIRST NIGHT OUTSIDE, IT WAS SO DESERTED downtown it was like my bawling was echoing around the city. It was bouncing off buildings, from locked doors to closed windows … maybe all the way to her.

      Sam gave me her paw and looked at me. In the dark, I could only see her orange eyes reflecting the light from the streetlight.

      I put my head in her neck, and I held her like when I was a kid and I would go to sleep crying but not knowing why, squeezing my teddy bear. You would think now that I’m an adult I would know why I’m crying, but, nope. There are too many things, way too many things. So many that I had to pick one.

      I don’t have a home anymore.

      I was sobbing, for the first time in a long time. I was seriously letting ’er rip. No one was around to tell me to pull myself together and that other people have it way worse. No one was there to tell me they were there, when I felt so alone that I was dry and empty inside. I kept thinking Why me? over and over so many times that I thought I would end up saying it out loud.

      You’re messing up your life. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

      Fuck you, Mom. You’re the one who messed me up.

      I sniffed in big. Too big. I almost puked.

      Sam lay down beside me. The lights went out. This is our life, now. Quit crying and go to sleep. I’m here. It’ll be okay.

      NORMALLY, MY MOTHER WAS HOME WHEN I WAS there. Not because she had something to do. Just to be there. I don’t know what happened to her, to me, or us. One day, I was watching TV with my head in her lap, and the next day she became like the noise the fridge makes: you don’t realize how much it’s annoying you till it stops. And when the hum starts up again, it drives you crazy. Maybe it was because of all the babies she lost. That’s what my dad said it was. I had to be nice to her, and patient, because she had a lot of pain. But my pain, nobody gave a shit about my pain. And that caused me pain, and it was like the thing with the chicken and the egg.

      I DON’T HAVE TIME TO THINK ANYMORE. IT’S A damn good thing.

      We don’t sleep on the street every night. There are squats, there are apartments that belong to someone who knows someone. There’s a laundromat at the corner of rue Dandurand and Troisième Avenue, a twenty-four-hour place, there’s the bracing to the left of Église Saint-Esprit … but, yeah, I guess you

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