Quiet Worm

Murdered woman Sarah deVries had written about it in her journal – how folks were washing her pain down their throats with a cup of coffee and a piece of toast. Sarah’s words, published in a newspaper spread about the missing women, read like a posthumous prediction.

The mess consumed me. I became a crazy writer lady, composing short narratives about the missing women, leaving them at bus stops or taped to public bathroom walls. Sometimes I’d hand my stories to people on the streets. I wanted to disturb people, because no one seemed disturbed. I kept throwing my furniture at people, only to see it flutter to the ground or thrown in the trash.

As the saying goes, “If it bleeds, it leads.” The papers continued their bloodletting, running special sections for the missing women: A3 to A7, or sometimes all the way through section C. At least something outside the rumble and roar of the Downtown Eastside was making some noise.

For the next six years, the headlines and mug shots piled up and up, until they reached a critical mass and Robert “Willie” Pickton was going to stand trial for a half dozen crimes against humanity’s femininity.

Over those years I gave up on being the crazy writer lady. I became a journalist and my stories went legit.

On the first day of trial, I sat in the second row of the overflow courtroom with my blue pen and reporter’s notebook in hand as the Crown opened its case with bisected heads in buckets strung together against the backdrop of a dilapidated farm and a greasy pig farmer. Suddenly the bone fragments, DNA and sifted dirt spun a thicker picture, heavy with horror.

That night I cried in my bath, but I still had my head.