The Short of It: Sara Power & Art of Camouflage

An excerpt from “G-LOC” in Art of Camouflage

Once upon a time there were two military kids, Jules and Siobhan.

I’m Jules.

Siobhan had a bunk bed with a built-in shelf where she kept the rocks and glass we collected—mostly Labradorite and shards of a school bus window that we came across one time. Her dad was deployed to Kosovo, or maybe Bosnia, and I was sleeping over at her house when her mom woke us up and took us outside in our pyjamas. We were wrapped in blankets so that the only thing touching the cold was our eyes. That night, the sky swirled green and blue; lights hovering and morphing. Those lights and their silence are bigger than anything you can say.

In the nineties, military kids under eighteen were issued special compasses for coping with remote postings. The compasses could be attached around our wrist, or ankle, or any body part so long as it registered a pulse. They gave us special skills, those compasses. Powers, really. During the first week of arriving at CFB Goose Bay, Mom, Dad, and I waited in line at the Military Family Resource Centre with other newly posted families to receive our compasses. The rules were that we could not swap our compasses with other military kids, and it was absolutely forbidden to allow the civilian kids to meddle with them. The compasses were to be returned at the end of the posting.

            Siobhan’s skill was Magnetism. Mine was Chameleon. Other military kids got Ultra Vision, Flexibility, Telekinesis. The idea was that these compasses would help us assimilate with the local civilian kids. The reality was that the civilian kids were curious about us for about a week, and that was it. A lot of those kids had been friends forever, and they knew we’d be moving away in two or three years.

            With her new Magnetism skill, Siobhan could slide a tin mug across the table in the cafeteria, open and close blinds in the classrooms. Outside, she’d stick her hands in the dirt, and as the sand fell away, iron ore filings covered her fingers, which were always puffy and scabby because she chewed her nails. “I give you ferrous sand,” she said. “Iron ore from the very earth we walk upon.” She said it like a magician.

            My Chameleon skill made me blend with my surroundings. The shades of my clothing, my hair, my skin, shifted so slowly that people didn’t usually see it happening. I could see it, the gradual darkening or lightening. I quickly noticed that one of two things happened when I switched on my compass and blended. Either the other kids seemed to forget that I was there, or they became familiar with me, like they’d known me forever. Vicki Coady was one of the popular girls in my class. She didn’t even look at me until one day I turned on my Chameleon, and she told me all about an old bus her dad had bought for parts. It was parked in her backyard. Most of the seats were removed and they fit a picnic table inside where they played Crazy Eights. She had parties in the bus. It was like a bus cabin.

            Siobhan was my first best friend. To this day actually, Siobhan is the best friend I ever had. Her father, Mr. D, was a NATO pilot from Germany, and Siobhan was an only child like me. My dad was an air traffic controller from Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, and from age ten to twelve (twelve and a half, actually), I lived in 3A, and Siobhan lived in 3B of a PMQ duplex on Birchall Street in Goose Bay. It took exactly seven minutes and twenty-eight seconds for us to ride our bikes to the chain-link, barbed-wire fence that enclosed the runway. Every so often, I’m twelve again, and Siobhan and I are gripping the runway fence waiting for takeoff. Her dad waves from the cockpit as his Phantom II is taxied to the platform. Seven or eight jets take off in a row, tearing across the runway, and it’s one explosion after the other. We stand shoulder to shoulder, fingers poked inside the diamonds as the thunder sweeps over the whole place and fills our stomachs. Airburst, boom in our chests, sand grit between our teeth, and the barbed wire rattles above our heads. Even the ground vibrates, and fumes from the planes turn air to water. Our eyes close. We are in a rocket’s blast vibration. After the final jet, it all fades to nothing. Contrails streak grey-white before they feather, and it’s so quiet we hear flags clanking on their poles. Siobhan says something like, “The force of those aircraft is nothing short of phenomenal.” She took such pride in her English vocabulary, used words like extraordinary and sacrosanct. Sometimes, she started a sentence with, ‘I suspect.’

            My mother was a high-school music teacher, but there were no jobs at local schools, and the extreme cold gave her back pain. She panicked when jets flew at sonic speed, those explosions when they broke the sound barrier. Sometimes she was so scared she vomited. There is a dank, stale-bread smell that always reminds me of her housecoat and our house on Birchall Street. Mom thought a jet would crash on our house. Once, we were watching TV and she started to cry. My skin and my clothes turned greenish grey so quickly that I felt nauseous. All of a sudden, we were sitting on the floor of a green-lit room that was flooded. Our legs were underwater, and a receiver of a black telephone with a winding cord floated next to me. Mom stared straight ahead, and I felt so heavy that I couldn’t move. My sweater tightened around my chest. When Mom looked at me, her eyes were like pebbles. That was the first time I realized that my Chameleon skill could latch onto moods and create wild imaginings. To anyone who noticed, I just blended with my surroundings, but I had these visions. I never used my Chameleon around Mom after that day watching TV.

            Siobhan had a trampoline in her backyard, which was connected to my backyard. It had been left by the last military family, because its measurements exceeded the maximum allowable by the moving trucks, according to Siobhan. Once, during a winter storm, the trampoline blew hellbent across the base, ended up outside the terminal. Ms. D followed it with her camera as it rolled over snowbanks, powdered snow in its wake. It wagon-wheeled past the AVRO Vulcan aircraft that was mounted on a concrete plinth. Click. Her picture made it onto the front page of The Labradorian,and she framed it and added it to the collage of Labrador photographs she had on display above the stairs in their house.

            Siobhan and I lay on her trampoline one time in late summer or fall, staring at the cloudless sky. I switched on my Chameleon, and it was like we were floating in clouds.

            “Your skin has a blue tint. I can see it.” Siobhan propped on her elbow to examine me. She bit into the skin of her ring finger.

            “It’s like we’re floating.”

            Siobhan rooted in her pocket for her model F-18 jet.

            “Why blue? Why not the colour of the trampoline?”

            “I don’t know. Sky’s so big I guess.”

            She tried to get me to control my Chameleon, but I couldn’t, nor could I control where my imagination went. All I could do was switch on my compass and wait to see what happened. The longer I left it on, the more I could sense people’s moods, and the more the visions evolved. If I left it on for too long, I became tired, like my brain was wool. I also became tired of being invisible, because that’s what it felt like, blending. Mostly, I turned on my Chameleon when it was just Siobhan and me, or when I was at her house, which was most days. She always wanted details.

A former artillery officer in the Canadian Armed Forces, Sara has a Bachelor of Science in Chemistry from the Royal Military College of Canada, and a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia. Sara’s writing has appeared in literary journals across Canada, the US, and the UK, including the anthology Best Canadian Stories 2024, edited by Lisa Moore. Her fiction has been awarded the Malahat Review Open Season Award, the Riddle Fence Fiction Prize, and been a finalist for the Toronto Star Short Story Contest, the New Quarterly Peter Hinchcliff Award, the Bath Short Story Award, and the RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Award. Originally from Labrador, Sara now lives in Ottawa with her husband, three children, and hound dog. Art of Camouflage is her first book.

Thanks to Sara for answering our questions, and to Freehand Books for the excerpt from Art of Camouflage, available here on All Lit Up or from your local indie bookseller.

Stay tuned for more Short of It next Wednesday when we share a Q&A with Michael Maitland.