The stories in Dominoes at the Crossroads by Kaie Kellough (Esplanade) read like a memoir—a memoir that includes travels of imagination that whip each narrator into distant places and other times. In one story the narrator falls asleep on a Greyhound bus somewhere in Ontario and suddenly he is a fugitive slave hiding in a tree at night and thinking about the past, “back to which the dogs and men wished to drag me, whereas I wanted to flee into the future.” In another story, from a hotel room in Kingston, Ontario, the narrator ponders the life of Stompin’ Tom Connors and then remembers a painting in the National Gallery of Jamaica of an African man who is suspended one foot above the ground by an iron hook through his flank and ribs. As the narrator contemplates the man’s suffering, he sees ships come and go, plantations thrive and fall derelict, and planes fill with emigrants who return bringing gifts, while still the man hangs there. I had skipped over the opening story because it looked like an introductory essay, but once the stories ran out I turned back to it because I was thirsty for more. The essay consists of opening remarks for a conference celebrating the 475th anniversary of the city of Milieu, “once known as Montreal, and once—and still—as Tiohtià:ke.” The speaker, a descendent of Kaie Kellough, a twenty-first century author who died fifty years ago, tells us that Kellough “is not interested in futurism” but rather he examines urban properties that “may one day emerge to shape the future.” This plus the final piece, “Notes of a Hand,” in which the narrator describes himself as “this amanuensis, this hand, this ghost, this slave” who is “in the story while being outside it” and lists the places and times that he may or may not have been present, frame this wild and innovative collection in a way that will help you feel like you understand what was going on.
