February 12-16 is 2024 Sexual Health Week here in Canada, and we’re always up for raising awareness about sexual health, education, and care—especially when we can do that through amazing CanLit. That’s why we’re excited (almost inappropriately excited) to be featuring an excerpt of award-winning author Susan Wadds’ upcoming novel, What the Living Do, due out with Regal House Publishing on March 18, 2024. (Available for pre-order now.)

About the book…

Sex and death consume much of thirty-seven-year-old Brett Catlin's life. Cole, ten years her junior, takes care of the former while her job disposing of roadkill addresses the latter. A cancer diagnosis causes her to question her worth, suspecting the illness is payback for the deaths of her father and sister. Thus begins a challenging journey of alternative healing that she doubts she deserves. Just as Brett surrenders to the prescribed cure, a startling discovery sends her on a more profound exploration of cause and effect. Encounters with animals, both living and dead, help her answer the question: who is worth saving?

Excerpt from What the Living Do:

Cole’s warm voice streams into the room. I sit with my side nestled into his back. I think about leaving all the time. It’s one thing I do very well, but there’s always one thing or another to put off the leaving. Cole’s hands for one thing. His mouth for another. He likes old songs, particularly folk songs from my parents’ time. He’s singing “Fire and Rain” now, which is nice. I close my eyes, letting the vibration from his ribs move mine. But right after the part about things in pieces on the ground, he stops singing and turns to me. “Let’s have a baby,” he says.

“Cole,” I say, trying to breathe some air back into my lungs.

“We could. It’s not too late.” He looks so earnest, so innocent, so trusting. He wants to assure me that I’m not too old, as if that’s the reason.

“Is the air conditioning on?” I say, unbuttoning my blouse.

Stroking my upper arm, Cole says, “You’d be a great mom.”

I catch his hand and bring it to my mouth, kissing the cup of his palm. “I’m sorry, Cole,” I say. “We’re not doing this.”

He draws away his hand to finger the frayed set list on the side of his guitar and drops his head so I can’t see his face.

“You want to fuck or eat first?” I ask into his ear.

“I hate it when you talk like that.”

I straighten my shirt and push myself off the ottoman.

Cole strums, his gaze floating out through the window and over the roofs of our neighborhood. Beckett follows me to the kitchen, quiet except for the clicking of his nails. Across the counter are four small plates littered with crumbs, two cereal bowls with gluey flakes, a coffee mug with congealed sugar, a yogurt cup, and a glass tumbler stuck with bits of pulp.

“Cole…”

“Norah called.”

I stretch out of my crouch. I don’t want to think about Norah, not her flushed hopeful face and not her crumpled one either.

“She wants you to call,” Cole says when I don’t answer.

“She has my cell number,” I say.

Beckett’s eyes track from mine to his dish. It’s still half-full of dry food. The guitar strings twang as the wood’s hollow sound reverberates against the wall. I set the dishes into the sink, turn on the tap, and squeeze out dish soap in a green line. Beside me Beckett sits, shifting from paw to paw, the skin lifting over each eye into alternate wrinkles. I turn off the tap and reach under the counter to dig into his bag of treats. The guitar is quiet, and now Cole is leaning on the archway to the kitchen, one thumb hooked into the front pocket of his jeans.

Beckett takes the chicken-cheese strip in one gulp.

“You should call her,” Cole says, moving close. “What’s with you two anyway?”

“I’ll call her,” I say, although I’m not sure I want to. It’s been sort of strangled between us ever since she had her second miscarriage. I brought her flowers, but I couldn’t stay with her for long. We’ve both created ghosts, their breath like those tiny white flowers that show up in sympathy arrangements.

Cole takes my face in both hands. “You okay?”

I kiss him hard, pushing my tongue into his mouth, and drop my hand to his crotch. We do a quickstep, with me leading and Cole back-stepping, until we fall onto the couch. Hoisting one leg over his thighs, I straddle him and unzip his jeans.

“Well, hello there,” I say, running my fingers along the length of his penis.

“Hush, baby,” Cole says, reaching for my face with one hand, my breast with the other. “Come here.” I love the saw-against wood sound of his voice when he’s aroused. Afternoons are my favorite time for sex. Cole hasn’t been up for long, so he’s full of young male wake-up horniness, and I’m letting down from the stink of the road, my body aching for release. It’s quick and satisfying. I propel myself off him, leaving a slippery trail across his belly. “I’m starving,” I say.

He doesn’t answer. When I turn to ask him what he wants to do about dinner, it doesn’t surprise me that his eyes are closed, one arm arched across his forehead, one leg sloping to the floor, his chest with its fine ginger curls circling the nipples in the slow rise and collapse of sleep.

Cole was twenty-two when I met him, squatting in the aisle of Zehrs with a sliver of skin showing between the knot of his apron sash and the top of his jeans, his hair the color of arbutus inner bark.

“Aisle four, about halfway, on the right.” He rose. His eyes were gold-brown with dark flecks. “Here, let me take you. It’s a bit hard to find,” he said, slowing so we could walk side by side.

“You like Thai food?”

I nodded, taking him all in. “You?”

“I love all kinds of food. Just put it in my mouth and I’ll eat it.”

Oh my, I wanted to say, but instead asked him, “What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever eaten?”

His grin revealed perfect teeth. “Frogs. Octopus. Crickets. You?” He indicated a left turn at the end of the aisle.

I gripped his eyes with mine. “Bulls’ balls.”

He took in a quick breath and then shot it out with a laugh. “No kidding? Here we are,” he said, pointing at the shelves of Asian foods. He hesitated, those fawn eyes scanning me in a way that made me heat and swell. “Bulls’ balls, eh? Did it work?”

I hoped that the look I returned made him heat and swell. “I guess it did.”

“Okay then,” he said, wiping his hands down the length of his green apron. Big hands, smooth skin. “I’d better get back to my spices.”

“I’m making cold rolls,” I said, reaching for a pad of rice paper.

“Cool,” he said, taking a small step backward.

“I could make enough for two?”

Five years later he is still almost eleven years younger than I am.

More about Susan Wadds:

Winner of The Writers’ Union of Canada’s prose contest, Susan Wadds’ work has appeared, among other publications, in The Blood Pudding, Room, Quagmire, Waterwheel Review, Funicular, Last Stanza, WOW-Women on Writing, and carte blanche magazines,. The first two chapters of her debut novel, published by Regal House Publishing, “What the Living Do” won Lazuli Literary Group’s prose contest, and were published in Azure Magazine.

A graduate of the Humber School for Writers, Susan is a certified Amherst Writers and Artists (AWA) writing workshop facilitator.

She lives by a quiet river on Williams Treaty Territory in South-Central Ontario with an odd assortment of humans and cats.