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06.18.13

Without a Body

Kilby Smith-McGregor

CHAPTERS

(in which—sea monsters—and Ava’s wedding ring is returned to Jacob by a female police officer)

IV.

(in which—the clavicle—Jacob refuses to fill out a form, and very little can be done without a body)

III.

(in which—division—Jacob studies causal relationships and the possibility

)

II.

(in which—the dream of

)

(in which

)

In addition to sampling fragments from a wide range of online ephemera (personal blogs, obituaries, interviews, surveys, newswire items, etc.), the following materials have served as key sources of reference and intertextual incorporation for “Without a Body”:

J.A. Davis’s “Bodies Found in Water” (American Journal of Forensic Medicine and Pathology, 1986); Katherine Gruspier and Michael Pollanen’s “Limbs Found in Water: Investigation Using Anthropological Analysis and the Diatom Test” (Forensic Science International, 2000); Derrick J. Pounder’s “Bodies from Water: Lecture Notes” (University of Dundee: Department of Forensic Medicine, 1992); and Jaap Mansfeld’s “Aristotle and Others on Thales, or the Beginnings of Natural Philosophy” (Mnemosyne, 1985). “The best love affairs are those we never had” is a line from from Norman Lindsay’s Bohemians of the Bulletin (1965).

Unattributed texts: The Nova Scotia Museum of Natural History’s “Ocean Currents” (Natural History of Nova Scotia, Volume I, 1984); “Processes of Water Cure” (Water-Cure Journal, 1845); “Management of the Sick Room” and “Woman’s Tenderness and Love” (Water-Cure Journal, 1848); the Philologos online Bible prophesy research archive; and the Encyclopedia Phoeniciana virtual center for Phoenician studies.

Kilby Smith-McGregor holds an MFA from the University of Guelph, and has received the Writers’ Trust of Canada’s Bronwen Wallace Award. Her fiction has appeared in Dublin Quarterly and Descant, as well as Brick.