Throwback Thursday: ‘The Gamogue’ by Rhea Rose

Childish Things

A girl stands her ground and discovers power in her own hands with Rhea Rose’s ‘The Gamogue’ from Pulp Literature Issue 12, Autumn 2016. The print copies of this issue are almost sold out, but you can get the eBook issue now for only $2.50 till the end of January.

The Gamogue

by Rhea Rose

Ronald, my father, was a genius, or so they say, but really it was the gamogue, the old fishing magic he possessed, that made him seem so.

He’d smarted his way out of his ancient Maritimes village, a place that had no transportation but dories and walking, a place where all sons were destined to be fishermen.  He’d used the magic of the gamogue, as he called it.  The word itself, as far as I understood, meant “silly trick.”  But my father always said, “The jackeen takes gamogue fer scut.”  He spoke that language when he wanted.  The saying meant something like ‘only a fool uses magic tricks for ill’.  He could manipulate the ancient power for good or for bad, for ‘talqual’.  He claimed not everyone had that power, and those few who did, well, the archaic sorcery worked differently for each bearer.  “When yer hands are hot like stones too long in the sun, the gamogue has come,” he said.

His hobby was the horse races.  “The sport of kings,” he liked to say.  After all, his name meant something close enough to king.  He used to sneak into my room at night and rob my piggy bank of all my birthday and paper route money and bet it on the horses.

“The gamogue’s with me tonight,” he’d whisper, as he slipped out the door with my earnings in his hot hands.  

Once, when my father won big at the races, he brought me home a plastic toy horse — a replica of a popular thoroughbred.  Its legs moved and bent to make him look like he ran.  I called the toy horse Cupcake, because he was a deep chocolate brown and had a little white frosting on his nose.  It didn’t take long for Cupcake to become the favourite in my collection.

Then, one day, Cupcake disappeared.  

Inconsolable, I suspected and accused everyone.

Maybe my mother took Cupcake and stomped on him, like she did with flies and spiders and any other small thing that might be in her way.  “A binicky woman,” my father often said of her ill temper.

Perhaps my father had taken back Cupcake and pawned the toy for betting money.  He’d done such things with my mother’s jewellery, many times.

On the other hand, perhaps the children of my parents’ closest friends were the culprits.  Whenever little Julia and Stanley Porter came to visit, they sought out those toys and small pets most precious to my brother and me, and broke them.  We’d try to catch these holy terrors at their destructive play, but somehow they had learned to distract us from their private moments of harm.  

“Did you hammer the Hot Wheels into smithereens?” I would ask.

“They were like that when we found them,” they’d answer.

“A pair of slieveens, the two of them,” I’d say.  After a day of their visiting, my talking doll only gurgled when I pulled her string.  My younger brother’s etch-a-sketch bled silver flakes, and in my aquarium, my angel fish swam awkwardly because its fins had been pinched off.

Read the full story in Pulp Literature Issue 12, Autumn 2016, on sale till January 31st.

Want more from Rhea Rose? Check out an excerpt of her feature story ‘A Collection of Secrets’ in Pulp Literature Issue 35, Summer 2022, also on sale till the end of this month!

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