This was the first time I’d ever seen my mother wearing makeup – lying in her coffin. Her corpse was a parody, death pallor pancaked with overripe peach foundation and pale carroty lipstick. Two manicured crescent moons rose above her sunken eye sockets, drawn in with a suburban taupe eyebrow pencil that matched the page-bob wig. She looked . . . inoffensive.

All my life, right up until chemo, my mother had sported ass-length Cher-in-the-seventies hair and a bushy black unibrow: proudly. My friends’ parents called her a Bohemian. I once asked Dad how come Bohemia never showed up on maps in Geography.

"It’s the WASP term for freak," he muttered.

Mum wore those eyebrows as an open provocation to the neighbourhood wives. My friends’ mums had thin, perennially arched eyebrows that didn’t exist before 7 a.m. She scoffed at such hairless subservience.

"Unfettered hair growth is a sign of intelligence. Look at Einstein. And fuck the patriarchy."

"Tannis. Are you sure she should be hearing that word from her mother?" Dad laughed.

Now here she was, poor Tannis, dead and hairless in a silk-lined box, painted, preened, and finally subdued. Long live the patriarchy.

I could have used someone to discuss the details with that day. But Dad was already dead and Anne Marie had broken her pelvis tobogganing only three weeks earlier. We mourners were few: some neighbours, bitchy Aunt Jane, Barbara, Mum’s Scrabble partner from the hospital ward, and me. Barbara was not long for this world herself. Months before, when she began chemo with mum, she’d painstakingly trace the ghosts of her eyebrows with a dark-brown pencil every morning. Now she sat emaciated in her crochet toque, stony-eyed under a ridge of bald flesh.

The priest was a plump, apple-cheeked man who had only met us last week. He chirruped a generic endorsement of Tan-nis’ time on earth while I searched for the end of the string hanging from my sweater sleeve.

All I wanted was the white wine and bitchy Aunt Jane’s devilled eggs waiting at the reception. I yanked at the string. When the wool resisted, I chewed at it. I looked down at my sweater sleeve. It had unravelled to the midpoint of my forearm.

Winter knifes through my bones as I lurch home. Earlier, it was just beginning to snow. Now, it’s an intense barrage of wet, white bombs. I sucked it back at the reception, three Chardon-nays for every devilled egg, and now I can feel my face puckering into that wino sneer. My stomach suddenly heaves and I pitch viscous yellow into the snow. I wipe my mouth with the funeral program.

I sometimes look in at other people, alone in their houses, performing routine tasks: cleaning, painting walls. Anne Marie claims it will lead to my arrest some day. But I find banality fascinating. Last week, I watched a couple doing the dishes. The woman kept swinging her long hair and waving her glass of wine in the air. The man smirked and rinsed. They reminded me of our parents, before they had us, when Dad was a Commerce major and Mum (I’ll give you one guess) was in Political Science. Dad met her at a party. She launched into one of her blistering, Food Not Bombs, socialist diatribes, while Dad politely listened. Then he quietly informed her that he was destined for partnership in an accounting firm, that he intended to make as much money as possible before he died, and that he was, in fact, The Enemy, an unapologetic champion of The Capitalist Scourge. Two years later, they were married.

All the houses are asleep tonight, like a long row of chickens. The snow muffles the trees in shaggy white sweaters. Behind me, my weaving trail of footprints is already disappearing. Hyp-notic silence descends. My stomach settles. I turn my face to-wards home.

I see a horse.

There’s a horse standing right in front of me.

Is that a horse?

Yes, it’s a horse – tall, grey, of at least 16 hands, standing quietly in the snow in the middle of the street, swishing its tail.

"What the hell are you doing here?" I ask.

There’s no shortage of wildlife on this street: racoons, rats, skunks. But, that’s a horse. No one in this neighbourhood has a corral in their backyard, that much I know. What do I do? Call the Humane Society, I guess.

This horse has liquid, shimmering, black-marble eyes. Un-conditional kindness beams from them. Its long curly-cue lashes flutter under the weight of snowflakes. Headlights suddenly flash across the snow bank. One nanosecond later, I’m alone.

I spin around. It’s just the snow, and me, and the lights approaching . . .

A chill races through my stomach and I’m racked with a full body spasm, jerking like a marionette. The taxi slides up, snow grumbling and chunnering under the tires. Although three blocks remain until I’m home, I flag him down.

"Where’s my devilled egg?" Anne Marie murmurs from the easy chair.

I’m worried about her getting blood clots from lying around so much. She says the pins in her pelvis hurt too much to move. I’m going to call the physiotherapist tomorrow and make sure she’s been going. My sister’s always been lazy and this injury is an excuse to be waited on. She takes full advantage.

"Bitchy Aunt Jane made two trays and they were gone in 15 seconds. The priest ate about sixteen on his own."

"That fat priest with the whiskey nose?"

"It’s not a whiskey nose, it’s rosacea."

"Yeah, right."

I don’t mention the hallucination. She eyes me carefully.

"You’re loaded!"

"I’m a little in the bag, big whup."

"You’re loaded!"

"Shut up."

That night, an eerie disquiet bores a hole in my sleep. The next morning, as I wake up groggy and hung over, my first thought is the horse. I’m late, of course, so I tear the memory from my mind, plug the iron in, and dive into the shower.

Anne Marie is still in the living room, calling for tea, when I emerge.

"What’d your last servant die of?"

"Insubordination. Skim milk and sweetener, please."

I wish she still lived with her boyfriend Greg. But they spilt up after the tobogganing incident. According to her, he did see the tree and, instead of trying to steer around it, he simply ejected. She calls it "attempted murder." Drama, always drama.