Transits Read online

  Lily could feel Saint Francis shake his head in disgus—she imagined him picking up his animals and walking away into the forest, closing the door to his tiny abode. She took a deep breath, and let it happen. “Yes, we're going tonight.” Her throat closed up with destiny's seal. Lucifer. Satan, Hitler. Men in white vans who did unspeakable things to children. That's where she was headed.

  But then it was pizza Friday at school and a sleepover at Kim's—whose parents were atheists—where they practiced jazz dance routines, made crush lists, and let Kim's hamster out of its cage to run around in their sleeping bags. When she arrived home on Saturday morning, pillow slung over her arm, Lily's mom came into the hallway, holding a pound of frozen meat wrapped in cellophane. “Your grandmother left a message. She said something about church and Paddy. She'll be here at five.”

  “Right,” Lily stuttered slightly. “Well, you know Nana. Always on about that priest Paddy.”

  Her mom laughed and rolled her eyes. “Oh I know. If she wasn't so damn pious…” She stopped mind-sentence, patting Lily on the head. Lily thought about telling her mom how big of a sin it was to swear, but instead, ran up to her room, heart pounding with the promise of more prayers later.

  Promptly at five, Lily's grandmother honked the horn. Tonight her parents were going to a potluck party. They were bringing beef stroganoff, Lily's mom scooping noodles into a brown and green ceramic bowl made by some “flaky hippy,” as her dad said every time she pulled it out of the cupboard.

  Margaret began talking before Lily even closed the car door. “Paddy didn't make it, honey. The funeral's on Monday.” Margaret kept her eyes on the steering wheel and didn't turn away.

  Lily felt her face getting warm. The smell of Brownie seemed stronger than usual. She looked down and started running her hands over her legs.

  “But he went to a good place, he's in peace knowing that you prayed so hard for him. I told him last night. And you even went to church—I'll admit I wasn't sure that you would go.” Margaret stroked Lily's cheek and kissed her forehead. “I'm so proud of you.”

  Lily swallowed and nodded her head down to one side in what she thought looked like genuine saintly sorrow. She rolled down the car window. It was going to be one long hot journey ahead.

  Ten Days in Whitehorse

  by Maggie Dort

  Day One

  The landing in Whitehorse is rough. The airport always emerges out of the mountains just in time to catch what feels like a free fall to certain death. It feels like coming home. Too familiar.

  The Yukon is a weird combination of tacky tourist attractions, fancy hotels, and cruddy little bars. It is a town of Outdoor People. Everybody fishes and kayaks and hikes and they all wear shorts in June out of spite. Secretly they all know it is still too cold.

  Day Two

  It is always light here and I'm lonesome for things I've never had, places I've never been. I want to go home but I don't know where that is anymore.

  When I get back to Halifax, I'll go to the doctor and she'll give me a prescription and the knot in my stomach will go away.

  Day Three

  It's still daylight. I went to the Frantic Follies, a vaudeville revue. There were cancan girls and banjos and skits and bad jokes. I've seen it a hundred times. I drove home on bright, empty, nighttime streets. Sometimes I get so caught up with being lonesome and worrying about dumb girly things that I forget how much I love it up here. The Yukon's got different rules. Fuck. I'm gonna quit school and build a log cabin and grow a beard and pan for gold for the rest of my days.

  Day Four

  The grandfather clock in the living room is counting out midnight. The sky is a stupid pink and I'm thinking about staying up all night. I think I'll go out and sit in the grass and write poems about that chunk of mud that gets stuck on the end of your handle bars when you fling your bike down on the lawn, back wheel still spinning. About how I think about you when I'm rounding the corner of an aisle in the dollar store. About not sleeping.

  Day Five

  I won a free plane ride. Round trip. “Where to?” I asked.

  “Well, back here.” The guy thinks he's pretty funny.

  But it was amazing. A little six-seater that looked like it was made of tinfoil. We flew over the Takhini river, to the old Livingston town site where there are still a few shacks and mines, up to Mount Black, and back around. It took about an hour. Sometimes the mountains were just right there, almost scraping the wings. They were still covered in snow and there were some little frozen lakes. I sat behind the pilot, facing backwards. If I pivoted around a bit, I could look over the pilot's shoulder and out over the nose of the plane. It made me feel dizzy and happy and stupidly excited about life.

  Day Six

  I went kayaking by myself. I sat in ballet pose and used my feet to control the rudder, and my left leg went directly to sleep. When I tried to get out, the leg slowly collapsed under me and I was neck-deep in Chadburn Lake.

  Later I played ultimate frisbee in my bare feet. All the boys wore cleats and when they looked at me I said I was from the East Coast. In bed my bright green feet curled up in unrelenting cramps.

  Day Seven

  The city of Whitehorse is 2305 feet above sea level. When you bake a cake, you have to adjust the recipe to account for the elevation. I don't know what you change, though, ‘cause I don't bake cakes. Maybe the soda.

  Day Eight

  The bartender at the Kopper King, some kind of biker bar, is from Antigonish. I dreamt about Stan Rogers. A man named Larry bought me a drink. “I wanna buy you a drink....what's your name again?” He kept slurring at me. He owns the concrete empire of the Yukon. A catch for sure. After I shook his hand I pictured him peeing and not washing afterwards. He seemed disappointed in me, but honestly, what kind of lady puts out for a 2 dollar Kokanee?

  I guess I'm going home now. It's a long fucking way.

  Day Nine

  There's a photo booth here at the airport, and I have a weird desire to take pictures of myself crying. Except I'm spending my change on the internet, sending you impersonal emails that leave out all the things I'd wish you'd say to me.

  Day Ten

  At the bar at the airport in Halifax I discovered Caesars. Clamtastic! Somewhere between Vancouver and Toronto, I woke up panicky. I clawed my way out of my seat and staggered down the aisle a bit, and then passed out, hitting my head on something on the way down. I spent the rest of the flight with my head between my knees, holding a paper bag. Dehydration and exhaustion and not eating. Apparently it's common on the red eye flights. Travel exhausts me.

  Proof of Loss

  by Jaime Forsythe

  Andy is secured under sheets with hospital corners and a duvet splashed with roses. It's a time for counting sheep; he counts his possessions instead. This is an easy game. The lights are out but he knows what lies scattered over the carpet of his mother's guest room. A picture frame, a stiff knapsack, a ceramic whale with a blowhole where a toothbrush may be inserted, and a soup ladle. Sale items his mother has picked up to help him get back on his feet. Things for holding other things. The room is crammed with much more, of course, down to the bed skirt frilling the mattress and the crocheted doorknob cover. His mother likes to decorate. Andy pictures himself setting off down the sidewalk, knapsacked, holding his whale and his ladle, the empty frame hanging around his neck. He doesn't doubt that all the housewares his mother will continue to buy for him will seem just as absurd, just as cold, just as unfriendly.

  He was forced to move back home two weeks ago. Each evening he isn't working, his mother has sedated him with mashed potatoes, followed by rum and Thirty-one's. The cards slapping softly on the vinyl tablecloth make Andy think of luck, or lack thereof. When the cuckoo clock shrieks twelve times, his mother kisses him on the cheek and they both go to bed. She takes a certain delight in his being here. A widow's loneliness is part of it, he supposes, although they've always lived in the same city. He suspects that his mother sees this
as an opportunity for her son's life to form a different kind of story. How else would one be able to start over, bake a life with ingredients from scratch? The way his mother sees it, Andy's been dealt an ace.

  He can't sleep. The shape of his days has been violently obliterated. The way he visualized a week had always mirrored his coil-bound planner: neat, identically sized blocks lined up in a row. Saturday and Sunday shaded in grey. Monday and Friday had their edges, a sharp breath in, a breath out. He was afraid his hours and thoughts would spread and bleed without a mold to constrain them. It was satisfying, like concrete being poured into a steel grid to form distinct squares of sidewalk and then drying—something to walk on. The systems in his apartment were containers to keep things that might otherwise evaporate or escape. His shoebox system, his bookcase system, his filing system.

  The time before the fire, along with the exact contents of each system, is no longer clear. Andy cannot name the things he was saving in any precise list. It is possible there were ticket stubs, cartooned napkins, polaroids or paper cranes, but he cannot be sure. Each item is like a word stuck on the tip of his tongue.

  On the night of the fire, Andy made his way home in the wee hours, suspicious his steps might be forming a swerving line. His voice was next to gone from talking above the pub noise. His legs and lungs ached after the climb up the steep incline to Gottingen street. He aimed himself towards his home, near the MacDonald Bridge that spanned the murky harbour separating Halifax and Dartmouth. There had been mention among Andy's co-workers this week of a bridge jumper, but he hadn't read anything in the newspaper about it. Disaster is ubiquitous enough at the hospital where he is a porter that it doesn't usually warrant lengthy discussion.

  The nature of a disaster, Andy figures now, head on his pillow, is that it is not predictable. That night, he had admired the graffiti stenciled on the sidewalk. He saw floating smoke, like grey wool being pulled apart, against the dark sky. Banjo strings plucking brightly through an amplifier still pattered in his head. Earlier, when the evening was just beginning, Andy had walked towards the bar feeling pretty good. He'd passed a cabbie leaned on his parked vehicle and gazing up at the silver bursts of Canada Day fireworks. Andy had felt almost sacrilegious for not stopping, for ignoring the spectacle. Maybe the smoke was residue from those fireworks, he thought, resisting a wave of vertigo.

  Time seemed to slow down as Andy walked. It was about three a.m. Friday morning. He would sleep hard for a few hours, and then get up to look out his window at the group waiting for the 8:11 bus with their zippered laptop cases and travel mugs. This sight always comforted him. He worked irregular hours, so it seemed important to have some footing in the nine to five day most others seemed to operate by. If he were to soften, succumb too much to his own liquid comings and goings, he might lose touch with the outside world completely, might find himself swallowed up by the fog hanging ghostlike in every pocket of the city. The trees thickened and the smoke faded in and out of sight. Andy looked forward to drinking his coffee when he woke up. Maybe go through some of his old drawings, linger there.

  The burning stench didn't fill Andy's nostrils until he turned onto his street. Even then, he didn't imagine it might be coming from his home. The evening he had just passed had been so familiarly round, looping around to blend seamlessly into other evenings like it, that a plot twist did not seem possible.

  Beams from the fire truck glowed long in the air. Andy's neighbours, most of them strangers, stood in socks or bare feet on the street behind yellow tape. Their eyes zeroed in on Andy as though he carried an answer. The liquor inside him leapt and rushed to his head. He saw no red or orange, only black and grey and streams and streams of water flying from the firefighter's hoses. Andy recalled the words “No Pets” from his lease while observing the ferret, the cat, and the Chihuahua clutched in tenants' arms. He hated knowing strangers' small indiscretions. He felt the exhilaration and dread of everything falling away. A scrap of burnt paper drifted lazily to the ground.

  Andy was sure this paper was one of his portraits. He was never good with faces, so that became his thing: portraits without faces. Instead, he sketched a hovering hat, pair of glasses, moustache, the curve of an ear. His drawings were not meant to replicate. They evoked. This was how he kept straight all the odd and wonderful people who had passed through his life. It wasn't that he needed to see any of them again, these friends that had scattered after claiming their degrees, but he needed to remember they existed. He did not want to lose that time when the calendar spinning was OK, because he was always with others. They sat and smoked and slept on couches. They interrupted one another with their ideas. Fingers massaged Andy's neck, a hand took his hand. They dressed up and danced in the living room. This much, he can conjure, but the specifics are now muddy, watercolours running into a brown pool.

  Standing on the street that night, Andy subconsciously gravitated towards Lila, the only tenant he knew. They have been acquaintances since they were both six years old. She has always simply been there: in his classrooms, in line at the grocery store. The day they ran into one another, stepping out of their adjacent apartment doors, she'd exclaimed over the “crazy coincidence.” Andy was not impressed. It was a city of coincidences.

  When Lila saw Andy that night, she grabbed his arm and teared up. “What's going to happen to us?” she asked, her voice cracking. Lila wore a red kimono and flip-flops, and her hair was up in sponge curlers. Her young face contrasted with the clothing of someone much older.

  Andy disliked these tears. He had no idea how to comfort Lila. His sense of hearing faded in and out; he wasn't sure his feet still touched the earth. He wasn't used to being exposed in front of a group of people. Things had gone wrong in his life before, but never in such a concrete, literal way. Lila's question was a good one. Andy felt sorry for her. He felt sorry for the damage to the businesses below the apartments. The aromas of warm pizza dough and samosas, the steady thump of giant dryers that he often mistook for the approaching steps of a visitor: gone.

  Lila's pale face was lit up by the twin beams of the fire truck, a wet and slippery moon. The image filled Andy's mind until he couldn't see anything else. Viciously, he wished it gone.

  In his mother's guest bedroom, Andy feels like a geranium hovering between clay pot and garden, roots dangling immodestly.

  Before the fire, he had projects: a shelf he was building, a transistor radio found at a yard sale he wanted to fix, the first lines of a drawing of the bus stop. There must have been more he was working on. Andy did remember worrying that he'd never finish. Had he even wanted to finish? Logically, nothing was going anywhere, so if he just kept putting one foot in front of the other, he would look up one day and see he had done everything he wanted to do. Now, there was no evidence that he'd been doing anything at all during the hours he spent by himself. He had no witnesses for those times.

  A sound comes back to him: Lila's voice magnified in the shower, through the walls, the words unintelligible, creating an otherworldly, underwater echo. This isn't what he's looking to recall, but it's a start.

  He clears a blank canvas in his head and tries mentally to sketch the people he likes to remember, no one more important than the other, but he can't. A few black lines appear and then dissolve, like an Etch-A-Sketch.

  He manages to rise in time to make his four o'clock shift the next day. His t-shirt clings to his skin by the time he reaches the hospital. Nurses in blue suck cigarettes by the curb. On the ninth floor, the receptionist is saying into her phone, “You're speaking to a beaten angel. Give me another day on that.” She waggles two fingers in Andy's direction.

  As he wheels his first cart onto the elevator, Andy's nerves smooth somewhat. At least the work rhythms have not left his body. He's safe here; nothing could burn this place down. It is an invincible kingdom of generators and solid walls, awake twenty-four hours a day, undisturbed by a blizzard or a hurricane. Bells, whistles, alarms sound at the first sign of danger. Each emergenc
y is documented with its own meticulous record.

  Andy exits the elevator and pushes his cart down a green corridor, alert for speeding gurneys, shuffling patients and lost visitors. Steering takes practice. It's a wordless traffic system of yielding, balance of cargo, knowing when to accelerate and when to merge. If he wants his day to pass at all, Andy must immerse himself in these small never-ending details. He speaks to the occasional nurse, rarely a doctor.

  Each of Andy's past workplaces has had a strong smell: chocolate factory, diner kitchen, plant store. The smell here is of rubbing alcohol, sour breath and urine, coffee and the hand disinfectant from pumps attached to the walls.

  He has almost reached his destination when he notices a woman in a wheelchair gliding towards him. She clearly knows where she is going. Patients navigate the halls confidently, while visitors and day appointments stumble and stop to read signs. Andy shifts his cart flush against the wall so the woman will be able to pass him easily. He nods at her. She is his age, maybe younger. A cotton ball is affixed with a band-aid to the inside of her right elbow. A birthmark covers most of her left cheek, rose-shaped. Her speed doesn't falter but she gives him a slow, familiar smile.

  After she has passed, Andy feels sick. Does he know her? He feels sick because he can't remember. Were they introduced at a party? Is she a friend's sister, suddenly ill? Andy looks behind him, but she is gone. Was it something more? Did she spend the night in his bed once, in the winter, and trace her name in the window condensation? Did she get up for a glass of water, wrapped in a sheet? All he can see is the mattress covered in inky soot, bloated with moisture.