Once, Mink and I were lying in this field together, before she started ripping off her skin and before she flooded Abbott College. We were holding hands and tracking the stars by clump-constellations and Mink squeezed my hand and said in this exact moment, billions of stars are forming and dying and forming and dying. Everything happening all at once and we are the smallest piece of it.

  I squeezed her hand and didn’t say anything.

  Do you know how stars are formed? It starts with instability. Imagine you are the centre. A cloud of dust begins to swirl in the awesome power of your gravity. You disrupt every particle around you. This dust becomes you. You are billions of tiny particles moving in big slow circles. Your dust moves faster as your mass becomes more compact, with each rotation. Your particles rub together, friction builds heat. Intense heat. You become hotter and tighter than you ever could have imagined. You’re building and building, singing and burning and shuddering—becoming whole from the fusing of uncountable pieces. And just when you think it’s too much—the heat and the compression and the ache of the building up—time stops. You hover in complete, perfect suspension for a single, brilliant moment and then, suddenly, your mass collapses in. Your energy bursts out. You spread eager toward everything. You reach for the whole universe with each fusion, each particle, each of your millions of years. A temporary force in the eternity of space, you claim your power.

  2

  it’s never as simple as a page marked 1

  Ever since I was a little kid I’ve seen my death coming. When the visions first came they scared me: shocks of pain strung to images of my skull smashing to pieces—groaning brains splattering—crashes like ocean waves in my ears—hot, hot static. I would wrap neutral thoughts around the knowledge like a child bandages a sliver, hoping it will go away. It doesn’t though. It burrows and festers, grows rancid and more persistently aching. I don’t know how I will die, exactly, but I feel gusts of death, pushing me off curbs into moving buses, pulling me onto tiptoes over balcony railings, shaking my wrist at the grip of a hammer. I’m not talking about that basic drive we all have to jump in front of a moving bus. It’s different. It’s different because I feel it. I feel each passing bus crushing my skull into oblivion. I know that my head will cave in because I’ve felt it already and again and again. These days it feels so close, the sensation in my skull so powerful, immediate, the vibrations closer in frequency to the vibration of the present moment than they have ever been before.

  Raven reads palms and they confirmed for me that my lifeline is short. They said most people don’t like to hear that but I just nodded and smiled. I told them I had a feeling. The line doesn’t peter, Raven said, it stops blunt. I didn’t tell Raven about the buses and the balconies and crushing my own skull with a hammer because I figured they would just worry. I shrugged and smiled lopsided. People always worry when you foresee violence. They suspect you’re mentally ill. I’m not sick, though, I’m symptomatic. The world is sick and its sick wears off on me and everyone I know and we’re stuck dragging around its bile and bandages. I’ve tried therapy and yoga and pills but none of it made me want to die any less. They just wrapped neutral thoughts around the premonitions, bandage over a sliver.

  In the libraries and in the halls of our university they’ve got these blown-up banners showcasing nearly beautiful, carefully diverse students with straight teeth and armfuls of books. Thick red letters rip across the bottom of each banner declaring, “This Is Your Student Experience.” Let the university curate the exhibit:

  1.Here you are walking with your peers in a straight line along the cobblestone pedway, six abreast, perfectly diverse, laughing.

  2.Here all six of you gather mirthfully over the shoulder of a peer to read from the same page of a book.

  3.Here you are smiling brilliant and knowingly over your shoulder, the University of Manitoba crest on your backpack perfectly foregrounded.

  4.Here you are reading a campus directory with the aid of your pointer finger, paused at a name.

  5.Here you are glancing up from a completed exam booklet, gracefully tired and beaming triumphantly.

  There’s a different story told beneath the shimmering faces blown up twenty feet tall on glossy vinyl, the story written on our bodies. Witness the exhibit:

  1.Here you are alone, slouched beneath the weight of your backpack, trudging through dimly lit halls; this is your student experience.

  2.Here you are in the back corner of a 300-seat lecture hall, struggling to hear the professor over your grinding teeth; this is your student experience.

  3.Here you are glistening with sweat, splitting a $400 textbook between three credit cards.

  4.Here you are ripping out a clump of your hair in a corner carrel of a library, a trickle of blood runs down your forehead.

  5.Here you are dreaming of the precipice of the six-floor pharmacology building, eyes on the sun, toes over the edge.

  This is your student experience.

  When I first met Mink she was sitting on the lowest marble step of Abbott College with her legs akimbo across the concrete. A grey-beige of grit climbed up her black jeans; her boots were caked in crumbling mud; her face was blank but her eyes inquisitive. I can’t show you Abbott College now, not the way it was, but I wish I could because I don’t think I can do it justice by description. I can’t show you Mink either, and I suppose I feel the same way about her. The more I try to see her face—the way it was before she got sick—the more it blends into the swirling of those marble steps.

  I met Mink that day on the steps but that wasn’t the first time I’d seen her or thought about her. I saw Mink every day, since my first day on campus. I’d pass her in the hall. I’d sit down and eat lunch beside her. She was blown up twenty feet tall, hanging outside the south library—glancing over her shoulder, smiling brilliant and knowingly. They’ve taken her banner down, of course, and it wouldn’t feel the same now, but having her there was soothing. If she could be so sure and consistent and confident then maybe I could be too.

  Abbott College is the oldest building on campus, with long limestone columns and thin latticed windows like a cathedral. It’s fronted by a marble staircase that draws the eye up to the college’s gothic-inspired wood and iron doors. This campus is made of sharp angles plugged into soil, stiff lines cutting up perfect prairie and severing us from river and sky, but Mink smoothed out the edges. She had this way of arranging her body as the campus’s mirror, elbows and knees at right or 45-degree angles, punching back at the concrete and iron with her own harsh lines, smoothing out the space by putting everything else in the periphery. When I saw her on the steps of Abbott College, her image crashed over me, punched at my temples, rattled my brain, smoothed me out. I balled my fists, mind dribbling down my shoulders. I walked over, sat beside her on the steps, motioned for a light. We smoked in silence, Mink’s eyes locked to the treeline just past my head. I kicked words around in my dry mouth, gathering ideas like chipping paint. I did my best impression of a nonchalant slouch, tried to mirror her angles, felt like brittle snapped twigs instead. She didn’t glance at me or say a word, her eyes still locked on the treeline. I opened my mouth but before I could utter a word she cut me off. Sshh. Look. She took my hand, cigarette and all, and pointed it toward the jackpines she’d been staring at. At the top of the tallest tree was a small, shuffling bird.

  Mink and I sat quietly on the step, with my wrist in her hand, staring at the pines for maybe a full minute before she dropped my hand, turned to me and whispered Baird’s sparrow.

  Oh, I said.

  Do you have class? She put her smoke out on the step and stood up. I did have class.

  No.

  We tiptoed toward the pines, Mink never taking her eyes off the bird. She squeezed my wrist tight when my step shuffled too noisily, so I made more noise than I needed to. Her palm was warm, her fingers strong. I don’t know what it’s doing here, she whispered, they’re supposed to nest in tall grass. The sparrow sat in a small gathering of twigs and leaves. It could have been a nest, maybe, but I didn’t really think so. It seemed just to be perching in that tree.

  Oh. Maybe it lives in the ag fields? She positioned herself beneath the tree and took a quiet image with her phone.

  Lynx is gonna flip.

  I didn’t make it to any of my classes that day, or many of them all semester. We walked back to Abbott College and down into the all-season tunnels that network below the campus. The tunnels start bright, big windows and colourful, freshly painted lockers, but as you walk deeper underground toward the heart of the campus, the tubes get narrow and grey with low ceilings and drooping copper pipes. Everything smells of sulfur. Mink took me deeper still, where the concrete floor is porous and weeping and the damp-weighed drywall caves in and bubbles and you’re pretty sure the ceiling is about to give in, and here, at the dankest, lowest point beneath the campus, lies the gaping sinkhole that students call the pit.

  The pit is situated at the centre of a concrete tunnel. The floor falls suddenly into an almost endless abyss with a perfectly round perimeter and thirty-foot diameter. When I toss my cigarette butts down the pit I can watch their ember tips fall for maybe ten whole seconds. If I listen close I can hear the soft hiss of them extinguishing on the cold wet bottom. The pit takes up almost the whole width of the tunnel so to pass it you have to grip your palms against a perpetually damp wall and tiptoe gently around the circumference, hoping for the best. The origin of the pit is obscured in myth. Some say that the long travelling aftershocks of a coastal earthquake ruptured beneath the school, pulling what was once a classroom into the darkness. Some say a spring flood filled the tunnels one year and when it finally drained the pit was exposed. In this version the pit sat as a well of water for decades before subsiding. No one knows for sure what lies at the bottom of the pit but me. I know that it’s filled with cigarette butts. The school has no official position on the origin of the pit, preferring, instead, to pretend it’s an urban legend—not a real, substantial hazard to the lives of students. The pit is the one campus entity that is not governed by an official policy.

  Down in this tunnel for the first time together, Mink and I edged our way along the circumference of the pit, toes gently sliding toward the sinkhole as we pushed our way through a grey wooden door that blended almost entirely into the walls at the dead centre of the pit’s east perimeter. Past the door was a cramped basement classroom with slim windows lining the ceiling. Either the electricity wasn’t connected in the room, or the florescent bulbs were burnt out, because the room was illuminated only by an electric camping lantern placed on one of the three small tables clumped at the centre of the room. The room’s perimeter was lined with stacked broken chairs—the type with little desks hooked to the right arm. Eight or so people were packed into the tight space, sitting precariously on stacked furniture, propping themselves against the walls, a few at the tables in the centre, all of them now staring at Mink and me, their faces sunken by the cold LED glow of the lantern. This is Fox, she’s cool, Mink announced. She moved through the room and sat cross-legged on top of one of the tables. I stood still in the doorway, tried to gasp away my anxiety. Mink motioned someone over from the corner—long dark hair slipping from their raised hood. Lynx, Mink said, you’ve gotta see this. Lynx cracked a huge smile when Mink pulled up the picture on her phone.

  For real? On campus?

  Mink nodded with a blushing smile, pleased with herself. In the jackpines behind Abbott College. Lynx’s smile quivered and they bolted toward their bag. It took off though, probably lives in the ag fields, Mink shouted to Lynx’s back. Lynx didn’t acknowledge those words as they pushed their way out of the room, knocking past my frozen body like it was inconveniently placed furniture. Mink cleared her throat loudly. Let’s call this meeting to order. The first item of business is who the fuck is going to facilitate the meeting next week because it can’t be me every fucking time.

  The spring Mink was sick, the spring that just passed, was the worst of my life, even worse than now that she’s gone. Mink would sleep constantly and her body was so hot and small and wet with sweat. I came over to clean her up more than once a week but wasn’t sure if she could tell that I was there at all because she didn’t seem conscious, not really. I would climb into her bedroom through the sliding window, which I always left just barely unlatched. I’d pick up her limp body out of the damp bed and move it to the couch two rooms over and she wouldn’t even wake up. I would wash the blood out of her sheets with baking soda in the bathroom sink before putting them in the machine. I’d wake her up and run a shallow bath and help her in and leave the door open a crack to sit on the floor outside, watching for a head above the rim, listening for splashes or gurgling or slipping, and all this with one eye on my phone, prepping my assignments for the next day’s classes. I would remake the bed with clean sheets and put Mink in and would comb her hair over a towel while she slept and I’d blow-dry it and wrap it into a loose knot and wrap the knot in a fresh, dry towel. I’d make sure Mink was asleep and then I’d pull the shoebox with her kit in it out from under the bed. I’d wash all the kit’s instruments—little blades, slips of wire, sharpened pencils with worn erasers—with soap and water and wipe them down with rubbing alcohol and throw out anything rusting. I’d put the instruments back in the box and the box under the bed and I’d sit down beside Mink’s shrinking body and do my readings until the last buses were leaving downtown. Then I would slip out the window and push it almost closed and crawl down the fire escape to the bus stop.

  Mink got sick about the same time as everyone else. I don’t know where it started but if I look back I can see it building—the tracks on the arms of one person, the bags under the eyes of another, the film of rotting clothes, thin skin draped on bones. I can see it when I look back; I just didn’t see it then. You can get used to an unpleasant smell if you sit in it a moment and I think that’s sort of what was happening. The sick gets in you and you don’t even know it. It feels sort of like anger at first. You get frustrated at work and in meetings and classrooms and just hanging out with friends. People talk too much, and never about what’s important. Every day it’s a new disaster of government or environment. We’re smack in the middle of the end of the world and no one can fucking focus. Then you’re panicking—no one listens to anyone else—even when we’re talking about what’s important no one’s really trying to solve it, just trying to have a say. You’re choking on bile. How can the ground be wet but the air pure static, and why does breathing feel like dry heaving and, then you’re exhausted, it’s your fault communication is broken, you take up all this space and contribute nothing. You consume everything; you produce nothing. You are more than a burden, you destroy. Your friends are dying your lovers are dying your planet is dying reality as we know it is—

  The sick usually starts out like picking your scabs, like scratching an itch. But gradually, as you lose focus, you dig too deep into the clots, rip up new-formed flesh and deepen the wound. You tear fresh tissue. You widen the scar. You make grotesque and permanent the smallest scratch. I’ve seen friends digging their fingernails into their chins in the middle of conversation, making little crescent impressions sometimes so deep they’re pink or torn, never noticing that they’re doing it. I’ve seen classmates rip the skin right off their knuckles, one hand rolling the strip of flesh into a ball between their thumb and forefinger, then tucking the bleeding knuckle into their abdomen. Mink was partial to blades and erasers and this cut of coated wire she’d wrap around her fingers ’til they were blue and dented with a thick bruise, almost incision, that’d take weeks to fade. I’ve watched someone rub a long line into their forearm with a pencil-top eraser until the skin broke red all over their notebook. I’ve watched someone puncture their knuckles with the library stapler, still tethered to the copy station by a plastic-sheathed cable. It doesn’t start brutal but—

  —after a while your fingers flex unconscious and constant. It hurts to be still. Your skin feels heavy on your muscles and too tight around your joints. If you could just open it up, make a bit more room, it’d be less cumbersome, less tense, less suffocating. You imagine it would feel near climactic to sever a limb / shatter a joint / crush your skull but you’ll settle for peeling off a thin layer, a slip of skin you can roll between your fingers.

  It’s hard not to give up when you’re walking around with blood-drenched arms and no one looks you in the eye. You march the halls every day trying to convince the university’s administration to divest from fossil fuels and the military industrial complex / support indigenous sovereignty / stop the budget cuts on arts and sciences / expand the campus daycare / put more students on the senate and the board / give a shit about our education and the world we’re in. You march the halls every day trying to convince your peers to boycott the campus food corporation that’s locked out their unionized staff / support prison abolition / join coalitions to combat climate change / strike against austerity / pay the fuck attention / just give a shit about our education and the world we’re in. Sure the handbills tend to be a bit blood stained but the message is pure. The issues demand blood. But no one looks up in the hall. Your peers avoid your outstretched hand like you’re contagious. Your professors dance around you. They offer extensions on your assignments and distant pitying glances. No one asks about your scabs or leaking wounds. No one talks about our dying world. No one talks about anything really.

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8