The ebb of the river coaxes the remaining brush and bones of forest off the bank and into the swill. Eventually the whole graveyard will be sucked into some spring flood and there will be nothing left for us to remember the boreal by.

  “How did you do it?” I ask.

  “From the sewer, mainly. We used mum’s training manuals. I disabled the grinder pump. We waited for the spring melt to make sure the sewers would be overfull. Heron duct-taped a bunch of fireworks to the backwater valve and lit them off after the banner drop.”

  “Are you going to be charged?”

  “I don’t know. But I think if we were we would know by now. We were careful, there was no electronic footprint.”

  “Careful? What about Mink.”

  “We didn’t know she was going to try to kill herself. It was supposed to be anonymous. Drop the banner and run. It was supposed to be safe. She promised.”

  6

  home is an urn of ashes

  Two weeks after Mink blew up the sewers the students’ union held a candle-light vigil on the quad. Sarah from my gender studies class had something to do with organizing it and assigned me to bring plastic cups to hold the candles and protect their flames from the wind. Maybe two hundred students and faculty showed up. It was impressive—a better turn out than any rally the collective had ever managed to round up. But I guess Mink’s demonstration was the most dramatic thing to ever happen on campus. Too bad we let student union leeches take advantage of that momentum instead of using it for something actually useful.

  The crowd was gathered at dusk in a scattered horseshoe on the quad’s perfectly round plot of dead grass, loosely ringed by trees and surrounded on all sides by towering buildings. The quad’s grass is dead all year round because no matter where the sun is in the sky, there’s a building blocking it. Sarah moved through the crowd handing out candles, lighting them, and instructing attendees on the program. She glared at me, Badger, and Heron as she passed and didn’t give us candles. I didn’t bring the cups and it was windy. Clumps of people were huddled together to try to keep their candles lit, rounding their backs to the wind and cupping hands around the flames.

  Badger, Heron and I chain-smoked a few feet back from the crowd. Campus security services and Winnipeg Police were stationed in a ring around the quad. Those near us eyed us suspiciously but kept a respectful distance. Camera crews from local news stations were set up near the speakers. Raven had been asked to give a personal statement about Mink and she talked about Mink the past-tense. She was a good friend. She worked hard. We loved her and we miss her. Raven gave a eulogy. It made me want to kill her. The students’ union president called for better mental health services on campus and soapboxed one of their clinically palatable corporate-partnered campaigns to start a conversation. Everyone has mental health. If we talk about our problems they go away. It made me want to kill myself. The university president expressed regret for the suffering of the suspect and the damage caused to the campus. He spoke for us all. When one hurts we all hurt. We extend thoughts and prayers to her family. It made me want to burn the campus to the ground.

  Then there was a moment of silence and the crowd dispersed. They moved past and around us with perfect fluidity, as though choreographed. Badger, Heron, and I stood still, glaring at no one in particular. Raven walked right past us with Sarah, Raven avoiding our eyes and Sarah glaring. Eventually the quad was empty except for the three of us. We each had a handful of blood. I had ripped a piece of skin off my elbow. Badger had slit his palm with his carving knife. Heron had ripped a massive scab off his collar bone. We surveyed the small plot of dead grass, now spotted with little mounds of cheap paraffin wax. Two police officers hung around and pretended not to watch us from beside their squad car. We wiped our hands on our jeans. Badger lit a cigarette and propped it up in the mound of our butts in the grass. Without speaking we dispersed in separate directions.

  Mink’s family home is a two-storey, red-brick-faced, 1980s split level with a small wooden front porch, about a block and a half over from my parents’ place. In junior high and high school, Mink would’ve played my school’s teams in volleyball and basketball and debate and band but I didn’t do any of those things and if I ever saw her, in all that time, I didn’t notice her. Suburbs are set up in such a way to discourage you from meeting the people whose yards connect to yours. If I sat at the peak of the highest tree in my backyard I would have been able to see right into her backyard but I didn’t know her when she lived there and that’d be a weird thing to do anyway and probably the tree wouldn’t even support me that high up.

  Mink had already moved out of her family home by the time she showed me the sparrow but once we started hooking up she asked me to help her pick up some of the belongings she had left behind. She gave me the address and I didn’t mention how close my place was, just that hers would be easy to find. When I got to the house she was seated on the lawn under a tall, thin birch. Her spine was hunched, gaze on the grass. Both her palms were spread wide beneath her, lush green oozing between her fingers.

  Hey, I said, sitting down beside her. The ground was sopping wet—her ass must have been soaked. I immediately stood back up.

  Hey. Let’s do it, then, she said, without looking at me.

  While the exterior of Mink’s home was crisp and tidy—freshly mowed lawn, swept deck, heavily varnished wooden patio furniture that shimmered in the afternoon sun—the interior was dark and dusty; the air was dense with cigarette smoke and the smell of stale beer, a trail of laundry spilling up the dark carpeted stairs. As we passed through the doorway I felt the walls of the home tremble with tension, like the smoke was so thick that the house had become a pressure chamber ready to pop. In the den off the entrance, a recliner was tilted all the way back, as though someone was sitting in it. Next to it, an ashtray overflowed onto the floor. There was a still-smoking butt in the groove of the tray; Mink picked it up and dragged. I followed her down to the basement and to the first room off the stairs, clearly her teenage bedroom. It held a small twin bed, unmade as though it was still being slept in. Dalí posters peeled from the wall. In one corner sat a small white desk with gold flower details on the drawers and ornate golden hardware—a child’s desk. Mink finished the cigarette that she’d pulled from the den tray and put it out on the carpet.

  Mink packed books and trinkets into two boxes while I sat on the bed, counting flecks of dust in the thin beam of light coming through the pocket window. When we emerged from the room carrying our boxes we found a small girl, maybe 10 years old, sitting at the top of the basement stairs with her chin in her hands.

  Why are you here, the girl asked stiffly, her eyes locked to Mink’s as though I was not there.

  Hi, Lola, Mink said.

  The girl had a shag of dark hair framing her face, and was wearing a far too big red sweater that swallowed her torso whole. Her scowl was as powerful as Mink’s, confident and defiant.

  Why are you here, she repeated. Mink met her gaze silently. That stuff is mine now, the girl continued, nodding towards the boxes. Dad gave it to me. You have to leave it. Dad said so.

  Mink sighed. Lola, I’m sorry, ok?

  That stuff is mine now.

  Please, Lola.

  Dad said.

  I’m sorry.

  Mink climbed the stairs toward her sister while I stood silent at the bottom. When Mink was level with her, Lola lunged at Mink’s legs, nearly knocking her off the stairwell, screaming, That’s my stuff!

  Mink kicked hard, instinctively, knocking Lola back into the railing. Lola crumpled onto the steps and buried her face in her arms. Mink stilled for a moment, staring at her sister’s heaving back, her eyelids shivering with Lola’s stuttered breathing. The moment passed and Mink turned to the landing and through the doorway.

  I ascended the stairs quietly, stopping beside Lola and crouching down with my box balanced on my knee.

  Are you ok? I asked.

  Without removing her face from her arms, Lola let out a long, piercing shriek. I jumped up and fled the basement, slamming the door behind me. Her scream penetrated the door and followed me into the hall.

  The main floor of the home was now swirling with heavy black smoke. I couldn’t see Mink and when I tried to call out to her, I felt smoke coating my lungs like syrup spreading in a warm pan. I dropped the box and fell to the floor coughing deeply. Below the smoke line I could see hundreds of small, dirty, bare feet crowded anxiously in the hallway, trampling over each other, stomping and shuffling. Through the smoke I could hear muffled whispers. I could not recognize any words but the whispers were increasing in pace and volume as though the hundreds of small shuffling bodies were tripping over me, piling on top of me, crawling beside me, breathing frantic secrets at my ears. I dragged myself on my stomach across the hall, pushing legs aside, wading through the crowd. From the basement Lola’s shriek grew louder, filling every last bit of space between the smoke and trampling feet—amplifying the tension in the walls until the doors and windows blew out creating a sudden vacuum that thinned the smoke and the whispers—making space for the shriek, which was potent and thick and all-consuming—flailing through my veins—re-tuning the vibrations in my bones. I sprang up from my stomach and bolted out the front door, coughing wildly in the fresh air, trying to buck Lola’s screams from my body.

  I found Mink back on the lawn beneath the birch, palming the grass. She stood silently as I approached. She didn’t ask me about the box I had left behind. We walked to the bus stop.

  7

  pretend there is a future

  Class has been in session two months and I’ve missed at least half my lectures. If it’s not anxiety about running into someone from the collective, it’s aggravation at the scared and sympathetic looks from my profs and peers. I’ve had far too many students approaching me with questions about Mink; people I didn’t think even knew my name seem to think it’s socially acceptable to ask me if she’s dead yet. I didn’t go to lectures today either but I am on campus to face the firing squad.

  My knuckles cling and pluck off heavy varnish as I row them lightly at the glossy wood panel of my English prof’s office door, gently nudging it open. Professor Ornun is leaning back in her chair, an essay pressed close to her face, eyes blinking rapidly at the pages like in disbelief, immersed. I knock once more and she spots me over the paper, motions me in with a tilt of her head. Ornun shares this office space with three other instructors. Two desks line each adjacent wall. Four dusty old computers hum, their screens coat the room in dull-blue buzzing light. Each desk has a small cubby shelf above it crammed with books, loose sheets of paper, soiled coffee cups. A little potted plant slouches thin and jaundiced in the corner. Behind Ornun a man is folded over his desk, his face pressed flat against his notebook. He appears to be asleep. Maybe dead. He’s tipped a styrofoam cup over with a splayed arm. A Rorschach inkblot of coffee and cream climbs up the sleeve of his shirt. His notebook is ruined and his computer may be next.

  “Sit down,” Ornun says.

  I roll a chair out from a neighbouring desk stacked with ungraded assignments to the height of my chest—and position myself across from her. There is little space for guests in this office and we are so close our knees are almost touching. Ornun drops the essay amongst the scattered journals and books on her desk.

  “So what have you got for me?” she asks.

  I look at the dead man behind her. “Do you think we should wake him? His coffee’s spilled.” I’m fidgeting.

  Ornun glances over her shoulder and smiles. “Humbolt? No, let him sleep. He probably needs it.”

  “His computer though—”

  “No mind. These buzzards are just for show. What have you got for me?”

  I shake my head and look at the floor and Ornun sighs.

  “Nothing. I’m sorry. I know—”

  Ornun nods slowly. Rests her face on her fist.

  “I know. You’ve given me lots of time and—”

  “Three weeks.”

  “Yeah, three weeks. I know it isn’t fair.”

  “To me or your classmates?”

  “Both? Right? I’m really sorry.”

  “Are you, Fox?”

  I run a hand over the opposite arm, gently dig in with my nails, release the tension building up against the skin, put both hands back in my lap. “I’m not going to ask for another extension, I just—”

  There’s a sharp crash behind us and we spin in our chairs. Humbolt has jolted awake, apparently flinging his keyboard into the wall in the process. He is on his feet and jamming books into his messenger bag, including the coffee-drenched notebook. His entire left arm from elbow to armpit is soaked in soft brown.

  “What time is it?” he shouts without looking up from his bag.

  “10 past 4,” Ornun says amused.

  “Oh, good. Good. Do I look awake?” He spins around to face us. The metal coil of his notebook has impressed a red ladder up the side of his face. Sleep is crusted to his eyes.

  “Maybe put your coat on,” I offer.

  “Oh, Humbolt, your face,” Ornun mutters.

  He rubs his hand against the impression and then shrugs his coat over one shoulder. “My students hardly look at me anyway.” He glides briskly out of the office, one arm submerged in his coat, the other carrying his bag. He pushes the door closed and Ornun turns back to me. “So.”

  “So. Yeah, I uh, I’m not asking for another extension. I’m dropping the class. I just can’t, right now, seem to get it done. And I know it’s not fair.”

  Ornun leans back in her chair, frowning. Her elbow knocks her mouse, kicking her screensaver to reveal her Facebook page.

  “Sorry,” she says, minimizing the app.

  “No worries,” I say, “I do lots of organizing on social media. Plus I get most of my news from Facebook. In my feed this morning I read that bees have officially been declared endangered and without bees everything dies. Pesticides are part of it but they’ve been discovering large crops of dead bees like mass graves and no one can figure out why.”

  “Oh?” Ornun raises an eyebrow.

  “Yeah. The African rhino is extinct now and the Liverpool pigeon and the fringe-limbed tree frog. I also read this morning that slave labour was discovered in Canadian-owned tantalum mines in the Congo. Tantalum is in all our phone batteries and everyone has a phone so all of us are exploiting that slavery together, which is pretty fucked up. They’ve got kids working those mines.”

  “Mhm.”

  “Sixteen black people have been killed by police in the States in the past month alone. Sixteen. And that’s just what’s in the media. There’s mounting evidence that the KKK has infiltrated governments and police forces in the States, likely Canada too, which I guess is no surprise to the people being murdered every day but I’ve been living in this sheltered little bubble of whiteness. Five people died in custody at the Winnipeg Remand last year. I mean, prisons are always state violence but this is shit.”

  “It is shit.”

  “Yup. Police forces are basically occupying militaries now. Oh, Husky has totally failed to clean up their oil spill in the North Saskatchewan River. Two hundred thousand litres of oil. I can’t even imagine what that looks like. Can you imagine what that looks like?”

  “No, but Fox—”

  “Me either. The government just approved another massive pipeline project in BC but that’s no fucking surprise. And I read that two hundred million litres of raw sewage have been dumped into the Red River in the last decade alone. It’d take my whole lifetime to imagine two hundred million litres of shit but half my lifetime for the river to overflow with it. No wonder this campus stinks like shit, even before Mink—”

  “Fox—”

  “Oh, and our atmosphere’s carbon concentrations have reached 400 parts per million. I’m not a hundred percent sure what that means but it’s really bad and scientists say there’s no getting back from that in our lifetimes. I’m honestly not sure why I keep reading. We’re all fucking dead anyway so what’s the point?”

  “Fox, your arm,” Ornun says calmly.

  The fingertips of my left hand are wet. I look down to see red tears throbbing from cirrus clouds raked across my right arm.

  “It’s important to keep reading,” she says, handing me a tissue. “Even when there isn’t any point.”

  “Oh? Why?” I dab my fingers on the tissue and wipe my arm and roll my sleeves down.

  “Because that’s what it takes to live in this world,” she says. “It isn’t glamorous and it doesn’t feel good but nothing worth-while ever feels the way we want it to.”

  “Is living at all worthwhile?” I mean the question to come out cheeky, I hope it did. I stand up to leave.

  “Now, there is a question without any point,” she says, standing with me. “Don’t drop my class. I can give you one more week.”

  “That’s really nice, Dr. Ornun, but I don’t know if—”

  “Don’t call me Doctor, I’m not, ok? Just try, please.”

  “Thanks. I’ll think about it.”

  Before everyone got sick, Mink and Lynx and I would catch the 60 downtown after classes and walk from East Broadway to the heart of the city. Mink’s home was this little pocket of dark, a three-storey apartment jammed between two massive office buildings and surrounded by highrise condos. We’d slip out the window and up the fire escape to the rooftop. You weren’t supposed to go up there but everyone did. Someone had set up a ring of those old crosshatch lawn chairs, decaying in the rain and sun, and we’d sit up there and smoke cigarettes and down king cans. Lynx and Mink would sometimes grade papers and I’d sit and smoke and provide second opinions on bad first-year writing and try to talk those two down from failing students just because their politics were obviously shit.

 

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