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CHEMICAL VALLEY

Chemical Valley STORIES

DAVID HUEBERT

A JOHN METCALF BOOK

BIBLIOASIS

WINDSOR, ONTARIO

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher or a license from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright license visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

FIRST EDITION

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Chemical valley / David Huebert.

Names: Huebert, David, author.

Description: Short stories.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210213477 | Canadiana (ebook) 20210213507 | ISBN 9781771964470 (softcover) | ISBN 9781771964487 (ebook) Classification: LCC PS8615.U3 C54 2021 | DDC C813/.6—dc23

Edited by John Metcalf

Published with the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country, and the financial support of the Government of Canada. Biblioasis also acknowledges the support of the Ontario Arts Council (OAC), an agency of the Government of Ontario, which last year funded 1,709 individual artists and 1,078 organizations in 204 communities across Ontario, for a total of $52.1 million, and the contribution of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and Ontario Creates.

PRINTED AND BOUND IN CANADA

For my parents—Ron Huebert and Elizabeth Edwards

In those days the world teemed, the people multiplied,

the world bellowed like a wild bull. THE EPIC OF GILGAMESH

Cutting grass for gasoline, for gasoline. GREGORY ALAN ISAKOV

CONTENTS

CHEMICAL VALLEY Chemical Valley

Leviathan

Swamp Things

Oilgarchs

Cruelty

DREAM HAVEN

Six Six Two Fifty

Desert of the RL

SHTF

The Pit

Dream Haven

The Empathy Pill

Acknowledgements

Chemical Valley

CHEMICAL VALLEY

I KNEEL DOWN and reach for the nearest bird, hydraulics buzzing in my teeth and knees. The pigeon doesn’t flinch or blink. No blood. No burn smell. Sal’s there in seconds, his face a blear of night-shift grog. He rubs his bigger eye, squats by the carcasses. Behind him the river wends and glimmers, slicks through refinery glare.

“Poison you figure?” Sal thumbs his coverall pockets. “Leak maybe.”

Suzy appears next to Sal, seeping chew-spit into her Coke can. She leans over and takes a pigeon in her Kevlared paw. Brings it to her face. “Freaky,” she says, bottom lip bulging. “Eyes still open.” She wiggles her rat face into a grin, a frond of tobacco wagging in her bottom teeth.

I can’t afford to say it: “Saving that for later?”

Suzy flares: “What?”

“The chew.”

Suzy puts a hand over her mouth, speaks with taut lips: “Enough of your guff.”

I snort. “Guff?”

She sets the bird down, hitches her coveralls. Lips closed, she tongues the tobacco loose and swallows. “Clean ’em up,” she says, nodding at the pigeons. She spins and walks away, trailing chew-spit across the unit.

WHAT YOU MIGHT find, if you were handling a dead pigeon, is something unexpected in the glassy cosmos of its eye: a dark beauty, a molten alchemy. You might find a pigeon’s iris looks how you imagine the Earth’s core—pebble-glass waves of crimson, a perfect still shudder of rose and lilac. What you might do, if you were

placing a dead pigeon into the incinerator, is take off your Kevlar glove and touch your bare index finger to its cornea. What you might do before dropping the bird into a white-hot Mordor of carbon and coke is touch your fingertip to that unblinking membrane and hold it there, feeling a mangle of tenderness and violation, thinking this may be the loveliest secret you have ever touched.

I’M TELLING EILEEN how I want to be buried, namely inside a tree. We’re sitting in bed eating Thai from the mall and listening to the 6:00 p.m. construction outside our window—the city tearing up the whole street along with tree roots and a rusted tangle of lead pipes —and I’m telling Eileen it’s called a biodegradable burial pod. Mouth full of cashew curry and I’m saying what they do is put your remains in this egg-looking thing like the xenomorph’s cocoon from Alien: Resurrection but it’s made of biodegradable plastic. I’m telling Eileen it’s called “capsula mundi” and what they do is hitch the remains to a semi-mature tree and plant the whole package. Stuff you down in fetal position and let you gradually decay until you become nitrogen, seep into soil.

Contemplating panang, Eileen asks where I got the idea about the burial pod and I tell her Facebook or maybe an email newsletter. “You click on that shit? Why are you even thinking about this now? You just turned thirty-four.”

I don’t tell her about the basement, about Mum. I don’t tell her about the pigeons strewn out on the concrete and then going supernova in the incinerator, don’t mention how it gets me thinking about flesh, about bodies, about waste. I don’t tell her about Blane, the twenty-nine-year-old long-distance runner who got a heart attack sitting at the panel in the Alkylation unit. Blane didn’t die but he did need surgery and a pacemaker and that sort of thing gets you curious. Which is how you end up lying in bed at night checking your pulse and feeling like your chest is shrinking and thinking about the margin of irregular and erratic.

Picking a bamboo shoot from her molars: “Since when are you into trees?”

She says it smug. She says it like Miss University Sciences, and nobody else is allowed to like trees. I don’t tell her how we’re all compost and yes I read that on a Facebook link. I also do not tell her about the article’s tag line: “Your carbon footprint doesn’t end in the grave.” Reaching for the pad Thai, I tell her about the balance, how it’s only natural. How the human body’s rich in nitrogen, how when you use a coffin there’s a lot of waste because the body just rots on its own when it could be giving nutrients to the system. Not to mention all the metals and treated woods in coffins. I tell her how the idea is to phase out traditional graveyards entirely, replace them with grave-forests.

“Hmm,” Eileen says, gazing out the window—the sky a caramelized rose. “Is this a guilt thing, from working at the plants?” I tell her no, maybe, I don’t know. An excavator hisses its load into the earth.

“Is this why you were so weird about your mother’s funeral?” I ask what she means and she says never mind, sorry. “Do you ever imagine they’re ducks?”

Eileen asks what and I tell her the loaders and the bulldozers and the cranes. Sometimes I imagine they’re wildlife, ducks or geese. And maybe why they’re crying like that is because they’re in distress. Like maybe they’ve lost their eggs and all they want is to get them back and when you think about it like that it’s still bad but at least it’s not just machines screaming and blaring because they’re tearing up old sidewalks to put new ones down.

“Ducks,” Eileen says. “Probably still be one working for every three scratching their guts for overtime pay.”

She stacks the containers and reaches for the vaporizer on the nightstand, asking if I love trees so much why didn’t I become a landscaper or a botanist or an arborist. I shrug, not mentioning the debt or the mortgage or the pharmaceutical bills. Not mentioning that if I wanted to do something it would be the comic store but there’s no market in Sarnia anyway.

I tell her it’s probably too late for a career change.

“No,” she coos, pinching my chin the way I secretly loathe. She smiles her sweet stoned smile, a wisp of non-smoke snaking through

her molars. “You could do anything. You could be so much.” Eileen lies down on her back on the bed, telling the ceiling I could be so much and the worst part is she means it. The worst and the best all coiled together as I reach out and thumb the curry sauce from her chin, thinking about when she’ll fall asleep and I’ll drift down to the basement, to Mum.

IN 1971 THE Trudeau government issued a ten-dollar-bill picturing Sarnia’s new refinery metropolis as a paean to Canadian progress. Inked in regal purple, the buildings rise up space-aged and triumphant, a Jetsons wet dream. Towers jab through the sky and cloudlike drums pepper the ground, a suspended rail line curling around the scene. Smokestacks and ladders and tanks and tubs. Glimmering steel and perfect concrete, a shimmering fairy city and the strange thing is that what you don’t see is oil, what you never see is oil. The other strange thing is that this is how Sarnia used to be seen, that not so long ago the plants were shiny and dazzling and now they’re rusty with paint peeling off the drums and poor maintenance schedules and regular leaks and weeds all over, stitching concrete seams.

ON THE DRIVE to work a woman on the radio is talking about birth rates as the corn fields whish and whisper. Eileen doesn’t know this or need to but I drive the long way to work because I like to pass through the corn fields. What I like about them is the sameness: corn and corn and corn and it makes you think that something is stable, stable and alive and endless, or about as close as you can get. If Eileen was in the car she’d say, “As high as an elephant’s eye in July.” Then she’d probably say her thing about ethanol. How the nitrogen fertilizer comes from ammonia, which comes from natural gas. How the petrochemical fertilizer is necessary to grow super huge varieties of hybrid corn products that mostly turn into livestock feed but also a significant portion turns into ethanol. Ethanol that is then used as a biofuel supplement to gasoline so what it is is this whole huge cycle of petroleum running subterranean through modern biological life.

The reporter is saying how first it was the birds and then it was the reserve and now they’re getting worried. Now they’re seeing plant workers producing only female children. No official studies on the area because Health Canada won’t fund them but the anecdotal evidence is mounting and mounting and the whole community knows it’s in their bodies, in their intimate organs, zinging through their spit and blood and lymph nodes.

“HEY,” SUZY SAYS, slurring chew-spit into her Coke can. “What do you call a Mexican woman with seven kids?” I try to shrug away the punchline but Sal gives his big-lipped smirk and asks what. “Consuelo,” Suzy says, her mouth a snarl of glee. She puts her hand down between her knees, mimes a pendulum.

I smile in a way that I guess is not convincing because Suzy says, “What’s the matter, Jerr-Bear?” I tell her the joke’s not funny. “Fuck you it isn’t.”

“Think I’ll do my geographics.”

“You do that,” Suzy says, turning back to Sal. “Can’t leave you here with Pockets all shift.” Pockets being what Suzy calls me in her kinder moments, when she doesn’t feel like “Smartass” or “Thesaurus” or “Mama’s boy.” Something to do with I guess I put my hands in my coverall pockets too much. I walk away while Sal starts saying something about Donaldson or Bautista and Suzy makes her usual joke about me and the Maglite.

Before she got sick, Eileen used to work in research, and on slow days, that is, most days, I used to think up towards her. I’d look at the shiny glass windows of the research building and imagine Eileen working on the other side. Mostly what they do up there is ergonomic self-assessments and loss-prevention self-assessments but sometimes they do cutting and cracking. A lot of what they do is sit there staring at glove matrices and gauges and screens but I’d always picture Eileen with her hands in the biosafety cabinet. I’d picture her in goggles and full facemask and fire-retardant suit, reaching through the little window to mix the catalyst in and then watching the crude react in the microscope. Because when Eileen was working she loved precision and she loved getting it right but

most of all she loved watching the oil split and change and mutate. Say what you want about oil but the way Eileen described it she always made it seem beautiful: dense and thick, a million different shades of black. She used to say how the strange thing with oil is that if you trace it back far enough you see that it’s life, that all this hydrocarbon used to be vegetables and minerals and zooplankton. Organisms that got caught down there in some cavern where they’ve been stewing for five hundred million years. How strange it is to look out at this petroleum Xanadu and think that all the unseen sludge running through it was life, once—that it was all compost, all along.

IN 2003 THERE was a blackout all across Ontario and the northeastern United States. A blackout caused by a software bug and what happened was people could see the stars again from cities. In dense urban areas the Milky Way was suddenly visible again, streaming through the unplugged vast. What also happened was babies, nine months later a horde of blackout babies, the hospitals overwhelmed with newborns because what else do you do when the power goes down. But if you lived in Sarnia what you would remember is the plants. It was nighttime when the power went out and what happened was an emergency shutdown of all systems, meaning all the tail gas burning at once. So every flare from all sixty-two refineries began shooting off together, a tail gas Disneyland shimmering through the river-limned night.

THE DAY SHIFT crawls along. QC QC QC. The highlight is a funny sounding line we fix by increasing the backpressure. Delivery trucks roll in and out. The pigeons coo and shit and garble in their roosts in the stacks. Freighters park at the dock and pump the tanks full of bitumen—the oil moving, as always, in secret, shrouded behind cylindrical veils of carbon steel. Engineers cruise through tapping iPads, printing the readings from Suzy’s board. Swarms of contractors pass by. I stick a cold water bottle in each pocket, which is nice for ten minutes then means I’m carrying pisswarm water around the unit. I do my geographic checks, walk around the tower

turning the odd valve when Suzy radios, watch the river rush and kick by the great hulls of the freighters. I think about leaping onto the back of one of those freighters, letting it drag me down the St. Clair and into Erie just to feel the lick of breeze on neck.

In the Bio unit, we deal with wastewater. Like the rest of the units we heat and boil. We use hydrobonds and boilers and piston pumps. We monitor temperatures. Unlike the other units, we don’t want to make oil. We want to make clean water. There are standards, degrees of toxicity. There are cuts, enzymes that we put into the water in the right doses to break down the hydrocarbons, to reduce the waste.

Time sags and sags and yawns. By 10:00 a.m. I can feel the sun howling off the concrete, rising up vengeful and gummy. Doesn’t matter that it’s mid-June and already there’s a heat warning, you’ve still got to wear your coveralls and your steel toes and your hard hat, the sweat gooing up the insides of your arms, licking the backs of your knees. The heat warning means we take “precautions.” It means coolers full of Nestlé water sweating beside the board. It means we walk slowly around the unit. As slow as we can possibly move but the slow walking becomes its own challenge because the work’s still got to get done.

The river gets me through the shift: the curl and cool of it, its great improbable blue. The cosmic-bright blue that’s supposedly caused by the zebra mussels the government put all over Ontario to make the water blue and pretty but if Eileen were here she’d say her thing about the algae. How she learned in first-year bio that what the zebra mussels do is eat all the particles from the lake, allowing room for algae to grow beyond their boundaries and leading to massive poisonous algae blooms in Lake Huron and Lake Erie. So you think you’re fixing something but really there’s no fixing and how fitting that one way or another the river’s livid blue is both beautiful and polluted, toxic and sublime.

THERE’S A TRAIN that runs beneath the river, from Sarnia to Port Huron and back. An industry train, bringing ethylene here and PVC there. On shift I often think of it running back and forth down there, fifty

or a hundred feet below the ground where we stand and work. I picture it wending through the underground, the strange world full of the dried-up oil reservoirs, salt caverns where miners have slipped and fallen to suffocate in a great halite throat. It’s hard to detect with the hydraulics and the million different vibrations but sometimes I feel or at least imagine I feel that train passing beneath me. Trundling among the ground-water and the salt and the drained chambers where peat and mud and seaweed cooked slowly for a hundred million years. Sometimes when I think of the train I think the river Styx. How Mum used to tell me about Charon the ferryman, who brought souls to the underworld. Charon travelling across the river again and again, plucking the coins from the mouths of the dead and if they couldn’t pay they’d have to walk the riverbank for a hundred years. And the souls that are down there are the souls of primordial beings that died suddenly and then stewed underground for eras and epochs and finally came up gushing and were gone.

“HEARD ABOUT THOSE bodies?” Sal asks, thumbing through his phone as I pass by the board. I ask what bodies and he says the ones in Toronto. “Like a half dozen of them, some kind of landscaper murderer stashing bodies in planters all over the city.”

“Isn’t that old news?”

Sal shrugs, his thumb swiping through newsfeed blue. Hard to say, sometimes, how those cycles work. “Doesn’t make it less fucked up.”

I kill the shift as usual: walk around wiggling the flashlight thinking about the different spots in the river and diving into them with my mind. Thinking about what might be sleeping down there —maybe a pike or a smelt or a rainbow trout nestled among the algae and the old glass Coke bottles. Sometimes I think my way across the bridge, over to Port Huron. Wonder if there’s an operator over there doing the same thing, thinking back across the river towards me.

I drive home the long way which means corn fields and wind turbines in the distance as the sky steeps crimson and rose. In the

thickening dark, I think of those bodies, the ones Sal was talking about. Bruce McArthur. I remember hearing about it—this killer targeting gay men in Toronto and the more planters they dug up the more bodies they found. Body parts buried among the city’s carefully strategized vegetal veinwork—a jawbone in the harebell, a scatter of teeth in the bluestem, a pair of eyeballs forgotten in the bergamot. In the rear-view a flare shoots up from the plants. Getting closer, I pass through a gauntlet of turbines, feeling them more than I see them. Carbon-filament sentries. Once I passed an enormous truck carrying a wind turbine blade and at first I thought it was a whale. It reminded me of videos I’d seen of Korean authorities transporting a sperm whale bloated with methane, belching its guts across the tarmac. The truck had a convoy and a bunch of orange WIDE LOAD signs and I passed it slowly, partly because of the danger and partly because there was a pulse to it, something drawing me in. The great sleek curve of the blade, its unreal whiteness.

EILEEN’S STILL UP, vaping in her chair by the window. “Sorry,” she says, spinning her chair to look at me. “Couldn’t sleep.” I tell her she can vape in the kitchen or wherever she likes but she looks at me with her stoned slanting smile and tells me it’s not that. Says how she’s been looking out into the yard a lot and when she does she thinks about the teenagers. She looks at me like she wants me to ask for details. I don’t, but she continues anyway. Rehearses how those kids in the seventies got trapped in the abandoned fallout shelter. “You know, the yards were so long because the properties used to be cottages and the old shelter was overgrown and the teens were skipping school and smoking up and the excavator came through and started to fill it in and no one realized the teens were missing until days later. The only explanation was that they were scared, so scared of getting caught that they stayed quiet, let it happen, hoped it would pass.”

“You don’t believe all that do you?”

Eileen shrugs, still staring out the window. “No. Maybe. I just like the story.”

I ask how’s the pain today and she says manageable. Turns her face towards me but doesn’t meet my eyes. I ask her out of ten and she says you know I hate that. She asks is something wrong, something else. I tell her no. “Seems like there’s something you’re not telling me about.” I don’t respond and she doesn’t push it.

We watch the original Total Recall and when we get to the part with the three-breasted woman Eileen asks if I find that strange or sexy and I tell her neither, or both. Eventually Eileen drifts off but when I stand up she lurches awake. She asks where I’m going and I say just downstairs to read the new Deadpool unless she wants the bedside lamp on. She says no, asks when I’m coming to bed. I tell her soon and she says cuddle me when you get here. “Don’t just lie there,” she says. “Hold me.” I tell her yes, of course, and head down to the sweet dank sogg of the basement.

Mum listens with tender quiet as I tell her about my day—about Suzy, about the pigeons, about the construction. Mum nods and smiles, gentle and sweet, her gold incisor catching light from the bare pull-string bulb. Eventually I check my phone and see that it’s pushing eleven and I should probably head upstairs if I want my six to seven hours. I give Mum a good night kiss and tell her to get some rest and then I notice something strange in the floor, stoop down to inspect.

A hand-shaped imprint in the foundation.

Mum looks on, her face a void, as I toe that dark patch with my basement-blackened sock and find that it’s wet, somewhat soggy. The hole’s a bit sandy and when I get closer I smell it. Muskeg. Skunky Lambton crude.

I prod a little deeper and become a stranger, become someone who would stick a curious thumb into such a cavity. The oil comes out gooey and black and smelling sharp, a little sulphurous.

I DREAM OF the bodies buried in planters in Toronto. In the dream the bodies aren’t skeletons, not yet. They’re in the active decay stage: their organs starting to liquefy, the soft tissue browning and breaking down while the hair, teeth, and bone remain intact. I see

them crawling up from planters all across the city. Not vengeful or anything. Just digging, rising, trying to get back.

“WOULD YOU HAVE liked to become an engineer?” Eileen sips her iced tea in the bug tent. Eileen’s just finished her shift, run the algorithms, the computer humming in the basement searching all the contests in the world. Outside the tent the charivari of loaders and bulldozers, the air heady with the lilt of tar.

“I am one. A chemical engineer.” I can see Eileen wanting to laugh and fighting it. Not like I’ve got any delusions about my four year Lambton College diploma but technically it is a credential in chemical engineering.

“Maybe an urban planner,” Eileen says. “Have you heard about all this stuff they’re doing in cities now? Condos with elevators big enough for cars. Cute little electric cars that you’ll bring right up to your apartment with you.”

“Sounds more like an Eileen thing.”

A bird lands in the armpit of the oak. A pocket-sized black bird with a slash of red on its wing. The one I love but can never remember its name.

Eileen sips her tea and says yeah I’m probably right but it’s just she can tell the hours are getting to me. The hours and the nights and the overtime. She reminds me how I told her, once, that it’s like a sickness, the overtime. “You could do whatever you want,” she says. “You could be so much.”

The worst part is she always means it and the worst part is it’s not true. Not true because Mum worked part-time and Dad died so young that there was no money for me to do anything but CPET. I don’t tell her because she already knows about the comics store, about how maybe I could write a comic on the side and I already have the character—BioMe, the scientist turned mutant tree-man after attempting to splice photosynthesis into the human genome.

“You’re so creative, you could be so much. Like your comics store idea. And remember that musical you wrote in high school, Hydrocarbonia?” She chuckles. “There was that three-eyed coyote and the plant worker Village People chorus?”

“I think it was basically a Simpsons rip-off. Mr. Hunter went with Guys and Dolls.”

“Still. You’re a poet at heart.”

“The bard of bitumen.”

“What I mean is I love you but sometimes I feel like all you do is work and all I do is sleep and we never see each other and I just wish we had something else, something more.”

A quick haze of stupidity in which I contemplate telling her about Mum. Then I see a seagull in the distance, watch as it catches a thermal and rides high and higher, an albatross floating through the glazed crantini sky.

“One more shift,” I tell her. “Then four off.”

She doesn’t need to roll her eyes. “Look,” she says, pointing up at the oak. “A red-winged blackbird.”

ON THE DRIVE to work they’re saying about the fish. Saying about the drinking water downstream, in Windsor and Michigan. Saying about the tritium spilling into Lake Huron. You think Chernobyl and you think Blinky the Three-Eyed Fish but what you don’t think is an hour north or so, where Bruce Power leaks barrels of radioactive tritium into Lake Huron. They’re saying how significant quantities of antidepressants have been found in fish brains in the Great Lakes.

I drive past the rusting drums and have to stop for a moment because there are some protesters forming a drum circle. They’re holding signs that read STOP LINE 9 and chanting about stolen land and of course they’re right but I don’t smile or stop or acknowledge them. Just park and walk through security, a new sting in the awful. At the gates the bent-toothed security guard is sitting in his white SUV next to the NO TRESPASSING sign. The guard waves, tweaks his wraparounds, the river glowing purple in his mirrored lenses.

WAYS PEOPLE DEAL with constant low-level dread: the myth that the wind blows the fumes south, towards Aamjiwnaang, towards Corunna, towards Walpole. That the airborne toxicity lands ten kilometres to the south. That the people who live north of the plants won’t get sick or at least not as sick. As if wind could really dilute

the impact of living beside a cluster of sixty-two petrochemical refineries that never sleep, could change the fact that you live in a city where Pearl Harbor–style sirens sound their test alarm every Monday at 12:30 to remind you that leaks could happen at any moment. There’s a joke around Streamline, a joke that is not a joke: the retirement package is great if you make it to fifty-five. Which is not inaccurate in my family seeing as Dad went at fifty-two and Mum followed at fifty-six and they said the lung cancer had nothing to do with the plants and the brain cancer had nothing to do with Mum’s daily swims from the bridge to Canatara Beach. The strange pride among people who work the plants: spending-your-oil-salary on-Hummers-and-motorcycles-and-vacations-to-Cuban-beaches-with plastic-cups kind of pride. A live-rich, live-hard kind of pride. The yippee ki yay of knowing that Sarnia is the leukemia capital of Canada and the brain cancer capital of Canada and the air pollution capital of Canada but also knowing that oil is what you know and what your parents knew and all your family’s in Lambton County so what else are you going to do but stay.

WE’RE PUTTING ON our facemasks and backpacks while Don the safety protocol officer explains for the hundredth time about the new model of self-contained breathing apparatus and the new standard issue Kevlar gloves. Telling us once again that personal safety is paramount even though all of us know that what operators are here for is to control situations.

I’m sitting there watching sailboats tack their way across the lake while Don goes on about the hydrogen sulfide incident that happened two years ago. Incident meaning leak. Telling us again how the thing about hydrogen sulfide is that you can’t see it, so there’s almost no way of knowing when it’s on fire. Two years ago when a vehicle melted in the loading dock an invisible sulfide fire came through and before the operators could shut it down the truck in the loading bay just melted. The tires evaporated and the air hissed out of them and the whole truck sank to the floor, a puddle of melted paint on the concrete and nothing left of the truck but a gleaming skeleton of carbon steel.

WE USED TO swim in the lake at night, just the two of us. Dad was usually home watching the Blue Jays so me and Mum would drive up to a secret little beach in the north and we’d swim out into the middle of the river where the lights from Port Huron gleamed and wiggled in the darkness. Sometimes it would rain and the rain would make the water warmer than the air. I’d seen a water snake at the beach once and I always imagined them down there among our legs. Though Mum had assured me they were nonvenomous, I saw them sharp-toothed and cunning, biding their time. Sometimes Mum would dip down below the water, her head disappearing for what seemed an impossibly long time and I don’t know how she found me but she’d wrangle her arms around both my legs and pin me for a moment while I kicked and bucked and then we’d both come up gasping and squealing and giggling in the black water, a gelatin dazzle of refinery lights.

“SO WHAT TREE?” Eileen asks, watching the sun bleed pink delirium over the abandoned Libcor refinery. Eileen in her chair and the van parked behind us. In front, the overgrown refinery that shut down thirty years ago after a mercaptan leak. When they left, the company kept the lot. Took down all the tall buildings and left a waste of concrete with a railway running through it, surrounded by a barbed-wire fence.

I ask for clarification and Eileen asks what tree I’d want to be buried in and I pause to think about it, looking out over the crabgrass and sumac and firepits full of scorched goldenrod. “Think there are any animals in there?”

Eileen says yeah, probably, like Chernobyl. She knows about Chernobyl from a documentary. In the Exclusion Zone, there’s a place called the Red Forest. It’s a bit stunted and the trees have a strange ginger hue but the wildlife is thriving—boar, deer, wolves, eagles. Eileen says how nuclear radiation might actually be better for animals than human habitation.

I stand quietly, holding Eileen’s chair and watching the sun pulse and glow and vanish. She reaches back and takes my hand, rubs the

valleys between my fingers. Eventually, without saying anything, we turn for the van.

“You ever think about concrete?” Eileen asks as I’m fastening her chair into the van. “How it seems so permanent. How it’s all around us and we walk and drive on it believing it’s hard and firm and solid as the liquid rock it is but really it’s nothing like rock at all. Weeds and soil beneath it and all of it ready to rise up at the gentlest invitation. It’s very fragile, very temporary.”

On the way home we pass by the rubber plant and the abandoned Bluewater Village and beyond it Aamjiwnaang and Eileen says, “Incredible shrinking territory.” The reserve used to stretch from Detroit to the Bruce Peninsula before being slowly whittled down through centuries of sketchy land deals. Eileen’s maternal grandmother was Ojibwe and she has three cousins on the reserve and we go over once in a while but mostly her tradition is just to say “incredible shrinking territory” when we drive by.

It comes to me when we pass a bungalow, spot a clutch of them crawling up from the cleft of the foundation. “Sumac, I guess.” “What?”

I say sumac again and Eileen clues in and says aren’t those basically weeds? I tell her no, they can get pretty big and I like the fruit, how they go red in autumn. I like how they’re sort of bushy and don’t have a prominent trunk. How they’re spunky and fierce and unpredictable.

“Sumac.” Eileen does her pondering frown. “Noted.” It’s dark now and the lights are on in Port Huron, flickering out over the river. Looking out the window, Eileen asks me to tell her again how the county used to be. I hold on to the wheel and steer through the great chandelier and tell it how Mum used to. I say about the plank road and the Iroquois Hotel, how Petrolia was incorporated the very year Canada became a country, so we’re basically built on oil. I tell about the gushers in every field, soaring up fifty feet and raining down on the fields, clogging up the river and the lakes until the fishermen in Lake Erie complained about the black grit on the hulls of their boats. I tell about the notorious stench of the Lambton skunk, and about the fires. No railway or fire

trucks and so when lightning hit and fire took to the fields they often burned for weeks at a time, a carnage of oil fire raging through the night.

“Wild,” she says. “Can you believe all that’s gone now? That whole world.”

I don’t say it’s not gone, just invisible—racing through stacks and columns and broilers. I tell her what a perfect word: “wild.”

EILEEN GOES TO bed early so I head down to the damp lull of the basement. The hole is the size of a Frisbee now, and it’s starting to stink. I sit on the old plastic-plaid lawn chair and talk to Mum about work, about Suzy, about the fish and the pigeons and the ratio.

There’s a long silence. I didn’t know the whole thing was getting to me. Didn’t know how it was building in me, fierce and rank. I tell Mum I’m worried. Worried I’m going to lose her. Worried about the smell, the secrets. Worried someone’s going to figure it out, maybe talk to Virgil the taxidermist. And I can’t tell Eileen and the whole thing is sorry, rotten, and what are we going to do, what am I going to do?

Mum sits there and listens sweetly. Then she twinkles her golden incisor towards the muskeg hole and I see something strange, something wrong, something white. So I step closer, grab an old chair leg and stir the muskeg a little and yes it definitely is what I think it is: a small bone that could easily be a piece of a raccoon thigh but could also be a human finger.

I WAKE UP at 5:00 p.m. and find Eileen making pesto, which means a good day. She’s got the contest software going on the table. “Six wins already!” she says as I’m making a Keurig. “Want to go to South Carolina? There’s these subway cars. Fake coral reefs. Vina and Phil are planning a trip.”

I pour milk into my Ninja Turtles mug and she tells me there’s another one in the toilet. “Sorry.” She winces, pouring olive oil on a mound of basil and parm. “I wanted to. Just didn’t have the energy.” She presses a button on the KitchenAid, makes whirling mayhem of leaf and oil.

I put on my spare Kevlars and head into the bathroom, pull the lid up to find the rat floundering, scrambling, its teeth bared and wet with fresh blood from where it must have bludgeoned itself against the porcelain. The water the colour of rust. The rat keeps trying to run up the side of the toilet, losing its purchase and sliding back down in a carnage of thrashing legs and sploshing water.

Without quite knowing why, I reach in and pin the rat and squat down to look into its eyes. I guess I want to know what it’s like to be a rat. Its head flicks back and forth in rage or terror, never meeting my eyes. Maybe it doesn’t know how to.

If I let it go it’ll just end up back here, in the toilet, in pain. So I hold its head under the water. Pin it as it thrashes and bucks and wheels its legs, switching its ghost-pink tail. Exhausted, the creature doesn’t fight much. More or less lets it happen.

I walk it through a Stonehenge of pylons and descend into the guts of the exhumed city street. I lay the rat in a puddle at the mouth of a culvert and throw some sludge over it. Walk back between a mound of PVC piping and a wrecked Jenga of blasted asphalt.

Back inside, I tell Eileen I released it alive. “Good,” she says. “I’m getting tired of this. Must have something to do with the plumbing, the construction.”

“Should be over soon.”

“What should?”

“Want to go down to the river?”

We park at Point Edward and I wheel Eileen down to the waterfront, where the river curls and snarls and chops its dazzling blue. Underfoot there’s a belligerence of goose shit. We watch a pair and Eileen tells me they mate for life and get fierce about their young. They’ve been known to attack adult humans to protect them. I look at the geese and wonder how long their families have been nesting on this river.

“When did they stop migrating?” Eileen asks.

Which makes me think of a book I read once, where the main character keeps asking where the ducks go in winter. I can’t remember what book or what the answer was, if there was one. I

tell her I don’t know and she tells me how weird it is that there’s this whole big thing about Canada geese flying south in winter but as far as she can tell they never leave.

“I think it’s the northern ones, more so.”

“And what, they migrate down here? Winter in scenic Sarnia?” Beneath the bridge a teenager launches into a backflip. Executes perfectly to uproarious applause. His audience: a chubby red-headed boy and three thin girls in dripping bathing suits. Eileen stops for a moment and I can see her watching them and maybe she’s thinking how comfortable they are. How cozy. How nice it must be to just have a body and not think about it.

Above them, transport trucks arc through a highway in the sky.

THE FOUR OFF blurs by in a haze of Domino’s and Netflix and assuring Eileen there’s no smell from the basement, that it’s probably just the construction. Eileen and I watch all of Jessica Jones, then all of The Punisher, listen to the bleats and chirps of loaders and excavators. On Saturday I find a bone like a human elbow joint in the muskeg, another like an eye socket. Rodent hip, I convince myself. Racoon brow. Squirrel bits. More rats.

Then it’s Sunday, meaning back to night shift for eight more on. I’m whizzing past corn fields on the way to work when I notice something strange, something I’ve never spotted. Which makes sense because it’s in the very back of the field and it sort of blends in with a little patch of windbreak trees behind it but there it is: a rusted old derrick in the middle of the corn field. An iron steeple rising up through the swishing haze like a puncture in time, a throwback to the days of gushers and teamsters, when the fields were choked with oil and fires burned for weeks.

Eileen texts me to say there’s still that weird smell in the house and she’s pretty sure it’s oil or gas. Maybe it’s the stove, should she be worried? She’s thinking of texting her brother to come check it out. I tell her no, don’t text your brother, I’ll open the windows when I get home. Which is when I hear the enunciator.

The blare of the Class A and then the radio crunches and Suzy comes on saying there’s a few malfunction lights on in Zone 1 and a

flare shooting off. “Main concern is FAL-250A. Flow transfer failure could be a big one, let’s get on it.”

When a Class A sounds, everyone goes. So it’s not just us Bio unit operators scurrying around, it’s also CDU and Naphtha and Alkylation and Plastics and the unit is full of bodies. Doug puts on an SCBA though nobody’s sure why. Derek and Paul smash into each other at full speed on the Tower 1 scaffold causing Suzy to yell, “No fucking-running rule still fucking holds.” Stan, one of the night engineers, says maybe it could have something to do with the sludge blanket level in the wastewater valve.

Suzy wheels on him. “How the fuck is that?” When Stan starts to explain she tells him to go back to his craft beer and his Magic card tournaments.

Jack tries again: “Backpressure?”

Suzy glares at him, leaking chew-spit onto the floor. Stan walks off muttering something about valve monkeys. Suzy stares at her board and calls orders out while the rest of us scramble around checking valves and lines and readings.

Sal finds the problem: a release valve is down and there’s buildup in the main flare. A buildup of hydrocarbon waste in the thirty-six-inch flare where the tail gas should be burning off, which means a lot of flammable gunk and Suzy’s board is telling her the flare’s going but the flare is not going.

“Looks like a problem with the pilot flame,” Sal shouts from halfway up the tower.

“Getting enough oxygen?” Stan shouts back up.

“Should probably call research,” Sal says. Suzy says fuck those fucking lab monkeys then moves towards the tower with a gunslinger strut. Grabbing a rag from a maintenance cart, she starts tying it around a plunger. She sets a boot down on the rubber cup and yanks the wooden handle free. Then she climbs up the tower to the first platform. As she’s heading up Sal races down and I’m backing off too as Suzy leans back, shouts, “Heads up,” and sends the plunger handle arcing towards the mouth of the flare.

The workers scatter—scurrying into the warehouse and the delivery building, hunching behind trucks and the board. I find a

dumpster and cling to the back of it. Sal hits the concrete and joins me just in time to watch the plunger arc and arc and land in the maw of the stack.

The air shimmies and buckles.

The flare lights.

Lights and blasts seventy feet into the moon-limned sky. Air swirls and booms and I clutch my chest because I can’t breathe. The dumpster jumps.

The dumpster becomes a toad and leaps ten feet across the floor. The flare lights, a hissing rage of tail gas, a seventy-foot Roman candle stabbing up at the sickle moon.

No one gets hurt. No one gets in trouble. Stan walks away shaking his head along with the ten or twelve operators gathered on the floor. The enunciator goes quiet and Suzy walks down from the stack brushing off her knees.

Sal looks over at me, muttering something about being too old for these shenanigans. He walks away huffing, pauses to curse towards the dumpster’s skid mark, which is longer than a car. Suzy calls me over and tells me I didn’t see shit, then tells me to look after the flare for the rest of my shift.

“What do you mean ‘look after it’?”

“Stand there and watch it, Stephen fucking Hawking.” So I stand there and watch it.

The moon grins down and the flame shoots up beside it for ten minutes, then twenty, with no sign of abating. I pace around Tower 1, checking pressures and temps and turning valves as needed but always keeping that flare in eyeshot.

One hour. Two.

Down by the river I see the lakeshore going liquid and sort of throbbing. At first I think it must be gas. Then I think I must be hallucinating because the shoreline itself has turned semi-solid as it refracts the flare’s corona. It looks like there’s flesh down there, a great beast sidling up to the fence.

I walk down and shine my flashlight on the shore and see that it is flesh. Not one creature, but thousands. Smelt. Thousands and

thousands of smelt cozying up to the shore, coming as close as they can to the flame.

I don’t notice Suzy until she’s gusting sour breath over my shoulder. “The fuck is that?”

“Smelt.”

She stands there looking at the fish awhile, spitting into her Coke can. Then she turns back to her flare, gives it the up-down. For a moment I think she might genuflect.

“Fucking smelt,” she scoffs, walking away.

I spend the rest of the shift watching the smelt shudder in the balm of the flare. Thousands of fish inching towards the tail gas column as it roars and rages through the punctured dark. Light licking them silver and bronze, the smelt push and push against the shore—close and closer but never close enough.

I DRIVE HOME past the wind turbines thinking as I often do about a hundred thousand years from now when maybe someone would come across this place. I talked about this once, with Mum. We walked into a corn field just to look at the turbines and when we got there I asked what would happen if there were no corn or soy or farmers left, just the turbines marking the graves of fields. How maybe a thousand years from now there would be a new kind of people like in Mad Max and they wouldn’t remember farms or electricity or the nuclear power plant in Kincardine. How these future humans might find this place where turbines sprouted up taller than any trees, their arms like great white whales. The surrounding farms all gone to wild again. And what else would these new people think but that these massive three-armed hangmen were slow-spinning gods? “That’s very well put,” Mum said then, as if she were the teacher she’d always wanted to be instead of being a woman who answered the phones at NRCore three days a week. She stood beneath that turbine, staring up at its bland white belly for a long time before she finally said, “It does sort of look like a god. A faceless god.”

Eileen’s still sleeping when I get home so I pour some Merlot and head straight down through the oil reek into the basement. Eileen

was right. The smell is getting bad. Detectable from the kitchen and almost unbearable in the basement itself and what this means is a matter of days at most. The morning sun winks and flickers through the cracked foundation. The hole is the size of a truck tire now and there are more bones floating at the surface. I grab an old broken chair leg and stir the muck around, transfixed by the bones. One that looks like a splintered T-bone, one that may be a gnawed jawbone, another that I’m pretty sure has part of a fingernail attached. A row of molars like a hardened stitch of corn.

The teenagers. In the yard. The story I’ve never believed. “It’s all right,” Mum would say if she could speak. “It’s all right, sweet sonny boy. You’re all right, you’re here, everything’s going to be fine.”

And Mum would be right. For the moment everything is nice and cool and dark and we sit there in the gentle silence until Mum wants me to tell her some of the old stories so I do. I tell them the way she used to tell me. I tell about her grandfather, the Lambton oil man who sniffed for gushers and got ripped off on the patent for the Canada rig. I tell about the last gusher and the time lightning struck the still and all the dirty land sales the companies made to get things started in Sarnia. Water, I remember her saying once. It was all about water. They chose Sarnia because they needed to be by the river. I tell her the same now and she sits there smiling faintly, a twinkle in her gold incisor and for the moment the two of us are calm and happy and together.

WHEN I CREEP into bed Eileen wakes up. She reaches for her bedside table, produces a rectangular LED blear. “It’s almost noon,” she says. “What were you doing?” I tell her I was in the basement. She asks if I was playing WoW again and I say no just reading some old volumes of Turok. She murmurs the usual: just don’t take up Magic like her brother. I laugh and tell her no, of course not.

Then she rises. Sits up in bed and I can see even with the blackout blinds that she’s gone serious. She asks if there’s something going on with me lately. I tell her no, of course not, just a hard day at work. And how could you expect what comes next:

“You know I’m never going to get better?”

In these moments I can never find the right thing to say because there is no right thing.

“It’s just,” she continues, “sometimes I forget, myself, that it’s not ever going to end, that it’s just going to keep going like this for who knows how long. And I just want to be sure that you know the full extent of that.”

I tell her yeah, of course.

She squints through the dark. “It’s just, I know it’s hard for you, and if you ever wanted—”

I tell her no, absolutely not, whatever it is. Whisper that I don’t want anything different, don’t need anything more than what we have. I go big spoon and nestle into her until I’m hot, until I’m roasting under the blankets and wanting to roll away but also wanting just to melt, to seep, to burn hot as compost in nitrogen night.

I DREAM BLACK water, a paddle, a smell, a funk, in front of me Mum standing, holding a punting pole. I can’t see her face but I see the reflection of her gold tooth in the thick black morass, a tooth like a sun. She is gone, she remains, I am trying to call her but this is the dream’s mute torture and the water is not water but sludge and in the mire there are faces, hands and faces dripping black and reaching up, grasping the pole, each other, the hull. Hands and limbs slick in the gunk the forgotten-vegetable slurry Mum leaning on the punting pole my mouth opening and straining, willing, wailing.

THE DAY DAD DIED, Mum and I sat in the bug tent in the backyard watching a horde of blue jays eat the heads off Mum’s sunflowers. Any other day she would have got up and screamed carnage at those birds but she just sat there watching. He’d weighed about forty-five pounds at the end and it was not a nice thing for a wife or a fifteen year-old son to watch. It ended graciously, in sleep. The ambulance came and Mum went with because there were checks to be done, forms to be signed. After she came home we sat in the backyard

watching those ravenous blue jays pick through a row of twenty or thirty six-foot sunflowers. I said how I didn’t know blue jays could be so vicious and Mum said oh yeah, everything beautiful has a dark side, just like everything wretched has a loveliness. When there were only three heads remaining and the blue jays were pecking tiredly, half of them gone, Mum told me those sunflowers had been growing in the spot where she’d buried her placenta after I was born. She said she’d always figured that’s why they grew so well there. Said how the placenta had enriched the soil and so in a way I was feeding those blue jays, we both were. And so the two of us sat there watching the birds gobble up the vegetation we’d nourished together and I saw each one grow a face. The last three sunflowers became me and Dad and Mum and I watched the blue jays shred those yellow faces into mangled tufts.

I TAKE THE long way to work and when I see the wind turbines I find myself driving towards them. Driving down a farm road and then onto a corn farm with a turbine on a strip of grass and weed and I’m leaping out of the car and sprinting up to it, kneeling while this terrible white demiurge churns its arms in slow rotation. I kneel there thinking up towards that turbine and feeling overpowered by something blunt and terrible and awesome. The sound of the thing is huge and steady and sonorous, an Olympian didgeridoo, and I remember about the bats. How this strange hum draws them in and then the arms send them plummeting into the fields where the farmers have to burn them so they don’t attract pests. The arms spin slow but in their slowness there’s something massive, something enormous and indifferent and nearly perfect. I imagine myself chopped into atoms, into confetti. I see tiny particles of my hair and skin feathering over the field, blending with the earth and the soil, becoming vegetable, becoming corn. The wholeness of that resignation, a longing to be unmade, to wilt beyond worry and debt, pension and disease.

The farmer whizzes over on an ATV. Behind the quad there’s a trailer carrying a blue chemical drum, the skull-and-crossbones

symbol on the side. The farmer asks if I’m all right and I tell him sure, fine, never better.

“Well then,” he says.

I walk away wondering how much ethanol’s in the soil.

THE NIGHT SHIFT sags and sputters. Clouds brood and curdle over the river. I get a text from Eileen saying she’s smelling that oil smell again and is she going insane? I text back not to worry, it’s just the construction, I’ll phone the city tomorrow. I tell myself don’t check the phone don’t check the phone and then I check and it says that Eileen’s brother’s on the way.

What I do is panic. What I do is leave, which is a fireable offence. What I do is vacate my coveralls there in the middle of the unit with Suzy walking through shouting don’t even think about it but I need to get home and so I just say, “Be right back,” and hustle to my car without showering.

What I do is drive tilting and teetering and when I get home Eileen’s brother’s truck is in the driveway among the shadowy hulks of graders and loaders lurking against the orange plastic mesh. Eileen’s in her chair at the top of the stairs saying sorry, she had to, the smell, and then her brother saw what was downstairs. She looks at me, a little broken.

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay. It’s weird, super-weird. It’s fucked, Jerr. But we can deal with it. We can talk about it. You’re hurting, you’re troubled.” She reaches out and I sink my hand in hers, let her squeeze it.

I head down into the basement where Eileen’s brother, Gord, stands in street clothes over the muskeg pit, his back to Mum. They’ve moved her slightly, pulled her beneath the stark light of the pull-string bulb. Up close, she looks bad. Wrinkly and purplish, with a sickly glaze.

I reach out to embrace her and Gord says no, don’t, not a good idea. I ask him am I under arrest and he talks to the floor. Says he’s sorry, he should be taking me downtown already but he’s doing Eileen a favour. I’m lucky he’s in street clothes but he’s still a cop.

He sucks his teeth, looks at me a little pale, struggling to meet my eyes. “This is a serious fucking bind, Jerr.”

I nod to Mum: “What’ll happen to her?”

He winces. “We’ll have to confiscate the body. Evidence.” I step closer and hug Mum tight, press my face against hers and kiss both cheeks. Pull away and look deep into her face, which has been in the shadows but is visible now, a snaggle of resin and vein. My pocket beeps. A text from Suzy: The fuck are you? Get back here emergency all hands. I don’t consult Gord, just turn and head for the steps. His voice barking behind me, talking about coroners, about extenuating circumstances and covering his ass. Gord shouting station sooner or later but I’m gone, rising, out of the basement.

THE ENUNCIATOR’S GOING Class A and everyone’s running around frantic as I scramble into my coveralls and grab an SCBA and head out to Tower 1. Sal’s walking away from the scene, heading for the parking lot. “Fuck this,” he grumbles into his SCBA helmet. “Not worth it.”

I ignore him, keep going, suddenly beyond worry, over fear. When I look up I can see a red alert light blinking by the broiler on Tower 1, so I head over and climb the stairs.

Suzy’s down below and shouting, “Back inside back inside,” but she can’t be talking to me because I’m floating. Floating very slowly, the world turned heavy and blurry. There’s a strange heat and a haze in the air and Suzy’s shouting, “Inside inside,” but now I’m starting to think she might be shouting, “Sulfide,” is clearly shouting, “Sulfide.” Which seems funny. Which seems hilarious. Which seems perfect.

The enunciator ratchets up a notch.

Below, the hydrants swivel their R2-D2 heads and let loose. Twenty hydrants sending millions of gallons of water arcing through the air to knock the gas off and that, too, is hilarious.

In the distance, turbines churn and churn and churn like children’s pinwheels, blowing all the bad air far far away. I keep climbing. The hydrants arc and spit and soak me. I slip on the latticed steel stairs and recover and get to the valve near the

alert light, start to turn it but it’s heavy, wildly heavy. Comically heavy as I lean in and stagger a little and then get it turning, get it shut.

On the way back to the stairs my legs are bendy like bubble gum. I take a step and then wilt into a kind of human puddle. Writhing onto my stomach, I see through the platform’s steel grid two ambulances and a fire truck raging into the parking lot. My SCBA’s bleating like a duck or a bulldozer and in the distance there are sirens, beautiful sirens. The hydrants spit their applause, twenty tearful arcs of triumph.

Eileen appears beside me, flapping turbine arms. I move to speak her name but she shushes me, fern-teeth wavering in the bog of her mouth. Her tongue is a hundred sea-snakes and she’s saying shush, never mind, she’s come to take me away. As I’m clutching the nubs on her scaly green withers, I ask what happened to Mum, to the basement muskeg. She tells me diverted pipeline and the company will pay us off and Mum’s all right now, it’s time to let her go. And of course she’s right, Eileen. Of course she’s always been perfect and right and brave, so brave.

She starts to flap her turbine wings and soon we’re chugging up and soaring, cruising, swooping high over the river, the hydrants swirling through the sky below. Eileen curls into a loop-de-loop and when we come back up I can see that the hydrants have become gushers. Twenty black fountains arcing and curling through the floodlit night. Down below, a million neon-blue smelt dance calypso at the surface of the river. Mum stands beneath the bridge, looking up and waving, her face no longer discoloured, her gold incisor gleaming.

I glance over at Eileen, her green eyes glowing elfin and wild. I tell her I have something to confess and she says she knows, she always knew. She says it’s a little weird, the thing with me and Mum, but what isn’t a little weird?

We catch hold of a thermal that takes us up fast, too fast, high above the black arcs of the fountains. The air strobes and changes colour and Eileen twirls a wing and says, “Look.” What I see is a sky full of plants. Coral and krill and strange ancient grasses and we’re

riding it, soaring on the spirits of five hundred million years and for once it is not bad, is not sickening. All around us the gleaming ghosts of sedge and bulrushes, zooplankton and anemones and all of it pulsing green again. Below the river full of dancing neon smelt as Eileen spreads her wings and jags her beak and tells me it was true, was always true: we were all compost, all along. I tell her thank you and I love you, cling to her wings as we rise up burning through the broken brilliant sky.

LEVIATHAN

HE WOKE TO the shush of the door, jamb grinding snow, the sudden cold working through him. Ragged remnant of a dream—a woman with a punting pole, lank hair, a slash of gold tooth. To the east the sun rose pale and pink among the stained fields cluttered with stumps and carts and three-pole derricks. In the doorway Lise sucked her hand into her gut, hunched against the cold. The three month pout of her, dark pools of her eyes. She shivered and stooped, waved him inside. Around him the snow was pocked with spirals of his footsteps. He raised his bare left foot, the raw weight of it like a foreign thing. His toes marbled violet and white. He remembered his father, his stubborn father still out in Wyoming or worse.

“Again?” she said. “How long’ve you been out here?” “Don’t know.”

“Come in,” she hissed, pulling her nightshirt around her stomach. She led him up the stoop, onto the stool in front of the hearth, his feet dragging melt across the floor. He danced foot to foot and thought of his father dozing in the Whole Hog or sleeping curled into a sheep or deciding he’d brave the road home in the storm. Malcolm had begged the old man to stay overnight in Wyoming and his father’d chuckled quietly, folding cheesecloth over oatcake.

Lise climbed up to the loft and pitched the bearskin over the edge, came down and saw him setting it over his feet. “No,” she said. “Lie on it.” She dragged the armchair over and set his feet on it. “Higher than the heart,” she said.

He looked at his toes, black around the nails, purplish grey closer to the knuckles. He took the iron and sat wincing and biting as he pushed the coals. She filled the kettle and hung it on the hearth, set

another pot of water on the coals, laid a hiss of embers on the lid. Heat licked out into the room as cinders rose and swirled. In the corner leered the crude crib his father had made for them as a wedding gift five years before.

The sharp heat worked through the base of his toes and into the pads of his feet and he thought how strange that cold should burn. She took the kettle from the hearth and poured him water. He sipped it and felt the freeze turning pain as if an egg was breaking inside him. She knelt beside him, reaching in and rubbing her palms on the bottoms of his feet. “Wiggle your toes.” He did so and found Lise smiling, showing her brown middle tooth. Stroking his temple with the back of her hand, whispering, “Good.”

She went up to sleep and he lay thirsty and weak. No point worrying now, there’d be no word or there would. He’d be fine or he wouldn’t. He tried to climb up to the loft but could not for his toes. Snow glowed in the window, an oil fire burning on a distant field. He hobbled back to the armchair and poked at the fire, thinking of the swell of her in the loft. Two months before she had woken him and said she had that good feeling back. He knelt and blew into the coals, watched them pulse, shadows shifting on the lintel.

He heard the footsteps before the knock. Swung the door open to find the postmaster, Hitchens, saying they’d found his father’s horse. Hitchens shivered in the doorway, a rose of frostnip on his nose. Malcolm thought down to the blackened toes inside his socks. Reaching inside his socks, he found a horde of numb blisters. Hitchens shuffled inside, stood on the sheepskin knocking one boot off the other, huffing into his hands.

“Just the horse?”

The postmaster swallowed. “Dead.” Hitchens combed ice out of his red beard. “Frozen solid,” he said. “Bled open.”

Malcolm heard Lise stir in the loft. “Tracks?”

“None to follow.” Hitchens shrugged. “A mess of them. Panic.” “You going?” Lise called.

“How far?” he asked Hitchens.

“Five miles.”

A draft blew through the smoke-soiled curtain that marked his father’s makeshift bedroom from the kitchen. “You’ll need to eat,” Lise groaned, heaving herself down the ladder.

Hitchens said he’d meet them after a couple more calls, rubbed his hands and left. Lise stood at the bottom of the ladder in her shift, hugging herself for warmth. He reached out and touched her stomach, palmed it. “You sure?” She stared back. Rocked from foot to foot on the carpet. She said nothing, far more than enough.

He went to the privy and came back to find her in her overcoat and duffle boots, holding a stick of butter and the end of yesterday’s loaf. “You’ll need to eat,” she said again. He shrugged and hitched his boots on. The door thumped shut and she was padding up behind him into the bite of morning chill.

Sable snorted and reared but Lise clucked her calm, rubbed her withers. The horse nickered and shook a thick mist from her nostrils. Lise settled her, got the blanket and saddle on. She climbed up and raised Malcolm scrambling behind her. They turned onto Main Street, trotted past the log homes and the shanties and the red brick bank. On the fringe of town stood the derricks in their strange elegance, snow whirling around their feet. The moon was high and clear—a half foot of fresh snow over the crust.

They left the log houses and the haste-built hotels, crossed the fields careful of the black mouths that dropped a hundred feet. They passed Malcolm’s employer, the leaning storehouse. An oil fire smouldered in the south find, a few drillers with rags around their faces shovelled snow onto the blaze.

They entered the woods slow, cautious on the pocked and crusted trail. Above them stooped snow-crowned limbs. Malcolm kept hissing to go faster but Lise told him to calm himself, handed him the bread and butter. They drove north through the woods, the horse’s warmth rising through them. They hit the corduroy road and passed it. The horse trotted calm through elms, willows, black ash, the beaver meadow, the broad glazed swamp.

They’d been here a decade, he and his father, had seen the derricks rise up and the speculators come off the train in gaiters and denim trousers. They’d watched the earth shudder and gush, had

seen the trampled blue clay and the new plank roads. The black ash hewn and turned upside down to make the derricks. In winter the men skating on the creek next to barrels of flaming kerosene. They’d heard the geologists speaking of the unseen chasms underfoot— shale and limestone, water and gas, seas of oil.

He clung to Lise, the bounce of her thin ribs and the pouch beneath them. The sun burned through the morning haze and they trotted on until the horse stopped fast.

Blood on the snow in reckless plenty. Pocks and lumps and valleys where it had frozen over the rutted trail. On the fringe his father’s chestnut curled fetal, hind legs tucked in, the left one snapped at the hock. Her throat had been slit and there was a seam cut up her barrel, the edges scummed with frozen blood and flesh.

Sable blew her nostrils, head rising through the fog. Looking at the stained snow Malcolm thought of the horse’s heart, the size of it. An organ that could pump such a quantity, send it pulsing through that great brown body.

He chucked his legs down, stumbled, frostbitten toes still numb, knee buckling in the crust. He cursed and paced around the horse kicking snow and shouting for his father, screaming into the woods. A breeze passed through the hemlock, set saplings gently shivering, sloughing a dust of twinkling snow.

When he turned back to Lise he saw her pointing to his boot. A head-sized hole in the crust and as he kicked the snow loose he saw that he had sunk his heel in a slush of frozen viscera. Horse entrails. The long fat squirm of the intestine, a brittle slab of lung. His father’s boots lay askew where he’d kicked them off. Malcolm leaned over to retch and coming up saw her pointing at the frozen gash along the creature’s midsection.

He stepped forward, knelt, and put his palm on the horse’s stomach, felt nothing but mute, cold. A frozen scar. A wound the length of a man.

He took the bowie from his belt and dug it hard into the seam, chiselled shards of ice and flesh. In a half dream he saw through the horse’s barrel to the man inside. Saw the sturdy bulk of his father curled up like a baby. Saw the red-bearded man at peace, there in

the horse’s guts. Resting, easing, eyes blinking, quivering, finally closed.

The woods crunched with the sound of horses. Hitchens appeared with Armbruster and two Chippewa teamsters. All of them knelt, looking. The two men traded glances.

“Crawled inside?”

“Wasn’t thinking straight,” Lise said.

“Must’ve thought the warmth would keep him alive.” The teamsters produced chisels and blades, helped Malcolm hack bits from the frigid corpse until Malcolm held up a hand. “Only one way,” he said with a hard look at Hitchens. The postmaster set off for benzene and the Methodist. The teamsters offered some lighting oil. They set some sacking over the heap and stood staring at the frozen horse and the white woods and the day coming on anemic over the fields.

The Methodist arrived, took Malcolm’s hand and asked the age of his father. Malcolm told him and one of the teamsters lit his pipe and handed Malcolm his matches. “The Lord is merciful,” the Methodist said, then turned to his book and read from the Old Testament. “‘Now the days of David drew nigh…’” Lise tamped her feet in the snow, made a nervous sound in her nose. Malcolm took a step back and stared into the long scar, Brailled with hoar at the edges. “‘And he charged Solomon his son, saying… I go the way of all the earth.’” Malcolm put his palm on that frost-rimmed wound, felt the cold sting of it and thought inwards, towards his father, the world spilling, tilting into the knowledge that to lose your maker is to be in some true sense unmade.

SOMEWHERE IN THE MURK of his mind there is a woman kneeling in muck, her hand at her scalp, tugging a clump of hair. A woman cradling a grey and silent thing, a wisp of hair caked red, its skin flaky, the texture of dry cheese. A woman with a red rage of hair and sixteen freckles down her back in the shape of the little dipper and she is kneeling in a spittle of rain, her shift dank with splashed mud. A woman laying the still child down in the hole at the foot of the railway-foraged bedrock slate into which she has scratched

letters with knitting needles. He can see her muttering about her blood, the curse in it, about the one runt child she’d managed and six more, all still. Laying the child in its trench and setting a handkerchief over her fingers then reaching into her own mouth. Reaching for the one remaining incisor and commencing to pull. Rocking and humming as she prods and tugs and wags the tooth free. Stroking the cold brow of the child who never bled or breathed but whom she will remember as pain and bloat and rhythm—the thudding of limb and palm, of a turning hip, a world without breath or sight or language but no less a world.

HAVING FINISHED, THE Methodist invited Malcolm to speak before the flames. “He was a good father,” Malcolm said, shivering as he tossed the match into a pool of crude at the horse’s mane. “Could be a hot man. Got angry sometimes, but his love was firm—a love like a fist.” Malcolm look at the cast-down eyes, the horse in the snow, the bulge of its gut. “Them’s my sentiments.”

Lise squeezed Malcolm’s hand as the fire took. Timid, at first, the flames grew around the animal. He thought of the gut-strung banjo his father’d been given by a Virginia man he’d met on a whale ship and which he’d never learned to play but held many nights, staring into it, drumming his stained fingers on the snare. He thought of his overgrown toenails, their terrible thickness, yellow and white. He saw his father in the summer, face smudged with muskeg to ward off the mosquitoes, sawing the joints for the corners of their slapdash home, a thunderstorm gathering in the distance and his father looking up, muck-faced, unflinching, saying they’d sleep in the throat of the wind if they had to. He thought of the old man flailing up the frozen creek with crude blades tied to his boots, blazing barrels of kerosene sludge on the creekside and his father flailing useless, half drunk, his weight tossing and chucking and never quite falling, somehow holding on. He thought of the man’s snore steady beneath them and as he and Lise covered each other’s mouths and leaned into the straw. He thought of the glass jar of teeth his father had kept at his bedside. The teeth Malcolm’s mother had pulled from her own head, one for each baby she’d lost. The

time he’d pulled back the curtain and found his father sobbing silently, chest heaving, the teeth laid out in his open palm. Or the times he heard his father lay those teeth gently in his own mouth and suck them like mints, savouring the salt of the gone.

Gradually the oil heated, burned deeper, mining for the core. The postmaster threw benzene on and the blaze began to crackle and reek. The onlookers stood with their palms out as the flames climbed and devoured each other. They stood warming themselves until the stench was too much and the flesh of the horse began to sizzle and slacken.

He did not see her leave. Did not see her hobbling off, shedding clothes then squatting. Neither he nor the rest of the men saw the steam rising from the cleft of her, her back chucking as it passed through. He did not see her on her haunches among the bald maples, petticoats in her hands, boots half-sunk in the snow. He did not see the red phlegm she took in her two cupped palms, along with a handful of snow. She stared into that clump for some time, then dropped on her bare haunches in the snow, gasped for a pain inside her and out. Malcolm did not see her turn twice as she buried all remnant of the blood that had passed through her, nor did he see her kick and pile fresh snow over what she’d left.

The seam in the horse’s guts split and crackled and dribbled a brown sap. Beneath the flames, where the snow had melted, blackened roots coiled and twisted one on top of the other like a nest of still serpents. From the oil fields, a boom. A distant crack and blast and then a deep shudder in the earth. Men were shouting. The teamsters and the Methodist and the rest of them looked at one another, tried to gauge one another but he heard the world booming on, a sound like cannons shooting. People shouted for help, wailed for help, for flax, for horses, for barrels. Somewhere, gushers rose and roared.

Lise knocked a young pine as she limped back to the men. The trees above her swayed in the wind, dropped a fine dust of last night’s snow.

“Bowels,” she whispered, clutching her guts. He could see in her face that she was more than just sick. “I’m sorry,” she said.

He didn’t know what for but he knew what they had lost. He pulled her in, felt the new slack in her. Pulled her close and nested his face in her. The blazing horse glowed, reeked, shifted. The smell of burnt flesh on the air and he was embarrassed to feel his stomach turning in hunger. The men left one by one, nodded their goodbyes. In the fields, the clatter of hammering and drilling, the clanging of smiths.

“We should go,” she said.

“Yes,” he said, but she didn’t move.

“I can’t,” she said, glancing down, then up at Sable.

“Right,” he said. “Of course.”

Gentle, he eased Lise up on the horse. Took Sable by the bridle and began the five-mile walk home.

SWAMP THINGS

MUM’S SPITTING HER CHEW into a double-double cup and I’m hovering my finger over Dawn’s contact because it’s been twenty-four hours and I said I wouldn’t text again. It’s mid-June—one more week before exams—and already the heat is thick, deep. Below the truck the pavement’s a wobbly gelatine. The reporter on the radio is talking record Albertan wildfires. Beside me, Mum scoffs. “This shit again.” A Captain Morgan’s ghost rises off her breath. “Every year’s a record, seems like. Gets tired.” I shrug. Mum drools brown into the coffee cup. “Skipping school again today?”

I stare into my phone. “Protesting. And it’s Thursday. Dad’s picking me up, remember?”

“Who’s Dawn?”

I clap a glance at Mum. “Don’t look at my phone.”

“Who pays the bill?” she says, grabbing for the phone as I slide it into my purse.

“Dad.”

I hear honks and look up to see a black Mercedes SUV cruising out from a side street. It moves drunkenly, gleaming grille lurching and bobbing as drivers swerve to avoid it. A screeching mayhem of brakes then the bleating salvo as the Mercedes sparks over the barrier, trundles into the Esso station. It’s rolling slow when it hits the vacant gas pump but still it folds the metal case. The box curling back to reveal a veinwork of black plastic tubes, a bundle of fibrillar orange wires.

Gas shoots up, a brown fountain.

Mum says, “Shit,” and starts scrambling through her purse. The Mercedes howls, a sustained blare. Through the tinted windows the

silhouette of the driver slumps against the wheel as gas geysers up from the sheared pump.

I cling to the handle, brace a palm against the dashboard. But there’s no fire, no boom. Just the spurt of gasoline spraying ten feet into the air then crowning, turning, arcing down to land in a muddy spatter on the windshield. I think of childhood splash pads, the blue water creeping over huge plastic mushrooms.

Mum finds what she’s looking for: peels back the foil and thumbs a Mentos into her mouth. The truck’s engine keeps running though the traffic’s stalled all around us. The Mercedes brays. “How about that,” Mum says.

“It could still explode.”

Mum scoffs, her breath sour with mint and rum.

“Any second. There’s often a delay. There could be a fire in there, deep down.”

I remember something Dad said once about internal combustion engines. How you can’t see it but there’s a fire burning all the time. “I’ve never really thought about it.”

“What?”

“The gas. Where it comes from. That it’s underneath us all the time.”

“Comes from over there.” Mum points down to Vidal, the citadel of the plants.

“It’s beautiful,” I say. “Beautiful and strange.”

“That’s sweet,” Mum says, handing me the pack of Mentos. “Now hold this while I puke.”

The traffic moves, finally, and we slide over the hill. I watch in the rear-view, waiting and waiting for a flash that doesn’t come.

DAWN DOESN’T LIKE the word “weeds,” doesn’t believe in lawns. Dawn says “climate crisis,” not “climate change.” Dawn has delicate collarbones like a pair of fossilized skeleton wings. Once, when I touched them, she taught me their special name: “clavicles.” Dawn keeps the ashes of her seven dead pets on the mantelpiece. Dawn has cinnamon skin and eyes that change colour at will. Dawn does not own a car, cycles two kilometres to work in all seasons, has a

special bike with spiked tires for winter. In her front room, Dawn has a baby grand named “Retirement Project.” Even as my English teacher, Dawn did not belittle my Alan Moore obsession. Dawn has two fanged scars along the bottom of her breasts from a reduction surgery in her twenties. Dawn’s home teems with houseplants. Vined things curling off the piano, hanging below the skylight, crawling down the balustrade. She waters them tenderly with spray bottles, calls them by ever-changing literary names: Kafka, Virginia, Gertrude, Twain. Dawn makes me deep green cocktails that she calls “Swamp Thangs.” Dawn keeps bees in her backyard, leaves the rest for wildflowers and pollinators, a raised bed for veggies. Dawn serves me curries jungled with cilantro from her garden, talks about the vegetal theory of oil origin. How the oil pumping through the Streamline refinery used to be life, plants and animals, microfauna and zooplankton stewed for hundreds of millions of years in gaseous chambers in the bottom of the earth. Dawn likes that she can talk to me, likes the way I listen, the way I “probe.” Dawn and I are platonic in the Symposium sense, something about erastes. Dawn runs her thumb along my upper lip, tells me she loves the little blond hairs you can only see from kissing distance. When Dawn goes to the bathroom I open the mouth of the piano, run the backs of my fingers against the smooth white teeth.

LAST NIGHT I DREAMT the reactor. The one Dawn told me about, in Mumbai. A fortress of fission perched on the edge of the Indian Ocean. On the cusp of dream I saw the control rods trembling like the insides of a great organ. The core swollen, humming, the angry ocean swashing through the control room, swallowing reflectors and rods, a pus of uranium and beryllium frothing over the dancing sea. The works tumbling into the ocean, fish and krill and whales dying in one great neon flash. A burst fierce and final, devastating. And though I couldn’t see what was revealed I knew that purple wave of light was both taint and revelation, a flowering doom.

The reactor churns through me as I arrive at school, chat with Deedee and Jenna about the Mercedes, the gasoline rain. The reactor hums and spins as I scout the halls for Dawn, fumble

basketballs, hurt my thumb, stand in the back for dodgeball. As girls swirl out of the locker room after gym class I scroll through Twitter, watch the parade of Bird Box challenge videos, Game of Thrones memes, dead whales, starving polar bears, giraffes sliding onto the extinction list, another year of record temperatures, chunks of sea ice the size of Texas calving off Greenland, Friends personality quizzes, chubby bunny memes, Stranger Things spoilers.

Deedee and Jenna are talking about slogans for today’s protest when Dad texts to confirm a 3:00 p.m. pickup. “Leaving at lunch. Lots to talk about. Podcast about sewage-to-energy.” “Good, thanks. Can’t handle Mum today.”

Dad sends three raised palm emojis with the Swiss flag. “Your mother’s on board, correct?”

“Yes.”

“Love you, Sapphire, see you soon.”

“Who’re you texting?” Jenna says, tossing a core in the garbage and mining her braces for apple skin.

“Your lover?” Deedee appears in my phone’s reflection, bleached blond and starkly mascaraed. She grins, chomping a carrot. Deedee calls herself a non-denominational vegan atheist. She and Jenna know about Dawn, of course. They’re my closest friends. We go to parties and climate protests.

Jenna adjusts her Friends sweater. “I heard she got fired?” Deedee nods. “Something to do with the nail clippings?” Jenna snorts: “No. Nails?”

Deedee shakes her feet, curls her toes: “Toenails. She clips them in class. Feeds her plants with them. She told us in grade ten. Gave a whole speech about the ‘sigma of decay.’”

Stigma of decay.

“Then right in front of everyone she puts her feet up on the desk and—” Deedee mimes it. A kind of podiatric orgasm. Feet raised, pelvis swirling, hair thrown back.

“No.” Jenna keels, keens. Giggling, tearing, cackling. “No. No. No. Stop. No.”

I check my phone but there’s no message. Just my lock-screen photo: a graphic image Dad sent me called “Future Toronto.” The

whole city flooded, condo buildings overgrown with vines and moss. The Rogers Centre converted to a giant greenhouse, sailboats cruising through the shallow waters of the lake. I imagine the black SUV roaring up that highway, devil-driven, screaming rubber, then soaring off the edge of that amputated highway in the sky.

“Yeah,” Deedee says, jabbing her phone at me. “Sapphire was drooling for it.” She does her porn voice again. “Tell me more, Miss Briar! More! More! More!”

WHEN YOU GROW UP in an Enchanted Castle of smog you tend to dislike home. When your mother is the lead operator in the Bio unit who brings home her bug-eyed boyfriend and stays up bingeing Naked and Afraid while filling the living room full of Sailor Jerry and Coke bottles, the bottoms swampy with chew-spit, you tend to prefer your dad although you can’t stand his tiny condo in Etobicoke with the Queensway howling by. When you ride your tricycle along the train tracks looking out at the dozens of plants on either side of the river, you tend to covet Elsewhere. When the main reckless activity for teens is swimming across the sick-blue river to the refinery town on the other side, you dream of New York and Seattle and San Francisco. You dream of bare feet squelching through bogs, of double-helix rainbows, of a wonderworld that might have been painted by Jeff Jordan—frogs the size of skyscrapers and solar panel roses blooming in the desert. You dream of a woman, an older woman. A savvy woman who puts her phone face down for dinner. A woman who has watched the world wilt but has smuggled a smile. A woman who clips a piece of her pothos, hands it to you in a Mason jar. “Call her Pathos.” A woman who breathes gardens, who knows we can’t purge or clean up all this filth but maybe we can bend it into new ways of making.

LUNCH HAPPENS. Grocery store sushi happens. Sitting on a curb at the edge of the Loblaws parking lot with Deedee and Jenna listening to the blare of the 12:30 sirens happens. The same post-WWII alarm that tests every day at 12:30 to remind Sarnians that life is a form of PPE. That the air around us is a cauterized wound. That the leak is an

ever-present threat, both norm and aberration. “The wonderhorn,” Jenna mutters into her sushi.

Scrolling Twitter, Deedee lights up. “Holy shit,” she says. “Awesome.” Then she shares her findings: the Mercedes that crashed into the gas station was some Streamline office worker. Associate Director of Sustainability. He’d tweeted something about “extended beach season,” a photo of himself windsurfing. Got a bunch of twitter hate and two weeks later, that is today, had a heart attack at the wheel. Streamline has put out a statement specifying that the event was not work-related.

Jenna snorts. “So fucking ironic.”

Deedee goes on saying how great this is but my mind is back at the gas pump, the fluid pouring onto the windshield, pooling there like a strange squirming jellyfish, new colours blooming in a bursting, tentacled sun.

IN ART CLASS Mrs. Jha asks us to draw a rainbow into a scene of our choice. She strokes the sad sac of her stomach. Last year, she was flushed, swollen, giddy. She shows us some M. C. Escher slides, tell us to bend the real. “Whatever’s been on your mind.”

I cradle the pastels. What’s been on my mind? Mrs. Jha likes my work for the wrong reasons. “Perfect neoclassical face.” “Sophisticated linework.” “Advanced perspective.” Once Dawn saw me sketching a man on all fours, naked in the middle of the desert, solar panels chained to his sun-scarred back. Dawn called it a “curious blend of sacred and profane.”

I decide against a Sailor Jerry bottle, against Mum leaking a rainbow of Skoal, against the reactor tumbling into the Indian Ocean, against Greta snorkeling in a garbage lagoon, against a dead sperm whale with an Evian intestine. I draw a man seen from behind pissing on the wall of a gas station. Above his head, an ad for bonus Air Miles. Beside him a giant novelty Coke bottle filled with actual Coke bottles. The stream of urine a sputtering pastel spectrum.

Mrs. Jha appears over my shoulder. “Office. Now.”

Which means sitting on a scratchy maroon armchair watching the secretary clack away. Jenna texts me a string of toenail emojis and without looking the secretary tells me to put the phone away.

Principal Andrews calls me into her prison warden’s office. Apparently the school was genuinely designed by a penitentiary architect. Andrews is mulleted, forty-something, built like a minifridge. A ribbon of fuchsia through her bone-bleached hair. High above us, there’s a single dusty window, a square of seedy light trying to creep in. And there’s a small dry jade in a black plastic pot. Its petals white and wilting.

“So,” Andrews says. She’s holding my artwork, examining it. She pinches it by one corner, dangles it away from her face. A soiled thing.

“I followed the instructions.”

Andrews drones about principles, the spirit of education. I watch the light change in the window, dust turn to ash on the windowsill. “I’m going to have to call your mother.”

“Good luck. Four off. She works in the Bio unit. She’ll be neck deep in Skoal and Sailor Jerry.”

Andrews sets my piece down on the side of her desk. “Your father then.”

“Driving in from Toronto. Still two hours away.”

“All right,” she says. “I’m writing an email to your mother. And you’ll go back to class for today and you’ll be amenable. Correct?” I swallow, nod. Dawn. She howls my blood.

Andrews bobs the painting. “You should know that this kind of work goes beyond distasteful. It’s—”

She gags for the word. Spits it like a hairball: “Obscene.” I think down towards my pocket, my phone. Its cobalt pulse. Dawn’s thumbs, pattering sweetly. Dawn saying that she gets it, she understands. Dawn calling me baby, Sapphy, Sappho. I tell Andrews that yes I understand why I’m being suspended for the rest of the day and tomorrow. I smile and nod and tell her of course I’ll be back on Monday with an attitude adjustment. When she tells me to go I ask her if she minds.

She straightens. “What is it?”

“I’m just wondering about Miss Briar. Any idea when she might be back?”

Andrews rubs her forehead, asks if that’s my business, if I’m even Miss Briar’s student this semester. “No.” I pause, stare up at the window, the parched jade. “But there’s Reach for the Top, and it’s just not the same with Mr. Arsenault as it is with Dawn.”

She squints at me, then over me. “Dawn? Does Miss Briar ask you to call her that?”

Shit. The window pulses, throbs. The room sours. “No. Sorry, no, I just—”

Andrews nods, slow. “She’s ill,” she says. “Is all I can say.” I cross the street and wait for Dad outside the waist-high jungle of the abandoned Libcor refinery, sun thumping down. Nothing from Dawn. Parched crabgrass, dandelions, a clutch of lupins, a few red trilliums. Names Dawn has taught me. On the rusted scrap of chain-link a grey cardinal alights, around him a coterie of white butterflies. An old rusted sign that reads, LIBCOR PROPERTY DO NOT ENTER.

I’m texting with Deedee—she actually said “attitude adjustment”— when the study about 2048 slides onto my phone. The sour clutch of the afternoon heat and Deedee’s talking plans for tomorrow night. Plans to go to the house of some old guy they know, a landscaper with a pool. I click through to the article, the author citing a Dalhousie study, CNN stating as if I needed to hear again that “the apocalypse is coming sooner than you think.”

DAD CALLS HIMSELF a shit man, which usually gets the desired eyebrow raise. Which invites his follow-up about his job managing the City of Toronto’s biggest water treatment facility. Then the story of how he started off working the boards at Streamline, ran poly broilers for twenty years. Hydrobonds, piston pumps, valve monkeys. What he generally does not mention is meeting Mum in the Bio unit. A polyurethane romance. The two of them making eyes across the hangar, bodies glowing as the dials whirled and spun. Mum sashaying through her checks, the lines above throbbing naphtha fat, dials whirring and wheeling. Dad was all set for retirement

when he started to talk to the union people. Resulting in a generous severance package and though Dad wasn’t ready to stop working he was ready to sever with Mum so he moved to Toronto. Crunched and sluiced and filtered his way to the top of the city’s new mansion of sewage. Meaning now he has to drive back to Sarnia to pick up his Alan Moore fan-girl child every second weekend. A three-hour drive with no traffic and there’s always traffic. Dad always says we’ve got to stop doing this, driving and flying. I know he’s right and I know we keep doing it.

IN THE PRIUS, AC on full and barely working, Dad asks about Mum, about home. I’m watching two women in the car behind us. A little red Kia. Twenties or thirties. The woman in the passenger seat has short hair and tattoos, a white T-shirt. She’s talking and talking, her hands pumping up and down. Bringing a coffee to her lips but never drinking from it because she’s too excited about what she’s saying. Smiling, then getting heated, turning to look at the other woman. They could be lovers or colleagues or friends but what matters is that they are together. Talking and feeling together in their rolling room of glass and steel.

“Mum’s great,” I say. “Planning another trip to Varadero so at least I’ll have the house to myself?” I don’t mention the graveyard of Coke bottles, one of them tipped over, leaking black sludge on the brown carpet.

Dad laughs into the windshield. “Heavy-duty Suzy,” he says. “‘Sleep when I’m dead.’”

We pass farm after farm and Dad tells me about sludge energy. Farms possible because of ancient swamps. The soil so rich Dawn says we should not be building houses here. China is smart enough to know that this is not a question of values anymore; it’s about survival, economically prudent. “Can you imagine pouring sewage into the ocean? All that wasted energy, precious rot?” Farm, farm, windmill. Watford, Strathroy, Middlesex. After Waterloo: malls and malls, roads and malls and underpasses. We roll and brake through the pavement belt. Dawn says it’s so big and dense you can see it from space.

Dawn. I don’t check my phone. Then I do.

Around Woodstock we get stuck behind a big white pickup, the driver drifting into the shoulder then the middle lane and back. His head tilted down just a little, just enough.

“Fucking texters,” Dad says. He looks at me, winks: “Whoops.” Outside London we see an SUV on fire across the median. Sam Cooke’s singing about teenage girls, Dad humming along, when we enter the sea of brake lights, the traffic gently slowing. There is no obstruction on our side of the highway but the vehicles sag as drivers turn their heads to look across the barrier. The silver SUV is fully immersed in a flame that flickers gaseous, liquid in the heat. There’s an ambulance and a fire truck, some police cars with their lights flashing. There’s one lane closed but the cars just pull around, squeeze through the obstruction, blast into the straightaway. For a moment I see the seats inside, each one a tower of flame. And then we’re gone, taking a corner. In the rear-view the SUV keeps burning, shards of heat through the shredded sky.

The world blurs and lurches by. Cineplex, Costco, water tower, Cineplex. Dad starts talking about jellyfish cities, whole cities powered by jellyfish, the leftover protein harvested for food. In the core of the city, Dad says, there would be a giant tub full of jellies, a throbbing furnace, and on the outside a great translucent computational wall. A kind of Siri membrane that would hold information in and filter the air. Dad chuckles, pleased with himself. “You could probably store information in the jellies’ cells.”

“So we’d steal all their energy? Make jellyfish slaves?” “No. I don’t know.”

Dad’s trying to think around this, wincing past the traffic to the parade of malls and gyms and suburbs when my phone chirps. Can’t be Dawn. Jenna or Mum forgetting where I am. As long as I don’t look there is still a possibility. But I’m looking, of course.

Everything all right stuck in intensive care no cause for alarm. I start to text back. Find myself gushing about Mum, about Sailor Jerry, about the Toyota and the wildfires and 2048. I delete it all. Go for a question: What happened?

I wait. Watch three blinking dots appear and vanish. No cause for alarm.

Maybe another angle: Should I come see you?

Or another: What happened?

Do you need help? Are you all right? Are you alone?

I’m coming.

Finally, she responds: Please don’t.

Malls spin by. Cinemas rise from the pavement—towering, monstrous, gone. Gas stations flash and flicker. SUVs burn, crash. Gasoline rises, pours. Traffic. More traffic. I stare at the phone. Put it in the glove compartment. Stare at the glove compartment.

“What’s wrong?” Dad asks.

Without thinking: “Dawn.”

“Who’s Dawn?”

“My English teacher from last semester.”

“Miss Briar? You text with a teacher?”

“She’s not teaching me anymore so it’s okay?”

Dad’s jaw goes tight. He thinks for a long time. “I’m not sure it is. What do you know about the legality?”

“Not much.”

Dad stares hard into the windshield. “Is this sexual?” “Ew.”

“Sorry—romantic?”

“No. No.” I stare at the console’s trove of gum wrappers and parking slips. Dad knows I’ve dated guys. He doesn’t know there are women too, but I know he’d be cool about it. “Do you believe me?”

Dad considers the skyline, then the dashboard. “I trust you.” I smile. Open the glove compartment, then close it. Dad smiles his you-can-talk-but-no-pressure smile. A sign announces that we’re entering the Green Belt as three lanes become four, then eight. I start telling him about Dawn, about 2048, about the strangled poisoned ocean, about the dead right whales in the St. Lawrence and the giraffes sliding onto the endangered species list while everyone clicks through to the next Kardashian meme. Dad takes my hand. Reaches over and puts his hand on my thigh and says baby, baby. Dad says my poor sweet girl. Dad says he’s so

so sorry and he just doesn’t know what else to say. He says he’s sorry but sometimes the world just feels broken and there’s nothing we can do but we have to hope, don’t we?

And then I’m telling him about Dawn, how I know all this because of her and she’s the only one who cares about what I think, how she called my art “sacred and profane” because she gets it, she really fucking gets it. Mrs. Jha will never get it and then I’m just saying her name, not sure what I’m sad about anymore, just babbling, “Dawn, Dawn, Dawn.”

Dad takes my hand, says again that he’s sorry, that it hurts, that he knows it hurts and he’s felt hurt like that before, that he feels awful for me and he doesn’t know if there’s anything more he can do.

The lake comes into view, flaunt of a million glinting waves. Cyclists lean over handlebars. Mothers push strollers. Windsurfers curl for the horizon.

DAD AND I WATCH Grizzly Man again and he makes me hot chocolate, goes out for Häagen-Dazs and hands me the bowl gently, with his eyes down. “Fair trade,” he says. I stand up and give him a long deep hug. “Thanks,” I tell him.

After the movie, Dad snores on the couch and I lie awake listening to the ghosts of the Queensway. There’s a sound barrier but it doesn’t work well enough, and from Dad’s fourth-floor apartment it makes the highway below look sci-fi and military. A moon base. If you listen close you can hear the cars through the glass. If you close your eyes, they sound like far-off people. People wailing, moaning. People that could have done more but never enough. Three years ago, when Dad and Mum broke up, I had a choice. I didn’t like Toronto, wasn’t big on Queen West or dreadlocked suburbanites or TTC tokens. Dad works too much anyway, and my friends are in Sarnia, and when I think of Elsewhere it’s a lot of places but it’s not the fourth floor of an Etobicoke condo building looking down onto the grey walls of the Queensway, the perpetual Christmas of throbbing tail lights.

Trying to sleep, I keep seeing the flame-crazed SUV. The steel frame beneath the enflamed roof, drops of liquid metal starting to form. The bare bones of the vehicle melting into the concrete.

DAD WAKES ME UP wagging his World’s Best Dad mug. He tells me sorry but he’s got to cut the weekend short. Surprise invite for a conference in California. Connections, a “gamechanger.” He winks: “Drop you off on the way.”

We stop at the office, which means me in the car staring at the plant. A huge concrete tower, squat red-brick buildings. I did a tour once, saw the squat tanks and the soil rows, the riddled white pipelines connecting it all. Beryllium-yellow cyclists wheel up Lakeshore, turn down to Leslie Spit. Watching them, I remember Dawn’s story about the old landfill of Front Street, how all the new waterfront is built on top of it. A whole lakeshore built on garbage. Past the plant, couples play volleyball on the man-made beach.

Dawn in her kitchen wearing her gardening gloves. Dawn putting on her apiary suit for me, naked underneath. The two of us giggling on the bed. Light slanting down. Dawn saying it would be better if I didn’t shave it. Dawn counting the freckles on my legs, walking her fingers up my thighs.

Dad taps the glass. Climbs in short of breath and hands me a travel mug with no lid. I look into the brown grunge he brews with the office French press. “Sludge energy,” he says, starting the car. “For me or you?”

He grins, pulls the wrong way onto Lakeshore. “Both.” I sip the murk, chew the grits into my teeth. I make Dad promise that he won’t tell Mum about the Dawn thing. He raises his palms. “Switzerland.” We drive on in silence, listen to radio ads for mattresses, McDonald’s, Virgin Mobile. We take the 403 back and once we’re past Hamilton I fall into a thin and lurching sleep.

WHEN MUM AND DAD were still together, we used to talk a lot about the whale shark migration, about going there as a family. Mum would thumb through hotel and car rental options and I would struggle just to imagine that you could swim with giants on the Ningaloo

Reef. Somewhere off the Yucatán Peninsula, there are whale sharks drifting through the frigid deeps. Creatures that are thirty feet long and weigh twenty tons. Creatures with three hundred rows of teeth. Pelagic filter feeders that dive to six thousand feet, descending into the midnight zone, where light has never spilled or seeped through the endless fathoms. Creatures quietly brooding in the depths while the human spasm storms and fizzles. Whale sharks diving through the coldest corridors of the ancient unseen sea.

GUTS ROTTEN FROM HUNGER and coffee, I walk through the emergency entrance, drift through the bright sliding doors. Dad dropped me across from the school, turned the corner as the city bus pulled up. Inside the hospital, the AC roars fast and cool. Coke machines wiggle and whir. I don’t check in, just roam the halls, nurses glancing strange.

I pass infants, pregnant women in wheelchairs, boys with broken legs. Everywhere white walls, sad sapped people. I peek into the doors of the sick, the elderly. I see a woman squatting fully naked, moaning like an airplane, the keg of her stomach flexing, rippling. I keep telling myself the hospital can’t be that big. No cause for alarm. No cause for alarm alarm alarm.

Her voice, her laugh. A laugh like summer thunder.

I pull back a curtain to find a fit nurse hovering beside Dawn’s bed. Dawn lies back, rigid, face and hands bandaged. Seeing me, the nurse pulls her hand back suddenly. Holds one dangling in the other. There are flowers all around the bed but what I see is Dawn’s red swollen skin. A horror of red up her neck, on her temples, her lips. Her eyes a drained green, the flesh bloated around them. The nurse looks at me hard. Holds my gaze and finally leaves.

Once we’re alone I whisper: “Dawn.”

She winces. “Please. Sorry but—” She looks towards the hallway. Red sores peek out from her bandages, jewel the mounds of her clavicles.

“Sorry. Would you like me to call you Miss Briar?”

“Don’t be dramatic. Should I call your mother?”

I laugh. “It’s not fair. You can’t just—”

“Sorry,” she hisses, holding up her bandaged hands. “It’s hard to communicate right now.” She changes her tone, speaks louder: “Did you want to discuss an assignment?”

“No.” I shake my head. “No no no no you don’t do that. You can’t do that to me this is fucked I deserve things.”

I reach for her hand but she pulls back.

“The bees,” I shout. “The fucking bees. I knew they were a bad idea, a terrible idea. I know the world needs pollinators. But not so close, not right there. Your poor, poor body.” I reach for her skin and she flinches again.

“Oh hon,” she says.

“Don’t hon me.”

“I’m sorry, Sapphire. What a mess. It was bad. It’s always been a bad idea.”

“So it’s over?”

She snorts. “Please. It was two afternoons.”

I glare at the red wreckage of her. “Just don’t tell me you didn’t feel it.”

She smiles, clucks. Nods like no, she didn’t. Like I’m so naive. Like I’ll understand when I’m older. She glances around the room, out into the hallway. “It’s my fault. I gave the wrong impression.” She’s using her teacher voice. “I hope you understand. I hope you’ll be discreet.”

“Okay.” I nod, spin, walk.

THE PROTEST IS ME and Jenna and Deedee. There’s another heat warning. Risk of smog in Sarnia. Children and the elderly and people with breathing issues advised to stay indoors. Kids amble back from lunch, join us for a vape, then head home or to class. Deedee is HOW DARE YOU and Jenna is NO PLANET B and I’m DYING SLOW 4 STATUS QUO. We sit on the stairs. We post bored selfies of ourselves with air filtration masks on, stacks jabbing up through the background. We look online at massive crowds in London and Berlin and it feels like we’re part of something. Something huge and distant. We put our phones away and it’s gone.

Dawn came back to school two weeks after I visited. She’s got some scarring around her neck, a little below her ears. She nods politely in the halls when I pass. I want her to ignore me, to shun me. I want her to scream, to flail her arms. Instead, her acid courtesy.

Jenna takes out a bottle of SPF 60. “Supposed to be forty-five with the humidex.”

“Fuck that.” Deedee snorts.

I scroll through my messages, wince at the seven I sent to Dawn. I stare at her response. Please don’t. I wonder what it meant, what she felt when she sent it, if ending it was a job thing or a for-your own-sake thing or if it had just gone sour for her.

Deedee starts talking about tonight. A pool party. A litre of Russian Prince. We watch the rugby girls churn into a bus. A cloud moves, and I adjust my sunglasses. “It’s not enough, is it?”

Deedee perks. “A litre of vodka?”

“No. This.” I wiggle my sign. “The non-violence, Greta, the whole shtick. It’s exhausting. Feels like you’re screaming into a toilet.”

Jenna and Deedee nod, eyes hazy. The rugby girls pull away, and reveal a cycling Dawn. Everything spandex. Her long legs. Hamstrings like salmon pulsing through the river. Dawn nods hello but doesn’t stop.

I see Deedee giving me the horse-eye. Then she touches my wrist. “What happened?”

“Nothing.”

“I know I chirp you,” she says. “But we can talk about it.” “No.” I stand up, turn towards home. “We really can’t.” Deedee tugs my shorts. “You’re coming tonight. I know this handsome Russian prince. Got to meet him.”

“I don’t know.”

As I’m walking away Jenna shouts, “Let’s make some memories!” Deedee: “And obliterate them!”

THE LAST TIME I saw her, Dawn and I had gone for a walk by the river. There were sailboats out, and motorboats. Across the river Port Huron winked and overhead transport trucks spun through the road in the sky. We looked down at the refineries and she told me again about the vegetal theory, how all that oil used to be life. Of course that got me onto the Swamp Thing comics, the merits of the Moore version over the Pasko and Collins. Dawn told me about the resonances she remembered from my essay on floronic monstrosity. Residues of Frankenstein’s creature, the Hulk, King Kong. I told her what I was always interested in was Moore’s mythology, the Parliament of Trees. The plant-protecting elementals that lived on this planet before humans. What happened, I explained, was synthesis. In the story, when a creature dies in flames it merges with the earth and joins the parliament. Hence Eyam, Bog Venus, and Swamp Knucker the dinosaur. Dawn went pensive, watching smoke bloom through the charcoal sky. “So what does that have to do with oil?” she said, and I didn’t like it because she was using her teacher voice but I knew what she meant before she said it. This oil-filled city, she said, this oil-thick land. It’s nothing but plant and animal bodies, biovegetal matter. Ancient life burning through this weeping wildfire world.

I WALK AROUND the school and in the back doors. I go through the basement, turn up a quiet hallway. I should not know she has a prep period, an empty classroom. I should not know that she keeps her spandex shorts on underneath her jeans, that there’s a loam of cooling sweat in the pout of her lower back as she sits on the ergonomic swivel chair she rolled on foot from Staples.

“Hello,” she says, straightening. She wears foundation now, though she doesn’t need to. No scar could mar her.

“Is there…” She sniffs. Takes a drink of pomegranate soy milk smoothie. Goes loud: “There’s no Reach for the Top today.” A tall boy skateboards through the blurry window, his hair like a blond cactus.

“I’m tired,” I tell her. “I can’t do this. I don’t think I can—” In the hallway, someone’s phone sings mournful autotune.

“Listen.” She puts her hand across the desk and leaves it there, looking me hard in the eye. The welts climb her forearms, red and cystic. Her eyes hold strong. Embers green and throbbing. “I need this. For me, for us. I need you to be strong, to keep it together. And maybe, after things quiet down.”

“Maybe what?”

She nods fast. Puts her hands in her knees and squeezes them together. Inhales without looking at me. “Maybe once you graduate.”

“Maybe what?”

The tall boy tries a kickflip, board scattering through the parking lot. Brakes screech. Dawn twirls her plastic throne.

I’M HOLDING PATHOS, stroking the cool green sunburst of her leaves, when Mum knocks on my bedroom door. I set the plant on the windowsill and open the door to Mum doing her three-drink doting face. Virgil’s calling from the next room. “Suze! Saltwater crocodiles!” I’m guessing also nudity and fear.

Mum walks in, sits on the bed. “What’s going on with your teacher?”

Dad. Fuck.

“Nothing.”

Rows of Alan Moore spines stare at us from my bookshelves. Cartoon Heather Locklear gazes sultry from the Return of Swamp Thing poster. Thighs peeking out of her flowy red dress. A thought bubble: Why can’t men be more like plants?

Mum inches closer, her weight on the bed sucking me into her. “You call your teacher Dawn? I found another old message from your principal.”

So potentially not Dad.

Virgil, howling: “Suze, you got to see this!” The volume on the TV goes up.

“Hold on,” Mum shouts to the door. Then she turns to me, half drunk and tender. “This Miss Briar. Is she the one filling your brain with all these swamp things?”

“Swamp Thing.”

“Whatever.” She breathes, steadies. Looks to the wall and back to me. “Should I be concerned?” “Sounds like you’d rather not.” “What?”

“Be concerned.”

Mum shrinks, then grows. Her face clenches. “Don’t get smart with me.” She skulks away muttering. I stay where I am, listening. My phone dings. Deedee. “Russian Prince? Dad got Leafs tickets.”

I walk by Virgil and Mum giggling on the couch, both holding Coke bottles, spitting into them in sync.

As I slip into my flats Mum growls, “Where you going?” I tell her a walk and see you tomorrow. She shouts something at the closing door but doesn’t rise from the couch.

ME AND DAWN were turning her compost heap. I held a pitchfork, which was as close as I wanted to get, but she was on her knees on the tarp we’d spread, hands deep in the sappy black. There were eggshells and hunks of banana peel, stray bits of white plastic, a throb of insects. From the far corner of the yard the bees buzzed around their hive. “The thing about compost,” Dawn was telling me, “is that it needs heat. The right mixture of greens and browns otherwise it’ll stagnate. You need it to heat up, help the rot kick in.” I told her about Moore’s mythology, the Parliament of Trees. The plant-protecting elementals that lived on this planet before humans. How when a creature died in flames it merged with the earth and joined the Parliament. She giggled like cute. Then she paused, put her nose close to the pile and sniffed. She leaned forward and took a fat handful, let some spill through her fingers, dusting the tarp. “Here,” she said, “touch it.” I didn’t want to. Approached cautiously, fearfully. Stood there panting before the rich sour smells, the drone of bee and street, the vibrations from the plants. I felt the world heating, seeking its origins, longing for the swamp. Dawn worked the ink-dark compost in her hands. Then, grinning wild, she smeared it over her cheeks and chin. “It’s rich,” she said, giddy. “So damn rich.” I knelt on the tarp and put a single finger into the dense earth, felt the astonishment of its heat. As I pulled my finger back

wet and warm, the black slime clung on. Laughing, Dawn came over, took my hand, plopped my brown slick finger into her mouth and sucked the rot off. “Attagirl,” she said, triumphant. Then she guided my hand deeper into the pile. Sunk it up to the wrist, then the forearm. I let it happen, let it feel good.

I WALK SLOW to Deedee’s through a mean-fisted heat. Over the river the sun’s waning, but its memory sings through the pavement. Mum texts to ask where I’m going. She needs to know for real. Deedee’s dad’s apartment is a dank oubliette of free weights and cracked leather couches. The walls are covered with fishing photos and hockey memorabilia, a signed Gretzky jersey. Deedee sits forward on the couch, flourishing the plastic bottle of Russian Prince.

“We call this the Feminine Hygiene Bloodstream Project.” She opens the bottle and starts to pour into a mixing bowl on the glass coffee table. Inside the bowl there are three unwrapped tampons. She mixes screwdrivers while we wait, watching the tampons bloat, the room sharp with vodka smell.

I stare at the near-empty bottle of Russian Prince, thinking through the plastic bottle and into the clear liquid, thinking about the corn or wheat or soy that made it. The sugars slowly breaking down, finally becoming ethanol. I think about refinement, about willowy plants drinking sunlight in Russian fields, fluid sintering in great steel vats and gradually clarifying. A corrosive astonishment of clear.

“Should we shoot some?”

I see a rifle, a wolf stalking the grain rows in a Russian field. Deedee wags a little silver shot glass. Jenna nods and Deedee fills the glass, flicking her black hair back as she drinks. We watch the bowl, stare into our phones. Jenna tells us about her cousins who’re going to be at the party, and the older guys with trucks. “It’s time,” Deedee says. She pulls a tampon out of the bowl, holds it dripping over her hand as she heads to the bathroom. She comes back grinning. “That’ll put some hair on your tits.” Jenna stands up. “Hair on your fucking clit.” She takes the bowl to the bathroom, brings it back to me with one tampon remaining.

“Your hygiene, Your Highness.”

I sit on the toilet next to the pebble-glassed sink, wondering if either of the other girls faked it. We stumble to the party, the strange tickle of the vodka perking through my bloodstream. We walk through the driveway and into the floodlit backyard. A sea of tattoos and flat-brimmed caps, of boys crushing tall cans. A bunch of deep fryers and plates of wings and cheese-filled mushrooms laid out on picnic tables next to full ashtrays. There are crews of older guys, beer-bellied plant workers.

An old guy with brown buck teeth smiles at us. “IDS please.” “Come on,” Deedee says. We clamber up the side of the raised pool and sit teetering on the edge of it, letting the warm water gush our ankles. Deedee sits beside an ogre of a hockey player who lets her bend into him for a few minutes before asking how old she is. The host comes around with a tray of LED-white shooters, calls them “Android Blood.”

I hold the pool tight, the booze whizzing through me faster and faster. Guys come up and talk to me and I smile back mean until they leave. I stagger to the spinning bathroom and pull the tampon out. Wait there clawing at peeling yellow tiles. The floor around the toilet a sticky yellow nimbus. I clutch at the tap, the room teetering, listing. I spill water on my arm and chest and then get some in my mouth, cue the hot relief of vomit.

I drink more water and emerge, zinging sober, to find the hockey ogre shouting, addressing the crowd. People are gathering around him. He’s peeling off his clothes, shouting about the river, about swimming to another country.

Deedee and Jenna trade glances. I can see that they want to. Someone shouts about the current. The current pulling south, into the river mouth. The currents beneath us, the currents in the pipeline, the currents, currents, occurrence.

On the walk down, in a crowd thick with tall cans and laughter and squealing girls, I fall to the back of the crowd thinking of the poison humming through me. Thinking of the closed office door. Of Dawn leaning over to look at my essay, her jeans, the feel of her thigh-flesh beneath them. Of how she ended it, how not to treat a

person. I get the secrecy thing, get that it’s complicated but wrong, still wrong, has to be wrong.

We approach the river, the rocky downtown beach where kayakers launch and swimmers cool their ankles by day. The stark light of the refinery plays on the black water as men peel their shirts, girls jumping one-legged, caught in their jeans. The hockey player sprints at the river fully naked and leaps out over the concrete blocks. When his head comes up you can see the full moon of his bald spot.

Deedee grabs me by the wrist. Drunk, swaying gently in the concrete. The strange thing is she’s smiling as she says it. “What happened anyway? With you and Dawn?”

I swallow. Think nothing.

An old photo of Dawn pinned on her corkboard, arm in arm with a man. Halloween, dressed as poison ivy. Green lipstick, green hair. Deedee’s eyes glow fierce. Her mascara chunking on her lashes. She grips my wrist harder. “You should do something. You’re not the only one.”

Jenna’s peeling her top off, then her shorts. Her butt cheeks catching moonlight as she stands knee-deep, shivering. Deedee close behind her and I’m not sure what else to do, not sure what I want so I swim. The hockey player is in the lead, his huge arms splashing reckless but pulling through strong. The water cool on me, the lights dancing, quivering.

I swim with friends and strangers, swim and swim, boats honking in the distance, refineries glowing on both sides of the river, the lights globbing over the water. Everyone hooting and shouting and then going quieter. Steady breathing. The odd gasp.

Deedee comes close and we stop for a moment, treading water. “You all right?”

I tell her yeah, I’m fine. I turn onto my back and watch the clouds whish and loaf through the dark sky. A few dull stars wink. There are voices calling, giggling, shouting. Quieter and quieter. When I turn back over I see them far away and shrinking. Arms wheeling and splashing into the blinking horizon. I see the closest person waving. I have to squint to see her but yes it’s Deedee and

then she’s shouting, shrill voice keening over the water, distant and desperate: “What are you waiting for?”

I pause there treading water in the open river. Halfway between two shores, two countries, two smouldering towns. And then I’m sinking, seal-like, into the darkness. Holding my breath and dropping, descending into the river’s black. I open my eyes, watch the lights play on the surface thinking into Deedee’s question. Into it and with it and through it.

Then I turn, pivot slowly. Reach out and pull.

I arrive panting at the beach, heave myself up. I find my shorts, my top, then mount the hill. A lost and lonely creature shedding water on the shore.

I’M WAITING OUTSIDE the office when Principal Andrews squeaks down the hall with a Booster Juice in her hand, GoodLife bag bouncing off her hip. It’s just her, no office staff yet. She’s got yoga pants on, bright sneakers.

In the past week, there was a super-flare, a major meltdown, and a death at the plant. Mum won’t tell me what’s going on, but I heard her muttering something about taxidermy. More and more, it feels like we’re hitting the edge of something. More and more, I picture the plants rusting out, sprouting tangles of vines, carbon steel Medusas crawling slowly into the river.

Principal Andrews squints, surprised. “Hi?”

I just look at her. The keys are shaky in her hands but she lets me in. Sets her gym bag in the corner and boots up the computer. The window has been dusted, and the jade plant is gone. Another hot day and the window is a throbbing yellow ember.

Andrews takes a sip of her smoothie and asks if there’s something she can do.

I take my phone out, scroll through the pictures. Hover on the one of a woman in an apiary suit.

She sighs. “Right.”

She tells me to send her the evidence.

“Right now?”

“Yes.”

“All of it?”

She gives me the email address and I scroll through my phone. Watch the colour in the windows change as I send her the messages and photos. She asks if I’m willing to provide a statement. I say yes and she tells me fine, that’s all for now. Then she gives me a look. An almost smile. A kind of lip-bit recognition.

On the way through the empty office I pass an unemptied garbage bin, see the jade plant sitting near the top. It looks parched and wilted, but salvageable. I reach in through the coffee cups and muffin wrappers, the milk-brown rills of yesterday’s double-double. In the black plastic pot the soil is dry and chalky, the roots impacted at the edges. Pulling it closer, I see that the plant is diseased, studded with gnarled black growths. Gently, I set it back. Lowering the pot into the plastic bag, I imagine the landfill it will settle in, the mound of VHS tapes and diapers and dog shit that will be its final garden. A heap of busted plastic at the end of an endless world.

OILGARCHS

26/06/2019. We are the N95 children. We are the purifiers, the carbon sinks. We see the world through polypropylene lenses, swim vinyl pools. We are weary with Oilgarchs—their wheezing desperation, their anaesthesia of greed. We expose the euphemism of acquisition, refuse the acid reign of Western law and knowing. We breathe the air of Vidal Street; we remember the evacuation of Bluewater Village; we trawl among the intersex fish. We remember the toxic blob, the spilled detergent, the skull-and-crossbones signs at the river’s fringe. We know about the land theft, the burial grounds quaking hydraulic, their chemical cathedral. We know about Health Canada refusing the studies. Zebra mussels shamming the water blue.

I’M THINKING OF the brain in the jar when Sapphire flips her newly bleached hair and sets the Ringwraith masks on the table. “I’ve identified the target,” she says. It’s an annual tradition to dine and dash on the last day of classes. Extra special on the last day of grade twelve. Jenna’s been calling it “the last last day.” The brain was found in a Mason jar in the cargo of a transport truck heading across Blue Water Bridge. They showed it on TV—blue hands holding the clear jar and inside the grey flub of brain wrapped in paper towel and bubble packing.

“Speak now,” Sapphire says, miming handgun. “Or forever hold your piece.”

“Target?” Jenna scoffs into her menu. “Don’t be dramatic.” “Target,” Sapphire repeats, brandishing the three masks and glaring at Jenna, at me. I watch out the window as a blue jay settles on a teenage maple. One of the city-planted trees, a black plastic cast around its trunk, leaves withering because it hasn’t rained in

weeks. Or because of the street behind it, snarling with motorbikes and pickup trucks.

“Who is it?” I ask.

“Not here.” Sapphire adjusts her T-shirt, cropped primly ragged. “We’re meeting the contact tomorrow.”

Jenna scoffs. “You mean your cousin?”

Sapphire snaps: “This is serious.”

“All right, Mission Impossible.”

The server skulks over and Sapphire asks for spicy tuna. I get cucumber maki. Jenna squints at the server: “What’s a dumpwing?” He tells her it’s like a cross between a dumpling and a chicken wing. Jenna stares back. Orders edamame and red curry. “There’s fusion,” Jenna says. “And then there’s confusion.” Plates arrive. Jenna stirs her curry, finds mostly potatoes. Sapphire worries her chopsticks, avoids Jenna’s eyes.

“Look,” Jenna says. “I’m out.”

Sapphire snorts, eyes the ceiling. “Of course.”

“I’m not sure you get what you’re doing. This stuff needs to be organized.”

“I’m tired of peaceful,” Sapphire says. “It’s not doing anything.” “This will be worse. All of this falls back on the community, on Aamjiwnaang.”

Before she says it, Sapphire glances at me for confirmation. “We’re allies.”

“Sure. Congratulations.”

Jenna pushes her chair back. “Deedee?” She looks at me like am I coming? I know I should, know she’s right. But I’m watching her leave.

“Fuck her,” Sapphire says. “Better this way. Cleaner. Right?” I slide the last piece of maki into my mouth. The tip of the chopstick comes out broken, rough. There’s no splinter, but I taste the tiny cut in my mouth, a fissure in the dark of me.

27/06/2019. We are sodden with sadness, beleaguered with elegy, sick with the thesaurus of useless hope. Change, emergency, crisis. Terminology does not change death. Does not change gas, CO2levels,

methane and benzene and hydrogen sulfide in our water, our brains, our air, our bones. Carbon taxes as if we might tithe ourselves free. We know that it’s not just us, not just here. We know that everyone lives in Chemical Valley. That there is always a refinery around the corner, a reactor in the closet. We live in an age of Militant Toxicity. Death by Chemical is mundane, banal. Where are our furies?

DAD GRUNTS AND creaks his weight bench, his neck flexed, meat-red. He swills Coors between reps, pretends not to glance at himself in the hall mirror. I’m reading about the target, Streamline’s V.P. Operations. He tweeted something tasteless about the toxic blob becoming the city’s mascot. Deleted it quickly but there are screenshots. Sapphire also sent me a note she wants to post after. “We need to claim it,” she said. “Or there’s no point.”

Dad rises for water and I stare out the window, thinking about the brain. Last week I saw a diver on local TV, a former navy officer who scubas under the bridge every day talking about the astonishing things he finds: a Petoskey stone net sinker from Stone Age fishing, a human skull from a wrecked nineteenth-century schooner.

Jenna calls from her auntie’s house. “You know we don’t, right?” I walk past Dad, trying not to hustle through the hall, down the steps, onto the sidewalk. “What?”

“‘We all live in Chemical Valley.’ That sounds like a Sapphire line.”

“Well. Is she wrong?”

“There are degrees, Deedee. There’s wealth. There’s privilege, proximity. There’s living next to the golf course and there’s having the plants in your fucking backyard, on your burial ground.”

On the front lawn of the building, squirrels chatter through a yellow shock of grass. The air is thick with the particular reek of refineries in summer. “Smells like money,” Dad likes to say.

Jenna sighs. “It sucks, all right. You know I love Sapphire, and I know she’s got her own shit to deal with. But she won’t do it without you.”

“We’re doing it.”

“Then do it right. You get in touch with the police. You need liaisons. You don’t hurt people. There are already people doing this work. You need to listen.”

“It’s all planned. We’re sending a message.”

“It won’t change anything.”

She hangs up, which is when I see the bones. In the stomped concrete, a mash of white, barely recognizable. The remnant of a claw, the crushed snarl of a tail. A rat decomposing, feeding the stone.

27/06/2019.

January 2011: Leviathan leaks undisclosed quantity of mercaptan. July 2013: Libcor spills 7,000 gallons of oil into the St. Clair River. December 2014: TJX spills 50 kilograms of ammonium carbonate. February 2015: Polymax spills 113 litres of corrosive materials. March 2016: Polymax spills 262 kilograms of ammonium nitrate. September 2016: Streamline spills 63 kilograms of benzene. March 2017: Polymax spills 331 kilograms of sulphides. September 2017: Libcor spills 104 kilograms of benzene/toluene xylene. April 2019: Libcor flare spills into gaseous ditch.

June 2019: Streamline leaks unknown quantity of hydrogen sulfide.

YOU GROW UP right angles. You grow up with Jenna, two toothy girls biking around the river’s fringe, regarding its twinkle, swan diving off the dock, learning every last word of The Little Mermaid. Together, you spend afternoons flopping around the house, tying towels around your legs, singing, “Poor Unfortunate Souls.” Your parents split up and your house becomes a mountain of leather and camo, a mausoleum of deer jerky. You go to your mother’s on weekends but she is a hollow mess of Gilmore Girls and YouTube, claiming she doesn’t log in or comment. Sapphire tells you her parents are divorced too. Tells you the pain is suburban and banal but no less real. You lie awake thinking of Fukushima. You lie awake doom-scrolling. You dream the burning Amazon, imagine ash and fireweed arriving on your doorstep in smiling boxes slashed with arrows. You and Sapphire and Jenna sit on the school steps on

Fridays, make signs that read WRECKED CONCILIATION and THE LAST CARE. You tunnel into calculus, burrow electrochemistry thinking med school, thinking scholarship, longing to believe you might change something, there might be things you could control. You apply to universities next to the ocean, get into all of them. You do the Toxic Tour, frequent protests, lean into the snug of slogans. “Keep the oil in the soil!” Megaphones outside the fences. Ten people, twenty. “Separate oil and state!” Peaceful protest after peaceful protest until finally Sapphire says enough. She says she can’t do it. She says something needs to break and there is a wild wind in her eyes and you think yes, you think of water, of the place where stone becomes sediment, where fear turns risk. You think of all the little cracks in the dam that fuse into flood.

28/06/2019. This is the work of the Oilgarchs themselves, the White Powerfuls who left us no choice. There is a term—tail gas—for the leftovers of oil refinery production. For what does not become gasoline or jet fuel or polyethylene, for what does not become your toothbrush, your chewing gum, the sunscreen rainbowing from your skin.

“THERE SHE IS.” Sapphire points down Christina towards Vidal, squat blocks of brooding plants and spires, the city within the city. The sun blares—another heat warning today. Lucy pulls up quiet in the Toyota pickup, a Frozen Thermos in her hands. “Water has memory,” she jokes as me and Sapphire cram into the graveyard of Scratch & Win tickets and crushed double-doubles, all of us squished in the front of the cab.

We pass Rainbow Park, pass the Aamjiwnaang burial ground. I look at the plant hunched on the other side it, think down to all those bodies, buzzing hydraulic. Jenna once told me that every city is a necropolis, built on its own bones. Lucy pulls the top off the Thermos, flashes the black muck, a slow coil of steam in the throat of the Thermos. In the rear-view, a train curls into the plants, behind it the river thrashing with sequined light. Sapphire hands me the Ringwraith mask, slides hers on, reaches for the Thermos.

“Look,” Lucy says. “I sympathize. I get you. Most of us don’t dream of valve monkeying.”

“But?”

Lucy points to the rear-view mirror, the refineries. “Sure about this?”

Sapphire thumbs her navel. Beneath it hangs the white tear of an old piercing gone wrong. “I’m a big girl,” she says.

I slip the mask on and Sapphire hands me the Thermos, the truck rolling slow among the offices. “There he is,” Sapphire hisses. She glares, and I follow her gaze. He’s stout, balding, trotting down the steps of the Streamline office building. Behind him, a thousand windows blare blue. He wears aviators and khakis, rummages for keys as he shuffles towards his vehicle: a grey pickup with a BABY ON BOARD bumper sticker, hockey sticks hooking out of the bed.

“Now,” Sapphire urges.

“What? I thought we were both—”

“He’s leaving,” Sapphire hisses.

I step out of the vehicle, stand on the sidewalk in the blare of heat and asphalt. A ghost shimmers out from the truck’s tailpipe, and I feel my world go light, moon-like. The cement wobbling, gooing into a swamp of liquid stone.

The target’s vehicle starts. When I tap on the window, he smiles kind, sweet, shows salesman teeth. “Do it,” Sapphire shouts, and a hot river sends through me as I fling my arm, release a slurp of black. For a moment I see his fear, grow giddy in the glee of it. The fear I was cradled in, that licked the wound of me. He steps on the gas and the vehicle lurches a few feet forward, then stops. The man is screaming, opening the truck door, slumping into the street.

“Oil pig,” Sapphire screams. “Gas giant!” And I’m running, a tumble of fear and thrill. Jumping in the cab and laughing, panting, heart cantering. “Holy shit,” Sapphire says. “You got him.” She takes my shoulder, shakes it proud. The tires squeal and screech as we approach the corner. In the rear-view, he kneels in the street, hands on his face, praying to the smoke-scarred sky. The pain comes before I see it: a black tear crawling down my knuckles.

28/06/2019. On his neck, near the clavicle, he bore a hooked black scar the size of a leech. The doctors said theophylline, montelukast, beta 2- agonist. Though the fluid mostly missed the face and did not enter the eye or other sensitive areas, doctors described edema, circumferential burns, the tourniquet effect of bitumen cooled and hardened on the skin. Yesterday’s incident on the front steps of the Streamline office on Vidal Street, Sarnia, was not the work of the Oilgarchs bloggers. Like tail gas, the events of today were an inevitable by-product of the Regime of Toxicity.

THOUGH THE BRAIN was not in the river, this is how you hold it in the swill of your mind—a jar nestled among the mussels, the lakeweed, the tossed needles and tires. The river is forty feet deep, more in some places, and it runs fast, all that lake squeezing into concrete watersheds, sending under its twinned tiara and down to Lake St. Clair. But the brain in the jar in the river is thoughtful, careful, waiting patient for the right solution of mercury and benzene to rust the lid just so. The perfect weft of current to tip the jar, pry its mouth and send this glob of lobe and blood vessel and grey matter floating among the crayfish and the mud puppies, the lost sunglasses and flip-flops, the walleye and smelt.

19/08/2019. The company media said the attack was random, an amateur-organized isolated incident. They were right—it was amateur. It was foolish. Everyone lives in Chemical Valley, but there are degrees. There is privilege, wealth, proximity. It can be hard to see this when you live in the throat of a dragon, but there are wrong ways to resist.

ME AND JENNA walk away from the Starbucks, cubes melting in our iced lattes. It’s the first time we’ve seen each other since the last day of school. A pigeon hobbles through a patch of stunned grass as we approach the river’s blue delirium. The twinned bands of the bridge arcing over it, trucks pulling their payloads into the U.S., the mirror city twinkling smokestacks and tail gas, smelling of money and sick.

It took a month for the hearing to happen, for the defendant to drop the charges, the judge to deem sufficient remorse. They never

linked Sapphire or her cousin, though they found suspicious searches on my computer. Online anonymity. Dark web. IP address encryption. The target, Martin Aucoin, didn’t lose his position as VP Operations. The company doubled down on their countermedia efforts. Sponsoring baseball tournaments. Saying community, reconciliation. Mr. Aucoin left the company, moved north on a severance package, decided not to press charges against the teenage girl who had shut down the blog and sent a personal apology. Much as I wish it was, the letter had said, the tragedy of oil is no executive’s fault. There is no Hitler to this Reich.

Jenna asks if I’m still planning on attending the Human Knowledge Factory. I laugh and tell her yeah, thumb the burn scar on my knuckles. A truck roars past, ersatz bull testicles wagging silver on the trailer hitch. She asks where I’ll go and I say somewhere next to the ocean, with good air.

We arrive at Point Edward, head towards the river’s ludicrous blue, our silence soaked with Sapphire—how she hasn’t apologized, how she’s moved to Toronto to be with her dad, how it’s all dissolving now. No other jumpers here yet so we climb over the guardrail, watch a rust-red lake freighter blare by, a pair of motorboats flanking. Overhead, the bridge catches sunlight as trucks brave the heat of August.

“When I was a girl I used to imagine it falling.”

Jenna fixes on me, so I explain. Point to the bridge and tell her how I’d look at the weight of the trucks and think of the bridge’s sheer implausibility. How does a thing like that become natural— ninety thousand tons of steel and asphalt hanging in the sky?

I squint up at the clouds, mine for strength. “Look,” I manage. “I’m sorry. You were right.”

“Always am,” she shouts, twirling into a flip, landing perfect, feet-first, then gone. I follow her into the water, its perfect pollution. I changed nothing, yet I am changed. I resolved nothing yet sometimes I still feel the rush of that man on his knees. The world revolves, dissolves, and I am swimming, treading the water’s cool as juggernauts climb the sky. Below, in the unseen murk, zebra mussels clump together, cling to rocks. In the mouths of those mussels,

threads of cilia sway and furl, ride the swish and bob of the current, feed the river blue.

CRUELTY

MONDAY

The thing about rodents, the exterminator tells her, is that they’re a lot like oil. Deepa holds the baby, staring into clouds of spray-foam insulation flung with mouse turds. Gabby reaches towards the turds and Deepa yanks her back into sidesaddle. The exterminator grins, his teeth square white suns, and repeats about mice, about oil. She has just told him about Dan, how he works in research at the Streamline plant. Something to do with catalysts. A trick an older married cousin taught her, years ago: whenever you feel the numb root of a distant want, speak your spouse’s name.

She asks what he means—rodents and oil—and he twirls a flashlight, says ubiquitous, invisible. “Just like how there’s pipelines all around you but you never see them.” He grins. “Same thing with the rodents.” He clucks, looks around the beams, the rafters, the spray-foam. “More mice in this city than people.”

Deepa sniffs, looks down at Gabby—her astronaut one-sie, the grime in her wrist-rolls, the squid-shaped splotch of crimson behind her right ear. Stork’s kiss.

“There are those we live with, and those that live among us.” The exterminator brandishes his flashlight. Slings it among the cobwebbed beams. Deepa swallows, rights herself, shifts the baby from hip to hip. The exterminator makes a kissy face, and Gabby laughs wetly.

Deepa swallows again. “She’s just started crawling. The other day I found a pellet mushed into the heel of her hand.” Deepa has been reading about hantavirus, electrical fires. Should he be wearing a mask? Should she? “Should I be concerned?”