by Amanda Leduc
School became another place for her to practise being alone. The stories she told herself on the playground were like the stories her father told her at night before bed; the stepsisters who cut off their toes so that they could wear the glass slipper, Hansel and Gretel with no happy ending.
“The witch has a crutch,” she said to her father. “Like the one I used to have.”
“But you don’t need the crutch anymore,” he told her. “And the witch was only pretending.” Then he told her about the mermaid who drowned herself in the sea.
“Stop telling her those stories,” her mother would say. Her mother, who had fallen in love with a dark-haired boy who worked outside and sang to trees. They were older now, with bills and a house and a child. No more romantic nights beneath the stars for them. Most days she felt foolish when she remembered who they used to be.
In the city, it was easier for Heather’s mother to pretend that Heather’s father was merely eccentric. He might go for long walks at night; he might go closer to the mountain than anyone was supposed to go. His whole family had been like that—dreamers, fantasists, people who told you a good story but forgot to put food on the table. In the city this could all be kept secret; that was the point of being city dwellers now, not outcasts who lived in a strange house under the mountain. He could tend the municipal gardens. She could teach at the school.
“Stop telling her things that are sad,” Heather’s mother would say. “Heaven knows she gets enough of that already.”
But Heather wasn’t sad; not really. The world was deep and dark and wonderful. Sometimes, like when she was at school, she did not like to be in it, and sometimes she did cry, but that was okay. Her father made it okay.
At night he went for long walks through the fields close to the mountain, sometimes for hours, always alone. He rarely slept. His fingernails were almost always black with dirt, but his hands were lovely—strong hands that tamed the flowers on the city boulevard as easily as they coaxed colour from the gardens at their house. He talked to the flowers and sometimes, he told Heather, they talked back. It had been so long since he’d been unhappy that Heather forgot that he’d ever been sad.
It was good, the doctors told her mother, to indulge him from time to time. If he was happy, let him be happy. Let him believe stories were true.
“One day you’ll come walk with me too,” he told Heather when she was ten. “We just need to wait until you’re a little older, Heather-Feather, and a little stronger. That’s all.”
She grew; her legs grew too, though her right leg remained shorter than the left. She was not able to do all of the things that the other kids could do—she couldn’t run as fast, she was a tentative climber—but to keep him hoping, she told her father stories of the games they played at school, the hikes the kids took in the city parks. I came in third in the race in gym today.
She kept the stories that he told her close, and thought about him walking far and wide under the moon. Once upon a time there were twelve princesses who danced late into the night. Once upon a time there were foxes who could talk, and witches who lived in the woods and granted wishes if you were brave enough to find them. They were only stories, yes, but wasn’t it nice to imagine a world that had so much dancing? Wasn’t it nice to imagine a world where mermaids were real, where she might win a race, where maybe one day it wouldn’t be difficult to walk a straight line?
Sometimes, if she was lucky, her father took her out into the city parks at night, and together they counted the stars. Three billion, one hundred and twenty-six million, four hundred and twenty-five thousand and one. They were like snowflakes, he told her. No two were the same. She carried the words inside her heart.
Then he died, and she didn’t have words anymore.
* * *
The survivors gather in another of the nearby houses, closer to the wreckage of the hospital. This one is larger, and there are no burned bodies in the backyard. They shuffle in and collapse on the couches, on the floor. Someone picks up the cordless phone beside the couch and dials 911 and nothing happens. There is no dial tone.
“So the TV stations and the cell towers are out. It can’t be everything. Can it?” a young girl says. Eighteen, maybe nineteen, something like that. Her hair is white-blonde and choppy, her Doc Martens boots just like the ones Heather wore as a teen.
“If the stations are out,” Heather says, “it’s because the satellites are out.”
“Maybe it was just our stations, though. Our satellites. Maybe other cities are okay?”
“If our own satellites are out,” Heather says, gently, “this isn’t the only place where this has happened.” She watches the man standing beside B take all of this in. Watches him remember that yes, there are other places, there’s an entire rest of the world. Surely the rest of the world is okay. Surely this was just us—one catastrophe, contained.
She closes her eyes and sees the large crater, looks down inside, sees the hunk of rock that’s even now cooling and fusing hard to the dirt. The pictures in her mind tumble fast—fiery rocks in other cities, in the oceans, across the continent.
“The whole world is burning,” she says. Her voice is low, but they hear her.
“What do you mean, the whole world?” the man shouts.
The blonde girl has gone rigid. “How do you know?”
Because I’m just like my father, she wants to say, only that isn’t right. Everyone thought he was crazy too.
How to explain it? It was just there after she came down from the mountain alone those years ago: these flashes in her head of things that would happen in other parts of the world. Some kind of connection that hadn’t been there before.
The kids had called her crazy at school after it happened, after he fell. Crazy. Just like your fucking dad.
“I don’t, not really,” she lies now. “Maybe that’s just how it all feels.”
Another man goes to the TV in this new house and kneels down in front of it, reaches forward to the screen as though sending out a prayer. He presses the button—nothing.
“It’s a digital TV,” Heather says, weary. “No satellites, remember?” Everyone else is silent, looking at the floor.
“Does anyone have a radio?” B asks. Several people reach for their phones.
“He means a radio that isn’t digital.” She looks at B. “What about the cars outside?” she says.
B hands her the baby—Greta? No, Jilly, she’s been holding Greta this whole time. She follows B outside, walking carefully, trying not to notice how he glances back at her, nervous. She thinks about her slippers—burned away, perhaps, or buried under how many cubic tonnes of hospital rubble.
The car in the driveway—it’s a minivan, with animal crackers scattered over the back seat—is locked, but B goes back into the house and fetches a wire hanger. He straightens it, then shimmies it down through the window.
“Couldn’t find the keys,” he says when he sees her staring.
“I didn’t know you could do that.”
He looks up as the lock clicks open, manages to grin at her. “I’m surprised I even remembered.”
He hot-wires the ignition, then turns the radio dial through static. Heather walks around to the passenger side and climbs in beside him. When a voice breaks through, they both jump.
“Satellites have gone dark. Police are asking everyone to stay calm. Evacuation orders—”
“Evacuation orders?” B mutters. “Evacuation where?”
“It was a meteor shower.” It’s the blonde girl again, at the passenger window. She kicks at the rubble scattered over the ground. “That’s what they’re saying.” She points down the street to another car, where a group of people huddle around an open door. That radio is louder. State of emergency, she hears. State of emergency.
It sounds ridiculous, all of it, like something from a movie. But the pictures that run thro
ugh her head will not stop. Cities that are burning. Faces locked in screams. The voices over the radio confirm what she already knows. No one has heard from the other side of the world in hours.
“How long do you think we were in the basement?” Heather asks as she slides back out of the car.
The blonde girl shrugs. “Hours? I’m not sure.”
“It’s after six,” B says. “Someone had an analog watch. We were under the hospital for most of the day.”
Heather thinks then of her mother, who is already dead—who did not live to see the twins or this. Four months ago—alone in her bed, her heart just giving out. A peaceful death, if unexpected. A murmur, the doctors told Heather after it happened. Undiagnosed her whole life.
Heather hadn’t cried. She didn’t cry when the girls were born and she isn’t crying now, even as the people around her wail anew at the scale of the disaster. Instead she walks across the sidewalk, then stands there for a moment, looking at the dusty grass. Soon B is beside her, reaching for the girls.
She lets him take them, then sits carefully down on the ground. When she is sitting and stable, he hands the twins back to her, one by one. She unlatches her bra beneath the hospital gown and shifts Greta so her tiny mouth latches on. It still hurts. B goes back to the car—he’s found a better frequency, less static. The blonde girl stands in front of her. When Heather looks up, she sees the mountain looming large over her shoulder.
The girl squats and reaches out to touch Jilly’s head. “What are their names?” she says.
“Jilly. And this one’s Greta.”
“I love their red hair. What’s your name?”
“Heather.”
“Heather. I’m Elyse.” She sits and wraps her arms around her knees.
Greta stops nursing and Heather shifts the baby to her shoulder to burp her, the baby’s bright head lolling softly into the dip of her neck. They are so calm, her babies. Already they seem older than they are. “So you were in the hospital too.”
Elyse nods. “My friend just had a lung transplant. She was hooked up to a machine.” She clears her throat, digs the toe of one Doc Martens into the dirt. “Her mum was there too. She wouldn’t leave the room.”
Heather thinks about this.
“I’m supposed to have the same surgery,” Elyse whispers. “I was supposed to go into the hospital next month. But what’s going to happen now? There is no hospital.”
Greta burps and Heather lays her back down in her lap, then picks Jilly up. After she latches on, Heather lays a hand on Elyse’s shoulder and squeezes.
Elyse seems very young now. “Did you hurt your foot? When everyone was running to the basement?”
Heather blinks at this, and then remembers. “No,” she says. “That’s just how I walk.”
“I’m sorry,” Elyse says, instantly. “I didn’t mean—”
“It’s okay.”
Her eyes follow Heather’s, up to the mountain. “Yanna and I were going to hike the mountain after we’d both recovered from our surgeries,” Elyse says. “The doctors said we wouldn’t be able to do it and we wanted to prove them wrong.”
“They don’t let people up the mountain.” A phrase she’s learned by rote. “It isn’t safe.”
“I know,” Elyse says. “I’ve heard the stories too.”
A faint siren peals into the air and everyone falls silent—Heather, Elyse, B over by the radio, the group near the other car. The sound grows, leaps from the air and burrows deep into their ears and hearts, their veins, their memories. Jilly pulls away from Heather’s breast and starts to cry; Heather covers her ears and Elyse covers Greta’s. Heather and Elyse press their foreheads together, smell the sour reek of each other’s fear. The siren cannot be any louder than this but still it comes.
Then there is a great shudder of tiles on pavement and the siren stops. They look up to see two fire trucks and an ambulance in the middle of the street, people spilling out like ants from the top of a hill. Their clothes stained and dirty, their faces bloody and bruised. They stare at the wreckage where the hospital used to be and despair leaks out over their faces. Who knows where they’ve come from, but clearly they were hoping that this city would be different. Their faces reveal more than the radio news—destruction behind them, wherever they’ve been, and destruction in front of them now.
Heather looks up at the mountain, and again it tells her nothing.
A dark-haired, dark-skinned woman steps out of the driver’s seat of the ambulance, wearing scrubs. Her eyes are brown and bright, slightly frantic. She’s fine-boned, like a bird—a small brown sparrow—but when she speaks she seems much taller. “Who’s in charge here?”
“No one,” B replies. Heather almost laughs. He walks over to her after he speaks, bends down to pick Greta up and rests her against his shoulder.
They are parents, Heather realizes again. She’s a mother.
The woman nods. Another woman, tall and blonde, has climbed down from the passenger side of the ambulance and comes to stand beside her. “Is the whole hospital gone? Are there salvageable supplies?” She raises her voice and Heather watches little shimmers of movement around them as people step toward her, hope flaring in their eyes. Maybe she knows. Maybe she understands what’s going on.
“How many survivors?” the dark-haired woman calls out.
“We don’t know,” B says. “We’ve only just come out of shelter.”
She looks at him with something like confusion in her face, which quickly softens into sadness. “We’ve been driving for hours,” she says. “The whole day. There are fires everywhere.”
Everywhere. They already know this, but still the shock rolls through them like a wave. Heather finds herself staring at the ground. What comes next? She has no idea. There are no flashes to tell her.
Then two scuffed greyish runners appear in front of her, peeking out from dark-blue scrubs. The small woman kneels and places a delicate brown hand—the nails blunt, the fingers slender—on Jilly’s head. The girls are both sleeping now, incredibly.
“Are they all right?” she asks.
Heather nods.
“My name is Tasha.” The woman peers into Heather’s face. “Are you all right?”
Heather laughs for real this time—sudden, hysterical. “Are you a doctor?”
“Yes.” The other woman sits back on her heels. Her hand feels warm and dry on Heather’s forehead, but at her touch, Heather sees a darkened room, hears weeping so loud it’s almost a scream. Her nostrils fill with smoke.
“What happened?” Heather whispers. “What happened in that other fire?”
Tasha pulls away as though burned. She stays crouched for a moment, opens her mouth to speak and then closes it. After another moment, she stands, wipes her hands against her scrubs, and moves on. She touches other faces, asks everyone’s name.
Heather sits on the curb until B takes the girls from her. He leads her back into the second house, where they find a spot on the living room floor, bedding down among strangers with blankets from somewhere far away.
She sleeps beside B, the girls snuggled between them, but she is not there. She is on the mountain. Only clouds and looming green ahead of her.
He isn’t there. She cannot see him no matter where she looks.
MOTHER FOX
Once there was a fox on the mountain, and she wanted babies more than anything else in the world. But she didn’t know how to get them, and so she asked the mountain.
The mountain told her, You must go down off the mountain and into the grasslands where the sun shines and casts no shadow. Once there, find a rock and pry it up from its resting place so that the earth beneath the rock sees the sun for the first time. Say to the rock: I am ready to bring you into the world now, and turn in two circles. If it thinks you deserve them, the rock will give you your babies.
The rock doesn
’t know who I am, the fox said.
Everyone knows who you are, said the mountain. You’re the Fox. You have red hair and a long red tail. The trees recognize you. The ground knows the way your footsteps feel different than the Deer’s. The rock will know you too.
But how will the rock know I deserve babies? the fox asked. How will it know I am worthy?
To this, the mountain made no answer.
The fox went down the mountain anyway. She was quick and light and small, and knew how to hide when larger creatures—bears, a wolf, an orange-brown coyote that grinned at her through the trees—got in her way. She found the grasslands with no trouble. She even found a rock. After she lifted it, she turned herself in two careful circles, then sat and spoke the words.
I am ready to bring you into the world now.
But when the fox looked down at the earth beneath the rock, she saw only dirt and worms. The fox was confused. There was no mountain around to tell her what to do next. So she walked farther through the grasses and found another rock and lifted it. She turned herself in two more careful circles and spoke the words again.
I am ready to bring you into the world now.
Again, only dirt and worms.
The fox, puzzled, went back to the first rock. She reached out a paw and touched it. It was warm, which surprised her; she’d never touched warm rock before.
The sun warms me, the rock said. It didn’t actually speak, but the fox heard it anyway. The sun warms rocks differently on the mountain.
I am ready to bring you into the world now, the fox said again, thinking that perhaps the rock hadn’t heard her.
I know, the rock said. The babies were waiting for you when you turned me over.
But, the fox said, not understanding, I saw only dirt and worms.
Can’t worms also be babies? the rock said. Don’t they also deserve to be in the world?
I don’t know anything about worms, the fox said. I don’t know what they eat. I don’t know how to keep them safe.
