Headwaters

A story in a single sentence:

Shaky after two days' release from the psych ward, she wants to "put it all behind her," as the genial yet guarded advice had gone, so she takes the Skytrain to go ask about rental costs at a nearby Enterprise office whose bleak geometry squats in a grim patch of stilted highways, loose rubble, and territorial chain link somewhere near where Vancouver borders Burnaby, but she gets cold feet at Renfrew Station, turns around and scurries back to the library near her home on East Pender, where she searches Google Maps and decides Swift Current is the loveliest place name she's ever heard, especially in contrast to that of its province, which is all brittle stalks and wheat sheaf angles (Sask-atch-ew-an), and wants to visit for that reason alone—Swift Current, that is; a name that evokes homecoming sockeye vigorous and sleek as distance runners' quadriceps—although the furthest she's ever driven was Vancouver to Hope, ironically when she'd been at her least hopeful, and even then she'd had a tire blow somewhere near Yarrow, nearly killing her, and the towtruck and repair costs had been so high she'd had to turn back, out by many dollars and by even more self-worth, given all her struggles with what some might call mental health issues yet she chooses to term emotional difficulties, since the former still contains a tiny jab of stigma, and dammit, it's hardly her fault, given her early life with Uncle Giorgio and then those grey-stuccoed group homes and weary, spiteful foster parents, let alone the haunted jaundiced nightscape of the Downtown Eastside and her disaster-recipe life with Gunther, he of the one-part lavish confectionary largesse and two-parts savage fists, but she is free now, aside from the medication she needs to remember, while something about Swift Current calls and calls like babbling headwaters to a downstream eddy, urging her to spawn, to take this step that might mark a new chapter in a thus-far chiefly sorrowful tale, one charged with the possibility of something other than grim nights shivering with cold or dread and warmer nights sleepless with mosquitoes or regret, so she finds somewhere online that calculates the cost of gasoline, which comes to a little over a couple hundred bucks for the three thousand kilometre round trip, and she feels a heartsurge of joy until she sees the carbon footprint she'll be leaving—one thousand three hundred and fifty pounds, to be exact—which sounds so appalling she immediately scratches out this new life at its source—indeed, guilt and eroded morale have long perfected her inner Scratch 'n Lose—erasing the evocative names of Shuswap and Salmon Arm, Golden and Banff, Dead Man's Flats and Medicine Hat from a future that might have held something other than the pitiless tidal ebb of try then turn back, try then turn back, the balance of which has always seemed impossibly, monstrously weighted.

Discount Noah

He knew a time approached when it might behoove a man to make good his escape from this tarnished jewel of a world. And for this, he began to build his pod from molded plastics and bright chrome, bringing to bear skills he'd learned in his youth. Granted, he favored natural materials, but he was a carpenter in a world bereft of wood.

"Never did Jesus much good, either," he said to Maisie Ellen, who stopped by now and again to chat.

"What's that now?"

"His trade, I mean."

"Stuff and nonsense."

He loved this part. Fastening and honing and sanding. Making things fit. Smoothing and fashioning. The backs of his hands were dry and creased as Martian valleys, all tawny cliffs and canyons fanned with deep rubicund gulches. Life, he thought, is mostly about elaborating.

So he elaborated.

"Jesus hisself, I'm sayin'. A carpenter who ended up nailed to two hunks of wood. Should probably have stuck to fishing. Though even then they probably woulda poked a hook through his damn lip and hoisted him over all them rubberneckers."

"He was a fisher of men, not a fisherman. Different thing entirely, you old heathen."

"Yeah, well."

She regarded him as he worked. He noticed.

"What? Woman, you look like you've been chewin' a lemon soaked in vinegar."

"You really think you can save your scrawny heretic posterior while billions pass from this tired old world?"

"Sure, maybe. Why not? Someone's gotta. Happened once before."

"You heard the saying about the only two things certain in life, right?"

"Yeah."

"Tell me."

He put down his tools and gave her eye contact. "Death and taxes."

"Uh-huh."

The faded charcoal arch of her brow forced him to elaborate again.

"Figure if I cheat the first, the other ain't gonna count for all that much. Kind of a twofer."

"Well, good luck with that, Major Tom. Me, I'm happy to keep canning fruit and sweeping away cobwebs until the good lord calls his sheep home."

"Always been more partial to goats myself. More gumption. And I prefer to take my chances up there." He peered into a dark void scattered with bright rainfall diamonds on some vast invisible dome. 

Had a lifetime of such mysteries. Getting tired now.

"You old fool. Up there's where I'm fixin' to go too. Only not in some contraption built outta duct tape, binder twine, and dollar-store gimcrackery, neither."

At this he laughed long into the night, while the two men observing through one-way glass glanced at each other; one shrugged and the other shook his head so briefly it might have been a tic.

"So convincing I could almost hear the other party's words."

"Yeah. He's in deep, poor old fella. We need to up his dose, I'm afraid."

Back in the room, the old man paced and chuckled to himself, rubbing his rough hands together and imagining to what glittering enchantments, what unspeakable radiance, the arc of his ark might soon transport him.