Well. That about brings us up to now. It’s around noon and Ava’s not home yet and Gemma is sitting on the bottle-green couch with the shade raised in front of the number three highway, a thin slice of grey under after-rain clouds, carrying this corner of the world through green and yellow and light. She’s a little buzzed off two beers from Trav’s and Olive is in her room. Gemma knows she has something special, a pass she cannot waste. Peace fills every pore of her at once, as if she’d stepped out the window to walk on the sky and a wind of stardust had swirled through her body and shot her higher, like she was nothing, nothing, nothing.

Blackouts are gun-toting enemies fused to one’s back, pale, disinterested monsters impassive to the ruin of ricochet. Can they ever surprise with unintentional kindness? Make sufficient the evil of the day? A gift untraceable to either heaven or hell, a glowing orb that can’t be trusted, but neither can it be refused? Gemma feels like maybe she can trust these two. She’ll find out if that’s the case. She’ll figure it out. She is a woman about to attempt to be alive for the millionth fucking time.

Gemma presses her nose to the window while Olive blinks in and out of sleep while Ava and Holly laugh at a workstation while a pocket universe unspools. Gemma had that only partway right. It begins as a universe as hopeful and possible as any other. It will quietly weave its own fence posts, it will discover its rhythm and order.

FLOODWAY

I was out front of the Toad after closing time with a bunch of other weirdos. I started talking with this short guy with curly hair. “You want to get a king can?” he said. His name was Owen. “I’m not from here,” he kept saying. “I grew up in a small town.” Owen was from Îledes-Chênes. He was pretty, and he was nice without being attentive, and I liked that about him.

We were drinking our last one in the parking lot when Owen’s friends drove by. “We’re going to see the meteor shower! Out by the floodway, wanna come?”

In 1950, the Red River catastrophically overflowed. It destroyed four of Winnipeg’s bridges, blanketing the valley to the south. In the years after, they built the floodway: a long, giant drainage culvert dug into the side of the prairie. It sends the river away from the city when it floods. They called it Duff’s Ditch after Duff Roblin, the premier, and my dad always said they voted him out ASAP because of how much money it cost. My dad loved to say that, but I looked it up and it wasn’t true. The guy was re-elected twice.

To answer Owen’s friends, I did want to go to the floodway, yes. “I can get my dad’s car. I’ve got keys,” I said to Owen. “We can follow them.”