“Yeah, lucky me,” I say.

“May I give you something else that may be of benefit?” he says. Without waiting for an answer he does a slo-mo rummage through the folds of his robe and pulls out a ­pocket-sized book and a little black business card emblazoned with a white lotus flower. “My dear friend and colleague. You might find her offerings useful on your path.” He presses the business card into my palm. “And this.” He extends a tiny book with an overexposed picture of his own handsomely beatific face on the cover toward me, “is my first book.” I look at the title, Living and Dying: You’re Doing it Wrong.

“Gee, thanks,” I say.

He smiles, does a weird little half bow, and shuffles off to the station wagon, chased by a wave of cloudy white curls and electric blue beads that only I can see.

I close my eyes to steady them as he drives away, then reset my vision by reading the card pressed into my palm: “Wendy MacDermid, Holistic Death Doula & Facilitator for Crann Na Beatha Eco-Burial Innovations.”

The Wendigo.

In Native American myth, the Wendigo is a gaunt, ­holloweyed humanesque monster with a grotesque odour and a taste for human flesh. At Loch Bhreagh Rural High School, The Wendigo was a skeletal girl a grade behind me, who smelled like BO and gnawed at the skin around her fingernails until it bled. From her Down North rumoured to be part-something-exotic mother, she’d inherited charcoal black hair and eyes and a stare that drilled holes in souls. And from her American backwoods, crunchy granola, hippy father — who worked as both a veterinarian and a pet cemetery keeper — she got a pasty complexion, an obsession with dead animals, and a nerve-jangling laugh that was seldom contained by decorum. Rumour also had it that she collected roadkill from the side of the highway, and once ate a raccoon eyeball. All I know for sure is that she submitted a heap of “artistic” photos of the grade ten biology class fetal pig dissections to the yearbook that year. She also rode the same bus as Allie. By all accounts, Wendigo Wendy was a weirdo. Judging by her business card, she still is.

I stuff the card in my pocket, plunk my arse down at a snow-covered picnic table, stare out at the grey expansiveness of the horizon, and decide that “horizon” must be Latin for “gaping maw of nothingness.” I think about dying. About heavens and hells and the spaces between. About last breaths and good deaths and what it will feel like to slip from existence. For a minute or ten, I even wonder what it might feel like to drown. Or freeze to death. I hear both are pretty peaceful, once you get to a certain point. This is what Hottie McMonk Pants and my fake friend Ami and every other Woo Woo Guru hack would call “contemplation,” I guess. Maybe the Universe is speaking to me. Maybe I met Hottie McMonk Pants here today for a reason. Maybe that reason was so he could give my dumb ass a ride home, so I wouldn’t have to trek through the snow in my lime-green parka and silver moon boots.