“With all due respect, Shirley Short, go fuck yourself.”

With a smile and a curtsey, out the door I go. To practise being motherless. Pregnant. And dying.

With the full moon throwing a sallow light across the icy whiteness of the yard, I bundle myself up in my snow pants, moon boots, and parka and go outside to sit in the snow. I plunk myself down just a few paces from the trailer and stare up at the pale old orb in the sky, surrounded by distant stars. I draw the frigid February night deep into my lungs and hold it there before sending a sigh’s worth of my own exhausted, stagnant breath back into the world. As if the world needs more exhausted, stagnant hot air. I keep trying to suck in some peace, some relief. But all I get is cold and uncomfortable. With snot and tears frozen to my face.

Despite my broken heart and murky mind, it occurs to me that the path of least resistance is being fully illuminated by this moon and all the other cold, hard, glaring realities that hang over my head now. My mother is dead. My friends are fucked. My days are numbered. I’m about to be homeless, and I got knocked up by a disabled deadbeat drug dealer. Dave suddenly looks like a knight in shining armour.

He will give me a good-enough love. He’ll hire some top-notch professionals to care for me when I’m blind and drooling and pissing my pants. Plus, Dave would be a stable steward of my little walking, talking legacy. Poor bastard always wanted to have a kid. I was always ambivalent, at best. Dave would make sure that this kid gets into the best daycare, the best alternative arts-based school, the best clothing and footwear. He would tell my child warm, charming stories about me without using the words shitfaced or arseholes or sur-fucking-prise. And he would most certainly be on board for having my ashes mashed into a multi-faceted gem of a memory after I die. Nobody around here thought getting Gem-Mortalized was as awesome as I did. When I told Mama that’s what I wanted, she scoffed and said, “Oh well, pardon me, Your Highness.” Even The Wendigo said it was creepy.

If I were inclined to believe that the almighty Universe is preoccupied with sending middle-aged, lower-middle-class white ladies divine cosmic messages about what they should or should not be doing with their existence, I might interpret the events of late as a series of none too subtle signs that my plan to live and die on this island was, in fact, a bad one.

You made your bed, now lie in it! I can almost hear Mama say. Almost. Except I can’t hear anything over the rumble of the rig coming up the driveway.

Dulcie Cooper is almost a hundred years old, but she plows her old car up the dark, snow-drifted road like a reckless seventeen-year-old, and wobbles her old bones up the walkway, carrying a pan of squares, a quart of milk, and an envelope from the Drummond Presbyterian Ladies’ Auxiliary. I don’t know much about Dulcie Cooper except that she’s old as dirt and drives like a nut. I didn’t know there was a Drummond Presbyterian Ladies’ Auxiliary. And I’m not going to eat the squares. But I do need milk for tea, and when I open the envelope, I nearly shit. Inside, there’s two thousand dollars, cash. Which, as I realize all too quickly, is enough for a one-way first-class ticket back to Toronto. The Universe is not whispering to me. It’s screaming like a banshee.