Cover

Dedication

For my mother

Part 1

1

Agents search me at the Canadian border. Of course they do, those fascists.

What exactly is suspicious about a woman traveling alone by bus from Detroit and into Canada with no luggage, I ask you?

Well, put that way, maybe it’s fair, but an entire bus is held up while the border agents in their ill-fitting uniforms conduct a physical search of my person and ask me questions verging on the intimate. Intimacy and I aren’t well acquainted, so the questioning stalls for some time.

“How long were you in the United States?” the female agent asks again, starting from the beginning. She’s likely doing this for the benefit of her supervisor, who has decided to join the party. Though the woman is older, they both look like poster children for the SS, with their blond good looks and their belief in harassing citizens of the country they’re supposed to be guarding.

I tell them what they want to know, even though the information is stamped right there in my passport. My voice breaks from the cold. It’s freezing, even inside the checkpoint. Raindrops spatter the windows, and outside I can see the wind kicking up fallen leaves. Sending them dancing. The damp and the gray remind me of Vancouver, my city, but the biting cold tells me I’m far from home.

“And what was the purpose of your trip?” she asks.

I shake myself back to the present and try to focus. But it’s difficult. We’ve been through all this before. This is how they get you: a constant stream of repetition until you change your story out of sheer boredom.

But I’ve been questioned by fascists before, and I know their game.

“My father grew up in Detroit. I went to visit his childhood home,” I tell them. I don’t say that he was a child of the Sixties Scoop, a program where thousands of indigenous children from Canada were adopted out of their communities. I’m not sure if cultural genocide is covered in their cross-border orientation handbooks.

The agent doesn’t believe me. Her supervisor is too busy sending me a threatening glare to notice the subtle shift of my body, the tension around my mouth. My patience is at an end. They’re either going to do a more thorough physical search or not. The words strip and cavity come to mind. I have never liked being touched by strangers, and the idea of having my cavities inspected verges on the obscene.

Maybe this is why I try to explain myself, for once.