ONE MID-WINTER DAWN, HE APPEARED ON THE EDGE OF the clearing. His white-tipped ears twitched and flicked as he glanced about. Faint wisps of breath curled from his snout in the cold. He lowered his head and stalked gingerly across the frost-limned grass to sniff the remains of a collapsed orange tent. Strewn about nearby were a portable propane stove, and two spent propane canisters. A sodden blanket. Two ripped pillows disgorging foam. And what remained of a smashed portable CD player.

19

I GOOGLED:

Can you die from grief?

Can you die from wishing it?

Can you die from a nightmare?

Does crying burn calories?

What happens if you die alone in a house?

How long does it take for a body to smell?

What was the longest time it took to discover the body of a person living alone?

Is time linear?

20

I WASN’T INVITED TO KYLE’S FUNERAL. NOT THAT I EXPECTED to be. I wasn’t invited to Damian’s either. Charges were brought forward but eventually dropped. Brenda threatened a civil suit, but to this day, nothing has come of it. I spent three weeks in a mental health unit. Paul visited every day. Ashley went away to university. Then I was discharged, back into my solitude. Months slipped by. I stopped tuning. I forgot how to. I wasn’t even sure if it was possible for one person to do so alone. The Hum persisted. It lost any sense of wonder or joy or meaning for me. It was no longer a mystery to be approached. It simply became a noise again. Something to torment my waking hours, hours upon hours which, for some reason, I had been granted, and a boy I once loved had been denied. I had a vision of this great ache extending from my chest in all directions like an invisible parachute, extending even beyond the walls of my house, like a football field, or an airport tarmac, just an ever-expanding expanse of sadness.

One winter afternoon I lay on the living room couch, drifting in and out of sleep, with the news playing on the television for a bit of company. I had sworn off the news for a long while. For months, actually. As long as it took for me not to be the news. But that afternoon, as I lay there, I caught fragments of the same local broadcast recycled throughout the day, the leading story of which was about The Hum.

—when, last Thursday, an independent investigation commissioned by the city determined a compressor station along the Phoenix Access pipeline as the source of the mysterious hum disturbing a handful of nearby residents over the past year—

—this morning, after several days of silence, though not the kind residents had been hoping for, Southwestern Gas announced they would be reducing the flow along the pipeline with the hopes of—

—a spokesperson from Southwestern Gas—