The pump jack on the horizon reflects sunlight so brightly, it could be an x-ray shining through flesh. It unsettles me, so I fumble for the sun visor. A truck passes to my left, and my car sways. I try to keep my eyes straight. I know this highway and its pump jacks, but I can’t resist another look at this one.
The light’s already changed; that’s how it is on the prairie. But what I see is more than a trick of the light. This pump jack has a roundness, a girth. The metal contorts in the sun, and it transforms into something different—a giant bison.
A truck flashes its lights and another honks, I’m crossing the meridian. I jerk back the wheel and look for the beast in the rearview, but the light’s shifted and now there’s only a pump jack winking back at me.
I shake my head. I’ve always been a daydreamer but not to this extreme. Maybe it’s my new transition lenses. I concentrate on driving as pump jacks along the road wave at me. I’m used to them, this is oil country. They’re everywhere on the landscape, pulling up what’s hidden underground, raw and unprocessed.
When I turn off the highway, the farmer’s field across my acreage hurts my eyes with its emptiness. I pull into my driveway and take a moment before turning off the engine. The after-image of the bison is still burned onto my corneas.
I take my cardboard box from the car and walk into the kitchen—Jay’s already waiting for me.
He rises from the table, face expectant. “Well, how was your big day?”
He’s not talking about the bison, but the other thing that happened today. I set the box down. It’s full of papers and random junk, the detritus of thirty years wasted.
He opens his arms. “Congratulations.”
I turn away and greet Rory, our lab mix. Jay waits for me, but I ignore him. It’s the first day of my retirement, and I don’t want to talk about it.
Jay makes dinner and does clean-up. He massages my shoulders, but I don’t relax. We’ve been married thirty-four years, but I haven’t loved him since our honeymoon. My career’s no different. I stayed three decades with my employer and hated every day of it. But my work kept me busy, I didn’t have to think. Now that lost time haunts me.
Katie calls with congratulations. She asks how “freedom fifty-five” feels. I tell her the truth—I’m unmoored. She doesn’t speak, but her presence calms me. She’s proof those years were worth something. She talks about her studies. When I hang up, I’m smiling, and my shoulders are loose for the first time all day.
Katie’s in fourth-year university. She lives with a room-mate in Edmonton. It’s less than an hour away, but sometimes I wish she was closer. Katie’s nothing like me. She holds her head high; she’s going to be somebody.
Jay makes breakfast while I stand in the kitchen listless. The corner of the quartz counter digs into my hip, and I look for something to occupy my fingers. Normally I’d be checking work emails. I don’t know how to drink coffee without working.
Jay says I should take each day at a time. I’ll figure it out; he did. He retired two years ago. Now he consults part-time and works out daily. Retirement’s been kind to him, his wrinkles are smoothing and his hair is getting thicker. His blood pressure’s never been so low. Nothing fazes him, he’s always moving forward in life, steadfast. He never looks back; the past hasn’t trapped him.
I start on the box with my work items. There’s a “director’s award” I shared for a project two years ago. A “thank you for being kind” certificate from a former manager. Forms about pension and retirement rules. A watch with my employer’s name engraved.
I chose the watch in lieu of cuff-links—those were the two choices in the catalogue. I try it on. It doesn’t fit. My co-workers gave me a vase. It comes with a card; I have to smile when I open it. I picked out the same one for a retiring colleague a few months ago. I wrote the same, bland “enjoy your retirement.” I shake my head: I’ve already forgotten the colleague’s name.
The next thing I pull out is a pamphlet. It says, “Preparing for the New Phase.” It was on my desk my last day. I didn’t mean to take it, someone must have packed it up for me. The pamphlet says retirement can spark “feelings” and there are resources to help me. There’s a 1-800 number; I throw it away.
The box bores me so I walk to the window. The empty field across my acreage looms. I pull out my phone—it’s only 2:30 p.m. I stare at the window and let my eyes blur. I have no idea what to do.
Katie texts with an invitation for lunch. We meet at an Earls near the university.
Katie slides into the booth, smiling wide. “Taanishi.”
I frown.
Her eyes dance. “Taanishi kiiya?”
I don’t understand her.
She shakes her head, still smiling. “It’s Michif, don’t you know?”
She’s joined a language group at university. They’re bringing in elders to teach the language. She asks if I learned it growing up. I shake my head, sorry to disappoint her.
She teaches me “How are you?” and the reply. She asks if my parents or grandparents spoke it, and I don’t have a clue.
Katie says that’s a shame, and I agree with her. She’s taking courses on Métis history; I didn’t know you could do that in university.
Katie’s writing her fourth-year honours thesis on the buffalo and the Métis in the 1870’s. I shake my head, impressed. Before I can stop myself, I describe my imagined bison.
Katie corrects me. “Don’t call it bison—it’s a buffalo. Lii bufloo.”
“Lii bufloo.” I repeat it. She says it smoothly, but my unpracticed tongue stumbles.
That night at dinner, I tell Jay Katie’s writing about buffalo. He says good for her, but the scientific term for the North American mammal is “bison.”
Katie’s words stay with me. She said the bison used to roam free. I think about it while I drive down the highway. Rub my eyes, I can’t imagine how that could be. To me, the oil derricks and pump jacks are the only constants of the prairie. That and the abandoned oil wells, they’re in the hundreds of thousands.
I let my eyes blur, and the afternoon sun glints off oil derricks on both sides of me. A pick-up truck pulls out from behind to pass. The driver honks, and I’m about honk back when I realize I’m 30 km/hr below the speed limit. I shake my head and tell myself from now on, I’ll concentrate.
Jay’s waiting for me when I get home. “We need to talk.”
I bend to greet Rory.
He holds out the work pamphlet. “It was hard for me too.”
I thought I threw that out days ago.
He sets it on the table. “Just tell me you’ll consider it.”
I take Rory outside, and we stare at the farmer’s field across the road. By the time we return to the kitchen, Jay’s made my favourite dinner—fried eggs on crispy potatoes. We eat in silence, then he goes downstairs like he always does.
I go to be bed early but wake in the night. It’s dark outside, I don’t know the time. I slip out of bed and feel my way to the kitchen. Rory’s sprawled out on the linoleum; I step around him to get water. Wind chimes hit the window, but Rory doesn’t move.
I sip my water and look outside. I’m about to turn when something flashes in the corner of my eye.
My breath catches. I press my forehead against the glass—there’s something across the road in the farmer’s field. My tongue tingles. I see a faint shine. Maybe it’s the moon on barbed wire. It flickers bright, then fades, not moon-like at all. I frown. A memory stirs, but I can’t grasp it. When I look again, there’s nothing at all.
Katie’s calling every day now. As long as I say my “Taanishi” and “kiiya maaka’s” she keeps it up. I download a Michif app and mangle a text message, but Katie answers immediately with a thumbs-up and a bison emoji. I reply, “love the bison,” and she’s swift to correct me: “lii bufloo.”
She says she has a surprise for me. She sends a text, but even with my transition lenses, I can’t make it out. The print is tiny like microfiche. Katie enlightens me—it’s the scrip certificate of my great-grandfather. She asks if I know what happened to the land.
I reply with a question mark, and she answers, “Don’t you know the history?”
Later I look it up. They didn’t teach this in school. It’s funny, my daughter’s the one teaching me history. Though it makes sense. My grandparents rented their whole lives; their grandparents fought in the Resistance.
Jay asks what we’re texting about. I can’t resist but reply smugly—this is our special thing, mother and daughter. Jay has his relentless optimism and thick hair, but not this. But he tries.
Katie comes for dinner, and he surprises us with homemade boulettes and bannock. He and Katie talk about New Year’s traditions; it turns out he googled them with the recipe. I try to remember what my mom told me. I don’t tell either of them I’m eating boulettes for the first time.
Jay makes hamburger soup from an online recipe. It doesn’t agree with me. I wake in the night with my gut roiling. Feel my way to the kitchen for water. Wind chimes smash against the window and Rory doesn’t acknowledge me. I lean over the sink, dry heaving. I swallow bile, and when I look out the window, the moon is so big it scares me.
I stumble back to my room. Hit the pillow and I’m fever-dreaming. I’m driving down the highway and the sky’s strangely bright. Something on the prairie catches my eye—it’s a herd of bison. The road changes and I’m speeding.
Wind roars in my ears and bugs hit the windshield like wind chimes. The sky changes, and when I turn my head, there’s a metal bison blocking the highway. I’m going too fast to slow down. The ditch is all barbed wire. The bison turns its head, and red eyes stare at me. The car lifts off the ground, and the earth rushes toward me.
I shudder awake, gasp for air, and force down vomit. My ears are screaming. I stagger back to the kitchen for water. Rory hasn’t moved. I have no idea how much time has passed. Wind chimes hit the glass, but I can’t hear them. The sound in my ears is deafening. I stand at the window, and there’s no moon at all.
Something shifts across the field. I try to focus. My stomach churns, and bile rushes up my throat. A moment later, I’m running, gagging to the bathroom.
My nausea’s gone in the morning, but my ears are still loud. I don’t have a fever, but something’s not right. I call the doctor, and she tells me tinnitus is often idiopathic. She asks if I’m stressed or have any recent life changes. I shake my head, “No.”
The drive home takes forever. My eyes catch on the gleam of passing oil haulers while derricks and pump jacks wink at me. I almost rear-end a braking hatchback. I breathe out slow. I’m almost home when two deer run across the road, and instead of the usual white tails, I see technicolour.
Days pass. I’m seeing things every day now. I try to tally the weeks since retiring, but it’s impossible to count. I used to mark days by my work calendar, but now I’m scattered across time and place, unfocussed.
Jay makes my favourite dinner, and when we sit down to eat, he reaches his hand across the table. I lift my eyes and watch the movement of creases around his lips. His voice has a funny timbre, and it’s hard to hear with my ears ringing.
But that doesn’t matter. I don’t need to listen, because I know what he’ll say. I’ve known for a while now. He calls it a “separation.” He says I can keep the house. He’ll take Rory, but if I want the truck, it’s mine. We’ll be kind to each other, stay a family for the sake of Katie.
I feel like I’m floating. I chew my food and swallow. He asks if I’m okay, and I nod. He takes the dishes to the sink and washes them. I watch him work, useless as ever. Don’t know if I’m relieved or gutted.
Jay goes downstairs, and that pamphlet on the counter stares at me. Did he dig it out of the trash? I throw it out for the umpteenth time.
We wait until the weekend to tell Katie. I can tell from her blinking we’ve surprised her. She says she understands, but her voice quavers. Jay starts to cry, and I almost remember what made my heart flutter in a different time and place.
I’m sitting at the kitchen table, drinking coffee and scrolling news headlines on my phone. There’s a story about bisons and I click on it.
There’s been a herd on the eastern edge of the city for as long as I can remember, but now there are herds in other places. There’s one at the cultural centre northeast of the city; they’re bringing bison back to Batoche, too. The article says they’re coming back, though it’s nothing like years ago, when there were thousands on the prairie.
I went to Batoche when I was Katie’s age. I was with my mom and grandma, my mom drove, and I remember the road, single-lane highway winding through coulees and spectacular ravines. The light was incredible, and the sky opened up to us.
I’m about to send the article to Katie when I get a better idea. I google the cultural centre and see they have tours. I text Katie the link and she replies right away.
On the day of the bison tour, I pick up Katie near the university.
“Taanishi!” Her eyes sparkle.
She hands me a thermos of hot coffee, and I sip it while I pull up my GPS and try to orient us.
We drive an hour and a half through rows of refineries northeast of the city. The air is sweet and sour, sometimes smoky. Orange flarestacks wave at me, and oil and gas haulers drive too slow in front of me, while others tailgate behind me.
We come out of the refineries to meet the North Saskatchewan. The cultural centre is at the top of a thick coulee. There are willows, poplars, saskatoons, and smatterings of spruce. It’s only September, but the trees are bare. It doesn’t make them any less beautiful. I park and take a moment to admire them. Katie nudges me.
We join our tour and climb into a jeep with three other visitors. Our guide drives through paddocks across a field. We see one bison, then another. Moments later, we come across a whole herd. I suck in my breath. They’re the size of pump jacks.
We watch while the bisons flick their tails and snort at each other. Our guide points out the differences between wood and plains bisons. Katie takes pictures. I have no words.
Katie and the guide trade facts. The guide calls them a keystone species, Katie describes how their presence changes and strengthens the ecosystem. I point out a pair of romping bison calves, and Katie corrects me, “bufloo!”
It’s strange to be so close to them. They’re nothing like the metal spectres I’ve been seeing. I can smell these creatures. They’re undeniably physical. They eat weeds, and birds land on their backs. Their scent and their presence grounds me. For the first time in days, I don’t feel lost.
Katie turns to me, and her eyes are more shades of brown than have names. A bison huffs, and its eyes are the same colours. The resemblance makes me giggle. Katie frowns. I try not to laugh but let out a snort. The other tour members look at me. Katie starts to smile. The tour guide asks if I’m okay, and I nod. A moment later, a guffaw escapes me, then Katie throws her head back and laughs with me.
We eat boulettes at the on-site cafe and agree they’re better than Jay’s. We turn onto the highway to drive home, and Katie talks about bisons. She has new ideas for her thesis—she might need to do an MA or PhD to explore them all. She pulls up the scrip on her phone and reads it out to me—Batoche, 240 acres, my great-grandfather’s mis-spelled name. She says maybe we can go to Batoche this summer. Maybe we’ll find where our family lived, maybe we’ll see the new buffalo.
I keep my eyes on the road, but something rises in my gut. It’s been so long I barely recognize it, but as we drive, I put a name to it: it’s somewhere between excitement and hope.
The smoke thickens as we drive. I should be used to it; wildfires last six months of the year now, the only seasons left are smoke and snow. When I was young, the air was clearer. Now, with the refineries and wildfire smoke, the landscape’s apocalyptic.
Katie googles travel routes to Batoche while I concentrate on driving. My eyes lose focus, and smoke curls around the road like it’s eating it. I jerk the wheel to stay in my lane. Katie doesn’t look up from her phone.
My lungs ache. I try to keep focus but I’m sleepy. I reach for the thermos but it’s empty. When I turn on the radio, there’s static. I turn it off, and Katie thanks me.
The sky darkens, and I can’t see the road in front of me. I turn on my lights. My eyes start to water, and Katie bends forward to cough. My heart seizes, and I see her as a little girl having an asthma attack in the hospital.
I look up to the road, and my breath catches. The smoke curls back to reveal a red-eyed metal bison blocking my lane. There’s no time to slow. I hit the brakes.
Everything slips out of sequence. The SUV sways to the right. We rock to the left and Katie screams. We cross the meridian. An oil tanker charges out of the smoke toward us. The bison flickers like a failing fluorescent. My ears hush, and the only sound is my heartbeat.
We hit the ditch on the other side of the road. There’s a whoosh, and the oil tanker thunders past. I swallow blood, and the earth shakes. My tooth slams through my tongue. We come to a stop.
Katie’s hunched over, not moving. My breath rushes out, and panic takes over. I want to scream, but I’m winded. Dizziness hits me, I’m on the cusp of fainting when Katie starts to move. I take in a ragged breath, and she reaches for her phone. She’s stopped coughing, and I remind myself she hasn’t needed an inhaler for years now.
I fumble for my keys, but my hands are shaking. Katie puts her fingers over mine and says it’s okay. I turn off the engine, and we sit in the ditch without speaking.
When we pull back onto the highway, the smoke is thinner. There’s no sign of the bison. I ask Katie if she saw anything, and she frowns at me.
I give the road my full attention, and the concentration gives me a headache. I drop off Katie and apologize for our incident. She laughs and waves her hand. I ask her, half-serious, if she trusts me to drive to Batoche. Her eyes soften, and she says she’ll go anywhere with me.
When I get home, I dig the pamphlet out from the trash before taking off my shoes. I call the 1-800 number, and “Wanda” assures me it’s okay to have feelings. I correct her—it’s not a feeling. I try to describe the bison.
She scribbles, and her voice changes. She asks, guarded, if I’m sure. Her voice says there’s something wrong with me. I try to backtrack, but she won’t let me. She says she’s referring me to a specialist, then gives me a breathing exercise before informing me our time is up.
Jay moves out with Rory. I’m listless home alone, so I tidy. The box from my work is still on the counter. I put it in the trash. An hour later I dig out the vase and the watch, and after two hours, I take out the pamphlet.
I open the fridge, but it’s empty. I find Kraft dinner in the cupboard and eat it plain. Pour myself a glass of wine then change my mind and dump it. I try the radio but there’s only static, and my tinnitus is louder than the wind-chimes.
I wash the dishes and look out at the farmer’s field. It’s getting dark earlier now, and there’s smoke outside. Cold seeps through the glass and makes me shiver. I miss Rory. I haven’t had the house to myself in a long time.
I wake in the night with my ears screaming. The bedroom’s dark, and I don’t know what time it is. My head is fuzzy, and my teeth have a film of starch. I sit up, and my head pounds. Did I brush my teeth?
I feel my way to the kitchen. Step around the linoleum before remembering there’s no dog. Gulp down cold water that hurts my teeth. The wind chimes don’t move.
I turn around, and the brown and cream squares of linoleum rise in front of me, three-dimensional cubes in technicolour. The kitchen counter isn’t just round, it’s also lengthening. The pamphlet is no longer rectangular.
I blink, not comprehending. Then all I know is I need to get air. I reach for my lumberjack sweater and pull it over my nightie. When I step outside, the cold pricks my bare legs. The air’s smoky, but I look up and see satellites and stars. I start down the driveway, and cold gravel digs into my soles. I should have worn shoes. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.
I pause at the highway. There’s no cars, not even distant headlights. The asphalt is soft on my feet after gravel. I cross the road.
The farmer’s field is full of dried grass and rocks that stab me. A twig catches between my toes, and I yelp. I can’t see the ground below me. I hold out my hand and try to remember where there’s a gap in the barbed wire. Feel my way through. The air’s different on the other side of the fence. I don’t smell smoke now. My tongue tingles, and the static in my ears becomes a crescendo.
I take a step and feel it. Smell it too—something metal. My ears hush like I’m in a tunnel. The only sound is something breathing.
There’s a groan of metal as it turns. My breath catches—its eyes are every possible shade of red. And its body—I reach out with trembling fingers and steel turns to ether as the bison flashes in and out of time and space like an x-ray.
The after-image dazes me, and when it snorts, the earth rumbles. My teeth go through my tongue a second time. It flashes again, and the revelation comes to me that it’s standing in the future and the past and every dimension. I suck in my breath. Even with this discovery, something tells me I’m not grasping the half of it.
There’s a sound behind me, I turn, and a truck is barrelling down the highway. It has on its brights. I crouch down, hoping the driver won’t see me. The truck rushes past and then disappears into darkness. I turn back to the bison, but the headlights have blinded me. I reach out but don’t feel anything. My knee hits something hard and I feel pipe—probably another abandoned oil well. I turn around and my fingers catch on barbed wire.
The next thing I know I’m crying. I run across the road, sobbing. Twigs and rocks gouge my feet and I rush up the driveway. I slam the front door and lean against it, then sink down to the floor. I can’t see through my tears; grief overtakes me.
The itch in my legs wakes me. There are dried leaves and twigs in my sheets, and blood from the cuts on my feet.
I spend too long in the shower. Have to brush my teeth twice to stop tasting Kraft dinner. My eyes are bloodshot. I try and fail to count the days since my retirement. I don’t even try to measure how long it’s been since Jay left with Rory.
I drink coffee and stand at the window. The barbed wire across the road reflects sunlight, and the field is unspeakably bare.
I google “metal bisons,” and “smoke” and don’t find anything. I squint into my phone and my eye aches. My transition lenses have been missing for days.
I’m sitting in the kitchen staring at space when Katie texts. She’s thought of a topic for her graduate studies. She sends another text before I can reply. “I’m tracking our family’s scrip. We can investigate on our road trip!”
I send her a heart. Katie cheers me, but I still feel a heaviness. I haven’t shaken last night’s grief. I don’t even know the reason for it. I stand at the window, and the field stares at me. Finally, I put on my boots.
I walk down the driveway and can’t believe I did that in bare feet and a nightie last night. I hold my elbows against my chest to keep out the cold. Cross the highway and squeeze through the gap in the barbed wire. Shake my head—it’s a wonder I didn’t shred myself.
At first, I can’t find the oil well. It’s hidden behind long grass, not immediately visible. There’s broken glass all over the place. I whistle at my luck last night. I reach out to touch the cold metal. It was probably abandoned decades ago.
I turn to leave, but my eyes catch on the barbed wire. The static in my ears gets louder, and the light reflects against the metal. The sky changes, and my eyes tear. An old memory comes back to me.
It’s in fragments. I don’t know how I remember, I would have been so young. I’d think it was made up, or something I overheard, if not for that sky. I can still see it, etched in my memory like microfiche.
We were driving on that highway. The road was different then, narrow and single-lane, ringed by aspen and birch trees instead of refineries. I don’t know if we’re driving east or west. I was a child, in the back seat. A pick-up truck flew by us and we wondered at its speed. It was so fast I saw it in technicolour.
We kept driving. We went down a stunning ravine and across a river. We climbed up a ridge, and the sky was spectacular. We started down a hill, and the light changed to illuminate everything. We saw the door first, and then the fender. We didn’t know what we were seeing until we came across the smoking metal.
We found her in the field. The driver must have lost control. It was the time before seat-belts. She’d gone through the barbed wire, and the metal shone red with her blood.
She was so pale. We held her hand, and the sky opened up over her face. She would have been Katie’s age. The light shifted, so the colours around us changed. The sun was incredible. That’s always how it is on the prairie. When she was gone, we looked for the driver.
We found him in parts. It was too late. The light was different already. My mom hugged me and told me not to look. The metal of the wreck was so bright I couldn’t look at it.
I walk home lost in the memory.
Months pass, inexplicably. Winter passes, then spring. The pamphlet’s on my counter, but the specialist doesn’t contact me, and I don’t feel the need to call Wanda.
I’m still waking at night, but I no longer walk around the linoleum. I don’t know if the tinnitus is gone or if my brain has finally gotten used to it. The farmer’s field is yellow because there’s no rain, and the city’s surrounded by wildfire again.
I take a calendar and manage to count the days since my retirement and Jay’s departure. I write down the number. It’s already July—there’s not so many days now to our road trip.
I pull up the Michif app on my phone and scratch out the English numbers of my tally and re-write them in Michif. I like these numbers better. I look up the names of the months and the days of the week and I change those too.
I’m no longer haunted, but a part of me mourns that metal beast. It tormented me but also showed me possibility. That maybe those years weren’t lost, that the past and future could brush against each other. That things could change, that my life wasn’t wasted.
Jay stopped texting me. It’s typical, Jay knows to be steadfast. He only looks forward, he doesn’t look back.
Now when I drive, the pump jacks are pump jacks. Oil derricks don’t contort into bisons. Nothing blurs. The past is imprinted and unchangeable like microfiche. Like the landscape—the bisons are gone, it’s all pump jacks and oil wells now. And the only certainties of the future are more oil derricks and hotter, bigger wildfires.
It doesn’t bother me. I’m past that silly daydream. It’s not just the delusion that gets me, it’s that I couldn’t even picture real bisons. All I had for reference was this burned landscape.
Katie dreams big, but the limit of my imagination is a metal beast of industry.
I pick up Katie on the day of our road trip, and she hands me a thermos of coffee. Her smile fills the car, invigorating me. I turn onto the highway, and the lines of the road soften.
We drive on divided highway ringed by refineries and gas plants. The sky is orange in some places. Katie talks about her thesis; she hasn’t made headway on our family scrip, but she’s hopeful. Besides, she’s changed her focus—now it’s the future that has her attention.
I listen to her talk. She’s not like Jay, looking forward as though there’s no past to speak of. Katie looks in all directions. She’s still learning Michif. She says the buffalo in Batoche are thriving and remaking the whole ecology. They’re changing the landscape, even. I try to picture Michif rolling off our tongues and real buffalo in place of metal derricks, but the dream is still too big for me.
Katie talks the whole drive. She says Jay is doing well and Rory ate her slippers. She’s teaching first-year students Michif. The light changes, and I tell Katie the story of the accident. It feels good to get it out. Katie shakes her head, and we don’t speak for a long time.
The road isn’t all refineries. The landscape changes as we drive. The sky is still wide, and when the sun comes out from the clouds, the world around us softens. It’s strange, everything’s rounder and the hues are all brighter. My vision should be blurry, but instead everything is in focus, like I’m wearing my long-lost transition lenses, though I lost them months ago.
My tongue tingles, and I’m in a different time. My shoulders tighten then relax when I see my company. I’m Katie’s age with my mom and my grandma, three generations driving eastward. It’s our trip to Batoche. The sky opens up and illuminates the prairie. I see our backs brightened by sun and aspen trees on both sides of us. The woman in the middle turns, and I expect to see my mom but instead I see Katie. Her face is full of laugh-lines. The younger woman who I thought was me says something, and Katie laughs and corrects her, “lii bufloo.”
My breath catches, and the road comes back to me. There are crows on both sides of the road and hawks in the sky. Prairie dogs scurry across the road in front of us. The road is ringed by saskatoon bushes and willow. Everything’s alive.
Katie’s watching me. “All good?”
I nod, and she passes me coffee.
We drive through spectacular coulees and alongside aspen bluffs. I start to remember the names of trees, and Katie translates them into Michif for me. It makes me doubt my previous certainty. Maybe Jay’s wrong about everything. Some things are past, but there’s a world of possibility.
We’re almost there when I see a silhouette on the side of the road. I wait for the flicker and for its red eyes to turn to me. Katie holds up her phone to take a picture.
I slow the car and look for the reflection of steel. Close my eyes and it still isn’t there. Katie rolls down the window and I don’t smell metal. She turns back to me and she’s smiling so wide I can see the beginning of laugh-lines.
The beast snorts, and we both say at the same time, “lii bufloo.”
The light shifts, and the sky opens up. The sun changes, and farther up the road, we see a whole herd. We drive closer. Katie’s eyes dance, and we take in the changing prairie.
