Erin Fisher - That Tiny Life

Kendra and the boy disappear into the trees. The boy — why couldn’t Kendra train her? Melanie pulls her toque lower — she can’t get it right, it catches on her trimmed hair and flattens it in uncomfortable directions — and follows their tracks across the field. At the edge of the pasture the snow mounds, then slants to nothing after the first few trees.

She walks through the high drift, sinking up to her waist in air pockets that surround the low branches. Snow and needles tip into her boots. From the trees comes the smell of wet cedar and rotting wood. The winter so far is mild, and the moss, soaked with melted snow, is green even through the filtered light.

She stops at the edge and stares into the clouds. Trace the flakes to their origin and she can see the height. There’s no end to the sky or the snowfall. Only white above her. She scoops a glove of snow and compresses it. The snow clings to itself, not like that sugary powder of really cold days. More like a handshake, the way the thick flakes come down, touch each other, and spiral into the pasture.

Kendra and the boy aren’t here.

What will she do now that she quit school? Keep going, she guesses. Follow them, since they’ve gone further, somewhere she can’t see.

A woods. That’s what this place is, not a forest, a woods. Trees, so many trees, thrust skyward and disappear above their branches. And if these trees are huge, remnants of even bigger trees — stumps the size of dinner tables — crumble back into the soil. Ferns, thin saplings, and a low moss that sprouts brown-green beads on threads. The forest floor is soft and damp, but not unfirm — it bends under his sneakers, as if, below the layer of needles and rotting wood, the ground might be hollow. Low brush hangs with bits of cobweb and old berries. Lola, on his hand, flashes glances into the boughs and swivels her head in a way that makes it look loose. She fans and tucks her tail to adjust balance.

“She can’t fall, right?” Dumb question. Lola has monster grip. His thumb and fingers are stuck half-curled under her feet. Well, the tightness is either Lola’s bird toes, or the stiff leather of the glove, or the cold, or it might be the jesses — leather straps slip-knotted to the brilliantly yellow legs and wound around his fingers — or possibly panic. He told Kendra about his mom. Not really told, but he gave her the card and she read it. Plus she went and told him about the white gyrfalcon. So now he’s got another secret to keep: Axel’s favourite bird is defective.

His foot slides off a root and he flails his arm. Lola spreads her wings and tugs on the jesses. The feathers around her throat raise and her beak opens and she shrieks — all he can think is, Get It Off. She flaps and jumps, but the jesses catch and she swings down and hangs from his fist.

“What do I do,” he calls. Lola thrashes. “What should I do?” Being this close, closer than close — actually holding a falcon — should be Fun Incorporated, but Lola is blurry brown feathers and yellow-fanged beak and she’s kind of horrible. She twists, and her wingbeats bring her high enough that she clips his cheekbone. He grabs his cheek with his free hand and throws his bird-arm out, stretching Lola as far away as he can get her. “Am I okay?” Doesn’t feel like blood, but — what if there’s blood? “Is there a wound?”

Kendra plants her walking stick in a cushion of snow and reaches over and jerks his arm down. The jesses momentarily slacken. Lola grabs his glove and rights herself. “A bit of feather in the face, that’s it. No wound.” Kendra purses her lips then turns her face away from him. She’s trying not to smile — he knows it.

“She was so light.” Cody bites his lip. Don’t cry. Don’t cry, lame-ass. “Heavier upside down.” The bird folds her wings like nothing happened and all’s good. Sleek, burgundy feathers at the shoulder.

Kendra unwraps the leather from around his thumb and tosses Lola into the bushes. The trees impede any real flight; Lola bumps her wings and body through the brush to a stump. “Not the best spot.” Kendra jerks her walking stick from the ground. “Branches, limited sight. We probably won’t catch anything. But it’s snowing too heavily in the pasture.” She digs out another stick. “Here.”

Kendra stabs thickets and whistles the bird along. Cody whacks underbrush a few metres to her left and hikes the slope behind her. She should talk more. She doesn’t have to wisecrack, but she could say, like, how fun the postcard was, or how she had a dog as a kid. Loosen the mood. Why did he even show her? Because she asked him how long he was staying and he panicked — he realized he doesn’t know. The bird follows them in the branches overhead.

“Quiet.” Kendra stops. So does he.

“What is it?”

“I can see your coat,” Kendra yells into the forest. And then Cody can too. The girl from yesterday, down the slope of the hill.

“Are you going to join us or just stalk us?” Kendra calls.

The girl stands there, a splash of red in the blacks and browns of the trees.

“We’re going to keep going, then.” Kendra continues up the slope. She stabs her stick into bushes as she goes.

“Doesn’t she go to school?” he asks.

“Don’t you?” Kendra veers south.

The trees break and a half-frozen creek spills down the mountain on his right. Along the edge water-sodden foliage conceals rocks and pits. Some places his leg sinks as deeply in the moss as it did in the snow in the pasture.

“This is a mountain?” He’s never hiked a mountain before and his thighs burn like crazy. The creek gurgles tea-coloured over the rocks, bending the light and jumping off the ground into an almost vertical stream.

“It’s a mountain.” Kendra nods her head. She keeps her pace over the moss and rotting logs.

Cody stops. “You gonna tell Axel about the white?”

“He’ll find out.”

Cody stares at her. How can she stand having this horrible secret, this pit in her, and not act? She has no plan to hide or tell the secret. It’s like his mom planting the postcard — she sent him off to the Greyhound station assuming he’d find it, but she didn’t know. For him there’s two choices: confess or cover. And if he waits too long to tell, quicksand happens. The confession gets sucked internal and then there’s no option but to lie. Like when he caught his mom, after she’d run out of ice, scraping the frost out of the freezer. He knew her pica picked up with low iron, anemia from not eating. He could have told Aunt Jen.

“Wait,” he calls. The ground shouldn’t be this steep. Shouldn’t be sideways. He’s going to tip down the mountainside and his skull will crack on the rocks. He collapses into a squat and tucks his head between his knees.

Kendra turns and walks back down. The bird screeches in a tree. “The creek gave you vertigo?” She stabs her walking stick into a patch of dirty snow and crouches. “Deep breaths through your nose. Have you eaten anything?”

Deep breaths. Almost creepy how much air gets into his lungs, and how it no longer feels cold in his chest like it did this morning. He’s a fish in a new bowl: bit of a shocker, then acclimatization. “It was like snorkelling.”

“Snorkelling?” Kendra looks at him like he’s the defective one instead of the white. Like he’s the most confused person in the world.

“My mom took me to Hawaii,” he says. “We went out on a boat to the reef and when I put my face in it was all, horrible.” How to describe it? He couldn’t feel his body, let alone control it. Had no idea how big or small he was; his arms and legs felt like they went on forever, past the end of the world. And the fish were way too close. Little shards of colour darted about, far, near, too near — near enough it was like someone had upended a change jar and pelted him with nickels. But that was nothing compared to his panic when the school broke below him and the reef dropped away into opaque, empty blue. He couldn’t see with the tears in his mask, and lost a flipper trying to get back in the boat before the current drifted him away from everything. “I suck at swimming,” he tells her.