Places Like These by Lauren Carter

Author:Lauren Carter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Book*hug Press
Published: 2023-02-18T23:44:47+00:00

* * *

That was a Tuesday.

The next morning, a car from the local detachment was parked outside the school, flinging its red and blue lights against the damp brick wall. Rumours in the hallway like the slow leak of leftover helium. By noon, everyone knew about the knife, the one in her backpack, the one she’d carried south with us that day we’d set out unsuccessfully to hitch the two-and-a-half-hour drive to see her mother, while I brought the bag of food.

There was a boy with a punctured kidney, an older boy, sixteen, but he never came to school. That’s what I heard, and that he was in the hospital and, eventually, that he didn’t make it. A while after that, someone said Marcie was in Thompson, where a painting of a giant wolf watches over the town, where I live now, with my kid. All the time I wonder if she’s still here, if I might see her one day. I imagine it: how I’ll be picking through the withered grapes to find the salvageable ones at the grocery store, dropping green bananas that cost over a dollar a pound into my cart, and I’ll look up and there she’ll be, staring at me, waiting for whatever words I have to offer. What words do I have?

My parents still live in the same house, the one where I’d stand at the end of the driveway to catch the school bus, snug in my mail-order parka, and look at the water across the road. That year, after Marcie left, the river did what it’s always done. Froze to months of white silence, then opened again in the spring. Ice plates carrying the winter’s wreckage: broken-down sleds, abandoned fishing huts, whole trees with their roots torn from the river’s edge. They drifted with the current before being pulled clear out of my sight. I watched them disappear; I went on with my life.

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