Unseen by Cathy Hird

Author:Cathy Hird [Hird, Cathy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: solarpunk, science fiction, science, fiction, ai, robot, artificial intelligence, traffic, toronto, future, gift, neurodivergent, neurodiverse, autism, lgbtq, lgbtqia, nonbinary, empath, supernatural, power
Publisher: Brain Lag
Published: 2023-02-10T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirteen

“Fifteen-minute warning,” said Darshani.

“You usually let us work past the final bell,” a student complained.

“I warned you that I couldn’t stay today. I’ll have the room open again at seven-thirty Monday morning and should be able to stay late that day.” Though the way things are going, I better not promise.

The kids groaned but began the process of cleaning up. When they had the room as tidy as an art room ever gets, it was five past the bell. With her backpack already on her shoulder, Darshani locked the door and hurried to the bus stop.

Once the bus came, she calculated how long it would take her to get to the core, added fifteen minutes and texted Amanda her ETA. She pulled out the early twentieth century novel she was currently reading. Her students thought her old-fashioned, reading physical books, but in art history classes, she liked to point out that to understand the art of an era, reading books from the period gave a sense of both the norms of a time and the accepted ideas that artists were embodying or pushing against. To illustrate the point, she would project images of famous paintings and read passages from equally famous novels. And physical books felt different from reading on her phone.

Arriving at the subway, she texted again that she seemed to be running right on schedule. This time Amanda answered that she would be waiting on a bench at the Firefighter’s Memorial. That made sense. Set back from the road as it was, the seer would not have to watch the stream of pedestrians and cars, would not see all the things that could happen to them.

The ride went smoothly, and before she knew it, it was time to transfer to the University Subway Line. Five minutes later, she climbed up the stairs at Queen’s Park station and into the cement parkette studded with statues. The statue to nurses felt inadequate to her, trying to represent the diverse profession with its founder Florence Nightingale. The one that honoured Doctors Without Borders annoyed her. The features of the doctors were generic enough, but the representations of the people they were helping were so clearly not European. As if DWB only worked in the Global South. What about the role they played after the nuclear catastrophe in Norway or the viral outbreak in the Canary Islands when the local health system collapsed, and these volunteers rushed in to fill the gap?

On a stone bench that faced one of the panels listing the names of firefighters lost in the line of duty, Amanda sat with her arms wrapped around her legs and her knees pulled up to her chin. Darshani slipped onto the bench beside her so that her shoulder touched Amanda’s. She waited for her colleague and friend to shake off whatever held her attention.

“When you got off the Bloor subway, did you fall on the stairs or have your backpack stolen?”

“Neither. There was a commotion behind me, and when I looked back an older woman had fallen.

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