chapter 24
september 28, this year.

There’s a TV show on in the middle of the morning, on one of those public channels with no ads. It’s a kids’ show about art. There’s a British host who is a bit too sure of himself. He has a British way of lilting that grates. I lie on my bed, which is still soaking wet from the sweat of my bad dreams, and watch him. He makes art from a piece of plastic wrap. He paints things. The product at the end looks impossible. He paints shadows with black and some kind of tea.

At the end of the episode, he grabs a bag of vegetables and sports equipment. He starts laying them down on the ground in an empty parking lot. He tosses cabbages here, a tennis net there, a handful of badminton birdies and three ears of corn.

The camera pans further and further out. It’s a dragon. The dragon is pouring fire from his mouth. A knight is aiming a sword at his heart.

It’s a pile of cabbage and corn.

Outside, the sounds of people are like the buzz of insects in my ears, and suddenly something falls into place and makes sense and I gasp.

I want to call my mom.

I call my mom. I watch my fingers dialing her number in Vancouver, the drag of my finger past the one. The six. The zero. The four.

I hang up.

Whatever I was thinking slips away, leaving me feeling confused. I go outside. I want a goddamn hot chocolate. I want a T-shirt. I grab some money and make my way to Our Joe. I give him my money. The chocolate tastes like chalk on my tongue. The T-shirt smells like warehouse dust. When did he get these printed up? I wonder. When did he have time?

I’m missing something. It’s like I have all the facts but nothing fits.

I don’t have all the facts.

I had the facts, but I lost them.

The facts are fish and they are silver and tiny and they are swimming back up into the sky like a reverse rain.

I go closer and closer to the crowd. What is a crowd? There are maybe fifty people here. It seems like a lot. There is some kind of platform. I don’t know where that came from. Raised up, so the crowd is all in one place, staring down at our field, and I think about the dirt and how it feels when you press your face into it, damp and real.

I go closer and closer. I am looking for someone. And you know exactly who I’m looking for if you’ve been following along. Because I haven’t seen her for days and the orange stone is still in my pocket and I don’t know why.

I look and look, as if looking for her will put her there in the scene where she isn’t. And then she is.

So it worked.

A flash of Olivia’s hair, and then I see her jacket. I see her hand gesturing. I see her step down from the platform. I see her turn to look at me, directly at me. I see her disappear into the corn. I want to follow her. I dump my hot chocolate on the ground and jam the T-shirt on inside out. I want to follow her, but I don’t.

I can’t.

The people on the platform are staring at me.

I go back to the house.

I wish I didn’t feel so strange.

I sit in the mouse chair and smoke another spliff. Just one more. Just one more before.