by Mikaela Brewer for The 44 North, Senior Editor
after Natalie Diaz’s “Of Course She Looked Back”
In a small middle school classroom in Red Lake, Ontario, Rilla Fable was called upon to answer a question in English class.
Cocking his head to the side, so that his ear became a funnel for her voice, Mr. Wilcox nodded as Rilla spoke. But it was clear he hadn’t heard her, for he paraphrased his own question following a kind smile.
Rilla wasn’t one for speaking, really, at all. But Jack, who sat behind her and had turned thirteen first, said that she better be careful: Her vocal cords would surely dry out if she didn’t use them enough, catching fire like sticks rubbed together when she ever did need to speak.
Despite what everyone else thought, her inner world wasn’t, likewise, silent. It was anything but.
Rilla glanced out the window. The smoke was so dense that the teachers’ parking lot was no longer visible. She closed her eyes for a moment and listened: The brush fires couldn’t be seen. Nor could the snapping and cracking be heard.
***
Rilla’s N95 mask strings were too tight, folding her ears down as she walked home from school. Her dad’s cycling sunglasses, with wraparound wind protection, didn’t block the ash from slipping behind her contact lenses. The fires weren’t far now, and the sky was thick with an orange haze that bled the sun’s light. Surely, the evacuation order would come soon.
Rilla stopped, knelt, and thumbed a brown-singed red lily growing from the boulevard. She looked across the dry grass as she stood; the wildlife was scorched along the sidewalks. Summer gardens had scattered into crumbs across front yards. Tree leaves had withered to lace. Rilla swept a finger along her bare forearm: No sweat. The air itself seemed dead, parched in the 35-degree heat.
Taking a shortcut through a paved ravine without sidewalks, Rilla had to avoid the bluffs this time—closed to the public to delay the fire spreading. There wasn’t much foot or car traffic here, given the steep, uneven asphalt, but there was usually a wide river bisecting the road, continuing beneath it. Rilla could always hear it rushing a few hundred metres away, comforted: It always seemed to know which direction to run. But there was no sound, now. For weeks it had been nothing but a small stream, hardly even a ‘burn’ as Rilla’s Scottish grandfather would’ve called it. But nestled among it were the friendly faces she’d hoped to see—the real reason she took this shortcut.
Rilla stopped on the metal-plated bridge overlooking the river, smiling as she watched pots being filled in the stream, soon to soak and soften dried ramen noodles. The coloured tents looked like a carnival, and perhaps that wasn’t an entirely dismissive observation. Each person she’d met in the encampment had a skill to offer the group: Cooking, sewing, medicine, geography, and knowledge of safe injection sites. The difference was, no one lined up to see the brilliance they had to offer the world. Locals seemed to see them as glitches in their life: Stains, filth, and impurity. They didn’t see Tomah’s large brown hands whittling wooden brushes and spoons from fallen trees, or Mag’s knowledge of nettle, witch hazel, and willow bark, or the fact that she could make absorbent diapers. There was Jern’s dexterity with a knife and needle, crafting bandages and clothes from scraps. Arnold seemed to have a complete territorial map of the area in his head, all the way to Thunder Bay. And then there was fourteen-year-old Fariq, who made Rilla blush, and tracked the moon while he carried buckets of toothpaste water to be discarded away from the stream. Just now, he looked up from mending a shoe with thread and needle alongside Jern. His serious, dark brows unfurrowed as he smiled and nodded. Rilla nodded back, lifting her elbows from the bridge that overlooked the encampment to wave. Would they ever be seen past houselessness, or struggling with heroin, psychosis, schizophrenia, HIV, and more that Rilla hadn’t yet seen the impact of? She admired their togetherness and their skills, but quickly caught herself: They were worthy of care, belonging, food, shelter, and dignity—unconditionally.
Fariq waved to her, but it seemed sad, as if ‘goodbye’ in code. She had to go home, now. The sky was reddening.
***
No one was home, which wasn’t unusual. As Rilla sat at the island on a bar stool, shelling pistachios, the kitchen saturated with orange light streaming in the windows. But Rilla stood to close the curtains as she did every evening: With her eyes closed, clearing shell residue from her teeth with her tongue. She didn’t want to see the sign across the street, today or any day, but just as she thought of it, the curtain clips clattered over the tension rod, and an alarming sound reverberated through the small townhouse. The evacuation order.
Rilla clamped her eyes shut and accidentally swallowed a sharp bit of shell. Her phone continued to siren, and the curtain clips seemed to reverberate their clanging in her teeth. She opened her eyes, just a crack, no wider than what was left of the burn in the ravine, and her gaze fell on the sign. One of those black and white, “Safer Ontario” signs filled with straight-faced, armed police officers in flapjackets. As the screen changed every day, it read abbreviated versions of, “Protecting Ontario neighbourhoods: Ontario is working to protect our neighbourhoods by tackling auto theft, clearing encampments, shutting down drug injection sites near schools and daycares, building more jails and strengthening the bail system, so criminals stay behind bars.”
Rilla winced, shook her head until dizziness blurred the image, and turned away.
“What do you think this means about remaining human, or finding the human spirit, in difficult times?” Mr. Wilcox had asked about Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower.
“To grieve, prepare, and breathe,” Rilla had replied, recalling the fascinating etymology of that word ‘spirit’: The breath of life, or of God.
There was only fire to breathe, now. Breathing would be hard—speech even harder. But Rilla’s voice had never been loud, and maybe it wasn’t a speaking voice she needed, but a quiet, generative one to disrupt the silence she longed for. One that says: Witness.
In the distance, flames cast ghostly shadows on the underbelly of the clouds. They flickered through the curtains like the sun through closed eyelids.
What if they didn’t receive the evacuation order? Rilla wracked her brain for a memory of anyone in the encampment with a phone.
Her rage churned from grief in her stomach, like cheese from milk. She knew her dads would be texting her that they were coming, driving towards the meeting spot they’d chosen that morning: Under the sign. It stood on two thick concrete poles above the seesaw, a sentinel on two immovable legs.
Parallel burns streamed down Rilla’s face as she grabbed her evacuation-ready bag and walked outside, grateful, now, for the tightness of the mask.
Do they have masks?
Out the front door, Rilla could see the flames licking the treetops in the hills. Fire isn’t survivable. Rilla knew that much. It can’t be breathed, digested, or burned inside the body. But she was sure that’s what her grief felt like. Only when she was safe would she cough up the ash of all that had burned behind her.
The anticipatory grief, it seemed, wouldn’t burn into anything but a stream in a ravine. Rilla scanned the county road her house sat on. Across the street, to the left, was the playground and the sign. To the right was the lip of the ravine. Rilla closed her eyes so tight, they squeezed out ash and salt. Hardening is human, whether into the charred bone of death, or alive into the salty-sting of regret.
Of course, when Rilla opened her eyes, she ran back.
