WRAITH
The ink dark cloud floats to the end of my futon. The night is black. But this is something deeper, more impenetrable. It takes shape, coalesces with purpose. It has become a vast bird that enfolds me with the sweep of its wings. Then a glint as it draws back its beak to plunge into my chest.
Breathless I draw up an arm to shield myself from the blow. But nothing happens.
A dream, perhaps.
The following morning I get the call. I am told I should sit. I know already what Pilon, the caller is going to say. I have never occasioned a phone call from him before. I suddenly have a glimpse of our mutual friend, Barry, two cats twining about his legs.
There’s been a car accident. The funeral, that day. And I don’t go.
We hadn’t seen much of each other recently. We had drifted. High school friendships, the bonds that create them, are fickle, even if the feelings are not.
Why don’t I go? Cowardice maybe. But not heartlessness. I have lost too many friends already.
First there was Chris. Grade 9. The one person who had made the echoing high school halls someone less alienating. Luminous Chris. The person who was universally popular, good at sports — who didn’t seem to care that I was tall and gawky and completely uncertain of just about everything and everyone — the first person who really seemed to care if I was all right. Hit by a car crossing the street. Someone said it was nothing serious. But then in the hospital, he went to sleep and never woke up. Like a match struck in a blackened corridor he was gone.
Then it was Danny. Tough as nails and riding a Kawasaki. Danny who
never gave way in a fight, whose family had come from a land broken and scarred by relentless wars. Someone who for some reason thought I was all right, though I was nowhere near as fearless, and certainly not near as tough. Danny. Hit by a driver not paying attention as he made a left turn on the motorcycle he had just agreed to sell.
I remember not being able to approach the casket. Standing at the back of the funeral home. Wanting the proceedings to be over. My friends, more courageous, who went to pay their respects, came back trembling. Danny’s uncle implores his lifeless figure: wake up, Daniel, your friends are here.
Now Barry. Another car accident. Another coffin, the certainty of it. I want to imagine that he is still a phone call away.
I should have gone. But It is the last day of Autumn, the light brilliant and pale through the streets. Instead, I am alone on a corner of Wellington Street West, the grey church looming sentinel-like behind me. A sudden wind that swirls leaves, crisp and coppery through the air like a lost fortune. Why am I there?
The traffic stills. The wind rises with a whistle. A clatter begins. A man in a hat, dressed head to toe in washed out denim approaches, walking his bicycle. It’s the rear fender trailing, rattling against the pocked pavement. The sound grows. The fender twitches and jumps, reminding me of a fallen bird in its death throes. The sound, the feeling are becoming unbearable.
The street, the world around it empties. Just me and him. All the cars, the drivers, the foot traffic, absent. He stops, holds me in his knowing gaze for an indeterminate period — a second, an eternity, maybe both?
There is a faint tugging at his lips. He is here to say something, but his look tells me I am not ready to receive it. So he simply nods and continues on his way. As the clatter of the trailing fender diminishes, the street suddenly moves again. A woman with a trolley bursting with grocery bags. A Chevy pickup. A dog barking. A plane and its contrail 40,000 feet above.
A sudden burst of black flapping wings. I flinch and jump back. A crow with the corpse of a smaller bird clutched in its beak. It regards me for a moment from the telephone wire above with a round black eye before taking flight with its prize.
I am 18. I am becoming a wraith. The world between worlds is where I drift.
The humans put the money in the money basket -- so that all contributors may become plump with their labour.