I picture myself trudging up the Rockies, sleeping in caves, then slogging across the Prairies, through walls of wheat. I get lost in a corn row. I give birth in a barn, in the hay, the cattle are lowing and dipping their big slab heads over my stall. To hold my course, this one in Vancouver, I rely on the sun and the occasional street sign with East in its name. I have a sense of going in and out of radio frequencies as the mood of one street gives way to the next and as certain houses and stores clamour with the possibility of a life that might have been mine. Might still be mine. I could live in that clapboard bungalow, put up with the canary-yellow trim and red mailbox that says “THE BINGLES” in cockeyed yellow letters, be the wife of strapping Mr. Bingle over there with his brush cut and hedge clippers. That girl in the grocery store, the cashier spinning dreamily on her stool? I could be her. When I finally stop walking, it isn’t because I’m tired, it’s because for some time I’ve been noticing blood oozing out of the open toes of my shoes, and the thought that this should concern me has become a distraction.
