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Yellowknife

a pilgrimage

By Katie AlafdalPublished 3 years ago Updated 3 years ago 8 min read
2
Yellowknife
Photo by Jonatan Pie on Unsplash

Yellowknife had an arsenic problem. At least, that’s what Jason had told her the night they met, his voice heavy and self-conscious over the music pumping from the loudspeakers of the frat house.

“What?” she had asked him, baffled. They had been discussing where they grew up before the two of them had ended up in Tucson for school-- she hailed from the glittering highrises and warm stretches of beach that made up Los Angeles, and he, it seemed, was from a small town in the very northernmost part of Canada. A place called Yellowknife.

“The entire town is overrun with arsenic. It’s actually kind of insane, when you think about it,” Jason explained, flashing her an appraising look, “When I was a kid, my parents wouldn’t let me play in certain places. There were signs everywhere that told people to keep out of waterways and abandoned fields where the worst of the deposits piled up.”

“Arsenic deposits,” she repeated skeptically, looking at him with wide, amused eyes.

He nodded feverishly, running a hand through his dark, cascading hair.

“Yeah, it started back in the forties with this, like, mining operation that started up on the edge of town. They found gold, and thought it would be super lucrative, but in the end, what they really uncovered were like a dozen sealed chambers filled with this arsenic compound that dissolves in water. So when the mine flooded, everything became basically unlivable. Yellowknife exists anyways though. Takes more than deadly poison to make my folks wanna pick up and start somewhere new.” He smiled shyly at her, his eyes light despite the subject matter.

It was such an absurdly dark way to pick her up, she remembered thinking. But the way he leaned against the grimy frat wall, gazing at her as though every one of her reactions were priceless, made it somehow effective. He felt real to her in a way that the rest of her life, up to this point, had not.

“So it got into the water supply? Doesn’t arsenic cause, like, birth defects, and cancer? Or things like that?” She struggled to find some semblance of reason in his story.

“Yes and yes,” he grimaced, “So now we just have to wait and see what kind of mutations I’m gonna be blessed with, I guess.” She shook her head. Even though they had only known each other for ten minutes, she could not imagine anything bad happening to this beautiful boy. He was too gentle, too easy to smile.

“And a huge percentage of the population are indigenous folks, right? But the government just doesn’t care at all about their well-being, so all they do is put up signs that say KEEP OUT where the poison is most potent. Not so much as a ‘Sorry for destroying your land and livelihoods’. That’s what the colonizers mean when they talk about truth and reconciliation,” he went on, his face going bitter for the first time.

“That’s horrific,” she returned. She tried to think of something else to say, something that might redeem the entire horrid situation, but could think of nothing.

“The view of the Northern Lights though is the best there in the world,” Jason offered, as though reading her mind, “I’ll have to show you one of these days.” His confidence should have shocked her, looking back, but in that moment all she felt was a kind of warmth spreading through her entire body, a kind of belonging she had never known.

* * *

When she told him she was pregnant, his face had been as blank and impassive as stone.

“You’re being serious?” he inquired, his muscles flexing under the thin material of his t-shirt.

She nodded, her throat constricted with fear. She had not been anxious to tell him, even though they were young and the circumstances were hardly ideal. He was kind, and generous, and thoughtful, and she knew they would figure it out together. But something in the impenetrability of his eyes caught her off guard. She reached out for his hand, and he let her take it indifferently, his gaze fixed on the wall behind her.

“You have to get rid of it,” he intoned curtly, shifting so that her grasp on him was broken, “I can’t afford a kid, and neither can you.”

That night after she drove him to his apartment, he blocked her on everything. Instagram, snapchat, even LinkedIn. She could find out his email from a mutual friend, she figured, but it seemed like a lost cause.

A sick, heavy feeling was growing inside her, an absence that felt more real than the new life she was polishing at this very moment.

* * *

The clinic was nice, she supposed. The linoleum floors at least, were clean, and she had scheduled her appointment for early enough in the day that the crowds of middle aged women hurling insults and bible passages at her had not yet taken up their posts on the sidewalk outside.

The man at the front desk was balding with watery eyes, but he had a kind face. Not that she trusted kind faces anymore, not after Jason.

He handed her a clipboard with a thin smile.

“Fill this out for me and we can get you in and out, okay?” he hummed, and she nodded mutely.

She did not say what she wanted to say, which was, “I want to die.”

She did not tell him, “My boyfriend should have driven me here but he left out of nowhere and now I feel like I’m going to be sick.”

She did not even make a passing remark about the baby, about how she was not entirely sure she wanted to make it disappear even though that was the reason she was there. She could picture the newborn in her mind’s eye, a baby with Jason’s dark skin and delicate nose, and her own expressive green eyes.

* * *

Afterwards a nurse arrived to ask how she was feeling, and to return her clothes. She came bearing a bottle of pain meds, and a sympathetic expression.

Now, as the anesthesia was wearing off, she felt her inhibitions slipping.

“You have a ride home?” the nurse regarded her piercingly, “I can’t discharge you if you don’t have a ride.”

“Yes, my roommate is waiting outside for me.”

The older woman nodded efficiently, beginning to back out of the room.

“I want to die,” she whispered softly, so softly that she could hardly hear herself speak.

“I’m sorry?” the nurse asked, pausing in the doorway.

“Nothing. Thank you.”

* * *

There was no logic in it, she knew. Not now that Jason and the baby were long gone. But she had procured the plane ticket anyway. A direct flight would take her to Vancouver, and then a smaller plane to Kamloops, in British Columbia. From there she would bus the rest of the way to the frozen area up north, the place of abundant arsenic and the Aurora Borealis.

She was not fool enough to imagine she would run into Jason. From the last she heard, he was living in Ohio, having relocated for grad school. She did not, likewise, have a desire to meet his family, the far away, haggard couple she imagined had raised the man she loved. No, this trip was strictly her own. A pilgrimage of sorts, she reasoned. The grace she was seeking could not be articulated or possessed directly. It was, in effect, a fool’s errand, but she had always been a fool, hadn’t she?

* * *

There was a single hotel, which she checked into without much fuss. She only had a single duffel, and a head full of churning, impossible thoughts. As ever, her mind drifted to thoughts of the void that had taken up a post inside of her the minute she awoke from the procedure. A void that existed, not where her child should have been, but in lieu of something else entirely. A different lost thing.

It was nightfall, and freezing. Her body had never experienced a cold quite like this. She shrugged on her long-johns and a parka, and thrust her socked feet into her cousin’s hand-me-down snow boots.

When she finally stepped outside under the stars, nothing more than a shadow under the moon which loomed lithe and mysterious through the clouds, she hardly felt the cold. How peculiar it was. Perhaps she was numb, or perhaps, she relished, she was in the late stages of hypothermia and she would be finished off soon.

The words that she had spoken at the clinic resurfaced in her mind. I want to die.

She shook herself, and began walking in the direction of the forest. She did not know where the best view of the lights would be found, so she decided to settle on the worst one. She would obscure her vision with trees and darkness.

She halted a few steps past the tree-line, shivering. Now the cold was permeating her coat, seeping under her skin to settle in her bones. I want to die.

Above her, the sky cleared a little, the clouds leaking out from the great bowl of the heavens. I want to die.

And then, quite suddenly, the lights began to flicker, sheer and unnatural upon her retinas. Oceanic blues, and pastoral greens, and flickering violets, all dancing desperately under her eyelids. It was, she might have admitted if she was capable of recognizing beauty, a lovely scene. The arcs of viridescent color descended upon her like a gag. She found she could not speak. Tears, unbidden, rolled down her face, freezing upon her flushed cheeks.

The voice in her head was gone now. There was only this light, this color, this grace that filled the sky, illuminating everything under it, even her from where she watched mutely under the trees. The ache in her stomach did not disappear, but it did become a little more bearable. Perhaps, this would be enough to start again.

Short Story
2

About the Creator

Katie Alafdal

queer poet and visual artist. @leromanovs on insta

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