Fiction
We went next door to Picardy's. The restaurant was crowded but we found a table in a corner behind a large potted fern. Mother settled Sunny. She didn't need much settling; she was sound asleep.
"You stay here with the baby, Violet, and I'll go up to the counter to choose our treats."
I was having none of that. I wanted to pick my own. She sighed and gave in to me. My mother wasn't much of a fighter.
There was chocolate cake and rhubarb pie and banana cream pudding and apricot tarts. I finally chose the chocolate cake. Mother added it to her bowl of pudding already on the tray. Sunny was too young for treats. Her needs were pretty basic, mostly involving milk.
I followed along behind my mother as she carried our tray back to the table. When it clattered to the ground every face in the room turned toward us. Moon-faced women and chisel-faced men and rosy-cheeked waitresses and busboys wearing hairnets. My mother scrabbled through the carriage and raced about the restaurant from table to table.
"Sunny!" she cried out. "My baby!"
The carriage looked the way it always did when Sunny wasn't in it. There was a soft dent in the pillow where her head had been. I touched it. It was warm.
My mum clutched at her throat where there was nothing but the flimsy collar of her summer dress.
"Help!" She didn't make a sound but we all saw the word leave her mouth.
A man in a dark suit took charge. He phoned the police from the restaurant phone on the wall next to the cash register. That frightened my mother even more. Surely it was too soon for those kinds of measures, she said. He tried to calm her and told everyone not to touch anything. Everything he said seemed to crank up my mum's terror a notch. I wondered if I should admit to having touched Sunny's pillow but I decided to keep it to myself.
"Maybe Will's got her," my mother said in an odd loud voice. "Maybe my husband slipped in and picked her up."
A waitress ran next door for my dad. We were well known at the restaurant: that nice lawyer's family.
My mother ran out to the street; the man who kept scaring her ran out too and women fussed over me. I stayed with the carriage, guarding it like I should have been doing all along. I placed my hands in the pockets of my dress to keep from touching anything and stared at my cake on the floor.
I don't think I considered that I would never see Sunny again or that my life would change drastically from that moment in time.
FRENCHMAN’S CREEK LINGERS ON the last trace of the prairies, a tendril nudging uncertainly into the Rocky Mountains, postscript rather than herald. Passersby ignore us tucked away as we are behind the gas station and abandoned motel, satellite dish rusting in lonely vigil. At one end of the welcoming strip is a giant wooden teepee, crumbling as its dream of welcoming tourist throngs fades. A street heads modestly into town; at the far side it ends abruptly at the creek facing the remnants of the bridge built to carry campers to the now remote island campground. Weekend nights in our bucolic setting are not as serene as you might expect but are interrupted by drunken arguments; pickups racing up and down the street; and by campers, f rustrated at the inaccessibility of the campground, parking on the edge of town, building bonfires, digging latrines, joining locals in their nighttime pursuits. During one such weekend of rustic revelry, the town leaders resolved to carve a ski hill into the side of Raven Mountain, sacred burial ground for the previous ten thousand years, looming behind. As the night progressed, the scheme became more grandiose, then, in the following weeks, took flight. But our conspiracy to rise from the flats, to be transformed from two dimensions to three, brought us to the attention of the Gods. On the ski hill’s opening day, students from our local school shouldered their wrath. After boarding the chairlift, one student, then thirteen, began to rock the chair. As they pitched ever more violently, the cable first came off its rollers then rebounded upwards. According to local reports, the students were then “slingshot sixty feet into the air.” The ski hill closed, but the trails left their scar, the shape of a pitchfork aimed down our throats pinning us to the ground evermore. Giant teepees, derelict dishes, unwanted campgrounds, ill-advised ski hills, dashed dreams. Perhaps the land is cursed. The Natives who first inhabited the land avoided the Flats, sending here only young men on vision quests or crossing it on their way to leave their dead on the mountainside. The first Europeans to settle were two dairy farmers from France, François and Pierre Joirret. Soon after their arrival, François began hearing voices in his sleep. His dead parents appeared in his dreams ordering him to kill his brother. “He is the spirit of evil!” they shouted. “He is building a machine with which to murder you!” “It was self-defense, ” François claimed in one of his few lucid moments during his trial. He had driven an axe into his brother’s head with such force it had entered even his neck.
