STYX

The 5:40 from Calgary, descending to the runway a kilometre to the south, rattles her roof and screams, all throat and flash, over the little frozen lake. Explosions of scarlet and green light track down the lake, pulse through the ice. The leafless aspens flare silver, copper, and are reabsorbed into darkness. The jet’s scream drops an octave, glissando. A spectacle of dragons, a kind of Valkyrie ride.

It’s her signal to close her laptop, abandon her work for the day. She stretches and blinks, tumbles from the tight interlocking puzzle of her mental work, of her reading and writing, into the jet’s destruction of silence, into the late afternoon of her empty house, as some component might peel from a shuttle and spin out into the void.

She had not thought, signing the papers for the house purchase, about the runway. Had not thought—entranced by the house, which in August had been full of light and space; entranced by the green and breeziness of the valley, a long slip of light, air, shade, and Montreal sultry and crowded; entranced by the real estate agent’s phrases: deer, ducks, lake path—she had not thought. She had seen only the lake, sparkling; the bobbing waterfowl.

She had forgotten how, even as a child, she had thought this area a bleak pinch of the landscape, a dark and dismal passage. The hills in this stretch of the valley low, blocky, not pleasing. A sort of rocky knob, just to the south and west of the lake, scattered now with dead and dying pines, blocking the light, the sun setting behind it by early afternoon. The least desirable land in the whole of the valley.

Reserve land, of course: what was given back to the original inhabitants as least valuable. Rocky, boggy land; the little lake, shallow and muddy, an afterthought in a valley famous for its lakes. Given back in treaties, this unprepossessing twist of the valley. A shameful illiberality. And now she has bought a house here, a bargain because on leased land.