Vis avis

Home? That's-

-your condo_minium you shared (share? shared.) with Hal. With the old coot of a building manager (corn crake, eventually actually) who thought the two of you made a wonderful couple even if Hal forgot to lock up the dumpster and fine arts students got caught scrounging around in there. On several occasions, in fact. Compared to the subletters - the domestically dysfunctional clutches of postgrads, the moneyed little starling who'll probably fail his BComm when he learns house parties aren't partial credit for his Marketing module - compared to them, you and Hal are (were) model neighbors.

Mental exercises of imagining yourself back there leave you short of breath; a sharp, high pain. Would the little kingfisher still be there? Would Hal?

What arrangement of answers there hurts the least to host?


Alright, then, what's the alternative? Is home-

-the lifestyle block at Pine Hill, an hours' drive from downtown and the long-range nail in the coffin of your teenage social life? The place inoculated you on the concept of the once-familiar drifting out of alignment with your memories. There's that to thank it for, at least.

You don't want to think about it. You hate yourself enough when you and Hal visit for Christmas; he'll have all four-to-tens in residence hanging off of him in five minutes flat and you. You'll be watching that simmering element within - laden with resentment and resting on your chest - your whole damn stay, and willing it not to boil over.

You can be happy for Burt and Wanda and their gaggle of foster kids, because you're not a fucking monster. They all deserve to be happy, and if that happiness has to eat into the tangible reminders of your childhood, well... you can pretend to be fine with that.

The living room's got a whole wall just about covered by this point in framed photographs. Still not enough to necessitate taking any down of you and your sister (first-days-of-school, the group photos sent out to relatives while they were alive, graduations, marriages), but you could barely stand spending time in there. You felt crowded and selfish and claustrophobic at all these lives lived in a space you've no right to have enshrined for you.

So you'd stroll down to the paddock at the bottom of the property, and stay awhile under the stars and pines looking back toward the city until everything in your chest was properly quashed away again.


So that's not it, either.


The copy shop. It's open. There's a stolid passerine of some persuasion sprawled outside on the pavement, either one of the city's homeless or some unfortunate birdbrain who flew into the storefront window. You pat your coat pocket down just to check the USB drive's there, then go in-