Jenny Ferguson

Maple Creek. Summer. Late August.

The growth on the banks towers tall, so you feel sunken deep into the earth, the roan red canoe floating low as if in a crevice. It earns new flecks of white, its patina changing with each scrape—okay, pull now; climb in—as you scale over beaver dams. Sunburn on the tops of your thighs and nowhere else. Serpentine creek, mid-afternoon. Around the next bend, a moose stands in chest-deep water, musky, brown, waiting.

This moment is indescribable. The creek and its low-water level pains forgotten.

You don’t reach for a camera. You breathe.

Later. Burn of shoulders, fire of muscle. The canoe heavy, the way the box of papers, of old postcards, of memories you think you cannot live without is every time your apartment complex fire alarm blares. Rain makes everything heavier. Today, it is raining like it does in your memories of Pennsylvanian summer storms, fierce and biting. You complete each portage three times, carrying what it is you need to survive, singing to warn off the bears: Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene.

Night. Woven hammock stretches out under your weight. The freeze-dried soup, not what you’d crave if you were home—Thai butternut cream—is crunchy still.

Years later. These fragments are what remains true in a heart far from the waters that remind you of home. You’ll miss that canoe the way you do your favourite uncle. You’ll see that moose, ghost-shimmering, in every creek.

Jenny Ferguson (she/her/hers) is Métis (on her father’s side) and Canadian settler (on her mother’s side), an activist, a feminist, an auntie, and an accomplice with a PhD. She believes writing, teaching and beading are political acts. BORDER MARKERS, her collection of linked flash fiction narratives, is available from NeWest Press. She teaches at Loyola Marymount University and in the Opt-Res MFA Program at the University of British Columbia.