White

Jaxen looks at me, searches the shore for his father. He wants a picture but he wants even more to take the fish back. I nod. Beaming, Jaxen starts towards the cylindrical hole in the ice, the underworld below, and the fish flops in his hands, one final attempt. Jaxen loses his grip. The cutthroat drops neatly to the ice like a puck, like Hockey Night in Canada in slow-mo replay, perfectly timed for the show of white, the glint of steel blades, the wooden sticks of the hockey players. Up close: their teenage faces intense, pimply, a film of freezing sweat on their brows, faraway eyes already marked by life. Fish on the ice, fair game – the dark of their pubescent laughter. In the splinter of a second they whiz across the ice, passing the still-live cutthroat efficiently back and forth between their sticks. Jaxen in his Buzz Lightyear boots, Chase in his matching Pooh Bear hat and mittens watch as the teenagers spread out to the far side of Lake Byrne. In the distance we can see the Dobermans running towards them.

“Hey!” my husband shouts across the ice.

Chase and Jaxen look up at me: grave, funeral faces. We stand in the still sunless air of a hard, cold minus-20 day, surrounded by roiled barbwire, the flat horizon on the white prairie, the still-flat earth of white Caroline. We witness fish/live/puck. Jaxen’s eyes well up, Chase’s too – even he understands there is no taking it back now.

I pick up Chase. My husband gathers Jaxen. We walk to the shore; find Ella in the smash of people. I lightly brush my wordless lips against her cheek; my husband declines the peppermint hot chocolate she offers. A collective cloud of smoke, pot, filterless Player’s, the cold breath of white strangers hangs tangibly in the air above the fire. Someone has thrown something in the fire, not a car or a quad but a winter boot so that the smoke blackens, smells like burning soles.

Over the past 18 years, Lee Kvern says she has written “full-time, part-time and, for a period, no-time.” Her novella, Afterall, was nominated for an Alberta Book Award in 2006. Based in Okotoks, Alberta, Kvern is working on her next book, The Matter of Sylvie.

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The views expressed by the writer do not represent the views of enRoute, Spafax or Air Canada. Certain readers may be offended by the contents.