Love after the End
Page 16
THE GATE
PROGRAM: ELOISE
ELAPSED TIME: 42:33.08
VIRTUAL TIME:425 YRS, 9 MTHS, 8 DAYS
“Why did you do that?” Cassie whispers into Emma’s ear, the closest she’s ever been to Emma, closer than when they met, when they just collapsed into each other across the rounded table, but never touched. She picks up the iPhone. There is a small red circle at the bottom of the screen, centred under the virtual time Emma has been gone. EXITUS. Exit. There is no reorientation. She is not supposed to remember. She is not supposed to remember Cassie. Cassie touches her fingertip against the red circle as though the glass might shatter, and she with it.
Moments later, seconds later, just seconds, Emma’s eyelids flutter open. She’s facing the window and stares at a shaft of light stretching across the room from a crack in the curtain. She stares at it for a long time, then looks away from it, scans the room, from right to left, until resting her eyes on Cassie.
“Tansi.” Cassie squeezes her hand and smiles.
Emma props herself up onto her elbows, and in the process lets go of Cassie’s hand. Her eyes do another lap of the room and she looks at Cassie again, curiously. Brow furrowed. Head tilted. “Where am I?”
“You’re in your bedroom.”
“I don’t know this place.”
Cassie doesn’t say anything.
“Who are you?”
Cassie fights back tears, tells Emma her name, and waits. There is a shaft of light between them. They are both staring at it. “I don’t know you.”
Cassie lets all the air out of her lungs before breathing again. Was four hundred years so much easier than a phone call? Was it easier to forget? Emma’s forgotten everything just to forget her. Cassie reaches forward, and when her hand is close to Emma’s face, Emma closes her eyes. Cassie pulls the thin white wires out of the stickers, one by one, and then peels the stickers away from Emma’s temples and forehead, each time brushing her fingertips against her skin, brushing her fingertips across the tiny follicles of hair, like she’s reading braille, like there’s a story written there that only she can read.
“That’s okay.”
“What’s okay?”
Cassie leans forward, Emma’s eyes still closed, collapses toward Emma, feels the shaft of light warm against her cheek, and then touches her lips against Emma’s, just for a moment, just for a few seconds, just for forever. Then, Cassie moves away, moves off the bed, walks toward Emma’s bedroom door.
She wants to say goodbye, but there’s no word for goodbye in Cree. She knows that. She was taught that. Remembers it clearly now. Remembers all of it. She stands facing the door. It’s a white door. There are white walls. There is a desk to the right and a wastepaper basket between the door frame and the desk. There is one crumpled-up piece of paper in the basket. Cassie bends down, picks it up, then straightens. Facing the door, then facing her hand, palming the crumpled-up paper. She unfolds it delicately to find her school picture, and on the back of it, her phone number in pencil, smudged almost enough to be illegible, more like trees within a dead forest in the distance.
Cassie thumbs the smeared numbers. “You silly girl,” she says, and reaches for the door handle.
“What did you say?” Emma asks.
Cassie turns around to find Emma standing beside her bed, eyes open, eyes fixed on her. Emma touches her lips, runs her fingertips across them.
Cassie thinks of what to say. Searches for the words, like they are dancing in the air within the shaft of light, dancing to music that only she can hear. And Emma.
She pockets the cut-out wallet photograph.
“Do you want to go for coffee?” Cassie asks.
“Ehe.”
“Americano, right? Decaf.”
“Right,” she says, then smiles. “My heart’s already beating too fast.”
FINIS
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
NATHAN ADLER is the author of Wrist (Kegedonce Press) and editor of Bawaajigan: Stories of Power (Exile Editions). He has an MFA in creative writing from UBC, is a first-place winner of the Indigenous Arts & Stories Challenge, and is a recipient of a Hnatyshyn REVEAL Indigenous Art Award for Literature. He is Anishinaabe and Jewish, and a member of Lac des Mille Lacs First Nation.
GABRIEL CASTILLOUX CALDERON (they/them) is nij-manidowag (Two-Spirit) Mi’kmaq, Algonquin, Scottish, and French Canadian. They currently thrive in Treaty 6 territory’s Amiskwacîwâskahikan (Edmonton). Gabe is actively involved in their Indigenous culture and ceremonies, and proudly celebrates a drug- and alcohol-free life. Gabe has won several short story awards, and they are a member of Breath in Poetry, the second-place champions of the 2019 Canadian Festival of Spoken Word team slam poetry competition. Gabe has also been chosen to represent the Two-Spirit community as Mr. Two Spirit International 2019–20.
ADAM GARNET JONES (Cree/Métis/Danish) is a Two-Spirit screenwriter, director, beadworker, and novelist from Amiskwacîwâskahikan (Edmonton). Adam came into his own as a filmmaker with the release of his first feature, Fire Song, at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2015. Fire Song went on to win the Audience Choice Award at imagineNATIVE before picking up three more audience choice awards and two jury prizes for best film at other festivals. Before going into production, the script for Fire Song won the Writers Guild of Canada’s Jim Burt Screenwriting Prize. Adam is now focusing on writing fiction and creating custom beadwork, primarily for Indigenous artists. His first novel, Fire Song (based on the film), was published in spring 2018. Publishers Weekly called it “striking and remarkable,” and the Globe and Mail said, “Fire Song is unquestionably necessary … because of its subject matter, perspective and voice.” The book received a starred review from Kirkus and was named an honour book by CODE’s Burt Award for First Nations, Inuit and Métis Young Adult Literature. It also won a bronze medal for young adult fiction from the Independent Publisher Book Awards. Fire Song has topped innumerable “best of” lists of the year’s LGBT YA literature in the United States and Canada. Adam works to support Indigenous filmmakers at Telefilm Canada as content analyst and Indigenous liaison.
MARI KURISATO is the pen name for a disabled, LGBTQIA, tribally enrolled Cote First Nation Ojibwe woman who lives in Denver, Colorado, with her wife and son. She has written two self-published books, and her short fiction has appeared in the anthologies Things We Are Not: M-Brane SF Presents New Tales of the Queer and Absolute Power: Tales of Queer Villainy! (Northwest Press). She is hard at work on her next novel, seeking an agent, and spending too much time on Twitter and in MMOs. Find her on Twitter at @CyborgN8VMari and online at polychromantium.com.
DARCIE LITTLE BADGER is a Lipan Apache writer with a PhD in oceanography. Her debut novel, Elatsoe, was published by Levine Querido in August 2020 and is a BookExpo 2020 Young Adult Buzz Finalist. Darcie co-wrote Strangelands, a comic series in the Humanoids’ H1 universe. Her short fiction, non-fiction, and comics have appeared in multiple publications, including Nightmare Magazine, Strange Horizons, and The Dark, and were featured in an episode on the pod-cast LeVar Burton Reads. She lives on both coasts of the United States and is engaged to a veterinarian who cosplays as Cassandra Pentaghast and Luke Skywalker.
KAI MINOSH PYLE is a Two-Spirit Métis and Baawiting Nishnaabe writer originally from Green Bay, Wisconsin, living in Bde Ota Otunwe (Minneapolis, Minnesota). They have been published in both creative and scholarly journals such as PRISM international, Transgender Studies Quarterly, Cloudthroat, and The Activist History Review. Their current projects include editing a zine of Two-Spirit writing, pursuing a PhD on Two-Spirit Anishinaabe history, and, as always, learning their ancestral languages.
DAVID A. ROBERTSON is the winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Beatrice Mosionier Indigenous Writer of the Year Award, and the John Hirsch Award for Most Promising Manitoba Writer. His books include When We Were Alone (winner of the Governor General’s Award, a finalist for the TD Canadian Children’s Literature Award, and a
McNally Robinson Best Book for Young People); Will I See? (winner of the Manuela Dias Book Design and Illustration Award, Graphic Novel category); the YA novel Strangers (recipient of the Michael Van Rooy Award for Genre Fiction); and Monsters (a McNally Robinson Best Book for Young People). Through his writings about Canada’s Indigenous peoples, David educates as well as entertains, reflecting Indigenous cultures, histories, and communities while illuminating many contemporary issues. David is a member of Norway House Cree Nation. He lives in Winnipeg.
JAYE SIMPSON is an Oji-Cree Saulteaux Indigiqueer whose roots hail from the Sapotaweyak, Keeseekoose, and Skownan Cree Nations. they are published in several magazines including Poetry Is Dead, This Magazine, PRISM international, SAD Mag, GUTS, subTerrain, Grain, and Room. they are in two Arsenal Pulp Press anthologies: Hustling Verse (2019) and Love after the End (2020). it was never going to be okay (Nightwood Editions) is their first book of poetry. they are a displaced Indigenous person resisting, ruminating, and residing on xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), səl̓ilwətaɁɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), and sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) First Nations territories.
NAZBAH TOM, Diné, is a somatic practitioner. They support individuals and groups through a process of embodied transformation using a combination of conversation, breath work, new skills, bodywork, and gestures. Their work aims to humanize and reconnect us to ourselves, each other, and our land. In between working with individuals and groups, they do their best to capture poems and short stories haunting them at all hours of the day.
Photo credit: sweetmoon photography
JOSHUA WHITEHEAD is an Oji-Cree/nêhiyâw, Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer member of Peguis First Nation (Treaty 1). He is the author of the poetry collection full-metal indigiqueer (Talonbooks, 2017) and the novel Jonny Appleseed (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2018), which was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize; shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, the Amazon First Novel Award, the Carol Shields Winnipeg Book Award, the Firecracker Award, and the Indigenous Voices Award; and won a Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction and the Georges Bugnet Award for Fiction. He is the winner of the Governor General’s History Award for the Indigenous Arts & Stories Challenge in 2016. He is working on a PhD in Indigenous Literatures and Cultures in the University of Calgary’s English department (Treaty 7).
joshuawhitehead.ca