These are the best things about them, and the way they lived. Cigarettes smoked on the fire escape of their first apartment. Years later, there was the smell of cut flowers and a peach pie cooling on the windowsill of an island cabin.

I am thinking of the way she loved the smell of burnt toast. Or that moment she pulled her hair back with one hand while she sorted through albums at the all-night record shop. I am sure there was nobody who noticed that except for him.

There were so many things, dust and crumbs swept under the rug of time. A girl loves goldfish and wrinkles her nose while she sleeps. A boy saves some ants from drowning in a dog dish, and writes a bad country and western song every time there is a full moon.

One night they watch Columbo and eat fried egg sandwiches, wrapped in his grandmother’s handmade Afghan. Another time they see strange lights in the sky above his parents? farm.

They never changed the course of history, or wanted to. In her red silk dress, she rode on the handlebars of his no-speed bike. They stood beneath a waterfall, swam naked in the creek, and caught tadpoles and butterflies in their cupped beggars? hands.

There are no preserved footprints, no archival footage, and no documents. Or none that matter, anyway.

There are snow angels and names drawn in the sand, and her reflection in a silver toaster. There are letters burnt, and negatives too old to print. There are Polaroids, maybe, lost in the hidden spaces of a Value Village couch.

Heights of grown children are recorded in pencil crayon on the door frame of a kitchen, beneath four layers of paint. There are unrecorded poetry readings and musical notes and laughter in the living room curtains and the cobwebs of long-abandoned houses.

I had a dream last night that I was a child again. I was standing on the edge of a circle of firelight, and the night sky was filled with a snowstorm of stars. I was reaching out in wonder, trying to capture all the billion tiny sparks drifting up from the bonfire. And I think that bonfire was the sweet crackling fuel of our days, and those sparks were the smallest of moments.

And you were there with me, right beside me, wide-eyed and laughing, watching them linger for a moment, then disappear as they landed like small, delicate gifts in our outstretched hands.

Always, I am learning to put one foot in front of the other, always picking myself up and starting again. I am walking into doors and stepping on feet. I am learning how to dance the tango with flippers on my feet. I am trailing loose wires and leaking sparks from every seam.

There are so many people that will tell you how it is a shiny thing, this human thing?tidy and slick, like mercury off a chrome duck’s back. They will tell you It’s all sleight of hand and cabriole and parlour tricks in halogen light.

But the more I learn, it seems to me a messy and untamed thing. It is graveyard breath and matted hair and hands dangling awkward at the sides. It is pocket lint and snot and shit and blood. It is things half seen in half-light. It is an ultrasound life, a black light life, a shadow puppet life, a glimpse-of-a-face-at-the-window kind of life.

I am a human being in a crowd of other human beings. We are a dark and moving mass, like marching ants, like the smoke from an airborne toxic event.

To forget our loneliness and our fear of what comes next, we are passing around rumours and gold coins. We are kissing in the dark. We are writing epic poems and composing symphonies for trumpet and harp.

Because we are all afraid of the dark, we are singing our human song. And it sounds like the west wind in a ghost ship’s sails, and a hive of silvery bees, and a gospel choir, and thousands of witches vomiting spiders and eggshells, and the cries of a coyote being carried off by a black tornado cloud descending on a prairie town.

We are using various forms of locomotion. We are crawling on our bellies, walking backwards, pogo-sticking, or floating two feet off the ground. We are carrying lanterns lit with the souls of drowned children. We are carrying our earthly belongings in burlap bags. We have telescopes and broken pocket watches and monkey paws. We have hand-drawn maps and prayer books written in long-dead languages.

We are all learning what it means to be human. We are all moving toward a light we see far off in the distance. It might be many things: a host of angels singing, a far-off city, a UFO landing site, a burning lake. All we know is that it keeps on shining. And we are all learning to move, and getting nearer all the time.

What’s that, sir? What do I feel my strengths are as an employee? You’re certainly taking this in a novel direction, aren’t you?

My strengths . . . my strengths . . . I suppose you could say the ability to keep a straight face most of the time. That definitely comes in handy for motivational meetings and the like. And decent penmanship, of course. That has been frequently commented upon.

Things I would like to work on? Hmmm. Well, I suppose if I had to narrow it down to just a handful of things, I would definitely put being a bit more honest near the top of the list. Less pilfering of coffee and office supplies, fewer incidents of sabotaging the photocopier and phoning in bomb threats in order to get the morning off, that sort of thing.

Also, something that seems to get in my way a bit is an utter lack of interest in what I’m doing. Laziness, procrastination, cynicism, intelligence, high expectations—one could really go on and on, couldn’t one? I suspect that all of these things are a barrier to my success with this corporation.

Oh, there’s no shortage of things I would like to change. The real problem lies in finding the motivation to do it. Quite frankly, I don’t think It’s going to happen. I expect you’ve felt that way yourself, haven’t you sir? I’ll bet there was a time when you, too, had dreams and a sense of humour. But you were obviously able to overcome them, and reach your true potential.

Well, that’s a good question. A real poser, as they say. Absolutely didn’t see it coming. Truth be told, I hadn’t really given it all that much thought, you see.

I suppose my long-term goals are to, you know, just keep slogging away in the accounts receivable department, whilst nursing unrealistic dreams of telling you to fuck off. The job itself is mind-numbingly tedious, of course, but it beats serving coffee or setting up a meth lab in the trunk of my car.

And there’s a certain grim satisfaction in staggering through to the weekend, when I can plug in my electric guitar, or sleep with my girlfriend, or catch a foreign film, or find myself a patio where I can sip a lime margarita, and watch the birds all flying by.

Gather your peers together to help. Feed them wild honey and craftsman’s cheese. Slake their thirst with pink lemonade and cups of freshly fallen rain.
If some of them play harp or clarinet or drum, let them form an orchestra to lend a soundtrack of shanties and dirges, madrigals and hymns to your long days of toil and joy.

don’t worry about the distance to malls or schools. Choose a spot near a body of water, deep and wide, and with a decent view of the seasons passing by. Keep in mind you will want a garden with a pear tree for reading poems under, and a shady grove that owls and foxes will be drawn to.

When you dig that first hole for the foundation, pay attention to the dirt your spade bites into. Notice the complex perfume of promise and decay. Notice the tenacious weeds and the fragile imprint of extinct creatures. Listen to the whispered conversation of stones and time, and join in when you have something important to add.

When the time comes to put up walls, don’t make them too thick. Plan to have the sound of laughter leak from room to room. Make sure there are lots of windows so that the moon and wind can come and go as they please.

Remember that no two houses should ever be exactly alike. Think eggplant and crimson, gargoyles and flamingos, kiwi green and bubblegum pink. Think weather vanes shaped like angels and whales. If possible, add a unique architectural flourish or two?a moon garden or a labyrinth or a tower of stone.

When the job is close to finished, let your mind wander from room to room, lighting lamps and candles along the way. Imagine the surfaces of avocado and cream, the ceiling stars, the comforts of kettle and claw-foot tub, the curtains alive with breeze. Climb the stairs and sit on the roof, feeling the summer sun melting into your bones.

Imagine what it will be like when everything is done. But always take time to idle and dream. Never work too long or too late. After all, It’s just a house.

I . . . was moving backwards in the darkness of the landing, drifting backwards down the stairs, floating backwards into the night.

You . . . were waiting for me next morning, ready to change the look of our home. You had your shirt sleeves rolled up, first thing, coffee on the stove, trowel and hawl in hand, smiling at me with white-flecked hair, saying ?Well, mister, this wall doesn’t seem to be plastering itself.?

I . . . was too busy to help, too many things on the go, building bomb shelters and biospheres, fences to keep back the neighbours dogs, the changing tides. All night long I was filling notebooks with designs for unrealistic machines. I was gone for long periods of time, off working in the clouds, or in unlit tunnels deep underground.

You . . . fell asleep in the TV room, night after night, with your head on my shoulder while the radioactive monsters chewed through city after city. You would sometimes laugh in your sleep, and I would wonder what it meant.

I . . . was afraid to move in case I woke you, so I stayed up through the late-night news?the real-life horrors, the atrocities in Winnipeg and the Middle East, the interviews with the victims? families?forgetting how to sleep. In the morning I told you about all the threats that could tear us apart: the psychopaths, the viruses, the bombs, the shifting tectonic plates.

You . . . said that if we are strong nothing can tear us apart, but that it wouldn’t hurt to have an emergency plan.

I . . . said, ?Just tell me where to wait for you, and for how long. Just tell me where we should meet.?

You . . . said ?How about the middle. Would that work??

I . . . tried to find you when the disaster finally hit. But the phones stopped working, and the bridges all collapsed. I kept getting off the bus or the train at the wrong time, only to see your face again and again, always when it was in a window pulling away.

You . . . came to me in my restless dreams for so long, always holding out your hand to me, waiting in places I could never find you. You wrote out directions for me, and hid them inside the covers of old records. You drew maps for me in the steam of bathroom mirrors, in the dust beneath our bed.

I . . . remember the last time I saw you. It was at the beach. I was standing on the edge of an inland sea, trying to make out your face in the fog and hear your voice above the waves.

You . . . were sitting behind me on a blanket, packing up the picnic stuff, searching through your purse for the keys to your car.

We . . . looked into each other’s eyes, before you stood up and walked away.

Ms. Allen shows us a video of what it looks like when bad cells divide. There are posters of smokers? lungs and classroom rules. We make collages of cancer symptoms.

Math

Outside the window thin, dark branches of unidentifiable autumn trees are being whipped around by a wicked north wind.

A car is reversing in the parking lot, transforming a dirty rain puddle into a pool of liquid rubies. The faint sounds of ?don’t Fear the Reaper? are leaking through the car’s open window. Somewhere a raven is cawing and a baby is screaming.

The clouds are monsters with sad, sensitive faces. The value of X remains unclear.

French

We learn how to say grapefruit and cake. We establish that a black cat is either above or below a certain table. We learn many conjugated versions of aller, without actually doing it. One of the cloudfaces has swallowed a thin sliver of pale morning moon, and is holding it in its belly like a radiant fetus.

Phys. Ed.

We practise indifference and dribbling a basketball. I can’t help but notice that Karla Kaake has been wearing those same green shorts since fifth grade.

Lunch

We sneak into the woods for chocolate bars and cigarettes. Daisy is pissed off about always lending me smokes. Dave saves a dragonfly from a spider’s web. There are rusted engine parts and a car’s back seat in the dried-out creek bed. We pretend we’re driving to Mexico, the radio on, the wind in our faces, a deck of Export A sitting on the dash.

Science

There’s a sub. We break thermometers in the sink and chase the shivery little mercury blobs with the tips of our fingers. Dave steals a frog from a jar of formaldehyde. Later that day, during lunch break, he will cut off one of its claws with a penknife, and put it in the nozzle of the drinking fountain.

English

I write a disturbing poem about unexpected mutations. We hear a scream from the direction of the drinking fountain. When Mr. Bakker leaves the room to investigate, I steal the bulb from his film projector.

Art

There is this new girl in the class, named Piri. It’s her first day, so she doesn’t yet know that Dave and I are losers. Her breath smells of cigarettes and peppermint. In the drawing, there is a girl who may or may not be her, standing naked on the hood of a Ford Falcon. She is brandishing a scimitar in her left hand.

At the bottom of the picture, there is a sentence written in Czech. I will spend many years of my life searching for a translation.

He has route maps and instructions. He has a glowing box of dreams he keeps in the corner of his room. In the evening, the dreams swim around in there, like neon fish in an aquarium.

He’s not sure, anymore, whose dreams these are he keeps seeing. He thinks maybe they’re his. Maybe they’re his.

At night, though, when he falls asleep (as he inevitably must) the other dreams keep coming. Most often, he dreams of angels, both weird and terrible. They are freakish angels, angel freaks.

There is the one, whose head is blinding light, erupting in sparks like a birthday party sparkler. She follows him through the house, and he is terrified she will set the kitchen curtains on fire. There is the one whose skin is a mirror, and the one whose body is inside out, her flesh decorated with veins and organs.

There are angels with three mouths, and angels hanging from the ceiling. There are angels clear as glass, and one who is the night sky, jewelled with emptiness and constellations.

All of them are singing their weird and terrible song, and no matter how hard his dreaming self clamps his hands over his ears, the music finds its way inside his head and his blood.

He desperately wants them to stop visiting him, so he spends his spare hours searching the Internet for a cure. He sits in clinic waiting rooms and on church pews. He wanders, tired and confused, through the self-help aisles of Indigo and Chapters. He falls asleep with his iPod on, and the box of acceptable dreams turned way up loud. He drinks endless cups of coffee to buy himself more time in the real, waking world.

Still, the angels keep coming, night after night. They sit on the edge of his bed; get tangled in his drapes and in his sheets. They have burning hair and the heads of beasts. They have folded black wings and dresses made of honeybees. They hum and they sing and they call to him to join them. They are beautiful and deadly, radioactive, translucent.

And he thinks, there is only so much madness a middle-aged, middle-class man can handle. And he spends his days cursing his fate, and searching for a cure.

It was a place of transformations. Wolves walked and talked like men. Women breathed beneath the waves.

There was a time, though, when she tasted the bitterness of others? words on her tongue, and came to feel all the stories were traps for her. They wanted to tell her who she was. But they did not know who she was.

She was no Shakespearean heroine, no Juliet, no Ophelia, or Lady Macbeth. She would not allow herself to be poisoned by love, would clutch no silver dagger to her heaving breast with bloodied hands, nor float down a darkened river tangled with weeds.

She was no country ?n western missus, no fairy-tale princess, no tragic victim of magic or love. She wouldn’t never steal nobody’s pickup truck, would not prick her finger on a cursed wheel, not sleep for a hundred years anticipating a kiss.

There was a time when she came to feel all the black codes on the pages of fables and textbooks were tiny, precise cogs rotating in an ancient and rusted clockwork of expectations. The machinery turned and turned. The cut-outs herky-jerked their way across a paper screen: the daughter?humble, cheerful, oppressed; the selfless, smothered mother; the painted, dancing whore; the wicked, finger-pricking rider of broomsticks; the housewife measuring her time in painkillers and gin. She looked in all their passing faces, and never saw her own.

There came a time when she found a different window. It opened inward, facing away from the world’s machine.

Through this window, she could see the transformations inside her. There were wolves in her heart and oceans in her blood. There were poets sleeping in the belly of whales. When she breathed in, she breathed thunderclouds into her brain, and lightning flashed behind her eyes.

When she ate peaches, fleshy maidens removed their veils for her, and sang her lullabies filled with honey and salt. When she walked abroad, she never walked less than one foot above the ground, and when she flew, the moon slipped beneath her dress. When she lay back upon her bed, she rode tigers through rain-wet gardens.

She had stories to tell, and stories to tell. And she told them.

Whenever I find myself bogged down with the blues, I find it a useful activity to come up with my own random, rambling version of that list.

The first week of March seems like as good a time as any, so here goes. (By the way, they are listed?it goes without saying?in no particular order.)

Wood-burning stoves, Gilbert and Sullivan, eggs Benedict, Robert Louis Stevenson, horses in the snow, the people I love, Madeleine Peyroux, Neil Young, Hockey Night in Canada, Calvin and Hobbes, Marc Chagall, dark ales, smoked meat, Lemony Snicket, Charles Dickens, the fact that there are tigers and whales, klezmer music, Abarat, garlic bread, carrot soup, The Tempest, Dr. Seuss, Peter Sellers, winter campfires, trickster stories, poutine, Anton Chekhov, kayaks, dark chocolate, Leonard Cohen, snowshoes, shadow puppets, dim sum, Emma Peel, candlelight, unexpected travel opportunities, Jeeves and Wooster, The Threepenny Opera, snorkelling, Brian Eno, five-pin bowling, fairy tales, Tin Tin, London Calling, A Christmas Story, Moby Dick, ?Visions of Johanna,? Picasso’s ?Night Fishing at Antibes,? rose gardens, cornfields, Acadian fiddle music, antique fur hats, antique maps, outsider art, cats, bioluminescence, the Gaspe Peninsula, Robert Lepage, meteor showers, art deco architecture, Van Morrison, penguins, old horror films, Dylan Thomas, ghost stories, sea shanties, the Kronos Quartet, Miss Vickie?s, tobogganing, Tabasco sauce, Miles Davis, Tom Waits, scallops wrapped in bacon, greasy spoon diners, strong coffee, accordions, The Weakerthans, sheet lightning, Paul Quarrington, claw-foot bathtubs, P.D. James, Joni Mitchell, Frank Zappa, Bjork, chicken vindaloo, expensive writing paper, wind chimes, road trips, hardwood floors, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, fire jugglers, reading books in sleeping bags by flashlight, searching for owls, Irish accents, rooibos tea, roasted vegetables, Raoul Dufy, hand-knit sweaters, snooker tables, cross-country skiing, riddles, pirate films, Martin Scorsese, Paul Simon, Charlie Brown, the first snow of the year, fresh-shucked oysters, train whistles, blue cheese, Johnny Cash, libraries, Boston cream pie, unique tattoos, the smell of pipe tobacco, the sound of women laughing, ?Amazing Grace,? northern lights, gospel choirs, croissants, circuses, my no-speed bicycle, beachcombing, ?The Lady of Shalott,? toasted French bread and blackberry jam, free jazz, wrought iron balconies, narrow roads that lead to the sea . . .

In the morning Merle and I came to fetch him, just as we always do. It was his day for the shops and the barber, and then off to the food fair for apple pie and soft ice cream. When we walked in his front door, though, we sensed right away something was not quite right. Somehow, even as we were calling for him, throwing our voices up the stairs and down into the basement, we knew he was gone.

Strangely, the coffee was still hot in the cup. The eggs in the frying pan were on low heat, and still slightly runny. His morning cigarette was only half burnt, and balanced on the ashtray’s lip. I remember thinking that this must be how it was for the first ones who boarded that ghost ship out in the middle of the ocean.

Without a word, we set about searching the house for clues, looking for anything out of the ordinary. Of course, our anxiety became worse when we discovered his outdoor shoes still in the closet, and his wallet still on the sideboard. I suppose at that point we were looking for signs of suicide or struggle?blood on the walls, a tooth stuck in the floorboards, that sort of thing. Every time I opened a door, I half expected to find him hanging from the ceiling, or else see his feet jutting out from beneath a piece of furniture, or his limp hand hanging over the edge of a bathtub filled with bloody water. He always did have a morbid streak.

The only thing remotely out of the ordinary, though, was a small black notebook lying on the covers of his freshly made bed. Blocking it from Merle’s sight (she has a habit of ?over the shoulder snooping?) I flipped through the pages in search of . . . well, I’m not sure what I expected to find.

There was little of interest, though. There was a hand-drawn map with what appeared to be odd-sounding place names none of us recognized. Loose between the pages were a lock of light blond hair, and a very old, blurred photograph of a woman turning away from the camera. Most of the pages seemed to be filled with weird, nonsensical drawings. Merle said the scratchings looked like hieroglyphs, or sketches of things you might see under a microscope. I thought they looked more like mechanical bits and pieces, like technical drawings, like plans for some impossibly complicated and impractical machine.

I expect he will turn up, one day, in a shallow grave, or the waiting room of some inner-city hospital. The likeliest explanation, I suppose, is that he simply wandered off to find himself a quiet place to die, content to have his passing as uneventful and unremarkable as his long and quiet life.