Bats or Swallows Read Online Free PDF

she waited another night, might be a fetus by daybreak. With a nose. Or maybe little feet that kicked. She knew it didn’t work that way, that the chronology was more drawn out, but her pants seemed tighter.
The abortion didn’t hurt the way Hannah was afraid it would and, either way, overriding the pain was a feeling of deep, exhausting relief. The trip to Toronto was a week later and because it coincided with her grandfather’s birthday, she was hesitant to cancel. Her hormones were still out of whack and she cried in the car. Once. She’d taken a detour from the monotony of the highway and was driving on a stretch outside of Kingston that passed through the Thousand Islands. It gave way to a more gentle and scenic view, the St. Lawrence hugging the curve of the road. She’d visited the area one summer, stayed with a childhood friend who had a cottage on one of the tiny islands. She remembers the two of them pushing a canoe into the water, her oar slicing through the calm, clear river.
In the early spring the scenery is desolate. The water is grey-white and icy and the solitary houses on the small islands shuttered and empty. As she merges back on to the 401, she snuffles, stops crying, takes a big, gulping breath. But it was a good kind of cry. Things could’ve turned out so much worse.
5. Prophecies
    Hannah was nineteen years old at the end of 1999, working at a grocery store when she wasn’t in school. People would come in and buy ten-pound sacks of flour, flats of water bottles and dozens of double D batteries, all in preparation for Y2K and the possibility of ultimate world destruction. These were people who’d read a sidebar in the newspaper about what items to have on hand in an emergency and wanted to stock up, but sometimes they would also get the crazies, people who gripped her arm desperately and wheezed, “Where’s the bottled water? I want all of it .” There was something vaguely prophetic about their hysteria and sometimes Hannah would even find herself in a minor panic.
New Year’s Eve approached and Hannah thought that if the world ended, she wouldn’t be surprised. It would make sense if it did. Still, she didn’t make special plans for this potential last day of Earth. On December 31st she sat in her boyfriend’s basement apartment with a few of their friends. They drank wine and she doesn’t remember what they talked about. When midnight struck, she squeezed her eyes shut and wondered if anything would be different when she opened them again. But everything was fine! The world didn’t fall apart; the computers kept running. They toasted each other, drank more wine, went to bed by three. She got the feeling that they were disappointed that nothing more spectacular had happened.
While in Toronto, Hannah visits this ex-boyfriend briefly. He has a new place, no longer a mouldy basement, now a postage-stamp sized condo downtown, all granite and glass. If the apocalypse loomed again, she wouldn’t choose to spend it with him, but she’s feeling nostalgic and decides that an hour while she’s visiting the city is fair.
He asks her how she’s doing, but he asks with a certain inflection—“how are you doing ?”—as if he’s genuinely concerned, like maybe he suspects something’s wrong. Hannah keeps looking at herself in the mirror and wondering if she looks different. She’s worried that her eyes look older or sad or that, even if she looks the same, maybe her palms give off less heat after such a cold winter.
As they’re talking, it starts raining and Hannah pauses to listen to it beat against his windows. The thought of rain is appealing and she hopes the weather is the same in Montreal. Rain would melt the snow, clean the streets.
“I’m good.” She says it confidently and he believes her, which is satisfying enough. Maybe “good” isn’t the right word to describe how she feels, but while she’s sitting there she realizes that she does feel differently than she has