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in a long time. She feels impermeable.
6. Signs
    When Hannah leaves her ex-boyfriend’s condo, she sees a rainbow stretching somewhere in the distance towards the lake. She stands underneath an awning and stares at it. The colours are blurred and faint, but it’s definitely a rainbow.
Logically, rationally and scientifically, she knows that a rainbow is just the reflection of light on water droplets. But she knows lots of things. She also knows that palm reading is a fluke and astrology can be interpreted any way one wants. She knows that she can’t read minds and people can’t read hers, and that the end of the world will probably not happen on the day everyone is predicting. Most of all she knows that life just happens and that there isn’t an overarching, sensible pattern to it, but it doesn’t mean that she can’t believe in signs or look to them for guidance.
The rainbow, Hannah decides, as she walks to the subway, is a good sign. She’s not sure what else it could be.

T HERE'S A SEGMENT OF THE POPULATION that even when forced will not throw out their useless and worthless belongings. My parents got rich by capitalizing on this sentimental weakness. They started by renting out 5×10 foot cubes that could be filled with detritus and stored in a warehouse, We Store, out of sight and out of mind. They opened another warehouse with more storage options and as the condo industry boomed, their business flourished. They now own a series of We Stores scattered around the Greater Toronto Area, all of them close to capacity and stuffed to the gills with—despite their owners’ claims—crap. Sometimes an expensive piece of antique furniture will come in for storage, something that can’t possibly match its owner’s new seven hundred square foot minimalist condo, but in general We Store houses garage sale fare—stained couches, plastic bags of greying stuffed animals, boxes of mismatched cutlery—everything packed carefully and precisely, as if their owners were historians preserving the most valuable of artifacts.
During high school I spent my summers working in reception at the warehouse in Mississauga, a half-hour drive from our home in Toronto. This particular We Store was wedged between the highway and a vast field that hadn’t yet been developed into an industrial park or subdivision. At dusk if I stood at the edge of the parking lot with my back to the warehouse and the highway, I could almost trick myself into thinking I was in the country, that hum of crickets and mosquitoes, all that overgrown former farmland bleached pale green and yellow from the summer sun. And there were animals too, small ones, raccoons and skunks and foxes, that would emerge from the field and nose their way towards the garbage bins. The unlucky ones would wander off and get slammed by cars that took the highway exit too quickly. We were the closest building, so the corpses often got tossed on our property, glassy-eyed and bloody, their fur still soft. My father once found a dead deer behind the garbage bins. It must have dragged itself over, looking for a place to die with dignity.
The summer I was seventeen, my older sister Greta asked our parents to get her boyfriend a job at one of the warehouses. Daniel was about to start a master’s degree in art history and the gallery he was supposed to work at closed at the last minute. He needed the money, so my father hired him and placed him as the assistant to our full-time facilities manager, Gord. Daniel was stationed in Mississauga with me.
On his first day at We Store there was mass carnage: an entire family of raccoons, two big ones and two little ones, done in by a transport truck. Their bodies were splayed across the parking lot, and I had to swerve to avoid them when I pulled in that morning. Daniel arrived soon afterwards.
“Hey April,” he said when he saw me. “It’s pretty gross out there.” I knew one of his responsibilities would be to clean it up, but I waited for