In the Land of Birdfishes Read Online Free PDF

sometimes alterations like that happen with brain injuries. That was his word,
alteration
, so I started to see Stephan in my head like a pair of slacks some tailor had opened up a seam in. The doctor said it might change. And he said, “Then again it might not.”
    So I ate a year of dinners with that thing between us at the table. The day Stephan said he was tired of Halifax, that he’d taken a job in Toronto without a word to me, I said, “Okay.” I came with him to a city where I knew no one. At the end of the phone calls I had with my father before he died 2,500 kilometres away, I’d go in the pantry of our new apartment to cry so Stephan wouldn’t hear.
    When he finally left, it was as sudden as if it had already happened. There was no conversation. Just the things he said. And the door behind him.
    I’d been on the bus almost two days when the flat, dry plains gave way to bright yellow fields. “What is it?” I asked the old man across the aisle. “What’s that growing there?”
    “Canola,” he said.
    “What’s it made of?” I asked.
    “Well, it’s itself,” he said. “It’s canola. Like the oil.”
    “Is it a GMO?”
    “A who now?”
    “It doesn’t look natural. It looks like people made it. Look at the colour of it. It looks like it’s all wrong because people made it.” The words came out of my mouth too fast and too many at a time, as if they’d been shoved in there, too many to fit, waiting to escape.
    The man frowned and got the sort of hard look on his face that I’d seen back home in Nova Scotia on other faces. He said slowly, “I don’t know, I guess.”
    “Like mules,” I said. “Or burros? Which one is it that’s a cross between a horse and a donkey? Or a donkey and a mule?”
    “I don’t know what you’re getting at there—”
    “They can’t reproduce.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “You’d think people might take some kind of lesson from that. You’d think we might wonder why we can’t even put a mule together without sterilizing it. Maybe every single thing we do is screwed up like that in some way we didn’t intend.” Ihadn’t spoken to anyone since I’d got on the bus. Now I realized it had been a mistake to start. I willed my hands to relax and set them in my lap in a loose, casual way, like they had just landed there on their own.
    The old man leaned forward so I could see the way the lower lids of his eyes didn’t quite make it all the way up anymore. They gaped at the bottom, revealing the wet pinkness beneath them. He said, “You want a Ringolo?”
    “No, thank you.”
    He sat back. “Okay,” he said, “but I’ll leave the bag here.” He set it on the seat beside the aisle and moved over to the window.
    As fast as I’d made up my mind, I’d begun to regret it. Dumb, dumb, dumb, to cross a country for scarcely more than a rumour from a dying man. The words had started circling around in my brain the second I stepped on the bus, an unending chorus to my stupidity. What am I doing, what am I doing, what am I doing, I had heard when it rained the first afternoon and the wipers slapped back and forth across the windshield. But I had no answer, and then at last, just as the second night fell and we crossed the border into Alberta, I knew why I didn’t: it wasn’t the right question.
    Just before dawn on the third day, we stopped in Calgary and the empty seats in the bus all got filled. A dark-haired girl with dreadlocks sat down beside me. “You mind if I turn the light on?” she asked. She had wide brown eyes with silver sparkles painted on the lids that made her eyes look enormous and startled.
    “That’s fine.”
    “I’ve got to read all this book before we get to Vancouver. You read this?”
    I looked at the cover. The type was big but written in tilted, script letters. As I moved the book a little closer to my face, I was able to read the title.
The First Time Around
. I shook my head.
    “It’s all about how you’re supposed to live