Wren wandered outside to look at the northern lights and hasn’t come back. I joined her out there for five minutes or so, and saw nothing but a bunch of people admiring a thin, undulating smudge of pale green above the shipping cranes, so I went back to bed. The next-door neighbour says Wren told him that no way was she missing out on the most spectacular show of aurora borealis in five hundred years, and that she was headed for the park, hoping to catch them dancing more enthusiastically over the harbour there. The woman at the end of the block was up with her baby, pacing at the window. She says Wren waved at her as she ran by. The man who sleeps by the CN Rail fence with his pit bulls says that when the dogs heard her coming, they got excited. He let them out of the tent so they could get one of the treats she keeps in her pockets. That was a few moments before the sky cracked open and the star matter fell.

The clatter of all that diamond light hitting the roof woke me up. The cat freaked out and wedged herself into the hole Wren kicked in the wall that time the truck convoy drove down 1^st Avenue, barging into our neighbourhood with their Fuck Trudeau signs and anti-vax rhetoric and their goddamned Canadian flags, wrecking it for all the sensible people. Anyway, the cat has been in there for the two days since. I put down some tuna to coax her out, but so far she’s ignored it.

News reports say the particulates fell for less than three seconds, even though the damage to roads and crops will take years to fix. I watched satellite footage of the instant the aurora borealis turned on their edge and sliced right through the exosphere, as though determined to pull us out before we died inside the mother. There’s no way of telling if that’s not, in fact, what happened to Wren.

The CN Rail security cameras captured those two pit bulls looking for another treat, their big blocky heads tilted toward the sky as it zipped back up. Their owner appears a few seconds later. He grabs the dogs by their collars and drags them out of the frame, and then all that’s left is the railyard with its slumbering trains and the fence with the overgrown blackberry bushes and the divots the stars made in the sidewalk.

Wren eats those berries right off the bush, even though they’re always dusty with train grime. She doesn’t care. She says the sweetness is worth the grit.

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Image courtesy of the author