Changing Heaven by Jane Urquhart

all over her apartment: under rugs, behind radiators, inside slipcovers, so that years later, cleaning, she might come across a yellowed slip of paper that would say something like, “west wind, 70 references; north wind, 92 references. East wind, south wind, nothing.”
    She begins to pay attention to the skies she sees in paintings, photographs, and travel posters. Visiting her mother, listening to stories of the past, she asks, “What was the weather like?” Ordinary conversation, at the post office, in the grocery store, becomes charged with meaning; “Hot enough for you?” or, “What crazy weather!” She collects odd names for certain seasons: dog days , or for strange meteorological regions: horse latitudes, the Bermuda Triangle .
    And all the while she is building a man, a partner in storm, creating the idea of him in his absence. She selects certainimages from her childhood: a shard of broken heaven near the highway, the wind of the disregarded hurricane pushing against the walls of her house, the grimace on the face of a faintly remembered saint in a dark, kept painting. That and the sound the page of a book makes as you turn it to discover sorrow immodestly disclosed there, and how you take the sorrow from it and preserve it more carefully than your own happiness.
    She grafts all this to the fractional collision in the garden, carefully constructing its significance over and over. How he stumbled against her and then vanished. How he spoke of being away and then thrust his hands through the dark to meet hers. The stars her mother spoke of speeding towards proximity and then exploding into invisibility. The perfect balance of here and gone , dramatized in a Toronto back garden in thirty startled seconds.
    Then she takes her construction and superimposes his shadow over everything else she does, so that in a way he is always with her and the engineered idea neatly precludes any expectation about the actuality of the man in her life. The energies of what might have been expectation are directed towards the beginnings of her book about weather–a subject she was introduced to by a woman who has been dead for over a hundred years.
    Ah, Emily , she thinks. Oh, fora walk on your moor now that I have something to take there with me; a male face disclosed by lightning, a searchlight, a star .
    And the shock of unexpected touch .

“I LOVE A ROOM that is full of wind,” said Emily, “a room that moves . Papa never let us have curtains, which would have been perfect, especially light curtains, because the windows there could never keep the wind out, never! Even as it was, even though we were clothed in woollens, our skirts moved in the air while we stood utterly still. We were besieged, you see, by something other, something outer, regardless of how we were sheltered. But in spring Aunt and Tabby aired the house-windows open-and everything flew. Once we chased one of Papa’s sermons around the house, up and down the stairs, through the parlour into the kitchen, and rescued only the last page before it was sucked into the fire. ‘Our God is a consuming fire!’ the last page began and we laughed and laughed. Papa, too, and Branwell laughing, almost hysterical, his red curls tossed by wind.”
    “I was never happier than when the wind was in the house – unless it was when I was out of the house myself, in the wind. The only thing that could have moved me more would have been to haul some of the stars I saw from my bedroom window into the parlour in the afternoon. Or snow. To freeze the interior, to make it polar, to change everything to white. To have icicles.”
    “At night sometimes my mind went white, as if it had become a white wind. Howling.”
    “Have you ever howled, Arianna, at the moon, at the wind, at the moors? You should have howled at him, tossed your anger out to the sea. You should have let the wind into the white room. “If you couldn’t move him, you might, at least, have moved the