February by Lisa Moore Page B

ice and the wind is at her back. Her hair stands out straight around her face. Snow swishes across the asphalt in thin veils, coiling and twisting up towards the sky.
    She had asked a man pushing a shopping cart for directions and now he is following her. His cart brimming over with garbage bags full of pop cans and plastic bottles, the wheels plowing through slush. Jane had given him money and he’d shoved the bill into his jeans pocket without looking at it.
    The man speaks in a kind of stage whisper, his eyes shooting back and forth, watching the crowd on the sidewalk, his words a melodic, insistent patter about dolphins and the beauty of marine life, the sway and flow of the ocean, and the creatures that break the surface, flying up out of the water and splashing down. He makes an undulating gesture with his hand, whistling through his teeth, blowing hard bursts of breath through his wet lips like the sounds of a dolphin frolicking in the waves. Coast of Mexico, he says, shaking his head as if he can see it stretching out in front of him.
    Jane excuses herself and ducks into a grocery store. She is hungry for something raw and sweet. Mist shoots down with a hiss from an overhanging shelf onto a bank of red cabbage and pale lettuce and bok choy and fennel. It drifts down onto the dirty beets and broccoli, and she runs her hand over the ruffle of wet herbs, the smell of earth and cilantro.
    Jane passes over the green apples and buys a single peach that comes in a fluted paper cup of dark purple. She is ravenous. There are three tables gathered under the sputter of a nearly broken fluorescent light and she takes a napkin from a chrome dispenser and rubs the fruit. The peach is so soft it is almost rotten and she bites it right to the centre. The pit bleeds a deep crimson stain into the orange of the flesh. She tries not to think of the texture of the peach skin; the fuzz gives her shivers like someone walking on her grave. Juice dribbles down her chin and she can feel a flutter from the baby. Her chin is sticky, and her fingers, and they smell like summer. The tips of her ears sting from the cold, and as she rubs them they begin to burn. It is as if the baby has felt the erotic pleasure of the peach and has kicked out to tell her.
    Back outside, the man with the shopping cart is waiting for her. The wind takes the heavy door of the store from her hand and smacks it against a cinder-block wall, and Jane struggles with the suitcase. One of the wheels is stuck in an iron grating. The man leaves his cart and grabs the suitcase, twisting it through, and then the shoulder strap of her laptop bag breaks.
    And boom —she knows. She does not want to have a baby by herself. The world is full of suffering. It is dark and cold. She is afraid of all that could go wrong. She needs a father for the baby. She needs John O’Mara.
    She thinks of that morning with John in Reykjavik, the Independence Day parade streaming past him, the brass and the drums and a glockenspiel, the crowds jostling against them both. How exhilarated they had been. He’d gone back to find her scarf. She’d dropped her scarf.
    The dolphin man is going up the stairs of a streetcar backwards, dragging her suitcase.
    What about your shopping cart, she shouts. The suitcase bounces and jitters up the steps, and the streetcar’s folding doors clamp shut on it and open and clamp shut again. Then the dolphin man is inside, knocking his way to the back, the suitcase smashing against knees and hips.
    Mexico, yeah, Mexico, he whispers. He squishes his way through to the back of the streetcar, and he sits next to a woman who gets up and moves, and he slides to the window seat and slaps the seat beside him, and Jane sits next to him. The man has a pitted complexion and he is unshaven. His front teeth are grey and soft looking and a few are missing. He speaks to Jane as if they are deeply involved. He speaks as if his life depends on convincing her of something obvious and