Following the Summer by Lise Bissonnette

One
    M ARIE IS TWENTY YEARS OLD AND SHE is knitting, white yarn against a green bench. Click of needles, rustle of birds. Of birds she never hears, in this park that is suspended in dust. Birds pass in the distance, on the other side of the lake, as if they were tracing the exhalation of the mine. Breathing that reverberates close by, three streets in back of her, where a veil settles over the trees, invisible, but she sees it as grey. It’s peaceful here, the leaves motionless, for the wind veers off at the first path, at the first dwarf trees, arrested in mid-growth as though someone has pruned them.
    Behind the low wall the rumbling cars are silent now. It must be four o’clock because a shadow has stirred on the wide pool of moss, what is left of the spring. Green. She imagines herself as a young woman knitting and watching over a child in a park, in France, where urban roses bloom around rented chairs. Knowledge borrowed from books. As usual, it is the scent she cannot quite grasp, the sweetness to go with the ashes of this place.
    At five she will go home, take back inside herself this nowhere city, this sultry day. A bag for her knitting, a leash for the dog, the hideous dog. Who for the moment has disappeared. Somewhere beyond the paved path, towards the trails, earth and bush, where curiosity used to draw her in the days when it still existed.
    To the north, one branch of the path has been erased. As if no one wanders any more to the fences that protect the guest houses, the mine’s castle-houses, now uninhabited for the most part. Though with their German casements and their French roofs they look as if they should be filled with servants: Their lawns slope down gently and stop at foliage that hides a glaucous beach lapped by the bile green of freshwater weeds. Poison.
    The other path still follows the shore, gritty with sand and bald stone. This place was witness to her adolescent rage. Amidst the drought of trampled grass, the grime of furrowed earth, the acid ochre of rocks seared by the chemistry of the mine. Bright red beside the water, dusky rose between stunted blueberries sterile at the root, and littered cellophane, cigarette butts, torn pages of yellowed newspaper.
    On another scorching afternoon a magic ceremony was held. Marie’s glasses were used, with a sliver of sun, to set fire to the grass; she had entered the water beside the flat stone to immerse Isis, a cloth goddess. (Her terror, legs caught in the solid, acrid lake. “And if I fall?” — “Then you will decompose. — Rust.” — “Shall I be reunited with gold?”) It had taken an hour before Isis was dry, before she burned. “May those who stop us from leaving here be drowned or consumed,” said Rita, her black hair the proper colour for casting spells.
    Blurred ceremonies, and now only the colours remain. With nothing to do during this lull, Marie goes to look for her dog. She is near-beautiful and annoyed by a trickle of sweat on her face, by the sand that sneaks into her brand-new sandals.
    She gropes for a place to step, her mind is blank, she is only impatient at being here, under this harsh sun, calling an animal. A clank of bicycles not far away, behind a knoll, punctuates the children’s shouts. Husky voices, already coarse. The path disappears into higher grass near the top. She is exasperated.
    A thin streak of half-dry clay, a square of shadow. Marie falls but it’s nothing, only the sharp edge of a stone that makes blood flow at the ankle’s hinge. A soiled dress, and now irritation because she must wait for the oozing to stop, beside water too dirty to use. No pain. Just a sense of absurdity, a spark of rage.
    No, summers in this natural garbage dump brought neither rituals nor sorcery, neither revelations nor evil spells. Only the summer, as dull as this one, divided between cycling and forbidden dancing, between brief rainfalls and drought, between weekday