Keys of Babylon by Robert Minhinnick Page A

walked around the car and I finish my circuit at the bonnet insignia. Which is a tulip. Shaped like an M. My scratch runs all the way round. No, my gouge . Down to the metal. The bare steel.
    When I reach the tulip the car alarm comes on. The indicators start flashing and there’s a siren noise like the ghost train makes and the couple out on the rocks glance up. In the twilight they start to run this way. But I’m looking at the waves. It’s funny really, this town. All the time I’ve spent here watching the tide. Because I still can’t tell when the tide is going out. Or when it’s coming in.
    Â 
    Â 

A bed on the prairie

    He was a big man now. Too big. But still a little man. His thighs chafed, his belly bulged. Once a week he’d ride the number three bus up 8 Street and was conscious he took up more than half a double seat. More than two thirds.
    Never mind. What could he do? Anyway, most journeys the bus was empty. People were going the other way. Sometimes he’d see the driver looking at him in the mirror and he’d put the brown paper bag below seat level. In the bag was a hip flask and in the flask a pint of Bushmills. Eye-watering, throat-sandpapering Irish. At 27 Street the bus would start to turn west and he’d pull the bell chord and get off and walk up the road. The driver still looking.
    It was an effort. His back hurt. The road led nowhere. It ended in a mound of bulldozed turf and rubble. There were sheets of plastic, Caterpillar tracks in the earth.
    It wasn’t the prairie. The prairie was somewhere else. But tonight it was the best the b ig l ittle m an could do. He stepped over the flattened wire and sat on the seat. Then took the whiskey out again.
    There was a plaque on the seat. It read In Memory of Walter and Ingrid McGovern , who Loved this Place.
    Strange people, he said to himself. For putting a seat here. A seat made from black recycled plastic. But if the developers didn’t move it, the seat would survive until the next ice age. He thought about ice and he thought about the north, the north where the ice age still persisted. The ice age that would never end. The McGoverns had lived in Highland Place, off 8 Street. They would park their Fleetwood back on the road and totter out on to the prairie. Because this had been the real prairie then. Virgin land, never touched by plough or genetically modified canola. And the McGoverns would look up at the stars or at the northern lights, holding on to one other, the fat woman, the sticklike man in his ballcap and Levi’s. They wouldn’t speak. Just gaze out at the new world. The promised land where they had arrived and were about to die.
    Eventually it was claimed, 27 Street would lead to the next mall the city was going to build. Another Safeway’s. Another Sears. But everything was on hold. A bank in Toronto had gone bust. Tits up, people around here said. In Toronto, investors had queued along Yonge Street in the snow. Here they had lined up on 4 Street for news. The news was bad. So what? said the voice of exhaustion in the Big Little Man’s heart.
    The Big Little Man sat and held the whiskey under his nose. The day was ending. Another day ending. He looked north into nothing. Then his eyes grew accustomed to the light. The prairie now was pale with sage, the silver sage that seemed to reflect the starlight. Maybe there were coyotes out there, though he’d never heard one. Maybe the last of the wolverines. He’d read about those. The fiercest of creatures, not welcome now in the world of wire. Maybe a single wolverine still lingered in the grass.
    Then he raised his sights. The stars burned so thickly they hurt his eyes. There was Mars, the Bushmills-yellow phantom that roamed the sky. There was Arcturus, a bonfire that never burned out. He knew if he looked long enough he’d see satellites passing in the dark, the red winglights of aeroplanes coming south from the pole. And