The Weight of Stones by C.B. Forrest

disguised as good ones. She had a plan, and nobody and nothing was going to pull her from its course. They’ll all find out a little too late, she thought, when I’m already long gone. The Greyhound to Vancouver with a savings account and a new name, a whole new past. She would get set up in an apartment, then she could be a mother, a wife. Imagine. She’d get a library card and a station wagon, and she’d shop for tasteful women’s clothing and nobody would ever know who she had been. It made her smile sometimes to picture herself in a house with a husband, a couple of kids, a dog, roast beef on Sunday nights, growing grey with grandchildren running around asking for her to tell them wild stories of the crazy old days.
    Sometimes her mind got stuck, and she saw the boy’s face, the dark hair and the blue eyes, and she felt him near her, a physical presence falling like a shadow across the rest of her life, and she saw all the things they had done, were going to do. But then she hurt so bad, she had to forget him or make him into something else, something she could hate...
    She sat there with her back against the wall in the hallway and lit a cigarette. A band of light bled from a crack in the bathroom door down the hallway. She thought about the new past she could create. She could be anybody again. The way she’d been at five, six years old. The future a clean slate, anything you could make of it. The pain couldn’t be undone, no. But she’d get so far away from it that it seemed like a movie she had watched a long, long time ago.
    Do you think I’m pretty, mama? Do you think I’d make a good vet?
    She drew on the cigarette, and she sat in the silence.
    The last person alive in the world. This was the best time of the day.

    Charlie McKelvey pulled himself, against his own will and his better judgement, through the murky slumber of unconsciousness. His mouth was dry. His body thrummed. They had him shot up with painkillers, the good stuff. He was weightless, and when he came around the first time, he briefly wondered if this is what death was like, a final freedom from the burden of your own body, of all the things you’d carried with you through a life. It would be good if it were like that…
    He blinked at the ceiling tiles, the steel safety guard at the side of the bed, the yellow institutional curtains drawn like a tent. His mind flashed with snapshots, recalled images: the lights in the parking lot glowing like halos above his head as he felt himself sinking, giving in to the promise of lostness, and then the strobe of ambulance lights, disembodied voices, his body being lifted, carried...the scattered sounds of the emergency room, a taste of blood in his mouth like old pennies.
    Is there anybody we can call?
    His eyes were raw, buzzing. He slipped away for a while then came back, like waking from a hundred-year sleep. The first face that came into focus was Hattie’s. She was smiling, or trying to, and her red hair was pulled back in a bun. A few wayward strands had escaped the confines of the hairpin and were swept across her shoulder, licks of flame. She was dressed in jeans and a green hooded sweat shirt that said “Dalhousie Tigers Hockey”.
    â€œYou’re cute after you’ve had a heart attack,” Hattie said.
    â€œThanks,” he said weakly, “but it wasn’t a heart attack.”
    â€œI know. The doctor told me,” she said. “Heart attack just sounds—I don’t know.”
    â€œMore dramatic?”
    â€œGastrointestinal hemorrhage just doesn’t have the same ring,” she smiled.
    â€œThat’s just your east coast sense of humour,” he said.
    â€œLooks like you got yourself a nasty peptic ulcer there, Detective,” she said.
    The young doctor who’d visited when McKelvey had first come around had mentioned something about the combination of the ulcer and stress—or perhaps he had