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The house despaired over the river, its eyes large and empty, its shingles gnawed by winds. Drawn to every forsaken thing, I pulled the canoe onto the river rocks and waded to the shore.
The vacant doorway flashed white for an instant at the flash of an apron and strong arms on a young woman in a grey checked dress which disappeared again in the house's darkness. The grass was still crisp below my feet as I approached the structure. The sudden sign of habitation was too surprising to believe; the grey house still decayed in front of me, and I followed no worn paths to the abandoned doorway.
She was not surprised to hear me enter the kitchen, and I am thankful she was not afraid, either. She had sponged clean several square feet of the floor, otherwise overrun with thin mud and rotting paper. She simply said "Hello", stood up and turned around. She shrugged, smiled and glanced at the molding walls.
I started scooping the mud out with my bare hands, already dirty from the climb up the bank. With the worst of that gone I tried to fashion a broom out of the hard grass that grew on the border between the shore and the wood. It was ineffective but it gave my hostess an excuse to stand while I bent over and continued scrubbing the floor.
By the night we had cleaned enough of the bare stone floor to lay down there, exhausted.
It was the sound of pigeons that woke me. The girl was gone.
The birds owned owned the second floor, where they lived and bred among their own shit and dead. All but the most stubborn fled at a few waves of my grass broom, but none of them offered serious resistance. After I chased the last one out I saw my friend smiling at me, then laughing down the stairs.
There was something in the angle of her nose as she turned, a certain peculiarity as she turned. I did not follow her down the stairs then because I knew it would take more than one or two days to decide if that nose was truly beautiful.
I spent the rest of the morning sweeping out the second story. It was a major advance against the birds, but only a temporary one until the windows could be closed.
This did happen in time. Slowly my friend and I built up the house's defenses, tearing out the worst of the internal walls, learning how to fashion rough planks with my ax to board up windows and replace shingles. Perfection was beyond us, but we relegated the leaks to predictable places and procured enough clean blankets to huddle in, against the wind that could not be kept out of the house.
The day that I retrieved the last of my things from the canoe, I saw frozen foamfloating by on the river. In another two days these grew to small plates, and in another two weeks a sheet of ice that might have been thick enough to walk on encased my boat. The world outside turned white and my makeshift broom became handy for sweeping out the stray flakes of snow.
Survival was only possible due to our successful excavation of the cellar. The piles of lumber and smashed concrete had covered an enormous larder of canned goods that would last us years, if it was still good; in our state of need we decided it still was. The only other thing of interest we found were some 1940's era pinup models. My friend was so amused by their dirty innocence that she hung them up on the walls and used to mock me. "Oh, Kevin," she said once, "don't you wish you could be in New Orleans now with Marsha," making curving motions with her hands around the tiny photo, "instead of cooped up here in Saskatchewan with a walrus?"
She struck a pose in her thick furs which was not particularly walrus-like; nor did it help to settle the nagging question of her nose.
Sometimes we would sit and watch the world outside, so much darker than out candle-lit home. Sometimes we drew patterns on the walls with charcoal, dirtying our clean house for the sake of novel visual experience.
One day, one of the last I was there, it rained. Snow turned to mush and fed the waking river. We sat by the ashes of the kitchen fire and I asked her, "In all the time in this house, I've never understood where you came from, how you came to be here."
She kicked the ash and said, "I guess there are many forgotten things in this world." And as she turned away, I knew that she was beautiful.
Rain collected in the buckets, so much that the floor was wet in the morning. The wind whistling through the shutters felt strangely warm.
Image by Kevin Saff
