Haru comments that the rocks look like umeboshi (Alberta, 2014)

She stood in the kitchen, wearing a red rubber skirt from Forever 21. I told her I wanted to take a picture of her skirt. I knelt on the kitchen floor and took a picture of her skirt from the front, from the back. She had hair that was red when the sun shone through it. Her hair was long and straight. She had long, fake eyelashes. Her cheek was swollen because I had hit her in the face. She had cuts on her hand from broken glass from a bottle of Absolut she had smashed on the bed frame. I had taken the glass and cut my arms with it. Both of our blood was on the kitchen floor in drips and streaks.

She had told me on the phone that she was coming back. It was late August. On the other end of the phone, I heard crows and traffic. I’d told her it was over. Some guilt about the whole thing that I didn’t want to explain to her. I’d told her I was going to marry her because I didn’t know how to tell her the truth. When she was only on the phone, I could come up with an excuse, just say it was over and she was better off for it and I was a scumbag. I had the conversation with her standing in the window well of a building site off 127 Street. Nobody was around. I’d been stuck with the task of digging out the window wells, laying some rebar in the basement. I’d driven over in the morning to pick up the rebar and had cut and had cut and measured and tied all afternoon. I’d been standing in the window well when she called. The plywood floor of the house was at eye level. My right hand, holding the phone was powdered with dirt and my thumb had been burned with eight identical puffy grooves by a piece of rebar heated by the blade of a circular saw. I told her that I’d pick her up at the airport. Rain started falling. I said goodbye. When I fell asleep that night, I kicked my legs over to her empty side of the bed. I heard the clink of rebar on rebar.

We drove to Calgary, not speaking. Parked downtown. At the top of Calgary Tower, two girls in short skirts spoke in Russian and struck poses on the glass floor. We looked down at Chinatown.

We drove to Calgary and stayed at a hotel near the airport. We watched TV. She fell asleep. I walked through the soft silence of the hotel corridors and took the elevator downstairs and asked the girl working the front desk if she had a cigarette. I smoked in the parking lot. I went back upstairs. She was awake. She didn’t mention him. We didn’t go to the airport. We laid under the stiff hotel sheets.

In the morning, we went to the zoo. We watched penguins swimming in a near-freezing swimming pool. We went to the top of Calgary Tower. We looked down on the city and she told me she hated Calgary more than anywhere on Earth. We looked down at Chinatown. Two Russian girls stood on the glass floor and took pictures of each other. She walked across the glass floor, too. I stood back and she asked if I was scared. I ran and jumped down as hard as I could on the glass floor. She didn’t flinch.

The knife was part of a set from Costco. It was yellow plaid. On the blade was the word: tomodachi. She held the point of it to her neck. She told me that she wanted to die. I knelt in front of her and told her to stop and to put down the knife. I took a handful of broken glass from the floor and rubbed it as hard as I could into my arm.

There were clouds hanging below the ridgeline and drawn like a curtain down the middle of the valley. Thick forest, greener in wet morning mist. It was late in the season to visit the hot springs. East of the Rockies, it was warm but when we turned westward at Calgary at dusk on the first day, snow was in the forecast. Coming east again, it had warmed up but in another month the hot springs and this twisting road leading to them would be closed. I turned the key in the ignition as we coasted around a bend and scared myself with the sudden weight of the wheel as the power steering died. There was thick forest on both sides.

There was a puffy wind blowing down from the ridge and through the parking lot. It was cold above the water. There was a black tour bus parked down the cement steps. We watched the tour bus slowly empty, elderly Europeans in crisp plastic jackets and wool scarves and hiking boots, carrying canes and cameras. We watched them walk up the cement steps and into the building. We watched them walk out of the shower rooms and down the ramp into the hot pool. The faces of the men were rough. The faces of the women were smooth. The men wore long swim trunks that they pulled up high over their pale white bellies. The women wore black or dark blue one-piece bathing suits. The men swam around the pool, pulling with their arms, their feet still stepping across the bottom. The women stayed in the shallow half of the pool. Their hair was white and grey and carefully pinned up. A sheep walked through the parking lot and disappeared between two tour buses. A woman with a polka dot bikini was pulling her young son through the water. She reached down to pull up the top of her bikini and I saw puffy red scars along the bottoms of her breasts. The water smelled like sulfur. There were three concrete swimming pools. Haru and I sat in the warmest pool. The pool faced the forest. The leaves in the forest were turning yellow. She was wearing a black Vero Moda bikini that she bought the night before in Jasper.

Rocks red and wrinkled as pickled plums. The rocks look like umeboshi, she said. We squatted to watch the fish in the shallows. In the stone basins, slender sticks of silver with dot eyes rose and wiped their mouths and broke the still flat water. We walked down along the fizzy blue rapids and along the crushed gravel banks to the place where the water fell away and down a hundred feet into a canyon. We climbed the boulders to the bridge over the falls and looked down through the slats and felt the mist rising up from the dark.

Rocks red and wrinkled as pickled plums, scattered over the gravel banks. I sat on a grey boulder and lit a cigarette and watched her squatted in front of one of the stone basins.