Six Years in Sudbury, Ontario
Amorak Huey

You will remember it as impossibly green. You will remember believing in self-sufficiency, physical contact, organic carrots, acoustic guitars, homemade peach wine, and whatever escapes memory you can invent. This was the point, writing your own story—plus, not ending up lungshot and bleeding to death in a jungle. Whatever doesn’t kill you fucks you up in some other way. You will remember falling in love more than once, finding seasonal work at a camp store selling beer to vacationing Michiganders, growing your own weed, growing your hair past your shoulders, shrugging off all that disapproval—and so much water. Lakes around every bend, an easy place to drown or disappear, though nothing’s ever so simple. What you will not remember is coming home, though it must have been something—crossing that spectacular bridge, five miles of suspended concrete and steel and the blood of the men who died building it because that’s the way the world functions. All work is seasonal. Perhaps it rained that day. Perhaps you made the eleven-hour drive in nine and a half. Perhaps the driveway had been paved, the house repainted, perhaps all sorts of small miracles had happened without you. Was anyone awaiting your return? Did your father hug you? Let us say yes. Let us imagine that something went the way you hoped.

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