THE TIMES ARE WINTER, WATCH—

The apples on the tree are brighten ing and falling, the wind is rising after dark, the grass is green and rich and deep—so summer's lease hath all too short a date. Nothing like Damnation Alley, not yet, but soon, and here in Edmonton and across the province. Then the mercury will pinch down the glass along with the November rains, and finally like a lonely man falling, fall onto bare concrete ground. Then the wind will curl and snap through the skyscrapers which stand along the river like the squared unnatural mountains in a Lovecraft novella. Then the pretty girls will be wrapped in long well-cut wool coats, and the men will have knit black scarfs piled high up to their eyes. Then a lone bright window here and there after dark and perhaps the faint bass thump of a band canyoned away in the basement of the club on 102 Street will be the only indication that men and women live after dark. Still, in the long black doorway of winter, in the dark evenings coming quickly, one or two of us—and may I, along with the original philosopher, be among them—we shall discover that within us there lies an invincible summer.

NOT TO BE ESPECIALLY ENID BLYTON

about things, but there were five of us and we moved into a house for a year—flip open Five Run Away Together—that house with the golden door buried in the central hallway and the wonderful bond of unity. We were Bazum and Ben and Early and Aurora and myself. I say we were and not we are because I don’t believe I’m the same person, anymore. That Roland is dead forever. Certain things may be the same, of course, or hardly changed. I still, unfortunately, slur my esses slightly when I particularly wish to speak well. And Bazum has kept her critical sharp eye for other people in the room, and Aurora still embarrasses herself in front of horror films, and I talked to Ben on the phone the other day and he still likes to speak in catchphrases. Things happened, and other things didn’t happen, as is always the way, and this is how they did or did not come about, how circumstances gathered together like a fish and another fish and another, until there is a school of fish, a silver cloud of uncountable mackerel drawing in all other gleaming bodies. And the black shadows of ships cape overhead as we flicker below, our mouths widening in the dark and we dart in a different direction forever. And the part of me I know is changed by the parts of me that I did not know. But what do you want? What do you expect? Others were changed by themselves, also, and together we changed each other. Not always pleasantly.

THE GIRL IS A GOOD LOOKING

girl, she has sleek blonde hair and a snub nose, large lake-water eyes. Her dark jeans are cut very low and tight, and she wears a grey off-the-shoulder sweater over her flat French film-star breasts, and red or green or dull white slippers. Bare ankles, of course. Whether she wears any jewelry or not, a piercing in the nose, the lip, the ears, the navel, I never know, because I never cross the dusty summer pavement and speak to her, and she never crosses the cold spring road and talks to me. But we smoke cigarettes together, Player’s, Kools, and sit in the early morning or evening, or late at night, summer or snow falling or rain or a warm breeze, me on this side of the street on my wooden stairs, her on that side of the road on her concrete steps. I don't know anything about her, though, nothing else. She might be royalty, maybe, maybe a queen.