Never once did she flinch, hesitate, sneer, or display shock at his attraction to her feet. Not even the first exquisite time he placed her feet sole to sole and slid his penis into the wonderful, smooth hole her two marblelike arches made. Whether he suggested inserting one of his own immaculate big toes into her, or masturbating himself while she lovingly cradled his feet between her lush breasts, Karen was willing to try anything.
And so when she shyly suggested that perhaps, if he didn’t mind so much, they might actually try intercourse...well, he felt obligated to perform.
Of course, he enjoyed it immensely — he was still able to feel her exquisite feet sliding up and down the backs of his calves as he pumped away. But being a fool, he assumed she was protected. A mistake, that. An accident.
Morris turns — again, a trifle too sharply — onto Peters Road and thinks: It shouldn’t have happened. The odds were against it.
He recalls something from the biology classes he was required to take to get his podiatry degree, something about a woman being fertile for only twenty-four hours once a month, and out of the twenty million sperm the average man ejaculates into a vagina, only fifty reach the egg alive. The odds of Karen falling pregnant that first time were entirely against it. But, nonetheless, it happened.
Morris’s fingers whiten on the steering wheel, and the pleasure of the whole memory vanishes, chased away by self-recrimination. He turns too quickly onto his gravel driveway, tires splashing through potholes and kicking pebbles into the street.
No, he can’t forgive himself for his oversight, for not ensuring Karen was on the Pill before so glibly agreeing to have intercourse with her. Because pregnancy altered her. Specifically, it changed her feet. Where once smooth, slim ankles existed, stouter ankles marred by small, permanent folds now lived. Curvaceous arches were exchanged for slightly flattened ones; two perfect size 7AA feet were transformed into two size eights. During her pregnancy, calluses rudely took up residence on either side of her big toes, and even to this day, they refuse to leave. In a word: ruined. Morris ruined the only pair of perfect feet he’s ever encountered.
Wearily, he climbs out of his Tercel and trudges through the rain to the back door, wondering how Karen can possibly love him after what he did to her.
Andy has fallen into the habit of visiting the suspension bridge every evening as dusk descends. How this compulsion started, he doesn’t remember; he’s not even conscious that it is a compulsion, that within him ticks some clock that guides him to the creaking, slimy planks of the hanging bridge at precisely the same hour each day.
After he finishes his homework, or practises his trumpet, or helps his mother chop broccoli/carrots/ eggplant for dinner, he slips into his jacket and shoes and races to the bridge. Every dusk. His mother warns him not to be late for dinner.
If it’s raining, he runs, rubber boots splashing through the puddles that pock the gravel road of the park; if it’s sunny, he also runs, sucking in swift, deep breaths of moss-and-cedar-scented air. No, he doesn’t run; he flies. Occasionally, he flaps his arms, glasses bouncing up and down on his nose and turning his vision staccato and trembly.
In the fall and winter, dusk comes early, almost as soon as he arrives home from school, and the park is silent save for the roar of the creek. Sometimes a dog walker passes him; he knows a few of the dogs by name. There is Bear, the barrel-size black Labrador with ropes of drool hanging from his mouth, and there is Grizzly, the exuberant malamute who stinks like a mildewy raincoat.
But the summer is different; the parking lot is packed with cars and buses. Tourists crowd the park’s single, paint-flaking totem pole, attempting to take pictures of one another. The German tourists wear big bellies, big cameras, and big voices. The Asian tourists swarm around their guides like bees around their queen. From the concession stand wafts the smells of Pine-Sol disinfectant, hamburger grease, and spilled orange soda.
No matter the season, Andy’s little form is ignored. He expects this invisibility because he is of the canyon, while the tourists are not. They no more see him than they do the purple periwinkle that grows by the roadside in the spring, or the orange lichen that grows like tiny inverted suction cups on the north side of fallen logs in the fall. The tourists are only interested in the bridge that swings above the creek, in satiating their lust for awe. They visit each headstone in the park, they pore over the dangers graphically displayed on the billboard, they jump up and down on the bridge so that the cables creak as white foam crashes on the rocks far below.
Likewise, Andy ignores the tourists.
He doesn’t think during these flights, not at all. Not of his tormentors at school, not of his fall from Candice’s grace, not of his parents, his homework, his inadequate twig body. He has given himself permission not to think of these things. During this special half-hour, he merely flies, inhaling the fragrance of wet rock and decaying leaves, sucking into his lungs the scent of swordferns, hemlocks, and the long tresses of beard moss.
In the spring and summer he runs to Twin Falls, which is relatively free of tourists because it requires a ten-minute hike downstrean from the suspension bridge — too much like work for most tourists. There, he climbs onto the wooden bridge (a stout, short, normal bridge plastered with gum and engraved with initials), leans over its slimy wooden railings, and gazes at the crashing green water below.
In the fall and winter he doesn’t need to escape the tourists (there are few), so he heads to the suspension bridge. Here he either watches the swirling water far below or he looks up and gazes at the sky. Either way, he witnesses magic: the magic of the creek or the magic of crows.
Crows, yes. For in the fall, against the smoky lavender of dusk, myriads of black forms wing their way southeast. Their silence is intense, their numbers staggering. Andy tried to count them once and gave up, overwhelmed after reaching a hundred for the seventh time. Only occasionally this creek of feathered black is broken by an empty stretch of sky, marked by a star or a lone, straggling crow.
Andy has discovered that it isn’t just here that this phenomenon can be seen. While visiting Nanny and Grampa Woodruff, the exodus of crows can be witnessed from their backyard. While strapped in his parents’ Tercel, stuck in traffic on the Second Narrows Bridge, he has also seen this flood of crows.
They appear out of the distant sky, black dots from West Vancouver, North Vancouver, and Deep Cove. The dots resolve into glossy wings and powerful beaks. The crows always appear in the fall, never in the spring or summer, and they always fly southeast, never north or west.
No one seems to notice this bizarre twilight ritual except Andy. He never sees anyone else look up. Crow after crow wings its way southeast, and no one notices save Andy. He wonders what strange, dark purpose the crows have, and how the thousands of people in the city can be unaware of this fantastical sunset journey. It fills Andy with awe and fear: he is surrounded by people oblivious to a great gathering of nature.
Once, he mentioned this phenomenon to his father, even managed to get him outside into the gravel parking lot adjacent to their house to look upward.
“Probably heading to a rookery somewhere, or migrating,” was all his father said, and Andy gaped at him, stunned. So many crows heading to the same rookery? So many thousands gathering unerringly each autumn night at the same place? That was too incredible to picture! And migrating, how could that be? Vancouver is no less short of crows in the winter than in the summer, so the crows aren’t leaving.
Unless, of course, phantom crows fill their places, shape-shifting spirits that choose to disguise themselves as crows ... It is this thought that currently shivers over Andy as he stands on the suspension bridge, neck craned back, glasses blurred with rainwater, fat cold droplets splattering his pale face and trickling down his neck. He is not thinking about his mother’s frightening request that he refrain