Anik See
$5
In a village in Canada's north, just under the Arctic Circle, two ravens are having a conversation. (A third turns it into an argument.) Two planes fly overhead each day. The noon whistle still goes off at noon. The occasional Ford truck chortles past, and you try hard to think of another noise, but you can’t. Not even a dog barking here and there. There’s a grader for a single day in June, repairing the winter potholes. Distant voices from the other side of a hedge, soft enough to not be able to make any words out. That’s it. On your first night here, you heard a woman scream – a long, horror movie kind of shriek – at three in the morning, but it was silent after that and hard to take seriously in all that 24-hour summer light. A joke, surely. And no news the next day of anything bad having happened. The trust and comfort of living in a small town. If anything happens, you’ll hear about it. Perhaps not accurately, but it will be known. You can’t miss a thing.
The village, and the silence. What was there long before us, and, at the same time, possibility.
published in Ottawa by above/ground press
as the seventh title in above/ground’s prose/naut imprint
March 2021
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy
Anik See is a Canadian writer and audio producer living in The Netherlands. She is the author of A Fork in the Road (Macmillan, 2000), Saudade: the possibilities of place (Coach House Books, 2008) and postcard and other stories (Freehand Books, 2009). Her writing, both fiction and non-fiction, has appeared in Brick, Prairie Fire, The Fiddlehead, Geist, grain, The National Post and Toronto Life, and has been nominated for numerous awards.
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