More than 450 million years ago, the Niagara Escarpment sprawled under shallow seas teeming with marine life. When these creatures died, their remains mixed with the sediment and became interred in rock.
When the seas evaporated, a cache of fossils was left behind: the trilobite's feathery legs, the sea scorpion’s claw. Over time, water and wind whittled the land, creating caves like the Grotto.
He craned his neck to check the side mirror before barreling out of the parking lot. Sunlight sharpened the planes of his face, the stubble striated with blond.
I slouched in my seat and turned around to caress our dog, Maiga. I felt the densities of jowl and jaw, the bands/thickness of sinew over bone, and his heart - that lopsided knot of muscle
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Light speared its path between the limbs of trees. The echo of its tires perforated the quiet, like the cry of a wounded animal. *
At Georgian Bay, time had crystallized. Jigsaw of rock. Jags of ash. Stagger of scree. Sea stacks and bluffs like statuary.
Maiga teetered on a leaden shard and then scrabbled up the flank of the escarpment.
On the ridge, cedars corkscrewed the overhangs; a few had been stubborn inhabitants for a millennium. Continents of lichen mottled bark and crag: blotches of verdigris, inky florets, burnished lace. Its life measured in millimetres.
The wind was keen as a bayonet, with resin filtered through.
I hurried to Indian Head Cove, skirting the circuitry of roots.
We perched near a rock pool. Maiga lolled at our feet, eyelids drooping. A bruised light emanated from the ragged mouth of the Grotto. Inside, the water seemed to draw its breath, eddying itself into calm. A muddle of light and dark. Hollers splintered the stillness. Four teenagers shook their legs free from the meshwork of boughs. Their bodies were as smooth as
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He had a face like an arrowhead, honed and precise.
I nodded.
He fretted with his bangs like a cat grooming itself, smoothing the same spot over and over. “So, are you swimming?"
I shook my head. "It's too cold for us."
The sky had blanched. And traces of the brothers’ presence lingered in the bleached rise of waves, in the seams of light knitting the sky together.
We imbibed the silence, thick and deep.
But the sea beckoned.
The boys shimmied up the headland and inched along the battered rock. They clung, implacable as weeds. One by one, they hurtled into the whitecaps – a mass as vague as jellyfish amid the welter.
A shoal of arms windmilled towards the cave and then vanished underwater. When they surfaced, their cries as raucous as those of the herring gulls.
Light lavished the Grotto, layer upon layer, born from upheaval. It seemed as though the past had been scraped clean, but this land was porous, ribboned with scintillas of bone and shale, with stories old and new. It trembled with the energy/ferocity/boldness beautiful fury of an elegy, fierce as an elegy, written and re-written, erased and re-written over