Changing Heaven by Jane Urquhart

outskirts of a town whose name reproduces, exactly, the sound of the Great Lake’s waves tossing foam and pebbles near the shore.
    “Oshawa, Oshawa …” the child whispers in the comfort of the car.
    Like all the other finned vehicles surrounding them, the car slows, and slows again, and finally stops altogether. Ann’s mother lights another cigarette, and squinting, leansover the wheel and looks up through the windshield towards the hemispherical blaze of glory that hovers just above its final destination, suspended by a chain from the sky. Ann has both her hands on the rear side window. Then she rolls it down and sticks her head out to see. Oh my Lord!, to see this , this glass heaven swaying in the wind, sunlight breaking through it like rain. It is a conductor of the light that blazes down to the surface of the highway.
    The overpasses are jammed with crowds of people who gaze like an awestruck primitive tribe or an entranced group of pilgrims at this miracle of light floating in the air. A brass band! Ann is sure there must be a brass band! In her imagination the band is crowded with heraldic horns and she sees sunbathed gold even though there is no evidence of music whatsoever. At the same time she sees, when she pushes her face out the window, only the dome and, for a fraction of a second, the silver glint of a row of automobile side-view mirrors stretching out from her own car. One by one, the little ovoid landscapes reflected there, the little green signs and cement overpasses, begin to pull away and then the Buick in which she sits slides under the concrete bridge and out the other side into a place where no majestic events happen at all.
    “Mummy!” Ann shouts, clutching the foam, vinyl, and springs, “Mummy, we have to stop and watch it!”
    “Honey,” replies Mummy, jamming her cigarette into the ashtray, “this isn’t the kind of road you can ever stop on.”
    Nevertheless they enter, and then come to a stop in the past. Grandma’s house, as reassuring as a Bartlett print. Autumnal walks through the blazing maple woods, crackling fires on the two chilly, windy mornings that make up the weekend, evening games of Chinese checkers, snap, old maid. And then, of course, the highway again, the return to the city.
    At this point the highway goes bad. The sun disappears, the wind turns icy, the Great Lake is as grey and still andfeatureless as the asphalt on a four-lane, highway. Nothing reflects gold. The outer world beyond the guard rails loses significance. The word “Oshawa” no longer sounds like the currents of a Great Lake caressing its beaches and begins, instead, to resemble the sound of one car after another coming off an assembly line, or the discontented mutters of striking auto workers, or a thousand transport trucks shifting, simultaneously, into fourth gear.
    The trouble, for Ann, with having this memory in the future is that it will be impossible to have just the first half of it. The inevitable second part will nudge the first aside, making its presence known before the floating dome can be fully savoured.
    Because, returning, they see no hemisphere of glass on its basilica pedestal, see instead an unfinished church, a crane from which hangs emptiness, and enormous glass shards littering the space between the architecture and the highway. Because of this, the whole memory will be broken.
    A suitably profound finish to the landscape of getting there. Grey, broken, unstoppable. Adolescence, adulthood, old age.
    No more luminosity hovering in the outer world.
    And so, the child turns inward. Her grandmother dies and the fist of time closes around the past, but the past is kept nevertheless, like mythology, between the covers of a book. Or like ancestors with names such as Obadiah, Kaziah, Oran, Ezekiel, in a tidy, fenced, nineteenth-century graveyard with a view of rolling hills and snake-rail fences, and no noise at all except the wind moving the cedars at the back of the plot.
    After the