Consumption by Kevin Patterson

better to do.”
    The flat light to the southwest slipped in under the clouds and lit the cabin briefly. She watched him in the orange light. He looked puzzled and almost angry.
    “I’m not saying that it was anyone’s fault. The world changes and people have to too. But all that change, in such a short period of time. It was so hard on those people.
    “My sister Ethel got pregnant. The guy was an out-of-work millwright. They moved to Australia. Then my brother Harold, he had been a machinist, moved to London, and got a job delivering sandwiches. I hadn’t really considered leaving until then, but suddenly it was clear to me: it was time to go. I heard it was easy to get a visa to Canada. I landed and started moving, asking around for jobs as I went, and never stopped until I ended up here. It seems kind of like a dream to me. It’s still a little hard to believe.”

    “Simionie Irnuk came to talk to me today,” Robertson said, watching the sun set through his cabin door one night in June, nearly midnight and the sky riotously purple and orange. She turned the radio off and straightened her clothes. It was almost time to go home.
    “What did he say?”
    “He asked me if I loved you.”
    “What did you say?”
    “That that sounded like a good idea.”
    “You didn’t.” She laughed.
    “I did.”
    “You shouldn’t play with him.”
    “I wasn’t.”
    Victoria looked at him again, and she saw the face of her new lover soften. She breathed in deeply then, and felt her chest catch. She touched his ear, and he caught her hand in his and kissed it.
    “Good night,” she said.
    All he could do was nod.
    When she became pregnant, she recognized the sensations. She told Robertson one night when they were sitting on the step of his cabin, watching the aurora borealis. In the darkness, she could not see his expression. He nodded and did not speak. Subsequently both of them avoided mentioning her pregnancy, though theycontinued to spend evenings together whenever he got away from the post.
    Neither were Emo and Winnie eager to discuss their daughter’s condition. Their connection with her felt too tenuous, and if what they assumed was true, that the Kablunauk was the father, then it seemed inevitable that their affiliation with her would diminish further. And she, their only daughter. Winnie wept quietly to herself about the matter. Emo felt panicked whenever he thought about it, whenever Winnie alluded to it, so he simply refused to discuss the subject. When Victoria returned home from her spells out at the Kablunauk’s cabin, she worried for the sanity of her parents, who were so much more jumpy than she remembered from her childhood.
    Even when Victoria was eight months along, her belly hugely swollen on her long, thin consumptive’s frame, she refused to participate with Robertson or anyone in any conversation that had to do with reproduction. She attended Père Bernard’s masses with her mother and father on Sunday mornings and she smiled and waved at the people who greeted her. She did not mention Robertson, nor did she bring him to church with her, and she did not discuss the fact of her having to leave to urinate twice during the service, nor her wide-gaited and comic waddle. Eventually she became too large for her parka and had to buy a zippered nylon coat from the Hudson’s Bay store. Still, she was unable to close the zipper, and so she had her mother sew a panel she could zip to the front of her coat to afford her otherwise exposed belly some shelter. Her coat was navy blue, and for reasons known only to Winnie the zippered panel was crimson. By the end, Victoria looked like a drake mallard waddling the slippery paths through the hamlet and still refusing to discuss her circumstances. When Elizabeth Makpah, who sat across the aisle from Victoria’s family at church, accosted her in the Hudson’s Bay store and bluntly asked what her plans were, Victoria had replied that they would have potatoes