The City Still Breathing by Matthew Heiti

one. The Barracuda. Coal black and polished like a razor. He slides into the driver’s seat and gets the key turned. Nothing. Turns again. More nothing. He took it out just last week and she was purring then.
    When he slides back out he sees it. Gas cap off and a hose dangling. It clicks. The smell of gasoline at the tractor. Lemmy’d tried to drive off like Batman and probably spilled gas all over the place doing it.
    Not going to waste time trying to siphon it back. Tarp’s off the second mound. The Beetle. Yellow paint and rust. Dragged by a crane out of the bottom of a ravine. They wanted to take it to the junkyard, but he said no. Washed out the stains, put in a new windshield, hammered the hood back into shape. Never could bring himself to repaint it. Yellow her favourite colour.
    He tosses the Pystykorva and the doll on the passenger seat. It hasn’t been driven since, only started up once a year. But even with stale gas, the engine comes to life on the first try. Figures.
    He drives the curving dirt road and rolls up to the edge of the highway. The asphalt stretching out in either direction. Right and he’s going into the city – going after Lemmy, going back to the farm, back to the plants, back to Ukki, back to his parents’ grave, back to tending and caring and bathing and feeding, back to going along the long flat line of life.
    Then there’s left. On to the Soo, on to Thunder Bay, on to the badlands and on up the mountains and on and on to the coast. To the ocean. The farm behind him. Ukki, Lemmy, the sad dead city – everything far behind. Tomorrow and all the days on and on – his. Just like all the pictures he’d scissored out of magazines and stuck on the walls of his bedroom, like the ocean behind his eyelids. Finally his.
    A snowflake. Just one, falling so slow. First of the year. He follows it down to the hood of the car where it melts. And then another. Second of the year and another, the third, and another, and more, losing count. Here comes another hard winter.
    Or he could stay here. The car’ll be buried under snow and he can hibernate until spring.
    The Pystykorva on the seat next to him. Running his hand down the oiled barrel, the wood stock, catching at the slash cut into the butt of the rifle. Ukki had carved one notch there, carved it so deep you could see daylight on the other side. He was no expert sniper. Not like Simo Häyhä, Ukki said, no valkoinen kuolema . No White Death – ei, ei, et sinä , not him. Carved this one notch down in some ditch over the ocean and then never moved on. Bringing that one notch with him over the ocean, into the house he built, and passing it on to his son, his grandsons, putting it into the fields around them. Milly stuck with this inheritance of the dead and dying.
    He puts the car into gear and turns right. Going on, because sometimes that’s enough to get you through the day. Going gone.
    The highway is a long black tongue all the way from Spanish, leading Milly down into the belly of the city.
    He drives in a trance. The windshield wipers keeping the snow off, each slow pass pulling back another curtain in his brain. Lemmy hit by a transport out on the road. Lemmy freezing out in the forest. Lemmy attacked by wild animals. Lemmy slipping, hitting his head on a rock. Lemmy falling in the river. The many ends of Lemmy.
    He’s just on the other side of McKerrow when he spots the ravine. Deep and wet like a mouth on his left side. He doesn’t know the exact spot. By the time Ukki took them there, the road crews had cleaned everything up, replaced the guardrails. He always figures he’ll feel something different on this patch of road.
    He had packed a bag before he went to sleep that night. The decision finally made. He only told Lemmy, before he climbed into his bunk, I’ll come back for you.
    He’d been lying in bed waiting, not knowing what for, when the phone rang. It rang and