The Sky Is Falling by Caroline Adderson Page B

overtures rejected. Then a loud WEEEE !! sounded, followed by a BANG ! , and she grabbed the nearest child and clutched too hard. She only wanted to protect him, but he started wailing; his outraged mother snatched him back. The bowl was empty anyway so we went back inside where I put the kettle on. Sonia gnawed her nails, looking miserable. Don’t , I wanted to say, just as a single voice called out from our darkened porch, “Trick or treat!”
    We both went to the door. “Oh, God! What are you doing ?” Sonia cried.
    The fruity weight of the breast, nipple projecting into the cold air. The left one. The other side was draped in filmy white fabric that hung off one shoulder and fell in folds around her Birkenstocks. “Come on,” Belinda said. “You have them too.”
    â€œNot like that!”
    The freckles petered out on her chest, making her look snowed on. She raised her arms. White feathers were attached and, in her armpits, aigrettes of auburn. “I am the Goddess,” she intoned, flapping.
    â€œInside,” Sonia hissed. “The neighbours.”
    Belinda followed us in and through to the kitchen. “How did it go with the cranes?”
    â€œOkay, I guess. Jane helped hand them out.”
    â€œDid she?” The Goddess glanced at me through judgemental slits.
    â€œPlease,” Sonia begged. “Put it away.”
    And the general mood was autumnal , Chekhov wrote. My umbrella was on the porch with the old placards, drying out. A beaded curtain of rain poured off the ruined eaves. Things had changed. I thought it was that fall had officially come and with it the infinite rains, the dirty batting of cloud, the sadness. I looked forward to the sadness. It made me feel like I shared something with other people, even though it was just a mood. I went down the front steps, past Pete’s car. The next-door neighbour was standing in her front window in her flowered housecoat, hugging herself, face resigned. I felt like calling out, “Me too!”
    At the bus stop I joined the ranks of the damp, our small shivering group physically separate but united by this resigned melancholia. Soon the bus came, but as it neared we saw that it was full. No one was surprised, not even when, in passing, it sent up a tidal wave of dirty water. By the time I got to campus, my hair would be stringy, my runners saturated. My feet were already cold and would be for the rest of the day. I could switch the hand that held the umbrella and warm the other in my pocket, but my feet were defenceless. If I’d been a character in a Chekhov story, I would have put on galoshes. (It was the same word in Russian: galoshe .) Ga-losh-es . Losh like slosh . Sloshing through puddles. Through luzhi . Galosh, galosh. A comical word, yet how sad they actually looked on a person’s feet!
    And so, standing in line for public transit, I found a subject for my first Russian Lit paper of the year. Chekhov and shoes. The stories are filled with them—galoshes, felt boots, slippers. Dr. von Koren in “The Duel” challenges the dissipated Ivan Layevsky partly because he wears slippers in the street. Podorin in “With Friends” (I’d read the story the night before) feels at home with the Losevs only when he borrows a pair of slippers. Later, weary of the visit, the slippers define his estrangement. Then he sat silently in one corner, legs tucked under him, wearing slippers belonging to someone else.
    The following Sunday, when I came home from my aunt’s, I stood staring at the jumble of shoes in the vestibule, wondering what I could discern about the group behind the closed French doors based on what they wore on their feet. Sonia’s clogs were set neatly against the wall. I already knew she was from 100 Mile House, that both her parents were high school teachers. Her mother taught Home Ec and her father Math. She had a younger brother, Jared, and a Sheltie named