EDEN IN FLAMES

The ambulance is parked at the end of a dead end street, where the pavement turns to dirt. One EMT has his feet up on the dash, window rolled, eyes closed, listening to the other talk about her day off, or her kids, or her sister’s kids or something like that. It’s not that he doesn’t want to listen, he’s just so tired. This is his first day shift in over two weeks. He’s already thinking about going back to nights—already missing the people. Or, maybe only one person. He’d send him a text right now, but he knows he’s probably still asleep. Instead, he daydreams about the potential interaction they might share back at the station when their shifts crossover.

His fantasies are interrupted only by the sudden rattling of the dashboard. The chopper is close. He reverts his thoughts back to the mystery patient at the other end of the long, dark and muddy road. It’s light everywhere else, but somehow the driveway is like a black hole. He’d be lying if he said it didn’t give him the creeps.

“Maybe we should have tried to hike in,” he says.

“What?” asks the woman, having just been interrupted.

“We should have hiked in, maybe,” he repeats, leaning forward to see up through the windshield.

“Don’t be stupid.”

It would have taken them over twenty minutes to reach the house, and it’s not like they’d be able to bring a stretcher with them, but he still feels guilty. Five years ago—heck, even two years ago—he would have ran it. He probably would have gotten in trouble for it later, but at least he wouldn’t be feeling the tinge of regret he’s feeling now. Those guys get all the action, he thinks to himself, as the chopper comes into frame.

***

“It’s like the last piece of ice in the arctic,” the pilot muses, looking out at the long standing cedar groves and marshland.

Kit knows what he means. The land around here is being developed faster than any where in the country; swallowed up by urban sprawl. But here, it’s like a portal to the North. It feels far away from Toronto.

“Beautiful, eh Kit?” The second paramedic is seated at the front of the helicopter to navigate. They’re communicated to each other via the headsets built into their helmets.

Kit looks out the window. It’s autumn. The colours are fiery. Like Eden is up in flames... “Yeah,” he exhales, from his seat in the back next to the empty patient stretcher. But, as beautiful as the sights are, they have to focus now. “I have eyes on the house. Three O’clock, just to the left of that yellow field.”

“DCA two kilometers from scene.What is that? Mustard?” the pilot asks, switching from flight lingo to casual speak, the way one does when they’ve been flying for so many years.

“No,” Kit smiles. “English bull’s—” Kit cuts himself off. It’s called something different here. “Black eyed Susans. And Goldenrod at the edges. It’s a field of Wildflowers.”

“I’ll put you down in that top corner,” he says, having spotted a flat area.

“Heli-96, preparing to land,” Kit communicates back to the air desk, using the radio in the back.

“Clear of the trees,” the pilot says.

“Right side is clear. Watching for power lines,” the navigator narrates.

“There are none,” Kit notices curiously, as he studies the solar panels on the roof of the interesting looking home adjacent to the field. It looks like something straight out of Frank Lloyd Wright’s imagination.

He looks again at the patient information on the iPad, transcribed by the 9-1-1 operator. Male. Late fifties. Found by girlfriend, unconscious next to a ladder. Bleeding from head. Disoriented. Loud breathing.

“There are a couple sheep, or goats under that shelter,” the navigator warns.

“As long as they’re not territorial, eh Kit?” jokes the pilot as they go into land, recalling a previous incident that Kit doesn’t like to think about.

Huge winds generated by the blades force a stand of poplars along the forest edge to nearly snap. Flowers are beheaded in the downdrafts.

***

Hanna was out harvesting Morels when she first felt the rumbling. Initially, she thought it was just the train, but it was lower in pitch then she knows it to be. She didn’t feel the vibration in her chest like she usually does; she felt it in her stomach.

A few times a week she’ll see a helicopter flying along the highway to the East of the property. It’s one of the main arteries into the city, whose downtown core is less than an hours drive away. With her chin to the sky, she follows the bright yellow body of an air ambulance. It’s traveling North. Squinting into the bright white of the overcast sky, she watches as she often does, expecting it to disappear past the trees again, but this time it does something she’s never seen before. At a fast speed, it peels away from the traffic, at almost a perfect ninety degree angle, tilting its body like a hawk catching a warm updraft.

It’s going to be flying right over her.

The usual forest sounds falls silent as the twin jet engines shake every cell of her body, every drop of water in the marsh, every root under the soil. She wonders if the vibration is strong enough to shock the fungi, still laying dormant inside the standing dead trees, into flowering. She hopes not. Morels don’t last well. She’s counting on spreading the harvest out over the next couple weeks. A strong enough vibration could get in the way of that.

The chopper seems to be slowing down. She assumes a student is trying to pass a test. But why would they be using a fancy helicopter for that? She loses sight of it through the canopy, so she runs up a hill to see it better. It’s hovering above her woods like a drone.

Her nerves swell. It’s been here too long.

It’s right over where the house is. Her fingertips turn numb as she watches it lower itself.

It felt, to her, as though she’d only been watching the helicopter through a TV screen, like all the times before. But now it’s somehow jumped out of the pixels and crossed over into her world; like two dimensions are touching that aren’t supposed to. No one should be here.

With her hand blocking the brightest patch of clouds in the sky, she keeps a close watch, expecting it to ascend again and leave—wishing it would— but it never does, and her heart starts beating out of her chest.

All she can think of is Bo.

She drops her bag and takes off running, violently pushing herself through the thick understory, not caring that the branches are digging into her skin. Her long, dark hair flows behind her as she picks up speed. When she reaches the boggy section, she runs across the narrow, mossy logs, with her arms out for balance, following the blueprint of the forest she knows by heart, learned over hundreds and hundreds of hours spent wandering.

She finally makes it to the stretch of pine forest where there’s little in her way between the rows of trees. Ignoring the fire in her lungs, her legs move faster than they’ve moved in a long while, her body flying over carpets of dead pine needles. And as her muscles rejoice in the memory of speed, her mind stays only on Bo.

new chapters coming soon xx!

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