Land Holding

By Molly Cross-Blanchard

Art by Michelle Campos Castillo

So my cousin Kira was coming home for Gram’s 80th birthday, riding in on the noon bus that grumbles and coughs all the way from Edmonton to Vancouver and back. She’s living in Valemount with her boyfriend of the minute who she texts me pictures of sometimes: walking through the forest looking back at Kira over his shoulder, taking a bite of a flaky pastry on a pebble beach, presenting the tomatoes they’re growing in a little square of dirt in their big backyard, a proud, stupid grin on his face. 

I guess I’m a little jealous or something. But I’ve got a shaggy dog named Dolly who’s so nice she doesn’t need a leash and Gram makes me breakfast in bed every Sunday. So we’re both doing pretty good for ourselves.

The bus was running late and I’d just drunk two bottles of Powerade (Blue Flavour, obviously), so I took a little walk across the highway where there’s a mountain range viewpoint for tourists, and an outhouse. Sweet relief, I tell ya. When I stepped back into the sun, this white couple was there leaning on the rope to look over the cliff edge with real-ass binoculars, passing them back and forth to each other. 

“Will we want to be so close to a bus station? I’m just not sure.” The woman’s voice dropped into a quiet hiss when she said bus station, like it was a synonym for dirty piss hole.

“If you want the northern and southern views, we may not have a choice.” Like a magician, the man pulled a long white tube out of his jacket and unrolled it across the top of the boulder me and Kira used to go sit on whenever Gram would kick us out for spending too many hours playing Animal Crossing in the basement (GameCube, not Switch. Get it right.). Go lookit some real animals and bring me something to cook up for supper, she’d say. So me and Kira would sit back-to-back on the boulder for hours watching the road, hoping a dozy trucker might clip a deer and we’d get to go home heroes. 

“I’m not the only one who wants both views! God, I hate that. I hate when you blame every inconvenience on me. Not this time, mister.” The woman—a wife, seemed like—glared at the sun and pulled her UFO-saucer shades down over her eyes. 

The man—a husband, probably—made a mark with a fresh pencil on his blueprint, then turned it right-side-up. “I don’t care about the view as much as the geothermal potential. Stanley says this is the best spot.”

“So now I don’t care about sustainability? I’m just some bitch who doesn’t want to live beside a hub for hitchhikers?”

“Trust the security system, honey. It’ll be top of the line.”

“What does that even mean, ‘top of the line’? You don’t know what that even means.” 

I walked back across the road and sat down in the bus shelter. But I kept watching them. She flung her claws around a lot when she talked, which made you want to duck to avoid stray projectiles, and he seemed to gather everything he wasn’t saying between his shoulder blades like he was powering up for more attack points or something. 

It was kind of peaceful, just watching them but not hearing what they were saying. In the foreground of the colossal wall of pines, they were like two fleas clinging to Dolly’s shaggy flank. Annoying, but relatively harmless. 

Then, that white woman, she flung herself around so much that she just—SHWOOP—disappeared down the side of the mountain. It happened so fast I didn’t have time to feel panicked for her, I guess. And the husband froze. I think he wanted to go after her, I really do. But that selfish little survival instinct in his body locked him up at the knees and the throat. So he just watched. 

And I wanted to help, I really did. But Kira’s bus pulled up just then and—surprise!—she had the boyfriend in tow, and a beautiful baby belly, and even a basket of some of those garden tomatoes. So I had to rearrange the backseat of the Camry to make room for her big, big life. 

I heard later from Martin down at the Shell station that the woman wasn’t rescued until well after midnight. Her foot had been caught between two rocks, the land holding on and on.

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Molly Cross-Blanchard is a white and Métis writer and editor born on Treaty 3 (Fort Frances, ON), raised on Treaty 6 (Prince Albert, SK), and currently living on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples, a.k.a. Vancouver. Her debut full-length book of poetry, Exhibitionist, was published with Coach House Books in 2021, and she's now working on a collection of short fiction about THW (a.k.a. "Truly Horrible Women''). She teaches Creative Writing and Indigenous Studies at Kwantlen Polytechnic University.