“‘What the hell do you know about oil anyway?’ I asked.
‘What’s there to know? It’s in the ground, you get it out the ground, you get paid.’”
That’s the premise for Nasir Husain’s “Fort Mac,” about two brothers who brave the Canadian oil sands of Fort McMurray to strike it rich, and maybe settle some demons from their past – until a wildfire comes sweeping in.
This is the first half of “Fort Mac” – the second half comes out tomorrow. Happy reading.
-The Editors
The fire came on the first of May, just as the last of the snow was melting.
It started as a plume of smoke southwest on the horizon, like a well fire or something like that. Something isolated, containable. We noticed it in the morning but didn’t think much of it, drinking our coffee, eating the powdered eggs and chewy bacon they served at the dining hall. The guys talked the usual shit, about the Stanley Cup playoffs and how much they’d drunk the night before and how hungover they all were now. It was a Sunday, but the days of the week didn’t matter up there. It was a workday.
The plume spread into a cloud and by lunchtime the cloud was black as tar and rolling like a wave. I took off my hardhat and wiped the sweat from my eyes and watched it swell towards me.
“It’s a wildfire,” said Russell, “I’ve seen ’em like that before.”
I nodded. I’d never seen anything like it before, but Russell’s lack of concern was reassuring to me. He was from interior BC. I didn’t doubt he’d seen his share of wildfires.
I glanced around for my brother Tanner, forgetting for a minute that he wasn’t there. It would’ve been impossible to spot him anyway. The hole was almost two-hundred square kilometers after all, and there were four-hundred of us working it, all wearing the same stupid orange vests and yellow hardhats. I put mine back on and Russell put the bulldozer in gear and we kept going like we had been.
Until the siren blew later that afternoon, none of us had any idea what was about to happen, how close we all were to the end.
But that’s how it usually goes, isn’t it?
I remember the beginning.
We were at a bar on Queen St. when he first told me his plan. The place was called Primo, which was some kind of joke or something because it was a real shithole. One of those dive bars with a broken jukebox and sticky floors and dirty jokes in Sharpie all over the bathroom stall. It was the kind of place Tanner loved, cheap and dead, which is why we were there in the first place.
“Fort Mac,” he said, like it was the answer to all life’s mysteries.
I had no idea what he was talking about.
“Fort McMurray,” he clarified.
“Where’s that?”
“Four hours north of Edmonton.”
“That’s like the fuckin tundra, man.”
“Well, that’s where it is.”
Tanner had just come back from Australia where he’d spent a year delivering furniture and learning to surf. We’d barely spoken while he was away. He was tan and lean and wore a mustache, which was the only place either of us could grow proper facial hair. I turned the glass in my hands, still warm from the dishwasher, the glass warming the beer, a cardinal sin for any bartender. “What the hell do you know about oil anyway?” I asked.
“What’s there to know? It’s in the ground, you get it out the ground, you get paid.”
“How much?”
“Like a fuckin stockbroker man. Eighty, a hundred K easy. For a grunt. You learn how to operate a drill, something technical like that, two hundred plus.”
“No shit.”
“Yes shit,” he smirked. “They’re calling it Fort McMoney.”
I knew there wasn’t any stopping him so I just raised my glass. “Sounds like you’ve got it all figured out. When do you leave?”
“Tomorrow if you want.”
“What?”
He smiled wide, a golden glimmer in his dark brown eyes.
It only took him two more rounds to convince me. Life in Toronto was nothing special. I was a line cook at a small pub that probably wouldn’t survive the winter. What little I made I spent on rent and beer. Three years asleep at the wheel lucky not to bash into anything.
We went for a smoke and I asked him how long he’d been thinking about this. He shrugged, “Bout a week, I guess.”
A week after that we were in Edmonton.
Tanner was the younger brother but also always the richer one. He had a nose for a buck, dating back to elementary school when he bought a giant box of Pop Tarts from Costco and sold them by the pack at lunch hour. In high school he applied the same principle to cigarettes, buying cartons on the Chippewa reservation and selling them by the pack at house parties.
One summer he convinced me to go treeplanting up near Temagami. He was seventeen, me nineteen, and we spent three months digging holes and planting saplings for twelve cents a tree. Once you got fast at it you could make a couple hundred bucks a day, which was pretty damn good so long as you didn’t mind sweat, sunburn, and horseflies the size of toonies.
It was a mix of moneycrazy kids like us and treehugger hippy types who strummed Neil Young at night and smoked joints with no filters. I don’t know what was stupider, us thinking it was an easy buck, or them thinking it was saving the world. The truth is it was just a job. Reforesting the clear cut so that one day, maybe a hundred years from now, someone can come back and cut it all down again.
They put us treeplanters up at the Huntsman Motel on the side of the highway, which had no air conditioning and no hot water. The kidney-shaped pool out front was empty, just a puddle of rainwater breeding mosquitoes and mocking us. Eventually we turned it into a skatepark where several people broke noses, wrists, kneecaps.
We worked four days on and one day off. By the end of the fourth day, my back was hunched, and my hands were frozen in vicious fists I had to pry from the shovel one finger at a time. The saplings, miniature pine and spruce trees, came in cardboard boxes covered with paraffin wax. One night, we filled the pool with about fifty of these boxes and lit a bonfire so big the flames toasted the moon like a marshmallow.
The first day in Edmonton I found a cheap Chevy Silverado in the classifieds and we bought it for three grand cash. The guy who sold it to us had worked the wells too back in the day, those early digs right around the city, even south of Edmonton, when the oil would bubble up and seep through your shoes. Or so he claimed.
“Not like that shit they’re shoveling up there now,” he said, “Sometimes I’m glad I’m old.”
We laughed politely and Tanner asked, “Got any advice for two first timers?”
“Yeah, actually. Buy extra toilet paper. They never give you enough at the well, and the food doesn’t always sit so good.”
Highway 63 went north from Edmonton past Grassland and Wandering River to the Athabasca oil sands. Two lanes the whole way. It was early November and there were already snowdrifts on the side of the road, and a heavy fog from which oncoming headlights shot out like bats.
“Go on and pass this asshole,” said Tanner, eating beef jerky and waving at the transport truck in front of us. We were stuck.
“Just sit back and eat your meat,” I told him.
A shitty road, arctic conditions, and shift workers who were either exhausted, intoxicated, or both. It was a perfect storm. Every few kilometers there was another reminder of why the highway had earned the nickname Suicide 63. A trio of crosses, scrap wood lashed together with duct tape, sticking out of the snow. Bouquets of dried flowers and long-extinguished candles. The carcass of a sedan they didn’t even bother towing out of the ditch.
That was the most dangerous part of working the rigs, getting up there in the first place. Most people died because they lost their patience, got tired of waiting behind some tanker truck and cut into the oncoming lane and the last thing they saw was headlights.
At one point we got caught behind a house. An actual house. It was one of those prefab bungalows with the furniture already inside and someone was driving it up on the back of a semitrailer. Turned a four-hour drive into eight. Tanner wouldn’t stop yapping, telling me to pass, calling me a pussy ass bitch. But I held tight. We could afford to wait. By then, Fort Mac was growing so fast people had to pack their own houses.
Even we were a little late to the party. The night we pulled into town, a cold Tuesday in November, the boom was well underway. There was construction everywhere, a hand-roll sushi joint on the corner, a Burger King across from that, a fucking Starbucks with a big plastic banner, “Coming Soon!”
We parked the truck on Main Street and went into the place that looked the busiest, an old pub called Piggy’s with a vaulted timber ceiling that gave off the homey smell of cedar. It was filled with workers in flannel shirts and Carhartt coats and we sat down where we could, a high-top by the bar. At that point we only had a couple hundred dollars left between us. We each ordered a cheeseburger and a beer.
There were two guys standing at the next table, one with a freckled face and sweaty red hair and the other who looked like a native, with a patchy beard and a ponytail of jet-black hair. Like most of the men there, they were around our age.
“You boys work round here?” asked Tanner.
“Nah,” said the ginger, “We’re here for the sunshine and fuckin supermodels.”
I chuckled, “Fair enough.”
The native sucked the meat off a chicken wing and tossed the bone in a wooden bowl. “You want work,” he said, like he was offering to pass the ketchup.
I glanced at Tanner. “Well, yeah,” I said, “That’d sure be nice. You hiring?”
The native glanced at the ginger and they both looked between Tanner and I like they were sizing us up. He licked his fingertips and pursed his lips. “After dinner.”
“Are you serious?”
He smiled, “Are you?”
We ate and we paid and over the course of the meal we learned that the ginger’s name was Flaherty and the native’s name was Russell. The four of us spilled out into the street, each fumbling to light a cigarette in the nasty wind. Flaherty had a big joint in his shirt pocket and he lit that too and magnanimously passed it around the circle.
I didn’t want to pester, but I didn’t want to be jerked around either. I passed the joint to Russell and said, “Where to?”
“Only one place to go,” he said.
I was a little buzzed but not as bad as the others, so we piled into the Chevy and I followed the lights to the edge of town. I drove past the Canadian Tire and Marcy’s Deli and the few blocks of cookiecutter houses where the engineers and executives lived. After that, it was frozen earth all the way to the arctic. And after ten, the only place with a pulse was Showgirls.
“Oh hell yeah,” said Tanner, looking up at the busty silhouette on the snowcrusted marquee.
“You know we’re looking for oil work, right?” I said, increasingly skeptical about how things were progressing.
“Trust me,” said Russell, closing the passenger door behind him, “This is like the, whaddaya call it…the career fair.”
The bouncer at Showgirls went by Bear. That night was well below freezing and Bear wore a sleeveless denim vest, showing off the Maori tattoo that wrapped up his python arm and around his neck. Everybody loved Bear.
“Russell,” Bear said in a gravelly voice, shaking the native’s hand, “Welcome back.”
“These two’re fresh into town,” Russell said. “You see McAuley in there?”
“Yeah, I think I might’ve seen him.”
The three of them, Russell and Flaherty and Bear, laughed like that was the funniest thing in the world. I opened my wallet and paid our covers and only had one lousy twenty left.
Showgirls had two bars and three stages, and they were all going that Tuesday night. On the mainstage was a girl with black hair and pale skin and an intricate dreamcatcher tattoo on her outer thigh.
Flaherty said the first round was on him, but he never came back from the bar and we didn’t see him again for the rest of the night.
“Flaherty’s got himself a problem with impulse control,” said Russell, slugging back a shot of whiskey.
“Likes a lapdance,” Tanner ribbed.
“Likes a lot of things.”
Flaherty wasn’t the only one. The whole place was full of us. The type of people who jump without looking, who can’t help it. The only thing separating Tanner and I from the rest of them was that we were broke. Guys were throwing fifties around like they were fives, doing coke off retractable car keys.
Russell found the man he was looking for at a circular table near the back of the club, a blonde with enormous fake tits sitting in his lap.
“McAuley,” said Russell, sliding in next to him.
McAuley was at least a decade older than us, short and barrel-chested, with a veiny bald head and a rowdy grey beard. He glanced over at Russell without turning his head, “What, I don’t see enough of you at the fuckin dig?”
“Sorry to interrupt boss, but I got a couple boys wanna work. I was thinkin since Todd and Luca left…”
“You mean since I fired Todd and Luca.”
“Yeah since then. These boys—”
“What boys.”
We’d just been standing in front of the table the whole time and McAuley finally looked up at us. I extended my hand, “Hey sir, my name’s Tyler and this is my brother Tanner.”
He didn’t take it, “That’s cute, the T thing.” He bounced the girl on his knee, “Isn’t that cute?”
“Like the Kardashians,” she said.
“Like the fuckin Kardashians,” he echoed.
The two of them laughed and Russell joined in too.
“Where you boys come from?”
“Back east, sir,” I said.
“You can stop callin me sir, it ain’t the goddamn army. Where east?”
“Toronto.”
“Coupla city boys! Tyler and Tanner from Toronto, eh?” He nibbled on the girl’s shoulder, “Whatcha think sweetheart, think I got any use for a coupla city boys soft as baby shit?”
“Look, we’re workers,” Tanner insisted, “Landscaping, treeplanting, construction…we don’t give a fuck.”
“He’s right,” I said, “We’ll dig with our fingernails if you tell us.”
McAuley chuckled. He looked over at Russell, then back up at the girl. She was eyeing me and Tanner. Then she leaned in and whispered something in McAuley’s ear. He nodded, scratched at his bushy beard, let out a long sigh.
“Okay. Fuck it. C’mon up with Russell’s shift tomorrow, we’ll see what you can do.”
It was that easy. We thanked McAuley profusely, told him he wouldn’t regret it. “I’m already regretting it,” he said, “Now fuck off.” We had no idea where we’d be going, what we’d be doing, or how much we’d be paid, but we didn’t push our luck. I used my last twenty to buy Russell a dance.
I saw the blonde again later that night. She was coming out of the dressing room as I was going to the bathroom.
“Hey, Toronto,” she said. She wore a blue sequined minidress and walked a little knock-kneed in her platform heels.
“Hey.”
She leaned against the wall and played with the hem of my white t-shirt. “You know I got you that job, right?”
“Oh yeah?”
She raised her eyebrows, “He listens to me.”
“Well, whatever you told him, thanks,” I said. “Seriously, thanks a lot.”
She bobbed a little curtsy. “How bout a dance?”
“I’m out of money,” I replied honestly.
She smirked and kissed my cheek. “Come back soon and you can thank me properly.”
We slept that night on the living room floor of Russell’s apartment, our jackets over us like blankets.
It was the first time in a long while, but when I thought about it, I realized me and Tanner had been sharing a bedroom for most of our lives. There were the apartments we grew up in, little two-bedrooms on Jarvis then Wellesley then Sherbourne, where the elevators smelled like fried onions and the walls were spotted with black mold. The first place, I had a single bed, and Tanner’s would slide out from beneath it. A trundle, it was called. The next place had bunks made of red metal that would squeak when Tanner climbed up top. And eventually, as the boyhood appeal of vertical sleeping arrangements wore off, we had two twins side-by-side.
There were certain unspoken agreements that allowed us to sleep meters apart for thousands of nights without killing each other, certain moments of mandatory blindness and deafness. Like when, in the middle of the night, the other sleeping body would roll over to face the wall and the bed would start to gently creak. And later, on those miraculous occasions a girl would come over, one of us would wait in the living room, sitting and watching TV like everything was totally normal. We never had to talk about these things, they just happened.
At the Wellesley place, mom started dating the guy who lived upstairs. He was a Czech guy named Tomas and he wasn’t so bad. He had a funny accent and loved hockey, would come play ministicks with me and Tanner before he and mom went out. “We’re just at the bar downstairs,” she’d say as she put on her shoes and wrapped her scarf around her neck, “in case you need anything.” She started spending more nights at his place. He didn’t have any kids, which obviously had its advantages, and one night she knocked on our door before going out and said, “Y’know, since I’m sleeping up at Tomas’ more, one of you boys should take my bedroom.”
We traded a suspicious look. “Why?” I said, ungratefully.
“Well, it’s a nice big bed, and there’s no sense not using it. Plus, you could have a little more privacy some nights.”
I slept in there exactly once. It was bizarre. The sheets smelled like mom, which is to say like cigarettes and Pond’s cold cream. The weirdest thing about it though was that I could hear everything going on in Tomas’ room right above. It wasn’t like they were fucking or anything, although I’m sure I would’ve heard that too if I’d extended my stay. They were talking. Tomas must have been lying down, but mom was pacing around and talking. I could hear her feet on the ceiling, her voice moving rhythmically back and forth across it like windshield wipers. It was clear she was drunk.
“I don’t know what to do, I really don’t. They want to put him on Ritalin.”
“Okay.”
“But he’s just a kid, right? He’s nine years old! Isn’t it normal for boys to be, I dunno, a little distracted?”
“I was. All the time.”
“But then I think, well, Tyler didn’t have any of these problems.”
“Every kid’s different.”
“I was different, Tomas. I was different.”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh god oh god, it was too much. Things had gotten so bad, and I was out of control. I wasn’t ready, wasn’t ready for another one, and now…”
She started to sob.
“Come here.”
“My baby,” she choked, “My baby, my baby, what did I do to my baby?”
I went back to our bedroom and Tanner lifted his head groggily off the pillow, “What happened?”
I shook my head, “Nothing, just wanted to sleep in my own bed.”
“Yeah,” he said, pulling the comforter up around him, “I never wanted to sleep there in the first place.”
Suncor was the biggest show in town, with a full-service refinery right by the Athabasca River and at least five mines up and running in the surrounding area. Tanner and I loaded up the truck and joined the convoy heading north to the Fort Hills lease, about an hour from Fort Mac. The country was hard and empty, tundra plains of snow and moss, forests of scrawny spruce swaying in the wind, grey mountain ridges rising up out of the flat distances.
It was dinosaur country. When we were kids, mom would take us to the Royal Ontario Museum to see the fossils, the tyrannosaurus in the main atrium hanging by invisible strings from the ceiling. The dioramas showed the Badlands, the clumsily named Albertosaurus and Edmontosaurus. I looked out the dusty window and imagined the fields millions of years ago, warm and lush like Costa Rica or some place like that, a pack of raptors galloping wild across the plain.
We saw the conveyor belts first, two ramps climbing high into the sky, up to the top of a massive white silo. And then the mine itself.
“Jesus Murphy,” said Tanner.
That’s all there really was to say. A hole the size of Buffalo carved into the earth. You’d think an asteroid had hit if it wasn’t so goddamn geometric. It was made. Expanded in concentric rectangles, like a zamboni going round and round a square rink. There were different tiers, different depths with connecting ramps, so that heavy equipment could be transported and deployed the whole way down.
And on the edge of the hole was the camp. Hundreds of trailers that looked like portable classrooms, each with two single beds, a mini-fridge, and a closet-sized bathroom. There was a dining hall, cafeteria style, with long tables and sneezeguard buffets. And a mess hall, with a TV, a pool table, a benchpress, and a few old paperbacks. That’s it. The closest town was Fort McKay, a forty-minute drive and there was jack shit to do there anyway.
The job was simple: make the hole bigger. Fort Hills was a pit mine, meaning the tar sand was up near the surface. We just had to shovel it out, get it into the hauling trucks, and onto the conveyor belt. The refinery would handle the rest. There was a whole ocean of it, a fifty-year dig they told us. Enough that a man could work his whole career and still not see the end of it.
The tar sand itself was less like sand and more like wet soil, black and mulchy. It sucked at your boots like a swamp bottom, a slurry of water, and clay, and the stuff we cared about: bitumen. That was the money. That’s what made the pile of shit worth shoveling.
It smelled like diesel fuel, or rotten eggs, or cat piss, depending on who you asked. But you got used to that eventually. The cold was another thing. We arrived just in time for winter, working outside in minus-twenty, minus-forty with the windchill. The wind would come flying across the plain and swoop down into the pit like an avalanche. The worst was your hands. If you wore ski gloves, your fingers were like fat sausages, useless on the switches. If you wore work gloves, the cold would eat right through them. Either way, you couldn’t do a goddamn thing.
It’s no wonder we all drank. That was the only thing to do and we did it with rigor. Everyone would drive up for their shift, trucks loaded with two-fours of beer and handles of liquor. Some guys didn’t even wait till they got there, chucking empties out the window onto the side of the road. Every night after dinner there were beers in the mess hall, and after that closed, we kept it going in the trailers.
Russell introduced us to his friend Lubomir, a Bulgarian electrician who’d been working the site since it opened. Everyone called him Lube or Luby, and everyone liked him because he was always hosting parties. He had his own trailer, a privilege afforded by his technical prowess and relative seniority, and yet he never seemed to be alone. There was always someone over, always something happening at Luby’s.
Our favorite thing to do, after getting blind drunk at flip cup or beer pong, was to climb up on the roof of Luby’s trailer and shank golf balls into the pit. Russell had a set of old clubs that he left at Luby’s for this very reason.
“What kinda Cree plays golf?” chirped Flaherty, swaying dangerously on the edge of the roof.
Russell smiled, “What kinda Irishman can’t hold his liquor?”
We took turns smacking balls as hard as we could, watching them sail over the last row of trailers and disappear into the hole without a sound. Sometimes we’d find one digging the next day, a little glimmer peeking out of the muck, white and smooth like a turtle egg.
Tanner was right about one thing: the money was pretty damn good.
That winter we each made seven grand a month, with our room and board covered by Suncor. If you lived smart, it was enough that you could save fifty grand a year, easy, or put a down payment on a house, or send it back to your family. And some guys did that, for sure. But most of us, and Tanner especially, we went the other way. It was easy to forget about saving when there was always another fat paycheck less than two weeks away. How could we have known that a colossal fire was about to come and fuck everything up?
One weekend, we decided to drive back to Edmonton for our three days off. I wasn’t too keen on logging extra time on Suicide 63, but it was a long winter in Fort Mac and you get tired of seeing the same shit over and over.
We got rooms at the Fairmont, which was the best hotel in Edmonton according to TripAdvisor. It looked like a fucking castle, perched high above the city, with white stone walls and a green copper roof. We pulled up to the valet, who looked a little sideways at our filthy Chevy, but we tipped him twenty and he put a smile on. We shaved and showered and went to The Keg for dinner, each ordering a prime rib, a baked potato, a Caesar salad, and a glass of single malt.
“Here’s to us,” I said.
“Here’s to us being rich.”
The next day we went to the West Edmonton Mall. I’d always heard how it was the biggest mall in North America, but it’s difficult to grasp how gigantic it actually is until you go. They’ve got all the usual stores, but also a rollercoaster, a waterpark with a wavepool, a full size skating rink, and an Imax movie theater. First we smoked a joint in the parking lot, because it seemed like the right thing to do before going into a place like that.
Tanner went crazy. He bought a pair of tan Timberland boots, some noise-canceling Bose headphones, a black leather jacket with a shearling lining, and a fourteen karat gold chain. That’s just the stuff I can remember. I was a little more restrained, but I did splurge on a pair of new skates and a nice hockey stick. There was a rink in Timberlea Park and I’d seen some guys playing out there in the morning.
We took our loot to the foodcourt and rang up a shit ton of fast food, Arby’s sandwiches and Wendy’s frosties and a bucket of Popeyes. We ate quietly and Tanner swiped through girls on his phone.
“It’s nuts man,” he said, dipping a french-fry in his frosty. “I set my radius to one kilometer. All these girls are literally in the mall.”
He matched with a girl named Gracie whose profile said she was eighteen. He was chuckling to himself as he messaged with her.
“C’mon man, she’s at the wavepool. She says she’s with her friend.”
“I don’t have a bathing suit.”
“So we’ll fucking buy some bro.”
The wavepool was in this massive atrium with a convex glass ceiling overhead. It was humid, like a greenhouse, and all around the pool deck people were peeling off their winter layers. We spotted Gracie and her friend under a fake palm tree, laying in their bikinis on plastic lawnchairs, as if there was a sun to tan them.
“Hi, we’re from Sports Illustrated,” said Tanner with barefaced sleaze, “Have you girls ever done any modeling?”
“Shut up,” said Gracie, laughing, as she stood and gave Tanner a hug. “Who’s this?”
“This’s my brother Tyler.”
Her friend, a pretty brunette wearing a heart-shaped pendant around her neck, stood up and shook my hand. “I’m Kendra.”
It turned out Gracie and Kendra went to the University of Alberta, freshmen in the nursing program. I was twenty-six at the time, and felt a little weird about the whole thing, but not enough to stop it. It wasn’t like there were a lot of eligible women in Fort Mac. We got in the wavepool and the girls climbed on our shoulders and played chicken. Tanner was commentating like it was Hockey Night in Canada. “And Gracie pushes with her right, and Kendra blocks it with her left, and they lock arms, aaaaand there, goes, Kendra! Gracie wins! Gracie wins! Gracie and Tanner fucking win!”
He flipped Gracie into the pool and the two of them spun away into the waves, which were just starting to really churn. Kendra took her cue and wrapped her arms around my neck.
“So you work up in Fort Mac, huh.”
“Mhm.”
“What’s it like up there?”
“Honestly,” I put my hands around her waist. “Pretty lonely.”
She pouted theatrically, touched my cheek, “You poor thing.”
We got a few beers and a couple mickeys of liquor and brought the girls back to the Fairmont. We were all in Tanner’s room, mixing the vodka and rum with pop from the minibar. The girls were jumping on the bed, singing along to a song I didn’t recognize. Tanner was at the desk, cutting some lines with his room key on the glass tabletop. I sat in the leather armchair, my head swimming, the walls receding.
I woke up in the middle of the night with Kendra’s arm over my chest. She slept with her mouth open, a light rasp with each breath. My head throbbed and I went to take a piss and get a glass of water. I drank it quickly and refilled it again, my feet cold against the smooth tile floor. The hotel hummed. I sat at the foot of the bed and looked out the window, down at the glowing city, the cars floating up and down the avenues. I remembered the wavepool, holding Kendra in my arms as the water started to churn, looking up through the arch of glass at the grey winter sky. This was where it all went. All the shit we dug out of the hole and loaded onto the conveyor belt. All those millennia of crushed leaves and dead flesh, a few heartbeats of sound and light.
-“Fort Mac” continues tomorrow-
Nasir Husain is a researcher and writer with a focus on social impact and public policy work. He grew up in Toronto, Canada.