Visitors

By Owen Torrey

They always arrived in the morning. If there was snow the night before, that is. That winter, there was. They appeared through the window above the sink on the hill. Slashing upwards in loose diagonals. Often in pairs. Often alone. I was alone. I had a book to tell apart marks in snow. Animal Tracks of Ontario. It was old, its pages illegible in places from use. In the snow, the imprints were unshaped with wind. But I knew each mark was the word that meant them. For weeks every sentence I began had that word in it. Sentences like: I know the world is there because they are. I would lay each night in sleep and guess the moment they passed by outside. Was it now? Now?

One morning, nothing. Above the sink, the only evidence in the snow was a set of boot-prints left from last night. I had gone to get firewood, milk. It was like tearing open an envelope to find a blank page inside. The next morning, the same. Now and then, reality. I lay in bed, turning through Animal Tracks of Ontario. There was a footnote beneath one page. Where you are, it said, there are none of them. Blamed for bringing liver fluke to local wildlife, they were hunted down to nothing. Snow fell from the roof outside. December was a blade. I had seen nothing. I went out and knelt in the ground, tracing with my finger that word over and over, until the whole hill was covered with it. That was the natural thing to do, wasn’t it? That was only natural.

About the author

Owen Torrey's writing has most recently appeared with Canadian Literature, CBC Books, The Literary Review of Canada, the League of Canadian Poets (poets.ca), The Malahat Review, Geist, ZYZZYVA, and Exclaim!, and has been longlisted for the CBC-Radio Canada Poetry Prize and awarded the Roger Conant Hatch Prize for Lyric Poetry. He currently lives in Toronto, where he works for the editorial department of Knopf Canada.