Kendra rounds the corner into Pike Place Market and fills her throat with the sweet smell of smoked fish, salt water, and history. She pulls the scent deep into her lungs, her stomach taut, her head sinking beneath the weight of something almost, but not quite, calm. It won’t last. Not when Ingrid has been dodging her like a bad Wi-Fi signal. She’s ready to rip an answer from her friend. Even if it burns.
She passes the iconic fishmongers tossing salmon. They raise the same lamentable heartache of Calgary’s Stampede parade. Both are celebrations of novelty, tradition, and the vitality of a place where everything is bigger than life. Her family back home in Alberta doesn’t see it this way. To them, the US is everything “other” and they take immense pride in their differences. Kendra exhales a snort of annoyance. She wouldn’t even be here if it weren’t for Ingrid.
“Fish? Free samples! Fresh fish!” A crowd develops around a blue-aproned man who deposits hunks of bright pink salmon into their awaiting palms. Kendra pushes in, strangers’ coats crinkling against one another and rain dripping into a spotlight around them. The cold fish hits her palm and she tips it into her mouth.
Ingrid wrinkled her nose when they first came here three years ago and she teased Kendra endlessly about her “fish hands” when they realized there was no sanitizing station nearby.
“You don’t know what you’re missing,” Kendra grinned, waggling her fishy fingers at her best friend.
Ingrid had shrieked and gone running through the labyrinth of shops and storefronts, peanut buttery blonde hair flying behind her underneath her knit toque. It hadn’t taken long to find her. She was standing in awe in front of a rainbowed wall of handspun yarn a few meters ahead.
Kendra shakes the memory from her head. The yarn merchant isn’t here today. She had hoped to buy a skein to make amends. It would have been Lake Louise turquoise; the colour of Ingrid’s eyes.
She can’t believe how quickly everything has unraveled. Ingrid had been her rock – her confidante, her partner in misadventure. She’s always been the more adventurous one, the bold one, the one with a plan. The plan that had brought them all the way to Seattle. Kendra? Well, Kendra is still figuring things out.
In the meantime, Ingrid’s messages have become sparse. Just quick responses, like a stranger trying to avoid eye contact. Recently, they stopped altogether.
Kendra rounds a corner and collides with a crowd watching a magician perform some sort of card trick. A few corners away, someone strums away on a banjo and belts out what sounds like a Bob Dylan track. The flat Midwestern tones float through the crowd as the magician shuffles his deck and a little girl in front of Kendra pulls a light-up flower out of her pocket and grins. They’re all part of this beautifully loose magic that happens in places like these.
It’s like Eau Claire market. There was a fishmonger there too for a while. Now Eau Claire sits like a ghost at its own funeral. The teal and orange angles and lines haunt her memory like a half-forgotten home. Someone said that the apartment complexes behind it burnt down a few weeks ago. It all feels so incredibly sad. It’s like part of her history died without her permission.
Kendra shoves her hands in her pockets while the magician pulls a red card out of thin air. He gives his best “gotcha” grin, signs it, and then passes it to a pretty brunette at the front of the crowd.
Kendra doesn’t think there was ever a magician at Eau Claire. If there was, he probably didn’t grin like that. A Canadian magician would have better sense.
She dips away and marches towards the stationery store, squaring her shoulders with renewed determination. Old Seattle Paperworks has a vaudevillian aura about it. A poster for Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds” greets her as she passes by a life-size decal of Robert Wadlow, the giant of Illinois. The pleats on his pants come up to her shoulder and he keeps going and going, his torso plastered on the window somewhere above her. Sometimes existing in Seattle feels like intruding on someone else’s inside joke.
She’s never lived alone and she’s never traveled so far from home. It’s all been for Ingrid. Ingrid, who is bent over a chipped wooden stand that spells out, “Old magazines! Cheap!” as she deposits copies of National Geographic into the slots. The one in front has some sort of a predatory bird on the front with the words “Why Birds Matter” in big, important-looking font.
“Why do birds matter?” Kendra tries to put on the air of a prospective customer as she approaches. She has to remind herself to unclench her jaw.
“Oh. Hey, man.” Ingrid’s freckles fall down her face into a grimace that makes Kendra’s heart plummet. “How’s it going?”
Kendra flips through a few of the magazines, avoiding eye contact, but knowing that her pale cheeks are burning as vibrant as her recently dyed scarlet hair. “Good. Like, not bad. Just wondering where you’ve been.”
“You know where I’ve fucking been. I told you I needed space.”
“I know,” Kendra presses her tongue to the top of her mouth, her heartbeat hammering in her ears. “But for how long?”
Ingrid tries to shove another five issues of National Geographic into the magazine stand, but they won’t fit. She takes the birds one out and another with a lone cowboy on the cover and tosses them aside. “I can’t answer that.”
“What am I supposed to do in the meantime?” Kendra sounds like someone’s whiny girlfriend and she hates herself for it. The back of the bird magazine has a flock of Canadian geese flying against a sunset and Kendra suddenly visualizes the inky black forms of Ingrid’s tattoo that stretch across her breastbone before sweeping down in a v-formation to the underwire of her bra. She flushes, remembering her hasty exit from that night. The whole thing was a mistake. Ingrid never acknowledged it as one, but she has to know. She needs to just admit that it never should have happened and then they can move on.
“I don’t know, Ken. That’s not really up to me. I can’t walk you through every damn dilemma that you come across. You need to start taking some ownership over these things.”
Silence.
“Do you even want to be here? Because it sure as hell doesn’t seem like it.” Ingrid spits the words out, tossing them carelessly at the magazine rack like they aren’t worth aiming properly.
“Be here? Like in Seattle?”
Ingrid nods, tossing aside a few more tattered copies of magazines.
“Of course I want to be here.” Kendra gasps. “This was our dream.” They had waited years to come. They were going to get jobs at big tech startups. A goal that neither one of them had come within a breath of yet. “It’s still my dream. Isn’t it yours?”
Ingrid shrugs, her loose cardigan falling off of one shoulder. Kendra stops herself from pulling it up for her. “I don’t know. You were my dream, Ken.”
Kendra lets her gaze fall to the floor. “I wish… I don’t know what I wish.”
“That’s the whole damn problem, isn’t it?” Ingrid muses. “You don’t know what the hell you’re doing. You’re half here and half still in Calgary. Why can’t you just commit to something?”
Kendra takes a step back. “I don’t know. It’s complicated. I just – I miss you. I miss your friendship, I mean.”
“You don’t miss me. You miss familiarity. God. Look at you. You’re a walking cliche of everything wrong with this city. Figure your shit out.” She stands there for a beat as if willing Kendra to deny it.
Ingrid shrugs one shoulder when she gets no answer. She turns on her heel, squeaks across the hardwood, and charges to the backroom.
Kendra moves to follow her, but the “employees only” sign rebounding off of the slammed door stops her. She swallows, running her hands over her dry cheeks.
“I’m not a cliche,” she whispers to the door. How can she be a cliche of Seattle when she’s not even sure if she belongs here? Ingrid’s just upset. She needs some time to cool down. Things will go back to normal and they’ll both laugh about how silly this entire argument was. Like spilled Coppermoon wine, that night should be wiped away and forgotten. Ingrid needs to just let it go. This is so stupid.
She mulls around the now-empty store. There’s no one to stop any would-be thieves from stealing the discarded magazines. Kendra picks up the one with the cowboy on the front and remembers her father’s deep oxen voice. “Don’t squat with your spurs on, Ken!”
“What does that even mean, Dad? Who says that?” She remembers a younger version of herself snickering to Ingrid about the bottle of Coppermoon they’d hidden in her backpack. The plan was to bust it out on the C-Train on their way to orientation at SAIT.
“It means don’t do something dumb or it could bite you in the ass. Now hand over the wine.”
It wasn’t funny at the time, but now she keeps finding excuses to use it in everyday conversation. Ingrid used to do it too sometimes.
When it’s clear that Ingrid isn’t going to come back out, Kendra reluctantly returns to the giant pants on the front window. She digs her phone out of her purse. Zero missed messages.
She taps a message to Ingrid. All the words she didn’t get to say. Backspaces. Types “spurs” into the search bar. Most of the gifs are of basketball players. None of them seem to reference their shared joke. Would she even remember it? Sometimes it seems like Ingrid wants to forget about who they were back in Calgary. Kendra wants to forget about who they’ve become here.
Fuck. A surge of hopelessness expands from within until Kendra can feel it absolutely everywhere in her body. The browns and blues and beiges of Old Seattle Paperworks feel both too intimate and too unsettling. She needs to leave. The posters spin in a maddening display of someone else’s nostalgia. They laugh in a language of the past; one that never belonged to her. She ambles down the stairs and into a dark forgotten corridor lined with shops selling cheap souvenirs like snow globes with the Space Needle in them and t-shirts with Kurt Kobain looking like some sort of sad lion in eyeliner.
The corridor comes to an abrupt stop featuring just one shop at the very end. The Wishing Tree. The storefront’s signage is peeling at the corners and a flickering green open sign struggles to stay lit, casting a stuttering glow onto the cracked cement floor. The display window is smeared with dust and someone has drawn a smiley face in the lower corner of it.
A little sandbox sits on a tabletop outside the door with a sign inviting shoppers to make a wish. There’s a tattered cardboard box full of marble animals to choose from. “A wish in stone and a secret in the sand” is written in childish cursive on the side of it. “$2. Cash Only.”
Kendra gazes around for a shop attendant, but they seem to be busy inside. She fingers through the marble creatures, waiting for her stomach to stop churning and her heart to stop drumming. She settles on an aquamarine hawk. Its expression reminds her of the National Geographic “Why Birds Matter” edition that Ingrid discarded. She takes the old toonie that she carries around in her purse for good luck. She could go in and pay for the hawk, but she doubts they take Canadian currency. It isn’t worth as much. It’s always lower than the U.S. dollar.
She digs a little hole in the sandbox and then holds the hawk firmly in her palms trying to conjure a wish. It doesn’t come.
Instead, she drops the toonie in the sand and buries it. Then unburies it. She glances around nervously before finally dropping both the toonie and the hawk in her pocket. She looks around the nearly abandoned corridor and flees.
At home, she pulls out both the stolen hawk and the toonie. An unmade wish and a good luck coin to carry it forward. So long as she keeps both of these items, the world is her oyster. The hawk, with its wickedly curved beak and unseeing gaze, seems to look into a future full of uncertainty. She thumbs the toonie between her thumb and her third finger. Outside, rain falls in a neverending drizzle against her window. A stark difference from the sudden clashing thunderstorms of the Canadian prairies. She hugs her blanket around her shoulders. Ingrid is so set on the idea that she needs to figure her shit out. Limit herself with decisions and commitment. Kendra grimaces. Maybe an unmade wish is better than a resolved one.
For now, she can be everything.t to a better place where I think I’ll be happy. I’m going to Walmart.”
Nichole Squire 