Into the Fall

by Tamara L. Miller

She couldn’t tell where the sky ended or began, as if the Mirabelle had swallowed the world.

ON AVERAGE, 57 KIDS DROWN EVERY YEAR IN CANADA. “Husbands?” she said, on a rushed breath. “I’m sorry. Say again?” Gabe asked. “How many husbands drown?” Sarah gestured to the poster

Memory was a misplaced faith; we believed in our pasts only as far as we remembered them.

It was like that, grief. Dormant, but always ravenous, waking in its own time to steal away moments of contentment.

“Occam’s razor. In the face of the unexplained, the simplest answer is the most likely.” The remembered lines from an undergraduate philosophy course dropped confidently from her lips.

Boychuk had dealt with more missing persons cases and grieving family members than he could count. Yet none had been as hard for him to read as Sarah Anderson.

He would never leave his family just because he lost his temper, she’d said to Bella. But was that really true?

mistake. That the envelope was the remnant of another time. Grief can do that: transport you to a moment where hope is stronger than reality.

Matthew and Jonathan Evans, like Schrödinger’s cat, was both alive and dead to Sarah.

If Matthew Anderson had indeed brought his wet suit with him that weekend, why hadn’t they found it with the rest of his belongings at the campsite?

“The wilderness is probably the purest expression of beauty there is in the world. There’s no right, no wrong, no good, no bad. The wild deals in life and death just as easily as we breathe. It’s primal and true. We can walk within it, even fool ourselves into believing we’ve tamed it, but disrespect it and it will swallow us.”