I don't remember when it arrived, that dusk. It was just—there. Always. Encroached on the edges of the brightest days. So it was then, and so it is now. I know there is memory…answers lost in the pit of it. What if I could free that shroud? I don't know. Trust is hard to come by. What might I learn if I rummaged through those shadows, gouged their depths, and freed its secrets? Or is it best they remain lost, accept, and go on? There are reasons for their silence. But now the shadows stir, demand release. Two years of Covid isolation, too much time to think, mired in the why and how. Time and again, I force the questions down, back into the morass. Time and again, they erupt to the surface. As they do now. I sit at the dining table co-opted as my desk, out the window as pre-dawn lightens to murk. Sam, my Karelian Bear Dog/Great Pyrenees cross, thrusts her head under my arm. She always knows when Mommy needs a cuddle. "Walk, baby girl? Let's go, then." Here in British Columbia's North Thompson, March is the month of in-between—not yet   free of winter nor firmly planted in spring. This is the month of morning mist; the sun often a dying light behind the fog. Trees shape-shift, the birdsong muffled. But, the river calls. Sam leads the way, then disappears into the brume. My feline babies, The Grizzly Bear and her offspring, Iddy, skitter out of the long grass, sidewind behind, ahead, and around my feet. Our progress is halting. Skeletal trees drip on last fall's droppings, heard but not seen. Our resident bald eagle is elsewhere, not perched on his usual branch in the naked pine. Since his woodpecker capture, Iddy firmly believes that he's a master hunter, and the eagle will be his next oversized victim. Like the humans surrounding him, Iddy's reality is adjustable, nebulous. Once through the wood, we pick our way down the bank. The fallen tree beside the water is chill and damp but a seat nonetheless. The river runs high, its usual rock-chatter buried under the spring run-off. We watch its progress up the levee like the eagle follows a salmon. The banks trickle dirt, cloud the shores, make it difficult to distinguish where one begins and the other ends. Trees lean over the water, braced to dive into its numbing cold. Sam gallops along the stone beach, wades into the chill, scoops water as she swims. Mergansers battle their way upstream, close to shore where the current isn't as fierce. She yips in their direction, turns and wades after them. They'll be nest-building soon; their young will hatch and learn to navigate the water. A baby will tire, climb on its mother's back, and nestle between folded wings as she glides downstream. Usually, this—my spot— is a no-thought place, a place where the rush of current sweeps away the out there, where the cacophony of water over boulder drowns the loudest of thought. Today the storm can't silence the sound of "would-have, could-have, should-have," the what I should have done and didn't; what I shouldn't have done and did. Today the fog bank is a winding cloth that binds out there around my body. I think of my cousin. He was a June baby, I, a December. We were—twins? Lost spirits? We shared night terrors. Was it his own lost and forgotten ghosts that drove him to the drugs and booze, or the demons he knew? It was the lost, the must-be-buried mysteries that tormented. I know he was scared. Frightened that the secrets his mind hid were so much worse than the memories retained. He couldn't trust his darkness or let it go. Once he came to live with us. He left the next day. Stay. Go. He didn't know both were the same, didn't understand that there was no safe haven behind our doors either. I tried to help, but in the end, we both lost. He, his life, I, him. But, I see him there, across the river, swirling in the mist. His unspeakable shifts, re-forms and surrounds him. We're not alone. An arm's length away, Sam, Grizz, and Iddy surround, protect, comfort, and wait for the ghosts to dissipate. Grandma's Attic. An uncle sits in a dusty red velvet armchair/his father creeps into a bedroom/his brother stands in a kitchen/his grandfather blocks a doorway. They look the same: sharp-faced, predatory. They grin. I stand between Uncle and my two-years-younger sister/a daughter lies frozen, terrified/a sister pushes away from the counter/a granddaughter spins and bolts for the back door. My sister doesn't remember the attic, the uncle. Too young, or did I protect her as I should? But, I remember. My mother, aunt, and cousin remember. We can't forget. Three of the four wolves are dead now. The future is safer. I check the obits often and see if the fourth has managed to die yet. I'm not sure if I'll ever know. Those who would, the like-minded, are gone. I need to look again. Joe Koo's restaurant. A red brick, one-storey sandwiched between the gas station and the bakery. This was Markdale; twelve hundred residents and a two-block crossroad downtown. In the nightmare, the restaurant has two storeys; a dining hall with a long wooden table framed by embossed red drapes on the second floor. A mirror hangs above an occasional table at the far end. On its mahogany top is a heavy crystal vase. These were the days of Michael Jackson, The Jackson Five, Donny Osmond and Family. We—Donny, Michael and I were born three in a row—1957, 1958, and 1959. The Osmonds had crocodile Chiclet teeth. Michael then was not the end-Michael, and he haunts me. I understand the need to be someone else; I can't imagine what drove him from that unblemished child to what he became. There must be a connection in the nightmare, a reason why it's Donny who stands in front of those curtains. A reason why, in my nocturnal torments, a hairy gorilla arm reaches from behind, grabs the vase, and swings back and forth, back and forth. Why chunks of Donny splatter across the room. An odd, twisted take on The Monkey and the Crocodile. In the mist, those things I see/imagine—my cousin's face, the attic, Joe Koo's—spiral, mutate from one to the next. Now I spot the Manitoba Maple in the highest tendril, the tree across the street from the Markdale house. Octopus roots curve around the hole at its base. A hole built for a child to crawl inside, crouch, and hide in its dark. This was my nighttime escape, where I ran to hide from the day. Sometimes, they followed—the fear, the hands, the perpetual threat of explosion. As I watch, my one-time sanctuary eddies into itself and disappears. The damp settles into my sixty-plus bones. My hands ache from it. The sun hovers at an oblique angle above the horizon, a blurred disk between the mountains hemming the river. Grizzly leaps onto my shoulders, drapes around my neck and rumbles in my ear. Think, she says. Think of a day when you were happy. Think. Randolph Street. The floor tiles an incandescent white. Sun streams through the glassed screen door. In the glass, a reflection —me, but not me. I tug Grizzly's ear, then sweep the bangs off my forehead. Tell her, Little Girl, I can't think of that anymore. I thought it was magic. It was just wanting—.