by Sandy Bonny

No one knows anymore exactly who found the springs, but coal miners built the pool. They piled rocks up to dam the springs, pulled their boots and socks off, and climbed on in. Coal dust floated up off their bodies and marked black lines on the rocks. Sulphur came out of the water where it spilled over the dam and floated back in clumps of yellow foam. That foam, and the water under it, stunk high as rotting eggs, but the miners came out of their black marked baths whiter than most of them could remember being. Clean white like a plate the Queen could eat off of. White like men with paper and desk jobs. Snow white so they could tell their families at home they got better jobs than they did. Miners to managers, blasters to bosses.

Bo told Tim this story three days into grading the road cut. He meant, wash your face, Tiam li. And when Tim resisted, Bo pushed him to a bucket of night-chilled water set out beside their tent. Tim bet that those too-clean-to-be-miners didn’t get paid any better for looking white.

Flint lifted his hat off to show the line where his red face ran into a smooth white forehead. He said ‘Eh mate, it’s only mehd dogs and Eenglishmen what run abeet in mid-die sun.’ He meant, keep your damn hat on, so Tim lifted his hat up to his head.

Flint came from Australia where there’s nothing but wild dogs to eat you. Bo came from China where bears only eat trees. Tim came from Vancouver and saw a grizzly bear once. A brown, wet looking lump that was eating thrown out fish at the landfill. He agreed that bears were nothing to be scared of, so Bo and Flint pointed out different ways Tim could scramble down to the stream. The road was cutting a strip of bright, blinky sunshine out of the forest and, under the new shade of his hat, Tim’s eyes had trouble, at first, seeing more than darkness between the trees.

Bo said the springs were just a trickle of hot stinky water no one but the miners cared about until the railway tried to clear grade right though them. They blasted into the rock beside the spring and the smell cracked from high rotten egg to nothing. ‘Damn, is…’ the blaster said, and woke up getting dragged over a fresh tipped tree. They all came around in clean air. Some quicker and with less slapping than others. The last two waking up remembered something sweet coming at them out of the rocks and dust. It smelled like snow, the man from Ontario said, new snow. ‘New snow no smell,’ Bo insisted, ‘Jasmine smell.’ Bo meant a smell like green jasmine tea, sharp and barely there. But Miner’s Springs changed to Jasmine Springs because of everything that got shouted around, the mapping engineer remembered what the chinaman said best.

Five weak aquifers along a fault in the bedrock that spewed out water that Flint said would feel too hot in the afternoon and perfect at night. Even more perfect, maybe, if you could get up there in winter, through the snow. Flint told Tim that the water stunk, but that a dunking felt so good that rotten eggs would get to smell more like a bath than the other way around. Early on one of the miners leaned a board up beside the pools that said: smell matches? A.O.K. smell nothing? R.U.N. Sulphur gas just smells like matches until it gets heavy. It’s denser than air, so if it gets too thick it’ll push the oxygen out of your lungs. Same as in a sour gas coal seam, Flint explained. The air over the springs could turn poisonous. Bo told Tim, ‘You smell nothing, you simple run or you simple die.’

The newspaper said With strong physiologic effect, Canada’s Rocky Mountain springs are world-class destinations for the miracles of hydrotherapy. World-class, sure, but ghosts grow in the places where sick people go. Bo didn’t mean to make a ghost up but he kind of did. By accidentally giving the springs a name that could’ve been a person’s. It was a railway scout who saw Jasmine first, not that long after Bo woke up insisting about the ‘Jasmine smell.’ Then some crippled ladies who got hauled up by a nephew came down claiming they’d seen her too. Halfway up the valley to Jasmine’s Springs they saw this pale little girl in a red and brown dress who tried to hide from them, slipping in and out of the trees.

No one with money could be bothered to put a road in to the springs and, even if you got up the trail, it was still a hard route to pick down. Tim could see how it might have been easy for people to start believing that a sick little girl died up there. Especially after he actually got to go to the springs and saw the bird’s cage somebody hung up where the springs and the sulphur gas came out of the rubble. It wasn’t a half bad idea, Flint said, but it was too wet in the steam for feathers and too cold at night for a miner’s canary. That cage rusted shut and banged at the rocks like something wanted out of it.

Sulphur steamed up in more than one place in the valley around Jasmine’s Springs and it would’ve eaten through any track the railway put in, so they laid the freight line two valleys over. It wasn’t ‘til 1932 that a road to Jasmine’s Springs started making as much sense as the other projects Ottawa was dreaming up to make jobs. Meantime, Bo’s ghost made the springs that much more physiologic for anyone with the guts to get up to them.

Jiam bo was with the rail crew that blew the aquifers open back in the 20’s, he knew the valley, and he knew grading, but he still felt eyes on him when he was hired onto the road crew. Tim’s mom, Violet, told him that Bo dreamt about all those jobless white people. Even if in real life they could spit at him, in Tim’s dreams they were all squashed together in train cars, and they were reaching out the windows with hungry, needing hands. Dirty hands. Violet said it was Bo’s working up in the mountains that hung shadows on his neck so heavy that he could barely spend his pay. The job promised a too good to be true thousand dollars for three summers running but even after the first summer Tim’s clothes came from the Church basement and Violet paid neighbours for bruised vegetables and fruits, sold cheap off the Chinese boats.

Nobody on the road crew minded the second summer when Bo brought his kid along, eating for free. They all felt lucky having shovels to wave around but they were up a valley, halfway up a mountain, mostly very far from families at home. They filled Tim’s pockets with mints and gum, and his ears with swears and stories. Tim sucked, listened, and smiled, but liked his father’s stories best. Bo’s English made his telling more authentic, like an accent off the radio. Like Flint’s accent. Tim couldn’t remember his dad ever telling stories at home, but in the mountains he played his Chinese accent up and the crew’s crinkled work faces went soft with whisky and listening.

If Bo paused to look down and nod, they’d all do the same thing. Nodding at the ground, or at each other. Or, if it was funny, winking across at Tim. When it was serious they rubbed their faces and sipped coffee or whisky or water and it got so still that Tim shuffled his shoes together to keep his ears from filling up with quiet.

Runny blood sickness, Bo said. If that girl ever got cut she could never stop bleeding. Tim had a hanky wrapped around a cut on his knuckle and Bo pointed to it, making Tim twist it tighter and everybody else pay a bit more attention.

Bo said that Little Jasmine’s father had read about water curing people in the Bible. Then that father read about springs curing people in the newspaper. Then he wrapped his little girl up in a quilt, let her mother kiss her goodbye, and climbed onto a train. It was a long ride, from Ontario to the mountains, and the trip seemed even longer when they got out at an empty station. Remember, Bo said, way back the mine closed down for a while. The war opened it again but when little Jasmine and her father got off the train the town was pretty well dead.

The only person there was an old Indian lady standing with a horse. She said, ‘Hey, you, give me that girl and I’ll take her for a bath.’

Little Jasmine’s father didn’t trust this old lady one bit. Her breath smelled, her body smelled, and she looked funny at his daughter.

He said, ‘Five dollars for your horse.’

‘No,’ She said, ‘You give me that girl and I’ll take her for a good bath.’

‘Ten dollars,’ the father said, ‘Fifteen.’ Then the Indian was quiet so he pushed money at her and put little Jasmine on that horse and dragged it away.

They went to the end of the emptied out town and then they followed a sign that pointed up a path to Miner’s Springs.

‘Don’t worry, little Jasmine,’ her father said, ‘We’ll have you cured tomorrow.’ He believed it, too. He made a camp for them to sleep one night in the woods and he thought in the morning they would see the valley where the springs were. The newspaper said you could see steam rising up, white as a signpost in the trees. But in the morning there was a fog so thick all around them that they couldn’t see more than a few feet anywhere. They could barely see each other. The father found the horse by listening hard for it’s breathing and the sound of it’s feet stomping down. When he reached out and caught its halter something red moved fast in the fog beside him. It was gone when he turned to look.

‘Did you see something, little Jasmine?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘The lady was pointing to the spring.’ But Little Jasmine was pointing to the sound of a stream.

‘No,’ her father said, nerved, ‘The spring is on the east side of this valley.’ It said so in the newspaper and he unfolded it from his pocket and showed her.

They sat together and looked into the fog where little Jasmine had seen the red lady until little Jasmine whispered, ‘She said to hurry.’

‘We’ll wait for this fog to clear up,’ her father said, but he couldn’t wait easy. He wrapped little Jasmine up in her quilt and lifted her onto the horse, to keep her warm and ready to go. He stood by the horse’s head, holding it steady. Twice he thought he saw something red move in the whiteness. Maybe a fox, but it never came close enough to tell. The third time, he smelled something too. Rotting egg smell. The horse stepped antsy and shivered, and the father felt wind picking up his hair. That wind got stronger and colder and then, finally, blew off the fog except for one twist of white in the trees ahead of them - the springs, not so far away. But when little Jasmine’s father stepped the horse forward it jumped at something under the bushes and shifted little Jasmine off.

The quilt made for a soft fall, but it didn’t keep a scraggly branch from scratching little Jasmine’s face on her way from the horse to the ground.

Bo jabbed a finger at Tim’s face to show the cuts, one on little Jasmine’s forehead, one on her soft as silk cheek. He smeared his fingers down Tim’s face, leaving dirty lines to show rivers of little Jasmine’s blood.

They’d got so close to the spring that all little Jasmine’s father could think was, you couldn’t have done this falling back home? He kissed his daughter, five, ten, fifteen times, but that runny blood kept draining out of her. Her yellow dress started turning red and her face got to be as white as a plate the Queen would eat off of. Little Jasmine’s father smelled something sweet and looked up and finally caught a good look at the fox that had been circling around in them in the fog. Red and scruffy, quick on black feet. When he looked down again his little Jasmine was still as a doll, floppy and wet from the fog and her own useless blood.

Her father wrapped the quilt around little Jasmine’s tiny dead body and carried her to the stream she’d pointed to. He laid her down beside it and covered her over with grave stones. He spent one night lying on the ground beside little Jasmine and then, cold to the inside of his bones, he went looking for the horse in the trees.

The horse whined and tripped and dragged back against little Jasmine’s father the whole way down the mountain. Maybe it was nervous because little Jasmine’s father was crying and smelling like blood and death. Maybe it didn’t like the sound of coins, ringing together in a pocket. Little Jasmine’s father heard that sound too, but every time he turned around, all he saw was the horse, nobody else.

The Indian lady was waiting at the empty train station. She said, no, she couldn’t buy that horse back, she spent all that money already. She got the horse back anyway, though, because little Jasmine’s father couldn’t pay to put it on the train. She got little Jasmine too. And that girl looks perfect now, all cleaned up except for those two cuts on her white as a moon face, but she smells like rotting meat and an old woman’s body. And Bo said that when she gets close enough to people she asks if they’ll take her home.

Tim worried that they would be digging one day and find her tiny bones. Or maybe they wouldn’t find bones and would build a road right over her. The road cut followed the stream’s valley and cut close to it more than once.

‘Is no father, no girl,’ Jiam bo explained, again, ‘Is story.’

But what if little Jasmine started following Tim because he was closest to her age? Or because of the cut on his knuckle that kept opening up to bleed again. What if she wanted to follow him home?

‘Is story, Tiam li.’

Mostly little Jasmine made Tim wonder what might happen to the other sick people trying to get up to the springs. It was a hard path but sick people came up the road more and more often the longer it got.

July mornings Tim could see the twists of steam rising up from the valley ahead. When he caught whiffs of sulphur on the wind he scanned the trees, looking for foxes, and keeping track of where Bo was working. Tim was disappointed, his first trip up, to find out that the springs were just big wooden bathtubs.

The road crew added a canvas dressing room to the cluster of tents pitched in the rubble beside the springs. Evenings and afternoons off they soaked in drawers and undershirts and counted their baths as laundry. Bo said the water was too hot for bones that were growing, though, or in his own case, bones that were old. Tim did their laundry in the stream on Sundays, but went up to perch on the edge of the tubs at night. Bo didn’t seem to mind getting left alone. And Tim liked the lanterns shining on the water in the dark. Its surface rippled up, spreading shadows out like lines and blobs of ink.

Sometimes mats of algae came loose from the rocks and floated down in oily black rafts that turned snot coloured in the light. They were firm and slippery as fish. Flint scooped them out of the water with his hands, but touching them sent shivers up Tim’s back. He felt the same thing when his feet, dangling into the tubs, rubbed on the slippery side of the boards. Flint slid his whole hairy red body down the boards and sighed out, ‘Ah, Mate.’ It tied Tim to his perch, a fast glue of admiration and disgust.

The first summer Tim came along it seemed like all they saw all day long were trees. White and Engelmann Spruce climbing the valleys and willows, poplars, dogwoods and aspen trembling down beside the stream. Bo named them for Tim and Flint listened in, saying he didn’t know woods from ‘wally’ because the whole of Australia is made out of bushes and dust. Tim loved trees. Vancouver cedars or these scraggly Rocky Mountain trees. He told Flint how he especially loved the smell of big trees coming down, the fresh cut. He liked to lift up his hat to scratch at the suntan line. And at the end of the day, Tim started looking out for Flint so they could turn around before supper and point back at how the road was coming in behind them. They were building the same road they’d go down to catch their trains home. In the fall, they would all have to run away backwards.

At home, Violet had a lot of pain and not a lot of anything for a boy out of school to do. Her leg bones were bent into arcs that ached with arthritis anytime she walked too far. That happened because she didn’t run enough when she was a girl, Bo said. He meant, go outside, Tiam li, no worrying about your achy mother. Tim did worry, though, that even with cousins and aunts running his errands, Violet would get lonely when he was away. She always find some thing to do, Bo said. And Flint said there’s a taste of loneliness a person misses in too much company. Flint thought that was why Bo stayed back at camp by himself most nights now, instead of coming up to soak and be social at the spring. They all missed his company, Flint said.

Tim kicked his feet in the water. He missed his dad’s stories too. Bo had scars on his shoulders he didn’t like showing, though. Long red and white ones that Flint didn’t know were there. Bo had always had scars. They were just there, like Violet’s rickety leg bones. Like Tim’s own Chinese eyes, which made people say he had very good English, didn’t he.

One night at the tubs Flint poured whisky into a jar of spring water to show Tim how alcohol doesn’t mix right with sulphur water. A yellow film of sulphur formed over the top of the jar. Inside, the two liquids swirled apart, spring water sinking and alcohol rising up. This was kind of hard to see, both liquids being pretty well clear. Flint called it separating, but the swirling apart looked like spirits twisting under water. The yellow skin might be what was holding those immiscibles in.

‘No ghost spirits,’ Bo said, and later, ‘Waste of whisky.’

White men always waste whisky, Bo said. One time there was a man who found a bear who knew how to play baseball and drink whiskey. Then it stopped playing baseball and all it wanted to do was drink whiskey. That was okay at first, though, because lots of people wanted to watch that bear get drunk. But one night, it got really drunk and then it chewed through its rope and ran away with that man’s wallet. All his money.

‘You understand, Tiam Li?’

Tim nodded. But he didn’t understand, exactly. That bear was a man who got turned into a bear, he guessed, but was he white or was the man who found him white?

‘Is story, Tiam Li,’ Bo sighed.

Tim finished for him, ‘No bear, no whiskey.’

And Jiam bo laughed. Tim tasted blood in his mouth and laughed too. It was a stupid story, but he had bitten the inside of his cheeks, trying to hold still and listen properly.

Most days, at least once, Tim got sent down the almost finished road to meet sick people coming up.

‘Good afternoon, sorry, but the road’s not done, the rest of the way isn’t really safe so you might want to turn around.’ The sick people either brushed past Tim, burst into tears, or stared hard at his eyes. He stared back at their rashes, their rolls of fat, their amazing thinness – some of their bones almost showed through their skin.

If they were too sick to go up through the trees their friends pulled blankets up around them and helped them to turn their horses or mules or cars around. If they were stronger, they left their cars on the road and hiked up past the road crew. There was a doctor who hiked up to the springs all alone and he looked perfectly healthy but shook his head and said ‘Cancer, six months.’

That doctor didn’t really believe the springs would cure him. He wanted a trip and had money to pay for the train. Tim thought he really looked very healthy, but then Little Jasmine probably looked healthy too if you didn’t know about her blood. Tim walked with the doctor for a ways, so he could tell him to watch out if it happened that he couldn’t smell anything. And how if he did smell anything more than the sulphur matches smell he should also be very careful. Especially if he saw any strange animals or ghosts. Though he shouldn’t worry too much about animals because there were lots of real ones around the springs too. Like deer and elk and squirrels, mostly, but also porcupines. And foxes could be real or not real, depending. On what other sounds you might be hearing.

The doctor nodded very carefully. ‘Your dad told you all this?’ he asked.

‘Some of it is just stories,’ Tim acknowledged.

‘Yes and no,’ the doctor said, ‘You know runny blood sickness is a simple way to say, haemophilia.’ A very real disease. And a real person who had that disease was a prince, the doctor said, and small cuts were much less of a problem for him than bruises. A bruise is bleeding inside your skin and hot water would only make that bleeding worse.

Tim asked if hot water would make arthritis better or worse.
The doctor asked back, ‘Were you born here?’

When they went back to Vancouver in the fall, Tim wanted to tell Violet about all the sick people coming for cures. He had met lots of people like her with stories about arthritis and legs bent by polio and rickets, and even some amputated right off. But Violet knew a lot about being sick already. Tim wanted to tell her about Bo’s stories and how he made a ghost, but Violet said the best way to make people listen is not to talk too much about things that have no importance. Then Violet said, Flint sounds very nice, but when she said that she was looking out the window at Bo walking past their house without coming home and Tim felt himself shrinking. Disappointing her. The rest of his summer had merged into one long and boring scramble, down to the fox’s stream and up again through the trees. A long nervous sliding down on moss and roots with a water barrel bouncing between his shoulder blades. On the way up he grabbed at trees for balance and their snakeskin bark chewed his hands, sap sticky and stickier. Violet turned away from the window to feel the scabs on Tiam li’s new calloused fingers. She looked at his face and asked, finally, about the bears that Tim had been afraid of, a little, back in the spring.

She had two cubs with her by the edge of the stream, Tim said. Two cubs and the dark alive smell that comes up when moss slips away from a rock.

‘Bears?’ he whispered, sliding to a stop. They were real bears, and Tim explained how he had never really believed in them before. Not as real, wild, fierce, and dangerous animals. He said that he ducked out from the strap of his water barrel and crouched at the edge of the streambed to watch them. Two dog-sized brown lumps and their giant spiked-fur mom. He held himself as quiet as the trees but she must have been able to smell him. Her head turned his way and let out a sound. A low, wet, unmistakably angry sound that suddenly froze him on the spot. He was sure that he was going to end up being bear dinner. But then just as suddenly he unfroze and he jumped up and shouted, ‘Bear!’ And then he ran up the slope and came so fast out of the trees at the top of the road cut that everybody thought one was chasing right behind him and broke into a run. Five men racing behind him down the new gravel until they ran into Bo, who was flagging trees to take out upslope.

‘Where bear?’ Bo squinted.

Tim told Violet how nobody else saw them. How no one quite believed how the mom’s big head turned towards him. Or how the too little eyes almost lost in the yellow white fur on her face were green and sparkly, like a dragon’s eyes. And the cubs’ fur was brown but very shiny, and kind of sparkly too. Three men went down with guns to scout along the stream and they saw a couple of mountain sheep but that was all. So Tim said maybe they were ghost bears. And of course everybody was very scared but Flint made them all get back to work. Then Tim told Violet how he tried to keep himself busy up on the road, picking too big rocks out of planed gravel, but that Bo sent him back down for the water barrel. And he told Violet that Bo said ‘Take a gun if you scared, Tiam li.’

Really he’d never even let Tim carry one.

Violet sent Tim out one night that winter to find Jiam bo. Tim found him walking, soaked through by a drizzling rain. He put a hand out to Bo’s shoulder and felt his father’s weight crumple into him drunk, red faced, foul breath and falling. Bo needed holding up on their walk home. In between streetlights, their bodies cast four shadows. Two that leaned forwards and two that leaned back. Tim and his taller shadow, Bo and the stranger the rain had melted him into.

Near the end of the third summer of work, when they dragged the road right up to the spring and were leveling ground for a proper pool, that was when Tim started wondering. Was it Little Jasmine’s father’s fault that she died? Or was it the Indian Lady’s? What would have happened if they had taken little Jasmine for that bath, considering how hot water made haemophilia worse? Was it the fox’s fault Little Jasmine died or was he trying to keep her safe from the springs?

Tim washed his fork and plate, kicked his tar-patched boots together and felt too old to ask. Is story, Tiam li. Bo would say. No father, no girl. Foxes are animals. And if he’d asked for boots, it would’ve been, no money.

But there was a girl. Because Tim had heard other people telling about her. Telling stories about seeing her that felt real. Even if Bo made her up. Even if Bo only smelled the Jasmine smell because being the chinaman, he was the last guy anybody remembered to slap back alive at the blasting.

In August of Tim’s second summer, a half-retained crew built a conservation cabin up by the spring, all walls and no roof. The roof would be tin, brought up the next spring. A Mennonite from the Alberta side came and bossed them to strip and fit logs so they’d lock watertight when they swelled into each other. He said the building would last, jointed and fitted, as long as anything could that close to steam. But Ottawa shipped up a crate of nails, so the night before the inspectors came, Flint and Bo pounded them in through solid fitted joints. For good and useless measure. The Mennonite told Tim they would rust out in a day and that the building was a recipe for black liquor. Not something to drink, but a sludge that comes out of wood decayed too fast. A kind of alcohol that’s meant for burning, the Mennonite said, which is what God made alcohol for. But Flint and Bo stayed up, hammering all those nails. And Tim watched, just outside of the pool of lamplight, grumpy and not wanting to help. They were drinking and it made Flint’s face happy and Bo’s eyes turn red. Bo forgot to have a proper accent and just rambled on in English that sounded like he didn’t know any better. He was dropping nails, too, bars that glinted up from the gravel around the cabin’s base. Flint’s whole body got softer when he drank. His laugh got softer and warm. His hammer moved like a whip off the end of his arm.

That second summer Flint had said no one could tell Chinese age and turned Tim old enough to be paid. This way Tim and Bo would get two cheques at the end of the summer, pay less expenses. The end of that summer seemed far away at first, but the black of the trees ate up all kinds of sparks that Tim wished, half way, would catch. Next summer he’d be staying with Violet in the city because the Jasmine’s Springs Road was stretched as far as it needed to go. And Flint was going home to Australia where he said they were making more roads than anybody had any use for.

They were packing out on a Wednesday. On the last Friday he had, Tim peeled out of his clothes and sunk his body down into the fullest bathtub, the one closest to the springs. He gasped, at the pull of the heat on his muscles, at the grip of it around his groin. He felt needles, pushing in and out of his feet where they made contact with the rocks at the bottom. He had snuck away from dinner. Timing his immersion so that no one would be there who would laugh, or tell Bo. But once he adjusted to the heat, Tim halfway wished someone was there. To see that he was in up to his neck, swirling the sulphur through the water with his hands. A secret his father would have to guess, by the smell of it on his skin. By the match strike that would follow his body back into the forest air.

Monday, Tim walked away from the camp tents and lanterns and found Bo standing on a raised concrete trough they’d poured to drain water from the newer pools to the stream. He turned his head at Tim’s footsteps, then lifted two fingers to cover his lips. He waved for Tim to climb up beside him. There were elk over the lip of the trough. Two females, heads lowered to lick the rocks where sulphury water splashed down to the stream bank.

Elk were everywhere that summer and Tim cleared his throat to say so, but stopped up when the elks’ heads rose. Their noses, puffing warm, visible breath, came almost even with Tim’s feet. He had the impossible idea that his father wanted him to leap off the trough and ride away on one of these creatures’ backs. Bo’s body tilted forwards and moved against Tim’s arm and the bag Flint had handed him to deliver. Tim was not supposed to know (but it was impossible that he wouldn’t know) that the bag held a bottle of whisky bought out of their pay. Two dollars that would be gone before they were packed. Less medicine for Violet, less rent for the winter. Tim shifted the bag, crinkling it so his father would notice, but Jiam bo was still looking down.

At their feet the elk were big but calm and quiet. These were not like Tim’s bears. He really did believe in elk and had seen them often in daylight, stepping around the boulders at the edge of the stream. Now they seemed to be watching him and his father, dark moist eyes still, noses shivering. The elk were wondering, maybe, if Bo and Tim were real. Human beings were the new and strange animals at Jasmine’s Springs. Elk, maybe even these exact elk, knew about the sulphur and the warmth of the water before the road came in, before the rail crew, before the coal miners or the Indians. Before time came along, or stories.

‘There your ghosts, Tiam li,’ Bo said, when the elk finally turned.

Round white faces bobbed and slipped into the trees. Elk bums by moonlight, Tim knew. A girl and an Indian, bowing and backing away.

Sandy Bonny is a writer and earth scientist. Her fiction has appeared in Grain, Spring and enRoute Magazine, was awarded a 2nd place 2001 CBC literary award, and will be included in an upcoming anthology 'The Shape of Content: An Anthology of Creative Writing in Mathematics and Science' from AK Peters Press. She can be found in Vancouver, but migrates frequently.