The departing locomotive’s whistle echoes across King’s Cross station. Stragglers hurry through the steam creeping across the platform and board the train: businessmen in fedoras, trench coats and briefcases; young women with pleated skirts and pin curls striking out on new careers; soldiers on their way to the countryside for family reunions and the chance to build a life that was crudely interrupted by the war.

Jack moves at a more deliberate pace. At precisely seven o’clock each morning, he makes his way to the bench in the corner of the platform. The flat cap rests 

The first time my dad took credit for his poetry in public was a tribute to his mother at her funeral. He masterfully articulated that her hands, now tired, bent and broken, were solemn evidence of a venerable life, dedicated to serving, lifting, and loving others. I never knew his words could be so eloquent and kind. I envied that he held her in such high esteem. Just a few weeks later, at my wedding, in his father’s tribute to the bride, the contrast was palpable and cold. It morphed into a mumbling apology to the groom. A penance that he couldn’t make me into someone worth taking off his hands. We have hardly spoken since that day, so when cancer came for him, as it inevitably does in our family, I yearned to salvage our 

Five is my magic number: five fingers, five toes. Add a tongue to two eyes and two lips, and you get five. Two ears, a nose, one heart, and a brain form the final quintet. Bring in time, too, because love needs to be measured. Without time, how will I know the value of you? Time keeps track of a stab of pain, a whole lot of laughs, and a tally of the days running into each other while your car eats the miles on a road trip through hamlets with regal names like Empress and Duchess. Then summer ends and fall sneezes into scattered leaves, only to be dispersed by hives of snow. One by one, I drop pebbles in a tin and shake it until spring bounces in like a filly, her legs flailing and her neck 

​Jillian sits bedside, forehead in her hands. Her mind rewinds to November 5, 2013. The day of the baby teeth.

She’d just climbed the stairs and stood in the second-story hallway. Bedroom doors were ajar, lights were off. A few random socks strewn here and there.

“Emily?”

The silence was suspicious, practically foreign in this household.

When Jacob Oblonski of Seven Valour Lane woke up that bright May morning, he did not expect the front lawn hullabaloo.

He flinched from the lights, raised his arm to ward off questions, and tried to shoo the crowd from his rose bushes, as if they were pigeons.

"Wha—?" he started, but was drowned out by reporters.

A horrifying realization: he was wearing the 'Super-Squirrel' pajamas his nephew had outgrown.

You went again, then came back in my dream
I awoke - sheets tangled, like the years since you left
 
Counting aloud now, six years - and still in tears
The gravity of the void your going left in my throat
 
I remember the days when I took you for granted
I remember when I realized I would no longer do that
 
It didn’t come with a manual when your home turned to hospice
After we knew, after it began working its way through you

​In the abandoned forest clearing, no one knew that Barlow the bear was gravely injured, not even Barlow himself. His ears still rang from his spectacular fall and the resounding crash of broken branches and crackling leaves.

He lay there under the pine tree, stunned into silence. His mighty paws had always been his failsafe, so this fall came as a shock. In his excitement for the coveted honey, his springtime secret, he had forgotten himself completely. His first lucid thought crept over him like a snail: the bark must have been slippery with sap. He tentatively shook his head to clear it.

When the doorbell rings unexpectedly, most assume it’s the Girl Guides selling cookies or sports groups asking for empty bottles. I never imagined it would be two police officers letting me know they had identified a body found that morning. That body was my son. He died from a fentanyl overdose. “That can’t be true,” I said. “He’s upstairs sleeping, and he doesn’t do drugs.” My heart shattered when I discovered it was true.

My life changed that day. For weeks, I didn’t get out of bed. It had always been him and me, and now he was gone. “Why?” I repeatedly called out. On the advice of 

​The call came from an unknown number.

I had been bracing myself for news from my dad’s healthcare team, a constant undercurrent of dread threading through my days. He had been at the University of Alberta Hospital for a month, his health condition an enigma growing darker and more impenetrable with each passing day. No diagnosis, no clarity—only the endless churn of tests, speculation, and a grim kind of waiting.

​He had been medevacked from Stanton Territorial Hospital in Yellowknife to Edmonton in mid-August, the urgency of his condition necessitating a transfer