Free Elephant Winter by Kim Echlin Page A

to tell anyone. Can you imagine what people would be able to do?”
    “Can we talk about this at home?”
    “No, I don’t want to. If I change my mind, if the pain is too bad, I’ll tell you and you can do it. You’ll be able to.”
    “Do what?”
    “I want to die as much as I can by myself. I want to be home. I’ve got enough morphine stockpiled if we need it. It’s in the old medicine box. Soph, I’m glad you’re here.”
    How like her. I want heroics, but only at home. I want painkillers but not too much. I don’t want drugs but I might change my mind. I want to die on my own, but you mighthave to help me. I wanted her to say it would be all right. But she didn’t. She was afraid.
    The snow was deep and the door of her studio was frozen and I couldn’t get it open. I struggled and dug away the snow with my hands, tears freezing on my cheeks, because of course we hadn’t thought to bring a shovel. She wasn’t a clear person. When I was younger and I used to complain about that, she’d answer, “Why would you want things clear? Life is too complicated.” I finally got the snow away from the studio door, pulled it open, and flipped up the electric switch. The large north window was iced, inside and out, with snow blowing from the Safari fields. Even the dust was frozen. She moved past me, turning on the floor lamps and track lights. Then she hurried back and switched off the bare bulb inside the door. The walls were hung with familiar canvases, things I’d seen before, large oils from her last sketching trip up the Labrador coast, a winter wolf nosing around a garbage dump and one of her icebergs in purples and pinks and blues still not finished. Strewn throughout the studio were tiny sweaters, dozens and dozens of shrunken, misshapen, cut up and partly unravelled sweaters. I could see our entire history in sweaters: my baby sweaters, my toddler pullovers, my little girl pink angoras, my red matched set, my teenaged tight-ribbed bodysuits, a favourite oversized beige and brown herringbone that I’d always worn on our camping trips. Hers were there too: her black sweater with the pearl buttons, her Irish knit, her paint-flecked work sweaters, the one with the enormousturtleneck that folded down like a necklace. There were dozens more that I didn’t recognize: men’s cardigans, boys’ hockey sweaters, children’s sweater coats with patterns of figure-skating girls and little Scottie dogs, women’s cocktail capes, grannies’ shawls, doll sweaters. She had shrunk them all, and those that didn’t shrink she’d cut down. She’d chosen them from a clothesline strung at odd angles, rows and rows of discarded sweaters she’d shrunk and hung up with pegs.
    On the south wall she had completed an enormous canvas. She had mounted about four dozen of the smallest sweaters in an astonishing collage. Each arm was placed at a different angle, some open, some closed, and the total effect was of a crowd of children who had danced wildly beyond the sun’s governance, shedding their clothes like unnecessary shadows.
    I moved up closer to look at the detail of the canvas. She had sewn into some of the buttonholes and collars the tiny feathers of her budgies. She’d drawn bird and animal tracks in the background. She’d woven around these in fine, fine script all sorts of words:
I have toil’d, and till’d, and sweaten in the sun; I could not sweate out from my hart that bitternes of sorrow; sweat the sail taut; She seeketh wool, and flax, and worketh willingly with her hands; sweat gold; labour and drudge, sweatie Reaper; It is no little thing to make Mine eyes to sweat compassion; sweater: one who sweats.
    But when I stepped back I could not see the words any more, so skilfully had she camouflaged them in the texturesof the background. She’d selected each sweater not only for its uniqueness—buttons, collars, design, bands—but also for how it had shrunk. Some had shrunk perfectly evenly, coming out as