Free A Complicated Kindness by Miriam Toews

I should have said no but I waited one beat too long for a convincing lie. She was referring to a photograph taken of me as a young volunteer at the museum village. I’d been a butterchurner. I stood in the hot sun in front of the hot outdoor bread oven robotically pushing a broom handle up and down in a ceramic jug of cream while Americans took pictures of me for the folks back home.
    One day I lit up a smoke and my bonnet, which protruded from my face stiffly like a pipe, caught on fire. The entrance of the tunnel leading to my face was in flames. I tried to untie it but couldn’t. I screamed and ran in circles around my ceramic urn until a quick-thinking tourist grabbed me from behind and plunged my head into a barrel of rainwater in front of the old general store. It was so vaudeville. I imagine everyone moving really fast and jerky in black and white.
    Yes, yeah, that’s me, I said. Gloria scanned my face. No scars though, she said. I wanted to scream: THAT’S WHERE YOU ARE SO UNBELIEVABLY WRONG!
    Yeah, well, I said. What’s a little inferno in your bonnet. The photo had been taken while I’d been on fire, before the dunking. It had been framed and mounted in the archival area of the new building, where you paid to go in. I don’t know why. The caption is: Young Pioneer, Naomi Nickel, learns valuable lesson.
    Hey, said Gloria, do you hang out at the pits now?
    Yeah, sometimes, I said. I shrugged.
    No offence, she said, but I always thought you were straight-edge.
    Mmm, yeah, well I was for a long time, I answered.
    She said oh and smiled.
    I could smell the wind coming through the open window behind her and it was like a present or a compliment or something. The sweetest winds blow over us Mennos sometimes, when the poultry massacre stops long enough for us to smell them, and they can literally stop you dead in your tracks and break your heart. It’s the certain smell of that wind and the sudden whoosh of heat that just undoes me. It’s a Junewind, mostly. An embrace. (Did I just say embrace? Asshole.) I could smell it now.
    You know what would have been nice, asked Gloria.
    What, I said.
    It would have been nice, she said wistfully, if our stoner periods had coincided.
    I nodded again and smiled and said yeah, it would have been. I thought about taking her hand but other things happened instead. I wanted to stay in Gloria’s store and talk to her about soccer and anarchy and Marvin Fast and our childhood but I’d already walked over to the door and put my hand on it and said goodbye and it would have seemed pathetic of me to change my course. Walking along Main Street felt ominous. It was way too bright. This is what an autopsy must feel like, I thought. I could feel the sun burning holes in my retinas.
    I walked past Tomboy and there was a new sign up in the window that said COME ON IN AND BURST A BALLOON. I wasn’t sure what it meant. A man in a cowboy hat carrying a baby walked past me and I said goodbye. The baby waved.
    The wind was my best friend but I couldn’t smell it any more and I was glad because it was killing me. I said goodbye to everyone I passed and trudged towards the outstretched arms of George Harrison.
    When I got to the lights I turned left on Second Avenue, past the post office. I dropped in on Mrs. Peters. She gave me home-made popcorn balls and I gave her the opportunity to talk about her dead son who, if he were alive, would be my age. I was her barometer. Although I was a girl, she used me to imagine what her son would be like if he hadn’t drowned when he was four years old. This had been going on for a while. It started in church when I was five or six and she leaned over one day and whispered: You fidget like my Clayton.
    I saw his body in the coffin at Wohlgemuth Funeral Chapel. He wore light blue seersucker overall shorts and a white shirt with a Peter Pan collar and flat buttons with tiny yellow ducks on them. His hair was blond and slicked over to one side, and he had a