Free Light Lifting by Alexander Macleod Page A

leave it in and wait for further instructions. Triage.
    We fill out our forms and huddle. Health Cards from a different province. Suspicion. You may have to pay for this up front and get reimbursed when you return home. Her temperature keeps rising. Wheezing when she breathes. Brown pus around her eyes. They take blood and urine samples right away. Then we wait.
    Five hours. Six.
    The light of the next day comes up. Regular staff arrive with coffee and their bagged lunches. Smile at each other. Talk about good two-for-one sales at the mall last night. The folding corrugated wall around the gift shop is opened up and the cash register blinks to life.
    We take turns holding her. Passing the limp body back and forth. She hasn’t opened her eyes all night. No sign of Vinnie Johnson.
    Talk to them, she says. What is going on? They think they’ve called us. They think they’ve already called, but they haven’t. They have our results by now. They have to have them. We’ve been here all night. Our file must be in the wrong place. Nobody would leave a baby out here, in this room, for an entire night at Christmas. Go talk to them.
    At the desk, I say, do you think we can take our baby home, please, and maybe you can call us with the results? I don’t think you fully understand the situation. We’ve been here for hours with a newborn and nothing is happening. Nobody has even checked on her.
    At that moment, a doctor comes through the swinging doors and calls our name.
    The nurse points at me.
    Right there, she says. They want to know if they can go home.
    He pulls the results out of a pile and looks me over. The same clothes for two days. The stink of the drive. No toothbrush or razor. He can smell The Bridge all over me.
    This child, he says, flipping the pages of the report, stretching it out. This child is not going anywhere.
    He slams his clipboard down on the counter of the nurse’s station. The swack brings the attention of the whole room onto my back. His eyes are furious. I am one of a hundred. There are a hundred every night. A thousand nights in a row.
    This child, he says, and he points at her name, a purple impression on the top of a form, is very, very sick.
    He waits. Breathes in and breathes out.
    This child is seriously ill and she needs to be admitted to this hospital right away. She will be admitted into the paediatric intensive care unit. That is where she needs to be, sir. Not going home with you. We know what she needs. You, sir, you are the person who does not fully understand the situation.
    We glare at each other. I sway in my own exhausted stench. Close my eyes for one second. I know what I look like.
    Or I can call child services if you prefer, he says. We can start a file.

    DDT was supposed to be the miracle cure. The end of Typhus and Malaria. Cheap and available everywhere. They sprayed it directly onto people’s heads, into their armpits. Clothes fumigated. Whole houses. Beds, and pillows, and sheets. Utensils, cookware. Entire populations disinfected. They called it the pesticide that saved Europe. Guy got a Nobel Prize for inventing it. Total extermination. The side effects go unnoticed until it is too late. Already deep in the food chain. A half-life of 33 years in nature. Toxicity building up through each stage, passed from organism to organism. Ground water, rivers and lakes. Grains. Cash crops. Poultry and Fish and Reptiles. Endangered Species. Infected crocodiles and alligators, Bald Eagles and Peregrine Falcons. They lay eggs with thin, almost transparent shells. No protection. Causes infertility in humans. Breast cancer. Miscarriages. Low birth weight. Developmental delays. Numbers too high to count. But lice adapt. They go on. Become resistant. Completely unaffected by DDT now. Not like us. Trace amounts of it in every single person’s blood.

    Chronic kidney disease. Dangerously low filtration rate. Advanced infection. A congenital abnormality.
    They strap