Free Birdie by Tracey Lindberg Page A

everything
Kohkom
said, although today she could not remember a word of Cree. They would scrape scrape scrape the remaining tissue, meat and fat from the hide,
Kohkom
with a deer bone, Bernice with a fashioned bed leg. The smell of the fat on her hands was strong and almost putrid. Nowadays, they had to keep the hides in a freezer and then thaw them out. Kind of like killing them twice,
Kohkom
told her. The smell was from freezing, thawing and freezing, not like the old days,
Kohkom
said in Cree. Bernice wondered silently if in the old days
Kohkom
used a wringer washer to soak the hides in like she did now. Wisely, she kept her mouth shut.
    When she walked by that family’s house, the family who had the legs, she wondered what they did with the rest of the deer. She wondered if they ate any of it, or if they tanned the hide. Most likely, they sent the hide to a taxidermist and didn’t eat the meat. Bernice and her aunt could have used the meat.
    Auntie Val made a lot of rice, noodle or potato casseroles.She ate bannock every day, and not always with jam. “This is nothing,” Auntie told her, unapologetically, the last time they visited. “We used to take bannock and lard to school and that’s all we had. Your uncle Larry,” she would always lower her voice at this point, “used to skip his meal and give it to the younger ones.”
    As she walked up the path and then steps of Val’s apartment she glanced around to make sure that no one saw her enter with her own key. Twenty of the Pecker Palace apartments were owned by the Native Co-op, and if they thought that Bernice lived there, Auntie Val’s rent would go up by one. The Co-op conducted periodic inspections, the stated purpose being making sure that the wiring and heating were okay, but every so often when she visited, Bernice would have to pack fast and leave. It was annoying, but Val paid only ninety dollars a month in rent for a pretty good place.
    She walked in and the smell of fresh bread and buns wrapped around her and hugged her. Auntie Val always baked on nights as cold as that one.
    When she opened the door, she spoke to her auntie in her new, non-voice. Auntie, I’m home, she whispered, brushing deer fur off her pants.
    “Is someone there?” Auntie Val asked.
    Auntie Val, Bernice had understood, could no longer see or hear her.
    She remembers going to the living room and sitting there for the night, the sounds of sirens, which usually bothered her, became a sweet low cadence. Even now, wide awake and eyes closed, she can remember thinking that nothing in herhad altered, that something outside of her had. If she were able to speak of it now, she would say that the world shifted, not she. That colours felt like tastes and sounds poured like liquid. It was something that started There and which became Here. At that time, in the city, she had no idea what she looked like or where she was when she changed. It didn’t occur to her that the day held any special meaning.
    Now, with the luxury of being here, she understands that the change may have happened completely that night, but pieces of it started earlier. Those changes started in her body. When she was sixteen Bernice first began to feel the dissonance between her active life and her inner life. She had no body knowledge, and no one but her cousin Freda talked to her once she left home, so she had no barometer for normal. She remembers feeling this disconnected before, when she was little and in the same apartment. Her auntie had taken her to live with her in Grandetowne. Every day Bernice would walk from the south hill of Big Valley to the north flats, spending her days in a religious all-white girls’ school and her nights in a (then) all-white neighbourhood. Just a few hours’ drive from the relative quiet of her community, she felt estranged from familiar faces and sounds. Felt that she would die if she went to Loon but that she was not living there either.
    When Freda moved out, first from