Free Twenty-Six by Leo McKay

showed a picture of the giant twin silos of Eastyard Coal’s pit at the south end of Albion Mines. Her heart began to pound. She’d seen them in photos and news clippings her parents had sent. The mouth of the pit had been damaged in some way. White panels from the enclosure that led into the ground lay scattered like shed teeth. The scene switched to show the Albion Mines Volunteer Fire Department’s two trucks parked below the blue-and-grey coal silos. She could not recognize the faces of the firemen moving purposefully about the trucks; their heads were covered with oxygen masks. The voice of the Japanese reporter was serious and matter-of-fact, but Meta understood less than 10 per cent of what he was saying. She could hear times being talked about. Five twenty-nine a.m. was one. She checked her watch, although she knew what time itwas. She struggled in her confusion and disorientation to calculate the time difference between Tokyo and Nova Scotia. What was the date the newscaster gave in Japanese? Was it yesterday’s? She listened hard for anything she could understand. A word came through clearly. One she understood:
bakuhatsu
: explosion. And
niju-roku nin
: twenty-six people.

A rvel put the last piece of toast into his mouth and drank warm, milky tea to soften the toast. “I gotta get up to that grave, anyway,” he said. He walked into the porch and put on his parka and heavy boots. He stopped at the door and turned to face his father, who stood backlit and grim-faced in the doorway to the kitchen.
    “You ever point a gun at me, old man, it better be loaded and you’d better pull the trigger. That’s just some advice.” Arvel turned his back on his father and walked to the end of the driveway. Even the rich black of the sky was different, was better. You could look up there and you’d know something about life. On a clear night you had the delicate patterns of stars. In overcast you got the town’s reflection of itself. The black overhead in the pit was meaningless, and it went on forever through the rock. His brother, Ziv, said lighting the pit with a cap lamp was like trying to get through a hurricane with a candle.
    Ziv hadn’t lasted in the pit. One shift and he was out. His brother thought of himself as a coward for not staying, but sometimes it took as much courage not to do things as it did to do them, and that’s what Arvel admired about Ziv: he did only what he wanted to do. He wanted to go to university, so he went. He wanted to quit university, so he did. He wanted to work in the pit, then he wanted to stop working in the pit. If everyone hired at the Eastyard mine had quit after a single shift, things could have been different underground.
    Unlike his brother, Arvel didn’t feel he knew how to get out of anything. His life now existed beyond his ability to control it. The problems he and Jackie were having seemed unsolvable; his job was murdering his spirit. If he had any guts, he’d get out of all of it. He’d move to Halifax, which is where Jackie wanted to go. He’d get a job out west, working in a hard-rock mine that wasn’t seething with methane. He’d get an electrician’s job, something he was actually trained for. He’d start all over out there, where nobody knew anything about him.
    All he had in his life that he took any enjoyment from was this short walk outside in the fresh air, and this ended in his arrival at the pit. There was nothing in any way scenic or beautiful about the walk, but it was a stroll outside under the sky and in the air. Since he’d been working in the pit, where the feeling of being enclosed was extreme, any time outside had become precious to him.
    But recently the walk to the pit had become haunted. Every step reminded him of a dream he’d had. It was a dream about walking to a pit, and since he’d had the dream, his walk to the Eastyard site had been charged with flashes of dream pictures.
    His alarm goes off just before six. He wakes up, pulls on