A Stain on Portage

In the cold embrace of an Winnipeg autumn, Sam grapples with the lingering spectre of violence, finding fragmented understanding and tentative hope amidst the city's hushed aftermath.

The cold seeped into Sam's coat, past the frayed cuffs, and straight into his bones. It wasn't just the autumn air; it was that specific, Winnipeg kind of cold that seemed to amplify everything, making sounds sharper, shadows deeper, and thoughts… louder. He hunched his shoulders, pulling the collar of his worn denim jacket higher, wishing he’d worn something heavier. The police tape, a stark yellow against the grey concrete, was gone. But its ghost lingered, a phantom boundary around the square of pavement where everything had shifted.

He watched a woman in a bright red toque hurry past, her head down, her pace quick. No one lingered here anymore, not like before. Before, this corner had been a blur of people, office workers spilling out for lunch, students grabbing coffee, the odd street performer trying to coax a smile. Now, there was a void, a subtle avoidance in every passerby's peripheral vision. A collective flinching. He could feel it, the tremor beneath the surface of the ordinary.

A bus hissed to a stop at the centre of the block, its air brakes letting out a long, wet sigh. Sam watched the doors open, then close, without anyone getting off at this stop. A small thing, maybe. But he’d seen it yesterday too. And the day before. The small, almost imperceptible ways a place changed when violence left its mark. He kicked at a loose piece of gravel with the toe of his boot, sending it skittering towards the curb. The sound was too loud in the unusual quiet.

His stomach was a knot of nerves, tight and cold, even though he hadn't eaten much all day. It had been like this since… since the sirens, since the flashing blue lights had painted the brick buildings in a macabre dance. Since the shouts, muffled and urgent, that had somehow still carried through the closed windows of the coffee shop where he'd been studying. He hadn't seen *it*, not really, not the worst part. But he’d seen the aftermath. The sheet. The way people looked at each other afterwards, a kind of wide-eyed horror and brittle fear. That was enough.

---

A hand clapped him on the shoulder, hard enough to make him jump, his heart thudding against his ribs. He spun around, already bracing, before he registered Lionel’s grin, a little too wide, a little too forced. Lionel, bundled in a parka that looked three sizes too big, his breath pluming out in white clouds.

"Thought you’d be here," Lionel said, his gaze flicking to the empty spot where Sam had been staring. He didn't ask *why* Sam would be there. They both knew.

Sam just nodded, shrugging off Lionel’s hand. "You… didn’t have to." It came out a little more flat than he intended. The kind of flat that meant *I appreciate it but also I don't want to talk about it*.

Lionel shoved his hands into his pockets, his shoulders hunching a little. "Nah, I figured. Felt like… needed to walk. Get out. Staring at textbooks wasn't cutting it." He looked around, eyes scanning the buildings, the distant spire of the Richardson building, the red brick of the old Exchange District. Anything but Sam's face. Or the spot.

They stood there for a moment, just two statues on a street corner, the autumn wind whipping around them. The silence stretched, thick and uncomfortable. It wasn’t a peaceful silence. It was a loaded one, brimming with all the things they hadn't said, couldn’t say. The sheer, stupid unfairness of it all. The sudden, brutal intrusion of the adult world into their still-forming one.

"It's… weird, right?" Sam finally managed, his voice barely a whisper. He watched a single, brown oak leaf detach from a nearby tree, spiralling slowly to the pavement. It landed with a soft, barely audible *pap*.

Lionel nodded, kicking at another piece of imaginary debris. "Yeah. Different. Like someone turned the volume down. Or maybe… maybe we just hear more now." He stuffed his hands deeper into his pockets, his gaze fixed on something in the middle distance. "Everyone’s pretending. You know? Like if we just… don’t mention it, it goes away. But it doesn’t." His voice trailed off, a gust of wind snatching the last word.

### A Different Glare

Sam clenched his jaw. He *knew*. He saw it in his mum's tight smile when she picked him up, in his dad’s sudden quietness at dinner. No one wanted to talk about it. No one wanted to admit that the invisible barrier, the one that kept the truly bad stuff in movies and on the news, had fractured, right here. Right in their city. It had felt like a punch to the gut, the realization that safety was… optional. Conditional. A privilege that could be ripped away in a flash of incomprehensible anger.

They started walking, slowly, aimlessly, their boots scuffing against the damp pavement. Past the boarded-up storefronts that always seemed to be there, past the coffee shops with their warm, inviting glow that now felt almost aggressively cheerful. Sam caught his reflection in a dark window – a pale, drawn face, eyes that felt too old for him. He quickly looked away, uncomfortable with the stranger staring back.

"Saw a pigeon earlier," Lionel offered, his tone deliberately light, trying to break the heavy mood. "One of the fat ones. Waddle-walked right in front of a bus. Didn’t even flinch. Like it owned the place." He managed a weak chuckle. "Like… you gotta admire that kind of nerve, eh?"

Sam tried to smile. It felt foreign, stiff on his face. "Yeah. Invincible pigeon." He thought of the man on the news, the victim. Not invincible. Definitely not. The contrast was a cold splash of reality. He looked at Lionel, really looked. His friend’s eyes were shadowed, too. The forced cheerfulness was a thin veneer over something raw and uncertain. They were both doing the same thing, trying to find a normal to cling to, like shipwrecked sailors finding a piece of driftwood.

---

They ended up by the river, the Red River flowing dark and sluggish under the grey autumn sky. The wind here was colder, biting harder. Across the water, the Museum for Human Rights stood stark and geometric against the horizon, its copper panels glinting dully. Sam found himself thinking about all the history contained within those walls, all the human suffering and resilience. It felt too big, too overwhelming. Like trying to fit an ocean into a teacup.

"My dad," Lionel began, his voice low, "he said… he said sometimes things just happen. Bad things. And it's not fair. And you can't make sense of it. You just… gotta keep going." He picked up a flat, skipping stone, testing its weight in his palm. His knuckles were chapped from the cold.

Sam watched the water, churning quietly. Keep going. What did that even mean? How did you just ‘keep going’ when the ground felt like it had shifted beneath your feet? He thought of the small acts of kindness he’d seen since: the flower tucked into a crack in the pavement near the spot, a small handwritten card. Tiny defiance against the crushing weight of it all. The courage of those anonymous gestures, like whispers in a gale.

"He's probably right," Sam mumbled, not entirely convinced. Or maybe, he just hoped he was. He watched Lionel throw the stone. It skipped once, twice, three times, before sinking into the murky depths without a ripple. Just like that. Gone. Like the moment it hit the water, it ceased to exist. He envied that kind of quiet disappearance.

### The Unspoken Weight

The sun, a pale, watery disc behind the clouds, cast long, distorted shadows of the bare trees across the riverbank. Every branch, every skeletal twig, seemed to stretch towards them, skeletal fingers grasping. The air was thick with the smell of damp earth and the distant, familiar scent of wood smoke from a backyard fire. It was a smell that usually brought comfort, the promise of crisp evenings and hot chocolate. Now, it just felt… thin. Incomplete.

They talked about school, about the upcoming physics test, about some ridiculous video game challenge. But the words felt hollow, like echoes in a cave. Their usual easy banter was missing, replaced by polite questions and short answers. Each sentence felt like it was walking a tightrope, carefully avoiding the chasm that lay between them. The thing they both knew but couldn't name. It was always there, a phantom limb ache, a pressure behind the eyes.

Sam remembered the flickering neon sign of the diner across the street from the incident, still buzzing despite everything. The smell of frying onions and coffee, stubbornly clinging to the air. Life, in its messy, persistent way, had gone on around the edges of the chaos. People had still ordered their breakfasts, commuters had still grumbled about traffic. It was a strange juxtaposition that made his head spin: the quiet horror and the insistent, relentless rhythm of the city.

He looked at Lionel, who was staring out at the river, his profile sharp against the grey sky. Lionel seemed to be thinking the same things, or something similar. The slight furrow in his brow, the way his lips were pressed together. They didn't need to speak it. They understood the new, unsettling vocabulary of their shared experience. The world had shown them a glimpse of its teeth, and they were trying, awkwardly, to swallow it.

"You wanna… grab something?" Lionel finally asked, turning, a small, hopeful shrug in his shoulders. "Coffee? Hot chocolate?" He looked at Sam, a flicker of something almost normal in his eyes.

Sam hesitated. The thought of a warm cup, something familiar and sweet, was tempting. But the knot in his stomach hadn't loosened. It felt like if he let his guard down, even for a second, everything would just… spill out. He didn’t want that. Not yet. Maybe not ever. He still needed to figure out what had actually spilled out inside him.

He kicked at another stone, then looked up at Lionel. The sky was darkening now, a deeper, bruised purple along the western horizon. Streetlights began to hum on, casting pools of weak, artificial light onto the wet pavements. Another day fading, another day gone. The city felt both resilient and fragile, all at once. Like them.

"Yeah," Sam said, a small exhale of breath leaving his lips, thin and white in the cold. "Yeah, alright." He started walking, not quite sure where they were going, or what they would say, but knowing that walking forward, for now, felt like the only thing they could do. He just had to hope that whatever felt so broken inside him could somehow, eventually, knit itself back together, even if the seams would always show.

The city, in its deep, indifferent way, would carry on, just as they would. The chill in the air bit a little sharper, a reminder that winter was always coming, and sometimes, you just had to brave the cold, one breath at a time.