Stains

"That is objectively the ugliest thing I have ever seen, and I’ve seen my dad try to parallel park a dually after three whiskeys."

I didn’t look up from the floor. I was on my knees, wrestling with a roll of duct tape that had frozen solid in the truck bed, trying to tape down a power bar that refused to sit flush against the curling linoleum. The tape made a tearing sound, like a zipper being forced.

"It’s texture," I said, finally looking at Sam. She was perched on a folding table, her legs dangling, wearing a toque that looked like it had been knitted by someone who hated her. It was neon orange and unraveling at the brim.

"It’s a pile of rusty saw blades glued to a pallet, Jeff," she said, gesturing with a half-eaten Timbit. "It looks like a tetanus shot waiting to happen. Is the title 'Lockjaw'? Please tell me the title is 'Lockjaw'."

I sat back on my heels, wiping my hands on my jeans. The basement of the Ironwood Community Centre smelled aggressively of floor wax and old coffee, a scent that seemed baked into the cinderblocks. It was freezing down here. The heater in the corner was making a noise like a dying washing machine, rattling its cage but producing absolutely no warmth. We were the only two people left. The ‘Northwestern Perspectives’ showcase opened in ten hours, and so far, we had three crooked easels and my sculpture, which, to be fair, did look a bit like a safety hazard.

"The title is 'Industry in Decline'," I said, feeling that familiar prickle of defensive heat on my neck. "And it’s commentary. On... extraction. And stuff."

Sam snorted. It was a loud, unladylike sound that echoed off the low ceiling. She hopped off the table, her boots landing heavy on the floor. She was wearing those massive Sorel boots, the kind that make everyone walk like a toddler in a snowsuit. She marched over to my sculpture and poked a jagged saw blade with a gloved finger.

"It’s commentary on how you need to stop raiding the dump for materials," she said, but her voice had softened. She looked at me, her dark eyes catching the harsh fluorescent light. "You cold? You look purple."

"I'm fine. I'm acclimating. It's a northern skill."

"It's hypothermia, Jeff. You’re shivering so hard you’re vibrating. It’s making me anxious."

She wasn’t wrong. The cold in here was insidious. It wasn't just the air; it was the dampness seeping up from the concrete foundation, a wet cold that got into your marrow and sat there. Outside, it was thirty below, the kind of weather where the air in your nose freezes instantly and engine blocks crack if you look at them wrong. Inside, it was maybe five degrees.

"We need to finish the lighting," I said, ignoring the shivers. "If we don't get the spots aimed right, Mrs. Gable is going to hang her watercolors in the dark again, and she’ll blame me. I can’t handle another lecture on 'respecting the elders' from a woman who paints nothing but barns."

Sam laughed, a sharp, bright sound. She reached into the pocket of her oversized parka—a vintage men's coat that engulfed her small frame—and pulled out a tangled mess of extension cords. "Mrs. Gable told me my photography was 'aggressive'. I took a picture of the paper mill at sunset. Apparently, smokestacks aren't 'nice'."

"Did you tell her the mill pays for the road she drives her Buick on?"

"I told her the sulfur smell is the scent of money. She didn't think that was funny."

We worked in silence for a bit, the only sounds the metallic clunk of the heater and the squeak of our boots. I watched Sam as she climbed a rickety stepladder to adjust a track light. She moved with a surprising grace given the layers of wool and down she was wearing. She was Anishinaabe, from a reserve about an hour north, but she’d been in town since high school. She had this way of looking at things—at me, at the town, at a rusted piece of junk—like she was dissecting it, peeling back the layers to see the rot and the gold underneath.

She twisted the light fixture, her tongue poking out the corner of her mouth in concentration. Dust motes danced in the beam she just activated—no, not dust motes. Dust. Just dirty, gray dust. I rubbed my eyes. I was tired. I was twenty-four, working two jobs, and spending my Friday night freezing in a basement for an art show that maybe fifty people would attend. Forty of them would be relatives looking for free cheese.

"Hey," Sam said from the ladder. She wasn't looking at the light anymore. She was looking down at me.

"Yeah?"

"Why do we do this?"

I stopped untangling a cord. "Do what? Lighting?"

"This," she waved a hand around the room, encompassing the bad art, the cold room, the town outside. "Pretend we’re real artists. Stay here. Freeze. Why didn't you go to Toronto? Or Vancouver? You had that portfolio review. They liked your stuff."

It was the question. The one that sat in the middle of every conversation we had, like a centerpiece on a dinner table nobody wanted to acknowledge. The elephant in the room, if the elephant was wearing plaid and driving a rusted Ford.

"Money," I said, the standard lie. "Rent is insane down south. I’d be living in a closet."

"You live in your parent's basement, Jeff. That is literally a subterranean closet."

"It has a separate entrance," I muttered.

She climbed down the ladder, skipping the last step and landing with a thud. She walked over to where I was sitting and crouched down, balancing on the balls of her feet. She was close enough that I could smell her—coffee, stale cigarette smoke, and something sharp and sweet, like pine resin.

"I stayed because I’m scared," she said. Just like that. No buildup. She picked at a loose thread on her knee. "I went to Winnipeg for a month, remember? First year uni?"

"Yeah. You came back."

"I hated it. It wasn't... the noise. It was the sky. You couldn't see it. The buildings cut it up into little squares. I felt like I was choking." She looked up at me, her expression open, raw. "But here... god, Jeff. Sometimes I feel like I'm screaming underwater. Nobody gets it. I show them a photo of a clearcut, and they see lumber prices. I show them a portrait of my cousin, and they see a statistic. It’s exhausting."

I looked at my hands. They were chapped, the knuckles red and cracked from the dry air. I had paint under my fingernails—Prussian Blue, from a session two days ago. It never really washed out.

"I stayed because of the light," I said quietly. It sounded pretentious the second it left my mouth, but it was the truth.

"The light?"

"Yeah. You know how it gets in January? Around four o'clock? When the sun hits the snow on the ridge, and everything turns that weird, bruised purple color? And the shadows get really long and blue? You don't get that light anywhere else. It’s... it’s lonely light. I like painting it."

Sam stared at me. For a second, I thought she was going to mock me, make a joke about how I was romanticizing seasonal depression. But she didn't.

"Blue hour," she whispered. "Photographers call it blue hour. But here, it lasts like fifteen minutes."

"Yeah. But it’s a good fifteen minutes."

She smiled, a small, crooked thing that made my chest do a weird stutter-step. "You're a sap, Jeff. A giant, freezing sap."

"And you're stalling. We have three more walls to prep."

"I'm hungry," she announced, standing up abruptly. The moment broke, but the warmth of it lingered, hovering in the cold air between us. "I can't hang art on an empty stomach. I need grease. I need nitrates. Let's go to Stan’s."

"Stan’s is closed. It's midnight."

"The truck stop then. Come on. My treat. I sold a print to the dentist last week. I’m rich."

We abandoned the extension cords. The showcase could wait. The art wasn't going anywhere.

Leaving the hall was a physical assault. The wind hit us the moment we pushed open the metal doors, stealing the breath from our lungs. It was a clear night, the kind where the stars look sharp and cruel, pinned against a black velvet void. The snow in the parking lot crunched loudly under our boots, a sound like styrofoam breaking.

My truck, an ancient Silverado that was more rust than steel, was sitting under a streetlight, looking miserable. I prayed to the gods of General Motors that it would start.

"Shotgun!" Sam yelled, her voice snatched away by the wind.

"You don't have to call shotgun, Sam. You're the only passenger."

"It's the principle of the thing!"

I climbed into the driver's seat. The vinyl was rock hard and instantly leeched the heat from my jeans. The cab smelled like old gasoline and the pine air freshener hanging from the rearview mirror. I turned the key. The engine groaned, a slow, agonizing *whir-whir-whir*, and then caught with a roar. I revved it, keeping the RPMs up so it wouldn't die.

Sam slammed her door. "Heater. Now. Full blast."

"It needs a minute. It blows cold air first."

"I hate this truck. I hate winter. I hate everything."

"You love it," I said, putting it in gear. The tires spun on the icy asphalt before catching, and we fish-tailed slightly out of the lot. "You'd miss the suffering."

"I would not. I would thrive in Arizona. I would be a lizard. I would sun myself on a rock."

"You'd melt. You're built for parkas."

The drive to the highway was quiet. The town of Ironwood was asleep. We passed the mill, a sprawling complex of pipes and steam rising into the night, lit up like a dystopian city. The smell of boiling pulp—wet cardboard and sulfur—filled the cab, even with the windows up.

"Look at that," Sam said, pointing at the plumes of steam. "It's beautiful, in a horrific way."

"That's your aesthetic, isn't it? Horrific beauty."

"It’s honest," she said, leaning her head against the cold window. "Better than painting barns."

The heater finally kicked in, blasting lukewarm air that smelled of dust. I drove with one hand on the wheel, the other tucked under my thigh to keep warm. I looked over at Sam. The green light from the dashboard lit up her face, casting shadows under her cheekbones. She looked tired. We were both tired. It wasn't just the lack of sleep; it was the weight of trying to be something in a place that didn't really have room for us.

"Do you think we're wasting our time?" I asked. The question had been gnawing at me all night.

Sam didn't answer immediately. She traced a pattern on the frosted window glass with her finger.

"Probably," she said. "But what else are we gonna do? Get jobs at the bank? I’d rather freeze in a basement with you."

My heart did that stutter thing again. *With you.* Not just 'freeze in a basement.' freeze in a basement *with you*.

"Yeah," I said, my voice sounding a little too thick. "Me too."

We pulled into the truck stop. It was a beacon of neon in the darkness, surrounded by idling semi-trucks. Inside, it was bright and smelled of frying bacon and sanitizer. We slid into a booth in the back, the red vinyl cracked and taped up—duct tape, the universal northern repair kit.

The waitress, a woman named Barb who had been working there since the dawn of time, dropped two laminated menus on the table without looking at us.

"Coffee?" she asked. It wasn't a question.

"Please," Sam said. "Intravenously, if possible."

Barb didn't smile. She just poured the coffee and walked away.

Sam wrapped her hands around the mug, closing her eyes. "Heat. Blessed heat."

I watched her blow on the steam. Her fingernails were bitten down, and there was a smudge of ink on her thumb. I wanted to reach across the table and touch it. Just brush my thumb over hers.

"So," she said, opening her eyes. "The showcase. If nobody buys anything, what's the plan?"

"Bonfire?" I suggested.

"I'm serious. My rent is due. If I don't sell that series of abandoned gas stations, I might have to move back in with my mom. And if I move back in with my mom, I will commit a felony within a week."

"You could sell online," I said. "Expand your reach."

"I tried. But nobody on Instagram cares about rusted gas pumps in Ontario. They want... aesthetic minimalism. They want avocados and beige walls. My life isn't beige, Jeff. It's... sludge colored. And white."

"I like your sludge," I said.

She looked at me over the rim of her mug. Her eyes crinkled at the corners. "You're such a weirdo."

"I'm serious. You have a good eye. You see the stuff everyone else ignores. Like that shot you took of the old arena? With the kid tying his skates in the dark? That broke my heart."

Sam lowered her mug. She looked away, towards the window where our reflections ghosted against the darkness outside. "Thanks," she muttered. She wasn't good at taking compliments. She deflected them like a goalie.

"You know," she said, changing the subject, "I was thinking about your sculpture. The saw blades."

"Please don't."

"No, really. It’s not... terrible. It’s angry. I like that it’s angry. People here are so polite, you know? 'Oh, how are ya, nice weather, bit of a chill.' But underneath, everyone is kinda pissed off. The mill is laying people off, the roads are garbage, everything costs too much. Your sculpture feels like that. Like a polite scream."

I stared at her. That was exactly what I was trying to do. I hadn't been able to articulate it, even to myself, but she saw it. She just... saw it.

"A polite scream," I repeated. "I might change the title."

"'Polite Scream'," she nodded. "I like it. Better than 'Industry in Decline'. That sounds like a textbook chapter."

We ate in comfortable silence for a while—fries and gravy, the food of champions. The diner hummed with the low murmur of truckers talking about weigh scales and black ice. It felt safe in here. Suspended in time.

"I don't want to go back to the hall," Sam admitted, pushing her plate away.

"Me neither."

"Let's go to the lookout," she said. "I want to see if the aurora is out. The app said there's a forty percent chance."

"Sam, it's thirty below on the ridge."

"We'll stay in the truck. Please? I need to cleanse my palate. I’ve been looking at Mrs. Gable’s barns for too long. I need some cosmic lights."

I could never say no to her. That was the problem. Or maybe the solution.

We drove up the access road to the lookout point above the town. The truck bounced over the ruts, the suspension protesting loudly. When we got to the top, I killed the engine and the lights. The sudden darkness was shocking. Then, your eyes adjusted.

Below us, Ironwood was a grid of orange streetlights and white snow. Above us... nothing yet. Just stars. Millions of them. A spray of diamond dust across the black.

"No lights," I said.

"Give it a minute. The app never lies."

We sat in the dark. The truck ticked as it cooled. The silence up here was heavy, absolute. It wasn't like the silence in the city, which is just the absence of noise. This was a presence. The silence of millions of trees waiting for spring.

"I'm glad you came back," Sam said softly. She didn't look at me. She was staring out the windshield.

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. It would suck being the only failure in town."

"Hey."

She laughed, but it sounded brittle. "I mean it. If you weren't here... I don't know. I think I would have left. And I would have been miserable somewhere else. At least here, I'm miserable with someone who knows which diner has the best gravy."

I turned in my seat to face her. The dashboard lights were off, so she was just a silhouette against the stars. "I'm not miserable, Sam."

"Liar."

"Okay, I'm frustrated. I'm cold. I'm broke. But... I'm not miserable. Not when we're doing this."

"Eating gravy?"

"Talking. Just... being. You make it bearable. You make it... interesting."

She went still. I could hear her breathing, a shallow rhythm in the quiet cab. The air between us felt charged, static electricity building before a spark.

"Jeff," she said, her voice dropping an octave.

"Yeah?"

She turned to look at me. I couldn't see her eyes clearly, but I could feel them. "Do you ever think about... us?"

My throat went dry. "All the time."

"Good," she whispered. "Because I was starting to think I was hallucinating this whole vibe."

She shifted, the nylon of her parka rustling. She leaned across the center console. It was an awkward maneuver—the gear shift was in the way, and we were both wearing enough clothes to survive an arctic expedition—but she made it work. Her hand found mine in the dark, her fingers cold but strong. She squeezed my hand, hard.

"You're a good painter, Jeff. And a decent driver. And..." she hesitated.

"And?"

"And if you don't kiss me right now, I'm going to punch you in the shoulder. Hard."

I laughed, a nervous, breathless sound. "We can't have that."

I leaned in. It wasn't a movie kiss. It was clumsy. Our toques bumped together. My nose was cold against her cheek. But when our lips met, the cold vanished. It was warm, terrifyingly warm. She tasted like coffee and chapstick. Her hand came up to grip the collar of my jacket, pulling me closer, anchoring me.

For a minute, the town below didn't exist. The showcase didn't exist. The saw blades and the barns and the crushing weight of wondering if we were good enough—it all just dissolved.

Then, a flash of green light exploded across the sky.

We broke apart, gasping.

"Look!" Sam pointed through the windshield.

A ribbon of green fire was tearing across the sky, dancing, twisting. It was huge, silent, and overwhelming. The aurora. It washed out the stars, bathing the snow on the hood of the truck in an eerie, spectral glow.

"I told you," she said, breathless, her eyes wide, reflecting the green light. "The app never lies."

"It's incredible," I said, but I wasn't looking at the sky. I was looking at her. The green light washed over her face, turning the angles of her cheeks and nose into something otherworldly, yet completely grounded. She looked like she belonged to the land itself.

She turned back to me, catching me staring. She didn't look away this time. The playfulness was gone, replaced by something intense, searching.

"Jeff," she said, her voice serious now. "If we stay... if we do this... we have to really do it. We can't just half-ass it and complain. We have to make this place ours. We have to force them to see us."

"I know," I said. And I did. I felt a sudden surge of something that felt dangerously like hope.

"Okay," she nodded, as if settling a contract. "Okay."

She leaned back against the seat, her hand finding mine again. We watched the lights dance for a while, the heater humming its steady, struggling note.

"We should probably go back," I said eventually. "We have to finish the lighting."

"Five more minutes," she said, squeezing my fingers. "Let Mrs. Gable wait."

We sat there for another ten minutes, just watching the sky burn green. It felt like a beginning. It felt like we had figured out the secret to surviving the north: you find someone to watch the lights with, and you hold on tight.

Finally, I reached for the key. "Ready?"

"Ready," she said.

I turned the key.

*Click.*

Nothing. No whir. No roar. Just a dead, hollow click.

I tried again. *Click.*

The silence that followed was heavy, instant, and terrifying.

"Jeff?" Sam asked, her voice tight.

"It's fine," I said, panic rising in my chest like bile. "It's just... cold. It just needs a second."

I tried a third time. *Click.* The dashboard lights flickered and died. The truck was dead. We were five miles from town, on a deserted ridge, in thirty below weather, and the heater fan just spun down into a chilling silence.

I looked at Sam. She looked at me. The green light from the aurora faded, plunging us into total darkness.

"Tell me," she whispered, "that you have jumper cables."

"I do," I said. "In the garage. Next to the space heater."