Singularity -- Spem Reduxit
When she was born, she could count what she loved on one hand.
She remembers being small, smaller then her people who dart around the trees, who sometimes take her hand and let her dance with them when there is a particularly lucky hunt, and she stomps her feet and laughs as they spin around the fire, unaware of how she sets them on edge. She can feel the strange looks they give her, wary of her appearance and whispering voice, but chooses to ignore them and fills her heart with the dance, for the dance is the first thing she has ever loved, and if she is silent and gentle than they need not be afraid. When they put out the fire and leave her by herself aside the ashes, she smiles her most thankful, quiet smile, and runs off to her favourite big, strong maple tree to cry - the second thing she has ever loved. Loneliness stabs at her heart and she wraps her short arms around the trunk, hardly reaching halfway, brushes her nose against the side, scratching her skin, pulls a sheet of birch bark from the neighbouring tree with sore, shivering fingers and tucks her whole body under it, pale and pink and cold.
The third thing she learns to adore comes in the form of brown, dirty feet, attached to little thin legs and a small bony body. They startle her, and she throws her bark blanket at them, then runs, fast as the tides that swoop in and out around her, jumps a wall of earth towards the sea and then across the sandbars the ebbing tide has formed, the sand becoming hard and then soft again under her steps, bits of shell nicking her toes, salt rushing into her lungs as she huffs. She ignores the shouts behind her, the gulls cawing above her head, and slows to a stop only when the sounds fade. She decides she loves the thin body and dirty feet and person they are attached to when she hears laughing, echoing along the water like a song, bubbling as they slip once again under the waves and roaring when the owner resurfaces, coppery hair stuck to his face and arm caught in a sinkhole.
She learns the people who dance with her are not her only people, that spoken sounds can be put onto paper as little shapes, that the sea is grander and larger than she ever thought and that she is a colony, part of the little skinny boy called Acadie who holds her hand and sings her songs and complains to her when he is told to do things he doesn’t like. She learns that she is someone - something - to be fought over; one night the skinny boy reads her a story about brave Jean D’arc, a women of God with resolve like stone, promises herself she will also be strong and brave and protect everything that so much as looks her way. She guards her people when the men from across the sea fight, their swords glinting with sunlight and caked with blood, their guns exploding onto their opponents, turns her own body into a shield for those who cannot run free fast enough, tears from her own clothes dressing for wounds. She throws herself across fields of war to help drag soldiers away, men three times her size and half dead anyway, and soon she makes herself sick with the effort, pulls more than one lead bullet from her arms and legs and the boy she loves grabs her tightly, his hands shaking, and begs her to stop.
But more and more people come to her as the fighting flows, and so she has more and more to protect, and she loves it, loves the effort and the strain and the single thanks she ever receives. For them she builds a city, lets them clear the land of its massive forest although her arms prickle and fingers ache, provides the sweetest apples and potatoes and good earth although her stomach gurgles unhappily, brings in and out the tides with her breath, gasping. She learns their tongues and watches them grow and dances with them when life is good -- when they are ripped away from her all she can do is collapse and bawl with the thin boy, his shoulders and arms forming a cage around her senses so she cannot watch the world of her Acadiens being torn apart, but they can both feel it, like a great sob in the earth, and their hearts ache in tandem.
She learns of the colony to her right, and although he balks at her language, a mush of English and French used interchangeably, she learns to love him, learns how to make him smile and how to hold his hand just right and how best to annoy him. She is impressed by him. She looks at herself, looks over her tiny frame and bright eyes, looks at how her land has changed, morphed by new people and battles and time, runs her fingers along her scars, and decides that she too will be her own self. The thin boy is appalled and yells and sulks, and he will not talk to her, and she finds him arguing with his leaders against the decision for months, and he does not visit her when she finds a new name and her borders are set. She is a young woman before he truly speaks to her again, his head bowed and eyes wet and asking, Y’don’ hate me, righ’? Please don’ hate me.
Neither expects the verdict that comes upon them suddenly, when they are finally at peace with each other again, prosperous and content, nor does her brother to the west or the brother after him, and all stand like stone when they are told they are to become one family again, one Canada. But as much as she fears this new status, as much as her brothers yell and fuss and argue, her heart warms and swells, and she decides she can love them and the dominion and the little blond infant that hides behind the coat of the English, and that she doesn’t mind not having married the thin, gangly boy, whose hand she slips hers into, and whose hand grips hers despite his attention being elsewhere.
On their first birthday together, when the documents are signed and their loyalty is sworn, she counts what she loves on her fingers and toes, and then makes her brothers hold up their fingers, and then counts their toes, and then cries when she runs out of digits.