In the city was a mountain, and the mountain was sacred; it was said that if you climbed to the very top and spent the night, you would have a vision. Once, some teenagers and the men that were too old for them went to the mountain for this purpose, the men going to the top to dream, the girls sleeping on the plateau below, alone together.

I did not dream, but we woke in the night to the sound of an animal walking around the tent and smelling us through the thin fabric in great huffs and snorts. Oh, I thought, for the second time in my life, that’s right, I’m meat. But that isn’t the story I’m telling you. In the morning when we woke, a thick fog had covered the city, so that it seemed to disappear. The trees were always threatening to take back the land, and now they were the only thing visible through the breaks in the cloud. This is what it will have looked like, I thought, and I didn’t finish the sentence. I also thought who but God can see this? but I did not say it, I was silent for the first time, not for lack of words but because of them. The eyes of God looked at me from hundreds of metres below, black spruce pushing up through them and I was quiet a long time, listening and letting them see me.

When the too-old men came back down they told us they had indeed dreamt, they were so happy. They did not ask what had happened while they were gone, and we did not tell them.

Decades later I flew back in a plane; from that height the water makes the landscape an archipelago, precambrian lace. I watched it for a long time through the oval window, thinking who but God can see this? I don’t sleep on planes, so I don’t dream. I was flying back to break someone’s heart. I was going back to break my own.

Even later still, tonight in fact I was lying in a dark room, sweating with strangers, and I told myself this story from behind my closed eyelids. There was just enough light in the dim for me to see the capillaries in that thin skin. Who but God can see this? I said to myself, looking at myself from the inside. And now you know this story too.