Aban's Accension

Chapter 11: The Wild Toronto

Chapter 11: THE WILD TORONTO

by Shireen Jeejeebhoy

“Wake up Aban!”

El’s booming voice shoots her heart into pounding, and she almost chokes on the toothpaste foaming in her mouth. She grabs the bathroom sink to steady herself. She spits toothpaste into it, rinses her mouth, and slouches out the bathroom and down the stairs to where El is waiting.

“Come on Aban. Let us go into the backbones of Toronto,” he grins at her with the hearty air of boundless energy and joy.

“Whatever,” she mumbles.

El and Aban leave the stuffy house and wade into the muggy city air. They walk up Greenwood, toward the railway bridge. Aban looks up from the sidewalk and into the underside of the old bridge as it shakes under the moving weight of a train. As they walk uphill past the bridge, a large concrete yard criss-crossed with rails and holding a silent, still, silvery engineless train or two, rises on their left. She mindlessly looks through the heavy chain-link fence toward the train as her feet scuff along and as El keeps an eye on her  for a moment and then continues on. She falls further and further behind. A lazy click-clack...click-clack soothes with its familiarity, and a train comes into view. She halts to watch idly for awhile, edging unthinkingly up to the fence. After a longer while, she turns her head to look along the sidewalk in the direction they had been walking. El is disappearing. Against her will, Aban begins to walk again. But El continues to disappear. She trots to catch up, the hot air stifling her breathing. She falls reluctantly into the faster rhythm of his walk.

The hill levels out, two-storey houses rise on each side of the four-lane road, and they reach the lights at a main intersection. Affixed to a post, a large rectangular blue sign with white letters declares that they’ve reached Danforth Ave.

Whatever.

They cross the wide road, walking up the hidden slope in the road that crests along the yellow centreline then down the slope toward the opposite sidewalk.

They continue on.

A large pointed grey-banded white sign declares that they are at Danforth Collegiate and Technical Institute. High school. She swallows and averts her gaze. El moves closer to her. Her gaze lands on the two-storey houses across the road. They sit silently with mere strips of brown lawn in front; the original front porches sit empty; and wide parched grass verges separate sidewalk and road. Trees grow everywhere, some young sticks, some reaching the sky and sheltering roofs from behind. She knows their names, and they idly scroll through her mind without effort: elm, maple, and chestnut.

Beside her, El keeps walking.

They reach a busy road. Two lanes of cars zip towards them, two lanes zip by in her direction. Aban cringes towards the neat bungalows behind their hedges and fences. El keeps walking.

Soon they’re at another major intersection. On one corner tall bright blue hoarding surrounds an angled crane with a wire hanging from its tip. “Coxwell Trunk Sewer Project,” the sign reads. She takes in the words, but they mean nothing to her.

El crosses the road first east and then north, and suddenly there is no traffic noise. They’re walking along a quiet street lined with brick bungalows with bow windows underscored by stonework, their roofs angling down to cover small enclosed garages. Two-storey houses punctuate the neat line of one-storey houses. Clipped green lawns edge up to the sidewalk, and majestic trees overhang the street here and there.

The road ends in a T-junction, and El and Aban step off the end of the sidewalk, cross the road, and enter a park. The screams of children erupt from the playground on the far right. The grass is brown and crisp; soil emerges here and there. Weeds creep a dark green pattern in the dead grass. Pine trees have let go of their needles, and the fallen needles scent the still, humid air. Aban’s T-shirt proclaiming “I Love Nature” sticks to her back; the same camouflage army pants she wore the day before cling to her thighs and drape over her smudged sneakers. Aban wants a drink, but she has no water, and her mouth doesn’t open to ask. El hands her a bottle from the bag slung over his shoulder. She grasps it, unscrews the cap, and gulps down the warm water. She screws the cap back on and hands it back to him. He regards her for a moment, but she continues to hold out the bottle, and he takes it.