Aban's Accension

Chapter 16: The Market

El snorts with impatience, “Have I not told you to be ready for all things? How long must I instruct you before you will listen?”

“Instruct me? Who told you to instruct me? I don’t need no instruction. That’s what Mom is for, and I left her. She can’t get at me now.”

“Is that why you came?”

Aban shrugs, suddenly not having enough breath to reply.

“Aban, you came for a reason. Do you not even know your own mind? Do you not even know why you came?”

“I came for my inheritance.”

“Did you?”

“Yeah,” Aban hesitates. “Yeah, I did. I did!”

El shakes his head and speeds up. Aban strives to keep up with his brutal pace.

He enters the still air of Greenwood subway station and Aban follows about a minute later in silence. Its maroon-and-mucky-yellow tiles echo the sound of El’s token falling into the stile as he walks through it once he sees Aban entering the station. The stile’s metal arms turn and smack to a stop as Aban fumbles with her wallet, her change clanging into the fare box while the guy behind the booth’s thick glass watches her under half-closed lids.

“Have you not yet bought tokens?” El asks her when she catches up to him at the top of the stairs. “You went downtown yesterday, yet you’re so unprepared you paid cash there and back and you’re still paying cash today?”

“Yeah, so what,” she mutters back. “I don’t got enough money to buy tokens anyway.”

“You have no money, no tokens because you put no forethought into it.” His eyes bore into her as they stand at the top of the stairs. Her eyes drop after a few futile moments of trying to hold his gaze. He turns away and leaps down the grey-tiled steps, his arms pumping in tune with his legs, while Aban follows at a run, her hand sliding along the metal rail, picking up black gummy brake dust that lies like a fine cloak all over TTC subway stations. She doesn’t notice.  The train blows in as they arrive on the platform, lifting for a brief, refreshing moment her damp curls.

They sit across from each other in the almost-empty train. He looks at her chest and reads out loud, “Everything is possible.”

“Yeah.”

“What if one day you are hit by a bus. Will it be possible for you to stand up?”

“Depends.”

“Depends how?”

“Well, if it like hit hit or just, you know, tapped.”

“You prevaricate like a lawyer.”

“Fine. Whatever that means. But you don’t get it anyway. It’s about...about...you know, you. Your spirit. What you can do with your life. Not about getting hit with a bus.”

“If everything is possible, why didn’t you leave your mother’s house in the last twenty years?”

“I was a kid!”

“Not for five years. Many leave home years before you did, knowing it’s time.”

“You don’t get it.”

El contemplates her. She turns her head away.

They conduct the rest of the trip down to Front Street in stony silence until they get off the bus El had led her onto after the subway. Aban doesn’t know where they are and scans the buildings around her to get her bearings. The early morning light outlines the structures nearby and the haze obscures the tops of the further-away tall office buildings and hides the CN Tower’s tip, but she thinks she recognizes them and takes a step in their direction. But El moves off in the opposite direction. She swivels to follow and almost twists her foot. She grimaces and yells, "Ow!" but El keeps walking. She glares at his back as she limps to catch up.