Headlights flipped on passing cars as he walked the sidewalk of Little Burgundy, in Montreal. Grocery carts and towels spread along the street into makeshift homes. Reed waved off solicitors, and cut down a side street towards the train tracks. He snuck through a small hole at the base of a fence covered in forest leaves, and stepped onto the gravelly base of the train tracks.

He stepped on each wooden plank of this vestige of human technology. He wondered about the girl — he hadn’t learned her name — about her wool beret.
“It’s my mother’s,” the girl had said as they lied together.
“The hat?”
“Yes, and she told me it’d bring me good luck. You pulled on it like she used to before she moved on.”
The girl kept talking, but Reed contemplated the shorthand of death. “Moved on,” “passed away,” “went to a better place.” These were codes of the bereaved, the acknowledgements of feigned acceptance. Time would heal the wound, they’d say, but it was really just exhaustion.