by Julie Booker

Lorrie and Katie tended to say too much.

Imagine two fat ladies in a kayak!

In skin-tight wet suits. Eek!

Talked up Alaska until they couldn’t back out.

Over egg white omelettes in Lorrie’s kitchen, Katie read: “If you meet a bear, stretch your arms overhead and say, ‘Hey, bear, hey.’ The bear will come toward you, but it’s a bluff charge. Only drop when he’s one foot in front of you.”

“What about the camper in the news last week,” Lorrie asked, “the one who got mauled?”

“The grizzly was ten feet away. He dropped too soon.”

“He dropped too soon,” Lorrie repeated, as if measuring how close she could come to fear. Animals, she trusted. She had other things to worry about. Since the bariatric surgery she’d dropped 140 pounds. Another sixty to go. Katie had chosen the slow route—melba toast and tuna—but the scales held stubborn at 280.

Lorrie didn’t know why a flashlight was on the gear list from the kayak company, considering the twenty-four hours of daylight. She and Katie went shopping for neoprene gloves, inflatable Therm-a-Rests, checking the strength of the nozzles. Oversized Gortex pants were difficult to find.

In Mountain Equipment Co-Op, they lay on the floor in XL sub-zero sleeping bags, trying to imagine the frigid night air. Drawstrings tight under their noses. The manager smirked, made them practice stuffing themselves into sleep sacs, two giant blue pills.

Julie Booker’s writing has appeared in an anthology published by Coach House Press, as well as in The New Quarterly, Descant, The Windsor Review, and upcoming issues of Prairie Fire and Exile. She won First Prize in The Writers’ Union on Canada 2009 Short Prose Competition for Developing Writers. Her short story collection, Silver Hearts, was shortlisted for the Metcalf-Rooke Award in 2005. Geology in Motion was shortlisted for the 2008 PRISM international Fiction Contest.