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By the time the plane landed in St. John’s, my eyes were gritty and sore. At some point I must have fallen asleep, because there was a crusty kind of feeling on my cheek where I’d drooled on myself.

Despite all that, I felt great. It’s an unbelievable feeling to know you can walk somewhere without feeling you’re about to get a knife in the back.

With a bounce in my step I found the car rental kiosk and flirted with the gray-haired man behind the counter. After signing away most of the remaining credit on my Visa, I bought a map and a bag of necessities (chips, pop and a paperback novel) and headed out to pick up my vehicle.

Cool fall air blew around me when I stepped out the doors into the night. I drew in a deep breath and imagined I could taste the tang of the sea over the airport smells of oil and tarmac. The blue, knee-length sweater I wore billowed in the breeze. I stood there just outside the door, simply breathing, for a good ten minutes.

It wasn’t until I was in the dimly lit parkade that I felt the hairs on the back of my neck rise. I stopped, spun around and saw nothing but the shadows cast by parked sedans and minivans.

“You’re being stupid,” I whispered to myself. There was no way he could have followed me here. I hadn’t told anyone where I was going, mostly because there wasn’t anyone to tell. My parents had died in a car crash two years ago. All the friends I’d had at the hospital were the kind of friends you talked to at work, but didn’t invite out for drinks after shift. Hell, I doubted any of them even noticed I’d quit two weeks ago. Being a trauma nurse didn’t offer much time to contemplate the whereabouts of your co-workers.

Still the feeling would not go away. My skin itched. Probably a janitor, I told myself, and forced my legs to keep moving.

I found my car, a putrid green hatchback that made me question the wisdom of asking for the cheapest car on the lot. With a wince I unlocked the door and threw my lumpy backpack into the backseat. Green was so not my color.

The airport was about ten kilometers from St. John’s, but I wasn’t heading into the city anyway. The cottage was in a small town on the southern coast, about an hour and a half away. Actually it wasn’t a cottage at all, in the way we think of them in Ontario. It wasn’t on a lake, or any waterfront for that matter, just a small house with a view of the ocean (if you squinted through the trees while standing on the roof) that my parents had bought because real estate was so cheap there.

Two weeks of restless sleep, followed by a late flight, didn’t exactly make me into the most competent of drivers. After forty-five minutes, I’d hit the shoulder about ten times and spilled half my pop in my lap. I was crashing, long past the point where a cup of coffee would help—even if there were any Tim Horton’s out in the middle of nowhere. The car didn’t come equipped with a radio of course, so I made do by sticking my head out the window like a golden retriever.

By the time I hit the outskirts of Dildo, I was holding one eye open with my left hand and driving with my right. Even snickering about the name of my destination wasn’t helping me stay awake, which is really saying something. I know it’s immature of me. Dildos are the pegs used to brace oars to a dory for rowing, but I was too tired to be thinking like an adult.

Maddy would be giggling right now. She’d always thought it was cool that we had a cottage here, and she told everybody all about it every chance she got. The only thing that kept our vacations here from falling into the realms of hell was that we were never here long enough for people to realize what a screwed up family we were.

As my eyes started to blur with exhaustion, I made a pact with whichever deity would listen—let me survive until November first and I’d never make another crack about Dildo again.

And that was when the moose stepped onto the highway.

“Son of a—” I swerved the car, aiming for the ditch. It would be just my luck to kill the damned moose that I was supposed to accept if I wanted to live. I’m pretty sure I was still giggling about how absurd that thought was, when I hit the tree and slipped into unconsciousness.