Wilma rushed across the open prairie carrying the sweet scent of saskatoon berries, hunting for any ear that would listen. She wanted one big Canada Day cheer to roll from coast to coast before fireworks. But the dry wind kept yanking her whispers sideways, scattering them into the dust. Her restless circling had carved a shimmering trail across the grass, a glittering loop of dust and tiny sparks. She was running in circles, and she knew it. A hunched old witch stepped onto the trail, beads clicking, staff tapping the dry earth. She pointed her staff toward a tall spiraling tower rising in twisting bands on the horizon. "Pour your voice in there, little breeze. It catches what the dry wind steals." Wilma raced to the spire and slipped inside its open rings. Her whispers swirled upward, gathering strength instead of scattering. At the top, a polished weathervane spun once, then split her voice cleanly east and west. A sleek prairie falcon launched from a ring, carrying the first whisper past the dry wind toward distant ears. Wilma laughed for the first time all morning. Her message was moving. But the spire hummed louder than she expected, and far below, the dust trail began pulling itself into a shape she had not asked for.

Wilma slipped down from the spire still laughing, ready to chase her whisper east. But the prairie air below had gone flat. Her gust hit it like a hand hitting a wall. The saskatoon scent she carried hung in place, then sank into the dry grass. A knot of dried straw spun once at her feet, lost its turn, and slumped into a still golden heap. That heap marked the dead spot. Her message had no road forward. She pushed harder. She circled the heap and tried to lift it, tried to drag the scent through the heavy air. Nothing moved. A child somewhere east was waiting on a porch, and Wilma could feel the minutes peeling away. The frustration built in her chest like a held breath. It pressed and pressed until something broke loose. A small, knotted creature tumbled out of her, covered in stuck-on letters from every word she had swallowed. It hissed at the still air and kicked the straw heap. Wilma stared. Her own anger had grown legs. The imp stomped in a circle, spitting half-words. Wilma almost shouted at it. Then she saw the weathered barn behind the dead patch, doors open wide, stacked hay bales inside, rope and tools hung along the back wall. A building could hold a gust. A building could box the air and force it to gather. She herded the imp inside and slammed against the bales, swirling tight between the walls. The imp screeched and spun with her. The loose straw lifted. The scent of berries lifted. The barn filled with a thickening pressure that had nowhere to go but the open doors. She shot out in one packed burst. The dead patch broke. The gust punched through the still air and kept going, carrying the berry scent and a thin trail of glowing straw east across the grass. Wilma felt the porch-waiting feeling click back into place inside her. But the imp came with her. It clung to her edge, still muttering letters, still kicking. She had her momentum back. She had also brought her temper along for the rest of the trip.

Wilma raced east with the berry scent packed tight against her chest. The imp clung to her edge, still spitting letters. She didn't look back at the barn. She watched the grass ahead for the bend of her own dust trail, the thin glowing line of straw she'd been laying since the spire. That line was her map. As long as she could see it curl forward, she knew which way the next town sat waiting. Then the line stopped curling forward. It pulled sideways, lifted, and knotted itself into a coiling shape above the grass. The dust thickened into a drifting body with a slow burning eye. It turned in the air and stared at her. Wilma slowed. The shape uncoiled one way, then the other. She tried to read it as a direction and could not. East was gone. Her own trail had become a creature, and the creature was not pointing anywhere. She drifted off the line trying to get around it. The prairie below looked the same in every direction. Grass, grass, a fence post, more grass. She skimmed low and found a brick wall standing alone where some building used to be. White chalk covered it from corner to corner, looping letters crashing into each other. Children had written over children. She tried to pick out a town name. The marks tangled the same way her dust had tangled. She pulled back. Two twisted maps now, and neither one would hold still. She pushed further and found a metal post bolted into cracked dirt. Four signs hung off its arms, paint streaked, letters half gone. One arm pointed at empty sky. One had no sign at all, just a bent bracket. Wilma circled the post twice. She could not tell which arm meant the next town. The imp kicked the pole and laughed. Then a small voice cut through from the shoulder of the road. An older woman in an orange vest stood there holding a stop sign like a walking stick. Wilma had blown past her crosswalk once, seasons ago. The woman tipped the sign east-southeast. "Town's that way. Two miles. Follow the power line, not the road." Wilma started to ask about the dust shape behind her. The woman shook her head. "Not my corner. Go." Wilma went. She left the chalked wall, the broken post, and the drifting dust creature behind her and tracked the power line low across the grass. The berry scent held. The porch-waiting feeling held. But her trail behind her was no longer a trail she could read, and the imp was already chewing on that. She had her direction back. She had lost her own map to get it.

Wilma followed the power line east until the grass gave way to a patch of cracked pavement. A playground stood there alone. Bright swings hung still. A green slide caught the late sun. No children climbed the ladder. A small boy sat at the foot of the slide with his back to it, knees up, waiting for nothing in particular. Wilma slowed. He was the first child she had found in miles. She gathered the berry scent against her chest and leaned in to whisper. The imp tightened its grip on her edge before the words left her. Its claws had hooked deeper since the barn. Letters peeled off its skin and stuck to hers. When her whisper passed through that knot of letters, the words came out wrong. Saskatoon turned to sour. Porch turned to alone. Fireworks turned to nobody's coming. The boy lifted his head halfway, then dropped it again. He scuffed his shoe in the dirt and turned his shoulder to the swings. Wilma pulled back fast. Behind him, on the pavement, sat a bright green candy someone had spat out. Sugar crystals glittered along its bitter edge. That was the taste her whisper had left in his ear. She circled the playground twice and looked at what she was carrying. The imp had built itself a nest in the curl of her trailing edge, a knotted lump of letters wedged tight where her wind narrowed. Every tender word she pushed forward had to squeeze past it first. She could not out-fly the thing. She had tried for two chapters of prairie. So she stopped pushing forward and pulled inward instead. She drew the berry scent close, packed it tight, and then let the bitter part out on purpose. She blew the anger straight at the imp. Every grievance about the eastern winds, the mountain drafts, the coastal gusts who never showed. She fed it all of it at once. The imp swelled. Its letters brightened. It chewed and chewed and grew too heavy for her edge. It slipped. It clawed once at her trailing wind and tumbled down into the dirt beside the spat-out candy, fat and slow and grounded. Wilma did not wait to see what it did next. She turned to the boy and whispered again, clean this time. Saskatoon. Porch. Fireworks soon. He lifted his head fully. He stood. He walked to the swing and sat down and looked east, the way children look when they are waiting. Wilma climbed and kept going. Her edge felt lighter and thinner than before. The berry scent was smaller now. She had spent something to shake the imp loose, and she could feel the difference in how much wind she had left.

Wilma climbed east with less weight in her than she had carried at dawn. The boy on the swing fell behind her, but her relief did not last. She tried to glance back at her own path the way a wind does, by reading the trail of dust and bent grass she had laid down. The line was gone. Where her trail should have been, the ground showed only a washed-out smear, soft at the edges, half-swallowed by the dirt. She could not tell if her whispers had landed in the towns behind her or blown past empty porches. Every child waiting east of her depended on the ones west of her hearing it first. She needed to know. She doubled back low and fast. A mile west she crossed a flat field with a hockey goal standing alone at one end. The netting inside the frame was twisted and stiff, caught mid-billow as if a gust had hit it once and quit. No footprints in the grass. No scuff marks at the posts. Her saskatoon scent should have settled here. A child should have lifted a head from a back step nearby. The goal stood the way she had left it, untouched. One whisper, gone. She marked the gap in her mind and pushed on. She found the next gap at a viewing deck above a long slope of prairie. Two wooden benches faced east. The railings were rusted at the joints. She had whispered toward this deck two days ago, aiming the berry scent at whoever might sit and watch the sky for sparks. The benches were empty. No coat left behind. No cup. No bootprint in the dust on the planks. Wilma hovered above the boards and felt the silence sit there like a held breath. Two gaps now, side by side in her route. She could keep flying back and counting losses until she had nothing left to carry forward, or she could choose. She chose forward. She dropped down to the faded smear of her old trail one last time and pressed her remaining berry scent into it, hard, the way a thumb presses ink into paper. The trail brightened for a moment under her, then dimmed. It was the most she could give the west. She turned east and climbed. She would not see behind her again. She would carry what she had left to the next porch, and the next, and trust the children she had already reached to tell the ones she had missed. Her wind was thinner now, and her direction was only one way.

Wilma climbed east with her scent packed tight inside her, held like berries in a sealed jar. She had trusted the children behind her to spread word west. Now she needed to reach the next porch. But a mile on, her speed dropped. The grass below her stopped bending. The air thickened around her edges the way water thickens before it freezes. She pushed harder and moved slower. Ahead, the prairie had gone flat and quiet, and she could feel it pulling the motion out of her. She found what had stalled her. A long red brick wall ran across the field, taller than a barn, weathered at the seams. Someone had built it as a windbreak years ago and forgotten it. The bricks held the heat of the sun and threw it back up in a thick, still cushion. Nothing moved on the near side. No grass twitched. Her scent stayed locked inside her, pressed against her like a cork in a glass jar. If she stopped here, the berry smell would sour before it reached anyone. She had to break the stillness or lose the whole eastern half of her route. She searched the flat air for anything that still moved. On the far side of the wall, past the dead zone, she saw a thin metal pole with a faded windsock hanging limp against it. Beneath the pole, a girl sat cross-legged in the dirt, chin tipped up, watching the sock for a sign. The girl had stopped waiting for fireworks and started waiting for the wind itself. Wilma understood then that she could not go around. She had to go through, and she had to arrive with enough left to lift that sock. Wilma dropped low and ran herself along the base of the wall, gathering the small warm currents the bricks pushed off. She braided them into herself, thin strand after thin strand, until she had weight. Then she rose and drove straight at the wall's top edge. She scraped over it, tore loose on the far side, and fell toward the pole in one hard gust. The windsock jerked. It filled halfway, then full, and swung out level. The cork of her held scent broke. Saskatoon smell poured across the girl's face. The girl stood up, both hands on the pole, and shouted east toward the next house. Wilma kept moving, thinner than before, her supply cut by half. The dead zone was behind her. So was most of what she had left to give.

Wilma crossed the last stretch of prairie thinner than she had ever been. The girl's shout had jumped ahead of her, house to house, porch to porch, faster than any wind could travel alone. When Wilma crested the low rise above the town, she saw what her whisper had done. Children lined both sides of the street. They stood shoulder to shoulder in matching red and white shirts, small flags in their fists, waiting. Some sat on curbs. Some held their parents' hands. All of them faced west, watching the sky for her. Wilma dropped low along the street and moved between their feet. She had one job left. She had to touch every child before the fireworks began, so the whole line would feel the celebration land at once. A boy near the front clutched a round red button pinned to his shirt, a maple leaf stamped clean across its face. He kept pressing it with his thumb like a doorbell. Wilma slipped past his ear and let a thread of saskatoon smell go. His head lifted. He whispered to the girl beside him. She whispered to the next child. The line began to hum. She was running out. She could feel the bottom of herself. Half her power had gone to the brick wall, and each child took a little more. She reached the middle of the crowd and almost stalled. Then she remembered why she had started. She thought of the boy at the abandoned playground standing up. She thought of the girl under the windsock shouting east. She pulled the last of her scent loose from wherever she had been holding it and let it out all at once. The air above the street cracked open. A bright creature spun into view over the children's heads, all sparks and wheels of colored light, turning fast. It was the shape her whisper made when it finally touched down. The children screamed with joy and pointed. Above the rooftops, the first real fireworks answered, red and gold, right on time. Wilma had almost nothing left. She drifted along the line of upturned faces and watched them. A small girl at the end of the street held her flag against her chest and laughed without looking away from the sky. That was the feeling. That was the whole reason. Wilma had carried it from Saskatchewan to here on her own, and the other winds had never come, and it had not mattered in the end. The children had carried the last miles for her. She let herself thin out over the crowd. Her scent was gone. Her speed was gone. What was left of her lifted between the sparks of the firework creature and joined them for a moment, prairie breeze and celebration light braided together above the street. Then she was only a soft movement in the hair of the girl with the flag, and then she was quiet. Coast to coast, children were shouting her message to each other under the same sky. The celebration held. Wilma had done what she came to do, and she rested.