I was sitting on a bench facing an old schoolhouse.

The door was locked. I had already tried it.

A few metres away stood an old church. Between them was a small courtyard with trees, a few benches, and an unusual silence for downtown Toronto.

A mild wind passed through the courtyard.

“Have you seen my boy?”

I turned around.

No one.

I looked behind the bench, toward the church, then toward the schoolhouse.

Nothing moved except the leaves.

The wind came again, and for some reason I remembered a friend of mine and one of his ridiculous theories.

He believed that voices never completely disappear.

According to him, old walls absorb them. Conversations, laughter, arguments and cries remain somewhere inside bricks, wooden floors and windows. One day, he was convinced, someone would invent a device sensitive enough to recover them.

We would hear conversations from rooms demolished a century ago.

I had laughed at him.

Sitting between two nineteenth-century buildings, I laughed again.

Then the voice returned.

“Please. Have you seen my boy?”

This time there was fear in it.

I stood up.

The voice seemed to be coming from the schoolhouse.

The building in front of me was the Enoch Turner Schoolhouse. It opened in 1849 to provide free education for children from Corktown’s working families.

But the locked door in front of me seemed to disappear.

It was sometime around 1855.

Children were inside.

And a young woman was running toward them.

I never saw her face. Somehow, I remained behind her, moving when she moved, stopping when she stopped.

Like her shadow.

“My son,” she asked. “Is he here?”

Children turned toward her.

No boy.

She hurried outside and crossed toward Little Trinity Church.

The church was already more than a decade old then, built for the working community growing in this eastern part of Toronto. Around it lived labourers and immigrant families in modest houses close to their places of work.

The woman entered.

For the first time, she stopped running.

She knelt.

I could not hear what she said. Perhaps she was praying. Perhaps she was simply trying to remember where she had last seen him.

Then she stood.

“Have you seen my boy?”

Again, no.

Outside, Corktown became louder.

The neighbourhood of churches and small houses was also becoming a neighbourhood of industry. Gooderham & Worts had been operating nearby since the 1830s, and workshops and industrial buildings were spreading through the area. Many Corktown residents lived only a short walk from the places where they worked.

I followed the woman toward the noise.

Workers moved through doorways. Wheels turned. Somewhere metal struck metal.

Then she stopped.

“I heard him.”

She ran toward one of the buildings.

A woman at the entrance blocked her.

“You cannot come in.”

“My son is inside.”

“There are only workers in there.”

“I heard him.”

“You need to leave.”

“He’s my son!”

She tried to push past.

The other woman held her back.

For a few seconds, their voices mixed with the machinery until I could no longer separate one sound from another.

Someone said they would call the police.

Then everything stopped.

The factory disappeared.

So did the woman.

I was standing alone in present-day Corktown.

A little farther away was another old industrial building. Today it houses Toronto Police Service’s 51 Division.

For a moment, I thought I had found where the woman had gone.

But history made that impossible.

The building was constructed in 1898 as part of the Consumers Gas Company complex. In 1855, when the woman whose voice I had been following would have walked these streets, it did not exist.

Somewhere along the way, the shadow had separated from its owner.

I walked on.

Then I heard her again.

Not beside me this time.

The voice seemed to come from somewhere far away, muffled at first, as if a wall—or perhaps more than a century—stood between us.

A man was asking questions.

“What is your son’s name?”

Silence.

“How old is he?”

Silence.

“When did you last see him?”

“At the school.”

“You saw him there?”

“I know he was there.”

Then another voice appeared.

A man’s voice. Breathless at first, then low and careful.

“I’m sorry.”

The woman said something I could not understand.

A voice that seemed to belong to a policeman spoke again.

“She has been looking everywhere.”

“I know.”

“Where is the boy?”

A long silence followed.

“There is no boy.”

The woman began crying.

The man continued.

“We had a son. He was stillborn. A few years ago.”

His voice became quieter.

“She has never completely recovered. Sometimes she thinks he is still somewhere out there.”

After that, I heard only her crying.

I returned to the small courtyard.

The schoolhouse was still locked. Little Trinity stood quietly beside it.

The afternoon had darkened while I was walking.

I sat on the same bench.

For a while, there was only the sound of leaves moving above me.

Then I noticed someone.

A woman was standing near the schoolhouse.

Her clothes looked as though they belonged to another time.

She did not look at me.

She slowly rested one hand on the gentle curve of her stomach.

Once.

Then again.

I stared at her.

A breeze passed through the courtyard.

For a moment, the leaves moved between us.

Then she was gone.

I remained on the bench for a few seconds.

“Idiot,” I muttered, thinking of my friend and his ridiculous theory.

Then I got up and left Corktown.

YF, August 12, 2026

Note: For those interested in exploring Corktown’s history further, I recommend Coralina R. Lemos’s Corktown: The History of a Toronto Neighbourhood and the People Who Made It (2018), a detailed account of the neighbourhood, its streets, institutions, and the people who shaped it.