by The Journey Prize Stories 32- The Best of Canada's New Writers (retail) (epub)
She squints through the dark. “It’s just, I know it’s hard for you, and if you ever wanted—”
I tell her no, absolutely not, whatever it is. Whisper that I don’t want anything different, don’t need anything more than what we have. I go big spoon and nestle into her until I’m hot, until I’m roasting under the blankets and wanting to roll away but also wanting just to melt, to seep, to burn hot as compost in nitrogen night.
The day Dad died, Mum and I sat in the bug tent in the backyard watching a horde of blue jays eat the heads off Mum’s sunflowers. Any other day she would have got up and screamed carnage at those birds but she just sat there watching. He’d weighed about forty-five pounds at the end and it was not a nice thing for a wife or a fifteen-year-old son to watch. It ended graciously, in sleep. The ambulance came and Mum went with because there were checks to be done, forms to be signed. After she came home we sat in the backyard watching those ravenous blue jays pick through a row of twenty or thirty six-foot sunflowers. I said how I didn’t know blue jays could be so vicious and Mum said oh yeah, everything beautiful has a dark side, just like everything wretched has a loveliness. When there were only three heads remaining and the blue jays were pecking tiredly, half of them gone, Mum told me those sunflowers had been growing in the spot where she’d buried her placenta after I was born. She said she’d always figured that’s why they grew so well there. Said how the placenta had enriched the soil and so in a way I was feeding those blue jays, we both were. And so the two of us sat there watching the birds gobble up the vegetation we’d nourished together and I saw each one grow a face. The last three sunflowers became me and Dad and Mum and I watched the blue jays shred those yellow faces into mangled tufts.
I take the long way to work and when I see the wind turbines I find myself driving toward them. Driving down a farm road and then onto a corn farm with a turbine on a strip of grass and weed and I’m leaping out of the car and sprinting up to it, kneeling while this terrible white demiurge churns its arms in slow rotation. I kneel there thinking up toward that turbine and feeling overpowered by something blunt and terrible and awesome. The sound of the thing is huge and steady and sonorous, an Olympian didgeridoo, and I remember about the bats. How this strange hum draws them in and then the arms send them plummeting into the fields where the farmers have to burn them so they don’t attract pests. The arms spin slow but in their slowness there’s something massive, something enormous and indifferent and nearly perfect. I imagine myself chopped into atoms, into confetti. I see tiny particles of my hair and skin feathering over the field, blending with the earth and the soil, becoming vegetable, becoming corn. The wholeness of that resignation, a longing to be unmade, to wilt beyond worry and debt, pension and disease.
The farmer whizzes over on an atv. Behind the quad there’s a trailer carrying a blue chemical drum, the skull-and-crossbones symbol on the side. The farmer asks if I’m all right and I tell him sure, fine, never better.
“Well then,” he says.
I walk away wondering how much ethanol’s in the soil.
* * *
—
The night shift sags and sputters. Clouds brood and curdle over the river. I get a text from Eileen saying she’s smelling that oil-smell again and is she going insane. I text back not to worry, it’s just the construction, I’ll phone the city tomorrow. I tell myself don’t check the phone don’t check the phone and then I check and it says that Eileen’s brother’s on the way.
What I do is panic. What I do is leave, which is a fireable offence. What I do is vacate my coveralls there in the middle of the unit with Suzy walking through shouting don’t even think about it but I need to get home and so I just say, “Be right back” and hustle to my car without even showering.
What I do is drive tilting and teetering and when I get home there’s a cruiser in the driveway among the shadowy hulks of graders and loaders lurking against the orange plastic mesh. Eileen’s in her chair at the top of the stairs saying sorry, she had to, her brother saw what was downstairs. She looks at me, a little broken.
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. It’s weird, super weird. But I love you. We can talk about it.”
I head down into the basement where a redheaded cop and Eileen’s brother stand kneeling over the muskeg pit, their backs to Mum. They’ve moved her slightly, pulled her beneath the stark light of the pull-string bulb. Up close, she looks bad. Wrinkly and purplish, with a sickly glaze.
I reach out to embrace her and the cop says no, don’t, you can’t do that. I ask him am I under arrest and he says you watch too much tv but this is basically unprecedented and we’re going to have to ask you a few questions downtown.
I nod to Mum: “What’ll happen to her?”
The cop winces. “Probably have to confiscate the body. Evidence.”
So I don’t let go. I don’t consult the cop. I step closer and hug Mum tight, press my face against hers and kiss both cheeks. Pull away and look deep into her face, which has been in the shadows but is visible now, a snaggle of resin and vein.
My pocket beeps. A text from Suzy: “The fuck are you? Get back here emergency all hands.”
Unlike feathered or furred animals, the human is a particularly difficult creature to preserve via taxidermy or other means. The main concern is the fragility of human skin, which discolours strikingly and stretches much more than animal skin. The taxidermied human, in other words, becomes highly unsightly. Take Jeremy Bentham’s failed auto-icon experiment, in which his otherwise soundly preserved head acquired a ghastly appearance and after years of student pranks had to be hidden away in a cupboard. While it is something of a legal grey area, it is also generally frowned upon, morally, to taxidermy or otherwise mount a human body. And yet experiments continue, mummification goes on, glassy eyes stare back unblinking from the far side of basement walls.
The enunciator’s going Class A and everyone’s running around frantic as I scramble into my coveralls and grab an scba and head out to Tower #1. Sal’s walking away from the scene, heading for the parking lot. “Fuck this,” he grumbles into his scba helmet. “Not worth it.”
I ignore him, keep going, suddenly beyond worry, over fear. When I look up I can see a red alert light blinking by the broiler on Tower #1, so I head over and climb the stairs.
Suzy’s down below and shouting, “Back inside back inside” but she can’t be talking to me because I’m floating. Floating very slowly, the world turned heavy and blurry. There’s a strange heat and a blur in the air and Suzy’s shouting, “Inside inside” but now I’m starting to think she might be shouting “Sulfide,” is clearly shouting “Sulfide.” Which seems funny. Which seems hilarious. Which seems perfect.
The enunciator ratchets up a notch, becomes a didgeridoo.
Below, the hydrants swivel their R2-D2 heads and let loose. Twenty hydrants sending millions of gallons of water arcing through the air to knock the gas off and that, too, is hilarious.
In the distance, turbines churn and churn and churn like children’s pinwheels, blowing all the bad air far far away.
I keep climbing. The hydrants arc and spit and soak me. I slip on the latticed steel stairs and recover and get to the valve near the alert light, start to turn it but it’s heavy, wildly heavy. Comically heavy as I lean in and stagger a little and then get it turning, get it shut.
On the way back to the stairs my legs are bendy like bubble gum. I take a step and then wilt into a kind of human puddle. Writhing onto my stomach, I see through the platform’s steel grid two ambulances and a fire truck raging into the parking lot. My scba’s bleating like a duck or a bulldozer and in the distance there are sirens, beautiful sirens. The hydrants spit their applause, twenty tearful arcs of triumph.
Eileen appears beside me, flapping turbine arms. I move to speak her name but she shushes me, fern-teeth wavering in the bog of her mouth. Her tongue is a hundred sea-
snakes and she’s saying shush, never mind, she’s come to take me away. As I’m clutching the nubs on her scaly green withers, I ask what happened to Mum, to the basement muskeg. She tells me diverted pipeline and the company will pay us off and Mum’s all right now, it’s time to let her go. And of course she’s right, Eileen. Of course she’s always been perfect and right and brave, so brave.
She starts to flap her turbine wings and soon we’re chugging up and soaring, cruising, swooping high over the river, the hydrants swirling through the sky below. Eileen curls into a loop-de-loop and when we come back up I can see that the hydrants have become gushers. Twenty black fountains arcing and curling through the floodlit night. Down below, a million neon-blue smelt dance calypso at the surface of the river. Mum stands beneath the bridge, looking up and waving, her face no longer discoloured, her gold incisor gleaming.
I glance over at Eileen, green eyes glowing elfin and wild. I tell her I have something to confess and she says she knows, she always knew. She says it’s a little weird, the thing with me and Mum, but what isn’t a little weird?
We catch hold of a thermal that takes us up fast, too fast, high above the black arcs of the fountains. The air strobes and changes colour and Eileen twirls a wing and says, “Look.” What I see is a sky full of plants. Coral and krill and strange ancient grasses and we’re riding it, soaring on the spirits of five hundred million years and for once it is not bad, is not sickening. All around us the gleaming ghosts of sedge and bulrushes, zooplankton and anemones, and all of it pulsing green again. Below the river full of dancing neon smelt as Eileen spreads her wings and jags her beak and tells me it was true, was always true: we were all compost, all along. I tell her thank you and I love you, cling to her wings as we rise up burning through the broken brilliant sky.
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
Michela Carrière is an Indigenous adventurer and artist from the trapline sixty kilometres from Cumberland House, Saskatchewan. She has grown up learning from her parents and grandparents, who have lived in this area for generations, practising the Cree way of life. She is now actively learning traditional medicine as she pursues the path of a Cree herbalist. Passing on her knowledge and experience through her company, Aski Holistic Adventures, she guides people on healing adventures in the wild nature of the north, on the homelands of the Cree and Métis.
Paola Ferrante’s debut poetry collection, What to Wear When Surviving a Lion Attack (Mansfield Press, 2019), was shortlisted for the 2020 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. She won The New Quarterly’s 2019 Peter Hinchcliffe Fiction Award and Room magazine’s 2018 prize for Fiction. Her work has appeared in PRISM international, Joyland, The Puritan, Grain, The Fiddlehead, and elsewhere. She is the poetry editor at Minola Review and is currently working on her first collection of short fiction, Her Body Among Animals. She resides in Toronto, Canada.
Lisa Foad’s short story collection, The Night Is a Mouth (Exile Editions, 2009), won the ReLit Award for Short Fiction and a Writers’ Trust of Canada Dayne Ogilvie Honour of Distinction. Her work has appeared in Taddle Creek, ELQ Magazine, Poetry Is Dead, and elsewhere, and has been awarded the Carter V. Cooper Short Fiction Prize. She holds an M.F.A. in fiction from Columbia University, where she was the recipient of a Felipe P. De Alba Fellowship and a nominee for the Henfield Prize. She lives in Toronto, and is currently working on a novel and short story collection.
David Huebert’s work has won the CBC Short Story Prize, The Walrus Poetry Prize, and was a National Magazine Award nominee (fiction) in 2018 and 2019. David’s fiction debut, Peninsula Sinking, won the Jim Connors Dartmouth Book Award, was shortlisted for the Alistair MacLeod Short Fiction Prize, and was runner-up for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award. David has taught creative writing at Dalhousie University and is the 2020–2021 Writer in Residence at the University of New Brunswick. His second book of fiction, Chemical Valley, is forthcoming from Biblioasis.
Jessica Johns is a Nehiyaw-English-Irish aunty and member of Sucker Creek First Nation in Treaty 8 Territory in Northern Alberta. She is the managing editor for Room magazine and a co-organizer of the Indigenous Brilliance Reading Series. Her short story “The Bull of the Cromdale” was nominated for a 2019 National Magazine Award in fiction and her debut poetry chapbook, How Not to Spill, won the 2019 bpNichol Chapbook Award. “Bad Cree” won a silver medal for fiction at the 2020 National Magazine Awards.
Rachael Lesosky is a writer from the Okanagan Valley. In 2017, she was a poetry finalist for The Malahat Review’s Open Season Awards, and in 2018 she was longlisted for the Jacob Zilber Prize for Short Fiction. Her work can be found in The Malahat Review and Saltern Magazine. She holds a B.A. in creative writing from the University of Victoria.
Canisia Lubrin is the author of Voodoo Hypothesis (Wolsak & Wynn, 2017) and The Dyzgraphxst (McClelland & Stewart, 2020). An editor, critic, and teacher, her writing has been published and anthologized internationally, with translations into Spanish, Italian, French, and German. Lubrin’s fiction has been shortlisted for the Toronto Book Award and longlisted for The Journey Prize. She was 2019 Writer in Residence at Queen’s University and taught poetry at the Banff Centre. NOW Magazine featured Lubrin in its 2020 Black Futures issue. In 2018 she was named a writer to watch by the CBC. “The Origin of the Lullaby” is part of her forthcoming linked short story collection, Code Noir. She holds an M.F.A. from the University of Guelph.
Born in Montreal and raised in Cobourg, Ontario, Florence MacDonald was a practising physician in the Northwest Territories, Hong Kong, and East Africa before becoming a full-time writer. Her multi-award-winning and internationally produced plays include Elevator, Take Care of Me, Belle, Home is My Road, Missing and How Do I Love Thee? With choreographer Shawn Byfield, she co-created the Dora Award–winning tap dance show, i think i can. She has written for CBC Radio and her short stories appear in Understorey Magazine, The Fiddlehead, and The Dalhousie Review. Florence is currently working on her novel, My Heart and I.
Cara Marks is a writer from Vancouver Island. She earned her B.A. and M.A. in creative writing at the University of Victoria and the University of East Anglia (U.K.). She writes playful, intimate stories, which have been longlisted for the 2018 Carter V. Cooper Short Fiction Competition, the 2017 Australian Book Review’s Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize, and the 2016 Mogford Prize for Food and Drink Writing. Her work has appeared in the Commonwealth Writers’ literary journal, adda, and elsewhere. As part of her creative-critical Ph.D. on food, literature and empathy, she is currently writing her first novel.
Fawn Parker is president of The Parker Agency and co-founder of BAD NUDES Magazine. She is the author of Set-Point (ARP Books, 2019), Jolie-Laide (Palimpsest, 2021), and Dumb-Show (ARP Books, 2021). Her work has been published in EVENT, The Puritan, All Lit Up, and Maisonneuve Magazine. She is the recipient of the Irving Layton Award for Fiction, the Avie Bennett Emerging Writers Scholarship, and the Adam Penn Gilders Award for Creative Writing. She is currently working on her third and fourth novels.
Susan Sanford Blades holds an M.F.A. in fiction from the University of Victoria. Her stories have appeared in Cosmonauts Avenue, Minola Review, the moth: arts and literature, Southwest Review, The Puritan, Numéro Cinq, Coming Attractions 16, and other publications. “The Rest of Him” is an excerpt from her novel, Fake It So Real, that will be published by Nightwood Editions in fall 2020. Susan lives with her three sons in Victoria, B.C., where she is working on her second novel.
John Elizabeth Stintzi is a novelist and poet who grew up on a cattle farm in northwestern Ontario. In 2019, they were awarded the Writers’ Trust of Canada’s RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers, as well as The Malahat Review’s Long Poem Prize. Their work has appeared in the Kenyon Review, Fiddlehead, The Malahat Review, and Ploughshares. They are the author of the novel Vanishing Monuments (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2020), as well as the poetry collection Junebat (House of Anansi, 2020). They currently live and work in the Uni
ted States.
Hsien Chong Tan was born in Singapore and holds an M.F.A. from the New Writers Project at the University of Texas at Austin. “The Last Snow Globe Repairman in the World” was the winner of PRISM international’s 2019 Jacob Zilber Prize for Short Fiction and was shortlisted for a 2020 National Magazine Award. Hsien’s stories have also appeared in Mid-American Review, Crab Orchard Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Vancouver with his wife and cats, and is currently working on a collection of short stories.
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTING PUBLICATIONS
For more information about the publications that submitted to this year’s competition, The Journey Prize, and The Journey Prize Stories, please visit www.facebook.com/TheJourneyPrize.
The Dalhousie Review is an award-winning literary journal published triannually by Dalhousie University. Now in its one hundredth year, it features poetry, fiction, essays, and interviews by both established and emerging writers in Canada and from around the world as well as reviews of recent books, films, albums, and performances. Past contributors include some of Canada’s most celebrated writers, such as Margaret Atwood, Alfred Bailey, Earle Birney, Elizabeth Brewster, Charles Bruce, George Elliott Clarke, Fred Cogswell, Laurence Dakin, Leo Kennedy, A.M. Klein, Kenneth Leslie, Malcolm Lowry, Hugh MacLennan, Alistair MacLeod, Alden Nowlan, A.J.M. Smith, Alice Mackenzie Swaim, W.D. Valgardson, Guy Vanderhaeghe, and Miriam Waddington. Editor: Anthony Enns. Production Manager: Lynne Evans. Correspondence: The Dalhousie Review, c/o Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS, B3H 4R2. For subscription and submission guidelines, please contact the Production Manager at [email protected]
EVENT has inspired and nurtured writers for almost five decades. Featuring the very best in contemporary writing from Canada and abroad, EVENT consistently publishes award-winning fiction, poetry, non-fiction, notes on writing, and critical reviews—all topped off by stunning Canadian cover art and illustrations. Stories first published in EVENT regularly appear in the Best Canadian Stories and Journey Prize Stories anthologies, are finalists at the National Magazine Awards, and won the Grand Prix Best Literature and Art Story at the 2017 Canadian Magazine Awards. EVENT is also home to Canada’s longest-running non-fiction contest (fall deadline), and its Reading Service for Writers. Editor: Shashi Bhat. Managing Editor: Ian Cockfield. Fiction Editor: Christine Dewar. Correspondence: EVENT, P.O. Box 2503, New Westminster, BC, V3L 5B2. Email (queries only): [email protected] Website: www.eventmagazine.ca
