The Journey Prize Stories 25

by Various

  – Nancy Richler

  “I remember buying twenty copies of the fourth Journey Prize anthology, and giving them out to family for Christmas with my story helpfully Post-it marked. I finally got up the courage to ask a cousin what he thought of it, and he said, ‘Yeah. It was long. Didn’t finish it.’ Which seemed to be the reaction of most of my family, except for my mom and dad, who kept their copy on the coffee table. The press and the attention I received from being in the anthology were important to my career, but not as crucial as my family finally referring to me as ‘The Writer’ instead of ‘The Most Educated Bum in Kitamaat Village.’ ”

  – Eden Robinson

  “The Journey Prize provides something valuable, sincere, and joyful: a celebration of short stories, a way for them to be appreciated in public, right out loud. Every writer has to write for him- or herself – there’s no way to work that hard if you don’t love it – but it really does help to know that there’s a community out there, waiting to cheer if you get it really, really right. The Journey Prize is a huge cheer, and a huge support to short story writers.”

  – Rebecca Rosenblum

  “The day I received the letter that told me my story would be included in the Journey Prize anthology was one of the most memorable days of my writing career. I felt that it meant my writing had been truly seen, and that my story had been included in a large literary conversation, with authors I admire and respect. It was like I’d been given a ticket to fly to another hemisphere! It gave me the confidence I needed to finish my first book. Being a part of the Journey Prize – both as a writer and as a juror – has been a privilege.”

  – Sarah Selecky

  “I owe a huge debt to the Journey Prize. Before my nominations, I didn’t even know I wanted to be a writer. I saw my writing as arts and crafts, nothing more serious than macaroni that’s spray-painted gold and glued to a tissue box. When my first story got nominated, I thought, ‘Fluke.’ When a second story got the nod, I thought, ‘Another fluke.’ When a third story was picked, I thought, ‘Career change!’

  If there were no Journey Prize, I wouldn’t have kept writing. I wouldn’t be sitting in a room all alone, making up stuff in my head. Obsessing over my fiction. Looking at somebody and thinking what a great character he’d make in my novel.

  When people ask how I’ve changed since publishing my first book, I reply that I’m now more neurotic but also more content. So a big thanks to the Journey Prize and McClelland & Stewart for feeding my neurosis and making me a happier person.”

  – Neil Smith

  “Quite a few years before I would have dared call myself a writer in public, while I was still working at a bank, I began to buy the Journey Prize anthology yearly. I did so because I understood it to collect the best new short fiction of the year, and I hoped quietly that I would be inspired. One afternoon, a colleague caught me reading the anthology at my desk. Knowing a little about my literary interests, he asked bluntly: ‘Are you in it this year?’ I wasn’t, and I said so. But after he left my office, I remember my astonishment, my disbelief at his suggestion. These are ‘real’ writers (I wanted to shout), and while I aspire in the same direction, I have yet to publish a single story! About eight years later, I was included in the anthology and I remembered my colleague. It occurred to me that – despite the years I’d been at it and the stories that had since been published – nothing up to that point had convinced me that I could be a real writer. And while I remained astonished to see my name in those pages, the Journey Prize anthology now marked a beginning in which I could really believe. I’ve continued to read the anthology, and count it as an honour to have adjudicated during its fifteenth year. To me, its ongoing contribution is found on every page: new writers, new voices, new confidence.”

  – Timothy Taylor

  “ ‘Simple Recipes’ was my first published story, and the one that, to my utter amazement, made it into the Journey Prize anthology. I remember getting the phone call, and remember sitting on the couch for a long time staring at the wall. I had a strange sense of vertigo, to think that it might actually be possible to one day write a book, and for that book one day to find readers. I had always quietly hoped for that possibility, but hadn’t really thought it was within the boundaries of reality until that day.”

  – Madeleine Thien

  “Looking back over two decades of writing fiction, I find to my amazement that the greatest imaginative feat required of me thus far has been the conception of myself as a writer. The early years were the toughest. Every published story helped, but the day I learned that my work was to be included in the eleventh volume of The Journey Prize Stories – and thereby in a national tradition of literary discovery – was the day when the writing life I had long imagined finally began to seem real.”

  – Alissa York

  INTRODUCTION

  Sitting on the Journey Prize jury is nothing if not daunting. After agreeing to serve as jurors, we each received a rather sizeable package in the mail. It contained a great bundle of short stories, which stretched across an impressive spectrum of genres. Fantasy and science fiction, works that travelled back in time or sprang forward into the future, works that could be categorized as traditional literary fiction alongside experimental stories that pushed the boundaries of what a story can be. The package contained work by many of the most promising of this country’s emerging writers, a bounty we were ordered to whittle down into the anthology you now hold in your hands – or that you’re reading on your iPad. In these pages, you’ll discover, we’re confident to say, twelve of the best short stories written by Canada’s emerging writers over the past year.

  On the one hand, the task was like comparing apples to oranges to, well, dragon fruit; every story had its own flavour. On the other hand, it was a rather straightforward job: judge the story’s excellence, nothing else.

  This is as pure a prize as you’ll find in Canada. As judges, we read and ranked the stories without knowing who the authors were. This is not a prize that rewards friends, nor does it favour reputation. It is a collection – twelve stories, three finalists, and one winner – that is based solely on the strength of the individual stories themselves.

  This year, eighty-one different stories battled for our affections, ranging in content from a post-apocalyptic suburb coping with rumours of cannibalism, to a movie theatre in Mauritius where dreams of a better future flicker on-screen, to a mattress store where a long-lasting friendship threatens to come undone.

  For each of us, it was a chance to partake in a process that now stretches back twenty-five years, a sneak peek at authors who – in the future – will likely become favourites. Like an appearance in a volume of Granta’s “Best Young Novelists” or the New Yorker’s “20 under 40” or the O. Henry Prize Stories, being in this anthology often marks the start of a long, and celebrated, career.

  It’s trite to say that it’s an honour just to be nominated, but check out the list of previous contributors at the back of this book: simply being in the anthology can be a mark of things to come. Included in past anthologies have been non-winners like M.G. Vassanji, Frances Itani, David Bergen, Steven Heighton, Marina Endicott, Anne Carson, Elizabeth Hay, Dennis Bock, Michael Crummey, Madeleine Thien, Lee Henderson, Karen Solie, Annabel Lyon, Emma Donoghue, Charlotte Gill, Sarah Selecky, Craig Davidson, and Pasha Malla.

  It’s also fitting that the Journey Prize should mark the beginning of a journey for the writers included in its pages: the impact of James A. Michener’s donation of the Canadian royalties for his novel Journey has clearly set many careers in motion.

  And how was it behind the closed doors?

  Like any jury, ours was one with argument, humour, complaint, and the occasional attempt at horse-trading, coupled with the knowledge that this is an anthology with real heft and value. The decisions mattered. We were three individual jurors making difficult, careful choices – but in the end, our choices were only the opinion of three people, three readers. This is
not a yes or no judgment on new careers as a whole – for all of us, what mattered was that the talent in the individual stories was humbling.

  And where do they all come from? That’s critical, too. It’s worth noting that the eighty-one submissions were initially selected by this country’s literary magazines, a segment of the literary world that is among the most financially precarious. They are out there, picking and publishing new and emerging writers; they are the farm teams, the incubators, the discoverers of Canada’s writing future.

  Remember that when you get a chance to subscribe to any one of them – to these magazines that are carving out the new frontiers – you will see things there that you will see nowhere else in this country.

  And the greatest wonder for all three of us? Seeing the names, finally, of the people behind this crop of stories, and welcoming them to a great fraternity.

  Here’s to twenty-five years, and then twenty-five more. The literary industry is changing in many ways: it might not even be fair to call it solely the “book publishing” business much longer. But there will always be new voices, new talent, and in whatever form, this anthology will continue to shine a bright light out into the darkness and reflect back new and hungry eyes.

  Miranda Hill

  Mark Medley

  Russell Wangersky

  June 2013

  LAURA LEGGE

  IT’S RAINING IN PARIS

  There is so much work to be done.

  Rain has been pounding Paris for weeks. Whole swathes of pavement have come untied, sidewalks once ribboned into four-way intersections, ravelled now with seams exposed, ragged hems no longer travelled by bicycles, sedans, wandering feet.

  They say my blueprints will pull us headfirst from this emergency.

  In my office, an eight-by-eight cork cubicle on the eighth floor of the Institut de la Ville, I hunch over an early draft I’ve called “Centre City Contingency,” using a line gauge to lay out a series of stormwater drains. Until I sense my boss hovering.

  Digging my heels into the linoleum, I turn slowly to face him.

  —We are in shit, Serge, he says.

  ––

  Two days ago, I saw a girl lose her life in a lemon sundress. She was crossing avenue de Choisy, past dusk on a Thursday, parting smoky sheets of rain. I was the only one near her when she was hit. Strangers crowded against the smoggy glass of dim sum restaurants, Hong Kong bakeries, stared hollow-eyed from the whale’s belly of the 183 bus.

  Her skin barely held her bones together.

  Time passed, who knows how much of it, before those same strangers poured onto the wet pavement. A man with pock-marked cheeks folded his nylon windbreaker in half, angled the makeshift pillow under the crown of her head. A woman in a silk turban knelt beside the body – marking with fluttering eyelashes the moment when her body became the body – and let a storm fall down her cheeks.

  At some point, an ambulance arrived. Two young medics pressed their ears to the girl’s chapped lips and waited for breath that never came. Every evening for the past two years, I have followed the same ritual: rolling my blueprints into a drawing tube, buttoning my vinyl raincoat, and fording avenue Kléber to my suite at Hotel Raphaël.

  The greatest joy of living in a hotel is that hardly anything you use belongs to you. The bed you sleep in, the tub you bathe in, these are tools you do not have to maintain.

  With my forearms, I iron my plans flat across the suite’s Victorian dining table. Bicycle boulevards, civic squares, aquatic reserves, the barbed wire of railroad tracks – a miniature city balances on the Carrara marble.

  My boss has fixed a slew of pink sticky notes like chicken pox on the plans. Remember, downtown is our town; the Seine is the yolk that flavours the egg of Paris. I tear them off one by one.

  Tonight my hands migrate south on the blueprint, to Chinatown, the shaded elevations of trauma centres, pediatric hospitals. And, as there must be, the depressions.

  —You’re unbearably vague, Colette is saying to me. I’ve been with her once, maybe twice. She has deep-set eyes that are at once inviting and distant, like a memory just beyond reach.

  She picks up a vanity jar of ground cardamom from the bedside table and rubs the fine powder in the flexures of her palms. I flash to lamb tagine, my Formica mother in a Formica kitchen, shag-rugged and minimal, her slack lips forming unreadable words, proud or pound, love or loaf.

  —You’re not handsome enough to get away with being vague. If you were better looking, you’d be mysterious.

  I’m lost in a long-gone Christmas, cardamom braids rising in a redbrick oven, an autumn-haired woman riveting her arms around my neck, ornamenting me with eggnog kisses, while Harry Belafonte croons “Glory Manger” on our worn-down record player. I say nothing. Colette turns her back on me.

  —You’re afraid, she sends over her shoulder. You’re a hunter with no heart.

  And how beautiful her bare spine looks, straightened as if to underline her unkindness. I think I’m beginning to love her.

  It seems that my boss has been crying.

  —Avenue de Choisy? he asks from the doorway to my office. His hair is rumpled with stress and humidity; he is a stray dog, river-eyed and wild, his matted coat licked against the grain.

  —I know what I’m doing.

  His cheeks burn red. —If there are sinkholes in rue de Rivoli because you want to pump all of our efforts into Chinatown, you’ll be out of a job. I won’t think twice.

  Through my office window, I make out the north face of Hotel Raphaël – the lace balustrade, the limestone carvings of pomegranates and lions’ heads – and I want, badly, to go home.

  My boss lowers his gaze to his polished Valentino loafers. On his left toe, he notices a pigeon dropping and looks as if he might cry again. He is a tweed suit with no man in it; his body has slipped out, vanished into tedium, rain poised to wash away any trace that he may have existed.

  In any flood, there are abandoned vehicles. I have flown to Chongqing, Queensland, and Cologne to plan for rebuilding after natural disasters, and seen miles of sedans deserted, dead headlights wired to dead batteries.

  Down de Choisy, the water is low enough to walk through – or, we walk through it because we can’t be still – but nothing smaller than a bus can clear the overflow. I follow the road like a salmon going downriver, netted by the quiet pull of magnetic fields, to Chinatown. At some point, the wind picks up, and I huddle under the domed awning of a magazine stand.

  I settle beside the gossip glossies while the proprietor, a man with a puddle for a chin, clears his throat over and over. From there I look out into the street, to an imagined chalk outline overwhelmed by the flood but not washed away, the nipped waist and tulip hem of a sundress.

  Here, it takes work to filter beauty from the ugliness, the vibrant trains of mounted paper lanterns from the ones that have fallen, detritus scattered in the ocean, taking on the shapes of pried-open clams, sunfish bones, red coral caked in salt. How to find anything beautiful while sadness folds itself around us, a beach blanket of steel wool?

  Before stepping out from under the awning, I raise a newspaper over my head. Two steps into the road, the newspaper is already soggy. Still I cling to it; not for shelter, but for its semblance of structure, as something I can hold in my hands.

  Colette paces the Alcove Suite, an architect surveying her building site, industrious but aware of its limitations. I perch on a red-velvet bergère, watching her luminous face as she decides what, together, we have room to construct.

  —I can’t believe it, she murmurs. Hotel Raphaël.

  While she slips off her slingbacks, I unseal my rainboots from my calves and peel away my socks. We line up side by side on the king bed, each half-starfished on the silk duvet, nowhere touching.

  —I went on a vacation once, Colette says, after so much time has passed that I thought she was asleep. When I was twelve, my father and I took a charter flight to Dakar.

  Across my mind runs a pano
rama of a clammy city, the opening montage of a New Wave movie: high-rises sweating like leather, women ripe on hot-waxed mopeds, men with rickety carts hawking dried plums and chevron beads. In this world I expect Colette’s words to be silver floss, to glisten.

  —He grew up there, but he was ashamed of growing up without money. When we visited, he rented a hotel room for me to stay in, alone, while he stayed in his childhood home.

  —Bet your hotel wasn’t like this one, I answer, unsure of the shades in my voice.

  —It was a Radisson. No shred of personality in that place. Not a single honest smell or mismatched piece of linen. Who can stand beige throw pillows?

  The sun, which had, for a spell of fifteen minutes, poked out from behind the cirrus clouds, disappears from view. Colette fits her palm to mine, and the darkness we are left in doubles for the low light of intimacy.

  Hell or high water, the suggestions have trickled in. Alternative routes for public transit, wider boulevards, new fountains. The people want to revive Old Paris.

  I refuse to reshape this city into its own shortcomings. Wider boulevards will only increase traffic; pigeons will drown in new fountains. I will not suffer for someone else’s nostalgia.

  The public doesn’t understand. Simply because the city is broken, and we are forced to rebuild, doesn’t make this an opportunity to carve out a dream world.

  I uncap a 0.18 millimetre pen – with it, I could perform surgery – and steady the nib in the heart of Chinatown.

  In the next room, my boss is singing Josephine Baker in a vaudevillian boom, filling each wordless bar with the mimicked lilt of an accordion. Paris! Paris! Paris! For people like him, this city is a Vincente Minelli movie – Leslie Caron sipping from a champagne flute, lovers picnicking on the Seine, Gene Kelly serenading a baguette.