The Journey Prize Stories 25

by Various

  “I don’t know,” said Lucas. “I never met him.” He paused. “Maybe you could ask your mother.”

  “My mother …” Casey stopped. “Yeah, maybe. Whatever.” She opened the book and started reading. Lucas sat on the step, watching her. After a minute, she looked up. “Um, I’m reading here,” she said.

  “Right,” Lucas said. He went back to the counter, picked up the labels and started sticking them, one by one, on the backs of the books.

  ––

  “God, Lucas, for someone who works with superheroes all day, you have no imagination.” That was Laure, during a game of Pictionary against Dave and Julie one Saturday night the previous winter. The subject was SpongeBob SquarePants. Lucas had spent the whole time drawing an exact, detailed replica of SpongeBob, who apparently Laure had never even heard of and thought that Lucas should have known that she wouldn’t have heard of him, and because of this he should have taken the drawing in a more abstract direction. Later, in their bedroom, the fight ballooned, and suddenly it wasn’t just his approach to Pictionary that lacked vision, but his entire life.

  “Why are we at home on a Saturday night playing Pictionary with Dumb and Dumber, anyway?” Lucas asked. “It’s like we’re fucking retired.” Even before Laure said anything, Lucas knew he had made a mistake. A tub of moisturizer flew past his face.

  “Because you didn’t want to go anywhere!” she screamed. “You never want to go anywhere!”

  “Laure,” Lucas said. He tried to wrap his arms around her while she pummelled him against his chest. “Where do you want to go?”

  She wrenched herself away and stared at him, wet-faced and angry. “Spain,” she said. “I want to go to Spain.”

  Lucas, who had been expecting a “somewhere fun” or “away from here” or something like that, was thrown off by her specificity. “Uh, okay,” he said. “Why … what’s in Spain?”

  Laure sat on the bed with her back turned to him, wiping at her face with the palms of her hands. “Nothing,” she said. “Forget it. Just go get ready for bed.” She lay down and curled herself into a ball. She still wouldn’t look at him.

  While he was brushing his teeth, Lucas tried to imagine himself surprising Laure with two plane tickets. She would probably think it was romantic. He tried to think of what airline would fly to Spain. Would there be direct flights from Toronto? Or would they have to switch planes in London? What if they had a long stopover there? Would they have to change their money to pounds, and then to whatever kind of money they used in Spain? What kind of money did they use in Spain? The whole thing just seemed so complicated. Later, when he had crawled into bed next to Laure, he decided maybe he’d just take her to a Spanish restaurant. Or Mexican, even. Yes. Mexican would probably be the best idea.

  A few weeks after Casey and her mom had moved in, Lucas opened the apartment door to find Pearl scrubbing vomit out of the carpet in the hall. He got down on his knees to help her, the stench curdling his earlier cup of coffee in his stomach.

  “She’s going through a rough time right now,” Pearl said. “The divorce was bad enough, but when Dylan chose to live with her father …” Pearl stopped. “I’m sorry, dear. You don’t want to hear this.”

  “It’s fine,” Lucas said, breathing in through his mouth.

  Pearl looked at him. “I know Casey’s been hanging around the store all the time, Lucas. I’m sorry if it’s been a burden.”

  Lucas dropped a paper towel into the Loblaws bag Pearl had brought out for garbage. “Pearl, don’t even worry about it. I barely notice her.”

  “I just – I don’t know what to do with her.” Pearl stopped scrubbing and Lucas saw that she was crying. He started picking up the rest of the paper towels and stuffing them in the bag, slowly moving away from her. Pearl took a piece of paper towel and blew her nose. “She’s just so much like … Nate …” She sat back on her knees and looked at Lucas. “You’re a good boy, Lucas,” she said. “That girl of yours is a fool for leaving.”

  Lucas stood up. “I’m going to, I mean, I’m on my way to Falucci’s for some milk,” he said. “Do you, uh, need anything?”

  “No, no, go, it’s fine.” Pearl dabbed at her eyes. “I’m just going to …”

  “Yeah,” said Lucas. “Okay.” He turned around and walked down the hallway as fast as he could without looking like he was running away.

  At Falucci’s he thought about buying something for Pearl, some chocolate maybe, or a bag of cookies. But he didn’t even know what kind of cookies she liked. She probably knew everything about him, but he didn’t even know what kind of goddamn cookies she liked.

  On the way back from Falucci’s, Lucas stopped to check on the bike, which, after three weeks, was still there. Lucas supposed he wasn’t surprised. Most bike thieves, he guessed, were men, and it wasn’t a practical bike for a man. Probably not a practical bike for a woman, either. He really thought Laure had liked it, though. She liked flowers, and girlie things. And she seemed so appreciative, when he brought it home, riding it around the parking lot, posing with it for pictures to put up on her blog. “And you can stop taking the subway all the time,” Lucas had told her. “Ride it to school, get some fresh air. You know.”

  “And I can put my books in the basket, just like a European,” she had said, wrapping her arms around him. But she never did ride it to school. It just sat in the corner behind the couch gathering dust. When people would come over to the apartment, she would show it to them, brag about Lucas’s amazing yard sale find, and wasn’t it so cool and vintage? Like it was a decoration, Lucas thought.

  “What are you doing?” Casey came up behind him, startling him so much he almost dropped his milk.

  “Why are you always around?” he asked.

  Casey, preoccupied with a Fudgsicle, ignored him. “Is that your bike?” she asked.

  “No,” he said. “It belongs to a friend of mine.”

  She walked over to the bike and prodded it with chocolate-sticky fingers. “It’s cool,” she said. “Kind of useless, though. There’s not even any speeds.”

  Lucas leaned against the wall. “Yeah. I guess she thought so, too.”

  Casey slid the end of her Fudgsicle off of the stick with her teeth and threw the stick on the ground. “Can I try it?” she asked.

  “I guess,” said Lucas. “The key’s upstairs, I can …” But Casey had already pulled a bobby pin out of her hair and was jamming it in the lock, and within a couple of seconds it popped open. “Nice work,” said Lucas.

  “Thanks,” said Casey. “You know, Dylan was a professional bike thief. She used to take me on runs with her some nights in Kingston, until one night she stole the bike of the son of the leader of the Russian mafia and they put a hit out on her …”

  “Yeah, yeah,” said Lucas.

  Casey jumped on the bike and started pedalling around the parking lot. “… In the middle of the night,” she called back over her shoulder, “we had to fleeeeeeeeeeee …” Her face was still covered in chocolate, and she had something green stuck in her teeth, but she was smiling. Lucas found himself wishing he was twelve again, that he had the time to do it all over again. The thought surprised and scared him. Up until that moment, he hadn’t thought he had anything to do all over.

  Casey brought the bike to a stop in front of him. “Yeah,” she said. “This bike sucks.”

  “Sorry,” said Lucas. “Maybe some other little brat will come steal it.”

  They walked the bike back over to the rack together. Lucas picked up Casey’s Fudgsicle stick and handed it to her. “Put this in the garbage,” he said.

  “Okay,” Casey said, taking it from him. “So, what was her name?”

  Lucas looped the lock back around the front wheel of the bike. “Who?” he asked.

  “Your friend. The bike chick.”

  “Oh.” Lucas stood up. “Laure. Her name was Laure.”

  “Weird.” Casey popped the end of the dirty stick in her mouth. Lucas cringed. “Where is she?”r />
  Lucas leaned against the bike rack and brushed his hands against his jeans. “Well,” he said. He looked at Casey. “We had been living together for two years, and I thought we were madly in love. She was a cellist. She had been recording herself playing and posting it on the internet. One day, this guy, a famous underground DJ from Ibiza named Isoceles Jones, found her site. Apparently he liked her stuff and wanted to sample it. So they started emailing each other, and talking on the phone, and then one day she just up and went to Spain to be with him.” He paused, rubbing his hands over his face. “Since then, they’ve recorded a single together that went to number 17 on the U.K. dance charts, and they’re going on tour opening for a German digital hardcore group called STV Suicide. All of which I found out from her Wikipedia page.” He grabbed one of the bike handles. “So I guess she doesn’t really need this.” He gave the bike a shake, then pushed it over. It clanged against the rack, but the lock kept it from falling.

  “Holy crap.” Casey took the stick out of her mouth, staring at him. “Dude, I am sorry I said you had no imagination. That was the best story I ever heard!”

  “Yeah,” said Lucas. “It’s a pretty good one.” He started walking toward the door.

  Casey trotted behind him. “Seriously,” she said, waving the stick through the air. “That could be a movie or something. Can I use that one sometime? About Dylan, I mean?”

  “Yup. Sure.” Lucas ran up the stairs, Casey at his heels.

  “I’d have to change all that love stuff …”

  “Whatever you want.” Lucas stopped at his apartment. “Milk’s getting warm,” he said. Casey opened her mouth again, but Lucas closed the door before she could get anything out.

  She had left him a note.

  A note. Even the insignificant roommates, the ones whose names he didn’t have plastered across his fucking heart, had managed better than that.

  Later, she had called him, crying. “Just tell me you want me to come back,” she whispered through the phone. She sounded so far away. “Just tell me you can’t live without me, that I mean everything to you, that you’ll come to Ibiza to get me if you have to.”

  But he couldn’t. “I’m keeping your sheets,” he said instead. “And your DVD.” He hung up, the phone shaking in his hand.

  That night, Lucas woke up to the smell of something burning. His first thought was that he was having a seizure. “Dr. Penfield,” he remembered the thick-accented woman in the Historica minute saying. “I smell burnt toast.” When he woke up enough to realize he was okay, he turned the light on and saw smoke pouring in from outside through the open bedroom window. Holding his breath, he closed the window and then threw on a T-shirt and headed downstairs to check it out.

  The bike was on fire. It seemed impossible, but it was true. Someone had taken stacks of paper – comic books, Lucas realized – and stuffed them around the bike rack and set them ablaze. Bright orange flames were licking the side of the building, illuminating the thick black plumes of smoke that were rising straight from the pile up to Lucas’s apartment. And off to the side, holding a can of WD-40, was Casey.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” Lucas snatched the can from her hand. She just kept staring straight ahead, watching the flames. “Casey!” He grabbed her shoulders and shook her.

  Slowly, she looked at him. “It was true, wasn’t it? Your story.”

  He dropped his hands. In the distance, he could hear sirens. “Yeah. It was true.”

  Casey kept staring at him. “I wish mine was,” she whispered.

  Lucas looked around, then threw the empty can on the fire. It exploded in a bright burst of flame. “Come on,” he said.

  Casey looked down at her hands. “People will find us,” she said.

  “No, they won’t,” said Lucas, giving her a push. “You’re a ninja, remember? Be a ninja.”

  They started walking. Behind them, they could hear voices, and the sirens getting closer, but they didn’t turn around. After about a block, Lucas realized Casey didn’t have any shoes on, so he bent down and let her climb on his back. He wasn’t sure where he was going, so he just kept walking, past Falucci’s, past the library, past the souvlaki place, into the unknown.

  “Perfect Storm,” he said after a while.

  Casey, who had been nearly asleep against his shoulder, raised her head. “Huh?”

  “Perfect Storm. It was the comic book I used to write. Well, tried to. I sent an issue to a publisher, but he said it was stupid.”

  Casey put her head back against his shoulder and was quiet for so long he thought she had fallen back asleep. Finally, she whispered “What was it about?”

  Lucas stopped. There was a small park ahead, and he bent over, sliding Casey off his back and onto a bench. The sun was just coming up. Across the street there was a Tim Hortons, and Lucas wished he had brought some change with him. He sat down on the bench next to Casey. “A super-intelligent tornado,” he said.

  Casey yawned. “That is stupid,” she said. She leaned over and put her head down on the bench, curling up into a little ball. Lucas stretched his legs out in front of him and waited for the sun to rise.

  MARNIE LAMB

  MRS. FUJIMOTO’S

  WEDNESDAY AFTERNOONS

  Mrs. Fujimoto takes her powdered green tea on the balcony at three o’clock on Wednesday afternoons from April to October. She has a standing appointment at one for a rinse and set. Her hair, a delicate helmet of curls, has retained the softness and lustre of youth. On leaving the stylist, she strides to the florist’s, designer two-inch heels clicking, turquoise coat (a small, as always) swaying. Older men smile as she passes, younger ones open doors.

  At the florist’s, she chooses the freshest flowers, yellow chrysanthemums perhaps. Back home, she arranges them asymmetrically in the two-headed porcelain vase and places the arrangement on the mahogany dining table. She boils water and opens the tin with the powder. She adds two jade-coloured scoops to a cup, stirs the mixture with a bamboo whisk, and brings the cup out to the balcony.

  The balcony faces a box-like building populated by low-level salarymen and foreigners, a view that is usually uninteresting to Mrs. Fujimoto. Instead she cranes her neck to the north, pinpointing the spot behind the NTT and Panasonic spires where she knows the temple garden lies. The honking of car horns and the yelling of schoolchildren below fade away as she imagines the winding pathway enclosed by azaleas, the spark of meeting a patch of irises in full bloom. Her face becomes slack. This slackening occurs only when no one else is present.

  One Wednesday in May 2005, two things attract her notice. The first is a white camellia petal which has blown onto the balcony and lies at her feet, waiting. She caresses the flower, its texture soft and vulnerable as wet paper, and inhales the aroma. The second is a flicker from the opposite balcony. A new foreigner, a young woman, is bending over a washing machine. She peers around the side, lifts up the top, and looks inside. She steps back and stares at the machine. From the way the foreign woman coils her copper hair behind her ear and stands with one leg slightly bent, Mrs. Fujimoto concludes that she is shyly aware of her good looks.

  When the foreign woman goes inside, Mrs. Fujimoto appraises the machine. She has excellent eyesight and can see that the machine is dirty and the hose to connect machine and tap is missing. The foreign woman comes out with a pile of clothes and begins stuffing them in the washing machine. Surely she realizes … but she pours detergent on the clothes, replaces the top, and reaches for the tap. Water sloshes onto the floor, and a rogue jet shoots into her eye. She leaps back. The corners of Mrs. Fujimoto’s lips twitch.

  The foreign woman grabs the clothes out of the machine. She stamps into the apartment and hurls the door shut, leaving Mrs. Fujimoto amused. What did she expect? Has she never done laundry? Mrs. Fujimoto hasn’t noticed the washing machine before and, later, discreet inquiries will reveal that the apartment was recently rented by an English-language school, which supplied the furniture. It isn’t entirely
the foreign woman’s fault, then. She probably expected to find electric lipstick here, and they leave her with this ancient contraption? What stories will she take home to her country about Japan? I thought it would be so modern, but they don’t even have automatic washing machines. Mrs. Fujimoto rubs the petal into shreds.

  Sixty-four years earlier in a neighbouring prefecture, she plays on the beach with her friend Sakina after school on Wednesdays. Wednesday is Mayuko’s day off. The other days are spent helping her mother, perhaps by shaving the dried bonito and stirring the flakes into the stock her mother is cooking.

  But Wednesdays she and Sakina race each other to the beach, down the alleys crowded with hawkers shouting to bargain seekers, past the stench emitting from the cartloads of freshly caught yellowtails. The beach has sand the texture of ash. Savage little waves snap against the shore, spitting their juice onto her bare feet. To Mayuko, it is paradise.

  This Wednesday, the wind pulls at Mayuko’s hair and buffets the terns in their path across the grey autumn sky. Nearby, a group of boys are playing soldiers. The taller, more muscular boys are the Japanese army, while the younger, weaker ones are the Chinese resistance. Mayuko and Sakina do not want to play, despite being offered the role of Chinese girlfriends. They have rejected the Japanese army’s gift of shiny stones.

  The girls prefer the oddly shaped shells they collected last week, the prizes for this round of jankempo. “One, two, three,” says Sakina. She points two outstretched fingers at Mayuko, who shows a flat open hand. “Ha!” Sakina exclaims as she snatches a shell. She looks at the boys, who are whooping and spearing each other with willow branches. “Soon we’ll have a war with the Americans. Because they won’t let us have oil.”

  Mayuko considers. “My dad says war is bad. He says we should leave China and make peace with the United States. He says we should build things other countries want and sell those things. That’s how Japan will advance.” She emphasizes this last, new word, which leaves a glow in her mouth.