The Journey Prize Stories 29

by Kevin Hardcastle

  —

  On my fourth day alone, I started the cleaning. At first, I was just tidying up the mess I’d been making in the kitchen. When the people came to rescue me, whoever they were going to be, I didn’t want them to think I couldn’t keep myself together. After I’d swept, I mopped, and then after that I started scrubbing everything. The stove top, the hood vent, the faucet and sink, the steel wool rubbing my fingers raw. I used a face cloth for inside the fridge that I had gradually been emptying. I took Mother’s toothbrush, still in the mug by the sink, and used it to scour the grout between the tiles, the minty smell of her toothpaste wafting through the water. I didn’t want to use any chemical cleaners because of the baby.

  Once the kitchen was done, I moved into the living room. I wiped down the baseboards, shelves, and television screen. I filled a bucket of frothing, soapy water and started shampooing the carpets. I can’t remember Mother ever cleaning. A layer of grime had spread seamlessly across everything.

  When I moved into Mother’s bedroom and pulled the mattress out from behind the wall, I found a clasped leather edition of the King James Bible. There wasn’t any dust on its cover. And it would’ve been nice to think that Mother was secretly pouring over its pages, whispering psalms while I slept upright in the chair beside her, pleading, Keep her well, Lord. Keep her well. But I’m sure it’s dustless only because it somehow got wedged between the headboard and the wall and has been squeezed there for years.

  There was a knock at the front door. I ran out of the bedroom, pausing to wipe the hair from my face and tie it into a bun. They had arrived, they were finally here. I opened the door, my duffle already in hand.

  Mormons.

  —

  Michelle didn’t know what to do about the people outside her house. The police had driven straight past them and hadn’t stopped.

  She peered through her bedroom blinds when she heard another car pulling into her driveway, its tires chewing the gravel. There was now a group of twenty or thirty where there used to be ten or twelve. A minivan pulled up and another five got out. Through her blinds, she watched the crowd swell on her front lawn. She wondered how many people down there had known Jay. Not just known his name and where his parents lived, but really knew him.

  Michelle’s thoughts floated from her bedroom window, around the house, out into the tall grass, and down into the hidden grave that held the boy and the dog. On the day of the burial, the earth had been dry and the spade rang off the cracked dirt. And so the grave had made them tight as twins, both of them curled forward with their limbs folded in. As Michelle’s mind moved over the boy’s body and toward his face, his eyes began to shine like coins. And in them, possessing perfect knowledge, Michelle saw his childhood, flat and full of unknowable distance. She saw him being scared of thunder but not lightning, saw him sneaking bread crusts into the bird feeder behind the laundromat. She saw him tunnelling into a snowbank and then watching his breath dissolve the flakes as he pretended that this was all there was in our white and weightless world. She saw him standing alone in a field scorched with sunlight, watching the scales of cotton rise into the air, as his mother sat on the stoop of their vacuum repair shop, taking long sips from a bottle beaded with water, and telling the gel-haired bachelors she loves them. And then, years later, Michelle saw the same woman asking the priest through the confessional’s slotted reeds how is somebody ever supposed to know what kind of a human a person is going to be, her hands around the hem of her shirt with her knuckles pulled white, while outside her son throws gravel at the endless stream of passing semis. And then Jay’s eyes began to burn with desire and daring and a beautiful brightness. And then she looked into the dog’s eyes, its skull huddled closely to his. And in them, Michelle saw that when it had mauled through the boy’s body, it was looking for something it had smelled inside him, something bitter and strong. But when Jay’s insides had been ribboned onto the grass, it turned out to have only been hate and more hate, solid and slippery as a heart.

  Another car arrived and the sound of its horn whiplashed Michelle’s thoughts back into the present. She knew that she, like the crowd below her, didn’t know anything about Jay and was just making these things up. But they seemed as if they could be true and there are times when that’s all that matters.

  She took a deep breath and opened her window a sliver. She smelled the exhaust from the idling cars. The crowd still hovered on the far side of the headlights so she couldn’t see their faces. Hidden behind the blinds, she yelled for the villagers to leave, said she’d sic the dogs on them if they didn’t. Below, the crowd mulled and then silenced. And from it then came a bottle that shattered against her front door, louder because it was night.

  —

  I had missed three days of school. When I arrived on Tuesday, it was as if I had this force field around me. I couldn’t get close to anybody, like when you chase one magnet across a table with the push of another. But then, at lunch, Travis came up to me and said he had heard about Mother and that he was sorry. It was shocking. Not that he was sorry but that he knew about it. Everyone did. But they didn’t do anything. Though I couldn’t blame them. I didn’t know what to do either.

  The day droned on, students offering their sympathies in the hallways or in notes passed in class. At the end of Social Studies, the last period, Ms. Haxton asked to speak with me. She said she had heard about my loss and was deeply, deeply sorry. She said that she too had lost her mother—“stepmother,” she corrected—and if I ever needed anything I knew what to do.

  “Do you have grandparents?” she asked.

  I had learned from my mistake with the paramedics. “No,” I said.

  “That’s good. That’s good,” she said. “Nobody should ever have to bury their child.”

  I agreed with her and let both my hands wander over my belly. Usually, I avoid touching my stomach in front of others but this time, I didn’t care. I felt the round warmth spread beneath my hands and then excused myself to the bathroom, where I splashed water on my face before I went home.

  —

  When the villagers hear the bottle shatter, they know they’ve crossed a line. Michelle runs from the house to the back barn where she keeps the dogs at night and slides open the door. All of them stare at her for a moment, their planetary eyes glowing beneath the barn’s incandescent light. When they hear the villagers running and shouting, firing their rifles, the dogs all charge past Michelle, abandoning her.

  She follows them through the moonlit field, toward the woods that grow on the north end of her property. As she runs through the tall grass, the rifle fire seems to come from all around her, her dogs yelping and whimpering. As she sprints into the woods, she hears someone gaining on her. She makes it to the trees but then trips and tumbles down a rock face and onto the dirt.

  Lying there, she hears their breathing. She picks herself up, ready to face what has been chasing her, her heart beating wildly inside her chest. And in the moonlight that needles through the canopy, she sees a shadow skulking toward her.

  —

  At first, I’d started working on my story to keep my mind off Mother. Near the end of it, she was sleeping for twenty-three hours a day and it was nice to watch her breathe heavily and then write about Michelle walking through a sunny field with her pack galloping around her.

  When Mother would wake, I’d read her what I had written and she’d nod along and then fall back asleep. “Make sure it has a nice ending,” she’d once said. It was good because she never felt like she had to share anything of herself when she was awake.

  I think I’m still writing for more or less the same reason.

  —

  Today, I got home from school to find a letter in the mailbox that’s addressed to “Current Occupant.” The letter says that unless somebody claims Mother’s body in the next five business days, the province will donate her cadaver to the university hospital. They use that word and everything. Cadaver. Like they already know what she’ll become
, and why bother trying to change what’s already been determined?

  I pick up my duffle bag, bring it into Mother’s room, and toss it on the bed. I’ve been thinking all day—calculating, really—and if I win this competition, the prize money and the money I have saved will take me to summer. And maybe Travis can help out a bit too. I dump the duffle onto Mother’s bed. I go to the kitchen, grab a large plastic bag from beneath the sink, and bring it back. And then I start pulling all of the drawers out of the dresser and dumping their contents into the bag. Once the drawers are empty, I tie a knot in the bag and place it by the front door.

  As I was putting Moby-Dick back in the bookshelf, I find a photo of Mother wedged between two novels. In the picture, she is young—as young as I am, so this must be only a year or so before she had me. She is at a Greyhound station, leaning against the bus’s silver side, wearing sunglasses, a plaid shirt, and jeans with holes in the knees. Her head is shaved and she isn’t wearing any shoes. There is a man beside her whose back is turned and his shoulders are hunched inward like he’s lighting a cigarette. He’s wearing a T-shirt, shorts, and steel-toed boots.

  Mother isn’t looking at the man but straight at the camera. And at first I thought the two don’t know each other. But then I noticed that the way her hand is frozen is like she was reaching to grab his sleeve, wanting him to look before it was too late. I can’t imagine who took the picture. In the window of the bus, right above the man’s head, is a sign that reads “Bethlehem.”

  In the photo, Mother stands straight with her jaw tilted up. She looks proud and stoic. Content. But there’s something about that contentment, like it’s more surrender than ease, like she knows that when push comes to shove, whatever she does, there’s nothing she’ll be unable to walk away from.

  I feel the baby kick and a wave of puke churns inside me. I go back to the bedroom and lie down on the bed and take deep breaths. I focus on my breathing and I can feel the baby growing inside of me, can feel it swelling, pushing against my stomach, finally realizing it’s trapped.

  —

  I’d once heard on TV that after you die, they harvest everything. I think of my mother on the stainless steel table in the university hospital. At her feet, a scalpel has unzipped the skin from her legs, the line running up her shin. And in her chest, sawed and sprung open, latex gloves lift out the parts of her that are dense and heavy and flow out like a magician’s handkerchief. But on her face, her goggles are still on, their clear plastic freckled with blood.

  There’s nothing that haunts you quite as much as something you knew was coming. At night, sleeping in my mother’s old room, I hang my dreams on the ceiling fan and watch them dance their slow circles above me, and they are soft and plush and safely held out of reach. Life, I am realizing, isn’t short at all. Life is the longest thing you will ever do.

  —

  It had spread amongst the town that the dogs were loose. But someone had said that all canines were afraid of fire. So they douse the dresses of their daughters and wrap them around the hockey sticks of their sons, and while the children watch from the living room windows, all the parents exit out their front doors. And they see something on the far end of the road. What was first just a shadow limping down Main Street will soon be illuminated in the torches’ hot gasp of orange light.

  It will be Michelle, riding on the back of a Great Dog, both of them bloody and ragged. And as Michelle and the dog stumble past each house, the neighbours will wave their torches, the flames frantically whispering their secrets.

  SARAH KABAMBA

  THEY COME CRYING

  “Back home, when someone dies, you can hear the women crying throughout the entire village,” Baba tells me, sitting on the edge of my bed. The glow from my night light leaks into the wrinkles in his face and highlights the grey in his curly black hair.

  From downstairs, I hear the crying. I can tell which cries are Mama’s. They’re the loudest, guttural and raw with grief. Baba continues to talk. I try to listen but all I can hear are the wails from below. Baba stops talking and looks at me expectantly. I pick at a stray thread on my flowered bedcovers.

  “Ada,” he says. “Are you even listening?”

  I continue to pull at the frayed thread. I want to build a fort with my covers and hide there with my hands over my ears.

  “Mama Dalia, your mother’s sister, has died.” Baba lifts my chin up with a finger, forcing me to meet his brown eyes. “Ada. I need you to go be with your mother.”

  I stand still as Baba wraps the bright purple and yellow patterned kikwembe around my waist. The cloth covers my Care Bears pyjama pants and hangs to the floor. It’s loose, Mama always ties it nice and tight so I don’t trip over the edges.

  “My older sister, Janie, showed me how to tie these,” Baba says. He looks at me and the corner of his mouth tips up. “I never paid attention.”

  “Are you going to come downstairs too?” I ask.

  Baba shakes his head. “Women and men don’t mourn together. The men will come tomorrow.”

  Baba hugs me and I snuggle into his chest. The wool of his sweater tickles my cheeks. I feel his heart beating like a drum and for a moment I can almost ignore the crying coming from downstairs.

  “Nakupenda,” Baba whispers in Swahili.

  “Love you too,” I whisper back.

  I slip out of his arms and stand at the foot of the stairs. There are fourteen steps. I count them in my head as I go down. The seventh step always creaks but tonight I don’t even hear it over the weeping.

  My kikwembe drags against the cold tile of the kitchen floor as I make my way into the living room. Mama sits on the floor in front of the fireplace surrounded by women. Their wails rise and weave with one another. I recognize Mama Jina and Mama Nuru. The other women are vaguely familiar in the way aunts and uncles that you only see on holidays are.

  Mama Jina, who is beside Mama, motions me over. “Mtoto,” she says, standing up. “Who tied this for you?” She picks at the knot Baba tied, rewraps the colourful material around my waist, and secures it at my right hip.

  I sit beside Mama. She doesn’t look at me. She just continues to cry and scream. She rocks back and forth, tears running down her cheeks, and the other women join in. I bow my head to hide the absence of tears from my own eyes. I want desperately to feel something but I can barely bring the image of my aunt to mind. I’ve never met her, only seen pictures and heard stories. She’s never been real to me, just a name of a woman in Congo that my parents promised I would one day meet.

  I look up and one of the women is looking at me with narrowed brows, tears glistening on her dark skin. “Ambaye ni mtoto huyu ambaye hawezi kulia?”

  Whose is this child who doesn’t cry? I keep my head bowed and pinch the skin of my arm until tears rise to the corner of my eyes.

  The kitchen is full of chattering voices and brightly patterned kikwembes. Oil sizzles in the pan as the plantain fries, okra boils in a pot, and one of the women heats water for the fufu in the largest pot we have.

  “You’re going to burn the plantain,” Mama Nuru says to no one in particular.

  “Where do you keep the piri piri?” another woman asks me.

  I take the plastic container with the ground spices out of the fridge and hand it to her. She thanks me and turns back to the stove.

  “Will you make the fufu?” Mama Jina asks me in Swahili.

  The woman who had glared at me yesterday clucks in surprise. “Oh, she speaks Swahili?”

  Mama Jina shakes her head. “Not fluently, Aisha, but she understands it.”

  I look Mama Aisha in the eye and I wonder if she is remembering what she said last night. She meets my gaze steadily and doesn’t look away. “Utafanya?” she challenges.

  I remember all the times Mama tried to teach me to make fufu and how I would never really pay attention. My dough always ended up too watery or full of lumps.

  I look at Mama Jina. “I don’t know how,” I whisper.

  �
��Kuja.” Mama Jina takes my arm. “You can make the rice.”

  Behind me, Mama Aisha clucks again. “A shame, not being able to make fufu at her age.”

  The doorbell rings. I hear Baba’s firm footsteps down the stairs. He opens the door to let the men in. They fill the foyer and speak in hushed voices as they follow Baba into his office. Bits and pieces of their conversation float into the kitchen and then one of the men pushes the door closed. The men have left their shoes in a careless pile and Mama Jina rearranges them, lining them up into pairs.

  When we are done cooking, every surface of the wooden kitchen table is covered with pots and plates. The food that could not fit is crammed onto the kitchen island. We stand around the table, eyes closed, as Baba leads the prayer. When he’s done, the men go sit at the dining room table in the other room, the one that we only use for special occasions and guests. The women prepare plates for their husbands. Mama Jina hands me a plate for Baba. I fill it with rice, fish, plantain, sombe, and fufu. Silently, the women slide the plates in front of the men, who do not pause in their conversation. Mama Nuru, whose husband died last year, goes around the table filling the glasses with water.

  Back in the kitchen, the women now fix plates for themselves. Mama Jina hands me a full plate.

  “Bring it to your mother,” she says.

  Mama is on the living room floor, where she has been since last night. The women who were not helping in the kitchen are sitting with her. I kneel down in front of her and present her the plate. She makes no move to take it. My knees ache and my hand trembles with the weight of the plate, but I don’t move.

  “Kula,” one of the women whispers to Mama. She takes the plate from me and places it on Mama’s outstretched legs.