“At night I dream of the prairie,” she told him.
“Your hands tremble,” he said.
But he was growing smaller. She reached out to stay him, but he retreated as she reached.
He had begun to fade too; what now seemed to be only a thin depiction of him, never a flesh-and-blood man, was dissolving before her.
What did you come for? a voice she thought was Garth’s asked. She wanted to answer him, but just as when she reached for him he had retreated, her reasons, once so clear and strong, were slowly evaporating and she couldn’t formulate them; she saw now they had never been anything more than will-o’-the-wisps, both their lives so tiny and inconsequential, mere dust motes in a background so deep, so vast…
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I owe a huge debt to the writers whose stories, plays and poems inspired me. My first reading of many of them going back to my days as an English and Art major at the University of Saskatchewan starting about 1957. My stories are, I know, a pale shadow of the brilliance of their work, work that has haunted me all these years.
But times change, lives change, focus changes, and one day a writer sees those stories in a new light, wants to say more, wants to say ‘and’ and ‘but’ and ‘if,’ and a new set of stories emerge. That ‘writer’ is me, now thinking about, for instance, what might have become of the young woman in “Hills Like White Elephants,” or what epic trip an old woman might take instead of swimming across the county as in “The Swimmer,” or having discovered a different view of love than that in “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” This is an old woman’s view, seasoned by fifty-plus years of experience since, as an awed teenager, I first read many of these works.
I owe my excellent editor David Margoshes a thousand thanks for, among many other things, helping me to anchor my stories. Thanks to Coteau Books for publishing (for most publishers the dreaded) collection of short stories, my fourth. And after forty years of writing, what does one owe the muse? Labour, gratitude, faithfulness. Thanks also to my agent Marilyn Biderman for her expertise and advice.
“The Departed” was originally published in Grain, Vol. 45.3, Spring, 2018
“Grace's Garden” is to be published in the on-line magazine, Joyland, in early 2019.
About the author
Sharon Butala is an award-winning and bestselling author of both fiction and nonfiction. Her classic book, The Perfection of the Morning, was a #1 bestseller and a finalist for the Governor General’s Award. Fever, a short story collection, won the 1992 Authors’ Award for Paperback Fiction and was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for best book (Canada and Caribbean region). Her novel, Wild Rose, also with Coteau, was published in 2015 and was shortlisted for the W.O. Mitchell Book Prize. Most recently, she published Zara’s Dead with Coteau Books in 2018. Butala is a recipient of the Marian Engel Award, the Saskatchewan Order of Merit, and the 2012 Cheryl and Henry Kloppenburg Award for Literary Excellence. In 2002 she became an Officer of the Order of Canada. She lives in Calgary, Alberta
Season of Fury and Wonder Page 14
