by The Journey Prize Stories 32- The Best of Canada's New Writers (retail) (epub)
Me and Cat and Sierra and Liv and Coco aren’t afraid of the empty lot, the yellow tape. We’re making new crime scenes.
“You’ve got street on you,” says the man, as he drops his shopping bags and shoves me to my knees. “But look at that baby face. What are you, thirteen? That’s my favourite number.”
He unzips his pants, pulls out his ugly grey slug of a cock, and says, “Suck it,” his breath already ragged. Behind him, Cat and Sierra and Liv and Coco are looming, and I reach for his slug cock and he closes his eyes, and it’s then that I punch his balls as hard as I can, and he yowls and drops to his knees, saying, “You stupid fucking bitch, I’m going to kill you.” For a second, I sit inside his words. They’re sharp and dark and thrumming. And it’s then that he lunges. I scramble, but he gets a fistful of my hair, and then his hands are around my neck, squashing and squeezing, and Cat is smashing him upside the head with the rock in her hand, and Sierra and Liv and Coco are clawing at his back, his arms. He goes down, but his hands are wrapped tight around my neck, and I can hardly breathe. I knee him hard between his legs, and he loosens his grip, and I slip out, coughing, choking, and then me and Cat and Sierra and Liv and Coco stomp him until he stops his moaning.
And then Coco starts to cry.
“Stop crying,” says Cat. “He’s dead.”
“But he should be more dead,” says Coco. “He should be more fucking dead.”
We roll his body toward the manhole that drops into the storm sewer that flows into the river. Cat tosses me the pry bar that’s rusting nearby. It’s been rusting ever since thieves used it to jimmy open the car doors of the two women who went missing. We watched them poke around the front seats and the back seats and the trunks and pocket the loose change they found.
I hook the pry bar into the manhole, and Cat wraps her hands around my hands, and with Sierra and Liv and Coco pulling hard at our hips, we yank until the cover pops open. We look at the dead man. His eyes are glassy wide, two blanks. Cat grabs his wallet and I grab his shopping bags and Sierra grabs his wristwatch and Liv grabs Coco. We kick him down into the grey water below, reset the manhole cover, and run.
We run past the dry cleaners and the Chinese restaurants and the Ukrainian restaurants and the porno theatres and the florists. We run down the streets the men have made. John Street. John Avenue. John’s Way. The men made every single street, and every single street is slimy with cum because the men jerk off in every place. We run past the dumpsters and ditches with their smell of dead women. Everywhere, carnivores are howling. We run past the houses and parks strung with yellow crime-scene tape. There is yellow crime-scene tape on every block. The wind whistles in our ears.
We run all the way to the Yvette Jade Wendy Gail Gloria Bridge, which is no longer a bridge, just a heap of crumbling concrete that used to bridge elsewhere until it was smashed by a wrecking ball because women were using it to drive out of the city and never return. That’s what we tell ourselves, anyway. Because that’s what our mothers told us.
We found the bridge because we were looking for a way out, but this city folds up like a cardboard box. The sky doubles back. The ground doubles back. The streets run in circles.
We climbed up the edge of the city, with its slippery slope and its craggy rocks and its dead shrubs. We were looking for a hole in the horizon.
Instead, we found the ruins of the Yvette Jade Wendy Gail Gloria, the bridge our mothers used to dream. We named it after them. It was clinging to the cliff edge, and what was left of its knocked-out roadway jutted like a snapped neck over the roiling waves below.
Sometimes, we walk the plank and throw rocks into the water, count for the plunk. We’ve never heard the plunk. It’s a long way down, we tell ourselves. But maybe the water is just a mirror, like the city that stares at ours from across the chasm. That city looks exactly like ours because it’s really just a mirror. There are no holes in this horizon.
There in the rubble of the Gail Gloria, with its jagged rocks and its fat weeds, we settle in. The sky is empty blue. Our cheeks are flushed. In the distance, the city is crammed and heaving. We’re not winded. We don’t get winded. We run all the time.
Cat pulls out the cleanup supplies we keep stashed in the rocks: soap bars and sanitizer gels and hand wipes we’ve pocketed from dollar stores and drugstores and diners.
And one by one, we wet our soap bars in the bucket of rainwater we call a sink, so we can wash away the blood spatter.
“That got out of hand,” says Cat, eyes on me.
“He got out of hand,” says Sierra.
“He smelled like bandages,” says Liv. “And sour milk.”
Coco starts to cry again.
“He should be deader. He should be fucking deader.”
I take the wetted soap from her hands and wash the spatter off the toes of her sneakers and the tips of her hair. I rub her back.
“At least he’s dead,” I say.
She wipes the wet from her cheeks and nods.
I give her back her bar of soap.
“Now wash your hands.”
I look at Cat, whose eyes haven’t left me. And in the tunnel that lives between us, we find each other.
And while Cat digs through the wallet, I dump the shopping bags, and it’s a good haul. Socks. Sunscreen. Cinnamon buns. Two wool blankets. Designer sunglasses we can pawn. Usually we just get allergy medicine and Old Spice deodorant and porno magazines: Juggs, Creampie, Barely Legal.
“What’s that?” says Sierra, pointing.
I root out the sliver of pink poking out from the bottom of the pile. It’s a make-believe magic wand. Its tip is a sparkly star, and the star is trimmed with a tail of ribbons, as though the star is shooting.
Coco’s eyes widen. “I want it.” Her voice is soft and pale as milk.
“It’s for babies,” says Liv, eyeing the wand’s shimmer.
“I don’t care,” says Coco.
She stands, takes the wand from my hand, and points it at Liv.
“I disappear you,” she says. And then she skips away, wand waving, into the sweeping field of wildflowers that surrounds our nest of rocks.
“Abracadabra!” she screams, over and over again.
“She’s such a baby,” says Liv.
She tugs hard at a fistful of weeds and hurls the green blades in Coco’s direction.
Liv used to be the baby, until we got Coco.
“There are wings too,” says Sierra, who’s been digging through our jackpot. “Fairy wings.”
She tosses them into Liv’s lap.
“I think they go with the wand.”
Liv’s eyes light, but she pulls a face. “I’m not a baby,” she says.
“Still,” says Cat. “It’d be fun to fly.”
Liv gnaws on her thumbnail, looking back and forth from Coco to the wings. “Well, I wouldn’t really be flying,” she says. “But wings are much better than a stupid wand.”
I help her into the wings, which are gauzy and glittery and pink, and which sit on her back via elastic bands on each arm. She stands and kick-stomps at the ground with one foot, like a bull. And then she charges into the sweeping field of wildflowers and Coco.
“They’re both babies,” says Sierra. She puts on the designer sunglasses, which are slick, aviator-style, and tinted green. “I want these.”
“We’re pawning those,” says Cat.
“Okay, just the watch,” says Sierra.
She shakes her wrist, and the fat gold watch winks and shines, nearly slides right off her hand.
“We’re pawning that too,” I say. “Besides, you don’t need a watch.”
We tell time with our fingers. We start at the horizon line, and stack one hand atop the other until we hit the sun. Then we count the time clocked in each finger. Five hours before sundown. Four hours before sundown. Me and Cat have twenty-
minute fingers. Sierra and Liv have twenty-five-minute fingers. Coco has thirty-minute fingers. Each of us, our own clocks. Each of us, ticking.
“It’s not fair,” says Sierra. “They got something.”
“Well, we can’t pawn a kiddie fairy costume,” I say.
Sierra rolls her eyes.
And then Coco and Liv are keening and wailing, wrestling each other to the ground. “Give me the fucking wand,” Liv is screaming. “Give me the fucking wings,” Coco is screaming.
“I’ll take care of it,” Sierra says.
Cat and I watch her corral the girls and redirect them into a game of tag. And then we walk the plank.
“She keeps crying,” says Cat.
“She’s only eleven,” I say.
“Liv didn’t cry. Sierra didn’t cry. We didn’t cry.”
“It’s different,” I say. “Her mom’s not dead.”
“She might as well be.”
It’s true. With her white bracelets and her white bath salts and her white pills for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, Coco’s mother is barely alive. That’s how Coco’s father got his hands under Coco’s bedsheets every night.
“She’ll grow out of it,” I say.
“Maybe we need to do an extra purge,” says Cat.
“Maybe,” I say.
But purges are hard. We do them every Friday. We sit in a circle and stick our fingers down our throats and get rid of the bad feelings that sit inside of us, so they don’t thicken and harden and calcify. And then we name the expulsions. His fat fingers. His humping hips. His wood. Afterwards, we’re spent.
Cat traces her fingers over the bruising up my neck.
“You paused,” she says.
“I know,” I say.
“What happened?” she says.
“I sat inside the words,” I say. Sharp. Dark. Thrumming.
“You can’t play chicken like that,” she says.
And I know she’s right. But I can’t stop wondering what last breaths feel like. What my mother’s last breaths felt like. “I can’t play chicken like that,” I say.
She slips a hand into my back pocket and leans into me. We let the air fill us.
“How’d we do?” I ask.
She hands me the wallet. “Eighty dollars plus the sixty he gave you.”
I look through the wallet’s insides. And of course he was a father. Him and his winter wife and his winter daughter, smiling for the camera in front of the swirly blue backdrop they use in the backroom at photo marts. And of course he was a Wild Man. We see their posters everywhere, in doughnut shops, in coin laundries, tacked to telephone poles. “Are You a Man or a Mouse? Resuscitate Your Inner Wild. Weekly Meetings & Wilderness Immersions: Reclaim Yourself. Reclaim What’s Yours.”
I shove the photo and the Wild Man ID back into the wallet, along with the credit cards we know better than to use. And then I sail the wallet into the air, and we watch it whirl its way down toward the water, which is where we sink all their wallets.
And then me and Cat are putting one foot in front of the other, and Cat is whistling the girls back to our nest of rocks.
We wrap ourselves in the flannel shirts we have stashed in the Yvette Jade Wendy Gail Gloria rubble. We settle in tight together and dig into the cinnamon buns and stare out at the city with its high-rises and smokestacks, its jackhammers and sirens, its hungry fathers and dead mothers, all these streets that don’t belong to us. We play I Spy. We let the sky hold us. We wait for night to fall because night is when we go hunting. When we first got Coco, she said, “Day. Night. What’s the difference?” We told her. During the day, we let them pick us. At night, we pick them.
It wasn’t always like this.
It used to be just me and Cat and Sierra and Liv.
And before that, it was just me and Cat and Sierra.
And before that, it was just me and Cat.
And before that, it was each of us alone, pretending to hold hands with the mothers we’d lost.
MICHELA CARRIÈRE
THE MOTH AND THE FOX
There was a young Cree girl named Amiskweecheeiskwew. She was a young medicine woman. In order to study medicines, she left her people to learn how to talk to the plants and learn their stories of medicine. It was the tradition of her nation that in order to become a woman, one must embark on a year-long journey into the woods to gain the knowledge, skills, and values of the land. Thus, Amiskweecheeiskwew journeyed for this purpose.
Before Amiskweecheeiskwew left her village, there was a celebration where they rejoiced that she was carrying on the traditions of their lands. Her long brown hair was braided tight by her Aunties. The Aunties sang prayers of love and strength as they wove the strands together. Her Aunties giggled, telling her that on this journey she would become a woman. She blushed and laughed, they were always teasing her. The Aunties told her what to expect in becoming a woman, the hardships and triumphs she would endure. They gave their advice as to how to survive alone in the woods. She was to follow a detailed map her father had drawn for her and assured her that he would keep her safe while she was on the land.
The last ceremony they conducted for Amiskweecheeiskwew was the ancient right of the face tattoo. The face tattoo signified that she was making a lifelong commitment to being a healer. Inside the smoky longhouse the sharp needle pierced Amiskweecheeiskwew’s tender flesh. Four black dots on the side of her face by her eyes symbolized the four directions of healing—the spiritual, physical, emotional, and mental aspects of humanity that must be brought into balance. Her eyes filled with tears of honour as her soul was now forever connected to her duty and to her people.
Amiskweecheeiskwew was gifted a birchbark cîmân filled with supplies that would last her the winter. Wild rice, dried meat, buffalo hides, tools, and a tipi were also part of the supplies. She was given a beautiful beaded leather bag from her kohkom, which she filled with tinder, a knife, tobacco, and sewing supplies. Her apoy was made by her father, lovingly carved out of white spruce, it smelled fresh and shined white. Her mother gave her a mahihkan coat lined with soft wâpos. Amiskweecheeiskwew smiled at her family and they nodded silently, knowing her journey would be long, challenging, and meaningful. They prayed for her safe return.
It was mikiskon when she started. She paddled away from her village to the east, toward the sun, watching golden rays of sun dance on the waters flowing ahead of her. The canoe glided along the waters, the river was bending this way and that, meandering over the land. The river divided. One was the main mighty river channel and the second a smaller winding stream. She chose to go down the smaller stream, as this path would take her along the route her father had shown her. She moved quickly, sleeping under her canoe at night.
One morning she rounded a bend and there sitting on the shore was an osâwahkesow, the sun shining on its fur like a fire. Amiskweecheeiskwew understood the fox was a sign for her to make her winter camp at this location. The fox darted into the woods as she approached the shore. Her chosen spot was a curve in the river with a soft sloping sandbar with nîpisîy blending into a mixed forest of minahik and mîtos trees. She knew this was a place she would be provided for. Before she set about her camp chores she laid tobacco on the ground and gave thanks. She cleared a spot in the woods and cut down several white spruce poles. She worked all day peeling the bark. Her arms and back getting sore. She raised the poles, making sure the tipi door pole faced the east so she would greet the sun each day. She wrapped the hides of the tipi snuggly to the poles and lined the bottom with fresh spruce boughs. The smell of deep green was energizing. She made a fire and cooked a stew of smoked whitefish. As she hung her food stores away from the animals, she saw an osâwahkesow watching her through the trees. She smiled at her new friend and the fox held her gaze for a moment before trotting off into the woods.
Amiskweecheeiskwew took several days for hunting and gat
hering, preparing for winter. She set a net in the river to catch kinosêw, which she smoked in the small smokehouse she had prepared earlier. Using her bow and arrow, she hunted for sakaw pihew in the woods and sîsîp from the beach. She said a prayer and made an offering of tobacco for the animals’ lives to show her gratitude for the nourishment.
Amiskweecheeiskwew began leaving a piece of meat in the woods for the fox to eat. Every day she would collect berries and herbs, taking note of where they grew, the plants in relation to them, the colours and daily changes of them. She would smell the plants and taste them, learning all she could.
One day she paddled far and found a wîsti. All around the wîsti grew tall bushy herbs of mint, stinging nettle, wîhkês, willow, and many more medicines. She was about to pluck a handful of plants when an amisk slapped the water right beside her, almost startling her out of her canoe. The amisk poked his whiskery nose out of the water and looked at her. To her surprise, he spoke.
“I am the medicine man of my family. This is my ocikana. I have worked all summer to plant. I have seeds from the mud of distant shores, saplings from high riverbanks, and roots from deep waters, all to feed my family. Remember to not take more than you need.”
She paused for a moment, wondering if she heard right, but his voice was crystal clear. She spoke to him, “I apologize for my greedy hands, I too come from the beaver clan, my name is Amiskweecheeiskwew, I respect your family and will not take from you.”
The beaver wiggled his whiskers, almost as if he was smiling. “Amiskweecheeiskwew! What an honourable name. Because I can tell your heart is pure, I will allow you, in times of need, to take a few plants from my houses, as long as you leave an offering.” And with that, he dove deep into the black water, a few bubbles floating up to the surface.