After Alice
Page 33
The old door sticks at the tile, swollen a little with the snow. Stephen will need to plane it a little, just on the lower left. She tugs at it. “Just a second,” she calls. “The door is stuck.”
She kicks through the jumble of Kodiaks and Columbias, braces her foot against the jamb, gets a better grip. Now. Now. She pulls harder, and the door bursts open.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to Evalyne Hillaby Smith and to Harold Rhenisch for their stories and details of life in the Okanagan in the 1940s and 1950s. (All factual errors are my own.) Thanks also to Carolyn Ives, Leigh Matthews, Rachel Nash, Patsy Alford, and Annette Dominik, who read early versions of the manuscript, and to Peg Hasted and Susie Safford for talking me through first chapter revisions late in the process. Anne Nothof refined the book with her clear editing skills.
A sabbatical leave from Thompson Rivers University gave me time to complete the first drafts. The Lake Country Museum provided many story triggers in its collection of artifacts and archives.
Karen Hofmann lives in Kamloops, B.C. She has been published in Arc, Prairie Fire, The Malahat Review, and The Fiddlehead. Her book Water Strider was shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay Prize at the 2009 BC Book Awards, and “The Burgess Shale” was shortlisted for the 2012 CBC Short Story Prize. After Alice is her first novel.