The Journey Prize Stories 27

by Various

  I was lifted (“Careful! Careful, everyone, the scar on his back still hasn’t healed …”) to a hospital bed wrapped in Star Wars sheets in the middle of the living room. The television that had been on a stand against the opposite wall was now perched on a stool by my bed between stacks of comic books and bouquets of helium balloons. The couches and chairs were now clustered in the dining room, the big table itself nowhere to be seen. New drapes had been hung on the window overlooking the porch and the street, silky sheaths that let the sunlight in while hiding me from curious neighbours, my experience of the outside world, in turn, reduced to dreamy, shimmery snatches of ordinary life.

  There were pictures missing from the hallway. For days, I stared at an edge of wallpaper that was lifting near the railing, trying to remember which one had been there.

  A steady stream of assistants paraded through the door for a long time, nurses and therapists checking scars, lifting arms, bending legs, taking measurements. (“He’s progressing well, Mrs. Coates. Kids have a tendency to bounce back.”) I asked for a radio. Mom was always home now, but on wide-awake nights, when everyone was sleeping, I still listened to Moonman in the dark.

  Since he was usually somewhere in the stream of nurses and therapists and caregivers, it took a while before I realized that my father didn’t live with us anymore.

  Huddled under a blanket on the porch one afternoon, still feeling achy and watery from an infection, I watched my parents standing by my dad’s car parked across the road. Mom stood with her arms crossed, looking past him far down the street. Dad fiddled with his keys. Mom said something and nodded a few times before walking back up to the house.

  He opened the car door and was about to get in when he looked up at me. I pretended I couldn’t see him. Drugged, groggy, it wasn’t hard to stare out at nothing in the distance. My mother came up the steps and with the back of her soft hand touched my forehead, then my cheek, and kissed me before going inside, the door banging shut behind her.

  “See ya in a bit, soldier,” my father called out.

  “Oh,” I said, acting like I just realized he was there. I lifted my arm, held up my hand. “Okay.”

  He slid into the driver’s seat, started the car, and unrolled his window. The radio was blaring. He flicked it off and lit a cigarette. For a moment he sat there in the puffs of grey, before driving off with his hand holding the door.

  My mother married Stephen when I was fourteen. Their ceremony quiet, silvery, cozy with night. He was a gentle but faraway man, a serious look in his pale eyes behind the small round glasses he was always adjusting. His long, thin black hair was tied in a ponytail that curled down his back, grey wisps framing his bony equine face. When he moved in, he brought heavy boxes filled with books, two lamps, a pair of jeans, and three black T-shirts. He bought a globe at a garage sale to show me how countries were drawn in the decades before the First World War. He touched my mother whenever he could.

  One evening on the porch when he was writing notes, I asked him if what he talked about on the radio was true. Without looking up, he said he didn’t know what truth meant anymore. Sometimes I liked when he responded that way.

  “I mean, are those things really happening?” I asked.

  “Some of them already have,” he said, consulting one of the open books on the table beside him.

  “But I mean, the really bad things, like the end-of-the-world kind of stuff.”

  “It’s cyclical, Simon,” he said, removing his glasses and rubbing his eyes. His voice bent in the direction of his on-air delivery. “And it’s relative. There’s a rhythm and a plan. Most is beyond our control.”

  “But I mean—”

  “Simon,” he said, lowering his pencil and looking straight at me. “Are you asking if I believe there will be change, even significant change, in our lifetime?”

  He held his breath and my gaze as though expecting some deeper understanding to reveal itself in my eyes, some realization I would come to that would prevent him from having to say what he really thought. But I was long accustomed to his pauses by now and thrilled to be his private audience for what felt like a particularly omniscient insight. I leaned forward, blinking.

  After a moment, he released a lung full of sour air.

  “Yes,” he said, returning to his books and jotting down a note. “I do.”

  You call and tell me how you remember the salespeople and middle managers and secretaries and vice-vice-presidents chatting about weekend plans as they descended the windowless concrete silos of office building stairwells, cellphones in leather holsters, name tags swinging from lanyards around their necks. “All the sheep,” you say, but not without pity. You gave them a quick smile of reassurance because that’s all you could do as you and everyone else poured out to the sidewalk. The grid of city streets locked with idling cars, drivers leaning out of their windows, squinting at the horizon, nearly decapitated by cackling bicyclists whizzing past. Everyone with phones to their ears, looking east, then south, then west, then north, then at the useless phones in their hands as one network went down, then the next, then the next, and then all we had left were the people in front of us, people slowly being covered in ash and soot that fell from the sky like black snow.

  It was so much like how Moonman said it would be. He’d warned us. He’d hoped we’d fight back in time enough to prevent it from happening, that we’d “wake up and see through the lies,” the attempts to tranquilize us. But his was only a voice in the night. And half the time, when you were tuned in, listening under the covers, it was impossible to tell if you were just dreaming.

  On spring and summer weekends, Stephen rose early and drew a map of the garage sales in the neighbourhood that had been advertised by handmade signs taped to lampposts, charting the most efficient course from one to the next and home again. He rarely came home with anything. He said to me once that buried treasure was hard to find.

  On winter weekends he sat in the worn wingback chair he had pushed to the living room window, flicking the newspaper from page to page, raging under his breath at our collective blindness in the hazy, dusty light.

  Now he’s on an island with my mother. I think. I like to think. Somewhere where an evening sun glistens orange and gold off the sea as they sit watching it on a mat she wove from palms, her head on his shoulder. Alice in a tree house nearby yelling “Big money! Big money!” at an old TV set that washed up on shore.

  My father went back to the car dealership to pay for the portions of my treatment the government wouldn’t cover, and moved into an apartment above a drugstore. He set up a bench press by the living room couch, his guitar in its case in the bedroom corner where it remained partially hidden by an Ikea wardrobe. When I went to visit him he’d chain my wheelchair to the bike post out front and carry me up the two long flights to his door, holding my chest close to his. He took each step slowly. We didn’t speak as he ascended, so the journey felt long. I once broke the silence by telling him he didn’t have to be so careful, that I wasn’t made of glass, but still he went slowly. Another time, during my grade twelve exams, I was exhausted and let my head drop on his shoulder, nearly drifting off as we went up and up and up. I heard his heart beating faster, and sounds of broken breathing. When he sat me down on the plaid chair he said he was going to order a deluxe pizza and went over to the phone on the wall with tears in his eyes.

  I’d like to think he’s on an island somewhere too, playing Bowie songs to a ragtag commune of tanned and shaggy octogenarians who listen and bob their heads as they sip hooch out of coconuts. But I can’t picture it, as much as I want to. He was the first person I thought about when the ash clouds rolled over and I realized what was happening, but I’m still not sure if it was because I wanted him to save me or if it was the other way around.

  My producer Cal says the lines are already lit up. He says we’re on in two. I glance up at the old digital clock counting down on the wall of the studio then return to highlighting my notes and stacking them in t
hree piles. Hour 1, Hour 2, Hour 3. All twelve lines on the phone are blinking in front of me.

  Cal stands at the control board with his left hand on the fader, the fingers of his right hand counting down in silence.

  Five. Four. Three.

  Two.

  One.

  The theme song comes up. It’s a song my father wrote a long time ago. It’s not even that good, but it’s been shared millions of times since I started playing it off the top of the show. I let it play for a while then click on my mic.

  “It’s Wednesday,” I say, pausing as the music comes up again. “We’re all still here. For now.”

  You tune in from all over to find out how to survive. You think I’ve got the answer. You say I’m the only voice you can really trust now, and you whisper it over the line as if I’m the only one who can hear you, as if the quiet dark around you isn’t rustling with perked-up ears. You think I’m genetically predisposed to outlive everything, so you buy my duplicate genes by the ounce and inject them into your veins, not even waiting for the zone nurse to come around and help. You press your radio to your ear to hear what I will say next and panic when the signal is lost. You know but do not care that as we rebuild our cities, our countries, our continent, I’ve built an empire on you.

  You do not know that when the sky went black I went nowhere. That the elevators stopped working and I watched everyone cluster to the windows and then file toward the red exit sign leading to the stairwell, looking at me sympathetically as they passed. Someone will be up soon, they said, squeezing my shoulder. You do not know that I was alone in the dark when my phone rang, and it was my mother telling me in a low, quivering voice to go into the washroom and lock the door. She said she had Alice. She said don’t worry, just go. Then the network went down and that was that.

  I don’t tell you that I didn’t make it out that day. I don’t say that I rolled my chair into the washroom and breathed in recycled air and drank toilet water in the dark for what felt like weeks. I don’t tell you that I was rescued by a man in a makeshift haz-mat suit who was pulling the office building apart for wires and copper and wood. I don’t tell you I was nearly dead. You don’t even know that I can’t walk. That is no way for a hero to be.

  I’ve told you elaborately concocted tales that even I believe half the time. I run through them again in my mind before I say, “Let’s go to the phones.”

  Cal says, “Chris is on Line 1.”

  “Chris,” I say, “Welcome to The Seed.”

  “Simon,” he says.

  I don’t say anything. No one knows my real name.

  “Simon,” he says. “It’s me.”

  My finger hovers over the drop button on the phone. I push it.

  EMILY BOSSÉ

  LAST ANIMAL STANDING ON GENTLEMAN’S FARM

  I came out in the morning to find three wattles frozen in the mud outside the pigs’ pen. They had turned greyish overnight, the melting ice on the ground waterlogging them into plump, fleshy petals. Maybe this is just something chickens did. Shedding wattles. Dropping chins to attract roosters. Chickens, am I right? There were clumps of feathers and down drifting across the half-frozen mud, but no signs of blood, as though the chickens had decided to reconfigure themselves into clean chunks, as if that just worked better for them. The rooster nodded sleepily on top of the fence post, undisturbed by their disappearance. The pigs blinked.

  I went into the kitchen and dug around in the junk drawer until I found the zodiac calendar I’d picked up with my Triple Seven order. Pig and Rooster were not listed under the “no match” column. In fact, they were a “match,” though not an “ideal match.” This made good enough sense, as the chickens were slowly becoming part of the pigs but, judging by the pools of yellow bile floating on top of the mud, the chickens were fighting the merger. I called Paul to see if he thought this meant anything.

  “I really don’t know what the hell kind of meaning you’re looking for here, Davey.”

  I unrolled the calendar again. “I don’t know, something about my perfectionism being consumed by, uh, loyalty or, shit, I don’t know.”

  “Your pigs just ate sixteen chickens and the first thing you do is look at a zodiac on the back of a takeout menu?”

  “Why would they eat them? All? In one night?”

  “This has nothing to do with the zodiac, dopey, and everything to do with the fact that pigs eat fucking everything.”

  “Even chickens?”

  “Sure, if they can get ’em. And once they taste flesh, well, that’s the end my friend.”

  “What now?”

  “Give them some Pepto-Bismol. And stop looking at that fucking pussy zodiac.”

  I began to really feel that the pigs were going to die.

  The night the envelope from LANDE & WOLFE arrived was the night someone held up the juice bar. I was trying out college on the West Coast and ended up at Shooting Sprouts instead.

  One night just before closing, two jerks in bell-bottoms and down vests come in and start massacring my face. The guy on top of me has his knuckles up my nose while the other one jimmies open the register with a crowbar. The guy whaling on me has all of these rainbow patches on his vest, like he’s winning a badge for robbery tonight, and he actually has feathered hair. Feathered hair. Once they have the money they leave me in a puddle of spit and blood, the door chiming after them. “Woah, real tough guys!” I scream at them from the floor. “Fucking Farrah Fawcett assholes!” But my mouth is pretty mangled, filling up with metallic, salty liquid, and suddenly something thicker, sweeter—

  After vomiting in the sink where we clean the blenders, I decide I need to get the hell out of this city. If I ever get my face tenderized again, it’s going to be over something I really believe in. Not a day’s worth of wheatgrass profits. When I get home, there it is: a big brown envelope with a note from my mom written on kitchen stationery and something from LANDE & WOLFE on legal letterhead. I open the legal letter first, and it says my uncle Phillip died and left a lot of his estate to me, something about property, something about chattel, a meeting, turnover, so on, so forth. The note from my mom is shorter, saying something along the same lines, but also God knows why Phil would leave this to me as he hasn’t seen me since I moved away, and I just don’t know the first thing about husbandry, but it’s just a hobby farm, really: a little more than a dozen chickens, eight pigs, one goat, a rooster, and a dog. Maybe it would be good for me, and if I can stand the thought of going back to Devon it’s mine. Then, at the bottom: P.S.—tell Paul I say “hi.” Yours, Mom. I’ve never heard of another mom who signs her letters “yours.” Good old Eva.

  I’m on the next bus out with as much as I can stuff into the duffel bag I stole from my deadbeat roommate. For a second I think I see Joanna sitting about six rows in front of me, slack jawed and stringy haired, her roots about six inches of grey fading into an orangey urine colour. She’s looking straight ahead just like she rides the bus over and over back home, but I can’t imagine Paul letting her out like that, and he’s been in charge of her since Mrs. Estey died. We stop at some trucker place called Chatter’s, and I call Paul collect. It’s around 3 a.m. back home, but he picks up the phone on the second ring. I tell him my uncle’s dead and I guess I’ve come into some land or something, and I’m coming home toot sweet. Paul inhales and exhales noisily into the phone.

  “Paul. Seriously. This is some Jane Eyre shit.”

  “Oh man,” there’s a sound of something falling over, glass hitting glass and shattering. “College boy.”

  “Wait, listen, are you okay? Did you fall over?”

  “You cheap bastard, why the fuck are you calling me collect? You own a goddamn farm.”

  There’s a woman in line behind me who’s wearing a lot of velour and tapping her foot.

  “Listen Paul, I have to go, someone else needs the phone. But, um, are things, uh, are they pretty much the same back there? At home?”

  There is another deep inhale and exhale on t
he other end of the line. “Different. Very different. We just got a Dixie Lee.”

  There’s no time to say I think his half-retarded sister is on the bus.

  No one knew exactly what was wrong with Joanna Estey growing up, and I don’t think anyone ever really tried to find out. When I moved to town Paul staked me out as a friend right away. We were nine, and he wore his Green Lantern pyjama top to school like it was a shirt. He kept trying to get the other kids to call him “The Rooster” because it sounded cool. That’s how he introduced himself.

  “Hey, I’m Paul, but everyone calls me The Rooster.”

  Paul was clearly the biggest loser in the class, but he demanded respect from the other kids by insulting them, and he had a BB gun.

  He brings me to his house after the first day of school and starts naming off a list of endless brothers that reads like a nursery rhyme.

  Dave does laundry, for the ER.

  Ian joined the army, married a stacked nurse.

  No one talks to Randy; he’s living with Dennis (and not in the macho kind of way).

  Norm’s a lawyer; don’t talk to him much.

  Ben moved to Toronto, goddamned bastard.

  And Percy is twelve but just lies in his crib.

  Paul stops in front of his house, which is smaller than mine, even though there’s only Mom and me to fill it. The middle drags the rest of the house toward it, like it needs more boards at the centre for warmth. The porch is supported by huge sheets of corrugated tin propped up between pillars, ending three inches from the roof. Someone tried to cheer up the entryway by painting the inside green. The effect isn’t cheerful; it just makes everyone at the door look like they are about to throw up.

  Just as he puts his hand on the door Paul turns to me. “Before we go in, I have to tell you about my sister. She’s fifteen.” His eyes dart toward the door handle.

  “What, is she like, mean or something?”