The Journey Prize Stories 27

by Various

  She whispered, It’s Caro’s eight-month birthday, I want to get him a xylophone.

  But can he play with it? I asked. I mean with his arms pinned.

  Probably not, she said sadly.

  He’s sleeping, I whispered. Why are we whispering?

  He’s not sleeping, he’s pretending, she whispered.

  Caro snored then, a small delicate snore. His mouth dropped open and a bit of dribble slipped down to his chin. Deb swooped it up with her thumb and put it in her mouth. Besides, I have to go to the doctor. I think I might be pregnant.

  Caro yelped. His eyes flew open and darted around madly, looking for something to soothe him, and he finally focused on one of Darryl’s large oil female nudes, very buxom. He immediately relaxed, closed his eyes, and apparently fell asleep. But he wasn’t kidding anybody anymore.

  He dreams about things you can’t even imagine, Deb said.

  What kind of things? I asked.

  A lot of times I think he dreams that he’s a rabbit.

  Sure enough Caro’s nose started to twitch, and Deb covered his ears and said, I told you he was faking.

  I asked if he always struggled in his restraints and she said, Sometimes he’s still, but I know he’s only trying to trick me into believing he won’t scratch. Regular babies can’t feel pain you know, Deb said.

  I wasn’t so sure.

  I mean they feel it, but they don’t know where it’s coming from. But Caro knows. He knows exactly where it’s coming from.

  Caro sneezed.

  He’s coming down with something, Deb said. I gotta get him in bed and put some onions in his socks to draw the fever.

  I went to the cupboard. Is one enough? I asked.

  Sure, she said and left with my car keys and one onion.

  I phoned Darryl. I really needed to unload. The anniversary dinner, the cold fries, the fake blood, Johnny confronting the old people in their Indian suits, Heidegger, the onion. I was gonna tell Darryl I was ready for him to come home. I knew we could work it out. I missed him a lot. A lot, lot. He told me he was going out with Melanie, the bartender at Milestones.

  That night I cried my eyes out, and the next and the next. I needed twenty minutes of teabags and ice cubes on my eyes before I could go to work. I thought about suicide. I thought about Europe. I thought about razors and pills and lighthouses in New Brunswick. I thought about climbing up the Angels Crest trail to the top of the Chief and jumping off. I wrote imaginary notes to Darryl: Dear Darryl, Go fuck yourself. I thought about all those nights he had stayed up late to cook pad Thai for me because he knew how sick I was of eating fried sweet potatoes at the restaurant.

  Deb called to tell me the commercial was on. I hung up on her. I was getting a fever. I called Deb back and left a message, Where’s my fucking onion? I felt hot and sweaty. My unit was so damp the walls leaked. A mushroom was growing in the corner of my rug.

  I called in sick and the manager said, Oh don’t even come back. I emailed my prof for a deadline extension. He emailed back, R U serious?

  Then one day Johnny Rain phoned and said he needed me to babysit. Deb was running late, grooming a spoiled Shih Tzu, and he was going to an anti-Olympics demonstration. I told him I was in no condition to babysit. He said he’d wash my windows in payment. I said, for chrissake I wouldn’t charge you for it, I’m just saying I can’t. I’m not reliable, I’m not safe to be around babies or sharp objects. He hung up.

  I soaked in a burning hot bath. I cried and watched myself in the mirror, crying. I looked so good I couldn’t figure it out. I hacked my hair off with the shears. I stuffed it all into a manila envelope and addressed it to Darryl. I wrote a note that said, Here’s a souvenir, Asshole. Love, Vivian. I glanced over at Heidegger lying open on my desk. Being-alone is a deficient mode of Being-with. Then the light dimmed. I looked up to see Johnny Rain outside my window, standing on the top rung of an aluminum ladder, smearing sudsy water in a looping pattern on the pane. Caro was strapped on his back in a baby carrier, blinking at me through the smudged wet glass.

  When I stepped outside later, on my front step were a box of Tampax with four missing, three quarters of an onion, my can opener, five hangers, my car keys, my skirt, my hairbrush. Even one fifty-nine-cent stamp.

  Johnny Rain was sitting on his bike in the street, revving it. When he saw me, he took off. In their apartment Caro was seated on the floor, surrounded by puzzles and hammers, things that popped and whistled and dinged and swung. His arms were pinned to his sleeper and his face looked like a topographical map of Russia in pink. The TV was on, playing a tape of the beer commercial. Caro was staring at the commercial, watching his dad get passed over by the gorgeous babe because he was drinking the boring beer. Caro had a note pinned to his shirt that said, Vivian, there’s mashed avocado in the fridge for when I get hungry.

  I laid Being and Time on the floor, next to a pop-up Sesame Street toy thing.

  I found the coffee I had lent Deb three weeks before, but no coffee maker. I sat on the floor next to Caro and watched the beer commercial, then rewound it and played it again. And again.

  I told Caro about my plans to climb to the top of the Chief. I told him that cliffs were hard and air was thin and gravity was almighty. I explained to Caro that Darryl had semi-sorted out his sexuality and was now dating Melanie the bartender at Milestones. I told Caro how hard it was for me to even say her name out loud. I told Caro that it doesn’t matter what beer you drink, it will never help you get the right girl. I told him that his mother was working late at Pet Fabulous and as soon as he was big enough she’d take him fishing on the ocean. I told him he’d outgrow his rash. I told him that the question of the meaning of Being must be formulated. I told him that it was snowing on top of the mountain, and what I wanted more than anything was to climb up the slope with my snowboard on my back and then stand at the top of fifteen hundred vertical metres and look away through the clouds to the Pacific in the distance and then slide and curl and bank down as fast and furious as I could until I was scared to high heaven and drenched in fine snow. I told him that Johnny Rain was his one true father. I told him Dasein always understands itself in terms of its existence, in terms of a possibility of itself: to be itself or not itself. I told him fear has three aspects: what we are afraid of; fearing; why we are afraid.

  I unpinned Caro’s arms.

  When Deb came home she looked at Caro and said, Oh, you told him.

  She started kissing Caro’s wounded face and his eyes closed in feigned sleep or bliss, and when she lifted her head away from him and turned to me, her lips were bright and vivid with his blood, as if she had smeared them with lipstick, as if she were going somewhere.

  ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

  Charlotte Bondy is from Toronto and has an M.Phil in Creative Writing from Trinity College Dublin. Her stories have appeared in PRISM international and The Moth Magazine. She is working on a collection of short fiction.

  Emily Bossé completed her Master of Arts in English and Creative Writing at the University of New Brunswick in 2014. “Last Animal Standing on Gentleman’s Farm” was her first piece of published fiction when it appeared in The Fiddlehead. Her first full-length play, COCAINE PLANE! was produced by The Next Folding Theater Company in March 2015. She is currently working on several plays and a collection of short stories entitled Here Comes Happiness.

  Deirdre Dore writes fiction, poetry, and plays. Her work has appeared on stages and in literary journals, including Geist, Prairie Fire, and The Malahat Review, among others. Her story “Sappers Bridge” won the Western Magazine Award for Fiction. She holds a degree in psychology from Boston University and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from UBC, where she completed a collection of short fiction. Originally from New York, she now lives in Nakusp, British Columbia, where she is revising her collection of stories and at work on a novella.

  Charlie Fiset is a gold-miner’s daughter from northern Ontario and a recent graduate of the University of New Brunswick’s Cr
eative Writing M.A. program, where she received the David H. Walker Prize for prose. “Maggie’s Farm” is her first print publication, but her story “If I Ever See the Sun” appears in The Fiddlehead’s 2015 summer fiction issue. She is currently at work on a Ph.D. in English at the University of New Brunswick.

  K’ari Fisher was born in Burns Lake, British Columbia, and now lives in Victoria. She has worked as a Zodiac driver for a killer whale research group off the Pacific coast, and for forestry in the Skeena and Bulkley valleys. She is currently completing her final year of an M.F.A. in Creative Writing at the University of Victoria, where she is at work on a novel. Her short fiction has appeared in The Malahat Review and Prairie Fire.

  Anna Ling Kaye reads and writes in Vancouver, where she is completing a short story collection and working on her first novel. A former prose editor at PRISM international, she is cofounder of Hapa-palooza Festival and sits on the board of Project Bookmark Canada. She is the editor of Ricepaper magazine.

  Andrew MacDonald won a Western Magazine Award for Fiction, is shortlisted for a National Magazine Award for Fiction, and is a three-time finalist for the Journey Prize. He lives in Toronto and New England, where he’s finishing a novel.

  Lori McNulty’s fiction was shortlisted for the 2014 Journey Prize. Her work has appeared in The Fiddlehead, The New Quarterly, PRISM international, The Dalhousie Review, Descant, and the Globe and Mail. She holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia and an M.A. from McGill University. She’s just completed a short fiction collection and is at work on a novel. Please visit www.lorimcnulty.ca.

  Madeleine Maillet is a writer and translator living in Montreal. She is also the fiction editor of Cosmonauts Avenue. A graduate of the University of Toronto, she is currently an M.A. candidate in English Literature at Concordia University.

  Ron Schafrick’s short fiction has appeared in The Dalhousie Review, The Prairie Journal, The Antigonish Review, Asia Literary Review, FreeFall, The Toronto Quarterly, The Nashwaak Review, The New Quarterly, Plenitude, and Southern Humanities Review. “Lovely Company” was also published in Best Gay Stories 2015. He is the author of Interpreters (Oberon Press, 2013) and is at work on a second collection of stories. For nine years he taught ESL in South Korea, but he currently lives in Toronto.

  Sarah Meehan Sirk’s short fiction has appeared in The New Quarterly, PRISM international, Joyland, Room, and Taddle Creek, where “Moonman” was first published. She studied math and philosophy at the University of Toronto, and was mentored by David Adams Richards at the Humber School for Writers. While not producing national programs for CBC Radio One, she’s completing a collection of short stories and working on her first novel. She lives in Toronto with her young family.

  Georgia Wilder completed a Ph.D. in seventeenth-century English literature. She teaches poetry and academic writing at the University of Toronto and hosts the monthly “Wild Writers” event at the Poetry Jazz Café in Kensington Market. She has been a feature poet at the Art Bar. “Cocoa Divine and the Lightning Police,” first published in Descant, is part of a larger cycle of fin-de-siècle queer adventures set in discoera Toronto.

  ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTING PUBLICATIONS

  For more information about the publications that submitted to this year’s competition, The Journey Prize, and The Journey Prize Stories, please visit www.facebook.com/TheJourneyPrize.

  For five decades, Descant was a quarterly journal publishing poetry, prose, fiction, interviews, travel pieces, letters, literary criticism, and visual art by new and established contemporary writers and artists from Canada and around the world. Editor: Karen Mulhallen. Managing Editor: Vera DeWaard. Descant ceased publication in early 2015.

  The Fiddlehead, Atlantic Canada’s longest-running literary journal, publishes poetry, short fiction, book reviews, and creative non-fiction. It appears four times a year, sponsors a contest for fiction and for poetry that awards a total of $5,000 in prizes, including the $2,000 Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize and the $2,000 short fiction prize. The Fiddlehead welcomes all good writing in English, from anywhere, looking always for that element of freshness and surprise. Editor: Ross Leckie. Submissions and correspondence: The Fiddlehead, Campus House, 11 Garland Court, University of New Brunswick, P.O. Box 4400, Fredericton, New Brunswick, E3B 5A3. E-mail (queries only): fiddlehd@unb.ca Website: www.TheFiddlehead.ca Twitter: @TheFiddlehd You can also find The Fiddlehead on Facebook.

  Geist is the Canadian magazine of ideas and culture—every issue brings together a sumptuous mix of fact and fiction, photography and comix, poetry, essays, and reviews, and the weird and wonderful from the world of words. The Geist tone is intelligent, plain-talking, inclusive, and offbeat. At the heart of our enterprise is the imaginary country that some of us inhabit from time to time, and which often has something to do with Canada. Editor-in-Chief: Michal Kozlowski. Submissions and correspondence: Geist, #210 – 111 West Hastings Street, Vancouver, British Columbia, V6B 1H4. E-mail: geist@geist.com Website: www.geist.com

  The Impressment Gang is very excited to be celebrating its first birthday with its inclusion in this anthology. Our mandate is to be open, critical, and interactive with our community. We are proud of the stimulating and innovative work we publish, and believe that our contributing writers should be compensated deservingly for their art. Inspired by CWILA, we make a conscious effort toward nurturing an inclusive literary community. We welcome impressive new writing. Please find our first issue, in which Charlotte Bondy’s “Renaude” is featured, on our website. Fiction Editor: Pearl Chan. Poetry Editor: Cassie Guinan. Submissions: submissions@theimpressmentgang.ca Correspondence: director@theimpressmentgang.ca Website: theimpressmentgang.ca

  The Malahat Review is a quarterly journal of contemporary poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction by both new and celebrated writers. Summer issues feature the winners of Malahat’s Novella and Long Poem prizes, held in alternate years; the fall issues feature the winners of the Far Horizons Award for emerging writers, alternating between poetry and fiction each year; the winter issues feature the winners of the Constance Rooke Creative Non-fiction Prize; and the spring issues feature winners of the Open Season Awards in all three genres (poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction). All issues feature covers by noted Canadian visual artists and include reviews of Canadian books. Editor: John Barton. Assistant Editor: Rhonda Batchelor. Submissions and correspondence: The Malahat Review, University of Victoria, P.O. Box 1700, Station CSC, Victoria, British Columbia, V8W 2Y2. E-mail: malahat@uvic.ca Website: www.malahatreview.ca Twitter: @malahatreview

  Matrix is a forty-year-old literary journal based in Montreal, Quebec, and housed at Concordia University. Published three times a year, Matrix features poetry, fiction, literary non-fiction, book and video game reviews. Editor: Jon Paul Fiorentino. Managing Editor: William Vallieres. Web Editor: Roxanna Bennett. Senior Editor: Jessica Marcotte. Art Director: Tyler Morency. Website: www.matrixmagazine.org

  The New Quarterly is an award-winning literary magazine publishing fiction, poetry, personal essays, interviews, and essays on writing. Now in its thirty-fourth year, the magazine prides itself on its independent take on the Canadian literary scene. Recent issues include The War issue and the summer issue on Visual Storytelling, with more exciting projects in the works. Editor: Pamela Mulloy. Submissions and correspondence: The New Quarterly, c/o St. Jerome’s University, 290 Westmount Road North, Waterloo, Ontario, N2L 3G3. E-mail: pmulloy@tnq.ca, sblom@tnq.ca Website: www.tnq.ca

  Plenitude, Canada’s queer literary magazine, publishes poetry, creative non-fiction, short fiction, book reviews, interviews, and other articles by both emerging and established LGBTQ writers, including Michael V. Smith, Ashley Little, John Barton, Lydia Kwa, Amber Dawn, and Betsy Warland. Now in its third year, it hosts an annual Emerging Writer Mentorship Award, which pairs one emerging queer Canadian writer with an established writer for one-on-one development of a manuscript. Plenitude aims to complicate expressions of queerness
through the publication of diverse, sophisticated literary writing, from the very subtle to the brash and unrelenting. Founding Editor: Andrea Routley. Prose Editor: Anna Nobile. Poetry Editor: Matthew Walsh. Reviews Editor: Rachna Contractor. Copy Editor: Kathleen Fraser. E-mail: editor@plenitudemagazine.ca Website: www.plenitudemagazine.ca

  Prairie Fire is a quarterly magazine of contemporary Canadian writing that publishes stories, poems, and literary non-fiction by both emerging and established writers. Prairie Fire’s editorial mix also occasionally features critical or personal essays. Stories published in Prairie Fire have won awards at the National Magazine Awards and the Western Magazine Awards. Prairie Fire publishes writing from, and has readers in, all parts of Canada. Editor: Andris Taskans. Fiction Editors: Warren Cariou and Heidi Harms. Submissions and correspondence: Prairie Fire, Room 423, 100 Arthur Street, Winnipeg, Manitoba, R3B 1H3. E-mail: prfire@mts.net Website: www.prairiefire.ca

  PRISM international, the oldest literary magazine in Western Canada, was established in 1959 by Earle Birney at the University of British Columbia. Published four times a year, PRISM features short fiction, poetry, creative non-fiction, and translations. PRISM editors select work based on originality and quality, and the magazine showcases work from both new and established writers from Canada and around the world. PRISM holds three exemplary annual competitions for short fiction, literary non-fiction, and poetry, and awards the Earle Birney Prize for Poetry to an outstanding poet whose work was featured in PRISM in the preceding year. Executive Editors: Sierra Skye Gemma, Jennifer Lori, and Clara Kumagai. Prose Editor: Nicole Boyce. Poetry Editor: Rob Taylor. Submissions and correspondence: PRISM international, Creative Writing Program, The University of British Columbia, Buchanan E-462, 1866 Main Mall, Vancouver, British Columbia, V6T 1Z1. Website: www.prismmagazine.ca