Best Canadian Stories 2018

by Russel Smith

  All these useless apologies. Nothing but sorry sorry sorry. And one paragraph circled in yellow magic marker—

  p.s. Another point, and I never knew this either. A person doesn’t need to get their feet off the ground to hang, in other words you don’t even need to dangle, it can happen kneeling or squatting, with body weight & gravity pulling you forward. In 3 minutes you’re brain dead, in 6-7 you’re dead dead. You might want to mention that to any other ‘attempters’ you know.

  Didn’t anyone screen these letters? How could they have let them through?

  …your mother wants me to tell you that she will write too, soon as she gets a chance. (She might still be mad about the car?)

  I stopped reading. I wanted to stop. The shame I felt was like a sick animal in my gut, chewing at my belly. At the bottom of the stack—

  Class: The assignment today is to write a descriptive essay, describing in detail one of your favourite relations. Try to get inside the character a little bit and use language that brings that person to life so that if I were to walk down the street I might recognize him or her.

  Stapled to it—

  My Antie Dodie

  She has brownish hair wich is grey on top and the botom is blondish and its semmy long and not totally stupid like some old peple who cut there hair to look like a poodle dog and then die it purpel wich we call purpel heads and she weres it in a braid which is becorse she dosnt care what peple think how she looks.and never gose anywere. She is not fat but meduim with big hooters and hands that r always rubbing togehter and shortich finger nails. She hs I dont know what coler eyes maybe blue and never wers makeup and has a moale on her on the side of her nose wich after awile you dont think about. I think inside she has one liver and 2lungs and a stumik and 1 heart not that u can see it but i giutted a deer once and i bet that peple have the same insides prety much, everyting shiny and wet and warm and brown except the guts wich r grey. If you saw her that’s what she wuld look like. Always moving arownd and making sandwhitches.tlking to hesself or sowing stuff. she always weres a blue ski coat all the time half the time she weres gumboots and other half she weres crocks and cares about walking the dog and feeding the chickens and pigs more than reugular peple. She has a reely nice dog tcalled Mitszy that Uncel Hank hit with hs trakter and i fed the dog my sandwish till she felt beter.

  Mitzy. So it was Hank and not Logan. My god.

  Dear Logjam (remember that old nickname?), I let your rabbits go. One of the rabbits in his tiny cage, had stopped eating. Even though I cleaned his cage and cleaned his water bowl and put out fresh grass and green dandelion leaves and carrots, he wouldn’t touch a thing, waiting for you is my guess. So I let him go. And the moment he was free he started doing back flips, jumping up in the air and turning somersaults. So I let the others go free as well, all 6 of them and they all disappeared. Keep a look out, maybe they’re on their way to you. Haha. Enjoying their freedom, if there even is such a thing.

  Freedom. I had doubted freedom while surrounded by wild green space, alive and variable.

  It’s the variation that creates a sense of freedom: the changes in scenery, here a hill, there a river, a hole, a dip, an expanse of field, a flurry of birds, deer bones, horse shit, a downed tree, a clump of winter kinniknick pawed up. Because it changes, you get a sense of freedom. Or illusions of freedom. The thing is, even paradise, if immutable would feel like prison.

  And Logan had written in the margin: Para-para-paradise, Para-para-paradise, Para-para-paralize

  Dear Mrs. Schorn,

  I’m glad we had a chance to talk on the phone, however briefly, and we are truly sorry for how things have turned out. Naturally there will be an inquiry and you are welcome to contribute whatever relevant information you might have and you, as his guardian will be allowed access to the report once it is completed and if further steps are required you will be advised as to the procedure. In the meantime I’m packaging up Logan’s effects and the originals of Logan’s letters and essays and artifacts which he had stored in an empty cereal box in his room. There was no further correspondence other than these few letters addressed from you. He may have lost those or perhaps they didn’t exist. Also a package and a letter from you that came today. Please let me know if we can be of any further assistance.

  They say the children in Juvie Jail, or the Monster Factory or whatever you call it feel safer inside than they do on the outside. Is that true? It sounds like a lot of bullshit to me. When I think of cages I think of hamsters or guard dogs or Patty Hearst, who the hippies loved at first, made a sort of hero, then either despaired for or cheered on as they watched her engineer her own fall from grace, depending on where you landed in terms of values. For me she was always just pretty Patty Hearst who was lucky enough to get a second chance. Well, you can thank your own lucky stars Logan there will be a second chance for you too when you get out.

  That last letter, clean as snow, unread, till now. Would it have mattered or changed a thing? Hank was on the stairs again. His footsteps were fast, and loud like he had business on his mind. The mole on my nose itched. I drank again. I felt reckless and afraid. I whispered, No, as loud as I could muster. Noooo. But I could barely hear myself, even my breath sounded louder, the heart beating in my chest was louder, even the sweat on my hands was louder. I shouted it. Who heard?

  TRACKS

  Alicia Elliott

  For the twelfth time in two days I watch as Laura shreds her vocal chords screaming and still she’ll take no drugs. Her eyes are hooded with exhaustion, her hair a wet mass on her sticky forehead. It was a twenty-two hour delivery, most of which she spent foodless and hunched over a birthing stool in the biggest suite at Tsi Non:we Ionnakeratstha Ona:grahsta’. She wanted a natural delivery, she’d said. If she could feel the conception she sure as shit was going to feel the birth. That was Laura. Ever crude and to the point.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to go to the hosp—”

  “How many times do I have to tell you? No no no no no no. No. Heck, Roy!”

  The camera shrinks away. It focuses on me spitting encouragement through the pulsing crush of Laura’s grip. I glimpse up at the camera—at Roy—and give a pained smile. Back then I didn’t know for sure that I couldn’t conceive but I had my suspicions.

  I fast forward to the end, when Sherry is finally in her arms. Laura looks tired as hell, but when the camera comes for a close-up, she swats it away with impressive quickness. “You’re not allowed to catch my wrinkles on camera just because I gave birth to your kid.”

  There’s a time lapse. When the camera starts again Laura’s made up like some eager starlet. But she’s not looking at the camera from beneath pristine eyelashes or blowing kisses the way she would when she was young. She’s looking down at Sherry. Every touch and gesture is full of yearning, for both the present and the future. Tracing Sherry’s veins with her fingers like she’s following a map. Like in those small bursts of blue, peeking from beneath crystalline skin, Laura saw their lives: love and anger, tenderness and humour, pain and envy. Like Laura saw their worlds—separate but interlocking, like the two halves of a Venn diagram.

  No one watching then could have seen anything but a mother and a daughter, each absolutely smitten, adoring and sizing one another up. I’m not sure I see anything different now but I continually find myself trying. Nothing ever really comes out of the blue. There must be shifting eyes somewhere in the grainy footage, a hesitation, a smile held a moment too long.

  “Em.” Tom is standing in the doorway in a too-big black suit. He’s holding my black pumps and watching me, a question on his face. I wish he would just ask it.

  “Is it time?”

  He nods. I stop the video, get up and grab my shoes.

  There is a persistent musty smell in the viewing room. It’s hidden well beneath strangers’ perfumes and plug-in deodorizers but it’s there. I imagine it’s the smell o
f formaldehyde or death, though I’ve never really smelled either. I’ve haven’t been to a funeral since Uncle Rob’s and that doesn’t really count. I was so young; for all I remember I wasn’t there at all. Laura said she remembered everything, from the music (“Fucking Garth Brooks”) to the “huge ass mole” on the priest’s chin. I didn’t consider it at the time but it was strange a priest was there. Mom said when she and Uncle Rob were at the Mush Hole together, he was constantly in trouble, back-talking the priests and refusing to speak English and biting the unlucky teacher tasked with cutting his long, black Indian hair to a more “civilized” length. They beat him so he hated them; he hated them so they beat him. And yet at the end of his life a priest was praying over his Mohawk soul.

  Twenty years after that funeral I’m at this one. Three generations—almost an entire family—gone, all put to rest courtesy of Styres Funeral Home. Laura planned her funeral shortly after she and Roy were married. It should have set off alarm bells but it didn’t. At least her preparations have helped Roy. All he’s had to do is nod, mute.

  The room is orderly enough. Chairs arranged with absurd precision. I have the feeling that were I to take a ruler and measure the distance between each one, I’d come up with the same number every time. There must be some sort of science to grief, some manual funeral home directors adhere to, detailing the most manageable chair arrangement or flower placement for friends and family of the deceased. Everything is too calculated: the beige wallpaper, the overstuffed couches, the pre-packaged condolences.

  Aunt Chelsea is at the podium, mascara that took her thirty minutes of applying and re-applying to perfect now sliding, sap-like, down her cheek. Otherwise she is composed, wearing the stiff proud pout of a once-great general facing a war tribunal. Her voice is level and dry.

  “Laura was such a smart girl. Rob loved her so much. When we lost him she was four. It was … difficult. But she was strong.”

  “Smart.” “Strong.” Adjectives any parent could slap on the dead child they didn’t care to know. I look around for evidence of skepticism. Not even a raised eyebrow. No one is thinking about Aunt Chelsea and Laura’s relationship, which was tempestuous at best. In the face of death ugly truths are redacted.

  As long as I can remember every conversation between them had notes of danger—as though any minute they’d collapse into fists and fire. I don’t remember Laura ever mentioning Aunt Chelsea with anything resembling love. Even when she was six and should have still been under her mother’s spell, she ignored her almost constantly, called her “Chelsea” with satisfaction.

  I remember in grade nine when she was asked to prom by Mark Hanson, a white twenty-year-old senior with a car and nipple rings. She was one of the only ninth graders going—probably one of the only kids from the rez going, too—a fact she loved to remind us, dangling it in front of our faces like a succulent piece of fruit. Laura couldn’t do anything without thoroughly pissing off her mother, though, so she decided to wear Aunt Chelsea’s low-cut red cocktail dress—the expensive one she bought herself in Toronto to celebrate graduating nursing school. The way Laura told it, she sauntered home drunk at 3 a.m. wearing Mark’s leather jacket and swinging her panties around her finger. She greeted her mother with a smile, slurring, “Guess who’s a woman now?” before throwing up on the kitchen floor.

  “You should’ve seen her face, Em,” she’d said, laughing. “I’ve never heard her scream so loud. And all for that ugly dress! Never mind her piss-drunk daughter shooting vomit like a fucking sprinkler.”

  But a month after prom, when it became obvious that Mark Hanson’s “gravity’s as good as birth control” claim was bullshit, Aunt Chelsea didn’t yell or tell her she had it coming, even if she thought it. She calmly described Laura’s options, then asked what she wanted to do. When abortion was chosen, Aunt Chelsea didn’t flinch or grimace in that self-satisfied way she usually did when Laura chose anything. She diligently set about doing all the work: finding a clinic, booking the appointment in Toronto, borrowing a car to drive us there. All Laura did the week before the procedure was talk about Mark. He hadn’t even looked in her direction since prom.

  “I’m gonna keep the fetus so I can send it to him. Like in a little jar. Oh! I should put a fake birth certificate in the bag, init? You know, like, ‘Mark Hanson Jr. was aborted on this day, child to a naïve girl and a small-dicked asshole.’”

  “You haven’t been naïve since kindergarten.”

  “Maybe I should send it to his mom. She’d already be pissed enough an Indian snagged her son, but wouldn’t it be great if she was one of those crazy pro-lifers? Like with the signs and bombs and stuff? She might actually kill Mark. Save me the trouble.”

  But when the day came she didn’t even mention Mark. She didn’t say anything at all. Afterwards she cried against her mother’s chest for almost an hour. It was strange to watch them in that embrace, as though they were any mother and daughter at any moment in history, timeless.

  Laura never really mentioned the abortion to me after it happened and out of respect for her, I never mentioned it either. I only heard her reference it once in an offhand kind of way the day Sherry was born. I didn’t hear it when she said it, I must have been talking to Roy or Aunt Chelsea. I don’t think anyone heard. It was something I noticed when I watched the video. The camera is on her bedside table. It only catches the pale curtain’s flutter, but I imagine her gazing down at Sherry, maybe touching her nose with a manicured nail. Then you hear it.

  “I get to keep you.”

  The first time I noticed it I rewound the tape to make sure that’s actually what she said. By the first replay there was no question in my mind but I still checked and re-checked. Each time I heard it I felt sick. Even all those years later, on what was supposed to be one of the happiest days of her life, tragedy was playing in the background, casting sinister lights. She put on a good show but she couldn’t forget. She couldn’t escape. Until she did.

  Maybe Laura was trying to atone for her sins. Sacrifice the child she chose for the child she didn’t. Maybe that was a clue. A dot I should have connected. As though hearing those words the first time could stop the train that was, months later, barreling forward.

  Aunt Chelsea’s voice has gotten thicker, the tears faster. She wobbles on her heels. Mom gets up and quietly approaches.

  “It’s okay, Chels.” She tries to lead her away by the hand. Aunt Chelsea only clutches the podium tighter as she continues to melt into the wood. Her cries are guttural, inhuman. She knows she wasn’t a good mother—the type who’d stay up all night and watch movies with Laura, or ask what she wanted to do with her life and really listen. She wasn’t the type of mother a daughter would come to when terrified by her own thoughts.

  Had Laura seen this, she would have offered a bemused cliché. “Better late than never.” As if time is infinite and lives don’t end. What good is remorse now? It might as well be never.

  I lean towards Tom. “I need a cigarette.” He moves to get up and I stop him quick with a shake of my head. He settles back into his chair frowning. Any time I’m alone for more than ten minutes he calls to me, or peeks his head in, or comes along with a cup of coffee or a bowl of corn soup. It’s suffocating.

  I stand in the doorway and inhale deeply. Freshly-shorn grass and charred hotdogs from a fundraising barbecue across the street. Evidence that other lives continue, unchanged. A slow nausea creeps up, stops short at my esophagus.

  The only other person outside is a woman wearing a simple black dress. About my age. White, blonde. She’s whispering into her phone with her back turned. As the screen door clicks shut she turns around sharply and thrusts her phone into her purse, her eyebrows squeezed in agitation.

  “Sorry.” I pull out a cigarette and try to light it. My hands are shaky and imprecise.

  The woman looks wary for a moment, then all creases smooth.

  “It’s okay. I
was looking for a reason to hang up anyway.”

  I raise an eyebrow and she rolls her eyes.

  “Ex-boyfriend,” she offers.

  I nod, focusing on my still unlit cigarette. Once, twice, three times, four and still no flame. The woman reaches into her purse, pulls out a red lighter and flicks its head ablaze without hesitation. In a moment the end of my cigarette’s aglow.

  “Thanks,” I say as I inhale.

  “No problem.”

  I can feel her eyes darting back to me as she digs through her purse. I wonder what she sees. Looking in the mirror hasn’t really occurred to me lately. I could have grown crow’s feet overnight. My lips could have decided once and for all they were done pretending, leaving me frowning forever. I’ve seen other people like that. Old Mohawk women with faces like scored leather. They couldn’t have always been that way. They must have been happy once, even beautiful, before some event came down on them with such unrelenting force that smiling became suddenly unworthy of the effort.

  Laura, of course, will remain young, beautiful, tragic.

  “You couldn’t handle it in there, either, huh?” the woman asks.

  “Nope.”

  She lights her own cigarette and takes a drag. Her nails are a familiar shade of pink. Showy and grossly inappropriate for a funeral.

  “Viva la Vulva?”

  The woman looks down at her hands and laughs. “It always sounds so much worse when said out loud like that.”

  “I’m not really a nail polish kind of girl.” I hesitate for a moment, then puff out, “But Laura liked that one.”

  “Is that right? I take it you and Laura were close?”

  I let the silence ring for a moment, observing her. She’s too put together, too eager. I shrug. “Not really.”

  The woman turns in towards me. Her eyes are shrewd, calculating like a jungle cat’s, her face angular and lean. Her voice drops to a whisper.