Best Canadian Stories 2018

by Russel Smith

  When the teenagers came out of the woods back onto the highway they were surrounded by five cop cars with the lights going. Both holding syringes in their raised fists, threatening to jab anyone who came near them. The cops drew out their tasers and the youngest cop, trigger happy, shot the girl. She was a long time before she could move. The boy dropped the syringe and was arrested peaceably. The army surplus bag of cigarette cartons, and whatever else was on the shelf he’d happened to clear out, had disappeared in the bog.

  The whole town of Bay de Verde had been evacuated. Houses gone. Beverly O’Grady was staying with her sister in Low Point and she’d come in for a tin of Carnation.

  They got everybody put up in the gym, she said. They’re waiting for the ammonia tanks to blow.

  A reporter from VOCM had stopped for gas and was eyeing the apple flips. There had been a new batch of them that morning and they were almost gone.

  Elaine Barrett came after Beverly and she said, The calls are coming now, they’re saying thirty-eight hours is all they can promise. Thirty-eight hours for everybody but you got to go to the two other plants.

  That’s a start, I say.

  Thirty-eight hours is no good to anybody, she says. You can’t get enough for stamps with thirty-eight hours. People are screwed unless they get overtime. People are saying the Thai workers should be sent back. If there’s not enough work for people here. They should go on home.

  I snapped the plastic bag for her bread and milk.

  I knows they’re sending money back to their families and that, she said. But people are put up in the gym down there. A lot of them homes got no insurance. Burnt to the ground. I’m lucky I got my sister up here. I’ll have one of them apple flips and give me five Scratch’N Wins. Then she bit at a hangnail so her finger bled a little stream of thin bright blood, which she licked away. She was wearing plaid pyjama bottoms and a jean jacket with a rose on the back in plastic jewels and silver studs.

  Thousands, hundreds of thousands, it had seemed. The cod throwing themselves in the air and diving back down. The ocean weirdly calm but for the plinks of the fish leaping up and sending out concentric rings from the dimple where they dove back under the surface. I wondered if there had been some shifting of tectonic plates out there. Was there a tidal wave coming? But we would have heard about that. I wasn’t surprised to see a stranger at the beach, because of the fish. Because it was an unnatural occurrence and all kinds of people had stopped to look. He might have just been driving past, coming from the other side of the island. He might have just caught sight of it and pulled over.

  I was trying the phone, the man said. But you got no reception here, do you?

  You can’t get a signal in some places, I said.

  Where are you from? he asked. You don’t belong here. He winced, a kind of slow spasm.

  I grew up in St. John’s, I said.

  You want a drink? the man asked. He lifted a bottle to show me.

  No, thank you, I say.

  Too good for a drink? I looked back over the cliffs and saw that the cars were all starting up and heading home. There would be something about the fish on the news. It was almost dark and the wind was picking up.

  I’m just out for a stroll, I said.

  I’m Lorraine Cake’s cousin, he said. Lorraine will vouch for me.

  I don’t care who you are, I said.

  You got a husband or anything? he said. Fine woman like you don’t want a drink?

  I tried to walk away from him then. But he was following me, close enough he jostled into me when he slipped a bit on the beach rocks. He made a grab at my elbow. I was heading back up the dirt lane from the beach to the highway that leads to the store. At the top of the hill, near the church, I’d get a few bars of service.

  Not going to answer me? he asked.

  Yes, I am married, I said. The church was maybe five minutes away, lit with garish red floodlights the new minister had installed at Christmas last year. They lit up the building all through the summer and fall.

  Percy’s truck drove past then and I waved him down. Nice-looking woman, the man said, as I got in the passenger side of the truck. Percy swept Coke cans and crumpled bar wrappers off the seat.

  Heading up to the store? he said. Yes, I said.

  Who is that? Percy asked.

  Some asshole, I said. The guy was in his own truck then and he tore out in front of Percy Strong and zoomed away, down the road toward the highway.

  Bat out of hell, Percy said. He stopped at the store and he came in with me for smokes. He bought a few Scratch’N Wins and won twenty bucks and I opened the cash and handed it to him.

  Have an apple flip on me, I said. I asked about the layoffs in the camps north of Fort Mac, where he had a year and a half to go before he got a pension.

  The likes of which you’ve never seen, he said.

  After he left, the grey monitor affixed to the ceiling showed me the empty aisles. The engines of the milk coolers buzzed hard. The store was empty. I felt clammy and chilled, a burst of intense fear. There was a dazzling floater hanging over the stand of chocolate bars across from the cash. I tried to get rid of it, focussing on the box of Turkish Delight bars at the end of the row. My armpits were sweating, my heart felt out of whack. Then the episode passed.

  There was a rush around nine thirty, several cars at the pumps. Lorraine Cake came in and I asked about the man.

  Said a cousin of yours, I told her. I described him and his truck.

  Lorraine said she didn’t know anyone who fit the description I gave of the man at the beach. She was certain she didn’t know anybody like that. She questioned me on each detail. Then she asked me did I see the fish.

  I never heard tell of anything like it, she said. They’re saying the scientists will be down here tomorrow.

  Scrabbling over the beach rocks, trying to get back up on the highway where I would be more visible to the passing traffic, and where I could get away from the man, the enveloping stink of him, I had suddenly remembered a dream I’d had the night before. In the dream, on my left breast four new nipples had grown overnight. They were raised and stiffened, raspberry-coloured, incredibly tender. They were large nipples and threatened, it seemed to me, to spurt milk. They really hurt, the way nipples hurt when a milk duct gets blocked and the skin cracks but is constantly damp with seeping milk or blood. I was thrown back twenty-five years to when I’d given birth to Kevin. The gentian violet I’d used when I got thrush. The word thrush, something a barn animal would be afflicted with. The shock of it, because we were encouraged to continue breastfeeding, despite the pain, so sharp it brought instant tears, and the baby’s mouth also painted that indigo purple, an ugly stain so everybody knew what was going on.

  The new nipples in the dream made my breast porcine, and in the swollen follicles around each nipple, stiff, silver hairs were sprouting.

  I filled with a shame so intense my main preoccupation in the dream was to hide the extra nipples, until terror made me show them to my husband. When I took off my T-shirt the nipples were gone. The skin was inflamed and there was a mark and swelling where each new nipple had been, like a mosquito bite.

  At midnight I shut the store and walked back down the road to the cabin. The ocean was calm then. No sign of the fish. In the kitchen I made myself some tea and I thought I saw a movement in the garden, in the bushes. Jocelyn’s light came on at once, and there I was in the glass with my cup pressed to my chest with both hands.

  That night in the cabin, I woke because of the smell. It was like the smell of capelin when they use it as fertilizer, mixed with the dirt on a hot day. The man was at the foot of my bed. I could not move at all. I was paralyzed. Everything felt heavy, even my eyelids. Two floaters hung above the man’s left shoulder for a moment, then they were moving slowly across the wall toward the window. After straining very hard, I managed to fling my ar
m over my body to the bedside table and I had the cellphone in my fist. But my fingers were like pieces of wood, tingling with pins and needles. I could barely hold the phone. I was afraid it would slip out of my hand. He got on his hands and knees at the foot of the bed and straddled me until he had worked his knees into my armpit and held my wrists down and then dug both his knees into my chest. I couldn’t breathe. And then he put his hands around my throat. He was wearing latex gloves. He was wearing the gloves I had near the salt beef bucket at the store.

  He lowered his mouth onto mine and began to suck what little breath I had from me. When he pulled away from the kiss his face was gone. There was just a featureless, black clot of darkness surrounded by a burning aureole of light from the bare bulb hanging on a wire from the ceiling behind him. With one hand he was working at his belt.

  I felt the phone in my hand change shape, transmogrify. The man shimmied forward on his knees, thrust his hips out, waggling his penis near my face so it hit my cheek; then the whole room filled with a sweet stink it took me a moment to recognize: vanilla. He must have bathed in it.

  I knew rather than felt that the cellphone had turned into a syringe, and with more effort than I have ever exerted in my life, as though I were lifting a hundred pounds, I forced my arm off the bed and drove the needle into his side. I felt it sink deep and hard; I felt the long needle crack as it drove against a bone. I gasped raggedly, drawing deep breaths, soaked now in sweat, sitting up on the bed. He was gone. My phone lit up. It was a text from Kevin. He asked me to buy a frozen pizza on the way home. I saw it was a text from more than a year ago.

  It was then I heard the screen door at the back of the cabin wheeze open, the door off the kitchen, and a key in the lock of the back door and then the back door swinging open and the stamp of two feet on the rug. Someone was getting the dirt off his shoes. The clatter of an animal in the hall; it sniffled and trotted to my room. The dog. It was my husband’s dog. He found me, dug his snout into my lap, pawed me, moaned. Then he turned and barked, twice. Sharp high-pitched barks at the wall. I hauled him out of the room by the collar.

  My husband switched on the kitchen light and his reflection in the black window appeared to be suspended above the garden; the branches of a maple tree in the field beyond shot through his back. He turned to face me and there were floaters on his face, two coins of shimmering light over his eyes; I blinked and blinked until they faded.

  I thought we could talk, he said.

  Please, I said. Really?

  What do you want from me? Tell me what you want, he said.

  Okay, I said. But you will do what I say.

  I saw his shoulders slump with relief.

  You’re willing to talk? he asked.

  I said: I’m going to decide.

  Inches

  Kathy Page

  The building was the colour of dried blood, and the door slammed heavily behind them. Inside, it stank of cigarettes. Several benches were bolted to the black-and-white tiled floor. The office was to the left; a pink-faced young police officer with very short hair slid open a much-smeared window.

  ‘Yes, Madam?’ he said. Earlier, Louise had thought of jumping out of the car, and now she thought of pulling free of her mother’s grip and running, but where? She was wearing flip-flops and had no money on her; also, part of her wanted to know if this could possibly be real, and if so what would happen next. Her mother’s fingers dug into her arm.

  ‘Constable Ryan? Mrs Miles. I called earlier. I’ve brought my daughter in because she’s beyond my control,’ she said. The officer switched his gaze to Louise, standing there in her jeans and T-shirt, and she stared back at him, noting a fold of neck fat that bulged above his collar. ‘I’d like to make a formal complaint,’ her mother said, and the officer picked up his phone. Her mother’s grip loosened and Louise tugged her arm free.

  ‘Constable Ryan. A mother with a teenage girl beyond parental control,’ the officer said. ‘Yes. Mrs Miles. Please sit down and wait,’ he told them, gesturing at the benches behind them, and obediently, they both did.

  ‘Look what you’ve brought me to,’ Louise’s mother said, clutching her bag on her lap.

  ‘I didn’t ask you to read my mail.’

  ‘Mail that you were having sent to your friend’s house!’

  ‘I wonder why.’

  ‘Don’t you take that high tone with me—’

  The door next to the sliding glass window opened abruptly, and the short-haired officer motioned them to come in. They followed him to a small but very high, cell-like room where a much larger, older and completely bald officer sat behind a metal desk. The door closed behind them with a loud metallic clang.

  ‘Sergeant Whitney,’ he told them. ‘What is the problem, madam?’

  ‘I believe my daughter has been having underage relations.’

  Call it instinct. She was vacuuming. It was a Friday afternoon and she was doing the stairs and landings and main bedroom. Monday and Tuesday were for the washing and then the kitchen and bathrooms and Wednesday and Thursday were for the living and dining rooms. The house was finally under control and things were much better since she’d spoken with Harry about the accumulation of books and the fussy, old-fashioned effect it gave a room, especially since his book jackets did not match. He had eventually agreed to limit himself to three shelves on the unit to his side of the living-room fireplace. After all, she had pointed out when he chafed at this, he was not actively reading most of them, and was there not plenty of storage in the attic, as well as a huge, free public library in town?

  On the matching shelves to her side, she kept her du Maurier collection and a few other good-looking hardbacks, along with framed photographs and ornaments, so the look was not really symmetrical, but the chaos had been contained, and the two landscapes that hung above each of the sets of shelves, Cornwall and Box Hill, were the same size and framing and so had a soothing, balancing effect. And as for Louise’s dreadful room, the rule was that she had to pick everything up and vacuum on Sunday mornings, or else forfeit her pocket money, and that worked fairly well, too. Valerie had been untidy as a child, but grew out of it, so there was hope! Lily, of course, had always loved to have things nicely put away.

  She had finished vacuuming the upstairs landings and for some reason opened the door to Louise’s room. There was that ghastly smell of incense. She noted the curtains still half closed, the plant on the windowsill dropping its leaves. The new carpet covered in papers, a stapler, staples, Sellotape, used cotton balls. The mirror and a clutch of cheap cosmetics beneath it, coated in dust. The bed made, but only just, books scattered and piled beside it, the bedside table stacked with cups and water glasses. The wastepaper bin empty, but maddeningly surrounded with balled-up paper … Her eyes settled on the desk, the surface of which was invisible beneath he accumulation of notebooks and yet more books. The titles, Being and Nothingness, The Doors of Perception, Self and Others, were enough to make your eyes roll out of your head. Was that what they studied at school now? Or was it something Harry was encouraging? And then she saw it, in a half-open drawer, a blue envelope.

  ‘You seem to be getting a lot of letters from someone,’ she had said when those envelopes had started appearing.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘A penfriend,’ Louise had told her, flicking her hair out of her eyes and frowning as if a mother did not have a right to know who her children were in contact with. Boy or girl? Boy. David. Living in Lancashire. What were they writing to each other about? Art, books and music, ideas, things of that sort. It sounded plausible.

  How did they get each other’s addresses? Louise had looked up at her then and said, ‘At school, Mum, it’s a scheme,’ and despite knowing Louise to be the worst—and also the best—liar of all three girls, she had believed her. Weeks passed before she realized that the letters had stopped coming
to the house. She meant to ask Louise why, but forgot. And now this: the letter was addressed, in that small, very regular hand to Louise Miles, c/o Miss Andrea Marsden. The thing had gone underground. She took the letter downstairs and sat at the dining room table to read it.

  Dear Louise,

  Thanks for your letter. I’m sorry to hear that you have been feeling depressed. It sounds like breaking up with Andy last year was unavoidable, and probably even a good thing, because of the difference in your ages and him wanting to go travelling before university and all that. It would be far worse if he went off and then came back six months later only to tell you he had met someone in Peru or wherever, or lied about it and then dumped you when he went off again in September. Or even if he didn’t, but expected you to just wait around for him to come back at Christmas and then who knows.

  He sounds like an OK bloke. And at least you have had a relationship of some kind! I’d be happy to say the same, but even though I do go out and socialize more these days as you suggested, I still find it v. hard to approach girls.

  I was very interested in what you said about the physical side of things between the two of you. I’ve never thought how it might be for a girl the first time she sees an erect penis! We are very used to seeing them ourselves but I can see that it might be a shock, even if you have felt it through cloth before. So how big would you say his was? From what I’ve read in magazines and agony columns and so on I know there’s a lot of variation, but most are about six inches long when erect but they can be much less and a fair bit more. The width can vary too. Do you think girls might even prefer them not to be too big? Mine is fairly standard …

  Sergeant Whitney leaned towards them over his grey metal desk, the pen dwarfed in his in huge hand. He frowned and looked from her mother to Louise and then back again, giving each of them several seconds of his attention.