CVC

by Gloria Vanderbilt

  He paused. He smiled. He was utterly mad.

  He swung around. “Isn’t that how you would do it, Racine?”

  Racine was my hired help. She was on probation, coming three days a week to sweep and answer the phone. Her face was up between the bars, worshipful, it looked to me.

  “More or less,” she said. “It’s the left-over lard gives me the headache.”

  “You’re right,” he said. “That precious lard! Duels have been fought over that lard.”

  The next minute the conversation had gone on to something else. The madman seemed intent on telling the gang how he and Deborah had initial inspiration for the Bad Frog book.

  “We were strolling arm-in-arm through Jardins de l’avenue Foch, in Paris, when this bad frog hopped right between the legs of a passing nun. Wasn’t that where it happened, Racine? In Foch? That startled nun?”

  Racine had her body glued to the bars. “That’s how I heard it,” she said. “The whole thing is to my mind so – so like a thrilling movie.”

  I was in shock. My little sister had been to France? When? On her salary? How?

  There you have it: a madman’s world.

  I had to take hold of myself. Thank God one of my boys had a pocket flask.

  What I said to the madman was, “What are your intentions?”

  He said, “With regard to what?”

  “Those Wednesdays.”

  “Those Wednesdays are privileged,” he said.

  “Delores is practically underage,” I said.

  “She’s older than a pile of monkeys,” he said.

  I thought about hitting him but was restrained by his bulk.

  He went reflective. “It started with that Frog book,” he said. “Delores had the idea my part of that book was biographical. Autobiographical, I mean. All that ridiculous business about my seduction of a nun. I asked her to name one instance when that book was such. She turned to page one. She read a few lines. ‘Here you have this nun. Which nun, is what I want to know.’ I was watching her eyes, how they skipped on ahead of what she was reciting. Then I watched her lips. I was hoping she’d recite the whole damn draft. So, in a manner of speaking, it was dating from those early precious seconds that Frog turned biographical. From that moment our lives were interwoven. Thus, the initiation of our Wednesdays. That’s where our book was written, you know. Our Wednesdays at The Only Motel. Here,” he said. “Have some duck.”

  “You’re a madman,” I said.

  Some of the boys had to restrain me. I told him I meant siccing my dogs on him and if those dogs suffered mange and malaria and hydrophobia, if they foamed white at the mouth, then so much the better.

  “You don’t have dogs,” he said. “Those dogs may run through your mind just the way you describe them, but those dogs were your crazy daddy’s dogs and the whole kit and caboodle died ages ago, about the same time you were a barefoot boy limping around in barbed wire on a broken toe.”

  I tried choking him but we all know you can’t shut up a madman. He was correct about the toe, the wire. He had neglected to mention the burnt hair, the boiling flesh.

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes. Your burns. Your father’s lamp through the kitchen window just as the lot of you are pulling out your chairs to sit down to Sunday dinner. Grown-ups and children flying off every which way in their burning clothes. Thank God Delores and I were still in the sandbox. We will never know why your father decided to incinerate everyone. And it is perhaps true I was overzealous in my response to the current situation. An assault and battery charge might well be justified. I roughened him up a bit. I ripped up his Day Pass, took away the gas can, goose-stepped him back to the bus station. All right, maybe I singed his hair a little. Maybe – what is the phrase? – I employed ‘excessive force.’ After all, not for nothing am I known as a madman.”

  What shall we eat, what may we drink, where shall we run when every river is on fire and toxic fumes haunt every breath?

  Whose hands ply these oars? Who is that burning boy? Say you’re into construction, reconstruction, resurrection, the pliable self redirected, improved, your body must be redesigned, restrung, other flesh grafted onto your own, ears rebuilt, nose, mouth, your very breath a sleek silent machine. The idea of a coming Sunday dinner is afloat – who is to sit down to that dinner, where will they sit, what will they eat, who is to cook, who shall wash the dishes, mop the floor? Sunday every day arrives, glory be to God, we are famished, hearth and hearty thanks to thee for this nourishment we now receive, sisters, please do sit down, will someone kindly call those lovely children in to dinner.

  Nothing so firmly holds

  to truth

  as the boughs beyond

  my window

  swaying in wind.

  Look how those leaves

  flutter each syllable

  not one among billions

  may comprehend.

  Carter V. Cooper

  Short Fiction Antholgy Series

  ~ BOOKS ONE THROUGH FOUR ~

  46 stories that represent the best

  of today’s Canadian writing!

  Authors’ Biographies

  Jason Timermanis of Toronto holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Arizona. His work has appeared in Spacing, Fab, Matrix, and the anthology Second Person Queer. He is nearing the completion of his first novel. www.jasontimermanis.com

  Hugh Graham of Toronto won an ACTRA and a Peabody Award for work with the CBC, has written for the Walrus and the Toronto Star, and his fiction has appeared in Descant, ELQ/Exile Quarterly, The Antigonish Review, The Fiddlehead and New Quarterly. His shortlisted story “Through the Sky” appeared in the Carter V. Cooper Short Fiction Anthology, Book One. He has published two books, with Exile Editions: Ploughing the Seas, a first-person account of CIA operations in northern Costa Rica during the war in Nicaragua, and the gothic black comedy in dramatic form Where the Sun Don’t Shine.

  Helen Marshall of Sarnia, Ontario, is an author, editor, and bibliophile. Her debut collection, Hair Side, Flesh Side, won the 2013 British Fantasy Award. Her speculative poetry and fiction have appeared in anthologies and magazines, including Paper Crow, The Year’s Best Canadian Speculative Fiction and Poetry, The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror and the Carter V. Cooper Short Fiction Anthology, Book Three. Her short story collection Gifts for the One Who Comes After is forthcoming in 2014.

  K’ari Fisher of Burns Lake, B.C., is currently following up on her degree in biology and studying writing at the University of Victoria. She is working on a collection of stories that explore the myopic vision of adolescence – the close-up, cut-throat clarity that ironically struggles to pull things into big-picture focus. K’ari has short stories forthcoming in the Malahat Review and Prairie Fire.

  Linda Rogers of Vancouver is a broadcaster, teacher, journalist, poet, novelist and song-writer. For her many books, she has received recognition by way of being awarded the Stephen Leacock prize for poetry, the Reuben Rose Poetry Prize (Israel), the Dorothy Livesay Award for best British Columbia book of poetry, the Hawthorne Poetry Prize, the Saltwater Festival prize, the People’s Poetry Prize, and most recently was co-winner of ELQ/Exile Quarterly’ s $2,500 Gwendolyn MacEwen Poetry Competition.

  Susan P. Redmayne of Oakville, Ontario, is the author of offbeat fiction – her muse a talk-ative red-sided eclectus parrot named Merlin. She holds a degree in English Language and Literature from Western University and is an alum of the University of Toronto Faculty of Law. In 2013 her short story “The Organ Grinder” was selected as a Top 3 finalist for the Penguin Random House Canada Student Award in Writing and appeared in Three: Volume XI edited by Lee Gowan. She is presently at work on a short story collection in which she explores diverse psycho-logical responses to death and loss.

  Matthew R. Loney of Toronto holds an MA in English and Creative Writing from the University of Toronto, and his stories have appeared in North American publications that include Everything Is So Political, Writing Without
Direction: 10 1/2 short stories by Canadian authors under 30 and the Carter V. Cooper Short Fiction Anthology, Book Three. He recently published in India and Hong Kong. His first collection of stories, That Savage Water, will be published in autumn 2014.

  Erin Soros of Vancouver has published fiction and non-fiction in international journals and anthologies, and her stories have been aired on the CBC and BBC as recipients of the CBC Literary Award, the Commonwealth Prize for the Short Story, and as a finalist for the BBC Short Story Award. “Still Water, B.C.” was recently a finalist for the U.K.’s Costa Short Story Award. She also collaborates with other artists, studies philosophy, and teaches psycho-analysis, modern literature, and human rights.

  Gregory Betts of St. Catharines, Ontario, is the author of five books of poetry, including If Language, The Obvious Flap, Avant-Garde Canadian Literature: The Early Manifestations, and the hilarious This Is Importance: A Students’ Guide to Canadian Literature. His poems have appeared in journals widely and internationally and his work is regularly taught at universities and high schools. He is the Director of the Centre for Canadian Studies and an Associate Professor in English at Brock University. His next book of poetry, Boycott, is forthcoming.

  George McWhirter of Vancouver was born and raised in Belfast, Northern Ireland. He is the author of 10 books of poetry, eight books of short and long fiction, and four books of translation. Literary recognitions include the Commonwealth Poetry Prize (shared with Chinua Achebe), the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, and the F.R. Scott Translation Prize. He served as the inaugural Poet Laureate of Vancouver.

  Madeline Sonik of Victoria, B.C. teaches writing at the University of Victoria. Her publications include a novel, a short story collection, a children’s book, two poetry collections, and a volume of personal essays. She has co-edited three Canadian anthologies, and for her non-fiction has won the Annie Dillard Award for Creative Non-fiction, and was among 10 authors longlisted for the 2012 B.C. National Award for Canadian Non-fiction. She has also been a shortlist nominee for the 2012 Charles Taylor Prize and won the City of Victoria Butler Book Prize 2012.

  Leon Rooke of Toronto is one of Canada’s most prolific writers, and the author of over 20 books, among them Shakespeare’s Dog, The Fall of Gravity, A Good Baby, The Magician of Love, The Beautiful Wife, The Last Shot, and Wide World in Celebration and Sorrow: Acts of Kamikaze Fiction. He has been widely anthologized, has won the Governor General’s Award, and with John Metcalf annually runs the Metcalf-Rooke Award for short fiction.

  The $15,000 Carter V. Cooper

  Short Fiction Competition

  A perspective, from writer and artist Gloria Vanderbilt, who sponsors one of the largest literary prizes in Canada, and who supports this unique Canadians-only short fiction publication:

  “I am proud and thrilled that all these wonderful writers are presented in the CVC Anthology. Carter, my son, Anderson Cooper’s brother, was just 23 when he died in 1988. He was a promising editor, writer, and, from the time he was a small child, a voracious reader. When a child dies, just as his adult life is beginning, in addition to the overwhelming grief, his family and friends are left with many unanswerable questions. I often wonder what would he be doing? What kind of man would he have become? If Carter were alive he would be 49 years old now. Some things are not knowable, of course, but I do know Carter would still be in love with writing, with words, and with stories. Carter came from a family of storytellers, and stories were a guide which helped him discover the world. Though I, and those who loved Carter, still hear his voice in our heads and in our hearts, my son’s voice was silenced long ago. I hope this prize helps other writers find their voice, and helps them touch others’ lives with the mystery and magic of the written word.”

  The Year Five competition opens Monday, October 13, 2014, and closes for submissions on Monday, March 30, 2015.

  There is also a special publishing follow through from this literary endeavour, and that is the publication of full-length books by authors who have made the shortlist. See following pages.

  all books available at www.ExileEditions.com

  CVC YEAR THREE WINNER

  From the winner of the Giller, Commonwealth, Trillium and Writers’ Trust prizes, comes an outstanding collection of eight stories.

  “[The book has] a fidelity to the kind of sensual language that has always been a hallmark of the author’s writing.” —National Post

  “While many of these stories are stationed in memory of the new immigrant experience, the titular story strikes a harmony of hurt as an elderly Barbadian immigrant stumbles around Toronto in black-face, lost in a fog of nostalgia, his struggle with age resurrecting and reciprocating his struggle with racism.The parallel is just the tip of the iceberg of insight Clarke’s wisdom offers in these stories.”

  — Telegraph Journal

  2013 autumn release 5 x 8 212 pages

  CVC YEAR TWO WINNER

  “The 20 pieces that make up Wide World in Celebration and Sorrow: Acts of Kamikaze Fiction could be considered a kind of literary tasting menu for those unfamiliar with Rooke’s oeuvre... and many of Rooke’s signature registers – the absurdist humour, the literary and philosophical allusiveness, the sudden violence – are on display [and...] interact with each other as readily as with a reader.”

  —National Post

  2012 autumn release 5.5 x 8.5 272 pages

  CVC YEARS THREE and FOUR SHORTLIST

  George McWhirter grounds his delightful characters in the real, while his sharp wit and creative scenarios border on the fantastical. A woman adopts a dolphin-man, an Irish madam runs a railroad bordello in the desert, a drought-stricken river joins a jobless man on his way to the pub for a pint of solace, a Catholic woman’s seventh child, son of a seventh daughter, is left to the mercy of five convent-schooled sisters. The Gift of Women is about sexuality and religion, the surreal and the magical, tales of earthy and incendiary women, capable of setting a man, the Alberni Valley and all of Vancouver Island on fire.

  2014 autumn release 5 x 8 256 pages, french flaps

  CVC YEARS THREE and FOUR SHORTLIST

  That Savage Water is a striking collection of stories about travels abroad, told in language that is rich in description, full of lucid and lively textures, smells and sensations that transports the reader to places not on the average itinerary. From familiar departure lounges on to foreign cities steeped in history, the enticing turquoise beaches of picture-perfect postcards, the desolate mountain ranges that take one well off the beaten track, bathing in the sacred Ganges, and fringe indulgences in Cambodian brothels – and a return to a northern Canadian cabin where the father of a tsunami victim contemplates how a surge of savage water forever changed the lives of so many, most poignantly, his own.

  2014 autumn release 5 x 8 208 pages, french flaps

  CVC EMERGING WRITER WINNERS – YEARS ONE and TWO

  “Moreno-Garcia has a spare prose style, but it is one that belies the complexity and depth of her ideas and is well suited to the many common folk who populate her stories. There is a subtlety and seriousness amid the skulls and bones, and beauty among the omens and death. ”

  —The Winnipeg Review

  Spanning a variety of genres – fantasy, science fiction, horror – and time periods, Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s exceptional debut collection features short stories infused with Mexican folklore, yet firmly rooted in a reality that transforms as the fantastic erodes the rational.

  2012 autumn release Fiction 5 x 8 224 pages

  “Miscione excels at writing about horrible things in beautiful ways. Her prose is not only deft and neat, but often wrenchingly lovely, so that much of the text comes across like a suppurating wound wrapped in hand-stitched lace.”

  — Quill & Quire

  A remarkable first collection. Existing somewhere in that chasm between bodily function and souledness, Christine Miscione’s debut collection Auxiliary Skins illumines all that’s perilous, beautiful and raw about being human.
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  2012 autumn release Fiction 5 x 8 160 pages