Knife Party at the Hotel Europa
Page 25
For here is the plain truth: no knife is driven in our thigh and femur, no rope ties our body to a boat, we are not suffocated by a volcano, and no hot stones fall on our head.
So why are we so fucking sleepy? In the name of heaven, why do we not swoon and scream, why do we orphans in the orchard not high-five over and over, why do we not laugh and dance in the aisles of the plane? Though I can’t actually dance, but you know, um, just a suggestion.
Acknowledgements
“The Dark Brain of Prayer”: prize-winner in Prairie Fire Short Fiction Contest and nominated for a National Magazine Award and Western Magazine Award
“Butterfly on a Mountain”: published in Prism International’s Love and Sex issue
“Knife Party”: prize-winner in Prairie Fire Short Fiction Contest
“Hospital Island (Wild Thing)”: published in This Magazine
“The Petrified Forest”: published in The New Quarterly
“Pompeii Über Alles”: published in Descant’s Berlin issue
“Hallway Snowstorm”: commissioned by Canada Code as part of Vancouver’s Winter Olympiad, published in Salon, and online in Numero Cinq
“Adam and Eve Saved from Drowning”: published in The New Quarterly and nominated for a National Magazine Award
“The Troubled English Bride”: shortlisted for a CBC Literary Award, honourable mention in The Malahat Review’s Open Season contest, and winner of SubTerrain’s Lush Triumphant creative non-fiction contest
“Party Barge”: published in The New Quarterly
“Exempt from the Fang (Aircraft Carrier)”: published on the site Numero Cinq
“Pompeii Book of the Dead”: published in Descant’s Hidden City issue
Author photo by Brian Atkinson
Mark Anthony Jarman’s writing runs the gamut from fiction to poetry to travel writing. He has won a Gold National Magazine Award in non-fiction, the Maclean-Hunter Endowment Award, and the Jack Hodgins Fiction Prize and has been shortlisted for the O. Henry Prize. He is the author of My White Planet, 19 Knives, New Orleans Is Sinking, Salvage King, Ya!, Dancing Nightly in the Tavern, and the travel book Ireland’s Eye.
Jarman’s writing has also been published in the Walrus, Canadian Geographic, Hobart, the Barcelona Review, Vrig Nederland, and the Globe and Mail and has been selected for the Journey Prize Anthology and Best Canadian Stories. He lives in Fredericton, where he teaches at the University of New Brunswick.