The Journey Prize Stories 28

by Kate Cayley

  The girl who worked in the front office stood, at the Christmas party, with Tommy’s wife and the other wives as if she was now one of them. They didn’t talk to her or include her in their conversations, but she was happy she could stand there with them, and not with Red and the others on the line. All of their noses looked the same, sticking out in the air like that. But now, the girl doesn’t work at the plant anymore. Something about Nicole and the other wives not liking her there. They thought the girl didn’t belong in the front office with their husbands but at the back, on the line, plucking feathers like Red. The girl was asked to take her job on the line again. She quit after that, on account of having been someplace better.

  After the front office job became available again, all the women wanted the job. The girls out back started to get nose jobs. Where they found a surgeon was something Red didn’t know. No facility around here to support that kind of thing. Maybe that’s why everyone’s nose didn’t quite look the same; some were slightly bent, didn’t heal properly, or scarred badly. One girl, when she talked, her nose moved in every direction that her upper lip moved. It was like her nose was attached to that lip. Most of the girls at the plant started to come dressed in heels and fancy clothes, their hair curled and pressed. They’d change into their work gear, the plastic shower cap and the matching white plastic pullover. They would change right back when their shift was over. They all seemed so glamorous.

  “Hey, Dang!” Somboun said. Dang was what people who knew Red called her. It means red in Lao. It wasn’t her real name, a nickname she got because her nose was always red from the cold. She hated that he called her by a nickname. It made things feel intimate in a way she didn’t want.

  “I didn’t get one!” she said, referring to the nose job.

  “You look fine the way you are.” He knew what she was talking about.

  “Thanks, Sam.” Red knew he hated to be called Sam. He hated his English name and always corrected people, not Sam but Somboun. He was proud in that kind of way.

  Red didn’t want his attention. Somboun was quiet, kept to himself around others. She rarely saw him during his work hours. He was the one who slit the necks before they got to Red, in another room. He saw the chickens when they were alive. She shuddered at the thought of doing anything with Somboun. What kind of gentleness could a man who did that for a living be capable of?

  “Hey, Dang?” Somboun called, trying to keep her attention.

  “What is it?” Red said irritably, hoping not to encourage anything further.

  “Did you hear about Khet? It was cancer. Started a few months after her nose job. Might have something to do with the material they put in there. Just something to think about.”

  Red glared at him, annoyed with all his hope.

  It was time to break for lunch. It was only twenty minutes. Enough time to use the washroom and gobble down some food. Red saw Tommy come by the line, tap the shoulder of one of the girls who worked for him. She was selected for that day. They walked to his car, where all of it took place.

  Just as they were getting into the car, Tommy’s wife pulled in the parking lot.

  She didn’t even bother to park properly.

  Nicole wore a white fur coat, her blond curls bounced fresh from the salon. She had bright red lipstick on and rouged cheeks. She was glamorous, beautiful.

  She was yelling at him about something. Furious.

  Nicole grabbed Tommy by the arm. She didn’t fall. She clung to a sleeve, her white heels dragged in the snow. The bottom of her white fur coat was dirty with mud. What she wanted there didn’t matter to Tommy. He shut the car door and drove away with the girl in the car. If Red had not come upon this scene, she might have thought the mud was shit. Might have asked how the shit got all over her like that. Women like Nicole are what the romantic movies were made for. They are always the star of their own lives and they always got their man in the end. It’s one thing to be ugly, like Red thought she herself was, and to be able to hide in plain sight, to be invisible, and unknown to that kind of advance from Tommy, to have never known that public declaration of love in front of family and friends like Nicole, only to know that simple uncomplicated lonely love one feels for oneself in the quiet moments of the day in the laughter and talk of the television at night and grocery aisles on the weekends. Beauty, for all its ambitions and desires and fuss, seemed so awful to carry and maintain. There’s so much to lose. Red felt grateful for what she was to others, ugly.

  Nicole spotted Red and trotted over. She grabbed Red and held her like they were the closest of friends. Nicole buried her pointy nose into Red’s neck. She could feel the poke. Nicole probably would have done that to anyone standing there. Probably. They stood there together in each other’s arms for some time. Both women cried, but for different reasons.

  ALEX LESLIE

  THE PERSON YOU WANT TO SEE

  Bodies open and close on the machines that fill the weight room. A man drags steel from his chest—front push, cheeks taut, and the winged twin paths of his arms move to full extension. His chest under the surgical light. Mechanical bird, his slow flight. Then, release. Arms in, he folds back in, weights clink into a neat stack. He rises, breathes, heads to the water fountain in the corner. At intervals, everyone in the room goes to that fountain, bends down to accept its hook of water into their mouths. The gym is at the front of the community centre, its long glass wall facing the street. The thick rainfall casts the gym in aquarium intimacy. Cars whip past, their headlights the eyebeams of giant fish. Inside, bodies struggle in the tinted air.

  Laura watches her body in the floor-to-ceiling mirror. Knee-length black shorts, a black T-shirt, broad shoulders. Behind her, women power the treadmills, knees and elbows in suspended animation. She is always the only woman on the weight machines. Men acknowledge her with nods. She knows them by the slogans on their giveaway T-shirts (RUN FOR THE CURE 1998 Home Hardware CREW, Who are you RUNNING for). Nobody speaks to her here and that is part of why she continues to come back.

  In the locker room, women peel clothes from their bodies. Steam is carried out of the showers on their shoulders and hips. A locker door bangs and shatters the warmth. Laughter of the exercise bike women entering in a crowd. After the quiet of the office and her condo, the locker room is jarring for Laura, a thousand electric shocks to her eardrums. As she adjusts her bra, Laura notices the clusters of red specks on her shoulders. She checks the other shoulder. The same. Twists her head to inspect again. A pattern of delicate explosions, where the blood vessels submitted.

  That night in bed, laptop nestled on her crossed knees, she Googles: blood vessels shoulders woman lifting weights. The fitness pages instruct her to exhale while taking on more weight. Ease the speed of flow. Too much muscle development too fast and the body begins to break itself down, cell by cell. Gradual release of breath is easier on the blood. Trails leave her shoulders, head for her arms. She checks the rest of her body for implosions. Finds none. If she held her breath and lifted hard, how many marks could she make? Her body a map of ruined currents. She twists her torso, holds still for the MacBook camera’s inbuilt eye to take a photo of one shoulder. She saves the image to the desktop.

  When she double-clicks on the image of her shoulder, it springs up, huge, fills the screen. A planet in low light, a maroon edge, a dark world.

  She Googles weightlifters, selects Images. Men with skin-tight balloons defending their necks, shoulders, chests. Their surplus limbs; her faint red trails.

  Laura has been coming to the gym every day for two months and she has felt the change. Not the slimming she expected, but a shift in texture. The ease of heaving the steel and glass doors to the government building where she works, doors that make the sound of a bank vault opening and closing. On mornings after she has lain in bed all night awake, the unexpected panic of being alone coming and going in surges, she climbs the stairs slowly and the secretary at the front desk nods sympathetically, knowingly. Her name is Phillipa and her son�
�s wife passed away five years ago, so she makes a point of over-identifying with every loss in the office—deaths of pets, ailing parents, breakups. Phillipa left a card on Laura’s desk when the news about Mallory got around. On the front of the card, a boy reached upward to catch a star, a Little Prince knock-off, a halo of text around his head that read You don’t know what you’re reaching for until you find it. As if someone had died. Also? What an invasive bitch. But maybe Laura’s getting bitter. Mostly she’s just so tired, all the time. But when she feels her arms they are hard and widening.

  Laura’s job at the passport office rigidified as routine several years ago. She used to complain about it to Mallory—the endless supply of people who took bureaucracy personally, scream at her earnestly over the phone, but my flight for Cuba is tomorrooooow—but now, she learns how routine is a crutch for numbness. Routine is everything to her now.

  And today, the gift from Phillipa of a meditation book (left anonymously at her desk). Laura picks it up, makes sure to look down at it with a neutral expression—a careful performance for whoever is watching. She leaves the book on the magazine rack in the reception area with the VISA pamphlets after reading the first line on the back: What you are experiencing is loss.

  Walking to her car, she texts her brother, Greg.

  Generous anonymous coworker

  AKA Philipa Lady of Perpetual

  Mourning left book informing me I am having a loss

  His response buzzes her hand as she slips her phone into her pocket. Greg, now thirty-two, texts like an irate teenager.

  why r anonymous ppl

  all such fuckwits do

  they have meetings

  u need a new job

  Then,

  ROBOOOOOTS!!!!!!

  !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  Yeah.

  u could move now

  why keep the condo

  big

  Yes I am considering a year long

  cycle tour through the

  countryside.

  Thank you.

  haha fuck you too

  Fifteen minutes later, he texts:

  what you are experien

  cing is losing

  loss

  sorry

  Laura has watched other people go through breakups on Facebook. The suggestive status updates, half-scripts of a melodrama, the sound of a palm clapping on a hard bright screen. Sometimes a few old photos of the couple from early days, posted ambiguously—these photos had a tendency to disappear. It was what people posted and quickly deleted that was most self-revealing, Laura thought. People thought people didn’t see, but that’s what everybody wanted—the satisfaction of watching life through a two-way mirror. Then, eventually, the Rumi and Hafiz quotes on letting go, the Facebook mourner giving public signs of personal growth. The appropriate I-am-moving-on updates always earned many heart icons (Laura hated these); any persisting bitter or wounded posts were quietly ignored, or condemned by receiving supportive comments only from the mourner’s parents. Things will look up love mom. Laura has scrolled through many divorces. She read those stories distantly—the grinning avatars amassing sympathy. Facebook was not the place for tough love—you just looked like an asshole. Have some self-respect, she’d thought. This too shall pass. It was something buried deep inside her, this reticence. Really, Facebook was only about who was watching you, not what you posted. Still, she couldn’t stop scrolling.

  When she starts to think about returning to Facebook, Laura isn’t surprised to get unsolicited advice from Greg. Over the past three months, he’s called her up a few times a week from Halifax, making his two older kids warble pitchy hellos to Laura over the phone. In the summers during his undergrad in public health he’d worked as a tree planter on Vancouver Island. He’s always had an effortless builder’s body. Laura dreads telling him about her weightlifting—doesn’t want to weather his enthusiasm. An outlet, he will say. I’m so glad you’ve found an outlet. Like she’s an electrical plug. These days Greg works part-time from home as a graphic designer. In his spare time he makes prints of his photos of trees. He gave Laura and Mallory a triptych of wind-bent arbutus trees for their third anniversary—trunks entwined, sinewy, red and gold. His wife’s father owns an American hotel chain. When they’d married Laura sat in the first row, beamed politely, and thought, you will never struggle.

  “Just post something,” he tells her. “Then it’s done with.”

  “What’ll I do about the comments?”

  “You just have to post something if you go back on. Otherwise it will be just—It’ll be weird. Everybody knows you split up. I mean, Mallory has like three thousand friends. You know?”

  “What? What do you mean? Did she post something? What did she post?” Laura, who’d never been very into Facebook, had put an embargo on it since Mallory packed her things and left.

  “Okay, okay never mind. Just give me your password. I’ll do it.”

  His youngest, just eight months, screams in the background and the older children sing, “PHONE HE’S ON THE PHONE QUIET QUIET QUIET HE’S ON THE PHONE PHONE PHONE,” followed by maniacal pack laughter. Mallory had always said that they should live in the same city. She loved the kids, their insatiable love, how they shoved their fingers into her mouth, tried to unravel her tight curls. After their week-long visits, Laura always spent an evening on the couch, watching music videos or a movie on her laptop, slowly recharging. Mallory had laughed at her: you’re like an old lady. Mallory, an only child, had lovingly followed and viciously mocked Greg’s novelistic Facebook albums of his family. Cherub-faced kid beside a potted rare kind of fern on his cedar deck. “Greg is one step away from Gerber babies,” she’d say solemnly. “You need to stop him.”

  “Won’t I have to respond to what people say?” Laura says now.

  “You don’t have to log in if you don’t want to.”

  But of course she would. She wouldn’t be able to resist inputting her name and password, an anagram of Mallory’s name and 0703, the anniversary of their first date, coffee and a documentary about penguin migration, which had made Mallory cry on the walk to Laura’s car afterwards—“I can’t believe how many of them die”—and Laura had kept walking, uncomfortable, thinking that she would not call Mallory again, that this woman was just too much for her, too much. So she hadn’t answered the first two voicemails Mallory left after that date, both of them five times longer than any message a normal person would leave, Laura had thought, calmly, rationally, pressing Delete.

  Username and password, muscle memory. Raymorl0703. She is a hacker’s dream, these numbers embedded in all of her passwords. Banking, cellphone account, debit and credit PINs, passwords to dating websites she’d secretly cruised for the last few months of their six years together, not out of serious interest but for passive entertainment. Lots of people must do this, she’d thought. It’s innocent. She’d aimlessly browsed the profiles of hopeful women, their open-ended self-descriptions and whimsical profile images. Rosie the Riveter; a panda holding a plate of brownies; a smirking Tina Fey. Half the profiles of people in their twenties used that actress from the TV vampire series Laura can’t watch because of the blood—a wan, pastel cheekbone of a woman who isn’t even very attractive, her vampire boyfriend cropped out. One woman wrote to her: We have so much in common, it’s like we’re meant to be, can I see a photograph? Laura had deleted the message in a panic, the sounds of Mallory showering after her ride home coming from the bathroom. Mallory had loved her cycle commute across two bridges and along the river. Now driving those bridges Laura looks straight ahead, the bike lane a hard margin against her eyes. The yellow backs with silver stripes. Each one is Mallory.

  “Why do I have to say anything?”

  Her little brother is silent on the other end of the line.

  “If you say nothing,” he says finally, “you’ll feel worse.”

  “God, we’re all such robots,” she breathes heavily.

  “If spending time on that
thing makes you feel like shit, just don’t log in. It’s a piece of shit anyway,” he adds encouragingly. “Lots of people don’t use it. It doesn’t matter anyway,” he lies. She says goodbye and logs in.

  The blue and white blocks, the faces in yearbook arrays. It’s all suddenly so incredibly small, the quips and posts, tickets printed with script and hurled to the wind.

  Click. Her profile. Click.

  Her profile photo is a ferry deck shot taken by Mallory—gull origami nighttime flight, wind-slapped cheeks, Laura’s hair exploded in a dark swarm. Her stomach twists at how post-coital the photo looks, as if they’d just fucked on the ferry deck against the Pacific-chilled white steel.

  Mallory had bellowed over the rushing wind while taking the photo: “Put your arms out. Wider. Wider.” Laughter. “Wider.”

  That smile, no idea what’s coming. You idiot.

  She deletes the photo, fingers popping wild across the keys. Heart absently hammering. Her drink slops onto her leg, just missing her keyboard. The smell of rum spreading down her thigh.

  A powder-blue avatar pops up.

  A no-her. Statuesque graphic. She can’t even erase herself—there will always be another digital stand-in.

  She scrolls through her newsfeed. Mallory’s endless number of acquaintances, Laura’s co-workers whom she sees every day, Mallory’s friends from veterinary school, Mallory’s friends from her bike racing squad. A few friends from Laura’s undergrad, from over a decade ago. But mostly these are Mallory’s people. Profiles attached to her by the tentacles of her dead relationship. Where are her people?