The Journey Prize Stories 24 (2 page)

In “Why I Read
Beowulf
,” Shashi Bhat’s exquisitely lucid tone keeps opening out into greater and more perilous surprises. We admired the matter-of-fact way Bhat introduced astonishing statements. Our hearts leapt in fear as we progressed through this wry study of the shifts between predator and prey.

Kevin Hardcastle’s “To Have to Wait” uses condensed lines to ignite this story of two brothers on a road trip to bring their father home from a desperate place. We loved Hardcastle’s deadly dialogue, his natural precision, and his mastery of relationships. The structure and pacing impressed us, as did the piece’s emotional elegance.

Grace O’Connell’s breathtaking story of the love between two friends repeatedly conveys the whole from a study of parts. Natural dialogue shows us a friendship that is strong yet ever so fragile. “The Many Faces of Montgomery Clift” manages to show how friends can achieve a kind of immortality despite
social constraints that fertilize hypocrisy and lies, and the writing bursts with transparent colour and freshness.

We lauded “Daughter of the Dead Reeds” for its elusive and enigmatic meaning. A strange admixture of dirty realism and fantasy, this story’s filthy secret only submerged us deeper within it. We never fully understood this story and we didn’t care. Martin West gave us that sinking feeling that belies all art, and we marvelled at it.

Jasmina Odor’s “Barcelona” meted out its riches in a way that forced us to embrace the story and be slowly danced toward an accumulating articulation of meaning. We recognized a complex marriage of theme and form in this story, and were moved and impressed by it.

We were delighted to learn we’d selected not one but two stories from Andrew Hood. The first, “Manning,” a foray into the absurd underbelly of a collectors’ convention, is a joltingly funny reminder that there is indeed such a thing as heartbreaking callousness, especially when it’s exhibited by a child, and especially when this child and his mother were left with only twenty-nine boxes of worthless sports cards as their inheritance. (Who would’ve thought such pathos could be wrung from a near-worthless Rance Davis baseball card?)

We loved Eliza Robertson’s “Sea Drift” for its strange regressive narrative, how it worked backward toward sense and built a gossamer matrix of imagery to hold that sense. We enjoyed its light touch, and its insistence on deconstructing myth into the personal. The story sparkles.

Andrew Hood’s second story in the anthology, “I’m Sorry and Thank You,” is a hilarious encounter between two disparate souls. Restrained and subversive, this piece uses clever
shorthand and radical leaps that give it a feeling of liftoff. We loved Hood’s natural language, his deft implications, and his exacting use of carefully selected words to large effect.

“Ashes” is a study in the use of telling details. We appreciated its snappy pacing – clipping along and never flagging – and its use of a framing device that works well with the subject matter. Nancy Jo Cullen uses concentrated phrases to say big things, and her respect for accuracy gives this story its sharpness.

Alex Pugsley’s “Crisis on Earth-X” sets up countless impossible hoops and then proceeds to jump through them in ways we could not have foreseen. Its sentences and its story surprised and amused us. It even broke our hearts in the way an excellent story can, so that we were glad to have them broken.

In her story “Ice Break,” Astrid Blodgett ties, hangs, and tightens a noose of narrative with a masterful touch. Every word in this story is essential, and you can almost hear the text cracking beneath you as you venture out upon it, inching further from the shores of its beginning. In this quiet prelude of tragedy, Blodgett has crafted a tale that lives in your mind long after you’ve broken through.

Kris Bertin sets up the more traditional narrative of a recovering alcoholic who takes a job as a night janitor, before veering things into a surreal devolution. In the world of “Is Alive and Can Move,” dashed middle-aged ambitions exist beside the unreasonable expectations of youth, monastic purity beside boozy excess, and careful celibacy beside sexual abandon. Besides, where else could you find this sort of linguistic gold: “I barely finished my cleaning that night because I was so fucked up over the lizard.”

“You Were Loved” by Trevor Corkum is an exquisitely paced and unflinching examination of how pain begets pain, a story about the long echoing aftershocks of parental absence and the dark crypts that exists inside us all. Corkum refuses all pat psychologizing, conjuring a complex, wayward man whose only defense is one of depersonalization and avoidance. With a sexual frankness rarely ventured in Can Lit, the story is nothing short of heart stopping.

Ultimately, as a jury, we were left with the impression that Canadian journals are not only locating and publishing top-notch fiction but also, in doing so, raising the bar, taking risks, and evolving our national voice. It was gratifying to be able to read such a wide range of strong entries. We are proud and heartened to be in the company of so many new and talented writers. We hope the experience of being put forward by these journals acts as a kind of mentorship for all the writers whose stories we read, and not just those who made the anthology. Carry on. Make more art. Be tenacious.

Tell us your stories.

Michael Christie

Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer

Kathleen Winter

June 2012

I
started reading
Beowulf
about a week ago, not because it was on the syllabus, but because I am in love with my English teacher. I would read anything for him. The cover of my copy of the book has a black background with the title in white block letters, and under those the jacket designer has placed the silhouette of a man, but just his top half, like a passport photo, except that the silhouette is made entirely of silver mesh. I keep turning back to this picture on the cover and wondering how they made it look three-dimensional, and half-expecting the pattern of metal to bulge into discernable features, to turn into a man’s face.

Once I finish the book, I will begin to drop casual references to it in class or at English club meetings. “This reminds me of my favorite epic poem,” I will say, pretending I don’t know that it’s also my English teacher’s favorite epic poem, and then I will quote brilliantly, lingering on the alliteration. Mr. Sears will pause, turning away from the blackboard to face me, holding a piece of chalk in his hand. Sometimes, in my most reckless
moments of imagination, I see him dropping the piece of chalk in amazement.

I am not sure yet exactly which passages I will quote, because I am only on page four. I reached page four this morning, as I sat in the hallway of the school with my best friend, Amy. Every day we have our mothers drop us off exactly forty-five minutes before the bell rings, and we sit on the ground outside the English office. I’m usually reading and Amy is usually peeling the varnish off the floor. The varnish lies in a loose coat over the hardwood and cracks as we step over it. Our school building deteriorates at an exponential rate; it seems like every day another part of it breaks off. One time I bicycled by and looked at the school and thought to myself, with fierce affection, “That is my high school,” relishing the still-newness of ninth grade, and just at that moment, a piece of one of the window frames creaked loose and fell from its hinge to the pavement.

Amy regularly peels the floor in patches all over the school. We eat lunch in stairwells, our backs against the concrete walls and legs crossed in front of us, sandwich bags in our laps, cackling at each other over inside jokes we’ve had since second grade, and she’ll take a break from peeling the floor to peel her tangerine, trying to remove each peel in one long strip. She peels the floor in the gymnasium during stretches, and then leaves the waxy scraps in small piles here and there so that later, when we’re made to do push-ups, people’s hands and shoes accidentally land on these piles and their limbs go sliding sideways.

I keep telling her not to do this, but lately she’s sort of been turning on me. I do think it’s natural to get irritated with your best friend, with whom you spend so many hours, encountering so many opportunities for disagreement – over which
movie to see or whether to eat at Subway or Tim Hortons or whether Americans have the right idea about making the drinking age twenty-one or whether moustaches worn ironically can ever look really handsome – but once you have invested so many years in a friendship, such things should cease to matter. I’m not sure Amy recognizes this. Although our lives have run parallel since age eight, when, in Mrs. Hollifriend’s class, we both agreed that dinosaurs were not as fascinating as everybody else seemed to think, lately I’ve been thinking that Amy might easily drop me, like a jacket with a hole in it, like a hair elastic that’s lost its stretch. So today, we’re sitting there outside the English office and I go, without really thinking, “Amy, what’s wrong with you? Why do you always have to peel the floor and deface our school?” and she turns to me and goes, “At least I haven’t memorized every article of clothing owned by my English teacher.” It’s sort of a joke of hers that I spend so much time gazing at Mr. Sears that I must have his clothes memorized by now, except that it’s not really a joke, because I know that he owns six button-downs (three different shades of blue, one white pin-striped, one yellow, and one grey) and white athletic socks that show when he sits down, and four pairs of pants that are all sort of beige-ish brown. Only once did I see him wear a pair of jeans, at the English Club fundraiser, which was a car wash to raise funds and awareness for literature from the Augustan period. We used the money we made to buy used copies of
Gulliver’s Travels
on Amazon.com and then we just handed them out to people on the street. Mr. Sears called it “Spreading the Word.” He smiled when he said it, his mouth an open oval. It took me the first half of the car wash to adjust myself to that new jeans-wearing version of my
English teacher, but then I found something beautiful in his effortlessness, and decided that his casual style did not take away in the least from his devotion to our cause.

I like to record these lists of clothing, and also all my related thoughts and observations, in a notebook, a Moleskin notebook like the kind Mr. Sears said Hemingway used.

Also, sometimes in class his socks fall around his ankles and I want to duck down on to the half-peeled floor and crawl under his desk and pull them up for him.

Because of all this pent-up sexual frustration, I’ve cultivated a new hobby, namely, interacting with pedophiles in Internet chatrooms. Or not pedophiles, but one pedophile in particular. His name is Ronald, and we’ve been talking online for about a month. He has asked me to think of him as my boyfriend, though he’s really more of a manfriend, because he is forty-one years old. When I told him I’m fourteen, he typed, “Your age is my age in reverse,” as though that means we are meant to be. He says he thinks I’m exotic because of my Indian background, so I didn’t tell him I was born in Canada. After I’m done with school and English Club meetings or band practice, I go home and go on “Internet dates” with Ronald the pedophile. We’ll Google important political figures and then discuss our findings, or we’ll furnish an imaginary home with furniture we imagine buying on eBay, and sometimes we’ll go to Freerice.com and spend hours defining words and ending world hunger.

Usually while I’m doing this, my parents are either working late or in the basement praying. They have created a “God Room” in the basement, where all of our Hindu gods and
goddesses hang in rows around the blue walls, staring out with peaceful expressions.

“You are as beautiful as a goddess,” Ronald said to me once, after describing himself as an agnostic. I’d added him on Facebook, though he’s on limited profile so he can’t see my address or anything, but I did allow him to see my photos, so he looked through all the ones of me and Amy and told me that I’m infinitely more desirable than she is.

I regularly watch
To Catch a Predator
on
Dateline
and am amazed at how often the child molesters resemble the guys my dad works with. I told Ronald about this and he found a bunch of episodes of the show on YouTube, and so we watched those on another Internet date. We witnessed one predator wearing a large shapeless hat atop his large shapeless head, entering the house, unaware of the NBC cameramen drinking coffee behind the decorative curtain. Then the decoy thirteen-year-old chirps something about going to change into her bathing suit and the guy with the large hat smiles to himself and actually, literally starts rubbing his hands together in anticipation, and I bet he has really dry hands so bits of skin are flaking off them, and also he has this backpack on that’s maybe too small for a grown man, and he takes that off and started rifling through it, but before we found out what monstrous equipment he has in this backpack,
Dateline
correspondent Chris Hansen emerges from behind the decorative curtain and introduces himself, and the man with the hat removes his hat and uses it to cover his face.

“Don’t worry, my darling,” Ronald said to me, “I am ten times the man he is,” which makes me wonder if Ronald knows how math works. Ten times a pedophile, I think, as I look
through his Facebook pictures. Unlike most people’s Facebook photos, Ronald’s feature no other people. Mostly they show him leaning against a blank wall, his head rounded in a way that indicates he took the photo himself with one outstretched arm.

In my most recent conversation with Ronald, he asked me for my phone number. I was reading
Beowulf
while talking to him, and thinking maybe I should rent the movie instead, and I was caught up in thinking about Mr. Sears and whether the movie version would be significantly different from the book version and checking Wikipedia to see whether the movie script used quotes from the Seamus Heaney translation. So I’d pushed the Ronald conversation window to the side of my screen, and all of a sudden he typed, “Are your parents home? Can I call you? What’s your phone number?” all three questions in a single row. I pictured him on a sofa, his laptop on his lap, sinking back into the cushions as he waited for my reply. And maybe due to all my unreturned love and daydreams for Mr. Sears, I started imagining what would happen if I fell in love with Ronald the pedophile. He lives in the next town over, so it wouldn’t be a long-distance relationship. Instead of Internet dates, we could go on actual dates to local hotspots and events like Heritage Village Day. We could climb each of the 144 flights of stairs to the top of the CN Tower in Toronto, something I have always wanted to do, but Amy refuses to go with me. “Would you climb the CN Tower with me?” I typed, and Ronald said, “Yes,” with a winking emoticon, and so then I typed my phone number in one swoop of momentum, with no spaces or dashes.