The Journey Prize Stories 22 (2 page)

AY
: Yes, and those same details often serve as evidence of an original mind at work. Among others, I'm thinking here of “The Dead Dad Game” by Laura Boudreau and “Ship's Log” by Eliza Robertson, both of which deliver fresh, even startling, takes on the popular theme of childhood loss and grief.

PM
: I think that sort of originality is what really set these twelve stories apart from the rest of the pack – which is saying something, as I don't think there was a single one of the seventy-four submissions that wasn't a solid, well-crafted piece of writing.

AY
: I love the fact that the search for the “best writing” led us to such diverse styles: the mad aria of “Laud We the Gods” at one end of the spectrum; the haunting plainsong of Andrew Boden's “Confluence of Spoors” at the other. So different from one another and so perfectly themselves.

JT
: And, of course, to diverse worlds – it's always a small miracle to find a world created whole within a short story. I was especially struck by writers who used settings we know and managed to disorient us by peeling back that sense of the familiar. “Confluence of Spoors” did it in a stroke, as a hunter follows a trail of blood into Vancouver's East Side. Danielle Egan's “Publicity” did it too, giving us a barely futuristic and surreal Vancouver.

PM
: “Confluence of Spoors” is a good example of a story, too, that deserves and benefits from repeat readings. To me that's the mark of a truly strong piece of short fiction: something that engages on the surface, but then, when you go back to it a second (and third) time, gets richer, more nuanced and layered. I feel the same way about “Ship's Log,” which is immediately captivating and charming, but sneaks up on you emotionally; you finish, gutted, and want to go back and figure out what was really going on the whole time.

JT
: Then of course there was our conversation the day the jury met to discuss the stories, which opened up all sorts of new meanings in the stories. “When in the Field with Her at His Back” is one of the stories that I thought especially rewards a second look. You're aware of the buried past as a diplomat returns to postwar Eastern Croatia to look for an old lover. Revisiting this story, I realized how skilfully Ben Lof had knit his characters' lives together through the image of unexploded landmines.

AY
: I agree, the landmines worked beautifully – a perfect underlying symbol for a story about the fragmented, dissociative state so many suffer in the wake of war. I'm fascinated by the power of well-chosen objects in many of these narratives: the soggy picture of Marilyn Monroe in Andrew MacDonald's coming-of-age piece, “Eat Fist!” (“I find her pulpy corpse floating in the drinking fountain.”); the perfectly creepy Curious George poster in “Five Pounds Short and Apologies to Nelson Algren.” And Pasha, I remember you brought up
the impact of the tights-as-tourniquet in “The Longitude of Okay” by Krista Foss – devastating!

PM
: Yeah, and also, in the same story, the belt used to secure the classroom door – there's such power in the dramatic repurposing of everyday objects, imbuing them with sudden, unexpected narrative and emotional resonance. That sort of thing always sticks with me, and maybe speaks more broadly to what I often love in fiction: seeing the familiar cast in a new light.

JT
: What moved me most about “The Longitude of Okay” were Krista Foss's characters. This story, about a school shooting, could so easily have been contained and prescribed by its subject, but it became instead an insightful exploration of the teacher's self-doubt. And the students are deftly drawn in a few strokes. They're so real.

PM
: The last thing I wanted to mention, and which we haven't touched on, was humour. Being funny is so hard to do well, as it relies so much on surprising the reader, and “Uncle Oscar” and “Serial Love” have some killer lines that totally cracked me up. Devon Code's thirteen-year-old narrator imagining cocaine to “feel like taking 500 dumps all at once” is so perfectly hilarious, and I laughed out loud a number of times at Carolyn Black's wonderfully dry descriptions of speed dating.

AY
: So often those moments that make us laugh (or cry, for that matter) occur when the writer has hit the nail on the head, getting a character's voice, thought, or action exactly right. It's
perhaps the fundamental challenge of writing convincing, compelling fiction, this business of spinning people out of the air – a challenge that the contributors to this year's edition of
The Journey Prize Stories
meet and exceed with style.

N
umber 29 is talking about serial killers.

Number 14 squints at him across the table. Her squint is a mean, suspicious wrinkle.

“Yes,” she thinks.

“No,” she thinks.

Unlike other men in the nightclub – men wearing loose-knit sweaters or brightly coloured dress shirts – Number 29 wears a black dress shirt with silver pinstripes. His black pants have creases ironed down the legs. Underneath the closely shorn stubble of his hair, his head looks uneven, dented in the middle and protruding on the right side. “Bullheaded,” she thinks, as he blunders on in speech. She writes “bullheaded” down on her scorecard in jagged cursive, so she will remember later that he frightens her.

Number 29 has said that he works as a criminologist. She has said that she works as an indexer.

He has said he is thirty-two. She has said she is thirty-three.

All this may be true.

They have eight minutes to decide.

Already, Number 14 has decided that working as a criminologist is not the only way a man might learn about the behaviour of killers and rapists.

She studies the man across from her. While he speaks, his hands chop at the tabletop in unison, as though he holds a box between them and is shaking it at her. His box of facts and knowledge.

He says, “Do you know what an area of awareness is?”

She shakes her head.

“It's where perpetrators commit most of their crimes and where they feel comfortable, often where they travel between work and home and social events.”

“What you're saying is that people commit crimes in areas that mean something to them? Near the people closest to them?”

“It's not my opinion. It's just the way it is.”

“Why?”

He eyes the doorway of the club.

“For one thing, it's easier to commit a crime if you know where the escape routes are.”

Escape is important for both perpetrators and victims, she thinks. Sometimes it must be hard to tell them apart when they're fleeing the scene.

“For another thing –” he continues and offers her a tentative smile, suddenly ducking his bulky head as though shy. Then he stops smiling and his hands fall onto the table. One flutters, with surprising delicacy, to his jacket pocket and
retrieves a pair of wire-rimmed glasses. When he puts them on, she cannot see his eyes.

“For another thing, everyone needs some sense of security.”

All evening, the strange men have passed in front of her. No sooner does a man sit down at her table than a bell is rung and he is up and off. After a while, it seems as though these are not different men, but one man who keeps changing his clothes and manner. A man in disguise. It is hard not to be suspicious of such a man – a man who keeps altering, like the landscape of the city, which is always under construction and covered with scaffolding, always getting torn down and rebuilt. Just as she adjusts to one view of the city, the next thing she knows, everything has changed. The buildings have gone from small to large or large to small and the familiar people are gone and unfamiliar people are in their place.

The nightclub has been built from stainless steel – bar, bar stools, walls, and low tables – as though designed to withstand crowds of people flowing through on their way to elsewhere. It reminds her of a subway station.

Two men before the criminologist, she meets a man who looks like a country singer, with his cowboy boots and square, bearded jaw, and when she asks him if this is what he does, he shouts, “Why does everyone keep asking me that!” He reminds her of her fourth boyfriend, who always shouted at her with reproach, so she ticks No on her scorecard. One man before the criminologist, she meets a man who owns a distribution business, but he will not tell her what he distributes. His silver rings remind her of the rings her sixth boyfriend
used to twist around his fingers while crying over her indifference to his feelings, so she ticks No on her scorecard.

No, no, no. It begins to feel like indexing, breaking each man down into parts, then putting the parts into categories. When she was younger, the world was broad and unknown. Now, she knows that world so well she can divide it up into index cards, which prevent her from making the same mistakes twice.

Number 29 holds a clear drink, a lime slice pinching the side of the glass. It looks like a gin and tonic.

She says, “That's what my eighth boyfriend used to drink. I thought he'd drunk them all. I thought there were none left in the world, he was so thirsty.”

Number 29 laughs, barkingly, but by the time she thinks to laugh, he has stopped.

“Ah, my ex-girlfriend was also sarcastic,” he smiles, but then looks away. “She was sarcastic even while she was leaving our apartment for the last time and getting into a car with another man. Even then she still thought she had some right to sarcasm.”

He leans back in his chair and eyes her across the table.

The bell will ring soon. Their time is almost up.

“I'm a feminist,” she says. She brandishes the word as though laying down something between them, a bundle board in a bed, for instance.

“Yes, so was my ex-girlfriend. I could be friends with a feminist,” he says.

Already, they are building their escape hatches, so when it comes time to flee the scene – and it will come, she thinks, staring at his shirt – the getaway will be fast and easy.

————

But! His hands have begun to dance out a new choreography. Now as he speaks, instead of chopping at the air, he dabbles with his fingers across the table as though laying out his words in rows. This seems familiar. This seems like what she does with words while arranging an index. Lulled by his dainty dabbles, she finds the chopping motion less violent and more generous when it returns. As he holds out his box of air to her again, she feels he may be offering her some intangible gift.

She throws one of her legs over the other and shifts both out from under the table, swinging her foot beside him. Then she remembers she knows nothing about him and sweeps her legs back under the table. Above the table, only her high-necked sweater is visible. Under the table, her black skirt barely covers her thighs.

She is thinking about areas of awareness, the familiar spaces where criminals commit their crimes.

“What about with bodies?”

He looks confused, so she traces the space around her hand, saying, “This is my area of awareness. But when I move my hand beside yours into your area of awareness –” she lays her hand beside his on the tabletop, so her thumb is millimetres from his own, “ … whose area is it? Who is the more likely perpetrator when two areas overlap?”

Deviancy is an odd thing to flirt about, but he is smiling.

“That's not criminal theory, the body as an area of awareness,” he says. “That's a theory of something else you're working on.” His smile widens, and this time her squint relaxes and she allows herself to grimace in amusement.

They lean closer together.

Yes. Yes. Yes.

The bell.

After Number 14 meets six more men, the bell rings for the last time and she tears the white sticker from her sweater. The sticker has a one and four written in pink marker, no name. She leaves it crumpled on the bar and drops her scorecard into the slot of a box wrapped in silver paper with red hearts. She has checked Yes beside only one number – his number.

As she walks past him on her way to the washroom, he touches her lower back, fanning his fingers across her spine. Her body is in love. It has fallen in love in three seconds. With a hand. Of course, it could be the hand of a serial killer, she thinks, squinting meanly into her eyes in the washroom mirror.

She is wearing four breasts tonight, two real and two padded discs, cupping the real as hands would, as his hands might. As she reaches for the taps, one disc slides towards her neck.

She imagines Number 29's fingers on her breasts, dabbling out their rows. She tries to reason it out. Even if he is a serial killer, perhaps he will not hurt her if she is willing and does not resist. In fact, if she is willing, she might never need to learn that he is a serial killer. This is the bargain she strikes with her reason.

It has been a while since a man touched her back.

She could leave the washroom and go home. The event is over. In a few days, if he has checked Yes beside her number on his scorecard, she will be sent his e-mail address. When she arrived, she signed a waiver stating she understood attendees were not screened. She released the event's organizers from any responsibility for what followed the final ring of the bell.
Suspicion lurked at the evening's outskirts like a peeping Tom.

“I am willing,” she whispers through her teeth, squeezing the taps. “I am willing.” Her molars grind together.

She retucks her fourth breast into her bra.

He is sitting at the back of the club on a low, modern sofa, a white rectangle with steel legs. He rubs his index finger against his thumb, staring off into space. The tip of his tongue darts in and out of the corner of his mouth to the rhythm of his rubbing. She decides not to see this. Instead, she sits down beside him.