That Savage Water (21 page)

The woman must have woken up that morning and tried to eat something. She would have tied the pillow around her stomach and then harnessed herself with the belt of explosives before the sun hit mid-day. She would have felt their calamitous weight hanging from her middle as she walked, peering out from beneath her burka at the grid of the world she would soon splatter herself against. How many hours or days prior had she imagined herself blown to bits, the pieces of her packed against the concrete walls, in the divots where the plastic chair legs met the dusty ground. How often had she thought of the instant she would burst into a constellation like the tails of crimson fireworks igniting outward from one molten core.

I just need to disappear for several thousand years – I feel him pull me even closer into him – Bury me in sand and forget me, then no one would have to pretend anything.

A camera in lust for images is as dangerous as any bomb. What appeals to me most about photographs is that what gets us closest to the truth is not always so truthful itself. And how it's not always the truth we're even looking for, just something meager and approximate to pacify us in the meantime. Like marriage, martyrdom is a lie: Karbala is hundreds of miles from Jerusalem, across the most desolate and hostile terrain. Bellies are as likely to be bombs as they are babies, and I've never been much of a deceiver but I've always made my way towards those who are. As much as I believe in the truth of loving, I know I'd become bored with it. That other, more powerful explosions will drift their scalding tentacles across the countryside and intoxicate me beyond reason until I am inspired, revolted and infatuated again.

bhajan: Hindu devotional song

dupatta: a long scarf worn by South Asian women

ghat: a series of steps leading down into a body of water

farang: a Thai word that refers to anyone Caucasian

kanji: the adopted logographic Chinese characters used in modern Japanese writing system.

khao soi: a Thai dish of Burmese descent

longyi: a long piece of cloth used as a skirt or loincloth

mohinga: considered the national dish of Burma

rambutan: a red plum-sized prickly fruit

riel: the currency of Cambodia

Rizla: English brand of cigarette rolling paper

shalwar (or shalwar kameez): loose pajama-liketrousers worn with a tunic by Pakistani men

sadhu: a Hindu holy man

vairagi: a Hindu renunciate or ascetic

“The Stampede” was published in 2010 in Clark-Nova's anthology
Writing Without Direction: 101/2 short stories by Canadian authors under 30
. “That Savage Water” was published in the
Maple Tree Literary Supplement
in 2011. “A Severed Arm” was published in
Lies with Occasional Truth
in 2008. “Les 3 Chevaliers” was published in
Pax Americana
in 2008. “Crawling with Thieves” was published in
The Southernmost Review
in 2009. “The Vagrant Borders of Kashmir” was published in
Nether Magazine
from Mumbai, India, 2012. “Soft Coral, Sinking Pearl” was published in
Cha: An Asian Literary Journal
from Hong Kong in 2012. “A Feast of Bear” was published in
Jonathan
in 2012. “From the Lookout There Are Trees” was published in the anthology
Everything Is So Political
in 2013. “A Fire in the Clearing” and “The Pigeons of Peshawar” appeared, respectively, in the 2013 and 2014
Carter V. Cooper Short Fiction Anthology–Book 3
and
4
, and in
ELQ/Exile: The Literary Quarterly 37.3
and
39.1
. “Jesus Very Thin and Hungry” appeared in
ELQ/Exile: The Literary Quarterly 38.1
. A hearty thank-you to the editors of these publications.

A special thanks to the Toronto Arts Council and the Ontario Arts Council, without whose support this collection would have taken decades.

For those teachers of risk, craft and imagination: Larry Garber, Rosemary Sullivan, Paul Quarrington, Sarah Kathryn York, E. Martin Nolan, Graham Arnold, Danielle Van Bakel, Brooke Lockyer, Kate Jenks, Catriona Wright, Jillian Butler, Andrew MacDonald, Michael Collins, Eric Overton, Josip Novakovich, Andrew Battershill, Troy Cunningham, Claire McCague and Jeff Parker. This collection is the brighter because of you.

Effusive thanks to the Exile Editions family whose generosity and enthusiasm are boundless.

Ultimate thanks to my partner, Sergio Beristain, who believed before I did.

CVC YEAR THREE "SENIOR" WINNER

From the winner of the Giller, Commonwealth,Trillium and Writers' Trust prizes, comes an outstanding col ection 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 "SENIOR" 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 "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 souled-ness, Christine Miscione's debut collection
Auxiliary Skins
illumines all that's perilous, beautiful and raw about being human.

2012 autumn release Fiction 5 x 8 160 pages

CVC YEARS THREE AND FOUR SHORTLISTED

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 Val ey and al of Vancouver Island on fire.

2014 autumn release 5 x 8 256 pages, french flaps

All books available
at www.TheExileWriters.com