The Journey Prize Stories 28 (2 page)

BRIAN FRANCIS

I remember hearing once that a short story should be short enough to read in one sitting. (Or one standing, if you're on the subway, which is where I do most of my reading.) I get the sentiment as far as length, but what are the general rules when it comes to short stories? What makes a short story good? What makes it exceptional? What makes you miss your subway stop?

I can't speak for my fellow jurors, but I was hesitant when I was asked to be a Journey Prize juror. As a writer, I'm not entirely comfortable judging the work of other writers. I know what goes into writing. The energy. The emotion. The time. But as I worked my way through these stories, and when Madeleine, Kate, and I met to discuss them, I realized that it wasn't so much about judging other people's work as it was about honouring excellence.

Ultimately, the stories in this collection are here because they're spectacular in their own ways, bright constellations of imagination, conflict, and depth. But they're also here because of the choices each writer made. Writing, after all, is a playground of choice: choices of words, of scenes, of characters, of tone, of subject matter. All of these writers have made very wise choices. Most of all, they invite you, the reader, into their work. The door is open. Step in. Wander around. Immerse yourself in the talents of eleven exceptional writers and their stories.

Keep an eye out for your subway stop.

KATE CAYLEY

A woman obsessively visits the gym after breaking up with her girlfriend. A veteran of the war in Afghanistan finds himself shooting a bear in the ballroom of an upscale hotel. A woman who works in a plant that processes chickens warily observes her co-workers' desperate attempts at escape. A miner may or may not be pursued by the devil in the dark. Missives are sent from Mars to an unresponsive Earth, as hundreds of years earlier, a man writes letters to a homeland he will never see again. As this year's jury carefully, and sometimes with difficulty, selected the stories for this anthology, I felt blessed and invigorated by the sheer variety of voices we encountered and was reminded of the John Berger quotation, “Never again will a single story be told as though it were the only one.” These were stories told in many styles, from delicate to brash to deeply strange, in voices that were sometimes baroque and sometimes heartbreakingly simple. I was buoyed up by the quality of each one, but even more by how wide-ranging the collection was as a whole.

In selecting the stories for the Journey Prize anthology, we found some patterns emerged. Some writers were far along in their craft, others less so. Interestingly, the experiences of clever people in cities or hoping to be in cities seems to be replacing stories of life in small towns as the cliché of choice. Some stories toppled under the weight of their conceptual frameworks. Others didn't have enough meat on the bones. Others showed promise in the evidence of a brilliant eye, but were too profuse in their details. But in the end, we had to set aside many good stories, stories that were beautiful, funny, sharp, and full of feeling, stories that, just as much as the ones in this collection, represented a wide range of both style and experience. To the writers in this collection: thank you. To the writers who very nearly were, whose stories we set aside with regret and admiration: thank you also.

MADELEINE THIEN

A description of the gym in Alex Leslie's “The Person You Want to See” describes perfectly, for me, the experience of reading these stories—descending into the “aquarium intimacy” of overlapping private worlds. One moment we're a male manicurist, then we're abandoned on a planetary outpost, or we're hip deep in a river as salmon blaze past to their end. The tensions between these stories are visceral and moving and sometimes disturbing.

Together they reveal a network of defended privacies and unusual hauntings: ghosts, refugees, forgotten wars, hunted animals, deleted Facebook posts, embryos, genes, history, and even the memory of salvation. The stories describe our contemporary world, but they confront us with our own alienness, all the things we never noticed or thought worthy of noticing. How do they do this? By committing entirely—word and sentence, feeling and intellect—to their imagined realities. When someone believes in something, it makes me pay attention. My antennae lift. There's energy here, between me and the writer, a necessary, though often challenging, friction.

Leslie quotes a trainer's advice, “The ultimate test of strength is to be able to hold up your own weight. Hold yourself aloft.” This is a mesmerizing way to think about each story. Can it hold up its own weight? Does it attempt to carry too much, and in so doing, manage to hoist—briefly, impossibly—another weight entirely? The reader, too, becomes another person inside that brevity, “close to it and out of sight,” as Souvankham Thammavongsa memorably observes in “Mani Pedi.” What I love about these stories is that each, in its own perilous way, chooses the uneasy path. My heartfelt admiration to the writers. I wish them all the best with the literature yet to come.

T
he sky was black like the middle of an eye. Red revved the engine, impatient, having to wait for the truck to warm up. It was an old thing. A thing she saw on someone's front lawn. The make was nothing special. They call it a pickup truck, but she never picked anything up in it. Just herself. It might have been the colour that drew Red to it. And the thing was big. It took up most of the lane on the road. It might have been the thought of that big red thing in the parking lot at the plant. It would be the best-looking thing. And it was hers. She wanted that. Especially.

Red worked at the plant like most of the others in town. It was her job to pluck the feathers, make sure the chickens were smooth when they left her. By the time the chickens got to her they were already dead. Their eyes closed tight like they were sleeping. It was almost like what happened in the other room didn't happen at all. Sometimes she could swear she heard the chickens in the other room—that sudden desperate flap of wing, as if flight could really take place there.

Red looked at her face in the rear-view mirror. It didn't show her whole face, just the eyes. She lifted herself from the driver's seat, turned her head to the right side, looked at her profile, and imagined what she would look like with a different nose. How maybe if she looked different, things would be different at the plant. Especially with Tommy. Tommy was her boss, her supervisor, married with two young boys. He was nice to her. Gave her more shifts than anyone else and complimented her work.

“You did good, Red. Keep it up. We've got plans for you.” What those plans were, she never knew. Just that they had them for her. Sometimes Tommy would buy her a cola from the machine or sit at her table during her lunch breaks. They talked mostly about his boys and how he was planning a trip to Paris with his wife for Valentine's Day. His wife, Nicole, had a nose Red wished she could have. It was a thin nose that stuck out from her face and pointed upward. Anyone who worked in the front office had that kind of nose. His wife always came to the plant's annual Christmas party, wearing something fashionable, with fabric no one else's clothes were made out of. The fabric was thick and fit her tightly, smoothed out and pressed, not a wrinkle in sight. At the party, she stood the whole time in a group with the other wives whose husbands ran or owned the company. They would all come say hello to each person who worked there, introduce themselves, and then go stand huddled in a corner with each other, like they did some great charity work, conversing.

Every year, at the party, it was fried chicken. It never bothered Red that the pieces she ate could have been one of those dead chickens that came to her to get plucked. Cut up into
pieces like that, there wasn't a face to think of. And every year, she looked forward to this party, wore her best clothes to it: a pair of jeans, a blue-and-white checkered shirt, and thick black boots from Canadian Tire. It wasn't fancy like the other girls, and it didn't show much, but there wasn't much Red wanted to show. It had become a trend a few years ago when one of the girls who worked there got a nose job. Her glasses didn't have to be held up with an elastic band at the back of the head. The girl got her hair done after that, every week. She already had a small thin body. Cute, was what Tommy called it. Then, she started getting more shifts and eventually got a job at the front office. The front office! It was hard to believe someone like them could get a job there. In this town, a girl either worked at the chicken plant or the Boobie Bungalow. At least at the Boobie Bungalow, you could make some quick cash and get the hell out of town, never look back, or you could get someone who could love you just long enough to take you out of the town. A man you met there was single or on his way to being single. At the plant, most of the men were married and if they weren't they would be eventually, to someone else who didn't work at the plant. You made enough money to pay for what you needed, but the big things in life, the things that could make you happy, well, you just never made enough to get those. Red knew, for her, it was going to be the chicken plant. She didn't have much in the chest area, and couldn't dance to music even if it had a beat. The way men never looked at her gave her the sense the Boobie Bungalow just wasn't for her.

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.