Best Canadian Stories 2018 Read online

  So I’ve decided not to look a gift horse in the mouth. I have lots of time on my hands right now, especially with Andrea and Kenz taking a break down in Florida with Andrea’s parents, so I’m thinking it might be time to put together a book, maybe using the last couple of speeches I gave as a jumping off point. (Don’t know if you caught the most recent one — over 200k views!) As you may recall from our Ottawa days, I’ve always wanted to try my hand at something book-length. A crossover book — every academic’s dream, as Hollister used to say. Poor old Hollister — he always used to wax a little melancholic about his reputation whenever we got together for drinks back in the day. Too bad he didn’t live to bask in the attention he’s getting now. Then again, I’m not sure he’d know how to handle it. In a way, I’m grateful for my crash course in all things internet these past few months. It’s been painful at times, but it was a wakeup call. I really do feel more equipped than ever to embrace a wider audience. I guess I just never had the material before now.

  Your Own

  Lucky Stars

  Deirdre Simon Dore

  Back before the troubles started, the boy was a nice diversion for Hank and me to have around the farm. Every summer we took him off his mother’s hands, Marj her name was. Hank’s younger sister. It started with a week, then more as the years went by, seeing as we had none of our own and at 40 I realized it might never happen and made the mistake of confiding in Marj that having a cat wasn’t really doing it for me anymore. That was when she came up with the idea of sharing the boy. More fun than a cat, she laughed, way more fun than a cat. She pretended she was doing us a favour and for awhile she was, though Hank never let Marj forget who was favouring who. I admit I was trepidatious at first.

  Me and Hank had been childless so long that we had gotten into certain habits: Hank liked to walk around with just a T-shirt on, I didn’t bother with a bra, we ate in front of the TV, watching the shows we wanted, farted at will. The idea of having to watch cartoons made us cranky. But over the years, with TV privileges fully established, Hank got him outside for chores: collecting eggs, cleaning out the coop, compost, feeding the slop to the pigs, just about anything we asked, while Hank watched baseball and I cooked and set the table for three. Like we were playing the family game. Sometimes I let him dry the good china, but I would not trust him with the weeding, doubt he knew a weed from a bean. Not that he was city bred. Rural to the marrow of his bones. But wild rural, garbage dumps and pissed up pubs and abandoned mine shaft kind of places. Not nice with flowers and gardens and chickens like our place. We got him rabbits, six of them to take care of, in cages that Hank had built. It was the only chore the boy really enjoyed doing.

  As the boy neared eleven, the attitudes and atmosphere shifted. He was becoming a thorn in our relationship, not that we had much of one, and we started dreading those two weeks every summer that sometimes stretched to three and even four. For one thing Hank liked to make a lot of noise when we screwed and seeing as the boy was in the room directly below us—well. I kept shushing Hank but Hank wouldn’t shush. So I said, ‘No screwing while the boy is here.’ Which I admit was a nice reprieve, for me at least. Also the boy ate like a starving hippo till Hank put a lock on the pantry. And things went missing. A pocketknife, the cat. Which made Hank narrow his eyes at me in a way that meant trouble. Things like that. But the boy was silently respectful and never seemed anxious to go home and I don’t blame him, I had seen his bedroom once, four bunk beds in the basement with all the bedclothes jumbled up on the floor mixed in with the dirty clothes and half-chewed dog bones on the bare mattress. Hank’s sister had five others and he was the middle one. Born funny with his intestines lying like grey dumplings on the outside of his body. So there was a lot of surgeries before she even took him home and I read somewhere that this separation probably interfered with the maternal bonding process. It makes you wonder who does these experiments that end in these hypotheses that everyone seems to believe. She was going through a second divorce plus recovering from surgery herself. I caught her showing her new tits to Hank and letting him feel one. I asked him later, ‘What did your sister’s tit feel like?’ He said, ‘Just a tit—but an expensive one.’ He’s got a sense of humour, Hank does. And when the boy was gone, we got another cat.

  One afternoon, during the last summer we had him, it was a hot day and he had just come in from the rabbits as I was putting together a rhubarb pie, he came to stand next to me to watch as I demonstrated how to make pastry with two knives scissoring through the cold chunks of butter. He was grabbing bits of dough to eat and I was slapping his hand away, laughing, when Hank walked in behind us. I could feel Hank’s eyes on my back but I kept on cutting butter into the flour then handed the two knives to the boy so he could try.

  ‘Maybe that’s why your ass is so big’ Hank said. ‘Ten pounds of butter every night.’ And he come right up behind me then and grabbed ahold of my ass with two hands and squeezed, elbowing at the boy at the same time and winking. I flushed red and hissed ‘stop it,’ my weight was an ongoing issue for me and I didn’t like being reminded, but the boy, the boy instead of laughing or leering or getting all embarrassed like Hank expected, he turned to face Hank so fast that he knocked the bowl off the counter. He still had the two knives in his hand and the way he was staring at Hank and breathing hard made me wonder what was going on.

  Hank smiled, let go of my ass and backed up, saying Whoa. Relax. He said, ‘I like a big ass, boy. One day you’ll know. Besides it’s none of your goddammed business.’ I dropped to the floor to scoop up the mess and carefully pulled the two butter knives out of the boy’s hands.

  That night at dinner Hank said to the boy without looking at him or bothering to stop chewing, ‘Hey. Take your hat off at the table.’ The boy looked so cute sitting there, big red freckles and big red ears, little black porkpie hat pulled down over his hair which was hanging in his eyes. He had small eyes the boy did, but bright blue as the sea. He took his hat off and mumbled sorry. I took it from him and put it on the sideboard behind the table.

  Hank looked at him. ‘Question for ya.’ I quietly sat back down and we waited while Hank chewed. ‘Was it you burned your mama’s shed down?’

  We had noticed the charred remains last time we were there but when we asked Marj what had happened she had shrugged. Insurance will cover it, was all she would say, by which we realized not to ask too many probing questions.

  Hank piled half the rhubarb pie onto his plate. ‘Well? he said, ‘was it you?’

  The boy blinked at Hank. ‘Me? Why would I do something like that?’ he said.

  Now it’s always been my opinion that if someone answers, ‘Why would I do something like that?’ to a question—that there’s more to the story.

  That night Hank told me he was done with the boy and never wanted him on the place again. I said, Why Hank? He’s your nephew. Why wouldn’t you want him? What happened? Is it the shed, Hank? Is it the cat? But he wouldn’t answer, he said, You call Marj and tell her we’re bringing him back, he’s her kid, she can deal with him.

  We drove the hour to Marj’s in silence and when we got to the yard the boy scrambled out of the car and bolted. There was a cage in the yard, a human cage. It had been dropped there a year before. A set piece from a slasher film shot somewhere in Alberta that one of Marj’s exes had snagged, thinking it was outrageously cool but could not think of a damn thing that it was good for and so had dumped it in her yard in front of the workshop, behind the tractor with the broken hydraulics. There it sat making the boy’s stepfather furious, he with enough of his own junk to choke a horse, let alone everyone else’s.

  Once after he had been kicked off the school bus and the rest of the family was either at school or plowing the timothy field or off drinking with Tommy B. the boy was made to babysit and so he lured his younger half-siblings into the human cage and in they went because they trusted him. And there the little ones sat penned t
he whole afternoon in the cage while the boy ransacked the house for candy and moonshine, watched TV and drank all those tiny bottles of Baileys that his mother had been collecting. His baby sister peed her pink dress and they were horribly sunburned, their throats raw from crying and so thirsty by the time he set them free, all sobbed out by then. Seeing that cage again and remembering that story, I thought to myself, Hank’s right. We have no business.

  To be polite we hung around for a bit, Hank had a beer and Marj whined. She had an appointment with a modelling agency in the morning and was counting on us, I was counting on you Hankwell, she pouted and bent down a little, showing off her expensive cleavage. I noticed Hank didn’t look away. Upstairs I could hear shouting or some noise coming from another room. Then it stopped and Marj’s boyfriend—an old logger with a big belt—came in and the boy ran out the back door. At that point, Hank decided it was time to go.

  I went out to the truck to get the boy’s duffel bag and looking up saw the boy. He stood in a little swamp just behind the house up to his ankles in muck and was screaming at the top of his lungs NOOOO NOOOO NOOOO. I asked Marj what his problem was, she shrugged and said, ‘The usual I guess’ and walked away. She only had one other kid living with her at that time, the rest having gone to their respective fathers and the other child was in her bedroom memorizing passages from her Bible. Nor was Marj’s boyfriend acting too concerned. So nobody wanted to talk about it and that was fine with me. People must respect people’s privacy, and boys screaming Nooo—in my limited estimation—had everything to do with cleaning their rooms and nothing to do with anything important. I think I may have even admired him at the time, for being able to let it all out so completely, I couldn’t remember the last time I had screamed like that, or even if I ever had, his whole skinny body was vibrating and rigid in rage and I thought of all the oxygen and carbon dioxide that he was inhaling and expelling and how good it must have felt to get it—whatever it was—off his chest. Later, after what happened, I wondered.

  Logan, I suppose it would not have been a massively huge deal if the little boy you sold that hit to (hits? tabs? pills? needle? ) had fully recovered from that seizure but so far it looks grim and there is almost a sure chance of brain damage but you’re a child yourself, don’t care who you’re screwing or how much you can drink, 12 is not adult.

  I had climbed up to the attic to a low sloped roof closet and sat on the floor with a flashlight and a bottle of Hank’s whiskey. I had on my lap the thick manila envelope that had come in the mail. I opened it. My handwriting on all of them. Stored in no particular order, in fact out of order, page two’s folded into the wrong page one’s. A year’s worth of letters. Ripped, then scotch-taped back together. Doodled on. A giant mosquito with huge breasts. I took a sip. I breathed in once and out. At random I read.

  I gather the children are given different coloured pants depending on the level of trust or responsibility they have reached. A Structured Point Behavior System. And food is a very big deal. Controlled supervision, probation. Custody, open or secure (you), remand (means: being in custody awaiting court hearing or sentencing) New words, new concepts.

  Crumpled, sticky with pop.

  Instead of this letter I should send you a funny postcard I found showing two old gold panners in Quesnel with their bums on display.

  And Christ, there was the postcard. I turned the page.

  Sorry but I don’t want to talk about your new official label as drug dealer for the eighth grade. Grass, crack, acid anything the elementary school children want. Well. Well well well. What could an old auntie even say about that. I won’t even mention what Hank has to say.

  I squinted to keep from seeing too clearly. Grateful that Hank was not home to grill me or crow.

  Do you have any privacy where you are? Or is it just an open toilet in your cell sort of thing? I gather that having visual access to the children’s ‘rooms’ is key for control and safety.

  Eggs needed collecting. Breakfast dishes in the sink. Hank would be wanting his lunch.

  … now I’m not even sure … was it crack cocaine? Or crystal meth? Or are those things different or are they the same? My ignorance must seem funny to you, I await your enlightening.

  Scrawled across, HAHAHAHA

  BUT more importantly I got your essays! Wonderful! But the one called The Uses of Napallm—(“napallm is so awsom the things that it can do for exampel the jel that makes it stick iand how it creates carben monxodide wich makes it hard to breth and peple pass out. and if u want to win a war u have to do things that ki8ll the enimy evn if its horibul.”) Logan when you get to a word that you don’t know how to spell, do you just sort of grab a bunch of letters from the alphabet and throw them at that space in the sentence and see what sticks?

  When had I become so pompous?

  And the other essay called Shit.

  He had drawn a rude sketch on the page, Then X’ed it out.

  I wrote a story too in eighth grade. It was called Of Human Courage. All I remember now is the sacred cow (it took place in India) that the running-away-girl bumped into feeling both reckless and afraid.

  Reckless and afraid! What was wrong with me?

  The title of course I took from Of Human Bondage, that story about the sad brave boy with a clubfoot, but I changed the word Bondage to Courage. Really corny.

  Had I really bragged about that story?

  I have a spot on my nose, the doctors are treating it and Hank doesn’t even know but …

  On that one, written across in black felt, SHUT THE FUCK UP.

  I have waited to mention this but when you visited us last summer, well before your incarceration (incarceration: confinement in a particular place) after you left, things went missing. Hmmmm? A pearl handled pocket knife, with two small blades ring any bells? One that my father gave me not that I expect you to put stock in sentimental value. Also money. Can you say fifty dollar bill with a straight face? Ha ha. Hardy har har. ROFLMAO. More fool I. And a nearly full jar of Nutella that had been sitting in the cupboard for 2 years and I know we didn’t eat and yes I do have a bad memory but I’m CERTAIN I would remember eating a nearly full jar of Nutella. I don’t expect you to return anything (oh wouldn’t that be a miracle of gargantuan proportions) but I do think it’s important you be aware that I am aware that we are all aware that things went missing after you left. Nuf said. (ALSO Mitzy started limping rather badly at the same time you were visiting and became withdrawn, not her usual joyful self and I am NOT accusing you of anything but if you happen to have any idea of why or what happened I’d be grateful to know.) When you get out of there and IF you ever stay with us again, I’m afraid there will be rules.

  I heard Hank come in the front door. I heard the door close. I heard the refrigerator open. I heard the pop of a beer can. And then noise from the TV. I read on.

  I am sorry that your facebook friends call you a loser. They are not real friends but still—12 year olds lamenting their old reckless ways, it’s almost surreal.

  One summer we had all watched a baseball game together. Logan and I had cheered for one team, and Hank the other. We were so happy, SO happy when our team won and Hank had muttered oh fuck you both and we had high-fived each other as he left the room. The highlight of my summer. Did he hate these letters as much I hated them now?

  The “incident” that happened to your cellmate with the dental floss (how is that even possible??)—The thing is that there are two classes of suicide—the completers and the attempters, the second category—attempters—is more a demonstration of angst or anguish or attention-seeking or what have you, the first—completers—is what it is, unless it’s a mistake made by someone who meant to be in the second category but was a little over zealous or just plain dumb about it. And I bet he doesn’t like being tied to his bed. Would you?

  Logan had triple underlined attempters.

  I read in the pap
er last week that two boys had escaped from your institution. One of them, after two nights out in the streets, sneaking from empty garages to dumpsters to gas station bathrooms, was finally found in the library (why the library?) filthy, hungry, sorry, crouched behind the stacks and the police came at him with tasers drawn.

  I heard Hank coming up the stairs.

  They say a taser can be quite deadly on a youth.

  ‘Yup’ in his childish penmanship.

  Hank opened the half door to my little hideaway. He stared down at me. He looked at the whiskey.

  What are you doing in here? he said.

  Nothing.

  I held a piece of paper up. It was decorated beautifully in skulls.

  I’m reading the letters.

  What letters?

  The ones I wrote him. Before he— when he was still … Do you want to see?

  Hank narrowed his eyes at me for a minute. No, he said, I don’t. And walked out. I heard him punching numbers into the phone downstairs.

  A doe and fawn are outside my window right now, the window that overlooks the river and it is snowing and their backs are covered in fine white blankets of snow and they are eating windfall apples and every few moments they lift their heads to scan for trouble, it’s a beautiful sight, their wariness. I’m sorry I haven’t written more. I mean, I have, but so many of my letters seem to end up in my desk drawer and never get posted.