CVC Read online

  CVC

  Carter V. Cooper

  SHORT FICTION ANTHOLOGY SERIES

  BOOK FOUR

  SELECTED BY AND WITH A PREFACE BY

  Gloria Vanderbilt

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication CVC / Gloria Vanderbilt, editor.

  (Carter V. Cooper short fiction anthology series ; book four) Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-55096-421-9 (pbk.).--ISBN 978-1-55096-424-0 (pdf).--

  ISBN 978-1-55096-422-6 (epub).--ISBN 978-1-55096-423-3 (mobi)

  1. Short stories, Canadian (English). 2. Canadian fiction (English)-- 21st century. I. Vanderbilt, Gloria, 1924-, editor II. Title. III. Series: Carter V. Cooper short fiction anthology series ; bk. 4

  PS8329.1.C834 2014 C813'.010806 C2014-903245-5

  C2014-903246-3

  Copyright © with the Authors, and Exile Editions, 2014

  Published by Exile Editions Ltd ~ www.ExileEditions.com 144483 Southgate Road 14 – GD, Holstein, Ontario, N0G 2A0

  Printed and Bound in Canada in 2014

  Digital formatting by Melissa Campos Mendivil

  We gratefully acknowledge the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF), the Ontario Arts Council–an agency of the Ontario Government, and the Ontario Media Development Corporation for their support toward our publishing activities.

  Exile Editions eBooks are for personal use of the original buyer only. You may not modify, transmit, publish, participate in the transfer or sale of, reproduce, create derivative works from, distribute, perform, display, or in any way exploit, any of the content of this eBook, in whole or in part, without the expressed written consent of the publisher; to do so is an infringe-ment of the copyright and other intellectual property laws. Any inquiries regarding publication rights, translation rights, or film rights – or if you consider this version to be a pirated copy – please contact us via e-mail at: [email protected]

  In memory of

  Carter V. Cooper

  The Winners for Year Four

  Best Story by an Emerging Writer

  ≈ $10,000 ≈

  Jason Timermanis

  Best Story by a Writer at Any Point of Career

  ≈ $5,000 ≈

  Hugh Graham

  CVC

  BOOK FOUR

  Preface by Gloria Vanderbilt

  Jason Timermanis

  Hugh Graham

  Helen Marshall

  K’ari Fisher

  Linda Rogers

  Susan P. Redmayne

  Matthew R. Loney

  Erin Soros

  Gregory Betts

  George McWhirter

  Madeline Sonik

  Leon Rooke

  Authors’ Biographies

  PREFACE

  I am proud and thrilled that all these wonderful writers are presented in this edition of the CVC Anthology. Though I, and those who loved Carter, still hear his voice in our heads and in our hearts, my son’s voice was silenced long ago. I hope this prize helps other writers find their voice, and helps them touch others’ lives with the mystery and magic of the written word. And so, as we conclude our fourth year of this annual short fiction competition – open to all Canadian writers – I have awarded two prizes: $10,000 for the best story by an emerging writer, and $5,000 for the best story by a writer at any point of her/his career. Hundreds of stories were received in 2013-14, and from the 12 that eventually were shortlisted, I selected the winners, being those that most appealed to me, as a writer, as a reader, and as a lover of the written word on paper. About the winners, I have this to say: “Appetite” by the new writer Jason Timermanis is a story that rings into the gut with the strength of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.” The writing is taut, compelling, mounting in terror. Masterful. And it stays with me, deeply; I cannot stop myself from thinking about it. Hugh Graham’s “The Man” is a gripping, moving vision of childhood remembered, free from the fake lyricism that often infects such stories. Wise without being clever. The paranoia is never milked. A work, as Ford Madox Ford liked to say, that is of the “First Chop.” And I want to give a big Thank You to the readers who adjudicated this competition: Matt Shaw, Joe Fiorito, Norman Snider and Barry Callaghan... all who have played their own special roles in the development and support of emerging writers.

  Gloria Vanderbilt

  May, 2014

  Jason Timermanis

  APPETITE

  The man awakens to murmuring outside his door, and is certain it’s the village men, come to slit his throat and leave him bleeding beneath the saguaros. He lifts his head from the pillow to listen, trying to tease out a strand of conversation, and hears the voice of one, then several women. His lungs ease open at the sound, release like two clenched fists. They would never kill him in the presence of women.

  He rises to open the door and the morning sun pours in from off the desert hills. All the people of the village are there, standing in loose clusters; they gape at him and point their fingers. He looks out and sees the woman at the back of the crowd, behind her father. The men of her family could have killed him quietly on one of the trails, but instead they stand and watch. Fingers keep pointing until the man turns and sees what has brought them all.

  There are marks on the front of his door. Seven of them, spread along the wood in smears of pulpy white. It takes him a moment to believe they’re really there, that the old stories have come to life on his door. He leans forward and breathes in. They do smell of milk.

  Men appear from the side of his house, leading his only horse away, and satisfied that he’s seen the marks, the crowd turns and follows them back down the hill. They leave the man to frown in the sun, breathing in the smell of milk, as the woman looks over her shoulder and burns him with her gaze.

  The next morning, he is still sleeping when some of the villagers return to take his door off its hinges and cut out the dirty glass from the single window on the side of his house. Standing at the end of his cot are men he once knew well, before he came and went so many times that no one thought of him as local anymore. He’d hoped this most recent return had gone unnoticed.

  As soon as he rises, they carry his cot out of the house. The chest of drawers is next; a relic from his grandfather; the old wood splits as they lift it. Women are tossing the contents of the kitchen cupboards into sacks. They look at him then look away. The men stare and wait. He knows what they’re waiting for, and slowly he obliges. He slides out of his shirt, revealing a torso bony from months on the road, eating little more than jerky. He removes his shorts; a pair of underwear comes off last, balled up and handed to them. They take his boots from the front door then leave with their women. Naked, he watches them drag their sacks down the hill.

  Of everything they take, it’s only the door they’re careful with. Each corner rests on a man’s shoulder, the marks facing upwards to the sun. They will bury it tenderly, as though it were a child, under the largest olive tree in the graveyard, where the other doors have been buried for as long as anyone can remember. Where the smell of milk never stays below the ground.

  Down the hill from the man’s house is another house, with no doors and no windows. When the village boys stand at the edge of the trail, and the afternoon light is falling, they can see into the house and its sand-filled rooms.

  The man only dimly remembers the family that lived there decades ago – the wife and young daughter who were driven from the village the day the house was emptied, and the husband who was left behind, naked in the doorway. They say he had been an industrious man, spending his days collecting the monsoon rains in barrels to keep alive a cluster of date palms he’d planted at the edge of the village on a streak of untouched land. When he was gone, the little date palms curled in
on themselves and blackened.

  Along the house’s overhang, six rusted forks twist on frayed bits of rope. Many more forks have fallen, to lie under the dunes around the house, and around the other empty houses that dot the village. When the winds shift, a few of them surface, furred red with rust, like bloodied teeth peeking out from the sand.

  The man turns his gaze from the empty house to find sunlight pooling on his dirt floor. With the filthy glass removed from the window, the light falls brightly for the first time. It feels like a visitor. From a distance, children watch him through the window, quietly whispering between themselves about his naked body lit white as he leans into the sun.

  In the night, the sand comes through the doorway, spinning in loose circles around the man’s sleeping body. It silently gathers in the corners of his room.

  Each day a different group of women come, their men waiting outside, to spit and argue under the shade of the ragged palms. The whole village smells of cooking meat.

  “Rump roast stew,” the first woman says, placing a small cauldron in the centre of the room. He doesn’t recognize the other women, but he remembers her: a friend of his grandmother’s, once. She’s built more solidly than most women in the village, and shifts from one sturdy foot to the other, glancing every now and then out the window, as they all do, up into the hills. Their eyes look for approval. This woman is amused by his nakedness. She leans forward to follow the curve of his spine as he hunches over the cauldron to eat. He can feel the weight of her eyes on his crotch.

  There is enough food in the cauldron for three men. It takes him the morning to eat it all, and the women wait, sitting on their heels, unmoving as statues. Sauce drips into the hair of his thighs. He chews and thinks of his horse, its greasy neck and the dull sheen of its eyes when spying an apple. His horse lies dismembered in kitchens across the village now, and its flanks fill his belly. The villagers provide him no water to wash away the taste.

  Ribs follow the next day, brought by an old schoolteacher with wrinkles hardened into cracks across her face. She says, “I char ribs black on both sides then rub in chilies – chilies from my garden, not from market.”

  He thanks the women after each meal. As they carry out the bones, they leave footprints in the thin carpet of sand on the floor.

  In the days that pass, he is fed the flank, the T-bone, the skirt and, one grimly memorable afternoon, the rubbery intestines, piled high on a platter, “stuffed with dates, soaked in lemon and fried with almonds.” They bunched in his throat and he retched; still, he continued, as black smoke rose from behind the hills. They were burning his possessions and singing. Their high, crooked voices raised a song of offering into the hills. What they offered was him.

  One night, he dreams of the woman’s father, with his grim, straight mouth, standing outside the house, twisting a coil of rope in his hands. He knows it’s only a matter of time before she returns, with him close behind. Every woman of the village must make an appearance in his house.

  Her father was nowhere to be seen the night he found her walking the trail leading into the village. After weeks of riding alone through the vast, repeating emptiness of the valleys, he saw her come out of the darkness, the braided rope of her hair oiled and swinging. Something lunged in him then, the way mountain lions are known to lunge onto the backs of passing riders. An appetite yanked tight the ten-dons of his neck and flooded his crotch with blood.

  He rode up beside her. “You shouldn’t be out here,” he said.

  She looked at him and quickened her pace. She wasn’t even carrying a lantern.

  “You shouldn’t be out here,” he repeated.

  “Please, I don’t—”

  He leapt from his horse and grabbed the rope of her hair, pulling her off the trail. The woman thrashed in the ditch, a flurry of nails and teeth and sand thrown into his eyes. She clawed up at the trail and one of her hands caught the horse’s hoof and held it tightly. The man struck her then, on the back of the head. Her hand let go of the hoof and she slipped back into the ditch. He began to strip her naked.

  Afterward, he fled back into the valleys, thinking that he’d never return. But the drought already crippling the region continued, until even a day’s farm work was impossible to find. Three months of hunger and he gave up, turning his horse once again in the direction of home.

  A wave of sand has crested across the back wall of his bedroom. He’s tried to sleep against it, but at night the sand inches over his shoulders and gently pours into his lap, so that when he wakes he feels half-fused to the wall, and panics. He climbs into the windowsill and curls up there, brush-ing the sand from his body. The fear stays, under his skin.

  In the morning, the women bring kebabs of horse neck, slathered in fat. Their men bring wooden chairs. They stand on them and string forks up along the house’s overhang. The metal catches the sun and scatters shots of light into the house and across his walls. The women in the room shield their faces, as if afraid it would be an omen to be struck in the eyes with that light. He enjoys it. The light is like an excited child running back and forth, room to room. When the wind picks up and the forks strike one another, the sound carries into the hills. The eyes of the women follow after it.

  To cook and present the last meal is an honour.

  It takes four women to carry in the silver platter normally used for village weddings. They push through sand up to their shins. Sitting in the window, he watches a small white scorpion tap its translucent claws together.

  They set the platter down in the sand. The horse’s head is pointed upwards, its skin blistered black in some places, cooked tight and brown in most of the others. Its big eyes are a vivid pink the man has only seen in sunsets.

  She appears in the doorway, as he knew she would.

  “Come and eat,” she says, and he sees her face up close in daylight for the first time. Her braid is gone, her hair cut to her jawline. As he climbs out of the window, she looks at his penis, and the beginnings of a sneer pull at her lips.

  “There’s a berry called a gualat that grows in the Slomah valley south of here. Do you know it?” she asks, sinking onto her knees on the other side of the horse head. Her voice is lower than he expected, her hands older.

  “I do.”

  “I made little slits all along here,” she says, pointing to a trail of grooves running along the horse’s face, “and I slid gualat berries under the skin before roasting it. The flesh should be tart, a little bitter.”

  He nods.

  “I took out its eyes and lined the sockets with a blend of spices. The eyes I marinated in sugar and wine and put back in only after the roasting. They should be refreshing.”

  He follows her finger to the horse’s lips. They’ve dried out in the fire and split open. Her finger is trembling.

  “I slit the tongue,” she says. “Very delicately, I hollowed out the middle and I filled it with peppercorns and slices of lemon, and then I stitched it back together before placing it in the fire.”

  She stands up and hands him a fork and knife. For a moment he looks at them, and then beyond them, to her belly, where there’s a small bump rounding her thin frame.

  “Eat,” she says. And he does.

  It’s evening when he pulls the last sour strip of skin from the horse’s face and stuffs it into his mouth. The women lift the silver tray and carry the skull out of the house. She is the last to leave, pausing in the doorway.

  “I don’t deserve such food,” he says. “I should be made to eat sand.”

  “Those flavours are for them, you know,” she says, gesturing up into the hills. “They will tear open your belly, and when they do, they’ll be pleased with what they find, and think kindly upon my family. You, you’re just like the javelina we stuff with sugar apples during the holy days. You’re what the children cut through to get at their reward.”

  At nightfall the children of the village are given a special tea to make them sleep. Their little bodies are then slid under the beds
, and their parents join soon after. Even the elders, with their creaking, hardened joints, inch along cold dirt floors to be safely hidden away. Doors are bolted. The village is extinguished, given over to an unbroken darkness. The only sound is the night birds shifting in the branches of the scrubby little trees.

  The man stands calf-deep in the sand of his home, watching the lights of the other homes go out one by one. All around him, forks ring and chatter against one another in the dark. He holds his hands together to stop them from shaking.

  An hour before dawn, he sees them, at first just shapes in the hills. But then they reveal themselves, and they’re nothing like the stories he was raised on. He wants to tell the people of the village how beautiful they are coming down from the hills, that their eyes are swarms of wavering green light, like the fireflies he’s seen on his travels in the north. If he doesn’t tell them, only the men after him will ever know.

  He thinks to call out to the villagers, to her, so that the stories can be told differently to the generations that will follow, but too soon they are climbing over the dunes; they are in the window and through his doorway. The words on his tongue are gone when he goes to speak them. His tongue is gone.

  They open his belly, and all her gifts come pouring out.

  Hugh Graham

  THE MAN

  The girls said it was the man. A car accident up the street; chrome and blue sky and a crowd. They said you could see red. The older sister, Karen, went up ahead and the younger one, Wendy, said, “There’s blood!” She grabbed my arm and pulled me up the walk. I was yet four then but wanted to go but, yet I was afraid. I tried to see the red under the crowd and the murmur of police radios and the girls kept moving ahead and I was afraid and kept pulling back.

  “It’s the man!” Karen said.

  The girls were five and seven and had a smell of oldness, of having lived: their grey skin, their faded, greyish dresses, their stained teeth, the thick wildness of their hair. They were saying that maybe the man had caused the accident and then I thought the man was lying under the car. They let go and ran on and I followed them, but slowly, because I was afraid that if I went there, they’d take me further into the hot haze and blood and falling darkness and I would be gone forever. Finally I turned and went back down the street to my house.